NEWS - State Prisons

Ex-California Prison Guard released New Book

StandingAlone47 — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 07:43:57 GMT

I just finished reading a book that is called The Green Wall. I purchased through the following link.

Outstanding book!! Must read!!!! and pass along.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/imageviewer.asp?ean=9781440140594

Jamestown update

Mamajo — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 18:42:46 GMT

Hello my son is in Sierra Conservation Center in Jamestown, CA and is waiting to go to firecamp as well. He has been waiting for last 6 months. The last update that I got from him 2 days ago is that Jamestown seems to be the only place where they are trying to integrate inmates and that it's not going well. So much that those who are not going along with the integration, which is pretty much everyone, have lost their privleges for 90 days, been in the "hole", have had time added on to their sentences and have had their fire camp priveleges cancelled. He said it doesn't look good and the only thing for any of them to do is to put in for transfers to other prisons where they might have a chance to go to camps and hope they get their transfers.

Jamestown mom.

two prison deaths

martha — Thu, 21 May 2009 18:15:55 GMT

nebraska state penitentary. has had two deaths in the same month..april 2009. one was 36 yr's old.know reason given, the other a 56 yr. old. for all intent and purpose these where healthy men. makes one really question the saftey of our loved ones ,,,,, martha[a mother waits]

New Cheap Pre-Paid Phone Service To Cell, Home or Office.

tearsonmypillow — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 08:18:56 GMT

I found this site that works great and is very cheap. Name of company is Portal32 - Inmate Collect Calling Alternative. I got 1000 Minutes for $15.99 a month and a local number to the facility. Hope this can help someone save. Site is portal32.com.

Another Victim of California's Three Strikes Law

arhunt — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 12:24:58 GMT

Lock the door, throw away the key

A mother grapples with the hidden heartbreak of California’s ‘three-strikes’ law

By Rhonda Erwin
More stories by this author...

“If I didn’t know God, I couldn’t be alive,”Ramona Rivera. “I couldn’t live.” Walk a mile in Rivera’s shoes, and you’ll understand why.

When she was 27, Rivera gave birth to Robert, her one and only son. He became her world until he was arrested at 18. He spent the next 10 years in prison. When he was released, he enjoyed just one week of freedom before overdosing on drugs. After recovering in the hospital, he was sent back to prison, this time for life, thanks to California’s “three-strikes” law.

“I start praying and talking to my Lord, praying that someday he will turn my son loose, out of the bars,” says Rivera, who requested that SN&R not use her or her son’s real names for fear of possible retaliation by inmates or prison authorities against her son. “It hurts me so much. My son never really had a chance to live. I cried the first 10 years when he lived his youth in prison. I cried the last 10 years as he lived his adulthood in prison. I just keep crying.”

For the past 20 years, she has moved from city to city, following her son, who has been transferred to a half-dozen different prisons while serving his sentence. Robert Rivera has never really known life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness. His mother gave up pursuing happiness long ago. She gave up living her life. But she never gave up praying her son will be free to pursue happiness. She never gave up loving her son.

Rivera says her son began using drugs in his early teens, around the same time his grandfather and favorite uncle died. He was extremely depressed and used drugs to escape the pain. She tried to get help, but at the time, the nation was still responding to the drug epidemic with Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign. Resources to prevent drug abuse were minimal. Drug arrests within underprivileged neighborhoods were plentiful, sentences to prison were pretty much guaranteed.

Drug rehab programs were overshadowed by a war on drugs geared toward incarcerating drug offenders. Instead of just saying no, Rivera says she needed someone to just say yes, to say, “Yes, your son’s life is valued; yes, we care that he lives.” The criminal-justice system that never said yes to her son is now saying no, he will never know freedom. No, he will never have a life outside of bars. No, Robert Rivera, you will not get the opportunity to pursue happiness.

Rivera’s odyssey began in 1987, when her son, then 18, was convicted of kidnapping his girlfriend in a Sacramento Valley town. In exchange for a guilty plea, the prosecutor offered Robert a two-year prison sentence. His mother counseled him against taking the plea bargain.

“I was afraid for him to go to prison and advised him not to take the deal,” Rivera remembers. “His attorney didn’t do anything.”

The case went to trial, and her son was found guilty and sentenced to seven years with one strike. She couldn’t help but notice the change prison brought in her son.

“Robert was young, he was afraid,” Rivera says. “But he wasn’t angry till he got to prison.” Behind bars, Robert received his second strike for possessing a knife. A seven-year prison sentence with one strike and the possibility of early release turned into a 10-year stretch with two strikes.

“I only had one child,” Rivera says. “I lost so much. I lost my son at an early age. I never had more children. I never had grandchildren. The judge, the lawyers, didn’t see Robert deserving to have a real life.”

Robert was released in December 1997 after serving a decade behind bars. His freedom was short-lived. “When Robert came home, he told me his heart was with me,” Rivera recalls. “He told me he wanted to stay with me and he wanted to stay home. But he said he was scared. He said he didn’t know how to live on the outside.”

A week after his release, Rivera woke up in the middle of the night with a feeling that something was terribly wrong. She walked to her son’s room, but he wasn’t there. She tried the bathroom door and discovered it was locked. She opened the door and found her son on the floor, overdosed on drugs.

“He looked to be dying,” she says. “I called 911, because I wanted my son to live. The police came first. The police wouldn’t let the ambulance in until they searched my house. They found a needle. I was scared Robert was going to die. I wanted them to hurry up and let the ambulance do CPR. I thought [the police] would help me.”

Eventually, the paramedics did perform CPR, and her son was taken to the hospital, where she kept a bedside vigil for the next two days.

“After two days, they told me I could leave,” she says. “But I didn’t want to leave the hospital. They didn’t understand. Yes, he was 28 years old, but I only had him for one week since he was 18. They said he was going to be all right. I thought they would help Robert and finally he’d get treatment. I didn’t know he’d be taken back to prison and given life.”

She had hoped that 10 years after “Just Say No,” her son would finally get the help he needed, that treatment would outweigh incarceration. Instead, a mother who was just beginning to breathe was informed her son, as per California’s three-strikes law, was being sent back to prison for 25 years to life. Her brief week of happiness gave way to another decade of misery as she once again followed her son from prison to prison.

“I shouldn’t have called 911,” she sobs. “Maybe if I wouldn’t have called for help, he wouldn’t have died because God would have let him live.”

Rivera believes people who commit crimes should be held accountable, but that the punishment should fit the crime. She’s not asking anyone to love her son. She believes God loves her son. She is asking that her son, who she says has given his life to Jesus Christ, finally be given his constitutional right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

“He is still a human being, a person, no one ever really saw Robert as a person who deserves a life,” she says. “He lost so much of his life.”

Suppose, she wonders, God gave people just three chances—three strikes—and then just gave up on them, never forgiving them and putting them forever out of sight. Is it right to permanently take away the entire life and freedom of human beings based on a law which sometimes generalizes, doesn’t see people individually, doesn’t always take into account the nature of the crime or consider that some people do change? It’s difficult for Rivera, who deeply believes in God’s forgiveness, to make sense out of people who are unforgiving.

“I have to forgive people for the pain I feel because our Lord forgives us,” she says. “But it hurts knowing so many are so unforgiving. I don’t understand it.”

The stress and heartbreak of watching her son’s life waste away in prison has caught up to Rivera. She’s seriously ill and hasn’t visited her son since last October because she doesn’t want to worry him. Robert’s father died while he was in prison; he never got to talk to his father or say goodbye. She doesn’t want her son to know her health is failing, too.

“He is all that I have,” she says. “I am all that he has. He has no brothers or sisters. His cousins and family members don’t know him anymore. Robert was so young when he left to go to prison. He’s been in prison for so much of his life, if they write him, they don’t know what to say. I pray Robert will always know his mother is waiting for him to come home. I feel like I am going to die, there is so much pain in my heart, the pain grows more and more.”

She cries uncontrollably and says a prayer for her son Robert.

“I am 63 years old now,” she says. “I don’t want to die without ever really spending time with my only child.”

Calif. To Ship 8000 Inmates to Arizona

arhunt — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 01:57:35 GMT

GONE, BABY, GONE
Shipping Prisoners Out of State

by Raj Jayadev, Metro Newspapers

A San Jose mother tries to prevent the Department of Corrections from
sending her son to an out-of-state prison

WHEN Beatrice Patlan's 18-year-old son Raymond was sentenced to prison in
2007, there was only one thing that made it bearable: He was placed at
Soledad Prison, a manageable hour and a half drive from her San Jose home.
On her days off from work, Patlan would drive down to the Salinas Valley to
visit her son, bringing his little brother and sisters so they didn't grow
apart during his incarceration. They could all hug him after their long
talks.

"For him, it kept his mind and heart strong," Patlan says, "and for us as a
family, the visits meant Raymond could still be a part of our lives."

But those visits may now be over, as her son is being sent to serve the rest
of his term in Arizona, pulling him hundreds miles out of reach of his
family.
Raymond Patlan is one of thousands of inmates who are now being transferred
out of state to ease the staggeringly overcrowded California prison system.

Convicted of aggravated assault, and slapped with a gang enhancement,
Raymond was given eight years for a first-offence crime. Beatrice believes
his story that he was jumped, and used a bat to defend himself and his
little brother. She knows he needs to serve the time for his crime, but she
is committed to supporting him through the ordeal. And so Beatrice Patlan
has been working to keep her son close.

She has repeatedly called the California Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation, spoken with the warden at Soledad, and had sit-down meetings
with Assemblymember Joe Coto's office and with state Sen. Elaine Alquist.
But after exhausting every option to figure out the rules of transfer and
determine whether they apply to her son, she has arrived at a demoralizing
conclusion: There are no rules.

Lawsuit Over Transfers
That is also the argument behind an injunction recently brought by the
Northern CaliforniaAmerican Civil Liberties Union, which filed a lawsuit
against the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to stop what
the ACLU calls an "unlawful transfer policy."

The injunction, filed on July 29, says the CDCR has failed to comply with
the state's Administrative Procedure Act when implementing the transfer
program.
Michael Risher, staff attorney with the ACLU, says the lawsuit is designed
to bring public scrutiny to the out-of-state transfer practice. "We are
trying to get the CDCR to follow the law, not secret guidelines," Risher
says.

Raymond Patlan's family is one of many casualties of a broken state prison
system, Risher says. His office has been getting many calls and letters from
inmates and their families since rumblings of the plan first hit the
prisons.
"It is an enormous hardship to suddenly be snatched and sent miles away," he
says. "It is hurting California families-wives, parents and children."

Risher hopes the CDCR will take a look at the legal arguments and move to
avoid having the court decide the case. In a written response to the court,
the CDCR denies violating the Administrative Procedures Act.

State of Emergency
On Oct. 4, 2006, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger issued an official proclamation
declaring a "Prison Overcrowding State of Emergency." The Legislature
followed this proclamation by enacting Assembly Bill 900, which authorized
$7.7 billion to create up to 53,000 new beds at state prisons in 10 years,
and authorizing the transfer of 8,000 inmates to out-of-state facilities.

