private prisons vs. government-run prisons

Writing at the California Political Review, Katie Modisitt shows us that a focus on private prison problems is too narrow.

In mid-August, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it would start phasing out its contracts with companies that run private prisons in light of disturbing reports of poor medical care, overcrowding and other abuses in their facilities. Although the issue has taken center stage in the debate over mass incarceration, it overshadows and distracts from the actual problem: the prison-industrial complex, which affects government-run prisons in a much more troubling way, and for many more inmates.

Government-run prisons are not inherently better than private prisons. 

Government-run, public prisons operate off the same perverse and monetary incentives to lock up human beings, but do so for more inmates and with much more at stake. ...

We don’t even have to leave California to get a glimpse of the perverse incentives at work in filling government prisons. The California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) represents approximately 30,000 California prison guards and parole officers. The union wields tremendous power over criminal justice policy, much more than private prison companies, and for nearly 20 times the inmates. While we are worried about private companies’ profit incentive to increase prison populations, shouldn’t we be infuriated about an organization that has job security, salaries and political influence hanging in the balance?

 Political influence.

Over the last 20 years, the CCPOA has contributed over $24 million to lobbying efforts and candidates. For comparison, GEO Group, a leading private prison company criticized for their role in increasing prison populations, spent only $5 million over the same time period. 

And, the activities of the CCPOA are aimed squarely on tougher sentencing laws, therefore preserving the prison-industrial complex that allows them to exist. The union, for example, spent over $100,000 to implement the original Three Strikes Law. More recently, it spent $1 million to defeat Proposition 5, which would have reduced sentences for nonviolent crimes, shifting the focus to rehabilitation for nonviolent drug offenders.

Rehabilitation for inmates who have to be there is one thing. Keeping them incarcerated for longer than necessary is another and yet that is what the correctional officers' union wanted.

Yes, private prisons can be bad. Not because they are private but because they are prisons.

prison should be our last resort and this is one reason why

Prison offers an opportunity for some to practice their sadistic tendencies on the defenseless, as we see in this story from The Marshall Project about the New York prison system.

... the guard escorted him past a set of double doors out of view of other inmates and the prison’s electronic surveillance cameras. Fabian said the officer, Michael Bukowski, a seven-year veteran, had then ordered him to face the wall and brace himself in the “pat-frisk” position, arms outstretched and legs spread. As he did so, Fabian recalled, he looked down and saw the toe of a boot swinging up between his legs. 

He saw a flash of light, felt a piercing pain and collapsed. “He told me to get up, but all I could do was crawl back to my cube,” Fabian, who is now 21, told investigators later. He lay on the floor in his cubicle in the prison’s dormitory, groaning and crying, for almost an hour before hobbling to lunch. In the mess hall, a sergeant sent him to the prison’s medical unit. He was soon loaded into a van and driven 80 miles north to a hospital in Albany. Doctors there performed emergency surgery, removing part of his right testicle.

 If you are thinking that surely that guard was fired, you are wrong.

More than a year later, however, Bukowski is still a state employee. His disciplinary case remains unresolved, although he faces a criminal charge of assault. His case, described in court documents and interviews, offers a stark example of the intricate protections that shield New York’s 20,000 corrections officers, even when there is compelling evidence of abuse. 

Since 2010, the state has sought to fire 30 prison guards accused of abusing inmates through a convoluted arbitration process that is required under the union contract. Officials have prevailed only eight times, according to records of disciplinary cases released under state Freedom of Information Law requests. Those records show that most abuse allegations never reach the arbitration level: Another 80 cases brought against corrections officers, sergeants and lieutenants since 2010 were settled directly with their unions for penalties other than dismissal, such as suspension.

Power in the hands of the unfit should be taken away as quickly as possible but that is not what happens when prison guards misuse power over inmates. The system is set up to keep the unfit employed in the very position for which they are least suited, a position that lets them do real damage to real people.

This is why we ought to use prisons only as a last resort.

