History > 2011 > USA > Justice > Prison / Jail (I)

Rex Babin

The Sacramento Bee

California

Cagle

26 January 2011

http://www.cagle.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/PCbest9.asp

California Inmates

End 3-Week Hunger Strike

October 13, 2011
The New York Times
By IAN LOVETT

LOS ANGELES — The hunger strike at California state prisons has ended, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said Thursday.

Thousands of inmates at prisons across California had stopped eating over the past three weeks in renewed protest against conditions of prolonged isolation in security housing units, though the number of hunger strikers dwindled to fewer than 600 this week.

But after negotiations on Thursday between the corrections department and lawyers representing the inmates, strike leaders agreed to resume eating.

Corrections officials reiterated the reforms the department had agreed to at the end of the previous hunger strike in July, which they said would take several months to finalize, and “agreed to stay on its same course,” according to a news release from the department.

The department had already agreed to a review of its policies for placing inmates in security housing units.

But Carol Strickman, a lawyer with Legal Services for Prisoners with Children who negotiated on behalf of the inmates, said that, most importantly, the department had agreed to review the cases of all prisoners already in isolation because of “validated” gang affiliation, rather than because of their behavior while in prison.

“This is the first time the prisoners had heard that kind of review was in the works,” Ms. Strickman said. “That new information, I believe, convinced them to end the hunger strike.”

Erica Goode contributed reporting from New York.

    California Inmates End 3-Week Hunger Strike, NYT, 13.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/us/california-inmates-end-3-week-hunger-strike.html

Exonerated of Murder, a Boxer Makes a Debut at 52

October 10, 2011
The New York Times
By PETER APPLEBOME

PHILADELPHIA — The television crew had him up at dawn doing the Rocky fandango, dashing up the 72 stone steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and dancing around in triumph like another over-the-hill, underdog pugilist who had made it big.

Cliché or not, it is hard not to imagine the familiar trumpet score along with the thwock, thwock, thwock of fists on punching bags as Dewey Bozella trains for one of the least likely boxing matches in history.

After 26 years in New York State prisons, and two years after he was exonerated of murder, Mr. Bozella will make his professional boxing debut on Saturday in Los Angeles, at age 52, on the undercard of the light-heavyweight champion Bernard Hopkins. (A mere 46 himself, Mr. Hopkins became the oldest fighter to win a major world championship this May.)

Mr. Bozella’s other fight, in which he is seeking compensation for the half of his life he spent behind bars, may be even more daunting than chasing victory in the ring. But for now, Mr. Bozella is focused on what he says will be his one and only professional bout.

“I want to go out there and give 100 percent and then move on with my life,” he said. “This is not a career move. It’s a personal move and a way to let people know to never give up on their dreams. My favorite quote is ‘Don’t let fear determine who you are and never let where you come from determine where you’re going.’ That’s what this is about.”

The product of a violent broken family and a hard life on the streets, Mr. Bozella was a troubled 18-year-old in 1977 when Emma Crapser, 92, was murdered in her Poughkeepsie, N.Y., home after returning from playing bingo. Six years later, based almost entirely on the testimony of two criminals who repeatedly changed their stories, he was convicted of the murder.

There was no physical evidence implicating Mr. Bozella. Instead, there was the fingerprint of another man, Donald Wise, who was later convicted of committing a nearly identical murder of another elderly woman in the same neighborhood. Mr. Bozella was retried in 1990, and was offered a deal that would let him go free in exchange for an admission that he committed the crime. He refused. A jury convicted him again.

At Sing Sing, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Mercy College and a master’s from the New York Theological Seminary. And he boxed in the prison’s “Death House,” once the scene of electrocutions, then a boxing ring, where he became Sing Sing’s light-heavyweight champion. At parole hearings, he repeatedly refused to express remorse for the crime he did not commit. He would get out one way, he said, either in a box or as an exonerated man. The box seemed more likely.

In the end, he was saved by a miracle. The Innocence Project, a legal clinic dedicated to overturning wrongful convictions, believing in his case but unable to pursue it absent DNA evidence, referred it to the law firm WilmerHale. Lawyers there eventually found the Poughkeepsie police lieutenant who had investigated the case. He had retired, and Mr. Bozella’s was the only file he had saved. It included numerous pieces of evidence favorable to Mr. Bozella that had not been turned over to his lawyers. On Oct. 28, 2009, he walked out of the courthouse in Poughkeepsie finally a free man.

He struggled to find work, eventually counseling former convicts while teaching boxing at a Newburgh, N.Y., gym until ESPN became interested in his story. In July, at its annual ESPY Awards, he was given its Arthur Ashe Courage Award, whose past recipients have included Muhammad Ali, Pat Tillman and Nelson Mandela. The offer to box professionally came as a result of that appearance.

But when he took the rigorous California State Athletic Commission test on Aug. 24 to get licensed to box in the state, he failed. After Labor Day, he began working out in Philadelphia with the trainers for Mr. Hopkins. They were skeptical.

“I’m thinking, ‘I’m going to kill this old guy,’ ” said Danny Davis, one of Mr. Hopkins’s trainers. “There’s no way this guy can make it through my training.”

But Mr. Bozella got tougher, leaner and more nimble, dropping 10 pounds in little more than a week. He sparred with, and took serious lumps from, a world-class fighter: Lajuan Simon, a middleweight title contender. Mr. Bozella took the test again on Sept. 29. This time he passed.

Officials said Mr. Bozella was believed to be the oldest fighter ever licensed to box in California. Fighters that age are extremely rare but hardly unknown. “The Ultimate Book of Boxing Lists,” by Bert Randolph Sugar and Teddy Atlas, has a section on “Boxing’s Greatest Methuselahs” that includes Mr. Hopkins; Jem Mace, the legendary 19th-century English boxer who fought at 59; and Saoul Mamby, a former junior welterweight titleholder who fought in 2008 at the age of 60, making him the oldest fighter ever to appear in an officially sanctioned bout.

Mr. Bozella, a cruiserweight — between light-heavyweights and heavyweights — will not be fighting for a championship; he is taking on Larry Hopkins, 30, of Houston, who is 0-3 as a professional (and is not related to Bernard Hopkins). His purse in the pay-per-view bout will be in the very low four figures.

But even if hype and marketing are as much a part of boxing as quick feet and sharp jabs, Mr. Bozella said the bout was anything but a stunt.

“You’ve seen the workout I went through, the pain, blood and bruises I’m getting,” he said after four rounds sparring with Mr. Simon last week. “No one’s giving me nothing for free. I can go out there and get knocked out, or I can knock the other guy out. It’s that simple.”

Mr. Bozella hopes to open his own gym as a way to mentor youngsters, but beyond its Hollywood touches, his feel-good story turns cloudier. The day after he passed the boxing test, a federal judge threw out his lawsuit against Dutchess County and the City of Poughkeepsie over the evidence that was not turned over to his lawyers.

The decision was primarily based on a controversial Supreme Court ruling in the case of Connick v. Thompson. By a 5-to-4 margin, the court, in a decision written by Justice Clarence Thomas in March, threw out a $14 million jury award to a former death row inmate freed after prosecutorial misconduct came to light. The decision stated that only a pattern of misconduct in properly turning over evidence could warrant financial compensation, no matter how egregious the misconduct against a single defendant.

“I’m not going to disrespect the courts,” Mr. Bozella said. “I’d just like the justice system to be fair. Same thing with boxing. If the judges are fair, then the real winner wins. Just be fair. That’s it.”

    Exonerated of Murder, a Boxer Makes a Debut at 52, NYT, 10.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/nyregion/exonerated-of-murder-dewey-bozella-makes-a-boxing-debut.html

California Begins Moving Prison Inmates

October 8, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

LOS ANGELES — Facing an unprecedented order from the Supreme Court to decrease its inmate population by 11,000 over the next three months and by 34,000 over the next two years, California prisons last week began to shift inmates to county jails and probation officers, starting what many believe will be a fundamental and far-reaching change in the nation’s largest corrections system.

Last spring, the Supreme Court ruled that overcrowding and poor conditions in state prisons violated inmates’ constitutional rights and, in a first, ordered a state to rapidly decrease its inmate population. Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature approved a plan that would place many more offenders in the custody of individual counties.

Under the plan, inmates who have committed nonviolent, nonserious and nonsexual offenses will be released back to the county probation system rather than to state parole officers. Those newly convicted of such crimes will be sent directly to the counties, which will decide if they should go to a local jail or to an alternative community program. And newly accused defendants may wear electronic monitoring bracelets while they await trial.

“This is the largest change in the California state system in my lifetime,” said Barry Krisberg, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has watched the state prisons for decades and testified in the Supreme Court case last year. “Given that what we had was completely broken and was the most expensive, overcrowded and least effective in America, there’s some hope that this will change it.”

The shift of prisoners to county facilities began Monday, and state officials expect to satisfy the Supreme Court’s mandate by June 2013 — at which time they must have reduced the state inmate population of 144,000, which put the prisons at 180 percent capacity, to 110,000, or 135 percent of capacity. First, though, they must reach the initial court-ordered benchmark by reducing the prison population to 133,000 by December.

In what the state calls a realignment of the criminal justice system, the plan places more responsibilities on the counties, and some local officials say they are unprepared and underfinanced to get the job done. But state officials say that keeping inmates closer to their communities will increase the chances that they can be rehabilitated, rather than in and out of state prison.

For the last several years, state parole officers would often catch criminals on technical parole violations, sending them back to prison for several weeks at a time — a practice many derided as a revolving door.

The constant influx of new and former inmates also sharply increased the cost for the state, because it must pay for a medical evaluation and several other assessments every time an inmate enters the system.

Matthew Cate, the secretary of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said the state hoped that the counties would concentrate on rehabilitating prisoners and helping them reintegrate into the community, something the state system was never able to do. Figures show that nearly 70 percent of inmates in California prisons end up there again.

“The catch-and-release way we had before was not working — I don’t know how anyone could disagree with that,” Mr. Cate said. “The only alternative we had was just a massive release of people from prison. Nobody seemed to want to talk about that.”

But some city and county officials say that the changes are likely to overwhelm local law enforcement agencies and that the state has not given them enough time or money to prepare. Last week, Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa of Los Angeles and the city’s police chief, Charlie Beck, said they would have to reassign 150 police officers to help monitor the former inmates.

Sheriff Scott R. Jones of Sacramento County has been one of the most outspoken critics of the plan, saying it is likely to drive up crime. He called it a “collision course with disaster,” because there is not enough money for the counties.

“To do all the things that they are asking everyone to do will cost an enormous amount of money, and we don’t have it,” Sheriff Jones said. “If this doesn’t work, it’s not like we get to go back and try again — we’re going to be stuck with the consequences.”

Sheriff Jones said the state might have been better off simply releasing 10,000 inmates, so it could use the extra time to figure out how to get more money or create a more comprehensive system for counties. “It’s not like we’re ready, because we’re not, and it’s not like we know what is best, because we don’t,” he added. “The only thing that is driving this is a court demand.”

But Mr. Cate dismissed the criticisms, saying the state had no other choice and had been coordinating plans for months.

“Everyone just wants to inoculate themselves from any kind of crime increase and blame it on realignment,” Mr. Cate said. “This is some massive change. It’s going to be subtle and happen over time.”

Counties across the state have been working “feverishly” to figure out their plans to handle the new responsibilities, said Sheriff Mark Pazin of Merced County, president of the California State Sheriffs’ Association.

“It’s a little tiring that we’re finally at the point where we have to do something and people start to react by just hitting the panic button,” Sheriff Pazin said.

Studies show that reduced sentences do not cause drastic increases in crime, he said, and many counties are working on alternative programs. “We need to be concentrating on what works best and how we can actually turn things around,” he said.

Sheriff Pazin said Mr. Brown had reassured him that the state would consider changing the way money is allocated to individual counties. Officials hope that five years from now, they will be able to determine which counties have been most effective at reducing the recidivism rate.