The move came at a time when California's prison population was at an
all-time high, with more than 170,000 inmates housed in facilities designed
for 100,000, and 29 of the state's 33 prisons above maximum safe capacity,
according to the CDCR.

Before to the governor's proclamation of prison overcrowding, the state
could only transfer inmates who had volunteered to do so. That protection to
inmates who wanted to stay in-state, known as Penal Code 11191, was
temporarily put on hold. The law was amended through A.B. 900 last May, and
since then California has been systematically shedding inmates and sending
them to states such as Tennessee, Mississippi and Arizona.

The budget stalemate in Sacramento has only put more pressure to expedite
the transfer process.

Mike Potter, Joe Coto's District director, has met with Beatrice Patlan
about her son's case. Potter says the prisoners are being transferred in a
desperate effort to save money.

"Budget pressure is one reason the CDCR is looking to hurry and ship 8,000
inmates out of state," Potter says.

Coto was one of the few assembly members who did not vote for A.B. 900.
Potter says the savings aren't worth the long-term damage done by the law.
"On the incarceration side, this program may be cheaper," Potter says. "But
in terms of the cost to the inmates, their rehabilitation, and their
families, these transfers may have a negative impact."

When a Rule Is Not a Rule
When Beatrice Patlan heard from her son that he had been placed on a
transfer list, she went into her own emergency response plan. Finding no
published criteria to challenge the transfer, she filed a request for
information, initiating her own investigation under the state's Public
Records Act. She received an internal memo from the CDCR regarding a
"sending protocol."

According to the memo, there is a five-tiered protocol-at least on paper.
The state is supposed to first look to transfer inmates who have been
previously deported by the federal government; next, inmates who are being
paroled outside California; third, inmates who have limited or no family
ties, based on a review of their visitation history; and then inmates who
have supportive family in another state. Only then is the state supposed to
transfer "other inmates chosen and considered appropriate by CDCR."

Raymond was safe, according to these criteria, except for the fifth, which
clearly is a catch-all that essentially nullifies the first four.

When Beatrice discovered this, she became frustrated, and launched her
one-woman letter-writing campaign. She says that the CDCR, the warden, and
Attorney GeneralJerry Brown have all promised written responses, which she
has not yet received.

Beatrice Patlan has not received her regular call from Raymond either. He
is currently in a "reception prison" while awaiting his permanent transfer,
and cannot call out until he is placed in his destination.

She says that the last time she heard from Raymond, he was trying to cheer
her up about the impending transfer to Arizona that would break up their
regular family gatherings. He told her, "Just think of it as one more stop
before I come home."

Prison Warden Appears On Leno With Some Of His Favorite Inmates

arhunt — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:15:35 GMT

BURBANK, CA—San Quentin State Prison warden Ron Ditmeier wowed Monday's Tonight Show audience by displaying some of his favorite inmates. "Rufus here is what we call a Throat-Slashing Double-Lifer," Ditmeier said while showing off an inmate to host Jay Leno. "These distinctive markings mean he's a hardcore in the Crips." The educational segment provoked peals of laughter when an Encino Wife-Beater urinated on Leno's shoulder and stabbed him in the leg with a pen.

WB Targets Booming U.S. Prison Population With New Sitcom

arhunt — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:15:16 GMT

LOS ANGELES—Responding to the explosive growth of the U.S. prison population, WB executives announced Monday that the network will soon launch a new sitcom targeting the nation's approximately 1.8 million incarcerated TV viewers.

"America is fast becoming the most jailed nation on Earth, with prisons packed to capacity and a swamped, inefficient judicial system that is ill-equipped to keep pace with the ever-growing crime rate. Clearly, something had to be done," said WB vice-president of programming Grant Bachman. "And what better way to address this serious crisis than with the outrageous new comedy In Da Yard!, debuting this week as part of the WB's 'Lock-Down Thursdays'?"

"U.S. prisoners," Bachman added, "represent a powerful demographic that this nation's entertainment industry can no longer afford to ignore."

Described in WB promotional literature as "a hysterical look at the nutty goings-on in a typical American maximum-security federal correctional facility," In Da Yard! will give the nation's nearly two million convicts the chance to "follow the weekly adventures of a zany bunch of hardened killers, drug offenders, B&E men and wacky, psychotic rapos" just like themselves.

"It's basically a show about living and learning in the '90s in prison," Bachman said.

Advance advertising figures for the show are said to be "very promising," with several high-profile accounts already secured and airtime pre-sold for most of the show's initial six-week run.

"U.S. inmates spend more than $5 billion in cigarettes each year, using them to buy everything from toilet paper and de-lousing shampoo to playing cards and dice," said Bryce Kelso of Advertising Age. "They're a prime, untapped consumer market that any smart advertiser would want to reach. The fact is, every day this vast market continues to go untargeted is millions more dollars in lost revenue. That's a harsh economic reality, and we cannot turn a blind eye to it. It must be faced."

Added Kelso: "Do you realize that the average rapist is out on the street and in stores in just five years?"

The first six episodes of In Da Yard!, WB officials said, have been extensively focus-grouped on a wide variety of felons at some 70 maximum-security facilities across the U.S. The show has reportedly scored high among all major prison demographics, from armed robbers to child molesters.

Particularly popular among focus groups was the debut episode, in which main character Detroit Ray, sentenced to life without parole for the murder of his wise-cracking landlord, finds himself desperately trying to fend off impending group anal-rape in the prison shower.

"It's great, over-the-top physical comedy," WB president Dan Vittolo said. "And it really seemed to hit test audiences where they live."

Future plotlines include a side-splitting mix-up when Ray's buddy Jorge pretends to be his "***" to impress a visiting cellmate; Ray slashing the wrong guard "just because he's too proud to admit he can't see without glasses"; and a full-blown prison riot "gone totally haywire."

"I thought there was going to be a riot right there in the screening room after that one," Vittolo joked.

"We feel confident that we can provide the swollen, overcrowded ranks of the U.S. prison system with characters and situations they can truly relate to," said Miles Forrest, recent Harvard graduate and In Da Yard! head writer. "The difficulty of sneaking a spoon out of the cafeteria to sharpen on a concrete floor; the silly shenanigans that ensue when someone smuggles in heroin inside their rectum; the overworked, underpaid guards and their nutty, sadistic foibles; and the goofy rivalries between warring, tattooed prison gangs—whatever's funny."

What's more, In Da Yard! executive producer Ira Clausner said, the audience for such prison-themed fare will only grow in the coming years.

"The U.S. prison population has doubled in the past 12 years and will probably do so again over the next 12," he said. "With that kind of grim reality working in our favor, we can't lose. Numbers don't lie, and these alarming figures, the result of years of social neglect and public apathy, paint a very bright picture for the future of the WB."

Vittolo agreed. "The number of U.S. inmates now stands at an all-time high," he said. "We'd be fools to just stand around and watch things get worse without lifting a finger to capitalize on the situation."

CA. To Solve Funding Issues San Diego Zoo, Prison Merge

arhunt — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:41:30 GMT

SAN DIEGO—Plagued by a lack of funding and growing staff shortages, the San Diego Zoo and Ironwood State Prison were combined earlier this week, bringing local inmates and wildlife together for the first time under the same roof.

The new state-of-the-art facility—which will house 12 separate cell blocks, a reptile house, two weight rooms, and a primate sanctuary—is expected to save the state of California up to $5 million in operation costs over the next year.

"It is with great pride that I announce the opening of the San Diego Maximum Security Zoological & Convict Reserve," director David Hennessey said at an opening ceremony Tuesday. "From southern white rhinos to repeat offenders serving 20 years for drug trafficking—you'll find them all here at our amazing new facility."

Construction on the resource-sharing project concluded last Wednesday, after which felons and fauna were carefully transferred to their new joint living space. According to Hennessey, the 40-acre facility features one of the largest collections of migratory birds, hoofed mammals, and hardened inmates in all of North America.

"This is, without a doubt, the only facility of its kind," said warden Jeff Thurston, noting the zoo-prison's authentic natural environments and thick bullet-proof glass. "At any given time, visitors may be able to spot as many as three parole violators and up to five adult black bears in the same holding cell. During scheduled feedings, that number may be even higher."

The San Diego complex is open to family members of convicted felons and state-appointed defense lawyers, and is expected to help boost the city's struggling tourism industry. Thurston said that visitors have so far responded favorably to the new facility, with many citing the "Emperor Penguin And Solitary Confinement" exhibit as their personal favorite.

The complex will reportedly also feature a number of "Scared Straight" talks each week, during which young visitors will simultaneously learn about the dangers of breaking the law, as well as what happens when a male lowland gorilla suddenly feels threatened.

"I got to see the little baby pandas, and the monkeys, and the zebras," said 8-year-old Michael Nayman, who was taken by his mother to the part-zoo, part-prison compound. "And then I went and saw Daddy. But he wasn't as much fun as the pandas. He just sat in his cage and cried a little."

Despite a positive opening day, officials admitted that the San Diego facility has experienced a number of setbacks. On Tuesday, a scuffle in the shared cafeteria forced officials to fire a series of elephant-tranquilizer shots, leaving three inmates unconscious for days. In addition, a red-tailed Indonesian peacock was found stabbed to death on Thursday, after a group of prisoners accused the three-foot-tall bird of flashing colors of a rival gang in their direction.

"We've been forced to expand our infirmary unit nearly tenfold in the last week," chief nurse Margaret Hodge said. "Unfortunately, the arrival of rhinoceros mating season has made things worse, leading to the gruesome deaths of almost 50 inmates in our communal showers."

According to officials, the institution has also suffered from three recent breakout attempts, including an ill-fated effort last Friday by Enrique Gonzalez, 36, to scale a reticulated giraffe up and over the compound's barbed-wire perimeter fencing. In addition, a 280-pound Bengal tiger was accidentally granted parole after its file was confused with that of mail-fraud convict Cole Bucholz, 47.

Since the merger, officials at San Diego Zoological & Convict Reserve have received a record 600 requests from inmates wishing to be transferred to another maximum-security facility. In addition, officials have received 20 requests from inmates begging to have the dates of their execution pushed forward.

"I've been in a number of prisons in my life, but nothing compares to this," said inmate Casey Ingersoll, who despite previously committing violent murders was still horrified after witnessing a fellow convict ambushed by three Komodo dragons. "If I stay here much longer, I'll have to join up with either the Anteaters or White Supremacists for protection."

While many local residents support the new facility, particularly due to the large number of jobs it has created, some have recently spoken out against the Zoological & Convict Reserve.

"To see all those poor souls forced to live in confined living quarters, with little to no sunlight, and no hope of freedom, it's just so inhumane," San Diego housewife Carol Wurster said. "Those otters deserve better."

The San Diego Zoological & Convict Reserve's formation has been the most controvercial merger since Orlando's SeaWorld and the Ryan E. Puttnam Mental Asylum were hastily consolidated earlier this year.

