History > 2006 > USA > Prisons  (IV-VI)

Hispanics battle blacks

in major Calif. prison riot

Sun Dec 31, 2006
4:35 PM ET
Reuters
By Adam Tanner

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A major California prison riot involving 800 inmates started when a black and a Hispanic prisoner began fighting, prompting other prisoners to join divided along racial lines, an official said on Sunday.

More than 50 people were treated for injuries suffered in the Saturday riot at the California Institution for Men in Chino east of Los Angeles. Guards battled for four hours to quell the fighting, which began at 9:24 a.m. on Saturday, said Oscar Hidalgo, a spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

"They used everything from tear gas, batons, they used wooden and foam projectiles," he said of the guards. "There were so many inmates involved at one time that they had to pull back and regroup."

It was one of the state's largest such uprisings in years.

"We believe initially two individuals were fighting in the yard which were a black and a Hispanic inmate," said Mark Hargrove, a spokesman for the Chino prison. "Everyone kind of drew their racial lines and began fighting between the races."

Inmates in California's prisons often join racially based gangs and shun interaction with those from other races.

Officials brought in reinforcements from other prisons and local police, both to regain control of the prison and assure that no one escaped from the area, which covers 2,500 acres , during the fighting.

One inmate suffered stab wounds and was in serious condition while 27 other inmates were taken to area hospitals for medical treatment, Hidalgo said. Another 24 were treated for minor injuries at the prison and one guard suffered heat exhaustion.

The Chino prison, which first opened in 1941, is divided into four facilities with minimum to medium security with 200 inmates living in each dormitory area. About 95 percent of the inmates are parole violators who have been returned to custody, spokesman Hargrove said.

The prison was under lock-down on Sunday and officials were inspecting the damage, included broken glass in all of the windows in the five units where fighting took place, or about 200 total windows, Hargrove said.

"We're looking at transferring approximately 36 inmates because of unacceptable housing situations," Hidalgo said. "It is one of the largest altercations we've had, no doubt."

The Chino prison offers a number of educational programs seeking to rehabilitate inmates, and just a few weeks ago the facility invited journalists to view their program to train deep-sea divers.

    Hispanics battle blacks in major Calif. prison riot, R, 31.12.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-12-31T213517Z_01_N31446506_RTRUKOC_0_US-PRISON-RIOT.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsHome-C1-topNews-11

Flatulence Allegedly Sparks Jail Fight

December 27, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:47 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NORTH PLATTE, Neb. (AP) -- Brian Bruggeman caused a stink at the Lincoln County Jail earlier this month and will now have to answer for it in court. Another inmate, Jesse Dorris, alleges that Bruggeman's flatulence, passed in close proximity to Dorris, sparked a Dec. 14 fight between the two at the jail.

Now Bruggeman, 38, faces a Jan. 11 preliminary hearing on the state's complaint of assault by a confined person. It's a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

Bruggeman is accused of injuring Dorris, his cellmate, when he pushed him into cell bars. Dorris, 26, was not charged.

The two began scuffling, County Attorney Jeff Meyer said Tuesday, because Dorris was fed up with Bruggeman's flatulence.

Jail fights are common, Meyer said, but the cause of this one was rather uncommon.

''It's usually about someone hogging the newspaper or someone not happy about what's on TV,'' he said.

Bruggeman, of Hershey, is serving a 90-day sentence for violating a protection order.

''He compounded his problems,'' Meyer said.

Dorris, of North Platte, is awaiting a January trial on a charge of aiding and abetting robbery.

Brad Dawson, Bruggeman's attorney, did not immediately return a phone message left at his office.

Sheriff Jerome Kramer said the incident was a result of overcrowding. The jail was built in 1933 and has a capacity of 23 inmates, according to 2006 standards, Kramer said. As many as 65 inmates have been lodged at the jail in recent days, he said.

''You just can't get a reprieve from one another,'' Kramer said. ''When you've got a guy causing problems passing gas, there's no way to get away from the smell.''

    Flatulence Allegedly Sparks Jail Fight, NYT, 27.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Flatulence-Fight.html

A TIMES INVESTIGATION

Healthcare suffers at L.A. jails

Despite some progress,
basic needs go unmet and delays can be long in the understaffed county system, records show.
The results are sometimes fatal.

12:07 AM PST, December 24, 2006
The Los Angeles Times
By Scott Glover and Matt Lait, Times Staff Writers

The Los Angeles County Jail system lacks enough doctors, nurses and other medical workers to meet the most basic needs of inmates, resulting in long delays in treatment for conditions ranging from hernias to heart disease.

Breakdowns in medical care, including treatment errors by physicians and nurses, have contributed to the deaths of at least 14 inmates since 1999, a Times investigation found.

Understaffing has contributed to an array of medical problems in the nation's largest jail system, a review of court files, autopsy reports, jail records and other documents shows.

