Category: prison reform

Victory for Walnut Grove

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According to a federal consent decree, the state of Mississippi will no longer house juveniles at the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility. The juvenile facility, located in Walnut Grove, MS, is run by GEO Group, the second largest private prison corporation in the U.S.

In November 201o, the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a federal class-action lawsuit against GEO Group when reports emerged of sexual abuse, improper medical care, extended prisoner isolation, and violence among inmates at Walnut Grove. According to the ACLU press release, youth at the facility were “forced to live in barbaric and unconstitutional conditions and [were] subjected to excessive uses of force by prison staff.”

The consent decree requires the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) to remove all youth under the age of 17 from the privately-run Walnut Grove facility and house them in a publicly-operated facility instead. The state is required to provide rehabilitative services for the youth and implement measures to protect them from sexual and physical abuse. Under this decree, the state of Mississippi is also prohibited from placing any youth in solitary confinement. MWN

Ground-Breaking Federal Consent Decree Will Prohibit Solitary Confinement of Youth Convicted as Adults, and Bar Their Incarceration in Violence-Ridden, For-Profit Prison Run by GEO Group

By KAREN WILSON

Children under the supervision of the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) will no longer be housed in a privately run prison or subjected to brutal solitary confinement under the terms of a groundbreaking settlement of a federal class action lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The lawsuit charged that conditions at the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility, which houses youth convicted as adults, are unconstitutional. The facility is operated by GEO Group Inc., the nation’s second largest private prison corporation.

“This represents a sea change in the way the MDOC will treat children in its custody,” said Sheila Bedi, deputy legal director for the SPLC. “As a result of this litigation, Mississippi’s children will no longer languish in an abusive, privately operated prison that profits each time a young man is tried as an adult and ends up behind bars.” (more…)

Major article on crime and mass incarceration in the New Yorker

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By Alan Bean

Adam Gopnik is an art critic, not an expert on mass incarceration.  But he has read widely on the subject and this major piece in the New Yorker offers an extended commentary on ideas recently shared by Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow), Robert Perkinson (Texas Tough), William Stunz (The Collapse of American Criminal Justice), and Franklin Zimring’s book on New York City (The City That Became Safe).  No book can say everything that needs to be said about the American Gulag, so a carefully-crafted piece that combines the best insights of leading authorities is extremely helpful.

Following Stuntz and Zimring, “The Caging of America” notes that major improvements can be enacted without revolutionary reforms.  The crime rate of New York City has fallen by 80% (twice the national average) without significant poverty programs.  People are no better off, by and large, they are just less likely to transgress.

If Gopnik had added the ground-breaking insights of David Kennedy (Don’t Shoot) to his mix, he would be less inclined to believe that crime, especially violent crime, falls of its own accord.  But Kennedy, like Stuntz and Zimring, isn’t waiting for the New Jerusalem to descend from heaven anytime soon.  These authors believe that utopian dreaming can be just an inimical to real reform as the tough-on-crime politics that created the problem in the first place.  

Gopnik’s piece concludes like this:

“Oh, I have taken too little care of this!” King Lear cries out on the heath in his moment of vision. “Take physic, pomp; expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” “This” changes; in Shakespeare’s time, it was flat-out peasant poverty that starved some and drove others as mad as poor Tom. In Dickens’s and Hugo’s time, it was the industrial revolution that drove kids to mines. But every society has a poor storm that wretches suffer in, and the attitude is always the same: either that the wretches, already dehumanized by their suffering, deserve no pity or that the oppressed, overwhelmed by injustice, will have to wait for a better world. At every moment, the injustice seems inseparable from the community’s life, and in every case the arguments for keeping the system in place were that you would have to revolutionize the entire social order to change it—which then became the argument for revolutionizing the entire social order. In every case, humanity and common sense made the insoluble problem just get up and go away. Prisons are our this. We need take more care. (emphasis added)

Has common sense made our problems “just get up and go away?”

If the problem is violent crime, a case could be made.  Even so, as Kennedy demonstrates in Don’t Shoot, violent crime rages on in cities like New Orleans and Baltimore with no solution in sight.  Common sense isn’t all that common.