Building more prisons and incarcerating more people means we have more corrections officers in a position where they can abuse other human beings. In a system where those who abuse their authority are rarely fired, we cannot be surprised when COs go bad.

If you can stomach it, read the whole thing.

Reason #472 why prison should be last resort

An article in The Guardian talks about how feminine hygiene products are doled out to female inmates.

...each cell, which houses two female inmates, receives five pads per week to split. I’m not sure what they expect us to do with the fifth but this comes out to 10 total for each woman, allowing for only one change a day in an average five-day monthly cycle.

Women, and men who pay attention, will see the problem in this.

Inmates in Michigan filed suit last December alleging that pads and tampons are so scarce that their civil rights have been violated.

Why so scarce?

The reasons for keeping supplies for women in prison limited are not purely financial. Even though keeping inmates clean would seem to be in the prison’s self-interest, prisons control their wards by keeping sanitation just out of reach. Stains on clothes seep into self-esteem and serve as an indelible reminder of one’s powerlessness in prison. Asking for something you need crystallizes the power differential between inmates and guards; the officer can either meet your need or he can refuse you, and there’s little you can do to influence his choice. 

Prison puts inmates at the mercy of correctional officers.

To ask a macho guard for a tampon is humiliating. But it’s more than that: it’s an acknowledgement of the fact that, ultimately, the prison controls your cleanliness, your health and your feelings of self-esteem. The request is even more difficult to make when a guard complains that his tax dollars shouldn’t have to pay for your supplies. You want to explain to him that he wouldn’t have a paycheck to shed those taxes in the first place if prison staff weren’t needed to do things like feeding inmates and handing out sanitary supplies – but you say nothing because you want that maxi pad. 

In the United States, there are 2.2 million people in prisons, under the thumb of correctional officers. People who become correctional officers are not inherently bad but giving them such intimate power over others leads to broad opportunities for abuse of power.

The 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment showed us how easily and quickly that abuse of power can develop. The experiment tried to answer a couple of questions.

What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph?

Briefly, the experiment assigned some students the role of  prison guard and some the role of prisoner, put them all in an improvised prison setting. Over the time of the experiment, it became clear that bad things were happening.

We had created an overwhelmingly powerful situation -- a situation in which prisoners were withdrawing and behaving in pathological ways, and in which some of the guards were behaving sadistically. Even the "good" guards felt helpless to intervene, and none of the guards quit while the study was in progress. Indeed, it should be noted that no guard ever came late for his shift, called in sick, left early, or demanded extra pay for overtime work. 

The experiment, planned to run for two weeks, was called off on the sixth day.

I ended the study prematurely for two reasons. First, we had learned through videotapes that the guards were escalating their abuse of prisoners in the middle of the night when they thought no researchers were watching and the experiment was "off." Their boredom had driven them to ever more pornographic and degrading abuse of the prisoners.

Six days.

What happens to people incarcerated for years or decades?

What happens to people who work as prison guards for years or decades?

As I said before:

We have a moral imperative to consider--and thoughtfully reject--a long list of alternatives before we put someone in prison.

That goes for prisoners and correctional officers.

how to avoid the registry: be a deputy sheriff?

I don't know what to say about this story.

Assuming the reporter has the facts, a sheriff's deputy coerced a young woman into performing oral sex on him, he tampered with the evidence in the case, he plead no contest, and was sentenced to six months in jail. No felony.

And get this: he avoids the sex offender registry.

This guy took advantage of a young woman; he was a predator in the most definite sense of the word and yet he will not be labeled a predator on the registry. He won't be on the registry at all.

I am happy for his family that they will not have to deal with the registry. Truly. Remember, I want the registry abolished because no one deserves that kind of public humiliation.

Cooper had been a deputy for about five years and was a corrections officer before that.

A corrections officer? That makes me think about how vulnerable the prison population is if there were a predator on staff.

