living on Mars: the 'pro' column

Scientists prepare for the rigors of space travel. (Warning: turn off your speakers; the website uses annoying autoplay ads. Really annoying.)

Six carefully selected scientists have entered a man-made dome on a remote Hawaii volcano as part of a human-behavior study that could help NASA as it draws up plans for sending astronauts on long missions to Mars. ...

They will have no physical contact with people in the outside world and will work with a 20-minute delay in communications with their support crew, or the time it would take for an email to reach Earth from Mars.

An email can travel from Mars to Earth in 20 minutes.

It took at least a couple of hours for an email sent to or from a federal inmate to reach its destination here on Earth, no matter how innocuous the contents.

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.

must an inmate confess to a casual correspondent?

Former Subway spokesman Jared Fogle responded to a letter from a woman he used to know and she released his letter to the press. The press, in turn, asked a sex therapist to comment on it.

Indianapolis sex therapist Carol Juergensen Sheets says the letter shows Jared still has a long road to go. 

“He hasn’t figured out what he needs to do to get healthy,” said Sheets.“From that letter, he’s minimizing, and sex addicts or people that have sexual compulsivity tend to minimize, justify, and defend themselves, and that’s what I see in the letter. He’s obviously a man who hasn’t had enough recovery yet to be 100 percent responsible for his behavior.”

Perhaps the therapy community exchanges stories about their famous clients; I don't know. Without that kind of professional gossip,though, Sheets has no way to know anything about Fogle's story except for what the press told the rest of us. If she has ever evaluated him professionally, commenting on his state of mind is an ethical breach.

Her analysis of his letter means nothing. Fogle wrote a letter to a casual acquaintance who took the trouble of figuring out how to correspond with him. Who could blame him for wanting to leave a good impression with her?

Is Sheets under the impression that Fogle is receiving sex offender treatment in prison? While his facility offers an SOTP, (sex offender treatment program) inmates generally don't begin that program until they are near their release date. It would be extremely unusual for someone to be in SOTP after only nine months.

As for Fogle's "recovery time" prison is no place for recovery. Prison is a place to recover from.

Most important, Fogel does not owe his casual acquaintances a confession, let alone the rest of us.

Remember that name, Indianapolis: Carol Juergensen Sheets.

Might be wise to avoid a therapist who advertises her services by getting her name in articles about famous people.

thinking about Dennis Hastert and his curious sentence

Dennis Hastert, former Speaker of the House, was sentenced today to 15 months in federal prison for structuring bank withdrawals so as to sidestep reporting requirements. It isn't illegal to withdraw cash in amounts less than $10,000 but it is illegal to do that in order to keep from being noticed by the feds.

Hastert was making the withdrawals so he could pay a man $3.5 million. He paid $1.7 million before the federal investigation into his withdrawals put a stop to the payments.

Why did he owe $3.5 million? When he was a high school wrestling coach, Hastert molested a boy and, several years ago, Hastert agreed to pay him that amount.

Jacob Sullum, at Reason.com, questions why the government does not see the $3.5 million as blackmail.

...Hastert was paying Individual A, who ultimately received $1.7 million of the promised $3.5 million, to keep their encounter a secret, fearing that other victims would come forward once Individual A made the incident public. Individual A's receipt of hush money certainly seems to meet the terms of the federal blackmail statute. Although it is understandable that federal investigators decided not to pursue that charge once they became convinced that Individual A's claim of abuse was true, it is disingenuous to pretend Hastert was not blackmailed.

In a weird twist, the victim is suing Hastert for the remaining $1.8 million.

The financial investigation uncovered the abuse but the statute of limitations prevents bringing sexual abuse charges against him. Sexually abusing students--sexually abusing anyone--is despicable, of course, but it is worth remembering that the judge was sentencing him for financial wrongdoing, not for sex crimes.

Federal District Court Judge Thomas M. Durkin sentenced him to fifteen months instead of the probation suggested by the defense or the five years requested by the prosecution.

Mr. Hastert... was ordered to pay $250,000 in fines, never to contact his victims and to receive sex-offender treatment.

Why sex offender treatment? Ostensibly, sex offender treatment is to help the offender avoid offending again. When there is no evidence that he has reoffended for decades, why sex offender treatment?

Is it possible the judge sees sex offender treatment as a punishment?

“If there’s a public shaming of the defendant because of the conduct he’s engaged in, so be it,” Judge Durkin said.

With that attitude, it seems the judge does see it that way. Many of those registered citizens who are paying for individual therapy and group therapy at the behest of courts, probation and parole officers--and, for some, at the risk of being sent back to prison if they cannot pay--would agree.

