History > 2015 > USA > Prison (I)

Eiko Ojala

How to Lock Up Fewer People

NYT

MAY 23, 2015

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/opinion/sunday/how-to-lock-up-fewer-people.html 

U.S. to Release

6,000 Inmates From Prisons

OCT. 6, 2015

The New York Times

By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is preparing to release roughly 6,000 inmates from federal prisons starting at the end of this month as part of an effort to ease overcrowding and roll back the harsh penalties given to nonviolent drug dealers in the 1980s and ’90s, according to federal law enforcement officials.

About a third of the inmates are undocumented immigrants who will be deported. Because many of them were convicted of significant legal offenses, President Obama is unlikely to be criticized as sharply for their release by those who have objected to past deportations by the administration.

The release will be one of the largest discharges of inmates from federal prisons in American history. It coincides with an intensifying bipartisan effort to ease the mass incarcerations that followed decades of tough sentencing for drug offenses — like dealing crack cocaine — which have taken a particularly harsh toll on minority communities.

“Today’s announcement is nothing short of thrilling because it carries justice,” said Jesselyn McCurdy, a senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. “Far too many people have lost years of their lives to draconian sentencing laws born of the failed drug war. People of color have had to bear the brunt of these misguided and cruel policies. We are overjoyed that some of the people so wronged will get their freedom back.”

While news of the early releases was widely praised, it raised some concerns among law enforcement officials across the country who are grappling with an increase in homicides. Their fear is that many of the freed convicts will be unable to get jobs and will return to crime.

Ronald E. Teachman, who was the police chief in South Bend, Ind., until last Wednesday, said inmates were not always convicted of all the crimes they had committed.

He also said that prisoners who were released after receiving job skills and other assimilation training often succeeded. But that rarely occurs, he said — even in the federal system.

“People come out of prison hardened and angry and more likely to offend,” said Mr. Teachman, now an executive with ShotSpotter, a company that promotes a system for detecting gunfire.

In April 2014, the United States Sentencing Commission reduced the penalties for many nonviolent drug crimes. That summer it said those guidelines could be applied retroactively to many prisoners serving long drug sentences. Eric H. Holder Jr., the attorney general at the time, had lobbied the sentencing commission to make the changes.

Under the new guidelines, prisoners can ask federal judges to reassess their sentences. Along with examining the inmates’ behavior in prison, the judges look at whether they are likely to act out violently if they are released.

As part of an effort to give the federal Bureau of Prisons time to prepare for an influx of convicts entering probation and re-entry programs, the releases were delayed. They will now take place from Oct. 30 to Nov. 2.

“The Sentencing Commission’s actions — which create modest reductions for drug offenders — is a step toward these necessary reforms,” said Sally Q. Yates, the deputy attorney general. “Even with the Sentencing Commission’s reductions, drug offenders will have served substantial prison sentences.”

The United States has a quarter of the world’s prison population, and Republican and Democratic lawmakers agree that prison spending, which accounts for a third of the Justice Department’s budget, needs to be reduced.

Last week, a bipartisan group of senators proposed a sweeping overhaul aimed at reducing mandatory minimums and winning early release for those serving sentences disproportionate to their crimes.

The changes would be retroactive if the legislation is enacted, and lawmakers estimated that up to 6,500 other prisoners — many of them charged with offenses related to crack cocaine — could qualify for resentencing under the changes. Given the bipartisan support, the legislation has a stronger chance of being passed than many other bills Congress is considering.

Immigrant advocates have accused the administration of breaking up families by deporting immigrants who did little wrong other than coming to the country illegally. This criticism was fueled by a record number of deportations in Mr. Obama’s first term — although that pace has slowed considerably in the last year.

This summer, Republican candidates for president, particularly Donald J. Trump, seized on the killing of a woman on a San Francisco pier by a man who had been deported to Mexico several times and was recently freed from a federal prison.

Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, on Tuesday declined to comment on the release of the prisoners, but expressed optimism that both parties would continue to support criminal justice changes.

“We’re pleased to see that many Republicans consider this to be a priority, too,” Mr. Earnest said. “At this point, I don’t think there’s a significant level of concern that any rhetoric on the campaign trail could sabotage the important bipartisan work that’s currently ongoing on Capitol Hill. And I hope I’m right about that.”

Anthony Papa, a spokesman at the Drug Policy Alliance, which supports the relaxation of certain drug sentencing laws, said, “It warms my heart to hear that 6,000 people will be coming home.”

“The drug war has devastated families and communities, and it is time for the healing to begin,” said Mr. Papa, who himself spent 12 years behind bars on a mandatory minimum drug sentence.

Michael D. Shear and Carl Hulse contributed reporting.

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A version of this article appears in print on October 7, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. to Begin Freeing 6,000 From Prisons.

U.S. to Release 6,000 Inmates From Prisons,
NYT, OCT. 6., 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/us/
us-to-release-6000-inmates-under-new-sentencing-guidelines.html

Prison Inmates Put a Name

to a Feared Guard Known

as Captain America

OCT. 1, 2015

The New York Times

By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

and MICHAEL WINERIP

Inmates at the Clinton Correctional Facility in northern New York said the guards who beat them in the days after a brazen escape in June wore no name badges and did not identify themselves.

But one guard, the inmates said, stood out. He had a large tattoo of the American flag down his left arm and was known around the prison as Captain America.

No officer has been publicly implicated in any wrongdoing since an investigation by The New York Times nearly two months ago found what appeared to be a campaign of retribution against dozens of Clinton inmates after the escape at the prison.

Now, through interviews with inmates, The Times has identified Captain America as Chad Stickney, a gang intelligence officer and onetime steward in the state corrections officers’ union.

The inmates’ willingness to come forward and be named speaks to their growing frustration with the pace of the investigation into their allegations. Amid worsening violence at the prison, some inmates said they had been subjected to further harassment after speaking out.

In the frantic days after the prison break, inmates said in letters and interviews with The Times that guards handcuffed them, took them for questioning into areas of the prison with no cameras, punched them and slammed them against the wall. One inmate described having a plastic bag pulled over his head and being threatened with “waterboarding.”

Victor Aponte, 60, who is serving a life sentence for kidnapping and rape, said it was the officer known as Captain America who tied a plastic bag around his neck like a noose during an interrogation and pulled it so tightly that Mr. Aponte passed out.

Later, Mr. Aponte said, he had asked around at the prison and had learned that the guard was Officer Stickney. Three other prisoners who were at Clinton at the time of the escape, Rashad Scott, Eddie Matos and Luis Zenon, also told The Times that Officer Stickney was Captain America.

Mr. Zenon, along with another inmate, Paul Davila, also named a second prison employee, Kevin Norcross, as being present during some beatings. Mr. Davila said that Mr. Norcross had identified himself as a member of the internal affairs unit with the State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. While Mr. Norcross did not take part in the beatings, the inmates said, he witnessed them.

Inmate accounts are frequently viewed skeptically by investigators. The Times interviewed six inmates at two different prisons for this article, and while they gave consistent accounts, their version of events could not be independently verified.

Officer Stickney did not respond to repeated requests for comment, nor did Mr. Norcross.

Neither Officer Stickney nor any other officer accused of taking part in beatings after the escape has been criminally charged. James Miller, the spokesman for the corrections officers’ union, said that no officer had been disciplined in connection with the allegations and that Officer Stickney has had a clean disciplinary record in his 18 years as a corrections officer.

Michael Powers, the president of the corrections officers’ union, said in a statement that had there been cases of brutality, officers from state, federal and local law enforcement agencies working inside the prison after the escape would have been aware of it.

“It is troubling and irresponsible to report allegations against officers as fact,” Mr. Powers said. “Most New Yorkers would question the validity of accusations coming from convicted violent felons, who have long criminal histories and nothing to lose by making such claims.”

Officer Stickney, who was chief steward for the corrections officers union at the Ogdensburg Correctional Facility before moving to the Clinton prison in 2012, has been sued three times for alleged assault and harassment.

One of the lawsuits was terminated after the inmate who filed it died. Two others are still active, including a suit filed in September by Terry Daum, an inmate who claimed that Officer Stickney punched him several times in the head and grabbed his genitals during a search. The lawsuit also said “Stickney utilized his hand to aggressively rub plaintiff’s rectum like a credit card swipe and then attempted to jam his fingertips into plaintiff’s rectum.”

Four months after two convicted murderers, Richard W. Matt and David Sweat, escaped through the tunnels under the prison in Dannemora, N.Y., Clinton remains a tense place. There have been at least three major brawls among inmates, with officers using tear gas and, in one case, live ammunition to bring the prison under control, according to the corrections department.

The state’s inspector general is expected in the coming months to release a report detailing security lapses that led to the escape. And the corrections agency has promised to investigate inmates’ claims of abuse.

Asked at a recent news conference whether there was a problem with brutality by guards in the state prison system, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said that while there might be a few isolated incidents, officers were doing a “good job.”

“State prisons are filled with very dangerous people,” Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, said. “They are policed by a relatively small number of correction officials, who are unarmed, I might add. It is a very, very difficult job. They have to make sure they get a certain amount of respect in the job, otherwise they get hurt.”

