U.S. Prison Population Seeing “Unprecedented Increase”

From IPS:

The research wing of the U.S. Congress is warning that three decades of “historically unprecedented” build-up in the number of prisoners incarcerated in the United States have led to a level of overcrowding that is now “taking a toll on the infrastructure” of the federal prison system.

Over the past 30 years, according to a new report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the federal prison population has jumped from 25,000 to 219,000 inmates, an increase of nearly 790 percent. Swollen by such figures, for years the United States has incarcerated far more people than any other country, today imprisoning some 716 people out of every 100,000. (Although CRS reports are not made public, a copy can be found here.)

“This is one of the major human rights problems within the United States, as many of the people caught up in the criminal justice system are low income, racial and ethnic minorities, often forgotten by society,” Maria McFarland, deputy director for the U.S. programme at Human Rights Watch, told IPS.

In recent years, as a consequence of the imposition of very harsh sentencing policies, McFarland’s office has seen new patterns emerging of juveniles and very elderly people being put in prison.

“Last year, some 95,000 juveniles under 18 years of age were put in prison, and that doesn't count those in juvenile facilities,” she noted.

“And between 2007 and 2011, the population of those over 64 grew by 94 times the rate of the regular population. Prisons clearly aren’t equipped to take care of these aging people, and you have to question what threat they pose to society – and the justification for imprisoning them.”

According to the new CRS report, a growing number of these prisoners are being put away for charges related to immigration violations and weapons possession. But the largest number is for relatively paltry drug offences – an approach that report author Nathan James, a CRS analyst in crime policy, warns may not be useful in bringing down crime statistics.

“Research suggests that while incarceration did contribute to lower violent crime rates in the 1990s, there are declining marginal returns associated with ever increasing levels of incarceration,” James notes. He suggests that one potential explanation for this could be that people have been increasingly incarcerated for crimes in which there is a “high level of replacement”.

For instance, he says, if a serial rapist is incarcerated, the judicial system has the power to prevent further sexual assaults by that offender, and it is likely that no one will take the offender’s place. “However, if a drug dealer is incarcerated, it is possible that someone will step in to take that person’s place,” James writes. “Therefore, no further crimes may be averted by incarcerating the individual.”

Smarter on crime

Of course, the U.S. prison population’s blooming needs to be traced back to changes within the federal criminal justice system. Recent decades have seen an expanding “get tough” approach on crime here, under which even nonviolent offenders are facing stiff prison sentences.

In turn, overcrowding has become a massive issue, with the federal prison system as a whole operating at 39 percent over capacity in 2011, according to CRS. The result has also been significant price overruns, with the Bureau of Prisons budget doubling to nearly 6.4 billion dollars even while hundreds of millions of dollars worth of unaddressed infrastructure problems continue to mount.

Yet the problems being experienced by the federal prison system actually stand in contrast to certain trends at the state level. While some states have dealt with even more worrisome problems of prison overcrowding – including California, which in 2011 was ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court to take steps to reduce the pressure – recent years have seen movement at the state level to counter over-incarceration.

Some of this action may have come from serious state budget crises. Currently, after all, it costs between 25,000 and 30,000 dollars to house a prisoner in the United States.

According to a new report by the Sentencing Project, a Washington advocacy group working on prison reform, prisoner populations in the United States overall declined by around 1.5 percent in 2011. Furthermore, last year lawmakers in 24 states adopted policies that “may contribute to downscaling prison populations”.

“There has been a marked change in the amount of activity at the state level to end our addiction to incarceration,” Vineeta Gupta, deputy legal director with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told IPS.

“Some states are currently having many discussions they would not have had 10 years ago – getting smarter on crime rather than tougher on crime. None of these moves are comprehensive enough to address the large scope of the problem, but they’re very important starting points.”

She continued: “Unfortunately, the federal government has been going in the opposite direction.”

Full article can be found here.

