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| Stuff About Prison; abzug [May 1, 2006] | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jun 7 2006, 10:16 PM (7,401 Views) | |
| abzug | Dec 6 2007, 11:17 PM Post #106 |
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In love with a prisoner
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I think they meant men in prison commit suicide more often than men outside of prison, not than women in prison. At least that was my reading of it.... |
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| DontUWish | Dec 6 2007, 11:32 PM Post #107 |
Out of Dorm
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Oh, duh. I should've realized that's what they meant, but then it's also 'duh' that men in prison commit suicide so much more often than men outside prison. Then too I wonder why they focus solely on male prisoner suicide rates and leave out women. From the earlier article it sounds like - sadly - the number/percent of women committing suicide wouldn't exactly drag down the total statistic. What I'm getting at is my hunch is they overlooked the suicide rate for women which just ticks me off because even though not as many women are in prison, I think a high percentage of women prisoners are committing suicide. When they say "perhaps the most worrying trend" involves men's suicide rates, I think they're mistaken. The most worrying trend is suicide rates, period. |
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| abzug | Dec 7 2007, 03:23 AM Post #108 |
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In love with a prisoner
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I couldn't agree more. Well put. |
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| abzug | Dec 9 2007, 04:08 AM Post #109 |
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In love with a prisoner
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Having not yet read a thing, I suspect that what's on this forum will be VERY interesting: http://prisonofficer.org.uk/phpBB2/ |
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| abzug | Dec 15 2007, 01:19 PM Post #110 |
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In love with a prisoner
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And in the battle for Worst Prison Abuse Story Ever, we have a new nominee folks! http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/12/world/am...s/12brazil.html December 12, 2007 Rape of Girl, 15, Exposes Abuses in Brazil Prison System By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO Correction Appended BRASÍLIA — The police jail at Abaetetuba could not be torn down soon enough for Márcia Soares, a lawyer and federal human rights official here. To her, the jail has come to symbolize everything that is wrong with Brazil’s efforts to safeguard women and children from violence. It was at Abaetetuba, in the northeastern state of Para on the fringes of the Amazon, that a 15-year-old girl arrested on suspicion of petty theft was illegally placed among 34 male inmates in late October. For 26 days they treated her as their plaything, raping and torturing her repeatedly. Sometimes she traded sex for food; other times, she was simply raped, federal investigators here said. The police in the jail did more than turn their backs on the violence. They shaved her head with a knife to make her look more like a boy, investigators said, and now are blaming her for lying about her age. The case is causing soul-searching here in Brazil’s capital, where federal officials have become increasingly concerned about the treatment of women and minors in the nation’s crowded prison system and the failure of judges throughout the country to prosecute cases of torture. Women make up only 5 percent of Brazil’s prison population, but the number is growing. States have not built enough jails and prisons with separate facilities for women, even though federal law requires such separation. A recent report to the Organization of American States by a group of private organizations in São Paulo that formed the Study and Working Group on Women in Prison showed that female prisoners were being illegally placed with men or transvestites in five Brazilian states, and being subjected to torture and sexual abuse. Even as Brazil was raised in November to the United Nations’ highest human development category, its spotty human rights history and mixed record of punishing those guilty of abuses have been an Achilles’ heel internationally. A SWAT team operates in Rio de Janeiro to root out and kill drug traffickers with impunity. The police are rarely convicted under a 1997 law against torture, because of an “institutionalizing of torture” under Brazil’s military dictatorship and more than 300 years of slavery, said Paulo Vanucchi, Brazil’s human rights minister. The case of the 15-year-old will be another test of justice in the largely lawless Amazon region. Two years ago, a Brazilian rancher ordered the killing of Dorothy Mae Stang, 73, an American-born nun and rain forest advocate. She was shot to death on a jungle road. The rancher, Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura, was sentenced to 30 years in prison. What has been particularly disheartening to federal human rights officials in the case of the 15-year-old girl is how many people had the chance to protect her. Ms. Soares, the lawyer, said the police, the judge and a public defender who had visited the