History > 2011 > USA > Justice > Prison / Jail (I)
Rex Babin
The Sacramento Bee
California
Cagle
26 January 2011
http://www.cagle.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/PCbest9.asp
California Inmates
End 3-Week Hunger Strike
October 13, 2011
The New York Times
By IAN LOVETT
LOS ANGELES — The hunger strike at California state prisons has ended, the
Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said Thursday.
Thousands of inmates at prisons across California had stopped eating over the
past three weeks in renewed protest against conditions of prolonged isolation in
security housing units, though the number of hunger strikers dwindled to fewer
than 600 this week.
But after negotiations on Thursday between the corrections department and
lawyers representing the inmates, strike leaders agreed to resume eating.
Corrections officials reiterated the reforms the department had agreed to at the
end of the previous hunger strike in July, which they said would take several
months to finalize, and “agreed to stay on its same course,” according to a news
release from the department.
The department had already agreed to a review of its policies for placing
inmates in security housing units.
But Carol Strickman, a lawyer with Legal Services for Prisoners with Children
who negotiated on behalf of the inmates, said that, most importantly, the
department had agreed to review the cases of all prisoners already in isolation
because of “validated” gang affiliation, rather than because of their behavior
while in prison.
“This is the first time the prisoners had heard that kind of review was in the
works,” Ms. Strickman said. “That new information, I believe, convinced them to
end the hunger strike.”
Erica Goode contributed reporting from New York.
California Inmates End
3-Week Hunger Strike, NYT, 13.10.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/us/california-inmates-end-3-week-hunger-strike.html
Exonerated of Murder, a Boxer Makes a Debut at 52
October 10, 2011
The New York Times
By PETER APPLEBOME
PHILADELPHIA — The television crew had him up at dawn doing the Rocky
fandango, dashing up the 72 stone steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and
dancing around in triumph like another over-the-hill, underdog pugilist who had
made it big.
Cliché or not, it is hard not to imagine the familiar trumpet score along with
the thwock, thwock, thwock of fists on punching bags as Dewey Bozella trains for
one of the least likely boxing matches in history.
After 26 years in New York State prisons, and two years after he was exonerated
of murder, Mr. Bozella will make his professional boxing debut on Saturday in
Los Angeles, at age 52, on the undercard of the light-heavyweight champion
Bernard Hopkins. (A mere 46 himself, Mr. Hopkins became the oldest fighter to
win a major world championship this May.)
Mr. Bozella’s other fight, in which he is seeking compensation for the half of
his life he spent behind bars, may be even more daunting than chasing victory in
the ring. But for now, Mr. Bozella is focused on what he says will be his one
and only professional bout.
“I want to go out there and give 100 percent and then move on with my life,” he
said. “This is not a career move. It’s a personal move and a way to let people
know to never give up on their dreams. My favorite quote is ‘Don’t let fear
determine who you are and never let where you come from determine where you’re
going.’ That’s what this is about.”
The product of a violent broken family and a hard life on the streets, Mr.
Bozella was a troubled 18-year-old in 1977 when Emma Crapser, 92, was murdered
in her Poughkeepsie, N.Y., home after returning from playing bingo. Six years
later, based almost entirely on the testimony of two criminals who repeatedly
changed their stories, he was convicted of the murder.
There was no physical evidence implicating Mr. Bozella. Instead, there was the
fingerprint of another man, Donald Wise, who was later convicted of committing a
nearly identical murder of another elderly woman in the same neighborhood. Mr.
Bozella was retried in 1990, and was offered a deal that would let him go free
in exchange for an admission that he committed the crime. He refused. A jury
convicted him again.
At Sing Sing, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Mercy College and a master’s
from the New York Theological Seminary. And he boxed in the prison’s “Death
House,” once the scene of electrocutions, then a boxing ring, where he became
Sing Sing’s light-heavyweight champion. At parole hearings, he repeatedly
refused to express remorse for the crime he did not commit. He would get out one
way, he said, either in a box or as an exonerated man. The box seemed more
likely.
In the end, he was saved by a miracle. The Innocence Project, a legal clinic
dedicated to overturning wrongful convictions, believing in his case but unable
to pursue it absent DNA evidence, referred it to the law firm WilmerHale.
Lawyers there eventually found the Poughkeepsie police lieutenant who had
investigated the case. He had retired, and Mr. Bozella’s was the only file he
had saved. It included numerous pieces of evidence favorable to Mr. Bozella that
had not been turned over to his lawyers. On Oct. 28, 2009, he walked out of the
courthouse in Poughkeepsie finally a free man.
He struggled to find work, eventually counseling former convicts while teaching
boxing at a Newburgh, N.Y., gym until ESPN became interested in his story. In
July, at its annual ESPY Awards, he was given its Arthur Ashe Courage Award,
whose past recipients have included Muhammad Ali, Pat Tillman and Nelson
Mandela. The offer to box professionally came as a result of that appearance.
But when he took the rigorous California State Athletic Commission test on Aug.
24 to get licensed to box in the state, he failed. After Labor Day, he began
working out in Philadelphia with the trainers for Mr. Hopkins. They were
skeptical.
“I’m thinking, ‘I’m going to kill this old guy,’ ” said Danny Davis, one of Mr.
Hopkins’s trainers. “There’s no way this guy can make it through my training.”
But Mr. Bozella got tougher, leaner and more nimble, dropping 10 pounds in
little more than a week. He sparred with, and took serious lumps from, a
world-class fighter: Lajuan Simon, a middleweight title contender. Mr. Bozella
took the test again on Sept. 29. This time he passed.
Officials said Mr. Bozella was believed to be the oldest fighter ever licensed
to box in California. Fighters that age are extremely rare but hardly unknown.
“The Ultimate Book of Boxing Lists,” by Bert Randolph Sugar and Teddy Atlas, has
a section on “Boxing’s Greatest Methuselahs” that includes Mr. Hopkins; Jem
Mace, the legendary 19th-century English boxer who fought at 59; and Saoul
Mamby, a former junior welterweight titleholder who fought in 2008 at the age of
60, making him the oldest fighter ever to appear in an officially sanctioned
bout.
Mr. Bozella, a cruiserweight — between light-heavyweights and heavyweights —
will not be fighting for a championship; he is taking on Larry Hopkins, 30, of
Houston, who is 0-3 as a professional (and is not related to Bernard Hopkins).
His purse in the pay-per-view bout will be in the very low four figures.
But even if hype and marketing are as much a part of boxing as quick feet and
sharp jabs, Mr. Bozella said the bout was anything but a stunt.
“You’ve seen the workout I went through, the pain, blood and bruises I’m
getting,” he said after four rounds sparring with Mr. Simon last week. “No one’s
giving me nothing for free. I can go out there and get knocked out, or I can
knock the other guy out. It’s that simple.”
Mr. Bozella hopes to open his own gym as a way to mentor youngsters, but beyond
its Hollywood touches, his feel-good story turns cloudier. The day after he
passed the boxing test, a federal judge threw out his lawsuit against Dutchess
County and the City of Poughkeepsie over the evidence that was not turned over
to his lawyers.
The decision was primarily based on a controversial Supreme Court ruling in the
case of Connick v. Thompson. By a 5-to-4 margin, the court, in a decision
written by Justice Clarence Thomas in March, threw out a $14 million jury award
to a former death row inmate freed after prosecutorial misconduct came to light.
The decision stated that only a pattern of misconduct in properly turning over
evidence could warrant financial compensation, no matter how egregious the
misconduct against a single defendant.
“I’m not going to disrespect the courts,” Mr. Bozella said. “I’d just like the
justice system to be fair. Same thing with boxing. If the judges are fair, then
the real winner wins. Just be fair. That’s it.”
Exonerated of Murder, a
Boxer Makes a Debut at 52, NYT, 10.10.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/nyregion/exonerated-of-murder-dewey-bozella-makes-a-boxing-debut.html
California Begins Moving Prison Inmates
October 8, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA
LOS ANGELES — Facing an unprecedented order from the Supreme Court to
decrease its inmate population by 11,000 over the next three months and by
34,000 over the next two years, California prisons last week began to shift
inmates to county jails and probation officers, starting what many believe will
be a fundamental and far-reaching change in the nation’s largest corrections
system.
Last spring, the Supreme Court ruled that overcrowding and poor conditions in
state prisons violated inmates’ constitutional rights and, in a first, ordered a
state to rapidly decrease its inmate population. Gov. Jerry Brown and the
Legislature approved a plan that would place many more offenders in the custody
of individual counties.
Under the plan, inmates who have committed nonviolent, nonserious and nonsexual
offenses will be released back to the county probation system rather than to
state parole officers. Those newly convicted of such crimes will be sent
directly to the counties, which will decide if they should go to a local jail or
to an alternative community program. And newly accused defendants may wear
electronic monitoring bracelets while they await trial.
“This is the largest change in the California state system in my lifetime,” said
Barry Krisberg, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who
has watched the state prisons for decades and testified in the Supreme Court
case last year. “Given that what we had was completely broken and was the most
expensive, overcrowded and least effective in America, there’s some hope that
this will change it.”
The shift of prisoners to county facilities began Monday, and state officials
expect to satisfy the Supreme Court’s mandate by June 2013 — at which time they
must have reduced the state inmate population of 144,000, which put the prisons
at 180 percent capacity, to 110,000, or 135 percent of capacity. First, though,
they must reach the initial court-ordered benchmark by reducing the prison
population to 133,000 by December.
In what the state calls a realignment of the criminal justice system, the plan
places more responsibilities on the counties, and some local officials say they
are unprepared and underfinanced to get the job done. But state officials say
that keeping inmates closer to their communities will increase the chances that
they can be rehabilitated, rather than in and out of state prison.
For the last several years, state parole officers would often catch criminals on
technical parole violations, sending them back to prison for several weeks at a
time — a practice many derided as a revolving door.
The constant influx of new and former inmates also sharply increased the cost
for the state, because it must pay for a medical evaluation and several other
assessments every time an inmate enters the system.
Matthew Cate, the secretary of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation,
said the state hoped that the counties would concentrate on rehabilitating
prisoners and helping them reintegrate into the community, something the state
system was never able to do. Figures show that nearly 70 percent of inmates in
California prisons end up there again.
“The catch-and-release way we had before was not working — I don’t know how
anyone could disagree with that,” Mr. Cate said. “The only alternative we had
was just a massive release of people from prison. Nobody seemed to want to talk
about that.”
But some city and county officials say that the changes are likely to overwhelm
local law enforcement agencies and that the state has not given them enough time
or money to prepare. Last week, Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa of Los Angeles and
the city’s police chief, Charlie Beck, said they would have to reassign 150
police officers to help monitor the former inmates.
Sheriff Scott R. Jones of Sacramento County has been one of the most outspoken
critics of the plan, saying it is likely to drive up crime. He called it a
“collision course with disaster,” because there is not enough money for the
counties.
“To do all the things that they are asking everyone to do will cost an enormous
amount of money, and we don’t have it,” Sheriff Jones said. “If this doesn’t
work, it’s not like we get to go back and try again — we’re going to be stuck
with the consequences.”
Sheriff Jones said the state might have been better off simply releasing 10,000
inmates, so it could use the extra time to figure out how to get more money or
create a more comprehensive system for counties. “It’s not like we’re ready,
because we’re not, and it’s not like we know what is best, because we don’t,” he
added. “The only thing that is driving this is a court demand.”
But Mr. Cate dismissed the criticisms, saying the state had no other choice and
had been coordinating plans for months.
“Everyone just wants to inoculate themselves from any kind of crime increase and
blame it on realignment,” Mr. Cate said. “This is some massive change. It’s
going to be subtle and happen over time.”
Counties across the state have been working “feverishly” to figure out their
plans to handle the new responsibilities, said Sheriff Mark Pazin of Merced
County, president of the California State Sheriffs’ Association.
“It’s a little tiring that we’re finally at the point where we have to do
something and people start to react by just hitting the panic button,” Sheriff
Pazin said.
Studies show that reduced sentences do not cause drastic increases in crime, he
said, and many counties are working on alternative programs. “We need to be
concentrating on what works best and how we can actually turn things around,” he
said.
Sheriff Pazin said Mr. Brown had reassured him that the state would consider
changing the way money is allocated to individual counties. Officials hope that
five years from now, they will be able to determine which counties have been
most effective at reducing the recidivism rate.
