The Prison Thread

[Nat]

For all things prison/prisoner-related.

[Nat]

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[Nat]

Rachel Maddow Exposing private prisons role in Arizona's 'Papers Please' roots

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I think this is an interesting twist on the Arizona law. It takes her a while to get there, but half-way through she finally gets to it (minute 6).
and a follow-up:

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[Nat]

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Based in central Austin, the Inside Books Project (IBP) is an all volunteer, non-profit organization sending free books and educational materials to people in prison in the state of Texas. It is the only project in the state offering this vital resource to Texas' prisoner population, which now exceeds 171,790.

[Medusa]

There's a pretty good book called "Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in a Man's Prison".
The writer talks about his time in prison and is now a human rights advocate due to all of the things he endured. Powerful stuff.

[SuperFemme]

I don't think that the population has ANY idea as to what it is like to be in prison in America.

Which is frightening considering the rate at which we fill up our prisons.

I do think we need to be clear on one thing. Prison is NOT about rehabilitation. The programs available that even take a small crack at rehabilitation are few and far between.

[The_Lady_Snow]

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[Nat]

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[Daywalker]

I have a share:
:koolaid:

http://www.sirdaywalker.com/SendthePainBelow_2009.pdf


Might wanna bookmark it ~ it's a long long story.
:glasses:

But the story is a non-fiction.
The story...is mine.

:daywalker:

[Sachita]

while in college my son, my baby, my life was arrested with possession of a fire arm in NYS. During that time they were really cracking down on gun laws and violent crimes. He spent quite a bit of time in prison. I stayed in NYS and for 4 years I followed him from hub to hub seeing him every single weekend until I knew he was going to be ok. It was the most difficult time of my life. I didnt date, I barely slept. I saw plenty, heard plenty but nothing prepares you for that feeling of feeling like you have no control. That no matter what you do, nothing can change what is happening. Thats how I felt. Imagine how they feel especially when they are used as an example or wrongly convicted.

The thing that always really got to me tho was that he had people and I was there all the time, he could call me often, our family and lots of visits, letters etc. a very large % of inmates families and friends forget and they are alone. Some deserved it, some didnt.

[SuperFemme]

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[Daywalker]

Just wanted to drop back in and tell you all thank you for the
messages n notes n stuff ~ and for taking the time to read my story.

It means a lot.
:goodscore:


:daywalker:

[Medusa]

It scares the shit out of me that a device like this even exists but I need to do some research because Im remembering an article from a long time ago that outlined how "crowd control" devices were always tested in prisons first before being moved to the "public sector".


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129630188&ft=1&f=1001

[Jet]

My real father was incarcerated from 1951-1964. I found him with the help of the FBI in 1983. I wanted to tell him that I was alive. I never knew about him until my mom and I sat down to a heart to heart and a bottle of Black Velvet for about 4 hours when I was 17.

Once I found him we talked a few times on the phone. He was excited that I had found him and wanted to know about my life. After a few phone conversations, I severed ties.

I was raised as an only child. I didn't know that I had 9 other brothers and sisters in California where I found him.

[coach]

I am overwhelmed.....thank you so very much for sharing your story. While it won't help you, I am truly sorry that this happened to you but am grateful that you have a gift of turning the nightmare you endured into words, words that moved me. thank you.


Just wanted to drop back in and tell you all thank you for the
messages n notes n stuff ~ and for taking the time to read my story.

It means a lot.
:goodscore:


:daywalker:

[Nat]

"Pete and Toshi Seeger, their son Daniel, and folklorist bruce jackson visited a Texas prison in huntsville in March of 1966 and produced this rare document of worksongs by inmates of the Ellis Unit."

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An unaccompanied song by prisoners in Texas Jail circa 1930 - a recording by John Lomax

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[IrishGrrl]

KnWkVo_Pm5A

Based in central Austin, the Inside Books Project (IBP) is an all volunteer, non-profit organization sending free books and educational materials to people in prison in the state of Texas. It is the only project in the state offering this vital resource to Texas' prisoner population, which now exceeds 171,790.

When I get back from my trip next week I will donate to this project. I think often about how books literally saved my life, my mental state, and taught me so many things. Mostly, they have been an escape. I think at the very least, no matter what someone's crime, they are entitled to books.

Irish

Thanks for this video!