If the problem is mass incarceration, no big-time fix is in sight.  Prison populations have leveled out, and in some places incarceration rates have actually dropped; but America still locks up over 2 million people, and it will take more than common sense to change that fact.  As Michelle Alexander argues, when careers and corporate fortunes are dependent on the status quo, change requires something akin to a revolution.

Gopnik believes that a massive drop in the American crime rate means mass incarceration was a mistake.  Not everyone agrees.  In fact, it is frequently argued that crime rates have fallen because we have locked up so many criminals.  So long as the American mainstream believes this (and it does) mass incarceration, with all its attendant woes, will flourish.    

The Caging of America

Why do we lock up so many people?

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Prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock. (more…)

Profiting from Prison

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by Melanie Wilmoth

Over the past decade, federal and state governments have increasingly turned to prison privatization. A report released this week by The Sentencing Project highlights the rise of private prisons in the U.S. and the consequences of privatization.

Private prisons now hold approximately 8% of the entire prison population in the U.S. This shift toward privatization, The Sentencing Project reports, began with public policies enacted in the 1970s and 1980s:

“The War on Drugs and harsher sentencing policies, including mandatory minimum sentences, fueled a rapid expansion in the nation’s prison population. The resulting burden on the public sector led private companies to reemerge during the 1970s to operate halfway houses. They extended their reach in the 1980s by contracting with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to detain undocumented immigrants.”

Private prison corporations are in the business of warehousing prisoners. They contribute to and profit from mass incarceration. With the help of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), for-profit prison companies have lobbied for mandatory minimum sentences, three strikes laws, truth-in-sentencing policies, and immigrant detention centers. As a result of increasing prison privatization, two of the largest private prison companies, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group, have combined annual revenues exceeding $2.9 billion. (more…)

A Life Not Lived

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By Olivia Lennox

A Life Not Lived

On January 3rd the campaigning organisation Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a report entitled ‘Against All Odds: Prison Conditions for Youth Offenders Serving Life without Parole Sentences in the United States’.  It is based on research conducted over a six year period, and it makes interesting and sometimes shocking reading.

The report deals with the plight of children incarcerated in adult prisons who due to the sentence they have received have no or at least very little prospect of ever seeing the outside world again.  They estimate there to be 2570 such young offenders in this position at the present time. HRW does not question the fact that the people their report deals with are offenders and that they should be punished for their crimes, but they do question the imposition of a life without parole sentence on such young people, and they also highlight the treatment and experiences those young people face.

Physical Violence

Building on previous studies it is established that under-eighteens in adult prison are, “twice as likely to be beaten by staff and fifty percent more likely to be attacked with a weapon than minors in juvenile facilities.”  Numerous examples are given of evidence provided by inmates that puts such statistics into a personal context.  Amongst them is that of Michael S., who was seventeen when he entered prison.  He wrote that:  ‘On several occasions I have been physically assaulted. I reported the first assault, but from that point forward I deduced that it was best to remain silent as I cannot afford to be labeled [an informant] in my current circumstances.’    (more…)

United Methodist Church divests from private prisons

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by Melanie Wilmoth

Until last week, the United Methodist Church (UMC) owned stock in two private prison companies, GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). According to Bill Mefford, Director for Civil and Human Rights for the UMC’s General Board of Church and Society (GBCS), the denomination held about $736,000 in CCA and $215,500 in GEO Group.

Months ago, Mefford, the GBCS, and UMC churches started a petition on Change.org:

The private prison industry is a fast growing industry and extraordinary profits are made from such investments, with these two companies posting profits of 2.9 billion by the end of 2010. These profits are at the expense of people of color. Private prison corporations, such as GEO Group and CCA, lobby hard for anti-immigrant legislation, such as seen in Arizona with SB 1070 and Georgia with SB 87. Private prisons are also responsible for neglect and abuse in prisons. Such legislation and examples of abuse and neglect directly contradict United Methodist stances and biblical teaching.

We, as United Methodists, believe that profiting from private prisons and owning stock in private prison corporations like GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America is incompatible with biblical teaching. Therefore, we call for The United Methodist Church to:

1. Immediately divest from all investment in private prison corporations, including Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group, and

2. Take all money earned to date of divestment from ownership of the stock in GEO Group and CCA, and give it to organizations dedicated to helping those coming out of prison to reenter society.