The last police officer accused of forcing a woman to perform oral sex did not receive jail time. Former Omaha Police Officer Scott Antoniak — convicted of first-degree sexual assault on an Omaha prostitute — served five years of probation under a sentence handed down in April 2007 by Judge Joseph Troia. 

The last? Is this behavior so common that there is a list of officers who have exhibited this predatory behavior?

Kleine said Cooper is expected to be stripped of his law enforcement certification.

One would hope.

We see it again and again: Power corrupts.

Reason #326 why prison should be last resort

Aramark serves food from the garbage to Michigan prison inmates.

Despite threats to terminate its contract, Gov. Rick Snyder (R) won’t let go of the company, which claims it will save taxpayers $12-16 million.

Saving $12-16 million? Imagine how much we could save if we closed prisons, instead.

My husband, who is not in Michigan, tells me of meat served long past its expiration date at the prison where he is assigned.

Prisons are a punishment because inmates are separated from their friends and family. That is the punishment. Piling poor treatment--extreme cold, extreme heat, spoiled food, sleep deprivation--on top of that is egregious.

We have a moral imperative to consider--and thoughtfully reject--a long list of alternatives before we put someone in prison.

steep price for overcrowded prisons

Horrifying news from California prisons.

California state prisoners are killed at a rate that is double the national average -- and sex offenders ... account for a disproportionate number of victims, according to an Associated Press analysis of corrections records.

Readers will expect me to rail against the murder of sex offenders--and of course I do--but we should all rail against the fact that any prison inmates are murdered.

Male sex offenders made up about 15 percent of the prison population but accounted for nearly 30 percent of homicide victims, the AP found in cataloging all 78 killings that corrections officials reported since 2007, when they started releasing slain inmates' identities and crimes.

As we all know, sex offenders are at the bottom of the prison hierarchy; they are generally not welcome in gangs; they are generally not hardened criminals. They can be easy targets, mostly because they are accepted as targets.

Categorizing a broad range of crimes as sex offenses instead of treating each crime as a distinct event--streaking, rape, public urination, possession of illegal images--encourages a public perception that all sex offenses are as bad as the worst of them.

Prison officials know that sex offenders are often targeted.

The deaths -- 23 out of 78 -- come despite the state's creation more than a decade ago of special housing units designed to protect the most vulnerable inmates, including sex offenders, often marked men behind bars because of the nature of their crimes. 

In some cases, they have been killed among the general prison population and, in others, within the special units by violence-prone cellmates. Officials acknowledge that those units, which also house inmates trying to quit gangs, have spawned their own gangs.

The special housing units do not--cannot--protect.

Corrections officials blamed a rise in the prison homicide rate on an overhaul meant to reduce crowding. As part of the effort, the state in 2011 began keeping lower-level offenders in county lockups, leaving prisons with a higher percentage of sex offenders and violent gang members. [My emphasis.]

That's a bad mix, something else that prison officials know.

When prisons are so crowded that neither inmates nor corrections officers are safe, it is time to think about why we put so many in prison. It is not because of a high crime rate. 

Over-criminalization can be blamed. A larger number of laws that we can break--and a larger number of laws that don't require criminal intent for there to have been a crime--means that more laws are broken. 

Increasing sentence length can be blamed.

All of us pay the price for crazy laws and for legislators who pretend they are not crazy laws.

Taxpayers pay around $40 billion annually for incarceration in the United States. We pay tens of thousands of dollars annually to incarcerate non-violent criminals who are housed with violent criminals.

Families pay needlessly when a family member goes to prison for a non-violent crime.

Corrections officers pay when they have to work in dangerously overcrowded prisons.

We all pay. Maybe not as much as sex offenders pay, though.

We should put as few people in prisons as possible. 

ignoring prison rape

Anyone with a family member or friend in prison grows to hate the inevitable "don't drop the soap" joke. Jokes about prison rape are rife when discussing someone convicted of a sex crime.

The idea seems to be that someone in prison for a sex crime is so evil that it is acceptable for another inmate to commit a sex crime against him.

