SHaRC

Children go to jail, for lack of options

2008-05-12T09:24:00.002-05:00

ROBIN DAHLBERG AND AMY REICHBACH
Children go to jail, for lack of options
By Robin Dahlberg and Amy Reichbach May 12, 2008

TWO YEARS ago, a 15-year-old named Maria was arrested for bringing a small fingernail file to school.

For eight weeks, she was held in a secure juvenile detention center awaiting trial. She was strip-searched upon entering the facility. She was housed with children who were drug-addicted, mentally ill, and charged with far more serious crimes than she was. The doors and windows of the facility were locked. And her ability to move around inside the facility was limited.

Maria was not jailed because she was a flight risk, or because she was a danger to her community. She was jailed because, having been raped by a family member before her arrest, a Massachusetts Juvenile Court judge felt she could not live at home safely. And the Commonwealth had no other place to put her. There were no readily available placements in either the Commonwealth's child welfare or mental health systems.

Maria's case is extreme, but she is hardly the only Massachusetts child to be jailed inappropriately while awaiting trial for a minor offense. Our organization, the American Civil Liberties Union, recently examined documents from the Department of Youth Services and interviewed dozens of professionals in the juvenile justice system. From the interviews, we found that hundreds of children who should be in the Commonwealth's child welfare and mental health systems are being jailed because Massachusetts has failed to provide these systems with sufficient resources.

Although these children have been charged with minor, nonviolent criminal acts, they are neither flight risks nor dangers to their community. Last year, for example, almost half of the 5,400 children who were locked up had been charged with misdemeanors. Most were eventually released back into their communities after their cases were resolved. Yet each child spent an average of 25 days in lock-up before an alternative placement was located or the child was permitted to return home.

Adding insult to injury, the Commonwealth's failure to adequately fund its child welfare and mental health systems falls heavily on the shoulders of youth of color. Although children of color comprise slightly more than 20 percent of Massachusetts's population between ages 7 and 17, they account for 60 percent of all children detained before a trial.

We are failing our children if we are locking them up for weeks at a time because we have nothing else to offer them. We are also threatening public safety. National research demonstrates that secure detention is one of the most accurate predictors of future criminal behavior. It further demonstrates the detention environment exacerbates behavioral problems, mental health issues and educational difficulties, and that detained youth are more depressed, angry, and dysfunctional when they are released than when they entered.

Massachusetts has already taken some important steps to limit the use of pre-trial juvenile lock-ups. The Commonwealth's Juvenile Justice Advisory Committee has publicly announced that one of its priorities reducing the number of youth of color in detention facilities. The Department of Youth Services is spearheading an effort supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation to develop alternatives to detention.

But we must do much more. We must invest in creating alternatives to jail for youth like Maria. Massachusetts should increase the availability and accessibility of placements for adolescents in both the Commonwealth's child welfare and mental health systems. In addition, it should develop community-based programs to supervise children who need such supervision in order to return to their families. And the Massachusetts Juvenile Court should use these resources, limiting secure pretrial detention to those children who are flight risks or dangers to their communities.

The current approach is not working. By creating effective alternatives to pre-trial lock-up and reserving secure detention for the relatively small number of children who truly need it, Massachusetts can invest our scarce tax dollars more wisely. We can keep our kids in school rather than in lock-up and, in so doing, make our communities safer in the long run.

Robin Dahlberg is a senior staff attorney with the national ACLU Racial Justice Project. Amy Reichbach is the racial justice advocate for the ACLU of Massachusetts.

The more we imprison, the less we vote

2008-05-08T09:26:00.000-05:00

The more we imprison, the less we vote
By Conor Clarke and Greg Yothers May 5, 2008

FOR THE past 12 weeks, we have both been students in an Amherst College class on citizenship. Unlike most college courses, however, this one isn't held in a classroom. Each week, as part of the nationwide program Inside-Out, we meet for 2 1/2 hours in the dimly lit visiting room of the Hampshire County Correctional Facility. Half the students in the class are from the college; half are inmates at the facility.

It is a class on citizenship with a cruel irony: Because of a 2000 amendment to the Massachusetts constitution disenfranchising incarcerated felons, half the students in the class cannot vote. In about a week, all of the Amherst students will leave for the summer; many will volunteer for a presidential campaign. This November, like most adult citizens, they will walk to a local polling station or cast absentee ballots from the comfort of a college dorm. The students inside the facility can't.

American incarceration has received a lot of attention recently. Last month, The New York Times reported that one in every 100 American adults is in prison, the highest rate in the world by a wide margin, and about six times higher than the world median. This drive to incarcerate has been rightly and roundly criticized as too expensive (it costs more per capita to imprison than educate) and too harsh, since the vast majority of inmates are serving time for nonviolent crimes. But amid the controversy over price and punishment, it tends to be forgotten that incarceration imposes a cost on American democracy: The more we imprison, the less we vote.

Why should that be the case? In early 2000, before the amendment passed, Governor Paul Cellucci told Bryant Gumbel of CBS News that disenfranchisement was necessary to ensure that felons did not damage the political process. Cellucci said, after a group of Massachusetts prisoners tried to organize a political action committee in 1997, he "thought that this was a little bit ridiculous, that prisoners would actually politically organize and try to lobby against the very laws that put them in prison to protect the people of this state." The clear implication was that, once you've broken the social contract, you've proved yourself unfit for any social contact, including the right to vote.

But our experience in class suggests that the opposite is true. We all write the same papers, read the same material by John Locke and Alexis de Tocqueville, and are all equally engaged in debating and discussing everything from the role of the good citizen to America's role in the world. There is no reason to think inmates are uniquely unqualified to wield a vote, and no reason to think they can't.

Yes, going to prison necessarily entails the loss of liberty. But the right to vote is in many ways more important than the right to walk freely down the street: Voting is the most basic check against the coercive power of the state. The places where that coercive power is most starkly exercised, such as prisons, are also the places where that most basic of checks becomes more important. The fact that prisoners have a big stake in governmental choices isn't an argument in favor of disenfranchisement; it's an argument against.

And because the vote is so essential to democratic citizenship, it is also an important part of reintegrating inmates with society. Prisons separate and divide, but at their best they also prepare inmates for life after imprisonment. Rebuilding civic engagement is perhaps the most important part of that process.

There are more than 25,000 inmates in Massachusetts correctional facilities, and more than half are racial minorities. Almost all of them will, at some point in the future, exit their cells and return to their homes and families. It would be better if they returned as voting citizens.

Conor Clarke is an Amherst College student; Greg Yothers is an inmate at the Hampshire County Correctional Facility.

Source URL: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/05/05/the_more_we_imprison_the_less_we_vote/

Packed Prisons

2008-05-08T09:22:00.002-05:00

Packed Prisons
The how and why of overcrowding
By CARA BAYLES

The US prison population grew eight-fold since 1970; more than 2.3 million people are incarcerated nationally. The rising numbers aren't proportional to population growth; the Pew Institute recently reported that for the first time in history, more than one in every 100 Americans is incarcerated. Don't like those odds? One in 30 men aged 20 to 34 is locked up, and that jumps to one in nine for black men. People of color make up 70 percent of the prison population, the reverse of the US race ratio outside prison walls.

The Massachusetts prison population grew by 3 percent since 2006, and overcrowding is pandemic. Two years ago, Massachusetts Department of Corrections (DOC) facilities were at 134 percent capacity. Now they've reached 143 percent. But that's merely a median ... MCI Framingham, the state's largest women's prison, is at 323 percent capacity. Only two of Massachusetts' 22 facilities are not spilling over capacity.

"Overcrowding means the facility population is greater than the design capacity," says DOC spokeswoman Diane Wiffin. "We turn single cells into doubles, provide more beds in a dormitory."

Hakim Cunningham was recently incarcerated in Massachusetts. "They were putting two or three people to a cell together," he says. "In Concord CI, they have people sleeping on the gym and rec areas in cots."

Such solutions are dangerous, says Joel Pentlarge, acting executive director of the Criminal Justice Policy Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates reforming the state's justice system. "Those cells are very small—typically under 80 square-feet. They're designed to hold only one prisoner," he says. "Those conditions escalate prisoner-on-prisoner violence."

Why is the prison population climbing, and why are people of color disproportionately incarcerated?

The relationship with Massachusetts' crime rate is tenuous; the prison population has climbed steeply since the late 1970s, but crime has wavered up and down, with peaks in the mid '70s and early '80s, and a steady decline since 1990.

Thomas Nolan, a professor of criminal justice at Boston University and retired Boston Police officer, says the rise in imprisonment corresponds with the war on drugs. "What we're seeing nationally, as well as in Massachusetts, is an incremental, long-term trend to incarcerate people, particularly for drugs," he says.

Nolan joined the Boston Police Department (BPD) in 1978, and saw the shift in national priorities play out locally. "In the mid '80s, police departments in urban areas devoted more time and attention to drug enforcement than ever before. Historically, a department goes where the federal funding goes. In the 80s it was the war on drugs, in the '90s it was community policing," he says. "In the 70s we had a small, centralized city drug department of half a dozen officers. Now, every district has its own drug unit. Roxbury even has two of them, a day shift and a night shift. And there's still a city-wide unit. So you've got 100 officers whose sole purpose is enforcement in the war on drugs."

***

Phillip, who asked that his real name not be used, has been shooting heroin since he was 16. He grew up in Cambridge public housing. Both his parents were junkies; his mother died of AIDS in 1997, his 65-year-old father is still in a methadone clinic. His father's face is scarred from "an incident when he fell asleep on a radiator because he was so high."

"There were a couple of times when my father would come into school inebriated and tell the teacher, 'Phillip has to go, he has a doctor's appointment,'" he says. "We'd walk out, and I'd say, 'Do I really have a doctor's appointment, Daddy?' and he'd say, 'No, I just thought you'd like to get out of there.' And I'd say, 'School's what I look forward to. It's the best part of my day.'"

***

While the percentage of people of color in Massachusetts prisons doesn't reach the national figures, they're still overrepresented. Hispanics make up 21 percent of prisoners in a state where they comprise 7.9 percent of the population. Nationally, Latinos make up 20.5 percent of prisoners, and 14.8 percent of the general population.

"It's not that these people are more likely to commit an offense," says Nolan. "They're just more likely to get caught and subsequently incarcerated."

National figures from 2000 indicate whites make up 72 percent of all drug users, yet blacks are five times as likely to get arrested on drug charges.

Their neighborhoods are policed more, according to Nolan. "Law enforcement is concentrating its efforts in communities of color," he says. "Historically, that's where law enforcement has devoted its resources. Law enforcement is going to tell you they go where the crime is, and it would be fruitless to focus elsewhere."

The BPD failed to respond to questions about their policies.

Katrina Christensen, a coordinator with the Cambridge Needle Exchange, says economic prejudices exist as well. "There's a stigma on a person sleeping on the street," she says. "There are many professionals out there who use, and people say, 'Oh, that's OK. They're doing well.' Well, what does that mean? That someone who's struggling to get by is useless?"

Pentlarge says the mentally ill are also more susceptible to getting mixed up in the criminal justice system. "When we closed down mental institutions in the '80s, prisons became the place of last resort for the seriously mentally ill," he says. With 15 suicides in the last three years, Massachusetts has the highest prisoner suicide rate in the country. Last year, the DOC hired suicide prevention specialist Lindsay Hayes to do an independent review of the phenomenon. Diane Wiffin says the DOC has implemented most of Hayes' recommendations.

Pentlarge insists prisons aren't designed to deal with mental illness. "A person might be seriously delusional," he says. "The prison's first response is to put them in solitary, which is where the majority of our prisoner suicides occurred."

***

Phillip started using because everyone around him was. But he couldn't afford it. "A lot of drug addicts resort to stealing to support their habit," he says. "The effect of the heroin will wear off, and it's a serious drag. When heroin addicts withdraw, they become ill."

In 1979, Phillip was convicted of armed robbery. He walked into a store, and the clerk welcomed him perkily. "I thought, 'I can't believe I'm about to do this. This isn't me.' I pulled out the gun, and she freaked," he says, dragging his fingers down his cheek. "It's hard for me to live with the fact that I traumatized this woman. I wasn't going to hurt her, but she didn't know that." He squats on the floor, placing his hand by his face. "She was just like this. It stays with me."

He went to prison when he was 17, and grew up inside those walls.

***

In 1994, the Gun-Free Schools Act mandated that states adopt legislation requiring the one-year expulsion of students who brought drugs or weapons to school. Massachusetts' statute allows for permanent expulsion and doesn't require any alternative education for expelled students.

Amy Reichbach, an advocate with the Massachusetts ACLU, says such measures are used mostly at schools with few alternatives. "Schools are under-resourced, and may not be able to offer counseling and the extra costs of different educational needs," she says.

Since the busing riots in the 1970s, Boston public schools have Boston School Police in their halls. Today, they employ 84 such officers, who don't carry weapons but have full arrest powers on school property.

Reichbach says transgressions the school traditionally dealt with are now met with harsher penalties or given to law enforcement. "There's a perception out there that this just affects kids bringing weapons," she says. "But they can get expelled for other misbehavior, like disorderly conduct. They can get arrested for disturbing a school assembly." Any student facing criminal charges (including offenses that occurred off school grounds) can also be suspended.

Tami Wilson studies this "school-to-prison pipeline" at Harvard's Charles Hamilton Institute. "This is happening more often than we think, though it varies by school district," Wilson says. "Five urban school districts in Massachusetts with a large population of children of color, immigrants and children eligible to receive free lunch were responsible for 103, or over half, of all school exclusions." Students of color make up approximately 20 percent of the state's student population, but represent over 55 percent of school exclusions. The state's dropout rate has also risen, reaching 3.8 percent.

In Massachusetts, 70.4 percent of prisoners never completed high school.

Aaron Tanaka, of the Boston Workers' Alliance (BWA), a nonprofit for underemployed workers, sees crime as a product of poverty. "About 12,000 Boston youth aren't in school," he says. "They don't have options in the mainstream economy, so they get involved in illicit activity, like drug trade or sex work."

***

Phillip's done several stints since his initial sentence; mostly petty thefts and drug charges. "You always come out worse than you came in," he says. "You come out with so much anger, your self-esteem plummets because you're used to being treated like you're worthless, like you have no value. People talk like I'm an evil, vile human being."

Now he's homeless. He can't get public housing or a job with his record. "Idle time for a drug addict is very dangerous," he says. "You can imagine."

***

Pentlarge says the state must find alternatives to incarceration. "Part of the reason we've so overcrowded is we're treating a disease as a crime," he says. "If we treated it like alcoholism, we'd ultimately save some money."

Nolan thinks there's been a shift in societal conception. "People lose their sense of relativity. We panic when we see the number of homicides reach 60, but forget that in the '80s, it hit triple digits," he says. "We have a harsh and punitive attitude toward those who violate laws. I think we should be targeting addiction and everything that goes along with it. Prisons serve no purpose other than warehousing people and taking them off the streets for a period of time."

Approximately 97 percent of prisoners face eventual release. A 2006 report from Brandeis University estimates at least 39,700 people in the state are in critical need of drug treatment, but aren't receiving it. The Pew Center recently found that in the last 20 years, Massachusetts' spending on corrections grew 127 percent, compared to a 21 percent increase for public higher education. For every dollar spent on a state college, 98 cents is spent on prisons.

The governor's extensive bond bill plan for infrastructure repairs includes $2.5 billion for prison repairs and expansions. It's in committee right now, but results are due in June. Rep. Carl Sciortino Jr., D-Medford, backed a bill placing a moratorium on prison construction for the next five years, and creating a committee to investigate incarceration trends. The bill's essentially dead for the session.

Wilson says that her final report on Massachusetts' school-to-prison pipeline will offer alternatives to punitive measures. "We're looking into restorative justice and peer mediation programs," she says. "Say a student commits some type of offense. Instead of shipping them off, they'd have to own up to what they did. An apology is made, and students work together to find ways to rectify the situation. It's more of a healing process, it's inclusive and the offense itself is addressed."

Such approaches to criminal justice exist in many court systems worldwide, and are being explored in some US states. Colorado, Kansas, Arizona, Delaware, Florida and Tennessee have passed legislation allowing for out-of-court reparation programs, particularly for juvenile offenders. No such legislation exists in Massachusetts.

For now, Wilson is focusing on the statistical landscape of the problem. "But as we look at data, it's important we make the connection that these are actual people with real potential," she says.

***

Phillip is still using. Over the course of the interview at the Cambridge Needle Exchange, he verged from tangential diatribes, to holding his eyelids open with his fingers, to scratching his arms, looking around the corner.

He says he'd like to get clean and councel other junkies. But it's not so easy.

"It's a mess of a life," he says. "You're defeated without hope. But I have hope."

Source URL: http://www.weeklydig.com/news-opinions/feature/200805/packed-prisons#

Publisher drops book ban lawsuit against Mass. prisons

2008-05-08T09:14:00.000-05:00

NOTE: PLN is continuing its lawsuit against the MA DOC, as issues related to damages and attorney fees are still not resolved. PLN is ably represented by NPAP attorneys Howard Friedman and David Milton.

Publisher drops book ban lawsuit against Mass. prisons

By Associated Press Wednesday, May 7, 2008

BOSTON - State prison officials have decided to allow a publisher of legal self-help books to distribute its materials in Massachusetts prisons.

The decision comes after mail-order publisher Prison Legal News sued Department of Correction Commissioner Harold Clarke. The Seattle-based publisher claimed Clarke was banning its publications in state prisons by refusing to add it to a list of approved vendors who can send books to prisoners.

DOC spokeswoman Diane Wiffin said Prison Legal News was added to the approved distribution list on May 1. She said Clarke, who became head of the state’s prison system late last year, is in the process of examining all its policies and practices "to determine whether any changes would be useful or beneficial."

Prison Legal News publishes a monthly journal of court decisions and other news affecting the rights of prisoners. It also distributes books on inmates’ legal rights.

Editor Paul Wright said he’s pleased with the DOC’s decision.

news.bostonherald.com/news/regional/general/view.bg?articleid=1092497&srvc=home&position=recent

Prison Legal News Files First Amendment Lawsuit Against Massachusetts Corrections Officials for Banning It from Selling Books to State Prisoners

2008-04-23T20:01:00.001-05:00

For immediate release:
April 23, 2008

PRESS RELEASE

Prison Legal News Files First Amendment Lawsuit Against Massachusetts Corrections Officials for Banning It from Selling Books to State Prisoners

Boston, MA – Prison Legal News (PLN), a non-profit publisher and bookseller, today filed a lawsuit in United States District Court in Boston against Corrections Commissioner Harold Clarke, former Commissioner Kathleen Dennehy, and others for banning books from PLN in Massachusetts prisons. PLN distributes books to prisoners in the other 49 states and to those in the federal prison system. Massachusetts, which permits only a handful of "approved vendors" to send books to prisoners, is the only state correctional system that refuses to allow PLN to send books to prisoners.

PLN distributes books and other written materials concerning the legal rights of prisoners and the conditions affecting prisoners. It is the sole distributor of some of these books. PLN distributes the Prisoner Diabetes Handbook free upon request. PLN also publishes a monthly magazine, Prison Legal News.

"Commissioner Clarke claims that improving prisoners' literacy is a priority in his administration, but banning books from Prison Legal News is designed to maintain an illiterate and uninformed prisoner population," said Paul Wright, the editor of Prison Legal News.

The lawsuit alleges that the policy banning PLN from sending books to Massachusetts state prisoners is unconstitutional. PLN seeks an order declaring the policy to be unconstitutional, preventing the defendants from maintaining the policy, and an award of damages and attorney's fees. PLN is represented by Boston attorneys Howard Friedman and David Milton of the Law Offices of Howard Friedman, P.C.

PLN has successfully vindicated the free speech rights of itself and its prisoner subscribers on numerous occasions around the country. Currently seven states operate their prison mail systems under PLN consent decrees, injunctions or both. Jails in three states operate under similar court orders.

PLN Editor Paul Wright can be reached at 802-257-1342 or pwright@prisonlegalnews.org and see www.prisonlegalnews.or..

Attorney Howard Friedman can be reached at 617-742-4100.

New High In U.S. Prison Numbers

2008-02-29T13:07:00.001-05:00

New High In U.S. Prison Numbers
Growth Attributed To More Stringent Sentencing Laws
By N.C. Aizenman, Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 29, 2008; A01

More than one in 100 adults in the United States is in jail or prison, an all-time high that is costing state governments nearly $50 billion a year and the federal government $5 billion more, according to a report released yesterday.

With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads the world in both the number and percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving far-more-populous China a distant second, according to a study by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States.

The growth in prison population is largely because of tougher state and federal sentencing imposed since the mid-1980s. Minorities have been particularly affected: One in nine black men ages 20 to 34 is behind bars. For black women ages 35 to 39, the figure is one in 100, compared with one in 355 for white women in the same age group.

The report compiled and analyzed data from several sources, including the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics and Bureau of Prisons and each state's department of corrections. It did not include individuals detained for noncriminal immigration violations.

Although studies generally find that imprisoning more offenders reduces crime, the effect may be less influential than changes in the unemployment rate, wages, the ratio of police officers to residents and the proportion of young people in the population, report co-author Adam Gelb said.

In addition, when it comes to preventing repeat offenses by nonviolent criminals -- who make up about half of the incarcerated population -- less-expensive punishments such as community supervision, electronic monitoring and mandatory drug counseling might prove as much or more effective than jail.

For instance, Florida, which has almost doubled its prison population over the past 15 years, has experienced a smaller drop in crime than New York, which, after a brief increase, has reduced its number of inmates to below the 1993 level.

"There is no question that putting violent and chronic offenders behind bars lowers the crime rate and provides punishment that is well deserved," said Gelb, who as director of the Center's Public Safety Performance Project advises states on developing alternatives to incarceration. "On the other hand, there are large numbers of people behind bars who could be supervised in the community safely and effectively at a much lower cost -- while also paying taxes, paying restitution to their victims and paying child support."

Sociologist James Q. Wilson, who in the 1980s helped develop the "broken windows" theory that smaller crimes must be punished to deter more serious ones, agreed that sentences for some drug crimes were too long. However, Wilson disagreed that the rise in the U.S. prison population should be considered a cause for alarm: "The fact that we have a large prison population by itself is not a central problem because it has contributed to the extraordinary increase in public safety we have had in this country."

About 91 percent of incarcerated adults are under state or local jurisdiction. And the report also documents the tradeoffs state governments have faced as they devote larger shares of their budgets to house them. For instance, over the past two decades, state spending on corrections (adjusted for inflation) increased 127 percent; spending on higher education rose 21 percent.

Five states -- Vermont, Michigan, Oregon, Connecticut and Delaware -- now spend as much as or more on corrections as on higher education. Locally, Maryland is near the top, spending 74 cents on corrections for every dollar it spends on higher education. Virginia spends 60 cents on the dollar.

Despite reaching its latest milestone, the nation's incarcerated population has been growing more slowly since 2000 than it did during the 1990s, when harsher sentencing laws began to take effect. These included a 1986 federal law (since revised) mandating prison terms for crack cocaine offenses that were up to eight times as long as for those involving powder cocaine. In the 1990s, many states adopted "three-strikes-you're-out" laws and curtailed the powers of parole boards.

Many state systems also send offenders back to prison for technical violations of their parole or probation, such as failing a drug test or missing an appointment with a supervisory officer. A 2005 study of California's system, for example, found that more than two-thirds of parolees were being returned to prison within three years of release, 40 percent for technical infractions.

"We're just stuck in this carousel that people get off of, then get right back on again," said Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton, who as New York City police commissioner in the 1990s oversaw a significant reduction in crime.

Because of these policy shifts, the nationwide prison population swelled by about 80 percent from 1990 to 2000, increasing by as much as 86,000 a year. By contrast, from 2007 to 2008, that population increased by 25,000, a 2 percent rise.

The U.S. Supreme Court has recently issued decisions giving judges more leeway under mandatory sentencing laws, and a number of states -- including Texas, which has the country's second-highest incarceration rate -- are seeking to reduce their prison population by adopting alternative punishments.

Last year, Maryland officials began developing a new risk-assessment system to ensure that low-level offenders are not kept in jail longer than necessary, said Shannon Avery, executive director of a policy planning division of the state's Department of Public Safety.

"That's what you have to do when you don't have enormous amounts of tax dollars available for building prisons," she said.

Among the early innovators that states can look to is Virginia, which overhauled its system for sentencing nonviolent offenders in the mid-1990s. Although the state's incarceration rate remains relatively high, Virginia has managed to slow the growth of its prison population substantially and reduce the share of its budget spent on corrections while still reducing its crime rate.

State judges use a point system to weigh factors believed to predict a lawbreaker's likelihood of becoming a repeat offender or otherwise pose a threat to public safety. Those deemed low risk are given alternative sentences. As a result, the share of Virginia prison beds occupied by nonviolent convicts has dropped, from 40 percent in 1994 to 23 percent in 2007.

"The idea is to make a distinction between the people we're afraid of and the ones we're just ticked off at," said Rick Kern, director of the Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission. "Not that you shouldn't punish them. But if it's going to cost $27,500 a year to keep them locked up, then maybe we should be smarter about how we do it."

Interview with Paul Wright on Prison Profiteers

2008-02-28T08:21:00.002-05:00

This is the video of the interview Paul Wright did with KEXP radio in Seattle last month about his new book, "Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration". The video also aired on community access TV in Seattle. It has now been posted on Youtube. It is 30 minutes long.

If you would like to check out the book, more information and ordering information is available at: https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/104_ProductDetails.aspx.

Paul Wright, Editor
Prison Legal News
972 Putney Rd. # 251
Brattleboro, VT 05301
802-257-1342
pwright@prisonlegalnews.org
www.prisonlegalnews.org

Commutation plea carries a political risk for Patrick

2008-02-27T13:01:00.000-05:00

Commutation plea carries a political risk for Patrick
Killer's request OK'd by Parole Board
By Shelley Murphy, Globe Staff

NORFOLK - Arnold King's supporters say he is the model prisoner.
In 36 years behind bars, he has earned undergraduate and master's degrees, published articles, mentored fellow inmates, and counseled high school students about the pitfalls of drugs and violence.

But it was the reason he ended up in prison that will forever define his life. On Oct. 20, 1971, King, then 18 years old and high on marijuana and alcohol, stuck a gun in a car window on Newbury Street and fired a shot into the head of John Labanara, a 26-year-old campaign aide to Mayor Kevin H. White of Boston. King was convicted of first-degree murder eight months later and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Now, after two-thirds of his life behind bars, King is asking for a second chance. He is the first inmate whose plea to be set free has made it to the desk of Governor Deval Patrick, and his attempt has met with the unanimous approval of the state Parole Board.

His request for a commutation - a reduction in sentence - along with the Parole Board's support, marks the first test of whether Patrick's attitude toward prisoners will be different from that of his Republican predecessors, who last commuted a sentence 11 years ago. It also forces the governor to wade into what has been a political minefield.

"In this society, everybody gets a second chance," said King, 55, in a recent interview in a bare conference room at the Bay State Correctional Center, a medium security prison.

"I think what I want people to understand is there is a possibility for change," King said. "I want to portray myself not as a teenage killer, but as a person who has done a lot of work and tried to make myself a better person. I think I have done that, and other people think I've done that."

King's supporters include the Massachusetts Black Legislative Caucus, academics, ministers, and community leaders, among them Harvard Law School professor Charles J. Ogletree Jr., Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner, and former Boston mayoral candidate Mel King. But Labanara's family, Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis, and Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley oppose King's release.

Labanara, a graduate of Boston University and Suffolk Law School, had just passed the Massachusetts bar exam and was coming from a celebration with friends when King shot and killed him during an attempted robbery.

"He snuffed out a life that was full of promise and hope for no reason whatsoever," said Stephen Bowen III, a close friend of Labanara's who worked with him on political campaigns. "For all those people who have sympathetic ears to Arnold King, let them have one of their children killed on the happiest day of their life and call me and tell me they forgive."

The state's six-member Advisory Board of Pardons, which is also the Parole Board, cited King's "exceptional strides" and sent his commutation petition to Patrick's desk Dec. 18 with a unanimous recommendation that he accept it. The governor's approval would move it to the Governor's Council for a final decision.

As the governor addresses the issue, the specter of Benjamin LaGuer looms large. LaGuer is a convicted rapist whom Patrick and many other community leaders rallied behind until DNA tests linked him to the crime. Patrick's actions - he donated money to LaGuer's defense - proved a controversial issue during the 2006 gubernatorial campaign.

Since then, Patrick has cautiously approached criminal justice issues, emphasizing his belief in rehabilitation, while not wanting to appear soft on crime. He declined through a spokesman to talk about his views on commutations and pardons. A statement released by his press secretary said: "The Governor is inclined to believe that offenders should serve their sentences in full. There is, however, a process in place where it is the responsibility of the Board of Pardons to review individual cases and make recommendations. The Governor will take advice from the Board under advisement and will make his own decision on a case by case basis."

Commutations and pardons are politically risky, and politicians over the last 20 years have been generally unwilling to grant any leniency for inmates, according to Mary Anne Marsh, a Democratic strategist.

"It seems that in politics today it's not a risk worth taking because of the potential backlash that can happen," said Marsh, citing the oft-referenced 1988 presidential campaign of former governor Michael S. Dukakis. "Whether you stay in office or run for higher office, it certainly will come up again."

Dukakis was lambasted for granting 48 commutations during his first term as governor, including 45 for first- and second-degree murderers. He was also criticized for a state furlough program that allowed inmates to go home for weekends. One inmate, Willie Horton, raped a Maryland woman and stabbed her husband during a 1986 furlough.

During his presidential bid, Mitt Romney, Patrick's Republican predecessor as governor, touted the fact that he had granted no commutations or pardons. Political rivals accused Romney of being inflexible for refusing to pardon a decorated Iraqi war veteran who could not become a police officer because he grazed a classmate with a BB gun when he was 13 years old.

The last commutation in Massachusetts was granted to Joseph Salvati in 1997, amid evidence he had been wrongly convicted of a 1965 murder. His conviction was later overturned.

Since Patrick took office last year, the number of commutation and pardon petitions has spiked, with 131 filed in 2007, compared with 49 during Romney's last year in office. King's commutation request and two pardon petitions were the only ones approved by the advisory board and forwarded to Patrick.

King, whose five prior commutation requests were denied, said he is sorry for killing Labanara.

Three days after he had been paroled from a New Hampshire prison after serving seven months for robbery, King and a friend were planning to rob a drug dealer when they came upon Labanara at 1:30 a.m., King said.

"I was young, on drugs and alcohol, it was more that I was out of control," said King, a high school dropout who was raised in Portsmouth, N.H., and started drinking and doing drugs by the time he was 13.

John Labanara grew up in Belmont, and played hockey at Belmont High and at Boston University. He served in the National Guard.

His mother, Margaret, who was widowed when Labanara was 2 and worked full time as a telephone company supervisor to raise her two sons, was devastated when her son died on what had been one of the happiest days of his life, said Lynne Labanara, widow of Labanara's brother, Frederick, who died in 2006.

"How lucky he is to have the opportunity to do all the things he is doing - and I strongly feel that he should continue to do that in prison," she said.

Labanara's family and friends also voiced concern about the more than 50 disciplinary reports King has received in prison.

"I don't believe he's been rehabilitated one bit," said Bowen, Labanara's friend. "He's just a conman who is . . . trying to get out on the street."

The advisory board denied King's first three petitions, citing his disciplinary record, the nature of the crime, and his failure to accept responsibility for the murder. But, the board voted 3-3 on his fourth petition, and 4-3 in favor of his fifth bid, which was then rejected by Romney.

King said he had difficulty adjusting to prison initially, but changed after getting educated, joining self-help groups, and founding programs that involve counseling high school students and other inmates. It is that kind of counseling work that supporters say is not only proof of his reform, but would make him a valuable resource in the community.

Sam Williams, chief operating officer of the Unitarian Universalist Urban Ministry in Roxbury, says he owes much of his success to King. "There are a lot of men in the community who are doing as well as I am who got taught and were mentored by Arnie," said Williams, who was released from prison in 1996 after serving 11 years for killing a man during a drug deal.

Ogletree, among King's most prominent supporters, said he understands the pain of being a victim because his sister, a police officer, was murdered 25 years ago.

"The fact that he could fall and go all the way to the lowest possible place and have the fortitude to rise above his misconduct and bad judgment to be someone that others look to for advice, for direction, that's why I think he has earned what I hope the governor will grant," Ogletree said.

Bypassing detention centers

2008-02-27T13:00:00.000-05:00

Bypassing detention centers
Program aims to keep youths at home, out of trouble
By Maria Cramer, Globe Staff

Isaiah is a soft-spoken sixth-grader with poor grades, virtually no relationship with his father, and a police record that includes attempted breaking and entering and assault and battery - the latter on his mother and sister when he was 11 years old.

He also has something else: a new lease on a young life, courtesy of a juvenile judge.

When Isaiah was arrested last November for trying to break into a friend's house in Dorchester, Judge Leslie Harris could have ordered him to be locked up in a detention center that resembles an adult prison.

Instead, Harris decided on a less punitive option. He referred Isaiah to an innovative program, through which the boy - and about 30 other Boston children charged with serious crimes - lives at home and stays in school. Three to four times a week, the children, who range in age from 11 to 17, go to a community center in Roxbury, where they meet with advocates who make sure they stick to court-ordered curfews and attend school. They receive counseling and take tours of nearby colleges on field trips their advocates hope will expand their world view beyond the street corners that seem to cause them so much trouble.

The fledgling program, known as the Detention Diversion Advocacy Project, was born in 2005 from a concern that too many minority children and teenagers are held at the state's juvenile detention centers. Incarceration at that age, statistics suggest, is even more likely to lead to a life of crime than being in a gang.

The program, which is funded with a grant from the federal Department of Justice and administered by the state, is part of a growing trend in recent years to steer children and teenagers away from detention. In 2006, more than 5,400 youths across Massachusetts were ordered held on charges ranging from trespassing and larceny to aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Only about 1,000 of them were eventually found guilty of their charges.

In Suffolk County, about 91 percent of the 1,019 youths detained were minorities. Most of them were black and Hispanic.

"I very seldom have a day where I'm not sending kids to DYS," said Harris, who works out of Dorchester District Court, which refers children to the program. "I also know that locking up kids isn't always the answer. I believe I see kids who are stressed and depressed, and having a program like DDAP can give them individualized attention before they become part of the system."

