History > 2007 > USA > Justice > Jails / Prisons (II)

Infection

Hits a California Prison Hard

December 30, 2007
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY

COALINGA, Calif. — When any of the 5,300 inmates at Pleasant Valley State Prison begin coughing and running a fever, doctors do not think flu, bronchitis or even the common cold.

They think valley fever; and, more often than they would like, they are right.

In the past three years, more than 900 inmates at the prison have contracted the fever, a fungal infection that has been both widespread and lethal.

At least a dozen inmates here in Central California have died from the disease, which is on the rise in other Western states, including Arizona, where the health department declared an epidemic after more than 5,500 cases were reported in 2006, including 33 deaths.

Endemic to parts of the Southwest, valley fever has been reported in recent years in a widening belt from South Texas to Northern California. The disease has infected archaeologists digging at the Dinosaur National Monument in Utah and dogs that have inhaled the spores while sniffing for illegal drugs along the Mexican border.

In most cases, the infection starts in the lungs and is usually handled by the body without permanent damage. But serious complications can arise, including meningitis; and, at Pleasant Valley, the scope of the outbreak has left some inmates permanently disabled, confined to wheelchairs and interned in expensive long-term hospital stays.

About 80 prison employees have also contracted the fever, Pleasant Valley officials say, including a corrections officer who died of the disease in 2005.

What makes the disease all the more troubling is that its cause is literally underfoot: the spores that cause the infection reside in the region’s soil. When that soil is disturbed, something that happens regularly where houses are being built, crops are being sown and a steady wind churns, those spores are inhaled. The spores can also be kicked up by Mother Nature including earthquakes and dust storms.

“It doesn’t matter whether you’re custody staff, it doesn’t matter if you’re a plumber or an electrician,” said James A. Yates, the warden at Pleasant Valley. “You breathe the same air as you walk around out there.”

The epidemic at the prison has led to a clash of priorities for a correctional system that is dealing with below average medical care and chronic overcrowding.

Last fall, heeding advice from local health officials and a federal receiver charged with improving the state’s prison medical care, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation delayed plans to add 600 new beds out of concern that the construction might stir up more spores.

Officials at the prison blame the construction of a state hospital nearby for causing a spike in valley fever. The construction was under way from 2001 to 2005, and valley fever hit its peak here in 2006, when the disease was diagnosed in 514 inmates.

This year, about 300 cases have been diagnosed among inmates at the prison, which sits along a highway lined with almond groves and signs advertising new “semi-custom homes.” Felix Igbinosa, the prison’s medical director, said “the No. 1 reason” was thought to be the soil disturbance from new construction.

The delayed expansion here was part of a $7.9 billion plan signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last summer to relieve overcrowding in the state’s prisons. Pleasant Valley was built in 1994 to house 2,000 inmates.

California reported more than 3,000 cases of valley fever in 2006, the most in a decade. Explanations for the spike have included increased residential development and changes in weather patterns that have resulted in increased blooms of the fungus.

Other prisons in the Central Valley of California have had increases in the number of fever cases in recent years, but in none has the rate of infection been higher than at Pleasant Valley, where about one inmate in 10 tested positive in 2006.

Even allowing for the nearby construction, experts say they do not know why the disease is so rampant here.

“Is the soil surrounding Pleasant Valley different?” asked Dr. Demosthenes Pappagianis of the University of California, Davis.

“There’s a lot we still need to know about it,” said Dr. Pappagianis, a professor of medical microbiology and immunology who has been studying valley fever for more than 50 years.

Early symptoms of the disease, which is clinically known as coccidioidomycosis, mimic the flu, with symptoms that include a cough, lethargy and a fever. Most of those who become infected recover with little or no treatment and are subsequently immune.

In about 2 percent to 3 percent of the cases, the disease spreads from the lungs and can attack the bones, liver, spleen and skin.

For the 11,000 non-inmate residents of Coalinga, about 200 miles southeast of San Francisco, the disease has been a fact of life for generations. “We just deal,” said Trish Hill, the city’s mayor. “You don’t do stupid things like go out on windy days or dig in the dirt.”

Inmates appear to be especially susceptible to the disease, in part because they come from areas all over the state and have not developed an immunity to the disease. California corrections officials are preparing new guidelines for prison design, including ventilation and landscaping.

“Prisons tend to have a lot of bare dirt, and that has some security benefit,” said Deborah Hysen, the corrections department’s deputy secretary of facility planning. “But in the case of valley fever, you want to really contain the soil.”

At Pleasant Valley, officials say the outbreak of valley fever places a burden on the institution, requiring guards to escort inmates to local hospitals, where stays can last months and result in medical and security costs of $1 million and more, said Dr. Igbinosa, the medical director.

The disease also affects inmate morale, doctors say.

Gilbert Galaviz was convicted of murder and is serving a sentence of 25 years to life. Mr. Galaviz had been at Pleasant Valley for a week or so when he started to feel sick. “I couldn’t breathe,” he said. “My chest starting hurting, I had pain all over like somebody beat me up, and I would sweat bad at night.”

The cause was valley fever. After six months, Mr. Galaviz is still weak, having lost 30 pounds, and is barely able to complete a lap in the prison yard. Earlier this month, he was attacked and his jaw broken.

“It wouldn’t have been like that if it hadn’t been for valley fever,” Mr. Galaviz said, his jaw still wired shut. “They wouldn’t have got me. It would have been the other way around.”

Dan Barry is off. Beginning Jan. 14, the “This Land” column will appear on Mondays.

