Richard Ramirez becomes 85th Death Row Inmate to Die of Natural Causes

Richard Ramirez, whose horrific crimes terrified residents of Southern California and beyond in the 1980s, died in San Quentin’s Death Row today of natural causes. The AP reports:

Ramirez, 53, had been taken from San Quentin’s death row to a hospital where authorities said he died of liver failure.

He had been housed on death row for decades and was awaiting execution, even though it has been years since anyone has been put to death in California.

At his first court appearance, Ramirez raised a hand with a pentagram drawn on it and yelled, “Hail, Satan.”

His marathon trial, which ended in 1989, was a horror show in which jurors heard about one victim’s eyes being gouged out and another’s head being nearly severed. Courtroom observers wept when survivors of some of the attacks testified.

Ramirez was convicted of 13 murders that terrorized Southern California in 1984 and 1985 as well as charges of rape, sodomy, oral copulation, burglary and attempted murder.

This makes Ramirez the 85th inmate to die of natural causes on Death Row in San Quentin. By comparison, since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 2006, only 13 inmates were executed. Earlier this week I explained on CBS-5 news that the death penalty in California has become, essentially, a very expensive version of life without parole.

My heart aches today for the families of Ramirez’s many victims, some of whom may have waited and hoped to see him executed. We may disagree about the substantive issue of the merits of the death penalty, but if anyone was deserving of such a cruel fate, it was Ramirez. But since we cannot, in modernity, deliver the promise of swift death without risking the execution of innocents (the new developments in Florida raise serious concerns about the prospect of mistakes), maybe it’s time to settle, as closure, for what we’re doing anyway: Life without parole, without expensive incarceration conditions in a dilapidated, outdated facility, and without endless and costly state-funded appellate litigation.

Cutting Food Benefits for the Formerly Incarcerated?

An amendment to a farm bill, currently debated in the senate, would permanently drop anyone ever convicted of a violent crime from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Colorlines reports:

According to Robert Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. . . 

The amendment would bar from SNAP (food stamps), for life, anyone who was ever convicted of one of a specified list of violent crimes at any time — even if they committed the crime decades ago in their youth and have served their sentence, paid their debt to society, and been a good citizen ever since. In addition, the amendment would mean lower SNAP benefits for their children and other family members.

So, a young man who was convicted of a single crime at age 19 who then reforms and is now elderly, poor, and raising grandchildren would be thrown off SNAP, and his grandchildren’s benefits would be cut. … Democrats accepted it without trying to modify it to address its most ill-considered aspects.

Two-thirds of SNAP recipients are children, elderly or the disabled, and two-fifths of SNAP households live below half the poverty line.

Beyond the obvious implications for the income gap and the disproportionate harmful impact on the African American community, this provokes some thought about the way the financial crisis has yielded a new perception of the offender. Our focus on inmates prior to their crisis had been on their risk level, and the crisis has focused our attention on their cost. This is what has yielded some of the advances in geriatric and medical parole, but it has also led to some bitterness over the “free healthcare” that inmates receive. This seems to be a development of the same ilk. In an era of competition over resources, formerly incarcerated folks are seen as somehow less deserving of help and compassion than others, and thus their benefits, regardless of economic condition, are first to go.

This is why, even though humonetarianism has made some significant dents in the mass incarceration machine, it cannot be relied upon as an exclusive strategy for reform. We’ve seen enough developments of the tough-‘n’-cheap variety to know that savings don’t always work in the direction of penal reform. The way to frame the savings argument here would be as a  long-term concern: Poor people with nothing to eat have less opportunities and might therefore resort to crime, and one way to save is to reduce recidivism.

Effort to Speed Executions Dies in Committee

Image courtesy KALW News.

One of the main features of the Prop 34 campaign was an increase in support for abolition by people who are not necessarily ideologically opposed to the death penalty, but resent the wastefulness of essentially holding people in life imprisonment conditions in a costly and dilapidated facility while allowing them free representation and litigation space. The campaign emphasized that, since resuming the death penalty, only 13 people have been executed in California, while 84 died of natural causes. And several conservative editorials in support of Prop 34 explicitly said that they fully support the death penalty, but not as administered by the state. This trend is pretty pronounced not only in CA policymaking, but also in states that recently abolished the death penalty. The recent issue of the ABA Criminal Justice section journal features an article by yours truly and Ryan Newby in which we analyze the way in which savings have impacted the anti-death-penalty activism realm (I’ve said similar things here.)