But several advocates for prisoners say they worry that the state is not doing enough to ensure that the counties will consider alternatives to jail, and several counties have said they will deal with the influx simply by adding more beds to their jails. Many of the county jails across the state are already overcrowded, and the Los Angeles County jails are being investigated by the F.B.I. over accusations of inmate abuse by deputies.

“There are no kind of guiding principles or oversight or monitoring,” said Donald Specter, the director of the Prison Law Office, which argued for the prisoners in the Supreme Court case. “I think there will be extreme variations, where some counties just will use the money to lock them up with no support and others who really try to figure out real solutions.”

Any violent crime committed by one of the former inmates is likely to grab headlines, but it will be years before the state can measure the impact of the change.

“We don’t have a lot of options,” Mr. Cate said. “The question years from now will really be: Did we avoid a disaster?”

    California Begins Moving Prison Inmates, NYT, 8.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/us/california-begins-moving-prisoners.html

Report Details Wide Abuse

in Los Angeles Jail System

September 28, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

LOS ANGELES — One inmate said he was forced to walk down a hallway naked after sheriff’s deputies accused him of stealing a piece of mail. They taunted him in Spanish, calling him a derogatory name for homosexuals.

Another former inmate said that after he protested that guards were harassing a mentally ill prisoner, the same deputies took him into another room, slammed his head into a wall and repeatedly punched him in the chest.

And a chaplain said he saw deputies punching an inmate until he collapsed to the ground. They then began kicking the apparently unconscious man’s head and body.

The examples are just a fraction of dozens of detailed allegations of abuse in Los Angeles County’s Men’s Central Jail and Twin Towers, according to a report that the American Civil Liberties Union is expected to file in Federal District Court here on Wednesday. The Los Angeles County jail system, the nation’s largest, is also the nation’s most troubled, according to lawyers, advocates and former law enforcement officials.

“This situation, the length of time it has been going on, the volume of complaints and the egregious nature are much, much worse than anything I’ve ever seen,” said Tom Parker, a retired F.B.I. official who led the agency’s Los Angeles office for years and oversaw investigations into the Rodney King beating and charges of corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department. “They are abusing inmates with impunity, and the worst part is that they think they can get away with it.”

The system has a long history of accusations of abuse and poor conditions. The A.C.L.U. filed a federal lawsuit 35 years ago, and an agreement eventually allowed the organization to place monitors inside the jails. But those monitors say that they receive six or seven complaints a week now, primarily from the two large jails in downtown Los Angeles that house thousands of men. The F.B.I. has also begun to investigate several episodes in the jails.

Sheriff Lee Baca has repeatedly dismissed any suggestion of a systemic problem in the jails, saying that all allegations of abuse are investigated and that most are unfounded.

This week, The Los Angeles Times reported that F.B.I. agents sneaked a cellphone to a prisoner as part of an investigation. Sheriff Baca reacted to the investigation angrily, saying that the agency did not know what it was doing and was putting prisoners and guards in danger.

Sheriff Baca discussed the matter with a Justice Department official in a meeting on Tuesday. Nicole Nishida, the sheriff’s spokeswoman, said that the department thoroughly investigated all complaints of abuse that it received and that most were unsubstantiated.

With California under an order from the United States Supreme Court to shed thousands of inmates from the state prisons, county jails are expected to receive many more inmates in the next year, which could aggravate overcrowding and other problems. Officials from the Sheriff’s Department have said that they will not place inmates from the state in the Men’s Central Jail, which they concede is an antiquated building.

But lawyers from the A.C.L.U. say that the Los Angeles County system is, in many ways, even worse than the state prisons that have been found unconstitutional. They say that many complaints are never properly investigated, and that often the very guards accused of abuse are in the room when an inmate is interviewed about the complaint.

In the last several months, the civil rights group has amassed 70 declarations from former prisoners and civilians who witnessed beatings. The statements suggest few patterns — the complaints span all times of day and multiple units in the jail. But, the A.C.L.U. says, the guards do seem to use the same terms repeatedly, shouting, “Stop resisting!” and “Stop fighting!” while they hit inmates, even when inmates are not moving or are in handcuffs.

Paulino Juarez, a Roman Catholic chaplain who has worked in the jail since 1998, was visiting an inmate’s cell early one morning in February 2009 when he heard several thumps and gasps in the hallway. When he moved to the cell door, he saw three deputies hitting a man and yelling, “Stop fighting!”

“But he wasn’t fighting; he wasn’t even defending himself,” Mr. Juarez said in an interview. “When they saw me, they froze. I was frozen, too. I didn’t say anything. I was too shocked, and I was terrified.”

Mr. Juarez filed a report with the Sheriff’s Department but did not hear anything about it for several months. More than two years later, during a meeting with his supervisor and Sheriff Baca, Mr. Juarez was told that the department found that the inmate had resisted going into his cell. There was no record of Mr. Juarez’s report, although a guard indicated in the file that the chaplain had exaggerated what he had witnessed. He was told that the inmate, whose name he did not know at the time, had later been released.

“I really don’t trust anymore,” Mr. Juarez said. “They always say inmates are liars and nobody believes them. But I saw them treated like this.”

While the sheriff has repeatedly dismissed complaints from prisoners, the number of civilians who have witnessed beatings has steadily increased, showing the brazenness of many of the guards in the jails, said Peter Eliasberg, legal director for the A.C.L.U. Foundation of Southern California.

This year, Esther Lim, the current monitor for the A.C.L.U., said she saw several deputies beat a man inside the Twin Towers jail, next door to Men’s Central, as if he were a “human punching bag.” The attack was widely reported in the local news media, and at the time a spokesman dismissed it, saying that Ms. Lim should have reported it sooner and that the inmate was attacking the deputies.

Mr. Eliasberg and Ms. Lim said that inmates who were beaten were routinely placed for several days afterward in isolation, known as “the hole,” and were often accused of assaulting the guards.

The A.C.L.U. plans to call for a wide-ranging federal investigation, and for Sheriff Baca to resign.

    Report Details Wide Abuse in Los Angeles Jail System, NYT, 28.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/28/us/aclu-suit-details-wide-abuse-in-los-angeles-jail-system.html

The Lingering Injustice of Attica

September 8, 2011
The New York Times
By HEATHER ANN THOMPSON

Philadelphia

FORTY years ago today, more than 1,000 inmates at Attica Correctional Facility began a major civil and human rights protest — an uprising that is barely mentioned in textbooks but nevertheless was one of the most important rebellions in American history.

A forbidding institution that opened in 1931, Attica, roughly midway between Buffalo and Rochester, was overcrowded and governed by rigid and often capricious penal practices.

The guards were white men from small towns in upstate New York; the prisoners were mostly urban African-Americans and Puerto Ricans. They wanted decent medical care so that an inmate like Angel Martinez, 21, could receive treatment for his debilitating polio. They wanted more humane parole so that a man like L. D. Barkley, also 21, wouldn’t be locked up in a maximum security facility like Attica for driving without a license. They also wanted less discriminatory policies so that black inmates like Richard X. Clark wouldn’t be given the worst jobs, while white prisoners were given the best. These men first tried writing to state officials, but their pleas for reform were largely ignored. Eventually, they erupted.

Over five days, Americans sat glued to their televisions as this uprising unfolded. They watched in surprise as inmates elected representatives from each cellblock to negotiate on their behalf. They watched in disbelief as these same inmates protected the guards and civilian employees they had taken hostage.

They also saw the inmates request the presence of official “observers” to ensure productive and peaceful interactions with the state. These eventually included the New York Times columnist Tom Wicker; the radical lawyer William M. Kunstler; politicians like Arthur O. Eve, John R. Dunne and Herman Badillo; and ministers as well as activists.

As the rebellion wore on, and the lawn around Attica filled with hundreds of heavily armed state troopers, these observers worried that Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, having already refused to grant amnesty to the inmates if they surrendered, would turn to force. This, they knew, would result in a massacre.

Several observers begged the governor to come to Attica. In lieu of amnesty, they reasoned, his presence might at least assure the inmates that the state would honor any agreement it made with them and prevent any reprisals should they end their protest. Rockefeller wouldn’t consider it.

On the morning of Sept. 13, 1971, he gave the green light for helicopters to rise suddenly over Attica and blanket it with tear gas. As inmates and hostages fell to the ground blinded, choking and incapacitated, more than 500 state troopers burst in, riddling catwalks and exercise yards with thousands of bullets. Within 15 minutes the air was filled with screams, and the prison was littered with the bodies of 39 people — 29 inmates and 10 hostages — who lay dead or dying. “I could see all this blood just running out of the mud and water,” one inmate recalled. “That’s all I could see.”

Incredibly, state officials claimed that the inmates, not the troopers, had killed the hostages. Meanwhile, scores of inmates who had survived the assault were tortured. Enraged troopers, and not a few correctional officers, forced these men, many of whom had been shot multiple times, to crawl naked across shattered glass and to run a gantlet as fists, gun butts and nightsticks rained down on their bodies. Investigators from the state police, the very entity that had led the assault, were then asked to determine what had gone wrong — all but guaranteeing that only inmates, not troopers, would face charges. Public opinion toward the inmates, once sympathetic, gradually turned against them.

The hostages were also treated miserably. The state offered families of dead hostages small checks, which they cashed to tide them over in this difficult time, but it did not tell them that taking this money meant forgoing their right to sue the state for sizable damages.

Much of the nation, however, never heard this history. Had it not been for the legal fight waged by inmates to hold the state accountable, and the testimony provided later by surviving hostages and their families, there might have been no official record of these brutal acts.

In 1997, the inmates were awarded damages for the many violations of their civil rights and, though the state fought that judgment, in 2000 it had to pay out a settlement of $8 million. In 2005, the state reached a settlement with the guards and other workers for $12 million. The vast majority of the inmates and guards got far less than they deserved.

Despite having to pay damages, 40 years later, the State of New York still has not taken responsibility for Attica. It has never admitted that it used excessive force. It has never acknowledged that its troopers killed inmates and guards. It has never admitted that those who surrendered were tortured, nor that employees were misled.

We have all paid a very high price for the state’s lies and half-truths and its refusal to investigate and prosecute its own. The portrayal of prisoners as incorrigible animals contributed to a distrust of prisoners; the erosion of hard-won prison reforms; and the modern era of mass incarceration. Not coincidentally, it was Rockefeller who, in 1973, signed the law establishing mandatory prison terms for possession or sale of relatively small amounts of drugs, which became a model for similar legislation elsewhere.

As America begins to rethink the wisdom of mass imprisonment, Attica reminds us that prisoners are in fact human beings who will struggle mightily when they are too long oppressed. It shows as well that we all suffer when the state overreacts to cries for reform.

 

Heather Ann Thompson, an associate professor of history at Temple University,
is writing a book on the Attica uprising.

    The Lingering Injustice of Attica, NYT, 8.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/opinion/the-lingering-injustice-of-attica.html

In California, Victims’ Families Fight for the Dead

August 19, 2011
The New York Times
By IAN LOVETT

SAN DIEGO — The other day, at the sprawling state prison here, Linda and Alfred Tay sat in a cramped, windowless room, just feet from the man serving time for murdering their son.

Quarters are close at parole hearings.

They listened as the inmate made his case for parole. And then, exercising their rights as victims under California law, the Tays made their own case, pleading with the parole board not to grant freedom to the man who killed their son. It was the second time they had gone through this painful ritual.

“We constantly have a shadow hanging over our lives,” Ms. Tay told the commissioners. “When you suffer such a horrific crime, there is never closure.”

The rights of families like the Tays to be heard has been a fundamental tenet of a movement since California passed its first victims’ bill of rights three decades ago — a model that has been followed by states across the nation.

Until recently, most of these parole hearings — however difficult they may have been for the family members — had little practical importance: inmates serving life sentences for murder were virtually never set free. Even on the rare occasions when the parole board granted a release, California’s two previous governors — Gray Davis, a Democrat, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican — almost invariably overturned it.