    Infection Hits a California Prison Hard, NYT, 30.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/us/30inmates.html

Justice Dept. Numbers Show Prison Trends

December 6, 2007
The New York Times
By SOLOMON MOORE

About one in every 31 adults in the United States was in prison, in jail or on supervised release at the end of last year, the Department of Justice reported yesterday.

An estimated 2.38 million people were incarcerated in state and federal facilities, an increase of 2.8 percent over 2005, while a record 5 million people were on parole or probation, an increase of 1.8 percent. Immigration detention facilities had the greatest growth rate last year. The number of people held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities grew 43 percent, to 14,482 from 10,104.

The data reflect deep racial disparities in the nation’s correctional institutions, with a record 905,600 African-American inmates in prisons and state and local jails. In several states, incarceration rates for blacks were more than 10 times the rate of whites. In Iowa, for example, blacks were imprisoned at 13.6 times the rate of whites, according to an analysis of the data by the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group.

But the report concludes that nationally the percentage of black men in state and federal prison populations in 2006 fell to 38 percent, from 43 percent in 2000. The rates also declined for black women, while rates for white women increased.

Over all, the number of women in state and federal prisons, 112,498, was at a record high. The female jail and prison population has grown at double the rate for men since 1980; in 2006 it increased 4.5 percent, its fastest clip in five years.

The report suggests that state prison capacity has expanded at roughly the same rate as the prison population, with prisons operating at 98 percent to 114 percent of capacity, a slight improvement over 2005.

Still, many prison systems are accommodating record numbers of inmates by using facilities that were never meant to provide bed space. Arizona has for years held inmates in tent encampments on prison grounds. Hundreds of California prisoners sleep in three-tier bunk beds in gymnasiums or day rooms. Prisons throughout the nation have made meeting rooms for educational and treatment programs into cell space.

Private prisons have also been a growing option for crowded corrections departments. And local jails contracted with various government agencies to hold 77,987 more state and federal inmates last year.

    Justice Dept. Numbers Show Prison Trends, NYT, 6.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/us/06prison.html

Report says U.S. jails more blacks than whites for drugs

Tue Dec 4, 2007
8:11pm EST
Reuters
By Matthew Bigg

ATLANTA (Reuters) - Black Americans are 10 times more likely to be imprisoned for illegal drug offenses than whites, even though both groups use and sell drugs at the same rate, according to a study released on Tuesday.

Almost all large counties in the United States showed sharp disparities along racial lines in the sentencing of drug offenders, the study by the Washington-based Justice Policy Institute showed.

There were 1.5 million drug arrests out of 19.5 million drug users in 2002, it said. About 175,000 people were incarcerated for a drug offense, of which half were black, even though blacks account for 13 percent of the U.S. population, it said.

The study looked at data from 198 U.S. counties with the biggest population. Its findings were similar to others on the subject, but it is the first to look at relative incarceration rates at a local level.

"What you keep seeing is this towering drug admission rate for African Americans and a very small rate for whites. In many cases, the admission rate for whites is smaller than the (percentage of whites in the) whole population," said Jason Ziedenberg, the institute's executive director.

The reasons for the disparity include federal mandatory minimum jail terms for drug crimes, which he said hit blacks harder.

For instance, the mandatory federal sentence is the same for possession of 5 grams (0.2 ounces) of crack, more associated with blacks, as 500 grams (18 ounces) of cocaine, which is more often used by whites.

Local police also tend to devote more resources to policing illegal drugs in open-air drug markets in inner cities with more blacks than in suburban communities or college campuses, Ziedenberg said, citing other research.

Research also shows that probation officers are sometimes more lenient with white offenders, blaming their problems on factors such as a broken home, than with black offenders, who were more likely to be described as having a failure of moral character, he said.

Ziedenberg advocated more investment in drug treatment and applauded individual U.S. counties that decided to make drug enforcement a lower priority than policing violent crime.

Reform of drug laws and increases in funding for drug treatment are difficult to achieve because politicians are unwilling to be seen as soft on crime, according to Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance.

"The public is by and large supportive of (some drug) reform, but legislatures have been hesitant to move forward. ... The law enforcement industry is politically very powerful and has a lot of sway over legislators," Nadelmann said.

    Report says U.S. jails more blacks than whites for drugs, R, 4, 12.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN0453686820071205

Trying to Break Cycle of Prison at Street Level

November 23, 2007
The New York Times
By SOLOMON MOORE

HOUSTON — Corey Taylor, a convicted drug dealer, recently got out of prison and moved into his grandmother’s house in Sunnyside, a south central Houston neighborhood of small, tidy yards.

During his first days home, Mr. Taylor, 26, got a sharp reminder of the neighborhood’s chronic problems.

“Out of 10 of my partners, only one is doing anything different,” he said, referring to his former drug-dealing companions. “I have some friends I haven’t seen for 10 years because either I was locked up or they were locked up.”

Last year, 32,585 prisoners were released on state parole in Texas, and many of them returned to neighborhoods where they live among thousands of other parolees and probationers.

Sunnyside is one of 10 neighborhoods in Houston that together accounted for 15 percent of the city’s population, yet received half of the 6,283 prisoners released in Houston in 2005, according to the Justice Mapping Center, a criminal justice research group.

The group, which is based in Brooklyn, has done work for the Texas Legislature that helped lead to a $217 million expansion of rehabilitation services.

Neighborhoods like Sunnyside can be found in virtually every big city in the nation. Even as violent crime statistics trend downward, incarceration rates throughout the country remain at a historic high of 750 per 100,000 residents. Each year about 650,000 prisoners are released on parole, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Mapping studies in neighborhoods as distant as the Phoenix suburb of South Mountain and the Newhallville area of New Haven show incarceration rates far higher than the national rate.