It was a great victory for the GBCS and other advocates when the UMC announced this week that it is divesting from GEO Group and CCA. According to Laura Markle Downton, Criminal Justice Grassroots Coordinator at the GBCS:

“As of last week, the United Methodist Church has divested from both CCA and GEO Group, and UMC’s Board of Pensions, which controls the investments of our church, has permanently put into place a screen that will not allow us to invest in any corporation in the future that has gross revenues of 10% or more from private prisons.” (more…)

Is ending the drug war enough?

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By Alan Bean

It is good to see book reviews like this popping up in conservative papers like the Amarillo Globe-News.  Ernest Drucker’s A Plague of Prisons covers ground that will be familiar to readers of this blog.  If his numbers are accurate, the State of Texas was locking up almost as many people in 2009 as the entire state prison system in the United States was incarcerating in 1970.  Grasp that fact and you get a feel for the extent of mass incarceration.

According to Ronald Fraser’s review, Ernest Drucker compares the growth of prisons to a contagion sparked by a futile war on drugs.  The solution?  According to Fraser and Drucker its simple: “Simply by not incarcerating new cases involving nonviolent, small-time drug offenders would, Drucker said, immediately cut prison admissions by 30 percent.”

The problem here is obvious.  Like most liberal and libertarian analysts, Fraser (and possibly Drucker–I haven’t read the book) refuse to grapple with the obscene spike in violent crime that gripped America from the late 1960s to the early 1990s.

Bill Stuntz saw the war on drugs as a proxy war on violent crime.  Thanks to a plethora of state and federal laws, it became much easier for prosecutors to put a gangsta away on drug charges than to make a murder or assault rap stick.  That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but there can be no doubt that the penalties for drug offenses have become grossly disproportional.

There can also be little doubt that the war on drugs was enthusiastically embraced by almost everybody, including the poor residents of most high crime neighborhoods and the politicians who represented them.  This wasn’t because people living in hot neighborhoods liked or trusted the police (they didn’t); but they liked the open air drug markets and gun violence even less. (more…)

Out in the cold: arrogant indifference in the federal legal system

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A Texas Monthly story argues that the federal justice system is less responsive to claims of actual innocence than tough on crime states like Texas.  Richard LaFuente, the federal inmate at the center of  Michael Hall’s investigative story, is incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Institution in Fort Worth, a ten-minute drive from the Friends of Justice office.

I spent four hours at FCI Fort Worth last night, three hours waiting to visit an inmate and one hour actually visiting.  Monty Shelton, the inmate I was visiting, can prove that most of the counts on which he was convicted nine years ago were in error.  He just wants an evidentiary hearing so he can make his case, but the federal appeals system ignores his arguments.  No one has ever refuted his legal logic; they don’t have to. 

I will have much more to say about the Monty Shelton case when our Friends of Justice investigation is complete.  But right now I want to tell you why it took three hours to get into (and out of) FCI Fort Worth last night.  (If you don’t want to hear my plaintive tale, you can just scroll down to the Texas Monthly story below).

I arrived at 5:30, the time visitation was slated to begin.  Noticing that several dozen people were standing in line waiting to enter the building, I took my place at the back of the queue.  “Do you have a paper?” a young woman asked.  “You have to get your paper before you get in this line.”

I entered the building and filled out a one-page form with my name, the name and number of the inmate I wished to visit, the license number of my 2000 Toyota and check marks in the “no” box indicating that I wasn’t smuggling illegal drugs or other nasty stuff into the prison.  Then I returned to the back of the line.

I was soon joined by a man in his early fifties who had traveled to Fort Worth from Oklahoma to visit his son prior to Christmas.  The boy had held up a bank on a dare as a late adolescent and had been sentenced to fifteen years.  His parents were both educators who had taught at Christian schools in China, Japan, Korea and several other exotic places.  They had traveled to four different prisons in Oklahoma, Texas and California over the past twelve years.

