USA > History > 2010 > Prison (I)

Freed From Prison,

Long Island Man Takes to Pulpit

December 24, 2010
The New York Times
By SARAH MASLIN NIR

CORAM, N.Y. — A Long Island man whose prison sentence in the fatal shooting a 17-year-old in front of his home was commuted by Gov. David A. Paterson said Friday that he was haunted by what he had done.

“I remember that family,” the man, John H. White, said in an interview after delivering an emotional speech at his church in which he described the horrors of prison. “I remember what they’ve lost. I remember their son. I will remember them the rest of their days. And I will ask God to forgive me all the rest of my days.”

It was Mr. White’s first full day at home after Mr. Paterson commuted his prison sentence after he had served five months of a 20-month to 4-year term. Mr. White, 57, had been convicted of second-degree manslaughter and criminal possession of a weapon in the racially charged case: his is one of the few African-American families in the upscale Suffolk County hamlet of Miller Place, and the teenager he shot, Daniel Cicciaro, was white, one of a group of young men who were demanding to fight Mr. White’s son Aaron one night in August 2006.

On Friday night, Mr. White, a construction foreman who is also a deacon at Faith Baptist Church in Coram, a less affluent town, spoke forcefully but cryptically about the time he served at the Mount McGregor Correctional Facility in upstate Saratoga County.

“There is another side to men that not even men know,” Mr. White said, standing before a congregation of about 40 on Christmas Eve. In a speech lasting about eight minutes and in an interview afterward, he described prison as an “upside-down kingdom” where “what’s right is sometimes wrong, what’s wrong is right.”

Mr. White, 57, wore a dark suit and red tie and began his speech with singing. His words were met with volleys of hallelujahs as the congregation celebrated his return. Church members had sent several hundred letters in support of him, part of an effort spearheaded by the N.A.A.C.P., said the Rev. Beresford Adams, Faith Baptist’s longtime leader.

“He’s an exceptional person,” he said of Mr. White. “He’s very devoted.”

“We are not gloating; I want to make that clear,” he added. “We are happy for the White family; our hearts go out to the Cicciaro family.”

On Friday morning at his home, Mr. White said that all he wanted was “to take a hot bath, to shave, to go to church.”

“Hope is eternal,” he said before shutting the front door decorated with a red-ribboned wreath.

At his trial, Mr. White described his actions as protecting his family from what he perceived as a lynch mob, saying Mr. Cicciaro and his friends yelled racial slurs as they stood in his driveway.

“There is no racial divide as far as the church is concerned,” Mr. Adams said. “We live on Christian principles that demand that everybody is the same in the eyes of God.” Chief among those principles, he said, “is forgiveness.”

Mr. Cicciaro’s mother, Joanne, declined to comment on the case on Friday. Dano’s Auto Clinic in Port Jefferson Station, which is run by the victim’s father, was closed on Friday, but a decoration, the face of an African-American Santa Claus, was taped to the outside of the front door. It was unclear who had put it there.

At a news conference in Manhattan, Governor Paterson said he wished he had spoken with the dead teenager’s family before making his decision. He said he ended up speaking with the family on Friday for nearly an hour, but declined to provide details.

The governor said that although he would not have changed his decision, “there were some points that Ms. Cicciaro made that were rather compelling.” He added, “There were some issues that were raised by Ms. Cicciaro that I will think about over the holidays.”

Nicholas Confessore and Anahad O’Connor contributed reporting.

    Freed From Prison, Long Island Man Takes to Pulpit, NYT, 24.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/25/nyregion/25white.html

Inmates in Georgia Prisons

Use Contraband Phones

to Coordinate Protest

December 12, 2010
The New York Times
By SARAH WHEATON

The prison protest has entered the wireless age.

Inmates in at least seven Georgia prisons have used contraband cellphones to coordinate a nonviolent strike this weekend, saying they want better living conditions and to be paid for work they do in the prisons.

Inmates said they would not perform chores, work for the Corrections Department’s industrial arm or shop at prison commissaries until a list of demands are addressed, including compensation for their work, more educational opportunities, better food and sentencing rules changes.

The protest began Thursday, but inmates said that organizers had spent months building a web of disparate factions and gangs — groups not known to cooperate — into a unified coalition using text messaging and word of mouth.

Officials at the Georgia Department of Corrections did not respond on Sunday to phone and e-mail messages seeking comment.

Smuggled cellphones have been commonplace in prisons for years; Charles Manson was caught with one in a California penitentiary this month. Officials worry that inmates will use them to issue orders to accomplices on the outside or to plan escape attempts.

But the Georgia protest appears to be the first use of the technology to orchestrate a grass-roots movement behind bars.

Reached on their cellphones inside several prisons, six participants in the strike described a feat of social networking more reminiscent of Capitol Hill vote-whipping than jailhouse rebellion.

Conditions at the state prisons have been in decline, the inmates said. But “they took the cigarettes away in August or September, and a bunch of us just got to talking, and that was a big factor,” said Mike, an inmate at the Smith State Prison in Downing who declined to give his full name.

The organizers set a date for the start and, using contact numbers from time spent at other prisons or connections from the outside, began sending text messages to inmates known to hold sway.

“Anybody that has some sort of dictatorship or leadership amongst the crowds,” said Mike, one of several prisoners who contacted The New York Times to publicize their strike. “We have to come together and set aside all differences, whites, blacks, those of us that are affiliated in gangs.”

Now, Mike said, every dormitory at participating prisons has at least one point man with a phone who can keep the other inmates in the loop.