Broken bones have gone untreated. Illnesses have been overlooked. Inmates have waited days, or weeks, for exams they're supposed to receive within 24 hours of making a request. Twenty percent of inmates who ask to see a doctor are released from jail without ever being examined, officials acknowledge.

In a confidential report, a consultant said an additional 720 jail medical workers were needed to meet minimum state treatment standards. At the time, the work force stood at about 980.

"The county incurs significant liability for continuing a system of care that clearly is not working," the consultant said in the 2004 report to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

Spurred by those findings, officials began to bolster the ranks of doctors and nurses. But the system remains several hundred medical workers short.

Jody Kent, a court-sanctioned monitor who for three years walked the county's cellblocks documenting complaints for the American Civil Liberties Union, said she frequently saw inmates suffering.

She said inmates showed her what seemed to be gaping wounds from staph infections, broken bones and bulging hernias.

"I basically saw grown men crying because they were in such pain," Kent said.

Sheriff's Lt. Stephen Smith, who oversees the jail system's medical services bureau, said tending to sick prisoners is fraught with complications. He said some inmates conceal medical problems from their jailers, while others feign illness. Thousands are mentally ill.

"We face unique challenges, and we do the best we can," Smith said. "These are difficult, angry, messed-up people. We try to treat people with the respect, not that they necessarily deserve, but that human decency demands."

Smith cited recent improvements in the quality of care: Medical records have been computerized, allowing for better tracking of doctors' orders, and distribution of prescription drugs has been automated, reducing medication errors. He said the department plans to launch a "telemedicine" program that will expand the reach of doctors by allowing them to remotely diagnose and treat inmates via computer and teleconference.

Smith acknowledged, however, that staffing shortages still exist and "bad outcomes" occur.

Deterioration, death

Pamela Wimberley was serving a 30-day sentence for forging a prescription. On the morning of Feb. 10, 2003, she awoke in her cell in the Twin Towers jail downtown with a headache and fever. A nurse who examined her noted that Wimberley's blood pressure was up and her pulse was racing.

A doctor was informed over the phone, and he noted that Wimberley was diabetic and at risk of developing a respiratory infection. He ordered blood and urine tests to determine if that's what she had.

The order was never put in writing, however, and the tests were never done.

Instead, Wimberley was given a pain reliever and sent back to her cell.

The next morning, she saw a doctor — the same one who had ordered the blood and urine tests. But the doctor did not check to see if the tests had been done. Rather, the physician concluded that Wimberley was suffering from a viral infection of the nose, throat and sinuses. She was given cough medicine and sent back to her cell.

Three days later Wimberley was seen by the medical staff again. Now she was experiencing chills, had a sore throat and had laryngitis. Though these symptoms can be signs of a bacterial infection, she was not placed on antibiotics. She was merely encouraged to drink lots of fluids.

On Feb. 15, five days after she initially complained, Wimberley's condition deteriorated. She had chest pains and difficulty breathing. Her pulse rate was high, her blood pressure low.

She was taken by ambulance to County-USC Medical Center in septic shock from bacterial pneumonia that had been ravaging her lungs. It was too late: Wimberley, 38, died two days later.

In response to a wrongful death lawsuit filed by her husband, county lawyers concluded that the treatment errors, including the failure to conduct blood and urine tests, "resulted in a missed opportunity to diagnose and treat Ms. Wimberley's condition, and are directly responsible for the results observed here."

The county settled the case for $150,000. The unidentified doctor who failed to follow up on the tests was suspended for three days.

Alan Wimberley said he felt frustrated and helpless as his wife tried to deal with her illness behind bars. He said she would call home in tears, complaining that no one would help.

"I was like, 'Honey, you're in jail,' " said Wimberley, an electrician from the Antelope Valley. " 'What can I do?' "

'I need my medicine'

An average of about 200,000 people enter the county jails each year. On most nights, the population hovers around 18,000, with more than a third requiring medical care. Many are in fragile health because of drug abuse, homelessness or chronic illness. For some, the only time they see a doctor is when they're behind bars.

The county Sheriff's Department, which runs the jails, is required by state law to provide basic medical care to all inmates — 90% of whom have not been convicted of the charges against them.

It is a constant struggle.

When inmates are booked, they are questioned to determine if they are physically or mentally ill. About half require additional screening or treatment before being assigned to a cell. If inmates develop medical problems later, there are daily "sick calls" in which they can sign up to see a nurse in clinics throughout the sprawling system.

Inmates requiring constant attention, such as kidney dialysis patients, are housed in a 200-bed mini-hospital known as the Correctional Treatment Center in Twin Towers. Urgent cases are transferred to a jail ward at County-USC or to other area hospitals.

"Today's jail population is older and sicker than it was a decade ago," Smith said. "The healthcare system is broken on the outside, and we see that in here."

The volume of inmates, coupled with a shortage of doctors and nurses, has resulted in a backlog of hundreds of inmates waiting to be examined.

"I could have every doctor in the county of Los Angeles here, and it still wouldn't be enough," said Sander Peck, chief physician in the jail system. "I don't know what 'enough' would be."