If I seem sympathetic to Hastert, I am not, even though I think his crime does not merit prison time or a $250,000 fine or sex offender treatment. From an article in the National Law Journal:

Hastert’s work on the Adam Walsh Act was “hypocritical and self-serving,” wrote Gail Colletta, the president of the Florida Action Committee, an organization seeking sex registry reform, in a letter filed by the court Tuesday. She asked the judge to impose a sentence longer than the six-month maximum advised by federal guidelines. 

“Hundreds of thousands of individuals and their millions of family members and friends have to live with the draconian punishments he fostered,” Colletta wrote. “These individuals are also the victims of Mr. Hastert’s actions.”

It is not unusual that someone caught up in the criminal justice system receives an unjust sentence. It seems that Hastert may be one of those cases.

I am not happy to see anyone go to prison, especially not a 74-year-old with health issues.

I do hope that Hastert's public humiliation has made him see how wrong he was when he worked to impose that fate on hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens.

when a family member goes to prison, the family serves the sentence, too

On Vox, Dominique Matti writes about how her father's incarceration punished the whole family. She writes beautifully about cruel circumstances.

For every man in a cell missing the birth of his child, there is a woman delivering alone. My uncle took me to my elementary school's father-daughter dance. No one asked why — everyone already knew. While I was grateful for my uncle's attendance, my dad's absence was a much larger presence, a yawning chasm at the core of my childhood. His absence was something we were all trying to accommodate, to build a life around, to cope with.

...his absence remained an elephant in every room we entered. His absence marked us. We had to compensate for it, compartmentalize it, and normalize it. ...

When my father was released, we tried to live like he had never been gone. But it was impossible. His goneness was as integral a piece in our relationship as his presence. ...

Despite the vast number of Americans dealing with it, having a loved one in prison is lonely. I had to deal with the absence of my father alone. My mother dealt with the absence of her co-parent alone. My grandparents dealt with the absence of their son alone. Incarceration has different implications on everyone it affects, and it often feels like no one understands.

There is a stigma attached to having a loved one in prison that makes it difficult to talk about openly. At sleepovers, speaking about it earned me looks of pity from my playmates' parents. At school, kids were amused by the stories. I was a stereotype fulfilling itself, and there was very little genuine empathy for what I was going through. I was confronting the reality that one misstep meant anyone I loved could be taken and locked away in a box for years. I needed understanding. 

Instead I found that many people believe it's our fault for loving the incarcerated — that we deserve the suffering inextricably linked to that love. People think we are foolish or unfortunate.

 And it feels selfish to speak to the person in prison about it. It's hard to fret for yourself when you know the reality an incarcerated person endures each day. I told my father I missed him. I did not tell him I was scared. People on the inside need strength and support, and much of that strength comes from the people on the outside — despite the fact that they need the same. And so the processing of all of the heavy emotions that come with incarceration is largely internal, and largely traumatic; it's largely done alone.

I sat through many callous remarks, many fairy tales about "good guys" and "bad guys," feeling like I was on the wrong side of existence. I was not aligned with the people protected by the system; I was being punished by it. And if I spoke up about its flaws — the traps of race and poverty, the evidence of unjust sentencing, the incentive to take a plea, the industrialization of prisons — I was silenced with nullifiers like, "You do the crime, you do the time." I learned quickly that many people are unwilling to hear about the humanity of prisoners and the people who love them. Human suffering requires confronting — "criminal" suffering does not exist (or, worse, it's justified).

The United States, with 2.2 million people incarcerated, is finally acknowledging the problem of overcrowded prisons. What we have yet to acknowledge is the problem of overcriminalization.

A 2014 Chicago Tribune editorial talks about how that problem leads directly to deaths like that of Eric Garner, the Chicago man who was killed by police when they arrested him for selling cigarettes:

On the opening day of law school at Yale, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.

The Chicago police may not have meant to kill Eric Garner but in their zealous attempt to enforce a silly law against selling "loosies", indivdual cigarettes, they did. Without that law, they would not have killed Garner.

The legal scholar Douglas Husak, in his excellent 2009 book "Overcriminalization: The Limits of the Criminal Law," points out that federal law alone includes more than 3,000 crimes, fewer than half of which found in the Federal Criminal Code. The rest are scattered through other statutes. A citizen who wants to abide by the law has no quick and easy way to find out what the law actually is — a violation of the traditional principle that the state cannot punish without fair notice. 

In addition to these statutes, he writes, an astonishing 300,000 or more federal regulations may be enforceable through criminal punishment in the discretion of an administrative agency. Nobody knows the number for sure.

Too many laws make it too easy to put people in prison, to put families into the awful black hole of having a family member in prison. As Ms. Matti makes painfully clear, even when the family member returns home from prison, that black hole remains a presence in the family.

Part of the problem, Husak suggests, is the growing tendency of legislatures — including Congress — to toss in a criminal sanction at the end of countless bills on countless subjects. It's as though making an offense criminal shows how much we care about it. 