The parolees are almost always coming back to areas where support systems, like schools and public assistance programs, receive less money and attention than incarceration does, the studies show. In an effort to break the cycle, Texas this fall began its expansion of services for former inmates, including job training classes, drug treatment programs and psychological counseling.

The approach, based in part on legislative presentations by the Justice Mapping Center, is a sharp departure from the state’s longtime criminal justice focus on retribution.

The shift is intended to save the state money by slowing the revolving door between state prisons and neighborhoods like Sunnyside. The parolees released last year cost the state $100 million over the course of their prison terms; the 85 who returned to Sunnyside, population 21,000, accounted for almost $8 million of that, according to data by the mapping group.

“It’s not uncommon for children of criminal justice system clients to themselves go into the criminal justice system,” said State Senator John H. Whitmire, a Houston Democrat and chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee.

“Certain lower socioeconomic areas produce clients for the criminal justice system in a way that is analogous to the way that the welfare system created a cycle of first- and second- and third-generation welfare recipients.”

Despite declining crime and lower arrest rates, Texas’s adult prison expenditures have grown to $2.8 billion a year, tripled since 1990. Decades of tough-on-crime legislation and low parole rates have quadrupled the state prison population since 1985.

The prisons are about 4,000 inmates beyond their legal capacity, according to prison officials.

A variety of groups, including the Council of State Governments and the Open Society Institute, are investigating the economic cost of communities with high rates of prison admissions and releases and the effectiveness of incarceration policies.

Eric Cadora, a founder of the Justice Mapping Center, said high incarceration rates hinder government efforts to turn around troubled neighborhoods by taking people out of the work force, compelling families to rely on government assistance and scaring away investment.

The Fifth Ward, an east Houston neighborhood, has one of the city’s highest concentrations of former prisoners. At least 125 state parolees resettled in the neighborhood in 2006, according to the mapping studies. Their prison terms cost Texas $9 million.

Mark Wright, 31, stood outside a house in the Fifth Ward recently selling drugs just weeks after completing a prison term for drug possession. Altogether, Mr. Wright said he had served 10 years for four drug-related convictions and one parole violation.

“I was bred into this life,” said Mr. Wright, who said he still made his living selling drugs. “It’s survival of the fittest out here.”

Mr. Wright said that “damn near 99 percent” of his friends had served prison terms, mostly for drug possession, including his younger brother, who is currently in prison.

“Half these dudes dropped out of junior high,” he said, pointing to several friends standing with him sipping from plastic foam cups of “Purple Drank,” a brain-battering draft of prescription-strength codeine cough syrup cut with soda. “Some of them dropped out of elementary school. All they got is this hustle. They got no backup.”

In east Houston, another of the city’s troubled neighborhoods, Marilyn Gambrell, the founder of No More Victims Inc., a support group for students at M. B. Smiley High School with incarcerated parents, said that more than half of the 1,250 students there have relatives in prison or who have done time in the past. Ms. Gambrell is a former parole officer who supervised many of the parents.

Each day, several dozen of the teenagers gather in a carpeted classroom with plush sofas and cushioned chairs to talk about what it is like to have a family member in jail or prison.

During a recent discussion, drugs, violence and poverty were running themes. One boy said he had accompanied his stepfather on drug runs, and most of the students said they themselves had already had run-ins with the police.

Tangenea Miller, 20, is considered a graduate of the support group. She works as a corrections officer at a Houston lock-up. “I see a lot of people there from my old neighborhood,” Ms. Miller said.

The situations described in the high school sessions were front and center one recent day in the Houston neighborhood of Kashmere Gardens. Weeds curled out of broken windows and open doorways in abandoned homes. Mounds of trash sat in empty lots flooded with stagnant water.

Young men, most of them unemployed, stood in front of shotgun houses sipping Purple Drank. Others dealt dope in front of strip-malls and on side streets in broad daylight. The Justice Mapping Center estimates that Texas taxpayers spent $10 million to incarcerate the 117 state prison inmates who were paroled to Kashmere Gardens last year.

Al Jarreau Davis, 26, was released back to Kashmere Gardens five months ago after serving less than a year in state jail for drug possession. It was his second jail term. Mr. Davis and his older brother, Bay Davis, also a recently released drug offender, support themselves by selling marijuana and crack cocaine.

A third Davis brother was shot to death a year ago during an argument after a traffic accident.

“There ain’t no jobs out here for someone like me,” said Al Jarreau Davis. Both brothers said they fully expected to be arrested again, or worse.

“I’m probably going to stay out on the street until somebody murders me,” said Bay Davis, matter-of-factly.

And new parolees keep coming. Every few weeks, several dozen inmates assemble in the chapel of the state prison in Huntsville on the eve of their release for a two-hour orientation program by Christian outreach workers. The prisoners are offered phone lists of clinics, churches, shelters and drug treatment programs. Then they file out of the chapel and back to their cells for one more night of restless confinement.

It is a shoestring program and most inmates do not participate, said the Rev. Emmett Solomon, a prison minister who leads the classes. “Most of what they get to prepare them for their release, they get right here,” Mr. Solomon said. “But it’s probably too little, too late.”

Mr. Taylor, the Sunnyside drug dealer, was in a recent class. He left for the bus station the next morning, with about 40 other men, wearing tattered, unfashionable donated clothes and carrying their possessions in mesh bags.

As Mr. Taylor got off the bus in Houston later in the afternoon, a passing stranger who called himself Ice welcomed him home.

“Hey man, I know how it is,” he told Mr. Taylor. “I just got out, too.”

