Released After Decades of Incarceration, Elders of Color Have No Safety Net

 

 This article originally appeared at New America Media, and is reprinted here with their permission.

After devoting over 20 years as a prison social worker, Fordham University researcher Tina Maschi, PhD, declared, “There’s something wrong with society when in some ways staying in prison is better than getting out. The people who are older have a much greater struggle, because they have special needs that a younger population doesn’t.”

Current efforts to release prisoners from the nation’s overcrowded and increasingly costly prisons, such as U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s new initiative to let out more nonviolent federal inmates, barely touching on the needs of older inmates, which Maschi and other researchers say will be more likely to be paroled because of their high health care costs and low recidivism rates.

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Sentenced to a Slow Death

If this were happening in any other country, Americans would be aghast. A sentence of life in prison, without the possibility of parole, for trying to sell $10 of marijuana to an undercover officer? For sharing LSD at a Grateful Dead concert? For siphoning gas from a truck? The punishment is so extreme, so irrational, so wildly disproportionate to the crime that it defies explanation.

And yet this is happening every day in federal and state courts across the United States. Judges, bound by mandatory sentencing laws that they openly denounce, are sending people away for the rest of their lives for committing nonviolent drug and property crimes. In nearly 20 percent of cases, it was the person’s first offense. 

As of 2012, there were 3,278 prisoners serving sentences of life without parole for such crimes, according to an extensive and astonishing report issued Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union. And that number is conservative. It doesn’t include inmates serving sentences of, say, 350 years for a series of nonviolent drug sales. Nor does it include those in prison for crimes legally classified as “violent” even though they did not involve actual violence, like failing to report to a halfway house or trying to steal an unoccupied car.

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This is a New York Times editorial.  Tom

Prisoners Denied Medical Care, Told To Pray Instead

A year after a lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union alleging grave medical neglect of prisoners by Arizona’s private prison health care providers, prisoners have continued to die or endure unnecessary suffering after lack of basic treatment. After asking for medical assistance, many prisoners were told to “be patient” or “pray,” according to a new report. In a particularly tragic case, a man with lung cancer, Ferdinand Dix, issued multiple requests for medical treatment. Instead of receiving proper attention, Dix was told to drink energy drinks. The cancer ultimately moved to the rest of his body, severely impacting his liver and lymph nodes, and resulting in Dix’s death.

The new report by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) issued this month found that medical neglect included “delays and denials of care, lack of timely emergency treatment, failure to provide medication and medical devices, low staffing levels, failure to provide care and protection from infectious disease, denial of specialty care and referrals, and insufficient mental health
 treatment.”

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Chess Grandmaster Takes On 10 Jail Inmates Blindfolded, And Wins

A chess grandmaster, ranked 3rd in the U.S., put his skill at playing blindfolded to the test Friday at the Cook County Jail, beating ten inmates in two hours, without ever seeing any of the chess boards.
WBBM Newsradio’s Mike Krauser reports Timur Gareev visited the jail as part of a program aimed at helping inmates think things through, and be more thoughtful about their actions.

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, who started the program last year, said the goal is to direct inmates away from their predilection toward seeking out instant gratification, and urge them to think before they act. He said chess teaches people patience and strategy, and acting impulsively will be devastating.

Gareev played against 10 inmates on 10 different chess boards on Friday, with a black bandana covering his eyes. He visualized each game as moves were called out loud, letting him know each of his opponents move as they made them. Still, he couldn’t exactly keep track of every single piece on each board throughout each game.

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California Prisoners End Hunger Strike Against 'Systemic State Sanctioned Torture'

'Peaceful Protest of Resistance' against solitary confinement to continue, they vow

 California inmates ended on Thursday their over two-month hunger strike in "nonviolent peaceful protest of . . . decades of indefinite state-sanctioned torture, via long term solitary confinement."

The historic strike began at the Security Housing Unit (SHU) in Pelican Bay State Prison but quickly spread to other prisons across the state, and included as many as 30,000 inmates at one point.

In a statement, representatives of the hunger strikers said that they "deemed it to be in the best interest of our cause to suspend our hunger strike action until further notice."