[Nat]

Help Free the Scott Sisters (http://action.naacp.org/page/s/scottsisters) <-- click to sign petition

Read the following petition to Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, and add your name on the form to your right
September 14, 2010

Dear Governor Barbour,

Jamie and Gladys Scott – the “Scott Sisters” – have been incarcerated in Mississippi for the last 15 years for an armed robbery which, according to court testimony, yielded $11. They have consistently denied involvement in the crime. Although neither of the Scott Sisters had a prior criminal record, they were each sentenced to an extraordinary double life sentence.

The presiding judge in their trial, Judge Marcus Gordon, has a history of racially biased rulings, including granting bail to the KKK murderer of the three civil rights workers: Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner.

Furthermore, Jamie Scott now has lost renal function in of her kidneys and cannot survive without a transplant. She has suffered repeated infections and been hospitalized due to unsanitary prison conditions. The Department of Corrections will not allow tests for kidney compatibility even though numerous volunteers have come forward.

Given these serious concerns, we ask that you:

1) Grant a pardon or commute the sentences of Jamie and Gladys Scott to time served, and

2) Grant Jamie Scott a “compassionate medical release” given the serious medical condition she is facing.

There is no greater form of violence than injustice. Please review this case and bring justice to the Scott Sisters who have suffered excessive incarceration for a crime in which their participation is questionable.

[Nat]

Miss. judge tosses out 31-year-old rape, murder convictions (http://www.clarionledger.com/article/20100916/NEWS/100916010/31-year-old-Miss-rape-murder-convictions-tossed)

HATTIESBURG — Two men imprisoned since 1979 for a rape and murder that DNA evidence now shows was committed by someone else are free men today.

Forrest County Circuit Judge Bob Helfrich this morning threw out the convictions of Phillip Bivens and Bobby Ray Dixon and ordered evidence be presented to a grand jury on Andrew Harris, whose DNA matches that of evidence from the crime scene. Harris already is serving a life sentence at the State Penitentiary in Parchman for another rape in Forrest County two years after Eva Gail Patterson was raped and murdered on March 4, 1979.

“Thank God, thank God,” Bivens said after Helfrich’s ruling.

Dixon, 53, who is out on medical release given inmates who have a terminal illness, said, “It feels good. It feels real good. I thank God. I feel blessed.”

Dixon has advanced lung cancer and a brain tumor and is undergoing chemotherapy.

The third man convicted of the crime, Larry Ruffin, died in prison in 2002.

Helfrich said he will take up the posthumous exoneration of Ruffin after the grand jury meets.

He appointed District Attorney Jon Mark Weathers as special prosecutor in this case. Weathers has been investigating Harris ever since he found out the DNA at the crime scene matched Harris.

The Innocence Project pushed for the DNA tests that ended up clearing Ruffin, Dixon and Bivens in Patterson’s rape and murder.

Ruffin’s case is the first time in Mississippi and the second time nationally that DNA has cleared an inmate posthumously, according to the Innocence Project. The first was last year in Texas when DNA tests cleared Tim Cole, who died in 1999, of the 1985 rape of a Texas Tech University student.

Dixon and Bivens had pleaded guilty and fingered Ruffin as the rapist after allegedly being beaten.

Of the 259 DNA exonerations since 1989, 63 have involved false confessions and 19 have involved false guilty pleas, according to statistics kept by the Innocence Project.

http://cmsimg.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/bilde?Site=D0&Date=20100916&Category=NEWS&ArtNo=100916010&Ref=AR&MaxW=318&Border=0
Phillip Bivens (left) is hugged by Teresa Strickland , the sister of Larry Ruffin, after Forrest County Circuit Judge Bob Helfrich ordered the release of Phillip Bivens and Bobby Ray Dixon, and said the two will be fully exonerated pending a presentation of DNA evidence to a grand jury. (Matt Bush/Hattiesburg American)

http://cmsimg.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/bilde?Site=D0&Date=20100916&Category=NEWS&ArtNo=100916010&Ref=V1&MaxW=180&Border=0
Dixon (George Clark/Hattiesburg American)

[Nat]

http://alt.coxnewsweb.com/shared-blogs/austin/courts/upload/2010/09/willingham_lawyers_ask_for_hea/M5X153_59C0_9-thumb.JPG

Lawyers for relatives of Cameron Todd Willingham, executed for the 1991 arson murder of his three young daughters in Corsicana, on Friday petitioned a judge in Travis County to hear evidence and determine whether Willingham was wrongly convicted.