    Trying to Break Cycle of Prison at Street Level, NYT, 23.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/23/us/23mapping.html

Woman Fugitive Caught After 33 Years

November 9, 2007
Filed at 11:52 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

ATLANTA (AP) -- Deborah Ann Gavin did what many women do. She met a man, married, had two kids and lived quietly as a nurse. Until the day she feared for 33 years finally arrived.

Federal marshals surrounded her two-story home in East Texas on Wednesday, ending her life on the lam from a Georgia women's prison that was closed long ago because of a sex scandal.

''She just said she knew this day was going to come. But she hadn't prepared for it yet,'' said Jason Watson, a state corrections employee assigned to a fugitive task force that caught up with Gavin, surrounding her two-story home in Frankston, Texas.

Gavin, who was convicted of armed robbery, has refused to sign extradition papers that would bring her back to Georgia. Before she was taken away, she phoned her husband, Richard Murphey, who was at work at a construction site.

''All she said was when I got home, she wasn't going to be there,'' Murphey said from Texas.

Gavin, 53, escaped from the Georgia Women's Correctional Institution in Baldwin County in 1974, moving from state to state. After living in Tennessee, Florida and settling in Texas, she met and married Murphey, changed her last name and had two children, authorities said.

Gavin got a nurse's license and worked at a hospital. When her back and heart conditions worsened and she was too weak to work in a medical ward, she started a quilting business from home.

And through it all, Gavin stayed out of trouble.

''As far as we know, she's been completely clear,'' said Ricky Myrick, chief investigator for the Georgia Department of Corrections.

Records show that Gavin had escaped from the prison several times before her final escape, once fleeing as far as Louisiana, but she was always recaptured. At the time, the prison had no fences and security was lax, officials said.

In July 1974 -- a month after her last recapture -- Gavin again broke loose. This time, she disappeared.

''Things in her past, she'd get upset if I brought them up,'' Murphey told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. ''I didn't push her.''

Murphey said he visited his wife Thursday in the Anderson County, Texas, jail. He said Friday that she told him she fled the prison because female inmates were being sexually abused.

The prison was the center of a sex scandal that broke in the early 1990s. Investigations prompted by lawsuits turned up cases going back for years of guards having sex with inmates. All the women were moved out of the prison in 1993 and it became a men's prison.

''They were having rapes and molesting the women, the guards were,'' Murphey said. ''That's why she took off. It floored me when I seen it on the Internet that she'd left six times.''

The search for Gavin made its way through the Southeast, until the U.S. Marshal Service's Southeast Regional Fugitive Task Force found she was living in Frankston under the name Deborah Murphey. They began watching the house Monday, posing as city workers who were checking on a work order.

''Thirty-three years is a long time,'' said James Ergas, a Marshal Service supervisory inspector working the case. ''They didn't want to jump a 53-year-old woman and drive her to the ground if it was the wrong person.''

    Woman Fugitive Caught After 33 Years, NYT, 9.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Fugitive-Caught.html

Fugitive Nabbed After 28 Years on Run

October 24, 2007
Filed at 1:43 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- A man who escaped from a New Jersey prison 28 years ago was arrested Wednesday at his Philadelphia home, making one last bid to conceal his identity and remain a free man.

Maximo Jurado, 75, was serving a 4- to 10-year prison sentence for a drug offense when he left the state's since-closed Marlboro Camp in central New Jersey. He had served less than four months of his term.

Confronted by officers from several law enforcement agencies, Jurado initially insisted his name was ''Juan.'' A few minutes later, when shown a prison photo of himself from 1979, he confessed: ''It's me.''

Jurado was not an especially notorious criminal -- though he had several run-ins with the law in the 1960s and 1970s -- and his escape didn't get much attention at the time.

He managed to avoid capture longer than all but a few people who have escaped from New Jersey prisons. He said he avoided breaking the law and moved around frequently.

Authorities say they tracked him through several states and aliases before catching up with him.

Journalists from The Associated Press accompanied the officers who made the arrest.

Jurado was being held in Philadelphia awaiting extradited to New Jersey.

He will have to complete his original sentence and could get up to five more years in prison if he is convicted of escape.

    Fugitive Nabbed After 28 Years on Run, NYT, 24.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Fugitive-Caught.html

In Connecticut Prisons, a System Long on People, Short on Space

October 17, 2007
The New York Times
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN and CHRISTINE STUART

SOMERS, Conn., Oct. 16 — Cubicles built for four are crammed with eight inmates, and enclosed areas known as dollhouses where inmates once played cards and wrote letters now hold 14 bunk beds. The corridors are lined with more beds.

Each large room at the Willard-Cybulski Correctional Institution once had 50 beds and now has 118. The dual prison, one part in Enfield and the other in Somers, is part of a system so overcrowded that it tests the state’s resolve to get tough on criminals.

Correction officers who work at this dormitory-style, minimum security prison say the cramped conditions give them little room to maneuver and little hope of keeping small problems from turning into big ones.

“As you can see, they really have no place to go,” Clint White, a longtime correction officer, told a group of lawmakers and reporters who were touring the prison on Tuesday.

The arrest in July of two parolees in the grisly murders of a mother and her two daughters in Cheshire, followed closely by a carjacking involving a parolee, touched off a wave of official responses that were intended to address flaws in the criminal justice system, but that also made crowded prisons even more crowded.

Gov. M. Jodi Rell ordered the Department of Correction to temporarily stop granting parole to violent offenders, a class that now includes home burglars. “Security comes first,” the governor said in a Sept. 21 statement.