Just a little humor....have a great weekend!

They need to Review?????

arhunt — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:33:21 GMT

Sentence reviewed for inmate in vegetative state

A convicted murderer left in a persistent vegetative state by a prison beating and whose care and custody have cost the state more than $1 million since December will get a chance to have his life sentence recalled.

The state Board of Parole Hearings referred Jackson Phaysaleum's case for a possible sentence adjustment on Tuesday after voting that the 24-year-old prisoner "is incapacitated and appears to present no public safety risk."

A sister of one of the two men shot dead April 2, 2004, by Phaysaleum in a dispute over Stockton drug turf expressed anger that San Joaquin County prosecutors never told her the matter came up for a hearing.

"They're not contacting the family at all," said Nisha Dutye, the sister of James Dutye, 46, who, along with Demetrius Silmon, 36, was gunned down by Phaysaleum. "How are we supposed to contest this or oppose it if we're not familiar with what is going on?"

Nobody spoke to the board Tuesday on the case.

San Joaquin County Deputy District Attorney Thomas Testa, who got the conviction that led to Phaysaleum's sentence of 46 years to life, could not be reached for comment.

Phaysaleum's sister-in-law, Kelly Thongsy, said the decision left her in "shock." She said she has been looking for a long-term care facility in Stockton in case he is released.

Under state law, the board's 10-3 vote sends the case to San Joaquin County Superior Court, which has final say on the sentence recall.

Phaysaleum was beaten unconscious Dec. 4 by his cellmate at Kern Valley State Prison. Medical officials at the prison said he is still in a persistent vegetative state and likely won't recover.

The state has since spent more than $1.1 million in medical and custody costs on Phaysaleum, according to figures provided by the corrections department.

Profiles of Two Women in TX Death Row

arhunt — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 15:40:13 GMT

Only a handful of females are currently awaiting execution in the United States. Texas accounts for many of them. While their stories may be different, certain similarities exist. This article looks at the stories of two women born in the same year, in the same state, both of whom ended up with the same fate- awaiting execution on death row.

Brittany Marlowe Holberg was born in Potter County, Texas on January 7, 1973. Brittany did not complete high school, although she did complete her junior year. Prior to her conviction and incarceration, she was a common laborer.

A slender female of medium build, Brittany was no stranger to crime. Earlier in 1996, before the murder was committed, she had been in trouble with the law due to substance abuse. After completion of a Substance Abuse Felony Punishment Program, she was released in September of 1996.

On November 13, 1996, an 80-year old white male was stabbed almost sixty times in his home in Randall County, Texas, after being struck with a hammer. The crime was a violent one. Several weapons were used during the commission of the crime, including a hammer, a paring knife, a grapefruit knife, a butcher knife, and a fork. A lamp pole was shoved partially down the man’s throat. The crime was violent.

There were no co-defendants in this trial. Brittany Marlowe Holberg was convicted for the heinous crime on March 27, 1998. At the age of 25, Brittany was sentenced to death row for the murder of the 80-year old white male. Now, at the age of 33, she is currently awaiting fulfillment of her sentence as one of the inmates on death row in Texas..

Erica Yvonne Sheppard, an African-American, was born on September 1, 1973 in Bay City, Texas. She completed high school and had no prior prison record. At the age of 19, Sheppard was already the mother of three young children. She was an unemployed, battered woman.

Solano Transfers

luvinchupis — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 02:02:44 GMT

Hey does anyone out there have a loved one in C.S.P Solano? I talked to my brother today & he told me he's getting transferred. He doesn't know where to, he'll talk to his counselor on Monday, but I just wanted to know if anyone else has heard anything about this.

Thanks for any info =)

5 Jail Hotels

arhunt — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:23:01 GMT

5 Jail Hotels (Where You Pay to Be In Prison): From Comfortable Cells to Nightmarish Slammers

A prison is probably the last place on Earth most of us would want to spend the night, right? Well, for some of these converted prison hotels that still holds true: in Latvia, for example, ‘guests’ who pay to stay at a former KGB jail complex are subjected to humiliation and emotional torture. In other cases, however, notoriously terrifying prisons have since become luxurious 4-star hotels where you can cozily enjoy a stay in a former prison library or even the director’s office! Here are 5 examples from around the world that range from luxurious to downright frightening - then check out some of the world’s smallest and coolest hotel rooms.

Boston, Massachusetts: The infamous Charles Street Jail was originally a model prison in the 1800s that fell into disrepair in the mid-1900s. Prone to riots and subject to physical decay, it was officially condemned to closer decades before it finally shut its doors (as a prison) in the 1990s. Now, however, it has reopened its doors as an amazingly luxurious four-star jail hotel that has former inmates shocked, impressed and perhaps a bit jealous.

Mt. Gambier, Australia: The Mount Gambier Jail experience is anything but luxurious. In fact, this place markets its rooms as budget accommodations for cheapskates and backpackers. Very little has been done to renovate the rooms here which are heavy, rusted and bolted just like they were when the jail was originally in use - the entire experience is rather Spartan. Still, the hotel has some local flavor and features some interesting odds and ends and regularly-scheduled events from a monthly jam sessions to a local produce market.

Luzern, Switzerland: A prison from the middle of the 19th century until just a decade ago, this jail hotel goes beyond simply renting out former prison cells as overnight rooms. For an extra price, visitors can stay in the former library or the director’s office, both of which have been turned into luxury suites. Every part of the prison has been put to some new and creative use without compromising the essence of the original layout (or the prison contents for that matter - the library is still full of old prison books for you to peruse on your stay!).

Liepaja, Latvia: This is one prison hotel where there is no messing around. The hotel brags that it is “unfriendly, unheated, uncomfortable and open all year round.” This former brutal KGB jail has no bells and whistles - just everything it had when it was a fully-functioning detention and torture center, barbed wire included. You are treated like an actual prisoner throughout, complete with threats and warning gunfire and crying fellow inmates. Sounds like a great time, eh?

Oxford, England: The core of Oxford Castle is nearly 1,000 years old but most of its structures (old and new) were converted into a prison in the 1800s. Today, the Malmaison Hotel complex has overnight rooms, apartments, restaurants and bars. Much of the prison infrastructure is still legible to visitors and overnight guests though everything has been upgraded, remodeled and refurbished for guests.

LEGISLATION: EARLY RELEASE

FreeJP — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 19:44:31 GMT

From: Taxpayers for Improving Public Safety (TiPS)
<matt@thecapitalalliance.com>
Sent: Friday, February 15, 2008 7:04:21 AM
Subject: TiPS Periodic Update 2-15-08

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LEGISLATION: EARLY RELEASE

Assemblyman Sandré Swanson (D-Oakland), has introduced AB 1965, a bill to require the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to establish a program to allow prisoners who are at least 55 years of age, are incarcerated for a nonviolent offense, have a diagnosed chronic illness or disease that requires ongoing medical attention, have medical coverage, and meet other specified criteria to be released on early parole.

TiPS' whitepaper on how to fix California's prison crisis, which was distributed prior to last year's Lobby Day, emphasized the need to release the nearly 4,500 terminal and chronically ill inmates.

These inmates, most of them unable to walk on their own and are confined to their beds, pose no credible threat to public safety and do not belong in prison.

We are pleased by Assemblyman Swanson's response to this irresponsible use of taxpayer dollars and wanted to let our members know of this progress.

North Kern Prison Plans Discussed

arhunt — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:50:01 GMT

Delano residents air thoughts on prison plan

DELANO -- North Kern State Prison appears to be a good neighbor, but the road that leads to it could use some improvements.

That's what state environmental planners heard from several people at a meeting Thursday regarding plans that would add more buildings and beds so inmates don't have to sleep in areas such as gyms and dayrooms.

The growth is part of Assembly Bill 900, which gave the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation authority to design, construct or renovate prison housing and other structures to add up to 16,000 beds in several phases at state facilities, including North Kern.

The state is seeking local agency and the public's feedback about environmental issues and prison growth, which will be addressed in a report. The draft report may be ready for review in late summer or early fall, said Roxanne Henriquez, a senior environmental planner with the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Cecil Avenue, which leads to North Kern and Kern Valley state prisons, is a two-lane road. Inmates are transported back and forth in large buses on Cecil, and soon more vehicles will be using it because Delano is growing in that area. A third high school and a satellite Bakersfield College campus will be close to the state prisons.

Additionally, Mayor Grace Vallejo said she would like to receive more of the mitigation funds, $800, that the county gets per inmate bed each year.

"We're the impacted location," she said. "The legislation needs to be changed."

Proposed growth at North Kern includes building five 100-bed housing units and facilities for health care and academic vocational training. The cells are designed for one inmate but may likely accommodate two. If the new cells are used for double occupancy, North Kern could gain 1,000 more inmates, which would bring the bed capacity to 6,473. Staffing levels could increase by 520, to 2,011 people.

Resident Stu Collins thinks the state prisons bring good jobs to Delano. But he would like to see Cecil Avenue improved, something that's been talked about for years.

"Don't tell us you're going to do something and don't do it," he said.

Mailing a Letter Will Cost a Penny More Starting in May

FreeJP — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 19:01:40 GMT

Mailing a Letter Will Cost a Penny More Starting in May

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Mailing a letter will soon cost a penny more.   The cost of a first-class stamp will rise to 42 cents starting May 12, the U.S. Postal Service said Monday.   The price of the Forever stamp will go up at the same time, meaning those stamps can still be purchased for 41 cents but will remain good for first-class postage after the rate increase takes effect.

The post office has sold 5 billion Forever stamps since they were introduced last April and plans to have an additional 5 billion in stock to meet the expected demand before the May price change, the agency said.

The charge for other services, such as advertising mail, periodicals, packages special services will also change. Changes in the price for Priority Mail and Express Mail will be announced later, the agency said.

Postage rates last went up in May, 2007, with a first-class stamp jumping 2 cents to the current 41-cent rate.   In the past raising postage rates was a long, complex process involving hearings before the independent Postal Regulatory Commission, a process that could take nearly a year.  However, under the new law regulating the post office that took effect in late 2006, the agency is allowed to increase rates with 45-days notice as long as changes are within the rate of inflation for the previous 12 months.

The Postal Regulatory Commission calculated that rate at 2.9 percent through January, limiting the first-class rate to an increase of just over a penny.   Under the new law, postal prices will be adjusted annually each May, the Postal Service said. Officials said they plan to give 90 days notice of future changes, twice what is required by law.

While the charge for the first ounce of a first-class letter rises to 42 cents, the price of each added ounce will remain 17 cents, so a two-ounce letter will go up a penny to 59 cents.   The cost to mail a post card will also go up a penny, to 27 cents

Other increases set for May 12:   -- Large envelope, 2 ounces, $1, up 3 cents.   -- Money Orders up to $500, $1.05, unchanged.   -- Certified mail, $2.70, up 5 cents.   -- First-class international letter to Canada or Mexico, 72 cents, up 3 cents.   -- First-class international letter to other countries, 94 cents, up 4 cents.