In addition to the human rights violations from long-term solitary confinement, California prison officials were slammed by human rights advocates for getting a green light to force-feed prisoners during the hunger strike, which stands in violation of international laws.

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Locking Up Millions of Americans Isn't Just About Punishing the Underclass, It's About Raking in the Dough

The murder of a teenage boy by an armed vigilante, George Zimmerman, is only one crime set within a legal and penal system that has criminalized poverty.

Debbie Bourne, 45, was at her apartment in the Liberty Village housing projects in Plainfield, N.J., on the afternoon of April 30 when police banged on the door and pushed their way inside. The officers ordered her, her daughter, 14, and her son, 22, who suffers from autism, to sit down and not move and then began ransacking the home. Bourne’s husband, from whom she was estranged and who was in the process of moving out, was the target of the police, who suspected him of dealing cocaine. As it turned out, the raid would cast a deep shadow over the lives of three innocents—Bourne and her children.

The murder of a teenage boy by an armed vigilante, George Zimmerman, is only one crime set within a legal and penal system that has criminalized poverty. Poor people, especially those of color, are worth nothing to corporations and private contractors if they are on the street. In jails and prisons, however, they each can generate corporate revenues of $30,000 to $40,000 a year. This use of the bodies of the poor to make money for corporations fuels the system of neoslavery that defines our prison system.

Prisoners often work inside jails and prisons for nothing or at most earn a dollar an hour. The court system has been gutted to deny the poor adequate legal representation. Draconian drug laws send nonviolent offenders to jail for staggering periods of time. Our prisons routinely use solitary confinement, forms of humiliation and physical abuse to keep prisoners broken and compliant, methods that international human rights organizations have long defined as torture. Individuals and corporations that profit from prisons in the United States perpetuate a form of neoslavery. The ongoing  hunger strike by inmates in the California prison system is a slave revolt, one that we must encourage and support. The fate of the poor under our corporate state will, if we remain indifferent and passive, become our own fate. This is why on Wednesday I will join prison rights activists, including  Cornel West and Michael Moore, in a one-day fast in solidarity with the hunger strike in the California prison system.

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California Prison's 'Pay-To-Stay' Option Offers 'Quieter' Rooms For $155 A Day

Some prisoners at one California jail will now have the option to pay their way into a more comfortable stay, community news source the Argus reports.

The Fremont Police Department is now offering its inmates a "pay to stay" option. For a one-time fee of $45 plus $155 a night, prisoners serving short sentences on lesser charges can stay in a smaller facility while avoiding county jails.

"It's still a jail; there's no special treatment," Lt. Mark Devine, a Fremont police official who oversees the program, told Chris De Benedetti of the Argus. "They get the same cot, blanket and food as anybody in the county jail, except that our jail is smaller, quieter and away from the county jail population."

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Climbing Out of the Hole

Do you remember where you were standing at this moment five years ago? Ten years? Twenty? Seventy-eight men in Northern California do.

They have been held in solitary confinement for at least 20 years, each in his own 8-by-10-foot windowless cell at the Pelican Bay supermax prison, with about a thousand others — half of whom have been there for more than a decade. They are allowed only about an hour of “recreation” each day, often in shackles, in a cement enclosure not much larger than their cell. 

Even among inmates accustomed to severe across-the-board restrictions of their liberties, there is a breaking point. This month, as many as 30,000 prisoners in California, most of whom are not in solitary confinement, went on hunger strikes to protest its mass use. 

In truth, that breaking point was passed long ago. Every day, it seems, there is another news story, psychological study or official report demonstrating the severe damage caused by long-term solitary confinement. 

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This is a NYTimes editorial.  Tom

When Prisoners Protest

THERE aren’t many protests in prison. In a world where authorities exercise absolute power and demand abject obedience, prisoners are almost always going to be on the losing side, and they know it.

The typical inmate doesn’t want trouble. He has little to gain and too much to lose: his job, his visits, his recreation time, his phone privileges, his right to buy tuna, ramen and stale bread at inflated prices in the commissary. The ways even a bystander to the most peaceful protest can be punished are limited only by the imagination of the authorities. Besides, logistics are difficult: men from cellblock X can’t just stroll down to see the inmates in cellblock Y. Strategizing must be done furtively, usually through intermediaries, any one of whom might snitch. 