Miguel, another prisoner at Smith who also declined to give his full name, estimated that about 10 percent of all inmates had phones.

“We text very frequently,” he said. “We try and keep up with what’s going on in the news and what’s going on at other facilities. Those are our voices.”

They are also a source of profit to the people providing the contraband. Miguel said he paid $400 for a phone that would have cost $20 on the street. Mike said he bought his through a guard. “That’s how a lot of us get our phones,” Mike said.

Inmates said guards had started confiscating the phones, and they complained that hot water and heat had been turned off. The Corrections Department placed several of the facilities where inmates planned to strike under indefinite lockdown on Thursday, according to local news reports.

“We’re hearing in the news they’re putting it down as we’re starting a riot, so they locked all the prison down,” said an inmate at Hays State Prison in Trion who refused to give his name. But, he said, “We locked ourselves down.”

The inmates contend that if they have a source of income in the prison and better educational opportunities to prepare them for release, violence and recidivism will go down. But the Department of Corrections has not publicly acknowledged the protest.

Mike said that the leaders were focused on telling inmates to remain patient, and not to consider resorting to violence.

The inmates’ closest adviser outside prison walls is Elaine Brown, a longtime advocate for prisoners whose son is incarcerated at Macon State Prison, one of the other major protest sites.

A former Black Panther leader who is based in Oakland, Calif., Ms. Brown helped distill the inmate complaints into a list of demands. She held a conference call on Sunday evening to develop a strategy with various groups, including the Georgia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Nation of Islam.

    Inmates in Georgia Prisons Use Contraband Phones to Coordinate Protest, NYT, 12.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/us/13prison.html

The Crime of Punishment

December 6, 2010
The New York Times

In 2005, when a federal court took a snapshot of California’s prisons, one inmate was dying each week because the state failed to provide adequate health care. Adequate does not mean state-of-the-art, or even tolerable. It means care meeting “the minimal civilized measure of life’s necessities,” in the Supreme Court’s words, so inmates do not die from rampant staph infections or commit suicide at nearly twice the national average.

These and other horrors have been documented in California’s prisons for two decades, and last week they were before the Supreme Court in Schwarzenegger v. Plata. It is the most important case in years about prison conditions. The justices should uphold the lower court’s remedy for addressing the horrors.

Four years ago, when the number of inmates in California reached more than 160,000, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a “state of emergency.” The state’s prisons, he said, are places “of extreme peril.”

Last year, under a federal law focusing on prison conditions, the lower court found that overcrowding was the “primary cause” of gruesome inadequacies in medical and mental health care. The court concluded that the only relief under the law “capable of remedying these constitutional deficiencies” is a “prison release order.”

Today, there are almost twice as many inmates in California’s 33 prisons as they were designed for. The court ordered the state to reduce that population by around 30 percent. While still leaving it overcrowded, that would free up space, staff and other vital resources for long overdue medical and mental health clinics.

The case will most likely be resolved by a vote of 5 to 4, with Justice Anthony Kennedy’s vote decisive. At the oral argument, he said that “at some point,” the court must say “overcrowding is the principal cause, as experts have testified, and it’s now time for a remedy.” After 20 years of litigation and 70 court orders, that point has come.

At the intense, sometimes testy argument, Justice Samuel Alito revealed the law-and-order thinking behind the California system. “If 40,000 prisoners are going to be released,” he said overstating the likely number, “you really believe that if you were to come back here two years after that you would be able to say they haven’t contributed to an increase in crime?” To Justice Alito, apparently, it was out of the realm of possibility that, rather than increasing crime, the state could actually decrease it by reducing the number of prison inmates.

Among experts, as a forthcoming issue of the journal Criminology & Public Policy relates, there is a growing belief that less prison and more and better policing will reduce crime. There is almost unanimous condemnation of California-style mass incarceration, which has led to no reduction in serious crime and has turned many inmates into habitual criminals.

America’s prison system is now studied largely because of its failure — the result of an expensive approach to criminal justice shaped by fear-driven ideology. California’s prisons embody this overwhelming failure.

    The Crime of Punishment, NYT, 6.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/opinion/06mon1.html

Missouri Tells Judges Cost of Sentences

September 18, 2010
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY

ST. LOUIS — When judges here sentence convicted criminals, a new and unusual variable is available for them to consider: what a given punishment will cost the State of Missouri.

For someone convicted of endangering the welfare of a child, for instance, a judge might now learn that a three-year prison sentence would run more than $37,000 while probation would cost $6,770. A second-degree robber, a judge could be told, would carry a price tag of less than $9,000 for five years of intensive probation, but more than $50,000 for a comparable prison sentence and parole afterward. The bill for a murderer’s 30-year prison term: $504,690.

Legal experts say no other state systematically provides such information to judges, a practice put into effect here last month by the state’s sentencing advisory commission, an appointed board that offers guidance on criminal sentencing.

The practice has touched off a sharp debate. It has been lauded nationally by a disparate group of defense lawyers and fiscal conservatives, who consider it an overdue tool that will force judges to ponder alternatives to prison more seriously.

But critics — prosecutors especially — dismiss the idea as unseemly. They say that the cost of punishment is an irrelevant consideration when deciding a criminal’s fate and that there is a risk of overlooking the larger social costs of crime.

“Justice isn’t subject to a mathematical formula,” said Robert P. McCulloch, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County.

The intent behind the cost estimates, he said, is transparent: to pressure judges, in the face of big bills, into sending fewer people to prison.

“There is no average case,” Mr. McCulloch said. “Every case is an individual case, and every victim has the right to have each case viewed individually, and every defendant has that right.”