In addition, prosecutors are holding out for stiffer plea bargains, and judges are imposing longer sentences.

Ms. Rell has promised a top-to-bottom review of the state’s criminal justice system, but in recent weeks, as policy makers have been discussing the issue, pressure has been building.

The union that represents two-thirds of the 7,000 employees at the Department of Correction said Monday that its members counted 821 temporary beds — they resemble plastic toboggans with mattresses — in use in 11 of the state’s 18 prisons one night last week.

“My members believe we’re already at a crisis population,” said Jon Pepe, president of a correction officers union. “We’re only managing them because the population is letting us manage them.”

At Willard-Cybulski, the din makes it hard for anyone inclined to read to concentrate, and guards report having to break up fights over the use of toilets and showers, when weaker inmates often lose out. “Just those last 10 people they added in here made a difference,” said Brian Cronin of Colchester, who is serving 30 months for drug possession.

Mr. Cronin said that he was approved for release in August, but that his release was delayed after the Cheshire slayings.

Amid this crackdown, there have been protests from some Democratic legislators.

State Representative Toni E. Walker of New Haven said that halting parole removes inmates’ incentive to cooperate, and “you take away their hope.”

One of the quandaries for lawmakers is the Department of Correction’s refusal to disclose precisely how many prison beds it has these days. Correction Commissioner Theresa C. Lantz spent several hours deflecting questions at a Joint Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this month.

“There is no set number,” Ms. Lantz insisted. “We accommodate whatever the population is.”

But Representative Gerald M. Fox III, a Democrat of Stamford, persisted. “I’m just trying to figure out when we start to worry,” he said.

“Every day, we manage the population so you don’t have to worry,” she replied.

Some lawmakers said they understood Ms. Lantz’s reluctance to supply a specific number since it would make it easier for advocacy groups and others to sue the state on the ground that the conditions are too harsh.

A study prepared in 2000 by a nonpartisan legislative committee put the number of beds at 17,600.

According to figures compiled by the nonpartisan Office of Legislative Research, the state was housing 18,869 inmates just before the slayings in Cheshire, which touched off the crackdown, and had 19,194 in confinement on Sept. 21, the day the governor suspended parole for violent offenders.

As of Tuesday, the state had 19,655 inmates, according to the Department of Correction. “This is the highest the population has ever been, and it’s grown by 800 in three months,” said Representative Michael P. Lawlor, a Democrat from East Haven who is co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

In late 1999, when John G. Rowland was governor, the state started sending 500 prisoners at a time to Virginia to save money and relieve congestion, but that experiment was criticized by the inmates’ families and stopped soon after Ms. Rell became governor.

Recent measures aimed at relieving congestion and reducing recidivism have fared better, like electronic monitoring and granting “transitional release” to those near the end of their sentences.

Still, union officials say that the current crunch is far worse than in years past.

“We have to do something to get the tension out of here,” State Senator John A. Kissel, a Republican from Enfield, said at the end of Tuesday’s tour. “I don’t think the correctional officers are making unreasonable requests.”

    In Connecticut Prisons, a System Long on People, Short on Space, NYT, 17.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/nyregion/17prisons.html

Troubles Mount Within Texas Youth Detention Agency

October 16, 2007
The New York Times
By SOLOMON MOORE

AUSTIN, Tex. — Juvenile detainees as young as 13 years old slept on filthy mats in dormitories with broken, overflowing toilets and feces smeared on the walls. Denied outside recreation for weeks at a time, they ate bug-infested food, did school work that consisted of little more than crossword puzzles and defecated in bags.

After months of glowing state reports, the squalid conditions were disclosed on Oct. 1 by state inspectors at the Coke County Juvenile Justice Center in Bronte. They are another sign of the deep disarray of the Texas Youth Commission, the nation’s second-largest, after Florida’s, and most troubled juvenile corrections agency.

The agency already faces state and federal investigations into accusations of sexual abuse by juvenile corrections officers. In March, the commission’s board of directors resigned under pressure, and many other top officials have been ousted. After a review by an expert panel, more than 200 inmates were released from some of the state’s 13 residential confinement centers because their sentences had been improperly extended.

There are also reports of endemic violence at some centers. At least 11,000 youth-on-youth assaults occur every year, according to state figures, and in the last 12 months there were 14,000 assaults on staff members.

State officials say chronic job vacancy rates and critical employee turnover are at the root of many of the system’s problems. Employee terminations since September 2006 have far outpaced recruitment. The agency has hired 870 juvenile corrections officers since September 2006 to October 2007. In that period 1,241 officers left their positions, or about half the juvenile corrections officers.

One-third of the departing officers were fired for poor performance, falsification of applications or inappropriate conduct, including physical abuse of detainees.

In August, the acting director of the agency, Dimitria D. Pope, the fourth person to run it since February, was confident enough about the system’s progress that she assured politicians that the abuse of juveniles had been “98 percent” eliminated.

The new Coke County disclosures seem to have shaken Ms. Pope’s optimism.

“I don’t know how deep the problems really are in terms of the corruption in the organization,” she said in an interview.

Ms. Pope has transferred the 197 offenders in Bronte to other institutions, fired seven monitoring officials and canceled an $8 million contract with the GEO Corporation, the prison company in Boca Raton, Fla., that managed the center. The state has also opened a criminal investigation and a review of the adult prisons run by GEO.

GEO executives said in a news release that they had “provided quality detention services at the center for 13 years” and announced plans to market it to local and federal agencies.

The agency’s 13 institutions are often hundreds of miles from metropolitan areas, and salaries starting around $23,000 have hindered recruiting staff members, say corrections officials and juvenile justice experts.

