Reprinted from Prisonist.org, Nov. 26, 2014

The night of Friday November 21 was a cold one, but the cold could not damper the excitement of the TEDxSing Sing organizing team, even though the heat in the venue had not yet been turned on! Bryonn Bain and several colleagues from NYU were on their way in to help coach the speakers to make sure their messages came across as powerfully as possible on the big day, December 3. This was the first time some members of the organizing team heard all of the inside speakers’ presentations, and they were blown away. The creativity, charisma, and passion that the speakers displayed ignited our excitement even more.

Bundled in coats, hats, and scarves, we did one run-through before Bryonn and his team arrived.  The organizers and the speakers gave each other feedback, and the MC got a feel for the stage. When Bryonn arrived, the real fun began! He performed some of his incredible poetry to live musical accompaniment, a guitar player and cello player both playing in the background. Sitting in a circle making  art together, it was easy to forget that we were freezing cold, and deep inside a maximum security prison. We transcended our differences in that moment and were simply people, communicating through lyrics and song. Superintendent Capra (who will be speaking on December 3) and his wife stopped by to see how everyone was doing, and both were very impressed by how everything was coming together. We are so lucky to be working with such a supportive and invested administrators like those at Sing Sing.

After the jam session, the real work began. We broke into small groups, with one or two speakers in each group, so everyone would have the chance to receive feedback. Speakers were instructed to find their “offering,” the main take-away from their talk, the big idea they were trying to communicate. All of the speakers knew abstractly why they were talking about their chosen topic, but focusing in on that offering, putting it into words, and connecting it to the core, personal reason that topic was so important to them, unlocked these presenters in an incredible way.  The speakers were already so engaging, but this centering and clarifying gave their presentations a new dimension of passion and confidence.

We left Sing Sing that night feeling such excitement for the day of December 3, and so eager to give these men a platform to offer their valuable ideas to the world. But we also knew that we had already succeeded; through the process of planning TEDxSing Sing collaboratively with incarcerated men, advocates, and members of the community, we had already created the healthy community we would be focusing on on December 3.

The growth of the American prison system is explosive – and misguided.

A recent book, The Justice Imperative: How Hyper-Incarceration Has Hijacked The American Dream, notes that between 1980 and 2000, the number of people incarcerated in the United States rose almost 700 percent from 300,000 to over 2 million.

By 2008, more than 7 million Americans (1 out of every 31 adults) were estimated to be behind bars, on probation or on parole. The U.S. now has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Even more troubling is that 37 percent of prisoners are African Americans. According to Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” there are now more African Americans in prison than there were slaves in the 1850s.

Our criminal justice system is in failure mode.  We lock people away for minor drug infractions when they should have been sent to a drug rehab center or, in some cases, receive treatment for a mental illness. These are not violent criminals. They are people, often young black and Latino men, who have made a mistake and are treated harshly by the system.

The real nightmare begins when they are released from prison.  A criminal conviction makes them second-class citizens. Depending on the state, these individuals cannot get a driver’s license, are denied public housing, and can’t apply for food stamps. Any hope of improving their lives is dashed because they are not eligible for Pell Grants or other federal education assistance. They can’t work in local, state or federal government jobs such as the post office – even the sanitation department.

Ex-convicts often can’t get a license to be an electrician, a barber, elevator inspector, air conditioning contractor, real estate agent, dog or cat breeder, or tow truck operator. A plea deal or guilty verdict has, for all practical purposes, rendered them irredeemable in the eyes of our law and our society.

Of course, our prisons don’t prepare them sufficiently to exist in the outside world. Few have adequate vocational training. Prisoners are released back into the community with no skills and very little hope of getting work. Particularly in  today’s tough job market, what employer is going to hire someone with an arrest record when there are other options?

All these hardships usually result in the majority of prisoners winding up back in jail. In a Bureau of Justice Statistics study of 30 states, three in four  former prisoners were rearrested within five years. Our prisons have become a revolving door for the poor and uneducated.

What is even more troubling is that we now spend more than $63 billion, according to a CBS News report from 2012, on locking people up and throwing away the key – a phrase that became popular in the 1980s as an answer to the war on drugs. Yet, major crimes in the U.S. have dropped annually for more than two decades (excepting a slight uptick in 2012), while the prison population has soared.