Supporters, however, say judges would never focus exclusively on the cost of a sentence or turn their responsibilities of judgment into a numerical equation.

“This is one of a thousand things we look at — about the tip of a dog’s tail, it’s such a small thing,” said Judge Gary Oxenhandler, presiding judge in the 13th Judicial Circuit Court and a member of the sentencing commission. “But it is almost foolish not to look at it. We live in a what’s-it-going-to-cost? society now.”

The shift here comes at a dire time for criminal justice budgets around the country, as states try to navigate conflicting, politically charged demands: to keep people safe and also cut costs. Michigan has closed prisons. Arizona considered putting its prison system under private control. California has searched for ways to shrink its incarcerated population.

Legal scholars predict that policies similar to the one in Missouri — which, unlike some other measures, might encourage cutting costs before inmates are already in prison — may soon emerge elsewhere.

Months ago, members of the Missouri Sentencing Advisory Commission, a group of lawyers, judges and others established by state lawmakers years ago, voted to begin providing judges with cost information on individual cases.

Judge Michael A. Wolff of the State Supreme Court, chairman of the sentencing commission, said judges had been asking for such data. By last month, Judge Wolff said, the computer algorithm was up and running, and the commission made note of it to the legal community in its August newsletter, “Smart Sentencing.”

The concept is simple: fill in an offender’s conviction code, criminal history and other background, and the program spits out a range of recommended sentences, new statistical information about the likelihood that Missouri criminals with similar profiles (and the sentences they received) might commit more crimes, and the various options’ price tags.

Judge Wolff said that some judges might never look at the price tags (though they are available to anyone, and some defense lawyers have begun mentioning them) and that judges ultimately did whatever they wished (within statutory limits) on sentences. Missouri’s sentencing commission makes recommendations only. And as Judge Wolff sees it, sentencing costs would never be a consideration in the most violent cases, just in circumstances where prison is not the only obvious answer.

“This is just more information,” Judge Wolff said.

Fewer than half the states have sentencing commissions like Missouri’s. In many cases, the commissions grew out of concerns, starting in the late 1970s, about racial and geographic disparities in sentences.

Now, however, the groups find themselves also weighing fiscal issues, like everyone else. Consider the theme of a meeting of the national association of sentencing commissions in August: “Sound Sentencing Policy: Balancing Justice and Dollars.”

Leaders of several commissions in other states said they had yet to consider a plan like Missouri’s. Some voiced concern about the ramifications, the methodology — even the price tag of calculating sentencing price tags.

Lots of states measure the costs of imprisonment and of new criminal laws, but on a generic scale. Many states, for instance, calculate the average cost of housing a prisoner, but that is rarely mentioned with down-to-the-dollar figures for a specific person as a judge picks a sentence.

To some, the concept sounds crass, and carries the prospect of unwanted consequences. Might a decision between life in prison and a death sentence be decided some day by price comparison? (Absolutely not, Missouri officials say, and besides, the computer model does not attempt to compute the cost of capital punishment.) Could the costs of various sentences become so widely known as to affect the decisions of jurors?

Numerous legal experts on sentencing issues said Missouri’s new policy made sense. Economic considerations play roles in all sorts of legal decisions, Rachel E. Barkow, a law professor at New York University, said, so why not let judges understand the cost of their choices?

Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at The Ohio State University, said: “One of the flaws in the operation of our criminal justice system is not only the failure to be attentive to cost but an arrogance that somehow you can never put a price on justice. Long missing has been a sober realization that even if we get significant benefits from incarceration, that comes at a significant cost.”

Others, like Paul Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah, argue that Missouri’s plan counts certain costs but fails to measure others — the societal price, for instance, if someone not incarcerated commits another crime.

“No one can put a price tag on being a victim,” said Scott Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association.

Still, money worries loom. This year, in an annual address, even the chief justice of Missouri’s Supreme Court, William Ray Price Jr., warned that the system would be threatened if budget cuts persisted.

“Perhaps the biggest waste of resources in all of state government is the over-incarceration of nonviolent offenders and our mishandling of drug and alcohol offenders,” he said.

Mr. McCulloch, the prosecutor, said the state’s prisons were filled with anything but harmless people. “You show me the college kid with a perfect record and a dime bag of weed who has been sent to prison, and I’ll get him out,” he said. “Find me him.”

When Missouri lawmakers meet next year, Mr. McCulloch says that he expects he and others may push to abolish the sentencing commission.


Emma Graves Fitzsimmons contributed reporting from Chicago.

    Missouri Tells Judges Cost of Sentences, NYT, 18.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/us/19judges.html

Embattled Illinois Prisons Chief Resigns

September 2, 2010
Filed at 12:39 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CHICAGO (AP) -- Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn says his embattled chief of prisons is resigning to pursue a new opportunity.

Quinn said Thursday that he would name a replacement soon for Corrections Director Michael Randle.

Randle's departure comes after a review last month of a secret program that granted early release to more than 1,700 prisoners before it was revealed by The Associated Press and halted. Some of those released have violent records.

Quinn, a Democrat running for his first full term as governor, heaped most of the blame for the program on Randle. Randle has said Quinn ordered that violent offenders not be released as part of the program.

    Embattled Illinois Prisons Chief Resigns, NYT, 2.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/09/02/us/AP-US-Illinois-Prisons-Chief.html

Federal Oversight for Troubled N.Y. Youth Prisons

July 14, 2010
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

Four of New York’s most dangerous and troubled youth prisons will be placed under federal oversight, strict new limits will be imposed on the use of physical force by guards, and dozens of psychiatrists, counselors and investigators will be hired under a sweeping agreement finalized on Wednesday between state and federal officials.