A terminally ill inmate, Cynthia Barella, 48, was so desperate to see a doctor that she bashed her head against her cell wall, inflicting a bloody injury that could not be ignored, records show. Barella, who suffered from hepatitis, cirrhosis and other ailments, was then taken to a hospital, where she died the next day.

The difficulty getting medical care is illustrated in more than 10,000 confidential complaints filed by inmates from 2000 to 2005.

The records, reviewed by The Times, portray an overwhelmed system in which inmates literally beg to be seen for problems ranging from rashes to life-threatening illnesses. "I feel myself becoming unglued, anxiety attacks, unstable," wrote one woman who said her medication had run out two weeks earlier.

"Please," her hand-scrawled note read, "I need my medicine. Please."

Another woman complained that she had gone 11 days without her medication for Huntington's disease, a neurological disorder characterized by involuntary muscle movement.

"My motor control is going; my speech and memory are disintegrating daily," she wrote in September 2001. "Help me!"

The complaint form indicates that the woman told medical workers about her condition at the Inmate Reception Center in the Twin Towers complex on Sept. 7 and was prescribed Motrin. For the two weeks that she remained in custody, she was given no follow-up care, sheriff's documents show.

In another case, a male inmate complained that he had been vomiting bile and traces of blood, and losing weight for weeks, but that his requests to see a doctor had been ignored.

"This is well known by staff and inmates," he wrote. "I don't know what it's going to take to get proper medical attention, short of expiring." Several days after complaining, the inmate was prescribed ulcer medication.

Scores of female inmates complained of being unable to get medication for vaginal infections.

"I have a yeast infection or some kind of female infection, and I would like some medical attention," wrote one woman, who said she'd been complaining about the problem for weeks. "The discharge is getting worse, and I feel nasty and unclean. Please help me."

'No street criminal'

The case of Jerone Woods illustrates how errors, oversights and inaction have contributed to inmate deaths.

Woods, 55, entered the jail in September 1999 to serve time for drunk driving. He had told authorities he had diabetes, high cholesterol and hypertension, for which he was taking Pindolol. The drug controls high blood pressure by decreasing the force and rate of heart contractions. He brought his medications with him. But in keeping with jail policy, they were taken away to be stored and returned upon his release — medications for inmates are supplied by the jail pharmacy.

Policy requires that inmates 55 or older be given an enhanced medical screening, including chest X-rays, lab tests and an electrocardiogram. When Woods was seen by a nurse at the Inmate Reception Center, the nurse erred by indicating on a form that he was not 55 or older.

Then came a second mistake: The nurse did not document that Woods had been taking Pindolol. Suddenly stopping the drug can trigger a heart attack. When the doctor briefly examined Woods a couple of hours later, jail records note, the inmate's blood pressure was "dangerously high." The doctor ordered that it be checked daily.

Because the doctor was relying on the nurse's form, he failed to order Pindolol.

Woods was transferred to a cell in Men's Central Jail. When he awoke the next morning, no one checked his blood pressure. He was assigned latrine duty, mopping bathroom floors, wiping toilets and cleaning sinks. At about 1:15 p.m., Woods had a heart attack. He was taken to a hospital, where he died an hour later.

A doctor and two nurses, whom sheriff's officials declined to identify, were punished for their treatment of Woods. The doctor was suspended for 10 days; one nurse received a five-day suspension, the other a one-day punishment.

County lawyers found that the failure to prescribe Pindolol and to monitor Woods' blood pressure "fell below the standard of care and may have directly contributed to Jerone Woods' … death." The county settled a wrongful death suit by his widow, Joyce, agreeing to pay her $850,000.

In a recent interview, she said her husband worked more than two decades in the aircraft parts business, didn't miss church on Sundays and raised a nephew as his own when the boy's mother died.

"He was no street criminal," she said. "They took away a good man."

Errors found

Artemio Barcenas-Jimenez was jailed in 2003 after suffering a skull fracture in a drunk-driving accident. A passenger in his car was killed in the crash, and Barcenas-Jimenez was charged with murder.

He complained of head discomfort and nausea.

"My head feels big," he told a nurse.

The nurse ignored the complaint, sheriff's disciplinary records show. After learning that Barcenas-Jimenez was having difficulty breathing, a doctor also failed to exam him.

He died two days later from blunt-force trauma complicated by diabetes, the coroner said. He was 34.

The nurse was suspended for seven days, the doctor for four, for ignoring the inmate's complaints.

In 2005, Louis Laskey was in a communal shower in Men's Central when he collapsed and began convulsing in view of 40 other inmates. As his face turned red, then blue, fellow inmates frantically shouted, "Man down!" in an attempt to get help. It took deputies up to 20 minutes to respond, the inmates said. Laskey, it turned out, had suffered a heart attack. He died later that day at age 49.

Two deputies were suspended 15 days for being slow to come to the inmate's aid.