The Adam Walsh Act, Jessica's Law, and Megan's Law all came from efforts to show how much legislators care for children. If only those legislators would acknowledge publicly that the laws have done more damage than good to children.

Legislators tend to nod solemnly when they hear how families suffer under those well-meant laws but we need more than sympathetic nods.

We need legislators with backbone, legislators willing to risk their legislative seat on behalf of families in their constituency.

I quoted a great deal of Ms. Matti's piece but please read the whole thing. Read the Tribune editorial, too.

People tend to think that incarceration issues concern only those who have someone in prison. Those of us in that category laugh a little ruefully at that way of thinking because we remember clearly the days when we didn't need to think about incarceration,either.

Overcriminalization increases the odds that your family will be touched, too.

these women will never recover

What happens to the wife of a man convicted of a terrible crime? Shannon Maroney tells how her life changed when her husband raped two women.

He confessed to the crime; in fact, he called 911 to tell police what he had done. From that point, her life was turned inside out.

News of the crimes hit the media, and I couldn't return to my home, now a crime scene surrounded by police tape. Privacy was ripped away and replaced by public scrutiny. He has a wife. Who is she? What's wrong with her? Was she part of this?

She had done nothing wrong and yet she began paying for his crime immediately.

The police were clear in telling me whose side I was on, no matter what my feelings for the victims might be. When I asked if there was anything I could do to help them, the victim services officer looked me up and down and said sternly, "The victims don't need to hear from Jason's arena."

Some friends drew lines in the sand, too. "Shannon, don't you know these women will never recover? You can't have compassion for them and Jason." Others offered their sympathy and support, as they faced their own conflicted feelings toward the Jason they'd known and the terrible things he had done.

These women will never recover. Labeling the victims according to the role they played in his crime--the woman who was raped! the wife!--forces the victims into a narrative the public enjoys in a twisted way. You think Nancy Grace doesn't enjoy the stories she details exhaustively again and again, trying to draw the audience into her horror story? The audience of strangers, family, and friends does the same thing, telling and retelling the story, relishing the thrill of the gory details, The players in the drama are not allowed to step out of their assigned roles and be people with complicated emotions about the crimes. These women will never recover.

While Jason spent nine months in solitary confinement — or "protective custody," as it was called — I was left on the outside to deal with the aftermath, completely unprotected, an easy target for judgment and blame. My school principal banned me from entering the school without permission and forced me out of my job. I lost my salary, benefits, seniority, place of belonging, and, worst of all, my relationships with students, staff, and parents. I was made guilty by association. [My emphasis.]

 She had done nothing wrong. Remember that...because the principal did not.

I turned to victim services at the police for help, as surely they could let the public know I had nothing to do with the crimes, that I hated what Jason had done. ...

But there was no one to help me. The defense counsel was for Jason, the accused. Victim services were for the real victims, not the collateral ones like me. I didn't fit anywhere. All I could do was put one foot in front of the other and try to find a way through to the other side, whatever that would look like.

Other wives out there are nodding as they read this story, recognizing themselves in it. With 850,000 sex offenders and 2.2 million people incarcerated in the U.S., that leaves millions of people who are collateral victims ignored by victim services, left alone to deal with the aftermath.

At the end of it, after enormous pain and loss were expressed in victim impact statements, remorse and confusion were expressed in Jason's statement, and the facts of the assaults were reviewed by the judge, all that happened is that one person was sent to prison for the rest of his life and everyone else was just sent home. It was indescribably empty, with no peace or healing to be found. That was something, it seemed, we would each have to find on our own.

Even the real victims, the ones who were raped, are left with no peace or healing. While sending the rapist to prison is the right thing to do, that alone does nothing to resolve the ugly mess of emotions caused by the crime. We ought not pretend that fear of him doing it again is the only thing the victims must deal with. Putting him in prison does not help with the rest of their turmoil.

They put the state and the accused in the center and victims around the periphery, typically using victims' stories only to achieve a conviction and to influence sentencing. The focus is on retribution.

Retribution is not healing.

Because when we merely lock people up, we seal off much of our own chance to build understanding or have our questions answered. Victims can be plagued by questions their whole lives, questions that only the offenders may be able to answer: Why did you do it? What was going through your mind? Why me? Do you know what you've done? Do you know how you've hurt me and my loved ones? How can I know you won't do it again?

Neither the real nor the collateral victims deserve to be left with unanswered questions. Restorative justice programs, Shannon Maroney's passion, offer a chance for them to ask those questions of the perpetrator and for the perpetrator to answer. Answering the questions can be part of healing the perpetrators, too

Maroney refers to the conversations she had with her husband during prison visits as an "informal" restorative justice process. It is an interesting thought, that people like her have been engaging in restorative justice ahead of the professionals.