The agreement will usher in the most significant expansion of mental health services in years for youths in custody, the vast majority of whom suffer from drug or alcohol problems, developmental disabilities or mental health problems.

Currently, the state does not have a single full-time psychiatrist on staff to treat young offenders.

Guards at the youth prisons, known as youth counselors, will be barred from physically restraining youths except when a person’s physical safety is threatened or a youth is trying to escape from the institution.

Guards will be allowed to use the most controversial method — in which a youth is forced to the ground and held face-down — for at most three minutes, with evaluation by a doctor to follow within four hours.

The accord comes almost a year after the Justice Department threatened to take over New York’s juvenile justice system unless the state took significant steps to rectify problems at the four prisons, where physical abuse was rampant and mental health counseling was scant or nonexistent.

“It is New York’s fundamental responsibility to protect juveniles in its custody from harm and to uphold their constitutional rights,” Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said in a statement. “We have worked cooperatively with New York officials to craft an agreement to ensure that the constitutional rights of juveniles at the four facilities are protected, and we commend New York and the New York State Office of Children and Families for their willingness to work aggressively to remedy these problems.”

Federal investigators found that staff members at the four institutions — the Lansing Residential Center and the Louis Gossett Jr. Residential Center, in Lansing, and two residences, one for boys and one for girls, at Tryon Residential Center in Johnstown — routinely used physical force to discipline the youths, resulting in broken bones, shattered teeth, concussions and dozens of other serious injuries in a period of less than two years.

Gov. David A. Paterson said in a statement, “With this historic settlement agreement, New York takes another step towards achieving true transformation of our juvenile justice system.”

Mr. Paterson, who has been trying to address problems plaguing the juvenile system, introduced legislation in June to let judges sentence youths to juvenile prisons only if they had been found guilty of a violent crime or a sex crime or were deemed to be a serious threat to themselves or others. Juvenile prisons house those convicted of criminal acts, from truancy to murder, who are too young to serve in adult jails and prisons.

The federal inquiry began in 2007 after a spate of episodes, including the 2006 death of a disturbed 15-year-old after two employees at the Tryon center pinned him down on the ground.

Two monitors, jointly chosen by federal and state officials, will oversee the state’s efforts to carry out the accord over the next two years, making regular progress reports to a federal judge, who must approve the agreement before it goes into effect.

Money for the new staffing — including a full-time psychiatrist at each of the four prisons, five licensed psychologists and more than a dozen social workers and nurse practitioners — was included in parts of the state budget already approved in Albany.

The state-federal accord, filed in United States District Court in Albany, echoes recommendations issued in December by a state task force, which found major shortcomings throughout the youth prison system. The task force recommended substantially expanding mental health care and replacing most residential youth prisons with smaller centers closer to communities where most young offenders and their families are from.

While the accord officially applies just to the four institutions cited, state officials said they hoped to use it as a springboard to seek broad changes through the juvenile system, which now houses 667 youths in 26 facilities around the state.

“It continues to move us in the right direction,” said Gladys Carrión, commissioner of the Office of Children and Family Services, which oversees the juvenile justice system. “It’s an affirmation of the work we have done already and of the recommendations of the governor’s task force.”

Ms. Carrión, who has moved aggressively in recent months to cut the number of youths in state custody and to limit the use of force by guards, said she would require all youth prisons in New York to abide by the restrictions on physical restraint. She said the state also planned to hire a chief psychiatrist in the near future to oversee drug regimens and mental health counseling at all of the state’s youth prisons.

But advocates for youths in state custody said they would continue to seek a far-reaching transformation in the juvenile justice system in New York, which they say merely warehouses youths who in most cases need intensive psychiatric care and counseling rather than being locked up.

“The changes will only affect those kids who have mental health needs who are already incarcerated,” said Gabrielle Prisco, director of the Juvenile Justice Project at the Correctional Association of New York. “It doesn’t get to the fact that any of those young people could be safely treated in their communities without ever seeing the inside of a prison cell.”

    Federal Oversight for Troubled N.Y. Youth Prisons, NYT, 14.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/nyregion/15juvenile.html

In Jail, Hate-Crime Killer Says He’s Not So Hateful

April 29, 2010
The New York Times
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

RIVERHEAD, N.Y. — From behind the plexiglass separating prisoner and visitor, Jeffrey Conroy recounted confronting two white men outside a convenience store in October 2007 during his junior year in high school.

A Hispanic man had left a bicycle outside the store, and one of the white men had sat on the bike and released the kickstand as if he was about to take it away. The men were laughing. Mr. Conroy, a standout on his school’s wrestling team, said he warned them not to steal the bike, or that they would have a problem with him. He said he did so because he felt bad for the Hispanic man, whom he believed to be an immigrant day laborer.

“I guess he didn’t have a car or anything,” he said.

One year later, Mr. Conroy and six of his friends would come upon two other Hispanic men near a parking lot of the train station in Patchogue, an encounter that would end far differently.

Prosecutors said Mr. Conroy and his friends surrounded and attacked the two Hispanic men as part of the sport they had made out of hunting and beating up Latinos, an activity the authorities said they referred to as “beaner hopping” and “Mexican hopping.”

Last week, a jury in State Supreme Court found Mr. Conroy guilty of first-degree manslaughter as a hate crime in connection with the death of one of the Hispanic men, Marcelo Lucero, and guilty of attempted assaults on three other Latino men. On the manslaughter charge, he faces a minimum of eight years and a maximum of 25 years when he is sentenced by Justice Robert W. Doyle on May 26.