The House I Live In (2012)

Mother's Day Special: "Justice Mamas"

For Mother's Day this year, the ACLU is working on awareness for mothers of incarcerated children with a special petition to ban solitary confinement. Solitary confinement is the practice of leaving people in single person cells for twenty-two to twenty-four hours per day. Most time spent in solitary confinement is spent without the use of telephone, television, reduced or no natural light, restriction or denial of reading material, television, radios and other property; severe limits on visitation; and the inability to participate in group activities. Often a person is solitary is not permitted visitation and when visitation is permitted, it is behind a barrier or the incarcerated person will have to attend the visit shackled. The ACLU notes that the practice of solitary confinement in US prisons is not limited to dangerous or violent prisoners. According to an information sheet that accompanies the petition:

Forty‐four states and the federal government have supermax prisons, housing at least 25,000 people nationwide. Using data from a census of state and federal prisoners conducted by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, researchers estimate that over 80,000 prisoners are held in “restricted housing,” including prisoners held in administrative segregation, disciplinary segregation and protective custody – all forms of housing involving substantial social isolation. The majority of individuals housed in isolated confinement are severely mentally ill or cognitively disabled. Low‐risk “nuisance prisoners” are also housed in solitary because they have broken minor rules or filed grievances or lawsuits. Children held in adult prisons are also held in solitary “for their own safety.” If the use of solitary confinement were restricted solely to the dangerous and the predatory, most supermax prisons would stand virtually empty.

Go To Trial and Crash the System

The New York Times ran an op-ed piece this past Sunday entitled "Go to Trial: Crash the Justice System". The article describes one woman's idea to organize thousands of people charged with a crime to not "play the game" and plead out, but instead to go to trial and "crash the system". As anyone who has worked in the criminal defense industry knows, the system depends on the plea bargain. There are not enough judges, juries, prosecutors, defenders, or other resources for everyone to go to trial. Indeed, over 90% of all criminal cases end in plea bargain. That, of course, is related to the unique threat and promise system of justice in America: a person charged is often threatened with stiffer penalties if he or she chooses to exercise the Constitutional Right to trial and the fear is a real one in a system where the Government generally has the better hand in terms of resources. But what would happen if those accused decided simultaneously to "break the house" and go to trial?
This is the question Susan Burton posed. Ms. Burton became a crack cocaine addict after her five year old son was run over by the police. For fifteen years she was in the revolving door of arrest, incarceration, release with no resources, and rearrest that is the hallmark of the American criminal justice system. But Ms. Burton asked Michelle Alexander, the author of the article and a new book entitled "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, what would happen if the people accused refused to play along? Here is an excerpt (full article here):

On the phone, Susan said she knew exactly what was involved in asking people who have been charged with crimes to reject plea bargains, and press for trial. “Believe me, I know. I’m asking what we can do. Can we crash the system just by exercising our rights?”

The answer is yes. The system of mass incarceration depends almost entirely on the cooperation of those it seeks to control. If everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights, there would not be enough judges, lawyers or prison cells to deal with the ensuing tsunami of litigation. Not everyone would have to join for the revolt to have an impact; as the legal scholar Angela J. Davis noted, “if the number of people exercising their trial rights suddenly doubled or tripled in some jurisdictions, it would create chaos.”

Such chaos would force mass incarceration to the top of the agenda for politicians and policy makers, leaving them only two viable options: sharply scale back the number of criminal cases filed (for drug possession, for example) or amend the Constitution (or eviscerate it by judicial “emergency” fiat). Either action would create a crisis and the system would crash — it could no longer function as it had before. Mass protest would force a public conversation that, to date, we have been content to avoid.

In telling Susan that she was right, I found myself uneasy. “As a mother myself, I don’t think there’s anything I wouldn’t plead guilty to if a prosecutor told me that accepting a plea was the only way to get home to my children,” I said. “I truly can’t imagine risking life imprisonment, so how can I urge others to take that risk — even if it would send shock waves through a fundamentally immoral and unjust system?”

Susan, silent for a while, replied: “I’m not saying we should do it. I’m saying we ought to know that it’s an option. People should understand that simply exercising their rights would shake the foundations of our justice system which works only so long as we accept its terms. As you know, another brutal system of racial and social control once prevailed in this country, and it never would have ended if some people weren’t willing to risk their lives. It would be nice if reasoned argument would do, but as we’ve seen that’s just not the case. So maybe, just maybe, if we truly want to end this system, some of us will have to risk our lives.”