“They get paid about the same as a Wal-Mart employee for a dangerous job that most people don’t want to do,” said Scott Henson, founder of Grits for Breakfast, a criminal justice blog. “So they have had to reach deeper and deeper into the bottom of the barrel.”

State auditors found that on average there was one corrections officer for every 24 juveniles, double the nationally accepted standard. Corrections officials say that with so few guards it is impossible to monitor youths adequately and defuse dangerous situations.

“Insufficiently paid staff, not enough staff — these are fairly common problems throughout the nation,” said Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in Oakland, Calif. “But the breakdown in Texas is more dramatic than any other place I’ve seen.”

The violence in the agency’s institutions has led to soaring injury rates, with more than 700 officers filing claims since September 2006, a higher proportion than at Texas’ adult prisons.

Detainees also suffer injuries. In 2007, Texas public hospitals said that 60 youths had sustained broken bones, many because of improper force by corrections officers. The commission tracked 11,881 uses of force from September 2006 to September 2007, including pepper spray and grappling holds.

Natalie Jordan, a juvenile corrections officer, is a 27-year veteran of the agency and the mother of a 15-year-old serving 12 months for burglary at the Crockett State School in East Texas.

Since he was committed, Ms. Jordan’s son has been in more fights than she can recount. In one fight, a corrections officer dislocated her son’s shoulder while trying to hold him. In another, she said, an officer broke up a fight by blasting her son in the face with pepper spray.

Don Sorgman said his 17-year-old stepson had repeatedly been assaulted by other offenders since he was committed in February for stealing from a snack machine.

Mr. Sorgman learned about the assaults from his son and from a profanity-laced letter sent to him by self-proclaimed gang members who bragged that they had physically dominated the boy. Mr. Sorgman said his son had also been pepper sprayed by guards at least twice.

“He’s a different person than he was,” Mr. Sorgman said, recalling his impressions after a recent visit with his stepson. “The hardships he has been put through has definitely hardened him, changed him, and not for the better.”

The use of pepper spray became a new source of contention for the agency in August, when Ms. Pope issued a memorandum expanding its use. Ms. Pope argued that juvenile corrections officers needed help controlling their short-staffed units and that pepper spray was safer than physically restraining disruptive or violent young people.

Despite a court settlement in September that halted the expansion policy in lieu of public hearings on the question, incidents of using pepper spray have spiked. The agency reported 652 such events from September 2006 to August 2007, a fourfold increase over the previous 12 months.

“I know a lot of people who have broken arms and ankles while trying to hold these kids,” said Tony Cox, a corrections officer at the Ron Jackson State Juvenile Correctional Complex in Brownwood. “That’s why I’m a strong believer in using pepper spray before actually grabbing a kid.”

In September, a state task force charged with recommending reforms to the agency said the debate between supporters of physical restraints and pepper spray presented “a false choice.”

“The challenge,” it said, was for the agency “to find ways to decrease all uses of force through an emphasis on other methods.”

    Troubles Mount Within Texas Youth Detention Agency, NYT, 16.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/16/us/16juvenile.html

NY's Oldest Inmate, 89, Denied Parole

October 10, 2007
Filed at 11:17 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) -- The oldest inmate in the New York state prison system was denied parole a week after his 89th birthday. Charles Friedgood was a well-to-do Long Island heart surgeon convicted in 1976 of injecting his ailing wife Sophie with a fatal dose of the painkiller Demerol.

He was arrested at Kennedy International Airport as he was trying to flee the country with more than $450,000 in cash, securities and valuables from his wife's estate to be with his girlfriend in Europe.

A parole board that met with him Tuesday determined his release would undermine respect for the law and be ''incompatible with the welfare of society.''

It was not clear what Friedgood told the board because a transcript of the hearing was not immediately available. But the board, in a decision released Wednesday, said ''it is very clear you continue to attempt to manipulate the board with ambiguous, carefully crafted and evasive answers.''

In a recent jailhouse interview with The New York Times, Friedgood maintained that he had no intent to kill his wife, who had been ill since a stroke. He also told the newspaper: ''If you don't want to be with a woman anymore, you divorce. You know, you don't have to resort to murder. So 32 years later, I begin to realize how stupid you can do things.''

Friedgood was sentenced in 1977 to 25 years to life in prison and is being held at Woodbourne state prison in the Hudson Valley.

He had been rejected for parole four times before. A board in 2003 said he had a ''propensity for extreme violence.'' A state appeals court later criticized that board's ''irrational'' conclusion about Friedgood, who has terminal cancer and wears a colostomy bag.

Some of Friedgood's children had supported his release, as had a former prosecutor who put him behind bars.

John Queenan, an attorney for Friedgood, would not comment on the board's decision because he had not seen it. But he said Friedgood's positive prison record and his medical condition merit his release.

''Obviously, he's just getting older day by day,'' he said.

Friedgood, who turned 89 on Oct. 3, is scheduled to appear before a parole board again in March 2009.

As New York's oldest inmate, Friedgood is symbolic of a prison population getting older as health care improves, baby boomers age and inmates get hit with longer sentences due to tough-on-crime laws like the Rockefeller drug laws.

Inmates 50 and over accounted for 3 percent of New York's prison population two decades ago, compared to 11 percent last year.

    NY's Oldest Inmate, 89, Denied Parole, NYT, 10.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Oldest-Inmate.html

Editorial

Out of Prison and Deep in Debt

October 6, 2007
The New York Times

With the nation’s incarcerated population at 2.1 million and growing — and corrections costs topping $60 billion a year — states are rightly looking for ways to keep people from coming back to prison once they get out. Programs that help ex-offenders find jobs, housing, mental health care and drug treatment are part of the solution. States must also end the Dickensian practice of saddling ex-offenders with crushing debt that they can never hope to pay off and that drives many of them right back to prison.