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

Willingham’s execution has caught national attention for the specter that Texas may have killed an innocent man. Several arson experts in recent years have rejected the science that the investigators who testified at Willingham’s trial used to determine that the fire that killed his daughters was intentionally set.

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Willingham, above right, was convicted of murder in 1992 in the deaths of his children —1-year-old twins Karmon and Kameron and 2-year-old Amber — who died of smoke inhalation after a fire at the family’s house in Corsicana, about 55 miles northeast of Waco.

He maintained his innocence until his 2004 execution.

Willingham’s lawyers have claimed that local and state fire investigators relied on faulty scientific methods in concluding that the fire at Willingham’s house had been intentionally set.

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

Willingham was executed during (Governor) Perry’s tenure (February 16, 2004) and Perry was accused of playing politics with the case last year when he replaced three members of the nine-member Texas Commission on Forensic Science, including the chairman, Austin defense lawyer Sam Bassett. The members, whose terms had expired, were replaced just days before the commission had been scheduled to hear the findings of the expert they had hired to evaluate the case. That presentation was postponed indefinitely.

[Nat]

http://alt.coxnewsweb.com/shared-blogs/austin/courts/upload/2010/09/willingham_lawyers_ask_for_hea/M5X153_59C0_9-thumb.JPG

Lawyers for relatives of Cameron Todd Willingham, executed for the 1991 arson murder of his three young daughters in Corsicana, on Friday petitioned a judge in Travis County to hear evidence and determine whether Willingham was wrongly convicted.

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

Willingham’s execution has caught national attention for the specter that Texas may have killed an innocent man. Several arson experts in recent years have rejected the science that the investigators who testified at Willingham’s trial used to determine that the fire that killed his daughters was intentionally set.

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

Willingham, above right, was convicted of murder in 1992 in the deaths of his children —1-year-old twins Karmon and Kameron and 2-year-old Amber — who died of smoke inhalation after a fire at the family’s house in Corsicana, about 55 miles northeast of Waco.

He maintained his innocence until his 2004 execution.

Willingham’s lawyers have claimed that local and state fire investigators relied on faulty scientific methods in concluding that the fire at Willingham’s house had been intentionally set.

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

Willingham was executed during (Governor) Perry’s tenure (February 16, 2004) and Perry was accused of playing politics with the case last year when he replaced three members of the nine-member Texas Commission on Forensic Science, including the chairman, Austin defense lawyer Sam Bassett. The members, whose terms had expired, were replaced just days before the commission had been scheduled to hear the findings of the expert they had hired to evaluate the case. That presentation was postponed indefinitely.

a follow-up on this - I read a while back that his wife is saying he confessed to her that he'd done it.

[Nat]

Ex-inmate's name cleared in rape (http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7255717.html)

He now can pursue $2 million from the state

Nearly three months out of prison, Michael Anthony Green on Wednesday received news he's long been waiting for — that the state of Texas said he was actually innocent for the crime that kept him behind bars for 27 years.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals' unanimous ruling is an enormous weight lifted off of the Houston man's shoulders.

"I almost feel like crying from the joy," Green, 45, said. "It's great for the state to acknowledge something I tried to tell them from the get-go."

The court's decision clears the way for Green to work toward a settlement of more than $2 million from the state, his attorney, Bob Wicoff said.

Green is expected to be taxed on the money, which he may get by the end of the year, Wicoff said.

He said legislators may change that law in the next session, which could be retroactive and make Green's money tax-free.

Wicoff said Wednesday's ruling was not a surprise because no one objected to the trial court's finding that Green was actually innocent.

Wicoff said he also expects to ask for an official pardon for Green.

Wrongly identified
Faulty eyewitness identification in 1983 sent Green to prison for 75 years for the rape of a Houston woman.

Prosecutors working on the case found the victim's jeans to be tested.

He was freed July 30 after DNA evidence cleared him from any involvement in the case.

http://www.chron.com/photos/2010/07/30/22717423/260xStory.jpg
Michael Anthony Green holds a photo earlier this year of his mother, Mary Ann Strait, who died while he was in prison.

[Nat]

Prisoner ordered free from Texas' death row (http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7266470.html)

After 18 years of incarceration and countless protestations of innocence, Anthony Graves finally got a nod of approval from the one person who mattered Wednesday and at last returned home — free from charges that he participated in the butchery of a family in Somerville he did not know and free of the possibility that he would have to answer for them with his life.