But now, with a United States Supreme Court mandate in May to reduce the populations of California’s overcrowded prisons, Gov. Jerry Brown has thus far upheld 207 of the parole board’s 253 decisions to release convicted killers. Already this year, more release dates granted to killers have been allowed to stand than in any year since governors got the power to reverse them.

As a result, these hearings have taken on a new urgency for victims’ family members — many of whom have seen themselves as the last line of defense between a killer and freedom — because inmates are now more likely than ever to be paroled.

For some family members, attending the hearings is cathartic, offering a voice to those who feel powerless in the wake of crimes that have upended their lives.

But even as victims have gained the right to be heard, the laws have also created unintended consequences — sometimes dividing families or resurrecting traumas year after year.

“The emotional experience is beyond words,” said Harriet Salarno, who has spoken at nine parole hearings, beginning in 1993, for the man who killed her daughter 32 years ago. “I’ve thought about not going many times. But I was fearful he would get out.”

Despite an increased possibility of parole, the emotional and financial burdens of attending hearings are too overwhelming for many families. Brandi Cambron, 29, testified last year against parole for her mother, who was convicted of murdering Ms. Cambron’s younger brother. But she did not return this year from her home in Virginia for the hearing near Los Angeles.

“As much as it’s fulfilling to go there and speak and be heard, it also reopened all these old wounds that I’d worked so hard to close,” she said.

California has led the way in passing victims’ rights laws. It became the first state to allow victims’ families to speak at parole hearings, and in 1982 passed a victims’ bill of rights — one of the first major pieces of such legislation in the country. More than 30 states have amended their constitutions to include similar measures.

Parole commissioners and victims’ rights advocates say that victim statements can have a major influence. They put a human face on a murder victim, who is often referred to only as “the deceased” during a parole hearing, and make it that much more difficult for the board to grant release.

Some victims who survived murder attempts show their scars — missing limbs or disfiguring burns — while relatives detail the emotional trauma they have endured.

“You need to be there so the board understands what this has done to your life,” said Nina Salarno Ashford, a lawyer with Crime Victims United, a group that helps represent some victims at parole hearings.

Ms. Salarno Ashford said the increase in parole grants upheld under Governor Brown makes it all the more important for victims to attend hearings.

“The governor seems not to be taking a hard-line stance as Davis or Schwarzenegger did,” she said. “It really highlights the necessity for victims to go to these hearings, so the parole board can feel the full impact of the crime.”

Like many such advocates, Ms. Salarno Ashford’s involvement with the issue is personal: her sister Catina was murdered in 1979. Harriet Salarno, her mother, quit her job and founded Crime Victims United, and the group has been one of the foremost opponents of the plan to reduce prison overcrowding by releasing inmates.

Few victims’ families — around 8 percent — actually attend parole hearings. But for those that do, the process, however painful, can also be restorative.

Some victims eventually even stop opposing an inmate’s release. Katie James, manager of victims’ services for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said those cases showed how well the process could work for the families.

“When the family goes to multiple hearings over a long period of time, they kind of get to know the inmate,” Ms. James said. “They get to see a gradual change in the offender. They’re never going to forgive what the inmate did, but they can be O.K. with what the parole board decides.”

Most victims, however, never reach that point. For some, the hearings become an obsession. They skip happy events in the lives of their living children — high school or college graduations — to honor a dead child at a parole hearing. For older victims, hearings can take a toll on their health, Ms. James said.

“For some families, the hearings eat away at them, and destroy their other relationships,” she said. “We try to encourage them to have a balance and let someone else go instead. But some feel like it has to be them.”

If nothing else, as the Brown administration allows more inmates sentenced to life to be paroled, more victims will be spared the pain of returning year after year to parole hearings. But more families will also watch killers win release dates, as the Tays did. Ms. Tay said she was considering writing to the governor, in the hope that he would reverse the decision. “I would keep going forever if I could,” she said.

Perhaps no one has gone to as many parole hearings as Debra Tate, the sister of Sharon Tate, who was murdered in 1969 in the Manson Family killings. She has, by her own count, spoken at dozens, perhaps even a hundred parole hearings: almost every one of those held for the Manson killers since the mid-1990s.

So far, only one of the members of Charles Manson’s murderous cult has died: Susan Atkins, in 2009. A few weeks before Ms. Atkins’s death, Ms. Tate spoke at her final parole hearing. On the day Ms. Atkins died, Ms. Tate wore all black, in memory of the murder victims.

“I cried one long alligator tear,” Ms. Tate said at the event. “It’s still a life lost. She had nieces and nephews. It’s never just about one person.”

Over the course of 40 years, the two women had become part of each other’s lives.

But Ms. Atkins’s death was not a relief, Ms. Tate said. “There are still so many hearings to go to.”

    In California, Victims’ Families Fight for the Dead, NYT, 19.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/20/us/20parole.html

Barbarous Confinement

July 17, 2011
The New York Times
By COLIN DAYAN

Nashville

MORE than 1,700 prisoners in California, many of whom are in maximum isolation units, have gone on a hunger strike. The protest began with inmates in the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison. How they have managed to communicate with each other is anyone’s guess — but their protest is everyone’s concern. Many of these prisoners have been sent to virtually total isolation and enforced idleness for no crime, not even for alleged infractions of prison regulations. Their isolation, which can last for decades, is often not explicitly disciplinary, and therefore not subject to court oversight. Their treatment is simply a matter of administrative convenience.

Solitary confinement has been transmuted from an occasional tool of discipline into a widespread form of preventive detention. The Supreme Court, over the last two decades, has whittled steadily away at the rights of inmates, surrendering to prison administrators virtually all control over what is done to those held in “administrative segregation.” Since it is not defined as punishment for a crime, it does not fall under “cruel and unusual punishment,” the reasoning goes.

As early as 1995, a federal judge, Thelton E. Henderson, conceded that so-called “supermax” confinement “may well hover on the edge of what is humanly tolerable,” though he ruled that it remained acceptable for most inmates. But a psychiatrist and Harvard professor, Stuart Grassian, had found that the environment was “strikingly toxic,” resulting in hallucinations, paranoia and delusions. In a “60 Minutes” interview, he went so far as to call it “far more egregious” than the death penalty.

Officials at Pelican Bay, in Northern California, claim that those incarcerated in the Security Housing Unit are “the worst of the worst.” Yet often it is the most vulnerable, especially the mentally ill, not the most violent, who end up in indefinite isolation. Placement is haphazard and arbitrary; it focuses on those perceived as troublemakers or simply disliked by correctional officers and, most of all, alleged gang members. Often, the decisions are not based on evidence. And before the inmates are released from the barbarity of 22-hour-a-day isolation into normal prison conditions (themselves shameful) they are often expected to “debrief,” or spill the beans on other gang members.

The moral queasiness that we must feel about this method of extracting information from those in our clutches has all but disappeared these days, thanks to the national shame of “enhanced interrogation techniques” at Guantánamo. Those in isolation can get out by naming names, but if they do so they will likely be killed when returned to a normal facility. To “debrief” is to be targeted for death by gang members, so the prisoners are moved to “protective custody” — that is, another form of solitary confinement.

Hunger strikes are the only weapon these prisoners have left. Legal avenues are closed. Communication with the outside world, even with family members, is so restricted as to be meaningless. Possessions — paper and pencil, reading matter, photos of family members, even hand-drawn pictures — are removed. (They could contain coded messages between gang members, we are told, or their loss may persuade the inmates to snitch when every other deprivation has failed.)

The poverty of our criminological theorizing is reflected in the official response to the hunger strike. Now refusing to eat is regarded as a threat, too. Authorities are considering force-feeding. It is likely it will be carried out — as it has been, and possibly still continues to be — at Guantánamo (in possible violation of international law) and in an evil caricature of medical care.

In the summer of 1996, I visited two “special management units” at the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence. A warden boasted that one of the units was the model for Pelican Bay. He led me down the corridors on impeccably clean floors. There was no paint on the concrete walls. Although the corridors had skylights, the cells had no windows. Nothing inside could be moved or removed. The cells contained only a poured concrete bed, a stainless steel mirror, a sink and a toilet. Inmates had no human contact, except when handcuffed or chained to leave their cells or during the often brutal cell extractions. A small place for exercise, called the “dog pen,” with cement floors and walls, so high they could see nothing but the sky, provided the only access to fresh air.

Later, an inmate wrote to me, confessing to a shame made palpable and real: “If they only touch you when you’re at the end of a chain, then they can’t see you as anything but a dog. Now I can’t see my face in the mirror. I’ve lost my skin. I can’t feel my mind.”

Do we find our ethics by forcing prisoners to live in what Judge Henderson described as the setting of “senseless suffering” and “wretched misery”? Maybe our reaction to hunger strikes should involve some self-reflection. Not allowing inmates to choose death as an escape from a murderous fate or as a protest against continued degradation depends, as we will see when doctors come to make their judgment calls, on the skilled manipulation of techniques that are indistinguishable from torture. Maybe one way to react to prisoners whose only reaction to bestial treatment is to starve themselves to death might be to do the unthinkable — to treat them like human beings.

 

Colin Dayan, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University, is the author of “The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons.”

    Barbarous Confinement, NYT, 17.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/opinion/18dayan.html

Casey Anthony Freed From Jail, Slips From View

July 17, 2011
The New york Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Casey Anthony was freed from a Florida jail early Sunday, 12 days after she was acquitted of murder in the death of her 2-year-old daughter Caylee in a verdict that drew furious responses and even threats from people across the U.S. who had followed the case with rapt attention.

Wearing a pink Polo T-shirt and blue jeans, Anthony left the jail at 12:14 a.m. with her attorney, Jose Baez. After three years behind bars, Anthony was given $537.68 in cash from her jail account and escorted outside by two sheriff's deputies armed with semi-automatic rifles. Neither Anthony nor Baez said anything to reporters and protesters gathered outside.

Anthony, looking somber with her eyes cast downward, said "thank you" to a jailer in the few seconds it took to escort her to the waiting SUV.

"It is my hope that Casey Anthony can receive the counseling and treatment she needs to move forward with the rest of her life," Baez said in a statement released to reporters.

News helicopters briefly tracked the SUV through Orlando's streets, but she quickly vanished from public view.

"This release had an unusual amount of security so, therefore, in that sense, it would not be a normal release," Orange County Jail spokesman Allen Moore said. "We have made every effort to not provide any special treatment for her. She's been treated like every other inmate."

Moore said there were no known threats received at the jail. Officials had a number of contingency plans in place, including plans in case shots were fired as she was being released.

After Anthony left the jail, the news helicopters followed the SUV to a covered parking garage at a downtown Orlando office building. The SUV never reemerged and other cars left that area, but it could not be seen if Anthony was in any of them.

A short time later, there was police activity as two vehicles pulled up to a twin-engine private jet at Orlando Executive Airport but no one saw Anthony get out and onto the plane. The news helicopter shots showed only some middle-aged men with luggage and golf travel bags. That plane took off shortly after 1 a.m. Sunday for Ohio, the home state of Anthony's parents.

As midnight approached, upward of 100 spectators had gathered outside the jail's booking and release center, where plastic orange barricades had been erected. The crowd included about a half-dozen, sign-carrying protesters who had gathered despite a drenching thunderstorm earlier. Onlookers had varied reactions to her release from the jail, where seven or eight deputies in bullet-proof vests patrolled the area. At least one officer carried an assault weapon and about five officers patrolled on horseback.

"She is safer in jail than she is out here," said Mike Quiroz, who drove from Miami to spend his 22nd birthday outside the jail. "She better watch her butt. She is known all over the world."

Lamar Jordan said he felt a pit in his stomach when he saw Anthony walking free.

"The fact that she is being let out, the fact that it is her child and she didn't say what happened, made me sick," Jordan said.