The Correctional Association of New York, an inmate advocacy group with a legislative mandate to monitor the prisons, recently interviewed 30 Clinton inmates who described continuing abuse. Of those, two said they had been assaulted by Officer Stickney before the escape; one of the two claimed a plastic bag had been placed over his head during an interrogation.

After complaining about the beatings to investigators, lawyers and reporters, the inmates appear to have suffered further consequences.

Mr. Aponte, who described being choked by Officer Stickney, said in a prison interview in September that after the publication of the article in The Times, he was visited by a corrections department investigator who sought more information. Mr. Aponte said he told the investigator who Captain America was.

The status of that investigation is unclear. But Mr. Aponte said that after speaking with The Times, he was locked in his cell for 23 hours a day and not told why. Patrick Alexander, another inmate who spoke with The Times, was confined to his cell for a disciplinary infraction he believes was fabricated.

After speaking with investigators, Mr. Aponte wrote a letter to the authorities requesting a transfer to another prison because he feared for his safety. He received no response for more than a month.

“I’m afraid of retaliation,” he said in an interview in September. “I know how they operate.”

After The Times inquired about Mr. Aponte’s request, corrections officials transferred him this week.

The prison break in early June set off a manhunt. Mr. Matt was killed by a federal agent three weeks later; two days after that, Mr. Sweat was captured.

The escape highlighted serious security failings at Clinton. Investigators say officers would routinely sleep during overnight shifts, allowing Mr. Matt and Mr. Sweat to spend hours each night searching the prison’s underground tunnels for a way out.

Joyce E. Mitchell, a former civilian employee at Clinton, was sentenced this week to a minimum of two years and four months in prison after pleading guilty to providing Mr. Matt and Mr. Sweat with hacksaws and other tools. A guard at the prison has also been criminally charged. Nine officers were suspended after the escape, and the prison’s leadership team, including the superintendent, was removed.

No inmates have been charged in the breakout.

In a memorandum dated Sept. 16, the corrections department warned officers not to punish inmates who spoke to the news media. “An inmate who has been interviewed by representatives of the news media shall not be subject to departmental discipline or any other adverse action,” the memo said.

Mr. Alexander said that was exactly what happened to him after he told The Times that officers had beaten him and threatened to use waterboarding during an interrogation shortly after the escape.

At Shawangunk Correctional Facility, where he was transferred, Mr. Alexander said he had been verbally harassed by officers who referred to him as the “Clinton inmate” and called him a snitch.

He has also been subjected to frequent frisking by guards, he said, and kept his boots untied so that they could be removed quickly during searches.

In a September interview, Mr. Alexander said that he had not been compensated for personal possessions lost during his transfer from Clinton, including photo albums, journals, a hot plate, a lamp, beard trimmers and a 13-inch color television.

On Aug. 25, Mr. Alexander said that within a few hours of signing a consent form to be interviewed by CNN, he had been singled out by guards to provide a urine sample. Though he had never had a drug infraction during his 11 years in prison, or any other serious disciplinary issue, according to his records, an officer said he was suspected of using marijuana.

A week later, according to prison records, the test came back positive for THC, the psychoactive compound in marijuana.

The corrections department uses a drug test called EMIT that some medical professionals say can yield a false positive for THC. The results from the test given to Mr. Alexander should have been verified using a second method, said Dr. Louis Baxter, director of the American Board of Addiction Medicine. The Times provided Dr. Baxter with a copy of Mr. Alexander’s urinalysis records. “This test I reviewed could have been positive because of the use of ibuprofen,” he wrote in an email.

The corrections department said in a statement that the drug-testing method had been challenged in court and found reliable. Mr. Alexander, the statement said, was one of four inmates chosen to be tested as part of an investigation into drug use at Shawangunk.

At a prison hearing, Mr. Alexander said he had not used marijuana and accused officers of falsifying the test results to punish him for speaking to the media.

The hearing officer found him guilty, confined him to his cell for 30 days and stripped him of privileges, including using the phone and the commissary, for 90 days.

The officer also wanted the television removed from his cell, but Mr. Alexander said that would not be necessary because the corrections department had already lost it.

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on October 2, 2015,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
In Beatings, Inmates Feared a ‘Captain America’.

Prison Inmates Put a Name to a Feared Guard Known as Captain America,
NYT, OCT. 1, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/02/nyregion/
prison-guard-known-as-captain-america-is-feared-on-upstate-cell-block.html

Brutalized Behind Bars

in New York State

 

SEPT. 30, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

New York City’s longstanding failure to curb brutality by guards at the Rikers Island jail complex fell under a spotlight last year when the United States attorney in Manhattan joined a class-action lawsuit and then the city agreed in June to sweeping policy changes.

Now charges of gratuitous beatings and even torture by corrections officers in the New York State prison system are attracting federal scrutiny. Though it is hard to fathom, the state system for disciplining officers who batter inmates without cause is even worse than in the city jails. To begin to fix this problem, state officials will need to win stronger disciplinary provisions in the next round of contract negotiations with the corrections union and generally take a much more aggressive approach to getting abusive officers off the job.

The state’s problems were made clear in an article in The Times on Monday, published in collaboration with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization. It examined the 2014 case of Ramon Fabian, an inmate at the Ulster Correctional Facility, who was taken by a corrections officer, Michael Bukowski, beyond the view of other inmates and the prison’s surveillance system and viciously assaulted.

Mr. Fabian told investigators he lay groaning on the floor of his prison cubicle for almost an hour before hobbling to lunch. A sergeant sent him to the medical unit, and he was driven 80 miles to a hospital in Albany, where doctors removed part of his right testicle in emergency surgery.

State corrections officials moved to fire the officer. But the politically powerful union exercised a contract provision that puts disciplinary cases like this one before an arbitrator who is jointly chosen by the union and the corrections department. Arbitrators often end up “splitting the baby” to keep both sides satisfied and ensure they are chosen for future cases. Even when compelling evidence warrants dismissal, officers often get off with less.

For example, since 2010, the state has tried to fire 30 prison guards — and prevailed only eight times. In the same period, an additional 80 cases brought against corrections officers, sergeants and lieutenants were settled with their unions for penalties other than dismissal.

The arbitrator in the Bukowski case found that the officer had used excessive force and lied to investigators. But the arbitrator lowered the penalty from dismissal to a 120-day suspension without pay, making a mockery of the process.

Arbitrators’ decisions are considered final and binding; in the past courts have ruled that those decisions may not be overturned even when they commit errors of law or fact. In this case, however, state officials refused to return the officer to the job, and the union, the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association, sued to reinstate him. A state court ruled that suspension for this kind of assault “shocks the judicial conscience” and ordered the case reheard.

The arbitration process is not the only problem. The article in The Times reported, for example, that in the office that handles these investigations, most of the investigators are corrections officers. They belong to the same union as the guards they investigate — and sometimes go back to work in the prisons.

Governors and state legislators are notoriously fearful of crossing a union that represents corrections officers. But the complaints of brutality in the state prison system and the obvious weakness of the disciplinary system cry out for a more effective way of getting brutal corrections officers off the job. If the state fails to deal with this problem, it could find itself hauled into court by the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, which frequently sues governments over this very issue. The division is currently enforcing agreements with nearly two dozen state and local governments aimed at protecting the rights of people in confinement.
 

A version of this editorial appears in print on September 30, 2015, on page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: Brutalized Behind Bars.

Brutalized Behind Bars in New York State,
NYT, SEPT. 30, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/30/opinion/
brutalized-behind-bars-in-new-york-state.html

The Prison Problem

SEPT. 29, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

David Brooks

Pretty much everybody from Barack Obama to Carly Fiorina seems to agree that far too many Americans are stuck behind bars. And pretty much everybody seems to have the same explanation for how this destructive era of mass incarceration came about.

First, the war on drugs got out of control, meaning that many nonviolent people wound up in prison. Second, mandatory-minimum sentencing laws led to a throw-away-the-key culture, with long, cruel and pointlessly destructive prison terms.

It’s true that mass incarceration is a horrific problem. Back in the 1970s the increase in incarceration did help reduce the crime rate, maybe accounting for a third of the drop. But today’s incarceration levels do little to deter crime while they do much to rip up families, increase racial disparities and destroy lives.

The popular explanation for how we got here, however, seems to be largely wrong, and most of the policy responses flowing from it may therefore be inappropriate.

The drug war is not even close to being the primary driver behind the sharp rise in incarceration. About 90 percent of America’s prisoners are held in state institutions. Only 17 percent of these inmates are in for a drug-related offense, or less than one in five.

Moreover, the share of people imprisoned for drug offenses is dropping sharply, down by 22 percent between 2006 and 2011. Writing in Slate, Leon Neyfakh emphasized that if you released every drug offender from state prison today, you’d reduce the population only to 1.2 million from 1.5 million.

The war on drugs does not explain the rocketing rates of incarceration, and ending that war, wise or not, will not solve this problem.