In interviews with Mr. Conroy, his father, his friends, his lacrosse coaches and his lawyer, one portrait of him emerges: that of a friendly, athletic teenager willing to stick up for others, of someone who counted several Hispanics among his closest friends, including the girl he had been dating off and on for years, Pamela Suarez, who is Bolivian.

Then there is the young man that prosecutors, Latino advocates and even some of the jurors see: a gullible, aggressive teenager with a swastika tattoo on his thigh who stabbed Mr. Lucero in the chest that night out of anger, and then lied in court when he blamed someone else for the crime.

In a one-hour interview on Monday at the Suffolk County jail, Mr. Conroy was at times reflective and apologetic, humble and hopeful. He sat behind the plexiglass in a beige booth and leaned down low to talk into the speaker hole.

He turned 19 in January and it shows. Though dressed in a green prisoner’s uniform, he still has the face, the demeanor and the vocabulary of a boyish teenager.

He spoke of his love and concern for his family: After the guilty verdict was announced in the courtroom, Mr. Conroy recalled, he turned and saw two of his sisters in tears, and told them not to worry, that everything would be all right.

He spoke of the future he hopes to have with Ms. Suarez, a freshman at Stony Brook University: They talked about one day getting married when she visited him on Saturday (“We’re going to have three kids,” he said, smiling.) He spoke of the narrow jail cell where he spends 22 hours a day: “I can stretch both my arms and touch both walls.” And he spoke of praying in his cell, for his family and for Mr. Lucero’s family.

He said he feels sadness and sympathy for the Luceros, and for Mr. Lucero’s younger brother, Joselo Lucero, a presence in the courtroom throughout the trial. “I would just look at him and then I would look away,” Mr. Conroy said. “I feel bad for him. I got a brother, too. I couldn’t imagine him dying.”

The interview was granted by Mr. Conroy’s lawyer, William Keahon, on the condition that Mr. Conroy not answer questions about the night of the stabbing. Mr. Keahon said Mr. Conroy planned to appeal the conviction.

Mr. Conroy had signed a five-page written confession to the police in which he admitted stabbing Mr. Lucero on Nov. 8, 2008, and bloodstains on the blade of the knife that the police found on him minutes after the stabbing matched Mr. Lucero’s DNA.

But at the trial, Mr. Conroy testified that he did not stab Mr. Lucero and that another teenager, Christopher Overton, told him that he was the one who stabbed Mr. Lucero. Mr. Conroy said in court that Mr. Overton asked him to take the knife because Mr. Overton was out on bail awaiting sentencing on a felony conviction.

Mr. Overton’s mother and his lawyer have denied the accusation, and a few of the jurors said in interviews that they found Mr. Conroy’s testimony unbelievable. Many of those who knew him and his family, however, said they did believe him.

“People are going to say I’m naïve,” said Marc Negrin, 52, a close friend of Mr. Conroy’s father. “People are going to say I’m stupid. People are going to say he’s my best friend’s son. They can say all that. But you know what, I’m a grown man. I’ve got three healthy kids that all do great in school. I’m a good judge of character. And he said he didn’t do it and I believe him. Because he’s never given me, in all the years I’ve known his family, never given me a reason to think any different. He’s never lied.”

Throughout the trial, Mr. Conroy emerged as a brazen, impulsive and, as his lawyer admitted to the jury, at times a foolish young man.

Mr. Conroy said he had his best friend give him a tattoo of a swastika on his thigh a few months before the stabbing “as a joke,” and because his friend had dared him to do it.

The day before the stabbing, Mr. Conroy got into a fight with a friend, because that teenager was spreading rumors that Mr. Conroy had a sexually transmitted disease.

At the police precinct, a detective asked Mr. Conroy why he would fight one of his friends, and Mr. Conroy replied, “Same reason I’m here now,” because I’m a jerk, though Mr. Conroy used a more vulgar phrase, the detective testified.

Mr. Conroy was a 17-year-old senior at Patchogue-Medford High School at the time of the attack. He lived in Medford with his parents, three sisters and a brother. His mother, Lori Conroy, works at a bank and had taught Sunday school for seven years at her church.

His father, Robert Conroy, is a former Kmart assistant operations manager now on disability who is a leader in organizing youth sports in Medford and Patchogue.

In 2005, Robert Conroy co-founded a nonprofit youth sports league for children ages 5 to 13, and if his son had a second home, it was at the league’s athletic fields two miles from his house. Jeffrey Conroy was too old for the league when it started, but he helped his father care for the park and became a mentor to many of the children. He helped coach 11-year-old football players at age 16, and spent one summer improving one boy’s lacrosse skills, because the boy’s mother had asked him to help her son.

“At work I have to try to explain to people how this is that I know this kid and love this kid,” said Matthew Cleary, 40, a league board member and family friend who works for the Long Island Rail Road. “I know a Jeffrey that when I was cutting the lawn he would come out and say, ‘I’ll finish.’ I know a Jeffrey that — that’s my 12-year-old son that looked up to him like a brother — and if he was to curse, Jeffrey would smack him off the back of the head and say, ‘Don’t curse, your mother’s upstairs.’ That’s the Jeffrey I know.”

Last week, four days after the verdict was announced, Robert Conroy went to his youngest son’s lacrosse game at the high school and then watched one of his league’s lacrosse teams practice at the park. He has remained involved in the community throughout the trial — he came up with the idea to rename the park in honor of an Army Special Forces soldier and former Medford resident killed in Afghanistan — and has long believed his oldest son and his family have been falsely branded as racists.