At the same time, though, she was being punished by her community for being the wife of a man who did something terrible. That is what the sex offender registry does to families: punishes them right along with the sex offender.

We lock down the families of offenders, typically into poverty, stigma, and shame. We often deem victims to be ruined for life. We make pariahs of people who have made mistakes right along with people who plan and carry out murder and harm "in cold blood," rather than getting to the root causes of either type of offending behavior. And all too often, we lock up people who suffer from mental illness, even as we know we cannot punish the mental illness out of a person.

Could professionals learn something from those informal restorative justice sessions that could lead to better help for the real victims?

These women will never recover. That's just wrong.

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.

"kids for cash" judge sentenced to 28 years

Four thousand convictions in Pennsylvania have been overturned because of a couple of corrupt judges.

An American judge known for his harsh and autocratic courtroom manner was jailed for 28 years for conspiring with private prisons to hand young offenders maximum sentences in return for kickbacks amounting to millions of dollars.

Kickbacks in the millions but his restitution is only $1.2 million.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has overturned some 4,000 convictions issued by the former Luzerne County judge between 2003 and 2008, claiming he violated the constitutional rights of the juveniles – including the right to legal counsel and the right to intelligently enter a plea.

He would have been just as wrong if he had been violating the rights of adults.

Federal prosecutors accused Ciavarella Jnr and a second judge, Michael Conahan, of taking more than $2m in bribes from the builder of the PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care detention centres and extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars from the facilities’ co-owner. Ciavarella Jnr filled the beds of the private prisons with children as young as 10, many of them first-time offenders convicted minor crimes. 

...as young as 10. 

When society ignores what happens in the courts, guys like this take advantage.

When society ignores what happens in the prisons, the prisons take advantage.

Ignoring what goes on gives them power. Power corrupts.

law piled on law piled on law keep inmates from leaving prison

This is an illustration of what happens when bad legislation meets bad legislation meets bad legislation.

Kentucky releases sex offenders from prisons "conditionally": they can only be released to an approved residence and, for five years, can be returned to prison for violating sex offender restrictions. The residence must be approved 180 days--six months--before the inmate's release date. For some, the biggest hurdle is the restriction that limits where they are allowed to live.

[He] served out every bit of his eight-year sentence for sexual abuse and should have been released from prison more than a year ago. 

But he is still behind bars and could be for up to four more years, with state taxpayers footing the bill for his medical expenses and incarceration

The reason: He was charged with violating the terms of his conditional release from prison before he even got out, because he couldn’t find a legal place to live as a sex offender. 

One law keeps him in prison if he cannot find housing, another law eliminates huge swaths of the city from the list of residence possibilities, and yet another law puts him on the registry and makes sure that he can be rejected for no other reason than being on that list.

He has been set up.

Wolfe is one of five inmates in Kentucky who have been “violated at the gate” — that is, found to have violated the conditions of their release before they even left the prison gates. One of them died in custody three months later. 

The article does not talk about whether these inmates have family or friends but we cannot assume they are alone in the world. Imagine being willing to take in the guy when he is released from prison but the law prevents you from doing so because your home is too close to a school.

When he is serving his up-to-five additional years in prison, he isn't simply getting housing and care unavailable on the outside. Housing and care are available on the outside. The law prevents him from getting to that housing and care.

In the meantime, Kentucky taxpayers are on the hook for this man's incarceration. Aging and sick inmates cost taxpayers a great deal more than the average young person in prison.

Finding legal places to live for sex offenders, especially those who require medical treatment, is a growing problem nationally, experts say. Illinois keeps 1,250 parolees behind bars because of a shortage of housing, and most are sex offenders, the Chicago Tribune reported in January. 

Remember: the shortage of housing is imposed by law.

[Public defender Melanie] Lowe says that it is unjust to hold inmates after they’ve done their time solely because they can’t find nursing care at a legal address. Sex offenders cannot live within 1,000 feet of a school, day care center or publicly owned playground.

Finding a home for a registered citizen when all that's needed is a place to live can be difficult. Add in medical care requirements and the search becomes even more difficult.

...nursing homes are reluctant to admit sex offenders because of the potential liability and because it would place the home’s address on the sex offender registry. 

The registry was supposed to be a protective measure, not a punitive measure. How did it come to cause so much expensive trouble?

State Sen. Brent Yonts, D-Greenville, sponsored a bill creating the conditional release for sex offenders — originally for three years and later amended to five — in 1998. ...

Yonts said in an interview that his primary goal was to keep something over the heads of offenders who disputed their crimes and didn’t complete sex offender counseling in prison. He said he also wanted to ensure all sex offenders registered at a legal address.