Available records indicate that no disciplinary action was taken after the death of Henry Torres, a 32-year-old drug offender. Moments before his arrest in 2000, he tried to hide some evidence by swallowing it. Over the next two months, he complained to jail officials that something felt stuck in his throat.

Torres' mother, Yvonne Benavides, said her son would call from jail and complain that he couldn't breathe. He told her nurses gave him aspirin and cough syrup but wouldn't let him see a doctor.

Four times the inmate appeared before a judge as his drug case moved through the courts; four times the judges ordered that medical workers take care of his problem.

They X-rayed Torres' neck and found nothing. They X-rayed his chest and found nothing.

The fourth order, signed Dec. 26 by Superior Court Judge Michael Cowell, ordered an "endoscopy to observe obstruction in throat & any other appropriate testing and/or treatment."

None was conducted. On Jan. 1, 2001, Torres was found dead in his cell. The coroner concluded that he choked to death on a plastic syringe cap lodged in his throat.

The county settled a wrongful death suit for $250,000.

Longtime shortages

County supervisors and sheriff's officials have known for years that there were not enough doctors and nurses in the jails. In 2001, a deputy described the shortages in a memo submitted to the supervisors. A San Francisco consultant, Rebecca Craig, was hired to study the problem.

Craig's conclusions — submitted to the county's top lawyer in April 2004 — called for significant increases. More than 520 new doctors, nurses and pharmacists were needed, she wrote. An additional 200 clerks and other support staff were also necessary so nurses and doctors could spend more time treating patients and less doing paperwork.

County supervisors did not respond to inquiries from The Times about medical conditions within the jails or about the consultant's report.

Since 2005, the county has allocated about $20 million to hire 280 more nurses and 13 more doctors, officials said. The Sheriff's Department, however, has been unable to fill nearly 100 of those positions, in part because of competition from private hospitals and clinics.

Nearly 100 other nursing jobs have candidates but won't be filled until background checks are completed, a process that can take months. More than 150 clerical and other support positions remain unfilled.

Smith, the sheriff's lieutenant, said officials have made healthcare in the jails their top priority in budget requests and have secured steady but modest increases in funding in the last two years. That is the best that can be hoped for, he said, since inmates are not a political constituency.

"This is an underserved population for a reason," he said.

Fatal complications

Gustavo Ortega, a 50-year-old insulin-dependent diabetic, was arrested March 1, 2004, for drinking in public.

After complications arose from his diabetes, he was taken to County-USC, where part of his right foot was amputated.

When he completed his sentence eight days later, he was given a pair of crutches and escorted to the lobby of the Inmate Reception Center in downtown Los Angeles.

But jailers failed to give Ortega his diabetes medication. Instead of going home, he curled up on a bench in the lobby— and stayed there, apparently unnoticed, for three days.

Ortega's family learned that he was no longer in custody when his brother tried to visit him a day after his release. The family spent the next two days searching skid row and homeless shelters for him.

When deputies finally noticed Ortega in the jail lobby, he was pale, disoriented and bleeding from his mouth. Yet deputies waited nearly four hours before calling paramedics, county claim records show. Ortega died a short time later of coronary artery disease, with diabetes, chronic renal failure and hypertension listed as contributing factors.

Ortega's family sued the county. Going to trial, county lawyers said, would be risky.

"Experts will be critical of the jail personnel's failure to provide Mr. Ortega with diabetic medications … and [their] delay to summon medical assistance," county lawyers wrote in a settlement memo.

County lawyers are seeking approval to settle the case for $700,000.

Times staff writer Jack Leonard and researcher Maloy Moore contributed to this report.

    Healthcare suffers at L.A. jails, LATs, 24.12.2006, http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-jailmeds24dec24,1,3566767,full.story?coll=la-headlines-california&ctrack=1&cset=true

Religion for a Captive Audience, Paid For by Taxes

December 10, 2006
The New York Times
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES and ANDREW LEHREN

Life was different in Unit E at the state prison outside Newton, Iowa.

The toilets and sinks — white porcelain ones, like at home — were in a separate bathroom with partitions for privacy. In many Iowa prisons, metal toilet-and-sink combinations squat beside the bunks, to be used without privacy, a few feet from cellmates.

The cells in Unit E had real wooden doors and doorknobs, with locks. More books and computers were available, and inmates were kept busy with classes, chores, music practice and discussions. There were occasional movies and events with live bands and real-world food, like pizza or sandwiches from Subway. Best of all, there were opportunities to see loved ones in an environment quieter and more intimate than the typical visiting rooms.

But the only way an inmate could qualify for this kinder mutation of prison life was to enter an intensely religious rehabilitation program and satisfy the evangelical Christians running it that he was making acceptable spiritual progress. The program — which grew from a project started in 1997 at a Texas prison with the support of George W. Bush, who was governor at the time — says on its Web site that it seeks “to ‘cure’ prisoners by identifying sin as the root of their problems” and showing inmates “how God can heal them permanently, if they turn from their sinful past.”