Not all of those who gathered condemned the 25-year-old.

"I'm for Casey," said Kizzy Smith, of Orlando. "She was proven innocent. At the end of the day, Caylee is at peace. We're the ones who are in an uproar."

Since her acquittal on murder charges on July 5, Anthony was finishing her four-year sentence for telling investigators several lies, including an early claim that Caylee was kidnapped by a nonexistent nanny. With credit for the nearly three years she's spent in jail since August 2008 and good behavior, she had only days remaining when she was sentenced July 7.

The case drew national attention ever since Caylee was reported missing. Cable network HLN aired the entire trial, with pundit Nancy Grace dissecting the case nightly. Vitriol poured into social networking sites after the acquittal, with observers posting angry messages on Twitter and Facebook's "I Hate Casey Anthony" page.

Outraged lawmakers in several states responded by proposing so-called Caylee's laws that would allow authorities to prosecute parents who don't quickly report missing children. And many still speculate about what really happened to Caylee: Was she suffocated with duct tape by her mother, as prosecutors argued? Or did she drown in an accident that snowballed out of control, as defense attorneys contended?

Now that she is free, it's not clear where Anthony will stay or what she will do next.

Her relationship with her parents, George and Cindy, has been strained since defense attorneys accused George Anthony of molesting Casey when she was young. They also said George Anthony made Caylee's death look like a homicide after the girl accidentally drowned in the family pool.

Caylee's remains were found in December 2008 in woods near the home Casey Anthony shared with her parents. George Anthony has adamantly denied covering up his granddaughter's death or molesting Casey Anthony when she was a child. Baez argued during trial that the alleged abuse resulted in psychological issues that caused her to lie and act without apparent remorse after Caylee's death. But defense attorneys never called witnesses to support their claims.

Prosecutors alleged that Anthony suffocated her daughter with duct tape because motherhood interfered with her desire for a carefree life of partying with friends and spending time with her boyfriend. However, some jurors have told various media outlets that the state didn't prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt as required for a conviction — though some have said they believe she bears some responsibility in the case.

Defense attorneys and sheriff's officials have declined to say where Anthony was headed. What Anthony will do to make a living also remains unknown. Anthony, a high school dropout, hasn't had a job since 2006.

One of her attorneys, Cheney Mason, said Friday that Anthony was scared to leave jail, given the numerous threats on her life and the scorn of a large segment of the public that believes she had something to do with the June 2008 death.

Her attorneys have said she has received numerous threats, including an email with a manipulated photo showing their client with a bullet hole in her forehead.

Security experts have said Anthony will need to hole up inside a safe house protected by bodyguards, perhaps for weeks, given the threats.

Greene also said Friday that Anthony was emotionally unstable and needed "a little breathing room" after her draining two-month trial.

The lies that were the basis of her conviction on the misdemeanor charges began in mid-July 2008, about a month after Caylee was last seen alive. Around the time the girl disappeared, Casey Anthony had begun staying with friends and not with her parents. When Anthony's mother Cindy began asking about Caylee, Anthony told her she was staying with a nanny named Zanny.

In mid-July, George and Cindy Anthony were notified that their car had been impounded after it was abandoned in a check-cashing store's parking lot. When the picked up the car, George Anthony — a former police officer — and the impound lot manager both said it smelled like a dead body had been inside.

Cindy Anthony then tracked down her daughter at a friend's apartment and when she couldn't produce Caylee, called the sheriff's office on July 15, 2008. The court found she lied to investigators about working at the Universal Studios theme park, about leaving her daughter with a nanny, about telling two friends that Caylee had been kidnapped and about receiving a phone call from her.

Mike Silva, 26, a makeup artist from Orlando, came to the jail Saturday night with a friend. Silva said he was surprised how there was not chaos. He said it was probably in her best interested to leave Orlando. "Why would she stay here? Everyone in Orlando knows her damn face."

Tad Campbell, a 50-year-old personal trainer from Orlando is glad the trial is over. But, he added, "I think the general consensus is that she got away with murder."

    Casey Anthony Freed From Jail, Slips From View, NYT, 17.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/07/17/us/AP-US-Casey-Anthony.html

In a California Prison,

Bunk Beds Replace Pickup Games

May 24, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

CHINO, Calif. — The basketball hoops jimmied up to the ceiling prove that this dingy space was a gym once upon a time. But for years now, the windowless space has served as a de facto cell for dozens of prisoners at the California Institution for Men.

The rows of bunk beds, just a few inches apart, covered almost every empty space on the floor Tuesday afternoon. The gap between most beds allowed only the thinnest of inmates to stand comfortably. A few prisoners wandered around, but most simply rested on their thin mattresses, reading or dozing. As a rule, they go out to the yard just two or three times a week.

Ominous messages stenciled on the walls signaled the tension: “Caution: No warning shots will be fired.” Two guards mind the 200 prisoners, while another, known as a gunner, watches from up high, ready to intervene at any moment.

It would be hard to call the cavernous cell anything but crowded. Still, there are fewer people in it than there were just a few months ago, when triple bunk beds lined the wall. Now, those have been converted to hold just two inmates.

“That helped,” said Michael Collins, a 49-year-old inmate who sits a few feet from a dank corner converted into a group of metal toilets and open shower stalls. “We have less people using the bathroom now. If you just mind your business and stay in your bed, it’s O.K.”

But according to a Supreme Court ruling issued Monday, California — which has the highest overcrowding rate of any prison system in the country — must eliminate rooms like this at its facilities across the state, shedding some 30,000 prisoners over the next two years.

The problem is not new. For decades, the prison population has steadily risen, largely because of tougher mandatory sentencing laws. The overcrowding has led to riots, suicides and killings of inmates and guards over the last several years.

Matthew Cate, the secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said conditions had actually improved since the filing of the lawsuit in 2006 that ended with Monday’s court decision. There are now roughly 143,000 inmates in the state’s prisons, down from 162,000 in 2006, in part because the state has sent some 10,000 inmates to out-of-state facilities.

While there were once nearly 20,000 inmates in spaces not meant for housing, commonly referred to as “bad beds,” that number has dropped to 6,600.

“It’s not perfect, but we haven’t been at those kinds of levels since the early 1990s,” Mr. Cate said. “The standard that I use personally is: are the prisons clean, are the staff positions filled and are prisoners complaining about care? I think that conditions are good on a day-to-day basis on the basics.”

But critics say that it is impossible for the state to deal with such a glutted system. The lack of space can make it impossible, for example, to move inmates from one prison to another for their own safety.

Mr. Cate said that the state was “the birthplace for every major prison gang in the country,” but that the overcrowding paralyzes wardens from switching prisoners to defuse racial and gang tensions.

“It’s an unacceptable working environment for everyone,” said Jeanne Woodford, a former director of the state prisons and a former warden at San Quentin prison. “Every little space is filled with inmates and they are housed where they shouldn’t be housed, and every bed is full. It leads to greater violence, more staff overtime and a total inability to deal with health care and mental illness issues.”

One major impact of the overcrowding, and a centerpiece of the Supreme Court’s ruling, is the lack of adequate health care for prisoners with mental illness or other chronic medical conditions.

In 2005, a federal official began overseeing California’s prison health care system after a judge ruled that the state was giving substandard medical care for prisoners. Now, Mr. Cate said, roughly 90 percent of all clinical positions are filled, although that rate varies among the prisons.

Donald Specter, the director of the Prison Law Office who argued against the state before the Supreme Court, said that medical care was still wanting.

“There are not enough beds for the mentally ill, you have prisons all over the state who are flunking by every measure in taking care of chronic conditions like H.I.V. and diabetes and high blood pressure,” Mr. Specter said, citing several recent reports by the state’s inspector general.

Mr. Cate concedes that the state is doing little to rehabilitate prisoners and has almost no space to run programs that would keep them from landing back here again.

“There’s far too much idleness, and that’s the thing that concerns me the most,” he said. “When you have lockdown as often as we have to, it’s not setting anyone up for anything good.”

Many of the prisoners here are serving sentences of less than a year for parole violations. According to California law, any parolee caught violating the terms of release could be sent back to state prison, creating a situation that many call the “revolving door.” Under a plan Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed, those inmates would instead be sent to county jails.

Robert Caldera, 52, has spent much of his life floating in and out of the prison system, most recently arriving at Chino after he did not report to his parole officer. Mr. Caldera was convicted of second-degree robbery several years ago, he said. Now, he spends his days reading the Bible with a group of inmates. He, too, said the conditions had improved, but like nearly everyone else here, he said the real problem is the bathroom.

“It’s nasty pretty much all the time,” he said. “There are holes in the walls that have feces in them. It’s damp constantly so you don’t ever feel clean.”

Even from several feet away, it is possible to smell the scent of an overused locker room. There is something that looks like mold on each of the walls and one guard said they are constantly battling broken pipes and leaks.

The conditions at other California prisons have led to outbreaks of viruses, causing officials to quarantine hundreds of prisoners at a time.

Correction officers in Chino say that while the crowding has eased, guarding as many as 70 prisoners at a time is unspeakably stressful. Several said they looked forward to the day when they would have a more manageable number of inmates. But it can be hard for them to muster sympathy for their charges.

“It’s worse than this in the Navy and you don’t hear those guys complaining,” said Robert Spejcher, an officer who oversees a room converted to hold 42 inmates. “We never really know what we’re dealing with and we never know how long they are going to stay.”

    In a California Prison, Bunk Beds Replace Pickup Games, NYT, 25.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/us/25prison.html

Prison Ruling Raises Stakes in California Fiscal Crisis

May 23, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

LOS ANGELES — The Supreme Court’s order to California to ease overcrowding in the state’s prisons, by releasing tens of thousands of inmates if no other solution can be found, will probably aid Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to move more inmates from state prisons to county jails.

But it is also sure to set off a fresh round of budget battling in the financially distressed state as the governor and local officials insist on ensuring state financing before changing the system.

The ruling on Monday has also already inspired a fresh round of political recriminations, with some law enforcement officials and Republicans echoing the Supreme Court’s dissenters by saying the release will result in more violence as released inmates, unable to find jobs, return to their former way of life.

“We’re bracing for the worst and hoping for the best,” said Mark Pazin, the Merced County sheriff and chairman of the state’s sheriffs’ association. “This potential tsunami of inmates being released would have such an impact on local communities. Each of those who would be released have really earned their pedigree as a criminal. It could create real havoc.”

And since the court requires that the state reduce the population one way or another, California’s residents were greeting the decision with a mix of nervousness and fatalism. That anxiety is unlikely to be eased by the news that about 150 prisoners took part in a fight on Sunday in the dining hall at San Quentin State Prison in which four men were stabbed or slashed. The cause of the melee was under investigation.

Matthew Cate, the secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, called the court ruling disappointing because it did not recognize improvements the state had made over the last several years. But Mr. Cate said state officials would push even harder for the Legislature to approve the governor’s plan, which he said would save money over time.

“Our goal is to not release inmates at all,” Mr. Cate said, adding that the governor’s plan would mostly address the overcrowding problem, although it would take three to four years to do so, longer than the two-year timeline laid out by the court. He said the state could apply for an extension and added, “I don’t think we can guarantee anything at this point.”

With the state facing a $10 billion deficit, Republicans have refused to sign on to the governor’s plan to ask voters to approve tax extensions. Under Mr. Brown’s proposal, some of that money would go to the counties, which would have responsibility for housing and rehabilitating the inmates.

According to Mr. Brown’s plan, no inmate convicted of violent, sex-related or otherwise serious crimes would be sent to the county jail systems. And while many counties have said that they can cope with the inmates, they say it would be impossible without extra money from the state.

“The only logical way to deal with the court order in a manner that continues to protect the public is to send some people to the counties,” said Paul McIntosh, the executive director of the California State Association of Counties. “A one-time release would be a terrible decision, and we need a fundamental change in the way we deal with criminals. The state really needs to step up quickly to give us the ability to deal with this.”