But several advocates for prisoners say they worry that the state is not doing
enough to ensure that the counties will consider alternatives to jail, and
several counties have said they will deal with the influx simply by adding more
beds to their jails. Many of the county jails across the state are already
overcrowded, and the Los Angeles County jails are being investigated by the
F.B.I. over accusations of inmate abuse by deputies.
“There are no kind of guiding principles or oversight or monitoring,” said
Donald Specter, the director of the Prison Law Office, which argued for the
prisoners in the Supreme Court case. “I think there will be extreme variations,
where some counties just will use the money to lock them up with no support and
others who really try to figure out real solutions.”
Any violent crime committed by one of the former inmates is likely to grab
headlines, but it will be years before the state can measure the impact of the
change.
“We don’t have a lot of options,” Mr. Cate said. “The question years from now
will really be: Did we avoid a disaster?”
California Begins Moving
Prison Inmates, NYT, 8.10.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/us/california-begins-moving-prisoners.html
Report Details Wide Abuse
in Los Angeles Jail System
September 28, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA
LOS ANGELES — One inmate said he was forced to walk down a hallway naked
after sheriff’s deputies accused him of stealing a piece of mail. They taunted
him in Spanish, calling him a derogatory name for homosexuals.
Another former inmate said that after he protested that guards were harassing a
mentally ill prisoner, the same deputies took him into another room, slammed his
head into a wall and repeatedly punched him in the chest.
And a chaplain said he saw deputies punching an inmate until he collapsed to the
ground. They then began kicking the apparently unconscious man’s head and body.
The examples are just a fraction of dozens of detailed allegations of abuse in
Los Angeles County’s Men’s Central Jail and Twin Towers, according to a report
that the American Civil Liberties Union is expected to file in Federal District
Court here on Wednesday. The Los Angeles County jail system, the nation’s
largest, is also the nation’s most troubled, according to lawyers, advocates and
former law enforcement officials.
“This situation, the length of time it has been going on, the volume of
complaints and the egregious nature are much, much worse than anything I’ve ever
seen,” said Tom Parker, a retired F.B.I. official who led the agency’s Los
Angeles office for years and oversaw investigations into the Rodney King beating
and charges of corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department. “They are
abusing inmates with impunity, and the worst part is that they think they can
get away with it.”
The system has a long history of accusations of abuse and poor conditions. The
A.C.L.U. filed a federal lawsuit 35 years ago, and an agreement eventually
allowed the organization to place monitors inside the jails. But those monitors
say that they receive six or seven complaints a week now, primarily from the two
large jails in downtown Los Angeles that house thousands of men. The F.B.I. has
also begun to investigate several episodes in the jails.
Sheriff Lee Baca has repeatedly dismissed any suggestion of a systemic problem
in the jails, saying that all allegations of abuse are investigated and that
most are unfounded.
This week, The Los Angeles Times reported that F.B.I. agents sneaked a cellphone
to a prisoner as part of an investigation. Sheriff Baca reacted to the
investigation angrily, saying that the agency did not know what it was doing and
was putting prisoners and guards in danger.
Sheriff Baca discussed the matter with a Justice Department official in a
meeting on Tuesday. Nicole Nishida, the sheriff’s spokeswoman, said that the
department thoroughly investigated all complaints of abuse that it received and
that most were unsubstantiated.
With California under an order from the United States Supreme Court to shed
thousands of inmates from the state prisons, county jails are expected to
receive many more inmates in the next year, which could aggravate overcrowding
and other problems. Officials from the Sheriff’s Department have said that they
will not place inmates from the state in the Men’s Central Jail, which they
concede is an antiquated building.
But lawyers from the A.C.L.U. say that the Los Angeles County system is, in many
ways, even worse than the state prisons that have been found unconstitutional.
They say that many complaints are never properly investigated, and that often
the very guards accused of abuse are in the room when an inmate is interviewed
about the complaint.
In the last several months, the civil rights group has amassed 70 declarations
from former prisoners and civilians who witnessed beatings. The statements
suggest few patterns — the complaints span all times of day and multiple units
in the jail. But, the A.C.L.U. says, the guards do seem to use the same terms
repeatedly, shouting, “Stop resisting!” and “Stop fighting!” while they hit
inmates, even when inmates are not moving or are in handcuffs.
Paulino Juarez, a Roman Catholic chaplain who has worked in the jail since 1998,
was visiting an inmate’s cell early one morning in February 2009 when he heard
several thumps and gasps in the hallway. When he moved to the cell door, he saw
three deputies hitting a man and yelling, “Stop fighting!”
“But he wasn’t fighting; he wasn’t even defending himself,” Mr. Juarez said in
an interview. “When they saw me, they froze. I was frozen, too. I didn’t say
anything. I was too shocked, and I was terrified.”
Mr. Juarez filed a report with the Sheriff’s Department but did not hear
anything about it for several months. More than two years later, during a
meeting with his supervisor and Sheriff Baca, Mr. Juarez was told that the
department found that the inmate had resisted going into his cell. There was no
record of Mr. Juarez’s report, although a guard indicated in the file that the
chaplain had exaggerated what he had witnessed. He was told that the inmate,
whose name he did not know at the time, had later been released.
“I really don’t trust anymore,” Mr. Juarez said. “They always say inmates are
liars and nobody believes them. But I saw them treated like this.”
While the sheriff has repeatedly dismissed complaints from prisoners, the number
of civilians who have witnessed beatings has steadily increased, showing the
brazenness of many of the guards in the jails, said Peter Eliasberg, legal
director for the A.C.L.U. Foundation of Southern California.
This year, Esther Lim, the current monitor for the A.C.L.U., said she saw
several deputies beat a man inside the Twin Towers jail, next door to Men’s
Central, as if he were a “human punching bag.” The attack was widely reported in
the local news media, and at the time a spokesman dismissed it, saying that Ms.
Lim should have reported it sooner and that the inmate was attacking the
deputies.
Mr. Eliasberg and Ms. Lim said that inmates who were beaten were routinely
placed for several days afterward in isolation, known as “the hole,” and were
often accused of assaulting the guards.
The A.C.L.U. plans to call for a wide-ranging federal investigation, and for
Sheriff Baca to resign.
Report Details Wide
Abuse in Los Angeles Jail System, NYT, 28.9.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/28/us/aclu-suit-details-wide-abuse-in-los-angeles-jail-system.html
The Lingering Injustice of Attica
September 8, 2011
The New York Times
By HEATHER ANN THOMPSON
Philadelphia
FORTY years ago today, more than 1,000 inmates at Attica Correctional Facility
began a major civil and human rights protest — an uprising that is barely
mentioned in textbooks but nevertheless was one of the most important rebellions
in American history.
A forbidding institution that opened in 1931, Attica, roughly midway between
Buffalo and Rochester, was overcrowded and governed by rigid and often
capricious penal practices.
The guards were white men from small towns in upstate New York; the prisoners
were mostly urban African-Americans and Puerto Ricans. They wanted decent
medical care so that an inmate like Angel Martinez, 21, could receive treatment
for his debilitating polio. They wanted more humane parole so that a man like L.
D. Barkley, also 21, wouldn’t be locked up in a maximum security facility like
Attica for driving without a license. They also wanted less discriminatory
policies so that black inmates like Richard X. Clark wouldn’t be given the worst
jobs, while white prisoners were given the best. These men first tried writing
to state officials, but their pleas for reform were largely ignored. Eventually,
they erupted.
Over five days, Americans sat glued to their televisions as this uprising
unfolded. They watched in surprise as inmates elected representatives from each
cellblock to negotiate on their behalf. They watched in disbelief as these same
inmates protected the guards and civilian employees they had taken hostage.
They also saw the inmates request the presence of official “observers” to ensure
productive and peaceful interactions with the state. These eventually included
the New York Times columnist Tom Wicker; the radical lawyer William M. Kunstler;
politicians like Arthur O. Eve, John R. Dunne and Herman Badillo; and ministers
as well as activists.
As the rebellion wore on, and the lawn around Attica filled with hundreds of
heavily armed state troopers, these observers worried that Gov. Nelson A.
Rockefeller, having already refused to grant amnesty to the inmates if they
surrendered, would turn to force. This, they knew, would result in a massacre.
Several observers begged the governor to come to Attica. In lieu of amnesty,
they reasoned, his presence might at least assure the inmates that the state
would honor any agreement it made with them and prevent any reprisals should
they end their protest. Rockefeller wouldn’t consider it.
On the morning of Sept. 13, 1971, he gave the green light for helicopters to
rise suddenly over Attica and blanket it with tear gas. As inmates and hostages
fell to the ground blinded, choking and incapacitated, more than 500 state
troopers burst in, riddling catwalks and exercise yards with thousands of
bullets. Within 15 minutes the air was filled with screams, and the prison was
littered with the bodies of 39 people — 29 inmates and 10 hostages — who lay
dead or dying. “I could see all this blood just running out of the mud and
water,” one inmate recalled. “That’s all I could see.”
Incredibly, state officials claimed that the inmates, not the troopers, had
killed the hostages. Meanwhile, scores of inmates who had survived the assault
were tortured. Enraged troopers, and not a few correctional officers, forced
these men, many of whom had been shot multiple times, to crawl naked across
shattered glass and to run a gantlet as fists, gun butts and nightsticks rained
down on their bodies. Investigators from the state police, the very entity that
had led the assault, were then asked to determine what had gone wrong — all but
guaranteeing that only inmates, not troopers, would face charges. Public opinion
toward the inmates, once sympathetic, gradually turned against them.
The hostages were also treated miserably. The state offered families of dead
hostages small checks, which they cashed to tide them over in this difficult
time, but it did not tell them that taking this money meant forgoing their right
to sue the state for sizable damages.
Much of the nation, however, never heard this history. Had it not been for the
legal fight waged by inmates to hold the state accountable, and the testimony
provided later by surviving hostages and their families, there might have been
no official record of these brutal acts.
In 1997, the inmates were awarded damages for the many violations of their civil
rights and, though the state fought that judgment, in 2000 it had to pay out a
settlement of $8 million. In 2005, the state reached a settlement with the
guards and other workers for $12 million. The vast majority of the inmates and
guards got far less than they deserved.
Despite having to pay damages, 40 years later, the State of New York still has
not taken responsibility for Attica. It has never admitted that it used
excessive force. It has never acknowledged that its troopers killed inmates and
guards. It has never admitted that those who surrendered were tortured, nor that
employees were misled.
We have all paid a very high price for the state’s lies and half-truths and its
refusal to investigate and prosecute its own. The portrayal of prisoners as
incorrigible animals contributed to a distrust of prisoners; the erosion of
hard-won prison reforms; and the modern era of mass incarceration. Not
coincidentally, it was Rockefeller who, in 1973, signed the law establishing
mandatory prison terms for possession or sale of relatively small amounts of
drugs, which became a model for similar legislation elsewhere.
As America begins to rethink the wisdom of mass imprisonment, Attica reminds us
that prisoners are in fact human beings who will struggle mightily when they are
too long oppressed. It shows as well that we all suffer when the state
overreacts to cries for reform.
Heather Ann Thompson, an associate professor of history at Temple University,
is writing a book on the Attica uprising.
The Lingering Injustice
of Attica, NYT, 8.9.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/opinion/the-lingering-injustice-of-attica.html
In California, Victims’ Families Fight for the Dead
August 19, 2011
The New York Times
By IAN LOVETT
SAN DIEGO — The other day, at the sprawling state prison here, Linda and
Alfred Tay sat in a cramped, windowless room, just feet from the man serving
time for murdering their son.
Quarters are close at parole hearings.
They listened as the inmate made his case for parole. And then, exercising their
rights as victims under California law, the Tays made their own case, pleading
with the parole board not to grant freedom to the man who killed their son. It
was the second time they had gone through this painful ritual.
“We constantly have a shadow hanging over our lives,” Ms. Tay told the
commissioners. “When you suffer such a horrific crime, there is never closure.”
The rights of families like the Tays to be heard has been a fundamental tenet of
a movement since California passed its first victims’ bill of rights three
decades ago — a model that has been followed by states across the nation.
Until recently, most of these parole hearings — however difficult they may have
been for the family members — had little practical importance: inmates serving
life sentences for murder were virtually never set free. Even on the rare
occasions when the parole board granted a release, California’s two previous
governors — Gray Davis, a Democrat, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican —
almost invariably overturned it.