In this manner, rape is treated as a feature of our justice system when it happens to prisoners, rather than what it is: another grave crime.

Sexual assaults in prison are not only inmate on inmate. No, they too often include assaults by prison staff. In his article in The Week, Michael Brendan Dougherty quotes from Colorlines.com: 

Roughly 200,000 men, women, and children reported being sexually abused in detention facilities in 2011, the most recent year for which the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has anonymously self-reported data from inmates.

If the jokesters are any indication, this is acceptable. Instead, let's recognize those jokes for what they really mean.

Acceptance of prison rape is a stinking corruption. No conception of justice can include plunging criminals into an anarchic world of sexual terror. And obviously it thwarts any possibility of a rehabilitative justice that aims to restore criminals to lawful society. Inmates are not improved or better integrated into society through physical and psychological torture.

Dougherty reminds us that what the government does to prisoners, it does in our name. In a moral world, that in itself is reason to work toward reducing prison populations. The larger the prison population is, the more we will see stinking corruption.

Prison rape ... vitiates any sense of retributive justice, since rape is not a proper punishment for a crime. Allowing prison rape is just a vindictive horror, and when accepted under the name of punishment makes criminals the victims of justice.

Prison inmates--save for a very few--are released back to society and we ought to want them to come back ready to be part of our society. Do our prisons prepare them for the return? 

Absent major and drastic reform of our prison system, however, the "lesson" our justice system teaches is not that crimes will be punished, but that getting caught may send you to unpredictable horrors; that our society's primary way of dealing with criminality is plunging you into more of it; and that the rod of the law comes in the form of supermax cruelty.

The statistics Dougherty uses show that prison rape is all too common. If it is, that is a problem that can be tackled with more oversight of and accountability for prisons.

How to solve the more insidious problem of people horrified by rape losing that sense of horror when it happens behind the razor wire? 

why I admire defense attorneys

Radley Balko interviewed longtime Louisiana defense attorney Sam Dalton for an August 2013 article on prosecutorial misconduct. As his final Huffington Post piece (before moving to the Washington Post), Balko published the whole Dalton interview.

Dalton is something of a legend in Louisiana courtrooms. He has just entered his seventh decade of practicing law. In that time, he has defended more than 300 death penalty cases. Of those, he spared 16 defendants from execution -- this in a state that's rather fond of executing people. He has also been a voice for civil rights, he chartered a model public defender system, and he's currently leading a charge to impose some accountability on Louisiana's more egregiously misbehaving prosecutors. My favorite thing about him: Outside his office door there's a "welcome" mat that reads: Come back with a warrant.

Talking about why prosecutors still try to avoid handing exculpatory evidence over to the defense, even though it has been the law for 50 years, Dalton said:

[Y]ou have to look at what the system rewards. The best way to get attention for yourself as a prosecutor is to put a lot of people in jail. There's no votes to be won for deciding not to prosecute someone in the interests of justice. No prosecutor runs for higher office by touting the charges he didn't bring, or the fairness he showed to those accused of terrible crimes. You put those two problems together, and you get a culture that encourages deliberate indifference, especially once they're publicly invested in a particular suspect. 

Anyone who has watched someone go through the meat grinder of our justice system knows this already. It is a sad time when prosecutors fear being accused of being fair. We also know the Department of Justice is publicly invested in a particular type of suspect--drug offenders for one, sex offenders for another. These offenses are easy to detect, easy to prosecute, easy to convict. I would note, too, it is easy for law enforcement to entrap someone for these offenses.

Now that Colorado and Washington have legalized marijuana for recreational use, it seems clear that public opinion will support further legalization. Perhaps that is why federal law enforcement has increased its investment in catching those who download child pornography--easy pickings will make it possible for a prosecutor to continue to boast the number of convictions on his watch.

I think it's a mistake for a defense attorney to define success by how many acquittals he wins. I define it by whether I've forced the state to do its job, and to do it fairly and in compliance with the Constitution. 