A broken criminal justice system shortchanges all of us, not just those behind bars. Property taxes are higher and municipalities are forced to spend money on prisons rather than improving the education system, taking care of the elderly or repairing aging infrastructure.

Change is coming very slowly. (See this New York times blog article, for example.)

This past election day, voters in California passed Proposition 47, a measure that reclassifies the personal possession of a number of illegal drugs and the theft of property valued at $950 or less as misdemeanors rather than felonies.

Voters in New Jersey supported a bail reform making certain that people remain incarcerated because of the severity of their crime, not their income. Washington, D.C., Oregon and Alaska legalized the recreational use of marijuana, which promises to keep many people out of jail. What all of this suggests is that changing our criminal justice system has become a bipartisan issue.

From 1980 to 2006, Connecticut’s prison costs grew from $48.3 million to $627.7 million, a meteoric rise of 1,300 percent.  After Medicare/Medicaid, the state’s prison system is the fastest growing budget item.

Connecticut’s prison population has soared from 3,800 to 17,000 since 1980. The majority of these inmates are non-violent drug users who would be better served in rehabilitation facilities. Even more troubling is that while 95 percent of Connecticut’s prisoners are eventually released, more than half end up back in prison because they are ill-equipped to succeed on the outside.

Annual spending for Connecticut’s criminal justice system now exceeds $1 billion. This money could better be used for education, affordable housing and senior care. It is a damaged system spiraling out of control.

The  Justice Imperative is written by a group of Connecticut citizens representing business,  clergy, law enforcement and  formerly incarcerated people who want to change the state’s criminal justice system and it offers effective and realistic recommendations for legislative, administrative and programmatic changes.

The book identifies 30 specific reform recommendations that would reduce Connecticut prison population substantially within five years; reduce the state’s recidivism rate by 30 percent and reduce state spending on the prison system dramatically in five years with two-thirds of the savings reinvested in drug and mental health treatments, educational and vocational training and post-release support and supervision.

It is time to re-think the policy of locking people up and throwing away the key. Hopefully, Connecticut can provide the blueprint for this effort.

John Santa is a Bridgeport-area businessman and chairman of the Malta Justice Initiative, a group of Connecticut lawyers, legislators, prisoner advocates, clergy, and others seeking to reform sentencing in Connecticut.

Originally posted in the CT Mirror

What does it really mean to be free? Is it just the ability to eat where and when I want? Is it the ability to go where I want, to watch whatever show on television that I want, or just to hang out with friends? To a large degree, it would be safe to define this as freedom.

However, Eastern wisdom tells us that even those who have the freedom to engage in all the activities mentioned above are imprisoned. They are prisoners of their mind and senses. The Bhagavad Gita, the most prominent spiritual text from India explains that we are not the physical body made up of matter. Rather, we are a spirit soul living in this body. Our imprisonment is our forgetfulness of our true identity, which is causing us to identify ourselves with the material body.

It’s a very difficult paradigm to digest, even if you were raised with a belief in the soul.  Basically, it’s telling us that when we’re looking into a mirror, we’re not seeing the real person.  We’re only seeing the exterior covering.  The real person is sitting within the body.  The body is often times described as a vehicle and the soul as the driver.  A vehicle can’t function without the driver.  The soul is seated in a vehicle made not of metal, but of flesh and bones.  The eyes are like the headlights and the arms and legs like the wheels, which allow for motion.

The soul is the spiritual spark that creates consciousness.  It can also be said that it is consciousness.  Without the soul, the body is just a lifeless lump of matter that starts decaying and loses all attractiveness.  We have to admit that no matter how close we were to someone, once the soul leaves the body, we’d prefer not to hang around the body for too long.

Recognition of our spiritual identity doesn’t translate into indifference towards one’s own or others’ bodies.  The body is a very important vehicle.  It can’t be neglected as it serves as the vehicle for the soul and it takes the soul to its next destination.  That destination can either be another material body or liberation from the cycle of birth and death.

