Reviving the Fight Against Solitary Confinement

It’s going to be a momentous week: On Tue, March 19, we’ll hold an event to reignite the struggle to end long-term solitary confinement in California.
The Louis B. Mayer Lounge at UC Hastings, at the ground floor of 198 McAllister Street, will host a life-size model of a SHU cell. Everyone is invited to come and take a tour of the SHU throughout the day. And when you do, think of what it’s like to live in a cell like that… not for a five-minute tour, but for years, 22.5 hours a day.
And at 6pm, we’ll be holding a panel featuring people who have done time at the SHU, activists, lawyers, and family members. 

The event is free and open to the public. More information on the event’s Facebook page.

And of course, two days later, on Thu, March 21, we’ll hold our big conference, California Correctional Crisis: Realignment and Reform. Please register, come, and bring friends.

Film Review: Life With Murder

A gentle, quiet, middle-aged Canadian couple is faced with one of the most horrific dilemmas imaginable: How do you cope with having your child been murdered… by your other child?

The excellent 2010 documentary Life With Murder follows Brian and Leslie Jenkins from Chatham in this horrific ordeal. A short driving distance from Detroit, where a murder occurs every day, in Chatham a murder occurs every year. “Unfortunately,” says Leslie, “1999 was our year.”

Jennifer Jenkins, 18, was a much-beloved and popular girl, and the town was stricken with grief when she was found shot to death in her home. Suspicion quickly fell on her brother, Mason (20 years old at the time), who tried to escape the house… on a horse.

Mason, Brian and Leslie’s interviews at the police station are shown on camera, as is the original 911 call from the parents who discovered the body. Mason insisted, against a mountain of condemning evidence, on his innocence and filed numerous appeals. His parents stood squarely behind him, not speaking about the events of the night of the murder for many long years, until Mason exhausted his appeals… and changed his story. And after these developments, their choices as a family are nothing short of remarkable.

Of special interest to readers of this blog is the incredible footage from Canadian prison. Mason is on friendly terms with a correctional officer, with whom he comfortably and amiably shares details of the night of the murder. Visitation happens in a natural, home-like setting: Mason’s parents grill meat with him in a yard with lawn around the cottage in which they visit; they get to spend visiting weekends with him in the little cottage. In one scene that will stun U.S. viewers, Mason and his mother cook a meal in a kitchen with knives on the wall. The contrast to the visitation experience in U.S. institutions is palpable.

But the most interesting aspect of the film is its gentle, and yet painfully honest, treatment of denial and detachment, and its subtle probing into the psyche of loving, introverted people gradually uncovering untold horror and coming to terms with it in their own way. In his insightful commentary about the film, director John Kastner talks about the difficulty of conducting “a major investigation of a subject when the participants don’t want to discuss it.” He writes:

Brian and Leslie were generous with their time, but would they open up to us? Or were they living – as some suggested — in a kind of Never-Never land, refusing to face facts about Mason? And how to explain their steadfast support of him, visiting him in prison regularly? (How could they talk to him? Look at him? Have anything to do with him?) 

A colleague and I began meeting them in Chatham for well over a year, often twice a month, gradually peeling back the layers of their psychological armour. At first they revealed very little. But it became apparent they were more aware of the awful details of the murder than they had initially let on. They parked the information in a mental drawer, so to speak, as a survival mechanism to help get them through the day. 

Eventually they decided they had bottled up their story for too long; it would be therapeutic to discuss it with someone besides a shrink who was sympathetic and who was familiar with the criminal justice system. Important to them, too, was helping other families learn from observing their own tortured efforts at healing and reconciliation. 

I think the Jenkins are wonderful people. I so admire their great character and integrity. Many in their shoes would have tried to protect their son by fudging the facts to the authorities. But the Jenkins’ remarkable, often painful, honesty is apparent in their videotaped interviews with the police – not to mention in their interviews with us.

Life With Murder streams on YouTube and on Netflix.

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Props to Katie Morrison for the recommendation.

Realignment and Long Jail Terms

An inmate in the Madera County Jail is taken to the inmate
housing unit. Photo courtesy The Press Enterprise.