But let me say something about convictions. Convictions are important. And it's important for attorneys to represent even clearly guilty people. There's the obvious reason -- that everyone deserves a fair trial. 

But here's a less obvious reason: Ask yourself, what contribution do convictions make to criminal case law? The answer is that they're responsible for almost all of it. When you're acquitted, you don't appeal. Only convictions are appealed. And it's on appeal that you argue that your client's rights were violated. Appeals are where the appellate courts enforce the Constitution. At least where they're supposed to. It's only because someone was convicted that we have the rules in place today that protect the accused. There's a kind of beautiful symmetry to that. It's because of convictions that we have the rules that protect the innocent.

I had not thought before about the role convictions play in the important battle to change laws. Dalton makes me see them differently, though I have to wonder if Dalton overlooks the fact that when prosecutors have been given the power to pin a defendant between a plea agreement and a mandatory minimum sentence, convictions lose that importance. 

Plea agreements often require the defendant to waive his right to appeal. No appeal means no way to argue that rights were violated, even when it is clear that a plea is less about admitting guilt than about avoiding the mandatory minimum.

Dalton talks about punishment:

We focus too much on retribution, and too little on protecting society from harm. 

Let me give you an example. Two men commit an armed robbery on the same night. The first man is a father of four. His family is about to be evicted. Or if you want to make him less sympathetic, let's say he's a drug addict who needs money to buy his next fix. He's nervous, he's sweaty. He's desperate, and he's panicky. He approaches his victim and roughly accosts him. He puts his gun to the victim's head. He's screaming profanities. He screams out for his victim's wallet, then screams louder and threatens the victim for moving too slowly. He takes his money and runs off. His victim is terribly frightened. 

In the second scenario, our mugger is calm, cool, and methodical. He approaches his victim from the front, puts a light hand on the victim's back, and slowly and unemotionally explains that he has a gun in his coat pocket. He tells his victim that if he hands over his wallet, no one will get hurt, and they can both be on their way. The victim hands it over. The mugger walks off. The victim is angry at just having been robbed, but he isn't terrified. And he was never in real fear for his life. 

Which of the two armed robbers is likely to get the longer sentence? Almost certainly the first one. Which of the two is the bigger threat to society? Unquestionably the second one. In fact, the second one is not only a likely career criminal, he's more likely to actually kill someone. The first one is scared because he knows he's doing something wrong. He feels some empathy for his victim. He's committing a crime of necessity. That isn't to say it excuses him. But his aggression comes from fear. The second mugger is incapable of empathy, or has learned to turn it off. He's cold-blooded. 

So you see we impose punishment based on fear and a desire for retribution, not based on rational evaluations of what crimes and criminals are most dangerous. [My emphasis.]

Sex offenders and their families know this well. The majority of those convicted of sex offenses are unlikely to commit another sex offense and yet they are sentenced according to the fear engendered by the term sex offense instead of any rational evaluation of danger.

Punishment should include alternatives to incarceration because incarceration is often a training ground for criminals and because the United States prisons are overcrowded. Another reason to avoid incarceration when possible is to avoid giving more people power over others.

Though Dalton is talking about judges and prosecutors, his warning also applies to correctional officers:

Power is insidious. It will creep up on even the most decent people. Always be aware of that, and be vigilant against it.

Read the whole interview. Defense attorneys take a lot of heat for their part in letting criminals go free but they stand between us and unjust convictions. I have great admiration for attorneys who defend the obviously guilty and especially those obviously guilty of terrible crimes.

Obvious guilt should be defended just as fiercely as innocence is.

high incarceration rate leads to poor hiring decisions

During a routine divorce hearing in a Las Vegas courtroom, a woman was sexually assaulted in a back room by a federal marshal.

[The] woman ...complains that a marshal sexually assaulted her in a back room. The woman becomes increasingly agitated as the marshal, who is in the courtroom, then arrests her for “making false allegations about a police officer,” all while the magistrate plays with the woman’s child, at least until the child begs the arresting officer to not take her momma away.