Lee Baca, the Los Angeles County sheriff, said the state, with the help of local officials, should immediately begin devising a plan, particularly to assure the public that hardened criminals would not soon be roaming the streets.

“The public does not want to see a violent predator slip through the cracks on this,” Sheriff Baca said. “We have to assure them that the department of corrections will not make a mistake on who gets released.”

Los Angeles County is expected to have some 11,000 prisoners come into its system under the plan. Sheriff Baca said he was confident that the county had programs to deal with the additional inmates and could do even more with programs to reduce recidivism.

“But you can’t just foist the problem on us without any more money,” he said.

Donald Specter, who argued for the prisoners before the Supreme Court, called the landmark ruling “fantastic” and said it would force the state to deal with problems it had long tried to avoid.

“The state has a lot of options,” Mr. Specter said. “It can reduce sentences for parole violations or change sentencing law or go along with the governor’s plan, but it has to do something.”

In Sacramento, Sheriff Scott Jones was less enthusiastic. He said the ruling could have “horrific consequences” in his jails, which are nearly filled to capacity each day.

“Whatever money they don’t give us, we have to make up with letting go a commensurate number of parolees or people who should be behind bars,” Sheriff Jones said. “There has to be a better way, but I don’t think we are going to get it here.”

    Prison Ruling Raises Stakes in California Fiscal Crisis, NYT, 23.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24california.html

Juvenile Killers in Jail for Life Seek a Reprieve

April 20, 2011
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK and LISA FAYE PETAK

CHARLESTON, Mo. — More than a decade ago, a 14-year-old boy killed his stepbrother in a scuffle that escalated from goofing around with a blowgun to an angry threat with a bow and arrow to the fatal thrust of a hunting knife.

The boy, Quantel Lotts, had spent part of the morning playing with Pokémon cards. He was in seventh grade and not yet five feet tall.

Mr. Lotts is 25 now, and he is in the maximum-security prison here, serving a sentence of life without the possibility of parole for murder.

The victim’s mother, Tammy Lotts, said she lost two children on that November day in 1999. One was a son, Michael Barton, who was 17 when he died. The other was a stepson, Mr. Lotts.

“I don’t feel he’s guilty,” she said of Mr. Lotts in the living room of her modest St. Louis apartment, growing emotional. “But if he was, he’s already done his time. He should be released. Time served. If they think that’s too easy, let somebody look over his case.”

As things stand now, though, the law gives Mr. Lotts no hope of ever getting out.

Almost a year ago, the Supreme Court ruled that sentencing juvenile offenders to life without the possibility of parole violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment — but only for crimes that did not involve killings. The decision affected around 130 prisoners convicted of crimes like rape, armed robbery and kidnapping.

Now the inevitable follow-up cases have started to arrive at the Supreme Court. Last month, lawyers for two other prisoners who were 14 when they were involved in murders filed the first petitions urging the justices to extend last’s year’s decision, Graham v. Florida, to all 13- and 14-year-old offenders.

The Supreme Court has been methodically whittling away at severe sentences. It has banned the death penalty for juvenile offenders, the mentally disabled and those convicted of crimes other than murder. The Graham decision for the first time excluded a class of offenders from a punishment other than death.

This progression suggests it should not be long until the justices decide to address the question posed in the petitions. An extension of the Graham decision to all juvenile offenders would affect about 2,500 prisoners.

Mr. Lotts, a stout man with an easy manner, said he was not reconciled to his sentence. “I understand that I deserve some punishment,” he said. “But to be put here for the rest of my life with no chance, I don’t think that’s a fair sentence.”

Much of the logic of the Graham decision and the court’s 2005 decision banning the death penalty for juvenile offenders, Roper v. Simmons, would seem to apply to the new cases.

The majority opinions in both were written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who said teenagers deserved more lenient treatment than adults because they are immature, impulsive, susceptible to peer pressure and able to change for the better over time. Justice Kennedy added that there was an international consensus against sentencing juveniles to life without parole, which he said had been “rejected the world over.”

One factor cuts in the opposite direction. Justice Kennedy relied on what he called a national consensus against the punishment for crimes that did not involve killings. Juvenile offenders were sentenced to life without parole for such nonhomicide crimes, he wrote, in only 12 states and even then rarely.

There does not appear to be such a consensus against life without parole sentences for juveniles who take a life. That may be why opponents of the punishment are focusing for now on killings committed by very young offenders like Mr. Lotts.

That strategy follows the one used in attacking the juvenile death penalty, which the Supreme Court eliminated in two stages, banning it for those under 16 in 1988 and those under 18 in 2005.

Kent S. Scheidegger, the legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a victims’ rights group, said that categorical approaches were misguided in general and particularly unjustified where murders by young offenders were involved.

“Since I think Graham is wrong,” he said, “extending it to homicides would be wrong squared.”

“Sharp cutoffs by age, where a person’s legal status changes suddenly on some birthday, are only a crude approximation of correct policy,” he added. There are around 70 prisoners serving sentences of life without parole for homicides committed when they were 14 or younger, according to a report by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit law firm in Alabama that represents poor people and prisoners.

The effort to extend the Graham decision has so far been unsuccessful in the lower courts. According to a study to be published in The New York University Review of Law and Social Change by Scott Hechinger, a fellow at the Partnership for Children’s Rights, 10 courts have decided not to apply Graham to cases involving killings committed by the defendants, and seven others have said the same thing where the defendants were accomplices to murders. Courts have reached differing results, though, where the offense was attempted murder.

All of this suggests that the question left open in Graham may only be answered by the Supreme Court. In March, lawyers with the Equal Justice Initiative asked the justices to hear the two cases raising the question.

One concerns Kuntrell Jackson, an Arkansas man who was 14 when he and two older youths tried to rob a video store in 1999. One of the other youths shot and killed a store clerk.

The second case involves Evan Miller, an Alabama prisoner who was 14 in 2003 when he and an older youth beat a 52-year-old neighbor and set fire to his home after the three had spent the evening smoking pot and playing drinking games. The neighbor died of smoke inhalation.

In Mr. Lotts’s case, too, state and federal courts in Missouri have said that his sentence is constitutional. In December, in a different case, the Missouri Supreme Court divided 4-to-3 over the constitutionality of the punishment in a case involving the killing of a St. Louis police officer.

A dissenting judge, Michael A. Wolff, wrote that “juveniles should not be sentenced to die in prison any more than they should be sent to prison to be executed.”

At the prison here, about 130 miles south of St. Louis, Mr. Lotts said he had grown up around drugs and violence, and he acknowledged that he used to have a combustible temper. But he said the years he spent living with his father and Ms. Lotts were good ones.

He and his brother Dorell were inseparable, he recalled, from Ms. Lotts’s three boys. The group was sometimes taunted because Quantel and Dorell were black and the other boys were white.

“If you wanted to fight one of us,” he said, “you had to fight all of us.”

He said he recalled very little about assaulting Michael. But he said he knew some things for sure.

“That’s my brother,” he said. “Why would I want to kill my brother? That’s not what I set out to do. That’s not what I meant to do. That’s not what I intended to do.”

Tammy Lotts said race figured in her stepson’s trial. “They said a black boy stabbed a white boy,” she said. For years, state officials prohibited her from visiting Mr. Lotts, fearing she would try to harm him. “I’m the victim’s mother,” she said, shrugging.

At the prison last week, Mr. Lotts was wearing a handsome wedding ring, and it prompted questions. Beaming, he said he had been married just a few weeks before to a woman who had written to him after hearing him interviewed. He pointed to where the ceremony had taken place, a couple of yards away, near the vending machines.

Ms. Lotts attended the wedding, but only after satisfying herself that the bride was a suitable match.

“She’s marrying my son,” Ms. Lotts explained.

    Juvenile Killers in Jail for Life Seek a Reprieve, NYT, 20.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/us/21juvenile.html

The Prosecution Rests, but I Can’t

April 9, 2011
The New York Times
By JOHN THOMPSON

New Orleans

I SPENT 18 years in prison for robbery and murder, 14 of them on death row. I’ve been free since 2003, exonerated after evidence covered up by prosecutors surfaced just weeks before my execution date. Those prosecutors were never punished. Last month, the Supreme Court decided 5-4 to overturn a case I’d won against them and the district attorney who oversaw my case, ruling that they were not liable for the failure to turn over that evidence — which included proof that blood at the robbery scene wasn’t mine.

Because of that, prosecutors are free to do the same thing to someone else today.

I was arrested in January 1985 in New Orleans. I remember the police coming to my grandmother’s house — we all knew it was the cops because of how hard they banged on the door before kicking it in. My grandmother and my mom were there, along with my little brother and sister, my two sons — John Jr., 4, and Dedric, 6 — my girlfriend and me. The officers had guns drawn and were yelling. I guess they thought they were coming for a murderer. All the children were scared and crying. I was 22.

They took me to the homicide division, and played a cassette tape on which a man I knew named Kevin Freeman accused me of shooting a man. He had also been arrested as a suspect in the murder. A few weeks earlier he had sold me a ring and a gun; it turned out that the ring belonged to the victim and the gun was the murder weapon.

My picture was on the news, and a man called in to report that I looked like someone who had recently tried to rob his children. Suddenly I was accused of that crime, too. I was tried for the robbery first. My lawyers never knew there was blood evidence at the scene, and I was convicted based on the victims’ identification.

After that, my lawyers thought it was best if I didn’t testify at the murder trial. So I never defended myself, or got to explain that I got the ring and the gun from Kevin Freeman. And now that I officially had a history of violent crime because of the robbery conviction, the prosecutors used it to get the death penalty.

I remember the judge telling the courtroom the number of volts of electricity they would put into my body. If the first attempt didn’t kill me, he said, they’d put more volts in.

On Sept. 1, 1987, I arrived on death row in the Louisiana State Penitentiary — the infamous Angola prison. I was put in a dead man’s cell. His things were still there; he had been executed only a few days before. That past summer they had executed eight men at Angola. I received my first execution date right before I arrived. I would end up knowing 12 men who were executed there.

Over the years, I was given six execution dates, but all of them were delayed until finally my appeals were exhausted. The seventh — and last — date was set for May 20, 1999. My lawyers had been with me for 11 years by then; they flew in from Philadelphia to give me the news. They didn’t want me to hear it from the prison officials. They said it would take a miracle to avoid this execution. I told them it was fine — I was innocent, but it was time to give up.

But then I remembered something about May 20. I had just finished reading a letter from my younger son about how he wanted to go on his senior class trip. I’d been thinking about how I could find a way to pay for it by selling my typewriter and radio. “Oh, no, hold on,” I said, “that’s the day before John Jr. is graduating from high school.” I begged them to get it delayed; I knew it would hurt him.

To make things worse, the next day, when John Jr. was at school, his teacher read the whole class an article from the newspaper about my execution. She didn’t know I was John Jr.’s dad; she was just trying to teach them a lesson about making bad choices. So he learned that his father was going to be killed from his teacher, reading the newspaper aloud. I panicked. I needed to talk to him, reassure him.

Amazingly, I got a miracle. The same day that my lawyers visited, an investigator they had hired to look through the evidence one last time found, on some forgotten microfiche, a report sent to the prosecutors on the blood type of the perpetrator of the armed robbery. It didn’t match mine; the report, hidden for 15 years, had never been turned over to my lawyers. The investigator later found the names of witnesses and police reports from the murder case that hadn’t been turned over either.

As a result, the armed robbery conviction was thrown out in 1999, and I was taken off death row. Then, in 2002, my murder conviction was thrown out. At a retrial the following year, the jury took only 35 minutes to acquit me.

The prosecutors involved in my two cases, from the office of the Orleans Parish district attorney, Harry Connick Sr., helped to cover up 10 separate pieces of evidence. And most of them are still able to practice law today.