The mandatory-minimum theory is also problematic. Experts differ on this, but some of the most sophisticated work with the best data sets has been done by John Pfaff of Fordham Law School. When I spoke with Pfaff on Monday I found him to be wonderfully objective, nonideological and data-driven.

His research suggests that while it’s true that lawmakers passed a lot of measures calling for long prison sentences, if you look at how much time inmates actually served, not much has changed over the past few decades. Roughly half of all prisoners have prison terms in the range of two to three years, and only 10 percent serve more than seven years. The laws look punitive, but the time served hasn’t increased, and so harsh laws are not the main driver behind mass incarceration, either.

So what does explain it? Pfaff’s theory is that it’s the prosecutors. District attorneys and their assistants have gotten a lot more aggressive in bringing felony charges. Twenty years ago they brought felony charges against about one in three arrestees. Now it’s something like two in three. That produces a lot more plea bargains and a lot more prison terms.

I asked Pfaff why prosecutors are more aggressive. He’s heard theories. Maybe they are more political and they want to show toughness to raise their profile to impress voters if they run for future office. Maybe the police are bringing stronger cases. Additionally, prosecutors are usually paid by the county but prisons by the state, so prosecutors tend not to have to worry about the financial costs of what they do.

Pfaff says there’s little evidence so far to prove any of these theories, since the prosecutorial world is largely a black box. He also points out that we have a radically decentralized array of prosecutors, with some elected and some appointed. Changing their behavior cannot be done with one quick fix.

Some politicians and activists suggest that solving this problem will be easy — just release the pot smokers and the low-level dealers. In reality, reducing mass incarceration means releasing a lot of once-violent offenders. That may be the right thing to do in individual cases, but it’s a knotty problem.

Two final points. Everybody is railing against the political establishment and experts and experienced politicians. But social problems are invariably more complex than they look. The obvious explanation for most problems is often wrong. It takes experience and craftsmanship to design policies that grapple with the true complexity of reality.

Finally, recategorizing a problem doesn’t solve it. In the 1970s, we let a lot of people out of mental institutions. Over the next decades we put a lot of people into prisons. But the share of people kept out of circulation has been strangely continuous. In the real world, crime, lack of education, mental health issues, family breakdown and economic hopelessness are all intertwined.

Changing prosecutor behavior might be a start. Lifting the spirits of inmates, as described in the outstanding Atlantic online video “Angola for Life,” can also help. But the fundamental situation won’t be altered without a comprehensive surge, unless we flood the zone with economic, familial, psychological and social repair.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 29, 2015, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: The Prison Problem.

The Prison Problem,
NYT, SEPT. 29, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/29/opinion/david-brooks-the-prison-problem.html

Rikers Island Captain and Officer

Are Charged With Beating Inmate, 18

 

SEPT. 4, 2015

The New York Times

By BENJAMIN WEISER

A Rikers Island captain and a correction officer were charged on Friday with assaulting a teenage inmate in a storage room where there were no video surveillance cameras, and then filing false paperwork to conceal their actions.

The 18-year-old inmate, Ambiorix Celedonio, had to be hospitalized after the beating, which left him bleeding from his forehead and lips and with other injuries.

The captain, Medzid Kolenovic, and the officer, Jean Destine, surrendered to the authorities and were released on their own recognizance after pleading not guilty in State Supreme Court in the Bronx, said the office of Robert T. Johnson, the Bronx district attorney. The Bronx prosecutor, whose office filed the charges, has jurisdiction over criminal matters at the Rikers jail complex.

The authorities said the episode occurred on Dec. 9, 2014, at the Robert N. Davoren Complex at Rikers. Mr. Celedonio was working at the mess hall when he and Captain Kolenovic began arguing. The captain then opened the door to a supply closet and invited the inmate to settle the matter, prosecutors said.

Officer Destine followed the men into the closet; when they emerged, Mr. Celedonio’s face was bruised and bloodied, according to video footage taken outside the storage room.

Prosecutors said that Captain Kolenovic and Officer Destine wrote in subsequent reports that the inmate had been the aggressor, and that they used appropriate force in response.

Mark G. Peters, the city’s investigation commissioner, said the case of excessive force was uncovered by the Correction Department’s investigation division, which immediately referred it to his agency.

“These officers led an inmate to an unseen closet and beat him bloody,” Mr. Peters said. “Where city employees of any kind engage in such gross behavior, we will find them and see that they are prosecuted.”

The charges came after Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration agreed in June to carry out sweeping reforms, including the appointment of a federal monitor, to settle a long-running federal class-action lawsuit filed initially by the Legal Aid Society and private law firms over violence and other abuse at Rikers. The suit was later joined by the office of Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York.

A year ago, Mr. Bharara’s office, after a two-and-a-half-year investigation, issued a scathing report on the treatment of teenage inmates at Rikers, which found widespread use of unnecessary and excessive force by correction officers and violations of the inmates’ civil rights.

The beating of Mr. Celedonio, who had an I.Q. of 65 and whose name has been spelled various ways, was one of 62 cases identified by The New York Times in an article in February of inmates who were seriously injured by correction officers from August 2014 through January 2015 — the period after Mr. Bharara released his report, which was addressed to the mayor and two other senior city officials.

The report had cited a “powerful code of silence” among Rikers staff and what it called a “staggering” number of injuries among teenage inmates. It noted that nearly 44 percent of the adolescent male inmate population as of October 2012 had been subjected to a use of force by staff members at least once.

Eve Kessler, a spokeswoman for Joseph Ponte, the correction commissioner, said on Friday, “The vast majority of correction officers perform their duties with the highest integrity, and Commissioner Ponte has zero tolerance for those who don’t.”

The department said Captain Kolenovic, 40, who was hired in 2007, and Officer Destine, 42, who was hired in 2006, were each put on modified status after the episode, meaning they no longer had contact with inmates.

The two defendants walked into the court on their own on Friday. Prosecutors said that each man, if convicted, could receive up to four years in prison. Captain Kolenovic’s lawyer, James Frankie, had no comment, his partner said later by phone; Officer Destine’s lawyer did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Norman Seabrook, president of the officers’ union, did not address the specifics of the case in a phone interview. But he said, “I would certainly like the Bronx district attorney’s office and the other counties to prosecute inmates for violating the rights of correction officers as vigorously as they do when it comes to uniformed personnel.”

Through a spokesman, he said later that if a “corrections officer commits a crime, they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Patrick Ferraiuolo, president of the captains’ union, said Mr. Kolenovic had been defending himself and would “absolutely fight the charges.” He added, “It’s just apparent, because of the charges, they don’t believe him.”

The charges came the same week that the city agreed to pay $450,000 to settle a civil rights lawsuit that alleged a Rikers inmate was beaten while he was hogtied and had his hands cuffed behind his back. A captain and five officers were later fired by Commissioner Ponte, and the Bronx prosecutor’s office has said it is looking into the case.
 

Nate Schweber and Michael Winerip contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on September 5, 2015, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Rikers Officer and Captain Are Charged in a Beating.

Rikers Island Captain and Officer Are Charged With Beating Inmate, 18,
NYT, SEPT. 4, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/05/nyregion/
rikers-island-captain-and-officer-are-charged-with-beating-inmate-18.html

The New Orleans Jails,

10 Years Later

 

AUG. 27, 2015

The New York Times

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

On Aug. 28, 2005, the New Orleans city jail held more than 6,000 people, giving it the highest per capita rate in America.

Most inmates weren’t violent offenders: Nearly nine in 10 had been picked up on minor charges like possessing marijuana or urinating in public. And because the vast majority were poor and could not afford bail, they stayed locked up for weeks or months, even though their charges rarely led to a conviction or a prison sentence.

The situation was intolerable and, it seemed, intractable. Then came the storm.

Over a few excruciating days, the whipping winds and rising waters that battered and drowned much of the city also unmasked the profound dysfunction of its most essential operations.

The jail network was among the hardest hit. In addition to widespread damage to buildings, many prisoners were abandoned in fetid floodwaters, while others endured chaotic transfers to distant jails.

Ten years on, many of the city’s pre-Katrina problems persist — entrenched poverty, a high crime rate and a persistent housing shortage for lower-income residents. But since Katrina, New Orleans has made significant progress toward a more humane and effective jail system. At the end of July, there were fewer than 1,800 people behind bars — a per capita rate still twice the national average, but a drop of over two-thirds from 2005 levels.

There is a long way yet to go: In 2013 a federal judge called the system “an indelible stain on the community” and approved a sweeping consent decree to address, among other things, poor training of guards and mistreatment of inmates, in particular those with mental illness. And, like everywhere in America, race plays a big role in who ends up in jail. In New Orleans, which is 60 percent black, 85 percent of jail inmates are black and are held twice as long as whites charged with the same offenses.

But in areas where it has improved, New Orleans can be a model. Nationally, jails — meant only for pretrial detention or short sentences — hold more than 700,000 people. This is nearly a third of the entire incarcerated population, yet it’s often overlooked in reform debates.

So what has gone right in New Orleans?