The state does not measure recidivism among teenagers and children who have been detained, but studies in other states show that youths who are locked up while they wait for their court dates are more likely to drop out of school, become depressed, and meet gang members who will try to recruit them. In Wisconsin, 70 percent of the youths detained were arrested again or returned to a detention center within a year after their release, according to a 2006 study of detention programs by the Justice Policy Institute.

Department of Youth Services Commissioner Jane Tewksbury said the state is in the preliminary stages of developing alternative programs that would focus on keeping children charged with less serious crimes, such as shoplifting, from being held while they wait for their court dates.

"I was aware of the dangers of detention," Tewksbury said. "For us, detention reform really is getting the kids with the less serious offenses out of the system."

Isaiah, who always wears a knit cap and favors baggy Dickies pants, describes his arrests with bravado. He laughed as he recalled one incident two years ago, when he said a zealous officer charged into his grandparents' house and pointed a gun at him and his grandmother. The officer showed up after Isaiah had run away from home following a fight with his mother and sister, who called the police to report the assault.

"Some white guy came in and said 'Freeze,' " Isaiah said, chuckling at the memory. "My grandmother said, 'Is this really necessary? He's only 11 years old.' " When he was referred to the Dorchester-based program, rather than being grateful to be kept out of detention, he was annoyed that his schedule was disrupted and suspicious of his advocate, Deborah Duncan, who remembered an angry boy who just wanted to go home.

" 'Why I gotta do this?' " she recalled him grumbling. "I thought it was going to be a hard one to crack, but he came around."

Isaiah eventually embraced life at the center, showing up almost every day and participating in activities organized by groups like Mission Safe, a nonprofit organization that runs after-school programs for teenagers and middle-school students. Isaiah's family asked that his full name be withheld because he is a juvenile.

Most days after school, Isaiah shoots pool in the basement of the community center or visits Simmons College, where he talks with students about their majors or conducts science experiments.

One Wednesday afternoon, he made ice cream with Boston University students in the community center, though the results were less appetizing than he expected.

"It was watery," he said with a grimace.
He now says he wants to be a police officer, but emphasized that his policing style will be "way different" from some of the officers he has met. He wants to do better in school, though mostly because his mother has promised him a new bike if his grades improve.

"He's very articulate, he has a lot of potential, and I don't want him to give up on himself," Duncan said.

If he is not arrested and shows up for every court date until his case is decided, he will be considered a success story for the program.

The number of detained children in the state has dwindled in recent years, from 6,408 in 2003 to 5,438 in 2006.

But as alternative programs like DDAP struggle to find funding, advocates worry that without them, judges will have no choice but to continue incarcerating children, who can quickly adapt to life behind bars.

"People who are at DYS think they can now handle prison, so they're not afraid of going to prison and they should be," said Harris, the juvenile court judge. "We've developed, in my mind, a bunch of kids who think they've earned their red badge of courage, because they went into the system."

Isaiah, who already has been detained at the Department of Youth Services, shrugged when he was asked if he feared being locked up.

"Not really," he said. "I'll get out sooner or later."

Professor Lee, "Life Without"

2008-02-27T12:58:00.000-05:00

This event is this evening--2/27/08 at 6:30 pm.

On February 27, from 6:30 - 8:30 pm at the Museum of African American History, 46 Joy Street, Boston, MA, Massachuesetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Professor Helen Elaine Lee will read from her new novel "Life Without" which chronicles the lives of inmates in U. S. prisons.

The Somerville 5 Need Your Support

2008-02-27T12:52:00.002-05:00

Somerville 5 need you to attend Cambridge Juvenile Court tomorrow @ 9:00 am!!

Retired, Unemployed, Bored or Motivated by the pursuit of Justice? Come to court tomorrow!!!
( And for however long the trial lasts! )
DEFEND OUR YOUTH!
DROP THE RACIST FRAME-UP CHARGES AGAINST THE SOMERVILLE 5!

STOP POLICE BRUTALITY AND RACIAL PROFILING!

The trial for the juvenile defendants in the case will start
TOMORROW--THURSDAY 9:00 AM
Your immediate help is needed:

COME PACK THE COURT:
Thursday, 2/28/08 9:00 AM

Middlesex Juvenile Court, 121 Third St. - Cambridge (brick building, corner of Thorndike + Third Streets, Lechmere Stop on Green Line)

Call, Fax or Write the Judge.
Demand Case be dismissed and all charges dropped!
Chief Justice of Juvenile Court Honorable Martha P. Grace, 3 Center Plaza, #520, Boston, MA 02108; TELEPHONE: 617-788-6550; FAX: 617-788-8965

The Somerville 5 are Black youth who were racially profiled by white Medford police then attacked, beaten, maced and arrested on April 20, 2005. They were charged with numerous crimes and suspended from Somerville High School. They became a symbol across Boston of youth standing up and fighting back against racism and police brutality.

Almost three years later, the Medford cops and Middlesex DA are continuing with their attempts to railroad the remaining 2 defendants, Cassius Belfon and Earl Guerra. Jury selection will start on Wednesday, February 27 and the trial is expected to begin on Thursday, February 28th.

These young men should be allowed to get on with their lives. Both Cassius and Earl will be graduating from high school this year and are looking forward to attending college. Both are active in organized sports and church activities.

The pursuit of this racist vendatta by the Medford Police and DA is an outrage, particularly in light of the fact that the first trial of Calvin Belfon and Isaiah Anderson was rife with conflicting police testimony and lies. One witness for the prosecution turned against them and testified in defense of the Somerville 5, saying she had been coerced and duped. Other witnesses were taken to the police station and threatened. The judge stated in a memo that it was clear that the police initiated the attack on the youths, resulting in the youths being forced to defend themselves.

For one and a half years, the Committee to Defend the Somerville 5, friends, family and supporters picketed, rallied, held press conferences, conducted a national phone/fax campaign, held fundraisers and then packed the courtroom. The judge, the jury, the police and the DA all took note of this. As a result, the DA's plan to lock the youth in prison for 2 years was stopped! But they were found guilty of some charges and given 2 years probation.

Enough is enough! We need to defend our youth! Demand all charges be dropped against Cassius Belfon and Earl Guerra!

Thank you,

Committee to Defend the Somerville 5

c/o The Action Center

284 Amory St.

Jamaica Plain, MA 02130

617-522-6626

New Site for Logging Abuse Complaints on Behalf of Prisoners

2008-02-10T15:26:00.000-05:00

Do you have a love one in lockdown? Does he/she complain about physical or mental abuses ? Are they being denied medicines or are locked down in solitary confinement for month on end? Have you complain to the "proper" authorities with no avail..?

Well here is a website to log your abuse complaints and to link with other activism on behalf of prisoners as well.

http://emergencyresponse.cc/

This is the website to log abuses, name names, and let other know what is happening behind the walls. Find out what is happening in the prison industrial complex that your tax dollars fund without your input.

Torture and death happens everyday right here in the United States Prison System. Get in touch with the truth and let people know that prisoners are still human beings.

Log on to http://emergencyresponse.cc/.

Please write a letter in support of Arnold King

2008-02-10T12:57:00.000-05:00

Please send a letter to Governor Deval Patrick in support of Arnold's commutation

Peace People, here are some points that we discussed at the community meeting at Mel King’s on Sunday (2/4), including some points from the legal team.

We would like you to write a letter in support of Arnold to Governor Deval Patrick asking him to approve Arnold's petition for commutation and forward Arnold's package to the Governor's Council for consideration.

Please address the letter to:

Governor Deval Patrick, Massachusetts State House, Room 360, Boston, MA 02133

Please incorporate into your unique letter as many of the following points as possible:

(1)

· People who write support letters to the Governor should state how long they’ve known Arnie.
· Optional…say something about how you met
· If you have, say how many parole hearings you’ve attended.

(2)

· People might want to mention that you’re aware of the Governor’s creation of an Anti-Crime Council.
· Of the Governor's direct participation in council meetings.
· Maybe mention some of the things that prompted him to establish the council, and its mission.
· Looking at Arnie’s documented record over the pass 30 years particularly in,
· Education,- Programs-participated in and created-
· Youth councilling
· Arnie, could be appropriate candidate for his muti-faceted Anti-crime council.
· Can quote MA advisory board statement about Arnie, “may very well prevent future crime by his outreach work in the community” or any other quote you feel is relevant.

(3)

· Para phase: we are also aware from your guidelines that you recognize the people with the greatest expertise to make an informed judgement on commutation petitions are the members of the parole board.
· That the advisory board has scrutinized Arnie for over twenty years.
· That after four hearings, 1992-2002-2004-2007
· Attendance at the hearings rose respectively from, 45, 75, 130, ~150. Couldn’t count the 2007 hearing since the parole room was filled, the over flow room was filled, the lobby, and hallways. They started telling people as they drove in, there was no more room.
· Arnold's self-development, self-improvement, exceptional strides…
· Arnold's unanimous recommendation for commutation and release.

(4)

Final point that the majority of the parole board was appointed by Republican Gov.s, Deval Patrick has only appointed two people of the six…so, they can not say that he is soft on crime if he signs it…He is simple following the process that was set up long before him.

Please write this letter of support as soon as possible and send a copy to Arnold (Bay State Center, P.O. Box 73, Norfolk, MA 02056) and Marva (1511 Athens Road, Wilmington, DE 19803).

Thank you for continuing to support our brother.

Peace and Love,

Kazi Toure and the rest of the King Family

Editor's Note: You may wish to review the Governor's Clemency Guidelines.

The $40M Ripoff

2008-01-25T12:15:00.000-05:00

Hello Friends and Allies --- Most of you have followed the escalating rate of prisoner deaths in the Commonwealth's lock-ups.

You probably followed the December 2007 Boston Globe series on alleged suicides in 2006 and 2007. Three times the rate of the rest of the US.

SHaRC takes exception to the way the series played out and how certain state entities collaborated to frame this deadly epidemic.

The Commonwealth- almost to a department- has come up with its own solution to the 'problem' it created and still perpetuates: Residential Treatment Units within the Department of Correction. The agencies are all happy to look for another $40 million to build these specialized units where DOC staff and medical/pysch folks would be specially 'trained' to work with "mentally ill" prisoners.

What could be so wrong about this proposed solution?

In the coming weeks we will publish articles written by prisoners and their relatives. These folks know more than any legislator could ever learn or admit!

You will hear what happens when staff culture turns therapists, doctors and nurses into violent 'predators'.

The first document (below) was submitted by Albert Gagne, a 62 year old man presently incarcerated at NCCI-Gardner.

He responds to representaive Ruth Balser's proposed bill for Residential Treatment Units. Balser is also a pyschologist.

Mass Correctional Legal Services supports this concept, as does the Disability Law Center, the Criminal Justice Policy Coalition and other non-profit advocacy types. It is obvious such entities are not alied with prisoners but with legislators and corrections.

THE FORTY MILLION DOLLAR RIPOFF

I recently learned that the Legislature has allotted or intends to allot 40 million dollars to the MA Department of Correction to set up mental health tiers (Residential Treatment Units) its prison system, a system that has always and will always be the Number One contributor to mental illness in the United States prisons.

Verbal and physical abuse of prisoners by guards and prison administrators is routine and constant. This is a story for another time. I would like to focus at this point in time on the Massachusetts Mental Health System and my 45 years of experience within this evil and devastating taxpayer-supported horror.

Let me start with my experience at the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane from 1963 to 1996. I have had a total of seventeen commitments to this horror chamber and a very well documented horror chamber in fact.

Most of my commitments were to the “Old” Bridgewater State Hospital where for years I was forced to witness and experience some of the most inhumane treatment of mentally ill human beings ever recorded in Massachusetts. Over the years, along with thousands of mental patients I was constantly subjected to vicious physical beatings at the hands of so called “corrections officers.” This happened in view of and with the approval and participation of so-called mental health professionals. Again, these are facts, which are very well documented and undisputable.

In addition to the horror just described, I was unfortunate enough to witness and be subjected to punishments such as: being tied down in four point restraints for weeks at a time while naked and cold; forced to urinate and defecate on myself while being fed through a tube; and hosed down with a fire hose when the smell was overpowering to the guards and staff of so-called mental health professionals.

I was forced to witness lobotomies conducted on wooden tables, constant shock treatments, overdoses of powerful drugs, forced feedings and years of isolation in segregated punishment cells. Some people were held as long as 20, 30, and 40 years. Cells were full of urine, feces and vomit. These conditions were ordered by and/or ignored by so called mental health professionals.

I personally observed the most horrific abuse and brutality of human beings by guards and mental health professionals, including my own, ever documented, and well documented it was.

One need only to visit the archives or observe the film “Titicut Follies”, produced by a Mr. Fredrick Wiseman, which was banned for more than 20 years in Massachusetts because of its horrific contents. I was there when Mr. Wiseman was making this film and even though the prison guards and mental health staff knew they were being filmed, they continued to abuse and brutalize the patients, all in the name and disguise of “treatment.”

For more than 32 years the New Bridgewater State Hospital has existed and to this very day, the mentally ill human beings who have the unfortunate stigma of being civilly committed there are subjected to many of the same abuses and brutality as described above: beatings, restraints, over-medication with powerful doses of drugs; and weeks, months and years of isolation in cells.

Let me move on now to my experience with the Federal Bureau of Prisons at the Prison Hospital for the Criminally Insane, located in Springfield, Missouri. In June of 1972 I was transferred to the Federal Penitentiary in Terre Haute Indiana, for allegedly inciting a riot in March at Walpole State Prison. While at Terre Haute I had altercation with the warden of that prison which resulted in my stabbing him and thus my transfer to Springfield Missouri.

Upon my arrival at this so called Prison Hospital I was placed in a cell block with 6 other prisoners from various U.S. prisons, who were like myself, considered “the worst of the worst” and uncontrollable.

This cellblock was known as the “Behavior Modification Unit” and home to the Federal Bureau of Prisons “S.T.A.R.T. Program.” This was a program of sensory deprivation and brainwashing tactics created for the Federal Government by the Harvard University behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner. START’s predecessor was first and ‘successfully’ used against the North Koreans during the Korean War.

I was placed in a small cell and kept in total darkness for 60 days. The entire cell was painted black, including the windows. I could not even see my hand in front of my face. After 60 days some alleged doctor surrounded by guards came to the second tier of the program where I would be afforded light and one book to read each week. I responded by punching him in the mouth. The door was slammed in my face.

About one half hour later the door to the cell was opened and several prison guards, one of whom fired a tranquilizer dart into my chest, confronted me. In less than 30 seconds I was completely helpless and could not so much as blink an eye. (I learned much later that this drug caused a simulation of death.) I was very much aware of my surroundings, was stripped of all my clothing and four pointed in another cell on a bed of springs. (No mattress, no linens, and no blanket)

Later that day a mental health doctor came and sat on the side of the spring bed and made statements such as “You don’t like the way you feel right now do you Mr. Gagne? We can continue to do this for as long as necessary, for as long as it takes and if necessary. We can make you feel a lot worse than you are feeling right now, and so one way or another you are going to obey the rules and if you continue with your resistance things are going to get a lot worse for you. On the other hand, if you obey the rules and change your behavior you will be rewarded.”

To make a long story short this ‘treatment’ lasted some two months. Every three, four or five days they would remove the restraints, give me the first food and water that I had for those number of days and allow me to take a shower, after which I would punch the doctor or guard in the mouth and the entire situation and process would begin again.

This went on for about three months. I lost more than 70 pounds and the drug they used on me rotted out all my teeth. It was not until several months later that I learned all of the other prisoners endured the same torture that I had endured at the hands of these ‘mental health professionals’.

Some three months into this ‘mental health program’, a group of Quakers, led by Ms. Faye Kopp, toured the prison to visit conscientious objectors doing time for resisting the draft, during the Vietnam War. They inadvertently came upon this torture block and were granted permission to tour the block.

When they observed us in the conditions described above they left the prison and contacted the American Civil Liberties Union in New York. The ACLU then contacted their office in Kansas City, which obtained a federal court order to enter and photograph of us in the conditions described above. The ACLU filed suit on our behalf.

The case was tried and the court ruled that they program of torture was unconstitutional, not because it was torture and was on the verge of killing us, but because we did not volunteer to participate in the program! We were subsequently returned to the prisons from which we came. (I believe Ms. Kopp now lives in Vermont and runs a program for battered women.)

All of the facts as described above are very well documented in psychology textbooks and in the archives of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Several years ago PBS Channel 2 interviewed B.F. Skinner’s daughter. When asked what she thought was her father’s greatest disappointment involving his work she stated without hesitation: the behavior modification program he implemented for the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the Federal Medical Prison in Springfield Missouri. Unlike his earlier ‘successful’ brainwashing programs in North Korea and later in Vietnam, Skinner’s 1970s U.S. prison experiment in torture and sensory deprivation was ‘unsuccessful’.

She went on to state that as result of this failure, B.F. Skinner was forced to re-write all of his papers and tests on the subject for he had come to find out and realize that unlike the Koreans and Vietnamese, who never experienced the tortures and sensory deprivations that he and his associates imposed upon them, that we seven prisoners had in fact been subjected to not only the same torture, nut even more severe tortures for most of our lives within the prison system. (In my case all my life at home and in juvenile facilities and reform schools prior to and after that age of ten (10) years old.)

So by the time of our arrival at Springfield Missouri, in other words, he and they could not do anything to us that hadn’t been done to us before we came on the scene except to kill us, which if not for Faye Kopp he most likely would have accomplished.

All of these absolutely true facts clearly show that like oil and water, mental health and corrections do not mix. The history of the Massachusetts Department of Correction and Mental Health in the prison context is one of absolute failure and disaster, and extremely detrimental and disastrous for society. Both camps have been and continue to be a failure both individually and collectively. Nothing verifies these points more than the following facts.

In 1986 the Massachusetts Attorney General, Department of Mental Health and Department of Correction were successful in convincing the Legislature to abolish the law, which allowed for the civil commitment of sexually dangerous persons to an “alleged” treatment center. As a result the DOC was given full operational control of treatment. This decision was immediately challenged by the civilly committed “prisoners” at the Center in two cases in Federal Court Brudger v Johnston and Pearson v Fair and during the trial before Judge David Mazzone, which lasted for several months at great cost to the taxpayers of the Commonwealth.

During the trail the then Commissioner of the Department of Mental Health, Philip Johnston, testified in great length to the following facts:

1.) That there is no such thing as a sexually dangerous person in the clinical world of mental health.
2.) That there was no treatment for sexually dangerous persons that they had no idea why these persons committed sex crimes.
3.) That sex offenders like most criminals suffered from antisocial personality disorder, which cannot be treated.
4.) That it was his opinion that sex offenders should be dealt with within the criminal justice system and not in a clinical manner.
5.) A Dr. Robert Fine, who at that time was Deputy Commissioner of Forensic Mental Health for the MA DMH, echoed this testimony. He is presently a “profiler” for the United States Secret Service.

As a direct result of their hypocritical testimony M cl. C 123-A was abolished and control of the “Treatment Center” given to the DOC. All of this was and is disturbing to say the least, but even more disturbing and outrageous is the fact that before the formal trial started and throughout it’s entirety, the DOC, assisted by DMH, was quietly and quickly as possible releasing sexual psychopaths out of the Treatment Center - despite warnings from various Treatment Center staff that this would end in disaster. The DOC and DMH were attempting to lower the Treatment Center population to a level whereby they could convince the Legislature to close the place for good.

As a direct result of this outrageous contempt for the safety of the general public, and as predicted, innocent human beings, women, children were slaughtered by the likes of Michael Kelly who raped and murdered at least three (3) women after his release. David Brown, also known as Nathan Bar-Jonah, murdered and cannibalized a young Montana boy after his release at the request of Treatment Center Staff. There were many, many, many more incidents.

As soon as these incidents began, the hypocrites in the DOC, DMH, and the Legislature and the press, who had all conspired and championed the abolishment of M.G.L. c. 123A immediately covered their arses (as they are doing once again with their 40 million dollar scam) by demanding for and reinstating M.G.L. c. 123A, calling again for the life time commitment of sex offenders. (All of this was a total contradiction to their previous sworn testimony in Federal Court.)

Suddenly, sex offenders were once again ‘mentally ill’ and could be ‘treated’. (Indeed, the DOC has invented their own treatment for sex offenders including beatings, isolation in isolation cells, constant verbal and psychological abuse both here and at the Treatment Center.) In an effort to provide this charade of treatment they have and continue to hire private contractors who provide treatment which they claim does not exist; so-called therapists and/or clinicians who have no qualifications, licenses or experience in the field of mental health or treatment of sex offenders. This is done with absolute contempt for prisoners and no concern for public safety. This is a matter of record.

Now, in 2008, the DOC and all their lackeys in the press and legislature, as stated above, are pretending to respond to the increasing suicides trying to cover their arses by setting up these phony mental health tiers and blocks – to cover their arses.

First of all, it is totally insane for anyone to believe that the same individuals, who refer to all prisoners as scumbags and maggots and who are the major cause of these suicides through their constant verbal, physical, and psychological abuse daily, weekly, yearly for decades, now suddenly have great concern for ‘mentally ill’ prisoners and wish to provide quality health care and treatment. Indeed, even as I write, the DOC is implementing new rules, regulations, policies, and procedures, here at MCI Gardner which have never been necessary and that are extremely abusive and punitive in nature and spirit. According to former and present DMH and DOC officials, all of us criminals suffer from recognized mental health illness of “anti-social” personality disorder; therefore we are all mentally ill and should be in mental facilities not prisons.

The DOC recently opened an alleged mental health tier here in Thompson Hall, consisting of 21 cells housing 42 prisoners, a very small percentage (4.2) of prisoners in this facility of over 1,000.

This tier separates the 42 mentally ill prisoners from the general population in living quarters only. They are not separate from general population in any other manner. They receive little or no treatment or counseling. It is plain and simple: a total sham. Only a fool would “believe” that 10, 12 or 20 of these tiers or blocks are going to cost 40 million dollars.

From more than 45 years’ experience of being locked up in this state’s prison system I can assure you all that less than 10% of the 40 million dollars will be used to support this scam while the rest will be directed to DOC staffing, security, hiring more unqualified guards and to support the extensive perks they all receive but which are hidden from public scrutiny.

The bottom line is this: If a person is mentally ill then for a society’s sake they belong in a mental health facility and as far away from the Department of “Correction” as possible. If there is anything in our society that should be abolished it is the penal and juvenile systems as they currently exist. They are, have always been and will always be extremely detrimental to society.
The billions of dollars on DOC failures would best be spent on the root cause of this insanity, which has been recognized and diagnosed as anti-social personality disorder.

I would like to conclude this statement in this manner. It is no surprise to me to learn that this 40 million dollar scam and cover-up by the DOC, the press and various members of the Legislature is being supported by the Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services.

I doubt that there is a prisoner in the Massachusetts prison system past and present who does not have anything but contempt for this state and taxpayer-supported agency, since their appearance well over 35 years ago. They continue to earn the dubious distinction as absolute sellouts and have as such contributed to the existing and extensive abuse within the DOC. They have contributed by avoiding and ignoring abuse, brutality and cruelty inflicted on prisoners and the civilly committed mental patients in the custody and control of the DOC.

Prisoners see and believe that MCLS continues to suck-up to the DOC and other state agencies and officials; looking the other way for some 30 years, while the Commonwealth along with its lackeys in the press have run amuck over the civil and human rights of all prisoners in the Commonwealth.

MCLS is careful to pick and choose issues and prisoners that will not jeopardize its funding. Within the prisoner community they have absolutely no credibility, never have and never will. If there is anything in this state that needs to be abolished in addition to the DOC it is Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services. They are, have always been and will always be extremely detrimental to prisoners and society as a whole.

In closing, I absolutely defy anyone to disprove a single claim in this document from me as false or misleading.

Respectfully submitted,

Albert Gagne, NCCI-Gardner

Speak Out Against Raids on Immigrant Workers

2008-01-23T12:30:00.000-05:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:

Boston May day Coalition
Sergio Reyes
617-290-5614
info[at]bostonmayday.org
www.bostonmayday.org

Speak Out Against Raids on Immigrant Workers

Friday, January 25, 2008 - 4pm-6pm
In front of the J.F.K. Building, Government Center, Boston

Boston, Mass., January 10, 2008 – The Boston May Day Coalition attended the seventh World Social Forum convened in Nairobi, Kenya in January of 2007. The delegation distributed and presented a proposal seeking transnational unity in the struggle for migrant workers rights. This international event provided the opportunity for the delegates to establish contact with the many activists who were working in their respective nations on issues regarding repression against migrant workers and related issues, similar to the BMDC work here in the USA.

The International Council of the World Social Forum has agreed that instead of convening its eighth World Forum this year (2008), it will conduct a global week of action ending on January 26. In view of the USA’s war against immigrant workers and particularly “undocumented” workers, The Boston May Day Coalition must respond to the vicious character of recent raids in the state of Massachusetts. The first massive raid was conducted almost a year ago (in March 2007) by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in New Bedford. More desolation and raids in the cities of Nantucket, Chelsea, East Boston, Revere, Somerville and most recently Milford followed this initial raid. The Boston May Day Coalition denounces what appears to be a media strategy to justify ICE raids as a search for “criminals”. The Boston May Day Coalition denounces and condemns all ICE raids against immigrants and calls upon people not to be deceived by this strategy.

The BMDC will demonstrate its global solidarity with migrant workers and express its dismay with the failed system of human rights in the USA. The BMDC will also denounce the anti immigrant sentiment projected by the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates as well as the continued repression against undocumented workers. The reality is that approximately 12 million undocumented workers contribute to the wealth of this country and their countries of origin and yet are perceived as criminals.

The BMDC affirms that no worker is illegal and demand that the USA government stop the raids and deportations of these workers, and recognize them as productive contributors to our society and welcome them! The time is NOW to embrace our fellow workers, welcome them into our labor unions and communities.

# # #

PARA DISTRIBUCION INMEDIATA

PROTESTA CONTRA LAS REDADAS DE TRABAJADORES EMIGRANTES

Viernes, 25 de enero de 2008, 4pm-6pm
Frente al edificio federal J.F.K, Government Center, Boston

Boston, Mass., 10 de enero de 2008. La Coalición Primero de Mayo de Boston (CPMB) asistió al Séptimo Foro Social Mundial en Nairobi, Kenia en enero del 2007. La delegación distribuyó y presentó una propuesta para buscar la unidad transnacional en la lucha por los derechos de los trabajadores migrantes. Este evento internacional le dio la oportunidad a nuestros delegados para contactar a muchos activistas que trabajan en sus respectivos países contra la represión de los trabajadores migrantes de igual manera que la CPMB lo hace acá en los Estados Unidos.

El Consejo Internacional del Foro Social Mundial acordó que en vez de convenir el Octavo Foro Social Mundial este año 2008, se llevará a cabo una semana global de acción que culminará el 26 de enero. Tomando en consideración la continua guerra contra los emigrantes y en particular los trabajadores migrantes indocumentados, la CPMB responderá en protesta a los ataques recientes en el estado de Massachussets. La primera redada masiva tuvo lugar casi un año atrás, en marzo del 2007, contra trabajadores en New Bedford. La policía de inmigración y aduanas (ICE) continuó las redadas en Nantucket, Chelsea, East Boston, Revere, Somerville y recientemente en Milford. La CPMB denuncia la nueva estrategia de ICE para justificar las redadas. Cada ataque contra los emigrantes ahora se presenta como un operativo para arrestar 'criminales'. La CPMB condena todas las redadas de ICE contra los emigrantes y llama al pueblo a no dejarse engañar por esta estrategia.

La CPMB, de igual manera, expresa su solidaridad con todos los emigrantes victimizados en el mundo y repudia el fallido sistema en los EE.UU. que lo lleva a violar los derechos humanos de los trabajadores migrantes y sus familias. Igualmente denunciamos la propaganda anti-inmigrante proyectada en la campaña presidencial por parte de republicanos y demócratas. La realidad es que cerca de 12 millones de trabajadores indocumentados contribuyen con creces a la riqueza de este país y sus países de origen y sin embargo son catalogados como criminales.

La CPMB afirma que ningún trabajador es ilegal y demanda que el gobierno de los Estados Unidos pare las redadas de estos trabajadores y les de reconocimiento como seres humanos productivos en la sociedad. De tal manera, en vez de perseguirlos se les debe dar la bienvenida! Es tiempo ya que los reconozcamos como compañeros de trabajo, y les demos acogida en nuestras uniones y en nuestras comunidades.

# # #

----------------------------------------------
Sign the on-line petitions to:

1. Stop the Raids and Deportations, and
2. Demand that the U.S. sign the UN Convention on Migrant Workers Rights

Please go to http://www.bostonmayday.org

Powerless in Prison: Sexual Abuse Against Incarcerated Women

2008-01-23T09:53:00.000-05:00

Powerless in Prison: Sexual Abuse Against Incarcerated Women
By Nicole Summer, RH Reality Check
Posted on January 15, 2008, Printed on January 23, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/73784/

"I am 7 months pregnant [and] I got pregnant here during a sexual assault. I have been sexually assaulted here numerous times! The jailers here are the ones doing it!"

-- excerpt from a letter from an inmate in a jail in Alabama to Stop Prisoner Rape.

Surviving a sexual assault and then navigating the health care system to receive adequate counseling and reproductive medical attention is daunting enough for those who walk freely on the outside. For women in prison, these hurdles can seem insurmountable. Unfortunately, sexual assault, particularly guard-on-prisoner sexual assault, is a fact of life for many incarcerated women, and the ensuing implications for their reproductive health are many.

The power dynamics in prison severely disadvantage the prisoner, who is at the absolute mercy of her guards and correctional officers, relying on them for necessities such as food and for the small privileges and luxuries such as cigarettes. Guards have unlimited access to prisoners and their living environment, including where they sleep and where they bathe. With such an imbalance of power, the likelihood of sexual assault increases. Sexual abuse in prison can range from forcible rape to the trading of sex for certain privileges. While the latter may seem consensual to some, the drastic power disparity makes the idea of "consent" almost laughable. In fact, all 50 states have laws that make any sexual contact between inmates and correctional officers illegal, "consensual" or not. "It's always unacceptable and illegal," says Lovisa Stannow, executive director of Stop Prisoner Rape.

While guard-on-prisoner sexual assault is common, putting a number on the instances is difficult because so many assaults are unreported. As with sexual assault on the outside, many survivors in prison are ashamed and embarrassed to come forward, fear that their claim will be hard to prove or fear that their attackers will retaliate. In prison the fear of retaliation is heightened, as the prisoner continues to live with her attacker controlling her daily life. And inmates who report a sexual assault are frequently put in segregated isolation, ostensibly to protect them from retaliation, but this isolation can be emotionally and physically draining, and well, terribly isolating. And many women in prison have been sexually abused in the past, before they were incarcerated, or are accustomed to using sex to get what they want, on the inside or the outside. "A lot of women don't view it as abuse," says Deborah Golden, staff attorney at the D.C. Prisoners' Project of the Washington Lawers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. About 80 percent of women inmates have already experienced some kind of sexual or physical abuse before prison, says Sarah From, director of public policy and communications at the Women's Prison Association.

Despite the widespread underreporting, some statistics exist. First, there are about 200,000 women incarcerated in the U.S. (in federal, state, local and immigration detention settings), a number that is growing exponentially and that makes up about 10 percent of the total prison population. Amnesty International reports that in 2004, a total of 2,298 allegations of staff sexual misconduct against both male and female inmates were made, and more than half of these cases involved women as victims, a much higher percentage than the 10 percent that women comprise of the total prison population. It can vary from institution to institution, but in the worst prison facilities, one in four female inmates are sexually abused in prison, says Stannow.

The risk of pregnancy as the result of a sexual assault is, of course, a concern for many survivors, incarcerated or not. But obtaining emergency contraception or an abortion, if one is desired, may be more difficult for women on the inside. Because many inmates do not report the sexual assault immediately (if at all), using emergency contraceptionis usually not possible, if it is even available. While prisoners' rights and reproductive rights organizations report hearing few complaints about emergency contraception being inaccessible to women in prison, they are unconvinced that it is widely available. Golden believes emergency contraception should be made readily available and should be on the prison's prescription formulary.

Unlike access to emergency contraception, access to abortion by inmates has seen its way through the courts. Crucially, women do not lose their right to decide to have an abortion just because they are in prison; rather, the issue is how the prison accommodates (or refuses to accommodate) her decision. "There are constitutional minimums," says Diana Kasdan, staff attorney with the ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project. Although the details can vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, prisons must provide access to an abortion if one is desired. "Providing access" can range from providing transportation to an off-site medical facility, to allowing for a furlough or to providing abortions on-site, although Kasdan says she has not heard of the latter. A court in Arizona recently ruled that a court order to obtain transportation for an abortion cannot be required, and a federal court in Missouri ruled last year that a prison cannot refuse to pay for the transportation of inmates to receive abortions.

Paying for the abortion itself is yet another issue for women inmates, and it is a patchwork quilt of inconsistency throughout the states. Some state prison systems fund abortions, some states refuse to pay for what they consider "elective" abortions and some states simply have no official written policy, research by Rachel Roth has shown. Only two states specifically mention sexual assault in their prison abortion policies; both Minnesota and Wisconsin allow for government-subsidized abortions when the pregnancy results from a sexual assault. The federal Bureau of Prisons also pays for the abortion in the case of sexual assault.

In prison, the possibility of a coerced abortion can hang over an inmate who discovers she is pregnant as the result of a sexual assault by a guard. In a letter to Stop Prisoner Rape, one inmate writes:

A rumor had spread through the facility that I was pregnant. I'm not sure how the rumor got started, but medical staff came to my cell and forced me to provide a urine sample that they could use to test for pregnancy. They did not ask me any questions, offer me any support, or seem at all concerned for my well-being. That same night, three guards, two female and one male, came into my cell, sprayed me in the face with mace, handcuffed me behind my back, threw me down on the ground, and said, "We hear you are pregnant by one of ours and we're gonna make sure you abort." The two female guards began to kick me as the male guard stood watch. The beating lasted about a minute, but it felt like ten or more. Afterwards, the male officer uncuffed me and they left.

The prisoner's rights as a mother, if she becomes pregnant and chooses not to terminate the pregnancy, are complicated, to say the least. Few jurisdictions allow women to keep their children in prison with them once they are born. Frequently, if there is no family member on the outside to take the child, the child will enter the foster care system, and the state will move to terminate the parental rights of the mother because she is absent. The parental rights of mothers in prison is a fraught and complicated issue, one that goes well beyond the particular problem of sexual assault by guards.