Daniel Weintraub: Report says state shouldn't give guards a pay raise

FreeJP — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 19:55:26 GMT

Daniel Weintraub: Report says state shouldn't give guards a pay raise

By Daniel Weintraub - dweintraub@sacbee.com
Published 12:00 am PST Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Story appeared in EDITORIALS section, Page B7
Rarely does a government report come along that I recommend people read for themselves. Normally, it's my job to read these things so you don't have to. But a report delivered last week from the state's Legislative Analyst's Office on the labor situation in the prisons is so good, and so important, that I suggest anyone with even a passing interest in state government get on the Internet and take a look.
You can find it at the analyst's Web site www.lao.ca.gov.
But I know that many of you don't have the time or the inclination to plow through a detailed, 20-page report, even one as interesting as this one. And some who might do so would probably like a readers' guide. So I am going to summarize the contents and put them into context here.
In a nutshell, the report describes the increasing cost of the state prison agency, which is the fastest growing major program in the state budget, and traces those costs to the extraordinary salaries, overtime and benefits paid to correctional officers – the people the general public thinks of as "prison guards." California's prisons are costing more than our universities now in part because we are locking more people up for longer terms. But the generous salaries and benefits paid to the correctional officers are also a major reason for the soaring costs.
The report looks at the current pay and benefits and the job market, and concludes that a 5 percent pay raise Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is offering the correctional officers is unnecessary. But the analyst also describes the relationship between the Schwarzenegger administration and the guards' union as "completely dysfunctional," and it says that several managerial changes Schwarzenegger is trying to make in the prisons should go forward.
California's prison system is big and is getting bigger. It is so large that the members of the union that represents correctional officers now account for one of every seven state employees. The salaries and benefits of those employees and their supervisors total 40 percent of all the personnel costs in the state's general fund.
The prisons and the related parole system are staffed by about 30,000 correctional officers and parole agents, and the officers' pay ranges from about $45,000 per year (before overtime, benefits and other perks) to $73,000. The job requires only a high school education.
The guards' union – the California Correctional Peace Officers Association – is at impasse with Schwarzenegger over a new contract. The union's last contract was negotiated by representatives of former Gov. Gray Davis in January 2002, on the eve of Davis' re-election campaign, and approved by the Legislature. It gave the officers a 34 percent raise over five years – more than twice as much as the average salary increase for state employees during the same period. The deal also gave the correctional officers a big increase in pension benefits so that officers can now retire as early as age 50. If they have 30 years on the job, they get 90 percent of their final pay.
The contract also gave the guards a more liberal overtime policy (overtime alone now costs the taxpayers a half billion dollars a year), reduced management control over sick leave and required more negotiations over everyday changes in the operation of the prisons. Schwarzenegger, who, unlike almost everyone else in state politics, has never taken a dime from the correctional officers' union, is trying to keep those provisions out of the next contract.
The union reacted harshly to the report's conclusion that a salary increase was unneeded. Lance Corcoran, a union spokesman, mocked the widely respected Legislative Analyst's Office in an interview with The Bee, noting that none of the office-bound analysts had ever been attacked by an inmate.
"No one at the LAO's office has to wear a stab-resistant vest," Corcoran said. "If the LAO believes that the job of a correctional officer is so desirable, then why don't they take off their pocket protectors, put on a jumpsuit and come work on a tier?"
Corcoran's macho rhetoric misses the mark. No one is saying that the correctional officer's job is easy or safe. But the report includes this important fact: About 130,000 job applications are received by the prison agency every year, the equivalent of one for every 140 people in the California labor force. And with ramped up training and expanded academies, the state is hiring more officers than it is losing, reducing the number of vacancies in the prisons.
"For any particular job classification, the 'target' public employee compensation level (including pay, health benefits, retirement benefits and other benefits) should be the minimum amount necessary to attract enough qualified labor to fill authorized positions," the report said.
That's the most important point in the analysis, and it should apply to every job in government. The compensation should be determined not by the union's political clout or anyone's subjective judgment of how dangerous a position might be. The pay and benefits should be whatever it takes to recruit and retain qualified people to fill those jobs.
And right now, it appears, the current compensation package for correctional officers is more than sufficient to meet those goals.
http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/705053.html

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation

FreeJP — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 19:09:05 GMT

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Opens New Family
Foundations Program Facility in Fresno

FRESNO – The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR)
today held a formal dedication and ribbon-cutting ceremony for its third
Family Foundations Program (FFP) facility. It is located at 2855 W. Whitesbridge
Avenue, Fresno. It will be operated under contract by WestCare California
Inc., a non-profit organization founded in 1973, and serve up to 35 women and 40
children up to the age of six.
This smaller community-based program for female offenders is one of the key
components of our prison reform efforts,” said CDCR Secretary James Tilton. “
By providing the opportunity for these women to live with and be parents to
their children, we hope to break the intergenerational cycle of incarceration
that we see all too often. By opening the third such program in California’s
Central Valley, we will be able to provide the type of wrap-around services
commonly provided by community-based programs. It also allows for more family
visiting with inmates’ families and friends within closer proximity.
The contract award was for $7.2 million over a five-year term. WestCare
California, Inc. has nearly 35 years of experience operating therapeutic
community drug treatment services in community-based, residential, and in-prison
treatment environments. WestCare’s comprehensive experience includes substance
abuse treatment and relapse prevention programs; parenting skills development;
child development services; vocational skills training; ancillary services;
and services to special populations that includes pregnant, post-partum and
parenting women.
This is a wonderful opportunity for West Care to collaborate with the CDCR,
said Maurice Lee, Regional Vice President for WestCare California, Inc. There
is a tremendous benefit to working together to serve our clients in this
community-based setting.
The Family Foundations Program is a community-based residential- type setting
for non-serious, non-violent female offenders, the majority of whom have been
convicted of drug-related offenses. On-site services include parenting
skills, health services, child development services, and vocational skills
training. Residents have the benefit of support groups and assistance to establish
and enhance close ties with their young children. Additionally, the mothers
share cooking and cleaning chores and learn life skills to help improve their
employability.
The Family Foundations Program was created by the State Legislature in 1994
when then-Sen. Robert Presley (R-Riverside) sponsored legislation establishing
The Pregnant and Parenting Women’s Alternative Sentencing Program Act. Each
facility houses 35 women and up to 40 children. Overseeing each facility is a
CDCR Correctional Counselor III, who supervises a staff of vocational and
academic instructors, substance abuse counselors, and others. Sen. Presley, as
Secretary of the Youth and Adult Corrections Agency, oversaw implementation
of the first two programs. They are located in Santa Fe Springs (Los Angeles
County) and in San Diego.

John Lum
Coalition for Effective Public Safety (CEPS)
(916) 995-2379

Ex-Florida prison boss: Drunken orgies tainted system

arhunt — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:46:25 GMT

TALLAHASSEE, Florida (CNN) -- Softball, drunken orgies and a prison system run like the mafia. That's what Florida's former prison secretary says he inherited when he took over one of the nation's largest prison systems two years ago.

In fact, on his first day on the job, James McDonough says he walked into his office -- the same one his predecessor used -- and there was crime scene tape preventing anyone from entering.

"That was an indication we had a problem in the department," McDonough told CNN in an exclusive interview before he stepped down last Thursday.

McDonough revealed a startling list of alleged abuses and crimes going on inside Florida's prisons:

• Top prison officials admitting to kickbacks;

• Guards importing and selling steroids in an effort to give them an edge on the softball field;

• Taxpayer funds to pay for booze and women;

• Guards who punished other guards who threatened to report them.

"Corruption had gone to an extreme," McDonough said, saying it all began at the top. "They seemed to be drunk half the time and had orgies the other half, when they weren't taking money and beating each other up."

He added, "Women were treated like chattel in this department."

McDonough described a bizarre prison culture among those that ran the system -- one that he says seemed obsessed with inter-department softball games and the orgies after games.

"I cannot explain how big an obsession softball had become," he said. "People were promoted on the spot after a softball game at the drunken party to high positions in the department because they were able to hit a softball out of the park a couple times."

"The connection between the softball and the parties and the corruption and the beatings was greatly intertwined."

The parties and orgies were often carried out at a waterfront house built on prison grounds for a former warden with taxpayer dollars, McDonough said. The house was complete with a bar, pool table and hot tub.

McDonough is a former Army colonel who commanded troops in Vietnam and Africa. He served as Florida's drug czar before taking on the job as the head of Florida's prison system, which oversees 90,000 inmates.

He left his post last Thursday as secretary of Florida's Department of Corrections because, he says, he feels he has cleaned up the corruption. It's time, he said, "to turn this over to law and order people that have made this their life's goal."

A Brooklyn, New York, native, McDonough says he witnessed the way the mafia worked in his youth and it provided him a keen insight into how his prison predecessor, James Crosby, operated.

"It reminded me of the petty mafia I saw on the streets of Brooklyn when I was growing up in the late 1950s, early 1960s -- petty, small-minded, thugish, violent, dangerous, outside the law, and completely intolerable for a society such as ours in the United States of America," he said.

Crosby would later plead guilty to bribery charges in relation to kickbacks from a prison vendor. He's now locked up in a federal prison. He refused CNN's request for an interview for this report.

"He's serving time in a federal prison. I hope he reforms and gets out and prospers," McDonough said.

He added, "When you have a rotten guy at the top, or gal at the top, it can be very invasive, and it's a cancer that needs to be excised."

And getting rid of this "cancer" is exactly what McDonough says he did. McDonough fired 90 top prison officials -- wardens, supervisors, colonels and majors -- claiming they were corrupt or, at the very least, not to be trusted. He demoted 280 others.

Criminal charges were filed against more than 40 others, and most were convicted. Among those arrested were seven officers accused of beating inmates, including five accused of forcing a prisoner to drink toilet water. All have pleaded not guilty.

Tina Hayes, the director of the prison's department initiatives who has worked in the prison system for 28 years, said the atmosphere before McDonough arrived was "a little tense" with workers "always on edge."

She said employees who didn't attend softball games or play on the teams were "isolated" and "pushed aside."

"I used to tell staff day in and day out: Keep your head high; do what's right; you know what morally is right; you've got some ethics; don't bow down to it," Hayes told CNN.

McDonough, she said, brought "standards back into the department."

"People can speak out now without being afraid to say what they need to say."

McDonough says the majority of the prison system's 28,000 employees were honest, hard-working people who weren't corrupt at all. But he says many of the top prison officials weren't and he believes he has weeded out "an organized vein of corruption."

Redemption and rehabilitation

FreeJP — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 22:34:31 GMT

Redemption and rehabilitation
San Francisco Chronicle: Editorial
January 18, 2008

Three years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the death penalty
for minors as cruel and unusual punishment, citing medical and
social-science evidence that teens lack the maturity to be held
accountable to the same degree as adults.