jail all knew the teenager was in an all-male setting. “Several officials were aware of what was happening, and at worst they were complicit in it,” Ms. Soares said. “It’s a very serious situation.” Ana Júlia Carepa, the governor of Para, has been scrambling to clean up the mess since the situation became public late last month. Ms. Carepa pressed Raimundo Benassuly, the state police chief, to resign the day after he said publicly that the girl had lied about her age because she had a “mental deficiency.” The police have said that the girl had claimed she was 19, not 15, during several run-ins with the law. Ms. Soares said that officials, including the judge in the case, a woman, did not press the girl for documentation proving she was an adult, even though she is under five feet tall and weighs about 80 pounds. “When I first saw her I thought she was 12, not 15,” Ms. Soares said. For Ms. Carepa, the girl’s age is beside the point. “If she is 15, 20, 50, 80 years old or almost 100, it doesn’t matter,” she told journalists in Rio last month. “A woman cannot be in a cell with men.” Ms. Carepa said that the jail would be torn down and replaced with something that has facilities for women. The judge who placed the girl in the all-male jail, Clarice Maria Andrade, is being investigated and could lose her job. Two others in her office are accused of altering a document to make it seem as if the judge had approved a transfer from the jail shortly after the police made the request, not 12 days later. Local officials were already familiar with the girl before she was arrested and placed in the Abaetetuba jail on Oct. 21. Growing up in a broken home, she had left school before and frequented an area known for child prostitution, Ms. Soares said. At the time of her arrest, she was shuttling among her parents’ homes and an uncle’s house, and no one seemed to keep careful tabs on her. During the 26 days, no relative came to the jail looking for her. Within her first two days in jail, a man raped her in the bathroom, the girl told investigators. Inmates rely on visiting relatives to bring food. With no such visits, extreme hunger soon overtook the girl and she began trading sex for food, investigators said. Other men, however, simply raped her when they wanted to, and tortured her for amusement, investigators said. Some placed crumpled papers between her toes as she slept and lighted them, Ms. Soares said, adding that the girl still had burn marks on her feet. Residents heard the girl’s screams from the road, which is near the jail windows. Yet for weeks no one came to her rescue. It was only after an anonymous note reached the local child protection services agency that she was removed from the jail. In recent days, she and her family have been relocated under a federal witness protection program. The girl’s father complained of death threats from the police. He said they had tried to press him to say that the girl was 19 or 20. “It’s now up to us to protect her and help her to start a new life,” Ms. Soares said. “And we need to keep up the political pressure, so that justice has a chance.” Correction: December 15, 2007 An article on Wednesday about the abuse of women in Brazil’s prison system described incorrectly the origin of a study about the subject. It was a report to the Organization of American States by a group of private organizations in São Paulo that formed the Study and Working Group on Women in Prison that led to increasing public and government attention to the problem. It was not a study commissioned by the government. |
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| DontUWish | Dec 16 2007, 03:47 AM Post #111 |
Out of Dorm
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OMG, that story absolutely without a doubt wins the award. And it being the season for awards maybe we should give all sorts of other prison-related awards .... Worst Prison Abuse Story (Abzug's latest gets my vote) Worst Prison Reform Idea Jim Fenner Award for Bad Prison Guard/Management Nikki Wade Award for Greatest Miscarriage of Justice Helen Stewart Award for Best Prison Reform Idea Two Julies Award for Longest Sentence for the Smallest Offense |
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| abzug | Jan 14 2008, 03:45 PM Post #112 |
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In love with a prisoner
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This blog has some articles about a program where they give UK prisoners musical instruments as part of a rehabilitation program: http://prisonersvoice.blogspot.com/2008/01...g-sound-of.html It also looks like an interesting blog overall--the guy who writes it was in prison for 35 years, and now works as an advocate for prison reform. Pretty remarkable guy. |
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| Jeanna | Jan 15 2008, 01:52 AM Post #113 |
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I said SIT IN THAT CHAIR
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I thought this was interesting. I was watching a dvd of Oscar Wilde plays and it contained a documentary where the grand niece to Lord Alfred Douglas (and, therefore, granddaughter of the Marquis of Queensbury) felt so guilty growing up knowing her family had "destroyed Oscar Wilde" and sent him to prison (for his relationship with young Alfred) that she was driven to work with prisoners, esp. lifers, as a means of reparation. |