According to a comprehensive report authored in June by the Vera Institute of Justice and a former New Orleans judge, the hard-fought decision to build a smaller jail was crucial. In 2010, the city nearly built a 5,800-bed facility to replace jails damaged by Katrina. But after a campaign by local residents, who saw the harm wrought by locking up so many people at no benefit to public safety, city leaders agreed to a single jail with just more than 1,400 beds.

Of course, a smaller jail works only if fewer people are being arrested and detained in the first place. Several important reforms are helping make that a reality.

First, New Orleans police officers are increasingly issuing summonses rather than making arrests for minor, nonviolent infractions. Second, the city last year stopped giving the Orleans Parish sheriff, who runs the jail, a per diem payment for each person behind bars, removing a major incentive to hold more people longer.

Finally, a new pretrial-services program identifies lower-risk arrestees who cannot afford bail and recommends judges release them on their own recognizance.

The present system is driven by the hugely powerful bail-bond industry and is getting worse. In 1990, 60 percent of defendants in the United States were released without posting bail; today that number is 38 percent.

In New Orleans, there remain big obstacles to reform. A fierce turf war between Sheriff Marlin Gusman and Mayor Mitch Landrieu — the city pays for the jail, but Mr. Gusman runs it largely without oversight — could impede progress. As the Vera report argues, the city must rely less on the discretion of a few unconstrained officials and more on transparent, evidence-based decisions about who stays in jail and who gets out. The city also needs to provide care for the huge number of mentally ill people who wind up in jail because there’s nowhere else for them to go.

There are no easy victories in New Orleans. But the dramatic reduction of the city’s jail population, and the commitment of residents and city leaders to focus on getting it lower and focusing more on violent offenders, is an important step forward against great odds.
 

A version of this editorial appears in print on August 28, 2015, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: The New Orleans Jails, 10 Years Later.

The New Orleans Jails, 10 Years Later,
NYT, AUGUST 27, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/opinion/
the-new-orleans-jails-10-years-later.html

Sex Offenders Locked Up on a Hunch

 

AUG. 15, 2015

The New York Times

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The essence of the American criminal justice system is reactive, not predictive: You are punished for the crime you committed. You can’t be punished simply because you might commit one someday. You certainly can’t be held indefinitely to prevent that possibility.

And yet that is exactly what is happening to about 5,000 people convicted of sex crimes around the country. This population, which nearly doubled in the last decade, has completed prison sentences but remains held in what is deceptively called civil commitment — the practice of keeping someone locked up in an institution for months, years or even decades for the purpose of preventing possible future offenses.

The authorities have the power to detain people with mental illnesses or disorders who cannot function independently, or who pose a danger to themselves or others. But since the early 1990s, this power has been used increasingly to imprison one distinct group: sex offenders.

Federal law and the laws in 20 states and the District of Columbia allow people convicted of violent sex crimes — such as rape or child molestation — to be held in custody indefinitely past the end of their criminal sentences. The Supreme Court has upheld these laws on the grounds that they are not intended to punish or deter crime, but only to hold people until they are no longer a threat. In theory, a civilly committed person gets treatment and is released as soon as possible.

In practice, however, it usually means leaving one prison for another — civil commitment facilities are generally high-security buildings patrolled by armed guards and ringed with barbed wire — from which many are never released.

In a decision in June, a federal judge ruled that Minnesota’s civil-commitment law for sex offenders violates the Constitution. Federal District Judge Donovan Frank said the law imposes “a punitive system that segregates and indefinitely detains a class of potentially dangerous individuals without the safeguards of the criminal justice system.” For example, local prosecutors — not clinicians or mental health professionals — choose whether to seek continued detention based on a screening test that claims to predict a person’s likelihood of committing another sex offense, though there is no clear evidence such tests are accurate.

Yet based largely on those screening tests, more than 700 Minnesotans who have completed their prison sentences are locked up, at an annual cost of more than $120,000 per person — triple the cost of prison. This civil commitment rate is by far the highest in the country. Some people have been held for more than 20 years. During that time, not one person has been released from the program unconditionally.

A central flaw, Judge Frank said, is that Minnesota does not perform reassessments of risk, so the burden lies with the detainees to prove they no longer pose a danger. On Aug. 12, Judge Frank ordered the state to come up with constitutionally valid reforms by the end of September, or he “may demand a more forceful solution.”

Despite the public perception that all sex offenders are recidivists — a belief that drove these laws in the first place — sexual re-offense rates are in fact lower than those for other crimes (though an unknown number of sex crimes go unreported). In addition, while some states’ laws make it easier for detainees to earn their way out, 30 states have no civil-commitment laws at all, and there is no evidence that a state’s sexual-violence rate is affected by whether it has such a law.

As with California’s three-strikes law or harsh mandatory-minimum sentences nationwide, the indefinite detention of sex offenders reflects the politics of fear and overreaction that drive so much of criminal justice policy. That was the case in Minnesota, which drastically increased the number of people it committed after a recently released sex offender sexually assaulted and murdered a college student named Dru Sjodin in 2003.

Public safety would be better served if resources were directed toward community supervision and other services for those leaving prison, rather than toward skirting the edges of the Constitution to keep them locked away.

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A version of this editorial appears in print on August 16, 2015, on page SR8 of the New York edition with the headline: Indefinite Imprisonment, on a Hunch.

Sex Offenders Locked Up on a Hunch,
NYT, AUGUST 15, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/opinion/sunday/
sex-offenders-locked-up-on-a-hunch.html

After 2 Killers Fled,

New York Prisoners Say,

Beatings Were Next

AUG. 11, 2015

The New York Times

By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

and MICHAEL WINERIP

Night had fallen at the Clinton Correctional Facility in far northern New York when the prison guards came for Patrick Alexander. They handcuffed him and took him into a broom closet for questioning. Then, Mr. Alexander said in an interview last week, the beatings began.

As the three guards, who wore no name badges, punched him and slammed his head against the wall, he said they shouted questions: “Where are they going? What did you hear? How much are they paying you to keep your mouth shut?” One of the guards put a plastic bag over his head, Mr. Alexander said, and threatened to waterboard him.

Hours earlier, Richard W. Matt and David Sweat had made their daring escape from the unit — called the “honor block” — where they were housed. Now it appeared that Mr. Alexander, a fellow convicted murderer who lived in an adjoining cell, was being made to suffer the consequences.

For days after the June prison break, corrections officers carried out what seemed like a campaign of retribution against dozens of Clinton inmates, particularly those on the honor block, an investigation by The New York Times found. In letters reviewed by The Times, as well as prison interviews, inmates described a strikingly similar catalog of abuses, including being beaten while handcuffed, choked and slammed against cell bars and walls.

They were also subjected to harsh policies ordered by the State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision: Dozens of inmates, many of whom had won the right to live on the honor block after years of good behavior, were transferred out of Clinton to other prisons. Many were placed in solitary confinement, and stripped of privileges they had accrued over the years — even though no prisoners have yet been linked to Mr. Matt’s and Mr. Sweat’s actions.

Indeed, it is prison employees who have been implicated: One has pleaded guilty to aiding the escape; another faces criminal charges; nine officers have been suspended; and the leadership of the prison, in Dannemora, has been removed.

More than 60 inmates have filed complaints with Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York, an organization that assists indigent prisoners. And 10 members of an inmate council at Clinton signed a letter last month to state corrections officials making similar allegations.

“We have been daily getting complaints along these lines from around the state,” said Michael Cassidy, a lawyer for Prisoners’ Legal Services.

After The Times published its findings, the corrections department released a statement saying the inmate complaints had been under investigation for several weeks and had “also been referred to the state inspector general.”

“Any findings of misconduct or abuse against inmates will be punished to the full extent of the law,” the statement continued.

Several inmates interviewed by The Times said they had been visited by members of the department’s Office of Special Investigations.

Frantic Questioning

The accounts suggest that as corrections officers frantically pressed for information that could lead to the capture of the two prisoners, and perhaps exonerate themselves for the security lapses that contributed to the breakout, they resorted to brutal tactics that most likely violated department regulations.

Victor Aponte, who worked in the prison tailor shop where Mr. Matt also had a job, said a guard with an American flag tattoo, known at the prison as Captain America, tied a plastic bag around Mr. Aponte’s neck in an interrogation and tightened it until he passed out. Reggie Edwards, who supervised the tailor shop, said corrections officials put him in solitary confinement for three weeks and threw out most of his belongings, including his family photographs and his wedding ring.

After a three-week manhunt, a federal agent shot and killed Mr. Matt on June 26. Two days later, a State Police officer shot Mr. Sweat, and he was captured.

Mr. Alexander got the news at Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Ulster County, where he had been transferred. He said he had earned his place on the Clinton honor block because he had not been written up for any serious infractions since entering the prison system in 2004. He occupied the cell next to Mr. Matt, who was in prison for murdering his boss and then cutting up the body. (Long before he cut his way out of prison, Mr. Matt was known around Clinton by the nickname Hacksaw.)

For Mr. Alexander, his cell’s location apparently made him a target for investigators.