The woman filed a complaint and the marshal was fired, though not because the judge took any interest in what was happening right in front of her.

How could this happen? How could such a man hold the position of federal marshall?

The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, with 2.2 million people in jails or prisons. So many people are incarcerated that Sesame Street has produced an education kit designed to help children who have family members in prison. 

Necessarily, the number of corrections officers has increased. Over 434,000 corrections officers are employed in the U.S. I imagine, though I couldn't find a source, the number of federal marshals has also increased. When more and more guards and marshals are needed, the chance of hiring the wrong person increases.

Not only is the incarceration rate playing a large role in bankrupting our country financially, putting more and more people in positions of power over others will play a large role in bankrupting our country morally.

sesame street goes to prison

Maia Szalavitz writes in Time about something new for the Big Bird set:

Nearly 2 million American children— one quarter of them too young to go to kindergarten— now have a parent in prison or jail.  To help the littlest ones cope, Sesame Street has just released a toolkit for families faced with losing a parent for what can be years or even decades, including a video featuring a Muppet whose father is locked up.  It is titled “Little Children Big Challenges:  Incarceration.”

Imagine! Two million children have a parent in prison or jail. Prison is becoming normal. Do we really want this for our country?

Research shows that incarceration does incredible damage to families, doubling the odds that children will later be homeless, increasing the risk for aggressive child behavior problems by 33% and the risk for severe psychological distress such as depression or anxiety in childhood by 20%.

It can hinder school performance and induces all of the trauma of other separations like divorce, but with the added element of shame, guilt and stigma.  Not to mention the financial strain losing a parent indefinitely imposes and the massively increased odds of winding up in foster care it causes.

Don't forget that the financial strain is caused by more than the income reduction when a wage-earner goes to jail or prison. If the family wants to stay in touch and communicate with Dad or Mom in prison, the family has to pay for the communication. My husband's prison paycheck for a month's work--a little over $5--would pay for a couple of brief phone calls or a book of stamps. Not both. Email costs extra. A family trying to get by without Dad's income also needs to send him money in prison if they are to stay together as a family.

But maybe ... what we really need is a rethink of our entire criminal justice system, one that has become not only the nation’s biggest holding cell for people with addictions, but also its largest psychiatric system— albeit one that only rarely provides evidence-based treatment for either addictions or other mental illnesses.

Yes. 

We now lock up 10 times more people for drug offenses than we did in the early 80s; and while some drugs have gotten less popular, others have become more so, leaving us with roughly the same rate of severe addiction. Further, 48% of all state prisoners are nonviolent and at least half of their crimes are either drug crimes or directly related to drug use.  92% of all federal prisoners are nonviolent, with a full 48% sentenced to federal prison because of drug offenses.

Ninety-two percent of federal prisoners are nonviolent! Even I wouldn't have guessed it that high.

A tremendous amount of this incarceration is unnecessary and could easily be reduced by decriminalizing drug possession, legalizing marijuana, sentencing nonviolent offenders to house arrest and monitoring and only using prison to lock up those whose crimes genuinely warrant it for appropriate amounts of time.

It isn't enough to stand back and say if you can't do the time, don't do the crime. It is necessary to consider what should be a crime, why it should or shouldn't be a crime, and what appropriate punishments should be.

It isn't enough to let the legislators, Congressmen and Senators sort it all out. They are the reason we are at the point where Sesame Street has to send in Big Bird and Grover to clean up after the SWAT teams, federal marshals, and corrections officers.

UPDATE: I can't believe I missed the opportunity to use the heading, "Big Bird goes to the Big House."

ignored life and death at Canaan

Something I noticed in the article discussed in my previous post: it contained no expression of sympathy for the inmate killed at Canaan in January. He was 29-year-old Ephraim Goitom. 

The slain inmate was as helpless--and his murder as undeserved--as the correctional officer who was killed. The murdered CO, 34-year-old Eric Williams, left behind friends and family. How they must ache for his loss...but don't forget that Ephraim Goitom, too, left behind family and friends. His friends in prison must be frightened to have seen how easily his life was taken.