The district attorney for Washington and Burleson counties, Bill Parham, gave Graves his release. The prosecutor filed a motion to dismiss charges that had sent Graves to Texas' death row for most of his adult life. Graves returned to his mother's home in Brenham no longer the "cold-blooded killer," so characterized by the prosecutor who first tried him, but as another exonerated inmate who even in the joy of redemption will face the daunting prospect of reassembling the pieces of a shattered life.

Graves was convicted of assisting Robert Earl Carter in the slaying of Bobbie Davis, 45; her 16-year-old daughter, Nicole; and Davis' four grandchildren, ages 4 to 9, on Aug. 18, 1992. Carter was executed in 2000. Two weeks before his death, he provided a sworn statement saying that his naming of Graves as an accomplice was a lie.

He repeated the statement while strapped to the gurney minutes before his death: "Anthony Graves had nothing to do with it. ... I lied on him in court."

Graves' youngest brother, Arthur Curry, testified in vain at his 1994 trial, telling jurors that Graves had been at home sleeping at the time when the murders occurred. Jurors did not believe him, so his brother's return home carried a deep, personal significance.

"The sun couldn't shine any brighter," Curry, now 37, said. "It's just like celebrating a resurrection, almost, because it was almost like a death in our family. But it was a slow death, continuously, just waiting for that demise."

http://www.anthonygraves.org/images/img16.jpg

This was Anthony in 1985

[katsarecool]

Nat, I don't have the link handy but it can be found on ABCNEWS Nightline and World News Tonight. The story is about a man who was accused of murder and spent over 25 yrs in prison. Recently someone else cofessed to this Cold Case. the board of clemency in AZ reccommended to Gov Jan Brewer that he be released. She has refused and said "I made my decision and that is final!" I will come back with the link but wanted to report this miscarriage of justice in the great state of Arizona. More trash on that bitch! Excuse my language but I detest that woman.

[katsarecool]

here it is http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/governor-refuses-release-man-granted-clemency-arizona-jan-brewer-clemency-double-murder-confession-dan-harris-11988234

[Nat]

here it is http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/governor-refuses-release-man-granted-clemency-arizona-jan-brewer-clemency-double-murder-confession-dan-harris-11988234

That is so horrifying and upsetting. :( Thank you for posting this.

[Soon]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/67/Prisoner_population_rate_UN_HDR_2007_2008.PNG/800px-Prisoner_population_rate_UN_HDR_2007_2008.PNG

[AtLast]

Nat, I don't have the link handy but it can be found on ABCNEWS Nightline and World News Tonight. The story is about a man who was accused of murder and spent over 25 yrs in prison. Recently someone else cofessed to this Cold Case. the board of clemency in AZ reccommended to Gov Jan Brewer that he be released. She has refused and said "I made my decision and that is final!" I will come back with the link but wanted to report this miscarriage of justice in the great state of Arizona. More trash on that bitch! Excuse my language but I detest that woman.

GeeeeZussssss!!

Now, please tell me this man can get help with this! Due process is in the US Constitution! And, wouldn't Brewer be subject to legal charges for this? OK, we need the attorney members to speak to this. Wouldn't federal jurisdiction supercede her in a case such as this?

I am mortified about this! Not that I don't know that there are many miscarriages of justice in the US as well as quite a divide between POC and the ruling class in terms of arrest, conviction and incarceration- guilty or not.

Most people don't give a damn about these kinds of things until or unless it happens to someone they love or a good friend or family member. They just think a verdict of guilty is it and have no problem with innocent people serving time.

Frankly, after seeing some of the coverage of Brewer during election debates, I think she suffers from dementia. I am not being cruel- have a brother-in-law with Alzheimer's and it is an awful disease. Brewer shows many of the symptoms. Let us not forget that Ronald reagan also displayed symptoms while in office. geez, and he was just the person that had the codes for that briefcase to use nukes!

[katsarecool]

I agree. There is certainly something wrong with Brewer's thinking process!!!! I also would like to know what is up with these hard mean spirited women of the Republican Party like Brewer, Angle, Palin, O"Donnell, Whitman, etc.!!!

[AtLast]

I agree. There is certainly something wrong with Brewer's thinking process!!!! I also would like to know what is up with these hard mean spirited women of the Republican Party like Brewer, Angle, Palin, O"Donnell, Whitman, etc.!!!