The other reason, everyone is considered imprisoned is because we all have a mind that is completely out of control.  Hinduism suggests that one cannot be considered a free person, unless they have control of their mind and senses. The mind lives within us and controls our thoughts, emotions and actions. We go to sleep with it every night and we wake up with it every morning. If we’re going to spend that much time with someone, doesn’t it make sense to develop a friendship with that individual?

The Bhagavad Gita says that the “mind can become one’s best friend or worst enemy.” Too often it’ll force us to act in ways that are detrimental to our physical, emotional, and spiritual health.

So, Hinduism implores us to make self-realization and God realization the primary goal of our human life. Meditation, prayer, and acts of devotion to God can purify the heart and mind of envy, greed, pride, and anger. Unless these tendencies are removed from our consciousness, there is very little possibility of character reform. It will take commitment and serious dedication to realize that we are not the body or mind and that we are actually servants and friends of the Divine. Spiritual freedom means to reestablish our relationship with the Divine which is the only true source of happiness.
__________________

Iowa Agency Wants $2000 For Prison Rape Records, The Marshall Project Refuses

Reprinted from Omaha.com, Wednesday, November 19, 2014

IOWA CITY (AP) — The leader of the Iowa Public Information Board is supporting a state agency’s decision to charge more than $2,000 for access to mandatory reports about sexual violence in Iowa’s prisons.

Board executive director Keith Luchtel has concluded that the charge by the Department of Corrections isn’t excessive and complies with the open records law. The board will review his opinion Thursday.

The Justice Imperative: Desired Outcomes

In our collective view, the four most significant goals or priorities to be pursued are straightforward and non-controversial:

1. Reduce Connecticut’s prison population, especially non-violent offenders who pose a low risk to public safety, in half within five years;
2. Reduce Connecticut’s recidivism rate by 30 percentage points or more within 5 years;
3. Close half of the State’s correctional facilities within 5 years; and
4. Reduce State spending on the prison system by half in five years, with two-thirds of the savings redirected to proven evidence-based drug and mental health treatments, educational and vocational training and post-release support and supervision programs.
   • RECOMMENDATIONS

Based on our review of the best practices in other states and countries, we have developed a set of thirty recommendations that will help realize the four desired outcomes. We have grouped our thirty recommendations into five categories: Legislative Changes; Executive Policies and Practices; Department of Correction Initiatives; Alternatives to Incarceration; and Improvement in the Re-entry Process.

See More: Please go to Chapter Twelve in “The Justice Imperative”

www.TheJusticeImperative.org

Re-posted from Equal Justice Initiative

Ricky Jackson walked out of jail in Cleveland, Ohio, today after spending 39 years on death row, making him the longest-held prisoner to be exonerated in the United States.

Ricky Jackson was just 18 years old when he and two others, Wiley and Ronnie Bridgeman, were convicted in the 1975 murder of Harold Franks after 12-year-old Eddie Vernon testified he saw the attack. All three men were sentenced to death. Mr. Jackson’s death sentence was vacated and the Bridgemans’ sentences were overturned when Ohio’s death penalty was found unconstitutional in 1978. Ronnie Bridgeman was released after serving more than 25 years in prison and is now seeking to clear his name; Wiley Bridgeman was freed today.

Prosecutors dropped the charges against Ricky Jackson after Eddie Vernon recanted and admitted that he did not witness the crime at all. Vernon said a friend had given him the men’s names, and after he told authorities the names and that he’d seen the killing, Cleveland police fed him information about the crime and what happened. Several people confirmed the boy was on a school bus nowhere near the crime scene at the time of the crime.

No other evidence linked the men to the murder. A gun and car seen at the crime scene were linked to a man who was arrested in 1978 for another murder, but he was never charged in Franks’ murder. In dropping the charges against Jackson, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty said, “The state is conceding the obvious.”

Ricky Jackson will be the 148th person exonerated from death row in the U.S. since 1973, the fifth in 2014, and the seventh in Ohio since 1973.

The fact that Mr. Jackson was sentenced to death despite his innocence adds to the growing body of evidence of unreliability and arbitrariness in death penalty cases.

