History > 2006 > USA > Prisons (I)

Leonard Brown

hugs his mother, Elizabeth Brown,

on Friday as he leaves the Hillsborough County Courthouse Annex.

Michael Spooneybarger, Tampa Tribune

  Inmate free after serving 10 years extra        UT        7.4.2006
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-04-07-inmate-mistake_x.htm

Chain gang

Locking up increasing numbers of Americans
is not just about fighting crime,
but about boosting business, argues Paul Harris

Thursday May 25, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

The people in Ellsworth, Kansas are lucky: it has a prison. That statement may seem a little odd, but for the good people of Ellsworth the jail is a lifesaver. In a region of dying small towns increasingly populated by the aged, the prison is a reliable source of valuable jobs.

Ellsworth was recently part of a scheme offering free plots of land to city dwellers willing to give up the hassles of urban life for small town Kansas, and as I watched a Little League baseball game on a sunny day at the local high school, it struck me as a pretty good deal.

And it was the prison that made it possible. The jobs it provided meant Ellsworth was still viable. Ellsworth's Main Street did not have the boarded up windows that plagued other towns nearby. Its diner was busy with a lunch time crowd (and yes, everyone inside did know everyone else).

No one had a bad word to say about the prison.

That's great for Ellsworth. But there are issues here for American society as a whole that need exploring. This week new figures came out that showed more than 2.2 million Americans now live behind bars, the highest rate of incarceration in the world. It is also a figure that is growing. There are 50,000 more Americans in jail now than this time last year. Amazingly 62 percent of them have not even been convicted of a crime. They are just waiting trial in a system that is clogged. This should be seen as a national crisis. But it is not. In America this is increasingly seen as a business opportunity. And business is booming.

Over the past few decades the free market has entered America's prison system in an ever expanding way. This is an issue that gets little mainstream attention. Yet academics and criminologists are worried. They should be. The main operator of private prisons is a company called Corrections Corporation of America. It now runs the sixth largest prison system in the US, behind only the Federal Government and four states.

Yet, as any private company would be, it is highly concerned with costs and managing them efficiently in order to maximize profit. One obvious cost is staff and their wages. A recent study found the turnover rate of CCA staff was three times that of public prisons, surely an indicator of a less than happy workforce. Perhaps that explained the findings of another report, by criminologist James Austin, that found CCA prisons have a 65 percent higher rate of prisoner assaults on other prisoners.

Another facet of the privatisation of the prisons system has been that prison companies have reacted just like any other industry in America. They have hired lobbyists to aggressively pursue their business interests. As they can offer jobs and hope to parts of the country where there is little else, prisons can have enormous influence over politicians keen to keep their voters at home happy. That's great, some might think: jobs for the jobless.

But it really goes beyond that. This creeping privatisation raises fundamental moral and ethical questions. The main one being: does a private company really have any interest in there being less prisoners? When a prisoner equals profit, what incentive is there to have less of them around? Does this help explain why so many politicians think the answer to crime is locking up more people?

But at the moment there is little sign of it stopping. In Kansas, in fact, highly successful lobbying by the prisons industry is aiming to open the market with a privatisation law. In Oklahoma private firms are now set to be allowed to handle maximum security inmates for the first time. That marks another huge leap in their power and influence in the system. To Big Oil, Big Tobacco and Big Pharma do we really want to add Big Prison?

There is another way too that market forces have entered America's jail system: in the form of virtual slave labour. There is much outcry in America about outsourcing vital jobs to China and India, but what about outsourcing them to jails? I once visited the famous Angola jail in Lousiana and was stunned to see groups of convicts in the fields slaving under a hot sun for - literally - a few cents an hour. Prisoners in Utah fare a lot better. They earn 40 cents an hour. In Colorado it is tougher: their income is capped at 60 cents a day.

Now I am not complaining about prisoners' rights here. Getting inmates to work is a good thing and they should not get rich while doing it. I am complaining about what the companies are paying. Whatever the prisoner gets for his or her labour is irrelevant. What the company pays should be a market rate. Otherwise the impact on local wages outside the prison is disastrous.

It is simple market forces: the same ones that see firms flee to China. If a company can pay a worker virtually nothing it will. That is its nature. Whether the worker is a Cantonese peasant or an American convict. Either way the person who suffers is the ordinary American who would have liked to do that job for a decent wage to feed his (or her) family.

Americans should be aggrieved at this. But instead, fueled by politicians and media scare stories, the obsession is fighting crime with tougher sentences and more and more prisoners. It is a system that is groaning under its own weight as state and federal governments don't have the funds to keep it going. That gives yet more incentive to see private jails as a viable alternative. No one seems willing to stop the rot. In Alabama the prison system is grinding to a halt because it is so flooded with prisoners. From 5,500 people in jail in the state in 1980, there are now a shocking 28,000 inmates.

Recently Alabama state judge William Shashy was so appalled at the chaos and backlog that he threatened to prosecute state prison chief Richard Allen. Unless Allen cleared the backlog of inmates, Shashy warned, then Allen would ... yes, you guessed it. He would be sent to jail.

    Chain gang, G, 25.5.2006, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329488420-111336,00.html

Innocent Man Describes Decade of Life on the Run

May 23, 2006
The New York Times
By JIM DWYER

MARATHON, Fla., May 22 — Mistaken for a rapist and sentenced to 65 years, Orlando Bosquette lay on a bunk in a Florida penitentiary and read "Papillon," the memoir about an inmate's escape from Devil's Island. It was 1983. Mr. Bosquette was 29 years old. Two years later, he fled, scaling barbed-wire fences, bobbing in soupy canals, hiding in ant-ridden ditches.

He ran for a decade. "Ten years, six months," Mr. Bosquette said Monday from a Monroe County jail here in the Florida Keys, with more than a touch of pride.

In flight, he shed the identity of Orlando Bosquette, Cuban refugee.

He borrowed the names and Social Security numbers of the recently dead or long absent and moved in disguise, like a hermit crab scuttling across the world in abandoned shells. As Mateo Lopez and Eduardo Jerez and Antonio Orlando, Mr. Bosquette worked fields in the South, made Weber barbecue grills in Chicago, and cooked Cuban food in Union City, N.J. He danced in nightclubs in North Miami with beautiful women.

Time and again, Mr. Bosquette would find himself arrested: along with the names, he inherited the outstanding troubles of the people whose identities he had assumed. "Three or four times I did 20 days, 30 days for warrants on D.U.I., things like that," he said. "I cleared a lot of records."

In his wallet he carried sandpaper, he said, believing that rubbing it upon arrest would temporarily distort his fingerprints and mask a link to his true identity. Whatever the reason, jail authorities did not trace the man doing small time back to the convicted rapist Orlando Bosquette.

Then came his stint in 1995 as Hilberto Rodriguez, who, it turned out, owed six months for driving while intoxicated. Mr. Bosquette vanished from a prison work gang. On the street, however, someone tipped off the police. He was sent back to jail, first to finish a year for the Rodriguez drunken driving term, the escape and some other unfinished business on the Rodriguez account, then for 50 years as Orlando Bosquette, rapist.

In response, he fought to stake a claim on the identity that he had spent years hiding from. He asked that his own DNA be tested against the surviving evidence from the 1982 rape that had led to his ragged wanderings. Nina Morrison, a lawyer from the Innocence Project in New York, helped.

"Un ángel de Dios," said Mr. Bosquette, declaring in Spanish that Ms. Morrison was God's angel. "The state's attorney, he helped, too."

Mark E. Kohl, the chief prosecutor for the area that includes the Florida Keys, has moved to vacate Mr. Bosquette's rape conviction and spent days untangling the feints and evasions.

"You aren't supposed to bust out of prison, but because this guy was wrongly accused and convicted, everybody believes this is the right outcome," said Matthew Helmerich, a spokesman for Mr. Kohl. "We're delighted to be part of the exoneration and release. We expect him to walk free Tuesday."

That may not happen: late Monday, Mr. Bosquette's lawyers said they were told that immigration authorities were likely to take him into custody as soon as he is released from the jails of Florida. He faces possible deportation for some of the crimes he admitted to — falsely, he says, the expediency of a fugitive — while using other people's names.

    Innocent Man Describes Decade of Life on the Run, NYT, 23.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/23/us/23inmate.html

"Son of Sam" will appear in court

Mon May 22, 2006 6:14 PM ET
Reuters
By Jeanne King

NEW YORK (Reuters) - "Son of Sam" killer David Berkowitz, whose 1970s killing spree terrorized New York, will be briefly out of prison for the first time in nearly 30 years in July to appear in court, his lawyer said on Monday.

Berkowitz will give a deposition as part of a lawsuit he filed to stop his former lawyer, Hugo Harmatz, from profiting from a book written about Berkowitz.

Ironically, Berkowitz is suing Harmatz under a law named after himself, the Son of Sam law, which prevents convicts from profiting from their crimes through movie, television or book deals.

"My client will be in Manhattan Supreme Court on July 18," his new lawyer, Mark Jay Heller, told Reuters. Berkowitz afterward will return to prison.

Berkowitz, 52, now a born-again Christian with his own Web site, sued Harmatz in June 2005 to get back letters, photos and other items he had turned over to his former lawyer for safekeeping.

The suit said Harmatz intended to use them in a book titled "Dear David."

A lawyer for Harmatz could not be reached for comment.

Berkowitz also is seeking to have Harmatz turn over "all past, present and future" proceeds from his book to the State Crime Victims Board.

Under the Son of Sam law, money made from criminals' book or movie deals must be turned over to the Crime Victims Board and distributed to relatives of the victims.

"In essence, Berkowitz is supporting and championing the Son of Sam law," Heller said.

For over a year starting in 1976, Berkowitz killed six people and wounded seven others, most of them in parked cars. After his capture in August 1977, Berkowitz pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 365 years in prison.

While still at large, Berkowitz sent strange letters mentioning "Son of Sam" to newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin and others, whipping up a public frenzy that was depicted in the 1999 Spike Lee movie "Summer of Sam."

    "Son of Sam" will appear in court, R, 22.5.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-05-22T221443Z_01_N22404224_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-SAM.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsArt-L3-U.S.+NewsNews-3

Mountain States Imprisoning More Women

May 21, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:28 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- Oklahoma, Mississippi and the Mountain states have set the pace in increasing the imprisonment of women, while several Northeastern states are curtailing the practice, according to a new report detailing sharp regional differences in the handling of female offenders.