But now, with a United States Supreme Court mandate in May to reduce the
populations of California’s overcrowded prisons, Gov. Jerry Brown has thus far
upheld 207 of the parole board’s 253 decisions to release convicted killers.
Already this year, more release dates granted to killers have been allowed to
stand than in any year since governors got the power to reverse them.
As a result, these hearings have taken on a new urgency for victims’ family
members — many of whom have seen themselves as the last line of defense between
a killer and freedom — because inmates are now more likely than ever to be
paroled.
For some family members, attending the hearings is cathartic, offering a voice
to those who feel powerless in the wake of crimes that have upended their lives.
But even as victims have gained the right to be heard, the laws have also
created unintended consequences — sometimes dividing families or resurrecting
traumas year after year.
“The emotional experience is beyond words,” said Harriet Salarno, who has spoken
at nine parole hearings, beginning in 1993, for the man who killed her daughter
32 years ago. “I’ve thought about not going many times. But I was fearful he
would get out.”
Despite an increased possibility of parole, the emotional and financial burdens
of attending hearings are too overwhelming for many families. Brandi Cambron,
29, testified last year against parole for her mother, who was convicted of
murdering Ms. Cambron’s younger brother. But she did not return this year from
her home in Virginia for the hearing near Los Angeles.
“As much as it’s fulfilling to go there and speak and be heard, it also reopened
all these old wounds that I’d worked so hard to close,” she said.
California has led the way in passing victims’ rights laws. It became the first
state to allow victims’ families to speak at parole hearings, and in 1982 passed
a victims’ bill of rights — one of the first major pieces of such legislation in
the country. More than 30 states have amended their constitutions to include
similar measures.
Parole commissioners and victims’ rights advocates say that victim statements
can have a major influence. They put a human face on a murder victim, who is
often referred to only as “the deceased” during a parole hearing, and make it
that much more difficult for the board to grant release.
Some victims who survived murder attempts show their scars — missing limbs or
disfiguring burns — while relatives detail the emotional trauma they have
endured.
“You need to be there so the board understands what this has done to your life,”
said Nina Salarno Ashford, a lawyer with Crime Victims United, a group that
helps represent some victims at parole hearings.
Ms. Salarno Ashford said the increase in parole grants upheld under Governor
Brown makes it all the more important for victims to attend hearings.
“The governor seems not to be taking a hard-line stance as Davis or
Schwarzenegger did,” she said. “It really highlights the necessity for victims
to go to these hearings, so the parole board can feel the full impact of the
crime.”
Like many such advocates, Ms. Salarno Ashford’s involvement with the issue is
personal: her sister Catina was murdered in 1979. Harriet Salarno, her mother,
quit her job and founded Crime Victims United, and the group has been one of the
foremost opponents of the plan to reduce prison overcrowding by releasing
inmates.
Few victims’ families — around 8 percent — actually attend parole hearings. But
for those that do, the process, however painful, can also be restorative.
Some victims eventually even stop opposing an inmate’s release. Katie James,
manager of victims’ services for the California Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation, said those cases showed how well the process could work for the
families.
“When the family goes to multiple hearings over a long period of time, they kind
of get to know the inmate,” Ms. James said. “They get to see a gradual change in
the offender. They’re never going to forgive what the inmate did, but they can
be O.K. with what the parole board decides.”
Most victims, however, never reach that point. For some, the hearings become an
obsession. They skip happy events in the lives of their living children — high
school or college graduations — to honor a dead child at a parole hearing. For
older victims, hearings can take a toll on their health, Ms. James said.
“For some families, the hearings eat away at them, and destroy their other
relationships,” she said. “We try to encourage them to have a balance and let
someone else go instead. But some feel like it has to be them.”
If nothing else, as the Brown administration allows more inmates sentenced to
life to be paroled, more victims will be spared the pain of returning year after
year to parole hearings. But more families will also watch killers win release
dates, as the Tays did. Ms. Tay said she was considering writing to the
governor, in the hope that he would reverse the decision. “I would keep going
forever if I could,” she said.
Perhaps no one has gone to as many parole hearings as Debra Tate, the sister of
Sharon Tate, who was murdered in 1969 in the Manson Family killings. She has, by
her own count, spoken at dozens, perhaps even a hundred parole hearings: almost
every one of those held for the Manson killers since the mid-1990s.
So far, only one of the members of Charles Manson’s murderous cult has died:
Susan Atkins, in 2009. A few weeks before Ms. Atkins’s death, Ms. Tate spoke at
her final parole hearing. On the day Ms. Atkins died, Ms. Tate wore all black,
in memory of the murder victims.
“I cried one long alligator tear,” Ms. Tate said at the event. “It’s still a
life lost. She had nieces and nephews. It’s never just about one person.”
Over the course of 40 years, the two women had become part of each other’s
lives.
But Ms. Atkins’s death was not a relief, Ms. Tate said. “There are still so many
hearings to go to.”
In California, Victims’
Families Fight for the Dead, NYT, 19.8.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/20/us/20parole.html
Barbarous Confinement
July 17, 2011
The New York Times
By COLIN DAYAN
Nashville
MORE than 1,700 prisoners in California, many of whom are in maximum isolation
units, have gone on a hunger strike. The protest began with inmates in the
Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison. How they have managed to
communicate with each other is anyone’s guess — but their protest is everyone’s
concern. Many of these prisoners have been sent to virtually total isolation and
enforced idleness for no crime, not even for alleged infractions of prison
regulations. Their isolation, which can last for decades, is often not
explicitly disciplinary, and therefore not subject to court oversight. Their
treatment is simply a matter of administrative convenience.
Solitary confinement has been transmuted from an occasional tool of discipline
into a widespread form of preventive detention. The Supreme Court, over the last
two decades, has whittled steadily away at the rights of inmates, surrendering
to prison administrators virtually all control over what is done to those held
in “administrative segregation.” Since it is not defined as punishment for a
crime, it does not fall under “cruel and unusual punishment,” the reasoning
goes.
As early as 1995, a federal judge, Thelton E. Henderson, conceded that so-called
“supermax” confinement “may well hover on the edge of what is humanly
tolerable,” though he ruled that it remained acceptable for most inmates. But a
psychiatrist and Harvard professor, Stuart Grassian, had found that the
environment was “strikingly toxic,” resulting in hallucinations, paranoia and
delusions. In a “60 Minutes” interview, he went so far as to call it “far more
egregious” than the death penalty.
Officials at Pelican Bay, in Northern California, claim that those incarcerated
in the Security Housing Unit are “the worst of the worst.” Yet often it is the
most vulnerable, especially the mentally ill, not the most violent, who end up
in indefinite isolation. Placement is haphazard and arbitrary; it focuses on
those perceived as troublemakers or simply disliked by correctional officers
and, most of all, alleged gang members. Often, the decisions are not based on
evidence. And before the inmates are released from the barbarity of
22-hour-a-day isolation into normal prison conditions (themselves shameful) they
are often expected to “debrief,” or spill the beans on other gang members.
The moral queasiness that we must feel about this method of extracting
information from those in our clutches has all but disappeared these days,
thanks to the national shame of “enhanced interrogation techniques” at
Guantánamo. Those in isolation can get out by naming names, but if they do so
they will likely be killed when returned to a normal facility. To “debrief” is
to be targeted for death by gang members, so the prisoners are moved to
“protective custody” — that is, another form of solitary confinement.
Hunger strikes are the only weapon these prisoners have left. Legal avenues are
closed. Communication with the outside world, even with family members, is so
restricted as to be meaningless. Possessions — paper and pencil, reading matter,
photos of family members, even hand-drawn pictures — are removed. (They could
contain coded messages between gang members, we are told, or their loss may
persuade the inmates to snitch when every other deprivation has failed.)
The poverty of our criminological theorizing is reflected in the official
response to the hunger strike. Now refusing to eat is regarded as a threat, too.
Authorities are considering force-feeding. It is likely it will be carried out —
as it has been, and possibly still continues to be — at Guantánamo (in possible
violation of international law) and in an evil caricature of medical care.
In the summer of 1996, I visited two “special management units” at the Arizona
State Prison Complex in Florence. A warden boasted that one of the units was the
model for Pelican Bay. He led me down the corridors on impeccably clean floors.
There was no paint on the concrete walls. Although the corridors had skylights,
the cells had no windows. Nothing inside could be moved or removed. The cells
contained only a poured concrete bed, a stainless steel mirror, a sink and a
toilet. Inmates had no human contact, except when handcuffed or chained to leave
their cells or during the often brutal cell extractions. A small place for
exercise, called the “dog pen,” with cement floors and walls, so high they could
see nothing but the sky, provided the only access to fresh air.
Later, an inmate wrote to me, confessing to a shame made palpable and real: “If
they only touch you when you’re at the end of a chain, then they can’t see you
as anything but a dog. Now I can’t see my face in the mirror. I’ve lost my skin.
I can’t feel my mind.”
Do we find our ethics by forcing prisoners to live in what Judge Henderson
described as the setting of “senseless suffering” and “wretched misery”? Maybe
our reaction to hunger strikes should involve some self-reflection. Not allowing
inmates to choose death as an escape from a murderous fate or as a protest
against continued degradation depends, as we will see when doctors come to make
their judgment calls, on the skilled manipulation of techniques that are
indistinguishable from torture. Maybe one way to react to prisoners whose only
reaction to bestial treatment is to starve themselves to death might be to do
the unthinkable — to treat them like human beings.
Colin Dayan, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University, is the author of
“The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons.”
Barbarous Confinement,
NYT, 17.7.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/opinion/18dayan.html
Casey Anthony Freed From Jail, Slips From View
July 17, 2011
The New york Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Casey Anthony was freed from a Florida jail early
Sunday, 12 days after she was acquitted of murder in the death of her 2-year-old
daughter Caylee in a verdict that drew furious responses and even threats from
people across the U.S. who had followed the case with rapt attention.
Wearing a pink Polo T-shirt and blue jeans, Anthony left the jail at 12:14 a.m.
with her attorney, Jose Baez. After three years behind bars, Anthony was given
$537.68 in cash from her jail account and escorted outside by two sheriff's
deputies armed with semi-automatic rifles. Neither Anthony nor Baez said
anything to reporters and protesters gathered outside.
Anthony, looking somber with her eyes cast downward, said "thank you" to a
jailer in the few seconds it took to escort her to the waiting SUV.
"It is my hope that Casey Anthony can receive the counseling and treatment she
needs to move forward with the rest of her life," Baez said in a statement
released to reporters.
News helicopters briefly tracked the SUV through Orlando's streets, but she
quickly vanished from public view.
"This release had an unusual amount of security so, therefore, in that sense, it
would not be a normal release," Orange County Jail spokesman Allen Moore said.
"We have made every effort to not provide any special treatment for her. She's
been treated like every other inmate."
Moore said there were no known threats received at the jail. Officials had a
number of contingency plans in place, including plans in case shots were fired
as she was being released.
After Anthony left the jail, the news helicopters followed the SUV to a covered
parking garage at a downtown Orlando office building. The SUV never reemerged
and other cars left that area, but it could not be seen if Anthony was in any of
them.
A short time later, there was police activity as two vehicles pulled up to a
twin-engine private jet at Orlando Executive Airport but no one saw Anthony get
out and onto the plane. The news helicopter shots showed only some middle-aged
men with luggage and golf travel bags. That plane took off shortly after 1 a.m.
Sunday for Ohio, the home state of Anthony's parents.
As midnight approached, upward of 100 spectators had gathered outside the jail's
booking and release center, where plastic orange barricades had been erected.
The crowd included about a half-dozen, sign-carrying protesters who had gathered
despite a drenching thunderstorm earlier. Onlookers had varied reactions to her
release from the jail, where seven or eight deputies in bullet-proof vests
patrolled the area. At least one officer carried an assault weapon and about
five officers patrolled on horseback.
"She is safer in jail than she is out here," said Mike Quiroz, who drove from
Miami to spend his 22nd birthday outside the jail. "She better watch her butt.
She is known all over the world."
Lamar Jordan said he felt a pit in his stomach when he saw Anthony walking free.
"The fact that she is being let out, the fact that it is her child and she
didn't say what happened, made me sick," Jordan said.
Not all of those who gathered condemned the 25-year-old.