Why weren’t they punished for what they did? When the hidden evidence first surfaced, Mr. Connick announced that his office would hold a grand jury investigation. But once it became clear how many people had been involved, he called it off.

In 2005, I sued the prosecutors and the district attorney’s office for what they did to me. The jurors heard testimony from the special prosecutor who had been assigned by Mr. Connick’s office to the canceled investigation, who told them, “We should have indicted these guys, but they didn’t and it was wrong.” The jury awarded me $14 million in damages — $1 million for every year on death row — which would have been paid by the district attorney’s office. That jury verdict is what the Supreme Court has just overturned.

I don’t care about the money. I just want to know why the prosecutors who hid evidence, sent me to prison for something I didn’t do and nearly had me killed are not in jail themselves. There were no ethics charges against them, no criminal charges, no one was fired and now, according to the Supreme Court, no one can be sued.

Worst of all, I wasn’t the only person they played dirty with. Of the six men one of my prosecutors got sentenced to death, five eventually had their convictions reversed because of prosecutorial misconduct. Because we were sentenced to death, the courts had to appoint us lawyers to fight our appeals. I was lucky, and got lawyers who went to extraordinary lengths. But there are more than 4,000 people serving life without parole in Louisiana, almost none of whom have lawyers after their convictions are final. Someone needs to look at those cases to see how many others might be innocent.

If a private investigator hired by a generous law firm hadn’t found the blood evidence, I’d be dead today. No doubt about it.

A crime was definitely committed in this case, but not by me.


John Thompson is the director of Resurrection After Exoneration,
a support group for exonerated inmates.

    The Prosecution Rests, but I Can’t, NYT, 9.4.2011
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/opinion/10thompson.html

Enlisting Prison Labor to Close Budget Gaps

February 24, 2011
The New York Times
By ROBBIE BROWN and KIM SEVERSON

JAY, Fla. — Before he went to jail, Danny Ivey had barely seen a backyard garden.

But here he was, two years left on his sentence for grand theft, bent over in a field, snapping wide, green collard leaves from their stems. For the rest of the week, Mr. Ivey and his fellow inmates would be eating the greens he picked, and the State of Florida would be saving most of the $2.29 a day it allots for their meals.

Prison labor — making license plates, picking up litter — is nothing new, and nearly all states have such programs. But these days, officials are expanding the practice to combat cuts in federal financing and dwindling tax revenue, using prisoners to paint vehicles, clean courthouses, sweep campsites and perform many other services done before the recession by private contractors or government employees.

In New Jersey, inmates on roadkill patrol clean deer carcasses from highways. Georgia inmates tend municipal graveyards. In Ohio, they paint their own cells. In California, prison officials hope to expand existing programs, including one in which wet-suit-clad inmates repair leaky public water tanks. There are no figures on how many prisoners have been enrolled in new or expanded programs nationwide, but experts in criminal justice have taken note of the increase.

“There’s special urgency in prisons these days,” said Martin F. Horn, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction. “As state budgets get constricted, the public is looking for ways to offset the cost of imprisonment.”

Although inmate labor is helping budgets in many corners of state government, the savings are the largest in corrections departments themselves, which have cut billions of dollars in recent years and are under constant pressure to reduce the roughly $29,000 a year that it costs to incarcerate the average inmate in the United States.

Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, introduced a bill last month to require all low-security prisoners to work 50 hours a week. Creating a national prison labor force has been a goal since he went to Congress in 1995, but it makes even more sense in this economy, he said.

“Think about how much it costs to incarcerate someone,” Mr. Ensign said. “Do we want them just sitting in prison, lifting weights, becoming violent and thinking about the next crime? Or do we want them having a little purpose in life and learning a skill?”

Financial experts agree.

“These are nickel-and-dime attempts to cut budgets, but they add up,” said Alan Essig, an expert on state budgets at the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. “You save a dollar here, a dollar there, and you keep your government’s functions.”

Technology has made it easier to coordinate. In Hunterdon County, N.J., nonprofit organizations and government agencies can view prisoners’ work schedules online and reserve them for a specific task on a free day. (Coming tasks include cleaning up after a Fire Department fish fry and maintaining a public park.)

“Using inmate labor has created unusual alliances: liberal humanitarian groups that advocate more education and exercise in prisons find themselves supporting proposals from conservative budget hawks to get inmates jobs, often outdoors, where they can learn new skills. Having a job in prison has been linked in studies to decreased violence, improved morale and lowered recidivism — but most effectively, experts say, when the task is purposeful.

“The days of just breaking rocks with sledgehammers” are over, said Michael P. Jacobson, director of the Vera Institute of Justice, a research group in New York. “At the grossest financial level, it’s just savings. You can cut the government worker, save the salary and still maintain the service, and you’re providing a skill for when they leave.”

There are, of course, concerns about public safety and competition with government or private workers. Professor Horn estimates that only 20 percent of inmates present a low enough security threat to work in public. And in some places, even financially struggling governments are not willing to take the risk of employing prisoners.

In Ocala, Fla., after a long debate, the City Council last summer decided to have a private company mow grass, even though using inmates would have saved $1.1 million. “Our area has been really hard hit by unemployment,” said Suzy Heinbockel, a Council member. “There was a belief that the private company would bring local jobs, rather than giving those jobs to prisoners.”

In other areas that have used prison labor to reduce costs, there have been embarrassing results. In Ohio, there was public outcry last year after state investigations found inmates drinking on the job at the governor’s mansion and smuggling tobacco back into jail. And in Maryland, a proposal to have prisoners pick blue crabs for a private company was dropped amid concern about food safety.

But the budget savings are worth it, many state officials say. In Florida, where the budget was cut by $4.6 billion this year, analysts say inmate farming could save $2.4 million a year. That is relatively small potatoes, but enough for the new governor, Rick Scott, to call for an expansion of prison farming. The state already uses 550 inmates to grow 4.8 million pounds of produce a year, and the governor has pledged $2.5 million to have more inmates grow their own food.

“It’s a win-win,” said Jeff Mullahey, the director of an agricultural center at the University of Florida whose staff was downsized in 2007 and replaced, in part, by prisoners. “It’s obvious to me why governments should be doing this.”

Inmates arrive at the center from the Century Correctional Institute every weekday, rain or shine, to grow tomatoes, peppers, squash, broccoli and oranges. The partnership with the prison began two years ago, after the university’s agriculture program sustained deep budget cuts.

Professors provide farming expertise, and inmates supply the labor and learn marketable skills as fieldworkers. The result has been so successful, providing $192,000 worth of food a year to the prison and saving $75,000 a year for the university, that wardens from around the state have visited to learn about replicating it with their inmates.

No inmates have escaped, and sometimes, Mr. Mullahey said, their criminal backgrounds are assets. Inmates with drug offenses already know how to grow plants, and when a university employee lost the key to a file cabinet, a prisoner with lock-picking experience helped him break in.

The prisoners say farming has made them feel better about themselves. “The department of corrections is going to find you a job so you might as well do something you want to do and learn something,” said Randall Riley, 37, who is doing a four-year sentence for habitual driving offenses.

And the savings are not lost on the prisoners either. “I’m on this side of the fence,” Mr. Ivey said. “But my family’s on that other side, and they’re paying taxes.”

    Enlisting Prison Labor to Close Budget Gaps, NYT, 24.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/us/25inmates.html

From Prison, Madoff Says Banks ‘Had to Know’ of Fraud

February 15, 2011
The New York Times
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES

BUTNER, N.C. — Bernard L. Madoff said he never thought the collapse of his Ponzi scheme would cause the sort of destruction that has befallen his family.

In his first interview for publication since his arrest in December 2008, Mr. Madoff — looking noticeably thinner and rumpled in khaki prison garb — maintained that family members knew nothing about his crimes.

But during a private two-hour interview in a visitor room here on Tuesday, and in earlier e-mail exchanges, he asserted that unidentified banks and hedge funds were somehow “complicit” in his elaborate fraud, an about-face from earlier claims that he was the only person involved.

Mr. Madoff, who is serving a 150-year sentence, seemed frail and a bit agitated compared with the stoic calm he maintained before his incarceration in 2009, perhaps burdened by sadness over the suicide of his son Mark in December.

Besides that loss, his family also has faced stacks of lawsuits, the potential forfeiture of most of their assets, and relentless public suspicion and enmity that cut Mr. Madoff and his wife Ruth off from their children.

In many ways, however, Mr. Madoff seemed unchanged. He spoke with great intensity and fluency about his dealings with various banks and hedge funds, pointing to their “willful blindness” and their failure to examine discrepancies between his regulatory filings and other information available to them.

“They had to know,” Mr. Madoff said. “But the attitude was sort of, ‘If you’re doing something wrong, we don’t want to know.’ ”

While he acknowledged his guilt in the interview and said nothing could excuse his crimes, he focused his comments laserlike on the big investors and giant institutions he dealt with, not on the financial pain he caused thousands of his more modest investors. In an e-mail written on Jan. 13, he observed that many long-term clients made more in legitimate profits from him in the years before the fraud than they could have elsewhere. “I would have loved for them to not lose anything, but that was a risk they were well aware of by investing in the market,” he wrote.

Mr. Madoff said he was startled to learn about some of the e-mails and messages raising doubts about his results — now emerging in lawsuits — that bankers were passing around before his scheme collapsed.

“I’m reading more now about how suspicious they were than I ever realized at the time,” he said with a faint smile.

He did not assert that any specific bank or fund knew about or was an accomplice in his Ponzi scheme, which lasted at least 16 years and consumed about $20 billion in lost cash and almost $65 billion in paper wealth. Rather, he cited a failure to conduct normal scrutiny.

Both the interview and the e-mail correspondence were conducted as part of this reporter’s research for a coming book on the Madoff scandal, “The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust,” for publication this spring by Times Books, a division of Henry Holt & Company.

In the interview and e-mails, he also claimed he had been helping the court-appointed trustee who is seeking to recover lost billions on behalf of his swindled clients. In e-mails, Mr. Madoff said repeatedly that he provided useful information to Irving H. Picard, the trustee trying to recover assets for the fraud victims. He met with Mr. Picard’s team over four days last summer, he said. The e-mails were written in December and January, but he only recently agreed that they could be made public.

In prison, Mr. Madoff’s access to the outside world is both limited and monitored. All visitors must be approved by prison authorities, who also screen his limited collect calls and his incoming and outgoing e-mails and letters, though interviews with lawyers like Mr. Picard and his colleagues are less restricted and can be conducted in private.

Asked about his cell, he described a room about 12 feet square with a big window looking out on the grounds; he said he had a roommate, the second since he arrived at the prison.

It was clear from the e-mails and interview here that Mr. Madoff closely followed news related to his case in December, the second anniversary of his arrest. He lashed out at what he called some of the “disgraceful” coverage of the suicide of his son Mark on Dec. 11.

Disputing reports that he refused to attend any funeral services for Mark, he said the prison informed him it would not approve a request for him to attend a service because of “the public safety issue” and the limited time available to make arrangements. He concluded any funeral he attended “would be a media circus” and that it “would be cruel to my family” to put them through that, he wrote on Dec. 29.

Regarding his meetings with Mr. Picard’s legal team, Mr. Madoff asserted in an e-mail written on Dec. 19 that he had given Mr. Picard’s legal team “information I knew would be instrumental in recovering assets from those people complicit in the mess I put myself into.”

In a message 10 days later, he was even more explicit about what he told the trustee: “I am saying that the banks and funds were complicit in one form or another and my information to Picard when he was here established this.”

Mr. Madoff’s claims must be weighed against his tenuous credibility. After deceiving federal regulators and supposedly sophisticated investors for at least 16 years, he would certainly be branded as a liar by defense lawyers if he appeared as a witness against any defendant in a courtroom — a fact he acknowledged somewhat ruefully during the interview on Tuesday.