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H&N Music Vid by me and ekny Something To Talk About YouTube My BG Music Vids On YouTube My vids You Tube removed Click Here OR HERE BAM for Beginners BAM Channel | |
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| ekny | Feb 28 2008, 09:44 PM Post #114 |
In love with a prisoner
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Abzug sent this to me to post: -------------------- 2/28/08 1 in 100 U.S. Adults Behind Bars, New Study Says By ADAM LIPTAK NY Times For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars, according to a new report. Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million. Another 723,000 people are in local jails. The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars. Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34. The report, from the Pew Center on the States, also found that only one in 355 white women between the ages of 35 and 39 are behind bars but that one in 100 black women are. The report’s methodology differed from that used by the Justice Department, which calculates the incarceration rate by using the total population rather than the adult population as the denominator. Using the department’s methodology, about one in 130 Americans is behind bars. Either way, said Susan Urahn, the center’s managing director, “we aren’t really getting the return in public safety from this level of incarceration.” But Paul Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah and a former federal judge, said the Pew report considered only half of the cost-benefit equation and overlooked the “very tangible benefits — lower crime rates.” In the past 20 years, according the Federal Bureau of Investigation, violent crime rates fell by 25 percent, to 464 for every 100,000 people in 2007 from 612.5 in 1987. “While we certainly want to be smart about who we put into prisons,” Professor Cassell said, “it would be a mistake to think that we can release any significant number of prisoners without increasing crime rates. One out of every 100 adults is behind bars because one out of every 100 adults has committed a serious criminal offense.” Ms. Urahn said the nation cannot afford the incarceration rate documented in the report. “We tend to be a country in which incarceration is an easy response to crime,” she said. “Being tough on crime is an easy position to take, particularly if you have the money. And we did have the money in the ‘80s and ‘90s.” Now, with fewer resources available, the report said, “prison costs are blowing a hole in state budgets.” On average, states spend almost 7 percent on their budgets on corrections, trailing only healthcare, education and transportation. In 2007, according to the National Association of State Budgeting Officers, states spent $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections. That is up from $10.6 billion in 1987, a 127 increase once adjusted for inflation. With money from bonds and the federal government included, total state spending on corrections last year was $49 billion. By 2011, the report said, states are on track to spend an additional $25 billion. It cost an average of $23,876 dollars to imprison someone in 2005, the most recent year for which data were available. But state spending varies widely, from $45,000 a year in Rhode Island to $13,000 in Louisiana. The cost of medical care is growing by 10 percent annually, the report said, and will accelerate as the prison population ages. About one in nine state government employees works in corrections, and some states are finding it hard to fill those jobs. California spent more than $500 million on overtime alone in 2006. The number of prisoners in California dropped by 4,000 last year, making Texas’s prison system the nation’s largest, at about 172,000. But the Texas legislature last year approved broad changes to the corrections system there, including expansions of drug treatment programs and drug courts and revisions to parole practices. “Our violent offenders, we lock them up for a very long time — rapists, murderers, child molestors,” said John Whitmire, a Democratic state senator from Houston and the chairman of the state senate’s criminal justice committee. “The problem was that we weren’t smart about nonviolent offenders. The legislature finally caught up with the public.” He gave an example. “We have 5,500 D.W.I offenders in prison,” he said, including people caught driving under the influence who had not been in an accident. “They’re in the general population. As serious as drinking and driving is, we should segregate them and give them treatment.” The Pew report recommended diverting nonviolent offenders away from prison and using punishments short of reincarceration for minor or technical violations of probation or parole. It also urged states to consider earlier release of some prisoners. Before the recent changes in Texas, Mr. Whitmire said, “we were recycling nonviolent offenders.” |
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| abzug | Feb 29 2008, 04:27 AM Post #115 |
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In love with a prisoner
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Thanks e. No Helen and Nikki board from the office anymore--they've blocked it. But I thought that article was significant enough to be posted here right away. Can you imagine an elected official in Texas talking about alternatives to prison for non-violent offenders? Amazing. |