But, Houston, there’s a problem. One of the negative consequences of eliminating all activist arguments against punitivism save for the cost argument is that one can conceive of rather horrific criminal justice policies that are also cheap. You don’t have to go as far as Texas to see the ill effects of tough-‘n’-cheap mentality. If the death penalty is broken, a potential conservative argument goes, just fix it by making sure that these people DO get executed, and save money that way!

Which is why I found Bob Egelko’s story on today’s Chron fascinating. Apparently, the California District Attorneys Association proposed to amend the death penalty law in CA, proposing SB779, which would shorten death penalty appeals and habeas proceedings and resuscitate the gas chamber as an execution method (in response to the chemical shortage that postponed an execution a while ago.) The proposal died in the Public Safety Committee, 5-2. The Chron reports:

The bill would have limited most condemned prisoners to one round of appeals in the state court system and another in federal court. Other provisions would have eliminated public review of regulations on execution procedures, barred disclosure of the suppliers of drugs used in executions and authorized a new method of gas chamber executions. 

California’s last execution by cyanide gas was in 1993. A federal judge ruled a year later that the gas chamber at San Quentin caused excruciating pain and violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. 

Lethal injections at the prison were halted in 2006 when another federal judge ruled that the executions, carried out by poorly trained staff in a dimly lit chamber, posed an undue risk of a prolonged and agonizing death. The court-imposed moratorium is likely to remain in place at least through 2013 as the state tries to validate new regulations and cope with a shortage of execution drugs. 

Under SB779, a gas execution would have been carried out by filling the chamber with a nontoxic gas, such as nitrogen or helium, displacing the oxygen and suffocating the prisoner. The condemned inmate could choose between gas and lethal injection, but the bill specified that the execution would be conducted by gas if injections were not legally available. 

To readers who are death penalty supporters, this is an interesting turn of events. It seems like, even in principle we endorse the death penalty, it is hard to live with the consequences of thinning out due process. There is no way back, folks. The only direction to go is forward, and any fantasy of saving money by hanging people in the town square cannot override the reality of many decades of death penalty litigation. Abolition is the only way to go now.

More From Jerry: Federal Prison Oversight a Waste of Money?

Photo credit Randall Benton for the Sac Bee.

After Governor Brown’s public comments about attorney’s fees for inmate rights’ litigators – on which we had plenty to say here and on The Recorder – he’s back to it this morning. The Sac Bee reports:

“During the life of these lawsuits, the prison health care budget has gone from $700 million to $2 billion,” Brown said in an interview with The Bee, his first on the issue since the state filed court documents in January seeking to regain control of its prisons. 

“That money is coming out of the university, it’s coming out of child care. It’s a situation you wouldn’t dream anyone would want.” 

The governor’s comments came as lawyers prepare for a battle in Sacramento federal court later this month over whether the state is providing a constitutional level of mental health and medical care for inmates. Oral arguments are scheduled for March 27 on California’s motion to terminate oversight of mental health care by U.S. District Judge Lawrence K. Karlton. 

Another motion by the state, also filed in January, seeks to vacate or modify an order by a specially convened three-judge court to reduce inmate population. Oral arguments on that motion have not yet been scheduled. 

Really, Jerry? Really? You reap what you sow. Why is the prison health care budget so costly? It’s true that mistreating and ignoring people’s medical plight is cheaper than actually treating them, but perhaps if treating them is so expensive then one should have considered whether so many of them should have been in prison in the first place. And whose fault is it that prison expenditures are higher than what we spend on education and child care? Complaining about this given that the government is the culprit is absurd, offensive, and inflammatory.

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.

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.

Starving the Messenger

It strikes me that yesterday’s post about Governor Brown’s gripe against the Prison Law Office and Rosen, Bien, Galvan and Grunfeld requires more blogging attention, because it hits at the heart of the problem: We shouldn’t begrudge people who work for human rights for getting paid to do their work. We should be grateful that they are willing, and able, to do it effectively.