Access to counseling after a sexual assault in prison is virtually nonexistent. An inmate cannot simply call a hotline, since all calls are monitored and she has no privacy. When one inmate sought mental health care from prison services after a sexual assault, she was offered sleeping pills, says Golden. "There's no capacity in prisons for talk therapy," she says. And any counseling inside the prison is not confidential. Some community therapists will come in on visiting days to counsel an inmate, but usually only at the behest of a lawyer, says Golden.

Despite the overwhelming power imbalance, guard-on-prisoner sexual assault is preventable, insists Stannow. Efforts such as making sure the staff is well trained, educating the prisoners about their rights, eliminating impunity for guards and following up on reports of sexual abuse would go a long way toward prevention, she says. Congress had similar goals in mind when it unanimously passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) in 2003. PREA aims to establish zero-tolerance standards of sexual assaults, to increase data and information on the occurrence of prison sexual assault and to develop and implement national standards for the detection, prevention, reduction and punishment of prison sexual assault. "PREA has been enormously important in ending sexual violence in detention," said Stannow. "Congress made clear that it's a problem that must be addressed." Perhaps most excitingly, PREA created a federal commission to generate binding national standards regarding sexual violence in detention. But "the existence of the law doesn't mean the problem is gone," Stannow continues. "Now we need to make sure that we build on the momentum of the law to make every corrections system in the country acknowledge that sexual violence in detention is a major problem, and does everything it can to end it."

One of the largest obstacles to eliminating prison sexual assault is the "social invisibility" of prisons. The general public neither knows nor cares about the plight of the incarcerated, and thus cannot demand that its government properly protect prisoners' bodily integrity and rights. Perhaps PREA is the beginning of the end of this social invisibility.

Nicole Summer is a writer and lawyer living in New York City.

Justices broaden officers' immunity

2008-01-23T09:50:00.001-05:00

Justices broaden officers' immunity
08:34 1/23/2008, RawStory.com Headlines
WASHINGTON Federal law enforcement officers are immune from lawsuits for mishandling, losing or even stealing personal property that comes under their control in the course of their official duties, the Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday in a 5-to-4 decision. The case was brought by a federal prison inmate, but the ruling was not limited to the prison context. It was an interpretation of the Federal Tort Claims Act, which applies to federal employees liability for damages and generally waives immunity from being sued.

Governor's CORI Proposal TODAY!

2008-01-11T11:50:00.000-05:00

Boston Globe Alert - Governor's CORI Proposal TODAY!

Dear CORI Reform Supporters,

The Governor's CORI Proposal is being released today. The proposal is a start, but there are still some major reservations that we have. It is an exciting day, but we have a lot of work ahead of us. Please stay tuned for our response to the proposal and our call for next action steps.

Thank you, Aaron - Boston Workers Alliance

----------------

Breaking bars to jobs
By Adrian Walker Globe Columnist / January 11, 2008

Governor Deval Patrick is about to address one of his major campaign promises, and there will be no shortage of strong reaction.

Today, Patrick will unveil his plan to overhaul the state's Criminal Offender Record Information law, better known as CORI. The administration has mapped out its approach largely behind closed doors.

Patrick's proposal was outlined by Public Safety Secretary Kevin Burke in an interview yesterday. An executive order will instruct state agencies to consider criminal history only as the last step in the hiring process, as opposed to blanket policies barring hiring offenders. In addition, applicants would be automatically rejected only if their criminal history had direct bearing on the job involved.

"If someone was being hired as a bookkeeper and had a conviction for larceny, that would be relevant," Burke explained. "If someone was being hired for an [information technology] job and had a conviction for assault and battery, you would make a judgment."

Other parts of the plan will require legislative approval. The legislation, also being filed today, would shorten the time records are sealed. Currently, records are sealed for 15 years for a misdemeanor and 20 years for a felony; in Patrick's proposal, those figures would become 5 years and 10 years, respectively.

CORI was a contentious issue during Patrick's campaign for governor. Advocates of changing the law, who were among his earliest supporters, have argued for years that criminal histories unfairly restrict opportunities to secure jobs and housing. They say so many organizations and companies have access to the records that the intended protections have lost their meaning. Defenders of the current law say employers deserve to know whom they are hiring.

Advocates of change seemed unsure how to react. "We're trying to decipher it to see if it really does what we want it to do, to determine if this is something that is really going to help people," said Horace Small of the Union of Minority Neighborhoods.

Senator Dianne Wilkerson of Roxbury said she does not believe the proposal goes nearly far enough. She has argued that juvenile records should be inaccessible but aren't. She also maintained that the proposal does not go to the heart of the issue, which is that people with criminal records have trouble finding work and rebuilding their lives.

"I think those people who have difficulty finding work because of CORI are not going to have much relief after the release of the governor's plan, and that to me is the most unfortunate part of it," she said. "The only real test is whether last year's no becomes this year's yes."

Catherine Hennessey is one of the people who has known firsthand the difficulties of navigating the job market after prison. She served a six-month sentence in 1989 for drug possession and conspiracy. She began working nine years ago for the Cambridge Health Alliance, as a temporary worker in the physical therapy department. But she wasn't hired permanently until four months ago, because the agency, like many health care agencies, had a policy of not hiring ex-convicts.

"It's just not fair to have a lifetime ban in an industry that has so many opportunities," she said yesterday. "When people are trying to rehabilitate themselves, they have no options."

In truth, the proposed measures are a bit timid, especially given Patrick's often-stated commitment to the cause. But it is certainly a step in the right direction.

Not everyone will think so. But it makes no sense to shut convicts out of the job market. The founding idea behind CORI was to allow convicts to lead productive lives after prison. But over several decades it has come to have the opposite effect, partly because the law is so porous.

How the proposed legislation will fare in election year, in a Legislature with plenty on its plate already, is anyone's guess. Its fate will stand as a test of whether Patrick's ability to govern can catch up to the soaring rhetoric that made him governor in the first place.

Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com.

Source URL: http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/01/11/breaking_bars_to_jobs/.

--
Aaron Tanaka
Boston Workers Alliance
51 Roxbury St.
Roxbury, MA 02119

p. 617.427.8108
c. 617.359.0336
f. 617. 442.9404
atanaka@bostonworkersalliance.org
www.BostonWorkersAlliance.org

Massachusetts Presidential Primary: February 5

2008-01-10T23:37:00.000-05:00

A quick public service reminder: the Massachusetts Presidential Primary is February 5th. The last day to register to vote in this Primary and/or change party enrollment for this Primary is January 16th, a week from yesterday. There are also some special election primaries to select nominees to fill vacant seats left by Rep. Marzilli, Rep. Correia, Rep. Petersen, and Rep. Festa.

If you have moved since the last election or never voted or registered, registering now will permit you to vote on Feb. 5th.

Presidential Primaries are elections. When citizens vote in a Presidential Primary for a particular candidate, they are actually voting to allocate their state’s delegates to a particular candidate before the national conventions. Each state is assigned a number of delegates based on population of the state. Those delegates will attend the national conventions in the summer to select the party nominee for President for each party. Voting in a Presidential Primary gives the average citizen an opportunity to participate in determining the party’s nominee for President and to influence the party platform.

You do not need to be enrolled in a party (registered as a Republican or Democrat or Green or Libertarian, etc.) in advance to vote in a primary. But, you will have to enroll in a party on the day of the Presidential Primary in order to participate in it. That means, when you go to your polling place, you will have to say, "I want to vote on the ____ (Republican/Democrat/Green/Libertarian, etc.) ballot." And, if memory serves, that will mean that you will remain enrolled as a member of that party after the primary unless you choose to indicate otherwise.

We have voter registration guides here and you can also download the voter registration forms here http://www.sec.state.ma.us/ele/elepdf/file.pdf. Be sure to follow the general and state specific instructions when filling it out. These must be postmarked by January 16th.

You can contact the Secretary of State's office with questions about primaries or registering to vote at the numbers below.

Telephone: (617) 727-2828
Toll-Free: 1-800-462-VOTE (8683)
Fax: (617) 742-3238
Email: elections@sec.state.ma.us

I am available to answer any questions that I can and hunt down answers for those I cannot. Please let me know if I can help in any way.

We encourage all of our friends to participate in this important process and let their voices be heard.

Happy New Year!

Best,
Deb

Deborah H. Fournier, Esq.
Associate Director of Public Policy
AIDS Action Committee
294 Washington Street, 5th Floor
Boston, MA 02108
617.450.1315
617.262.6185

Don't forget, the only folks in Massachusetts who cannot vote due to incarceration are those who are incarcerated POST TRIAL for a FELONY CONVICTION. All others can vote -- those on probation, parole, and those with criminal records CAN vote. those who are incarcerated pre-trial and those who are incarcerated post-trial for misdemeanor convictions CAN vote.

CORI: Juveniles Must Be Included in the Executive Order

2008-01-10T09:17:00.000-05:00

It is critical that Governor Patrick doesn't leave out the thousands of juveniles that are negatively harmed by current CORI practices. Please Call Governor Patrick and tell him it is CRITICAL that the following language be included in the Executive Order:

"Only summer camps shall receive juvenile court activity record information records; when juvenile court activity record information is disseminated, employers shall receive court activity records of juveniles limited to cases which contain adjudications of delinquency; all other adjudicatory dispositions of juveniles shall not be disclosed."

Call the Governor at 617.725.4005 or email him at the following link:
http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=gov3utilities&sid=Agov3&U=Agov3_contact_us.

Lisa Thurau-Gray states:

Juvenile records are released to housing authorities, private enterprises—from banks to fast food restaurants, hospitals (sometimes 12 years later), day care centers, and to the summer youth employment programs. Youth with records are denied entry to a panoply of training programs—just by dint of having a record.

Even juvenile records which disclose a youth's case has been dismissed or the youth has been acquitted are used to justify not hiring youth. The release of this information to employers represents the trumping of the arrest information over the disposition of the juvenile judge—an employer sees the charge and assumes there is danger. This dissemination of data vitiates the whole point of the court proceeding by making the fact of the arrest the most salient piece of information.

****************************
''Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

--
Union of Minority Neighborhoods

83 Highland St
Roxbury, Ma 02119
617-521-4111

2 Harris Ave
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
617-522-3349

www.unionofminorityneighborhoods.org

Juvenile justice and the pardon

2008-01-04T13:26:00.000-05:00

Juvenile justice and the pardon
January 3, 2008

LEAVING ASIDE for a moment the self-serving presidential campaign rhetoric that has brought to the front page Mitt Romney's refusal to pardon a decorated war veteran, we should ask how it is possible for a juvenile at the age of 13 to have a public criminal record that would require pardoning as if the individual were an adult at the time ("Mass. pardon case at center of GOP storm," Jan. 2).

Juvenile court is supposed to be a confidential legal setting. The whole purpose of juvenile justice is to recognize adolescence and the need to treat juveniles as if they are less responsible for their actions than adults. A juvenile's record of delinquency is not a permanent record of criminality but a temporary one that is to be wiped clean when the juvenile turns into an adult.

The juvenile court's mission remains important in providing youths with the second chance that they need to become productive, law-abiding adults.

The fact that Anthony Circosta as an adult had to petition to be pardoned for an offense that he committed at 13 is a sad indictment not only of a former governor who consistently refused to grant any petition, but of a state that prides itself on its ability to provide justice.
SIMON I. SINGER, Boston

The writer is a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University.

WOULDN'T IT be rich for Governor Patrick to show up his predecessor by issuing a long-overdue pardon to Anthony Circosta? Nothing would send a stronger message regarding justice and sensitivity.
PHIL HALL, Fairfield, Conn.

Death of Suffolk inmate is being investigated

2008-01-04T13:25:00.000-05:00

Death of Suffolk inmate is being investigated
By Megan Woolhouse, Globe Staff | January 3, 2008

Suffolk County jail officials and the Boston Police Department are investigating the death of an inmate on New Year's Eve as he was transferred to the maximum-security section of the Suffolk County House of Correction.

Relatives demanded an independent investigation, saying that they had seen his body and that he appeared to have been beaten.

Officials disputed the family's account. They said Darryl Lee Leslie, 41, died shortly after 9 p.m. as he was being transported out of minimum security.

Steve Tompkins, jail spokesman, said officials learned Leslie was "planning a violent attack" on another inmate and were moving him to more restrictive quarters when he became disruptive.

"During the move, he fell into unconsciousness," Tompkins said last night. He would not elaborate, but he said a preliminary investigation by the sheriff's Internal Affairs Division found no wrongdoing by guards. "There was no excessive or unwarranted force used," Tompkins said.

Tompkins said he did not know the names or the number of guards involved in the move. Leslie, who was 6 feet 6 inches tall, would have been accompanied by two or more guards, he said.

Leslie's body was sent for an autopsy by the state medical examiner's office last night, Tompkins said.
He had been incarcerated since Aug. 17 for violating his probation, Tompkins said, adding that Leslie had been in and out of the 1,600-inmate jail over the years on charges of larceny, assault and battery with a box cutter, and receiving stolen property. Tompkins said Leslie had also served time in state prison for armed robbery.

Thomas Leslie, the inmate's younger brother, said yesterday that the family was outraged to learn of his death and questioned whether the guards used force. Thomas Leslie said morgue employees let him and a sister view their brother's head yesterday; the rest of the body was under a white cloth. His face appeared bruised and swollen, he said.

Tompkins said the family had not been allowed to see the body.

ACLU Procession and Vigil

2007-12-31T10:36:00.000-05:00

On January 11, from 12:30 pm to 1:30 pm, the ACLU of Massachusetts will hold a procession and vigil in downtown Boston demanding the closure of Guantánamo prison.

Contact me at nancy@aclum.org if you want more information.

Six years ago on January 11, the first prisoners arrived at the notorious Guantánamo Bay prison camp.

The Bush Administration has told us that Guantánamo is for "the worst of the worst" terrorism suspects -- yet many of the detainees were seized by militia and warlords, and handed over to the U.S. in exchange for large cash bounties. Only five percent of Guantánamo detainees were actually captured by U.S. forces, and after six years, zero trials have been completed.

The reality is that Guantánamo Bay has become one of the worst stains on our country's reputation. Guantánamo embodies some of the very things the U.S. was founded to prevent: indefinite detention, the use of secret evidence, and torture.

One of our New Year's resolutions should be to close Guantánamo. We should demand that the Administration either charge the prisoners in Guantánamo and put them on trial, or set them free.

The ACLU has taken a lead in working to close Guantánamo, and you can help. Whether you have just one minute, five minutes, 15 minutes, or more, there's something you can do to help ensure that Guantánamo and all U.S.-run secret prisons are closed in 2008:

http://www.aclu.org/safefree/detention/closeguantanamo.html

As 2008 begins, help us close this dark chapter of American history. Help us shut down Guantánamo Bay.

Nancy Murray
Director of Education

King Update

2007-12-28T10:41:00.000-05:00

From: Arnie King
Sent: Friday, December 28, 2007 9:30 AM
Subject: Hope in 2008 !!!

Warm greetings!

As we celebrate the holidays and the New Year, we are reminded of the principles of Kwanzaa. The first day of Kwanzaa is Umoja, which stresses the importance of unity. This project’s strength is a direct result of the unity of everyone involved who has contributed by writing letters, attending Sunday brunches at Mel’s, circulating and signing petitions, presenting at and attending public hearings, soliciting additional supporters, and offering prayers and expressing positive vibes. There is no question that all of these efforts combined resulted in the current status and success of Arnie’s petition for commutation of sentence.

We thank you for the wonderful contribution and ultimately your presence in this project. We could never have done this without you. The journey has been long and intense and we appreciate your resilience to staying the course. It is clear we have God and the spirits of our ancestors with us as we struggle against the odds.

The petition currently awaits the Governor’s signature and then a public hearing will be scheduled with the Governor’s Council. It will be great to see you and others at the State House for this hearing. We will keep you posted on the details as they become known to us.

Meanwhile, transcripts of the October 25th hearing and the Board opinions are now available to read and download from the website here: http://www.arnoldking2007.org/post-hearing.html

We wish all of you a joyous holiday season and a New Year of good health and great happiness.

One Love,

The Arnold King Commutation Working Group

Unanimous Vote for Arnie King!

2007-12-22T10:56:00.000-05:00

From: Arnie King
Sent: Friday, December 21, 2007 7:41 AM
Subject: FABULOUS NEWS FROM ARNIE'S LAWYER

Hey folks!!

I just got a call from Maureen Walsh informing me that the board has voted unanimously to recommend commutation of Arnie’s sentence to Governor Patrick!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Soffiyah

CORI Update

2007-12-22T10:52:00.000-05:00

Family,

As some of you know, the CORI reform movement has been pushing Governor Patrick to implement an Executive Order to reform the states draconian CORI system as a means to help the Governor reach his stated goal of providing real relief to individuals affected by CORI this calendar year.

To that end, the Massachusetts Alliance to Reform CORI (MARC) along with the Boston Workers Alliance and the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute drafted an executive order for the Administrations consideration, since it had become clear that reform legislation was not going to occur this year.

Thus began a series of discussions with the administration through the Executive Office of Public Safety. Participants in these discussions included Undersecretaries Mary-Beth Heffernan, John Grossman, and representatives of MARC, BWA, MLRI and Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner.

In the next few days, Governor Patrick will be issuing his executive order which as we understand it, will include the following information:

1) ACCURACY ISSUES:

- The Governor's Executive order is to include major changes in CORI accuracy. This meand converting from a named based system to a finger printing system to ensure accurate CORI's

- The fixing of all incorrect CORI's

- Significantly beefng up staff and improving the technology at the CHSB

- Expanding the training to businesses and others who hire on the reading of CORI's

2) EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES REGULATIONS:

- The Executive Office of Health and Human Services will rescind the Presumptive Qualifications that give people with CORI's a lifetime ban in health and human services jobs. (However, there is some talk about providing employers with an advisory list of crimes for which employers who represent vulnerable populations are advised to pay attention to. The administration and the Executive Office of Public Safety is aware that we disagree with this proposed advisory list. We have been assured that the administration is taking our concerns seriously, and that no final decision has been made on this idea. We expect to meet with them once again on this issue very soon).

3) LEGISLATION:

- The Administration will be introducing legislation proposing changes in the states sealing law. They are proposing changing the sealing laws from its current 10 years for misdemeanors and 15 years for felonies to 5 years for misdemeanors and 10 years for felonies. CORI activists have been advocating for changes that call for the sealing of records at 3 years for misdemeanors and 7 years for felonies. The administration is open to working with us on our proposal.

- Increasing sanctions, including criminal charges, on businesses who misuse CORI.

WHAT'S STILL IN PLAY:

- Anti-discrimination, particularly the issue of removing the question of past criminal activity on job applications

- Limiting the CHSB in sending out CORI information through regulatory screening via executive order

- Strengthening due process for indiviiduals who's CORI's come back to an employer

Clearly, this is a good first step towards real reform, particularly the EOHHS provision. All of us who have participated in these discussions are clear that the administration of Governor Patrick is serious about reform of the system. However, remember family, THIS IS JUST A FIRST STEP!! We must continue to be vigilant in our organizing. We must ensure that employers honor these expected changes, and we ALL must be committed to the legislative fight that is to come to lower the sealing provision to 3 and 7 years.

When the order is issued, and the above information is what we expect it to say, it will help people immediately...but again, this is just the beginning. We still have to fight for jobs and job training. IT AIN'T OVER!!!

Here's hoping that this information will make your holiday season a little brighter. Have a great holiday, with lots of love and peace thrown in.

Horace

83 Highland St
Roxbury, Ma 02119
617-521-4111

2 Harris Avenue
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
617-522-3349

www.unionofminorityneighborhoods.org

Responses to the Globe's series on prison 'suicides'

2007-12-22T10:47:00.001-05:00

'A call I pray I never receive'
December 21, 2007

I READ your Spotlight series "Breakdown: The prison suicide crisis" (Page A1, Dec. 9-11) through the eyes of a parent whose son has a mental illness and is an inmate who has experienced solitary confinement.

The phone call that Leslie Aranda received telling her that her son had committed suicide is a call I pray I never receive.

I have experienced the devastating effects of segregating a loved one who is out of touch with reality and cannot comprehend why he is being isolated and forbidden contact with his family and his private possessions.

My son has helped me to understand why someone would prefer death to being psychologically tormented and physically caged with the horrors of his delusions and hallucinations.

In addition to isolation, he has also been the victim of careless errors and dangerous decisions by correctional and medical staff. For example, medications for his physical and mental health problems were either not prescribed or abruptly discontinued or decreased to below therapeutic levels.

Contrary to the way many view people with mental illness, he was very aware of anticipating, and then experiencing, the deterioration in his physical and mental health status.

Other Comments:

I pray every day that my son will survive another day of his incarceration.
JOAN JOHNSTON
Dalton

YOUR SERIES on prison suicides was informative. However, I am concerned that this is presented as a mental health issue.

Many people who entered prisons certifiably sane were driven to suicide by the extremely dehumanizing environment. That needs to be addressed.

JONATHAN CAMPBELL
Jamaica Plain

First-Ever National Survey of Prisoners Shows Widespread Sexual Abuse

2007-12-17T12:40:00.001-05:00

Stop Prisoner Rape, Los Angeles, December 16, 2007. A national survey of inmates, released today by the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), confirms that sexual abuse plagues American prisons, derailing justice and shattering human dignity.

According to the report, an estimated 60,500 inmates held at state and federal prisons were subjected to sexual abuse in the past year alone.

Today's National Inmate Survey (NIS) is the first of its kind and covers more than 1.3 of the 2.4 million people currently in detention in the United States. Detainees held at county jails, juvenile facilities, and immigration detention centers were not included in the survey, nor were prisoners at half-way houses. The research method used in the new report - asking prisoners directly and anonymously whether they had been subjected to sexual abuse in the past 12 months - sets it apart from previous attempts by the federal government to study the problem, which have relied entirely on data submitted by corrections officials.

"We know from speaking daily with prisoner rape survivors that the vast majority will never file a formal complaint, for fear of retaliation, stigma, or further abuse," said Lovisa Stannow, Executive Director of Stop Prisoner Rape (SPR). "Not surprisingly, today's report establishes a 15 times higher rate of sexual abuse than an analysis of formal inmate complaints over a one-year period, published by the BJS four months ago."

Garrett Cunningham, a prisoner rape survivor from Texas and a member of SPR's Board of Directors, is a case in point. "After being raped by a prison guard, I was devastated and terrified. I felt sure that filing a formal complaint with the perpetrator's colleagues would only have made my situation worse."

In today's report, the BJS identifies the U.S. prisons with the highest and the lowest rates of sexual abuse. Alarmingly, five of the ten worst facilities are prisons run by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ). This finding confirms SPR's own data, based on letters the organization has received from some 900 prisoner rape survivors nationwide; 20 percent of these letters come from men and women held in TDCJ facilities.

SPR urges corrections officials across the country to consider today's BJS report a wake-up call. "When the government makes the grave decision to remove a person's liberty, it takes on the responsibility to guarantee his or her physical safety," said Ms. Stannow. "Whether perpetrated by staff or by inmates, sexual abuse in detention is a problem of poor prison policies and practices. It is not an inevitable fact of life behind bars."

An international human rights organization, Stop Prisoner Rape (SPR) is the only group in the U.S. dedicated exclusively to eliminating sexual violence against men, women, and youth in detention. SPR was instrumental in securing passage of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) of 2003, which mandated the BJS to conduct the NIS and publish the report released today.

For more information, visit www.spr.org or call Lovisa Stannow at 213-384-1400 (ext. 103) or 310-617-4350 (cell).

http://www.spr.org/en/pressreleases/2007/12_16_07.asp

Race and Ethnicity in America: Turning a Blind Eye to Injustice

2007-12-15T10:55:00.000-05:00

RACE & ETHNICITY IN AMERICA: TURNING A BLIND EYE TO INJUSTICE

On December 10, 2007, the ACLU released a comprehensive analysis of the pervasive, institutionalized, systemic and structural racism in America. The report, Race & Ethnicity in America: Turning a Blind Eye to Injustice, is a response to the U.S. report to the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) released earlier this year. The U.S. report, which the ACLU called a “whitewash,” swept under the rug the dramatic effects of widespread racial and ethnic discrimination in this country, and fails to honestly assess the ways in which racial and ethnic discrimination and inequality persist.

Read the ACLU report >>

Prisoners’ Rights Violated in U.S

2007-12-13T14:12:00.000-05:00

Prisoners in U.S. Suffer Discrimination
Based on Race, Gender & Sexual Orientation
Human Rights Activists Say Prisoners’ Rights Violated in U.S.

PHILADELPHIA, PA [DECEMBER 12] — The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and a coalition of more than 80 prison activists and human rights organizations have issued a report detailing the systemic racism and other forms of discrimination routinely experienced by people of color, women, and sexual minorities in U.S. prisons.

The report, issued to commemorate International Human Rights Day, is part of a larger effort spearheaded by the U.S. Human Rights Network (USHRN), which coordinated the work of more than 250 human rights and social justice organizations in preparing a shadow report rebutting the U.S. State Department’s (DOS) periodic report on compliance with United Nations Committee on the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), to which the U.S. is a signatory.

The State Department’s report, which claims great strides in identifying, correcting, and remedying racism and racial discrimination, was quietly submitted to the U.N. last spring and posted without publicity on the Department’s website. It has been characterized by USHRN as a “complete whitewash.”

Among its many conspicuous gaps, the official U.S. report failed to address the fact that Blacks and Hispanics together account for about only one quarter of the general population but make up more than 60 percent of the jail and prison population. According to the latest statistics from the US Department of Justice, as of June 30, 2006, there were 905,600 African Americans and 459,300 Latino/Latinas in prisons and jails.

The AFSC portion of the report notes that Black men comprise 41 percent of all men in custody, and Black and Latina women comprise 34 percent and 16 percent of incarcerated women, respectively. Native Americans, who experience the highest rate of incarceration of any ethnic group in the U.S., received no mention in the State Department report.

Although the State Department report discusses several mechanisms by which it can investigate and prosecute “torture, cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment of prisoners,” it only explicitly mentions one instance directly related to racial discrimination in which it provided technical assistance to a corrections department that was segregating prisoners based on race.

In the prison report, AFSC points out that given the tremendous over-representation of people of color within prisons and jails, it is vital that a report on racial discrimination look critically at the means by which those who experience racial discrimination in prisons can receive redress. Unfortunately, it has become increasingly difficult for even the most egregious abuses to be remedied by the courts.

“When people of color constitute just 25 percent of the U.S. population but represent more than 60 percent of people in prison, the government can’t credibly claim that the prison system is operating without racial discrimination,” said Naima Black, National STOPMAX Campaign Coordinator at AFSC.

American Friends Service Committee co-chaired and wrote sections of the report on prisons as part of a broader Criminal Justice Working Group. The report examines a multitude of commonplace violations of Articles 1, 2 and 5 of the Convention in U.S. prisons and jails, including direct testimony from prisoners, and offers specific recommendations.

The report details numerous racial injustices and disparities with regard to: solitary confinement and supermax prisons; access to education; access to appropriate medical and mental health care; rape and sexual assault; preservation of family unity for people of color in prison; Native American prisoners; freedom to practice religion; effects of incarceration practices on the census and re-districting; and the treatment of prisoners in post-Katrina Louisiana.

“This collaborative shadow report provides critical information including data and personal testimonies from which the committee can draw their specific questions,” said Black.

The U.N. committee that monitors compliance with ICERD will meet in February 2008 in Geneva to review reports from around the world, including this report from the United States, and will question the U.S. government on its compliance with the treaty.

To view a copy of the prison report, please visit http://www.stopmax.org/.

To view the full report: http://www.ushrnetwork.org/files/ushrn/images/2008_shadow_report/Shadow_Report_2008_web.pdf.

To view a copy of a summary of the shadow report submitted by the U.S. Human Rights Network, please visit http://lacccenter.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/shadowrptsummary2008.doc.

# # #

The American Friends Service Committee is a Quaker organization that includes people of various faiths who are committed to social justice, peace and humanitarian service. Its work is based on the belief in the worth of every person and faith in the power of love to overcome violence and injustice.

Patrick aide spurns prison policy change

2007-12-12T11:04:00.000-05:00

Patrick aide spurns prison policy change
Rejects call to ban solitary confinement for the mentally ill
By Michael Rezendes and Thomas Farragher, Globe Staff | December 12, 2007

The Patrick administration said yesterday that it would not support a blanket ban on the placement of mentally ill inmates in solitary confinement, rejecting calls for swift action from lawmakers who said the practice only makes sick prisoners sicker and prone to suicide.

"What I've been reading about and what I've heard about is horrible," Governor Deval Patrick said, reacting to a Globe Spotlight report that detailed an alarming rate of inmate suicide and self-inflicted harm behind state prison walls.

Still, the governor's public safety secretary, Kevin M. Burke, said that while the administration is committed to ensuring mentally ill inmates receive proper treatment, an outright prohibition on locking them in isolation could jeopardize the safety of correctional staff, other inmates, and the mentally ill themselves.

"We don't think that's a good idea," Burke said.

But several lawmakers on Beacon Hill, reacting to the Globe report, said they would push for legislation to keep mentally ill inmates out of closet-size solitary confinement cells.

"We have an obligation to treat the people who are ill who are in the state's custody," state Representative Ruth B. Balser, who chairs the Legislature's Joint Committee on Mental Health and Substance Abuse, said at a State House news conference with prisoner advocates.

She said the bill would "establish a policy which is not only humane, but will ultimately save the Commonwealth money and will protect the public safety."

For nearly 20 years, there have been calls for high-security treatment units for violent, mentally disturbed prisoners. But there has been little progress toward that goal. Earlier this year, the administration secured about $1 million to begin to bring some of those units on line, a measure Burke, in an earlier interview, called little more than a "Band-Aid."

Burke said it would take "several million" dollars to fully fund the solution advocates are calling for.

Balser and state Representative Kay Khan want the correction department to build the high-security special treatment units within each state prison to house mentally ill inmates who are difficult to manage and who pose a danger to themselves or to correction officers and other inmates. The units are cells staffed by mental health professionals and by officers who are trained to deal with mental illness.

"The Department of Correction did not ask to become the state's biggest psychiatric facility, but it is," said Leslie Walker, director of Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services. She said the department's recent record with mentally ill inmates, documented this week by the Globe, is a continuation of a problem that has festered for two decades.

"What has been lacking is not knowledge, however," Walker said. "It has been political will."

The Globe reported that 15 inmates have committed suicide in Massachusetts prisons in the past three years, and a 16th was left brain dead. Nine of these prisoners were being held in isolation. Many of them suffered from mental illness or drug addiction.

Patrick said the money he wanted to spend on state prisons this year was trimmed by state lawmakers. His spokesman said the governor expects to file legislation "within a month" that would provide an additional $10 million to $15 million in funds for improvements in prison facilities.

"But I don't think anybody believes that the solution resides in more money alone," the governor said. "It's better strategies. It's more accountability. I think we have the right leadership at the [Department of Correction] to help deliver that, and they know I'm watching."

When Patrick was heading the civil rights division of the US Department of Justice during the Clinton administration, he issued sharp criticism of states that he said failed to implement policies that adhered to "notions of humanity and decency" when housing mentally ill inmates. In 1996, for example, Patrick threatened Maryland's governor, Parris N. Glendening, with a lawsuit, in part because of the state's practice of housing mentally ill inmates in solitary confinement.

"Where conditions of segregation greatly exacerbate mental illness, and the period of segregated confinement is prolonged or indefinite, feasible alternative custodial arrangements should be explored," Patrick said then in a 13-page letter outlining his concerns about Maryland prisons.

As prison suicides surged, the Massachusetts correction department sought an independent study, which pointed to prison practices and policies that have exacerbated the problem. Conducted by Lindsay M. Hayes, a national prison specialist, the study, released earlier this year, made 29 recommendations for change that were quickly adopted.

Meanwhile, a nonprofit group has a federal lawsuit saying the agency is housing hundreds of mentally ill inmates under inhumane conditions.

The Disability Law Center, which provides legal assistance to the disabled, said in its lawsuit that housing the mentally ill under such conditions amounts to cruel and unusual punishment and should be banned. It also said the practice of isolating mentally ill inmates runs counter to the Americans with Disabilities Act and other federal laws.

"History will look back on this era," Balser said, "and wonder why we were locking up so many people who were sick."

Beth Healy of the Globe Spotlight team contributed to this report.

BREAKDOWN: The Prison Suicide Crisis. Part 3

2007-12-11T10:22:00.000-05:00

Advisory: SHaRC cannot confirm the veracity of this series. Reader beware.

Part 3: Desperation, frustration
As prisons become the asylum of last resort for the mentally ill, desperation, frustration and violence are rising on both sides of the cell door. About 50 times each month, inmates are assaulting prison staff members. And, at nearly the same rate, inmates, many of whom say they are abused by officers, attempt to kill or injure themselves. The Spotlight Team examines the tension between mentally disturbed inmates and their jailers.

BREAKDOWN: The Prison Suicide Crisis. Part 2

2007-12-10T12:20:00.000-05:00

Advisory: SHaRC cannot confirm the veracity of this series. Reader beware.

Part 2: An inmate's suicide
Nelson Rodriguez was a mentally-retarded 26-year-old when he hanged himself in the notorious 10-block isolation unit at MCI-Cedar Junction. Unable to master the rules of prison life, he was repeatedly punished with solitary confinement.

Supreme court allows lighter crack cocaine terms

2007-12-10T12:19:00.000-05:00

Supreme court allows lighter crack cocaine terms
11:26 12/10/2007, Reuters: Top News
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. judges who disagree with federal sentencing guidelines can impose lighter prison sentences in crack cocaine cases, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday in deciding a racially sensitive issue.

BREAKDOWN: The Prison Suicide Crisis. Part 1

2007-12-09T19:46:00.000-05:00

Advisory: SHaRC cannot confirm the veracity of this series. Reader beware.

Inmates at risk

With 15 suicides in three years, inmates have taken their own lives in Massachusetts prisons at roughly triple the national rate for state prisons. And hundreds more inmates are hurting themselves and attempting suicide. A Globe Spotlight Team investigation found that most of the deaths came after careless errors and deadly decisions by Department of Correction officials and health staff, at times when inmates were obviously at risk.