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| richard | Mar 8 2008, 09:46 PM Post #116 |
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Enhanced
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That is totally wierd, Abzug and makes me think that there is an unhealthy flow of ideas from the most reactionary elements in your country to the ideas floating round in our godawful leaders. There is a description of its politics as 'left of cente' and that is an offence angainst the English Language. It is trying to 'build its way' out of the overcrowding problem which is vividly described in this piece from the Howard League of Penal Reform website ................................................................................................................. There are currently over 80,000 men, women and children in prison in England and Wales, The prison population has been rising steadily since 1993, increasing from 42,000 to today's unprecedented levels. This means that there are now a higher percentage of people in prison here than in any other country in western Europe. The impact of overcrowding - Overcrowding means that over 12,000 prisoners are being held two to a cell designed for one. Many of these cells have unscreened toilets which fail to provide even the most basic of human dignity. In a desperate attempt to find empty beds, prisoners are being transported all over the country. In 2001, 37,000 prisoners were being held over 50 miles away from home, for 5,000 of these the distance was more than 150 miles. This cost the taxpayer millions of pounds in transportation costs and in delays to the criminal justice system as a result of late arrivals for court appearances. It also jeopardises family relationships and the chances of successful re-integration back into the community on release; tow of the most important factors in reducing re-offending. The huge prison population is undermining any good work the prison service is trying to do in terms of making the prison experience constructive for the majority prisoners. In 2001-2 the prison service failed to meet its own target of providing prisoners with at least 24 hours of purposeful activity for week. Only 3 out of 40 of the male local prisons (those holding predominantly remand and short sentence prisoners) which suffer the worst overcrowding, managed to meet this target. Prisons cost £2.2bn a year. With re-offending rates after release still at about 60% (and over 75% for young offenders) prison is an expensive failure, which has no impact on crime levels or the fear of crime. Copyright © 2006 the Howard League for Penal Reform. Charity no. 251926 Company limited by guarantee No. 898514 |
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| abzug | Apr 8 2008, 05:35 PM Post #117 |
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In love with a prisoner
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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/f...7477,full.story Rampant abuse is seen at O.C. jail The grand jury investigation probed the October 2006 beating death of John Chamberlain, an inmate at the Theo Lacy Jail in Orange. Jail guards regularly watched DVDs, slept, used cellphones and read books, according to grand jury testimony on the October 2006 fatal beating of inmate John Chamberlain. April 8, 2008 A grand jury transcript released Monday describes an Orange County jail in disarray, with deputies watching television, playing video games and taking naps while inmates were allowed to use brutality and intimidation to keep order in the cellblocks. The conclusions are contained in 7,000 pages of transcripts from a special criminal grand jury impaneled by Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas to investigate the 2006 death of an inmate at Theo Lacy Jail, as well as how the Orange County Sheriff's Department handled the incident. The Sheriff's Department tried to keep the grand jury's evidence secret. The Times and the Orange County Register went to court to have the transcripts made public. They show that then-Sheriff Michael S. Carona exercised his 5th Amendment rights rather than answer the panel's questions. The grand jury found that while one of the ranking guards at the jail in Orange exchanged personal cellphone text messages and watched the television show "Cops," a 41-year-old computer technician was stomped and beaten to death not far from the glass-walled guard station. Though the pummeling lasted up to 50 minutes, guards said they were unaware of it until it was over. While jail logs from that day said guards checked the cellblock where the beating occurred every 30 minutes, the grand jury concluded that the area had not been checked for five hours. The transcripts suggest that a mixture of systemic indolence and officially sanctioned inmate violence underpinned the death of the inmate, John Derek Chamberlain. "Inmates do run the jail system," Phillip Le, a deputy on duty at the jail that day, told the grand jury. "There is more inmates than deputies." Chamberlain was in custody on suspicion of possessing child pornography when inmates dragged him into Cubicle D and attacked him in successive waves, at times washing blood from the crime scene and their own clothes. Inmates believed, mistakenly, that he had been charged with molestation. He suffered 43 displaced rib fractures and was stripped, sodomized, spat on and urinated upon. During the attack, he screamed and pleaded for help. According to testimony, jail guard