Keeping infirm inmates in prison because they can’t find places in nursing homes “is not what I originally contemplated,” Yonts said. 

The law of unintended consequences is always in effect, isn't it, Senator Yonts?

Yonts is not the one paying the price, however, reducing any urgency he might feel to correct the law. Inmates spending additional time in prison after their release date are paying the price.

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.

phone companies overcharge inmate families

It will not come as a surprise to many inmate families to learn that prison phone service providers have been overcharging them.

Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell is asking that millions of dollars in telephone charges illegally collected from families of Louisiana’s 40,000 jail inmates be refunded. 

“The Public Service Commission regularly orders refunds when utilities overcharge customers,” Campbell said. “Companies that operate inmate telephone systems in Louisiana jails and prisons must be treated no differently.” 

Campbell’s request is on the PSC’s agenda for its July 22 meeting in Baton Rouge. Jails and prisons hire specialized firms to run telephone systems used by inmates. Family members on the outside pay for the calls.

Families cannot shop around for a better deal.

A PSC investigation in 2011-12 concluded that the rates for inmate calls were an average of 30 times higher than calls on the outside. 

Thirty times higher. Can you hear me now?

The investigation also found that telephone companies routinely ignore commission orders and tack on a variety of illegal fees. Examples include $10 to buy a $50 block of time, $2.50 to add a telephone to the account, and $5 to obtain a refund. 

Inmate families often have greatly reduced income when a family member goes to prison and anyone who would take advantage of their vulnerability is a scoundrel, through and through.

“These practices are dishonest and immoral. Jail telephone companies prey on inmate families, who have no choice in the provider of service and little to no ability to fight back.”

It is hard to imagine the discussions in the board rooms of Securus and City Tele-Coin, the two unscrupulous phone companies servicing Lousiana prisons, when this thievery was approved.

Speaking of thievery, there's more:

“Some of these companies also confiscate any money left in consumer accounts after a period of time,” Campbell said.

All but a small minority of inmates will be released from prison at some point. To reduce their ability to maintain contact with those they left at home is to make their homecomings more difficult.

The United States, as everyone should know by now, has around 2.2 million in jail or prison. If you went to prison tomorrow, how many people would miss you? How many people would you like to call from prison? Multiply that number by 2.2 million.

That's the number of people who are at the mercy of companies like Securus and City Tele-Coin.

Kudos to Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell for taking up this fight for Louisiana families.

UPDATE: Added a link. (July 15, 2015)

sentencing for violent offenders is key to easing prison overcrowding

Legislators everywhere are wrestling with the problem of prison overcrowding. How to reduce our astoundingly high prison population without risking public safety?

Today, nearly everyone acknowledges that our criminal justice system needs fixing, and politicians across the spectrum call for reducing prison sentences for low-level drug crimes and other nonviolent offenses. But this consensus glosses over the real challenges to ending mass incarceration. Even if we released everyone imprisoned for drugs tomorrow, the United States would still have 1.7 million people behind bars, and an incarceration rate four times that of many Western European nations.

Lighter sentences for non-violent offenders will not be enough to make the difference we need. We need to look at how we punish those convicted of violent crimes. 

We could cut sentences for violent crimes by half in most instances without significantly undermining deterrence or increasing the threat of repeat offending. Studies have found that longer sentences do not have appreciably greater deterrent effects; many serious crimes are committed by people under the influence of alcohol or drugs, who are not necessarily thinking of the consequences of their actions, and certainly are not affected by the difference between a 15-year and a 30-year sentence.

Legislators have unnecessarily burdened our judges by eliminating their ability to judge.

...as a result of mandatory sentencing laws, judges often cannot make reasonable distinctions between drug kingpins and street-corner pawns. We ought to empower judges to recognize the difference, and to reduce punishment for run-of-the-mill offenders...

For sex offenders and their families, here is the meat and potatoes of this opinion piece:

Recidivism is also a serious obstacle to reform. Two-thirds of released prisoners are rearrested within three years, and half are reincarcerated. But many of the returns to prison are for conduct that violates technical parole requirements, but does not harm others. And much of the problem is that the scale and cost of prison construction have left limited resources for rehabilitation, making it difficult for offenders to find the employment that is necessary to staying straight. So we need to lock up fewer people on the front end as well as enhance reintegration and reduce collateral consequences that impede rehabilitation on the back end. [My emphasis.]

Sex offenders are not mentioned at all but, for those who study sex offender issues, the absence is big and loud. Sex offenders have an exceptionally low recidivism rate. Those who do return to prison are far more likely to return because of a parole violation that does not harm others.

An honest examination of prison overcrowding will acknowledge this.

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.

prison is a "deep wound"

Jean Trounstine, professor at Middlesex Community College in Lowell, Massachusetts, writes about taking her class to visit a prison. 