“This line doesn’t get you into the visitation room,” the father informed me.  “Once we get inside they will give us a beeper so we can go and wait in our cars where its warmer.”

We had only been waiting in the cold for ten minutes at that point, but I wasn’t adequately dressed and was already getting uncomfortable.  Glancing around at the 100 or so other people in line, I could see that most were even less prepared for the chilly conditions than I was.  The temperature had risen to over 60 F in Fort Worth earlier in the day but a cool front was moving in and the temperature was rapidly plunging toward the freezing mark.  A brisk breeze added to the frigid effect.

The line moved at a crawl.  Half an hour into our wait, I asked my friend to hold my place in line so I could talk to the woman inside.  “Is there any good reason why these good people have to wait in the cold this long just to get a beeper?” I asked.

“We don’t have many beepers,” the harried woman told me.  “People keep stealing them and sometimes they just stop working.”

“How many beepers do you have?” I asked. 

“I don’t know,” she said.  “Not many.”

“How much does a beeper cost?” I asked incredulously.  “Because some of these people aren’t dressed for this weather and a lot of them will wake up with a cold tomorrow morning.”

“You need to talk to somebody above my pay grade,” the woman informed me.

“And who do you suggest I talk to?”

“The warden.”

“I’ll do that,” I replied.  It was clear my beef wasn’t with a low-level employee.

“And when you do,” she continued, “tell her that we’re so understaffed down here I can’t keep up–especially at this time of the year.”

I wondered why FCI Fort Worth, unlike most prisons, lacked a waiting room.  I knew in advance that the warden would blame the situation on inadequate funding and that she might well be right.  Still, I doubt anyone in the Department of Justice is particularly concerned about the plight of the men, women and children who drive long distances to visit their loved ones in federal prisons.  In my experience, the families of inmates are generally treated like criminals who have dodged their just desserts.  Prison and jail officials are typically harsh, rude, inconsiderate and unresponsive.  They are also overworked, underpaid and underappreciated.

By the time I returned to my place in line we had been waiting forty-five minutes.  “This is bad,” my friend told me, “but I’ve seen far worse.  When my son was in the Big Spring prison, we had to get in line at four in the morning and we didn’t get into the visiting room until after 10:00.”

“You waited six hours to get into the prison?” I asked in disbelief.

“Twice,” he replied with a weary shrug.  “Once it was really, really hot, and the other time it was bitterly cold.  It was miserable.”

“I wouldn’t say I’m miserable right now,” I responded, “but I’m getting uncomfortable.”

“I think I’ve made it to miserable,” he said. (more…)

Budget cuts affect access to prison education in Texas

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When state legislators slashed education funding this session, the Windham School District’s (WSD) annual budget decreased from $130.6 million to $95 million. WSD, which provides education to prisoners in the custody of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, lost one-fourth of its budget. According to district spokeswoman Bambi Kiser, 16,750 fewer prisoners will have access to education as a result of these dramatic cuts.

Considering that research suggests that participation in prison education programs reduces the likelihood that individuals will return to prison after release, these cuts to prison education are especially concerning. The Amarillo Globe-News article below, which details the district’s budget cuts, gives a great overview of the issue. MW

Prison education struggles amid cuts

By AZIZA MUSA 

Ex-convict Jorge Renaud discovered philosophy and psychology in classes taught behind the razor-wire fences and cinder-block walls of Texas prisons.

It changed his life.

Renaud’s family traveled constantly when he was a child, following the crops to such southwestern farming hubs as Dimmitt and Cactus, he said. At 17, he joined the U.S. Army and spent three years in the service. When he got out in 1977, Renaud turned to making quick money from quick crimes, after he committed burglary of a habitation. It landed him in the state penitentiary.

“Why does anybody commit a crime? Stupidity, ignorance, irresponsibility,” he said. “I thought I needed material possessions.”

After he was released in 1980, he committed two aggravated robberies within the next decade and went back to prison.

That’s when Renaud turned to post-secondary education, with help from the prison education system. He said the classes helped him find his way out of the prison stint.

“Prison has to offer a hope, a rope to those who are drowning,” he said. “To some people, it’s religion. But even then, you will want to have some critical thinking skills. Where are you going to get that?” (more…)

“Banking on bondage”: The rise of private prisons in the U.S.