Kevin Taylor spent that time watching "Cops" and exchanged 22 personal text messages on his cellphone. It was not until an inmate stood in front of the guard station, waving his arms at the window, that deputies said they noticed something wrong. "The cumulative evidence often demonstrated that vigilance was the exception as opposed to the rule," according to a the report of the investigation prepared by Rackauckas. Four inmates told investigators that jail deputies falsely told inmates that Chamberlain had been charged with molestation, setting up the fatal attack. But Rackauckas said the inmates' story could not be corroborated independently. Nor was there enough evidence to charge sheriff's deputies and officials, even though several lied to the grand jury, he said. The district attorney's summary report also showed instances in which deputies tampered with and withheld evidence and interfered with the grand jury investigation. Rackauckas expressed doubt about a log entry at 2:30 p.m. on the day of Chamberlain's slaying, saying that the Mission Viejo man told deputies he was not in fear for his life. "That's probably not very believable, but we don't have any evidence to contradict it," he said in a statement. "We don't have proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the entry is a falsification." As part of its probe, the grand jury examined why the Sheriff's Department, then under the command of Carona, insisted on conducting the investigation into Chamberlain's death, despite a clear county policy that the task belonged to the district attorney's office. Despite the "thorough and complete" work of the grand jury, Rackauckas said, he still did not know who in the sheriff's chain of command determined that the agency would investigate. Carona refused to cooperate with the inquiry. Asked if he was the sheriff of Orange County the day Chamberlain died, Carona declined to answer that question as well. Prosecutors finally gave up and excused Carona. Conflicting evidence hampered the probe. A former sheriff's captain, Bob Blackburn, testified that Assistant Sheriff Steve Bishop told him that Carona had made the decision to break policy and let his own department investigate the killing, though Bishop denied this. The transcripts show that ranking sheriff's officials professed not to know or were hazy on the details of who made the decision not to hand the jail death investigation over to the district attorney. Bishop, who supervised investigations, and then-Undersheriff Jo Ann Galisky, who supervised jail operations, told the grand jury that they were unaware of cases in which the district attorney conducted a criminal investigation of an in-custody homicide, even though their own department had informed them otherwise. The district attorney's office, in fact, had investigated 129 prior inmate deaths. Galisky said she had a conversation with Carona about which agency should handle Chamberlain's slaying, but "he never told me how it should be handled." During her testimony she conceded having altered a memo from a lieutenant that outlined the policy for custodial deaths to say that the Sheriff's Department was the lead investigative agency in such cases. The memo had been provided to an earlier grand jury. Both Galisky and Bishop were forced out of their jobs in January, shortly after Acting Sheriff Jack Anderson was briefed by the grand jury. Assistant Chief Charles Lee Walters, in charge of overseeing the county's jail operations, professed ignorance of the district attorney's long record of handling inmate deaths. After lengthy testimony in which Walters appeared to have few specific answers to questions about jail practices, a prosecutor told him, "You don't seem to have any passion about your job." Sheriff's Sgt. Yvonne Shull testified that she made the initial decision to have the Sheriff's Department assume the lead role in the investigation. Along with their troubling glimpse of the sheriff's hierarchy, the transcripts offered a rare look into a jailhouse's inner workings. Le, one of the officers on duty during the beating, said inmate "shot-callers" would enforce jail rules with beatings, called "taxations," and receive special privileges in return. He said guard Kevin Taylor, who was accused by inmates of instigating the attack on Chamberlain by telling inmates that he was a child molester, would tell shot-callers about certain inmates flouting policy. He said Taylor was aware the shot-callers would use violence to keep other inmates in line. Le was the first one to notice Chamberlain's wounds. He said he was alerted by an inmate standing on a table waving his arms. Asked why Taylor would not notice this himself, Le responded, "I am assuming Deputy Taylor's focus was on the TV, sir." Another guard, Sonja Moreno, said Taylor told her he had been watching "Cops" when the attack occurred. Jason Chapluk, another guard, said that after the incident he talked by phone with Carona, who was in Europe. "He said something along the lines of 'Hey, nobody knows what it's like to have people writing bad stuff about you in the newspaper more than me. Don't worry about it. We're supporting you. Just hang tough in there,' " Chapluk testified. The grand jury transcripts were released two weeks after Superior Court Judge James A. Stotler found that the Sheriff's Department had no legal standing to keep them secret. The Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register argued for full access