I invite you, gentle reader, to revisit the figures offered by the Washington Post regarding the expenses on Plata/Coleman. The Prison Law office is reported to have received $8.3 million in attorney’s fees; Rosen, Bien, Galvan and Grunfeld have received $19 million. But, while it might be convenient for Brown to focus on these expenses, there were other lofty expenditures on this case, including the salaries for Brown’s own attorneys and for the people appointed by the court to mix his mess of a correctional health care system, which he conveniently ignores.  The expenses related to the federal receiver were $7 million, and the expenses related to the special master in charge of the mental health system were $48.4 million. And of course, state attorneys, and private attorneys hired by the state, also need to be paid for their services. The Justice Department salaries amount to more than $4 million, and the private attorneys hired by the state were paid $15 million.
The conclusion from the numbers is that Governor brown is misled at best, and misleading at worst. Yes, the lawyers for the inmates won attorneys’ fees – as they well deserve for their important service. It would be naïve to expect so many people, on both sides of the litigation, to commit so many hours to these cases as volunteer work. As Governor Brown no doubt knows, this is how civil rights cases are litigated in this country: Relentlessly, and by taking a financial gamble that the court will eventually see the serious civil and human rights violations for what they are, the inmates will win, and their attorneys will recoup their costs as well as make a well-deserved living.
But the remark is also infuriating in principle. Nonprofits that help those to whom the state turns its back are important watchdogs in the struggle to humanely treat the weakest links in our social chain. And solid, prosperous law firms who devote a substantial amount of their human and material resources to civil rights litigation, rather than pay lip service to the idea of pro bono, should be commended and encouraged.
As a coda, it would behoove Governor Brown and his number crunchers to get a broader perspective. In 2012—the year at the end of which the state began realigning its non-serious offenders to county jails—the total budget for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) was $10 billion dollars. Out of this amount, $2 billion was spent on correctional health services, to mixed results. These expenditures dwarf the dwindling funds spent on inmate vocational and educational programming. They also dwarf the expenses of the lawsuit itself. Governor Brown is to be commended for advocating fiscal responsibility, but perhaps some of CDCR’s expenses could be lowered if Californians had abolished our costly and broken death penalty years ago, or if anyone had considered the possibility that some the many people we are now diverting to county jails need not be incarcerated in the first place. Perhaps retooling parole as an instrument of hope, rather than a revolving door of recidivism, could have lowered the price tab. Perhaps our nineteen-year affair with the Three Strikes Law brought into prison thousands of people, many of them for nonviolent offenses, for disproportionately lengthy sentences that encumbered us with their health care expenses. And perhaps providing people with skilled, prompt and humane health care could prevent the many iatrogenic health problems that plague our systems and jails and save a few nickels and dimes as well.
As to the accusation of prolonging litigation in this matter, perhaps the fault for that lies with the state’s stalling techniques in what could amount, under a less forgiving judicial system, to contempt of court. Complying with the court mandate, which left the state ample leeway in choosing its course of action, would also be a way to save money.
The California health care cases shone a bright light on one of our state’s most invisible populations and its plight. We would not have known that our tax money was being wasted on abysmal medical treatment to a population doing time (sometimes excessive and sometimes unnecessary) under overcrowded, unsanitary conditions, sleeping in triple bunks in converted gyms, and receiving medical attention in cages. Like Governor Brown, I am pleased that serious steps have been taken to cure this disease. But when someone draws our attention to human rights violations, we don’t shoot the messenger, nor do we complain about his salary. We thank them for opening our eyes. 

What’s Cheaper: Litigating or Realigning?

Today brings with it an interesting financial gripe: Governor Brown’s concern with the money made by private law firms representing inmates in prison conditions litigation. ABC News Report:

A tally by The Associated Press, compiled from three state agencies, shows California taxpayers have spent $182 million for inmates’ attorneys and court-appointed authorities over the past 15 years. The payments cover a dozen lawsuits filed over the treatment of state prisoners, parolees and incarcerated juveniles, some of which have been settled.

The total exceeds $200 million when the state’s own legal costs are added.

While the amounts are a blip on California’s budget, they provide a continuous income stream for the private attorneys and experts involved in the ongoing litigation. And that is the point Brown is trying to make.

The AP sought the tally after the Democratic governor began using court filings and public appearances to call for an end to two major lawsuits that have forced the state to spend billions of dollars improving its medical and mental health care for prison inmates. Brown says the complaints are expensive, frivolous and motivated by attorneys’ own financial interest.

“They don’t want to go away,” he said last month, standing behind a stack of court documents. “I mean, the name of the game here is, ‘Come to Sacramento and get your little piece of the pie.'”
Brown says that, thanks to recent overhauls, California now offers inmates the best medical and mental health care of any prison system in the nation.