"From a moral standpoint, it would be misguided to equate the failings
of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists
that a minor's character deficiencies will be reformed," Justice
Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in the 5-4 opinion for the court. The justices
acknowledged that their decision was influenced, in part, by the desire
to end the United States' international isolation on the issue.

All of those arguments also could be applied to laws that put juveniles
in prison without the possibility of parole, which still occurs in this
country. In fact, 99.5 percent of all juveniles who are sentenced
without a chance of release are in the United States.

It was instructive that Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, was initially
frustrated in his efforts to get a straight answer about how many
California inmates serving life without parole were convicted before
age 18. The prison system did not seem to know. Or care. These inmates
were written off as irredeemable without regard to their ages at the
time of their crimes.

"Basically, what we're saying is we're giving up on them ... they're
never going to see daylight again because they're so dangerous," Yee
said.

In some cases, a lifetime of incarceration may be justified. But Yee, a
child psychologist, said there is "evidence both neurological and
psychological" that young people who commit crimes are not necessarily
beyond redemption.

Finally, Yee received a number: 227 inmates. Of those, 59 percent had
no prior criminal record; 26 percent were participants in a robbery or
other felony that resulted in a homicide - but someone else was the
actual shooter.

Yee's Senate Bill 999 would eliminate life sentences without parole for
juveniles who are tried as adults. Instead, the maximum penalty would
be 25 years to life.

As Yee emphasized, "This bill does not give you a get-out-of-jail
card." As we have noted in our examination of other cases, California's
parole board is famously - and properly - judicious in deciding which
inmates are fit for release. In most years, less than 5 percent of
"lifers" who appear before the board are cleared for release.

Beyond that, a law passed by voters in 1988 gives the governor the
ability to veto the parole of anyone convicted of murder. As of
December, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had allowed the release of just
170 of the 771 parole-board recommendations that reached his desk.
Former Gov. Gray Davis allowed just six such releases during his tenure.

So there are plenty of safeguards against the release of unrepentant,
dangerous predators. This measure restores an element of judgment into
the equation. This bill also, to invoke the words of Justice Kennedy,
reflects the morality and wisdom of a society that recognizes that even
a terrible act at age 15, 16, 17 does not call for the dismissal of a
life. The Department of Corrections recently added "rehabilitation" to
its name. This is one way to advance that goal.

It won't be easy. Yee's bill squeaked through the Senate Public Safety
Committee on a 3-2 vote last year. Any loosening of sentencing laws
requires a two-thirds vote from each house. SB999 is expected to reach
the Senate floor later this month.

"It's a tremendous hurdle," Yee said, acknowledging the opposition of
law enforcement and victims'-rights groups.

However, it's the right thing to do for a society that respects medical
science and promotes the value of redemption and rehabilitation.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/18/EDROUGTKF.DTL

SAN QUENTIN JOURNAL

FreeJP — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 17:07:38 GMT

SAN QUENTIN JOURNAL
Prison Makes Way for Future, but Preserves Past
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

SAN QUENTIN, Calif. — The dank crypt for the living still wields
Emotional power, its peeling ocher walls and low vaulted ceilings
Suffused with chill and darkness.

With its oaken, iron-latticed door and two-foot-thick granite bricks,
San Quentin’s dungeon looks so stereotypically medieval that it might
Have been dreamed up by one of Hollywood’s masters of the macabre.
But as niches for wooden pegs that once secured chains and shackles
Attest, these gloomy catacombs bore witness to “an enormous amount of
Human history, pain, misery and atonement,” said Kevin Starr, the
California historian.

As a federal court-ordered overhaul of California’s prison medical
System begins, the storied prison overlooking San Francisco Bay is
Tearing down several outmoded buildings on the 432-acre property,
Including the original 1885 hospital built in the institutional
Italianate style. A $146 million, state-of-the-art primary care
Health services complex will open in 2010.

Before demolition, state historians called in to survey the site
Discovered the significance of what had been a forgotten space used
For storage. The space, a dungeon, was the original San Quentin and
Is believed to be the oldest surviving building constructed by the
State.

The now-moldering cloister will be preserved because of its
Importance, while demolition proceeds above it. It was completed by
Prisoners in 1854, four years after statehood. “It was the state’s
First public work, before the Capitol building, the roadways, the
Public colleges and universities,” Dr. Starr said. “Its preservation
Is not trivial. Like the catacombs in Rome, it’s where people suffered.”

Its history is indeed grim. Originally intended to house 45 inmates,
It was built out of local rock and clay brick quarried by convicts
Living aboard the Waban, a prison ship anchored in San Francisco Bay.

More than 150 men were piled into the dungeon’s cells, which were
Sealed off with iron doors with a small slit known as a “Judas hole.”
The men slept on vermin-infested straw matting. “Night buckets” for
Waste were left uncovered. Floggings with a rawhide strap were
Standard punishment, along with “shower baths” — a precursor of water-
Boarding — in which naked prisoners were tied to ladders and then
Sprayed in the face, chest and genitals with a high-pressure stream
Of cold water.

In 1869, a visiting physician, Alfred W. Taliaferro, wrote of the
Deplorable conditions: “men literally piled up on one another; this
Fills the room with animal heat and impure air.”

The dungeon eventually became a “hole” for solitary confinement,
Modeled on Pennsylvania’s Quaker-inspired system in which isolation
Was viewed as a path to reflection and penitence (thus the term
“penitentiary”). In 1880, the last flogging was officially
Administered at San Quentin and 60 years later, the warden, Clinton
Duffy, abolished the use of the dungeon altogether, removing the iron
Gates as a symbol of reform.

Federal historic preservation law requires surveying potentially
Historic structures on state or federally owned property and saving
Those deemed very significant. The Italianate facade of the 1885
Hospital will be incorporated into the new medical facility. The
Dungeon, “a microcosm of how prisoners were treated,” in the words of
Madeline R. Bowen, an architectural historian for the firm Jones &
Stokes, had languished for years until it was unsealed so that
Historians could document it.

“There was nothing cleaned up about it,” said Gerald T. Takano, an
Architect who documented the dungeon for the Historic American
Buildings Survey, part of the Department of the Interior. “You can
Still really sense how it was.”

Unlike Alcatraz, which has more than a million visitors a year, San
Quentin is still an active prison where convicted killers like Scott
Peterson wait out their death sentences in limbo, as the controversy
Over lethal injection continues. Sgt. Rudy Luna, administrative
Assistant to Warden Robert L. Ayers Jr., said future use of the
Dungeon would be determined once the building is finished and might
Include storage, public tours on a limited basis or “keeping it as is.”

Many of his co-workers are unaware of the dungeon’s history, Sergeant
Luna added. “I think it should be preserved,” he said as he escorted
A reporter around the prison yard, which retains its crenellated
Gothic aura. “If you know history, then you won’t make the same
Mistakes.”

Although few survive intact, dungeons were a fixture of 19th-century
Prisons, said Norman Johnston, a professor emeritus at Arcadia
University in Pennsylvania and the author of “Forms of Constraint: A
History of Prison Architecture” (University of Illinois Press, 2000).
The concept of solitary confinement, pioneered at the Eastern State
Penitentiary in Philadelphia in 1829 and then repeated later in the
“dark cells” of San Quentin’s dungeon, was developed as a more
effective means of rehabilitation.

The reliance on isolation continues in today’s “super-max” prisons,
like the administrative maximum, or ADX, federal prison in Florence,
Colo. “The technology is more advanced but the basic operating
principles are pretty much the same,” said Prof. Craig W. Haney of
the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of
“Reforming Punishment: Psychological Limits to the Pains of
Imprisonment” (American Psychological Association, 2006).

There is evidence that public fascination with prisons is growing:
Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, for instance, closed to
prisoners in 1971, is now a major tourist attraction that draws
110,000 visitors at Halloween, when it is converted into a haunted
house. The prison’s current “Winter Adventure tours” feature “an hour-
long tour of the beautiful winter cellblocks with an expert guide and
a cup of hot chocolate!” the Web site says.

“People want to know what’s behind the wall,” Professor Johnston
said. “There’s a certain morbid curiosity about prisons, just as
there is with automobile wrecks.”

In Boston, the historic Charles Street jail has been converted into a
luxury hotel, the Liberty, complete with a restaurant called Clink,
where tapas-style small plates are served amid the atmospheric
original cell bars.

Should the dungeon at San Quentin ever be open to the public, even on
a limited basis, it would have much to teach, said Ari Wohlfeiler, an
organizer for Critical Resistance, an advocacy group that opposes
prison expansion.

“The history of imprisonment in the U.S. has been marked by poor
conditions, overcrowding and an endless cycle of construction, which
continues to this day,” Mr. Wohlfeiler said. “It would be an ironic
history lesson.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/18/us/18dungeon.html?

Corcoran State Prison's Most Famous

arhunt — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 00:51:31 GMT

Sirhan Sirhan

Victim: Sen. Robert F. Kennedy of New York, who was shot and killed in Los Angeles in 1968.

Where is he now? Though Sirhan contends he was hypnotized during the murder -- and requested that the Ambassador Hotel not be demolished to preserve evidence of his innocence -- he remains in Corcoran State Prison, having been denied parole more than a dozen times. He is now 63.

Eligible for release? His next parole hearing is in 2011.

Lethal injection is the wrong debate

FreeJP — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 20:14:16 GMT

Lethal injection is the wrong debate
Ray Krone
Monday, January 14, 2008

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments last week in Baze vs. Rees,
which challenges the constitutionality of execution by lethal injection.
While the court wrestles with technical issues concerning the Eighth
Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, there's a much
larger reason our country is rethinking the death penalty: the possibility
of sentencing to death and executing an innocent human being.
Unlike almost any American, I speak from experience.
I spent more than 10 years in Arizona prisons for a crime I didn't commit,
including nearly three years on Death Row. In 1992, I was sentenced to death
for killing a bartender, even though I was at home, asleep, when the murder
was committed.
In 2002, through the tireless work of my attorneys, I was the 100th person
to be exonerated and released from death row since the death penalty was
reinstated in the United States. Despite DNA evidence that exonerated me, it
took years before the prosecution grudgingly acknowledged it had no case
against me. If it had been up to the state of Arizona, I'd be dead today.
Who knows how many more innocent people sit on death row today, guilty of
nothing more than the fact that they couldn't afford a lawyer? And can
anyone honestly say with certainty that of the nearly 1,100 people who have
been executed in the past 30 years, not a single one wasn't innocent?
As my story illustrates, even with DNA testing there will always be a chance
an innocent person will be sentenced to death and executed.
Recently, the New Jersey Legislature and governor showed courage and common
sense when they abolished that state's death penalty. One of the primary
reasons cited was the possibility of executing an innocent person.
New Jersey Sen. Raymond Lesniak, one of the bill's sponsors, recalled the
case of Byron Halsey, who spent 22 years in prison for the murder and rape
of two children before being released after DNA testing linked another man
to the crime.
"There are hundreds of Byron Halseys throughout the United States who were
wrongly convicted of murder," Lesniak said. "No doubt, some were sentenced
to death and executed."
Meanwhile, in December, at the same time the bill to abolish the death
penalty was making its way through the New Jersey legislature, three more
former death row prisoners were released. Michael McCormick (Tennessee),
Jonathon Hoffman (North Carolina) and Kenneth Richey (Ohio) had spent a
combined total of more than 40 years on death row before being freed.
Sen. Lesniak summed the problem up best when he said, "It's impossible for
human beings to devise a system free of the risk of human error."
The last time I checked, our criminal justice system was devised and run by
human beings.
And instead of equal justice under the law, in far too many capital cases we
see incompetent legal representation, racial discrimination and
prosecutorial misconduct. These blemishes to our justice system are
problematic, to say the least. But when a human life is at stake, such
potentially fatal flaws are an embarrassment to a nation that considers
itself the standard bearer for human rights.
So while the U.S. Supreme Court contemplates whether or not killing a person
with a particular combination of chemicals is cruel and unusual punishment,
all of us should recognize a much larger, more obvious fact: If sentencing
to death and possibly executing an innocent person isn't cruel and unusual
punishment, nothing is.
Quite literally, I'm living proof of that.