Realignment was initiated, in part, as a reaction to the ruling in Brown v. Plata and the belief that, whatever the conditions in local jails, surely nothing could be worse than state prisons. But is that true? The Press Enterprise reports that more than 1,100 people are serving terms between 5 and 10 years in county jails, some of which are seriously ill equipped to handle such long sentences.

Authorities originally believed that the maximum jail sentence under realignment would be three years, and anyone with a lengthier sentence would go to prison.

But judges found no legal grounds to send convicted inmates to state prison for most violations detailed under realignment. The number of inmates getting lengthy sentences to county jails has been rising ever since.

County law-enforcement officials are concerned that increasing the number of long-term jail inmates will lead to a new round of prisoner rights-violation lawsuits. Jails originally were meant to hold sentenced inmates for no more than a year. They don’t have the medical, mental health, disability and work-program facilities found at state prisons

Fresno County already has been sued by inmates claiming mental health and medical care in its jails is inadequate. A prison-rights law firm has been reviewing Riverside County’s facilities.

The piece goes on to document some anti-Realignment bills aimed at minimizing its effects by excluding more categories of offenders or setting a sentencing limit. The fact that there is now one person sentenced to 42 (!) years in L.A. County Jail (presumably for a nonserious, nonviolent, nonsexual offense) should be an indication that reform is being done in a horribly wrong fashion.

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Props to Josh Page for the link. Come talk to us about realignment at our conference, California Correctional Crisis: Realignment and Reform, on March 21-22.

Book Review: Jumped In by Jorja Leap

Jumped In, by UCLA gang anthropologist, educator, and activist Jorja Leap, follows her professional footsteps in researching gangs and establishing contacts with current and former gang members. Along the way, it weaves narratives from gang members’ lives with the story of Leap’s professional and personal development and struggle in conducting the research.

For many, Los Angeles gangs primarily mean bloods and crips (and the stories of those gangs are fascinating and important), but Leap walks us through neighborhoods and projects that are home to many hundreds of latino gangs, a geography that changes weekly on the streets. Making connections with gang interventionists who can provide her with introductions as well as safety, Leap interviews gang members, trying to assure them early on of her confidentiality (except in child abuse cases, which she is obliged to report.)

Her conversations with homies and homegirls reveal a wealth of details about gang life. For example, an entire chapter is devoted to gang tattoos and their significance, as well as the importance of tattoo removal for those interested in leaving gang life. Other chapters examine drug abuse, mental illness, personal histories of poverty and abuse, and the difficulties of changing one’s life around.

Among these chapters, Leap’s stories on women’s role in gang life, informed by intimate conversations with women on the ground, stand out. Her empathy for the women she interviews, and her genuine attempt to understand and help, are particularly touching, and she does a great job exposing domestic violence, which she considers the one unaddressed problem in gang intervention. Her narrative is nuanced enough to accommodate battering that victimizes men (a phenomenon often underreported and misunderstood). She handles the parallels to the abusive aspects of her own first marriage with subtlety and grace, understanding the class difference and respecting the common and unique features of the experience.

Another theme in the book is the strength of gang connections and the pull of street life. Here, the narrative is somewhat less successful. Leap rejects the oversimplification of the popular notion that “you can never leave the gang”, but her own interviews and examples confirm the immense difficulty of doing so, as people derive so much of their identity and community from the gang. Her upset at juries and district attorneys disbelieving change is therefore left empty, and the reasons behind it (beyond belief in this or that person’s innocence) unpacked.

Leap also speaks to the complex relationship between gangs and drugs, rejecting the notion that drugs are sold in corporate-like hierarchies, and instead revealing a less structured drug trade stemming out of poverty and lack of opportunity.

The book is on shakier ground where policy prescriptions are concerned, and when thrown together at the end of the book, they read a bit disjointed. Leap’s overall preference for long-term holistic solutions over emergency interventionism, of which she is ambivalent. The book oozes contempt for David Kennedy’s slick marketing of his “ceasefire” plan (“give me 50 million dollars and I’ll solve the gang problem”), but not a lot of actual arguments against it. In fact, Leap has respect for some forms of interventionism as heroic and important in acute situations. Where the book takes an unequivocal stance is in its justified support for the incredible work of Homeboy Industries and the relentless work of Father Greg Boyle.

