by TChris

The Correctional Services Corporation is finally taking some well-deserved heat, but it's still able to obtain lucrative government contracts despite its dismal history as an administrator of private prisons.

A report by the Justice Dept.'s Civil Rights Division describes how CSC employees "brutally beat youths" at a facility in Maryland. The report says that "basic living conditions didn’t meet even the lowest constitutional standards."

Yet Homeland Security hired the CSC to operate a new detention center in Tacomah designed to house 700 undocumented immigrants as they wait to be deported. Homeland Security also hired CSC to operate a facility in Texas.

If the goal is to divert governmental functions to the private sector in order to move tax dollars into corporate hands, privatization is working well. If the goal is to obtain better services at a lower cost while maintaining accountability, CSC and Halliburton prove privatization doesn't always deliver.

Florida state senator Mandy Dawson is asking again for a constitutional amendment to restore voting rights to Florida's felons who have completed their sentences:

With state and national Democratic leaders concerned about a new purge of felons from voter rolls, state Sen. Mandy Dawson wants the party to support a constitutional amendment that would restore felons' rights -- including the right to vote -- once they have completed their prison sentences.

The issue is clouded by race because of the disproportionate number of blacks in the state who have felony records and are unable to cast ballots. Democrats are concerned that blacks, long loyal voters for their candidates, will refrain from voting this year, fearing a repeat of the 2000 presidential election. Thousands of eligible voters were turned away from polls that year because they had mistakenly been purged from the voting lists as felons. Many of them, in fact, had no criminal records.

This is the fifth year Sen. Dawson has sought such an amendment. It's not likely to happen this year. Jeb Bush opposes it. But it should. Here are the numbers.

Let it Begin here has the story of how America is becoming a Gulag nation. The latest figures released by the Government show 2.1 million people in jails and prisons.

Any time you hear America is a democracy, where citizens have rights, remember that prisons represent our 35th largest state. We have more people in prison than live in Nevada, West Virginia, New Mexico, Nebraska, Maine, Idaho, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, Vermont, or Wyoming.

America now is the greatest jailer on earth. We imprison 715 out of every 100,000 citizens, the highest number on the planet. By contrast, Canada's rate of incarceration is 116 out of 100,000, China's is 119 per 100,000 and Germany is 96 per 100,000. Our rate of imprisoning our citizens is approximately 600% higher than either China or Canada.

Racially, things are even worse. In historical perspective, the 899,000 African Americans incarcerated today are nine times the number of 98,000 in 1954, the year of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. So there are now 900% more blacks in prison today than there were 50 years ago, while the black population has only doubled, or increased 100%.

Why did this man die while in custody in Georgia? His family is asking for an investigation--they say it's a David and Goliath situation:

All Yanga Williams knows is her Fred with the easy smile and accommodating “sure, baby” attitude is gone. She doesn’t know why, and she can’t begin to tell their four children that daddy isn’t coming back. Grieving family members are left with many unanswered questions about the death of 31-year-old Frederick Jerome Williams. He died Thursday morning after struggling with authorities at the Gwinnett County Detention Center.

Williams was removed from life support when doctors at Gwinnett Medical Center determined he was brain dead, according to Williams’ family members. “He was just the kind of person that worshiped me and the kids,” Yanga said Thursday. “No matter what I did, no matter what I presented him with he was very supportive. It was always, ‘sure, baby.’”

by TChris

Pennsylvania's prisons seem to be having management problems. From Westmoreland County:

Westmoreland County's prison warden was threatened with a contempt hearing and a potential involuntary stay in his own building Thursday over repeated failures to release an inmate on work release. Warden John Walton said he attempted to comply with the court orders but was looking after the county's financial interests when a self-employed inmate didn't have any workplace insurance.

Here's a clue, Warden: that's a problem for the judge to worry about. Your job is to follow the judge's orders, not to ignore them because you think it's in the county's "best interests" to do so.

From Fayette County, a problem that involved a corrections officer, rather than an inmate:

Fayette County has reached a nearly $16,000 settlement with a correctional officer who was temporarily fired 10 years ago for urinating in a prison office. William Prinkey, 48, who was dismissed in 1994 after relieving himself at his duty post when he was denied a restroom break, will receive $15,800.

When ya gotta go, ya gotta go.

Not only are 1 in every 75 men in the U.S. in jail, but the rate in some states is dramatically higher than in others. Who leads? Texas...not just in the number of texecutions but also in the number of inmates:

A federal study released Thursday shows that Texas led the nation in the number of inmates incarcerated in state prisons and county jails in June 2003.
Texas had 164,222 inmates on the last day of that month, about 800 more than California. The Texas inmate population was up by 4.2 percent, or 6,578 inmates, from June 2002, according to the study by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Texas' June 2003 incarceration rate also was the highest in the nation, with 692 inmates per 100,000 population. Mississippi ran a close second with an incarceration rate of 688 per 100,000 residents.....Overall, the report said the nation's federal, state and local prisons and jails were holding more than 2 million people on June 30, 2003, the largest number in four years.

Here's DOJ's Press Release on the report.

