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June
27, 2003
Jason
Leopold
CIA: Seven Months Prior to 9/11 Iraq
Posed No Threat to US
David
Lindorff
The Catch and Release of "Comical
Ali"
Ray McGovern
Cheney, Forgery and the CIA
June
26, 2003
Sen.
Robert Byrd
The Road of Cover-Up is a Road to Ruin
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Instructed the CIA to Investigate
Hans Blix
Paul
de Rooij
Ambient Death in Palestine
Chris Floyd
Mass Graves and Burned Meat in Bush's New Iraq
Elaine
Cassel
Wolfowitz as Lord High Executioner
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Wire
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Sheldon
Hull
Squatting in Mansions
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A Guide to Hating Almost Anyone
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Avnery
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June
25, 2003
Bruce
Jackson
Buffalo Cops Wage War on Pedal Pushers
Mickey
Z.
The New Dark Ages
David Lindorff
Indonesia's War on Journalists
Dan
Bacher
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Adam Federman
"Success is Not the Issue Here"
Elaine
Cassel
"Ain't No Justice": Fed Judge Quits, Assails Sentencing
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My America vs. the Empire
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Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
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June
24, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Supreme Indemnity
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Monajem
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Chuckman
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WMD Damage Control at the Times
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Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/24
June
23, 2003
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Pritzke
Washington Lied: an Interview with
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Conn
Hallinan
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Wayne Madsen
Commercials, Disney & Amistad
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Said
The Meaning of Rachel Corrie
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Bush's Wars Web Log 6/23
June
21 / 22, 2003
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Cockburn
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Standard
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Ron Jacobs
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June
28, 2003
Rehnquist Family Values
Barbarity
as Normalcy in America's Prisons
By
JOANNE MARINER
With prisons filled to overflowing, it's no wonder
that state governments are seeking to cut costs. The goal of
rehabilitation was long ago replaced with that of warehousing,
and now the only real goal is to warehouse cheaply.
The Michigan prison system is a microcosm
of national problems. Holding fewer than 19,000 inmates in 1986,
it confined more than double that number in 1995. It was in that
year, as prisoner numbers continued to swell, that the state
corrections department instituted strict new rules to reduce
the number of visitors that prisoners received. Visitors, the
department claimed, were overwhelming the prison system's resources.
A federal district court struck down
the most restrictive of the new regulations, in a ruling that
an appellate court unanimously affirmed. Chiding the corrections
department for having implemented "a series of haphazard
policies" that violated inmates' rights to family contact,
the court found that the department had utterly failed to justify
them.
Last week, the Supreme Court disagreed.
Although the Court issued three opinions - we might call them
mean, meaner, and meanest - its judgment was unanimous. A more
callous and short-sighted ruling is hard to imagine.
Fewer Visitors, Less
Work, Better Security
Under the reasoning of last week's ruling
in Overton v. Bazzetta, state corrections departments are almost
entirely free to restrict or deny prisoners' visiting privileges.
Because, in the Supreme Court's view, regulations meant to reduce
the number of prison visitors serve the goal of promoting prisons'
internal security, they merit only the most deferential scrutiny.
Upheld in the Overton case was a regulation
that barred prisoners who had twice committed drug infractions
from receiving any family visits, including non-contact visits
(where inmates see their relatives through a reinforced glass
window). Other regulations that were sustained prevented inmates
from receiving visits from their
siblings, nieces and nephews under age eighteen, and from minors
who are not accompanied by an immediate family member or legal
guardian.
In its decision, the Court stopped just
short of ruling explicitly that prisoners have no right at all
to intimate association - in other words, no right to family
contact. Its reasoning, however, was broad enough to relegate
any residual right to insignificance.
"Alternatives
to Visitation Need Not be Ideal"
How would you react if you were told
that you could no longer see your children, but, not to worry,
you could still write them letters? And if you were told that
if you - like some 40 to 80 percent of Michigan inmates - were
functionally illiterate, or if your children were too young to
read, you still had the option of short phone calls, at least
a few minutes long?