The night of the escape, Mr. Alexander said, he worked late at the tailor shop, and when he returned to his cell around 9:45 p.m., Mr. Matt gave him bowls of salad and fried chicken that had been bought at the commissary. “He told me: ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll get the bowls from you in the morning,’ ” Mr. Alexander recalled.

He said he was awakened around 5:15 a.m. for the morning count. “The officer comes banging on the bars,” he said. “He goes to Matt’s cell and bangs on the bars, and then he leaves and he bangs on Dave’s bars.” When there was no response, he said, a sergeant and several guards rushed up and down the cellblock shouting to one another that two inmates were gone.

“The sergeant comes over to me: ‘You hear something? You had to hear something,’ ” Mr. Alexander recalled.

It would be several hours before the first details of the escape were made public. Around 11 a.m., Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo toured the honor block and inspected the holes the inmates had cut in the backs of their cells with hacksaw blades.

Governor’s Stare

The governor then stopped to question Mr. Alexander.

“Must have kept you awake with all that cutting, huh?” Mr. Cuomo asked, according to video of the exchange. Then, Mr. Alexander said, the governor “gave me his best tough-guy stare and walked off.”

Later, the governor said he would be “shocked” if any corrections officers had been involved.

Twice during the day of the escape, Mr. Alexander said he was questioned by investigators from the State Police and the corrections department inspector general’s office.

Then, around 8 p.m., he was handcuffed and taken to a broom closet where, he said, three corrections officers whom he had never seen before interrogated him. An officer wearing a jacket with the initials C.I.U. — Crisis Intervention Unit — sat down and asked him, “Do you know the difference between this interview and those other interviews?” Mr. Alexander recalled.

“The officer jumps up and grabs me by my throat, lifts me out of the chair, slams my head into the pipe along the wall,” he said. “Then he starts punching me in the face. The other two get up and start hitting me also in the ribs and stomach.”

With each punch, Mr. Alexander said, the officers shouted another question.

“The whole time he’s holding me up by my throat,” he added.

When Mr. Alexander repeatedly insisted that he had no information, one officer pointed to a plastic bag hanging on some pipes, asked if he knew what it was for and said, “You know what waterboarding is?” Mr. Alexander recalled.

The officer then put the bag over his head and started beating him again, Mr. Alexander said.

He said the interrogation lasted about 20 minutes, and he was then taken, bleeding, back to his cell.

Later, Mr. Alexander said, the same officer “began quietly taunting and threatening me, telling me, ‘Don’t worry, Fat Boy, we’ll be seeing you really soon.’ ”

In a letter to Prisoners’ Legal Services, Mr. Aponte, who also worked in the tailor shop, described going through a similar interrogation two days later.

One officer stood in front of a window blocking the view into the room, he wrote, while another guard in a C.I.U. windbreaker tied a garbage bag around his neck, “using the plastic bag as a hanging noose.”

“I don’t know how long he hung me up like that because I passed out,” Mr. Aponte wrote.

Mr. Aponte, along with several other inmates, said they were initially denied medical care. Days later, when he was finally taken to the prison clinic, officers warned him not to tell the medical staff how he got his injuries, he wrote in a letter.

“The sergeant tells me that I’ve been in prison for a long time and I should know better, that if I didn’t tell the nurse that was going to examine me that nothing has happened that they were going to kill me for real this time,” he wrote.

Paul Davila, another resident of the honor block, wrote in his complaint that after he was beaten during an interrogation, he was pressured to “sign a report stating, ‘I was not assaulted.’ ”

“Left with no other choice,” he wrote, “I signed.”

In the two weeks after the escape, inmates from Clinton’s honor block were dispersed, many of them sent to solitary confinement at other prisons. Some said they were beaten during their transfers by officers from the department’s Correctional Emergency Response Team, known as CERT.

“The CERT team rushed into my cell, threw me down on the bed, twisted my wrist and yelled at me not to resist,” an inmate, Manuel Nuñez, wrote in a letter, adding that later they “assaulted me while I was cuffed, chained and shackled.”

Gantlet of Guards

He said when he and other inmates were lined up to board a corrections bus, officers passed by, punching them.

During an interview last week at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Westchester County, Mr. Nuñez showed reporters purple scars around his right ankle that he said were the result of CERT officers’ intentionally shackling him too tightly.

Some of the former honor block residents have lost privileges that had taken years to earn at Clinton. Mr. Edwards, who had supervised 50 inmates at the prison tailor shop, had been able to earn as much as $45 a week. Since being moved to Sing Sing, he has been working as a porter making $3 a week. “They took everything from me,” he said. “They did everything they could to blame the ones who stayed.”

Mr. Alexander said that days after being beaten up, he was moved, first to the Upstate Correctional Facility in Franklin County and then to Shawangunk Correctional Facility. In the process, he said he lost his TV, his diaries, family photos and a decade’s worth of letters from his mother and aunt that he had laminated with packing tape for safekeeping.

Despite all this, Mr. Alexander and many others interviewed said they did not resent the two escapees. Mr. Sweat was serving life in prison with no possibility of parole for shooting a sheriff’s deputy in the back 20 times and then running him over. Faced with that kind of time, some said, they may well have considered escape.

“I can’t say what I’d do; I didn’t have the time Sweat has,” said Mr. Alexander, who has spent 11 years in prison and will be eligible for parole in 2023. “So no, I don’t resent them. Maybe I should, but I don’t.”

Inmates said the freedoms awarded on the honor block were not what led to the escape. Investigators have found that it was a corrections officer and civilian supervisor who smuggled in the tools that aided Mr. Matt and Mr. Sweat. And because of security lapses, officials say, Mr. Sweat was able to spend night after night preparing an escape route, cutting through the backs of their cells, a brick wall and a steel steam pipe.

Investigators and inmates say that instead of making hourly rounds of the cellblock each night, as they were supposed to do, most guards slept through much of their shift.

“Laziness caused that incident, not privileges,” Mr. Davila said.

Inmates joked that the only ones walking the cellblocks on the overnight shift were the cockroaches.

A version of this article appears in print on August 12, 2015,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Brutal Interrogations After Two Escaped.

After 2 Killers Fled, New York Prisoners Say, Beatings Were Next,
NYT, AUGUST 11, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/12/nyregion/
after-2-killers-fled-new-york-prisoners-say-beatings-were-next.html

For Prisoners, a Path to Society

JULY 31, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Conservatives and liberals who clash on just about everything else agree that the harsh drug sentencing laws that swept the country starting four decades ago have been wholly counterproductive, driving up prison costs to bankrupting levels, undermining confidence in justice and decimating communities. But as Congress seeks to reform federal sentencing policies, it should revisit other outdated policies that trap people with criminal convictions at the margins of society — and indeed have driven many of them back to jail — by denying them jobs, housing and education.

The Obama administration did just that this week, creating a pilot program that will allow a limited number of inmates to receive federal Pell grants to take college courses behind bars. It will last three to five years and be open to inmates who are eligible for release, giving priority to those scheduled to be released within the next five years.

The program, created by executive authority since Congress closed off access to Pell grants in 1994, is cast as an “experiment’’ to gather evidence on how education affects recidivism. But mountains of data already show that inmates who receive college degrees in prison — or who only participate in prison education programs — are far less likely to return to prison.

Congress was incapable of hearing that message in 1994, when it was ratcheting up criminal penalties under the misguided belief that people who commit crimes deserved to be permanently exiled from society’s mainstream. Among its other dumb moves was to revoke inmate access to Pell grants in federal and state prisons. Congress left the impression at the time that inmates were eating up an undeserved share of student aid when, in fact, they received fewer than 1 percent of the grants.

The move had a disastrous impact on prison college programs. About half shut down. In many states where the programs survived, costs were shifted to inmates or their families, or were underwritten by private donors or foundations. Though underfunded, these programs did a world of good. In 2013, for example, reviewing 30 years of prison education research, the RAND Corporation found that inmates who participated in education programs had a substantially reduced risk of committing a new offense within three years compared with those who did not. For every dollar spent on education, taxpayers saved $4 to $5 on reincarceration costs.

A similar pattern emerged in the rigorous, highly acclaimed Bard Prison Initiative, launched in 2001 by Bard College. The program offers a broad academic calendar with more than 60 courses a semester, including Mandarin Chinese, advanced mathematics, studio arts and offerings in the humanities. It has yielded a remarkable 4 percent recidivism rate for participants, and an even lower 2.5 percent for those who obtained degrees while in prison; the rate for the state as a whole is about 40 percent. It has granted 350 undergraduate degrees so far and sent students to graduate schools at elite universities like Columbia, Yale and New York University. Widely emulated, it has sister programs in 10 states.

College prison programs have more than proved their worth. Still, the present Congress is unlikely to restore the broad access inmates enjoyed to Pell grants two decades ago. The Obama administration’s “pilot program” will provide temporary help for some of the people who need it while also highlighting the need for a broad new policy at the federal level.

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A version of this editorial appears in print on August 1, 2015, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: For Prisoners, a Path to Society.