"I'm for Casey," said Kizzy Smith, of Orlando. "She was proven innocent. At the
end of the day, Caylee is at peace. We're the ones who are in an uproar."
Since her acquittal on murder charges on July 5, Anthony was finishing her
four-year sentence for telling investigators several lies, including an early
claim that Caylee was kidnapped by a nonexistent nanny. With credit for the
nearly three years she's spent in jail since August 2008 and good behavior, she
had only days remaining when she was sentenced July 7.
The case drew national attention ever since Caylee was reported missing. Cable
network HLN aired the entire trial, with pundit Nancy Grace dissecting the case
nightly. Vitriol poured into social networking sites after the acquittal, with
observers posting angry messages on Twitter and Facebook's "I Hate Casey
Anthony" page.
Outraged lawmakers in several states responded by proposing so-called Caylee's
laws that would allow authorities to prosecute parents who don't quickly report
missing children. And many still speculate about what really happened to Caylee:
Was she suffocated with duct tape by her mother, as prosecutors argued? Or did
she drown in an accident that snowballed out of control, as defense attorneys
contended?
Now that she is free, it's not clear where Anthony will stay or what she will do
next.
Her relationship with her parents, George and Cindy, has been strained since
defense attorneys accused George Anthony of molesting Casey when she was young.
They also said George Anthony made Caylee's death look like a homicide after the
girl accidentally drowned in the family pool.
Caylee's remains were found in December 2008 in woods near the home Casey
Anthony shared with her parents. George Anthony has adamantly denied covering up
his granddaughter's death or molesting Casey Anthony when she was a child. Baez
argued during trial that the alleged abuse resulted in psychological issues that
caused her to lie and act without apparent remorse after Caylee's death. But
defense attorneys never called witnesses to support their claims.
Prosecutors alleged that Anthony suffocated her daughter with duct tape because
motherhood interfered with her desire for a carefree life of partying with
friends and spending time with her boyfriend. However, some jurors have told
various media outlets that the state didn't prove its case beyond a reasonable
doubt as required for a conviction — though some have said they believe she
bears some responsibility in the case.
Defense attorneys and sheriff's officials have declined to say where Anthony was
headed. What Anthony will do to make a living also remains unknown. Anthony, a
high school dropout, hasn't had a job since 2006.
One of her attorneys, Cheney Mason, said Friday that Anthony was scared to leave
jail, given the numerous threats on her life and the scorn of a large segment of
the public that believes she had something to do with the June 2008 death.
Her attorneys have said she has received numerous threats, including an email
with a manipulated photo showing their client with a bullet hole in her
forehead.
Security experts have said Anthony will need to hole up inside a safe house
protected by bodyguards, perhaps for weeks, given the threats.
Greene also said Friday that Anthony was emotionally unstable and needed "a
little breathing room" after her draining two-month trial.
The lies that were the basis of her conviction on the misdemeanor charges began
in mid-July 2008, about a month after Caylee was last seen alive. Around the
time the girl disappeared, Casey Anthony had begun staying with friends and not
with her parents. When Anthony's mother Cindy began asking about Caylee, Anthony
told her she was staying with a nanny named Zanny.
In mid-July, George and Cindy Anthony were notified that their car had been
impounded after it was abandoned in a check-cashing store's parking lot. When
the picked up the car, George Anthony — a former police officer — and the
impound lot manager both said it smelled like a dead body had been inside.
Cindy Anthony then tracked down her daughter at a friend's apartment and when
she couldn't produce Caylee, called the sheriff's office on July 15, 2008. The
court found she lied to investigators about working at the Universal Studios
theme park, about leaving her daughter with a nanny, about telling two friends
that Caylee had been kidnapped and about receiving a phone call from her.
Mike Silva, 26, a makeup artist from Orlando, came to the jail Saturday night
with a friend. Silva said he was surprised how there was not chaos. He said it
was probably in her best interested to leave Orlando. "Why would she stay here?
Everyone in Orlando knows her damn face."
Tad Campbell, a 50-year-old personal trainer from Orlando is glad the trial is
over. But, he added, "I think the general consensus is that she got away with
murder."
Casey Anthony Freed From
Jail, Slips From View, NYT, 17.7.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/07/17/us/AP-US-Casey-Anthony.html
In a California Prison,
Bunk Beds Replace Pickup Games
May 24, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA
CHINO, Calif. — The basketball hoops jimmied up to the ceiling prove that
this dingy space was a gym once upon a time. But for years now, the windowless
space has served as a de facto cell for dozens of prisoners at the California
Institution for Men.
The rows of bunk beds, just a few inches apart, covered almost every empty space
on the floor Tuesday afternoon. The gap between most beds allowed only the
thinnest of inmates to stand comfortably. A few prisoners wandered around, but
most simply rested on their thin mattresses, reading or dozing. As a rule, they
go out to the yard just two or three times a week.
Ominous messages stenciled on the walls signaled the tension: “Caution: No
warning shots will be fired.” Two guards mind the 200 prisoners, while another,
known as a gunner, watches from up high, ready to intervene at any moment.
It would be hard to call the cavernous cell anything but crowded. Still, there
are fewer people in it than there were just a few months ago, when triple bunk
beds lined the wall. Now, those have been converted to hold just two inmates.
“That helped,” said Michael Collins, a 49-year-old inmate who sits a few feet
from a dank corner converted into a group of metal toilets and open shower
stalls. “We have less people using the bathroom now. If you just mind your
business and stay in your bed, it’s O.K.”
But according to a Supreme Court ruling issued Monday, California — which has
the highest overcrowding rate of any prison system in the country — must
eliminate rooms like this at its facilities across the state, shedding some
30,000 prisoners over the next two years.
The problem is not new. For decades, the prison population has steadily risen,
largely because of tougher mandatory sentencing laws. The overcrowding has led
to riots, suicides and killings of inmates and guards over the last several
years.
Matthew Cate, the secretary of the California Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation, said conditions had actually improved since the filing of the
lawsuit in 2006 that ended with Monday’s court decision. There are now roughly
143,000 inmates in the state’s prisons, down from 162,000 in 2006, in part
because the state has sent some 10,000 inmates to out-of-state facilities.
While there were once nearly 20,000 inmates in spaces not meant for housing,
commonly referred to as “bad beds,” that number has dropped to 6,600.
“It’s not perfect, but we haven’t been at those kinds of levels since the early
1990s,” Mr. Cate said. “The standard that I use personally is: are the prisons
clean, are the staff positions filled and are prisoners complaining about care?
I think that conditions are good on a day-to-day basis on the basics.”
But critics say that it is impossible for the state to deal with such a glutted
system. The lack of space can make it impossible, for example, to move inmates
from one prison to another for their own safety.
Mr. Cate said that the state was “the birthplace for every major prison gang in
the country,” but that the overcrowding paralyzes wardens from switching
prisoners to defuse racial and gang tensions.
“It’s an unacceptable working environment for everyone,” said Jeanne Woodford, a
former director of the state prisons and a former warden at San Quentin prison.
“Every little space is filled with inmates and they are housed where they
shouldn’t be housed, and every bed is full. It leads to greater violence, more
staff overtime and a total inability to deal with health care and mental illness
issues.”
One major impact of the overcrowding, and a centerpiece of the Supreme Court’s
ruling, is the lack of adequate health care for prisoners with mental illness or
other chronic medical conditions.
In 2005, a federal official began overseeing California’s prison health care
system after a judge ruled that the state was giving substandard medical care
for prisoners. Now, Mr. Cate said, roughly 90 percent of all clinical positions
are filled, although that rate varies among the prisons.
Donald Specter, the director of the Prison Law Office who argued against the
state before the Supreme Court, said that medical care was still wanting.
“There are not enough beds for the mentally ill, you have prisons all over the
state who are flunking by every measure in taking care of chronic conditions
like H.I.V. and diabetes and high blood pressure,” Mr. Specter said, citing
several recent reports by the state’s inspector general.
Mr. Cate concedes that the state is doing little to rehabilitate prisoners and
has almost no space to run programs that would keep them from landing back here
again.
“There’s far too much idleness, and that’s the thing that concerns me the most,”
he said. “When you have lockdown as often as we have to, it’s not setting anyone
up for anything good.”
Many of the prisoners here are serving sentences of less than a year for parole
violations. According to California law, any parolee caught violating the terms
of release could be sent back to state prison, creating a situation that many
call the “revolving door.” Under a plan Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed, those
inmates would instead be sent to county jails.
Robert Caldera, 52, has spent much of his life floating in and out of the prison
system, most recently arriving at Chino after he did not report to his parole
officer. Mr. Caldera was convicted of second-degree robbery several years ago,
he said. Now, he spends his days reading the Bible with a group of inmates. He,
too, said the conditions had improved, but like nearly everyone else here, he
said the real problem is the bathroom.
“It’s nasty pretty much all the time,” he said. “There are holes in the walls
that have feces in them. It’s damp constantly so you don’t ever feel clean.”
Even from several feet away, it is possible to smell the scent of an overused
locker room. There is something that looks like mold on each of the walls and
one guard said they are constantly battling broken pipes and leaks.
The conditions at other California prisons have led to outbreaks of viruses,
causing officials to quarantine hundreds of prisoners at a time.
Correction officers in Chino say that while the crowding has eased, guarding as
many as 70 prisoners at a time is unspeakably stressful. Several said they
looked forward to the day when they would have a more manageable number of
inmates. But it can be hard for them to muster sympathy for their charges.
“It’s worse than this in the Navy and you don’t hear those guys complaining,”
said Robert Spejcher, an officer who oversees a room converted to hold 42
inmates. “We never really know what we’re dealing with and we never know how
long they are going to stay.”
In a California Prison,
Bunk Beds Replace Pickup Games, NYT, 25.5.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/us/25prison.html
Prison Ruling Raises Stakes in California Fiscal Crisis
May 23, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA
LOS ANGELES — The Supreme Court’s order to California to ease overcrowding in
the state’s prisons, by releasing tens of thousands of inmates if no other
solution can be found, will probably aid Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to move more
inmates from state prisons to county jails.
But it is also sure to set off a fresh round of budget battling in the
financially distressed state as the governor and local officials insist on
ensuring state financing before changing the system.
The ruling on Monday has also already inspired a fresh round of political
recriminations, with some law enforcement officials and Republicans echoing the
Supreme Court’s dissenters by saying the release will result in more violence as
released inmates, unable to find jobs, return to their former way of life.
“We’re bracing for the worst and hoping for the best,” said Mark Pazin, the
Merced County sheriff and chairman of the state’s sheriffs’ association. “This
potential tsunami of inmates being released would have such an impact on local
communities. Each of those who would be released have really earned their
pedigree as a criminal. It could create real havoc.”
And since the court requires that the state reduce the population one way or
another, California’s residents were greeting the decision with a mix of
nervousness and fatalism. That anxiety is unlikely to be eased by the news that
about 150 prisoners took part in a fight on Sunday in the dining hall at San
Quentin State Prison in which four men were stabbed or slashed. The cause of the
melee was under investigation.
Matthew Cate, the secretary of the California Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation, called the court ruling disappointing because it did not
recognize improvements the state had made over the last several years. But Mr.
Cate said state officials would push even harder for the Legislature to approve
the governor’s plan, which he said would save money over time.
“Our goal is to not release inmates at all,” Mr. Cate said, adding that the
governor’s plan would mostly address the overcrowding problem, although it would
take three to four years to do so, longer than the two-year timeline laid out by
the court. He said the state could apply for an extension and added, “I don’t
think we can guarantee anything at this point.”
With the state facing a $10 billion deficit, Republicans have refused to sign on
to the governor’s plan to ask voters to approve tax extensions. Under Mr.
Brown’s proposal, some of that money would go to the counties, which would have
responsibility for housing and rehabilitating the inmates.
According to Mr. Brown’s plan, no inmate convicted of violent, sex-related or
otherwise serious crimes would be sent to the county jail systems. And while
many counties have said that they can cope with the inmates, they say it would
be impossible without extra money from the state.
“The only logical way to deal with the court order in a manner that continues to
protect the public is to send some people to the counties,” said Paul McIntosh,
the executive director of the California State Association of Counties. “A
one-time release would be a terrible decision, and we need a fundamental change
in the way we deal with criminals. The state really needs to step up quickly to
give us the ability to deal with this.”