to the grand jury transcripts, pointing to the California law that requires their release after indictments are returned, unless they jeopardize defendants' rights to a fair trial. The Sheriff's Department argued they should be kept under seal until sheriff's officials could review the transcripts, on the grounds that they might contain "highly confidential" information about deputies, witnesses or inmates. The county this year agreed to pay $600,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by Chamberlain's father. Nine inmates were ultimately charged in the death, and all have pleaded not guilty. No charges have been filed against sheriff's personnel, and all of the guards remain employed as deputies. Chamberlain's death marked the first slaying in an Orange County jail since 1994. Anderson, who took over after Carona was indicted in an unrelated criminal case, has promised greater transparency. At times, Sheriff's Department brass appeared out of touch with the realities within the county's own jails. Brian Wilkerson, a captain who oversees Theo Lacy Jail, said in testimony that he was surprised and disappointed to hear that deputies acknowledged using shot-callers to control the inmate population, used cellphones to conduct personal text-message conversations while on duty and recorded log entries saying that their barracks were secure without walking the floor. "You have a very different view of Theo Lacy Jail than what has been presented to this grand jury," one grand jury member responded to the captain. "You may want to spend more time there." |
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| abzug | Apr 23 2008, 04:29 PM Post #118 |
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In love with a prisoner
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Fascinating article about how US prison sentences and imprisonment rates are wildly higher than any other western countries in the world. It will make all the UK folks on this board feel quite superior, and rightly so. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/us/23prison.html April 23, 2008 American Exception Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’ By ADAM LIPTAK 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 Q. 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 H. 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. “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, Mr. 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 Ms. 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 B. 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 Mr. 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,” Mr. 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,” Mr. 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,” Mr. 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,” Mr. 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 Mr. 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 G. 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,” Mr. 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,” Mr. 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. Mr. 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.” |
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| Just Another Mad Bad Fan | Apr 25 2008, 10:16 PM Post #119 |
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This story has been all over the news today in various forms - along with the suggestion of potential strike action by prison officers unhappy with their lot and increased overcrowding, as the prison population in England & Wales reached a new all-time high of 82,319 inmates. 'Prisoners love the cushy life' ITN - Friday, April 25 03:59 pm Prisons have become so comfortable that inmates no longer want to escape, according to a senior prison officer. Glyn Travis, assistant general secretary of the Prison Officers' Association, claimed criminals enjoyed cooked breakfasts in bed, television sets and games consoles in their rooms as well as access to mobile phones and cheap drugs. Mr Travis said there were even attempts to smuggle prostitutes into some of Britain's open prisons. Dealers have been breaking into one jail in Yorkshire by climbing over its fence to deliver drugs and phones to inmates, he said. His shock comments come as new figures reveal record numbers of prisoners are crowding into the country's jails. Latest statistics released by the Prison Service show there are 82,319 inmates in England and Wales, nearly 140 more than the previous record set in February. The number of inmates has rocketed by nearly 600 in just three weeks - the equivalent of an average-sized jail.The total included 12 inmates being held in police stations as part of emergency measures to deal with overcrowding, known as Operation Safeguard. Mr Travis appeared to accept that prison officers had lost control of jails, admitting that there were "no-go areas" in some institutions where inmates have "complete control". Asked whether it was the case that "prison officers are not in control of our prisons, prisoners can do pretty much what they like - including escape - but they don't want to escape because life is so cushy", Mr Travis replied: "Unfortunately, you have summed that up pretty much accurately." He added: "We have got a serious crisis in our prisons today, but unfortunately prisons are not a vote-winner, so we are a soft target for the Government to force its fiscal policy on public servants." Mr Travis cited