more on prison in cali

December 21, 2006

Former Calif. Prisons Chiefs Testify

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 12:00 a.m. ET

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Two former state prisons chiefs who resigned in quick succession this year told a federal judge Wednesday the political sway the prison guards’ union held over Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger drove them from office.

Roderick Hickman, who quit the post in February after little more than two years on the job, and his successor, Jeanne Woodford, who resigned in July, testified at a hearing called by U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson as part of his ongoing oversight of state prison reform.

”The political environment in California is overly influenced by well financed special interests that disallow policy makers to make good policy because they’re concerned about their political futures,” Hickman testified. He said the California Correctional Peace Officers Association was foremost among those interest groups.

Woodford testified that the union appeared to have vetting rights over her appointments of subordinates, and said union officials were meeting secretly with the governor’s staff. She said she resigned after a meeting with Schwarzenegger during which he seemed to sideline prison reform proposals she had made over concerns they might have on his re-election campaign.

The governor’s office has repeatedly denied bowing to the influential prison guards union. Adam Mendelsohn, a spokesman for the governor, declined to comment on Woodford’s depiction of her meeting with the governor.

Schwarzenegger was re-elected last month. The prison guards union did not endorse him.

Lance Corcoran, the union’s chief of governmental affairs, said it has never had vetting authority over postings and called the former chiefs’ testimony ”absolutely ridiculous.”

Meanwhile, attorneys said Wednesday that a federal judge bypassed state law and ordered pay raises for hundreds of mental health workers in California prisons to try to fill vacancies and improve care for mentally ill inmates.

The order, issued in Sacramento Friday by U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton, was made public Wednesday by attorneys representing mentally ill inmates.

The increases will cost state taxpayers about $56 million a year, according to the state Department of Finance.

A bulging prison population has left the mental health caseload about 15 percent over capacity, court-appointed special master Michael Keating said in a recommendation filed with the court last week.

He said higher wages were needed to fill hundreds of vacancies.

The new salary schedule affects 19 classes of state employees and takes effect next year.

The order comes as Schwarzenegger prepares to outline a broad prison reform

luis rodriguez final papers update

I need some help with these papers

what i want you to do is resubmit them to may email address  so that i can open and read them.  

Ben Basque your file will not open at all

some of you are not there and i dont know if it is a mistake

Everyone deserves to get the best they can so i want these papers re submitted  thanks  

forget what i just told you and read below

in an interesting turn of policy i just found out that the password i use to enter cate and your grades is not necessarily the same one i need to use to look at your papers

ie  one is case sensitive and the other is not as if your gradebook was less important than your papers  go figure

No luis rodriguez will be read to day since i have a oral exam tomorrow on a book and must prepare   

luis rodriguez final papers etc

No one will be penalized so dont start it-

i cannot access my assignments page and i cannot figure out how to change this situation.

SO  please re send your luis rodriguez papers – the final ones to MY EMAIL ADDRESS and put  Final Luis in the header so i can keep them all together.

any other papers that are ungraded and posted to CATE must also be sent to my email address i suppose since i have no way to get into the system at the moment   j

the body of the condemned >>>

Torture Is Now Part of the American Soul

By George Monbiot, The Guardian
Posted on December 18, 2006, Printed on December 18, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/45613/

After thousands of years of practice, you might have imagined that every possible means of inflicting pain had already been devised. But you should never underestimate the human capacity for invention. United States interrogators, we now discover, have found a new way of destroying a human being.

In early December, defense lawyers acting for Jose Padilla, a US citizen detained as an “enemy combatant,” released a video showing a mission fraught with deadly risk — taking him to the prison dentist. A group of masked guards in riot gear shackled his legs and hands, blindfolded him with black-out goggles and shut off his hearing with headphones, then marched him down the prison corridor.

Is Padilla really that dangerous? Far from it: his warders describe him as so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for “a piece of furniture.” The purpose of these measures appeared to be to sustain the regime under which he had lived for over three years: total sensory deprivation. He had been kept in a blacked-out cell, unable to see or hear anything beyond it. Most importantly, he had no human contact, except for being bounced off the walls from time to time by his interrogators. As a result, he appears to have lost his mind. I don’t mean this metaphorically. I mean that his mind is no longer there.