America. Prison Nation.

A new report by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics finds that 1 of every 75 men in the U.S. are in prison or jail.

The cause: Mandatory minimums, three-strikes, truth in sentencing laws. The effect:

The prison system just grows like a weed in the yard," said Vincent Schiraldi, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute, which pushes for a more lenient system. Without reforms, he said, prison populations will continue to grow "almost as if they are on autopilot, regardless of their high costs and disappointing crime-control impact."

America. Prison nation.

by TChris

The notion that kids who commit "adult" crimes should be subjected to "adult" punishment has often resulted in kids facing the same abuse that adult prisoners encounter. Maybe the failure of that approach in Louisiana will be a lesson to other states.

The allegations began soon after the prison opened for business: teenage inmates beaten by guards, beating each other, running loose on the rooftops of the barracks-like dorms. Ten years later, Louisiana is shutting down its toughest juvenile prison, a move that child welfare advocates see as an admission of failure.

In 1997, the Justice Department found widespread abuse of inmates by guards had left teens with gashes and broken bones. Federal investigators reported a year later that teens were beating and raping fellow inmates.

Abusing kids doesn't scare them into obedience, it just teaches them to be abusive.

Advocates said the adult-style prison - with individual cells inside cell blocks behind fences and razor wire - created an atmosphere unlikely to rehabilitate the teens. They said the teens were more likely to commit far worse crimes when they got out.

This story also teaches a lesson about the danger of privatizing prisons.

by TChris

Before President Bush tears down Abu Ghraib to build his promised "modern, maximum-security prison," the Iraqi authorities should visit some U.S. supermax prisons and ask whether that's what they really want.

Prisoners have called them "torture chambers" where they are subjected to flagrant human rights and civil liberties violations and appalling psychological and physical abuses. In a lawsuit filed by Ohio prisoners at the state's supermax prison in Youngstown in 2002, inmate Keith Garner bluntly told a judge that the conditions at the prison were "like being in a tomb."

Reform begins at home. It's one thing to replace an old building with a new one; it's another to treat prisoners humanely. President Bush said that Abu Ghraib doesn't reflect America; but it does reflect America's prisons. The story of Abu Ghraib should lead American reporters back home.

Public Defender Dude, a practicing Public Defender in California with a great blog, has a new piece up on the grossly excessive political clout of the California Prison Guards' Union. He says the power of the Abu Ghraib guards pales by comparison.

In California, the prison industry is the fastest growing industry around. In fact, if you want to talk about pure political muscle, there is no lobby quite as strong as the prison lobby. Consider what the prison guard's union has helped to accomplish in the last 20 years. They have increased tenfold the number of inmates in prison, they have increased exponentially the number of prisons, they have backed numerous draconian laws to ensure that more and more people go to prison for longer and longer for doing less and less.

Gov. Schwarzenegger is to be commended for the change in policy his adminstration has made in the granting of parole--an area in which Gray Davis' record was simply abysmal.

Convicted in 1991 of a murder he insists he didn't commit, the former real estate agent maintained his innocence despite offers of a plea deal and urgings to express remorse. Then in 2002, relatives told the state parole board they'd heard Riojas' estranged father, a drug dealer and smuggler, confess to the killing shortly before his own death. The board, without any objection from the prosecutors who sent Riojas to prison, granted him parole.

Their recommendation then was sent to Gov. Gray Davis who, having publicly vowed to keep convicted murderers in prison for life, rejected it. But a year later, after an unexpected change in state leadership, Riojas is free, one of the 31 convicted murderers and kidnappers paroled by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in his first seven months in office. That's nearly four times the eight life-term inmates who were granted parole during Davis' 4 1/2 years as governor.

Score one for Gov. Arnold.

Schwarzenegger's legal secretary, Peter Siggins, credits the change to a difference in philosophy. "He is a governor who believes people can reform and be reformed."

Now we want to see the Governor go a little further and not reverse as many favorable parole board recommendations as he has to date--he's nowhere near as bad as Gray Davis was, but we think he can do better than this:

by TChris

Scandals at the California Youth Authority (TalkLeft background here) and a Governor who doesn't need campaign contributions have combined to create a new political reality for the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. The prison guard's union has wielded enormous influence in the state's Democratic party, resulting in tough-on-crime legislation that guarantees full prisons and full employment for well-paid prison guards.

Bucking its history of support for the CCPO, the California Senate unanimously approved a code of conduct for prison guards in an effort to eliminate "what a federal court-appointed watchdog said is a systemwide 'code of silence' that protects wrongdoers while punishing whistleblowers." The Senate also voted to block a clause in the union contract that requires investigators to turn over confidential information to prison employees who are under investigation.

In addition, 17 Democratic Senators want to renegotiate a contract that gives prison guards a 37 percent pay increase over five years. The union is fighting back with increased spending on public relations, but it may have trouble convincing voters that the pay increases are justified in tough economic times.

"To be honest, they look a little like crybabies. I don't think they're going to get a lot of public sentiment," said University of California, Berkeley political scientist Bruce Cain.