Lee Baca, the Los Angeles County sheriff, said the state, with the help of local
officials, should immediately begin devising a plan, particularly to assure the
public that hardened criminals would not soon be roaming the streets.
“The public does not want to see a violent predator slip through the cracks on
this,” Sheriff Baca said. “We have to assure them that the department of
corrections will not make a mistake on who gets released.”
Los Angeles County is expected to have some 11,000 prisoners come into its
system under the plan. Sheriff Baca said he was confident that the county had
programs to deal with the additional inmates and could do even more with
programs to reduce recidivism.
“But you can’t just foist the problem on us without any more money,” he said.
Donald Specter, who argued for the prisoners before the Supreme Court, called
the landmark ruling “fantastic” and said it would force the state to deal with
problems it had long tried to avoid.
“The state has a lot of options,” Mr. Specter said. “It can reduce sentences for
parole violations or change sentencing law or go along with the governor’s plan,
but it has to do something.”
In Sacramento, Sheriff Scott Jones was less enthusiastic. He said the ruling
could have “horrific consequences” in his jails, which are nearly filled to
capacity each day.
“Whatever money they don’t give us, we have to make up with letting go a
commensurate number of parolees or people who should be behind bars,” Sheriff
Jones said. “There has to be a better way, but I don’t think we are going to get
it here.”
Prison Ruling Raises
Stakes in California Fiscal Crisis, NYT, 23.5.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24california.html
Juvenile Killers in Jail for Life Seek a Reprieve
April 20, 2011
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK and LISA FAYE PETAK
CHARLESTON, Mo. — More than a decade ago, a 14-year-old boy
killed his stepbrother in a scuffle that escalated from goofing around with a
blowgun to an angry threat with a bow and arrow to the fatal thrust of a hunting
knife.
The boy, Quantel Lotts, had spent part of the morning playing with Pokémon
cards. He was in seventh grade and not yet five feet tall.
Mr. Lotts is 25 now, and he is in the maximum-security prison here, serving a
sentence of life without the possibility of parole for murder.
The victim’s mother, Tammy Lotts, said she lost two children on that November
day in 1999. One was a son, Michael Barton, who was 17 when he died. The other
was a stepson, Mr. Lotts.
“I don’t feel he’s guilty,” she said of Mr. Lotts in the living room of her
modest St. Louis apartment, growing emotional. “But if he was, he’s already done
his time. He should be released. Time served. If they think that’s too easy, let
somebody look over his case.”
As things stand now, though, the law gives Mr. Lotts no hope of ever getting
out.
Almost a year ago, the Supreme Court ruled that sentencing juvenile offenders to
life without the possibility of parole violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on
cruel and unusual punishment — but only for crimes that did not involve
killings. The decision affected around 130 prisoners convicted of crimes like
rape, armed robbery and kidnapping.
Now the inevitable follow-up cases have started to arrive at the Supreme Court.
Last month, lawyers for two other prisoners who were 14 when they were involved
in murders filed the first petitions urging the justices to extend last’s year’s
decision, Graham v. Florida, to all 13- and 14-year-old offenders.
The Supreme Court has been methodically whittling away at severe sentences. It
has banned the death penalty for juvenile offenders, the mentally disabled and
those convicted of crimes other than murder. The Graham decision for the first
time excluded a class of offenders from a punishment other than death.
This progression suggests it should not be long until the justices decide to
address the question posed in the petitions. An extension of the Graham decision
to all juvenile offenders would affect about 2,500 prisoners.
Mr. Lotts, a stout man with an easy manner, said he was not reconciled to his
sentence. “I understand that I deserve some punishment,” he said. “But to be put
here for the rest of my life with no chance, I don’t think that’s a fair
sentence.”
Much of the logic of the Graham decision and the court’s 2005 decision banning
the death penalty for juvenile offenders, Roper v. Simmons, would seem to apply
to the new cases.
The majority opinions in both were written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who
said teenagers deserved more lenient treatment than adults because they are
immature, impulsive, susceptible to peer pressure and able to change for the
better over time. Justice Kennedy added that there was an international
consensus against sentencing juveniles to life without parole, which he said had
been “rejected the world over.”
One factor cuts in the opposite direction. Justice Kennedy relied on what he
called a national consensus against the punishment for crimes that did not
involve killings. Juvenile offenders were sentenced to life without parole for
such nonhomicide crimes, he wrote, in only 12 states and even then rarely.
There does not appear to be such a consensus against life without parole
sentences for juveniles who take a life. That may be why opponents of the
punishment are focusing for now on killings committed by very young offenders
like Mr. Lotts.
That strategy follows the one used in attacking the juvenile death penalty,
which the Supreme Court eliminated in two stages, banning it for those under 16
in 1988 and those under 18 in 2005.
Kent S. Scheidegger, the legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal
Foundation, a victims’ rights group, said that categorical approaches were
misguided in general and particularly unjustified where murders by young
offenders were involved.
“Since I think Graham is wrong,” he said, “extending it to homicides would be
wrong squared.”
“Sharp cutoffs by age, where a person’s legal status changes suddenly on some
birthday, are only a crude approximation of correct policy,” he added. There are
around 70 prisoners serving sentences of life without parole for homicides
committed when they were 14 or younger, according to a report by the Equal
Justice Initiative, a nonprofit law firm in Alabama that represents poor people
and prisoners.
The effort to extend the Graham decision has so far been unsuccessful in the
lower courts. According to a study to be published in The New York University
Review of Law and Social Change by Scott Hechinger, a fellow at the Partnership
for Children’s Rights, 10 courts have decided not to apply Graham to cases
involving killings committed by the defendants, and seven others have said the
same thing where the defendants were accomplices to murders. Courts have reached
differing results, though, where the offense was attempted murder.
All of this suggests that the question left open in Graham may only be answered
by the Supreme Court. In March, lawyers with the Equal Justice Initiative asked
the justices to hear the two cases raising the question.
One concerns Kuntrell Jackson, an Arkansas man who was 14 when he and two older
youths tried to rob a video store in 1999. One of the other youths shot and
killed a store clerk.
The second case involves Evan Miller, an Alabama prisoner who was 14 in 2003
when he and an older youth beat a 52-year-old neighbor and set fire to his home
after the three had spent the evening smoking pot and playing drinking games.
The neighbor died of smoke inhalation.
In Mr. Lotts’s case, too, state and federal courts in Missouri have said that
his sentence is constitutional. In December, in a different case, the Missouri
Supreme Court divided 4-to-3 over the constitutionality of the punishment in a
case involving the killing of a St. Louis police officer.
A dissenting judge, Michael A. Wolff, wrote that “juveniles should not be
sentenced to die in prison any more than they should be sent to prison to be
executed.”
At the prison here, about 130 miles south of St. Louis, Mr. Lotts said he had
grown up around drugs and violence, and he acknowledged that he used to have a
combustible temper. But he said the years he spent living with his father and
Ms. Lotts were good ones.
He and his brother Dorell were inseparable, he recalled, from Ms. Lotts’s three
boys. The group was sometimes taunted because Quantel and Dorell were black and
the other boys were white.
“If you wanted to fight one of us,” he said, “you had to fight all of us.”
He said he recalled very little about assaulting Michael. But he said he knew
some things for sure.
“That’s my brother,” he said. “Why would I want to kill my brother? That’s not
what I set out to do. That’s not what I meant to do. That’s not what I intended
to do.”
Tammy Lotts said race figured in her stepson’s trial. “They said a black boy
stabbed a white boy,” she said. For years, state officials prohibited her from
visiting Mr. Lotts, fearing she would try to harm him. “I’m the victim’s
mother,” she said, shrugging.
At the prison last week, Mr. Lotts was wearing a handsome wedding ring, and it
prompted questions. Beaming, he said he had been married just a few weeks before
to a woman who had written to him after hearing him interviewed. He pointed to
where the ceremony had taken place, a couple of yards away, near the vending
machines.
Ms. Lotts attended the wedding, but only after satisfying herself that the bride
was a suitable match.
“She’s marrying my son,” Ms. Lotts explained.
Juvenile Killers in Jail
for Life Seek a Reprieve, NYT, 20.4.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/us/21juvenile.html
The Prosecution Rests, but I Can’t
April 9, 2011
The New York Times
By JOHN THOMPSON
New Orleans
I SPENT 18 years in prison for robbery and murder, 14 of them on death row. I’ve
been free since 2003, exonerated after evidence covered up by prosecutors
surfaced just weeks before my execution date. Those prosecutors were never
punished. Last month, the Supreme Court decided 5-4 to overturn a case I’d won
against them and the district attorney who oversaw my case, ruling that they
were not liable for the failure to turn over that evidence — which included
proof that blood at the robbery scene wasn’t mine.
Because of that, prosecutors are free to do the same thing to someone else
today.
I was arrested in January 1985 in New Orleans. I remember the police coming to
my grandmother’s house — we all knew it was the cops because of how hard they
banged on the door before kicking it in. My grandmother and my mom were there,
along with my little brother and sister, my two sons — John Jr., 4, and Dedric,
6 — my girlfriend and me. The officers had guns drawn and were yelling. I guess
they thought they were coming for a murderer. All the children were scared and
crying. I was 22.
They took me to the homicide division, and played a cassette tape on which a man
I knew named Kevin Freeman accused me of shooting a man. He had also been
arrested as a suspect in the murder. A few weeks earlier he had sold me a ring
and a gun; it turned out that the ring belonged to the victim and the gun was
the murder weapon.
My picture was on the news, and a man called in to report that I looked like
someone who had recently tried to rob his children. Suddenly I was accused of
that crime, too. I was tried for the robbery first. My lawyers never knew there
was blood evidence at the scene, and I was convicted based on the victims’
identification.
After that, my lawyers thought it was best if I didn’t testify at the murder
trial. So I never defended myself, or got to explain that I got the ring and the
gun from Kevin Freeman. And now that I officially had a history of violent crime
because of the robbery conviction, the prosecutors used it to get the death
penalty.
I remember the judge telling the courtroom the number of volts of electricity
they would put into my body. If the first attempt didn’t kill me, he said,
they’d put more volts in.
On Sept. 1, 1987, I arrived on death row in the Louisiana State Penitentiary —
the infamous Angola prison. I was put in a dead man’s cell. His things were
still there; he had been executed only a few days before. That past summer they
had executed eight men at Angola. I received my first execution date right
before I arrived. I would end up knowing 12 men who were executed there.
Over the years, I was given six execution dates, but all of them were delayed
until finally my appeals were exhausted. The seventh — and last — date was set
for May 20, 1999. My lawyers had been with me for 11 years by then; they flew in
from Philadelphia to give me the news. They didn’t want me to hear it from the
prison officials. They said it would take a miracle to avoid this execution. I
told them it was fine — I was innocent, but it was time to give up.
But then I remembered something about May 20. I had just finished reading a
letter from my younger son about how he wanted to go on his senior class trip.
I’d been thinking about how I could find a way to pay for it by selling my
typewriter and radio. “Oh, no, hold on,” I said, “that’s the day before John Jr.
is graduating from high school.” I begged them to get it delayed; I knew it
would hurt him.
To make things worse, the next day, when John Jr. was at school, his teacher
read the whole class an article from the newspaper about my execution. She
didn’t know I was John Jr.’s dad; she was just trying to teach them a lesson
about making bad choices. So he learned that his father was going to be killed
from his teacher, reading the newspaper aloud. I panicked. I needed to talk to
him, reassure him.
Amazingly, I got a miracle. The same day that my lawyers visited, an
investigator they had hired to look through the evidence one last time found, on
some forgotten microfiche, a report sent to the prosecutors on the blood type of
the perpetrator of the armed robbery. It didn’t match mine; the report, hidden
for 15 years, had never been turned over to my lawyers. The investigator later
found the names of witnesses and police reports from the murder case that hadn’t
been turned over either.
As a result, the armed robbery conviction was thrown out in 1999, and I was
taken off death row. Then, in 2002, my murder conviction was thrown out. At a
retrial the following year, the jury took only 35 minutes to acquit me.
The prosecutors involved in my two cases, from the office of the Orleans Parish
district attorney, Harry Connick Sr., helped to cover up 10 separate pieces of
evidence. And most of them are still able to practice law today.
Why weren’t they punished for what they did? When the hidden evidence first
surfaced, Mr. Connick announced that his office would hold a grand jury
investigation. But once it became clear how many people had been involved, he
called it off.