And yet, sometimes things get so bad that prisoners feel compelled to protest, with work stoppages, riots or hunger strikes. On July 8, some 30,000 inmates in the custody of the California Department of Corrections went on a hunger strike to demand improvements in prison conditions. Their biggest complaint was the runaway use of solitary confinement, the fact that thousands of prisoners are consigned to this cruelty indefinitely, some for decades.

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Solidarity From the Outside as Calif. Prisoners Face Retaliation On the Inside

As over 12,000 prisoners continue their hunger strike at prisons across California, supporters gear up for a state-wide rally at the 'maximum security' Corcoran State Prison Saturday to stand with those on the inside who are putting their bodies on the line.

Prisoners at two thirds of California's 33 prisons are going without food to demand an end to the 'state-sanctioned torture' that plagues the California prison system, including long-term solitary confinement spanning decades.

"This moment is historic in the ability of comunities inside prison to work with communities outside of prison towards common goals," Isaac Ontiveros of the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition—which includes scores of prisoner advocacy and prison abolition groups, loved ones, and civil rights lawyers—told Common Dreams.

"[The mobilization] is really profound. It pushes forward the spirit of humanity prisons are meant to crush and opens a wide range of possibilities in which winning the demands of hunger strikers is something we can do together," he adds

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Ontario ombudsman says jail staff committing ‘brazen acts of violence’

Some prison guards in Ontario beat convicts, then lie about their injuries, scare them into silence and force their colleagues to do the same, says the province’s ombudsman in a damning report on jailhouse violence.

André Marin’s report includes photos of inmates, their eyes swollen shut, their faces covered in blood, and the stories of the prison guards who tried to get away with the attacks.

“Punching, slapping, kicking, stomping on someone who is under control, under restraints, is inexcusable and morally repugnant,” Marin said at a news conference Tuesday.

“Regardless of why they are incarcerated, inmates are human beings and they deserve respect, dignity and humane treatment.”

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Photos: Doing Time on a Southern Prison Farm

In the summer of 1964, Bruce Jackson—then a junior fellow at Harvard—arrived in Texas to record work songs on several state prison farms. He was researching the music and folk culture of incarcerated men, a project that had earlier steered him to Indiana State Prison and Missouri Penitentiary. Landing in Texas was essentially dumb luck; Jackson had family there, and knew that the Lone Star State claimed many of the country's harshest prison farms.

Besides audio equipment, he also brought a 35mm Nikon with which he intended to create a visual diary of the inmates he met. Fifteen years and thousands of photos later, the diary had become more like an encyclopedia—portions of which you can now read.

In his new book, Inside the Wire: Photographs From Texas and Arkansas Prisons, Jackson documents a society and economy whose roots were entwined with the antebellum South. Many prison farms were converted slave plantations that still bore the family name of long-buried landowners: Ellis, Ramsey, Cummins, Wynne. Sprawling across thousands of acres, these were agricultural purgatories where prisoners harvested much of their own food, spun cotton into clothes, and staged annual rodeos for the amusement of each other and the locals, all while living under the long shadow of death row. (The state prison system's psychiatric unit, Jester IV, is located on the site of a former prison farm called Harlem Plantation, but that's another story.)

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TV, gym, DVDs (and no 18-plus films)... prisoners will have to 'earn privileges' in jails as Government cracks down on lax regime

Prisoners will no longer have the automatic right to a television in their cell and could be barred from going to the gym, wearing their own clothes and watching DVDs unless they are prepared to work, the Justice Secretary Chris Grayling will announce today.


As part of a part of a package of measures to appease right-wing complaints that prisons are too lax inmates will be made to “earn privileges” that are currently automatic.

This will include an expectation that inmates will no longer be able to turn down prison work without consequences while perks such as pay TV will end altogether.

However prison reformers criticised the plans as “punishing people for an idleness that prisons encourage” and said it was “bizarre” to be introducing new layers of red tape which would add to the cost of prison and demands on staff time.

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Still too many prisoners in California

Gov. Jerry Brown is fighting the courts, but he should be trying harder to curb inmate overcrowding.