This is not an academic book, and as such it offers a dimension seldom explored in academic texts – the experience of the researcher herself. Leap weaves her gang research journey with her personal life, including her candid examination of her second marriage to a widowed LAPD officer and adoption of his daughter. The account of the marriage unflinchingly explores the frictions between Leap and her husband over professional approaches to gang violence and danger on the job. Far from another self-serving “women can’t have it all” essay, this is an expose of a professional woman’s struggle to be respected, not only on the streets but at home, for what she does. There is also hope offered, for after Leap’s husband’s retirement from the LAPD, his approach becomes more flexible and he finds himself joining the efforts to rehabilitate gang members. Another way in which this personal approach might speak to researcher is its gentle exploration of the thin line between researcher and activist. Leap’s description of her subjects is refreshingly empathetic; she is deeply involved in their lives and spends her time not only evaluating projects, but writing grants and actually teaching life skills. At times, the contrast between her values and those of her subjects is jarring, but she handles it with grace and tact, honestly exposing her internal conflict for the readers.

All in all, Jumped In is an engaging read that makes you care about Leap’s friends and acquaintances on the street and confront our ignorance about gangs, but for rigorous, in-depth understanding of gangs we should read her academic publications.

California Correctional Crisis: Realignment and Reform!

We’re very excited about the upcoming California Correctional Crisis: Realignment and Reform conference! Our conference preparations are well under way and we have terrific speakers and panels. Please check our program to the left!

The conference is free and open to the public, and we offer MCLE credits for lawyers. Registration is through the conference website.

When: Thu-Fri, March 21-22, 2013

Where: California State Building, 350 McAllister Street, San Francisco, CA

What: An up-to-date conversation about the politics, economics, and day-to-day practice of corrections in California, in light of Plata, the Realignment, the recent election, and more!

Who: Senators Mark Leno and Leland Yee, Death Penalty Focus chair Jeanne Woodford, Federal Receiver Clark Kelso, Michael Bien of Rosen, Bien, Galvan and Grunfeld, CDCR General Counsel Benjamin Rice, Judges Richard Couzens and Elizabeth Lee, and various academics, activists, and policymakers.

This is a two-day conversation you don’t want to miss – so please join us!

The Limits of Savings: Cutting Prisons but Not Populations

Inmate working on a flag at the Prison Industries Autority at CCWF.
Image from story on struggle to maintain
vocational programs in prison.
Credit Lea Suzuki for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Over the last five years, we’ve spent a considerable amount of time on this blog discussing the impact of the financial crisis on reversing the punitive trend, a phenomenon that I refer to, in my forthcoming book with UC Press, as humonetarianism. A recent story by Truthout’s Victoria Law is more skeptical about the potential of the crisis for changing real policies, and in fact highlights the perverse ways in which closing prisons and shifting populations negatively affect prison conditions.

Law provides some examples of how consolidating inmates in fewer institutions makes overcrowding worse:

In December 2011, on the heels of the US Supreme Court’s decision that the overcrowding in the California state prison system is unconstitutional, the CDCR proposed converting Valley State to a men’s prison and transferring its women and transsexual prisoners to the neighboring Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF). That month, CCWF was at 160 percent capacity with 3215 people.

“The CDCR has been talking about gender-responsive and gender-humane prisons. They said that women have different needs than men, but look at us now – women are overcrowded with eight to a room,” Wendy stated. A room, according to the Merced Sun-Star, is 348 square feet.

After the CDCR announced the conversion, despite threats of retaliation, 1000 people inside VSP and 200 inside CCWF sent letters against the plan to advocacy groups the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) and Justice Now. “Women are not cattle. You can’t just shove us into a barn and [expect that] we will be all right,” wrote one woman. As of January 16, 2013, with Valley State having been emptied of all but five women, CCWF is at 187 percent capacity with 3748 women, making it the state’s most crowded prison.