The Overton case was, in part, based
on the judgment that while such options may not be optimal, they
are nonetheless sufficient. "Alternatives to visitation
need not be ideal," the Court emphasized, "they need
only be available."
In other words, it doesn't matter if
prisoners spend years without ever seeing their children. Because
allowing greater numbers of visits might require "a significant
reallocation of the prison system's financial resources,"
it's enough to grant prisoners access to letters and phone calls
(calls that are charged at exorbitant rates, one should note).
Increasing Recidivism
and Harming Children
The Overton ruling might be a relief
to financially-strapped prison systems, but its long-term costs
are likely to be heavy. The social impact of limiting inmates'
family visits - measured in higher recidivism rates and in damage
to children's lives - is unquestionably negative.
According to unrefuted evidence admitted
at trial, visitation with family and friends is the single most
important factor in ensuring a prisoner's successful return to
society. Prisoners who maintain continuous, quality contact with
three people while they are incarcerated, for example, are only
one-sixth as likely as others to be back in prison a year after
their release.
Children, too, need contact with their
incarcerated parents. According to Denise Johnston, a national
authority on the psychological and developmental implications
of parental incarceration, parent-child visits improve children's
emotional well-being and may prevent or mitigate negative behavior.
If other states were to follow Michigan's
example, the impact could be enormously damaging. An estimated
1.5 million children have a parent behind bars in the United
States, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Indeed,
researchers estimate that over 10 million children have undergone
the imprisonment of a parent at some point in their lives.
Justice Thomas's Reminiscences
One would be remiss to discuss the Overton
ruling without commenting on Justice Clarence Thomas's separate
opinion, so successfully does it caricature the decision's flaws.
Reviewing the history of American prisons
through the nineteenth century, Thomas describes prison regimes
built around solitary confinement, stringent regimentation, and
frequent humiliation. "No reading materials of any kind,
except a Bible, were allowed inside," he notes in describing
Sing Sing circa 1840.
Does Thomas mention such conditions in
order to condemn them, or to underscore how far the country's
prison have come? Hardly. Not only is his tone entirely unjudgmental,
he writes, if anything, with a certain wistfulness. Although
he acknowledges that states are free to grant increased constitutional
rights to prisoners, he never suggests that this would be a good
idea.
Thomas's callousness toward prisoners
is especially striking in light of the enormous racial disparities
in the nation's prisons and jails. As of June 2002, 884,500 of
the country's two million prisoners were African-American. Among
males between the ages twenty-five and twenty-nine, 12.9 percent
of blacks were incarcerated, compared to 1.6 percent of whites.
Rights "of Basic
Importance to Our Society"
It was not that long ago that the Supreme
Court ruled that associational rights pertaining to "marriage,
family life, and the upbringing of children" were "of
basic importance to our society." Such rights, the Court
emphasized, should be "sheltered against the State's unwarranted
usurpation, disregard, or disrespect."
In Overton v. Bazzetta, a ruling likely
to accelerate the disintegration of families, the Court signally
failed to heed its own advice.
Joanne Mariner
is a human rights attorney and regular CounterPunch contributor.
She is the author of No
Escape: Male Rape in US Prisons published by Human Rights
Watch. An earlier version of this piece appeared in FindLaw's
Writ. She can be reached at: mariner@counterpunch.org.
Weekend
Edition Features
Alexander
Cockburn
My Life as a Rabbi
William
A. Cook
The Scourge of Hopelessness
Standard
Schaefer
The Wages of Terror: an Interview with R.T. Naylor
Ron Jacobs
US Prisons as Strategic Hamlets
Harry
Browne
The Pitstop Ploughshares
Lawrence
Magnuson
WMD: The Most Dangerous Game
Harold
Gould
Saddam and the WMD Mystery
David Krieger
10 Reasons to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Avia
Pasternak
The Unholy Alliance in the Occupied Territories
CounterPunch
Summer Reading:
Our Favorite Novels
Todd Chretien
Return to Sender: Todd Gitlin, the Duke of Condescension
Maria
Tomchick
Danny Goldberg's Imaginary Kids
Adam Engel
The Fat Man in Little Boy
Poets'
Basement
Guthrie, Albert & Hamod
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