The Caging of America

From the New Yorker, by Adam Gopnik:

A 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.

That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.

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Liberation Prison Project

Resource for incarcerated client interested in Buddhism...

Liberation Prison Project offers spiritual advice and teachings, as well as books and materials, to people in prison interested in exploring, studying and practicing Buddhism. Lama

A Tibetan Buddhist organization and social services project affiliated with the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition, since 1996 the project has supported the Buddhist practice of over 20,000 prisoners.

Active mainly in the US and Australia, where we are established as nonprofit organizations in San Francisco and the Australian Blue Mountains, we also have branches in New Zealand, Spain, Mexico, Mongolia and Italy.

Conrad Black: My Prison Education

Here is an excerpt printed from the National Post by Conrad Black on being released from federal prison:

Before I got into the maw of the U.S. legal system, I did not realize the country has 47 million people with a criminal record, (most for relatively trivial offenses,) or that prosecutors won more than 90% of their cases. There, at Coleman, I had seen the courage of self-help, the pathos of broken men, the drawn faces of the hopeless, the glazed expression of the heavily medicated, (90% of Americans judged to require confinement for psychiatric reasons are in the prison system), and the nonchalance of those who find prison a comfortable welfare system compared to the skid row that was their former milieu. America’s 2.4 million prisoners, and millions more awaiting trial or on supervised release, are an ostracized, voiceless legion of the walking dead; they are no one’s constituency.

Of course, I was glad, jubilant, to leave, (though a return is not an impossible result of the pending rehearing), but also grateful for many of the relationships I had formed; enlightened by my observation of American justice on the other side of the wall; and happy to have got on well in an environment very foreign to any I had known before.

My departure was processed quite cordially and the personnel even conducted us to a back exit, through a padlocked gate, far from the media, and shook hands and waved as I slipped the bondage of the U.S. government. It had been 28 months and 18 days since I arrived. The send-off was more congenial than the reception and the ride back to Palm Beach was on the same roads over the same flat, scrubby landscape of strip malls and bungalows as the approach. It seemed more verdant and welcoming on the way back. The drive was contemplative and uneventful.

I was delighted to be back in my home, which the prosecutors had tried to seize for years. For the first time since I was last there, I enjoyed pristine quiet, free of loudspeakers, screamed argument, and the snoring of a hundred men. I had a glass of wine, and waited for Barbara, to celebrate the happiest of all wedding anniversaries.

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Homeboy Industries

The motto of Homeboy Industries is "nothing stops a bullet like a job." Their mission statement: "Jobs not Jails: Homeboy Industries assists at-risk and formerly gang-involved youth to become positive and contributing members of society through job placement, training and education." The organization, run by Father Greg Boyle, S.J., assists former gang members with community reentry from prison, tattoo removal, mental health counseling, drug counseling, employment services, legal assistance, and a number of other services. They run businesses in the Los Angeles area including a screen print shop, a cafe, a bakery and training schools. In these tough economic times, Homeboy Industries is hurting for cash so they are doing a virtual car-wash. Here, you can donate ten dollars to support this most worthy cause. For more information, these documentary clips are a good overview:

The Black Rock:the African American Experience at Alcatraz

For Black History Month here is a clip from "The Black Rock" a 2009 film that explores the largely undocumented history of the African American prisoner experience on Alcatraz. Filmmaker Kevin Epps has shifted his documentary lens from previous subjects like life in Hunters Point, and the Bay’s Hip Hop underground, to life in SF’s notorious offshore federal lock up.

Prison Architecture: Treating Prisoners Makes a Difference?

An article published in this week's New York Times magazine section, "Behind Bars...Sort Of" describes a prison in a small Austrian town of Leoben. There is a slideshow that accompanies the article detailing the philosophy behind punishment using something besides the physical space of a traditional prison.
A word on the architecture:

[t]he building looked both idle and inviting, like a college library during winter break — or it would have, anyway, were it not for the razor wire coiled along the concrete wall of the yard and the sentence carved below it, a line from the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (which the United States signed and ratified) that reads: “All persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person.”