Federal judges rejected Gov. Brown's request that they return control of California's still-overcrowded prison system to the state. Above: Inmates are seen at California State Prison-Lancaster in 2010. (Los Angeles Times / June 10, 20)

It may come as a disappointment to Gov. Jerry Brown — but it certainly should not come as a surprise — that a panel of federal judges rejected his request that they return control of California's still-overcrowded prison system to the state. The network of 33 state prisons continues to hold more than 9,000 inmates beyond the court's mandated cap, and Brown's administration has not presented a realistic plan to eliminate that excess, even though the court has extended the deadline for compliance from June 30 to the end of the year.

Brown is vowing to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, and more power to him. He argues that medical and mental health care provided in California's prisons, recently so abysmal as to be deemed cruel and unusual punishment, is now the nation's best, and perhaps he is right. But even so, the courts can be expected to retain jurisdiction until the target inmate population is reached, and until the justices are assured that new standards of care in the prisons are a permanent part of the institutional
culture and not merely a short break after decades of unconscionable inmate treatment.

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This is from an LA Times editorial.  Tom

 

Florida Lays Off State Workers After Outsourcing Prisoners’ Health Care To A Private Company

Now that Florida’s Department of Corrections has auctioned off the job of providing state inmates with health services to the highest-bidding companies, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) is moving ahead with his controversial plan to privatize prisoners’ health care. Since Florida is now locked into a contract with Corizon Healthcare of Nashville, and plans to sign a second contract with Pittsburgh-based Wexford Health Sources, Gov. Scott’s administration has already begun to lay off nearly two thousand state workers whose jobs have now become obsolete.
As the Miami Herald reports, nearly 2,000 state workers are beginning to receive notices that their jobs are ending, as part of the nation’s biggest push to outsource prisoners’ health care to private companies:

“Due to the outsourcing of this function, your position will be deleted,” reads a dryly worded dismissal notice from the Department of Corrections, sent to 1,890 state employees in the past two weeks. [...]
In the dismissal letters, prison officials emphasize that dismissed workers will get first consideration for new jobs at one of the two for-profit vendors, though with fewer benefits. The workers also expect to pay more out of their pockets for their own health insurance.
Many make less than $35,000 a year, have not had a raise in six years and live in economically distressed areas home to many state prisons, including Bradford, Dixie, Levy, Suwannee and Union counties.

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Rae calls for public inquiry into Ashley Smith’s prison death

Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae is calling for a public inquiry to get to the root of the tragedy that befell Ashley Smith, the troubled teen who choked to death in her prison cell as guards stood watch.
And he wants the inquiry to go beyond the particulars of Ms. Smith’s death to expose the general inability of the prison system to cope with mentally ill offenders.

Mr. Rae made the call Thursday after concluding the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper won’t on its own reveal everything it knows about the Smith case.

He expressed frustration that the Conservative government has not responded to his repeated questions as to whether more videos exist documenting the mistreatment of Ms. Smith and other mentally ill offenders.

Since the release last week of two disturbing videos showing Ms. Smith being restrained with duct tape and injected with powerful anti-psychotic drugs against her will, the government has said it has ordered corrections officials to co-operate fully with a coroner’s inquest into Ms. Smith’s death.

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Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America's Prisons.

We throw thousands of men in the hole for the books they read, the company they keep, the beliefs they hold. Here's why.

IT'S BEEN SEVEN MONTHS since I've been inside a prison cell. Now I'm back, sort of. The experience is eerily like my dreams, where I am a prisoner in another man's cell. Like the cell I go back to in my sleep, this one is built for solitary confinement. I'm taking intermittent, heaving breaths, like I can't get enough air. This still happens to me from time to time, especially in tight spaces. At a little over 11 by 7 feet, this cell is smaller than any I've ever inhabited. You can't pace in it.

Like in my dreams, I case the space for the means of staying sane. Is there a TV to watch, a book to read, a round object to toss? The pathetic artifacts of this inmate's life remind me of objects that were once everything to me: a stack of books, a handmade chessboard, a few scattered pieces of artwork taped to the concrete, a family photo, large manila envelopes full of letters. I know that these things are his world.