The forensic psychiatrist who examined him says that he “does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation.” Jose Padilla appears to have been lobotomised: not medically, but socially.

If this was an attempt to extract information, it was ineffective: the authorities held him without charge for three and half years. Then, threatened by a supreme court ruling, they suddenly dropped their claims that he was trying to detonate a dirty bomb. They have now charged him with some vague and lesser offences to do with support for terrorism.

He is unlikely to be the only person subjected to this regime. Another “enemy combatant,” Ali al-Marri, claims to have been subject to the same total isolation and sensory deprivation, in the same naval prison in South Carolina. God knows what is being done to people who have disappeared into the CIA’s foreign oubliettes.

That the US tortures, routinely and systematically, while prosecuting its “war on terror” can no longer be seriously disputed. The Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project (DAA), a coalition of academics and human rights groups, has documented the abuse or killing of 460 inmates of US military prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay. This, it says, is necessarily a conservative figure: many cases will remain unrecorded. The prisoners were beaten, raped, forced to abuse themselves, forced to maintain “stress positions,” and subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation and mock executions.

The New York Times reports that prisoners held by the US military at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan were made to stand for up to 13 days with their hands chained to the ceiling, naked, hooded and unable to sleep. The Washington Post alleges that prisoners at the same airbase were “commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep” while kept, like Jose Padilla and the arrivals at Guantanamo Bay, “in black hoods or spray-painted goggles.”

Alfred McCoy, professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argues that the photographs released from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq reflect standard CIA torture techniques: “stress positions, sensory deprivation, and sexual humiliation.” The famous picture of the hooded man standing on a box, with wires attached to his fingers, shows two of these techniques being used at once. Unable to see, he has no idea how much time has passed or what might be coming next. He stands in a classic stress position — maintained for several hours, it causes excruciating pain. He appears to have been told that if he drops his arms he will be electrocuted. What went wrong at Abu Ghraib is that someone took photos. Everything else was done by the book.

Neither the military nor the civilian authorities have broken much sweat in investigating these crimes. A few very small fish have been imprisoned; a few others have been fined or reduced in rank; in most cases the authorities have either failed to investigate or failed to prosecute. The DAA points out that no officer has yet been held to account for torture practised by his subordinates. US torturers appear to enjoy impunity, until they are stupid enough to take pictures of each other.

But Padilla’s treatment also reflects another glorious American tradition: solitary confinement. Some 25,000 US prisoners are currently held in isolation — a punishment only rarely used in other democracies. In some places, like the federal prison in Florence, Colorado, they are kept in sound-proofed cells and might scarcely see another human being for years on end. They may touch or be touched by no one. Some people have been kept in solitary confinement in the United States for more than 20 years.

At Pelican Bay in California, where 1,200 people are held in the isolation wing, inmates are confined to tiny cells for 22-and-a half hours a day, then released into an “exercise yard” for “recreation.” The yard consists of a concrete well about 12 feet in length with walls 20 feet high and a metal grill across the sky. The recreation consists of pacing back and forth, alone.

The results are much as you would expect. As National Public Radio reveals, 10% of the isolation prisoners at Pelican Bay are now in the psychiatric wing, and there’s a waiting list. Prisoners in solitary confinement, according to Dr Henry Weinstein, a psychiatrist who studies them, suffer from “memory loss to severe anxiety to hallucinations to delusions … under the severest cases of sensory deprivation, people go crazy.” People who went in bad and dangerous come out mad as well. The only two studies conducted so far — in Texas and Washington state — both show that the recidivism rates for prisoners held in solitary confinement are worse than for those who were allowed to mix with other prisoners. If we were to judge the United States by its penal policies, we would perceive a strange beast: a Christian society that believes in neither forgiveness nor redemption.

From this delightful experiment, US interrogators appear to have extracted a useful lesson: if you want to erase a man’s mind, deprive him of contact with the rest of the world. This has nothing to do with obtaining information: torture of all kinds — physical or mental — produces the result that people will say anything to make it end. It is about power, and the thrilling discovery that in the right conditions one man’s power over another is unlimited. It is an indulgence which turns its perpetrators into everything they claim to be confronting.