Resources
The Death Penalty
Information Center links.sfgate.com/ZCBA
Witness to Innocence links.sfgate.com/ZCBB
Ray Krone is director of communications for Witness to Innocence, an
organization of exonerated former death row prisoners and their family
members. He lives in York, Pa.

This article appeared on page B - 5 of the San Francisco Chronicle

States Hesitate to Lead Change on Executions

FreeJP — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:48:56 GMT

States Hesitate to Lead Change on Executions
NEW YORK TIMES By ADAM LIPTAK

When a state panel recommended last April that Tennessee abandon the
three chemicals used in executions across the nation in favor of the
single drug usually used in animal euthanasia, the state¹s corrections
commissioner said no.

Though the move would have simplified executions and eliminated the
possibility of excruciating pain, the commissioner, George Little, said
Tennessee should not be ³out at the forefront² of a decision with
³political ramifications,² according to recently disclosed evidence in
a death row inmate¹s lawsuit.

Mr. Little¹s decision helps illuminate one of the questions lurking
behind the year¹s most eagerly anticipated death penalty case: Why have
states so doggedly and uniformly clung to an execution method with the
potential to inflict intense pain when a simpler one is readily
available?

When the Supreme Court hears arguments on Monday in Baze v. Rees, the
Kentucky case that has led to a de facto national moratorium on
executions, it will mostly be concerned with the question of what
standard courts must use to assess the constitutionality of execution
methods under the Eighth Amendment, which bars cruel and unusual
punishment.

But beyond that is the more practical question of why all 36 states
that use lethal injections to execute condemned inmates are wedded to a
cumbersome combination of three chemicals.

The answer, experts say, seems to be that no state wants to make the
first move. Having proceeded in lock step to adopt the current method,
which was chosen in part because it differed from the one used on
animals and masked the involuntary movements associated with death,
state governments would prefer that someone else, possibly the courts,
change the formula first.

³The departments of correction are dug in,² said Deborah W. Denno, an
authority on methods of execution at the Fordham University Law School.
³There¹s safety in numbers. But if one state breaks from that, the
safety in numbers starts to crumble.²

³If you change,² Professor Denno continued, ³you¹re admitting there was
something wrong with the prior method. All those people you were
executing, you could have been doing it in a better, more humane way.²

In the Baze case, lawyers for John D. Rees, the Kentucky corrections
commissioner, said the three-chemical combination was safe and painless
and produced a dignified death. Using only a single barbiturate, they
said, was untested, could result in distressing and disruptive muscle
contractions, and might take a long time. The method is the one most
commonly used for pets, sometimes in combination with a sedative.

Lawyers for the Kentucky inmates, Ralph Baze and Thomas C. Bowling,
said a barbiturate would bring on fatal cardiac arrest ³within a matter
of minutes.² They conceded that muscle contractions were possible, but
said that inmates were strapped down and that witnesses could be told
that the movements did not indicate pain. And they said the
three-chemical combination, which is not used in veterinary euthanasia,
was itself once untested.

Mr. Baze is on death row for killing a sheriff and a deputy sheriff who
were trying to serve him with a warrant. Mr. Bowling is there for
killing a couple whose car he had damaged in a parking lot.

Lethal injection protocols nationwide were copied from one developed in
Oklahoma in 1977 ‹ the year after the Supreme Court reinstituted the
death penalty ‹ based on advice from a medical school professor to a
state senator. They call for a short-acting barbiturate to render the
inmate unconscious, followed by a paralytic and then a chemical to stop
the heart.

If the first chemical works, there is no dispute that the process is
quick and painless. If it does not, there is no dispute that the inmate
will suffer intense and terrifying pain. But because the inmate is
paralyzed, it may not be possible to tell whether the first drug worked.

When Texas was considering whether to adopt the Oklahoma protocol in
the late 1970s, the medical director of Texas¹ corrections department,
Dr. Ralph Gray, consulted a veterinarian in Huntsville, Tex., Dr. Gerry
Etheredge.

³I told him,² Dr. Etheredge recalled Wednesday, ³that in veterinary
medicine when we euthanized an animal most of us used pentobarbital, a
general anesthetic, which is very potent and long-lasting, and we
overdosed it and everything went smoothly. It was very safe, very
effective and very cheap.²

Dr. Gray, who has since died, had only one objection, Dr. Etheredge
recalled. ³He said it was a great idea except that people would think
we are treating people the same way that we¹re treating animals. He was
afraid of a hue and cry.²

Texas adopted Oklahoma¹s three-chemical combination and started using
it to execute inmates in 1982.

These days, opponents of that protocol make the opposite argument of
the one Dr. Gray feared. They say that death row inmates deserve to be
treated at least as well as animals.

Two other states have considered revising the three-chemical
combination.

In March, a Florida commission appointed to study lethal injections
endorsed the three-chemical combination. But it indicated uneasiness
about the second drug in the combination, pancuronium bromide, a
paralytic that, used alone, would leave the inmate conscious but
suffocating and unable to cry out.

The Florida commission urged the state to explore ³more recently
developed chemicals² to substitute for the paralytic drug that might
³make the lethal injection execution procedure less problematic.²

In May, a California commission issued a report saying it had
considered recommending a single drug, which has ³the advantages of
being simpler to administer and virtually eliminates the potential for
pain.² But the commission rejected it because a single-chemical
protocol s untested, may result in involuntary muscle movements and
might take a long time.

The Tennessee committee saw it differently.

³The primary advantage of the one-drug protocol,² according to its
draft report in April, ³is that it is much simpler to administer.² It
also ³has the advantage of eliminating both of the drugs which, if
injected into a conscious person, would cause pain,² the report added.
³All of the medical experts consulted by the state were very supportive
of the one-drug protocol,² it said.

Indeed, Judge Aleta A. Trauger of Federal District Court in Nashville
said in a decision in September, ³No medical testimony supports the
proposition that the one-drug protocol causes any suffering or that it
prolongs the pronouncement of death.²

In that decision, Judge Trauger barred the execution of Edward J.
Harbison, who is on death row for beating a woman to death in a
burglary in 1983. Judge Trauger found that the corrections commissioner
was ³deliberately indifferent to the plaintiff¹s excessive risk of
pain² because he rejected the use of a single drug.

That decision is on appeal.

Judge Trauger appeared unimpressed with the testimony of Mr. Little,
the corrections commissioner. She said Mr. Little had ³at first denied
that the protocol committee recommended to him the one-drug protocol²
but ultimately admitted that it had.

At a hearing in September, Judge Trauger questioned Mr. Little directly
about his statement that political considerations had played a role in
his decision to retain the three-chemical combination.

³Did you mean that the governor might look soft on execution or soft on
convicted murderers if he went to a one-drug-protocol?² Judge Trauger
asked. ³He might be pandering to the anti-death-penalty people?²

Mr. Little said no, but he did not elaborate. He did say, according to
the notes of Steve Elkins, the governor¹s lawyer, that the one-chemical
protocol could be a fallback if the courts struck down the
three-chemical combination. ³Vice versa, no fallback,² the notes said.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Little said he had no comment beyond what he had
said in court. A spokeswoman for the attorney general declined to
comment, citing the pending litigation.

Some experts on executions say the debate over which chemicals to use
is the wrong one. States have adopted a process that appears humane
because it looks like medical treatment, Professor Denno said. But
looks can be deceiving, she added.

³To me,² Professor Denno said, ³the firing squad is the most humane and
perceived to be the most brutal.²