I know! I think it has to do with years of being with tight-assed, wealthy, white men that can't dance. Repression can do many things! Also, think about all the GOP politicians that have been nailed for seeing sex workers.

AND consider living with (and sleeping with) a Rush Limbaugh! Hummm... if so much wasn't at stake, I could almost feel sorry for these GOP women.

:fart: to them all!

[Nat]

http://www.clarionledger.com/article/20101109/NEWS/11090342/Cleared-man-s-freedom-cut-short-by-cancer

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) - A Mississippi man who spent more than 30 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit has died less than two months after his name was cleared in the case.

Bobby Ray Dixon died Sunday from cancer. He was 53. Jerry Dixon says he's glad his brother lived long enough to see himself cleared by DNA evidence in the 1979 rape and murder of a Hattiesburg woman.

In September, a circuit judge set aside the guilty pleas of Bobby Ray Dixon and another man in the slaying of Eva Gail Patterson after the Innocence Project New Orleans filed a petition on their behalf. The judge is expected to rule later on a posthumous petition for a third man, Larry Ruffin, who died in prison in 2002.

[Nat]

"After I did the teaching, one of the people who sat with me at the dinner table was a Palestinian man who's become a very good friend of mine named Salaam Kalili (sp?). I said,"What brings you to do hospice work?"

And he said,"Well, my experience in prison."

I said,"What's that?" because I've done a lot of work in prisons and am quite interested.

He said,"I was a journalist in Jerusalem during the late '60s, before and after the '67 war, and I was writing about a free Palestinian state and Palestinians having part of Jerusalem as a capital, and at that time it was forbidden to do so in Israel. So periodically I'd be carted off to jail or prison and I spent about 6 years on and off in prison. I'd write and they'd arrest me. And while I was in prison, once in a while I would get beaten or tortured in some way - which happens in war. It happens on both sides, it's not like one side - it's just what happens when people go insane in war."

He said, "So one day, I was in this prison, and this guard was beating me and kicking me, and I died. There I was on the floor and this boot was kicking me and blood was coming out of my mouth, and the police report says that I died.

"But actually what happened is all this pain, and then it stopped and I was floating on the ceiling watching it...I watched it and I felt so peaceful because it wasn't really my body then, it was just what was happening.

"And then something interesting happened. What happened is that the bubble of the sense of my consciousness observing myself popped, broke, and all of the sudden I became everything. I was the walls of the prison and the old green paint flecking off the walls. I was the body there, but I was also the boot kicking it, and the dirt under the fingernails of the guard, and I was the goat whose bleating you could hear from the window outside, and I was all of it. I knew that I was never born and never could die. Then I looked at this and I said, 'What is all the fuss about?' I felt so peaceful and so joyful because I knew who I really was.

"And then a few days later I woke up inside this broken body at the bottom of a cell, but I was smiling. It took a while for my body to heal, and I got out of prison, but I couldn't do anything for the Palestians anymore. It didn't make any sense. I married a Jewish woman, I have Jewish-Palestinian children...

"I stay with people who are dying because I want to let them know that it's nothing to be afraid of, basically."

There is a certain way that as we come and practice together here and you sit through your pain and fear and loneliness and depression and ideas and all the different things that will come and go, there's a steadying of your being in the midst of the tension in the body. There's an opening of the mindfulness of resting in awareness itself as the mind tells its stories and the unfinished business of emotional waves come and go, that allows us to return to what we already know, to who we already are.

Afis (sp?), the Iraqi poet, he says,"The mind is ever a tourist wanting to touch and buy new things, then toss them into an already filled closet." And you sit here, and the mind does all that stuff, and something greater than that, the knowing, the awareness itself, becomes able to contain and be the witnessing of it, and beyond that, as Salaam experienced."

Zencast 161 - Ten Perfections

[Nat]

Federal Lawsuit Reveals Inhumane Conditions at For-Profit Youth Prison (http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/federal-lawsuit-reveals-inhumane-conditions-at-for-profit-youth-prison)

Youth at Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility Suffering Brutal Conditions, Horrific Physical Abuse and Denials of Educational and Medical Services

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Jackson, MS civil rights attorney Robert B. McDuff today filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the for-profit operators of Mississippi's Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility (WGYCF), charging that the children there are forced to live in barbaric and unconstitutional conditions and are subjected to excessive uses of force by prison staff.