“He’s not what everybody has portrayed him to be,” Robert Conroy said. “He’s a good kid.”

Mr. Conroy’s life was typical of what it’s like growing up in the predominantly white middle-class towns and villages of eastern Long Island, but his experiences also had shades of diversity. He listened to Jay-Z, Nas and other black hip-hop artists. His half-sister from his father’s previous marriage is part Puerto Rican. One of his best friends is Turkish.

“I’m nothing like what the papers said about me,” Mr. Conroy said. “I’m not a white supremacist or anything like that. I’m not this serious racist kid everyone thinks I am.”

Under the state’s hate-crime law, the prosecution was not required to prove Mr. Conroy was anti-Hispanic, but only that he had selected his victims because of their race or national origin.

The growing numbers of day laborers, many of whom are illegal immigrants, have created racial tensions on eastern Long Island. Mr. Conroy said he never formed an opinion on the issue. “I don’t have any problems with it,” Mr. Conroy said.

The trial made clear that Mr. Conroy was not, initially at least, the most aggressive of the teenagers on that November night. Mr. Conroy neither came up with the idea to go look for Hispanics to beat up nor did he suggest that they drive to Patchogue to look for victims; one or more of the other teenagers did. He testified that his plan was to watch his six friends beat up another Hispanic person but not to take part in the fighting himself.

Mr. Cleary, the family friend, said it seemed as if Mr. Conroy was a follower at times, though he thought of himself as a leader.

“It’s a terrible Jekyll and Hyde story to me, and I don’t believe a lot of it,” Mr. Cleary said. “I believe that he got roped into events that others had started, and being 17 and filled with testosterone, sometimes you do things that get the best of you before you can think about it clearly.”

Mr. Conroy can imagine his life now were he not in jail. He said he would be playing midfield on a college lacrosse team, either at the State University at Albany or at Plattsburgh. And his thigh would no longer have the swastika.

“It doesn’t mean anything to me at all,” Mr. Conroy said.

    In Jail, Hate-Crime Killer Says He’s Not So Hateful, NYT, 30.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/nyregion/30patchogue.html

California, in Financial Crisis, Opens Prison Doors

March 23, 2010
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

LANCASTER, Calif. — The California budget crisis has forced the state to address a problem that expert panels and judges have wrangled over for decades: how to reduce prison overcrowding.

The state has begun in recent weeks the most significant changes since the 1970s to reduce overcrowding — and chip away at an astonishing 70 percent recidivism rate, the highest in the country — as the prison population becomes a major drag on the state’s crippled finances.

Many in the state still advocate a tough approach, with long sentences served in full, and some early problems with released inmates have given critics reason to complain. But fiscal reality, coupled with a court-ordered reduction in the prison population, is pouring cold water on old solutions like building more prisons.

About 11 percent of the state budget, or roughly $8 billion, goes to the penal system, putting it ahead of expenditures like higher education, an imbalance Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has vowed to fix.

The strains on the system are evident inside the state prison here, about 50 miles north of Los Angeles, where 4,600 inmates fill buildings intended for half as many. A stuffy, cacophonous gymnasium houses nearly 150 people in triple-bunked beds stretching wall to wall.

The new effort this year is intended to remove from prisons criminals who are considered less threatening and divide them into two categories: those who pose little or no risk outside the prison walls, and those who need regular supervision.

The goal is to reduce the number of inmates in the state’s 33 prisons next year by 6,500 — more than the entire state prison population in 2009 of Nebraska, New Mexico, Utah or West Virginia. In all, there are 167,000 prisoners in California.

“People in the criminal justice world are looking at California with great interest,” said Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “Some very important reforms are under way.”

The effort, narrowly approved by the Democratic-controlled State Legislature and signed into law by Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, will be achieved through a range of steps long recommended by independent analysts and commissions.

To slow the return of former inmates to prison for technical violations of their parole, hundreds of low-level offenders will be released without close supervision from parole officers. Those officers will focus instead on tracking serious, violent offenders.

Some prisoners may also be released early for completing drug and education programs or have their sentences reduced under new formulas for calculating time served in county jails before and after sentencing.

The effort represents a “seismic shift,” said Joan Petersilia, a criminologist at Stanford Law School and a longtime scholar of the state’s prisons.

Public safety concerns have other states rethinking their decisions to save prisons costs by releasing inmates early and expanding parole.

The same red flags are being raised here, but the overcrowding problem dwarfs that of any other state and the budget deficit — $20 billion and climbing — has left lawmakers with virtually no choice but to move ahead.

The Schwarzenegger administration has floated a number of other ideas to reduce costs, including building prisons in Mexico for illegal immigrant offenders, turning over prisons to private contractors and, last week, having the University of California handle inmate health care.

The release of prisoners in California has stirred a backlash. Several hundred inmates at county jails were released in the last couple of months because of confusion over time credits in the new law.

Attorney General Jerry Brown, a Democrat who is running for governor, issued a directive clarifying the law, but not before one inmate in Sacramento was arrested shortly after his release and charged with attempting to rape a woman. The man had been released on probation after serving time on an assault charge.

That case prompted several lawmakers to call for abandoning early releases. And crime victim and law enforcement groups have been sounding alarms about what they consider the dangers of not more aggressively tracking the low-level offenders.

“We are concerned about victims these felons will leave in their wake before being rearrested for committing new crimes,” said Paul M. Weber, the president of the Los Angeles police union.