a security breach at the low-security category C Everthorpe Prison near Brough, in East Yorkshire, where ladders were used to scale the fence and deliver drugs and phones to inmates. "These were prisoners who have a history of escaping from lawful custody, and the prisoners did not take the opportunity or plan to escape because, we believe, life is so cushy in the prison system," he said. "If members of the public can put ladders up against fences during night-time, then they can do it during daytime, and at that time it can become quite easy for any prisoner to escape lawful custody. "Throughout the day, prisoners will have access to the grounds, where they will be walking round unsupervised and if they had wanted to leave custody, they could have quite easily done so." He added: "It's no good simply appeasing prisoners by giving them a choice of menu on a regular basis so they lead a cushy life in prison and don't escape." Mr Travis denied his claims were simply intended to put pressure on the Government to increase staffing levels. "We are after a safe and secure system that the public can have confidence in," he said. "It is not anything to do with a political statement. What we are saying is that the public deserve to have safe and secure prisons." A Ministry of Justice spokesman defended the conditions in prisons, saying "harsh" regimes would not lead to a reduction in reoffending. He said prisoners who misbehaved could have their TV access taken away and those who had sets in their cells paid £1 a week to rent them. He said the average wage for a prisoner was under £10 a week. "All prisoners are provided with a breakfast pack each evening which they eat in their cells in the morning," said the spokesman. "If a cooked breakfast is provided, prisoners have to collect it from the wing servery and take it back to eat in their cells. "The punishment of the court is loss of liberty - harsh regimes do not lead to rehabilitation or a reduction in re-offending. "The comments by POA undermine the excellent work done by prison officers - their own members. "It is simply not true that there are areas of prisons that are no-go areas for staff. "Prisoners do try to escape, but the Prison Service has an excellent record in preventing such escapes. "The POA's description of prisons is out of touch with reality. "Prisons have fundamentally been stable for over ten years - this is an excellent record which all staff should be proud of." |
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| richard | May 3 2008, 10:33 AM Post #120 |
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I cribbed this from the Howard League of Penal Reform which shows a total contrast. 'Rates of self injury have rocketed by 40% in the last 5 years, accelerating well beyond what would be expected by the ever rising prison population in England and Wales. Figures show that, in 2003 there were 16,393 incidents of self injury in prison. In 2007, there were 22,459 incidents. The rise of 37% is almost four times the rise in the prison population for the same period which was just over 9.5%. In 2003, the average number of men, women and children was 73,000. By 2007, the average population for the whole year was around 80,000. Self injury rates amongst women in prison have risen even further with a 48% rise in recorded incidents between 2003 and 2007. In Styal prison, self injury rates amongst the female prisoners has leapt from 376 to 1,324 in the past 5 years." This article from the 'Independent" shows another interesting aside. The reference to calls for possible POA industrial action over pay parallels the 1 day strike action by teachers, college lecturers and civil servants in the UK (of which I'm one) ....................................................................................................................... "More than 1,000 staff at six prisons have walked out in protest after two colleagues were suspended, the Prison Officers' Association said today. The walkout, which centres around a dispute at Lindholme, is thought to have spread from Everthorpe and Moorland prisons to three more jails in Yorkshire. POA national vice chairman Steve Gough said staff at New Hall, Wakefield and Hull prisons had now walked out in protest. Leaders of the POA said they were concerned that the Government had "engineered" the dispute in a bid to justify recent legal moves to prevent prison officers taking industrial action. A union spokesman said managers at Lindholme Prison were fully aware of the depth of feelings among staff due to the suspension and threats of dismissals of prison officers. "They knew that if they lit the touch paper, there was every likelihood that staff would react," said an official. Leaders of the union said they wanted to make clear they had not encouraged POA members to walk out but said they were "disgusted" at the threats against the staff. "It is morally wrong that individuals should be used as scapegoats to justify the Government's action in reintroducing anti-trades union legislation. "To threaten staff with summary dismissal when the leaders of its union are seeking a resolution through negotiations is disgraceful." The POA said officials were returning from attending conferences outside the UK in a bid to resolve the dispute. The action comes ahead of next week's annual conference of the POA at which there will be calls for industrial action over pay." |
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