President Bush maintains that he is fighting a war against threats to the “values of civilized nations”: terror, cruelty, barbarism and extremism. He asked his nation’s interrogators to discover where these evils are hidden. They should congratulate themselves. They appear to have succeeded.

George Monbiot is the author of ‘Poisoned Arrows’ and ‘No Man’s Land’ (Green Books). Read more of his writings at Monbiot.com. This article originally appeared in the Guardian.

Where to put your next assignments

Something is amok on the CATE server and i am being asked for an additional password and I have no idea what it could be.  I have written to the webmanager but i know they are not working till monday.  Therefore

If you are submitting Asha final projects send them to me as an email attachment  (several are already in the CATE box and can be resent)  and if you are doing your final chapters of prisoners wife attach them to this post

If you are finished your self assessment you can wait to send it or send it to me as an email attachment

sorry for this but i can do nothing if the computer doesnt cooperate

did you see the death penalty process in Cali is now declared to be unconstitutional?      

whats up

okay  i think i recorded all the luis rodriguez  papers and by sunday nite i will have read the 5pagers   or i hope so if not i will have done so by monday night.  thank you for your patience and if there is an error  i know you will tell me !!!!!

your asha posts

have been recorded and if you go to the gradebook and see any errors (some assignments were not marked one or two and since they were posted together they may be in the wrong place)  shoot me an email with the file attached

DO not re post it

I will begin Luis Rodriguez papers today  thanks for your patience

NYT article on Cali prisons

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December 11, 2006

Prisons Push California to Seek New Approach

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 10 — By nearly every measure, the California prison system is the most troubled in the nation. Overcrowding, inmate violence, recidivism, parole absconders and the prison medical system are among its many festering problems.

Now, with the November election behind them, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state lawmakers from both parties say the time is ripe for the first major overhaul of the system since the 1970s.

Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican who easily won re-election, recently took the extraordinary step of declaring a state of emergency in the prison system, a move generally reserved for areas hit by natural disasters.

James E. Tilton, appointed in September by Mr. Schwarzenegger as the secretary of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, described the prison system as a “powder keg” at risk of exploding.

“If you look at the characteristics of other states that have riots, we have an environment that is rife with the same,” said Mr. Tilton, who had been the acting secretary since April.

The creation of new prisons seems likely, but the governor and lawmakers are also seriously contemplating broad changes to the parole system and the establishment of a sentencing guidelines commission — anathema to some just a year ago — like those used by other states to reduce overcrowding and its costs.

“The November election is over, and that is critical in terms of the politics of prison reform,” said the State Senate majority leader, Gloria Romero, Democrat of Los Angeles. “The governor is particularly looking at his legacy, and I do not believe he can have a positive one if he does not solve the prison crisis.”

Overcrowding is so severe that 16,000 inmates are assigned cots in hallways and gyms; last month, the state began asking for volunteers to be moved to prisons out of state.

The system’s medical program is in federal receivership and much of the rest of the system is under court monitoring. Cellblocks are teeming with violence. Seven of 10 inmates released from prison return, one of the highest rates in the country.

The state has the largest number of parole absconders, roughly 20 percent. Life for corrections officers has become so miserable, their union says, that there are nearly 4,000 vacancies. In May, just after Mr. Tilton started work, a corrections officer was held hostage for 10 hours by an inmate with a knife to her throat.

Like so many things in California, the scope of the prison problem stems largely from its size. The system houses 173,000 inmates — second-place Texas has 152,500 — and has an $8 billion budget.

Its population explosion is in large part an outgrowth of a general increase in the state’s population, its unusual sentencing structure and parole system, a legislature historically enamored with increasing penalties, and ballot measures like the three-strikes initiative.

Further, most rehabilitation programs have been eliminated from the system in recent years, which some criminal justice experts believe has increased the rate of recidivism. Some experts also argue that a legislature bound by term limits has created an expertise vacuum on the complex and emotional issue of prison sentencing.

Under laws passed in the 1970s, ironclad sentences for crimes are set by the legislature, with little discretion left to judges. Looked at simply, people sentenced to prison for three years get out in three years, whether they have behaved, gone to school or stared at the wall.

Once out, prisoners are assigned to parole and can be sent back to prison for automatic sentences for technical or criminal violations.

“All of these things lead to this incredible overcrowded prison system,” said Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.