Photo essay Amid trail of errors in prisons, families left with questions

Photos Jarred Aranda, comforts long forgotten

Notes Read some inmates' last words

How America Lost the War on Drugs

2007-12-05T22:41:00.000-05:00

How America Lost the War on Drugs

After Thirty-Five Years and $500 Billion, Drugs Are as Cheap and Plentiful as Ever: An Anatomy of a Failure.
Rolling Stone

Ben Wallace-Wells

Posted Nov 27, 2007 12:56 PM

1. AFTER PABLO

On the day of his death, December 2nd, 1993, the Colombian billionaire drug kingpin Pablo Escobar was on the run and living in a small, tiled-roof house in a middle-class neighborhood of Medellín, close to the soccer stadium. He died, theatrically, ridiculously, gunned down by a Colombian police manhunt squad while he tried to flee across the barrio's rooftops, a fat, bearded man who had kicked off his flip-flops to try to outrun the bullets. The first thing the American drug agents who arrived on the scene wanted to do was to make sure that the corpse was actually Escobar's. The second thing was to check his house.

The last time Escobar had hastily fled one of his residences - la Catedral, the luxurious private prison he built for himself to avoid extradition to the United States - he had left behind bizarre, enchanting detritus, the raw stuff of what would become his own myth: the photos of himself dressed up as a Capone-era gangster with a Tommy gun, the odd collection of novels ranging from Graham Greene to the Austrian modernist Stefan Zweig. Agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, arriving after the kingpin had fled, found neat shelves lined with loose-leaf binders, carefully organized by content. They were, says John Coleman, then the DEA's assistant administrator for operations, "filled with DEA reports" - internal documents that laid out, in extraordinary detail, the agency's repeated attempts to capture Escobar.

"He had shelves and shelves and shelves of these things," Coleman tells me. "It was stunning. A lot of the informants we had, he'd figured out who they were. All the agents we had chasing him - who we trusted in the Colombian police - it was right there. He knew so much more about what we were doing than we knew about what he was doing."

Coleman and other agents began to work deductively, backward. "We had always wondered why his guys, when we caught them, would always go to trial and risk lots of jail time, even when they would have saved themselves a lot of time if they'd just plead guilty," he says. "What we realized when we saw those binders was that they were doing a job. Their job was to stay on trial and have their lawyers use discovery to get all the information on DEA operations they could. Then they'd send copies back to Medellín, and Escobar would put it all together and figure out who we had tracking him."

The loose-leaf binders crammed in Escobar's office on the ground floor gave Coleman and his agents a sense of triumph: The whole mysterious drug trade had an organization, a structure and a brain, and they'd just removed it. In the thrill of the moment, clinking champagne glasses with officials from the Colombian police and taking congratulatory calls from Washington, the agents in Medellín believed the War on Drugs could finally be won. "We had an endgame," Coleman says. "We were literally making the greatest plans."

At the headquarters of the Office of National Drug Control Policy in Washington, staffers tacked up a poster with photographs of sixteen of its most wanted men, cartel leaders from across the Andes. Solemnly, ceremoniously, a staffer took a red magic marker and drew an X over Escobar's portrait. "We felt like it was one down, fifteen to go," recalls John Carnevale, the longtime budget director of the drug-control office. "There was this feeling that if we got all sixteen, it's not like the whole thing would be over, but that was a big part of how we would go about winning the War on Drugs."

Man by man, sixteen red X's eventually went up over the faces of the cartel leaders: KILLED. EXTRADITED. KILLED. José Santacruz Londoño, a leading drug trafficker, was gunned down by Colombian police in a shootout. The Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, the heads of the Cali cartel, were extradited after they got greedy and tried to keep running their organization from prison. Some U.S. drug warriors believed that the busts were largely public-relations events, a showy way for the Colombian government to look tough on the drug trade, but most were less cynical. The crack epidemic was over. Drug-related murders were in decline. Winning the War on Drugs didn't seem such a quixotic and open-ended mission, like the War on Poverty, but rather something tangible, a fat guy with a big organization and binders full of internal DEA reports, sixteen faces on a poster, a piñata you could reach out and smack. Richard Cañas, a veteran DEA official who headed counternarcotics efforts on the National Security Council under both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, can still recall the euphoria of those days. "We were moving," he says, "from success to success."

This is the story of how that momentary success turned into one of the most sustained and costly defeats the United States has ever suffered. It is the story of how the most powerful country on Earth, sensing a piñata, swung to hit it and missed.

2. THE MAKING OF A TRAGEDY

For Cañas and other drug warriors, the death of Escobar had the feel of a real pivot, the end of one kind of battle against drugs and the beginning of another. The war itself had begun during the Nixon administration, when the White House began to get reports that a generation of soldiers was about to come back from Vietnam stoned, with habits weaned on the cheap marijuana and heroin of Southeast Asia and hothoused in the twitchy-fingered freakout of a jungle guerrilla war. For those in Washington, the problem of drugs was still so strange and new in the early Seventies that Nixon officials grappled with ideas that, by the standards of the later debate among politicians, were unthinkably radical: They appointed a panel that recommended the decriminalization of casual marijuana use and even considered buying up the world's entire supply of opium to prevent it from being converted into heroin. But Nixon was a law-and-order politician, an operator who understood very well the panic many Americans felt about the cities, the hippies and crime. Calling narcotics "public enemy number one in the United States," he used the issue to escalate the culture war that pitted Middle Americans against the radicals and the hippies, strengthening penalties for drug dealers and devoting federal funds to bolster prosecutions. In 1973, Nixon gave the job of policing these get-tough laws to the newly formed Drug Enforcement Administration.

By the mid-1980s, as crack leeched out from New York, Miami and Los Angeles into the American interior, the devastations inflicted by the drug were becoming more vivid and frightening. The Reagan White House seemed to capture the current of the moment: Nancy Reagan's plaintive urging to "just say no," and her husband's decision to hand police and prosecutors even greater powers to lock up street dealers, and to devote more resources to stop cocaine's production at the source, in the Andes. In 1986, trying to cope with crack's corrosive effects, Congress adopted mandatory-minimum laws, which hit inner-city crack users with penalties as severe as those levied on Wall Street brokers possessing 100 times more powder cocaine. Over the next two decades, hundreds of thousands of Americans would be locked up for drug offenses.

The War on Drugs became an actual war during the first Bush administration, when the bombastic conservative intellectual Bill Bennett was appointed drug czar. "Two words sum up my entire approach," Bennett declared, "consequences and confrontation." Bush and Bennett doubled annual spending on the drug war to $12 billion, devoting much of the money to expensive weaponry: fighter jets to take on the Colombian trafficking cartels, Navy submarines to chase cocaine-smuggling boats in the Caribbean. If narcotics were the enemy, America would vanquish its foe with torpedoes and F-16s - and throw an entire generation of drug users in jail.

Though many on the left suspected that things had gone seriously awry, drug policy under Reagan and Bush was largely conducted in a fog of ignorance. The kinds of long-term studies that policy-makers needed - those that would show what measures would actually reduce drug use and dampen its consequences - did not yet exist. When it came to research, there was "absolutely nothing" that examined "how each program was or wasn't working," says Peter Reuter, a drug scholar who founded the Drug Policy Research Center at the RAND Corp.

But after Escobar was killed in 1993 - and after U.S. drug agents began systematically busting up the Colombian cartels - doubt was replaced with hard data. Thanks to new research, U.S. policy-makers knew with increasing certainty what would work and what wouldn't. The tragedy of the War on Drugs is that this knowledge hasn't been heeded. We continue to treat marijuana as a major threat to public health, even though we know it isn't. We continue to lock up generations of teenage drug dealers, even though we know imprisonment does little to reduce the amount of drugs sold on the street. And we continue to spend billions to fight drugs abroad, even though we know that military efforts are an ineffective way to cut the supply of narcotics in America or raise the price.

All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs - with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used. Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 1.5 million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. We have nearly 500,000 people behind bars for drug crimes - a twelvefold increase since 1980 - with no discernible effect on the drug traffic. Virtually the only success the government can claim is the decline in the number of Americans who smoke marijuana - and even on that count, it is not clear that federal prevention programs are responsible. In the course of fighting this war, we have allowed our military to become pawns in a civil war in Colombia and our drug agents to be used by the cartels for their own ends. Those we are paying to wage the drug war have been accused of human-rights abuses in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. In Mexico, we are now repeating many of the same mistakes we have made in the Andes.

"What we learned was that in drug work, nothing ever stands still," says Coleman, the former DEA official and current president of Drug Watch International, a law-and-order advocacy group. For every move the drug warriors made, the traffickers adapted. "The other guys were learning just as we were learning," Coleman says. "We had this hubris."

3. BRAINIACS AND COLD WARRIORS

"At the beginning of the Clinton administration," Cañas tells me, "the War on Drugs was like the War on Terror is now." It was, he means, an orienting fight, the next in a sequence of abstract, generational struggles that the country launched itself into after finding no one willing to actually square up and face it on a battlefield. After the Cold War, in the flush and optimism of victory, it felt to drug warriors and the American public that abstractions could be beaten. "It was really a pivot point," recalls Rand Beers, who served on the National Security Council for four different presidents. "We started to look carefully at our drug policies and ask if everything we were doing really made sense." The man Clinton appointed to manage this new era was Lee Brown.

Brown had been a cop for almost thirty years when Clinton tapped him to be the nation's drug czar in 1993. He had started out working narcotics in San Jose, California, just as the Sixties began to swell, and ended up leading the New York Police Department when the city was the symbolic center of the crack epidemic, with kids being killed by stray bullets that barreled through locked doors. A big, shy man in his fifties, Brown had made his reputation with a simple insight: Cops can't do much without the trust of people in their communities, who are needed to turn in offenders and serve as witnesses at trial. Being a good cop meant understanding the everyday act of police work not as chasing crooks but as meeting people and making allies.

"When I worked as an undercover narcotics officer, I was living the life of an addict so I could make buys and make busts of the dealers," Brown tells me. "When you're in that position, you see very quickly that you can't arrest your way out of this. You see the cycle over and over again of people using drugs, getting into trouble, going to prison, getting out and getting into drugs again. At some point I stepped back and asked myself, 'What impact is all of this having on the drug problem? There has to be a better way.' "

In the aftermath of the Rodney King beating, this philosophy - known as community policing - had made Brown a national phenomenon. The Clinton administration asked him to take the drug-czar post, and though Brown was skeptical, he agreed on the condition that the White House make it a Cabinet-level position. Brown stacked his small office with liberals who had spent the long Democratic exile doing drug-policy work for Congress and swearing they would improve things when they retook power. "There were basic assumptions that Republicans had been making for fifteen years that had never been challenged," says Carol Bergman, a congressional staffer who became Brown's legislative liaison. "The way Lee Brown looked at it, the drug war was focused on locking kids up for increasing amounts of time, and there wasn't enough emphasis on treatment. He really wanted to take a different tactic."

Brown's staff became intrigued by a new study on drug policy from the RAND Corp., the Strangelove-esque think tank that during the Cold War had employed mathematicians to crank out analyses for the Pentagon. Like Lockheed Martin, the jet manufacturer that had turned to managing welfare reform after the Cold War ended, RAND was scouting for other government projects that might need its brains. It found the drug war. The think tank assigned Susan Everingham, a young expert in mathematical modeling, to help run the group's signature project: dividing up the federal government's annual drug budget of $13 billion into its component parts and deciding what worked and what didn't when it came to fighting cocaine.

Everingham and her team sorted the drug war into two categories. There were supply-side programs, like the radar and ships in the Caribbean and the efforts to arrest traffickers in Colombia and Mexico, which were designed to make it more expensive for traffickers to bring their product to market. There were also demand-side programs, like drug treatment, which were designed to reduce the market for drugs in the United States. To evaluate the cost-effectiveness of each approach, the mathematicians set up a series of formulas to calculate precisely how much additional money would have to be spent on supply programs and demand programs to reduce cocaine consumption by one percent nationwide.

"If you had asked me at the outset," Everingham says, "my guess would have been that the best use of taxpayer money was in the source countries in South America" - that it would be possible to stop cocaine before it reached the U.S. But what the study found surprised her. Overseas military efforts were the least effective way to decrease drug use, and imprisoning addicts was prohibitively expensive. The only cost-effective way to put a dent in the market, it turned out, was drug treatment. "It's not a magic bullet," says Reuter, the RAND scholar who helped supervise the study, "but it works." The study ultimately ushered RAND, this vaguely creepy Cold War relic, into a position as the permanent, pragmatic left wing of American drug policy, the most consistent force for innovating and reinventing our national conception of the War on Drugs.

When Everingham's team looked more closely at drug treatment, they found that thirteen percent of hardcore cocaine users who receive help substantially reduced their use or kicked the habit completely. They also found that a larger and larger portion of illegal drugs in the U.S. were being used by a comparatively small group of hardcore addicts. There was, the study concluded, a fundamental imbalance: The crack epidemic was basically a domestic problem, but we had been fighting it more aggressively overseas. "What we began to realize," says Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studied drug policy for RAND, "was that even if you only get a percentage of this small group of heavy drug users to abstain forever, it's still a really great deal."

Thirteen years later, the study remains the gold standard on drug policy. "It's still the consensus recommendation supplied by the scholarship," says Reuter. "Yet as well as it's stood up, it's never really been tried."

To Brown, RAND's conclusions seemed exactly right. "I saw how little we were doing to help addicts, and I thought, 'This is crazy,' " he recalls. " 'This is how we should be breaking the cycle of addiction and crime, and we're just doing nothing.' "

The federal budget that Brown's office submitted in 1994 remains a kind of fetish object for certain liberals in the field, the moment when their own ideas came close to making it into law. The budget sought to cut overseas interdiction, beef up community policing, funnel low-level drug criminals into treatment programs instead of prison, and devote $355 million to treating hardcore addicts, the drug users responsible for much of the illegal-drug market and most of the crime associated with it. White House political handlers, wary of appearing soft on crime, were skeptical of even this limited commitment, but Brown persuaded the president to offer his support, and the plan stayed.

Still, the politics of the issue were difficult. Convincing Congress to dramatically alter the direction of America's drug war required a brilliant sales job. "And Lee Brown," says Bergman, his former legislative liaison, "was not an effective salesman." With a kind of loving earnestness, the drug czar arranged tours of treatment centers for congressmen to show them the kinds of programs whose funding his bill would increase. Few legislators came. Most politicians were skeptical about such a radical departure from the mainstream consensus on crime. Congress rewrote the budget, slashing the $355 million for treatment programs by more than eighty percent. "There were too many of us who had a strong law-and-order focus," says Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican who opposed the reform bill and serves as co-chair of the Senate's drug-policy caucus.

For some veteran drug warriors, Brown's tenure as drug czar still lingers as the last moment when federal drug policy really made sense. "Lee Brown came the closest of anyone to really getting it," says Carnevale, the longtime budget director of the drug-control office. "But the bottom line was, the drug issue and Lee Brown were largely ignored by the Clinton administration." When Brown tried to repeat his treatment-centered initiative in 1995, it was poorly timed: Newt Gingrich and the Republicans had seized control of the House after portraying Clinton as soft on crime. The authority to oversee the War on Drugs passed from Rep. John Conyers, the Detroit liberal, to a retired wrestling coach from Illinois who was tired of drugs in the schools – a rising Republican star named Dennis Hastert. Reeling from the defeat at the polls, Clinton decided to give up on drug reform and get tough on crime. "The feeling was that the drug czar's office was one of the weak areas when it came to the administration's efforts to confront crime," recalls Leon Panetta, then Clinton's chief of staff.

4. THE YOUNG GUNS

The administration was not doing much better in its efforts to stop the flow of drugs at the source. Before Clinton had even taken office, Cañas - who headed drug policy at the National Security Council - had been summoned to brief the new president's choice for national security adviser, Anthony Lake, on the nation's narcotics policy in Latin America. "I figured, what the hell, I'm going back to DEA anyway, I'll tell him what I really think," Cañas recalls.

The Bush administration, he told Lake, had been sending the military after the wrong target. In the 1970s, drugs were run up to the United States through the Caribbean by a bunch of "swashbuckling entrepreneurs" with small planes - "guys who wouldn't have looked out of place at a Jimmy Buffett concert." In 1989, in the nationwide panic over crack, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney had managed to secure a budget of $450 million to chase these Caribbean smugglers. (Years later, when a longtime drug official asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld why Cheney had pushed the program, Rumsfeld grinned and said, "Cheney thought he was running for president.") The U.S. military loved the new mission, because it gave them a reason to ask for more equipment in the wake of the Cold War. And the Bush White House loved the idea of sending the military after the drug traffickers for its symbolism and swagger and the way it proved that the administration was taking drugs seriously.

The problem, Cañas told Lake, was that the cocaine traffic had professionalized and was now moving its product through Mexico. With Caribbean smugglers out of the game, the military program no longer made sense. The new national security adviser grinned at Cañas, pleased. "That's what we think as well," Lake said. "How would you like to stay on and help make that happen?"

Taking a new approach, the Clinton administration shifted most military assets out of the Caribbean and into the Andes, where the coca leaf was being grown and processed. "Our idea was, Stop messing around in the transit countries and go to the source," Cañas tells me. The administration spent millions of extra dollars to equip police in Bolivia and Colombia to bust the crop's growers and processors. The cops were not polite - Human Rights Watch condemned the murders of Bolivian farmers, blaming "the heavy hand of U.S. drug enforcement" - but they were effective, and by 1996, coca production in Bolivia had begun a dramatic decline.

After Escobar fell, the American drug agents who had been chasing him did not expect the cocaine industry to dry up overnight - they had girded for the fallout from the drug lord's death. What they had not expected was the ways in which the unintended consequences of his downfall would permanently change the drug traffic. "What ended up happening - and maybe we should have predicted this would happen - was that the whole structure shattered into these smaller groups," says Coleman, the veteran DEA agent. "You suddenly had all these new guys controlling a small aspect of the traffic."

Among them was a hired gun known as Don Berna, who had served as a bodyguard for Escobar. Double-crossed by his boss, Berna broke with the Medellín cartel and struck out on his own. For him, the disruption caused by the new front in America's drug war presented a business opportunity. But with the DEA's shift from the Caribbean into Bolivia and Colombia, Berna and other new traffickers had a production problem. So some of the "microcartels," as they became known, decided to move their operations someplace where they could control it: They opened negotiations with the FARC, a down-at-the-heels rebel army based in the jungles of Colombia. In return for cash, the FARC agreed to put coca production under its protection and keep the Colombian army away from the coca crop.

Berna and the younger kingpins also had a transportation problem: Mexican traffickers, who had been paid a set fee by the cartels to smuggle product across the U.S. border, wanted a larger piece of the business. The Mexican upstarts had a certain economic logic on their side. A kilo of cocaine produced in Colombia is worth about $2,500. In Mexico, a kilo gets $5,000. But smuggle that kilo across the border and the price goes up to $17,500. "What the Mexican groups started saying was, 'Why are we working for these guys? Why don't we just buy it from the Colombians directly and keep the profits ourselves?' " says Tony Ayala, a retired DEA agent and former Mexico country attache.

The remaining leaders of the weakened Cali cartel, DEA agents say, traveled up to Guadalajara for a series of meetings with Mexican traffickers. By 1996, the Colombians had decided to hand over more control of the cocaine trade to the Mexicans. The Cali cartel would now ship cocaine to Guadalajara, sell the drugs to the Mexican groups and then be done with it. "This wasn't just happenstance," says Jerome McArdle, then a DEA assistant agent for special operations. "This was the Colombians saying they were willing to reduce their profits in exchange for reducing their risk and exposure, and handing it over to the Mexicans. The whole nature of the supply chain changed."

Around the same time, DEA agents found themselves picking up Mexican distributors, rather than Colombians, on the streets of New York. Immigration and customs officials on the border were meanwhile overwhelmed by the sheer number of tractor-trailers - many of them loaded with drugs - suddenly pouring across the Mexican border as a consequence of NAFTA, which had been enacted in 1994. "A thousand trucks coming across in a four-hour period," says Steve Robertson, a DEA special agent assigned to southern Texas at the time. "There's no way we're going to catch everything."

Power followed the money, and Mexican traffickers soon had a style, and reach, that had previously belonged only to the Colombians. In the border town of Ciudad Juárez, the cocaine trafficker Amado Carrillo Fuentes developed a new kind of smuggling operation. "He brought in middle-class people for the first time - lawyers, accountants - and he developed a transportation division, an acquisitions division, even a human-resources operation, just like a modern corporation," says Tony Payan, a political scientist at the University of Texas-El Paso who has studied the drug trade on the border. Before long, Carrillo Fuentes had a fleet of Boeing 727s, which he used to fly cocaine, up to fifteen tons at a time, up from Colombia to Mexico. The newspapers called him El Señor de los Cielos, the Lord of the Skies.

The Mexican cartels were also getting more imaginative. "Think of it like a business, which is how these guys thought of it," says Guy Hargreaves, a top DEA agent during the 1990s. "Why pay for the widgets when you can make the widgets yourselves?" Since the climate and geography of Mexico aren't right for making cocaine, the cartels did the logical thing: They introduced a new product. As Hargreaves recalls, the Mexicans slipped the new drug into their cocaine shipments in Southern California and told coke dealers, "Here, try some of this stuff - it's a similar effect."

The product the Mexican cartels came up with, the new widget they could make themselves, was methamphetamine. The man who mastered the market was a midlevel cocaine trafficker, then in his late twenties, named Jesús Amezcua. In 1994, when U.S. Customs officials at the Dallas airport seized an airplane filled with barrels of ephedrine, a chemical precursor for meth, and traced it back to Amezcua, the startling new shift in the drug traffic became clear to a handful of insiders. "Cartels were no longer production organizations, whose business is wrapped up in a single drug," says Tony Ayala, the senior DEA agent in Mexico at the time. "They became trafficking organizations - and they will smuggle whatever they can make the most profit from."

5. THE LOBBYISTS & THE MAD PROFESSOR

It is only in retrospect that these moments - the barrels of ephedrine seized in Dallas, the quiet suggestion that meth had worked its way into the cocaine supply chain - take on a looming character, the historic weight of a change made manifest. Up until methamphetamine, the War on Drugs had targeted three enemies. First there were the hippie drugs - marijuana, LSD - that posed little threat to the general public. Then there was heroin, a horrible drug but one that was largely concentrated in New York City. And, finally, there was crack. What meth proved was that even if the DEA could wipe out every last millionaire cocaine goon in Colombia, burn every coca field in Bolivia and Peru, and build an impenetrable wall along the entire length of the Mexican border - even then, we wouldn't have won the War on Drugs, because there would still be methamphetamine, and after that, something else.

Gene Haislip, who served for years as one of the DEA's top-ranking administrators, believes there was a moment when meth could have been shut down, long before it spiraled into a nationwide epidemic. Haislip, who spent nearly two decades leading a small group at the agency dedicated to chemical control, is his own kind of legend; he is still known around the DEA as the man who beat quaaludes, perhaps the only drug that the U.S. has ever been able to declare total victory over. He did it with gumshoe methodicalness: by identifying every country in the world that produced the drug's active ingredient, a prescription medication called methaqualone, and convincing them to tighten regulations. Haislip believes he was present the moment when the United States lost the war on methamphetamine, way back in 1986, when meth was still a crude biker drug confined to a few valleys in Northern California - a decade before the Mexican drug lords turned it into the most problematic drug in America. "The thing is, methamphetamine should never have gotten to that point," Haislip says. And it never would have, he believes, if it hadn't been for the lobbyists.

Haislip was known around the DEA as precise-minded and verbal. His impulse, in combatting meth, was the same one that had pushed the drug warriors after Escobar: the quixotic faith that if you could just stop the stuff at the source, you could get rid of all the social problems at once. Assembling a coalition of legislators, Haislip convinced them that the small, growing population of speed freaks in Northern California was enough of a concern that Congress should pass a law to regulate the drug's precursor chemicals, ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, legal drugs that were used in cold medicine and produced in fewer than a dozen factories in the world. "We were starting to get reports of hijacking of ephedrine, armed robbery of ephedrine, things that had never happened before," Haislip tells me. "You could see we were on the verge of something if we didn't get a handle on it."

All that was left was to convince the Reagan administration. One day in late 1986, Haislip went to meet with top officials in the Indian Treaty Room, a vast, imposing space in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building: arches, tiled floors, the kind of room designed to house history being made. Haislip noticed several men in suits sitting quietly in the back of the room. They were lobbyists from the pharmaceutical industry, but Haislip didn't pay them much attention. "I wasn't concerned with them," he recalls.

When Haislip launched into his presentation, an official from the Commerce Department cut him off. "Look, you're way ahead of us," the official said. "We don't have anything to suggest or add." Haislip left the meeting thinking he had won: The bill he proposed was submitted to Congress, requiring companies to keep records on the import and sale of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine.

But what Haislip didn't know was that the men in suits had already gone to work to rig the bill in their favor. "Quite frankly," Allan Rexinger, one of the lobbyists present at the meeting later told reporters, "we appealed to a higher authority." The pharmaceutical industry needed pseudoephedrine to make profitable cold medications. The result, to Haislip's dismay, was a new law that monitored sales of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine in bulk powder but created an exemption for selling the chemicals in tablet form - a loophole that protected the pharmaceutical industry's profits.

The law, drug agents say, sparked two changes in the market for illegal meth. First, the supply of ephedrine simply moved overseas: The Mexican cartels, quick to recognize an emerging market, evaded the restrictions by importing powder from China, India and Europe and then smuggling it across the border to the biker groups that had traditionally distributed the drug. "We actually had meetings where we planned for a turf war between the Mexicans and the Hells Angels over methamphetamine," says retired DEA agent Mike Heald, who headed the San Francisco meth task force, "but it turned out they realized they'd make more money by working together." Second, responding to a dramatic uptick in demand from the illegal market, chemical-supply companies began moving huge amounts of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine out to the West Coast in the form of pills, which were then converted into meth. Rather than stemming the tide of meth before it started, the Reagan administration had unwittingly helped accelerate a new epidemic: Between 1992 and 1994, the number of meth addicts entering rehab facilities doubled, and the drug's purity on the street rose by twenty-seven percent.

Haislip resolved to have another go at Congress, but the issue ended up in a dispiriting cycle. The resistance, he says bitterly, "was always coming from the same lobbying group." In 1993, when he persuaded lawmakers to regulate the sale of ephedrine in tablet form, the pharmaceutical industry won an exception for pseudoephedrine. Drug agents began to intercept shipments of pseudoephedrine pills in barrels. Three years later, when lawmakers finally regulated tablets of pseudoephedrine, they created an exception for pills sold in blister packs. "Congress thought there was no way that meth freaks would buy this stuff and pop the pills out of blister packs, one by one," says Heald. "But we're not dealing with normal people - we're dealing with meth freaks. They'll stay up all night picking their toes."

By the time Haislip retired, in 1997, the methamphetamine problem was really two problems. There were the mom-and-pop cooks, who were punching pills out of blister packs and making small batches of drugs for themselves. Then there were the industrial-scale Mexican cartels, which were responsible for eighty percent of the meth in the United States. It took until 2005 for Congress to finally regulate over-the-counter blister packs, which caused the number of labs to plummet. But once again, the Mexican groups were a step ahead of the law. In October 2006, police in Guadalajara arrested an American chemist named Frederick Wells, who had moved to Mexico after losing his job at Idaho State University. An academic troublemaker who drove around campus with signs on the back of his pickup truck raging at the college administration, Wells had allegedly used his university lab to investigate new ways that Mexican traffickers could use completely legal reagents to engineer meth precursors from scratch. "Very complicated numerical modeling," says his academic colleague Jeff Rosentreter. By the time Wells was arrested, the State Department had only just succeeded at pressuring Mexico to restrict the flow of pseudoephedrine, even though Wells had apparently been hard at work for years creating alternatives to that chemical. The lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry, Haislip says, "cost us eight or nine years."

For some in the drug war, it was a lesson that even the most promising efforts to restrict the supply of drugs at the source - those that rely on legal methods to regulate legally produced drugs - remained nearly impossible, outflanked by both drug traffickers and industry lobbyists. The tragedy of the fight against methamphetamine is that it repeated the ways in which the government tried to fight the cocaine problem, and failed - racing from source to source, trying to eliminate a coca field or an ephedrine manufacturer and then racing to the next one. "We used to call it the Pillsbury Doughboy - stick your finger in one part of the problem, and the Doughboy's stomach just pops out somewhere else," says Rand Beers. "The lesson of U.S. drug policy is that this world runs on unintended consequences. No matter how noble your intentions, there's a good chance that in solving one problem, you'll screw something else up."

6. THE GENERAL & THE ADMAN

Within the Clinton White House, the reform effort spearheaded by Lee Brown had created a political dilemma. Republicans, having taken control of Congress in 1994, were attacking the administration for being soft on drugs, and the White House decided that it was time to look tougher. "A lot of people didn't think Brown was a strong leader," Panetta tells me. As senior figures within the administration cast about for a replacement, they started by thinking about who would be the opposite of Brown. "We wanted to get someone who was much stronger, much tougher, and could come across that way symbolically," Panetta says.

During the planning for a possible invasion of Haiti, Panetta and others had discovered a rising star at the Pentagon, a charismatic, bullying four-star general named Barry McCaffrey, who had annoyed many in the Pentagon's establishment. In 1996, halfway into his State of the Union address, Clinton looked up at McCaffrey, a lean, stern-seeming military man in the balcony, and informed the nation that the general would be his next drug czar. "To succeed, he needs a force far larger than he has ever commanded before," Clinton said. "He needs all of us. Every one of us has a role to play on this team." McCaffrey, the bars on his epaulets shimmering, saluted. It was one of the president's biggest applause lines of the night.

For the drug warriors in McCaffrey's office, "the General" was everything the languid, considered, academic Lee Brown had not been. "It was clear from the outset that here was a guy who would take advantage of the bully pulpit and who, unlike Brown, would probably be able to get things done," says Bergman, Brown's former liaison. "One thing that surprised us all was how thoughtful he was - he wasn't a knee-jerk, law-enforcement guy. He understood there needed to be money for treatment. He prided himself on being very sensitive to the racial issues, and he was sensitive to the impact of sentencing laws on African-American men." McCaffrey imported his own staff from the Southern Command - mostly men, all military. They lent the White House's drug operation - previously a slow place - the kinetic energy of a forward operating base. "We went to a twenty-four-hour clock, so we'd schedule meetings for 1500," one longtime staffer recalls. "His people sat down with senior staff and told us what size paper the General wanted his memos on, this kind of report would have green tabs, this would have blue tabs."

The General's genius was for publicity. "He was great at getting visibility," Carnevale says. McCaffrey held grandstanding events everywhere from Mexico to Maine, telling reporters that the decades-long narrative of impending doom around the drug war was out of date - and that if Congress would really dedicate itself to the mission, the country had a winnable fight on its hands. Drug-use numbers were edging downward; even cocaine seemed to be declining in popularity. "We are in an optimistic situation," McCaffrey declared.

For the first time ever, McCaffrey had the drug czar's office develop a strategy for an endgame to the drug war, a plan for finishing the whole thing. The federal government needed to reduce the amount of money it was spending on law enforcement and interdiction. But McCaffrey believed this was only possible once it could guarantee that drug use would continue to decline. "The data suggested very strongly that those who never tried any drugs before they were eighteen were very likely to remain abstinent for their whole lives, but that those who even smoked marijuana when they were teenagers had much worse outcomes," says McCaffrey's deputy Don Vereen. So the General decided to focus the government's attention on keeping kids from trying pot.

The "gateway theory," as it became known, had a natural appeal. Because most people who used hard drugs had also smoked marijuana, and because kids often tried marijuana several years before they started trying harder drugs, it seemed that keeping them off pot might prevent them from ever getting to cocaine and heroin. The only trouble is, the theory is wrong. When McCaffrey's office commissioned the Institute of Medicine to study the idea, researchers concluded that marijuana "does not appear to be a gateway drug." RAND, after examining a decade of data, also found that the gateway theory is "not the best explanation" of the link between marijuana use and hard drugs. But McCaffrey continued to devote more and more of the government's resources to going after kids. "We have already clearly committed ourselves," he declared, "to a number-one focus on youth."

"That decision," Bergman says, "was where you could see McCaffrey begin to lose credibility."

In 1996, less than a year into his term, the new drug czar met Jim Burke, a smooth-talking, silver-haired executive who chaired the Partnership for a Drug-Free America - the advertising organization best known for the slogan "This is your brain on drugs." "Burke personally was very hard to resist," one of his former colleagues tells me. "I've seen him sell many conservative members of Congress and also liberals like Mario Cuomo."

Burke told McCaffrey a simple story. In the late 1980s, he said, the major television networks had voluntarily given airtime to the Partnership to run anti-drug ads aimed at teenagers. The number of teenagers who used drugs - especially marijuana - declined during that period. But in the early 1990s, Burke said, the rise of cable TV cut into the profits of the networks, which became stingier with the time they dedicated to anti-drug advertising. The result, the adman told the General, was that the number of teenagers who used drugs was climbing sharply - to the outrage of Dennis Hastert and other conservative members of Congress. As a clincher, Burke handed McCaffrey a graph that showed the declining amount of airtime dedicated to anti-drug advertising on one axis and the declining perception among teenagers of the risks associated with drugs on the other. "I'm ninety-nine percent sure," one staffer at the Partnership tells me, "that it was that conversation that sold McCaffrey."

The General mobilized his office, lobbying Congress to allocate enough money to put anti-drug advertising on the air whenever teenagers watched television. His staff was skeptical. For all of McCaffrey's conviction and charisma, he didn't have much in the way of facts. "That was all we had - no data, just this one chart - and we had to go and sell Congress," Carnevale recalls. But Congress proved to be a pushover. Conservatives, who held a majority, were thrilled that soft-on-pot liberals in the Clinton administration finally wanted to do something about the drug problem. "At some point, you have to draw a line and say that some things are right and some things are wrong," says Sen. Grassley, explaining his support of the measure. "And using any drugs is just flat-out wrong." To the Partnership's delight, Congress allocated $1 billion to buy network time for anti-drug spots aimed at teenagers.