One Roman Catholic inmate, Michael A. Bauer, left the program after a year, mostly because he felt the program staff and volunteers were hostile toward his faith.

“My No. 1 reason for leaving the program was that I personally felt spiritually crushed,” he testified at a court hearing last year. “I just didn’t feel good about where I was and what was going on.”

For Robert W. Pratt, chief judge of the federal courts in the Southern District of Iowa, this all added up to an unconstitutional use of taxpayer money for religious indoctrination, as he ruled in June in a lawsuit challenging the arrangement.

The Iowa prison program is not unique. Since 2000, courts have cited more than a dozen programs for having unconstitutionally used taxpayer money to pay for religious activities or evangelism aimed at prisoners, recovering addicts, job seekers, teenagers and children.

Nevertheless, the programs are proliferating. For example, the Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest prison management company, with 65 facilities and 71,000 inmates under its control, is substantially expanding its religion-based curriculum and now has 22 institutions offering residential programs similar to the one in Iowa. And the federal Bureau of Prisons, which runs at least five multifaith programs at its facilities, is preparing to seek bids for a single-faith prison program as well.

Government agencies have been repeatedly cited by judges and government auditors for not doing enough to guard against taxpayer-financed evangelism. But some constitutional lawyers say new federal rules may bar the government from imposing any special requirements for how faith-based programs are audited.

And, typically, the only penalty imposed when constitutional violations are detected is the cancellation of future financing — with no requirement that money improperly used for religious purposes be repaid.

But in a move that some constitutional lawyers found surprising, Judge Pratt ordered the prison ministry in the Iowa case to repay more than $1.5 million in government money, saying the constitutional violations were serious and clearly foreseeable.

His decision has been appealed by the prison ministry to a federal appeals court and fiercely protested by the attorneys general of nine states and lawyers for a number of groups advocating greater government accommodation of religious groups. The ministry’s allies in court include the Bush administration, which argued that the repayment order could derail its efforts to draw more religious groups into taxpayer-financed programs.

Officials of the Iowa program said that any anti-Catholic comments made to inmates did not reflect the program’s philosophy, and are not condoned by its leadership.

Jay Hein, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, said the Iowa decision was unfair to the ministry and reflects an “overreaching” at odds with legal developments that increasingly “show favor to religion in the public square.”

And while he acknowledged the need for vigilance, he said he did not think the constitutional risks outweighed the benefits of inviting “faith-infused” ministries, like the one in Iowa, to provide government-financed services to “people of faith who seek to be served in this ‘full-person’ concept.”

Crossing a Bright Line

Over the last two decades, legislatures, government agencies and the courts have provided religious organizations with a widening range of regulatory and tax exemptions. And in the last decade religious institutions have also been granted access to public money once denied on constitutional grounds, including historic preservation grants and emergency reconstruction funds.

In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that public money could be used for religious instruction or indoctrination, but only when the intended beneficiaries made the choice themselves between religious and secular programs — as when parents decide whether to use tuition vouchers at religious schools or secular ones. The court emphasized the difference between such “indirect” financing, in which the money flows through beneficiaries who choose that program, and “direct” funding, where the government chooses the programs that receive money.

But even in today’s more accommodating environment, constitutional scholars agree that one line between church and state has remained fairly bright: The government cannot directly finance or support religious evangelism or indoctrination. That restriction typically has not loomed large when public money goes to religious charities providing essentially secular services, like job training, after-school tutoring, child care or food banks. In such cases, the beneficiaries need not accept the charity’s religious beliefs to get the secular benefits the government is financing.

The courts have taken a different view, however, when public money goes directly to groups, like the Iowa ministry, whose method of helping others is to introduce them to a specific set of religious beliefs — and whose success depends on the beneficiary accepting those core beliefs. In those cases, most of the challenged grants have been struck down as unconstitutional.

Those who see faith-based groups as exceptionally effective allies in the battle against criminal recidivism, teen pregnancy, addiction and other social ills say these cases are rare, compared with the number of programs receiving funds, and should not tarnish the concept of bringing more religious groups into publicly financed programs, so long as any direct financing is used only for secular expenses.

That concept has been embodied most prominently since 2001 in the Bush administration’s Faith-Based and Community Initiative, a high-profile effort to encourage religious and community groups to participate in government programs. More than 100 cities and 33 states have established similar initiatives, according to Mr. Hein.

The basic architecture of these initiatives has so far withstood constitutional challenge, although the Supreme Court agreed on Dec. 1 to consider a case on whether taxpayers have legal standing to bring such challenges against the Bush administration’s program.

Defenders of these initiatives say they are necessary to eliminate longstanding government policies that discriminated against religious groups — to provide a level playing field, as one White House study put it.

But critics say the “level playing field” argument ignores the fact that giving public money directly to ministries that aim at religious conversion poses constitutional problems that simply do not arise when the money goes elsewhere.