Changes to the system have been akin to peace in the Middle East — everyone agrees on the outcome, but there has been great debate over its path.

The corrections officers union, among the state’s most powerful, has been historically resistant to reducing the prison population. Conservative lawmakers and the governor have resisted any change that smacks of sentence reduction, and their liberal counterparts have been loath to be tarred as soft on crime.

But a consensus has been building over the last six months, with union officials, the governor, public policy experts and many members of the legislature agreeing that a sentencing commission is in order.

Sentencing commissions, made up of a diverse group of experts including former judges and crime victim advocates, essentially treat prison beds as scarce resources that need to be properly allocated.

Used in many states, the commissions, armed with empirical data, establish sentencing grids, with the offense on one axis and the offender’s history on another, forming a narrow range of possible sentences.

These grids are presented to judges, who have discretion to go outside the range in light of extenuating circumstances. One of the system’s greatest advantages, its proponents suggest, is that it depoliticizes sentencing by taking it out of the hands of elected officials.

Under a sentencing commission, a parole system can also be altered, placing, for instance, violent offenders under intense supervision after their release, and offering nonviolent offenders a chance at early parole.

“The way our current system works, all you have is sticks,” said Joan Petersilia, director of the new Center for Evidence-Based Corrections at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the state’s leading experts on prisons.

“But we want to give carrots, too,” Professor Petersilia said. “If in fact you can show us stable housing and drug treatment program for six months, you are off parole. The benefit of that is self-selection. Inmates who are low risk and who are motivated will do it, and then we reduce caseload size and let officers target very violent offenders.”

The best commissions, criminal justice experts agree, are those in which violent criminals spend more time behind bars than they did before the commission’s creation, and nonviolent offenders are placed in treatment programs, county jails or other alternatives, paid for in part by the savings accrued from not having them in prison.

Mr. Tilton said that in addition to such a commission, the system would require more prison beds, so prisoners would not be housed in gyms and classrooms and those areas could be used once again for programs to prepare offenders for life outside prison.

These changes have the support of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, which has regarded the governor warily.

“I am tired of my profession being categorized as a failure when our success is judged on the success of people who everyone else failed with,” said Lance Corcoran, a spokesman for the association.

Not everyone is convinced. “If sentencing commission is a code word for shortening terms, I am against it,” said George Runner, the State Senate Republican caucus chairman. “It is an interesting discussion, but it cannot be had until we create more beds and have a parole re-entry program that works.”

The California District Attorneys Association also regards sentencing commissions with suspicion and will not support a law that does not increase sentences for some offenders.

Those who think a sentencing commission is an antonym for law and order “should look carefully at the statistics in a state like North Carolina,” said Tom Ross, the former chairman of that state’s sentencing commission, widely regarded as one of the most successful in the nation.

“Violent and career offenders serve nearly twice as much time as they did before the commission,” Mr. Ross said, while low-level offenders are sent elsewhere. “What it resulted in here was a substantial reduction in the incarceration rate.”