Inside the prison it felt like Sunday afternoon, though in fact it was a Tuesday. There was a glassy brightness over everything, and most surprising, an unbreakable silence. Prisons are usually clamorous places, filled with the sound of metal doors opening and closing, and the general racket that comes with holding large numbers of men in a confined space. Noise is part of the chaos of prison life; Leoben was serene. I mentioned as much to Hohensinn, and he smiled and pointed to the whitewashed ceilings. He had taken great care to install soundproofing.

A word on the philosophy:

It sounds odd to say, but it’s nonetheless true: we punish people with architecture. The building is the method. We put criminals in a locked room, inside a locked structure, and we leave them there for a specified period of time.....
“They are criminals,” Hohensinn said to me, “but they are also human beings. The more normal a life you give them here, the less necessary it is to resocialize them when they leave.” His principle, he said, was simple: “Maximum security outside; maximum freedom inside.”

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime: Justice and Prison Reform

Fair and effective criminal justice systems which ensure respect for the human rights of all those involved are a prerequisite for combating crime and for building societies based on the rule of law. UNODC assists States in developing strategies to reform all the aspects of their criminal justice systems, with particular emphasis on vulnerable groups. Through its field office network, the Office has developed projects in the areas of juvenile justice, penal reform and support to victims. It has also prepared assessment tools and manuals in all areas of criminal justice reform, based on United Nations standards and norms in crime prevention and criminal justice. More information can be found here.

42 Million Dollar Judgment Upheld in Inmate Death in Texas

This from Grits for Breakfast:

Everybody from Texas Prison Bidness to the New York Times is oohing and aahing that the 13th Texas Court of Appeals approved a $42.5 million judgment against the Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut), a private prison contractor over a murder in a South Texas Prison, for failing to protect inmates under their care. According to the opinion (pdf):

This case involves the horrific and gruesome death of Gregorio de la Rosa, Jr. (“Gregorio”). Gregorio, an honorably discharged former National Guardsman, was serving a six-month sentence at a prison operated by Wackenhut Corrections Corporation for possession of less than 1/4 grams of cocaine. A few days before his expected release, Gregorio was beaten to death by two other inmates using a lock tied to a sock, while Wackenhut’s officers stood by and watched and Wackenhut’s wardens smirked and laughed.

Changing Lives Through Literature

From the Green Mountain Barrister

In the never ending effort to rehabilitate and prevent recidivism, there is a program through which offenders, as a condition of their probation, are ordered to attend and complete homework for six twice-monthly seminars on literature. The program is titled "Changing Lives Through Literature." It is an alternative sentencing program, started in 1991 in Massachusetts, and has been embraced by seven other states. According to the website, cltl.umassd.edu/home-flash.cfm, "[l]iterature has the power to transform men's and women's lives - this is the philosophy behind Changing Lives Through Literature (CLTL). Individuals who read about characters in literature may find a connection between themselves and those characters. If literature is a regular companion in our lives, this is not news. But, many adults and youth do not have access to literature and its transformative nature. CLTL participants, judges, probation officers, and instructors believe that bringing carefully selected works of literature to criminal offenders may help these men and women gain insight into their lives and behavior, while learning that they are not alone with their problems. The written word affects us far beyond the moment of reading."

In addition to Massachusetts, the program is available in seven other states: Texas, Arizona, Kansas, Connecticut, Maine, New York, and Rhode Island.

Webb Sets His Sights On Prison Reform

From the Washington Post

Somewhere along the meandering career path that led James Webb to the U.S. Senate, he found himself in the frigid interior of a Japanese prison.

A journalist at the time, he was working on an article about Ed Arnett, an American who had spent two years in Fuchu Prison for possession of marijuana. In a January 1984 Parade magazine piece, Webb described the harsh conditions imposed on Arnett, who had frostbite and sometimes labored in solitary confinement making paper bags.

"But, surprisingly, Arnett, home in Omaha, Neb., says he prefers Japan's legal system to ours," Webb wrote. "Why? 'Because it's fair,' he said."

This spring, Webb (D-Va.) plans to introduce legislation on a long-standing passion of his: reforming the U.S. prison system. Jails teem with young black men who later struggle to rejoin society, he says. Drug addicts and the mentally ill take up cells that would be better used for violent criminals. And politicians have failed to address this costly problem for fear of being labeled "soft on crime."

Full article here.