The General was also starting to make friends beyond the Clinton administration. The drug czar had found a natural ally in Hastert, who had become the GOP's de facto leader on drug policy. The former wrestling coach struck few as charismatic - his joyless and drudging style, his form like settled gelatin - but his experiences in high schools had left him with the feeling that the drug issue, in the words of his longtime aide Bobby Charles, "had become extremely poignant." Hastert wasn't quite Lee Brown; he believed that the prime focus of the drug war should be to increase funding for military operations in Colombia. But he and his staff had grown frustrated with the exclusively punitive character of drug policy and wanted the Republicans to take a more compassionate stance. His staff had studied the RAND reports and largely agreed with their conclusions. "We felt if you didn't get at the nub of the problem, which was prevention and treatment, you weren't going to do any good," says John Bridgeland, a congressional aide who helped coordinate Republican drug policy. Hastert eventually won $450 million to be used, in part, to expand a faith-based program discovered by Bridgeland: Developed by a former evangelical minister, it brought together preachers, parents and drug counselors to fight the problem of "apathy" through "parent training" and "messages from the pulpit."

But with McCaffrey's emphasis on kids came another, almost fanatical focus: going after citizens who used pot for medical purposes. If he was fighting marijuana, the General was going to fight it everywhere, in all its forms. He threatened to have doctors who prescribed pot brought up on federal charges, and dismissed the science behind medical marijuana as a "Cheech and Chong show." In 1997, voters in Oregon introduced an initiative to legalize medical marijuana in the state. "I'll never forget the senior-staff meeting the morning after the Oregon initiative was announced," Bergman says. "McCaffrey was furious. It was like this personal affront to him. He couldn't believe they'd gotten away with it. He wanted to have this research done on the groups behind it and completely trash them in the press." As the General traveled to the initiative states, stumping against medical marijuana, his aides sneered that the initiatives were "all being mostly bankrolled by one man, George Soros," the billionaire investor who favored decriminalizing drugs.

Even for those who shared McCaffrey's philosophy, the theatrics seemed strange: There he was, on evening newscasts, effectively insisting that grandmothers dying of cancer were corrupting America's youth. His office pushed arguments that, at best, stretched the available research: Marijuana is a gateway drug that leads inexorably to the abuse of harder drugs; marijuana is thirty times more potent now than it was a generation ago. "It didn't track with the conclusions our researchers came to," says Bergman. "It felt like he was trying to manipulate the data."

McCaffrey had taken the drug war in a new direction, one that had little obvious connection with preventing drug abuse. For the first time, the full force of the federal government was being brought to bear on patients dying from terminal diseases. Even the General's allies in Congress were appalled. "I can't tell you how many times I went to the Hill with him and sat in on closed-doors meetings," Bergman recalls. "Members said to him, 'What in the world are you doing? We have real drug problems in the country with meth and cocaine. What the hell are you doing with medical marijuana? We get no calls from our constituents about that. Nobody cares about that.' McCaffrey was just mystified by their response, because he truly believed marijuana was a gateway drug. He truly believed in what he was doing."

7. THE HARVARD MAN

For the cops on the front lines of the War on Drugs, the federal government's fixation with marijuana was deeply perplexing. As they saw it, the problem wasn't pot but the drug-related violence that accompanied cocaine and other hard drugs. After the crack epidemic in the late 1980s, police commissioners around the country, like Lee Brown in Houston, began adding more officers and developing computer mapping to target neighborhoods where crime was on the rise. The crime rate dropped. But by the mid-1990s, police in some cities were beginning to realize there was a certain level that they couldn't get crime below. Mass jailings weren't doing the trick: Only fifteen percent of those convicted of federal drug crimes were actual traffickers; the rest were nothing but street-level dealers and mules, who could always be replaced.

Police in Boston, concerned about violence between youth drug gangs, turned for assistance to a group of academics. Among them was a Harvard criminologist named David Kennedy. Working together, the academics and members of the department's anti-gang unit came up with what Kennedy calls a "quirky" strategy and convinced senior police commanders to give it a try. The result, which began in 1995, was the Boston Gun Project, a collaborative effort among ministers and community leaders and the police to try to break the link between the drug trade and violent crime. First, the project tracked a particular drug-dealing gang, mapping out its membership and operations in detail. Then, in an effort called Operation Ceasefire, the dealers were called into a meeting with preachers and parents and social-service providers, and offered a deal: Stop the violence, or the police will crack down with a vengeance. "We know the seventeen guys you run with," the gangbangers were told. "If anyone in your group shoots somebody, we'll arrest every last one of you." The project also extended drug treatment and other assistance to anyone who wanted it.

The effort worked: The rates of homicide and violence among young men in Boston dropped by two-thirds. Drug dealing didn't stop - "people continued what they were doing," Kennedy concedes, "but they put their guns down."

As Kennedy reflected on the success of the Boston project, which ran for five years, he wondered if he had discovered a deeper truth about drug-related violence. If the murders weren't a necessary component of the drug trade - if it was possible to separate the two - perhaps cities could find a way to reduce the violence, even if they could do nothing about the drugs.

In 2001, Kennedy got a call from the mayor of San Francisco that gave him a chance to examine his theories in a new setting. The city had experienced a recent spike in its murder rate, much of it caused by an ongoing feud between two drug-dealing gangs - Big Block and West Mob - that had resulted in dozens of murders over the years. Could Kennedy, the mayor asked, help police figure out how to stop the killings?

Kennedy flew out to San Francisco and met with police. But as he researched the history of the violence, it seemed to confirm his findings in Boston. Though both Big Block and West Mob were involved in dealing drugs, the shootings were not really drug-related - the two groups occupied different territories and were not battling over turf. "The feud had started over who would perform next at a neighborhood rap event," says Kennedy, now a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "They had been killing each other ever since."

Such evidence suggested that drug enforcement needed to focus more narrowly on those responsible for the violence. "Seventy percent of the violence in these hot neighborhoods comes back to drugs," Kennedy says. "But one of the profound myths is that these homicides are about the drug trade. The violence is driven by these crews - but they're not killing each other over business." The real spark igniting the murders, he realized, was peer pressure, a kind of primordial male goad that drove young gang members to kill each other even in instances when they weren't sure they wanted to.

Given that police departments had already locked up every drug dealer in sight and were still having problems with violence, Kennedy thought a new approach was worth a try. "There's a difference between saying, 'I'm watching this, and you should stop,' and putting someone in federal lockup," he says. "The violence is not about the drug business - but that's a very hard thing for people to understand."

But in the early days of the Bush administration, police departments were in no hurry to experiment with an approach that focused on drug-related murders and mostly ignored users who weren't committing violence. Kennedy's efforts proved to be yet another missed opportunity in the War on Drugs - an experience that made clear how difficult it is for science to influence the nation's drug policy.

"If ten years ago the medical community had figured out a way to reduce the deaths from breast cancer by two-thirds, every cancer clinic in the country would have been using those techniques a year later," Kennedy says. "But when it comes to drugs and violence, there's been nothing like that."

8. HELICOPTERS AND COCA

Instead of pursuing the Boston Gun Project and other innovative approaches to fighting drug violence, the federal government decided to escalate its military response in Colombia. For the past decade and a half, cooperation from officials in Bogotá had been halfhearted, sporadic and deeply corrupt. But by 1999, the country, it seemed, was on the verge of collapsing into civil war. The drug money that had flowed into Colombia had found its way into the hands of the rebel militia - the FARC - which had been laying siege to the Colombian government. The Clinton foreign-policy team, having spent the previous few years dealing with the consequences of failed states in Somalia and the Balkans, was deeply concerned about the possibility of a failed narcostate in America's own back yard.

One afternoon in June 1999, a dozen senior Clinton officials filed into the National Security Council's situation room, summoned by Sandy Berger, the president's national security adviser. Even though Bogotá had ceded control of vast swaths of the country to the left-wing rebels, they were told, recent peace talks had collapsed. "The FARC had basically always been jungle campesinos - they were a pretty austere bunch," says Brian Sheridan, who was in charge of the Pentagon's counternarcotics effort at the time and attended the meeting. "All of a sudden, they were leveling these attacks that had gotten more and more audacious." When FARC rebels had emerged from the jungle for a round of peace talks the previous fall, they had brandished brand-new AK-47s and Dragunovs, as if on military parade. One U.S. official observed at the time that the weaponry was "far beyond" what the Colombian army had - in a pitched battle, the Clinton administration worried, the Colombian government could plausibly collapse.

The White House advisers weren't the only officials in Washington concerned about Colombia. Earlier that day, two men who attended the briefing - Rand Beers of the State Department and Charlie Wilhelm of the Defense Department - had gotten a call from the Republican caucus on the Hill. Dennis Hastert, who had been elevated to Speaker of the House six months earlier, wanted to see them right away. "It was kind of unusual," Beers recalls - but when Hastert called, you came.

When Beers and Wilhelm arrived, Rep. Porter Goss, then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, handed them a piece of paper. It was a copy of a supplemental spending authorization that the Republicans planned to offer immediately. Crafted by Bobby Charles, Hastert's longtime aide, the bill would have more than doubled military aid to Colombia to take on the rebels and narcotraffickers -to a staggering $1.2 billion a year. But it was the politics of the situation that worried Beers as much as the money. "It occurred to me that if the administration was going to do anything on Colombia, it better do it soon," he says now, "or the Republicans would once again outflank what they perceived as the I-never-inhaled Clinton administration." Beers told the Republicans he would take a look, and then hurried to Berger's meeting.

Throughout much of the Clinton administration, the hope had been that the United States would be able to reduce its military aid to the Andes as the cocaine epidemic waned. Now, as Berger's group heard from intelligence agents, that hope seemed to be fading. Narcotraffickers were paying off the FARC so they could grow coca in the jungles of Colombia. The FARC were then turning around and using the money to buy weapons to stage attacks on the Colombian government.

Berger decided to act. Rather than oppose the Republican plan, he agreed to negotiate on an assistance package to bail out the Colombian government. The result was Plan Colombia - nearly $1.6 billion to escalate the War on Drugs in the Andes. The new program would arm the military and police in their fight against the FARC, launch an ambitious effort to spray herbicide on coca crops from the air and provide economic assistance to poor farmers in rural villages. The initial aid, officials decided, would be heavily concentrated in Putumayo, a rebel-run province in the jungle.

No one is sure what convinced President Clinton to approve such an ambitious escalation in the War on Drugs. But some observers at the time speculated that the critical factor was a conversation with Sen. Christopher Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat, whose state is home to the helicopter manufacturer Sikorsky Aircraft. In early 2000, Clinton unveiled Plan Colombia - and Sikorksy promptly received an order for eighteen of its Blackhawk helicopters at a cost of $15 million each. "Much has been made of the notion that this was Dodd looking to sell Blackhawks to Colombia," Beers tells me. He pauses before adding, "I am not in a position to tell you it didn't happen."

Plan Colombia would be the Clinton administration's primary and most costly contribution to the War on Drugs, the major counternarcotics program it bequeathed to the Bush administration. But as with so many other aspects of American drug policy, the plan had an unintended consequence: As it evolved, the emphasis on supplying arms to the Colombian government ended up having less to do with drugs and more to do with helping Bogotá fight its enemies. Colombia used the military aid to target the left-wing FARC - even though many believed that right-wing paramilitaries, who were allies of the government, were more directly involved in narcotrafficking. "It wasn't really first and foremost a counternarcotics program at all," says a senior Pentagon official involved in the creation of Plan Colombia. "It was mostly a political stabilization program."

9. THE TEMPLE OF HOPE

In July of 1999, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas traveled to Cincinnati to visit Hope Temple, a former crack house that had been turned into a church. It was an almost unbearably hot day. Bush was on a tour through the Midwest during which he was testing out his philosophy of compassionate conservatism, trying to see if its rhetoric and principles could sustain a winning presidential run. "The American dream is vivid," Bush told audiences, "but too many feel, 'This dream is not meant for me.' " John Bridgeland, the congressional aide who had helped steer federal funding to Hope Temple, says Bush was "overwhelmed" by his visit to the church that day, and stayed the whole afternoon. That evening, Bush spoke about the fervent religiosity of the place and the rough joys of the addict's redemptions. "These," he said, "are the armies of compassion."

This was a strange moment in the politics of the drug war: Just as the Clinton administration was toughening its rhetoric, influential Republicans were going all soft and gentle. John DiIulio, a political scientist from the University of Pennsylvania who would become a key Bush adviser, was disgusted by the "perverse consequences" of harsh sentencing laws that had put millions of young Americans in prison, disbelieved the "sweeping scientific claims" made about the dangers of medical marijuana and wanted to expand "meaningful drug-treatment opportunities in urban areas." DiIulio and his contemporaries were troubled, too, by the racial imbalances of the War on Drugs: Blacks, who comprised only fourteen percent of drug users, made up seventy-four percent of those in prison for drug possession. It was not as if the Republican Party had suddenly taken up a position on the far left of the drug war. But it did seem, for a moment during the 2000 campaign, as if some moderation were possible.

Three months later, when the Bush campaign released its drug policy, even the most experienced drug warriors were impressed. The platform balanced spending between demand- and supply-side programs, stressed treatment and doubled the number of community anti-drug coalitions. When Bush won the White House and DiIulio became the director of the Office of Faith-Based Programs, they raided the team of compassionate conservatives surrounding Hastert: Bridgeland became director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, and Charles became assistant secretary of state for narcotics control. The new administration, DiIulio believed, would take the lead in "reforming drug-related sentencing policies that research had shown were having perverse consequences."

"If you look back at that campaign document, it really is pretty impressive," says Carnevale, who ended up heading the drug office's transition team for the Bush administration. "Which is kind of remarkable, given what happened next. They've appointed a drug czar who ran like hell from a very sensible policy."

It took Bush nearly a year to pick his drug czar, and almost no one felt encouraged by his choice: John Walters, a laconic Midwesterner who had served as Bill Bennett's chief of staff during the administration of George H.W. Bush. "We all knew who Walters was," one longtime drug warrior tells me, "but he wasn't what you would call an inspiring figure, even to conservatives." When Walters submitted his first National Drug Control Strategy to Bush in February 2002, it became clear that the administration's focus had narrowed: Walters was devoted to Plan Colombia and to a prevention campaign that would keep kids from trying drugs for the first time, aimed particularly at marijuana - even though the number of first-time pot smokers had been flat for half a decade. Longtime drug warriors like Carnevale were stunned. "We were going back to an Eighties-style drug policy," he says - one that emphasized the kind of military and law-and-order programs that had been proven not to work, while ignoring programs, particularly treatment, that did.

Walters also had a complaint with the ads that the Partnership for a Drug-Free America had created for the drug czar's office under McCaffrey. They were, he said, too soft. He had a point. The ads, which ran under the slogan "The Anti-Drug," had been designed by a committee of academics who apparently believed that kids needed to be shown that not doing drugs could be fun too. In one characteristic spot, a pen draws an animated landscape, with a cartoon boy avoiding the advances of cartoon dealers before driving off into the distance with a cartoon dragon on a cartoon motorcycle. "My name is Brandon, and drawing is my anti-drug," the narrator says sweetly. The commercials made abstinence seem so lame they could have been designed by the cartels. "A lot of the ads that were produced were really boring," admits Philip Palmgreen, a University of Kentucky communications professor who served on the ad committee. Walters not only wanted harder-hitting messages - he also wanted the focus "to narrow around marijuana," according to one staffer at the Partnership who asked not to be identified. "Very candidly, the Partnership pushed back against that because the problems associated with marijuana are not very dire." But Walters disagreed, the staffer adds, "and we lost."

Walters refused to be interviewed for this story, but his office did make available one of his top advisers, David Murray. I asked him why his boss had narrowed the focus to marijuana, even though studies had disproved the causal link between marijuana and hard drugs. "If you're going to have a national office of drug-control policy, you look at the most prevalent drug in the society that's readily available - you don't go after meth first thing," he says. "You think about it like an epidemiologist, and you go for the vector that's most likely to spread, and that's teen marijuana users."

The new ads took a counterintuitive approach. "We wanted to make sure we were getting through to the thrill-seekers - those teenagers who are much more likely to use drugs - and convince them that it was more exciting not to do drugs," says Palmgreen. In a heralded spot called "Pete's Couch," the teenage narrator says, "I smoked weed and nobody died. I didn't get into a car accident. I didn't OD on heroin the next day. Nothing happened. We sat on Pete's couch for eleven hours." Then the camera shifts to show other teenagers, presumably those who haven't smoked weed, doing fun things - biking, playing basketball, flirting with girls. "You have a better shot at dying out in the real world," the narrator says, "but I'll take my chances out there." The advertising community was impressed with the spot: "Finally, an admission that smoking pot isn't calamitous," cheered Slate's advertising columnist, Seth Stevenson. Said Palmgreen: "Really good spots. The focus groups of thrill-seekers gave them great grades."

But the reality is that such ads - no matter how persuasive - do little if anything to prevent teens from trying pot. In 2005, a government-commissioned study designed to evaluate the prevention campaign over five years delivered its conclusions: Kids who had been exposed to the campaign ended up with rates of drug use that were roughly the same as those of the control group, who had not seen the ads. Murray loudly challenged the study's methodology, but when Congress asked federal analysts at the Government Accountability Office to assess the findings, the GAO upheld the report. The anti-drug campaign had not worked at all.

There was another problem with the Walters approach: Just as the federal government asserted the dangers of smoking pot, the states - first California, then three others - were permitting doctors to legally prescribe marijuana to relieve the chronic pain that came with cancer, polio and other debilitating long-term diseases. Attorney General John Ashcroft dispatched federal agents to begin raiding the suppliers and purchasers of medical marijuana in California - people who were operating completely within state law. The raids were even more surreal in their theatrics than the ones that had been launched by McCaffrey: In one particularly ludicrous incident, a forty-four-year-old post-polio sufferer named Suzanne Pfeil, who smoked prescription marijuana to relieve her pain, was hauled off to jail by DEA agents who pointed automatic rifles at her head and handcuffed her to her wheelchair. The rhetoric reached the level of crusade: Walters called citizens who plant and tend marijuana gardens "terrorists who wouldn't hesitate to help other terrorists get into the country with the aim of causing mass casualties."

What was striking to many veteran drug warriors was how fully the drug czar's office had bet on the youth marijuana initiative. For all Ashcroft's bluff talk about wanting to "escalate the War on Drugs," only a very small portion of it was being escalated. Funding for drug courts, which channel nonviolent drug offenders through treatment programs rather than prison, was zeroed out, and funding for local police was gutted. Carnevale, who quit his job after overseeing the transition in 2000, began to feel he was in a time warp. "This White House is walking away from prevention funding and treatment," he says now. "They haven't supported the community anti-drug coalitions, which actually work pretty well, and domestic law enforcement is flat or declining. To have a successful drug policy, you need all these elements, and what this administration has done is go crazy on exactly the element that doesn't work."

By the summer of 2005, the drug czar's failures were beginning to spill out into the open. For four years, while he focused obsessively on pot, Walters had done virtually nothing about meth, which was rapidly devastating the red states that had elected his boss. Walters struck a strangely discordant note on the growing epidemic, insisting that even as methamphetamine spread from the West Coast to the East, it remained a regional problem, not a national one, and therefore did not place high on his list of priorities. That September, the House's meth caucus asked Walters to come in for a meeting, to see if they could restore some element of dialogue and begin to rebalance the budget. The drug czar, once again downplaying the issue, sent Murray in his place. The congressmen, who had excluded the press to prevent grandstanding, went through the budget in detail and told the drug deputy what they wanted restored to fight meth. But, according to one staffer, Murray just sat there: "He didn't even bother to ask a question."

Incensed, Rep. Mark Souder, a Republican who chairs the House Subcommittee on Drug Policy, walked out of the room and held an angry press conference. Murray's testimony, he said, had been "pathetic" and "an embarrassment," and Walters was not doing his job: "If he does not lead, we need a change of the drug czar." Sen. Grassley, the Iowa Republican, echoed Souder a few days later. "What I've never understood," he said, "is why they took marijuana so much more seriously than methamphetamine, when methamphetamine is a much more serious drug."

By virtually every objective measure, the White House had lost the War on Drugs. Last year, Walters boasted that drug use among teenagers has fallen since 2002 - ignoring the fact that overall drug use remains unchanged. The deeper problem is that the drug czar has stopped measuring anything other than drug use. During the 1990s, at the direction of Gen. McCaffrey, Carnevale had created a comprehensive system to measure whether we were winning the drug war. The system took into account drug price and availability in the United States, how difficult it was for drug smugglers to get their product into the country and the consequences of drug use on public health and crime. But Walters simply tossed out that system of evaluation - as well as the unflattering facts it highlighted. "Had we kept it," Carnevale tells me, "we would see that the Bush administration has not made a positive impact on any of the measures."

Most unexpectedly of all, crime - a problem that seemed to have been licked a decade ago - is beginning to creep back up. In October 2006, the Police Executive Research Forum released a report declaring that violent crime in the country was "accelerating at an alarming pace." Murders were up twenty-seven percent in Boston over the previous year, sixty percent in San Antonio and more than 300 percent in Orlando. Even in the cloistered world of policing, complaints began to build about the numbers and about the cuts in federal funding. "The reality is a lot of police officers are politically conservative folks," says Ron Brooks, the president of the National Narcotics Officers' Association. "But there's been a lack of leadership in this administration on this issue."

10. THE RETURN OF DON BERNA

While the drug czar was cracking down on medical marijuana, the Bush administration was also overseeing a dramatic escalation in its overseas front of the War on Drugs. From the start, the White House had trumpeted Plan Colombia as an essential weapon in its anti-drug arsenal, eliminating inconvenient rules that had gotten in the way of a full military commitment to the project. For "those in the drug business," Walters declared in January 2002, "now is the time to get out." But despite the billions the administration spent on the program, and the new impunity given to the Colombian military, nobody really knew whether it was working. In July 2006, Adam Isacson decided to see for himself.

Isacson, a scholar who runs the Colombia program at the Center for International Policy, flew down to the Andes to construct his own assessment of Plan Colombia. He decided to make two stops - in Medellín, to determine how much the country's security situation had improved, and in Putumayo, to determine the success of the plan to eradicate the drug traffic. Regular assessments compiled by the White House drug office suggested that the crop-eradication program had reduced the acreage under coca cultivation in Colombia, but Isacson was skeptical: The price of cocaine on the American street had not risen, and separate estimates by the United Nations undercut the Bush administration's findings.

The modern Medellín he found looked more like Miami than a front in the drug war. The government and its paramilitary allies had secured the city, and U.S. officials went out of their way to praise the cooperation they were getting from Colombian police and military units - which had been cleansed, they said, of corruption. When Isacson pressed people about why the violence had decreased so dramatically, he was told repeatedly that "the paramilitaries won" - that government-supported forces had simply driven off the left-wing guerrillas and ended civil war in the city.

The paradox for Americans was that paramilitary commanders, such as Don Berna, had also taken control of the cocaine trade and retained enough political clout, according to a study by a Colombian think tank, to alter the composition of the Colombian Senate. When Don Berna was arrested two years ago, the entire bus transportation system of Medellín shut down for a day. "The command came down from the prison phone," says Aldo Civico, a professor of international relations at Columbia University who has done extensive research on drug smugglers and the paramilitaries. Don Berna is now in a jail cell south of Medellín, from which he continues to control his trafficking organization. "It is a signal to everyone that Don Berna is the one who is in power in Medellín," Civico says.

In Putumayo, Isacson found tent cities buried in the thick jungle, migrants living underneath sheets of plastic. Though tens of millions of American dollars had been spent on trying to improve the local economy, the main road that farmers were supposed to use to ferry their legitimate products to market was still unpaved, and a factory American money had built in 2003 was already shut down. Putumayo had been the first target of Plan Colombia's spray-eradication efforts and the site of its initial success: Coca cultivation had been cut by ninety-three percent from 2000 to 2004. But the place Isacson saw only two years later was "depressed." With no real financial incentive to switch to legitimate crops, farmers in the region had once again begun planting coca: Cultivation doubled in 2005. "We didn't see anything to suggest the improvement was sustainable," Isacson tells me.

The problem was that coca had simply moved next door, to the rural province of Nariño, along the country's Pacific Coast. Traffickers were planting strains of coca that could grow from seed to harvest in just six months. "The spray planes eradicated Putumayo," Isacson says, "and then all of a sudden coca cultivation starts in Nariño, and you see the same pattern - coca money means all these nightclubs and stores go up in these nothing towns, the police start reporting a sharp increase in murders, and eventually the provincial government is overwhelmed." The traffickers hopscotched across the country - Putumayo to Nariño, Nariño to Antioquia - always one step ahead of the drug agents and soldiers.

"As a drug-control policy," Isacson says, "it's hard to come to any conclusion other than that Plan Colombia has failed." In June of this year, the CIA released an assessment that confirmed Isacson's conclusion. Admitting that it had previously been undercounting the coca crop, the agency issued revised numbers showing that six years of Plan Colombia, at nearly $1 billion a year, had not cut coca cultivation at all. The effort to stop cocaine at its source had not made a dent.

"We've been working in Colombia for thirty years, and we don't have a hell of a lot to show for it," says Myles Frechette, the American ambassador to Colombia during the Clinton administration. "This is like a cancer. Every year the lesion, if you took a snapshot, would be bigger."

11. THE WATER BALLOON

At night, the population of el Paso, Texas, is 700,000, and that of Ciudad Juárez, just across the border, is 1.4 million. During the day, those numbers shift, as Mexicans stream across the cobblestone bridge over the Rio Grande for legal work in the United States. Every twelve hours, the two cities pass 100,000 people back and forth, squeezing them from end to end like the contents of a water balloon. "Among them," says Tony Payan, the political scientist at the University of Texas-El Paso and an expert in the dynamics of the local drug trade, "you see the spotters, the lingerers, mostly young men who are just standing there, watching out for when the coast is clear or when an American border agent who's been paid off by the cartel comes on duty. Then they tell the people that need to know, so they can make their drug runs across the border into Texas." With the failure of Plan Colombia, a handful of bridges along the Mexican border have become the main front in the War on Drugs.

Cocaine trafficking in Mexico has its own prehistory. For generations, family networks of smugglers had moved marijuana and cheap, black-tar heroin across the border -veteran DEA agents were accustomed to arresting the grandsons of men they had arrested years earlier - and the whole drug traffic in Mexico was small enough, by the mid-1980s, that it was effectively controlled by one man, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, who ran a violent trafficking organization out of Tijuana. As Colombian groups, chased from the Caribbean by American interdiction efforts, began to look to the southwest border in the early 1990s, Felix Gallardo discovered he could no longer control the traffic himself from prison. "He had a meeting with his lieutenants and divided the Mexican border crossings up among them, creating the modern cartels," Payan says. "His nephews kept Tijuana, and one group got the Sinaloa-Arizona crossing, another got Laredo-Nuevo Laredo, and Amado Carrillo Fuentes got El Paso-Juárez."

Mexican officials along the border, whose PRI party had kept a lock on national power for seventy years, allowed traffickers to move their product in exchange for reduced violence. "In order to coexist, the government looked the other way as long as the cartels didn't wreak havoc in the country," says Armand Peschard-Sverdrup, director of the Mexico Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "It became somewhat of a safety valve in terms of dealing with organized crime, as a way of mitigating the political instability." Though the U.S. government pushed Mexican officials to crack down on corruption, its pleas and threats went largely unheeded. By 1997, Carrillo Fuentes - the Lord of the Skies - was moving tons of cocaine across the border every year and had amassed a fortune worth $25 billion. But that same year, Carrillo Fuentes died on an operating table in Mexico City, where he had been undergoing plastic surgery to change his appearance and avoid detection: In the ghoulish post-mortem photographs, his face is speckled like a snake's skin, two shades of brown and one of pink. Juárez fell into a testy, three-way competition for control of the drug trade, and the murders took on a symbolic vocabulary of their own: Tortured victims piled in oil barrels filled with concrete and buried alive, members of opposing cartels murdered and left to rot in car trunks in their own neighborhoods, snitches killed and left on the side of the road. The violence between cartels is so pervasive, Payan says, "if you move into a home in Juárez, you will never know whether there's a body underneath the floor in your dining room."

At the beginning of the Bush administration, it looked like Mexico might actually begin to bust corrupt cops who did business with drug smugglers. In 2000, when Vicente Fox, the reforming, conservative rancher and friend of George W. Bush, took power, he began prosecuting dirty police officers, throwing tens of thousands of them off the force. "There were unintended consequences," says Peter Andreas, a Brown University professor who has studied drug trafficking along the border. "Many of the corrupt cops went to work in the drug trade" - a shift in power that had the effect of professionalizing the violence. In addition, an estimated 90,000 Mexican soldiers deserted during the Fox administration, many of them signing up with the cartels.

In Juárez, the effect was devastating. Free to operate as they pleased, the cartels began to split, with capos challenging one another openly for control of the drug corridors. Local and state police killed each other over the right to protect the traffic. A new gang called the Zetas, made up of Mexican soldiers who had quit their day jobs to take over the drug trade, waged war in Juárez and killed 100 people in the corridor around Nuevo Laredo in the summer of 2005. The gaudy theatrics of the murders have only intensified as drug gangs seek to guarantee that their killings send a message by getting media attention: Last year, gunslingers wearing military uniforms walked into a popular nightclub in Uruapan and dumped the severed heads of five rivals on the dance floor, like soccer balls. Over the past year, drug-related murders in Mexico's border states have doubled, driven primarily by the booming trade. "What we're seeing is the Colombianization of Mexico," says Andreas.

For those who have studied American drug policy, the catastrophe along the border looks like a final reckoning for overseas interdiction. "It's like a balloon effect - we've never succeeded in cutting off the traffic, we've just pushed it around," says Payan. "We cut off supply in the Caribbean, and it came here. We cracked down on the Colombian traffickers, and it just meant the Mexicans traffickers got wealthier, and the violence came here." Like many DEA agents and border experts, Payan was consumed last summer by the story of Zhenli Ye Gon, a Chinese pharmaceutical executive whose house Mexican police raided, suspecting him of diverting meth components from China for illegal use. Inside they found $206 million in cash -final evidence of just how far the meth epidemic has spiraled out of control since pharmaceutical lobbyists prevented Gene Haislip from forestalling it with a simple federal regulation. Payan believes, as do many in the DEA, that Ye Gon is a harbinger of the next frontier in the War on Drugs.

"Even if somehow we could manage to get the drug trade away from the Mexican border, it will come through Asia next," he says. "Instead of fighting a border war, we'll be fighting it in containers. But unless we can reduce demand, it's a zero-sum game."

12. THE PRIVATEERS

Even by conservative estimates, the War on Drugs now costs the United States $50 billion each year and has overcrowded prisons to the breaking point - all with little discernible impact on the drug trade. A report by the Government Accountability Office released at the end of September estimated that ninety percent of the cocaine moving into the United States now arrives through Mexico, up from sixty-six percent in 2000. Even Walters acknowledges that for all of the efforts the Bush administration has devoted to overseas drug enforcement, the price of cocaine has dropped while its purity has risen. More than forty percent of Americans support legalizing marijuana, yet the government continues to target pot smokers. In October, the administration announced it was planning a new military offensive, dubbed Plan Mexico, with a price tag of $1.4 billion. Things look so bleak that Walters was recently moved to describe a momentary upward blip in drug prices as "historic progress."

There are a handful of battles in the War on Drugs that have actually been won, times when fresh thinking prevailed over politics - but they are not the kind of victories that the Bush administration is eager to trumpet. In the summer of 2003, the police department in High Point, North Carolina, held its annual command-staff retreat in a small conference center themed to look like the log cabins of the pioneers who settled the region. One topic dominated the conversation: an increase in violent crime that was concentrated in three drug-dealing neighborhoods in the city. "The place we were at was that all the traditional enforcement was making no difference," says the department's deputy chief, Marty Sumner. "We agreed we weren't going to be able to eliminate drug use. We weren't even going to try to go after drug use. We wanted to change the marketing of the drug."

Sumner's department called in the Harvard criminologist David Kennedy. The High Point police had worked with Kennedy before, adopting the Boston Gun Project's policy of trying to break the link between drugs and crime. Now the criminologist told them that he had a new kind of project to propose, one that went beyond the Boston experiment. Kennedy's pitch was simple: The trick, he said, wasn't to focus on eliminating drugs but rather to shut down the most "overt" drug markets, the ones operating so openly that they attracted prostitution and violent crime. "Instead of looking at it as a drug problem, we decided to think of it as a drug-market problem," Sumner says. "What the public really couldn't stand was the violence associated with public drug markets." Dealers operating in the open are targets for stickup men and other would-be robbers, and the public swagger and turf consciousness of street slingers can cradle violent, simmering beefs.

High Point police began in the West End neighborhood, one of the city's three overt drug markets. A team of officers staked out the site, videotaping hundreds of hand-to-hand sales and mapping out a complete anthropology of the West End drug market. They found it was strikingly small: Sumner had expected as many as fifty dealers working there, but it turned out there were only sixteen. Before long, the officers had enough evidence to put away each of the sixteen dealers for good. But they didn't. Instead, Sumner and Kennedy called them in for a meeting. They showed each of them the portfolio of evidence against them and said that unless they stopped dealing drugs, the whole file would be handed over to the prosecutors and they'd be in jail for years. Family members were brought in to urge the dealers to stop, and social-service providers pledged assistance with food, housing and job training.

"We didn't think it would work," Sumner tells me, "but the drug markets have disappeared."

For five years before the program went into effect, the number of drug-related murders in High Point had stayed steady, around fifteen a year. In 2007, in the program's fourth year, it has plummeted to two. Violent crime in the West End has declined by thirty-five percent. "The use of drugs isn't something we could affect," says Kennedy. "But the violence was." His logic has an appealing clarity for overworked police departments: There are now more than sixty cities in the United States that use some version of Kennedy's program, edging away from thirty-five years of punitive measures that have turned the United States into the world's leading jailer to a social-work model that encourages communities and cops to engage the problem on a more human level. The real radicals of the War on Drugs are not the legalization advocates, earnestly preaching from the fringes, but the bureaucrats -the cops and judges and federal agents who are forced into a growing acceptance that rendering a popular commodity illegal, and punishing those who sell it and use it, has simply overwhelmed the capacity of government.

In 2000, voters in California, whose prisons now hold nearly twice as many inmates as they were designed to incarcerate, passed a referendum called Proposition 36, which has since sent more than 150,000 nonviolent drug offenders to treatment instead of prison. The program is not perfect: Though the outcomes for those who make it through treatment are surprisingly strong, many convicts simply skip the sessions, and there are few enforcement mechanisms to compel them to attend. But the program, according to a study conducted by researchers at UCLA, still saves taxpayers $2.50 for every dollar put in. And a pilot program in Honolulu which requires near-constant drug tests of those on probation and provides incremental punishments for each extra failed test - suggests an effective model for treating hardcore addicts, says Angela Hawken of UCLA and Pepperdine University. "It offers the promise that we might really be able to solve this problem."