COs choose to work at the prison. They can go home after their shift, they can have dinner with their families, they can go on vacation, they get paid to be there. And if those benefits are seen as inadequate in the face of the danger the CO faces, he can work elsewhere. 

The inmate may have "chosen" to be there by committing a crime, but he cannot choose to leave. He is stuck in a dangerous environment, helpless against threats.

Criminals are sentenced to time in prison; they are not sentenced to endure physical threats in addition to incarceration. The Federal Bureau of Prisons is supposed to provide a safe environment for them. 

An inmate's life is as valuable, as worthy of grief and mourning, as worthy of notice as other lives. To ignore an inmate's murder because he was only an inmate is despicable. 

life and death at Canaan

Canaan, the high security federal prison in Pennsylvania, has been in lockdown since February 25 when an inmate allegedly murdered a correctional officer. Reports from the prison, through phone calls to family members, are that, in the unit where the CO was killed, the cells have been stripped of all personal belongings. Books, magazines, radios...all removed. Other reports say the prison will remain in lockdown until sometime this summer. There is cruel uncertainty for families and friends trying to learn if inmates are safe--from each other and from the angry and frightened correctional officers.

Canaan is a troubled prison.

Since the facility opened in 2005, more than a dozen inmates have been charged with assaulting correctional officers or attacking each other. In the last three years, three inmates have stabbed other inmates to death. The latest victim was 29-year-old Ephraim Goitom in January...

So far this year, inmates at Canaan have been especially ruthless, perpetrating the first inmate-on-inmate murder, the first assault on a guard with a weapon and recently the first homicide of an officer out of all the 114 facilities in the Bureau of Prisons...

On top of all that, the Canaan community is also mourning the death of a CO who killed himself soon after the funeral of the murdered CO. It sounds like a miserable place to work. 

"If you're not scared when you go to work, you're not right," one correctional officer said. "These inmates are there for a reason. If you don't watch your back, you're going to be in trouble."

Darrell Palmer, the president of the union representing correctional officers at Canaan, put it this way:

"Imagine what it would be like if you came to work and they put you in this cell block with 130 criminals and they gave you a set of keys and a radio and said, 'Run it.' And there's murderers, drug dealers, rapists and even terrorists. And you're going to deal with them for eight hours, five days a week. People in the public don't realize what it's like." 

Correctional officers often work alone at Canaan, leaving them vulnerable to attack. The murdered CO was working alone when he was killed.

It does not make sense, correctional officers and their union officials contend, to assign one guard per 100-plus inmate housing unit. But that has been the norm since 2005, when the Federal Bureau of Prisons decided to assign only one officer to each cell block, instead of two, to save money. 

That decision has cost lives, some say.

The solution seems to be to put two COs on duty at a time. That's what the correctional officers union is pushing. They could be right but that is an expensive solution. 

Another idea would be to lower the prison population among Bureau of Prison facilities and spread inmates out so the COs aren't responsible for so many inmates at once.

Keeping non-violent offenders and first-time offenders out of prison if at all possible has a number of benefits: Fewer low-level criminals "graduate" from prison with an education in high-level criminal skills; fewer low-level offenders spend years isolated from society, making it harder for them to re-integrate when they complete their sentence. Fewer families broken up, fewer families in economic distress. More room in prison for those who do need to be there, a better workload for the COs, and a considerable cost-savings for the federal government.

Judging by the article linked above, which includes not even a hint that the inmates may have a perspective worth hearing, no one will consider the possibility of lowering the population of federal prisons. Especially not the correctional officers union...which benefits from hiring more correctional officers.

I challenge journalists to find the other side of the story: the inmate experience. Why is there so much violence in a single prison? 

how much can you say in fifteen minutes?

Receiving my husband's first phone call from prison was both joyful and despairing. Joy at hearing his voice, despair over him being far away. He sounded alone and sad and we could do nothing to help him.