For Prisoners, a Path to Society,
NYT, JULY 31, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/01/opinion/for-prisoners-a-path-to-society.html

Shut Down Rikers Island

JULY 17, 2015

President Obama

Takes On the Prison Crisis

 

JULY 16, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

On Thursday, for the first time in American history, a president walked into a federal prison. President Obama was there to see for himself a small piece of the damage that the nation’s decades-long binge of mass incarceration has wrought.

Mr. Obama’s visit to El Reno, a medium-security prison in Oklahoma, capped off a week in which he spoke powerfully about the failings of a criminal justice system that has damaged an entire generation of Americans, locking up millions — disproportionately men of color — at a crippling cost to them, their families and communities, as well as to the taxpayers and society as a whole.

Speaking to reporters after touring the cells, Mr. Obama reflected on the people he met there. “These are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different than the mistakes that I made, and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made. The difference is they did not have the kinds of support structures, the second chances, the resources that would allow them to survive those mistakes.”

This indisputable argument has been made by many others, most notably former Attorney General Eric Holder Jr., who was the administration’s most powerful advocate for sweeping justice reforms. But it is more significant coming from the president, not just in his words but in his actions. On Monday Mr. Obama commuted the sentences of 46 people, most serving 20 years or more, for nonviolent drug crimes. It was a tiny fraction of the more than 30,000 people seeking clemency, but the gesture recognized some of the injustices of America’s harsh justice system.

On Tuesday, in a wide-ranging speech to the N.A.A.C.P., Mr. Obama explained that people who commit violent crimes are not the reason for the exploding federal prison population over the last few decades. Most of the growth has come instead from nonviolent, low-level drug offenders caught up in absurdly harsh mandatory minimum sentences that bear no relation to the seriousness of their offense or to the maintenance of public safety.

“If you’re a low-level drug dealer, or you violate your parole, you owe some debt to society,” Mr. Obama said. “You have to be held accountable and make amends. But you don’t owe 20 years. You don’t owe a life sentence.”

Mandatory minimums like these should be reduced or eliminated completely, he said. Judges should have more discretion to shape sentences and to use alternatives to prison, like drug courts or community programs, that are cheaper and can be more effective at keeping people from returning to crime.

Mr. Obama also put a spotlight on intolerable conditions, like overuse of solitary confinement in which more than 80,000 inmates nationwide are held on any given day. Many are being punished for minor infractions or are suffering from mental illness. “Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for 23 hours a day, sometimes for months or even years at a time?” Mr. Obama asked. He said he asked the Justice Department to review this practice.

He talked about community investment, especially in early-childhood education and in lower-income minority communities, as the best way to stop crime before it starts. And he spoke of the importance of removing barriers to employment, housing and voting for former prisoners. “Justice is not only the absence of oppression,” Mr. Obama said, “it is the presence of opportunity.”

As Mr. Obama acknowledged, however, his powers are limited. Any comprehensive solution to this criminal justice catastrophe must come from Congress and the state legislatures which for decades enacted severe sentencing laws and countless other harmful measures. In recent years, the opposite trend has taken hold as lawmakers in both conservative and liberal states have reduced populations in state prisons — where the vast majority of inmates are held — as well as crime rates.

It’s time that Congress fixed the federal system. After failed efforts at reform, an ambitious new bill called the SAFE Justice Act is winning supporters, including, on Thursday, the House speaker, John Boehner, and may have enough bipartisan support to pass. It would, among several other helpful provisions, eliminate mandatory minimums for many low-level drug crimes and create educational and other programs in prison that have been shown to reduce recidivism.

One sign of how far the politics of criminal justice has shifted was a remark by former president Bill Clinton, who signed a 1994 law that played a key role in the soaring growth of America’s prison system. On Wednesday, Mr. Clinton said, “I signed a bill that made the problem worse. And I want to admit it.” It was a long overdue admission, and another notable moment in a week full of them.

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A version of this editorial appears in print on July 17, 2015, on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: Mr. Obama Takes On the Prison Crisis.

President Obama Takes On the Prison Crisis,
NYT, July 16, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/17/opinion/
president-obama-takes-on-the-prison-crisis.html

Ending the Rikers Nightmare

How to Lock Up Fewer People

 

MAY 23, 2015

The New York Times

SundayReview | Opinion

By MARC MAUER

and DAVID COLE

WHEN Hillary Rodham Clinton, Ted Cruz, Eric H. Holder Jr., Jeb Bush, George Soros, Marco Rubio and Charles G. Koch all agree that we must end mass incarceration, it is clear that times have changed. Not long ago, most politicians believed the only tenable stance on crime was to be tougher than the next guy.

Today, nearly everyone acknowledges that our criminal justice system needs fixing, and politicians across the spectrum call for reducing prison sentences for low-level drug crimes and other nonviolent offenses. But this consensus glosses over the real challenges to ending mass incarceration. Even if we released everyone imprisoned for drugs tomorrow, the United States would still have 1.7 million people behind bars, and an incarceration rate four times that of many Western European nations.

Mass incarceration can be ended. But that won’t happen unless we confront the true scale of the problem.

A hard-nosed skeptic would tell you that fully half the people in state prisons are serving time for violent offenses. And most drug offenders behind bars are not kids caught smoking a joint, but dealers, many with multiple prior convictions. We already have about 3,000 drug courts diverting those who need it to treatment rather than prison. Recidivism remains astonishingly high for those we release from prison, so releasing more poses real risks. And criminal law is primarily enforced by the states, not the federal government, so this is not a problem the next president can solve.

To move beyond symbolic sound bites to real progress, we need to address each of these objections in turn.

It’s true that half the people in state prisons are there for a violent crime, but not all individuals convicted of violent crimes are alike. They range from serial killers to minor players in a robbery and battered spouses who struck back at their abusers. If we are going to end mass incarceration, we need to recognize that the excessively long sentences we impose for most violent crimes are not necessary, cost-effective or just.

We could cut sentences for violent crimes by half in most instances without significantly undermining deterrence or increasing the threat of repeat offending. Studies have found that longer sentences do not have appreciably greater deterrent effects; many serious crimes are committed by people under the influence of alcohol or drugs, who are not necessarily thinking of the consequences of their actions, and certainly are not affected by the difference between a 15-year and a 30-year sentence.

For the same conduct, we impose sentences on average twice as long as those the British impose, four times longer than the Dutch, and five to 10 times longer than the French. One of every nine people in prison in the United States is serving a life sentence. And some states have also radically restricted parole at the back end. As a result, many inmates are held long past the time they might pose any threat to public safety.

Offenders “age out” of crime — so the 25-year-old who commits an armed robbery generally poses much less risk to public safety by the age of 35 or 40. Yet nearly 250,000 inmates today are over 50. Every year we keep older offenders in prison produces diminishing returns for public safety. For years, states have been radically restricting parole; we need to make it more readily available. And by eliminating unnecessary parole conditions for low-risk offenders, we can conserve resources to provide appropriate community-based programming and supervision to higher-risk parolees.

It’s true that most individuals incarcerated for a drug offense were sellers, not just users. But as a result of mandatory sentencing laws, judges often cannot make reasonable distinctions between drug kingpins and street-corner pawns. We ought to empower judges to recognize the difference, and to reduce punishment for run-of-the-mill offenders, who are often pursuing one of the few economic opportunities available to them in destitute communities. The single most important thing we can do is provide meaningful work opportunities to the most disadvantaged.

There are already drug courts in many American communities, and studies show they can reduce substance abuse without incarceration. But the criteria for diversion are often unduly narrow, and they screen out substantial numbers of drug users who could benefit from treatment. Equally important, we should not limit our response to those who have been arrested. Part of winding down the “war on drugs” will require making treatment options more widely available, before individuals enter the criminal justice system.

Recidivism is also a serious obstacle to reform. Two-thirds of released prisoners are rearrested within three years, and half are reincarcerated. But many of the returns to prison are for conduct that violates technical parole requirements, but does not harm others. And much of the problem is that the scale and cost of prison construction have left limited resources for rehabilitation, making it difficult for offenders to find the employment that is necessary to staying straight. So we need to lock up fewer people on the front end as well as enhance reintegration and reduce collateral consequences that impede rehabilitation on the back end.

Criminal justice is administered largely at the state level; 90 percent of those incarcerated are in state and local facilities. This means mass incarceration needs to be dismantled one state at a time. Some states are already making substantial progress. New Jersey, California and New York have all reduced their prison populations by about 25 percent in recent years, with no increase in crime. That should be good news for other states, which would reap substantial savings — in budgetary and human terms — if they followed suit. While the federal government cannot solve this problem alone, it can lead both by example and by providing financial incentives that encourage reform.

Ending mass incarceration will not be easy. Opposition will come from rural community leaders who see prisons as economic development, legislators who still respond emotionally to the “crime of the week” and prosecutors who measure success by convictions and incarcerations, rather than by resolving conflict. But the recent tragic police shootings of young black men have, for the moment, focused our attention on the imperative for reform. And state budgetary crises have led many to question the vast resources we devote to holding too many people under lock and key.