"So when you're in Iran and in solitary confinement," asks my guide, Lieutenant Chris Acosta, "was it different?" His tone makes clear that he believes an Iranian prison to be a bad place.
He's right about that. After being apprehended on the Iran-Iraq border, Sarah Shourd, Josh Fattal, and I were held in Evin Prison's isolation ward for political prisoners. Sarah remained there for 13 months, Josh and I for 26 months. We were held incommunicado. We never knew when, or if, we would get out. We didn't go to trial for two years. When we did we had no way to speak to a lawyer and no means of contesting the charges against us, which included espionage. The alleged evidence the court held was "confidential."

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Follow this link,  Life in the Hole: Inside a Solitary Cell, for an interactive tour of a Solitary Cell.  Tom

 

What Happens When the Amish Go to Prison?

Do they have to shave and wear orange jumpsuits?

Sixteen members of a breakaway Amish sect were convicted of hate crimes in Ohio on Thursday. The jury found them guilty of violently shaving the hair and beards of disfavored members of the community, and they now face up to 20 years in prison. How do American prisons accommodate the old-fashioned religious practices of Amish people?

They don’t, for the most part. State and federal prison systems don’t have special regulations for the tiny number of Amish serving extended sentences, many of them for sex offenses. The Amish reject most modern technology and dress. In prison, however, their cells have electric lighting and climate control, they wear orange jumpsuits, and they are transported between the prison and the courthouse in vans, just like other inmates. Prison administrators generally require prisoners to keep their beards trimmed, but wardens sometimes allow exceptions for religious reasons.

U.S. prisons are required to accommodate religious beliefs under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, but inmates’ religious freedoms are tempered by security and cost concerns. Striking this balance has proven challenging for judges. In the case of facial hair, for example, courts have struck down outright beard bans, but agreed with wardens that excessively long or unkempt facial hair prevents guards from quickly identifying inmates. Prisoners who require special meals have also met with mixed responses. An inmate can demand a halal meal, but it is often just the prison’s vegetarian meal, because the facility refuses to pay the added expense of halal butchering.

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The Affordable Care Act: Implications for Public Safety and Corrections Populations

Many people in correctional institutions have faced barriers obtaining needed health and behavioral health care services in the community either prior to their incarceration or upon reentry following
incarceration. One-third to three-quarters of men booked into jails in ten major cities in 2010 were not covered by any type of health insurance.1 This is largely because of high rates of unemployment and narrow Medicaid eligibility criteria. Unemployment limits access to employer-based health plans and the ability to purchase private insurance or pay health costs out-of-pocket. Additionally, people who have been incarcerated face enduring barriers to employment both because of legal barriers and
the stigma associated with having a felony conviction. Consequently, they also face enduring challenges obtaining employer-based health insurance.2, 3 Medicaid is an alternative for some individuals, but only for those who meet income requirements and who are also either pregnant, have dependent children, or are severely disabled.4

The Affordable Care Act

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) signed into law by the President in 2011 potentially can aid individuals who are at risk for incarceration and those who have been incarcerated through provisions that allow states to expand eligibility for Medicaid. The ACA creates new mechanisms for uninsured people to obtain coverage for physical and behavioral health care. First, by 2014 each state must have a health insurance exchange that will act as a regulated health insurance marketplace whereby
uninsured individuals with incomes between 133% and 400% of the federal poverty limit can purchase coverage. Individuals will receive tax credits on a sliding scale to offset the cost of this coverage.5

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Too Many Prisoners

The Justice Department in its recent annual report on federal sentencing issues wisely acknowledged that public safety can be maximized without maximizing prison spending. As it noted, the growing federal prison population, now more than 218,000 inmates, and a prison budget of almost $6.2 billion are “incompatible with a balanced crime policy and are unsustainable.” 

The department calls for reforms “to make our public safety expenditures smarter and more productive.” Yet it fails to address sentencing changes that should be made, which would significantly reduce the problem of overincarceration in federal prisons. 

Last fall, the United States Sentencing Commission issued a comprehensive report that said mandatory minimum sentences are often “excessively severe,” especially for people convicted of drug-trafficking offenses, who make up more than 75 percent of those given such sentences. Mandatory minimums have contributed in the last 20 years to the near tripling of federal prisoners, with more than half the prisoners now in for drug crimes. 

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This is a New York Times editorial.  Tom