In 2005, I sued the prosecutors and the district attorney’s office for what they
did to me. The jurors heard testimony from the special prosecutor who had been
assigned by Mr. Connick’s office to the canceled investigation, who told them,
“We should have indicted these guys, but they didn’t and it was wrong.” The jury
awarded me $14 million in damages — $1 million for every year on death row —
which would have been paid by the district attorney’s office. That jury verdict
is what the Supreme Court has just overturned.
I don’t care about the money. I just want to know why the prosecutors who hid
evidence, sent me to prison for something I didn’t do and nearly had me killed
are not in jail themselves. There were no ethics charges against them, no
criminal charges, no one was fired and now, according to the Supreme Court, no
one can be sued.
Worst of all, I wasn’t the only person they played dirty with. Of the six men
one of my prosecutors got sentenced to death, five eventually had their
convictions reversed because of prosecutorial misconduct. Because we were
sentenced to death, the courts had to appoint us lawyers to fight our appeals. I
was lucky, and got lawyers who went to extraordinary lengths. But there are more
than 4,000 people serving life without parole in Louisiana, almost none of whom
have lawyers after their convictions are final. Someone needs to look at those
cases to see how many others might be innocent.
If a private investigator hired by a generous law firm hadn’t found the blood
evidence, I’d be dead today. No doubt about it.
A crime was definitely committed in this case, but not by me.
John Thompson is the director of Resurrection After Exoneration,
a support group for exonerated inmates.
The Prosecution Rests,
but I Can’t, NYT, 9.4.2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/opinion/10thompson.html
Enlisting Prison Labor to Close Budget Gaps
February 24, 2011
The New York Times
By ROBBIE BROWN and KIM SEVERSON
JAY, Fla. — Before he went to jail, Danny Ivey had barely seen a backyard
garden.
But here he was, two years left on his sentence for grand theft, bent over in a
field, snapping wide, green collard leaves from their stems. For the rest of the
week, Mr. Ivey and his fellow inmates would be eating the greens he picked, and
the State of Florida would be saving most of the $2.29 a day it allots for their
meals.
Prison labor — making license plates, picking up litter — is nothing new, and
nearly all states have such programs. But these days, officials are expanding
the practice to combat cuts in federal financing and dwindling tax revenue,
using prisoners to paint vehicles, clean courthouses, sweep campsites and
perform many other services done before the recession by private contractors or
government employees.
In New Jersey, inmates on roadkill patrol clean deer carcasses from highways.
Georgia inmates tend municipal graveyards. In Ohio, they paint their own cells.
In California, prison officials hope to expand existing programs, including one
in which wet-suit-clad inmates repair leaky public water tanks. There are no
figures on how many prisoners have been enrolled in new or expanded programs
nationwide, but experts in criminal justice have taken note of the increase.
“There’s special urgency in prisons these days,” said Martin F. Horn, a
professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former commissioner of
the New York City Department of Correction. “As state budgets get constricted,
the public is looking for ways to offset the cost of imprisonment.”
Although inmate labor is helping budgets in many corners of state government,
the savings are the largest in corrections departments themselves, which have
cut billions of dollars in recent years and are under constant pressure to
reduce the roughly $29,000 a year that it costs to incarcerate the average
inmate in the United States.
Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, introduced a bill last month to
require all low-security prisoners to work 50 hours a week. Creating a national
prison labor force has been a goal since he went to Congress in 1995, but it
makes even more sense in this economy, he said.
“Think about how much it costs to incarcerate someone,” Mr. Ensign said. “Do we
want them just sitting in prison, lifting weights, becoming violent and thinking
about the next crime? Or do we want them having a little purpose in life and
learning a skill?”
Financial experts agree.
“These are nickel-and-dime attempts to cut budgets, but they add up,” said Alan
Essig, an expert on state budgets at the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute.
“You save a dollar here, a dollar there, and you keep your government’s
functions.”
Technology has made it easier to coordinate. In Hunterdon County, N.J.,
nonprofit organizations and government agencies can view prisoners’ work
schedules online and reserve them for a specific task on a free day. (Coming
tasks include cleaning up after a Fire Department fish fry and maintaining a
public park.)
“Using inmate labor has created unusual alliances: liberal humanitarian groups
that advocate more education and exercise in prisons find themselves supporting
proposals from conservative budget hawks to get inmates jobs, often outdoors,
where they can learn new skills. Having a job in prison has been linked in
studies to decreased violence, improved morale and lowered recidivism — but most
effectively, experts say, when the task is purposeful.
“The days of just breaking rocks with sledgehammers” are over, said Michael P.
Jacobson, director of the Vera Institute of Justice, a research group in New
York. “At the grossest financial level, it’s just savings. You can cut the
government worker, save the salary and still maintain the service, and you’re
providing a skill for when they leave.”
There are, of course, concerns about public safety and competition with
government or private workers. Professor Horn estimates that only 20 percent of
inmates present a low enough security threat to work in public. And in some
places, even financially struggling governments are not willing to take the risk
of employing prisoners.
In Ocala, Fla., after a long debate, the City Council last summer decided to
have a private company mow grass, even though using inmates would have saved
$1.1 million. “Our area has been really hard hit by unemployment,” said Suzy
Heinbockel, a Council member. “There was a belief that the private company would
bring local jobs, rather than giving those jobs to prisoners.”
In other areas that have used prison labor to reduce costs, there have been
embarrassing results. In Ohio, there was public outcry last year after state
investigations found inmates drinking on the job at the governor’s mansion and
smuggling tobacco back into jail. And in Maryland, a proposal to have prisoners
pick blue crabs for a private company was dropped amid concern about food
safety.
But the budget savings are worth it, many state officials say. In Florida, where
the budget was cut by $4.6 billion this year, analysts say inmate farming could
save $2.4 million a year. That is relatively small potatoes, but enough for the
new governor, Rick Scott, to call for an expansion of prison farming. The state
already uses 550 inmates to grow 4.8 million pounds of produce a year, and the
governor has pledged $2.5 million to have more inmates grow their own food.
“It’s a win-win,” said Jeff Mullahey, the director of an agricultural center at
the University of Florida whose staff was downsized in 2007 and replaced, in
part, by prisoners. “It’s obvious to me why governments should be doing this.”
Inmates arrive at the center from the Century Correctional Institute every
weekday, rain or shine, to grow tomatoes, peppers, squash, broccoli and oranges.
The partnership with the prison began two years ago, after the university’s
agriculture program sustained deep budget cuts.
Professors provide farming expertise, and inmates supply the labor and learn
marketable skills as fieldworkers. The result has been so successful, providing
$192,000 worth of food a year to the prison and saving $75,000 a year for the
university, that wardens from around the state have visited to learn about
replicating it with their inmates.
No inmates have escaped, and sometimes, Mr. Mullahey said, their criminal
backgrounds are assets. Inmates with drug offenses already know how to grow
plants, and when a university employee lost the key to a file cabinet, a
prisoner with lock-picking experience helped him break in.
The prisoners say farming has made them feel better about themselves. “The
department of corrections is going to find you a job so you might as well do
something you want to do and learn something,” said Randall Riley, 37, who is
doing a four-year sentence for habitual driving offenses.
And the savings are not lost on the prisoners either. “I’m on this side of the
fence,” Mr. Ivey said. “But my family’s on that other side, and they’re paying
taxes.”
Enlisting Prison Labor
to Close Budget Gaps, NYT, 24.2.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/us/25inmates.html
From
Prison, Madoff Says Banks ‘Had to Know’ of Fraud
February
15, 2011
The New York Times
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES
BUTNER,
N.C. — Bernard L. Madoff said he never thought the collapse of his Ponzi scheme
would cause the sort of destruction that has befallen his family.
In his first interview for publication since his arrest in December 2008, Mr.
Madoff — looking noticeably thinner and rumpled in khaki prison garb —
maintained that family members knew nothing about his crimes.
But during a private two-hour interview in a visitor room here on Tuesday, and
in earlier e-mail exchanges, he asserted that unidentified banks and hedge funds
were somehow “complicit” in his elaborate fraud, an about-face from earlier
claims that he was the only person involved.
Mr. Madoff, who is serving a 150-year sentence, seemed frail and a bit agitated
compared with the stoic calm he maintained before his incarceration in 2009,
perhaps burdened by sadness over the suicide of his son Mark in December.
Besides that loss, his family also has faced stacks of lawsuits, the potential
forfeiture of most of their assets, and relentless public suspicion and enmity
that cut Mr. Madoff and his wife Ruth off from their children.
In many ways, however, Mr. Madoff seemed unchanged. He spoke with great
intensity and fluency about his dealings with various banks and hedge funds,
pointing to their “willful blindness” and their failure to examine discrepancies
between his regulatory filings and other information available to them.
“They had to know,” Mr. Madoff said. “But the attitude was sort of, ‘If you’re
doing something wrong, we don’t want to know.’ ”
While he acknowledged his guilt in the interview and said nothing could excuse
his crimes, he focused his comments laserlike on the big investors and giant
institutions he dealt with, not on the financial pain he caused thousands of his
more modest investors. In an e-mail written on Jan. 13, he observed that many
long-term clients made more in legitimate profits from him in the years before
the fraud than they could have elsewhere. “I would have loved for them to not
lose anything, but that was a risk they were well aware of by investing in the
market,” he wrote.
Mr. Madoff said he was startled to learn about some of the e-mails and messages
raising doubts about his results — now emerging in lawsuits — that bankers were
passing around before his scheme collapsed.
“I’m reading more now about how suspicious they were than I ever realized at the
time,” he said with a faint smile.
He did not assert that any specific bank or fund knew about or was an accomplice
in his Ponzi scheme, which lasted at least 16 years and consumed about $20
billion in lost cash and almost $65 billion in paper wealth. Rather, he cited a
failure to conduct normal scrutiny.
Both the interview and the e-mail correspondence were conducted as part of this
reporter’s research for a coming book on the Madoff scandal, “The Wizard of
Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust,” for publication this spring by
Times Books, a division of Henry Holt & Company.
In the interview and e-mails, he also claimed he had been helping the
court-appointed trustee who is seeking to recover lost billions on behalf of his
swindled clients. In e-mails, Mr. Madoff said repeatedly that he provided useful
information to Irving H. Picard, the trustee trying to recover assets for the
fraud victims. He met with Mr. Picard’s team over four days last summer, he
said. The e-mails were written in December and January, but he only recently
agreed that they could be made public.
In prison, Mr. Madoff’s access to the outside world is both limited and
monitored. All visitors must be approved by prison authorities, who also screen
his limited collect calls and his incoming and outgoing e-mails and letters,
though interviews with lawyers like Mr. Picard and his colleagues are less
restricted and can be conducted in private.
Asked about his cell, he described a room about 12 feet square with a big window
looking out on the grounds; he said he had a roommate, the second since he
arrived at the prison.
It was clear from the e-mails and interview here that Mr. Madoff closely
followed news related to his case in December, the second anniversary of his
arrest. He lashed out at what he called some of the “disgraceful” coverage of
the suicide of his son Mark on Dec. 11.
Disputing reports that he refused to attend any funeral services for Mark, he
said the prison informed him it would not approve a request for him to attend a
service because of “the public safety issue” and the limited time available to
make arrangements. He concluded any funeral he attended “would be a media
circus” and that it “would be cruel to my family” to put them through that, he
wrote on Dec. 29.
Regarding his meetings with Mr. Picard’s legal team, Mr. Madoff asserted in an
e-mail written on Dec. 19 that he had given Mr. Picard’s legal team “information
I knew would be instrumental in recovering assets from those people complicit in
the mess I put myself into.”
In a message 10 days later, he was even more explicit about what he told the
trustee: “I am saying that the banks and funds were complicit in one form or
another and my information to Picard when he was here established this.”
Mr. Madoff’s claims must be weighed against his tenuous credibility. After
deceiving federal regulators and supposedly sophisticated investors for at least
16 years, he would certainly be branded as a liar by defense lawyers if he
appeared as a witness against any defendant in a courtroom — a fact he
acknowledged somewhat ruefully during the interview on Tuesday.
Despite his many references to the complicity of others, he acknowledged in the
Dec. 19 e-mail that he had not shared his information with the federal
prosecutors working on criminal cases related to his fraud — although the
trustee most likely would have done so, if Mr. Madoff’s information was relevant
to the investigation.