Converting Young People

Those constitutional problems sharpen when young people are the intended beneficiaries of these transformational ministries. In recent years, several judges have concluded that children and teenagers, like prisoners, have too few options and too little power to make the voluntary choices the Supreme Court requires when public money flows to programs involving religious instruction or indoctrination.

That was the conclusion last year of a federal judge in Michigan, in a case filed by Teen Ranch, a nonprofit Christian facility that provides residential care for troubled or abused children ages 11 to 17.

In 2003, state officials imposed a moratorium on placements of children there, primarily because of its intensively religious programming. Lawyers for the ranch went to court to challenge that moratorium.

“Teen Ranch acknowledges that it is overtly and unapologetically a Christian facility with a Christian worldview that hopes to touch and improve the lives of the youth served by encouraging their conversion to faith in Christ, or assisting them in deepening their pre-existing Christian faith,” observed a United States District judge, Robert Holmes Bell, in a decision released in September 2005.

Although youngsters in state custody could not choose where to be placed, they could refuse to go to the ranch if they objected to its religious character. As a result, the ranch’s lawyers argued, the state money was constitutionally permissible.

The state contended that the children in its care were “too young, vulnerable and traumatized” to make genuine choices. The ranch disputed that and added that the children had case workers and other adults to guide them. Judge Bell rejected Teen Ranch’s arguments. “Regardless of whether state wards are particularly vulnerable, they are children,” he wrote.

The ranch in Michigan has discontinued operations pending the outcome of its appeal, said Mitchell E. Koster, who was its chief operating officer. “We are confident that our argument will win,” Mr. Koster said. “It’s just a question of at what level.”

In another case early last year, a federal judge struck down a federal grant in 2003 to MentorKids USA, a ministry based in Phoenix, to provide mentors for the children of prisoners. In a case filed by the Freedom From Religion Foundation in Madison, Wis., the judge noted that the exclusively Christian mentors had to regularly assess whether the young people in their care seemed “to be progressing in relationship with God.” In a program newsletter offered as evidence, its director said, “Our goal is to see every young adult choose Christ.”

The federal government had been clearly informed in advance of the nature of the MentorKids ministry, said John Gibson, chairman of the group’s board. “The court’s decision meant that there were 50 kids we could have served that we were not able to serve.”

In another case, more than $1 million in federal funds went to the Alaska Christian College in Soldotna, Alaska, which says it provides “a theologically based post-secondary education” to teenage Native Americans from isolated villages. But an investigator from the Education Department who visited the school last year found a first-year curriculum “that is almost entirely religious in nature.”

The Freedom From Religion Foundation sued to block the financing. The school promised to use government money only for secular expenses, and federal financing resumed last May, according to Derek Gaubatz, of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represents the college.

A number of government grants to finance sexual abstinence education have been successfully challenged. For example, the Louisiana Governor’s Program on Abstinence gave federal money to several religious groups that used it for clearly unconstitutional purposes, a federal judge ruled in 2002, in a case filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

One grant went to a theater company that toured high schools performing a skit called “Just Say Whoa.” The script contained many religious references including one in which a character called Bible Guy tells teenagers in the cast: “As Christians, our bodies belong to the Lord, not to us.”

The federal judge said the grants were so poorly monitored that the state missed other clear signs of unconstitutional activity — as when one Catholic diocese sent monthly reports showing that it had used federal money “to support prayer at abortion clinics, pro-life marches and pro-life rallies.” Gail Dignam, director of the abstinence program, said that state contracts now emphasize more clearly that no grant money may be used for religious activities.

The Programs in Prisons

Programs like the one at the Iowa prison are a rare ray of hope for American prisoners, and governments should encourage them, their supporters say.

“We have 2.3 million Americans in prison today; 700,000 of them will get out of prison this coming year,” said Mark L. Earley, a former attorney general of Virginia. Many inmates come out of prison “much more antisocial than when they came in,” he added. He said he saw faith-based groups as essential partners in any effective rehabilitation efforts.

Mr. Earley is the president and chief executive of Prison Fellowship Ministries, based in Lansdowne, Va. With almost $56 million a year in revenue, the ministry oversees the InnerChange Freedom Initiative, which operates the Iowa program.

Since its birth in 1976, Prison Fellowship has been most closely associated with one of its founders, Charles W. Colson, who said in a 2002 newsletter that the InnerChange program demonstrates “that Christ changes lives, and that changing prisoners from the inside out is the only crime-prevention program that really works.”

In early 2003, Americans United for Separation of Church and State joined with a group of Iowa taxpayers and inmates to challenge the InnerChange program in federal court.

In ruling on that case, Judge Pratt noted that the born-again Christian staff was the sole judge of an inmate’s spiritual transformation. If an inmate did not join in the religious activities that were part of his “treatment,” the staff could write up disciplinary reports, generating demerits the inmate’s parole board might see. Or they could expel the inmate.