...the students take a tour of Billerica House of Correction, where they experience confinement to some degree and listen for an hour to an incarcerated man talk about his life and what it is like to be behind bars.

...to some degree.

The tours are perfunctory, showing the students what a prison looks like on the inside and letting them feel what it is like to be there, though a short visit where all the students know they are free to leave cannot possibly convey that.

This time, when the twenty of us entered, there were only a few men in their brownish beige uniforms sitting at tables. Another two were talking to the guards who policed the room, two perched at a computerized station at one end. The students all took turns entering a cell to see what it is like, a rather disturbing experience on many levels for most of them. One student, we’ll call her Sofia, suddenly turned toward me as Spanish was heard above us. She pointed up at a window where a man smiled widely and pressed his face against the [window]. 

“That’s my brother,” Sofia said, her eyes filling with tears. 

I looked up and he waved at me, his sister’s teacher. Sofia looked away. 

I asked the young woman if she had known he would be here, and yes, Sofia said, she knew he was in this  facility but no, she had no idea she might see him. She seemed torn, wanting to look, wanting to hide. She said under her breath as others continued their entrance into cells, as far as she knew, he had no hope of ever not doing drugs. She’d lost touch, she said. She couldn’t imagine he might be doing OK.

This tour was suddenly anything but perfunctory.

Prison became about loneliness, about being apart, about the kind of pain that happens when families break up. It was no longer just about this space or this room or that hallway. Sofia’s brother, as close as he was, was nowhere near his sister. And would not be for a long time, perhaps never. She understood that and so did I.

Prison incorporates all kinds of discomforts--punishing a man for complaining about the cold by confiscating his thermal underwear for the winter, turning on lights that shine into each cell all night long.

People think of that kind of discomfort and try to decide how they would withstand those challenges. Could I deal with strip searches? Could I keep my mouth shut when a guard calls me a faggot? Could I get used to sleeping on a mattress only a couple of inches thick? Could I stay sane crowded into a cell with five other men?

The real misery, though, is being apart from family and friends. A prison tour usually cannot even touch that fact.

When we exited Billerica that day, Sofia told the other students about her brother behind bars. Now, after walking through Billerica, and after being with Sofia, they understood why prison is not just a physical place, but a deep wound.

Families who have someone in prison too often cope with that deep wound alone. Those who know we have a family member in prison don't know what to say, so they say nothing. We say nothing because--...wanting to look, wanting to hide...-- letting on that we are hurting can elicit the simplistic and cruel "if you do the crime, you do the time". If anyone understands the true meaning of that breezy platitude, it is prison families.

Prison sentences are handed out like candy at a classroom Valentine party. We should be sure the sentence is worth a broken family.

why so many behind bars in the U.S.?

Judy Woodruff of PBS NewsHour interviews Nicholas Turner, president and director of the Vera Institute of Justice, and Margo Schlanger from the University of Michigan, about the high rates of incarceration in the United States.

The interview makes the same point I make here, that we need to find ways to stop putting people behind bars.

JUDY WOODRUFF: A new report finds that more Americans than ever are spending time in jail. The Vera Institute of Justice showed that, in the past two decades, despite a drop in the crime rate, the number of people going to jail has increased dramatically. 

In addition, those behind bars are staying longer. Some 62 percent of them have not yet been convicted of a crime, and three-quarters of those jailed now are brought in for nonviolent offenses. The report also finds that a disproportionate number of those in jail suffer from mental illness.

This surprised me. Sixty-two percent of those in jail have not even been convicted yet. Why so many stuck in jail while waiting for trial?

NICHOLAS TURNER: ...about 60 percent of them are still locked up without having been convicted yet, so they’re presumed innocent — a large percent of them are locked up or are unable to get released because they can’t post bail.

So take New York City, for example, where in 2013 half of everyone who was at Rikers or some of the other detention facilities were there because they couldn’t post low rates of bail, $2,500 or less.

Our jails are overcrowded because poor people arrested for non-violent crimes can't afford bail, not because the world is full of so many dangerous criminals. Remember that most of these are people arrested for misdemeanors.

Those convicted of felonies end up in prison. How to reduce the prison population?

MARGO SCHLANGER: Solving the prison problem, the problem for people who have been convicted of felonies, that will take a more varied kind of set interventions. But I think it’s really — right now is a great moment for us to try to make those interventions. 

... We could — we need to do parole and probation reform. We need to do the reform of the system that allows prisoners good-time credit off their sentences if they are behaving themselves in prison. We need to do community corrections kinds of reform, so that prosecutors have some place to send people when they — so that they don’t just send them to prison because it’s the only option.

Schlanger and Turner also talk about why so many mentally ill people end up in jail or prison.