Mr. Madoff wrote in an e-mail that while he was willing “from the beginning” to
give prosecutors information “to help recover assets only, I refused to help
provide them with criminal evidence.” In the interview he declined to discuss
any of the criminal cases under investigation.
In the months after the Picard team’s prison interviews, the trustee’s law firm,
Baker & Hostetler, filed hundreds of civil lawsuits seeking approximately $90
billion in damages and fictional profits withdrawn from Mr. Madoff’s scheme over
the years. The defendants in those cases included the Wilpon family, the owners
of the New York Mets; JPMorgan Chase, which served for decades as Mr. Madoff’s
primary banker; and Sonja Kohn, the Viennese financier at the hub of a network
of hedge funds that invested heavily with Mr. Madoff.
Mr. Madoff said about Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, Mr. Wilpon’s brother-in-law and
business partner: “They knew nothing. They knew nothing.”
There was no obvious sign that any of those lawsuits were based on evidence or
guidance from Mr. Madoff. All the defendants have said they had no knowledge of
the fraud and have denied the trustee’s claims that, as financially
sophisticated investors, they should have been suspicious from the beginning.
Mr. Picard declined to comment on whether his team had interviewed Mr. Madoff
and would not say whether information from him had contributed to the vast body
of litigation filed since last summer.
In some e-mails, Mr. Madoff conceded that Mr. Picard’s team conducted its own
investigation into the withdrawals made by some big clients, in the years before
the Ponzi scheme collapsed, to determine who might have known what and when.
Such withdrawals could indicate that investors could have been aware of the
fraud, which could increase their liability.
However, Mr. Madoff added, “the facts are that I alone was present at certain
meetings with these clients.”
To date, none of the major banks or hedge funds that did business with Mr.
Madoff have been accused by federal prosecutors of knowingly investing in his
Ponzi scheme. However, Mr. Picard in civil lawsuits has asserted that executives
at some banks expressed suspicions for years, yet continued to do business with
Mr. Madoff and steer their clients’ money into his hands.
All the financial entities facing civil lawsuits by Madoff victims and Mr.
Picard have denied they had any knowledge of the fraud.
In a related e-mail on Jan. 12, Mr. Madoff cited out-of-court settlements that
some banks and funds had negotiated with private Madoff investors over the last
two years and claimed some settlements were made “to keep me quiet” about the
role the institutions played in “creating my situation” and about the identity
of the beneficial owners of some of their private accounts.
Mr. Picard has already recovered roughly $10 billion through asset sales and
settlements with several foreign banks and a few significant Madoff clients,
including the estate of a private investor, Jeffry Picower, and the family of
Carl Shapiro, a philanthropist in Palm Beach, Fla.
While the Picower settlement had been under negotiation since at least the fall
of 2009, the settlements with the Shapiro family and a Swiss bank, Union
Bancaire Privée, both came after Mr. Picard’s trip to the prison here in Butner.
But because both settlements came before Mr. Picard had filed any public claims
in court, it is unclear whether information from Mr. Madoff was a factor in
those settlement talks.
Neither Mr. Shapiro nor the Swiss bank has been accused of any complicity in Mr.
Madoff’s crimes, and Mr. Picard has publicly acknowledged their good-faith
cooperation with his inquiries when he announced the settlement agreements,
which totaled more than $1 billion.
The only people formally charged with complicity in Mr. Madoff’s crime are his
former auditor and members of his own staff.
Although Mr. Madoff swore in court that he had carried out his elaborate fraud
on his own, his accountant, David H. Friehling, and Mr. Madoff’s senior
lieutenant, Frank DiPascali, have pleaded guilty and are cooperating with
prosecutors. Five other former Madoff employees have been indicted; they have
asserted their innocence and are awaiting trial.
While Mr. Madoff said he was determined to aid the trustee’s efforts to recover
assets, he was also critical of the trustee’s reach, claiming that Mr. Picard
was seeking far more money than was needed to resolve valid investor claims.
In addition to the customer claims for the cash losses and the paper wealth that
vanished, the Madoff estate also faces claims by general creditors, like unpaid
vendors and landlords, who cannot recover until all the valid customer claims
are paid.
Mr. Madoff argued in several e-mails that Mr. Picard’s responsibility was to
return only the $20 billion in out-of-pocket cash that investors lost in his
scheme.
Given that Mr. Picard has already recovered roughly $10 billion, Mr. Madoff
calculated that the lawsuits against major banks and hedge funds would produce
more than enough to cover the rest of the cash losses without Mr. Picard having
to pursue “clawback” litigation against some longtime investors who withdrew
more from their accounts than they put.
From Prison, Madoff Says Banks ‘Had to Know’ of Fraud,
NYT, 15.2.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/business/madoff-prison-interview.html
As Republicans Resist Closing Prisons, Cuomo Is Said to Scale
Back Plan
January 28, 2011
The New York Times
By DANNY HAKIM and THOMAS KAPLAN
ALBANY — Nearly a month ago, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo made a call to close some
prisons an emotional capstone of his first annual address to the Legislature,
vowing, to sustained applause from fellow Democrats, that underused prisons
would no longer be “an employment program” for upstate New York.
The issue has long prompted resentment, particularly for families of New York
City residents who are shipped hours north of the city to be incarcerated, to
places like the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, which is perched in
the northern Adirondacks.
But now Mr. Cuomo appears to be, at least partly, in retreat.
The governor and his staff had considered closing or consolidating potentially
10 or more adult and youth prisons and other facilities controlled by the
corrections department, but they have faced stiff resistance from Senate
Republicans, who are trying to fend off the loss of hundreds of state jobs in
some of their upstate districts.
Now the governor appears to be scaling back his ambitions, those with knowledge
of his plans said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were
not allowed to talk on the record about the governor’s budget deliberations
ahead of the budget’s completion.
Any plan to shutter specific prisons is unlikely to be included in the budget
Mr. Cuomo releases on Tuesday and will be left to negotiations with the
Legislature as it hammers out a final budget over the next two months.
The governor’s office has already signaled a willingness to accommodate
Republicans; a plan floated on Friday in The New York Post suggests as few as
six prisons would be closed, three of them in New York City, including two that
house work-release programs.
If the new strategy holds, it would sharply curtail Mr. Cuomo’s ambition and
could ultimately even increase the proportion of prisoners sent upstate.
In his Jan. 5 address to the Legislature, Mr. Cuomo said that “an incarceration
program is not an employment program.”
“If people need jobs, let’s get people jobs,” he added. “Don’t put other people
in prison to give some people jobs. Don’t put other people in juvenile justice
facilities to give some people jobs. That’s not what this state is all about,
and that has to end this session.”
On Friday, his administration had little to say publicly on the matter.
“While any speculation about the budget is premature,” Mr. Cuomo’s deputy
communications director, Josh Vlasto, said, “prisons with very significant
vacancy rates should be evaluated and potentially considered for closure given
the state’s fiscal condition.”
Mr. Vlasto also said there was never a plan to close only upstate facilities.
Republicans have certainly made their feelings clear about any potential
closings.
“We recognize that this is going to be a tough budget with real cuts, and we
just hope that these cuts are equally distributed around the state,” said
Senator Thomas W. Libous, a Binghamton Republican and the deputy majority
leader.
“I do think the governor understands the prison issue,” he added. “I know he
understands the prison issue is always a sensitive one to upstate.”
Leaders of the legislative committees that oversee prisons said Friday that they
had not been briefed by Mr. Cuomo or his aides on what closings might be part of
his budget.
The chairman of the Assembly’s Committee on Correction, Jeffrion L. Aubry,
Democrat of Queens, expressed concerns about possible closings of prisons in New
York City that have work-release programs. “We believe in work release,” he
said. “We would not want to see a diminution of work release in the city of New
York, where a large majority of the prisoners come from.”
“If you close them in the city of New York, where are you going to have those
inmates functioning out of?” he added. “Is it going to be some place that’s
close to employment?”
Mr. Aubry also rejected the idea of balancing prison closings based on
geography. “That’s not good policy,” he said. “That’s just politics.”
Robert Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, a
nonprofit prison-monitoring and advocacy group, said he would be disappointed if
only six facilities were closed and half were in New York City.
“The totally legitimate corrections wisdom is it’s important to locate prisons
in communities that are close to where the people come from that are locked up,”
Mr. Gangi said. “The evidence and the research show that when prisoners are able
to maintain ties with their family, they cope better with their prison
experience and they have a lower recidivism rate.”
But Senator Betty Little, a Republican whose district includes much of the
Adirondacks, said the economic effects had to be considered. “The area I
represent is northern New York, it’s very rural, and we built an economy around
these facilities, first of all because no one else wanted them in their
neighborhoods and because the land was cheap,” she said. “Hopefully when they
look at closure, they look at economic impact. I’m not trying to create inmates
to keep these places open, but we need to look at the whole picture.”
Senator Ruth Hassell-Thompson, a Democrat who represents parts of the Bronx and
Westchester County and is chairwoman of the Legislature’s Black, Puerto Rican,
Hispanic and Asian Legislative Caucus, said: “So many of our inmates are already
separated by vast distances from their families. And this decision must be
carefully thought through with a focus not only on the financial savings, but
also, on the impact on our local communities.”
Nicholas Confessore contributed reporting.
As Republicans Resist
Closing Prisons, Cuomo Is Said to Scale Back Plan, NYT, 28.1.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/29/nyregion/29prisons.html
For
Ex-Prisoners, a Haven Away From the Streets
January 17,
2011
8:15 pm
The New York Times
By TINA ROSENBERG
This year,
the United States will release nearly three-quarters of a million people from
prison, a record high. Nationally, 2.3 million people are in prison in the
United States, and 95 percent of them will, at some point, get out and go home.
Society has a strong interest in keeping them home — in helping them to become
law-abiding citizens instead of falling back into their old ways and returning
to prison. But American programs for newly released prisoners echo the typical
follies of our criminal justice system: our politicians usually believe that
voters only want the emotional satisfactions of meting out maximum punishment,
even if these policies lead to even more crime.
The usual package granted to someone released from prison in New York state is
$40, a bus ticket and the considerable stigma that follows an ex-offender. Since
prisoners are often held far away from their families and states charge
astronomical rates for prison phone calls, prisoners often lose touch with their
loved ones and may not have anyone to take them in when they get home. They may
arrive in their home cities with no plans, other than — worrisomely — those
hatched with fellow prisoners. They have little prospect for jobs or housing.
Since many don’t get effective drug treatment in prison, they might still crave
a fix, which costs money. It is little wonder that some former prisoners fall
back into crime within hours or days.
Returning prisoners need many things: stable housing, drug treatment, job
training, G.E.D. (high school equivalency) classes, parenting lessons, anger
management. But even the handful of people who do worry about ex-offenders
rarely mention what may be the most crucial need of all: a better class of
friends.
Former prisoners go back to their old neighborhoods and meet up with their old
gang, or new people of the only type they may be comfortable with — criminals.
But what people need is to stop hanging out with associates who tempt them with
promises of easy money or drug-filled nights. They need to start hanging out
with people who think about the consequences of their actions, who value
legitimate jobs, sobriety and family — people who go to their A.A. meetings and
G.E.D. classes, who are trying to rebuild their lives.
How important are the right friends? We know that people get into crime and
gangs primarily because their friends do. Hanging around with delinquent friends
encourages young people to think of themselves as delinquents, and puts them in
a world where criminal behavior is easy to engage in and brings social rewards.
We do not know as much about whether pro-social peer groups can turn people away
from crime. But it is reasonable to believe that the right peer group can help.
In West Harlem there is a large and beautiful Gothic building overlooking the
Hudson River. It is called the Fortune Academy, but it is known to all as the
Castle. It is owned by the Fortune Society, a group dedicated to helping
returning prisoners succeed with starting new lives. The Fortune Society helps
about 4,000 newly released prisoners each year with job training and placement,
drug treatment, classes in cooking and anger management and being a father, and
G.E.D. studies.
Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times The Fortune Academy in West Harlem.