The scope of the ex-offender debt problem is outlined in a new study commissioned by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Assistance and produced by the Council of State Governments’ Justice Center. The study, “Repaying Debts,” describes cases of newly released inmates who have been greeted with as much as $25,000 in debt the moment they step outside the prison gate. That’s a lot to owe for most people, but it can be insurmountable for ex-offenders who often have no assets and whose poor educations and criminal records prevent them from landing well-paying jobs.

Often, the lion’s share of the debt is composed of child support obligations that continue to mount while the imprisoned parent is earning no money. The problem does not stop there. The corrections system buries inmates in fines, fees and surcharges that can amount to $10,000 or more. According to the Justice Center study, for example, a person convicted of drunken driving in New York can be charged a restitution fee of $1,000, a probation fee of $1,800 and 11 other fees and charges that range from $20 to nearly $2,200.

In some jurisdictions, inmates are also billed for the DNA testing that proves their guilt or innocence, for drug testing and even for the drug treatment they are supposed to receive as a condition of parole. These fees are often used to run the courts, the sheriffs’ offices or other parts of the corrections system.

A former inmate living at or even below the poverty level can be dunned by four or five departments at once — and can be required to surrender 100 percent of his or her earnings. People caught in this impossible predicament are less likely to seek regular employment, making them even more susceptible to criminal relapse.

The Justice Center report recommends several important reforms. First, the states should make one agency responsible for collecting all debts from ex-offenders. That agency can then set payment priorities. The report also recommends that payments to the state for fines and fees be capped at 20 percent of income, except when the former inmate has sufficient assets to pay more. And in cases where the custodial parent agrees, the report urges states to consider modifying child support orders while the noncustodial parent is in prison. Once that parent is released, child support should be paid first.

The states should also develop incentives, including certificates of good conduct and waivers of fines, for ex-offenders who make good-faith efforts to make their payments. Where appropriate, they should be permitted to work off some of the debt through community service. Beyond that, elected officials who worry about recidivism need to understand that bleeding ex-offenders financially is a sure recipe for landing them back in jail.

    Out of Prison and Deep in Debt, NYT, 6.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/06/opinion/06sat1.html

Aging Inmates Clogging Nation's Prisons

September 29, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:32 p.m. ET
The New York Times

HARDWICK, Ga. (AP) -- Razor wire topping the fences seems almost a joke at the Men's State Prison, where many inmates are slumped in wheelchairs, or leaning on walkers or canes.

It's becoming an increasingly common sight: geriatric inmates spending their waning days behind bars. The soaring number of aging inmates is now outpacing the prison growth as a whole.

Tough sentencing laws passed in the crime-busting 1980s and 1990s are largely to blame. It's all fueling an explosion in inmate health costs for cash-strapped states.

''It keeps going up and up,'' said Alan Adams, director of Health Services for the Georgia Department of Corrections. ''We've got some old guys who are too sick to get out of bed. And some of them, they're going to die inside. The courts say we have to provide care and we do. But that costs money.''

Justice Department statistics show that the number of inmates in federal and state prisons age 55 and older shot up 33 percent from 2000 to 2005, the most recent year for which the data was available. That's faster than the 9 percent growth overall.

The trend is particularly pronounced in the South, which has some of the nation's toughest sentencing laws. In 16 Southern states, the growth rate has escalated by an average of 145 percent since 1997, according to the Southern Legislative Conference.

Rising prison health care costs -- particularly for elderly inmates -- helped fuel a 10 percent jump in state prison spending from fiscal year 2005 to 2006, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. That growth in spending is projected to continue, the group said.

The graying of the nation's prisons mirrors the population as whole. But many inmates arrive in prison after years of unhealthy living, such as drug use and risky sex. The stress of life behind bars can often make them even sicker.

And once they enter prison walls, they aren't eligible for Medicaid or Medicare, where the costs are shared between the state and federal government, meaning a state shoulders the burden of inmate health care on its own.

Estimates place the annual cost of housing an inmate at $18,000 to $31,000 a year. There is no firm separate number for housing an elderly inmate, but there is widespread agreement that it's significantly higher than for a younger one.

In addition to medical costs there are other, less obvious expenses. For instance, elderly inmates can't climb to the top bunk so they sometimes need to be housed in separate units that require more space.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that inmates have a constitutional right to health care. But what that means can depend on where an inmate is locked up.

In Alabama, the Southern Center for Human Rights in 2005 filed a federal class action lawsuit to force the Hamilton Aged and Infirm Correctional Facility to improve conditions. Prisoners with serious medical conditions sometimes had to wait several months or more for treatment at the overcrowded facility housing frail inmates with dementia and Alzheimer's, the lawsuit said.

A federal judge in 2006 appointed a receiver to oversee California's prison system after finding that an average of one inmate a week was dying of neglect or malpractice. A new report issued by the receiver found that as many as 66 inmates died last year because of poor medical care.

State lawmakers have been reluctant to tinker with the tough laws that are keeping more people in prison for longer sentences. Reacting to violent crime waves in the 1980s and 1990s, state lawmakers passed two- and three-strikes laws and abolished parole.

They are now seeing the results of those laws, said Ronald Aday, professor of aging studies at Middle Tennessee University who has written a book on aging prisoners.

''This number is going to keep going up and up until they address the issues that are putting these people there in the first place,'' Aday said.