During the transfers, medications were withheld. Once at CCWF, women reported difficulties receiving them. CCWP campaign coordinator Colby Lenz told Truthout that one woman was taken off her medications for two weeks before she was able to appear before a 12-doctor panel; they reassigned a new medication regimen.

Medical staff reportedly told an 81-year-old woman that she was old and going to die anyway, so they weren’t going to give her anything. Others complained about a particular nurse who was randomly withholding medications.

In addition, those in VSP’s mental health programs must be placed on a waiting list before accessing any mental health counseling. Wendy noted that, although CCWF only has six self-help groups, VSP’s 56 self-help groups, run by the women themselves, have been discontinued.

“No one was able to take their materials to start a [new] group. They [prison staff] are citing overcrowding and the cost to taxpayers of shipping these papers across the street,” said Lenz.
“People [transferred] are in a really horrible state. They are really traumatized,” she said. “The prison wasn’t giving people blankets, pillows, toilet paper, tampons or cleaning supplies.”

Claiming a shortage of staff to supervise the increased numbers, the prison placed many under lockdown. CCWP has been told that some women were transferred from general population at VSP directly into segregation units at CCWF. In addition, women reported that guards were provoking violence against the VSPW “bitches.” The mother of one transferee told Truthout that her daughter had said that conditions were so awful that she was contemplating suicide.
I don’t doubt any of this for a moment. Not only good things have happened in the correctional world since the financial crisis; bad and ugly ones abound. This is not just about increased overcrowding in consolidated institutions. Private prison companies have been making more profit offering local governments savings. Educational and vocational programs have been slashed (in fact, here’s an example of that in the very prison Law writes about). More inmates are housed in presumably more efficient out-of-state settings, taken away from relatives and friends. The trend of rolling incarceration expenses on the backs of the inmates themselves has increased as a “creative solution” for incarceration costs.

But I maintain that a lot of this comes from a misguided, short-term view of the expense argument. When seeking an emergency way to save money, correctional policymakers are likely to make these mistakes, ignoring the potential expensive implications they might have on the future in terms of recidivism rates. It is easier to adopt emergency measures than to think holistically about the challenges of mass incarceration and how they affect our spending later.

Short-term thinking about incarceration is not a new mentality. In a way, you could say this is what started the whole thing. What characterized our thinking about prisons in the 1970s was lack of actually thinking about them. The Nixon administration fueled money into law enforcement, and the expansion of prisons was an afterthought, a result of the increased number of arrests by a better funded and empowered police force. Even our way of funding prisons is a way of passing the buck to future generations, not through taxes we pay in real time but through hidden bonds that will be due later. Is it any wonder that, when trying to patch up the hole in our finances, we’re not considering the possibility that unprogrammed, overcrowded institutions, are a recipe for deteriorated health and decreased skills, which mean more costs and more recidivism?

The key to changing this is to transform the cost argument in a way that incorporates consideration of future recidivism rates into the assessment of everything we try to do. This is not easy to do, because measuring recidivism is tricky, and so is predicting recidivism. But I really hope we can do it, because there doesn’t seem to be any other motivation for change that holds the same amount of public appeal.

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Props to Caitlin Henry for the link.

Ninth Circuit Revives Inmate Lawsuit for Pagan Chaplaincy

A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit has acknowledged, apriori, that Pagan inmates complaining about the lack of a paid chaplain might have two valid legal claims, and remanded the case to a lower court for consideration of such claims.

Some background: CDCR employs a five-faith policy, which acknowledges, for purposes of religious accommodation, Catholicism, Protestant Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Native American spirituality. For years, volunteer Wiccan prison chaplain Patrick McCollum waged a legal struggle to obtain ackowledgment, and lost due to lack of standing: The right to a chaplain belongs to the inmates, not the chaplain.

A recent survey of religion in prison has revealed that Paganism, or Earth-based spirituality, is one of the fastest growing faiths in correctional institutions, and according to McCollum, the survey is tainted by underreporting on the part of inmates that were concerned about the repercussions.

In Hartmann and Hill v. CDCR, decided a few days ago, inmates argued that the lack of an official chaplain position also leads to other forms of religious discrimination and lack of accommodations. Their main contention is that the “five-faith policy” is not based on any neutral considerations, and that in Chowchilla, where the plaintiffs are incarcerated, there are more Pagan inmates than members of some of the approved five faiths.