Proponents, including Mr. Schwarzenegger’s corrections secretary, Matthew Cate, have stood by the law, calling it overdue and necessary. The state spends, on average, $47,000 per year to house a prisoner. Early estimates suggest the new changes could save $100 million this year.

“This was an opportunity to do something impactful without imperiling public safety,” Mr. Cate said, adding that allowing parole officers to focus on more serious offenders will improve public safety.

Even with the new law, the system falls short of providing the kind of rehabilitation, drug treatment and education and job programs that academics and prisoner advocates have called for to help ensure prisoners and parolees do not commit new crimes.

The governor and the Legislature received a report on March 15 from a state oversight board warning that cuts to inmate rehabilitation programs would jeopardize the effort to reduce recidivism.

California is the only state that places all prisoners on parole at release, no matter the offense, Professor Petersilia said, and usually for one to three years. If a parolee is arrested or fails a drug test or misses an appointment with a parole officer, the offender lands back in prison.

Now, low-level offenders will not need to meet regularly with a parole officer and must be convicted of a new crime to be sent back.

Eric Susie, 24, recently had his parole terms readjusted under the new law. Mr. Susie had served 13 months in prison for possessing an M-80 firecracker wrapped with razors near a school (he argued, unsuccessfully, that it belonged to a friend).

Now, more than a year out of prison, he no longer reports to a parole officer or submits to monthly drug tests and can travel more freely, including out of state to visit family in Las Vegas.

“I feel like I am finally free,” Mr. Susie said. “I feel like I don’t have that monkey on my back, like being a prisoner. I feel like I am a human being and can get my life together.”

Even the guards’ union, which so heavily promoted and supported the tough sentencing of the past that fueled the prison building and expansion boom, now says it supports the idea of alternatives to prison and did not publicly object to the new law.

The overcrowding, union officials now say, poses a physical threat to its members, and the union has sided with plaintiffs battling in federal court to force even greater reductions of 40,000 inmates over the next two years.

But even with the progress in recent months, State Senator Mark Leno, a Democrat from San Francisco who helped push through changes in the prison system, suggested that further reductions would be a hard sell. Mr. Leno called the changes under way “a noble effort” and the best that could be achieved in the current political climate.

Many lawmakers, he said, still want to lengthen sentences and spend more on incarceration, both politically popular notions.

“We can’t control ourselves,” Mr. Leno said. “Or some of my colleagues can’t control themselves.”

    California, in Financial Crisis, Opens Prison Doors, NYT, 24.3.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/us/24calprisons.html

Jails Hope Eye Scanners Can Provide Foolproof Identification System for Inmates

February 27, 2010
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

DES MOINES (AP) — A Baltimore inmate who bluffed his way out of prison last week probably would not have been able to trick guards if they had eye scanners like the ones being installed at dozens of jails nationwide.

The federal government is paying for the scanners as part of an effort to build a nearly foolproof identification system to put a stop to such escapes.

“After this occurrence, we will be studying whatever we can do to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen again,” said Mark Vernarelli, a spokesman for the Maryland corrections department, which oversees the facility that mistakenly released the Baltimore inmate, Raymond Taylor.

Mr. Taylor was serving three life sentences for shooting his former girlfriend and her two teenage daughters. He impersonated his cellmate on Thursday and was released. He was arrested the following day in West Virginia.

The eye-scanning program is intended to put an end to such deception. The Justice Department has given a $500,000 grant to the National Sheriff’s Association, which is doling out the money in $10,000 grants to about 45 agencies across the country. That will create a national database that better identifies, registers and tracks inmates, said Fred Wilson, who is leading the association’s effort.

Eye scanners have been used for years by a few jails, the military, some European airports and private companies, but they remain rare, primarily because of the cost.

“While this technology has been around generally for 10 to 15 years, it just hasn’t gotten into the mainstream yet,” Mr. Wilson said. “You have to remember that the average law enforcement agency is very small, and they can’t afford this stuff.”

Most of the $10,000 grants paid for the equipment, and a small part went toward training.

The sheriff’s association teamed with Biometric Intelligence and Identification Technologies, a scanner company based in Plymouth, Mass., and selected agencies nationwide from more than 400 that had expressed interest. In choosing jails, officials looked to spread machines across the country and put them in spots with the technological experience to use them.

The chosen agencies ranged from big operations like the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department to small departments in Story County, Iowa, and Rutland County, Vt.

Officers at the Story County Jail will start using their scanner soon. “If we can get every state involved in this,” Sheriff Paul Fitzgerald said, “that would be tremendous, just like the fingerprint databases.” For law enforcement, speed is the biggest advantage that eye scanning has over fingerprints.

The F.B.I. has the fingerprints and criminal history of about 65 million people in its database. Sheriffs complain that fingerprint search results can take hours or even days, but results with an iris scan are nearly instant.

“Within 15 seconds you can get an identification back on who this is,” Sheriff Fitzgerald said.

Scanning inmates is quick, too. A person simply looks into a camera, which uses infrared light to illuminate and map the iris. Each iris is unique and contains about six times more features than a fingerprint.

Despite its advantages, creating an iris database could raise privacy concerns, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest research group in Washington.

Mr. Rotenberg said prisons were often testing grounds for new technologies later used in the general public. What might make sense behind barbed wire could be seen as intrusive in the free world, and it is hard to foresee what those problems could be, he said.

Fingerprints, though, will remain an important tool for agencies because scans have limitations. One is that only the living can use the system because irises immediately break down when people die, and fingerprints will remain essential for investigators as evidence at crime scenes, said Patricia Lawton, senior development officer at Biometric Intelligence and Identification Technologies.