The report, to be released Sunday by the New York-based Women's Prison Association, is touted as the most comprehensive state-by-state breakdown of the huge increase in incarceration of women over the past 30 years.

Overall, the number of female state inmates serving sentences of more than a year grew by 757 percent between 1977 and 2004, nearly twice the 388 percent increase for men, the report said.

Though the surge occurred nationwide, it was most notable in the Mountain states, where the number of incarcerated women soared by 1,600 percent, the report said.

According to federal statistics cited in the report, Colorado had 72 female inmates in 1977 and 1,900 in 2004, while the comparable numbers increased from 28 to 647 in Idaho, from two to 473 in Montana, from 187 to 2,545 in Arizona and from 30 to 502 in Utah.

Idaho, Wyoming and Montana were among six states, along with Oklahoma, North Dakota and Hawaii, where women comprised more than 10 percent of the prison population in 2004 -- compared to the national average of 7 percent. In Rhode Island, by contrast, only 3.2 percent of the inmates were women.

Oklahoma had the highest per capita imprisonment rate for women -- 129 behind bars for every 100,000 women in its population. Mississippi was second with a rate of 107. Women in those states were roughly 10 times more likely to be imprisoned than women in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, which shared the lowest rate of 11.

Nationwide, there were 1.42 million inmates in state and federal prisons at the end of 2004, including 96,125 women -- up from 11,212 in 1977.

Though the overall surge of women behind bars has continued in recent years, it has tapered off in the Northeast, the report said. From 1999 to 2004, it said, the number of female inmates dropped by 23 percent in New York and 21 percent in New Jersey -- part of broader reductions that also cut the number of male inmates.

The report concurred with previous analyses attributing much of the nationwide increase in women's imprisonment to the war on drugs. The proportion of women serving time for drug offenses has risen sharply in recent years, while the proportion convicted of serious violent crimes has dropped, it said.

Bob Anez, a Corrections Department spokesman in Montana, confirmed that drug offenses -- especially related to methamphetamine -- were a major factor in the high proportion of female inmates in the state. Half the women imprisoned from January through March had committed meth-related offenses, he said.

Jerry Massie of Oklahoma's Corrections Department also said rising drug convictions were a factor in the high number of imprisoned women, but he noted that Oklahoma has one of the highest incarceration rates for men as well as for women.

Ann Jacobs, executive director of the Women's Prison Association, said states with high rates of women behind bars should look closely at alternative sentencing, particularly mandatory treatment as an option for drug offenders.

''It's startling to think that Oklahoma incarcerates 129 of every 100,000 women, while other states can provide public safety by incarcerating 11 of every 100,000,'' she said. ''Women in Oklahoma can't possibly be 10 times worse.''

K.C. Moon, executive director of the Oklahoma Criminal Justice Resource Center, said the state's high incarceration rate is linked to the types of crimes that are felonies -- including simple drug possession and relatively minor thefts.

''Those are two types of crimes that are typically committed by women,'' Moon said. ''In Oklahoma, we choose to make lower-level crimes felonies, therefore we stand out like a sore thumb.''

The Women's Prison Association and like-minded groups focus attention on female inmates in part because they are more likely than men to be primary caretakers of children, and their incarceration can place severe strains on families.

The report urged an expansion of research to identify factors that have contributed to the increase of female inmates and to develop policies which help at-risk women lead law-abiding, self-sufficient lives. Jacobs said the reduction of female inmates now occurring in some Northeast states would be worth celebrating only if coupled with investment in social programs that could reduce recidivism.

Associated Press writer Sean Murphy in Oklahoma City contributed to this report.

------

On the Net:

Women's Prison Association: http://www.wpaonline.org

    Mountain States Imprisoning More Women, NYT, 21.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Women-Prisoners.html

Lawyers Elsewhere Take Note as a New York Man Is Freed by DNA Tests

May 17, 2006
The New York Times
By JIM DWYER and DAVID STABA

Freed after serving 10 years for a murder he confessed to but did not commit, Douglas A. Warney rolled out of a courthouse in Rochester yesterday morning in his wheelchair, celebrating the DNA tests that led the authorities to another suspect and condemning the tortuous legal process that had kept him behind bars.

"I'm angry that I was put in a position that I could have been executed for a crime that I didn't commit," said Mr. Warney, 44, who initially was charged with first-degree murder, which carried a possible death sentence.

Mr. Warney's release — after bitter fights over the validity of his confession, his right to DNA testing and an abrupt reversal by the Monroe County district attorney — struck a powerful note nearly 800 miles away at a prison in Nashville.

There, another man who had confessed to murder, Sedley Alley, was granted a two week stay of execution by Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee so he could return to court to make new arguments for DNA testing that prosecutors have opposed and courts have not permitted.

Mr. Alley was scheduled to be executed at 1 a.m. today, but the state Board of Probation and Parole voted 4 to 3 to recommend that Governor Bredesen delay the execution to permit new tests. In presenting their plea to the board, Mr. Alley's lawyers said that the case of Mr. Warney in New York offered instructive parallels.

"The Warney case is so eerily similar to ours that it's scary," said Kelley J. Henry, an assistant federal defender in Nashville who is one of Mr. Alley's lawyers.

In both cases, the men were said by prosecutors to have made convincing admissions of guilt, offering details that only the killers would have known. Defense lawyers said that the confessions also contained striking inconsistencies with important facts. In neither case were DNA tests conducted, and the prosecutions rested almost entirely on the disputed confessions.

Prosecutors say that Mr. Alley admitted to killing and raping a 19-year-old marine, Suzanne Collins, in 1985. Evidence collected from and near her body has never been tested, and prosecutors say that Mr. Alley, who entered an insanity defense at his trial in 1987, first claimed he was innocent in 2004.

The state has opposed DNA tests, saying he forfeited any right to them by waiting so long to ask. Mr. Alley and his lawyers have been unable to persuade state or federal courts that he is entitled to them.

Governor Bredesen, whose wife, Andrea Conte, is a founder of a crime victims' group that supports the execution, said that he believed Mr. Alley was guilty and that he was acting "reluctantly" in delaying the execution.

In upstate New York, Mr. Warney was released shortly after noon yesterday, accompanied by members of his family and his lawyers. Based entirely on a two-page statement that he signed after being questioned by police, Mr. Warney was arrested and charged with stabbing William Beason to death on New Year's Day, 1996.

Soon after he was taken into custody, investigators learned that blood found at the crime scene had come from someone other than the victim or Mr. Warney. Defense lawyers said that it was the blood of the killer, and excluded Mr. Warney; prosecutors said that while he might have had an accomplice, he knew secret details of the crime. He was convicted and sentenced to a minimum of 25 years.

When Mr. Warney sought DNA testing two years ago, prosecutors opposed it, persuading a judge that the tests would not prove anything the jury did not already know.

Despite winning that argument, the prosecutors then conducted the testing, without telling Mr. Warney's lawyers. The results linked the blood to a man serving time in prison for a series of violent attacks with knives, including one murder. One of the man's fingerprints also was found in the victim's home.

That man, Eldred Johnson Jr., was interviewed in prison last week and told investigators that he had acted alone in killing Mr. Beason and that he did not know Mr. Warney, said the Monroe County district attorney, Michael C. Green.

Asked yesterday why he had refused to permit the DNA tests when Mr. Warney sought them, Mr. Green said, "I felt they legally weren't entitled to the relief they were seeking."

In February 2005, Mr. Green's office lost a case involving similar DNA issues in the Court of Appeals, the state's highest court. A few days after that decision, Mr. Green wrote a letter that began the process of testing the DNA in Mr. Warney's case.

Mr. Green said that ruling "had nothing whatsoever to do" with his decision to order the DNA testing. He did it, he said, because after rereading files from the Warney case he realized that blood at the scene might have come from someone who took part in the murder but was still at large.

"I called everyone together and said we have to go into this with a blank slate," Mr. Green said. "If it leads to evidence that shows Warney was properly convicted, great. If it shows us that he didn't do it, so be it."

One of Mr. Warney's lawyers, Peter J. Neufeld of the Innocence Project in New York, said that a special prosecutor should be appointed to investigate how Mr. Warney learned nonpublic facts about a crime that he was not involved in, arguing that the police must have fed details to Mr. Warney.

Mr. Green said Mr. Warney could have gotten information from newspaper articles, from visits to the victim's home, and from the detectives. "He could have gleaned information from the questions the police asked him," Mr. Green said. "We'll never know."

The interrogation of Mr. Warney was not recorded, a measure urged by some legal scholars as a way to resolve questions about the reliability of a confession. Mr. Green was ambivalent. "I don't have any real objection to taping," he said. "The one concern is that, is taping going to inhibit people from talking to the police?"

Jim Dwyer is one of the authors of a book, "Actual Innocence" (Doubleday, 2000), with Barry Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld. Mr. Neufeld is one of the lawyers representing Douglas A. Warney, and Mr. Scheck is representing Sedley Alley. Mr. Dwyer reported from New York for this article and David Staba from Rochester.

    Lawyers Elsewhere Take Note as a New York Man Is Freed by DNA Tests, NYT, 17.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/nyregion/17dna.html

Guard released unharmed in prison standoff

Updated 5/7/2006 1:13 AM ET
USA Today

SACRAMENTO (AP) — A female correctional officer was released unharmed Saturday evening after a 10-hour hostage standoff that prompted a lockdown at a state prison, authorities said.

Michael David Watson, 41, released the hostage, Sheila Mitchell, 45, without incident shortly after 5 p.m., according to California State Prison, Sacramento spokeswoman Lt. Joyce McClendon.

Mitchell was supervising a prison work crew cleaning up the dining room after breakfast when Watson, armed with a six-inch metal knife made in the prison, grabbed her and pulled her into a nearby office, said Capt. Fred Schroeder of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. It was unclear how many inmates were in the dining room at the time.

The prison was secured and placed on full lockdown, as officials negotiated over the phone with Watson, a maximum-security inmate. Watson had demanded to be moved to another prison and to have his property inventoried, Schroeder told the Sacramento Bee.