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by Melanie Wilmoth

A recent report by the ACLU, “Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration,” details how the private prison industry feeds (and profits from) mass incarceration in the U.S.

As the ACLU points out, there are few who truly benefit from our country’s obsession with “tough-on crime” policies. With over 2.3 million people behind bars in the U.S, the punitive consensus driving mass incarceration has successfully shattered families and busted states’ budgets. However, there is one group that does benefits from locking up more and more people: the private prison industry.

Just as prison populations in public corrections facilities boomed over the last 30 years, the number of individuals in private prisons increased over 1600% between 1990 and 2009.

For private prisons, more crime equals more prisoners and more prisoners equals more profit. It’s no wonder that for-profit prisons support immigrant detention, mandatory minimum sentences, and “truth in sentencing” and “three strikes” laws. Large prison populations and harsh sentences result in greater profits. In fact, the success of the private prison industry relies on the country’s opposition to criminal justice reforms and fair sentencing laws:

“In a 2010 Annual Report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison company, stated: ‘The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by…leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices…’

The GEO Group, the second largest private prison operator, identified similar “Risks Related to Our Business and Industry” in SEC filings:

‘Our growth depends on our ability to secure contracts to develop and manage new correctional, detention and mental health facilities, the demand for which is outside our control …. [A]ny changes with respect to the decriminalization of drugs and controlled substances could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, sentenced and incarcerated, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them. Similarly, reductions in crime rates could lead to reductions in arrests, convictions and sentences requiring incarceration at correctional facilities. Immigration reform laws which are currently a focus for legislators and politicians at the federal, state and local level also could materially adversely impact us.’”

Moreover, when you’re in the business of locking people up, there is high incentive to cut costs and maximize profits and little incentive to rehabilitate inmates and reduce future crime. As a result of cost-cutting measures, research suggests prisoners in private facilities are more likely to experience violence and inhumane conditions. In addition, private prisons tend to have high staff turnover due to low wages. While corrections officers and staff are making close to minimum wage, top executives at GEO and CCA receive over $3 million each in annual compensation.

Also of concern, as Scott Henson at Grits for Breakfast points out, is the seldom mentioned “revolving door” between public and private corrections which the ACLU report highlights:

“Many in the private prison industry…once served in state corrections departments, and numerous state corrections officials formerly worked for private prison companies. In some cases, this revolving door between public corrections and private prisons may contribute to the ability of some companies to win contracts or to avoid sufficient scrutiny from the corrections departments charged with overseeing their operations.”

With high incentives to increase prison populations while cutting corrections costs and with little meaningful oversight due to the “revolving door,” the private prison industry is in a dangerously powerful position. In order to end mass incarceration, as the ACLU suggests, we must divest from private prisons and halt the expansion of “for-profit incarceration.”

To read the full ACLU report, click here.

The growing campaign to end the New Jim Crow

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Alan Bean and Melanie Wilmoth

Just a few nights ago, activists, former prisoners, and concerned citizens gathered at Riverside Church in New York to discuss mass incarceration and the criminal justice system. These individuals are launching a campaign built around the ideas expressed by Michelle Alexander in her book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” Especially concerned with the effect our broken justice system has on people of color, these organizers are advocating for a complete transformation of our system of mass incarceration. MW

I met Jazz Hayden at a conference in Chicago a while back and have been following his work ever since.  Pockets of resistance to the New Jim Crow are popping up across the country and Jazz is at the forefront of this movement.  AGB

Prison Activists Work to End Racial Bias in Justice System

By Nat Rudarakanchana

On a quiet Friday evening, a band of grizzled but passionate prison activists wound its way through the corridors of Riverside Church, into a bright business-like meeting room. On the agenda this night: the launching of a campaign to end what they call the “New Jim Crow.”

The phrase refers to academic Michelle Alexander’s book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” which argues that the American criminal justice system is both unjust and racist. Several city-based activists dealing with the rights of prisoners have heard of the book: more than a few highly recommend it, too.

Among those present at this private meeting were two Harlem residents who have endured the prison system for decades and survived to tell the tale. (more…)