In recent years, there have been flickers of political progress that suggest America's drug policy is ready for a historic shift. Democrats in both the House and Senate have voted to cut proposed funding for Plan Colombia and have pushed for hearings on sentencing reform. As the politics of crime and drugs have lost their power to move votes, some conservatives, including Republican senators Jeff Sessions and Sam Brownback, have begun to question the logic of mandatory-minimum sentences. "There is a more promising environment for drug-policy reform than at any time since the Carter administration," says Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance and one of the country's foremost critics of the drug war.

But despite their evident success, the most forward-looking programs remain buried at the fringes of drug policy, featured not in the president's budgets but in academic journals and water-cooler talk in cities like High Point. Experimentation at the community level is more imaginative than programs that are federally sanctioned. "We haven't had the kind of national leadership that blesses this and encourages it," says Caulkins, the RAND researcher from Carnegie Mellon. "So this kind of innovation stays below the radar." Thirty-five years after Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs, the most promising programs continue to be shunted aside by Washington's unswerving emphasis on law and order.

The drug war, in the end, has been undone in no small part by the sweeping and inflexible nature of its own metaphor. At the beginning, in the days of Escobar, the campaign was a war as seen from the situation room, a complicated assault that spanned multiple fronts, but one which had identifiable enemies and a goal. Today, the government's anti-drug effort resembles a war as seen from the trenches, an eternal slog, where victory seems not only unattainable but somehow beside the point. For the drug agents and veterans who busted Escobar, the last decade and a half have been a slow, agonizing history of defeat after defeat, the enemy shifting but never retreating. "You get frustrated," Joe Toft, a former DEA country attache in Colombia, tells me. "We've never had a true effort where the U.S. as a whole says, 'We're never going to crack this problem without a real demand-reduction program.' That's something that's just never happened."

Toft, now a private security consultant, thinks back to the heady days after the fall of Escobar, the days when winning the War on Drugs seemed only a matter of dispatching more American helicopters to the Andes. "The first couple years, I had this very naive idea that I was really going to make a huge impact," he says. "But after a while, you start realizing that without a concerted effort to reduce demand, it's not going to happen. Over the years, I came to see my job as basically keeping the lid on the garbage can trying to sit on that lid and prevent that garbage can from overflowing. If you talk to a hundred agents, that's what almost all of them would say. We're just being realistic."

Original: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/17438347/how_america_lost_the_war_on_drugs

Upcoming Boston Globe investigative series on prison 'suicides'

2007-12-04T13:19:00.000-05:00

Upcoming Boston Globe investigative series on prison 'suicides' and what you (we) can (will )do

FORWARD SEND FAR & WIDE

Hello All.

I understand that the Boston Globe Spotlight Team will FINALLY publish its investigative series on Massachusetts prisoner 'suicides' beginning next Sunday December 9. Four reporters have been working on this effort for almost 8 months.

The stories - as many of us close to the prisoner families know- are compelling and should 'shock the conscience' of all. We do not believe for one moment that all these deaths were by suicide. Nor do we believe that all those who did commit suicide were 'mentally ill'.

While it may be true that many folks diagnosed as 'mentally ill' may attempt or complete suicide attempts it is the DOC's abuse of prisoners that brings many to a terrible choice: to live in unending deprivation and despair or to end their suffering. A 'healthy, normal’ person would soon sink into depression, anger and hopelessness under the daily conditions inside MA prisons and jails. Prisoners who come into correctional facilities with a diagnosis of psychiatric disabilities are targeted for mistreatment by staff. Indeed there are probably more suicides than the DOC has 'reported.' The so-called good guys are free to torment and humiliate incarcerated citizens. Most legislators will not act to hold the DOC accountable because they’d prefer to look tough–on-crime.

What many should know is that the Commonwealth, the Legislature and correctional legal services, the Disability Law Center and the DOC all agree that the solution to this torture is to spend more money to create special Residential Treatment Units within correctional facilities for 'mentally ill' prisoners. This is the real craziness! The abuse will continue. It'll just be in a different location. What the state does not address is the root cause of the conditions within prisons. RTUs will not stop extra-judicial punishment or, medical neglect. It is not the cure for the lack of oversight. It's just sending another 40 million tax dollars down a rat hole!

It seems that Globe Spotlight Team has worked thousands of hours to bring this story ('suicides') to light. The team is comprised of fabulous journalists. However- they took direction from state-funded agencies. While families of the lost prisoners were consulted at great length- there was very little use of grassroots organizations and activist friends & families.

There is an opportunity to bring OUR insight, our expertise to this issue and to the greater public next week. What will you do? How is the epidemic of suicide connected to the call for a jail in Somerville? Who will speak about state complicity in the death of the prisoners? Who will demand accountability? There are many avenues here for effecting REAL CHANGE.

Let's hear from you.

Thank you.

Susan Mortimer
www.massdecarcerate.org
info@massdecarcerate.org

Support Sean Pelzer

2007-11-28T12:15:00.000-05:00

Come to Dorchester Court

Help ensure a fair hearing for Sean Pelzer

Sean Pelzer’s case:

Dorchester Municipal District Court

510 Washington St. – Dorchester, MA

(4-Corners Neighborhood)

Injustice In Boston

Brother Sean Pelzer is a 39 year old African American male who is currently employed as the Lead Organizer for the Union of Minority Neighborhoods, a local Social Justice Agency with offices in Roxbury and Jamaica Plain.

Presently Brother Pelzer is facing probation surrender, hearing on November 29, 2007, at 2:00 pm, in Dorchester District Court. Being falsely accused we request the community’s support in the form of presence in the courtroom on November 29th.

Understanding the nature of today’s criminal justice system we do not feel Brother Pelzer will receive a fair hearing without the community’s support.

Calendar of Events

2007-11-27T10:19:00.000-05:00

There are at least 4 events this weekend at which you can feel 'nourished', validated, connected and rejuvenated. The first is the Saturday rededication
of the Sacco and Vanzetti Plaque in the North End. Second, this Sunday at noon, Community Church presents its 31st Sacco and Vanzetti Award to City Councillor Chuck Turner. On Saturday and Sunday Jericho Boston commemorates International Day of Solidarity with Political Prisoners. See below -- and see you there!

MISSING HISTORICAL PLAQUE FOR SACCO AND VANZETTI TO BE REDEDICATED IN BOSTON’S NORTH END

Boston, November 21, 2007.- On Saturday, December 1st, at 11:30, the Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society will rededicate a historical marker outside the entrance to 256 Hanover Street, the site of the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee’s headquarters from 1925-1927.

In 1976 the City of Boston placed a plaque on the building, located along the city’s Freedom Trail in the North End, in recognition of the historical impact the men’s trial and subsequent execution had on both the nation and much of the world. Sometime in the early 1980’s the original plaque disappeared. Today the Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society is proud to announce the upcoming unveiling and
rededication of a new plaque.

Speakers will include Boston City Councilor Felix Arroyo (confirmed), Former Governor of Massachusetts Michael Dukakis (tentative), and others. There will also be readings from the writings of Sacco and Vanzetti.

256 Hanover Street is located a short distance from the Haymarket T stop.

Contact:

Sergio Reyes
Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society
617-290-5614
info@saccoandvanzetti.org
www.saccoandvanzetti.org

---

Community Church of Boston
565 Boylston Street
Lothrup Auditorium
Colpley Square, Boston
Sunday, December 2, 2007 - NOON

31st Annual Sacco-Vanzetti Award for Social Justice
Councillor CHUCK TURNER
“Where Do We Go From Here?: Strategies for the 21st Century”

Come celebrate activism, community and our struggles for justice as the Community Church of Boston presents the 2007 Sacco & Vanzetti award to Chuck Turner. Councilor Turner will be honored for his decades-long service to the community and ongoing activism, and will present a talk to help us answer the question, 'Where do we go from here? Strategies for the 21st Century.'

Special guests will include Mel King, Felix Arroyo, Jean McGuire, Kerrick Johnson, and others.

(Move's Pam Africa may attend along with Jerich Boston Members-- see below) Music by Danielle Scott and da Family. A delicious buffet luncheon will be served following the program. $20 donation requested at the door or in advance; $5 students/seniors; all are welcome regardless of ability to pay.

Sponsorships are greatly appreciated.

---

Jericho Boston has been working on events to commemorate the International Day of Solidarity with Political Prisoners (December 3rd).

****************************************

1. The Shootout

Performance artist, Jihad Abdul-Mumit will present The Shootout, a two-person theater performance and workshop. The Shootout is a two-man dramatization depicting the spiritual and psychological divisions that have historically ripped apart just about every semblance of unity amongst African Americans. The Shootout starts right from the beginning when Africans were snatched so violently and decisively from Mother Africa. The play speaks to the many problems people are confronted with. Among the root causes of violence in oppressed communities are economic exploitation, social underdevelopment and the colonial relationship between the community and those in power. CORI and other draconian laws have been passed to keep people marginalized and disenfranchised, while prison expansion cuts in education continue.

Saturday, December 1st

2pm (Doors open at 1:30)

Great Hall

Codman Square, Dorchester

****************************************

2. Panel Discussion
Sunday, December 2nd Encuentro 5
2-6pm, 33 Harrison Ave., Chinatown

This panel is part of a three-day series organized by Jericho Boston. Let us remember and honor, not only the political prisoners being held in the us, but also those being held everywhere in the world, in places like Palestine, Turkey, the Basque Country to name a few. We are honored to host:

o Ashanti Alston (former Black Liberation Army Political Prisoner)
o Edwin Cortes (former FALN Prisoner of War)
o Jihad Abdul-Mumit (former Black Liberation Army Political Prisoner)
o Pam Africa (MOVE! Organization, ICFFMAJ)
o Ward Churchill (American Indian Movement, Author).

Our guests will speak about their struggle and of their people's struggle to overcome the fierce repression and imperialism unleashed onto them for their fight for self determination and freedom from oppression. Many of the root causes of economic exploitation and social underdevelopment which were in place back then are still affecting our communities today.

Join us to strategize to bring our freedom fighters home and liberate our communities!

Sponsors: Jericho-Boston, (617) 830-0732, www.jerichoboston.org and NECDP, www.onepalestine.org.

CORI Screening by Vendors of the City of Cambridge

2007-11-27T10:06:00.000-05:00

From: "UMN/Horace Small"
Subject: "CORI Screening by Vendors of the City of Cambridge"
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2007 11:48:18 +0000

There is more to do!

Although the Cambridge City Council passed the Fair CORI Hiring ordinance over a year ago, the Cambridge City Manager has yet to implement the ordinance. City Councilor Brian Murphy is hold a hearing this Wednesday, November 28th, at 5:30PM at the Cambridge City Hall, in the Sullivan Chamber, 2nd floor, City Hall, 795 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

It is critical that you attend and testify to the importance of this ordinance's passing for the good of the community and to allow legitimate access to those individuals needing to provide for themselves, their families, and contribute to their community.

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

See Cambridge City Clerk notice below:

TO: INTERESTED PERSONS

FROM: D. MARGARET DRURY, CITY CLERK

DATE: NOVEMBER 28, 2007 at 5:30 PM

RE: ORDINANCE COMMITTEE HEARING

************************************************

Please be advised that Councillor Brian Murphy, Chair of the Ordinance Committee has scheduled a public hearing of the Ordinance Committee for Wednesday, November 28, 2007 at 5:30 p.m. in the Sullivan Chamber, 2nd floor, City Hall, 795 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The purpose of the hearing is to consider proposed amendments to the Cambridge Municipal Ordinance Chapter 2.112 of the Municipal Code by adding Section 2.112.060, CORI Screening by Vendors of the City of Cambridge, to ensure that the persons and businesses supplying goods and/or services to the City of Cambridge deploy fair policies relating to the screening and identification of persons with criminal backgrounds through the CORI system.

Your kind attention in this matter will be greatly appreciated.
***********************************************

For more information please see the following CORI screening policy text ("CORI Screening by Vendors of the City of Cambridge"):
http://www.cambridgema.gov/CityOfCambridge_Content/documents/CORI%20screening.pdf.

Please come and share your opinion! The City needs to know that CORI reform is important to you!

Best,
-Omar

Omar M.R. Bandar
Special Assistant to the Mayor
Cambridge City Hall
795 Massachusetts Ave, 2nd floor
Cambridge, MA 02139
Tel: 617-349-4329
Fax: 617-349-4320

-

Union of Minority Neighborhoods
83 Highland St
Roxbury, Ma 02119
617-521-4111

2 Harris Ave
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
617-522-3349

www.unionofminorityneighborhoods.org

Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration

2007-11-26T12:52:00.000-05:00

https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/104_ProductDetails.aspx

Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration

Paul Wright & Tara Herivel

This is the third and latest book in a series of Prison Legal News anthologies that examines the reality of mass imprisonment in America. [The other two titles are The Celling of America: An Inside Look at the US Prison Industry and Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor, both available from PLN].

Prison Profiteers is unique from other books on the market because it exposes and discusses who profits and benefits from mass imprisonment, rather than who is harmed by it and how. Why is sentencing reform dead on arrival in every state legislature and congress? What is the biggest transfer of public wealth into private hands in recent history? Read Prison Profiteers and you will know! Hint: It has to do with prisons.

Positive: With the baby boomlet demographics, we foresee increasing demand for juvenile [incarceration] services. Negative: . . . it is often difficult to maintain the occupancy rates required for profitability.—FROM A REPORT PRODUCED FOR THE PRIVATE PRISON INDUSTRY BY INVESTMENT ANALYSTS FIRST ANALYSIS SECURITIES CORPORATION

Locking up 2.3 million people isn’t cheap. Each year federal, state, and local governments spend over $185 billion annually in tax dollars to ensure that one out of every 137 Americans is imprisoned. Prison Profiteers looks at the private prison companies, investment banks, churches, guard unions, medical corporations, and other industries and individuals that benefit from this country’s experiment with mass imprisonment. It lets us follow the money from public to private hands and exposes how monies formerly designated for the public good are diverted to prisons and their maintenance. Find out where your tax dollars are going as you help to bankroll the biggest prison machine the world has ever seen.

Contributors include: Judy Greene on private prison giants Geo (formerly Wackenhut) and CCA; Anne-Marie Cusac on who sells electronic weapons to prison guards; Wil S. Hylton on the largest prison health care provider; Ian Urbina on how prison labor supports the military; Kirsten Levingston on the privatization of public defense; Jennifer Gonnerman on the costs to neighborhoods from which prisoners are removed; Kevin Pranis on the banks and brokerage houses that finance prison building; and Silja Talvi on the American Correctional Association as a tax-funded lobbyist for professional prison bureaucracies; Tara Herivel on juvenile prisons; Gary Hunter and Peter Wagner on the census and counting prisoners; David Reutter on Florida's prison industries; Alex Friedmann on the private prisoner transportation industry; Paul Von Zielbauer on the sordid history of Prison Health Services in New York; Steven Jackson on the prison telephone industry; Samantha Shapiro on religious groups being paid to run prisons and Clayton Mosher, Gregory Hooks and Peter Wood on the myth and reality of building rural prisons.

Tara Herivel is the co-editor of Prison Nation. She is a prisoner rights attorney and the author of numerous articles in the alternative press. She lives in Portland, Oregon. Paul Wright is the founder and editor of Prison Legal News and co-editor of Prison Nation and The Celling of America. He lives in Seattle, Washington and Brattleboro, Vermont.

This is an exclusive paperback printing made just for Prison Legal News.

Penalties for Crack

2007-11-26T12:50:00.000-05:00

Penalties for Crack
The sensible reduction of jail time for drug offenders should be made retroactive.
Monday, November 26, 2007; Washington Post, A14

THIS MONTH, a measure of rationality was injected into federal sentencing guidelines when more lenient penalties for crack cocaine became the law of the land. The new guidelines will affect defendants convicted in the future, but they also should be made retroactive. That would bring some measure of equity to thousands of offenders -- roughly 85 percent of them African American men -- already serving unjustifiably long prison terms.

In May, the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which has the authority to craft sentencing guidelines for federal crimes, sent to Congress a proposal that would reduce the penalties for crack offenses. For example, a first-time offender caught with five grams of crack previously faced a prison term of up to 78 months; under the new sentencing scheme, he faces a maximum of 63 months. The commission had forwarded such recommendations several times before, only to have them vetoed by Congress. This time, to lawmakers' credit, the measure was allowed to stand.

The commission is considering whether to make the more lenient penalties retroactive -- a power it can exercise without congressional approval. It estimates that 19,500 prisoners would be eligible for reduced sentences, including roughly 270 prisoners from the District, 280 from Maryland and 1,400 from the Eastern District of Virginia, which includes Northern Virginia and Richmond.

The Justice Department and some in the law enforcement community worry that allowing early release for so many crack offenders would affect public safety. But the evidence suggests the worries are overblown. For starters, any reduced sentence must be approved by a federal judge, who may take into account a prisoner's criminal history and other factors. Federal prosecutors also have a voice in this process and can raise objections to a particular prisoner's sentence reduction. And not all of the 19,500 would be released at once. Different numbers of prisoners would become eligible for early release at different times over a period of three decades, according to a commission analysis. In the District, 32 inmates would be eligible for immediate release if the reforms were made retroactive; in Maryland, the number would be 21; in the Eastern District, 48.

The lunacy in crack penalties will not be eliminated until lawmakers grapple with the mandatory minimum sentences now in place. These statutes mandate a five-year sentence for someone caught with five grams of crack; an offender would have to be caught with 500 grams of powder cocaine to trigger the same sentence. There are good arguments for why crack should carry tougher sentences than powder cocaine, including the fact that crack is ferociously addictive and destructive. But a 100-to-1 disparity is irrational. Lawmakers should act quickly on one of the several bills pending in Congress that would narrow that gap.

Creating a sensible marijuana law

2007-11-23T11:11:00.000-05:00

Creating a sensible marijuana law
By Lester Grinspoon
November 22, 2007

ALMOST HALF of American adults have tried marijuana, and the number of people who use it regularly has increased to about 15 million. This expanding use of marijuana can no longer be dismissed as simply a youthful fad that can be eliminated through the war on drugs.

Still, marijuana arrests account for nearly 44 percent of all drug arrests in the United States. According to the Uniform Crime Report, nearly 830,000 people were arrested in 2006 on marijuana charges, nearly a 15 percent increase over 2005. Nine out of 10 were arrested for mere possession.

Despite the increasing threat of arrest, the growing demands of employers for urine tests, and the ubiquity of the misinformation purveyed by the US government and the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, the number of Americans who experiment with or regularly use this substance continues to grow. So many people have discovered its remarkably limited toxicity and its versatility as a medicine that 12 states have now adopted legislation or initiatives that allow for its medicinal use and 12 states have decriminalized it by reducing penalties for possession of small quantities to a fine, with no arrest or jail penalty.

Massachusetts is considering decriminalizing minor marijuana offenses, with both proposed legislation and a proposed voter initiative. An out-of-state grouphas been collecting signatures for the voter initiative. Despite my agreement with the goal of eliminating criminal penalties for minor marijuana offenses, I oppose the initiative as it has been drafted.

The initiative reduces the penalty for possession of up to 1 ounce of marijuana to a fine of $100, but it actually establishes a new offense. The sponsors should withdraw it and replace it with a more thoughtfully worded version.

The new offense is internal possession of marijuana metabolites. Anyone discovered to have any of these metabolites in his body fluids or hair would be prosecutable.

However, like many other chemicals that are fat-soluble, these metabolites are excreted slowly, often long after their capacity to exert any psychoactive effect has disappeared. For example, an individual who has smoked marijuana on a Saturday night might have a positive urine test when she reports for work on Monday morning even though there is no evidence that she is "high."

If she has used it every night, in much the same way others have a daily alcoholic drink after work, her urine would test positive for at least a month after the last smoke. Currently no such offense exists under Massachusetts law; an individual today cannot be charged with any offense simply because he has inactive THC metabolites in his system. The existence of these metabolites in the body does not signify impairment; their presence simply establishes a history of having used marijuana in the past.

A second flaw in the initiative that should be corrected is the definition of marijuana as limited to cannabis sativa that contains no more than 2.5 percent THC, the primary active ingredient in marijuana.

Most marijuana ranges from 8 to 15 percent THC, and any initiative must redefine marijuana as the flowers and leaves of the cannabis sativa plant without THC limitation. Instead, the drafters of the initiative have responded to this inadequate definition of marijuana by drafting language that would decriminalize up to an ounce of the far more potent pure THC, perhaps an unintended result of trying to make the initiative compatible with the present statute.

Overall, the wording makes the initiative defective and vulnerable, a vulnerability that would surely be exploited by the drug warriors as they attempt to build opposition to this proposal should it eventually make the ballot.

So let's reject this fatally flawed proposal and work with the Legislature for a well-drafted law that would effectively decriminalize the possession and use of marijuana by adults in Massachusetts. If that doesn't happen by early 2009, another well-drafted initiative, one that would truly free adults to use this drug responsibly, would be in order.

Dr. Lester Grinspoon, an emeritus associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is author of "Marijuana Reconsidered" and coauthor of "Marijuana, the Forbidden Medicine."

Judge skips guidelines, releases man in crack case

2007-11-23T11:09:00.000-05:00

Judge skips guidelines, releases man in crack case
Long prison sentence hurts blacks, she says
By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff | November 21, 2007

A federal judge has freed a Boston man who pleaded guilty to selling small amounts of crack cocaine, saying that he dealt the drugs out of desperation and that long prison sentences for such crimes often do more harm to black communities than good.

US District Judge Nancy Gertner sentenced Myles Haynes to the 13 months he has served in jail since his arrest. She said that he appeared to be an honest man whose two admitted drug sales were isolated and that lengthy federal prison terms for such crimes are depleting cities of a generation of young black men.

"Isn't it time for us to say that there is on the one hand the impact of the drug trafficking and on the other hand the impact of mass incarceration of African-Americans from crack cocaine?" Gertner said from the bench Monday. "To suggest that the public safety requires the further incarceration of Mr. Haynes makes no sense."

Gertner then set aside sentencing guidelines that could have kept Haynes behind bars an extra 20 to 28 months. While federal judges sometimes depart from guidelines, it is rare for them to air such outspoken views from the bench.

Glancing at Haynes's 8-year-old son, Myles Jr., in the gallery with the defendant's family, Gertner added, "Indeed, when I see your son, I think that public safety requires that you be with your son so that he doesn't follow in your footsteps."

US Attorney Michael J. Sullivan criticized the sentence by Gertner, a Clinton-era appointee who has often accused the US Department of Justice of pursuing ex cessive federal prison sentences for nonviolent offenders.

"Mr. Haynes is a grown man who had options and opportunities for a better life," Sullivan said in a written statement.
"Yet he chose to deal crack cocaine and made life decisions that adversely affected and endangered the decent people who call Bromley-Heath their home," Sullivan added, in a reference to the development in Jamaica Plain, where Haynes was living at the time.

However, the judge received praise from Sullivan's predecessor, Donald K. Stern, who co-wrote a recent opinion piece with Gertner in the Globe saying that overly long sentences in many street crimes are counterproductive.

"Some people belong in prison; there's no alternative," Stern said in an interview. "But I think what Nancy is raising is, one ought not to assume that everybody fits into the same box."

The Rev. Jeffrey L. Brown - a leader of the Boston Ten-Point Coalition, and antiviolence group - agreed.
"I've never heard a federal judge point out what she pointed out," said Brown, who is pastor of Union Baptist Church in Cambridge. "It's not to say that I don't believe in law and order. But I also know from working every day in the streets that things are much more complex than a single arrest and conviction."

Haynes, 37, is one of 23 individuals who were charged last year after a six-month investigation by the FBI and Boston police of cocaine sales at the Bromley-Heath housing development.

He sold an informant a small wrapper with 1.8 grams of crack cocaine May 11 last year and then sold a slightly smaller amount five days later, authorities said. Both sales totaled $380 and took place inside the development, where Haynes grew up.

His lawyer, Jessica Hedges, said the total amount of cocaine equaled the contents of three or four packets of Sweet'N Low.

Haynes, who was held at the Plymouth County jail after his arrest, pleaded guilty in July to selling cocaine in a public housing project and aiding and abetting.

Even prosecutors said he was not a typical drug dealer. Haynes graduated from Newton North High School, which he attended through the Metco desegregation program.

He enlisted in the US Marines after high school but was injured and discharged after several months of basic training, according to a memorandum by Hedges. He enrolled in a community college in 1993 but withdrew to work to support a daughter.

Before the drug charges, Haynes's criminal record revolved around a 1998 incident for which he was convicted of several charges, including assault with intent to kill and possession of a firearm, said Assistant US Attorney John A. Wortmann Jr.

Neither side gave details. But Hedges said that the incident happened at a New Year's Eve party and that the relatively short sentence, one year in jail, indicated mitigating circumstances.

Since his release, Haynes has held a variety of jobs, including as a maintenance worker for New England Medical Center and an assistant manager for a City Sports store, said Gertner. The month after the cocaine sales, he completed training sponsored by Boston Emergency Medical Services to become a basic emergency medical technician.

Around the same time, the Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad Co. offered him a job but rescinded it because of his criminal record.

But Wortmann said Haynes's actions reveal a dark side. As a result of his record, he had to meet in the spring last year with a psychiatrist to see if he was suitable to become an emergency medical technician.

"At the same time he's meeting with a psychiatrist to demonstrate that he's not a danger to the community, he's selling crack cocaine in the housing project in which he grew up," Wortmann said.

Hedges said Haynes had struggled to find a job. She also said that while he was in jail in June, he used his emergency medical training to treat an inmate who had a diabetic seizure.

Haynes, for his part, apologized to his community and family.
"I made some desperate choices, and that's the way I chose," he said. "The solution wasn't the right one."

Responding to Police Requests to Search YOUR Home

2007-11-19T20:46:00.000-05:00

SAFE HOMES PROGRAM
What YOU Should Know

Members of the Boston Police Department may come to your door and ask to search your home. They may tell you they want to get guns off the street and will not arrest your child if they find a gun -- unless that gun is linked to a shooting.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Massachusetts believes you should make an INFORMED CHOICE about whether to allow police to search your home.

HERE IS WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT SUCH A SEARCH.

You have the right to say NO to a search.
Then the police should leave.

If you say YES, any of the following can happen:

• If the police find a gun and test it, they may arrest someone who lives in your home, including your child.

• If the police find drugs or anything illegal, they may charge someone who lives in your home, including your child, with a crime.

• Anything the police find in your home may lead to school discipline for your child, including suspension or expulsion.

If you have any questions or concerns, contact the ACLU of Massachusetts: (617) 482-3170.

Prison system a costly, harmful failure: report

2007-11-19T16:07:00.000-05:00

Prison system a costly, harmful failure: report
14:14 11/19/2007, Reuters: Top News
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The number of people in U.S prisons has risen eight-fold since 1970, with little impact on crime but at great cost to taxpayers and society, researchers said in a report calling for a major justice-system overhaul.

Hospital Quality Care Bill

2007-11-15T13:41:00.000-05:00

Below you'll find a snippet from the Mighty Wonderful State Representative Denise Provost of Somerville. Read about her House Bill 2226, and hospital-acquired infections. Many of us know that our loved ones in MA jails/prisons are exposed daily to MRSA-- an antibiotic resistant infection. It is commonplace in correctional facilities due to poor health, poor ventilation, limited access to hot water and soap and the hesitance of jailors to act on this health threat. It only makes the news when guards acquire the infection. In recent years I've called the DPH/Sanitation Offices to discuss the incidence of MRSA 'inside'. While the DPH folks were responsive to me they also acknowledged that they downplay MRSA with the prisoners because they 'over-react'

We all know how imprisonment destroys health. So please call or write to support this bill. Hospital Quality Care Bill. I have filed a bill to improve health care quality in the Commonwealth which aims to address issues of hospital-acquired infections, public notification of so-called 'never events,' and patient notification of potential adverse medical events. The bill also strives to improve physician/patient relationships by allowing physicians to acknowledge a medical error with an apology, without fear of a lawsuit, and would establish 'Patient and Family Councils' to provide patients and their families an opportunity to offer suggestions for the improvement of hospital care. I am working hard for the passage of this important legislation, House bill 2226, which is entitled 'An Act Promoting Health Care Transparency and Consumer/Provider Partnerships, Submitting Written Testimony. I encourage you to submit written testimony to the Committee on Public Health, where the bill was heard, in support of the legislation.

If you choose to write a letter urging the Committee to report the bill out favorably, it should be addressed to the Committee chairs.

The Honorable Susan Fargo
Committee on Public Health, Senate Chair
State House
Room 504
Boston, MA 02133

The Honorable Peter Koutoujian
Committee on Public Health, House Chair
State House
Room 130
Boston, MA 02133
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http://www.prisoners.com/dropmrsa.html

MRSA
Prison Disease Infects Prisoners and Guards
By: Chris Holbrook

Pennsylvania prisons have become a greenhouse for a virulent and highly contagious strain of Staphylococcus. The so-called 'MRSA' (for Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureau) strain of bacteria is a fast-growing infection which generally rots through the victims skin. It can be fatal especially to older or weakened victims. The disease spreads readily from person to person, particularly between men forced to share the same tiny prison cell.

In the filthy Pennsylvania prisons MRSA has infected many prisoners. Nobody counted how many or cared much about the disease until it started infecting prison guards. The guards are given an endless supply of rubber gloves to protect them. Prisoners aren't allowed to possess or use such protection.

The medical department in at least one Pennsylvania prison circulated an alert to the staff. It taught the guards how to wash their hands; actually giving step-by-step hand-washing instructions as one might do with a toddler. (Prison guards aren't recognized as being as bright as toddlers.) No similar warning or alert was issued to the prisoners - let 'em rot!

Even with the alert, guards are being infected. At last count, at least 11 guards have suffered from MRSA. Nobody knows how many prisoners have been infected or have died from the disease. We know of cases currently active in several Pennsylvania prisons.

So far, most infections seem to have proven very difficult to treat, but not totally hopeless. In several cases, it's been necessary to hack-out the infected flesh. The medical folks call that 'excising tissue.' What's done is the diseased part of the body is dug out. If they miss a germ or two, the Staph keeps right on growing, rotting whatever it touches. In addition, very powerful medications are administered. They are often pumped directly into the heart in an effort to delay or prevent death.

At least that's what's done for infected guards. Prisoners are occasionally offered two aspirin and a dab of Vaseline to ease the ream-job that's coming. Let 'em rot!

One particularly obnoxious prison guard, Jerry Droppings, a runt who enjoyed demeaning and debasing prisoners, came down with a bad case of MRSA. Maybe he didn't know how to wash his hands. Mr. Droppings quickly became seriously sick. He was hospitalized, had a chunk of infected tissue lopped out and received huge doses of antibiotics and other medications. We have no affection for Mr. Droppings, he's a truly foul human being, but nobody, not even a prison guard, cop or lawyer should suffer from MRSA and its painful complications. We sincerely hope that Mr. Droppings recovers. He has a family who likely hopes to join the imprisonment industry. It's a family business. We sincerely hope that the family isn't infected with the guard's disease.

Guard Droppings had a relative who could read and write. The relative whined about the poor darling's medical condition. It doesn't matter how badly he treated others, the relative thought that he should be treated better. We agree. Two wrongs don't make a right. There was a lot of public gnashing of teeth about the case. Nobody cared about the many prisoners similarly infected. We hope that everybody infected with this virulent infection recovers as well and as quickly as possible. Mr. Droppings and his relative seem mostly interested in money.

The principal reason for the epidemic of MRSA and other diseases in the Pennsylvania prisons is the very poor materials available for routine cleaning of cells, showers, messhalls, visiting rooms and communal areas. There is no effective disinfectant, no scouring powder or scouring pads. There is no effective soap or detergent to sanitize even the toilets and sinks. Nothing is really clean. Complaints to the prison administration are rebuffed.

A few years ago, such cleaning chemicals were readily available. There was far less disease. In fact, the state prison at Huntingdon in central Pennsylvania actually manufactured potent cleaning chemicals for the whole prison system.

Pennsylvania prison guards are such pussies, that they were afraid of the cleaning chemicals. The guards treat prisoners so very badly, that they're terrified of retaliation. If they're that scared, perhaps they should have looked for jobs as hairdressers. The bullies worry that, how about if potent cleaning chemicals were to be thrown on them! What would the poor darlings do then?!

Such things almost never actually happened. When they did, the effects were trivial. The cowardly guards would be better off to worry about the truly serious consequences of infections such as MRSA from having the prisons so filthy.

Pennsylvania prisons now use very small amounts of impotent colored water in place of real cleaning materials. Even that scares some of the more cowardly guards. We know of the case of guard, Mr. 'C.' He's won't let the men use even the watery 'disinfectant' spray. Trembling at the thought that some might be squirted at him, Mr. 'C.' keeps a tight grip on the bottle. Where a toilet must be disinfected, he personally gives the bowl a meager mist of colored water. Diseases will spread, but the cowardly Mr. 'C' is safe from colored water.

It appears likely that the MRSA bacteria was carried into the prisons from veterans returning for the insane Iraq war. Lots of prison guards are so enamored with bullying, killing and feeling important, that they've gone to Iraq in hope of killing helpless civilians. They discovered that it wasn't so easy. Some of the civilians didn't like being invaded. They defended themselves. They shot back. The prison guards pretty quickly quit and scurried home, bringing diseases with them.

Pennsylvania prison guards seem to think that it's a lot safer to abuse prisoners than to invade other people's land. If MRSA isn't eradicated in the prisons, they may be very wrong. Proper cleaning materials would be the first step in the right direction.

House lawmakers reject death penalty bill

2007-11-10T22:23:00.000-05:00

House lawmakers reject death penalty bill

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2007/11/07/house_lawmakers_reject_death_penalty_bill/

November 7, 2007

BOSTON --House lawmakers overwhelmingly reject a bill to reinstate the death penalty in Massachusetts.

The 110-46 vote effectively kills any chance of the bill becoming law this session and reflects a growing opposition to the death penalty on Beacon Hill.

Supporters of the bill say the state should reserve the right to capital punishment in the most heinous cases where there is no doubt of guilt.

Critics say the death penalty is costly, immoral and used disproportionately against racial minorities. Gov. Patrick had promised to veto the measure.

The bill mirrors an earlier bill by former Gov. Romney to create a national death penalty "gold standard."

House lawmakers rejected Romney's bill by a by a 99-to-53 vote.