Neither Watson nor Mitchell, a correctional officer for nine years, were injured. Mitchell was sent to an outside hospital for evaluation.

The prison remained on lockdown Saturday night as officials continued their investigation, McClendon said.

Watson was serving a 26-year sentence for robbery and false imprisonment after being convicted in San Diego County. He had been scheduled to be released from prison in August 2012.

It was the fifth hostage-taking at state prisons since 1995, and all have ended safely, according to the Corrections Department.

    Guard released unharmed in prison standoff, UT, 7.5.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-05-06-californiaprison_x.htm

Autopsy Ties Boy's Death to Boot Camp

May 6, 2006
The New York Times
By CHRISTINE JORDAN SEXTON

Martin Lee Anderson, a 14-year-old boy who died in January a day after entering a boot camp in northwest Florida, died from suffocation and not sickle cell trait, a new autopsy released yesterday concluded.

The initial medical examiner in Bay County contended that the boy had died from the rare condition of sickle cell trait despite a video that showed guards at the boot camp beating him. But State Attorney Mark Ober, who was appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush to investigate Martin's death, ordered a new autopsy.

Mr. Ober released the autopsy results, but did not make any arrests yesterday and said in a statement that he had no "timeline" for completing the investigation.

At a press conference in Tallahassee the boy's parents, Gina Jones and Robert Anderson, and their lawyer, Ben Crump, thanked Governor Bush, Mr. Ober and the Hillsborough County medical examiner, Vernard I. Adams, a medical doctor who conducted the second autopsy.

"The truth is out," Ms. Jones said. "We all knew how Martin passed away so I am relieved and happy today. It's a beginning. Justice needs to be served."

Dr. Adams concluded that the beating on Jan. 5 by boot camp guards left bruises but did not directly cause Martin's death. Guards punched and choked the boy after he said he was unable to finish running laps. The beating was captured on tape.

"Martin Anderson's death was caused by suffocation due to actions of the guards at the boot camp," Dr. Adams said in a release.

He added, "The suffocation was caused by manual occlusion of the mouth, in concert with the forced inhalation of ammonia fumes that cause spasms of the vocal cords, resulting in internal blockage of the upper airway."

Dr. Adams consulted with several pathologists as well as a pediatric critical-care specialist and a pediatric hematologist. He also asked NASA to improve the quality of the videotape, and it reduced glare and inserted a digital clock.

While the parents were satisfied with the release of the second autopsy, members of the Florida Black Legislative Caucus expressed anger that no arrests had been made.

"If the guards caused his death, then they need to be arrested immediately," said State Senator Frederica A. Wilson, a Democrat from Miami, who added, "We can't accept that."

The death has sparked protests and was partly to blame for the sudden resignation of one of Florida's top law-enforcement officials. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement executive director, Guy Tunnell, resigned after the discovery that he had sent e-mail messages to the Bay County sheriff discussing the continuing investigation into the death. After the discovery, Mr. Ober removed Mr. Tunnell's agency from any role in the investigation.

Governor Bush appointed Mr. Ober after criticism of the initial autopsy done by the Bay County medical examiner, Dr. Charles Siebert. It concluded that Martin died from complications of sickle cell trait.

Dr. Siebert said yesterday that he stood by the findings of his autopsy.

"I am still sticking to my findings at this point, since I don't have any proof of his findings, said Dr. Siebert, who added that he had ruled out suffocation as a cause of the boy's death based on hospital reports that, Dr. Siebert said, indicated that the amount of carbon dioxide in the blood were low.

Dr. Siebert said that there was an "automatic" assumption that Dr. Adams's results were correct and that "is very premature at this point." He also said he expected the Florida Medical Examiners Commission to assemble a probable-cause panel to review if there was any wrongdoing and whether his licenses should be revoked.

"I don't see a way of avoiding it," Dr. Siebert said.

Mr. Bush said in a release that he considered the actions of the Bay County boot camp guards "deplorable" and that he was committed to providing any resources Mr. Ober might need to complete the investigation "as quickly as possible."

    Autopsy Ties Boy's Death to Boot Camp, NYT, 6.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/06/us/06bootcamp.html

    Related > http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/bootcamp-statement.pdf

2nd autopsy finds boy roughed up at boot camp died of suffocation by guards

Updated 5/5/2006 9:18 PM ET
USA Today

TAMPA (AP) — A 14-year-old boy kicked and punched by guards at a juvenile boot camp died because the sheriff's officials suffocated him, a medical examiner said Friday, contradicting a colleague who blamed the death on a usually benign blood disorder.

"Martin Anderson's death was caused by suffocation due to actions of the guards at the boot camp," said Dr. Vernard Adams, who conducted the second autopsy.

Adams said the suffocation was caused by hands blocking the boy's mouth, as well as the "forced inhalation of ammonia fumes" that caused his vocal cords to spasm, blocking his upper airway. The guards had said in an incident report that they used ammonia capsules to keep Anderson conscious.

The autopsy report draws no conclusions about whether Anderson's death was a homicide or an accident.

Anderson had been sent to the boot camp for violating probation by trespassing at a school after he and his cousins were charged with stealing their grandmother's car from a church parking lot.

He collapsed while doing push-ups, sit-ups, running laps and other exercises that were part of his admission process at the camp. The sheriff's office said force was used on Anderson because he was uncooperative.

Martin Lee Anderson's body was exhumed after a camp surveillance videotape surfaced showing the guards roughing him up Jan. 5, a day before he died. His family had questioned the initial finding by Dr. Charles Siebert, the Bay County Medical Examiner, that the boy died of complications of sickle cell trait.

Anderson's parents, Gina Jones and Robert Anderson, said the new autopsy findings vindicated their campaign for a thorough investigation of the boy's death.

"All you do bad, the goodwill come out. And so the truth is out now," Jones said.

No one has been arrested in connection with the death, which sparked protests at the state Capitol, forced lawmakers to scrap the military-style camps and led to the resignation of the state's top law enforcement officer.

"I am disturbed by Dr. Adams' findings and consider the actions of the Bay County boot camp guards deplorable," said Gov. Jeb Bush, who ordered the investigation that led to the second autopsy.

Marc Tochterman, a spokesman for the Bay County Sheriff's Office, which operated the boot camp, said the agency had no immediate comment.

Siebert said Friday that he stands by his findings. If Anderson had suffocated, he said, there would have been higher levels of carbon dioxide in the boy's body.

"I came to my conclusion by valid means," Siebert said. "I've seen no explanation as to how (Adams) came to his conclusion."

State Attorney General Charlie Crist said Friday that Siebert "should probably be suspended pending further review." He said there will "probably will be arrests."

Waylon Graham, attorney for sheriff's Lt. Charles Helms, who was second in command of the boot camp and present in the exercise yard that day, said the investigation has turned into a "witch hunt." He said Helms doesn't believe that the guards caused Anderson's death.

    2nd autopsy finds boy roughed up at boot camp died of suffocation by guards, UT, 5.5.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-05-05-bootcampdeath_x.htm

Death at Florida Boot Camp Draws Thousands of Protesters

April 21, 2006
The New York Times
By LIZ BABIARZ, New York Times Regional Newspapers

TALLAHASSEE, April 21 — The death of a teenager at a Florida boot camp for young offenders last January drew hundreds of protesters to the state capital today, where they called on state officials to finish an investigation and charge those responsible.

The teenager, Martin Lee Anderson, died Jan. 6 after guards at a Panama City juvenile boot camp repeatedly kicked, kneed and choked him, in an incident caught by a security camera. No arrests have been made and no guards have been fired.

Wearing t-shirts comparing the 14-year-old to Emmett Till, students from Tallahassee's three colleges joined a march led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton. The march followed a two-day sit-in at the office of Gov. Jeb Bush.

Mr. Jackson and Mr. Sharpton used the event to bring attention to other racially charged deaths across the United States and the need for blacks to be more vigilant in political matters.

"Today, we thank Martin," Mr. Jackson said. "His death made us come alive. When you stand up and fight back, you change the world."

Alongside the speakers were Anderson's parents, Gina Jones and Robert Anderson. The family and protestors have accused the authorities of trying to cover up the death.

Even though the videotape recorded the beating of the of Martin, the Bay County medical examiner ruled that he died of natural causes, complications of sickle cell trait, which is a typically benign blood disorder. The ruling outraged many blacks in Florida , who called on Governor Bush to order a second autopsy.

The family says the results of the second autopsy need to be released and charges should be filed.

"It shouldn't be taking this long," said Benjamin Crump, the family's attorney. "There is a cloud of suspicion over everything." The family also wants action taken against the medical examiner, Charles Siebert, and Guy Tunnell, who resigned Thursday as commissioner of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement amid criticism of his handling of the case and recent comments he made about it. At one point he exchanged sympathetic e-mails with the Bay County sheriff, who ran the camp.

And more recently, at a meeting with agency heads at the Capitol, he compared the scheduled speakers at today's rally to Osama bin Laden and Jesse James

Mr. Sharpton said Mr. Tunnell's resignation doesn't take the place of prosecution. "Those roaches can start running, but we're going to keep marching until justice comes in this case," he said.

The protest began just before 9 a.m. Friday, as the crowd, estimated at about 1,500, moved from the Leon County Civic Center parking lot toward the Capitol.

"They're getting away with the murder of a child," said Charlene Howard-Gammage, president of the Florida State University chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. "Nobody is doing anything. They're just writing it off as another death."

Governor Bush, who met with Mr. Sharpton and Mr. Jackson after the rally, expressed sympathy for the family's frustrations and the protestors' demands. "If you talk to the mom and she says, 'Look, it's been 105 days since the death of my son, why can't this be done quicker?' I share her frustrations," said Mr. Bush, who met with the Anderson family Thursday. "But I also know this investigation has to be done as thoroughly as possible for the best possible end result."

Joe Follick contributed reporting from Tallahassee for this article. Liz Babiarz is a reporter with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

    Death at Florida Boot Camp Draws Thousands of Protesters, NYT, 22.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/21/us/21cnd-florida.html

Inmate free after serving 10 years extra

Updated 4/7/2006 3:32 PM
USA Today

TAMPA (AP) — A man who spent 10 years too many behind bars because of a judge's sentencing error walked free Friday into the arms of his family.
Leonard Brown, 47, spent more than half his life behind bars after a judge wrongly sentenced him to 99 years on a robbery conviction that should have brought him a 15-year term instead.