Today, at long last, a consensus for reform is emerging. The facts that no other Western European nation even comes close to our incarceration rates, and that all have lower homicide rates, show that there are better ways to address crime. The marked disparities in whom we choose to lock up pose one of the nation’s most urgent civil rights challenges. But we will not begin to make real progress until we face up to the full dimensions of the task.
 

Marc Mauer is executive director of the Sentencing Project. David Cole is a professor of law and public policy at Georgetown University.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on May 24, 2015, on page SR6 of the New York edition with the headline: How to Lock Up Fewer People.

How to Lock Up Fewer People,
NYT, MAY 23, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/opinion/sunday/how-to-lock-up-fewer-people.html

Prison Riot in Nebraska

Leaves 2 Inmates Dead

MAY 11, 2015

The New York Times

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

A riot at a Nebraska prison left two inmates dead and two hospitalized, officials said on Monday, after prisoners took control of part of the complex and set fires.

Guards retook control of the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution by Monday morning, and “two inmates were discovered dead in a housing unit,” according to a statement from the state Department of Correctional Services. “Staff are working to identify and notify next of kin,” the statement said.

The department said nothing about how the inmates had died or who was responsible.

Violence broke out at the prison, in the southeast corner of the state, on Sunday at about 2:30 p.m., the department said, when prison staff members “noticed a large gathering of inmates in front of a housing unit” and tried to break it up. Two employees were assaulted in that melee but not seriously hurt, and several other episodes followed in multiple housing units.

Two inmates were hospitalized, the department reported — one who was shot during the initial confrontation and one who was “injured by a rubber projectile.”

Inmates gained control of parts of the prison and set several fires; smoke could still be seen rising from some of the buildings until early Monday morning.

Sunday’s riot in Tecumseh was the weekend’s second violent episode at a Nebraska prison. On Saturday, two guards were injured after “a series of inmate on inmate altercations” at the Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln, according to a statement from officials there. That facility was placed on lockdown as a result.

All of Nebraska’s prisons are overcrowded, according to state data, and the corrections department has faced lawsuits from inmates claiming poor treatment and dangerous conditions.

The Tecumseh prison, which is home to the state’s death row, is the least overcrowded, operating at 105 percent of its capacity last month. Another facility designed for 160 inmates was housing 536 in April, 335 percent of its planned capacity.

A more significant concern at Tecumseh is understaffing, said Mike Marvin, executive director of the Nebraska Association of Public Employees, a union representing state corrections officers.

Mr. Marvin said Tecumseh’s remote location made hiring and retaining guards a challenge, sometimes leading to limited staffing and mandatory overtime shifts that he said can create dangerous working conditions.

“People go to work there and then they get stuck working 16-hour days several days a week,” Mr. Marvin said. “And they can’t plan any of their family events, and they quit, which makes the situation worse.”

A state employment website shows the Tecumseh prison is hiring guards for $15.15 an hour.

Mr. Marvin said there had been no prison riot in Nebraska on this scale in recent memory, but he said he had warned state lawmakers that the prisons had too many inmates and not enough guards.

“I told them, ‘We either build a new prison and staff it, or we find a way to get this inmate population down, because it’s going to explode,’” Mr. Marvin said. “We’re going to have a problem. Something’s going to happen.”

Mitch Smith contributed reporting.

Prison Riot in Nebraska Leaves 2 Inmates Dead,
MAY 11, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/us/nebraska-prison-riot.html

President Obama’s Letter to 22 Prisoners

 

APRIL 2, 2015

The New York Times

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

On Tuesday, 22 people serving sentences of decades or life for nonviolent drug crimes in federal prisons across the country received a personal letter from President Obama, commuting their sentences and ordering their release in late July.

Each had applied to Mr. Obama for clemency — a power the Constitution unreservedly grants the president as a way to correct injustices or offer forgiveness, but which has fallen into near-total disuse in recent decades. Before Tuesday, Mr. Obama ranked as the least merciful president in modern history.

Among the inmates are people like Francis Darrell Hayden, a Kentucky man who was sentenced to life for growing marijuana, and Rudolph Norris, serving 30 years for selling cocaine. In his letter, Mr. Obama warned the prisoners that after their release they would face the doubts of those who do not believe people with criminal records can change. “But remember that you have the capacity to make good choices,” he wrote. “I believe in your ability to prove the doubters wrong.”

It was a rare moment, and it underscored the critical role executive clemency can play in a justice system that far too often imposes punishments out of any reasonable proportion to the crime.

The commutations are part of a broader effort the Justice Department undertook last year to identify and encourage low-level, nonviolent federal inmates to apply for clemency if they meet certain criteria, such as having no “significant criminal history,” exhibiting good behavior in prison, and serving a sentence of longer than 10 years that would be shorter today because of changed laws.

To date, more than 8,000 applications have poured in to the pardon office, and more than 30,000 inquiries have been received by a coalition of volunteer defense lawyers assisting the administration.

There are clearly far more than 22 people deserving of a reduced sentence. For example, thousands of inmates are serving unjustly long sentences under an absurdly harsh law that treated one gram of crack cocaine the same as 100 grams of powder cocaine for sentencing purposes. The law was changed in 2010 to reduce that ratio by more than four-fifths, but it still applies only to future prosecutions. Mr. Obama could wait forever for Congress to make the law retroactive, or he could use his clemency power to tackle an obvious unfairness now.

But good intentions mean little without the resources to make them a reality. Staffing levels at the pardon office, which reviews clemency applications, have barely changed since 1996, even though the number of applications has increased more than eightfold since then.

Tuesday’s commutations also highlighted the damage caused by federal prosecutors who overcharge defendants who refuse to plead guilty — a common practice that effectively punishes people for exercising their constitutional right to a trial. Many of the sentences Mr. Obama commuted were the result of such overcharging.

Commuting 22 sentences was the right thing to do. As Congress dithers on sentencing reform, Mr. Obama should do more to show mercy to thousands of inmates who could be released without any threat to public safety.

A version of this editorial appears in print on April 2, 2015, on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: President Obama’s Letter to 22 Prisoners.

President Obama’s Letter to 22 Prisoners,
NYT, April 2, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/02/opinion/president-obamas-letter-to-22-prisoners.html

California Convicts

Are Out of Prison After Third Strike,

and Staying Out

FEB. 26, 2015

The New York Times

By ERIK ECKHOLM

LOS ANGELES — William Taylor III, once a lifer in state prison for two robbery convictions and the intent to sell a small packet of heroin, was savoring a moment he had scarcely dared to imagine: his first day alone, in a place of his own.

“I love the apartment,” he said of the subsidized downtown studio, which could barely contain the double bed he insisted on having. “And I love that I’m free after 18 years of being controlled.”

“My window has blinds, and I can open and close them!” he exclaimed to visitors the other day, reveling in an unaccustomed, and sometimes scary, sense of autonomy.

Mr. Taylor, 58, is one of more than 2,000 former inmates who were serving life terms under California’s three-strikes law, but who were freed early after voters scaled it back in 2012. Under the original law, repeat offenders received life sentences, with no possibility of parole for at least 25 years, even if the third felony was as minor as shoplifting.

Formerly branded career criminals, those released over the last two years have returned to crime at a remarkably low rate — partly because they had aged in prison, experts say, and because participation in crime declines steadily after age 25, but also because of the intense practical aid and counseling many have received. And California’s experience with the release of these inmates provides one way forward as the country considers how to reduce incarceration without increasing crime.

“I hope the enduring lesson is that all of these people are not hopeless recidivists,” said Michael Romano, director of the Three Strikes Project at Stanford Law School, which provides legal aid to prisoners and training to public defenders.

“Those who remain dangerous should be kept behind bars,” added Mr. Romano, who was an author of the 2012 revisions. “But there are many people in prison who are no threat to public safety.”

More than 20 states joined California in adopting some form of a three-strikes law. But California’s was perhaps the country’s harshest and contributed to a soaring prison population. The state, under court order to reduce prison crowding, has diverted low-level felons to county jails and, after another voter initiative last year, has redefined minor thefts and drug possession as misdemeanors.

Success for those emerging from long prison terms does not come easily. These inmates are entering a 21st-century world they have never learned to navigate. Many, including Mr. Taylor, have histories of psychiatric and drug problems, and nearly all would seem to be at risk of homelessness and new arrests.

To help with the re-entry, Mr. Taylor first spent seven months in therapy and coaching in a transitional residence, a structured setting with bunk mates. Now he has a spot in an apartment building with a counselor on the first floor.

California’s three-strikes initiative was adopted by voters in 1994, when fear of crime was at a peak, fueled by a former prisoner’s murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas. Proponents said the law would keep habitual predators behind bars for good.

But jarring stories of a different sort appeared almost immediately, as breathtaking sentences were given not only to killers and rapists but also to small-time burglars and purse snatchers.

In 2012, with crime down and prisons overflowing, California voters had second thoughts. Proposition 36 held that many prisoners whose third offenses were not violent or serious would be eligible for resentencing, so long as a judge did not find an “unreasonable risk of danger to public safety.”