In reversing the district court’s dismissal for failure to state a claim, the Ninth Circuit court was careful to state that the First Amendment does not require CDCR to provide all faiths with a chaplain. Nor did the Court find an equal protection violation. However, the court did find that the inmates’ claim that CDCR violated the Establishment Clause is valid; that is, that the existing arrangement potentially unreasonably burdens the practice of religion on the basis of preferential treatment. The plaintiffs also have a valid claim based on the California Constitution. In remanding the case to the lower court, the Ninth Circuit court instructed to view the Establishment Clause argument through the lens of facts – conditions of employment for chaplains, number of inmates in need of religious services, etc.

For excellent, informed commentary on the decision, including from Patrick McCollum himself, see Jason Pitzl-Waters’ blog The Wild Hunt. Or, for a dosage of ignorance and bigotry, see Debra Saunders’ poor excuse for a column on the Chron.

Today: Solitary Confinement Hearing in Sacramento

Today marks the beginning of a new wave of protest and action against the overuse of solitary confinement in California. Protesters meet for the State Assembly Public Safety Committee Hearing held following Tom Ammiano‘s recent visit to Pelican Bay.

The Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity website reports the intent to resume peaceful protest against these conditions of incarceration starting July 8, unless demands are not met; the protest will include a hunger strike and work stoppage.

There is reason for optimism. Not only is solitary confinement piercing the invisibility screen and making its way to public consciousness, commentators like George Will, whom no one would suspect of being a bleeding-heart liberal, are speaking out against these incarceration practices. As is the case with all narrow coalitions nowadays, he includes the steep price tag of solitary confinement in the list of reasons to end it.

But there’s more: More people are being released from solitary confinement, and a federal lawsuit is challenging indefinite segregational incarceration. The L.A. Times reports:

Department spokeswoman Terry Thornton this week said the agency has so far reviewed 144 inmates who were placed in the SHU because they allegedly associated with prison gangs, an activity that now no longer merits segregation. Of those reviewed, she said, 78 have been released into the general population and 52 have entered the “step down” program. An additional seven inmates have been retained in segregation, 

Thornton said, “for their safety,” and the remaining 10 have agreed to debrief, the term the corrections department uses for providing prison investigators information on gang activity. Thornton said the department intends to eventually review all SHU inmates for possible release, though there are about 1,200 in segregation at Pelican Bay State Prison alone, some held there more than 20 years.

If you can’t attend the protest in Sacramento today, you can follow it live on Tweeter following @stoptortureCA.

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Props to Ashley Toles and Zafir Shaiq.

Book Review: Prison Profiteers, Edited by Tara Herivel and Paul Wright

Many books and articles decrying mass imprisonment use the term “prison industrial complex”, and many of us know that it refers to the financial aspects of incarcerating a population of immense scale. Many of us also know about the for profit business of private prisons and its many ills. But few are privy to the nitty gritty aspects of the prison industry.

The edited collection Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration fills this gap with a distressing collection of snapshots of the prison industry. Herivel and Wright did an excellent job of picking authors with intimate knowledge of the crevices of the financial machine behind mass incarceration, and the essays illuminate aspects that, even to those of us who study prisons, often remain unseen.

The essays in the first part of the book, The Political Economy of Prisons, provide a general background to prison finance, explicating (in Kevin Pranis’ essay) the mechanism of bond finance and the collaboration between banks and local governments that leads to opaque, disturbing financial deals that remain hidden from, and thus uncriticized by, the public. Jennifer Gonnerman’s discussion of “million dollar blocks,” that is, neighborhood blocks the incarceration of whose residents costs the nation untold amounts of money, calls for a different distribution of funds – to invest them in the neighborhoods that yield prison population in the first place, rather than in the distant prison. The distance between prisons and the communities of origin of inmates is illuminated in Gary Hunter and Peter Wagner’s discussion of the impact of prisons on the census, and the detrimental effect that a a large population of non-voting, non-deciding citizens has on the democratic process and on local government funding. Clayton Mosher et al provide data that refutes the assumption that cities that agree to build prisons in their midst fare better economically. And Paul Wright discusses the harm of glorifying prisons in popular culture.