A fellow inmate who once worked for a law firm discovered the error in Brown's file last year and helped him get it into court.

"I thank God for setting me free," Brown told reporters. "I thank my family for sticking by me all these years, especially my mom."

Brown was involved in two robberies in 1981 and — even though another man wielded the gun — was charged with armed robbery, attempted murder, attempted robbery and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon.

Prosecutors later acknowledged Brown wasn't carrying a gun, and in a plea deal the charges were reduced to indicate that he was unarmed.

He was sentenced to a year in the county jail followed by 10 years probation. But within weeks of his release, he was charged with violating his probation by writing a check on a closed account.

Brown found himself in back in court and facing Circuit Judge Harry Lee Coe III.

Coe, known for dishing out tough sentences, gave Brown 30 years in prison for attempted murder, 15 years for aggravated battery, five years for attempted robbery — and 99 years for armed robbery.

The problem was Brown pleaded to robbery — not armed robbery — which made the 99-year sentence illegal.

Prosecutors said that with good behavior and other considerations, Brown should have been released years ago. His attorney, Darryl Rouson, said Department of Corrections records indicate the other sentences ended in 1996.

Outside court, Brown grinned and said, "Thank you, sir," when Circuit Judge Daniel H. Sleet granted his motion to correct the sentence. He walked out into the arms of his mother, Elizabeth, and other family members.

Elizabeth Brown, 73, had driven all over the state visiting her son almost weekly while he was in prison.

"This is the most wonderful feeling I think a mother could have," she said.

Coe was later elected state attorney. He committed suicide in 2000 amid a governor-ordered investigation of his personal finances and his handling of public records.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Inmate free after serving 10 years extra, UT, 7.4.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-04-07-inmate-mistake_x.htm

From Jail Cell, a Convict Challenges a Prosecutor

March 16, 2006
The New York Times
By MICHAEL BRICK

A decade ago, the paths of a prosecutor and a young drug abuser crossed in a murder conviction. It was an ordinary verdict at an extraordinary time, a redeeming victory for the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes.

The prosecutor, Michael F. Vecchione, who traveled to Puerto Rico with an assistant to meet a witness in the case, built a reputation as a formidable investigator. He later rose to first deputy, then took the title of chief of investigations.

The drug abuser, Jabbar Collins, built a reputation as a jailhouse lawyer while serving his murder sentence at the Green Haven Correctional Facility. He compelled prosecutors across the state to disclose documents for inmates, and a federal judge praised him for "a very good job of arguing."

Yesterday, their paths crossed again.

A lawyer for Mr. Collins filed documents accusing Mr. Vecchione of misconduct in the murder case, alleging that he failed to disclose evidence and misled jurors about deals with witnesses. Hundreds of pages of supporting materials include secret notes by Legal Aid lawyers, Department of Correctional Services records, 911 tapes and new statements by central witnesses.

In a decade-long investigation from prison, Mr. Collins gathered evidence through litigation and freedom of information laws, according to papers filed by his lawyer, Joel B. Rudin. Some of the evidence, including a recorded statement, is of dubious legal value: it was obtained in clear violation of prison rules and state wiretapping laws. But in a sworn statement seeking to vacate the murder conviction, Mr. Rudin said the evidence "firmly documented gross misconduct at the highest levels of the D.A.'s office."Mr. Vecchione did not return a call seeking comment. Jerry Schmetterer, chief spokesman for Mr. Hynes, said: "We haven't seen these papers yet, and without seeing them, we can't comment."

The case harks back to the foundations of Mr. Hynes's power as a crusading prosecutor, and comes just as he positions a continuing inquiry into judicial corruption — in which the Kings County Democratic leader, Clarence Norman Jr., has been convicted twice — as his crowning legacy. Mr. Vecchione is leading that inquiry.

Soon after Mr. Hynes won election on the strength of his work on the 1986 Howard Beach racial attack, another racially charged case crossed his desk. A Hasidic man killed a black child with a car, then a 29-year-old rabbinical student was attacked and killed in Crown Heights in 1991. When the man who stabbed the student was acquitted, a state report blamed Mr. Hynes. Federal prosecutors took over the case.

Seven months after the report, Mr. Hynes was confronted with the killing of another Orthodox Jew, Abraham Pollack, a landlord and father of nine, who was shot to death as he made the rounds at a building he owned in Williamsburg.

Mr. Collins surrendered in the killing, and Mr. Hynes assigned Mr. Vecchione, a deputy district attorney, to the case.

On April 3, 1995, Mr. Collins was sentenced to at least 33 years. The victim's wife described raising fatherless children aged 6 months to 12 years. Prosecutors told reporters that potential witnesses had received death threats. Mr. Collins's appeals were denied in 1999.

For the most part, the case was done, though it was briefly mentioned again in 2001, when Newsday published an article detailing Mr. Vecchione's romantic ties to his assistants. Mr. Vecchione confirmed that he had traveled to Puerto Rico with an assistant named Stacey Frascogna, with whom he later had an affair. In passing, the newspaper noted that Mr. Vecchione said his intent had been to subpoena a witness in the Collins case, but that Ms. Frascogna had "proved so 'charming,' the witness voluntarily returned to testify against Collins." That part seemed insignificant — cute, if anything — at the time.

Meanwhile, Mr. Collins began researching testimony by central witnesses in his case, according to court documents. One witness, Adrian Diaz, had returned from Puerto Rico with Mr. Vecchione. In court, Mr. Vecchione had said Mr. Diaz had been promised nothing beyond airfare.

From his cell, Mr. Collins found the witness working at a car rental company in Massachusetts. Posing as a prosecutor reassembling records destroyed in the 2001 terrorist attacks, Mr. Collins recorded a telephone interview with Mr. Diaz. On the tape, Mr. Diaz indicated that the district attorney's office had eradicated a probation violation to secure his testimony. Though the recording undermines Mr. Vecchione's representations (and, for court aficionados, explains his cryptic comments to Newsday), its legal legitimacy is questionable. Mr. Collins lied about his identity and had no permission to record the call.

Other evidence was secured through proper channels. Through freedom of information requests, Mr. Collins obtained recordings of 911 calls discussed at trial but not disclosed to defense lawyers. Another prosecution witness, Edwin Oliva, allowed the Legal Aid Society to give Mr. Collins notes showing that he had testified in exchange for leniency in a robbery case. That evidence contradicts closing statements in the murder case, where Mr. Vecchione called claims of a deal "absurd" and "laughable."

The court documents include evidence linking two other men to the crime. Mr. Rudin, the lawyer for Mr. Collins, asked for a new trial outside Brooklyn, noting the broad judicial corruption investigation led by the district attorney's office.

"The pressure on any judge to curry favor with Mr. Vecchione or with Mr. Hynes's office, or at least the appearance of such," Mr. Rudin wrote, "would be enormous in this case, above all others."

    From Jail Cell, a Convict Challenges a Prosecutor, NYT, 16.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/nyregion/16suit.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Brooklyn Detention Center Plan Would Make It a Jail With Retail

March 10, 2006
The New York Times
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER

By almost any measure, the Brooklyn House of Detention, 10 stories of razor wire and wire-mesh windows in Boerum Hill, is a repellent sight.

But, the city reasons, it need not be so. So, to attract people other than criminal suspects to the 760-bed jail, the Correction Department has decided to convert part of the complex into 24,000 square feet of retail shopping space.

"The site is going to be redeveloped," Martin F. Horn, the correction commissioner, said in an interview this week. "One way or another, retail is going to be there."

Under Mr. Horn's jail-with-retail plan, three sides of the block that the jail now occupies, along Atlantic Avenue between Smith Street and Boerum Place, would be converted to one-story retail space beginning this summer. The jail entrance, now on Atlantic, would be moved to the fourth side of the block, along State Street.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Mr. Horn said, "enthusiastically" supports the redevelopment plan, part of a $240 million reconception of the jail that will most likely also add more cell space. Mr. Horn declined to say exactly how many more inmates a bigger Brooklyn jail would hold.

A spokeswoman for the mayor referred questions about the plan last night to the Correction Department.

Which retailers would be asked, or be willing, to open a shop on jail property remains to be seen, several city and local elected officials said. But Mr. Horn and several elected officials in Brooklyn, including Marty Markowitz, the borough president, and David Yassky, a city councilman from Brooklyn Heights, floated a few ideas this week.

An upscale food market, Mr. Horn suggested; a children's clothing store, Mr. Yassky offered; law offices, Mr. Markowitz mentioned.

Mr. Markowitz, who is known to gush about how great Brooklyn is, said that even a boutique hotel on jail grounds would be nice — but only if the city razed the existing structure and rebuilt it from scratch.

"If it's designed in such a way that the guests feel totally comfortable," he said yesterday, "why not?"

Mr. Markowitz added that although he would prefer to see the jail closed permanently, if it is to be open it should also have retail and, preferably, residential space.

"Let's make it something that we never would have dreamed about," he said.

Retail experts said a deluxe supermarket would do well in the neighborhood, a nexus of Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill and Downtown Brooklyn.

"Food would be a very important component there," said Howard Davidowitz, chairman of Davidowitz & Associates, a retail consulting and investment banking firm based in New York. "Coffee would be critical. From there, you might go to something jeans-oriented, or footwear."

And, of course, Mr. Davidowitz added, "a home store."

"Even a mini Home Depot," he said. "It would be perfect."

The idea of making the House of Detention more than just a lockup was generated months ago by neighborhood groups. Meeting with Mr. Horn in Mr. Markowitz's Borough Hall offices, members of three groups that wanted the jail closed — and it will not be, Mr. Horn has said — said that if it must remain open, perhaps it could accommodate shopping or residential space.

Mr. Horn said he took the idea to the mayor and City Council leaders. By summer, he said, he plans to send out requests for redevelopment proposals; shops under the jail could be open in three years. Meanwhile, Mr. Markowitz's office asked students at the Pratt Institute to draw up a few ambitious designs.

But to some groups, one floor of retail space, comprising just 24,000 square feet, is not enough to veil the architectural grimace they say the jail casts over the neighborhood.