December 26, 2007
U.S. Disparity in Executions Grows as Texas Bucks Trend
NEW YORK TIMES By ADAM LIPTAK
This year¹s death penalty bombshells ‹ a de facto national moratorium, a
state abolition and the smallest number of executions in more than a decade
‹ have masked what may be the most significant and lasting development. For
the first time in the modern history of the death penalty, more than 60
percent of all American executions took place in Texas
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/usstatesterritoriesandpossessio
ns/texas/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> .
Over the past three decades, the proportion of executions nationwide
performed in Texas has held relatively steady, averaging 37 percent. Only
once before, in 1986, has the state accounted for even a slight majority of
the executions, and that was in a year with 18 executions nationwide.
But enthusiasm for executions outside of Texas has dropped sharply. Of the
42 executions in the last year, 26 were in Texas. The remaining 16 were
spread across nine other states, none of which executed more than three
people. Many legal experts say the trend will probably continue.
Indeed, said David R. Dow, a law professor at the University of Houston
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/univers
ity_of_houston/index.html?inline=nyt-org> who has represented death-row
inmates, the day is not far off when essentially all executions in the
United States will take place in Texas.
³The reason that Texas will end up monopolizing executions,² he said, ³is
because every other state will eliminate it de jure, as New Jersey did, or
de facto, as other states have.²
Charles A. Rosenthal Jr., the district attorney of Harris County, Tex.,
which includes Houston and has accounted for 100 executions since 1976, said
the Texas capital justice system was working properly. The pace of
executions in Texas, he said, ³has to do with how many people are in the
pipeline when certain rulings come down.²
The rate at which Texas sentences people to death is not especially high
given its murder rate. But once a death sentence is imposed there, said
Richard C. Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information
Center, prosecutors, state and federal courts, the pardon board and the
governor are united in moving the process along. ³There¹s almost an
aggressiveness about carrying out executions,² said Mr. Dieter, whose
organization opposes capital punishment.
Outside of Texas, even supporters of the death penalty say they detect a
change in public attitudes about executions in light of the time and expense
of capital litigation, the possibility of wrongful convictions and the
remote chance that someone sent to death row will actually be executed.
³Any sane prosecutor who is involved in capital litigation will really be
ambivalent about it,² said Joshua Marquis, the district attorney in Clatsop
County, Ore., and a vice president of the National District Attorneys
Association. He said the families of murder victims suffered needless
anguish during what could be decades of litigation and multiple retrials.
³We¹re seeing fewer executions,² Mr. Marquis added. ³We¹re seeing fewer
people sentenced to death. People really do question capital punishment. The
whole idea of exoneration has really penetrated popular culture.²
As a consequence, Mr. Dieter said, ³we¹re simply not regularly using the
death penalty as a country.²
Over the last three years, the number of executions in Texas has been
relatively constant, averaging 23 per year, but the state¹s share of the
number of total executions nationwide has steadily increased as the national
totals have dropped, from 32 percent in 2005 to 45 percent in 2006 to 62
percent in 2007.
The death penalty developments that have dominated the news in recent months
are unlikely to have anything like the enduring consequences of Texas¹
vigorous commitment to capital punishment.
A Supreme Court
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/supreme
_court/index.html?inline=nyt-org> case concerns how to assess the
constitutionality of lethal injection protocols. While it is possible that
states may have to revise the ways they execute people, executions will
almost certainly resume soon after the court¹s decision, which is expected
by June.
Similarly, New Jersey¹s abolition of the death penalty last week and Gov.
Jon Corzine
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/jon_s_corzine/
index.html?inline=nyt-per> ¹s decision to empty death row of its eight
prisoners is almost entirely symbolic. New Jersey has not executed anyone
since 1963.
And while the total number of executions in 2007 was low, it would have been
similar to those in recent years but for the moratorium, if extrapolated to
a full year.
There do seem to be slight stirrings suggesting that other states might
follow New Jersey. Two state legislative bodies ‹ the House in New Mexico
and the Senate in Montana ‹ passed bills to abolish capital punishment, and
in Nebraska, the unicameral legislature came within one vote of doing so.
Texas has followed the rest of the country in one respect: the number of
death sentences there has dropped sharply.
In the 10 years ending in 2004, Texas condemned an average of 34 prisoners
each year ‹ about 15 percent of the national total. In the last three years,
as the number of death sentences nationwide dropped significantly, from
almost 300 in 1998 to about 110 in 2007, the number in Texas has dropped
along with it, to 13 ‹ or 12 percent.
Indeed, according to a 2004 study by three professors of law and statistics
at Cornell published in The Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Texas
prosecutors and juries were no more apt to seek and impose death sentences
than those in the rest of the country.
³Texas¹ reputation as a death-prone state should rest on its many murders
and on its willingness to execute death-sentenced inmates,² the authors of
the study, Theodore Eisenberg, John H. Blume and Martin T. Wells, wrote. ³It
should not rest on the false belief that Texas has a high rate of sentencing
convicted murderers to death.²
There is reason to think that the number of death sentences in the state
will fall farther, given the introduction of life without the possibility of
parole as a sentencing option in capital cases in Texas in 2005. While a
substantial majority of the public supports the death penalty, that support
drops significantly when life without parole is included as an alternative.
Once an inmate is sent to death row, however, distinctive features of the
Texas justice system kick in.
³Execution dates here, uniquely, are set by individual district attorneys,²
Professor Dow said. ³In no other state would the fact that a district
attorney strongly supports the death penalty immediately translate into more
executions.²
Texas courts, moreover, speed the process along, said Jordan M. Steiker, a
law professor at the University of Texas
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/univers
ity_of_texas/index.html?inline=nyt-org> who has represented death-row
inmates.
³It¹s not coincidental that the debate over lethal injections had traction
in other jurisdictions but not in Texas,² Professor Steiker said. ³The
courts in Texas have generally not been very solicitous of constitutional
claims.²
Indeed, the Supreme Court has repeatedly rebuked the state and the federal
courts that hear appeals in Texas capital cases, often in exasperated
language suggesting that those courts are actively evading Supreme Court
rulings.
The last execution before the Supreme Court imposed a de facto moratorium
happened in Texas, and in emblematic fashion. The presiding judge on the
state¹s highest court for criminal matters, Judge Sharon Keller, closed the
courthouse at its regular time of 5 p.m. and turned back an attempt to file
appeal papers a few minutes later, according to a complaint in a
wrongful-death suit filed in federal court last month.
The inmate, Michael Richard, was executed that evening.
Judge Keller, in a motion to dismiss the case filed this month, acknowledged
that she alone had the authority to keep the court¹s clerk¹s office open but
said that Mr. Richard¹s lawyers could have tried to file their papers
directly with another judge on the court.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/27/opinion/27thu1.html
New York Times Editorial,
December 27, 2007
State Without Pity

It is a shameful distinction, but Texas is the undisputed capital of
capital punishment. At a time when the
rest of the country is having serious doubts about the death penalty, more
than 60 percent of all American
executions this year took place in Texas. That gaping disparity provides
further evidence that Texas's
governor, Legislature, courts and voters should reassess their addiction to
executions.

As Adam Liptak reported in The Times on Wednesday, in the last three years,
Texas's share of the
Nation's executions has gone from 32 percent to 62 percent. This year, Texas
executed 26 people. No other
state executed more than three.

It is not that Texas sentences people to death at a much higher rate than
other states. Rather, Texas has
proved to be much more willing than others to carry out the sentences it has
imposed.

The participants in Texas's death penalty process, including the governor
and the pardon board, are more
enthusiastic about moving things along than they are in many states. Texas's
system also contains some
special features, like the power of district attorneys to set execution
dates. Prosecutors are likely to be more
eager than judges to see an execution carried out.

While Texas has been forging ahead with capital punishment, many other
states have been moving away
from it. New Jersey abolished the death penalty this month, and other states
have been considering doing
the same thing. Illinois made headlines a few years ago when its governor,
troubled about the number of
innocent people who had been sent to death row, put in place a moratorium on
executions.

These states have had good reasons for their doubts. The traditional
objections to the death penalty
remain as true as ever. It is barbaric -- governments should simply not be
in the business of putting people to
death. It is imposed in racially discriminatory ways. And it is too subject
to error, which cannot be corrected
after an execution has taken place.

In recent years, two other developments have undercut the public's faith
in capital punishment.

There has been a tidal wave of DNA exonerations, in which it has been
scientifically proved that the wrong
people had been sentenced to death. There is also increasing awareness that
even methods of execution
considered relatively humane impose considerable suffering on the condemned.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments next month in a case about whether
the pain caused by lethal
injection is so great that it violates the Eighth Amendment injunction
against cruel and unusual punishment.
Those who study the death penalty say that if current trends continue,
eventually almost all of the nation's
executions will occur in Texas. That is not a record any state should want.
Some states, such as Illinois
and New Jersey, have already had wide-ranging discussions about what role
they want the death penalty to
play in their criminal justice system. Texas is long overdue for such a
debate.

If it is unwilling to abolish the death penalty, which all states should
do, Texas should at least take a hard
look at a system that still produces so many executions and is so wildly out
of step with the rest of
the country.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/27/opinion/27thu1.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/27/opinion/27thu1.html?_r=1&oref=slogin>

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-beiser1jan01,0,3022746.story?coll=
la-opinion-rightrail
From the Los Angeles Times
Falling out of love with death
Though a majority of Americans back capital punishment, surveys find growing
unease over it.
By Vince Beiser

January 1, 2008

The media are abuzz over the 40th anniversary of 1968, the year that saw so
much change in this country. But one of the most extraordinary of those
changes has been almost completely forgotten: 1968 was the first year in the
history of the United States that not a single prisoner was executed. Today,
we're getting closer than we have in decades to matching that milestone.

Forty years ago, the death penalty was dying off. With the injustices
highlighted by the civil rights movement prominent in the public
consciousness, polls found that more Americans opposed capital punishment
than supported it. Several states had banned the practice starting in the
early 1960s, and prominent leaders, from then-presidential candidate Robert
Kennedy to local politicians, were denouncing it. Even the U.S. attorney
general at that time, the nation's top law enforcement official, called for
its abolition. In a 1968 ruling, a Supreme Court justice dismissed death
penalty advocates as a "distinct and dwindling minority." That year, the
number of annual executions, which had been slipping into the single digits,
hit zero. Finally, in 1972, the Supreme Court effectively banned executions.

But just a few years later, the nation began an astonishing about-face. The
Supreme Court reopened the door to capital punishment in 1976, launching an
era in which the U.S. didn't just bring back the death penalty, it
feverishly embraced it. By the 1990s, a record majority of Americans favored
capital punishment. Opposing it had become political suicide for any major
candidate. Courts were handing down hundreds of death sentences every year,
and dozens of new crimes were being made capital offenses in state after
state. By the start of the new millennium, thousands of men and women were
languishing on death row, and the number of executions shot up to nearly 100
a year.

What happened? By the mid-1970s, much of middle America was deeply uneasy
about how the very fabric of society seemed to be unraveling. Drug use and
crime were rising; minorities, women and homosexuals were demanding more
power and respect. And the mighty United States was humiliated, first in
Vietnam and later by Iranian hostage-takers.

In this milieu, politicians increasingly learned that crime could pay -- for
them. From federal candidates to county sheriffs, would-be officeholders
began vying to out-tough each other on law-and-order issues. One result was
the extension of the death penalty to dozens of new crimes, along with
cutbacks on appeals and other protections for capital defendants.

Today, however, the nation is again losing its enthusiasm for capital
punishment. Executions nationwide are effectively on hold until the U.S.
Supreme Court takes up a case later this month on whether lethal injection
is unconstitutionally inhumane. If the court rules that it is, states can,
of course, find some other way to end convicts' lives. But Americans are
increasingly queasy about doing so, no matter how it's done.

Although about two-thirds of all Americans still support capital punishment
in principle, that number is considerably lower than what it was just five
years ago. In practice, we're ever more reluctant to impose it. That's
largely because of the more than 100 men and women who have been freed from
death row in recent years, thanks to DNA testing and other advances. That
shocking proof of the system's fallibility also has made juries, judges,
prosecutors and politicians much more wary about pushing for the ultimate
punishment. In 1996, courts handed down 317 death sentences; last year, that
number plummeted to 110, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
And in December, New Jersey became the first state in 40 years to abolish
its death penalty. At least two other states are considering doing likewise.

According to Amnesty International, 133 countries have abolished the death
penalty. Last month, the United Nations voted for a worldwide moratorium on
capital punishment.

As far back as the 1960s, almost every industrialized nation had abandoned
the death penalty as a barbaric and pointless anachronism. The U.S. in 1968
was on track to do the same -- not because the Supreme Court forced it on
us, but because we as a nation had decided it was a bad idea. Support for
the death penalty hasn't always been a fact of American life. That's
something worth remembering in this new year.
Vince Beiser is a California-based writer who often writes on criminal
justice issues.

http://www.kansascity.com/105/v-print/story/424378.html

Posted on Sun, Dec. 30, 2007
Race emerges as a death penalty issue
By TONY RIZZO; The Kansas City Star

Across the nation, death chambers sit idle while the U.S. Supreme Court
mulls the viability of lethal injection.

But it¹s another less-publicized death penalty issue that in the long
run may prove to have a much larger impact on who dies and who decides
if they should.

The issue is race. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard
arguments in the appeal of a black man from Louisiana convicted by an
all-white jury. In his case, the prosecutor admonished jurors to not
let the defendant get away with murder like O.J. Simpson.