And while the program was supposedly open to all, in practice its content was “a substantial disincentive” for inmates of other faiths to join, the judge noted. Although the ministry itself does not condone hostility toward Catholics, Roman Catholic inmates heard their faith criticized by staff members and volunteers from local evangelical churches, the judge found. And Jews and Muslims in the program would have been required to participate in Christian worship services even if that deeply offended their own religious beliefs.

Mr. Earley said Judge Pratt’s decision was sharply inconsistent with current law and his standard for separating secular from religious expenses was so extreme that it would disqualify almost any faith-based program. He acknowledged that inmates, whatever their own faith, are required to participate in all program activities, including worship, but he insisted that a religious conversion is not required for success. InnerChange uses biblical references only to illustrate a set of universal values, such as integrity and responsibility, and not to exclude those of other faiths, he said, adding that it was “unfortunate” if any inmates felt the program denigrated Catholicism or any other Christian faith. Corrections officials in Iowa declined to comment on the case.

Not all programs in prisons are so narrowly focused. Florida now has three prisons that offer inmates, who must ask to be housed there, more than two dozen offerings ranging from various Christian denominations to Orthodox Judaism to Scientology. But at Newton, Judge Pratt found, there were few options — and no equivalent programs — without religious indoctrination.

“The state has literally established an Evangelical Christian congregation within the walls of one of its penal institutions, giving the leaders of that congregation, i.e., InnerChange employees, authority to control the spiritual, emotional and physical lives of hundreds of Iowa inmates,” Judge Pratt wrote. “There are no adequate safeguards present, nor could there be, to ensure that state funds are not being directly spent to indoctrinate Iowa inmates.”

InnerChange, which has been widely praised by corrections officials and politicians, operates similar programs at prisons in Texas, Minnesota, Kansas, Arkansas and, by next spring, Missouri. Officials in those states are monitoring the Iowa case, but several said they believed their programs were sufficiently different to survive a similar challenge.

A government-financed religious education program at a county jail in Fort Worth was struck down by the Texas Supreme Court more than five years ago, and more lawsuits are pending. Corrections Corporation was among those sued last year by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which is challenging a Christian residential program at a women’s prison in Grant, N.M. The foundation has also sued the federal Bureau of Prisons over its faith-based rehabilitation programs. And Americans United, the Iowa plaintiff, and the American Civil Liberties Union have sued a job-training program run by a religious group at the Bradford County Jail near Troy, Pa.

Prison Fellowship Ministries is one of about a half-dozen Christian groups that operate programs at jails and prisons run by the Corrections Corporation. The company’s lawyers are studying the Iowa decision, said a spokeswoman, Louise Grant. “But we are not, at this time, changing or altering any of our programming based on that, or any other ruling.”

Inadequate Monitoring

Government agencies have been criticized repeatedly for inadequately watching these programs. Besides the criticism in various court decisions, the Government Accountability Office has twice raised questions about cloudy guidelines and inadequate safeguards against government-financed evangelism.

In its most recent audit released in June, the G.A.O., which examined faith-based organizations in four states, found that some were violating federal rules against proselytizing and that government agencies did not have adequate safeguards against such violations.

The problem is not that none of these programs are audited. Every group that gets a federal grant worth more than $500,000 has to pay a private auditor to examine its books and report to the government. Many federal programs, like those that provide Medicaid services or help the government allocate arts grants, require additional audits.

But no supplemental audits are required under the faith-based initiative — indeed, it would probably violate the Bush administration’s new regulations to do so, said Robert W. Tuttle, a professor of law and religion at George Washington University and co-director of legal research, along with Ira C. Lupu, for the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy, a project of the Rockefeller Institute.

“The rules can be read to prohibit special audit requirements because that would be considered a stigma, which would be discriminatory,” Professor Tuttle said. “But that flies in the face of constitutional logic, because religion is special, and that special quality has to be reflected in program guidelines and audit rules.”

The G.A.O. also says the government cannot easily or accurately track either how much money is flowing to groups or whether they are using the funds in unconstitutional ways.

The Bush administration is already studying whether these constitutional problems can be resolved by reshaping many government grants into voucher programs under which the beneficiary decides where the money goes. But vouchers are a limited solution because most social service agencies need to know that a certain amount of money is assured before they can begin operations.

Mr. Hein, the White House official, agreed that vouchers could clarify the legal landscape. But even where they are not practical, he said, the Bush administration remains committed to keeping the doors to government financing open for as many religious groups as possible.

Donna Anderson contributed research.

    Religion for a Captive Audience, Paid For by Taxes, NYT, 10.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/business/10faith.html?hp&ex=1165813200&en=9d0e1451cc709fc2&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Experiment Will Test the Effectiveness of Post-Prison Employment Programs

October 1, 2006
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM

CHICAGO — As raw garbage streamed by on a conveyer belt, newly released convicts pulled out paper, plastics and other recyclables on a recent morning, throwing aside the occasional brick or mattress.

Noisy, dusty and smelly, paying $6.50 an hour, the jobs yield neither the swagger nor the swag that these men and women chased as drug dealers, thieves or worse. But many of them see the temporary work as a fresh start.