• Reuters: Ohio Man Exonerated After 39 years in Prison, to be Released Friday

• The Plain Dealer: Ricky Jackson Leaves Prison: “The English language doesn’t have the words to express how I’m feeling right now.”

BY ALICE OLLSTEIN ThinkProgress.org

California Attorney General Kamala Harris told ThinkProgress Wednesday she is concerned her department created a perception that the state’s prisons have a goal of “indentured servitude.” Harris was responding to revelations that lawyers in her office argued in court without her knowledge that a program to parole more prisoners would drain the state’s source of cheap labor.

“The idea that we incarcerate people to have indentured servitude is one of the worst possible perceptions,” said Harris. “I feel very strongly about that. It evokes images of chain gangs. I take it very seriously and I’m looking into exactly what needs to be done to correct it.”

In a new chapter in California’s years-long battle over how and when to reduce the population of its unconstitutionally crowded prisons, lawyers in Harris’ division pushed back against a federal order to expand an early parole program, arguing that it would deplete their stock of prison labor, especially inmates who fight wildfires.

Harris told Buzzfeed she was “shocked” and “very troubled” to discover this, and told ThinkProgress on Wednesday that the argument was counterproductive. “It’s important for us to be constantly vigilant in developing and nurturing relationships of trust with communities that are policed and impacted by criminal justice policy,” she said.

Harris declined to answer whether the state is reevaluating the appropriateness of relying on prison labor for key public safety work like firefighting, but she called Wednesday for a broad re-examination of the policies that led to the US having a higher prison population than some countries.

“The war on drugs was a failure,” she said at a policy conference hosted by the Center for American Progress. “These so-called ‘tough on crime’ approaches have resulted in a nearly 800 percent rise in incarceration nationally. It’s just not smart to have those approaches. Instead of keeping them because of a blind adherence to tradition, we should ask, ‘What is the return on investment?’”

But Harris has not been as strong on drug policy reform as some of her constituents would like. She declined to join in other states’ efforts to remove marijuana from the DEA’s list of most-dangerous substances, and issued a somewhat mixed statement whenfederal agents raided compliant medical marijuana dispensaries in California.

With California voters possibly deciding the future of recreational marijuana in 2016, Harris is focusing her attention elsewhere — particularly on programs to reduce recidivism, as California has one of the highest rates in the nation with 70 percent of released prisoners returning in three years or less. “It’s a broken system. It has wasted taxpayer money. I feel strongly that we need reform,” she said, citing programs California is pursuing to support ex-offenders in finding work, housing and education.

Harris also said she hopes to prevent people from entering the prison system in the first place. “There’s no question there’s a school to prison pipeline,” she said. “We should have the goal of ending the pipeline, shutting it down. Let’s break it down to its discrete parts, and let’s take it on with gusto and make some progress. I’ve chosen to focus on elementary school truancy.

Harris also praised California voters for passing a ballot initiative to reclassify several non-violent offenses from felonies to misdemeanors, which is already allowing thousands of prisoners to reduce their sentences and, in some cases, be released early. Harris said the measure will save the state $150 to 200 million dollars a year, and promises the savings will go “directly to mental health, truancy, services for victims of crime.”

But the state’s massive prison system remains unconstitutionally overcrowded, and the current administration has blown off many deadlines set by courts to remedy the situation. Protests also continue over the state’s use of long term solitary confinement, the pepper spraying of inmates with mental illnesses, and unsanitary conditions that have led to the death of some prisoners.

The Pope and the Problem of Punishment, by Aaron Taylor

Reprinted from firstthings.com, Nov. 5, 2014

Pope Francis recently gave a speech to the International Association of Penal Law advocating for the improvement of prison conditions and reiterating pleas made by his predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI for an end to the death penalty.

Francis, however, went further than either of his predecessors by extending Catholic critiques of capital punishment to life sentences, which he condemned as the “death penalty in disguise.” His comments have reopened debates in Italy about life sentences (nearby countries such as Spain and Portugal have abolished them) and prompted Catholic bishops in the Philippines to denounce life sentencing as “inhuman.”