Beyond the prosecutor¹s closing-argument theatrics looms his alleged
desire to strike blacks from the jury. It highlights what many see as
the ongoing racial disparity in how capital punishment is meted in this
country.

Whether real or perceived, when black defendants face a jury with no
black faces in it, particularly in a case involving the question of
life or death, they are often left with the feeling of being unfairly
judged, according to some attorneys and death penalty researchers.

³Perception is reality,² said Kansas City defense attorney John P.
O¹Connor. ³The perception of justice is often as important as justice
itself.²

The current debate about whether the chemicals used in lethal injection
can lead to undue pain and suffering is a peripheral issue that will
work itself out, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death
Penalty Information Center.

³Race and the death penalty is a much more fundamental issue,² Dieter
said.

Blacks are disproportionately represented on the nation¹s death rows.
And blacks who kill whites are overwhelmingly more likely to be
executed than blacks who kill other blacks or whites who kill blacks.

Since 1976, when capital punishment in its current form was
established, 223 black defendants have been put to death for killing
white victims, according to records maintained by the information
center. During that same period, only 15 white defendants have been
executed for killing black victims.

This year, of the 14 black defendants put to death, victims were white
in 10 of those cases. Twenty-two whites have been put to death this
year. None of the victims was black.

³The existing data clearly suggest that many of the death sentences are
a product of racial discrimination,² Dieter wrote in a 1998 study of
race and the death penalty. ³There is no way to maintain our avowed
adherence to equal justice under the law while ignoring such racial
injustice in the state¹s taking of life.²

Unfairly excluding blacks as jurors ³undermines public confidence in
the fairness of our system of justice,² the U.S. Supreme Court noted in
a landmark 1986 decision.

Though noting that a defendant has no right to have anyone of his own
race on a jury, the court said that the state cannot use race as the
basis for removing someone from the jury pool.

³By denying a person participation in jury service on account of his
race, the state also unconstitutionally discriminates against the
excluded juror,² the court reasoned.

That ruling required that before an attorney can exercise a
³peremptory² strike to remove someone during jury selection, he must be
able to provide a race-neutral basis for the strike.

But legal theory does not always translate to practical application in
the courtroom.

O¹Connor said that he knows of several cases where prosecutors have
³contrived² reasons to remove black jurors.

In a decision handed down earlier this year in a case that O¹Connor
tried, the Missouri Court of Appeals ruled that the reason prosecutors
provided to strike a black person from the jury in a murder case was
³pretextual² and that they ³engaged in purposeful discrimination.² As a
result, the court overturned the conviction of defendant Lance
Livingston.

That is the same argument raised by lawyers for the Louisiana man whose
case the Supreme Court recently heard.

Prosecutors provided race-neutral reasons for using strikes to remove
all five blacks from the jury. But defense attorneys say the
prosecutor¹s words and deeds - including the O.J. analogy - betray his
true racial motivation.

The court is expected to rule by summer.

³I think the Supreme Court considers it an important issue,² Dieter
said. ³They can send a message that we¹re going to monitor this
closely.²

O¹Connor said he thinks the Supreme Court eventually may have to do
away with peremptory strikes entirely to prevent attorneys from playing
games with jury selection.

While peremptory strikes long have been a part of the American justice
system, the Missouri Court of Appeals said in the Livingston case:

³The right of a party to peremptorily strike a juror must always give
way to a right of a citizen to participate in our judicial system
without regard to race, gender or national origin.²
To reach Tony Rizzo, call 816-234-4435 or send e-mail to

California's broken parole system

FreeJP — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 21:10:03 GMT

California's broken parole system

The Sacramento Bee reports that California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is looking to save money by cutting the corrections budget, perhaps by releasing as many as a third of the inmates in California prisons because they're non-violent and no danger to anyone. Atrios has been on this, and apparently makes some good points:

The thing is, when something like this is being proposed as a budget-cutting measure rather than a "good public policy" measure they're bound to get it wrong.

I'm all for speeding up the release of many/most/all non-violent drug offenders but you obviously just can't do itall at once, and you can't do it assuming that it will magically suddenly save lots of money. Our society has put up so many barriers preventing the re-integration of previously incarcerated felons into "normal" life that one can't imagine a successful mass prison release program without spending quite a bit of additional moneys on reintegration programs.

The trouble is, that in California's instance, they probably can do exactly that. Read the Bee article linked above, but notice these passages near the end:

On Nov. 14, the state's Little Hoover Commission issued a scathing report in which it noted that nearly 70 percent of California parolees were returned to prison. The national average is 35 percent, and many of the California inmates who went back to prison did so for violating relatively minor conditions of their release.

"The state's fiscal crisis provides an important opportunity to rethink essential public safety policies that are not working well," commission Chairman Michael E. Alpert said when the report was released.

And on Nov. 18, the day after Schwarzenegger took the oath of office, his administration settled a federal lawsuit over how long suspected parole violators were forced to sit in prison before hearings were held on whether they actually did break conditions of their release.

That settlement, resisted by the Davis administration, calls for hearings within 35 days and gave suspected violators the right to have their case argued with a lawyer.

These two points only hint at a huge problem in California's penal system that never seems to register with people until it's specifically pointed out, and even then, they don't often want to believe it.

In California, parole violations are determined and assigned exclusively by correctional officers - in essence, prison guards. If a parolee's parole officer says "you've violated parole," the parolee is arrested and taken to the county jail. There's no warrant, no proof - nothing but the parole officer's word. He then sits in jail for 1-2 months before being transferred to a state prison, where he sits for another 30-90 days before a "violation committee" reads the parole officer's report and hears the inmate's response in person.

The committee then sides with the parole officer (something like 99.5% of the time) and assigns the inmate a violation prison term of between two weeks and one year. Sometimes it'll be "time served," since many parolees have been back in custody for 2-3 months by the time their hearing comes up. That's one aspect of the November 18 settlement - from now on, California has only 35 days from the time the parolee is re-arrested to hold the legally required hearing. Apparently, the settlement doesn't require it to be more than the rubber stamp against the inmate that it's been for decades.

If a parole violator wants to appeal this decision, California law requires that he first do so through the Board of Prison Terms' own administrative appeal process, which usually takes about eight months and always (again, about 99.5% of the time) upholds the violation finding. Only then can the inmate take it to court, but by the time any court would hear the case, even the maximum one-year violation term is over, and the court dismisses the case as moot.

Put these facts together with some statistics about the California penal system and the problem becomes clearer:

No court or jury put any parole violator back in prison. That happens solely by non-judicial parole officers, upheld by parole committees also composed of correctional officers. All of the state employees involved, other than in the BPT's administrative appeals, are members of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association - the CCPOA, better known as the prison guard's union.
The CCPOA is, at present, the most politically powerful union in California, and has pushed hard for new prisons and tougher laws to fill them.
California's prisons have held about 50% more people than designed capacity for many years. This leads to lawsuits and demands for more prisons. California's prison system is larger than the US Federal prison system.
About half the people currently in California state prisons are parole violators.
California's parole system eventually issues violations (and re-incarcerates) 70% of parolees, twice the national average.

In other words, CCPOA members - who directly benefit from overcrowding and more prisons - are the ones who decide on parole violations. If they did so at the national average rate, California would instantly (or at least within one year) drop the prison population by about 25%, probably at no risk to anyone.

Many California inmates actually dread parole, because they know that their parole officers will find some way to "violate" them, as it's called. They won't be able to keep a job or start anything long-term because they know, at a moment's notice, a parole officer who doesn't like them or who they pissed off (while not violating the rules) can have them re-jailed for up to a year. By law, it can continue for up to three years even on a one-year sentence. If you're sentenced to 16 months in a California prison, you can actually serve more time on parole violations than you did on your sentence - even more than 16 months total. It's not like that in other states, but it is in California.

It's something like this: by law, the parole term is a maximum of three years from the date of initial parole, but that clock stops running while you're in prison on a violation, but only for one year. So if you're paroled on July 1, 2003, but "violated" on September 1, 2003, for a period of six months, you've completed two months of the parole, and the clock starts again on March 1, 2004, when you're released again. If you're then violated again for a one-year term on May 1, 2004, the clock starts ticking again on November 1, 2004, even though you're still in prison on the violation. Since you'd completed four months "outside," then when the clock resumes on November 1, 2004, your parole must be discharged by law 32 months later, on July 1, 2007, even if you spend every day of that time in prison on various violations. If you spend no time in custody (as only 30% of parolees do), your term is a maximum of three years. If you spend a year or more in custody on violations, it's four years.

Now, as it turns out, California law provides for a "presumptive discharge" of parolees after one year. If you haven't caught a parole violation after 12 months, your parole officer has to fill out a form explaining why you shouldn't be discharged from parole. If BPT doesn't agree disagree with it, then after 13 months, you're discharged from parole and your sentence is completely over. This doesn't happen as often as it should, though, as the California Department of Corrections (CDC) pretty much assumes that certain classes of people don't deserve early discharge, like "people who were in prison." Don't think that running is the answer, either: by law, the three-year clock halts the day you abscond from parole, and it only starts again when you're rearrested, even if that's 20 years later.

Much of what the Bee says is true, too: California has way too many non-violent offenders in custody, largely because it spent much of the 90s trying to figure out how to declare more people to be dangerous, life-long offenders who could be locked up for 25 years or more without much chance of those pesky appeals or reviews. Pre-release counseling has been a joke, and there is no meaningful appeal because the system has been designed to keep it in CDC or BPT hands until the violation term is over.

However, the real problem in California is the parole system. Most people think "parole" means that if you're released after two years on a three-year sentence due to "good behavior," then you'll be supervised on parole for one more year and that's it. They have no idea you can serve four years in prison on parole violations after a one-year sentence, nor do they know that a judge or jury will never hear the case during any of that time. The only people who will hear it are those who have a vested financial interest in keeping the prisons packed. Simply bringing California's parole system in line with national standards would accomplish just about all of Schwarzenegger's financial goal for the system without endangering anyone.

Now go back and read the beginning of the Bee article again:

Convinced that California can no longer afford its $5.3 billion prison and parole system, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration is exploring moves that would all but eliminate parole conditions for nonviolent, nonserious offenders and eventually -- through early release and lighter penalties -- dramatically shrink the prison population.

See? It's not so much "early release" of inmates as it is taking them out of the deeply-flawed parole system. Former prison guard Don Novey, head of the CCPOA, would only say that "anything they do should be looked at with public safety paramount." That's a clue - for the past 20 years, CCPOA's version of "public safety" has been "lock up every single person we can for as long as we can and never parole them." Just you watch what happens next year. I'll bet a quarter that if any proposal removes parolees from CDC and BPT power - or never puts them under that parole system in the first place - Novey and his lobbyists will cry "endangering the public" to every reporter they can find, and they can find a lot of reporters.

Eisenhower warned the nation about the military-industrial complex. It's a shame no one ever warned California about the correctional-industrial complex.