The jobs are arranged by a Chicago charity, the Safer Foundation, which works with current and former prisoners. Offering transitional jobs like these — immediate, closely supervised work and help finding permanent employment — is a growing tactic in the effort to usher felons back to society and curb recidivism. Now the effectiveness of this approach is about to be tested scientifically for the first time.

Starting in January, the employment and recidivism rates of 2,000 newly released male prisoners, all with similar histories of little work and poor schooling, will be studied in Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Chicago.

Half of the men will receive more limited aid: instruction in work behavior, résumé preparation and other employment skills and help looking for a job. The other half will get those services and also a few months of temporary work in places like the recycling plant here — a chance for them to get into the unfamiliar rhythms of a regular job.

The experiment, which will track the two groups over three years, is being sponsored by the Joyce Foundation in Chicago and directed by the Manpower Development Research Corporation in New York, which specializes in scientific studies of poverty programs.

Separately, the research group is conducting a controlled study of the transitional jobs program at the Center for Employment Opportunities in New York, which provides maintenance crews for public facilities and has been a national model.

“If you ask inmates what they want most, they want a job,” said Mindy Tarlow, executive director of the center in New York. “But they don’t know what that means.”

She added, “What we’re competing with is making some money at night on a street corner instead of having to show up somewhere at 8 a.m. every day.”

Despite the apparent promise of transitional jobs, questions remain about their long-term effectiveness that the study hopes to address.

Are those who last through these programs such a select group — so motivated to change — that they would succeed anyway, or can well-timed help turn others around, too?

Can work-site counseling, sobriety meetings and a strong dose of mainstream work overcome the criminal pull of old haunts and friends?

And more fundamentally: will people with low skills, even if they adapt to steady work, ever make wages high enough to support a family and stifle the temptation to return to crime?

Roberto Reyes, a 36-year-old high school dropout in Chicago who has served seven years on burglary, gun and drug charges, works the conveyer belt at a recycling plant that is run for the city by Allied Waste Services.

Mr. Reyes has labored at the plant for four months, the longest he has held a job. “The money here is not that much, but it’s better than nothing,” he said. “Sometimes you wake up and don’t want to come to work, but I’m not going to leave this until I find another job. I knew I couldn’t just keep going on with that lifestyle and see life pass me by.”

Mr. Reyes’s determination is evident, but the numbers and records of people in his situation are daunting.

In Chicago, more than 20,000 prisoners come home from state facilities each year. Fifty-four percent are re-incarcerated within three years for new crimes or parole violations — a tale of wasted lives and victimized communities that is repeated nationwide among more than 600,000 prisoners that are released annually.

While common sense, and prisoners themselves, say that employment is vital to an honest new life, the obstacles are huge. A majority of those leaving prison did not finish high school and have little legitimate work experience. Many have serious drug or psychological problems that must be treated before they can hold a regular job. And while transitional programs may acclimatize them to the time-clock world of the workplace, many are likely to remain stuck in low-end jobs anyway.

Those who work with prisoners say that enticing onetime thugs to give work a try is not always as hard as it sounds. “They tell us that what comes with the street life is looking over your shoulder all the time,” said Diane Williams, president of the Safer Foundation. One key, she said, seems to be getting released prisoners into work quickly, when the desire to normalize their lives is strongest.

Jimmy Parker, 24, was in and out of prison and hustling until six months ago when he decided, as he put it, “enough is enough.”

“This job is rough, but I’m trying to change my life around,” he said during a break at another recycling site run by Allied. “I’ve accomplished one thing — I got my own studio apartment — and someday I want to get custody of my daughter.”

The Safer Foundation has eight employees who search for companies willing to hire former prisoners. Allied Waste’s experience with such workers has been positive, said Robert Kalebich, general manager for the company in Chicago. Safer keeps a full-time “job coach” at each work site to advise workers and deal with disputes.

“If anything we see an advantage in this arrangement,” Mr. Kalebich said. “If we hire off the street we have to wonder are they trained, are they here legally, are they properly drug tested.”

Raphael Carter served drug time when he was 18, stayed out for nearly a decade, then found himself in prison again. “I woke up and said, I can’t do this anymore, it’s a dead end road,” he recalled, adding that he now has two children, 13 and 6, who depend on him.

“You have to weigh the options, would you rather go back to jail or get a little increment of money and see your kids,” said Mr. Carter, 30, who lives with his girlfriend and her four children. “Being older, I made the right choice.”

He worked for six months at the recycling job, then found a chance in a nearby city driving a forklift for the attractive wage of $11.60 an hour. But his car broke down once too often during the hour and a half drive to work, he said, and he was let go.

Now he works for a company that erects large party tents, a seasonal job at $8.50 an hour, and he is consulting the Safer listings for a permanent job.

“By myself I wouldn’t have had any of these opportunities,” he said.

    Experiment Will Test the Effectiveness of Post-Prison Employment Programs, NYT, 1.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/us/01reentry.html