"This is kind of less than what we were expecting," said Judy Stanton, the president of the Brooklyn Heights Association. "We're definitely in favor of retail. It's just disappointing that we spent so many meetings and involved two classes of Pratt students to come up with mixed-use ideas, when the only thing that may come from it is ground-floor retail."

Other neighbors said they worried about shopping under a jail tower packed with criminal suspects. Correction officials, however, said the retail area would be securely separated from the inmate section of the jail. Inmates are not evident to the public; they arrive at the jail in buses that enter the bowels of the complex through a gate.

City officials noted that in New York, jail space is already mixed with retail shops. Along Centre Street, under the Bernard B. Kerik Center, the jail complex in Lower Manhattan, restaurants and other businesses do a brisk business.

The Brooklyn jail was closed in June 2003; most inmates are now housed on Rikers Island, which is connected to Queens via one two-lane bridge. But the Brooklyn House will reopen next year, if not sooner, Mr. Horn said, when the floating barge jail in the Bronx is closed for repairs.

Keeping the Brooklyn jail open makes sense for other reasons, too, Mr. Horn said. "For a lot of reasons, it's not good policy for the city to put all its inmates, including women and babies, on Rikers Island," he said. For instance, in the event of a major hurricane, he said, much of Rikers Island would flood.

"How would I evacuate 12,000 over that one bridge?" Mr. Horn asked.

    Brooklyn Detention Center Plan Would Make It a Jail With Retail, NYT, 10.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/10/nyregion/10jail.html

City Inmate Population Up; Brooklyn Jail May Reopen

March 3, 2006
The New York Times
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER

The number of inmates in New York City jails has been rising faster than correction officials had anticipated, by 9 percent since Jan. 1, leaving the jails at close to their current capacity.

It is not clear why it it is happening, but if the trend continues, the City Correction Department will need to reopen the Brooklyn House of Detention, department officials said. That jail, closed since June 2003, could accept inmates again as early as this summer.

Yesterday, the inmate census at the 10 city jails was 13,793, compared with 12,754 on Jan. 1. But the count on Monday, typically the day when jail population peaks, was 14,002, the high mark for the year. The 10 jails currently open can hold up to 15,000 people, correction officials said.

The average daily jail population was highest in 1992, at 21,448 inmates. Sending inmates back to the Brooklyn House of Detention, a grim 10-story tower on Atlantic Avenue between Brooklyn Heights and Boerum Hill, would relieve the strain that the large number of inmates has placed on correctional and health care workers at Rikers Island. But it would be a defeat to some neighborhood groups and homeowners in Brooklyn, who have spent years trying to persuade city officials to have the jail turned into a residential development.

Because the city jail population ebbs and flows rather predictably from one month to the next, year after year, any decision to reopen the Brooklyn jail would depend largely on what day of which month the city's jail census reaches 14,700, said the correction commissioner, Martin F. Horn. He called that figure "the tipping point."

Next Monday's count could be even larger than this week's, depending on factors like arrest rates and the weather. But Mr. Horn said an influx of another 700 to 1,000 inmates could happen "in a blink of the eye."

"If it precipitously jumps and tomorrow I'm looking at 14,700 and it could jump by another 700 in a month," he said in an interview on Wednesday, "then I'm going to start making contingency plans."

If, however, a sudden increase in jail inmates occurs later this month, the department might resist opening the Brooklyn jail, Mr. Horn said, knowing that the inmate population typically declines steadily in April, May and June.

If the jail count reaches 14,700 in June, , he said, "that would be a big problem," he said.

"I would say June is the tipping point," Mr. Horn said, "because June through September it's going to continue to grow."

Once the decision is made to reopen the 760-bed Brooklyn jail, cleaning crews would need several weeks to remove debris left from a renovation — of the jail clinic, visitor center and administrative office — that has cost $50 million over the past 12 years, Mr. Horn said.

Jail officials said they did not know precisely why there were more jail inmates now, but they suspected it was partly because of the unusually warm winter, which drew more residents outside and into trouble that led to arrests. Delays in the state and city criminal courts may also be leaving more people in jail, unable to post bail while awaiting a preliminary hearing.

But the most powerful influence on the city's jail population, correction experts said, is the New York Police Department, whose arrest rates and anticrime initiatives directly affect how many people end up behind bars.

A spokesman for the Police Department, Inspector Michael Coan, said officers made 59,191 arrests this year through Feb. 26, compared with 57,263 in the same period last year, a 3 percent increase.

Whatever the cause, a 1,000-person increase in jail population in two months is unusual, jail experts said.

"That's a pretty big bump," Michael Jacobson, a former city correction commissioner who is now director of the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit policy research organization based in Manhattan. "I would think that it has to do with more than just the weather."

The growing jail population is already causing logistical and bureaucratic problems on Rikers Island, including unacceptably long waits to process newly arriving inmates, Mr. Horn told members of the city's Board of Correction at a public meeting last month.

Some neighborhood groups say they are sanguine about any reopening of the Brooklyn jail. But some homeowners wondered if the city has other options.

"We really would prefer it not to open," said Sue Wolfe, president of the Boerum Hill Association, adding, "It hurts the merchants; it hurts the people that live and work here."

Judy Stanton, executive director of the Brooklyn Heights Association, said a jail reopening would have a visceral impact on the area, with more Correction Department buses driving through, more inmates in handcuffs seen in the neighborhood, and more inmates' family members arriving for visits. But she said her group could live with that.

    City Inmate Population Up; Brooklyn Jail May Reopen, NYT, 3.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/nyregion/03jails.html

Prisons Often Shackle Pregnant Inmates in Labor

March 2, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

Shawanna Nelson, a prisoner at the McPherson Unit in Newport, Ark., had been in labor for more than 12 hours when she arrived at Newport Hospital on Sept. 20, 2003. Ms. Nelson, whose legs were shackled together and who had been given nothing stronger than Tylenol all day, begged, according to court papers, to have the shackles removed.

Though her doctor and two nurses joined in the request, her lawsuit says, the guard in charge of her refused.

"She was shackled all through labor," said Ms. Nelson's lawyer, Cathleen V. Compton. "The doctor who was delivering the baby made them remove the shackles for the actual delivery at the very end."

Despite sporadic complaints and occasional lawsuits, the practice of shackling prisoners in labor continues to be relatively common, state legislators and a human rights group said. Only two states, California and Illinois, have laws forbidding the practice.

The New York Legislature is considering a similar bill. Ms. Nelson's suit, which seeks to ban the use of restraints on Arkansas prisoners during labor and delivery, is to be tried in Little Rock this spring.

The California law, which came into force in January, was prompted by widespread problems, said Sally J. Lieber, a Democratic assemblywoman from Mountain View.

"We found this was going on in some institutions in California and all over the United States," Ms. Lieber said. "It presents risks not only for the inmate giving birth, but also for the infant."

Corrections officials say they must strike a balance between security and the well-being of the pregnant woman and her child.

"Though these are pregnant women," said Dina Tyler, a spokeswoman for the Arkansas Department of Corrections, "they are still convicted felons, and sometimes violent in nature. There have been instances when we've had a female inmate try to hurt hospital staff during delivery."

Dee Ann Newell, who has taught classes in prenatal care and parenting for female prisoners in Arkansas for 15 years, said she found the practice of shackling women in labor appalling.

"If you have ever seen a woman have a baby," Ms. Newell said, "you know we squirm. We move around."

Twenty-three state corrections departments, along with the federal Bureau of Prisons, have policies that expressly allow restraints during labor, according to a report by Amnesty International U.S.A. on Wednesday.

The corrections departments of five states, including Connecticut, and the District of Columbia, the report found, prohibit the practice. The remaining states do not have laws or formal policies, although some corrections departments told the group that they did not use restraints as a matter of informal practice.

Many states justify restraints because the prisoners remain escape risks, though there have apparently been no instances of escape attempts by women in labor.

"You can't convince me that it's ever really happened," Ms. Newell said. "You certainly wouldn't get far."

About 5 percent of female prisoners arrive pregnant, according to a 1999 report by the Justice Department. The Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group, estimates that 40,000 women are admitted to the nation's prisons each year, suggesting that 2,000 babies are born to American prisoners annually.

Illinois enacted the first law forbidding some restraints during labor, in 2000. "Under no circumstances," it says, "may leg irons or shackles or waist shackles be used on any pregnant female prisoner who is in labor."

Before that, said Gail T. Smith, the executive director of Chicago Legal Advocacy for Incarcerated Mothers, the standard practice was to chain the prisoner to a hospital bed. "What was common," Ms. Smith said, "was one wrist and one ankle."

The California law prohibits shackling prisoners by the wrists or ankles during labor, delivery and recovery. Until recently, prisoners from the Valley State Prison in Chowchilla, Calif., were routinely shackled to their beds after giving birth at the nearby Madera Community Hospital.

"These women are mostly in for minor crimes and don't pose a flight risk," said Ms. Lieber, who met with 120 pregnant women at the prison in August. "Madera Community Hospital is in one of the most remote parts of California. It's hard to walk to a filling station, much less a bus stop."

Washington State has also forbidden the use of shackles during labor, though as a matter of corrections department policy rather than law. Pamela Simpson, a California nurse, described in an e-mail message to Ms. Lieber the practice in Washington before the policy was changed.

"Here this young woman was in active labor," Ms. Simpson wrote, "handcuffed to the armed guard, wearing shackles, in her orange outfit that was dripping wet with amniotic fluid. Her age: 15!"

Arkansas has resisted an outright ban on restraints, though Ms. Nelson's case may change that.

Ms. Nelson was serving time for identity fraud and writing bad checks when she gave birth at age 30. She weighed a little more than 100 pounds, and her baby, it turned out, weighed nine and a half pounds.

The experience of giving birth without anesthesia while largely immobilized has left her with lasting back pain and damage to her sciatic nerve, according to her lawsuit against prison officials and a private company, Correctional Medical Services.

Ms. Nelson, now known as Shawanna Lumsey, and lawyers for the defendants did not respond to requests for comment. In court papers, the defendants denied that they had caused any harm to Ms. Nelson.

Partly as a consequence of Ms. Nelson's suit, Arkansas has started using softer, more flexible nylon restraints for prisoners deemed to be security risks. They are removed, Ms. Tyler said, during the actual delivery.