At Men's State Prison in central Georgia, the older inmates stick together, said Manson Griffin, 66, and Joe Williams, 62.

They rattle off a list of ailments common to men their age: arthritis, high blood pressure, bad backs. Williams wears a neck brace and walks with a cane. Both are taking a laundry list of prescription medications.

Still, Griffin said he's in fairly good condition compared with some of the older inmates at Men's, where the average age is 52 and the oldest prisoner is 86.

''It's heart-rending to see some of the older people in the condition they're in,'' Griffin said. ''You have to wonder why they haven't had a little leniency on them to let them go home?

''What can an 80-year-old man in a wheelchair do? Run?''

    Aging Inmates Clogging Nation's Prisons, NYT, 29.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Aging-Prisoners.html

Prisons to Restore Purged Religious Books

September 27, 2007
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26 — Facing pressure from religious groups, civil libertarians and members of Congress, the federal Bureau of Prisons has decided to return religious materials that had been purged from prison chapel libraries because they were not on the bureau’s lists of approved resources.

The bureau had said it was prompted to remove the materials after a 2004 Department of Justice report mentioned that religious books that incite violence could infiltrate chapel libraries.

After the details of the removal became widely known this month, Republican lawmakers, liberal Christians and evangelical talk shows all criticized the government for creating a list of acceptable religious books.

The bureau has not abandoned the idea of creating such lists, Judi Simon Garrett, a spokeswoman, said in an e-mail message. But rather than packing away everything while those lists were compiled, the religious materials will remain on the shelves, Ms. Garrett explained.

In an e-mail message Wednesday, the bureau said: “In response to concerns expressed by members of several religious communities, the Bureau of Prisons has decided to alter its planned course of action with respect to the Chapel Library Project.

“The bureau will begin immediately to return to chapel libraries materials that were removed in June 2007, with the exception of any publications that have been found to be inappropriate, such as material that could be radicalizing or incite violence. The review of all materials in chapel libraries will be completed by the end of January 2008.”

Only a week ago the bureau said it was not reconsidering the library policy. But critics of the bureau’s program said it appeared that the bureau had bowed to widespread outrage.

“Certainly putting the books back on the shelves is a major victory, and it shows the outcry from all over the country was heard,” said Moses Silverman, a lawyer for three prisoners who are suing the bureau over the program. “But regarding what they do after they put them back, I’m concerned.”

The bureau originally set out to take an inventory of all materials in its chapel libraries to weed out books that might incite violence. But the list grew to the tens of thousands, and the bureau decided instead to compile lists of acceptable materials in a plan called the Standardized Chapel Library Project. The plan identifies about 150 items for each of 20 religions or religious categories.

In the spring, prison chaplains were told to remove all materials not on the lists. The bureau said it planned to issue additions to the lists once a year. Chaplains packed up libraries with thousands of books collected over decades. Unidentified religious experts helped the bureau shape the lists of acceptable materials, which independent scholars said omitted many important religious texts.

Bob Moore, director of prison policy oversight at Aleph, an advocacy group for Jews in prison, said the lack of detail and transparency about how the lists were determined troubled him.

“This is a positive step: it means they are not throwing the baby out with the bath water,” Mr. Moore said of keeping books on the shelves for now. “But our position is there should not be a list of what should be on the shelves, but what shouldn’t be.”

Mr. Silverman said the return of the books would “go a long way” to resolving the lawsuit. But he added, “I remain concerned that the criteria for returning the books will be constitutional and lawful.”

    Prisons to Restore Purged Religious Books, NYT, 27.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/washington/27prison.html?hp

2 Texas Inmates Escape; Officer Killed

September 24, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:50 p.m. ET
The New York Times

HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) -- Two inmates working in prison field overpowered a guard Monday and ran her over in a stolen pickup truck, killing the woman as they fled, prison officials said.

One inmate was apprehended within an hour, and a manhunt was under way in Huntsville for the second. Stetson-hatted lawmen on horseback could be seen in the nearby fields with bloodhounds checking in the brush.

The missing inmate, Jerry Martin, 37, had been imprisoned since 1997 and was serving a 50-year sentence for attempted murder.

Martin and John Ray Falk were working in a field outside the Wynne Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice just north of Huntsville when they overpowered the officer, grabbed her weapons and escaped in a Huntsville city truck that was nearby, department spokesman Jason Clark said.

''They ran over the officer,'' Clark said. ''We can confirm she did die.''

The name of the officer was not immediately released.

Falk was quickly recaptured. State Department of Criminal Justice officials said the truck was found abandoned about a mile south along Interstate 45.

Authorities in Utah were also searching for a pair of fugitives Monday after two convicted killers escaped from a county jail near the Utah-Wyoming border.

Danny Martin Gallegos, 49, and Juan Carlos Diaz-Arevelo, 27, escaped Sunday after jumping the fence at the Daggett County jail, about 120 miles east of Salt Lake City, said Jack Ford, a spokesman for the Utah Department of Corrections. He said the men were discovered missing during an inmate count at 8 p.m. -- six hours after they were last seen at the jail.

''Both men are considered dangerous. Do not approach,'' the sheriff's office said in a statement.

Diaz-Arevelo was convicted of murder and child abuse in 2006. Gallegos was convicted of aggravated murder in 1991. Because of overcrowding, the two men had been transferred to the jail from the state prison, Ford said.

In north Georgia, another search was on for three inmates who escaped from the Fannin County Jail in Blue Ridge. The Georgia State Patrol was called to assist the search by air after the three escaped on Sunday.

    2 Texas Inmates Escape; Officer Killed, NYT, 24.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Prison-Escape.html