The response from Prison Law Office:

“It’s ridiculous for the governor to merely characterize these cases as being about money, when in fact these cases have been the only impetus in the last 20 years for reducing the prison population and improving conditions,” said Donald Specter, director of the nonprofit Prison Law Office in Berkeley, which has won several major cases against the state.

And from Rosen, Bien, Galvan and Grunfeld:

Michael Bien, the lead attorney representing the welfare of mentally ill inmates in one of the major class-action lawsuits, said Brown is wasting more of the state’s money on a legal fight he has little hope of winning. Moreover, Bien said, inmates’ attorneys expect the court battle will reveal additional lapses in inmate care that will cost the state even more money to fix.

“He’s litigating with your money and my money,” said Bien, of the San Francisco law firm Rosen Bien Galvan and Grunfeld, which is among the law firms that have been paid $19 million by the state in the inmate mental health lawsuit.

He said Brown and the state would be better off complying with a prison population cap supported by the U.S. Supreme Court and by working with Lopes to reduce inmate suicides and improve mental health treatment.

“It’s a distraction from the primary issue here, which is, ‘Why is the state still running unconstitutional prisons where prisoners are dying unnecessarily?'” Bien said. “The easiest way to stop this process is to fix the problem.”

The Washington Post offers the breakdown on legal costs for Plata/Coleman, 1997-2012:

  • Inmates’ attorneys (lead firm, Prison Law Office, Berkeley), medical lawsuit: $8.3 million. 
  • Inmates’ attorneys (lead firm, Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld, San Francisco), mental health lawsuit: $19 million. 
  • Court-appointed receiver’s attorneys and experts, medical lawsuit: $7 million. 
  •  Court-appointed special master and experts, mental health lawsuit: $48.4 million. 
  •  Private lawyers hired by the state, medical lawsuit: $14.3 million. 
  •  Private lawyers hired by the state, mental health lawsuit: $714,312. 
  •  Justice Department attorneys representing the state, medical lawsuit: $589,797. 
  •  Justice Department attorneys representing the state, mental health lawsuit: $3.5 million. 

Total legal costs for medical and mental health lawsuits: $101.8 million. 

Query: Wouldn’t taxpayers–particularly the ones exposed to the medical horrors that prompted the Plata/Coleman litigation in the first place–have preferred to see the medical system fixed without any need for litigation?

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Props to Caitlin Henry for bringing this to my attention.

Book Review: Golden Gulag by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

So many great books have come out in the 21st century examining the genesis of mass incarceration; we’ve discussed many of them here. While many of these books look at trends nationwide, or even in the industrialized West, it is no coincidence that they tend to focus on California. Not only does California have the largest prison population (in absolute numbers; we are not leading the gloomy per-capita parade), but it has pioneered many of the punitive legislation and policies later adopted by other states.

Which is partly why Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag provides a necessary local context to much of the conversation. Gilmore, a geographer, focuses on somewhat less analyzed aspects of mass incarceration in the Golden State: The economic and geographic conditions that have yielded massive prison construction.

After providing a dense and detailed introduction to the California political economy, Gilmore moves on to provide the central thesis of the book: California’s prison boom is a “prison fix” to a problem of fourfold surplus: Capital, land, labor, and state capacity. Her discussion of the mechanism behind prison finance, done through bonds to avoid accountability to taxpayers, shows how supply and demand has worked to create a prison boom that empowered the California Department of Corrections and rendered its construction activities immune to public critique.

1982 is a key year for Gilmore’s narrative. That year, the legislature approved facilities in Riverside, LA, and San Diego, as well as $495,000,000 in general obligation bonds to build new prisons, with the express goal to enhance public safety. In the same year, the legislature also reorganized CDC in a way that exempted its bidding and budgeting practices from the competitive process and instead allowed to assign work to outside consultants, to guarantee that construction occur quickly.

While prisons were initially funded by general obligation bonds, which are backed by the full faith and credit of the state, underwriters and legislators had to deal with “politically contradictory limit to taxpayers’ willingness to use their own money to defend against their own fears”. Their solution was to use lease revenue bonds, usually issued by the Public Works Board for college and university facilities, as well as for veterans and farmers. LRBs carried more risk, as they were only backed by a moral obligation rather than a fiscally binding one, but the expense was offset by the fact that LRBs did not have to be placed before the voters in general elections, and could therefore be quickly organized and issued so prisons could be built close to the time they were bid on, to avoid cost hikes. As a result, in less than a decade, the state debt for prison construction expanded from $763 million to $4.9 billion, an increase from 3.8% to 16.6% of total state debt.