Most of the people who work at Fortune were once themselves drug addicted,
homeless or imprisoned. This is important. “The clients can look at the staff
and say, ‘a few years ago, that person was where I am,’” said Glenn E. Martin,
Fortune’s vice president of development and public affairs. (He himself served
six years in prison, and was released nine years ago.) The staff can also see
past appearances: “Some others may see a guy with his pants pulled down and his
hat on, yelling, and say ‘he’s not ready,’ ” said Martin. “But we’ll talk to
him.” The credibility and understanding produced by having a staff of former
offenders is important. But about 300 of Fortune’s clients each year get
something more: a bed in the Castle, and the chance to start a law-abiding life
in the company of other people trying to do the same.
The Castle provides solutions to several of the most important problems facing
newly released prisoners. One is housing. Between 10 and 20 percent of people
released from state and city prisons and jails have nowhere stable to go — they
couch surf with friends or go into homeless shelters. But a stable home is a
prerequisite for all the other things needed for a productive life. The Castle
can be that home for a few nights or many months, until the person can find work
and safe housing he or she can afford.
Anyone newly released from prison with nowhere else to go can apply to live in
the Castle. Open beds are filled by the first qualified applicant, but the
Castle turns away at least 10 people for every one it accepts. Prisoners
throughout New York state apply — because the Fortune Society has physical
offices in some jails and prisons, the parole bureaucracy refers them and
because prisoners themselves spread the word. “We get several thousand letters a
year,” says JoAnne Page, the president and chief executive of the Fortune
Society. “We get referrals from people’s mothers.” The Castle has single rooms
for residents who earn them; the rest have roommates. It serves meals and has
staff on duty around the clock. It has a computer lab, laundry and a cafeteria.
Residents are required to go full time to counseling, services such as drug
treatment or job placement, or to school.
But perhaps more important than housing, the Castle gives people a new group of
friends to identify with. Every Thursday night at 6 the Castle has a group
meeting of all its residents. At one recent meeting, people sat around an
enormous table and talked about the successes of their week. One woman talked
about her job as a janitor at a shelter for women. “It’s a safe place, and clean
— that’s because of me,” she said with pride. One man recounted a speech he
attended by a political candidate. Another said he opened a bank account for the
first time in his life. One woman was applying for jobs and wondered aloud how
best to phrase the information that she was a felon. JoAnne Page took the
opportunity to deliver one of Fortune Society’s key messages: You are not a
felon. You committed a felony and did your time, but that is not who you are.
One man announced that the Castle’s chorus was rehearsing and was open to new
members. The residents applauded each other fervently.
Delancey Street, in San Francisco, is a very different community with the same
purpose. People come to live at the Delancey Street residential building for an
average of four years. Each resident is required to get at least a high school
equivalency degree and learn several marketable job skills, such as furniture
making, sales or accounting. The organization is completely run by its
residents, who teach each other — there is no paid staff at all. Teaching others
is part of the rehabilitation process for Delancey residents. The residence is
financed in part by private donations, but the majority of its financing comes
from the businesses the residents run, such as restaurants, event planning, a
corporate car service, a moving company and framing shop. All money earned goes
to the collective, which pays all its residents’ expenses.
At both Fortune and Delancey, a person emerging from prison is surrounded by a
community of people who support him, hold him accountable, teach him skills and
model good behavior. Many of the men and women in these programs come to think
of themselves as productive members of society for the first time in their
lives, and it may also be the first time they ever feel competent at anything
besides lawbreaking.
The Delancey Street residence, which began in 1971, has never been formally
evaluated. But there is no question that is phenomenally successful. It has
graduated more than 14,000 people from prison into constructive lives. Carol
Kizziah, who manages Delancey’s efforts to apply its lessons elsewhere, says
that the organization estimates that 75 percent of its graduates go on to
productive lives. (For former prisoners who don’t go to Delancey, only 25 to 40
percent avoid re-arrest.) Since it costs taxpayers nothing, from a government’s
point of view it could very well be the most cost-effective social program ever
devised. The program has established similar Delancey Street communities in Los
Angeles, New Mexico, North Carolina and upstate New York. Outsiders have
replicated the Delancey Street model in about five other places.
While some
other Fortune Society programs have been researched and found to be effective,
there has been no study of the Castle, which began in 2002. Nevertheless, the
Castle is often cited by criminal justice experts as a model for helping
ex-offenders. New York State’s Division of Parole gave a special award to the
Fortune Society last month, and parole officers who work with Castle residents
speak highly of it. “It’s working,” said Otis Cruse, a parole officer who has
had the Castle in his jurisdiction. “It has counseling, groups, connections to
employment – it’s one-stop shopping. It’s comfortable, quiet, clean and safe —
you can sleep without looking over your shoulder. It’s an environment where
positive people are doing positive things — you are colleagues in pursuing the
same goal.”
There is one possible caveat about the Castle’s effectiveness: most of the
people I saw at the Castle were in their 30s or older. Older people who get out
of prison, by definition, are more likely than young ones to have served long
sentences for serious offenses. And the longer the sentence, the more
disconnected and disoriented prisoners are likely to be upon release. So they
are important clients for the Castle. But they are also at an age where people
are leaving crime on their own, finally ready to accept some responsibility and
aware they are not immortal and want a family and a stable life. Crime is a
young person’s game. It may be true that many people at the Castle successfully
turn around their lives. The question is whether their age would help them to do
so in any case.
There are two puzzles here. Delancey Street is now celebrating its 40th
anniversary. One would think that by now there would be Delancey 2.0 models
sprouting all over. But there are not. A related mystery concerns the idea that
underlies both Delancey and the Castle: the importance of pro-social peers. Our
guts tell us they matter; we know the effect our friends can have on our
behavior. Peer pressure may be the single most important factor getting people
into crime — surely it should be employed to get them out again. Yet it is not.
Besides Delancey and the Castle, there is probably not a single government
agency or citizen group working with former prisoners that lists “clean-living
peers” alongside housing, job training and other items on its agenda for what
former prisoners need to go straight. These two communities of former prisoners
are good projects, but they have failed to have a wider impact. Saturday’s
column will look at why this is the case.
Tina Rosenberg
won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts
After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and now a
contributing writer for the paper’s Sunday magazine. Her new book, “Join the
Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World,” is forthcoming from W.W.
Norton.
For Ex-Prisoners, a Haven Away From the Streets, NYT,
17.1.2011,
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/for-ex-prisoners-a-haven-away-from-the-streets/
The
Handwritten Letter, an Art All but Lost, Thrives in Prison
January 7,
2011
The New York Times
By JEREMY W. PETERS
To the
Georgia Department of Corrections he is inmate No. 544319, in prison on a
five-year sentence for drug possession. But to the editors of Maxim, he is Mike
Bolick, a faithful reader and regular letter writer who has loopy penmanship and
an eye for beautiful cover models.
Mr. Bolick has become known at Maxim over the years for sending cover girls
letters through the magazine with the hope that they will agree to be his pen
pals. He is gracious and self-effacing, complimenting their beauty while asking
them to please excuse his poor spelling and punctuation. He has plans to get his
G.E.D. to remedy that, he explained in a recent letter to the pin-up girl
Rachelle Leah.
On occasion he asks for a few pictures — just not nude ones. Those would surely
be confiscated by the guards.
In prisons across the country, with their artificial pre-Internet worlds where
magazines are one of the few connections to the outside and handwritten
correspondence is the primary form of communication, the art of the pen-to-paper
letter to the editor is thriving. Magazine editors see so much of it that they
have even coined a term for these letters: jail mail.
At magazines like Maxim, with its male-heavy readership and sexy spreads that
feature women in just enough clothing to avoid running afoul of prison
standards, mail from inmates can easily make up three-quarters of the
handwritten letters that come in. Maxim says it receives 10 to 30 such letters
each week. Rolling Stone says it receives at least one a day. And at Esquire,
editors receive about 15 to 20 a month, about a quarter of the magazine’s mailed
letters. The rest come mainly from older readers.
Many letters are like the ones Mr. Bolick sends: from inmates with plenty of
free time asking to meet famous people featured in profiles and photo spreads.
But they take on all forms. Some are as simple as an inmate complaining about
not receiving his subscription or writing with a change of address. Others are
personal reflections on a recent article. Country Weekly regularly receives
songs from a prisoner in Texas who has ambitions of being a country star.
Some letters arrive censored by prison staff, with strokes of black marker
obscuring certain sentences.
A common type comes from inmates who claim they were wrongfully convicted and
would like a journalist to investigate. “It turns out every person in jail is
innocent. Imagine that!” said Will Dana, managing editor of Rolling Stone. “It
seems every day there are a couple” of letters, he said. “And they’re usually
requests for help or to look into the incredible miscarriage of justice that
landed them in jail.”
Jail mail comes to magazines of all stripes and socioeconomic demographic. Even
Vanity Fair, with its glossy photo spreads of black-tie galas and articles on
high society travails, used to receive about one letter a month from prisoners
seeking to get in touch with the investigative reporter Dominick Dunne before he
died in 2009. It seems to be a mostly male phenomenon. Women’s magazines like
Glamour, Self and O, the Oprah Magazine, said they did not typically get mail
from female inmates.
Ebony receives about 25 prison letters a month — a quarter of all the written
mail that comes to the magazine’s offices in Chicago. Terry Glover, the managing
editor, said she was often surprised by how serious and introspective some of
the prison letters could be. “You come to these letters with a certain
expectation like, ‘O.K., what is it that they want?’ Because often they are
looking for financial support or an address for a hot celebrity.” But more often
than not, Ms. Glover said, it is apparent to her that prisoners have used their
ample time alone to consider why they are incarcerated.
“They say, ‘This is what happened to me, don’t let this happen to any other
kids,’ ” she said, adding that Ebony has occasionally printed letters from
prisoners.
The letters are usually recognizable as jail mail even before they are opened.
In the space for the return address, an inmate number follows the writer’s name.
A return address with words like “United States Penitentiary” or “correctional
center” is a dead giveaway.
Magazines these days receive the bulk of their reader correspondence through
e-mail. Esquire, for example, will get 100 to 150 e-mails in any given month,
compared with only about 60 mailed letters. Sports Illustrated stopped
soliciting reader letters entirely after the anthrax scare of 2001.
Prisoners send handwritten letters not out of any romantic attachment to the
old-fashioned craft of letter writing but out of necessity. Many prisons do not
allow inmates access to computers. And prisons that do hardly ever allow inmates
access to the Internet or to conventional e-mail systems. In California, for
example, prisoners are not permitted e-mail contact.
But in the federal prison system and in states like Oregon and Pennsylvania,
inmates can receive e-mail through a third-party system that allows prisons to
review messages for words like “escape” and “drugs.” Family members and friends
of the imprisoned can send messages through this system. And after they are read
and approved, prison staff members can print the messages out and deliver them
to inmates.
Just like any correspondence, magazines are censored inside prisons. While an
inmate may have a subscription, not every issue makes it through. Prisons
typically block ones that contain articles and images they would prefer inmates
not see: risqué photos or other overtly sexually provocative content, references
to drugs, weapons and — a definite deal-breaker — anything to do with breaking
out of prison.
Sometimes the prisons just destroy the magazines, other times they are stamped
“return to sender.”
“Every once in a while we’ll just get a huge envelope of issues and a letter
saying, ‘These were rejected by the prison,’ ” said Peter Martin, an associate
editor at Esquire.
One magazine that failed to get past censors was the August 2008 issue of
Esquire, which featured an article that rehashed in detail how a group of
inmates plotted an escape from a Michigan prison.
Magazines as G-rated as Popular Mechanics have been denied for articles that
explain subjects like bombs or weapons.
As editors at American Media found out, prisoners can be rather fussy about
their magazines. American Media, which publishes Country Weekly, Men’s Fitness,
The National Enquirer and Star, was sued by a prisoner for $25,000 plus damages.
Why? He claimed he was deceived and defrauded after Country Weekly reformatted.
For American Media, no stranger to lawsuits from celebrities, a prisoner lawsuit
was a first.
In an environment where people are stripped of almost all individual
possessions, magazines are one of the few things that prisoners get to
experience as their own. And that helps explain why many write in so frequently
and passionately, said Joe Levy, Maxim’s editor.
“Magazines are one of their primary sources of contact with the world outside,”
Mr. Levy said. “Certainly there’s television. But there’s a difference between
television, which many of the guys have to watch communally, and a magazine
that’s theirs.”
The Handwritten Letter, an Art All but Lost, Thrives in
Prison, NYT, 7.1.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/08/business/media/08jailmail.html
|