Ms. Newell considers that slight progress for the approximately 50 women in Arkansas prisons and jails who give birth each year.

"Childbirth should be a sacred event," said Ms. Newell, a senior justice fellow at the Soros Foundation. "Just because they're prisoners doesn't mean they shouldn't get the usual care."

Dawn H., an Arkansas prisoner who delivered a baby in custody in 2002, said her guard wanted to shackle her to the bed.

"Fortunately," she said, "I had a very wonderful nurse who told the guard I was in her care. I was her patient. And no one was going to shackle me." (She asked that her full name not be used because her employer did not know about her imprisonment for passing bad checks.)

The Wisconsin Corrections Department has also recently changed its approach, after a state newspaper, The Post-Crescent of Appleton, reported on the issue in January. The department said it would end the use of restraints during labor, delivery and recovery.

Merica Erato, serving time for negligent homicide after a car accident, went through labor with chains around her ankles in Fond du Lac, Wis., in May, her husband, Steve, said in an interview.

"It is unbelievable that in this day and age a child is born to a woman in shackles," Mr. Erato said. "It sounds like something from slavery 200 years ago."

In most cases, people who have studied the issue said, women are shackled because prison rules are unthinkingly exported to a hospital setting.

"This is the perfect example of rule-following at the expense of common sense," said William F. Schulz, the executive director of Amnesty International U.S.A. "It's almost as stupid as shackling someone in a coma."

    Prisons Often Shackle Pregnant Inmates in Labor, NYT, 2.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/02/national/02shackles.html?hp&ex=1141362000&en=6f6390e020cbb341&ei=5094&partner=homepage

New York to Restrict Use of Force on Jail Inmates

March 1, 2006
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

New York City officials said yesterday that they had agreed to broad new measures to control the use of force by guards against inmates in city jails, including the use of blows to the head.

The settlement with 22 inmates caps two decades of grinding legal battles; it is the first time reform measures — already in place in some correction facilities — will be applied citywide to reduce violence behind bars.

Settling a 2002 lawsuit by the Legal Aid Society, the city agreed to revise its guidelines on when and how guards may use force, post hundreds of new video cameras in the jails, overhaul its procedures for investigating violent episodes and provide more training for guards in how to restrain inmates.

The city will also pay a total of $2.2 million to 22 inmates who were injured in clashes with guards. Inmates in the suit had suffered shattered cheekbones, ruptured eyeballs and split eardrums after officers threw punches at their heads instead of using less damaging control methods.

The settlement, reached on Feb. 17 and placed into the court record late last week, presents a twist on the usual use of video cameras for security: They will be in place to watch the guards as well as the inmates.

City jails include the large Rikers Island complex, a jail barge off Hunts Point in the Bronx, the Bernard B. Kerik Complex in Manhattan and the prison wards at Bellevue and Elmhurst hospitals. There are about 13,750 inmates in the city system on an average day. The jails that have already adopted similar reforms include two units at Rikers Island — the Central Punitive Segregation Unit and the Eric M. Taylor Center — and the two hospital wards.

While the city had responded to a series of earlier suits — the first one dates back to 1983 — with reforms in a few detention centers, this time correction officials agreed to make the changes across all 11 jails in the system. The settlement will accelerate across New York the application of practices, like video monitoring and self-defense tactics for guards that do not involve using fists, that have long been standard in other big-city correction systems around the nation.

City officials hailed the settlement as a legal victory and a harbinger of their new, more aggressive approach to legal challenges that try to force change through the courts. The city did not admit that there was any pattern of abuse in the jails, as Legal Aid had claimed that there was. The suit is expected to be closed this month with no court-appointed monitor or any other continuing role for the court.

The settlement "preserves the good name of the City of New York," said Martin F. Horn, the city's correction commissioner, because "there is no finding that confirms the most damning and critical allegation of a pattern of brutality." He said many of the mandated reforms were already under way and others had been on his agenda to carry out regardless of the suit's outcome.

Lawyers for the inmates said they had agreed to settle the suit rather than endure a grueling trial against city officials, who appeared recalcitrant. The 34-page settlement, the inmates' lawyers said, allowed reforms they had sought for years to be put in place faster. The agreement gives the city strict timetables for carrying out the new measures, and it gives Legal Aid more access to the jails and to information about violent encounters so it can verify that the agreement is being honored.

In four years of litigation, some 350,000 pages of documents piled up in the chambers of the presiding judge, Denny Chin of Federal District Court in Manhattan. The secret settlement negotiations alone lasted one year.

The details of the financial settlements with the individual inmates remained confidential for their protection, lawyers for both sides said, since some are still incarcerated.

One plaintiff, Shawn Davis, 38, lost the sight in his left eye when a guard on Rikers Island kicked him in the face after a melee. Another, Charles Paige, a practicing Muslim who is 47, suffered a fractured cheekbone from a face blow (called a head shot in prison parlance) after confronting Rikers guards who, he said, had mishandled his Koran and stepped on his prayer rug.

The settlement sets specific revisions to the guidelines for use of force by guards. The new guidelines say, with more clarity than earlier versions, that it is "expressly prohibited" to use more force than is necessary to restrain an inmate. They say explicitly that blows, including blows to the head, "should not be struck" if other tactics, like control holds or pushes, would work to subdue an inmate.

"It's not inappropriate to use force, it's inappropriate to use force inappropriately," Mr. Horn said, summarizing the guidelines' message for correction officers. Guards will get extra training on techniques to restrain inmates that are less potentially harmful.

Hundreds of additional video cameras will be mounted in locations agreed upon with Legal Aid. The exact places and numbers remain confidential, so neither guards nor inmates will be aware of them. Mr. Horn supports using cameras in jails; about 2,000 of them are already in place. But the suit pointed out that many of the cameras were faulty. The settlement details how Legal Aid will be told about the duration and results of the recordings. It also requires guards to use hand-held video cameras to record cell searches.

The Correction Department will revamp the manual, procedures and training of its internal investigations unit, acknowledging that the unit had fallen behind the times. The city will hire an outside consultant to recommend changes, and will provide a new 40-hour training program for investigators. The suit had charged that officers were not disciplined after injuring inmates because many investigations made cursory reviews or were biased against prisoners.

If the city complies, the agreement "is likely to yield significant changes that will improve the security of the prisoners," said Jonathan Chasan, a veteran Legal Aid lawyer. He pointed to a steep decline in violent encounters in a dangerous center, the Central Punitive Segregation Unit, following a 1998 court order stemming from an earlier Legal Aid case.

"Where we brought suit and were successful, there was an enormous reduction in the violence perpetrated on our clients," said John Boston, the director of the Legal Aid Society's Prisoners' Rights Project. But he said city officials "didn't get the hint" — until now — that the reforms should be extended to the whole system. Legal Aid was assisted in the case by two private firms, Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady and Sullivan & Cromwell.

Mr. Horn argued that conditions over all in New York's jails have improved sharply in recent years, even without the lawsuit. In 2005, incidents of force where inmates were injured by guards dropped to 72, from 459 in 1997, according to correction figures.

Judge Chin will hold a final hearing on March 31 to approve the settlement. If the city does not meet its terms, Legal Aid lawyers cannot return to a federal judge, but they can file for breach of contract in state court.

The settlement expires on Nov. 1, 2009, near the end of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's current term. Gail Donoghue, a senior counsel for the city, said that New York would not be locked in excruciating legal battling "for the next 20 years."

    New York to Restrict Use of Force on Jail Inmates, NYT, 1.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/01/nyregion/01prison.html?hp&ex=1141275600&en=6ed0f628e6633d79&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Debt to Society Is Least of Costs for Ex-Convicts

February 23, 2006
The New York Tlmes
By ADAM LIPTAK

It is increasingly expensive to be a criminal.

Beverly Dubois, a 49-year-old former park ranger in Washington State, spent nine months in jail for growing and selling marijuana. She still owes the state almost $1,900 for court costs and various fees. Until she pays up, the state has taken away her right to vote.

Wilbert Rideau, 64, a convicted killer, spent 44 years in Louisiana prisons. Not long after he was released last year, he filed for bankruptcy in an effort to avoid the state's attempts to collect $127,000 in court costs.

Almost every encounter with the criminal justice system these days can give rise to a fee. There are application fees and co-payments for public defenders. Sentences include court costs, restitution and contributions to various funds. In Washington State, people convicted of certain crimes are also charged $100 so their DNA can be put in a database.

Private probation companies charge $30 to $40 a month for supervision. Halfway houses charge for staying in them. People sentenced to community service are required to buy $15 insurance policies for every week they work. Criminals on probation and parole wear global positioning devices that monitor their whereabouts — for a charge of as much as $16 a day.

The sums raised by these ever-mounting fees are intended to help offset some of the enormous costs of operating the criminal justice system. But even relatively small fees — $40 per session, say, for a court-ordered anger management class or $15 for a drug test — can have devastating consequences for people who emerge from prison with no money, credit or prospects, and who live in fear of being sent back for failing to pay.

"The difference between 30 years ago and today," said George H. Kendall, a lawyer with Holland & Knight in New York who represents Mr. Rideau, "is that people who everyone agrees are poor are leaving the courthouse significantly poorer."

Prosecutors and political leaders often say it is only fair that criminals rather than taxpayers pay for what it costs to protect the public.

But Judge James R. Thurman of the Magistrate Court in Lee County, Ga., said his state's many fees, known there as add-ons, were a backdoor way to make poor people pay for the free lawyers guaranteed to them by the United States Supreme Court's decision in Gideon v. Wainwright in 1963.

"You're asking the people who can't afford to hire an attorney to pay anyway by making them pay through add-on fees," Judge Thurman said.

Indeed, according to the American Bar Association, at least 15 states, including New Jersey and Connecticut, charge application fees to people seeking court-appointed lawyers. Washington has one of the longest lists of fees assessed to criminals, and it is diligent in trying to collect them. Ms. Dubois, disabled after a car accident, makes payments of $10 a month toward what was once a $1,610 debt — $1,000 for a county "drug enforcement fund," a $500 "victim assessment fee" and $110 in court costs.

"I still don't know who the victim was," she said.