Among the named defendants in the lawsuit, filed on behalf of all the teenagers and young men in the facility, are the Walnut Grove Correctional Authority and the Geo Group, Inc., the second largest private prison company in the country. The facility houses youth between the ages of 13 and 22 who have been tried and convicted as adults.

The lawsuit describes a facility well known for its culture of violence and corruption –a culture that is perpetuated by WGYCF’s incompetent management. Some prison staff exploit youth by selling drugs inside the facility. Other staff members abuse their power by engaging in sexual relationships with the youth in their care. Many youth have suffered serious and permanent physical injuries as a result of the WGYCF’s deficient security policies and violent staff members. Youth who are handcuffed and defenseless are kicked, punched and beaten all over their bodies. Youth secure in their cells are blinded with chemical restraints.

[Billy]

Everytime I see this thread I get this warm fuzzy feeling :blink: Wrong prison thread :byebye:

[Nat]

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners.


The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China's extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)

San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner.

The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England's rate is 151; Germany's is 88; and Japan's is 63.

The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

There is little question that the high incarceration rate here has helped drive down crime, though there is debate about how much.

Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America's extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges — many of whom are elected, another American anomaly — yield to populist demands for tough justice.

Whatever the reason, the gap between American justice and that of the rest of the world is enormous and growing.

It used to be that Europeans came to the United States to study its prison systems. They came away impressed.

"In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States," Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in "Democracy in America."

No more.

"Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror," James Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. "Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons."

Prison sentences here have become "vastly harsher than in any other country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared," Michael Tonry, a leading authority on crime policy, wrote in "The Handbook of Crime and Punishment."

Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States "a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach."

The spike in American incarceration rates is quite recent. From 1925 to 1975, the rate remained stable, around 110 people in prison per 100,000 people. It shot up with the movement to get tough on crime in the late 1970s. (These numbers exclude people held in jails, as comprehensive information on prisoners held in state and local jails was not collected until relatively recently.)

The nation's relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of people in American prisons.


U.S. prison population dwarfs that of other nations.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/world/americas/23iht-23prison.12253738.html)
"The assault rate in New York and London is not that much different," said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group. "But if you look at the murder rate, particularly with firearms, it's much higher."

Despite the recent decline in the murder rate in the United States, it is still about four times that of many nations in Western Europe.

But that is only a partial explanation. The United States, in fact, has relatively low rates of nonviolent crime. It has lower burglary and robbery rates than Australia, Canada and England.

People who commit nonviolent crimes in the rest of the world are less likely to receive prison time and certainly less likely to receive long sentences. The United States is, for instance, the only advanced country that incarcerates people for minor property crimes like passing bad checks, Whitman wrote.

Efforts to combat illegal drugs play a major role in explaining long prison sentences in the United States as well. In 1980, there were about 40,000 people in American jails and prisons for drug crimes. These days, there are almost 500,000.

Those figures have drawn contempt from European critics. "The U.S. pursues the war on drugs with an ignorant fanaticism," said Stern of King's College.

Many American prosecutors, on the other hand, say that locking up people involved in the drug trade is imperative, as it helps thwart demand for illegal drugs and drives down other kinds of crime. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, for instance, has fought hard to prevent the early release of people in federal prison on crack cocaine offenses, saying that many of them "are among the most serious and violent offenders."

Still, it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes American prison policy. Indeed, the mere number of sentences imposed here would not place the United States at the top of the incarceration lists. If lists were compiled based on annual admissions to prison per capita, several European countries would outpace the United States. But American prison stays are much longer, so the total incarceration rate is higher.

Burglars in the United States serve an average of 16 months in prison, according to Mauer, compared with 5 months in Canada and 7 months in England.

Many specialists dismissed race as an important distinguishing factor in the American prison rate. It is true that blacks are much more likely to be imprisoned than other groups in the United States, but that is not a particularly distinctive phenomenon. Minorities in Canada, Britain and Australia are also disproportionately represented in those nation's prisons, and the ratios are similar to or larger than those in the United States.

Some scholars have found that English-speaking nations have higher prison rates.

"Although it is not at all clear what it is about Anglo-Saxon culture that makes predominantly English-speaking countries especially punitive, they are," Tonry wrote last year in "Crime, Punishment and Politics in Comparative Perspective."