Reducing the number of people behind bars in the United States will require legislators to stand up and do the right thing, even when it is unpopular.

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? 

"my soul wide open"

Oakdale Chronicles delivers a moving Christmas reverie in which an inmate wonders how to celebrate Christmas while in prison, far from family, friends and familiar traditions.

Those of us who have loved ones in prison know that, even with additional treats served up by the prison administration, the holiday season must be bereft of celebration for them. It must be impossible to celebrate the Nativity in such hostile surroundings.

George, the inmate, remembers the Christmases of his childhood.

On Christmas Eve, we would pile into the station wagon and head for church. It was the one time of the year my Mom had no trouble getting the whole family to go to church; mostly because Santa came to our house while we were at the evening service. 

I would sit in the pew imagining what Santa was doing moment by moment. Was he enjoying the milk and cookies we’d left?

Surely our family members locked away from us must have the same moment-by-moment imaginings. Has my family opened gifts yet? Did they decorate the house the way we always did? Are they at church now?

Were the other reindeer jealous of Rudolph because we only left one carrot especially for him, or did he share by letting a different reindeer eat the carrot at each new house? Rudolph was the most popular with all of my neighborhood friends, so I knew no one ever thought of Blitzen or Prancer by leaving more than one carrot. Did Rudolph remember the pain of being left out of the reindeer games, which is why he gave his carrot away as an act of forgiveness?

Forgiveness. How many hours inside prison walls are spent contemplating forgiveness?

My favorite part of the service ... was when Minister Peters asked us all to kneel as he read the Christmas story, Luke 2:1-20 (RSV). 

“In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus…,” and as he read, the organist began to quietly play an interlude into the hymn Silent Night. The lights over the congregation were dimmed down and out so only the altar was swathed in bright light. 

“And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth…,” and the congregation softly joined the organ and sang as underscoring to the minister’s narration. 

When the lyrics started, an acolyte took the center candle of the Advent wreath and lit the handheld candles of the first person seated in the front row on both sides of the center aisle. 

The candlelight is passed from person to person.

I tipped my unlit candle into my Mom’s flame and then turned to offer my light to my sister. And so it moved down the pew...

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will among men…”

“Christ the Savior is born…

Christ the Savior is born.”

In that candlelight, with tears of joy streaming down my face and my soul wide open, I understood the mystery of God and the truth of Christmas.

Immersed in his memories of  how Christmas used to be and trying to find a way to celebrate, George thinks:

I’m not sure how I’ll recapture those feelings of Christmas while I’m here at Oakdale FCI. Without family, longtime friends, and all the traditions that go with celebrating Christmas, it could become a bleak midwinter’s night. How can the light shine here? 

That star, and all the stars that filled the night sky, reminded me that I am free, even though I am imprisoned. Funny how reminders of comfort and love are often right in front of our eyes, if we only open our souls to see. 

There will be no traveling for me this year, and I definitely don’t have any gifts to bear. I don’t even have a drum on which to play a song; however, my heart does beat the rhythm of life. A life that can once again kneel, see the light, feel the light, and pass that light on to others. With that knowledge in my soul, I am more free inside this prison than many who sit in their homes before a warming fire, or even some who sit in the packed pews on Christmas Eve.

Think of it. It is possible to be more free inside prison than outside because of Christmas.

I pray that inside or outside the prison walls, we can approach the manger with our souls wide open and gently, jubilantly, pass the Light to others.

a defense of John Grisham

Radley Balko steps in to remind us that John Grisham is not a lunatic who cares nothing for justice even though Grisham himself has apologized for his earlier statements about child pornography sentences.

Grisham's apology:

"Anyone who harms a child for profit or pleasure, or who in any way participates in child pornography -- online or otherwise -- should be punished to the fullest extent of the law," the author said in a statement. "My comments made two days ago during an interview with the British newspaper The Telegraph were in no way intended to show sympathy for those convicted of sex crimes, especially the sexual molestation of children. I can think of nothing more despicable. I regret having made these comments, and apologize to all."

Balko's defense of Grisham, which is a longer and much more thoughtful piece than my blog post: 

Grisham certainly could have chosen his words better. But he isn’t wrong, and the invective he’s receiving right now is both misinformed and wildly over the top. There are Twitter users calling him a pervert, or for his hometo be raided by the FBI. It isn’t all that different than suggesting that people who criticize the drug laws must be doing or selling drugs. [My emphasis.]

Take this quote out of context, and one could make Grisham look like he thinks the biggest problem with the criminal justice system is that old white guys are getting locked up for looking at child porn. But context is important. Grisham has spent a great deal of time, money, and influence advocating for criminal justice reform. He helped found the Mississippi Innocence Project, and sits on the board of directors for the Innocence Project in New York. He wrote a nonfiction book about a wrongful conviction, and helped another get published. He testified before Congress about the need for reforming the forensics system, addressing the problems he’s seen firsthand in Mississippi.