Despite his many references to the complicity of others, he acknowledged in the Dec. 19 e-mail that he had not shared his information with the federal prosecutors working on criminal cases related to his fraud — although the trustee most likely would have done so, if Mr. Madoff’s information was relevant to the investigation.

Mr. Madoff wrote in an e-mail that while he was willing “from the beginning” to give prosecutors information “to help recover assets only, I refused to help provide them with criminal evidence.” In the interview he declined to discuss any of the criminal cases under investigation.

In the months after the Picard team’s prison interviews, the trustee’s law firm, Baker & Hostetler, filed hundreds of civil lawsuits seeking approximately $90 billion in damages and fictional profits withdrawn from Mr. Madoff’s scheme over the years. The defendants in those cases included the Wilpon family, the owners of the New York Mets; JPMorgan Chase, which served for decades as Mr. Madoff’s primary banker; and Sonja Kohn, the Viennese financier at the hub of a network of hedge funds that invested heavily with Mr. Madoff.

Mr. Madoff said about Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, Mr. Wilpon’s brother-in-law and business partner: “They knew nothing. They knew nothing.”

There was no obvious sign that any of those lawsuits were based on evidence or guidance from Mr. Madoff. All the defendants have said they had no knowledge of the fraud and have denied the trustee’s claims that, as financially sophisticated investors, they should have been suspicious from the beginning.

Mr. Picard declined to comment on whether his team had interviewed Mr. Madoff and would not say whether information from him had contributed to the vast body of litigation filed since last summer.

In some e-mails, Mr. Madoff conceded that Mr. Picard’s team conducted its own investigation into the withdrawals made by some big clients, in the years before the Ponzi scheme collapsed, to determine who might have known what and when. Such withdrawals could indicate that investors could have been aware of the fraud, which could increase their liability.

However, Mr. Madoff added, “the facts are that I alone was present at certain meetings with these clients.”

To date, none of the major banks or hedge funds that did business with Mr. Madoff have been accused by federal prosecutors of knowingly investing in his Ponzi scheme. However, Mr. Picard in civil lawsuits has asserted that executives at some banks expressed suspicions for years, yet continued to do business with Mr. Madoff and steer their clients’ money into his hands.

All the financial entities facing civil lawsuits by Madoff victims and Mr. Picard have denied they had any knowledge of the fraud.

In a related e-mail on Jan. 12, Mr. Madoff cited out-of-court settlements that some banks and funds had negotiated with private Madoff investors over the last two years and claimed some settlements were made “to keep me quiet” about the role the institutions played in “creating my situation” and about the identity of the beneficial owners of some of their private accounts.

Mr. Picard has already recovered roughly $10 billion through asset sales and settlements with several foreign banks and a few significant Madoff clients, including the estate of a private investor, Jeffry Picower, and the family of Carl Shapiro, a philanthropist in Palm Beach, Fla.

While the Picower settlement had been under negotiation since at least the fall of 2009, the settlements with the Shapiro family and a Swiss bank, Union Bancaire Privée, both came after Mr. Picard’s trip to the prison here in Butner. But because both settlements came before Mr. Picard had filed any public claims in court, it is unclear whether information from Mr. Madoff was a factor in those settlement talks.

Neither Mr. Shapiro nor the Swiss bank has been accused of any complicity in Mr. Madoff’s crimes, and Mr. Picard has publicly acknowledged their good-faith cooperation with his inquiries when he announced the settlement agreements, which totaled more than $1 billion.

The only people formally charged with complicity in Mr. Madoff’s crime are his former auditor and members of his own staff.

Although Mr. Madoff swore in court that he had carried out his elaborate fraud on his own, his accountant, David H. Friehling, and Mr. Madoff’s senior lieutenant, Frank DiPascali, have pleaded guilty and are cooperating with prosecutors. Five other former Madoff employees have been indicted; they have asserted their innocence and are awaiting trial.

While Mr. Madoff said he was determined to aid the trustee’s efforts to recover assets, he was also critical of the trustee’s reach, claiming that Mr. Picard was seeking far more money than was needed to resolve valid investor claims.

In addition to the customer claims for the cash losses and the paper wealth that vanished, the Madoff estate also faces claims by general creditors, like unpaid vendors and landlords, who cannot recover until all the valid customer claims are paid.

Mr. Madoff argued in several e-mails that Mr. Picard’s responsibility was to return only the $20 billion in out-of-pocket cash that investors lost in his scheme.

Given that Mr. Picard has already recovered roughly $10 billion, Mr. Madoff calculated that the lawsuits against major banks and hedge funds would produce more than enough to cover the rest of the cash losses without Mr. Picard having to pursue “clawback” litigation against some longtime investors who withdrew more from their accounts than they put.

    From Prison, Madoff Says Banks ‘Had to Know’ of Fraud, NYT, 15.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/business/madoff-prison-interview.html

As Republicans Resist Closing Prisons, Cuomo Is Said to Scale Back Plan

January 28, 2011
The New York Times
By DANNY HAKIM and THOMAS KAPLAN

ALBANY — Nearly a month ago, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo made a call to close some prisons an emotional capstone of his first annual address to the Legislature, vowing, to sustained applause from fellow Democrats, that underused prisons would no longer be “an employment program” for upstate New York.

The issue has long prompted resentment, particularly for families of New York City residents who are shipped hours north of the city to be incarcerated, to places like the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, which is perched in the northern Adirondacks.

But now Mr. Cuomo appears to be, at least partly, in retreat.

The governor and his staff had considered closing or consolidating potentially 10 or more adult and youth prisons and other facilities controlled by the corrections department, but they have faced stiff resistance from Senate Republicans, who are trying to fend off the loss of hundreds of state jobs in some of their upstate districts.

Now the governor appears to be scaling back his ambitions, those with knowledge of his plans said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to talk on the record about the governor’s budget deliberations ahead of the budget’s completion.

Any plan to shutter specific prisons is unlikely to be included in the budget Mr. Cuomo releases on Tuesday and will be left to negotiations with the Legislature as it hammers out a final budget over the next two months.

The governor’s office has already signaled a willingness to accommodate Republicans; a plan floated on Friday in The New York Post suggests as few as six prisons would be closed, three of them in New York City, including two that house work-release programs.

If the new strategy holds, it would sharply curtail Mr. Cuomo’s ambition and could ultimately even increase the proportion of prisoners sent upstate.

In his Jan. 5 address to the Legislature, Mr. Cuomo said that “an incarceration program is not an employment program.”

“If people need jobs, let’s get people jobs,” he added. “Don’t put other people in prison to give some people jobs. Don’t put other people in juvenile justice facilities to give some people jobs. That’s not what this state is all about, and that has to end this session.”

On Friday, his administration had little to say publicly on the matter.

“While any speculation about the budget is premature,” Mr. Cuomo’s deputy communications director, Josh Vlasto, said, “prisons with very significant vacancy rates should be evaluated and potentially considered for closure given the state’s fiscal condition.”

Mr. Vlasto also said there was never a plan to close only upstate facilities.

Republicans have certainly made their feelings clear about any potential closings.

“We recognize that this is going to be a tough budget with real cuts, and we just hope that these cuts are equally distributed around the state,” said Senator Thomas W. Libous, a Binghamton Republican and the deputy majority leader.

“I do think the governor understands the prison issue,” he added. “I know he understands the prison issue is always a sensitive one to upstate.”

Leaders of the legislative committees that oversee prisons said Friday that they had not been briefed by Mr. Cuomo or his aides on what closings might be part of his budget.

The chairman of the Assembly’s Committee on Correction, Jeffrion L. Aubry, Democrat of Queens, expressed concerns about possible closings of prisons in New York City that have work-release programs. “We believe in work release,” he said. “We would not want to see a diminution of work release in the city of New York, where a large majority of the prisoners come from.”

“If you close them in the city of New York, where are you going to have those inmates functioning out of?” he added. “Is it going to be some place that’s close to employment?”

Mr. Aubry also rejected the idea of balancing prison closings based on geography. “That’s not good policy,” he said. “That’s just politics.”

Robert Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, a nonprofit prison-monitoring and advocacy group, said he would be disappointed if only six facilities were closed and half were in New York City.

“The totally legitimate corrections wisdom is it’s important to locate prisons in communities that are close to where the people come from that are locked up,” Mr. Gangi said. “The evidence and the research show that when prisoners are able to maintain ties with their family, they cope better with their prison experience and they have a lower recidivism rate.”

But Senator Betty Little, a Republican whose district includes much of the Adirondacks, said the economic effects had to be considered. “The area I represent is northern New York, it’s very rural, and we built an economy around these facilities, first of all because no one else wanted them in their neighborhoods and because the land was cheap,” she said. “Hopefully when they look at closure, they look at economic impact. I’m not trying to create inmates to keep these places open, but we need to look at the whole picture.”

Senator Ruth Hassell-Thompson, a Democrat who represents parts of the Bronx and Westchester County and is chairwoman of the Legislature’s Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian Legislative Caucus, said: “So many of our inmates are already separated by vast distances from their families. And this decision must be carefully thought through with a focus not only on the financial savings, but also, on the impact on our local communities.”


Nicholas Confessore contributed reporting.

    As Republicans Resist Closing Prisons, Cuomo Is Said to Scale Back Plan, NYT, 28.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/29/nyregion/29prisons.html

For Ex-Prisoners, a Haven Away From the Streets

January 17, 2011
8:15 pm
The New York Times
By TINA ROSENBERG

This year, the United States will release nearly three-quarters of a million people from prison, a record high. Nationally, 2.3 million people are in prison in the United States, and 95 percent of them will, at some point, get out and go home.

Society has a strong interest in keeping them home — in helping them to become law-abiding citizens instead of falling back into their old ways and returning to prison. But American programs for newly released prisoners echo the typical follies of our criminal justice system: our politicians usually believe that voters only want the emotional satisfactions of meting out maximum punishment, even if these policies lead to even more crime.

The usual package granted to someone released from prison in New York state is $40, a bus ticket and the considerable stigma that follows an ex-offender. Since prisoners are often held far away from their families and states charge astronomical rates for prison phone calls, prisoners often lose touch with their loved ones and may not have anyone to take them in when they get home. They may arrive in their home cities with no plans, other than — worrisomely — those hatched with fellow prisoners. They have little prospect for jobs or housing. Since many don’t get effective drug treatment in prison, they might still crave a fix, which costs money. It is little wonder that some former prisoners fall back into crime within hours or days.

Returning prisoners need many things: stable housing, drug treatment, job training, G.E.D. (high school equivalency) classes, parenting lessons, anger management. But even the handful of people who do worry about ex-offenders rarely mention what may be the most crucial need of all: a better class of friends.

Former prisoners go back to their old neighborhoods and meet up with their old gang, or new people of the only type they may be comfortable with — criminals. But what people need is to stop hanging out with associates who tempt them with promises of easy money or drug-filled nights. They need to start hanging out with people who think about the consequences of their actions, who value legitimate jobs, sobriety and family — people who go to their A.A. meetings and G.E.D. classes, who are trying to rebuild their lives.

How important are the right friends? We know that people get into crime and gangs primarily because their friends do. Hanging around with delinquent friends encourages young people to think of themselves as delinquents, and puts them in a world where criminal behavior is easy to engage in and brings social rewards. We do not know as much about whether pro-social peer groups can turn people away from crime. But it is reasonable to believe that the right peer group can help.

In West Harlem there is a large and beautiful Gothic building overlooking the Hudson River. It is called the Fortune Academy, but it is known to all as the Castle. It is owned by the Fortune Society, a group dedicated to helping returning prisoners succeed with starting new lives. The Fortune Society helps about 4,000 newly released prisoners each year with job training and placement, drug treatment, classes in cooking and anger management and being a father, and G.E.D. studies.
Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times The Fortune Academy in West Harlem.