In the federal system, phone calls are limited to fifteen minutes. How much can be said in fifteen minutes?

In our first call, we had time for the kids to ask what he wears and what he eats. We learned that the corrections officer (CO) in Reception didn't allow him to keep the CPAP machine he took with him, the machine that enables him to sleep at night. Instead, they gave him a prison-provided CPAP and then put him in a cell that had no outlet for him to plug it in. His second day was spent finding another cell with an outlet he could use.

We learned that the Bible we sent with him, the Bible in which we wrote messages of encouragement, was not allowed, either. The Bible and the CPAP would be shipped back to us.

The CO did tell him that we could send the Bible back to him in the mail, as long as we remembered to write "One book" on the envelope we use to send it.

That was a difficult call. So much to ask, so much to answer; and no time for satisfying anyone.

I try to write down questions for him so I don't waste time trying to dredge my memory for what I thought of earlier in the day. He does the same. Efficiency matters; it leaves more time for other questions, other topics of conversation.

In one phone call, I asked an important question about a business matter; he misunderstood me. I asked again. He tried to answer but had obviously misunderstood again. The noise on his end sometimes prevents him from hearing us clearly so we waste precious minutes clarifying. That time, we had to give up.

There is no time for leisurely discussions about our day, about how the kids are doing in school. No time for long, funny stories from the kids about their friends or the teacher who did something outrageous or the homework that keeps them up late.

No time for the long, rambling discussions about books and what the pastor's sermon was about this week. We save that for letters. Our letter-writing is a delight for both of us. We write pages and pages and enjoy doing it.

His voice, though. It is important to hear his voice as frequently as possible. I can tell when he is sick or worried or afraid. I can tell when he's had a good day and I can tell when he needs to hear me as much as I need to hear him.

Fifteen minutes. That is the longest phone call possible at one time. If he wants to call a second time, his phone system will not allow him to call my number again for another hour.

Fifteen minutes. If we try to stretch the 300 minutes he purchased so that we can talk every day, every phone call needs to be less than fifteen minutes.

Seventy dollars--for 300 phone minutes, the most an inmate can purchase each month--can be a lot of money to find for some families. For them, fifteen minute phone calls or daily phone calls are impossible. How do those families get their questions answered? Questions about filing taxes, about who carries the homeowner's insurance, about how to clean the gutters, about how to make chili the way we all like...

If your husband or wife were suddenly away from home tomorrow and you had to take over their duties at home, what questions would you have?

Think about how many minutes you spent talking with your husband or wife today. Count up all the passing bit of conversation that you don't even count as conversation: Gas prices are up again. Boy, that math teacher hands out crazy-hard assignments! Do we still have hamburger in the freezer? I wish the kids would keep the back seat of the car clean. Your mom's birthday is next week. Add in the conversations over dinner about the city council's latest screw-up and the bedtime conversations about how your brother's wedding is going to be a fiasco. Don't forget to add the minutes you used to text each other about who will pick up the kids after soccer practice and who will pick up milk at the store.

How would you do if you were limited to less than fifteen minutes each day?

power over others

The knowledge that someone has  power over you and your family is terrifying and when you find yourself in that position unfairly, the terror level is especially high. Guilt and innocence have little to do with the unfairness of it. Prosecutors have all the power to decide if they want a person in prison or not, and nothing can stop them. So, from the very beginning, we are powerless, defenseless. Sending a family member to prison means they are again powerless, defenseless--and without even the comfort of loving touch or familiar faces.

America builds more and more prisons (15 federal facilities opened in the last twelve years) and incarcerates more and more citizens, requiring more and more prison guards. Most people recoil at the idea of working as a prison guard and yet there is always someone who will do the job, no matter how many guards are needed. As of 2000, there were 270,317 custody/security staff in federal, state, and private adult facilities.

What happens to a person who is given physical power over others? If power corrupts, it cannot be good that we are putting an increasing number of people in positions of physical power over others.