Balko's piece is heavy on the links because the information he presents about Grisham is important. Grisham has a history of being on the side of justice. 

The reality is that John Grisham has done far, far more to actually address racial bias in the criminal justice system than the self-righteous pundits mocking him have done or will likely ever do. But because he had the temerity to stick up for a friend — and a middle-aged white male friend at that — the rush is on to disregard all of Grisham’s prior work, exaggerate the indignation, and reduce the man to a caricature....

This dressing down of Grisham by Jessica Goldstein at ThinkProgress pieceis pretty typical. There’s no mention of Grisham’s criminal justice activism. Just a lot of scolding, belittling, and berating. Worse, much of it is factually inaccurate.

Balko goes on to point out several inaccuaracies and then takes issue with the usual arguments about child porn.

I don’t disagree that children depicted in child porn videos continue to experience harm as those videos are distributed. I’m also certain that viewing the ISIS beheadings causes trauma to the families of the victims. Yet I’m not ready to start putting people in prison who, for whatever reason, decided to watch those videos. I’m skeptical of the supply and demand argument, particularly when the suspect hasn’t bought or traded any porn. But even if it’s true that merely viewing child porn provides a market for more child porn, it’s also far from clear that harsh sentencing laws are the answer. We’ve been tossing people in prison for viewing child porn for decades now, yet both the United Nations and the Justice Department say that the online supply of child pornography is only growing. [My emphasis.]

Read all of the Balko piece; I covered only part of it. It will be worth your time. 

If only John Grisham had been better-prepared to argue what his good sense--and his sense of justice--knows to be true: Sentences for child porn offenses are too harsh.

child porn voodoo logic

State and federal courts hand down very different sentences for child pornography crimes. While state courts will hand down a sentence of probation, federal courts will send the defendant to prison for years for the very same crime.

Federal laws are tougher than state laws, but federal authorities say their limited resources allow them to go after only the worst of the worst.

My family and many other families waiting for someone to come home from federal prison would dispute that the feds go after only the worst of the worst. A man in possession of four images or twelve images or eight videos simply cannot be the worst of the worst. The feds go after the easy cases and child porn possession cases are easy.

An interesting research project would be to compare recidivism rates of child porn defendants sentenced by the state with those sentenced in federal court. If there is little difference (a safe bet), that should further the cause for reduced sentences.

...many cases end up in state court where sentences are lighter — which some prosecutors say can be appropriate for offenders who mostly need therapy.

 Makes sense. Why spend $25-30,000 to incarcerate someone for a year when lesser measures can have the same effect?

Others say the lack of mandatory sentences creates a system where the punishment does not fit the crime.

 Nope. Without mandatory sentences, the judge can hand down stringent sentences when necessary but mandatory sentences prevent the judge from giving a lesser sentence when appropriate. Mandatory sentencing laws get in the way of proportionate sentencing.

The article ends with a quote from someone who said,

"Child porn is not a victimless crime — and we need sentencing laws that recognize not only the severity of these crimes, but the suffering the victims endured,"

In the comments, Tiglath Philizar talks about "Child Porn Voodoo logic"--the idea that looking at child porn images can hurt the person represented in the image in the same way that sticking pins in a voodoo doll can cause damage to a real person nowhere nearby.

Think logically for just one minute. If front of me I have a voodoo doll I stick that voodoo doll with a pin and the person I curse is injured. Child Porn Voodoo logic; Someone possesses a photo of a child, in the form of 0′s and 1′s in a computer file. When s/he looks at the medium, the individual depicted in the photo, video or both gets victimized and hurt. While I can appreciate that actual creating CP victimizes children, I cannot agree that looking for, viewing, or collecting CP actually victimizes anyone. If you were to apply the same reasoning to any other crime, then looking at a photo of any crime would be re-victimizing someone.

If the argument is correct that the child in a pornographic image is victimized again when someone looks at the image, we should be able to extend that argument to other victims and other situations and yet no one suggests that possession of a photo of someone cruelly beaten with fists should be illegal because looking at the image will victimize that person again. No one seriously suggests we incarcerate those who downloaded the recently hacked naked photos of celebrities. Making the argument for anything other than child porn exposes the silliness of the argument.

Tiglath Philizar has his own example:

If the simple act of viewing an image of someone is harmful perhaps an appropriate punishment would be to simply take a photo of the perpetrator in jail, then set them free, but have some look at the photo that was taken while they were in jail; same logic.

That would be a change in sentencing policy I could get behind. 

The idea that someone looked at or possessed images of child pornography should concern us far less than the very real actions of someone who abuses a child sexually and records the abuse.