Most of the people who work at Fortune were once themselves drug addicted, homeless or imprisoned. This is important. “The clients can look at the staff and say, ‘a few years ago, that person was where I am,’” said Glenn E. Martin, Fortune’s vice president of development and public affairs. (He himself served six years in prison, and was released nine years ago.) The staff can also see past appearances: “Some others may see a guy with his pants pulled down and his hat on, yelling, and say ‘he’s not ready,’ ” said Martin. “But we’ll talk to him.” The credibility and understanding produced by having a staff of former offenders is important. But about 300 of Fortune’s clients each year get something more: a bed in the Castle, and the chance to start a law-abiding life in the company of other people trying to do the same.

The Castle provides solutions to several of the most important problems facing newly released prisoners. One is housing. Between 10 and 20 percent of people released from state and city prisons and jails have nowhere stable to go — they couch surf with friends or go into homeless shelters. But a stable home is a prerequisite for all the other things needed for a productive life. The Castle can be that home for a few nights or many months, until the person can find work and safe housing he or she can afford.

Anyone newly released from prison with nowhere else to go can apply to live in the Castle. Open beds are filled by the first qualified applicant, but the Castle turns away at least 10 people for every one it accepts. Prisoners throughout New York state apply — because the Fortune Society has physical offices in some jails and prisons, the parole bureaucracy refers them and because prisoners themselves spread the word. “We get several thousand letters a year,” says JoAnne Page, the president and chief executive of the Fortune Society. “We get referrals from people’s mothers.” The Castle has single rooms for residents who earn them; the rest have roommates. It serves meals and has staff on duty around the clock. It has a computer lab, laundry and a cafeteria. Residents are required to go full time to counseling, services such as drug treatment or job placement, or to school.

But perhaps more important than housing, the Castle gives people a new group of friends to identify with. Every Thursday night at 6 the Castle has a group meeting of all its residents. At one recent meeting, people sat around an enormous table and talked about the successes of their week. One woman talked about her job as a janitor at a shelter for women. “It’s a safe place, and clean — that’s because of me,” she said with pride. One man recounted a speech he attended by a political candidate. Another said he opened a bank account for the first time in his life. One woman was applying for jobs and wondered aloud how best to phrase the information that she was a felon. JoAnne Page took the opportunity to deliver one of Fortune Society’s key messages: You are not a felon. You committed a felony and did your time, but that is not who you are. One man announced that the Castle’s chorus was rehearsing and was open to new members. The residents applauded each other fervently.

Delancey Street, in San Francisco, is a very different community with the same purpose. People come to live at the Delancey Street residential building for an average of four years. Each resident is required to get at least a high school equivalency degree and learn several marketable job skills, such as furniture making, sales or accounting. The organization is completely run by its residents, who teach each other — there is no paid staff at all. Teaching others is part of the rehabilitation process for Delancey residents. The residence is financed in part by private donations, but the majority of its financing comes from the businesses the residents run, such as restaurants, event planning, a corporate car service, a moving company and framing shop. All money earned goes to the collective, which pays all its residents’ expenses.

At both Fortune and Delancey, a person emerging from prison is surrounded by a community of people who support him, hold him accountable, teach him skills and model good behavior. Many of the men and women in these programs come to think of themselves as productive members of society for the first time in their lives, and it may also be the first time they ever feel competent at anything besides lawbreaking.

The Delancey Street residence, which began in 1971, has never been formally evaluated. But there is no question that is phenomenally successful. It has graduated more than 14,000 people from prison into constructive lives. Carol Kizziah, who manages Delancey’s efforts to apply its lessons elsewhere, says that the organization estimates that 75 percent of its graduates go on to productive lives. (For former prisoners who don’t go to Delancey, only 25 to 40 percent avoid re-arrest.) Since it costs taxpayers nothing, from a government’s point of view it could very well be the most cost-effective social program ever devised. The program has established similar Delancey Street communities in Los Angeles, New Mexico, North Carolina and upstate New York. Outsiders have replicated the Delancey Street model in about five other places.

While some other Fortune Society programs have been researched and found to be effective, there has been no study of the Castle, which began in 2002. Nevertheless, the Castle is often cited by criminal justice experts as a model for helping ex-offenders. New York State’s Division of Parole gave a special award to the Fortune Society last month, and parole officers who work with Castle residents speak highly of it. “It’s working,” said Otis Cruse, a parole officer who has had the Castle in his jurisdiction. “It has counseling, groups, connections to employment – it’s one-stop shopping. It’s comfortable, quiet, clean and safe — you can sleep without looking over your shoulder. It’s an environment where positive people are doing positive things — you are colleagues in pursuing the same goal.”

There is one possible caveat about the Castle’s effectiveness: most of the people I saw at the Castle were in their 30s or older. Older people who get out of prison, by definition, are more likely than young ones to have served long sentences for serious offenses. And the longer the sentence, the more disconnected and disoriented prisoners are likely to be upon release. So they are important clients for the Castle. But they are also at an age where people are leaving crime on their own, finally ready to accept some responsibility and aware they are not immortal and want a family and a stable life. Crime is a young person’s game. It may be true that many people at the Castle successfully turn around their lives. The question is whether their age would help them to do so in any case.

There are two puzzles here. Delancey Street is now celebrating its 40th anniversary. One would think that by now there would be Delancey 2.0 models sprouting all over. But there are not. A related mystery concerns the idea that underlies both Delancey and the Castle: the importance of pro-social peers. Our guts tell us they matter; we know the effect our friends can have on our behavior. Peer pressure may be the single most important factor getting people into crime — surely it should be employed to get them out again. Yet it is not. Besides Delancey and the Castle, there is probably not a single government agency or citizen group working with former prisoners that lists “clean-living peers” alongside housing, job training and other items on its agenda for what former prisoners need to go straight. These two communities of former prisoners are good projects, but they have failed to have a wider impact. Saturday’s column will look at why this is the case.

Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and now a contributing writer for the paper’s Sunday magazine. Her new book, “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World,” is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.

    For Ex-Prisoners, a Haven Away From the Streets, NYT, 17.1.2011, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/for-ex-prisoners-a-haven-away-from-the-streets/

The Handwritten Letter, an Art All but Lost, Thrives in Prison
 

January 7, 2011
The New York Times
By JEREMY W. PETERS

To the Georgia Department of Corrections he is inmate No. 544319, in prison on a five-year sentence for drug possession. But to the editors of Maxim, he is Mike Bolick, a faithful reader and regular letter writer who has loopy penmanship and an eye for beautiful cover models.

Mr. Bolick has become known at Maxim over the years for sending cover girls letters through the magazine with the hope that they will agree to be his pen pals. He is gracious and self-effacing, complimenting their beauty while asking them to please excuse his poor spelling and punctuation. He has plans to get his G.E.D. to remedy that, he explained in a recent letter to the pin-up girl Rachelle Leah.

On occasion he asks for a few pictures — just not nude ones. Those would surely be confiscated by the guards.

In prisons across the country, with their artificial pre-Internet worlds where magazines are one of the few connections to the outside and handwritten correspondence is the primary form of communication, the art of the pen-to-paper letter to the editor is thriving. Magazine editors see so much of it that they have even coined a term for these letters: jail mail.

At magazines like Maxim, with its male-heavy readership and sexy spreads that feature women in just enough clothing to avoid running afoul of prison standards, mail from inmates can easily make up three-quarters of the handwritten letters that come in. Maxim says it receives 10 to 30 such letters each week. Rolling Stone says it receives at least one a day. And at Esquire, editors receive about 15 to 20 a month, about a quarter of the magazine’s mailed letters. The rest come mainly from older readers.

Many letters are like the ones Mr. Bolick sends: from inmates with plenty of free time asking to meet famous people featured in profiles and photo spreads. But they take on all forms. Some are as simple as an inmate complaining about not receiving his subscription or writing with a change of address. Others are personal reflections on a recent article. Country Weekly regularly receives songs from a prisoner in Texas who has ambitions of being a country star.

Some letters arrive censored by prison staff, with strokes of black marker obscuring certain sentences.

A common type comes from inmates who claim they were wrongfully convicted and would like a journalist to investigate. “It turns out every person in jail is innocent. Imagine that!” said Will Dana, managing editor of Rolling Stone. “It seems every day there are a couple” of letters, he said. “And they’re usually requests for help or to look into the incredible miscarriage of justice that landed them in jail.”

Jail mail comes to magazines of all stripes and socioeconomic demographic. Even Vanity Fair, with its glossy photo spreads of black-tie galas and articles on high society travails, used to receive about one letter a month from prisoners seeking to get in touch with the investigative reporter Dominick Dunne before he died in 2009. It seems to be a mostly male phenomenon. Women’s magazines like Glamour, Self and O, the Oprah Magazine, said they did not typically get mail from female inmates.

Ebony receives about 25 prison letters a month — a quarter of all the written mail that comes to the magazine’s offices in Chicago. Terry Glover, the managing editor, said she was often surprised by how serious and introspective some of the prison letters could be. “You come to these letters with a certain expectation like, ‘O.K., what is it that they want?’ Because often they are looking for financial support or an address for a hot celebrity.” But more often than not, Ms. Glover said, it is apparent to her that prisoners have used their ample time alone to consider why they are incarcerated.

“They say, ‘This is what happened to me, don’t let this happen to any other kids,’ ” she said, adding that Ebony has occasionally printed letters from prisoners.

The letters are usually recognizable as jail mail even before they are opened. In the space for the return address, an inmate number follows the writer’s name. A return address with words like “United States Penitentiary” or “correctional center” is a dead giveaway.

Magazines these days receive the bulk of their reader correspondence through e-mail. Esquire, for example, will get 100 to 150 e-mails in any given month, compared with only about 60 mailed letters. Sports Illustrated stopped soliciting reader letters entirely after the anthrax scare of 2001.

Prisoners send handwritten letters not out of any romantic attachment to the old-fashioned craft of letter writing but out of necessity. Many prisons do not allow inmates access to computers. And prisons that do hardly ever allow inmates access to the Internet or to conventional e-mail systems. In California, for example, prisoners are not permitted e-mail contact.

But in the federal prison system and in states like Oregon and Pennsylvania, inmates can receive e-mail through a third-party system that allows prisons to review messages for words like “escape” and “drugs.” Family members and friends of the imprisoned can send messages through this system. And after they are read and approved, prison staff members can print the messages out and deliver them to inmates.

Just like any correspondence, magazines are censored inside prisons. While an inmate may have a subscription, not every issue makes it through. Prisons typically block ones that contain articles and images they would prefer inmates not see: risqué photos or other overtly sexually provocative content, references to drugs, weapons and — a definite deal-breaker — anything to do with breaking out of prison.

Sometimes the prisons just destroy the magazines, other times they are stamped “return to sender.”

“Every once in a while we’ll just get a huge envelope of issues and a letter saying, ‘These were rejected by the prison,’ ” said Peter Martin, an associate editor at Esquire.

One magazine that failed to get past censors was the August 2008 issue of Esquire, which featured an article that rehashed in detail how a group of inmates plotted an escape from a Michigan prison.

Magazines as G-rated as Popular Mechanics have been denied for articles that explain subjects like bombs or weapons.

As editors at American Media found out, prisoners can be rather fussy about their magazines. American Media, which publishes Country Weekly, Men’s Fitness, The National Enquirer and Star, was sued by a prisoner for $25,000 plus damages. Why? He claimed he was deceived and defrauded after Country Weekly reformatted.

For American Media, no stranger to lawsuits from celebrities, a prisoner lawsuit was a first.

In an environment where people are stripped of almost all individual possessions, magazines are one of the few things that prisoners get to experience as their own. And that helps explain why many write in so frequently and passionately, said Joe Levy, Maxim’s editor.

“Magazines are one of their primary sources of contact with the world outside,” Mr. Levy said. “Certainly there’s television. But there’s a difference between television, which many of the guys have to watch communally, and a magazine that’s theirs.”

The Handwritten Letter, an Art All but Lost, Thrives in Prison, NYT, 7.1.2011,     http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/08/business/media/08jailmail.html