"It could be related to economies that are more capitalistic and political cultures that are less social democratic than those of most European countries," Tonry wrote. "Or it could have something to do with the Protestant religions with strong Calvinist overtones that were long influential."

The American character — self-reliant, independent, judgmental — also plays a role.

"America is a comparatively tough place, which puts a strong emphasis on individual responsibility," Whitman of Yale wrote. "That attitude has shown up in the American criminal justice of the last 30 years."

French-speaking countries, by contrast, have "comparatively mild penal policies," Tonry wrote.

Of course, sentencing policies within the United States are not monolithic, and national comparisons can be misleading.

"Minnesota looks more like Sweden than like Texas," said Mauer of the Sentencing Project. (Sweden imprisons about 80 people per 100,000 of population; Minnesota, about 300; and Texas, almost 1,000. Maine has the lowest incarceration rate in the United States, at 273; and Louisiana the highest, at 1,138.)

Whatever the reasons, there is little dispute that America's exceptional incarceration rate has had an impact on crime.

"As one might expect, a good case can be made that fewer Americans are now being victimized" thanks to the tougher crime policies, Paul Cassell, an authority on sentencing and a former federal judge, wrote in The Stanford Law Review.

From 1981 to 1996, according to Justice Department statistics, the risk of punishment rose in the United States and fell in England. The crime rates predictably moved in the opposite directions, falling in the United States and rising in England.

"These figures," Cassell wrote, "should give one pause before too quickly concluding that European sentences are appropriate."

Other commentators were more definitive. "The simple truth is that imprisonment works," wrote Kent Scheidegger and Michael Rushford of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in The Stanford Law and Policy Review. "Locking up criminals for longer periods reduces the level of crime. The benefits of doing so far offset the costs."

There is a counterexample, however, to the north. "Rises and falls in Canada's crime rate have closely paralleled America's for 40 years," Tonry wrote last year. "But its imprisonment rate has remained stable."

Several specialists here and abroad pointed to a surprising explanation for the high incarceration rate in the United States: democracy.

Most state court judges and prosecutors in the United States are elected and are therefore sensitive to a public that is, according to opinion polls, generally in favor of tough crime policies. In the rest of the world, criminal justice professionals tend to be civil servants who are insulated from popular demands for tough sentencing.

Whitman, who has studied Tocqueville's work on American penitentiaries, was asked what accounted for America's booming prison population.

"Unfortunately, a lot of the answer is democracy — just what Tocqueville was talking about," he said. "We have a highly politicized criminal justice system."

[moxie]

Federal Lawsuit Reveals Inhumane Conditions at For-Profit Youth Prison (http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/federal-lawsuit-reveals-inhumane-conditions-at-for-profit-youth-prison)

Youth at Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility Suffering Brutal Conditions, Horrific Physical Abuse and Denials of Educational and Medical Services

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Jackson, MS civil rights attorney Robert B. McDuff today filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the for-profit operators of Mississippi's Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility (WGYCF), charging that the children there are forced to live in barbaric and unconstitutional conditions and are subjected to excessive uses of force by prison staff.

Among the named defendants in the lawsuit, filed on behalf of all the teenagers and young men in the facility, are the Walnut Grove Correctional Authority and the Geo Group, Inc., the second largest private prison company in the country. The facility houses youth between the ages of 13 and 22 who have been tried and convicted as adults.

The lawsuit describes a facility well known for its culture of violence and corruption –a culture that is perpetuated by WGYCF’s incompetent management. Some prison staff exploit youth by selling drugs inside the facility. Other staff members abuse their power by engaging in sexual relationships with the youth in their care. Many youth have suffered serious and permanent physical injuries as a result of the WGYCF’s deficient security policies and violent staff members. Youth who are handcuffed and defenseless are kicked, punched and beaten all over their bodies. Youth secure in their cells are blinded with chemical restraints.

This is old, but am just now reading it.

Private (or for-profit) prisons are known for their bad conditions and poor pay for staff. CCA is one of the major players in the private prisons and last time I knew they were trying to pay prison guards $9.25/hr and of course were horribly understaffed because of the low rate in pay. And they, along with the state/federal-run prisons are moving away from rehabilitation to help reduce recidivism and focus on punishment; but the lack of rehabilitation is moreso present in private prisons. Recidivism is good for them, it ups the demand and keeps their beds full, which makes them money.

Will write more later. This video is from 2008 but has some good information.

http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/419/video.html