One person sold on the technology is Vincent Guarini, the warden at the Lancaster County Prison in Pennsylvania.

In 1996, the prison became the first in the nation to install an iris scanner after, like in Maryland, an inmate claimed to be his cellmate and was released. He, too, was later caught.

“From then on, I said we would never, ever do this again,” Mr. Guarini said. “And I want some kind of mechanism, technology, device, whatever and take the human element out of it.”

    Jails Hope Eye Scanners Can Provide Foolproof Identification System for Inmates, NYT, 28.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/us/28eyes.html

For Detained Youths, No Mental Health Overseer

February 10, 2010
The New York Times
By JULIE BOSMAN

Edwina G. Richardson-Mendelson has been the administrative judge of the New York City Family Courts for nine months, in charge of the judges responsible for the detention of dozens of young people charged with crimes, the vast majority of whom suffer from some form of mental illness.

But it was not until last September that she was informed of what struck her as a startling fact: The State of New York does not have a single full-time staff psychiatrist charged with overseeing the treatment of the 800 or so young people who are detained in state facilities at any given time.

“There wasn’t one human being on-site overseeing all the mental health needs of the population,” Judge Richardson-Mendelson said in an interview. “When we place these children in these facilities, we expect their needs to be met, especially their mental health needs.”

Yet all 17 psychiatrists at the detention facilities in the state’s deeply troubled juvenile justice system work on contract and part time. Weeks often pass between their visits with each troubled youth, and state officials say their turnover rate is very high.

“Those people turn over so quickly that there are often huge chunks of time when there is not even a contracted psychiatrist available to evaluate the youngster or provide needed follow-up services,” said Judge Monica Drinane, the supervising judge in Family Court in the Bronx.

Gladys Carrión, the commissioner of the Office of Children and Family Services, the state agency that administers the juvenile prisons, declined to be interviewed.

Edward Borges, an agency spokesman, said, “The commissioner has said that we need more mental health professionals, that we need psychiatric help, and it’s something that she’s recognized.” Ms. Carrión is in the process of hiring a “chief psychiatrist,” who will work on salary or on contract, Mr. Borges said.

For now, then, the oversight of the mental health treatment of the young people in state facilities falls to several dozen psychologists who visit them for consultations, and staff members at the jails who run group therapy sessions despite often having no qualifications beyond a high school degree.

Aspects of the lack of mental health services throughout New York’s juvenile prison system were described last August in a withering report from the federal Department of Justice that examined conditions at four notorious state juvenile prisons.

The report criticized the state for failing to properly diagnose juveniles’ mental health problems, administering medication inappropriately and making inadequate treatment plans. Young people are frequently assigned several different diagnoses at the same institution, resulting in confused and ineffective treatment.

“One psychiatrist described his role as ‘an outsider’ and expressed frustration because, ‘I have to beg, borrow and steal information,’ ” the report said.

The proposed state budget released by Gov. David A. Paterson in January included an additional $18.2 million to improve services in the juvenile prisons, particularly mental health care. And officials from the Office of Children and Family Services said they had begun more consistent screening of children for mental health issues, reducing the use of physical restraints in the facilities and hiring an additional 37 mental health professionals to work in state-run juvenile residential centers.

But Commissioner Carrión recently told a number of Family Court judges, who decide which children should be sent to prisons, that the conditions at many isolated facilities upstate made it hard to recruit psychiatrists to work there.

Lawyers for the Legal Aid Society said they had many examples of mentally ill children who had been mistreated while in prisons.

One 16-year-old boy received a diagnosis of moderate mental retardation, took powerful psychotropic medication and functioned on a first-grade educational level. Last July he was placed in a state residential facility by a Family Court judge who had ordered that he receive mental health services.

However, he was not placed in a mental health unit until five months later, after being harassed, taunted and restrained at least five times by the prison staff, according to the Legal Aid lawyers.

A 15-year-old girl with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, conduct disorder and adjustment disorder was sent to a juvenile prison last February. Since then, she has not received proper mental health treatment, and has been restrained by the staff more than 15 times, her lawyers said.

Surveys of youth prisons indicate that about two-thirds of the nation’s juvenile inmates — about 92,800 in 2006 — have at least one mental illness.

“The system just isn’t equipped to deal with children with serious mental health issues,” said Tamara A. Steckler, the lawyer in charge of the Juvenile Rights Practice of Legal Aid. “We need to find another mechanism to treat those children.”

A task force led by Jeremy Travis, the president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, recently examined conditions at state juvenile prisons.

“I think it’s clear that for these young people to succeed while they’re in these facilities and for them to succeed when they’re coming home, many of them need extensive mental health services,” Mr. Travis said. “And it’s clear that the current services fall far short of professional standards.”

The problem of ineffective psychiatric care in juvenile prisons stretches back decades. Michael A. Corriero, a recently retired judge who spent 16 years as an acting State Supreme Court justice presiding over Manhattan’s courts that dealt with youth offenders, recalled sentencing a 15-year-old who had sodomized an 11-year-old boy.

He placed the teenager in a juvenile prison, sentenced him to a term of two to six years, and recommended that he receive intensive counseling.

“I said, ‘You’re going to have to get this kid appropriate psychiatric care, and it has to be one-on-one,” Mr. Corriero said. “And the answer was, ‘We don’t have a psychiatrist.’ ”

    For Detained Youths, No Mental Health Overseer, NYT, 11.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/nyregion/11youth.html