another supreme court decision worth noting

Incarceration Nation Marc Mauer December 11, 2006
Marc Mauer is the executive director of The Sentencing Project and the author of Race to Incarcerate and co-editor of Invisible Punishment (both from The New Press). Two remarkable developments in Washington in the past week highlight the extent to which the United States has become the land of mass incarceration.  First, the Supreme Court denied the appeal of Weldon Angelos for a first-time drug offense. Angelos was a 24-year-old Utah music producer with no prior convictions when he was convicted of three sales of marijuana in 2004. During these sales he possessed a gun, though there were no allegations that he ever used or threatened to use it. Under federal mandatory sentencing laws, the judge was required to sentence Angelos to five years on the first offense and 25 years each for the two subsequent offenses, for a total of 55 years in prison.  In imposing sentence, Judge Paul Cassell, a leading conservative jurist, decried the sentencing policy as “unjust, cruel, and even irrational.” The Angelos decision came on the heels of a Bureau of Justice Statistics report finding that there are now a record 2.2 million Americans incarcerated in the nation’s prisons and jails. These figures represent the continuation of a “race to incarcerate” that has been raging since 1972. With a 500 percent increase in the number of people in prison since then, the United States has now become the world leader in its rate of incarceration, locking up its citizens at 5-8 times the rate of other industrialized nations. The strict punishment meted out in the Angelos case and thousands of others explain much of the rapid increase in the prison population. The composition of the prison population reflects the socioeconomic inequalities in society. Sixty percent of the prison population is African American and Latino, and if current trends continue, one of every three black males and one of every six Latino males born today can expect to go to prison at some point in his lifetime. The overall rates for women are lower, but the racial and ethnic disparities are similar and the growth rate of women’s incarceration is nearly double that of men over the past two decades. While the United States has a higher rate of violent crime than comparable nations, the substantial prison buildup since 1980 has resulted from changes in policy, not changes in crime. The “get tough” movement, which embraced initiatives designed to send more people to prison and to keep them for longer periods of time, contributed to massive prison construction and a corrections budget now totaling $60 billion annually. These policy changes included mandatory sentences that restrict judicial discretion while imposing “one size fits all” penalties, “three strikes and you’re out” laws that allow life terms upon a third felony conviction, and the “war on drugs.” Drug policies have been responsible for a disproportionate share of the rise in the inmate population, with the 40,000 drug offenders in prison or jail in 1980 increasing to a half million today. A substantial body of research has documented that these laws have had virtually no effect on the drug trade, as measured by price or availability of drugs. Most of the drug offenders in prison are not the “kingpins” of the drug trade. Indeed, the low-level sellers who are incarcerated are rapidly replaced on the streets by others seeking economic gain.  While crime rates have been declining nationally for a decade, research to date demonstrates that expanded incarceration has, at best, been responsible for only a quarter of this decline. Other factors that played a key role include a strong economy in the 1990s that provided employment opportunities for low-skill workers, a marked decline in crack cocaine use and its associated violence by the early 1990s, and strategic community policing.  New York City, which experienced a two-thirds reduction in homicides from 1990 to 2002, did so despite a one-third decline in its jail population during that period. And conversely, while Idaho led the nation with an astonishing 174 percent rise in its prison population, it nevertheless experienced a 14 percent rise in crime. With a new Democratic Congress in place, there is hope that long-festering criminal justice policy inequities can finally be addressed. Long-time reform champions Reps. John Conyers, D-Mich., and Bobby Scott, D-Va., are poised to take over the chairmanships of the House Judiciary Committee and its Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security subcommittee, respectively. But we should be cautious in our expectations given the Democratic Party’s record of complicity in endorsing “get tough” measures. Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, for example, was loaded with harsh sentencing provisions and $8 billion in new prison construction. Progressives would be wise to continue to build bipartisan support for criminal justice reform measures. In recent years this has led to alliances with conservative Senators Sam Brownback and Jeff Sessions who sponsored bills for prisoner reentry and crack cocaine sentencing reform respectively. As we look to the new Congress, high on any reform agenda should be the following: • Crack cocaine sentencing reform ”During the last 20 years, the federal sentencing laws for crack cocaine offenses have subjected thousands of low-level defendants to mandatory five- and 10-year prison terms, while exacerbating the racial dynamics of incarceration.  More than 80 percent of the persons charged with these offenses are African Americans, who receive much stiffer terms than those meted out to powder cocaine defendants. • Mandatory sentencing reform—ConCongressional mandates to impose harsh sentences with no judicial input have created unfair and overly harsh penalties, and have been decried by the American Bar Association and Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, among many others. • Racial impact statements—Just at as fiscal impact statements aid lawmakers in assessing the financial implications of sentencing policies, the preparation of racial impact assessments could provide similar benefits to policymakers.  Had such assessments existed in 1986, we could have had a debate on the racial dynamics of the crack cocaine laws prior to their enactment, not 20 years later. • Felon disenfranchisement reform ”Five million Americans could not participate in the November election due to a current or previous felony conviction.  Laws that govern these practices are enacted by the states, but Congress has the authority to require uniform voting rules in federal elections. Legislation proposed by John Conyers in the House would require states to permit voting by any non-incarcerated person in federal elections, even if barred from participating in state elections. Three decades of prison expansion have led to rates of imprisonment that are shameful for a democratic nation.  Both public safety and community health would be better served through investments in policies that promote job creation, high school graduation and substance abuse treatment. It’s time to reverse the race to incarcerate.