In the next section, Gilmore examines the economic, demographic and geographic push for partnerships between CDC and various central valley towns who wanted to revitalize their economy through the labor and land improvement that would result. As her case study, she looks at Corcoran, an agrarian town with a diverse population suffering a serious economic downturn, in part because of ten years of weather calamities. Most Corcoran residents were hopeful that a prison would put their real property to work and generate employment; their visit to Susanville impressed them with the potential of a prison to revitalized the city. Despite vocal objection, the prison was built, but the town’s hopes were crushed. Employment and opportunities for locals did not improve, confirming general research that shows that, over time, prison towns compare unfavorably with depressed rural places that do not acquire prisons.

The last part of Gilmore’s book looks at anti-prison activism originated by mothers. While it is an interesting account, it delves too much into the personal and would be better as a piece on its own, as it is rather disjointed from the grand narratives and analysis that precedes it.

I’m not sure I am entirely on board with Gilmore’s interpretation of Marxist surplus theory, and I think it does not fare well in providing a full explanation of mass incarceration. But as a piece of the puzzle, the book offers an informative and important explanation of prison construction, one which is sorely needed as the mechanics of prison finance are cleverly hidden from state voters and taxpayers. Her tale of Corcoran is told from the perspective of someone who is not only well informed, but who cares deeply about these towns and their crushed hopes. It is certainly helpful to me as I try to understand and explain what happened after 2007 (when the book was published) and how the financial crisis impacted these developments.

U.S. Bureau of Prisons to Review Solitary Confinement

Good news via Reuters:

A spokesman from the bureau confirmed that the National Institute of Corrections plans to retain an independent auditor “in the weeks ahead” to examine the use of solitary confinement, which is also known as restrictive housing.

“We are confident that the audit will yield valuable information to improve our operations, and we thank Senator Durbin for his continued interest in this very important topic,” spokesman Chris Burke said in a statement. 

Prisoners in isolation are often confined to small cells without windows for up to 23 hours a day. Durbin’s office said the practice can have a severe psychological impact on inmates and that more than half of all suicides committed in prisons occur in solitary confinement. 

In Durbin’s state of Illinois, 56 percent of inmates have spent some time in segregated housing. 

“The United States holds more prisoners in solitary confinement than any other democratic nation in the world, and the dramatic expansion of solitary confinement is a human rights issue we can’t ignore,” said Durbin, who chaired a Senate hearing on the use of solitary confinement last year. “We can no longer slam the cell door and turn our backs on the impact our policies have on the mental state of the incarcerated and ultimately on the safety of our nation.”

The Vera Institute’s Segregation Reduction Project, in which they partner with states and help them reduce the population under solitary confinement, has yielded, to my surprise, impressive monetary savings and no decrease in prison security.

Yesterday, at the Western Society of Criminology, I heard something interesting. Ashley Rubin, who is joining the criminology faculty at Florida State University next year, presented a fascinating paper based on her archival study of Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia (which we visited a few years ago.) In the 19th century, Eastern State advocated an incarceration model based on total isolation of inmates. Auburn prison, in New York State, did not isolate its prisoners, though it did require them to work in silence; Auburn model supporters critiqued Philadelphia for the inhumanity and wastefulness of solitary confinement. Officially, Philadelphia supporters rejected the critiques. But privately, they double-celled inmates. The warden’s journal reveals the motivation behind this practice: Concern about the inmates’ sanity and their need for company. They also allowed inmates to work out of the cell, when they needed to do so to reduce prison costs through inmate labor.

Apparently, there is nothing new under the sun. Keramet Reiter from UC Irvine has been studying the modern supermax and solitary confinement, and has found the exact same practice going on today: Double-celling in solitary cells in the supermax. Apparently, a second bunk had been thrown into solitary cells in supermaxes as an afterthought, and it’s being used. Read this for more information. Whether CDCR does so to alleviate overcrowding, save money, or alleviate inmates’ mental anguish, it raises the question whether being housed with another person for 23 hours a day in close proximity and tight quarters is better or worse than doing time alone. I suppose the answer depends greatly on the circumstances, the person, the mental state of both inmates, and the extent to which staff monitor the possibility of violence in the cell.

The U.S. Bureau of Prisons’ willingness to examine solitary confinement is welcome news. I hope its findings, as well as the Vera Institute’s important activity, will yield some thoughts on the state and local level about reducing the usage of solitary confinement.