Those of us who lean conservatively where criminal justice is concerned would do well to take to heart the Pope’s critique of the “vengeful trend which permeates society” and reflect on how our attitudes toward convicts line up with the teaching of Scripture. “Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them,” the author of the Letter to the Hebrews exhorts us (Heb 13:3).

The Pope’s comments should provoke a searching examination of conscience in the United States, which incarcerates a larger proportion of its population than any other country in the world. A country in which 80,000 people languish (many unnecessarily) in the psychological hell of solitary confinement should listen to a Pope who brands as “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” the practice of placing prisoners in a situation where they “lack contact with other human beings.”

That said, it is difficult to see how opposition to life imprisonment in principle could be a legitimate development of Catholic teaching. The Catholic Church has long upheld the right of a society to remove serious offenders from the community. If an offense is serious enough to warrant permanent removal from the community, this can be done either through the deprivation of life (capital punishment) or liberty (life without parole). In a 1952 allocution, Pope Pius XII taught:

In the case of the death penalty the State does not dispose of the individual’s right to life. Rather public authority limits itself to depriving the offender of the good of life in expiation for his guilt, after he, through his crime, deprived himself of his own right to life.

As with all rights, there are limits to the right of societies to punish, and Pope Francis correctly highlights in his Address what is too often forgotten—that criminal punishment must take into account the dignity of the offender as well as his victims. John Paul II proposed a development of Catholic doctrine by teaching that “bloodless means” of punishment should be preferred to the death penalty wherever possible. In other words, the teaching of contemporary Popes has been that it is more in keeping with human dignity—a property shared by both criminals and their victims—to limit capital punishment to cases of “absolute necessity” (Evangelium Vitae, 56).

The problem is that John Paul II viewed the “necessity” of the death penalty purely in terms of its function of public defense. That is, the death penalty is only seen as necessary when physical incarceration is not viable, and therefore there is no other way of protecting the community against violent offenders who pose a threat to the safety of others. This is a “problem” because previous Popes like Pius XII clearly taught that capital punishment had not merely a defensive function but one of “expiation”—that is, the offender must suffer loss in order to redress the disorder caused by his crime. Expiatory punishment can even be morally redemptive for the offender if accepted willingly. Yet this function of punishment seems to have been quietly dropped in recent teaching.

In his Pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland, Pope Benedict XVI highlighted—among the causes of the sexual abuse crisis in the Irish Church—a loss of respect for the role that punishment plays in safeguarding the common good:

In particular, there was a well-intentioned but misguided tendency to avoid penal approaches to canonically irregular situations. It is in this overall context that we must try to understand the disturbing problem of child sexual abuse, which has contributed in no small measure to the weakening of faith and the loss of respect for the Church and her teachings.

Time and again, extremely serious sex crimes committed by clergy went unpunished. The prevailing attitude in the 1970s was that as long as clergy went through therapy programs that were believed to counteract the physical threat they might pose to the safety of children, expiatory punishment such as turning them over to civil authorities, removing them from the clerical state, or banishing them to monasteries, served no useful purpose.

One of the reasons that isolated cases of sex abuse eventually turned into full-blown national crises was that although ecclesiastical authorities did have some (largely inadequate) regard to the need to defend children from abuse, they had no regard for the need to punish those who perpetrated the abuse. For the 1970s generation, the entire concept of “punishment”—whether relating to the theology of the atonement, the concept of the Eucharist as a propitiatory Sacrifice, or to holding clergy accountable for violations of moral and canon law—was something to be consigned to the dustbin of history. Catholics should think very carefully before we ask the civil community to apply to itself a philosophy of punishment that has borne such bitter fruit within the Church.

Those of us who are Catholic should confidently trust that the Church will eventually untangle the Gordian knot into which Catholic teaching on the purposes of punishment seems to have become tied—and we should accept whatever teaching that process of untying reveals. But until that happens, it is difficult to see how further developments of doctrine can come from previous developments—in this case, opposition to life sentencing developing from Catholic teaching on the death penalty—that have not yet been adequately explained.

Aaron Taylor, a Ph.D. student in ethics at Boston College, holds degrees from the University of Oxford and from Heythrop College, University of London. This article has been updated to remove a reference to the case of Jerry Dewayne Williams.

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