Hearing on sentencing bills

2007-11-10T22:20:00.000-05:00

Massachusetts Joint Judiciary Committee Hearing on sentencing bills
Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2007 Room A-2, State House, Boston 1:00PM

Your help is needed to demonstrate support for reform! The Massachusetts Joint Judiciary Committee has rescheduled its hearing on state sentencing reform bills, including S.884, sponsored by Sen. Cynthia Creem (see www.famm.org for more info). The hearing will be held on Nov. 13. PLan to spend the entire afternoon and be prepared for a crowded hearing room.

Meet with your legislators while you wait. FAMM will have packets to give your legislators. If you can, please bring a picture of your loved one in prison.

Register today! Call Tom Burkert (517-487-1261) or email tomburkert@famm.org with the name and address of each person planning to attend so we can prepare packets for everyone."

A Second Chance for Ex-Offenders

2007-11-07T11:15:00.000-05:00

November 7, 2007
NYT Editorial

A Second Chance for Ex-Offenders

If past patterns hold true, more than half of the 650,000 prisoners released this year will be back behind bars by 2010. With the prison population exploding and the price of incarceration now topping $60 billion a year, states are rightly focusing on ways to reduce recidivism. Congress can give these efforts a boost by passing the Second Chance Act, which would provide crucial help to people who have paid their debts to society.

Newly released inmates are often driven right back to prison by difficulty in obtaining jobs, education and housing, as well as by the social stigma that comes from having been in prison. In addition, many of these people suffer from mental illnesses but have no access to treatment. Some states have begun offering assistance in these areas, but much more needs to be done.

The Second Chance Act would add to what the country knows about the re-entry process by establishing a federal re-entry task force, along with a national resource center to collect and disseminate information about proven programs.

The bill would broaden access to high-quality drug treatment, which is in scarce supply almost everywhere. It would also encourage states to work harder at reuniting families, which are often torn apart when a parent goes to prison.

The country worsened the recidivism crisis when it killed off many of the in-prison education programs that have a strong track record of helping released inmates live crime-free lives. The bill would begin to reverse that destructive trend by providing grants to improve academic and vocational education behind bars.

The programs necessary to help former prisoners find a place in society do not exist in most communities. The Second Chance Act would help to create those programs by providing money, training, technical assistance — and a Congressional stamp of approval.

Read the fine print

2007-11-05T15:43:00.000-05:00

Making Criminals Serve Their Full Terms: Joe Biden has written legislation that provides funds to states for building prisons if they agree to keep their violent offenders behind bars for at least 85 percent of their sentence, currently state prisoners serve only 40 percent of their sentences behind bars on average.

http://www.joebiden.com/assets/pdfs/crime_plan.pdf

Patrick nominates two to state parole board

2007-11-04T12:41:00.001-05:00

Patrick nominates two to state parole board
October 24, 2007

BOSTON --Gov. Deval Patrick has appointed a behavioral scientist to the state parole board and re-nominated the current chairwoman to remain on the board.

Leticia Munoz of Florence is a behavioral scientist and she has worked as the clinical director of the Brightside School Street Counseling Institute in Springfield since 2001.

Maureen Walsh of Deerfield has led the Parole Board since 2003, and she serves on the Gov.'s Anti-Crime Council.

Patrick has asked the Gov.'s Council to promptly review and confirm their nominations.

Democratic State Representative Ruth Balser of Newton says the nomination of a clinical psychologist brings much needed professional diversity to the Parole Board.

Secretary of Public Safety and Security Kevin Burke praised Walsh's re-nomination, saying she has credibility with law enforcement and criminal justice professionals.

Patrick to select new chief of prisons

2007-11-02T09:48:00.000-05:00

Patrick to select new chief of prisons
Washington official seen as an agent for changing focus
By Frank Phillips, Globe Staff November 2, 2007

Governor Deval Patrick today is expected to appoint as corrections commissioner Harold W. Clarke, the top corrections official in the state of Washington, who has built a national reputation for improving prisons despite encountering controversy.

Officials who know Clarke, who previously ran Nebraska's prison system, said his appointment would mark a shift in Massachusetts away from the hard-nosed policies established during 16 years of Republican governors.

Clarke is at the "top of the heap" among national penal experts, with a record of reducing violence in prisons and professionalizing staff, said Martin Horn, New York City's top prison official and a specialist on prison reform.

Clarke has been criticized after incidents in which felons on post-release supervision killed police officers, and also for a controversial release of felons from overcrowded jails, but his reputation remains high, Horn said.

"He is a true professional with rock-solid integrity," Horn said.

Officials in Patrick's administration said Clarke accepted Patrick's offer to take the post late yesterday, making him the second African-American to lead the Massachusetts Department of Correction. His mandate, the officials said, will be to revamp a corrections department that has focused for years on tough-on-crime policies while cutting to a bare minimum training and reentry programs.

Former attorney general Scott Harshbarger, a member of Patrick's six-member selection panel, said Clarke is up to the job of overhauling a system that has been supervised under harsh policies articulated in 1991, when former governor William F. Weld vowed to "reintroduce Massachusetts prisoners to the joys of busting rocks."

"It will be a major shift in philosophy and approach, one that will balance top-flight professional leadership and public safety with effective reentry of inmates," Harshbarger said. "This is a major-league selection."

Until Clarke's name surfaced recently, the seven-member panel, headed by Secretary of Public Safety Kevin Burke, had struggled to find a replacement for Kathleen Dennehy, who was let go last spring. Clarke is expected to be paid about the same salary as Dennehy, $140,000 a year.

Clarke will manage a system that has 11,000 inmates, a $500 million budget, and about 5,000 staff members while dealing with one of the toughest public unions, the Massachusetts Corrections Officers Federation Union. The system has 18 facilities.

Clarke, a native of Panama who headed Nebraska's prison system for 14 years before taking over Washington's system in 2005, will be Massachusetts' first black commissioner in 33 years, since John O. Boone.

Clarke has come under fire in Washington since being appointed by Governor Chris Gregoire two years ago.

He faced a crisis this year when two freed felons under post-release supervision killed two Seattle police officers in separate car accidents, and another shot and killed a county sheriff.

In addition, a work-release program in Seattle this year faced an investigation after six workers were accused of sexual misconduct and falsifying drug tests.

At the same time, an infuriated Gregoire said that she was "outraged" when Clarke's department released 90 felons from county jails because of overcrowding.

Last summer, the leadership of the Washington Federation of State Workers called for a no-confidence vote in his management. Gregoire headed off a vote by the union membership.

Harshbarger said the selection panel looked at those issues and found nothing that would alarm its members about his management abilities.

He said he expects the same sort of resistance to change in Massachusetts, but that the state needed to move beyond the legacy of Willie Horton, the convicted murderer who, while on a weekend furlough in the 1980s, went to Maryland where he raped a woman and stabbed her male companion. National Republicans used the issue to help defeat Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election.

"Is Willie Horton going to dominate our correctional philosophy forever?" Harshbarger said. "Some risk is always inherent. But the risk we have now is more expensive and more dangerous than a policy of being tough but with support programs for reentry."

Source URL: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2007/11/02/patrick_to_select_new_chief_of_prisons/?rss_id=Boston+Globe+--+City%2FRegion+News

Report on Arnie King's Commutation Hearing

2007-11-01T08:31:00.001-05:00

Hello All,

The meeting began at 10:25 am. It started with the opening statements by Ed Berkin, Attorney and Arnie King, Petitioner.

Maureen Walsh, Chairperson, began the questioning and questions from other board members followed. The questions allowed for thoughtful, reflective responses from Arnie. He was eloquent with his answers and his sincerity was felt by all in the room. The board members were positive in their comments and there was a justifiable, hopeful spirit in the room.

Some of the comments made since the hearing:

"I believe this hearing was blessed by God." (Marva)

"Arnie spoke with tremendous dignity..." (Fran)

"My job is to work with boards....and we try to read where a board is coming from. There wasn't a discouraging word that gave me reason for concern." (Glenn)

"...my impression was that the parole board was very positive about all the work and effort Arnie has put into his activism over the years." (Laura)

"Arnie's commitment to ending violence among young people came through so powerfully...The board seemed to really understand the importance of Arnie's work in the world. That came through in many ways." (Becky)

"I was impressed by Arnie's eloquence in speaking to a situation which is heart rendering not only for him but for his family, the family of the victim, and all involved at any level." (Chuck)

There were over 150 people in attendance and unfortunately they could not all be in the main room that held only 60. The remainder of supporters were in the overflow room which provided a video screen of the proceedings.

After the board finished questioning Arnie, the floor was opened for the following preselected speakers:

Group One: Sven Bursell, Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School; Becky Thompson, Professor, Simmons College; Reebee Garofalo, Professor, U Mass, Boston

Group Two: Tony Irving, Free Lance Photographer, Youth Worker; Glenn Koocher, Executive Director, Mass. Association of School Committees (MASC); Renny Cushing, Executive Director, Murder Victims' Families For Reconciliation

Group Three: Sam Williams, Director of Operations, Unitarian Universalist Ministry; Nancy Murray, Director of Education ACLU; Reverend Ray Hammond, Minister of Bethel AME and Co-founder of 10 Point Coalition.

Group Four: Marion Messinger, Executive Director of City School; Former staff members of City School, Banjineh (Foundation Movement) and Ama (Bronx High School teacher)

Group Five: Laura Efron, Editor, What's Up Magazine; Cindy Miller, Professor, Emerson College

Group Six: Marva King, sister, EPA Project Manager and Ph.D. Student; Danny King, brother, former Delaware and Maryland Education and Program Director

Group Seven: Charles Ogletree, Professor, Harvard Law School and Executive Director of Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice.

Sister in law of (victim) John Labanara

Further comments were:

"From the first supporter, Harvard Medical Dr. Sven Bursell (who flew in from Hawaii that morning for the hearing) speaking for Arnold to the last supporter, Harvard Law Professor, Charles Ogletree the Board was told why each speaker believed Arnold met the "exceptional" criteria." (Marva)

"...the testimony from Renny Cushing and Tony Irving was very powerful..." (Glenn)

"It was an honor to be amidst the multiracial, mixed class, inter-generational crowd that came together." (Becky)

"The amount of love, respect and dedication in that room was so emotional for me. It warmed my heart." (Chris)

"I left believing in my heart that we will get a unanimous positive vote." (Chuck)

Soffiyah Elijah, Attorney, closed with a wonderful summation.

I wanted to thank both Eddie and Soffiyah for the great job they did preparing and conducting Arnold's hearing. I can't even imagine all the hard work they put into it for the hearing to end up so organized and effective." (Marva)

"...I would like to say thank you to everyone who helped make the day. People who became aware of Arnie's case and joined in the effort, staying the course over the years... it was a great collective effort; bigger than any one person's efforts." (Kazi)

Letters of support can still be written to the Parole Board. Please send to Maureen Walsh, Chairperson, Parole Board, 12 Mercer Road, Natick, MA 01760 and don't forget to CC Arnie.

The board advised that they would provide a decision within 12 weeks. We will see that a copy of the transcript is available, soon, and then the board's opinion, once that becomes available to us.

The Commutation Workgroup

CORI WORKING GROUP ANNOUNCES PUBLIC HEARING ON NOVEMBER 7

2007-11-01T08:29:00.000-05:00

The CORI Working Group formed by Gov. Patrick following the Sept. 18 judiciary committee hearing has announced that they will hold a public hearing on November 7. The hearing will be be chaired by Secretary of Public Safety Kevin Burke, who will be joined on the panel by Undersecretary for Criminal Justice Mary Elizabeth Heffernan, Health & Human Services Secretary JudyAnn Bigby, and Suzanne Bump, Secretary of Labor & Workforce Development. The panel will also include Joint Committee on the Judiciary chairs Sen. Robert Creedon and Rep. Eugene O'Flaherty, as well as other committee chairs who are participating in the working group. Your presence and/or testimony at this hearing is important as we continue to push forward on this important issue! If you are interested in providing oral or written testimony, please let me know. Following are the details of the hearing:

CORI WORKING GROUP PUBLIC HEARING
Wednesday, November 7
4:00-7:00 p.m.
Gardner Auditorium, State House

For Women Behind Bars, "Health Care" Can Be Deadly

2007-11-01T08:23:00.000-05:00

For Women Behind Bars, "Health Care" Can Be Deadly
By Silja J.A. Talvi, Seal Press

Why a book about women in prison?

Readers of Women Behind Bars might ask the logical question of why an entire book should be focused on female incarceration while men are still, by far, the majority of people getting arrested and locked up. To many criminologists and writers who cover prison issues, the percentage of women in prison is so small as to warrant little, if any, attention or analysis. (Indeed, at many of the prison-related conferences that I have attended over the years, prisoners are referred to by the male pronoun almost exclusively.)

This question is entirely valid, and deserves a response. Men do face unique issues and hardships in prison, and the overrepresentation of men of color (especially African Americans), the mentally ill, and poor people in general has been more of an overall focus in my work than women's issues in prison until this point.

The deeper I began to delve into the underlying reasons for the rapid growth of girls and women in lock-up, the more insight I gained into a world that few outsiders see, much less understand. Once I began to pay particularly close attention to the ways in which females in the criminal justice system were portrayed in the media, it became clear to me that stereotypes and judgments about "fallen women" from centuries ago were still holding fast.

There's much more to all of this, of course, from the overt medical neglect of women's chronic health needs; to the prevalence of sexual coercion and abuse in women's detention facilities (primarily at the hands of correctional officers, as opposed to other inmates); to the fact that girls and women enter the criminal justice system with far higher rates of drug abuse, sexual violence, childhood abuse, mental illness, and experiences with homelessness. Women are also being punished heavily with undeserved federal "conspiracy charges" for their general unwillingness (or inability) to "snitch" on their loved ones or friends in drug cases -- to the point that this has began to be known as the "girlfriend problem" in the criminal justice system.

Today, the number of girls and women doing time is utterly unprecedented in U.S. history. In 1977, there were just slightly more than 11,000 women in state or federal prison. By 2004, the number of women in prisons had increased by a breathtaking 757 percent. At the end of 2006, there were 203,100 women in jails, state and federal prisons, plus another 1,094,000 women on probation or parole, for a total of 1.3 million females under some form of correctional supervision. (Another 15,000-20,000 girls are being held in juvenile detention.) While Euro-American women still outnumber any other demographic group in jails and prisons, African American women are four times more likely to be locked up than their Euro-American counterparts. (Collectively, African American women and Latinas represent more than 60 percent of women doing time.)

The following excerpt provides just one woman's story from Women Behind Bars. She did not live to tell it, but I am able to share it with you here.

****

I was already several months into the process of writing when I received an e-mail from a woman by the name of Grace Ortega. Grace had heard about the book project, and wanted to know if she could tell me what happened to her daughter, Gina Muniz, after she was incarcerated for the first (and last) time in her life. In truth, I already had enough women's stories to fill the pages of a few books -- if anything, I was overwhelmed trying to figure out which stories not to include -- but there was something about Grace's letter, the sheer urgency of it, that made me want to talk to her.

In our first conversation, Grace and I talked for two hours -- or, to be more precise, I listened for those two hours. It actually didn't click until a few days after that conversation that something sounded very familiar about what Grace had been telling me in great detail. Sure enough, I had once actually written about Gina, albeit briefly, in an article about the allegations and emerging evidence surrounding shoddy, abusive, and sometimes life-threatening medical "care" in two adjacent women's prisons: Valley State Prison for Women (VSPW) and the Central California Women's Facility (CCWF) in Chowchilla.

Grace and I stayed in touch, and I made it known that I would be interested in researching the details of her case for Women Behind Bars. I asked her to send me court documents, medical records, prison memos, grievances, or anything else she might have that would enable me to grasp the chronology of events in Gina's life, and to look more deeply into her situation. A few weeks later, a cardboard box the size of an orange crate arrived at my home. Grace had taken my request seriously and literally; from what I could tell, she had sent me absolutely everything she possessed pertaining to her daughter's case.

I didn't actually examine the contents of the box closely until I was already well into a few chapters of this book. When I did finally start to sort through the material, I saw that Grace had included four 8" x 11" color photos of her daughter. I set them down on my kitchen table and just stood there, staring at them. I don't know how much time passed, but I know it was long enough that the images were actually seared into my mind.

When I mentioned earlier that I was haunted by Gina's story, I meant that I have also been haunted by these images. For a time, I actually buried the photos under piles of paper in a strange attempt to block out my emotional reaction to them. It didn't matter; my mind couldn't erase any of it.

As I write this, these pictures are out of hiding, because I can finally give Gina's story a voice. The photograph that I have placed next to me is of her emaciated body, shackled to a bed in a community hospital near CCWF. Another of Gina's photos, which was taken just two months before her arrest on August 8, 1998, is on top of my desk. This is a snapshot of a naturally, strikingly beautiful woman with thick, dark curls framing her wide smile. Gina's warmth and kindness radiate from that picture, just as the one taken just a few weeks before her death conveys the agony of living in a body taken over by cervical cancer, which had started out as an entirely treatable, early-stage illness.

Gina's face in the hospital picture is that of a much, much older woman. The only parts of her that still look young are her hands and long fingers, which resemble a pianist's. Her left arm is shackled to the bed, per the requirement of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation that even terminally ill prisoners be shackled to their beds and guarded twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Her right arm tenderly cups the head of her then-eight-year-old daughter, Amanda.

Her eyes give away the intensity of her suffering, which started out as horribly as it ended. When she was first taken to the LA County Jail, Gina began to bleed so profusely that she would go through many sanitary pads in the space of a few minutes; most of the time, she was just left to bleed all over herself and her cell. When her cries got loud enough, jail guards would typically come over and look at her with disgust, and then throw toilet paper rolls into her cell.

All of this went on until Gina passed out while talking to her mother on the phone after nearly eight months of nonstop bleeding in jail. Gina's collapse was apparently what it took for her pleas for medical assistance to be heard. Even then, it would be months before she was examined properly and diagnosed with Stage IIB cervical cancer, which has a high success rate of being treated and stopped in its tracks if it is treated aggressively and consistently.

Gina's pleas for justice, however, were not heeded. She received a life sentence in state prison, with an additional seven years tacked on. A life sentence would seem to indicate that she had committed a heinous crime, and most certainly a crime of violence. But Gina had actually committed a nonviolent act, although even she thought she should be punished for stealing $200 from a fifty-one-year- old Vietnamese American woman. Gina did not have a gun, knife, or any other weapon with her, but she admitted that she "strong-armed" the woman into going to a nearby ATM and giving her the money. Even the victim herself, when the police arrived on the scene, stated that Gina had not hurt her in any manner. Gina hadn't been a career criminal by any stretch of the imagination.

Her only violations were for car-related misdemeanors, including a June 30, 1998 charge for driving without a permit. (Gina did not do jail time, although the incident did go on her record.) What happened that pushed this twenty-seven-year-old, with no history of criminal behavior, to the point of rob- bing someone?

Grace explained to me that Gina's father's death on April 22, 1998, triggered a serious, debilitating spiral of depression in her daughter's life. Although Gina's father had periodically been a heavy cocaine and heroin user, and Grace had left him when Gina was just a child, Gina still adored him and tried to see him as much as possible.

By all accounts, cocaine hadn't even been a part of Gina's life until after her father died. Although she had gotten involved with men who hadn't exactly done right by her, Gina had set her sights on becoming a nurse and paving the way for a good life for Amanda.

Seeing her grief, a much older, married male family member offered his "support" to Gina, and then gave her a taste of a drug that he promised would help her get through the pain. His encouragement of her cocaine use was obviously far from being in Gina's best interest. When her use turned into dependency, he started demanding sexual favors, which she provided to him for a time in exchange for money to buy more drugs.

The "exchange" went on for a few months, until a day when she asked for $200 and this relative demanded another sexual favor. As Gina later admitted to her mother, she was suddenly consumed by hatred and disgust -- toward him and toward herself. She refused his advances, and he in turn refused the money. But Gina's desire for more cocaine overtook her ability to think clearly. As her mom put it, "Gina did something that she would have considered unthinkable" in the not-so-distant past.

A mere surface examination reveals that Gina's poor attempt at a crime was obviously a fumbling act of desperation by a woman addicted to drugs. But that's not how the court saw it. Gina's own defense attorney took Grace's hard-earned money (which he was eventually forced to return when Grace filed a complaint with the California Bar Association), did nothing to argue her case, and then urged Gina to plead guilty in exchange for a short sentence. While the judge was announcing the terms of her sentence, Gina heard the words "life" and "seven years," and anxiously asked her lawyer what was happening.

As a bailiff would later testify, Gina's lawyer had lied to her, telling her that entering a guilty plea would get her only a seven-year sentence, not life in prison. Gina did not find out until she was sent to CCWF that she was going to spend the rest of her life in prison. Medical "decisions" made at some level in the process ensured that she was denied the necessary hysterectomy, radiation, and chemotherapy that would have saved her life. In essence, her already cruel and unwarranted life sentence was hastened into a death sentence over just a few horrible months of pain and suffering, during which she and her mother pleaded constantly for medical intervention and urgent treatment.

It took many months of letter writing, and the volunteer assistance of the San Francisco-based advocacy group Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, for Grace to get her daughter out of a depressing community hospital room under the constant watch of prison guards. Gina wanted to die at home, and so she did. On September 29, 2000, Gina Muniz slipped away in silence, surrounded by her immediate family, just two days after her mother took her home.

Where is the healing or hope in a story like this? Gina was certainly not given the chance to experience either.

Instead, they have manifested themselves in Grace's ability to turn her own grief into advocacy on the part of other women in prison. Grace has traveled across California, testifying before legislators and advocating for compassionate release for terminally ill women in prison so that they do not have to endure anything akin to the needless and slow death that Gina suffered.

Grace still looks at the pictures of her daughter every day, and she worries that her daughter's life will be forgotten entirely or, worse yet, dismissed as the plight of a criminal whose life and death were of no particular significance. "Please," she asked me again at the end of our last conversation, "Please make sure that Gina isn't forgotten."

Silja J.A. Talvi is a senior editor at In These Times. Her work appears in the anthology, "Prison Nation" (Routledge, 2003).

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/66637/

On October 27th, Take a Stand!

2007-10-24T22:02:00.000-05:00

Dear activists, colleagues and friends,

It has been over 4 and a half years since the invasion of Iraq. 3,835 U.S. soldiers and over 1 million Iraqi citizens have lost their lives. U.S. taxpayers have spent over $600 billion on this war with no end in sight.

This Saturday, October 27th, you can take a stand. United for Peace and Justice is coordinating over 150 peace groups across the country for demonstrations in 11 cities.

Boston, Chicago, Jonesborough Tennessee, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York City, Orlando, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Seattle.

There are also events in Fairbanks, Tucson, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Denver, Kapaa Hawaii, Des Moines, Smithfield NC, and Oklahoma City.

We made a video to help get the word out. Watch it here and recruit your friends to come:

Please come! Four years ago this month we documented the lies that led us into this war in "Uncovered: The War on Iraq," and last year we took on the mercenaries, cost-plus contracts, Blackwater and Halliburton in "Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers." Both of these stories are now widely known in the broader media thanks to your efforts in screening the films and organizing with them.

This new video is about getting people into the streets and DOING SOMETHING.

See you on Saturday!

Robert Greenwald, Jim Miller, and the Brave New Foundation team

P.S. Click that forward button!

Brave New Films is located at 10510 Culver Blvd., Culver City, CA 90232 and info@bravenewfilms.org

Call In for CORI Reform

2007-10-24T21:57:00.000-05:00

Call In for CORI Reform (pt 1)!
October 22nd - October 31st

GOOD JOBS can break the cycle of poverty, violence, and incarceration in our communities. BUT the CORI – our state's criminal record check system – stops thousands from obtaining decent work. The time for change is NOW.

Over 600 people came to the State House last month in support of CORI reform. The Governor's Office is deciding whether to act on the CORI issue.

Please support the movement and call your officials today.
---------------------
(617) 725-4005

DEAR GOVERNOR DEVAL PATRICK:

The violence that plagues our streets has put our communities in crisis. CORI is a barrier to jobs, education and housing for both youth and adults.

People with CORIs are being discriminated against, and the waiting period to seal a CORI is too long.

We are counting on you to act now. Don't forget about your community.

SUPPORT THE PUBLIC SAFETY ACT of 2007, H.1416.

---------------------
(617) 635-4500

DEAR MAYOR THOMAS MENINO:

As you know, the CORI is creating crises in our neighborhoods. Without jobs, the violence will continue.

Thank you for speaking out for CORI reform.

Please support the "Public Safety Act" (H. 1416) and use your power as mayor to win reforms now.

---------------------
Call (617) 427-8108 or email cori.reform@gmail.com for more info or to let us know that you called.

This "CORI Call-In" is co-sponsored by the Union of Minority Neighborhoods, Jobs With Justice, Community Change, Inc., Ex-Prisoners and Prisoners Organizing for Neighborhood Advancement, Community Labor United, Boston Mobilization, and Dorchester People for Peace

www.BostonWorkersAlliance.org

King Commutation Hearing

2007-10-19T12:10:00.000-05:00

Warm Greetings! Thanks so much for the love and support and preparing for the October 25th hearing. We are almost there now. A lot of folks are committed to attending while others have written inspiring letters to the Advisory Board of Pardons. Attached are the bios of some of the folks who will be present. City School, What's Up Magazine and Project Hip Hop will be there as well. If you haven't decided yet, please consider the positive impact of your presence and join with us in this effort.

One Love,

The Commutation Project

P.S. PLEASE note all attendees at the hearing will be searched. The following items are NOT allowed in the hearing room: overcoats, hats, gloves, umbrellas, sunglasses, food or drinks, gum chewing, cell phones, cameras.

March for P.E.A.C.E.

2007-10-12T09:07:00.000-05:00

Join Survivors, Peace Activists and concerned citizens of all ages as we March for P.E.A.C.E.

Roxbury Crossing to the State House
Saturday October 13th, 2007
1:00 PM

o CORI Reform
o PowerBuilders P.E.A.C.E. Fund
o Green-collar Jobs not Jails

Co-sponsored by:

The Live for the Future Campaign, The Bobby Mendes Peace Legacy, City Mission Society, Reach Out 2007

For more information, call 617-969-6378.

King Commutation Hearing

2007-10-11T10:11:00.000-05:00

In two weeks, Thursday October 25, @ 10:00 am, we will be at 12 Mercer Street in Natick for the commutation hearing. This audience will include elected officials from the state house and city hall, several clergy, university professors, people of various communities, and lots of family members and friends.

State Rep Gloria Fox and Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree lead this effort to break the chains, which surround the ankles of Arnie King. Will you be there? Reverend Ray Hammond of Bethel AME Church will be present, Dr. Sven Bursell, and a host of other Metro Boston professors will provide testimony. The staff of What’s Up Magazine, the City School, and Project Hip Hop will be heard. People will be traveling from up and down the east coast and beyond to be there too.

Over 130 folks attended the 2004 hearing and we’re hoping for a larger turnout in two weeks. So if you can attend, and maybe bring a friend or two, we will appreciate joining our arms together that morning, or send a prayer with a kind thought for positive results.

Please let us know as soon as possible one way or the other if you will attend.

Thank you for your ongoing support!

Regards,

The Arnold King Commutation of Sentence Working Group

Breaking Point

2007-10-07T11:40:00.000-05:00

Premieres Sunday, Oct. 7, at 9 p.m. ET/PT, Discovey Channel

What does the California prison system have in common with Harvard University? It costs precisely as much to house, feed and guard one prisoner for one year in a California state prison as tuition, meals and housing cost for a student enrolled for one academic year at Harvard. As far as California taxpayers are concerned, it gets even worse. Their prison system is so overcrowded that it’s reached a breaking point. Either the state finds a long-term solution or the federal courts have warned they’ll begin ordering the release of inmates, just to ease the crush.

In this two-hour broadcast, Ted Koppel examines how California got to this point and presents an inside view of the crisis through in-depth interviews with inmates, guards and prison officials at California State Prison Solano in Vacaville.

Designed to accommodate no more than 100,000 inmates, California’s prisons now hold 173,000, each at an annual cost of $43,000. How did things get so out of control? Mandatory sentencing is a big part of the answer. When California voters threw their support behind a get-tough-on-crime bill that came to be known as "Three Strikes and You’re Out," the state prison system filled up and is now overflowing.

While shooting, Koppel spent a number of days among the general population at Solano. His reporting focuses on the inhabitants of H Dorm, where inmates are stacked in triple-deck bunk beds on an old indoor basketball court. Correctional officers are so badly outnumbered that prison officials keep inmates segregated by race and gang affiliation in a desperate effort to avoid friction and maintain control. Even so, Solano still sees three to four race riots a year. Using smuggled cell phones, gang bosses continue running criminal operations on the street from behind prison walls. At the same time, they’re running drug and prostitution rings inside Solano.

Koppel will introduce viewers to many of Solano’s inmates, including Travis Tippets, Joseph Mason and Brian O’Neal. Having completed a six-year sentence for assault with a deadly weapon, Tippets is being released from Solano and sits for a brief "exit interview" with Koppel. The last time he was paroled, it took Tippets less than a day to get arrested and sent back. Knowing that a third strike could land him back in prison for life, Tippets finds out how hard it is to get a job with no skills and a criminal record.

Joseph Mason is a third-striker. He’s been arrested and convicted three times for nonviolent burglaries and he won’t be eligible for parole until 2019; the ultimate irony is that he voted for the three strikes law. Brian O’Neal is also a nonviolent repeat offender. He has been to prison 11 times and nine of those sentences were for
violating parole. Koppel’s cameras track O’Neal’s 11th release from prison as his pregnant girlfriend picks him up and the two drive out of Solano. Within weeks, O’Neal is arrested again for violating his parole.

Women’s prison crisis costing state millions

2007-10-07T09:13:00.000-05:00

New lockup likely as population soars; many inmates denied training,
rehab
By Laura Crimaldi
Sunday, October 7, 2007

The state’s major prison for women is overflowing with inmates, and correction officials are scrambling to find beds, cover soaring medical costs and provide training and detox for cons before they are set loose.

MCI-Framingham is “bursting at the seams,” said Mary Beth Heffernan, undersecretary for Criminal Justice at the Executive Office of Public Safety, which runs prisons. “They don’t get the programming that these women need.”

The number of inmates has risen by 11 percent since 2003, from 970 to 1080, and a top public safety official says a costly new facility for women is all but inevitable.

In the same four-year period, the budget for Framingham - the state’s principal prison for women - rose by 17 percent, from $26.9 million in 2003 to $31.4 million in 2007. Longer prison terms and crowded county jails account for the high capacity - nearly double what the site is intended for.

During a recent tour, female inmates were seen living six to a room in modular units, sharing tiny bathrooms. In another modular unit, about 68 women live in a large room furnished with bunk beds. Quarters there are so tight that arguments erupt over such trivial issues as personal hygiene, snoring and gossip, DOC officials said.

“If the county prisoners returned to the counties, the inmate population would be 215,” said Superintendent Lynn Bissonnette, who started her career at MCI-Framingham as a correction officer. If that were to happen, “we could do wonderful things” toward rehabilitation, she said.

In the first three months of 2007, there was an average daily population of 231 inmates awaiting trial, which is 361 percent of the design capacity for pretrial prisoners of 64 beds, according to a quarterly DOC overcrowding report.

The inmate population at the 452-capacity prison has swelled so dramatically because it is the repository for pretrial and sentenced female offenders from Worcester, Middlesex, Essex, Plymouth and Norfolk counties, where there are no facilities for women.

Last month, 67 percent of the 699 women at the prison were either serving a county sentence or awaiting trial, the DOC said.

Inmates also are showing up with severe medical and mental health problems and more serious detox needs, prison officials said. Costs related to housing pretrial detainees, medical and pharmaceutical services and utilities are the top reasons for budget increases, a DOC spokeswoman said.

Given the overcrowding, programs offered by the prison to prepare women for release carry long waiting lists.

“I think we could have a major impact on our women’s lives if we had them longer,” said Bissonnette. “But we don’t want to incarcerate people just so they can get programming.”

There are 42 women who want to enroll in a new cosmetology training course, which has slots for 12 inmates, she said. There are 109 women on the wait list for First Step, a 35-day substance-abuse program. The Correctional Recovery Academy, an eight-month substance-abuse and recidivism program, has a wait list of 53.

Last week the state Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance launched its search for a consulting firm with correction expertise to get a $1.5 million contract to conduct a master plan with the DOC and sheriffs, said DCAMM deputy director Kevin Flanigan.

The team is expected to be named by December. The process, which will take a year, will consider the maintenance and capacity needs, operational and capital costs and plans for demolition and new construction at county and state facilities, Flanigan said.

“I am hoping and the governor and this administration is hoping that conducting a master plan for correctional facilities will yield a result that we need an eastern Massachusetts women’s facility,” said Mary Beth Heffernan.

The opening of the 210-bed Western Massachusetts Regional Women’s Correctional Center in Chicopee last month has no impact on overcrowding in Framingham because the $26.1 million facility is housing women from an existing site in Ludlow.

Leslie Walker, executive director of the Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, opposes building more prisons and jails.

“We can’t build our way out of this. It’s too expensive and the recidivism rate is too high,” she said. “If prisons worked there’d be a better argument. They do not. They warehouse people for a few years except for those lucky enough to receive training and education. The rest are delivered back to society in much worse shape than when they come in.”

Of the 738 female inmates released by the DOC in 2002, 42 percent were reincarcerated within three years, according to DOC spokeswoman Diane Wiffin.

“They just become tinderboxes. There is such a high level of mental illness at Framingham compared to other facilities it’s a whole other dimension. It’s a very needy population of inmates. There’s just not enough help to get it done,” said Steve Kenneway, president of the Massachusetts Correction Officers Federated Union. “They need to build more female prisons in Massachusetts.”

Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/general/view.bg?articleid=1036493

Joint Economic Committee Holds Hearing on the Economic Costs of the Surge in U.S. Prison Populations

2007-10-06T10:17:00.000-05:00

On October 4, the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee held a hearing entitled "Mass Incarceration in the United States: At What Cost?" The hearing focused on the costs of maintaining a large prison system and the long-term labor market and social consequences of mass incarceration. The hearing also covered whether the increase in the prison population correlates with decreases in crime, and what alternative sentencing strategies and post-prison reentry programs have been the most successful at reducing incarceration rates in states and local communities.

Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) and Committee Vice Chair Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) ran the hearing. Senators Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Bob Casey (D-PA) and Representatives Bobby Scott (D-VA), Philip English (R-PA), and Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) were in attendance.

Witnesses included Dr. Glenn Loury, Economics and Social Sciences Professor at Brown University; Dr. Bruce Western, Director of the Inequality and Social Policy Program at Harvard University; Alphonso Albert, Executive Director of Second Chances; Michael Jacobson, Executive Director of the Vera Institute for Justice; and Pat Nolan, Vice President of Justice Fellowship, Prison Fellowship Ministries. To view the full witness list and submitted testimony, click here.

In his opening statement, Senator Webb explored the enormous economic costs of high incarceration rates and the disproportionate impact on minority communities. Witnesses all discussed the multiple challenges related to the return of incarcerated persons from prisons and jails to their communities and emphasized the importance of reentry programs to help curb the economic and social costs of imprisonment.

"Providing employment and training assistance for ex-offenders is critical to reducing barriers to employment, and it benefits families," said Congresswoman Maloney. "That's why I support the Second Chance Act. Putting more resources into creating economic opportunities that provide alternatives to crime would pay dividends in reducing crime and incarceration, while also strengthening families and communities."

In his remarks, Senator Brownback also stressed the importance of community-based reentry services and substance abuse treatment for people returning from prisons and jails. He spoke in support of the Second Chance Act and expressed his desire to see the bill enacted this year.

"We have an incredible opportunity to greatly improve the way in which this nation's prison systems operate," said Senator Brownback. "The Second Chance Act, which is now pending before Congress will certainly bring much-needed change to the American criminal justice system."

Senator Webb and Representative Scott also expressed their support of the Second Chance Act.

For more information on the SCA, please visit the Re-Entry Policy Council website or contact Sara Paterni.

"HEAL THE HOOD"

2007-10-06T10:15:00.000-05:00

An afternoon of music, discussion, and another step towards "Healing The Hood"

When: October 6, 2007, 2:00-4:00pm
Where: St. Paul's Cathedral
138 Tremont Street, Boston, MA 02111
What: "HEAL THE HOOD":
Who: Main speaker T. Rodgers, PhG in Gangology, Author, Actor and South Central Community Leader.

Performing local artists- Boss Youngin, Semi Auto, Miss Aquarius, and (NJ's) Quest Money.

T. Rodgers is a non-traditional leader who founded Sidewalk University a community based consulting organization. The organization grew into a strategy that empowers disenfranchised communities.

T Rodgers built his Los Angeles Nation one member at a time. Now he wants to undo the damage and stop gang violence the same way, one human at a time. His unique transformation from Nation leader to community advocate is based upon years of experience in the heart of the gang lifestyle.

This is not just another discussion; it is a gathering of young men and women whose lives have been directed by violence. They are united as part of a greater movement to change the course of their future. From T. Rodgers they are gaining the knowledge that they need to take their lives in a new direction. If given the necessary tools they will make positive change.

Why: T. Rodgers has been providing services across the United States for over 30 years. He has been a trailblazer in the art of empowering individuals with the necessary tools to become S.E.L.F. (Survival Education for Life and Family) sufficient, therefore decreasing negative activities in the communities.

This is a free event, donations are welcome

For More Information Contact:

Louis D. Brown Peace Institute
Mario @ 617-825-2257
stonecity@gmail.com

Sponsored by: The Louis D. Brown Peace Institute, American Friends Service Committee, ST.Pauls Cathedral, Brightminds Production, Critical Breakdown, Grove Hall Mosque #11, Greater Four Corners Action Coalition

Jail begins releasing inmates to reduce overcrowding

2007-10-06T10:13:00.000-05:00

October 2, 2007

WEST BOYLSTON, Mass. --Inmates are being released or transferred from the Worcester County Jail and House of Correction to comply with a federal judge's order to relieve chronic overcrowding at the facility.

Sheriff Guy Glodis has been pushing lawmakers for construction of a new facility, so far without success.

The jail had more than 1,520 inmates as of Monday. U.S. District Court Judge Rya Zobel has ordered that the inmate population be reduced to about 1,250 by December.

Jail officials say none of the 126 prisoners released so far are considered violent. Many are pretrial detainees awaiting trial on such charges as drug possession or theft.

Officials say most of the convicts being released have served at least 70 percent of their sentences.

Court Revisits Sentencing Guidelines

2007-10-06T10:09:00.000-05:00

Increased Penalties for Crack Cocaine Disproportionately Affect Blacks
By Robert Barnes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 3, 2007; A02

The Supreme Court yesterday struggled with how to give judges discretion in imposing sentences while still maintaining guidelines that seek to minimize disparities in justice.

The arguments received special attention because they marked the first time the court has considered Congress's 1986 decision to punish users and suppliers of crack cocaine more severely than those involved with powder cocaine.

The "100 to 1" disparity -- trafficking in 5 grams of crack cocaine triggers a mandatory five-year sentence, the same punishment imposed for 500 grams of powder cocaine -- results in higher sentences for African Americans, who are more likely to use that form of the drug, than for whites and Hispanics, who are more likely to use powder cocaine.

The larger question of judicial discretion is a quandary that is partly of the court's own creation, as the justices ruled in 2005 that federal sentencing guidelines must be advisory, not mandatory. Since then, federal appeals courts have sought to come up with standards for reviewing sentences that stray from what the guidelines recommend.

"What are the words that should be written, in your opinion, by this court that will lead to considerable discretion on part of the district judge but not totally, not to the point where the uniformity goal is easily destroyed?" Justice Stephen G. Breyer asked one of the lawyers arguing the cases.

After two hours of arguments, such a standard seemed elusive.

The crack case involves Congress's decision, in response to a rising crack epidemic and the death of University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias, to impose dissimilar treatment for the drugs in 1986.

Derrick Kimbrough, a Gulf War veteran and construction worker, was arrested in Norfolk with 56 grams of crack cocaine and 92.1 grams of powder cocaine, as well as with a firearm. Under the guidelines, Kimbrough faced a sentence 19 to 22 1/2 years, driven by the increased penalties for crack.

Kimbrough's lawyer noted repeated calls from the U.S. Sentencing Commission to reduce the disparity, and U.S. District Judge Raymond A. Jackson agreed, labeling the longer sentence "ridiculous." He sentenced Kimbrough to 15 years, which he said was "long enough."

But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit reversed that decision.

"Judge Jackson did it right in this case," said Michael Nachmanoff, a federal public defender from Alexandria who represents Kimbrough. He said the sentence honors Congress's intent but creates a just punishment.

But Deputy Solicitor General Michael R. Dreeben said the judge substituted his judgment for Congress's intent and that was a "textbook example of an unreasonable sentencing factor."

It appears that the crack cocaine sentencing guidelines will change regardless of the court's decision. The Sentencing Commission voted in April to reduce the federal minimum sentence for crack, a decision that will go into effect Nov. 1 unless Congress intervenes.

Another sentencing case involves Brian Michael Gall, a former dealer of the drug ecstasy who quit the business and had established a different life by the time he was arrested. A judge gave him probation instead of the three-year prison term called for in the sentencing guidelines.

An appeals court overturned the sentence, saying such an "extraordinary reduction must be supported by extraordinary circumstances."

The cases are Kimbrough v. United States (06-6330) and Gall v. United States (06-7949).

© 2007 The Washington Post Company

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/02/AR2007100201154.html

Exoneration Using DNA Brings Change in Legal System

2007-10-06T10:01:00.000-05:00

October 1, 2007
By SOLOMON MOORE

State lawmakers across the country are adopting broad changes to criminal justice procedures as a response to the exoneration of more than 200 convicts through the use of DNA evidence.

All but eight states now give inmates varying degrees of access to DNA evidence that might not have been available at the time of their convictions. Many states are also overhauling the way witnesses identify suspects, crime labs handle evidence and informants are used.

At least six states have created commissions to expedite cases of those wrongfully convicted or to consider changes to criminal justice procedures. One of them, the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, will hold a hearing this month on remedies for people who have been wrongfully convicted.

Laws in several states, including Illinois, New Jersey and North Carolina, have bipartisan backing, with many Democrats supportive on civil rights grounds and Republicans generally hoping that tighter procedures will lead to fewer challenges of convictions.

“Technology has made a big difference,” said Margaret Berger, a DNA legal expert who is on a National Academy of Sciences panel that is looking into the changing needs of forensic scientists. “We see that there are new techniques for ascertaining the truth.”

Maryland, North Carolina, Vermont and West Virginia passed legislation this year to create tougher standards for the identification of suspects by witnesses, one of the most trouble-ridden procedures.

Nationwide, misidentification by witnesses led to wrongful convictions in 75 percent of the 207 instances in which prisoners have been exonerated over the last decade, according to the Innocence Project, a group in New York that investigates wrongful convictions.

Legislatures considered 25 witness identification bills in 17 states this year, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers reported. Five states approved bills, while five states defeated them. Bills are pending in seven states.

“It’s become clear that eyewitnesses are fallible,” said Lt. Kenneth A. Patenaude, a police commander in Northampton, Mass., who is an expert on witness identification techniques.

Two states, Vermont and Maryland, passed laws this year to improve crime lab oversight to eliminate errors and omissions. Maryland recently passed a law that will hold its crime labs to the same standards as clinical labs, a much more rigorous requirement. Other legislative changes to crime lab oversight are pending in 21 states, including New York.

More than 500 local and state jurisdictions, including Alaska, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia have adopted polices that require the recording of interrogations to help prevent false confessions, according to the Innocence Project.

The California Legislature also passed a bill this year that requires informant testimony to be corroborated before it can be heard by a jury. Critics say such testimony can be unreliable, especially when it is offered by convicts or suspects in return for leniency. The bill awaits approval by the governor.

Advocates of efforts to use DNA to exonerate those wrongfully convicted say the changes in the state laws are welcome and long overdue.

“The legislative reform movement as a result of these DNA exonerations is probably the single greatest criminal justice reform effort in the last 40 years,” said Peter J. Neufeld, co-director of the Innocence Project.

But some law enforcement officials oppose some of the changes, saying they create legal minefields for the police and prosecutors. Any deviation from the new standards, no matter how minor, could be taken up by defense lawyers in an appeal, the critics say.

The California State Sheriffs’ Association is fighting two bills there that would mandate electronic recording of interrogations and corroboration of informant testimony. The bills have been passed by the Legislature and are awaiting final approval by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican.

“Simply put, these two bills create loopholes for defendants to get an edge in court on technicalities,” according to a letter from the sheriffs’ organization to the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice. The association also opposed a state bill that would create guidelines for suspect lineups.

Even some proponents of the new standards balk at making them state law, insisting they are better dealt with by local law enforcement agencies.

“I’m not fond of legislation,” said Lieutenant Patenaude, the Massachusetts police commander. “I’ve been asked to review bills in several states, and I haven’t seen one that mirrors the best practices that we’ve put out here. I’d like to see police agencies mold the procedures instead of legislatures or courts.”

Studies of wrongful convictions suggest that there are thousands more innocent people in jails and prisons. The Innocence Project, the nation’s most prominent organization devoted to proving wrongful convictions, is pursuing 250 cases and at any given time is reviewing 6,000 to 10,000 additional cases for legal action. Approximately 1 percent of those cases will be accepted, and half of those accepted cases are closed because evidence has been lost or destroyed.

Other smaller efforts to overturn wrongful convictions also receive thousands of letters from inmates.

In a 2005 study, a University of Michigan Law School professor, Samuel R. Gross, estimated that 340 prisoners sentenced from 1989 to 2003 had been exonerated. Of those, 205 were convicted of murder and 121 of rape. Half of the wrongful murder convictions and 88 percent of the wrongful rape convictions included false eyewitness identification, the study found.

DNA evidence was used to exonerate 144 of those inmates.

In a 2007 study, Professor Gross analyzed 3,792 death sentences imposed from 1973 to 1989 and found that 86 death row inmates, or 2.3 percent, had been exonerated through 2004

Professor Gross said the total number of innocent prisoners was likely to be far higher. In his view, well-documented wrongful convictions in capital cases provided a window on systemic problems, with even larger numbers of convictions for less serious and less publicized convictions.

“Of the 340 exonerations I looked at” in the 2005 study, Professor Gross said, “96 percent are for rape and murder.” He added: “Does that mean nobody was wrongfully convicted for drug possession, or drunk driving or burglary? Chances are there are many, many more false convictions for lesser crimes.” The most recent prisoner to be
exonerated by DNA evidence was Dwayne Allen Dail, who served 18 years in North Carolina for a false conviction of child rape. Prosecutors had used the victim’s identification of Mr. Dail and hair found at the crime scene to convict him. Years later, after repeated inquires from defense lawyers, the police found a box of additional evidence in the case that contained the victim’s semen-stained nightgown. DNA analysis ruled out Mr. Dail and implicated another man. Mr. Dail was released from prison in August.

The proposed laws on witness identification are intended to reduce cases like Mr. Dail’s by requiring things like sequential photo lineups of suspects, in which police officers show witnesses photographs of one suspect at a time. Studies have shown that witnesses tend to compare photos when they are shown them simultaneously, a tendency that can lead to errors.

The legislation would also create “double blind” systems so that the police officers administering the photo lineups are unaware of the suspects’ identities in order to avoid influencing witnesses.

The North Carolina legislature adopted both lineup procedures this year.

Crimes labs are also getting additional scrutiny in some states.

William E. Marbaker, president of the American Society of Crime Lab Directors, an independent accreditation body, said the group had accredited more than 300 crime labs. But some law enforcement agencies are finding that even more oversight is needed.

A two-year review of the Houston Police Department’s crime lab called into question more than 600 cases. The review was initiated after a court found in 2005 that faulty forensic evidence led to the conviction of George Rodriguez in 1987 for kidnapping and assaulting a child. Mr. Rodriguez served 17 years of a 60-year sentence before his release two years ago.

Houston crime lab officials erroneously concluded that hair found at the crime scene belonged to Mr. Rodriguez. The crime lab also failed to rule out Mr. Rodriguez as a suspect after finding that semen collected from the scene matched that of another man.

Eight states — Alabama, Alaska, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming — do not have laws that give inmates access to DNA evidence.

Advocacy groups, including the Innocence Project, said they intend to lobby for the passage of access laws in those states during the next legislative session.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/us/01exonerate.html?ex=1348891200&en=4d3cc5a0c8234964&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Our penal system, and the uses and abuses of punishment

2007-10-06T09:58:00.000-05:00

September 30, 2007

CHRISTOPHER SHEA captures an important truth when he observes that the penal system is not just "a reflection of society, but a force that shapes it" ("Life sentence," Ideas, Sept. 23). The United States has undertaken a vast social experiment of mass incarceration with human subjects, and the limits of damage to individuals and society are not fully known. The use of punishment as the preferred method to address medical problems such as mental illness and substance abuse is one area where reforms of the penal system are overdue. High incarceration rates of these populations represent a failure by society to effectively provide access to treatment before crimes are committed. In both these areas, effective medical treatment is available. From a medical point of view, there are more humane and cost-effective ways to spend limited resources in addressing risk factors to incarceration.

Dr. SCOTT A. ALLEN
Dr. JOSIAH D. RICH
Providence

The writers are with the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at the Miriam Hospital.

FOLLOWING RECENT events in Jena, La., Christopher Shea's spotlight on the prison system was welcome.

Indeed, many people, not just "hard-left liberals," have tried for years, with little help from the media, to draw attention to myriad fronts, such as how the drug war is stacked against the poor and people of color, and how courts have been used to hobble political foes going back to J. Edgar Hoover.

As a guard at the Dorchester juvenile lockup, I saw how young people are socialized in jail. Their self-esteem is eroded, they learn dysfunctional behaviors, and then they head back out to teach their peers and children.

By axing mental health, detox, and education programs both inside and out, and blocking legal employment with overbroad CORI checks, we prevent healthy reentry and promote recidivism. Why aren't we focusing on cheaper alternatives to prison that could break the cycle?

Of course, one unspoken barrier to change is profit. Too many politicians and their corporate friends benefit financially. And communities see new prisons as life savers.

How long will we let this myopia and profiteering ruin lives and destroy our society?

ALEX PAPALI
Jamaica Plain

King Hearing Scheduled - Your Confirmation is Requested

2007-09-30T21:24:00.000-05:00

In 2004, there were an impressive 130 people who attended the hearing in support of Arnie King’s request for commutation of sentence. It made a difference; he was given a favorable recommendation by the Advisory Board of Pardons and your support and presence helped make that happen.

This year, WE NEED YOU AGAIN; Arnie needs you to PACK THE PLACE, and then some, at his upcoming hearing on Thursday, OCTOBER 25th, 2007, at 10:00 AM.

Please reply to this email or call (617) 576-5367 with answers to the following questions by no later than OCT 10, 2007, to tell us:

Can you come?
Can you bring anyone and if yes, how many?
Can you give a ride to whoever may need one (provide your address/location)?
Do you need a ride (provide your address/location)?

IMPORTANT: You MUST bring a PICTURE ID with you. Please dress in an appropriate manner (no halter tops, shorts, worn out jeans, hats, and T-shirts - per guidelines).

HEARING DETAILS:

Date: Thursday, October 25, 2007
Time: 10:00 AM
Place: Massachusetts Parole Board Central Office, 12 Mercer Road, Natick, MA 01760
DIRECTIONS

More information: http://www.arnoldking2007.org/

Thank you for your ongoing support to free Arnie King!

Regards,

Arnold King Commutation Working Group

JOINT ECONOMIC COMMITTEE TO EXAMINE ECONOMIC COSTS OF SURGE IN U.S. PRISON POPULATION AND POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

2007-09-30T17:32:00.000-05:00

Hearing on Costs of Mass Incarceration Called by VA Sen. Webb in Light of 500 Percent Increase in Prison Populations in Last 30 Years

Washington, D.C. - U.S. Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) will hold a Joint Economic Committee (JEC) hearing to explore the economic consequences and causes of and solutions to the steep increase of the U.S. prison population.

The hearing entitled, "Mass Incarceration in the United States: At What Cost?" is scheduled for Thursday, October 4, 2007 at 10:00am in Room 216 of the Hart Senate Office Building.

The United States has 25 percent of the world's prisoners, despite having only 5
percent of the world's population. The JEC will examine why the United States has such a disproportionate share of the world's prison population, as well as ways to address this issue that responsibly balance public safety and the high social and economic costs of imprisonment.

Expert witnesses have been asked to discuss the costs of maintaining a large prison system; the long-term labor market and social consequences of mass incarceration; whether the increase in the prison population correlates with decreases in crime; and what alternative sentencing strategies and post-prison re-entry programs have been most successful at reducing incarceration rates in states and local
communities.

WHAT: Joint Economic Committee Hearing: "Mass Incarceration in the United States: At What Cost?"

WHEN: Thursday, October 4, 2007 - 10:00am

WHERE: 216 Hart Senate Office Building

Witnesses (as of September 27):

* Dr. Glenn Loury, Economics and Social Sciences Professor, Brown University

* Dr. Bruce Western, Director Inequality and Social Policy Program, Harvard University

* Alphonso Albert, Executive Director, Second Chances

* Michael Jacobson, Executive Director, Vera Institute for Justice

The Joint Economic Committee, established under the Employment Act of 1946, was created by Congress to review economic conditions and to analyze the effectiveness of economic policy.

www.jec.senate.gov

Conaway B. Haskins III
Deputy State Director
Office of U.S. Senator Jim Webb
507 E. Franklin Street
Richmond, VA 23219
Pho: 804-771-2221
Fax: 804-771-8313
Email: Conaway_Haskins@webb.senate.gov

Website: http://webb.senate.gov

For ex-offenders, CORI law not working

2007-09-30T17:28:00.000-05:00

By Michael Jonas September 30, 2007

At a time when residents of high-crime neighborhoods are on edge over the plague of gang and gun violence, Mayor Thomas Menino ventured up to Beacon Hill this month to lobby on behalf of the city's ne'er-do-wells. The mayor was there to testify at a Judiciary Committee hearing in favor of a bill to limit employer access to criminal records. While some might say Menino should focus his energies on law-abiders, not lawbreakers, he is driven as much by a concern for the former as the latter.

"There are young people who made a mistake," says Menino. "I don't believe it should be a life sentence."

Reform advocates have complained that the state's Criminal Offender Record Information law, or CORI, has become just that - preventing those convicted of even minor offenses from being able to turn themselves around and find honest work.

But Menino says the wide access to criminal record information does more than just hold back ex-offenders. "It makes neighborhoods unsafe," says Menino. "It's part of our public safety problem, as I see it."

That's because nearly everyone locked up by the criminal justice system is eventually let out, some 250 inmates every month from the Suffolk House of Correction alone. And the options open to them can have a big impact on whether they end up back behind bars - and whether a law-abiding citizen becomes a victim in the process.

CORI laws keep them from getting jobs and finding a place to live, says Menino. "After a while, they get frustrated and get angry, and they turn to the world they came from," he says.

Under the bill Menino supports, access to full CORI reports would be available only to law enforcement agencies and employers that serve children and other vulnerable populations. Other employers would have access to more limited summaries, while all employers seeking information would have to attend a training session on accurate reading of CORI reports, which are notoriously difficult to decipher.

Horace Small, director of the Union of Minority Neighborhoods and a man not unfamiliar with tossing an occasional grenade at politicians, has nothing but praise for the mayor's willingness to push for changes in the CORI system. "He gets this at the most basic level," says Small. "From a practical level, from a public safety level: Get them jobs and there will be fewer crimes."

That basic level involves regular encounters Menino has with young people, sometimes in his City Hall office, but more often in the neighborhoods where they live. At one such session recently in Dorchester's Uphams Corner, Menino says the CORI issue came up repeatedly.

That plenty of young people not even out of their teens already have criminal records is a depressing thought. That those records could be a barrier to success for even those most determined to get on the right path is an even more grim reality for ex-offenders. But it should be of equal concern to those who share the same neighborhood with them.

"I see a real impact every day that we don't take action," says City Councilor Steve Murphy, who cosponsored a 2005 Boston ordinance that lessens the impact of CORI in city hiring.

Menino says a longtime friend of his with a produce business in Newmarket Square makes it a point to hire young people with records, putting into practice the maxim that the best social program is a job. "They're the best workers he has," says Menino.

That may not always be the case, and there are plenty of jobs that even CORI reform advocates acknowledge should be off-limits to those with records for serious offenses. But there will also be a price paid if state lawmakers and the Patrick administration don't figure out the right balance and fix a system that many agree is not working.

Michael Jonas can be reached at jonas@globe.com

Source URL: http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/09/30/for_ex_offenders_cori_law_not_working/

CORI foes continue their fight for Mass. legal reforms

2007-09-27T12:03:00.000-05:00

09/27/2007
By Yawu Miller

More than 600 activists from across Massachusetts rallied at the State House last week, urging lawmakers to reform the state’s Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) system.

Many of the activists — among them ex-offenders and their families, clergy, lawyers and civil rights advocates — crowded the halls of the State House while others testified in a hearing room jammed beyond its 100-person capacity.

The overwhelming majority of those who testified spoke in favor of reforming CORI laws, as did the activists and lawmakers who gathered in front of the State House for a rally.

“We’re going to march,” said Boston Workers Alliance (BWA) organizer Maggie Brown during the rally. “We’re going to demonstrate. We’re going to do whatever we have to do to make them feel the pain we’re feeling in our community.”

The state’s CORI laws were created to give law enforcement officials and prospective employers access to information about ex-offenders. Opponents of the law argue that it goes too far, listing not only convictions, but also arrests and charges that do not result in convictions.

Misdemeanors and charges that are dropped appear on CORI records and remain there indefinitely, leaving an arrest record that makes it more difficult for ex-offenders to obtain even menial jobs.

Ex-prisoners must now wait 10 to 15 years before they are eligible to seal a record for a felony. The proposed reform legislation would reduce the waiting period to seal a CORI to three years for a misdemeanor and seven years for a felony.

The legislation would also provide anti-discrimination protections by allowing employers to check a CORI only after they have shown interest in hiring the applicant, removing non-conviction, not guilty and dismissed cases from CORI records, and allowing juveniles to have their CORIs purged by a judge.

CORI reform advocates last year made a similar push with rallies, marches and lobbying at the State House. The Public Safety Act of 2006 cleared the Senate before House Criminal Justice Committee Chairman Eugene O’Flaherty referred the bill to a study commission made up mostly of law enforcement personnel.

That move effectively killed the legislation. The commission never met, and the legislation died in the House.

This year, the same coalition of CORI reform activists have joined in the Massachusetts Alliance to Reform CORI (MARC) — including the BWA, Neighbor to Neighbor Massachusetts, Ex-Prisoners Organized for Community Action, and the Criminal Justice Policy Coalition.

Others who turned out last week to testify on behalf of CORI reform included Mayor Thomas M. Menino and Suffolk County Sheriff Andrea Cabral.

The reform advocates expressed disappointment when Suzanne Bump, secretary of labor and workforce development under Gov. Deval Patrick, called for the creation of a study commission to look at CORI reforms.

“This has been studied enough,” said Horace Small, executive director of the Union of Minority Neighborhoods and a founder of MARC.

“We are in dialogue with the governor,” he said. “We’re not trying to be disrespectful, but we have to deal with the governor like we deal with anyone else.”

Small said activists are banking on the reform legislation passing this year.

“We know we have a very short window in which to work,” he said. “In 2008, when there’s a presidential election, nobody’s going to want to deal with this.”

Source URL: http://www.baystatebanner.com/issues/2007/09/27/news/local09270714.htm.

Boston’s Biggest Community Book Drive Ever!

2007-09-27T11:49:00.000-05:00

The Prison Book Program and City Mission Society of Boston have joined with other local non-profit groups to organize a massive book collection– hard covers & paperbacks, used & new, fiction & non-fiction – we’ll take them all!

Here’s a way to clear out those book shelves and boxes while ensuring your books are put to a good use.

Only books in good condition, please!

WHEN: Saturday October 20, 2007, 10am to 4pm

WHERE: Brighton-Allston Congregational Church UCC, 404 Washington St., Brighton, MA

WHY: Donations will be sent to prisoners around the country to promote literacy, sold at City Mission Society’s used bookstore, or distributed by Better World Books to benefit other literacy efforts.

Here's how YOU can help:

· Bring your unwanted books to Brighton on Oct. 20th

and encourage your friends & family to do the same.

· Or better yet, organize a book drive at your office, church,

club or in your neighborhood and bring all of the books to Brighton on the day of the event!

For more information, please email info@prisonbookprogram.org or call 617-423-3298.

Influx of U.S. Inmates Slowing, Census Says

2007-09-27T11:48:00.000-05:00

Number Incarcerated Still a Record High; Sentencing in '90s Cited as Factor

By N.C. Aizenman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 27, 2007; A12

After two decades of massive growth, the U.S. prison population began to level off in the first six years of this century, according to 2006 census statistics released today.

At nearly 2.1 million, the number of adults in correctional institutions remains at an all-time high. Still, that figure represents a 4 percent rise since 2000 -- nowhere near the 77 percent spike in the prison population from 1990 to 2000.

The data, from the yearly American Community Survey, represent the Census Bureau's first in-depth look at people in prisons since the 1980 Census. Although the numbers vary, the census findings generally track with trends in twice-yearly statistics compiled by the Justice Department.

Many analysts point to crack cocaine in the 1980s as a catalyst for the subsequent boom in incarceration rates. Attracted by the drug's low price, dealers in impoverished urban neighborhoods began selling it in open-air markets, where they and their customers were targets for arrest. Thirst for the drug also fueled other crimes by addicts.

Perhaps the most significant factor, however, was the introduction of tough sentencing laws in the 1990s.

Congress dramatically increased prison time for offenses involving crack cocaine compared with those involving powdered cocaine. The federal government also introduced guidelines limiting judges' discretion at sentencing, as well as rules that drastically curtailed states' ability to parole offenders convicted of violent crimes. Many states also passed mandatory minimum-sentencing laws.

The result was an explosion in the prison population even as crime rates began to drop.

"The growth wasn't really about increasing crime but how we chose to respond to crime," said Allen J. Beck, deputy director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. "When you increase the likelihood of a person going to prison for a conviction, and then you increase how long you keep them there, it has a profound effect."

Despite pending court challenges, most of those laws remain on the books. There are indications that the impact may be increasingly on women -- whose rate of violent crime has increased, and who often are arrested for low-level participation in drug conspiracies led by boyfriends or male relatives. In 1990, 8 percent of the prison population was female. By 2000, women were 9 percent of the population, and in 2006, 10 percent.

Still, the overall growth of the prison population has slowed substantially compared with the 1990s. Researchers point to a variety of reasons. First is the precipitous drop in crime rates since the late 1990s, possibly because of the declining popularity of crack cocaine, the introduction of innovative policing strategies and many would-be offenders already being behind bars.

Perhaps as important, many felons locked up in the 1990s are completing their sentences.

"All those people who were in prison are starting to come out. . . . So the number that is going in is approaching the number going out," said Christy Visher, primary research associate with the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center.

Indeed, said Visher, the prison population might even start to decline if it weren't for the high recidivism rate of those released: About half return to prison within three years.

And with a recent uptick in the crime rate, and increasing numbers of offenders being placed on probation, Beck said that the prison population may begin to significantly increase again.

Even if the prison population remains at its current level, the social and economic costs to the nation are enormous, Visher said.

She noted that the federal government and states are spending more than $65 billion per year on corrections alone. "We need to have a national conversation about how to transition this population into being productive," Visher said.

Just as worrisome is the persistent overrepresentation of blacks in prison. In 2006, blacks accounted for 12 percent of the general population but 40 percent of those in adult correctional institutions.

Hispanics are also overrepresented, but to a lesser extent. They made up 15 percent of the general population and 19 percent of the prison population.

By contrast, immigrants are underrepresented. Foreign-born inmates accounted for 9 percent of those incarcerated, compared with 13 percent of the total population.

Meeting location: Boston Workers Alliance

2007-09-27T11:46:00.000-05:00

BWA NEW MEETING LOCATION:

Thursday, Sep 27
5-7pm
Freedom House
14 Crawford Street

Thanks to the gracious people at the Freedom House, the Boston Workers Alliance weekly meetings will now be held at the Freedom House. Please join us this Thursday for CORI and Job Committee Meetings ~ starting at 5pm.

The movement for jobs and CORI reform needs your help!

(617) 427-8108
www.BostonWorkersAlliance.org

Slavery: A Shark's perspective

2007-09-27T11:43:00.000-05:00

Slavery: A Shark's perspective
A strange text sheds new light on the true roots of abolition
By Marcus Rediker | September 23, 2007

This year and next mark an important historical anniversary: Two centuries ago, both the United States and Great Britain abolished the African slave trade.

By the time they did, the trade had carried 9 million Africans to New World plantations, where they would live under the lash and produce the largest planned accumulation of wealth the world had yet seen. Abolition followed a long and determined campaign waged by antislavery activists on both sides of the Atlantic.

But who really brought the slave trade to an end?

In popular history, the people who abolished the slave trade are seen virtually as saints. They were somber, often dressed in black; they were devout, earnest, and good; they were the very embodiment of Christian virtue. In New England, many were descended from Puritans and reflected their austere and humorless ways. In England they were epitomized by the aristocratic evangelical William Wilberforce, the voice of abolition in Parliament. The recent movie "Amazing Grace" portrays him as a selfless, somewhat sickly angel who loved animals, servants, Africans, and God. Piety has long been seen as the hallmark of abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic.

If that were the full story, though, it would be exploded by this document. While working in the special collections library of Bristol University in England on a book on 18th-century slave ships, I found an almost completely unknown broadside entitled "The Petition of the Sharks of Africa." It looked like any other printed petition, elegant in its composition, suitable for presentation, addressed "To the Right Honourable the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of Great Britain, in Parliament assembled."

It was, however, a vivid and harsh piece of satire. In fact it claimed to have been written by the "Sharks of Africa," who declared themselves to be a numerous and flourishing group thanks to the many slave ships that visited the coast of West Africa. From these vessels, they explained, they got "large quantities of their most favourite food - human flesh."

When the dead were thrown overboard, the sharks devoured the corpses. Sometimes they got live flesh, when African rebels who preferred death to slavery jumped overboard. When slave ships were "dashed on the rocks and shoals" of the region, throwing "hundreds of human beings, both black and white" into the water, it was a feast.

The sharks were writing to the British Parliament kindly asking them not to end the slave trade. Taking a sensible conservative view, the sharks denounced the abolitionists' "wild ravings of fanaticism," confident that their benevolent lordships would not let His Majesty's loyal shark subjects starve. The petitioners were sure that they could count on "the wisdom and fellow-feeling" of the House of Lords. Sharks should stick together, after all.

Nothing I had read had prepared me for such a document. Here, unexpectedly, was a dark and daring kind of humor I had never known to exist among abolitionists.

Further research revealed that it had been republished widely, in Edinburgh, Philadelphia, New York, and Salem. I concluded that "The Petition of the Sharks of Africa" had been written by a Scot named James Tytler, who was a physician, poet, composer, an editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and Britain's first hot-air balloonist. For his radicalism, he was eventually arrested and charged with sedition, only to flee into exile in 1793, first to Ireland, then to Salem. His contribution has never figured in the histories of abolition - partly, I am convinced, because it does not fit the enduring image of abolitionists.

The document joins a long string of new findings that have changed our understanding of who the abolitionists were. Working-class men and women protested the trade through boycotts; sailors smuggled pamphlets and told their horror stories to activists ashore. The front line of the war against human bondage was occupied by the enslaved themselves, whose resistance sent shock waves around the world, terrifying many and inspiring some. Their names may be lost to the history books, but they anchored a complex and diverse social movement.

Why do we need to know this today? First, it is important to understand that the abolition of the slave trade, and of slavery itself, was not a gift from on high. William Wilberforce did not abolish the slave trade, as "Amazing Grace" might make it seem, just as a lone Abraham Lincoln did not free the slaves. It will no longer do to pretend that a "great man" did things that are more accurately described as a result of a complex historical situation and a many-sided resistance.

Second, it is important to people demanding justice and reparations today - whoever and wherever they may be - to know that their forebears played an important role in bringing the slave trade and indeed the entire institution of slavery to an end. We owe the end of the abolition of the nefarious trade not just to aristocrats and Puritans, but to enslaved rebels, to factory workers and sailors, and to at least one irreverent Scottish daredevil.

Marcus Rediker is a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. His new book, "The Slave Ship: A Human History," will be published by Viking-Penguin in October.