The second part of the book, The Private Prison Industry, discusses a better known part of the problem – private prison companies. But the essays do a great job at exposing the mechanisms through which these companies make money and lobby for punitive legislation and policy. Having just read in the paper that a university stadium in Florida is destined to bear the name of a private prison company, GEO, these essays are even more poignant. Ian Urbina’s essay on the prevalence of prison labor, and the multiple ways in which it destroys the larger labor market, is particularly notable.

The third part of the book, Making Out Like Bandits, is a series of ground-level exposes on different aspects of the for-profit industry: The deceitful marketing techniques of tasers (by Anne-Marie Cusac), the horrific abuse and neglectful safety measures taken by private prison transportation companies (by Alex Friedmann, the exorbitant prices of telephone calls and their detrimental ostracizing impact on inmates and their families (by Steven Jackson), the proliferation of high-tech gear and workshops for prison staff (by Jennifer Gonnerman), and the horrors of privatized prisons for youth (by Tara Herivel). But the most devastating essays are by Will Hylton and Paul von Zielbauer, which dissect the private health care providers. Here in CA, the standards exposed in Plata and Coleman might lead one to think that no one can provide worst health care than the states. These essays offer sobering evidence to the contrary, and the multiple examples of medical neglect and indifference are truly heartbreaking.

The collection does not offer high-level analysis of the meaning of the incarceration industry. For that, one must turn to the many big-picture works already out and available. Instead, it provides much-needed foci on the many aspects in which privatization permeates every possible aspect of incarceration. The essays are full of examples and written in an easy-to-read journalistic style. I highly recommend educating yourself not only about your tax money’s role in this, but about the many businesses that benefit from this somber enterprise.

Film Review: West of Memphis

I have just returned from watching West of Memphis, the latest film in the West Memphis Three saga. This is a case I care about a great deal, and I have been following it for eighteen years, until its surprising ending last fall in an Alford plea.

Those of you who have followed the case and were convinced, as I am, of the defendants’ innocence, may have been drawn to the case by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky series of documentaries Paradise Lost (1996), Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (2000), and Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (2011). What could a fourth documentary possibly add to those?

Plenty, apparently. West of Memphis, directed by Amy Berg and produced by Damien Echols and his wife and staunch supporter Lorri Davis, as well as supporters such as Peter Jackson, offers fresh perspectives on the case that were not highlighted in the previous documentaries. If you thought what you saw in Paradise Lost of the trial was an absolute travesty, wait until you see incredible footage of the trial not seen in the original documentary. This movie also benefits from the passage of time and the discovery of new forensic evidence, as well as recantations by several key witnesses from the original trial.

The film has many strengths, but the most interesting bit, to me, was the blow-by-blow documentation of the Alford plea process, and in particularly the excruciating dilemma faced by Jason Baldwin, who did not want to plead guilty to a crime he did not commit. We got to hear moving words from the judge accepting the pleas (who was clearly convinced of the defendants’ innocence) and some ridiculous statements from prosecutors, present and past.

The weakness of the film is in its overemphasis on the alternative theory, according to which Terry Hobbs, stepfather of one of the children, committed the crime. It is true that some forensic evidence ties Hobbs to the crime, and he is therefore a more convincing suspect than John Mark Byers, who was cast as a possible suspect in Paradise Lost 2. At the time, I thought that the case against Byers was no less a witchhunt than against the original defendants. While these filmmakers have a bit more to support their theory, including DNA from the alibi witness, I can see a talented defense attorney explaining away the DNA evidence. The crime does not necessarily make sense, there is no clear motive, and the hearsay evidence about a late confession could be as problematic as the bogus evidence about Damien Echols’ alleged confession in the original trial. I think we can easily come to believe in Echols’, Baldwin’s and Misskelley’s innocence without casting aspersions on new suspects without conclusive proof.

That said, the film is a masterpiece: Beautifully filmed, fast paced, intelligent, and providing a fascinating perspective into the case and the defendants’. I urge you all to see it.