Her efforts notwithstanding, her debt is growing because of the 12 percent interest assessed annually by the State of Washington. As of September, it stood at $1,895.69.

"I will never have it paid off in my lifetime," Ms. Dubois said.

Washington also uses an unusual tool: it denies people who have not paid such debts the right to vote.

"You have to complete all the terms of your sentence" to regain the right to vote, explained Jeffrey T. Even, a lawyer for the state. "If the monthly payment is low enough and if the debt is high enough, you can actually be going backwards."

Aaron H. Caplan, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington State, which has filed a lawsuit on behalf of Ms. Dubois challenging her disenfranchisement, said that tens of thousands of people were affected and that their number would grow. "Over the last 20 to 25 years, the Legislature has been making it more and more expensive to purchase back the right to vote," Mr. Caplan said.

National figures concerning fees assessed to criminals are not available, but Washington is something of a case study. The state sends out some 79,000 bills every month, and it collected about $25 million last year. But these collection efforts are barely making a dent in the $1.2 billion owed by former offenders, much of it for the cost of prison room and board, which can reach $50 a day. The budget of the State Department of Corrections for the two-year period ending in 2007 is more than $1.4 billion.

Fees for room and board are levied in many states, and they can quickly mount to levels that are essentially uncollectible, with states not bothering, except in special cases. Even other types of fees can be unwieldy.

Mr. Rideau, for instance, has been billed $127,000 for the cost of his fourth and final trial last year.

Louisiana wants him to pay for the costs of housing, feeding and transporting his jury from across the state. The prosecution has submitted bills from more than two dozen establishments, including the Seafood Palace ($435.68), Ruby Tuesday ($312.66) and Best Suites ($16,874.33).

His trial was expensive partly because Mr. Rideau was so famous in Lake Charles, La., where he killed a bank teller in 1961. He was convicted of murder three times, in 1961, 1964 and 1970, but appeals courts threw out the verdicts, citing misconduct by the government.

A fourth jury last year rejected the murder charge and found Mr. Rideau guilty of manslaughter, which had a maximum sentence of 21 years, meaning his sentence was complete. Mr. Rideau, who was also a prison journalist during his four decades behind bars, was freed that same day.

But Louisiana was not done with Mr. Rideau. David A. Ritchie, the judge in the case, ruled that Mr. Rideau was responsible for all of the charges billed by the prosecution.

"Mr. Rideau is the one that committed this crime that led to this trial, then led to all these costs," Judge Ritchie said at a hearing in August. "That's why people are charged court costs, because it's their actions."

Mr. Rideau has filed for bankruptcy, even though it is not clear that bankruptcy can erase debts of this kind. He has also appealed the decision, saying he is puzzled by the state's efforts.

"Society's interest is in an ex-con becoming solvent and in becoming a contributing member of society," Mr. Rideau said. "They created this court-costs sham to sabotage my efforts to create a life."

John F. Derosier, the district attorney in the case, defended the charges in court papers opposing Mr. Rideau's appeal last month. "He owes a debt to society which must be paid," Mr. Derosier wrote.

The assessment of court costs is common in civil cases. Many state laws allow or require the costs to be imposed in criminal cases, too, though rarely for an amount even approaching that sought from Mr. Rideau. Vanita Gupta, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which also represents Mr. Rideau, said his case might have unintended consequences.

"The prospect of having to pay for court costs is going to dissuade some defendants from going to trial," Ms. Gupta said. Even an innocent defendant, she said, may prefer a guilty plea to a trial if the downside includes not only a longer sentence but also a crushing debt.

Georgia is also aggressive in collecting fees, and it has enlisted private probation companies to help. The companies charge a monthly fee of $30 or $40 for their services. That fee can rival the fine.

"You're basically charging an interest fee that would make a finance company blush," said Stephen B. Bright, the director of the Southern Center for Human Rights.

In 2003, for instance, Sabrina Byrd, a 27-year-old single mother, was ordered to pay $852 for failing to leash and vaccinate her dog in College Park, Ga. Too poor to pay, she was placed on probation while she made 10 monthly installments, along with a monthly fee to a probation company of $39 — about half of the fine. When she fell behind and failed to contact the company, a judge revoked her probation and sentenced her to 25 days in jail.

Though the Supreme Court has said that defendants may not be jailed for failing to pay a fine when they have no money, they can be jailed for failing to report to their probation officer. Many poor people do not appreciate that distinction and fail to report when they have no money.

Judge Thurman, who was not involved in Ms. Byrd's case, said he took pains to tell people to report no matter what. Otherwise, "I have no alternative but to issue a warrant for your arrest," he tells defendants.

But some probation companies, according to court records, effectively use the threat of arrest as a collection tool.

John Cole Vodicka, the director of Georgia's Prison and Jail Project, questioned the current system.

"A $500 fine going into probation translates into $1,500 coming out of probation," he said. "No one's really benefiting, except maybe private companies."

New technologies can also add fees. Isecuretrac, an Omaha company that sells global positioning monitors to local governments to track sex offenders and others, promotes a system that encourages offenders to pay, often on a sliding scale based on financial resources. Thomas E. Wharton Jr., the company's chief executive, said about 70 percent of county agencies that use electronic monitoring charge the offenders for them.

"I don't think the intent really is to gouge offenders," Mr. Wharton said, "because they have a difficult enough time to get back into their communities and to support themselves."

    Debt to Society Is Least of Costs for Ex-Convicts, NYT, 23.2.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/23/national/23fees.html?hp&ex=1140757200&en=1d68d39913f894b7&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Nearly 2,000 inmates riot in Calif. jail

Posted 2/4/2006 10:27 PM Updated 2/5/2006 12:36 PM
USA Today

CASTAIC, Calif. (AP) — Nearly 2,000 inmates rioted at a Southern California jail, throwing mattresses and banging heads against bunk beds, in an uproar that officials said stemmed from racial tensions. One inmate was killed.

More than 100 inmates were wounded and 20 were hospitalized with serious injuries from the nearly hour-long melee on Saturday, authorities said. Smaller fights broke out for at least four hours after the main brawling ended.

"The motivation appears to be racial tensions and a carry-over of a feud between black and Hispanic gangs," said Deputy Steve Suzuki, a sheriff's spokesman. Two days earlier, a Hispanic gang member was stabbed by a black gang member, he said.

Black and Hispanic inmates were being segregated and a lockdown was ordered systemwide, Sheriff Lee Baca said.

Authorities had information that a disturbance was imminent, but they didn't know the time or location, said Sam Jones, chief custody officer of the county jail system.

A 45-year-old black inmate who was a registered sex offender was killed, Suzuki said. Twenty-six wounded inmates were treated at the jail; the 20 hospitalized inmates did not have life threatening injuries. No jail employees were injured.

The North County Correctional Facility, about 40 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles, is a maximum-security complex composed of five jails that together house about 4,000 inmates.

It is illegal to segregate inmates based on race or ethnicity, but legal advisers said it can be done in emergency situations, Jones said.

The jail has a history of race related riots. In 2000, a three-day riot at the Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic injured more than 80 inmates, leaving one in a coma. Attorneys representing 273 black inmates filed a civil rights lawsuit alleging the sheriff's department failed to disarm Hispanic inmates.

Several racially motivated brawls at Castaic jails in 1998 injured dozens of inmates. In 1996, 5,300 prisoners battled, leaving six guards and 123 inmates injured after the Mexican Mafia prison gang ordered an attack on blacks.

    Nearly 2,000 inmates riot in Calif. jail, UT, 5.2.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-02-04-prison-riot_x.htm

Calif. prison riot leaves 1 dead, dozens injured

Sat Feb 4, 2006 11:41 PM ET
Reuters

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A riot at a Los Angeles-area prison on Saturday left one inmate dead and some 60 wounded, officials said.

By Saturday evening, the fighting was contained and deputies had regained control of the prison, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputy Tanya Plunkett said.

The cause of the riot, which began on Saturday afternoon in the all-male prison, was not immediately clear.

Officials set up a triage area to evaluate the wounded patients. The most seriously wounded, including 10 with critical injuries, were sent to nearby hospitals for treatment, a fire department official said.

The Wayside Prison about 20 miles north of Los Angeles near Castaic has been the site of more than 150 racially motivated brawls since 1990, sheriff's deputies have said. Many of those altercations pitted black inmates against Hispanics.

The prison is built to house 3,800 inmates but the number detained there as of Friday was not immediately available, Plunkett said.

It was also not known how many inmates participated in the melee, she said. A Los Angeles Fire Department official earlier estimated several thousand had been involved.

A foundation run by former National Football League star and actor Jim Brown has had a contract with Los Angeles County to provide counseling to deputies and inmates in a bid to reduce violence at the prison.

That contract began in 2000 after 81 inmates were wounded at a riot at the prison, which is known formally as the Pitchess Detention Facility.

    Calif. prison riot leaves 1 dead, dozens injured, R, 4.2.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-02-05T044139Z_01_N04329078_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-PRISON.xml

A disputed study claims rape is rare in prison

Posted 1/17/2006 5:44 PM
USA Today
By Kim Curtis, Associated Press Writer

SAN FRANCISCO — A bitterly disputed, government-sponsored study has concluded that rape and sexual assault behind bars may be rampant in movies and books but are rare in real life.

T.J. Parsell, board president for Stop Prisoner Rape, says he was raped by four inmates at age 17, while serving time for armed robbery.
By Bebeto Matthews, AP

When inmates have sex, it is usually by choice, and often engaged in as a way to win protection or privileges, said Mark Fleisher, a cultural anthropologist who specializes in prisons and crime at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

He said inmates who cry rape are usually lying and looking for a transfer, money or publicity.

"Inmates say it may happen, but the conditions under which it happens are rare," Fleisher said. "It is unlikely all the stars are going to align properly for this to happen, particularly in prisons today. You're going to get caught."

The two-year study, commissioned by the U.S. Justice Department for $939,233, has come under withering attack from other experts. The department has not endorsed the study, saying Fleisher has yet to turn over his data for closer examination.

"To take the position that it's not a problem and prisons are safe places is asinine," said Reggie Walton, a federal judge and chairman of the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, set up under a 2003 federal law. He said Fleisher's conclusions are "totally inconsistent" with what he has learned during 30 years in the criminal justice system.

Cindy Struckman-Johnson, professor of psychology at the University of South Dakota and one of nine commission members, said Fleisher's 155-page study is not in scientific form. She said there is no literature review, no raw data, and no in-depth explanation of his subjects or research methods.

Fleisher said he spent more than 700 hours interviewing 564 randomly chosen inmates at dozens of institutions across the country. He said he never met anyone who claimed to be a victim of sexual violence.

He said his findings were no surprise to him, though he admitted his conclusion "flies in the face of what everyone believes."

Fleisher said he found that inmates' sexual activity is not "routinely or overwhelmingly violent or aggressive" and sex is "engaged in by men and women who choose it." In his report, he suggested that what outsiders see as rape is regarded differently by inmates.

"Prison rape worldview doesn't interpret sexual pressure as coercion," he wrote. "Rather, sexual pressure ushers, guides or shepherds the process of sexual awakening."

Justice Department spokeswoman Catherine Sanders said Fleisher's report is being peer-reviewed and is not considered finished. However, Fleisher co-wrote an article about it in The Criminologist, the American Society of Criminology's newsletter.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Justice Department official familiar with the findings said that the department is trying to determine whether the conclusions are supported by the data, but that Fleisher has not shown his evidence to anyone.

Lovisa Stannow, co-director of Los Angeles-based advocacy group Stop Prisoner Rape, called Fleisher's conclusions offensive.

"We communicate with survivors literally every single day," she said. "He takes issue with the use of the term rape. Because it wasn't used by the prisoners he interviewed doesn't mean rape didn't happen. There is an objective truth to sexual violence regardless of what it's called."

The Prison Rape Elimination Act, signed into law by President Bush to create the investigatory commission and establish a national zero-tolerance policy for sexual assaults behind bars, called prison rape an epidemic that largely goes unacknowledged and unreported. The law said experts have conservatively estimated that at least 13% of U.S. prison inmates have been sexually assaulted, and the total number in the past 20 years is probably more than 1 million.

In July, the Bureau of Justice Statistics said there were 3.15 inmate complaints of sexual violence per 1,000 prisoners in 2004.

The commission held public hearings to take testimony from lawmakers, prison officials and former inmates who offered graphic descriptions of abuse.

T.J. Parsell, 45, said he was sent to a Michigan prison for armed robbery at 17. On his first day, he said, his drink was spiked and he was raped by four inmates.

"When they were done, they flipped a coin to see which one I belonged to," said Parsell, board president for Stop Prisoner Rape. He said the corrections industry "would like nothing more than for the problem to get minimized so it can get put away for another 50 years."

    A disputed study claims rape is rare in prison, UT, 17.1.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-01-17-prison-rape_x.htm

Trial Opens in Prison Slaying of Ex-Priest

January 12, 2006
The New York Times
By PAM BELLUCK

WORCESTER, Mass., Jan. 11 - The murder of John J. Geoghan, a defrocked priest, in 2003 by an inmate in state prison was a shocking and almost surreal dénouement to one of the darkest chapters of the sexual abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church.

Mr. Geoghan's violent death in the most secure prison in Massachusetts was to some an appalling failure of the state to protect one of its most despised inmates. To others it was a horrible but justified retribution against Mr. Geoghan, one of the most reviled priests named in the abuse scandal, accused of molesting some 150 children in several parishes over three decades.

Now, the man who admits he killed Mr. Geoghan, Joseph L. Druce, is having his day in court, and for anyone watching the trial, it is hard to figure out where to put one's sympathies - with the murder victim or the man who killed him.

Mr. Druce, 40, is pleading not guilty by reason of mental illness. His lawyer, John LaChance, does not dispute the details of the case. Prosecutors say Mr. Druce followed Mr. Geoghan into his cell at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center on Aug. 23, 2003, and jammed the cell door shut with a nail clipper and a ripped-up copy of "The Cross and the Switchblade," a book about a minister who transformed the lives of teenage gang members by introducing them to Christianity.

Mr. Druce then tied Mr. Geoghan's hands with a T-shirt, wrapped stretched-out socks around Mr. Geoghan's neck, tightened them with a shoe, and then jumped up and down on his body.

According to testimony by corrections officers on Wednesday, Mr. Druce later told them he "did it for the children," to stop Mr. Geoghan, 68, from molesting more boys when he got out of prison.

Mr. Geoghan was serving 6 years of a 9-to-10-year sentence for groping a boy in a swimming pool, and Mr. Druce told law enforcement authorities that he had heard Mr. Geoghan talking about plans to assault more children upon his release. Mr. Druce also signed a card waiving his Miranda rights "the Reverend Joseph Druce."

Mr. LaChance suggested Wednesday that Mr. Druce's behavior was evidence of insanity, saying "he began fantasizing about being an individual who would save the kids and save the world."

The prosecutor, Lawrence Murphy, suggested the opposite, that the fact that "Mr. Druce was planning to kill John Geoghan" showed that he was not insane.

Mr. Druce is serving a life sentence without parole for beating and strangling a driver who he said made a sexual advance toward him when he was hitchhiking in 1988. He unsuccessfully tried an insanity defense in that case in 1989, and his lawyer in that case emphasized Mr. Druce's highly troubled background, including serious behavior problems, drug use, a mother who did not want him and a father who was abusive to his mother.

Mr. LaChance referred to that background Wednesday, saying that Mr. Druce was "like a little puppy you beat and beat," adding, "Eventually the puppy strikes back when it is old enough and big enough."

At the time of Mr. Geoghan's slaying, Mr. Druce's father, Dana Smiledge, said Mr. Druce also had white supremacist leanings - a hatred of gay people, Jews and blacks.

Mr. Geoghan's murder not only stunned victims of abuse by priests, but also ignited a state investigation into the prison system. Several correction officials were removed, including the correction commissioner.

The investigation found that only one guard was monitoring the 26-inmate unit at the time Mr. Druce slipped into Mr. Geoghan's cell and that the cell doors had been left open while the inmates were taking their lunch trays to a collection point.

Mr. Geoghan was jailed in early 2002 and moved from a medium-security prison in Concord to the maximum-security Souza-Baranowski prison in Shirley in early 2003 after complaining that he felt harassed by guards and afraid for his safety.

The state investigation said that Mr. Geoghan was indeed mistreated by guards in Concord and that he was inappropriately transferred to Shirley, where he was put in a wing for inmates who needed to be separated from the general prison population. But some of them were violent offenders, and many were younger than the frail Mr. Geoghan.

Mr. Druce was transferred there not long afterward because he, too, had felt unsafe in his previous prison, where he had become a jailhouse informant, his lawyer said. Mr. Druce had changed his name, from Darrin Smiledge, because he was afraid of his prison enemies.

Mr. LaChance said that Mr. Druce had been delusional in the past, pretending he was a rich person who owned yachts and million-dollar houses, and subscribing to Robb Report, the luxury magazine, at his previous prison. He said Mr. Druce fantasized that if he killed Mr. Geoghan "he would be someone like a rich person with a yacht."

Mr. Druce, who has previously held up photographs and demonstrated other showy behavior in court, was medicated Wednesday with Ritalin and possibly other drugs, Mr. LaChance said. He made a thumbs up sign to several reporters, but otherwise seemed less attention-seeking. If his defense is successful, Mr. Druce is likely to be moved to a psychiatric institution.

    Trial Opens in Prison Slaying of Ex-Priest, NYT, 12.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/12/national/12priest.html

FACTBOX-Guantanamo Bay prison has operated for 4 years

Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:53 AM ET
Reuters

(Reuters) - The United States has operated a prison for foreign terrorism suspects at its naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for four years.

Following are key facts about the controversial facility.

BY THE NUMBERS

The Pentagon says it holds approximately 500 non-U.S. citizens at the base at the southeastern end of Cuba. The United States classifies them as enemy combatants and not prisoners of war, thus denying them rights accorded to POWs under the Geneva Conventions. Nine have been charged with crimes and none of their trials has been completed. The Pentagon says it has transferred 256 detainees out of Guantanamo in the past four years with 180 freed in their home countries and 76 placed in the custody of other governments. These transfers were the result of consultations with other nations and separate military reviews of each detainee's case.

FIRST ARRIVAL

The first group of 20 detainees arrived on January 11, 2002, aboard a U.S. military C-141 cargo plane that flew from Afghanistan. They wore orange prison jumpsuits, black-out goggles and face masks, with their hands bound and some shackled at the legs. They were placed in single-occupant, 6-by-8-foot cells with wooden roofs and open chain-link fence sides in the temporary Camp X-Ray. More-permanent facilities have since been built. The detainees' arrival came four months after the September 11 attacks orchestrated by the al Qaeda guerrilla network, which operated out of Afghanistan during the rule of the hard-line Taliban.

HUMAN RIGHTS COMPLAINTS

Human rights activists have condemned the indefinite detention of detainees and the lack of legal rights given to them. Some critics have called it a "legal black hole." In 2005 Amnesty International described it as "the gulag of our times," referring to the vast Soviet system of forced labor in which millions died. The International Committee of the Red Cross in 2004 accused the U.S. military of using tactics "tantamount to torture" on Guantanamo detainees. The Pentagon has said the detainees are treated humanely and not tortured.

U.S. RATIONALE

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld argues that holding detainees at Guantanamo prevents them from returning to the battlefield and that interrogations provide valuable intelligence. Rumsfeld says Guantanamo detainees have revealed details on al Qaeda's leadership structure, operatives, funding mechanisms, communication methods, training programs and plans for attacking the United States and its allies. The Bush administration asserted in 2005 that the United States can legally hold the Guantanamo detainees "in perpetuity."

GUANTANAMO BASE

The 45-square-mile (117-sq-km) base was founded after the United States took away control of Cuba from Spain in the Spanish-American War in 1898. The United States has a perpetual lease for the base that began in 1903 and was reaffirmed three decades later. Cuba's current government contests the U.S. right to the base, home to more than 9,500 Americans, and Cuban President Fidel Castro has consistently refused to cash the $4,085 a year in rent checks.

(Reporting by Will Dunham in Washington)

    FACTBOX-Guantanamo Bay prison has operated for 4 years, R, 11.1.2006, http://today.reuters.com/News/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-01-11T075314Z_01_KNE127474_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&related=true