Of about 9,000 prisoners who had been sentenced under the three-strikes law, about 3,000 qualified for a rehearing; another 6,000, with more violent records, did not. As of late February, 2,008 inmates had been released for time served, and 92 were serving out reduced sentences. More than 700 cases remain to be adjudicated.

Judges ruled against just 132 of the eligible inmates.

After being free for an average of more than 18 months, just 4.7 percent of the former life prisoners have returned to prison for new crimes, usually burglaries or drug crimes. By comparison, Mr. Romano calculates based on state data, of all inmates released from California prisons, about 45 percent return for new crimes over a similar period.

A large share of the resentencing cases were filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, where one judge, William C. Ryan, has decided the fates of about 600 prisoners so far and has turned down eight who were otherwise eligible for resentencing, he said.

“A few of them look like out-and-out sociopaths to me,” Judge Ryan said in an interview. But in most cases, after considering the defendants’ ages, their behavior in prison and the support awaiting them, he is willing to take the chance.

“I’m not sure the taxpayers need to spend $45,000 a year on these guys if they are not dangerous,” he said.

A majority of the pending cases are in Los Angeles. Judge Ryan said that two more judges would join him in March, but that it would still take a year to hear the remaining petitions. Virtually all of those cases face opposition from prosecutors and require public hearings to decide.

One of Judge Ryan’s denials involved David Smith, who repeatedly bilked elderly people out of money by impersonating a relative in need. At Mr. Smith’s third-strike proceeding in 2002, for defrauding another 12 people ages 73 to 91, the fed-up trial judge sentenced him to 12 consecutive 25-to-life terms.

Judge Ryan said Mr. Smith had shown no evidence of rehabilitation or remorse. “At some point, society must say enough is enough,” he ruled last March.

To help with the re-entry, William Taylor III first spent seven months in therapy and coaching in a transitional residence, a structured setting with bunk mates. Now he has a counselor on the first floor of his apartment building. Credit Monica Almeida/The New York Times

“Just navigating the basics — getting an ID, health insurance — can be tough,” said Mark Faucette, director of community relations for the Amity Foundation, which runs drug treatment centers and the transitional housing center in South Los Angeles, Amistad de Los Angeles, where Mr. Taylor stayed.

“But re-entry means so much more,” Mr. Faucette said. “There’s a lot of emotional work. They’re moving from a number to a name.”

Christopher Benton, who was finishing his third week at the residence, said he had spent 36 of his 49 years behind bars — the last 18 of them after a three-strikes sentence for drug possession.

“I know I need a lot of work,” Mr. Benton said. “I need to change the way I think, and not look at every situation as, ‘How can I make money out of this?’”

Mr. Taylor, whose convictions did not involve guns or serious violence, was freed last June by Judge Ryan, who stipulated that he must stay under official supervision and receive mental health services.

When the moment came, Mr. Taylor was overwhelmed by doubt. “I was afraid that someone would do something to make me react and get arrested again,” he said.

Mr. Taylor admits to a paranoid streak that has led him to angry disputes. Overly self-conscious about a drifting, blind eye, he wore sunglasses day and night when he first arrived at the Amity center.

But he says he has learned to trust others for the first time and hopes to cultivate his passion — writing lyrics for what he envisions as “pop gospel” songs, with lines like “Complaining ain’t no way to be / Just think things naturally.”

Mr. Taylor has moved into what is known as permanent supportive housing, in a building run by the nonprofit SRO Housing Corporation. For rent, he pays one-third of his monthly disability check, leaving him with $514 a month to live on. He has a sister who drives him to Walmart for groceries.

The apartment building is in a barren warehouse district, and homeless people camp on nearby sidewalks. But to Mr. Taylor, it may as well be a palace.

For his first night in his new home, he said, he would cook oatmeal and have a fruit cup. And then, he said, he was going to soak in a hot bath for the first time in nearly two decades.

California Convicts Are Out of Prison After Third Strike, and Staying Out,
NYT, FEB. 26, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/us/
california-convicts-are-out-of-prison-after-third-strike-and-staying-out.html

Inmates to Be Transferred

After Riot at Texas Prison

FEB. 21, 2015

The New York Times

By KENNETH ROSEN

A federal prison in South Texas over the next week will transfer up to 2,800 inmates to other institutions in the area, after a riot on Friday rendered the facility uninhabitable, an official said.

Inmates at the Willacy County Correctional Center, who took control of the prison using pipes as weapons, were compliant on Saturday evening as negotiations with the authorities continued.

Ed Ross, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, said in a phone call that about 2,800 low-security offenders and illegal immigrants will be transferred to other facilities.

“Staff are continuing to communicate with the inmate population in an effort to regain complete control of the facility, which is now uninhabitable due to damage caused by the inmate population,” the bureau said in a statement.

The Valley Morning Star newspaper reported fires were set inside three of the prison’s 10 housing units. It was not immediately clear what caused the riot.

Administrators on Saturday met with inmates, who broke out of their housing units and entered the recreation yard, Issa Arnita, a spokesman for Management and Training Corporation, the operator of the prison, said in a statement.

Inmates did not breach the two surrounding security fences, he said.

“Correctional officers used nonlethal force, tear gas, to attempt to control the unruly offenders,” Mr. Arnita said in the statement.

Staff members and contract employees at the prison did not suffer any injuries, The Associated Press reported.

Federal Bureau of Investigation personnel were at the correctional center Saturday and were to remain throughout the night.

“The inmates are cooperating, and it appears they are interested in resolving the matter as well,” Michelle Lee, a spokeswoman with the FBI in San Antonio, said in a statement.

The private prison, about 200 miles south of San Antonio, once operated as a “tent city,” or immigration detention facility for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In 2011, it removed all of its detainees after reports of abuse, and a month later it reopened as a Criminal Alien Requirement prison.

In a report last year by the American Civil Liberties Union, inmates at the prison said they faced “severely crowded and squalid living conditions.”

Manny Fernandez contributed reporting.

Inmates to Be Transferred After Riot at Texas Prison, NYT,
FEB. 21, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/us/
inmates-to-be-transfered-after-riot-at-texas-prison.html

Prison Architecture

and the Question of Ethics

FEB. 16, 2015

The New York Times

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

SAN FRANCISCO — Faced with lawsuits and a growing mountain of damning research, New York City officials decided last month to ban solitary confinement for prison inmates 21 and younger. Just a few weeks earlier, the American Institute of Architects rejected a petition to censure members who design solitary-confinement cells and death chambers.

“It’s just not something we want to determine as a collective,” Helene Combs Dreiling, the institute’s former president, told me. She said she put together a special panel that reviewed the plea. “Members with deeply embedded beliefs will avoid designing those building types and leave it to their colleagues,” Ms. Dreiling elaborated. “Architects self-select, depending on where they feel they can contribute best.”

What are the ethical boundaries for architecture? Architecture is one of the learned professions, like medicine or law. It requires a license, giving architects a monopoly over their practices, in return for a minimal promise that buildings won’t fall down. Raphael Sperry, the Bay Area architect who spearheaded the petition to the institute, thinks the public deserves more in return for that monopoly.

I met with him here the other morning to talk about the institute’s decision. He said architects have a basic responsibility to act in the public interest, pointing to the institute’s code of ethics and professional conduct, which states, “Members should uphold human rights in all their professional endeavors.” That’s boilerplate, without teeth.

Mr. Sperry and his organization, Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility, wanted the institute to adopt a rule similar to the American Medical Association’s, which specifically prohibits doctors from participating in execution or torture.

He and I puzzled over solitary confinement, which takes many forms, and whose ethics have a lot to do with enforcement, not just design. Death chambers, by contrast, are custom-built for one purpose. Mr. Sperry’s point was that a rule against them would merely reiterate the association’s standard about human rights.

But the A.I.A. said no, it doesn’t regulate building types. It also said the rule would be hard to enforce.

That sounded like double talk. So I called Ms. Dreiling. “The code has to do with the way architects practice, treat each other, perform in the eyes of our clients,” she told me. “It isn’t about what architects build.”

I asked if the institute has issued any position or policy statement about death chambers.

“No,” she said. “If we begin to stipulate the types of projects our members can and cannot do, it opens a can of worms.”

I imagined that she was talking about other politically fraught buildings, like, say, nuclear power plants or abortion clinics. Mr. Sperry said there was a difference with death chambers. International human-rights treaties don’t explicitly prohibit abortion or nuclear power, as they do execution and torture. The United Nations and other international human-rights organizations consider the death penalty a violation of human rights.

“Is there nothing so odious that the A.I.A. wouldn’t step in?” he asked. “What about concentration camps? The A.I.A. is basically saying business is more important than human rights. Yes, this is a tough profession. But you don’t gain respect by hunkering down in a position of fear. You just dig yourself deeper into a hole.”

If architects want more respect, he argued, they need to take a stand. This is an interesting moment, with echoes in the past. A century ago, movements like the Bauhaus, looking to improve design for the masses, emerged from a culture in which the widening gulf between rich and poor was sundering civil society.

Today, prison design is a civic cause for some architects who specialize in criminal justice and care about humane design. There is a lot of research documenting how the right kinds of design reduce violence inside prisons and even recidivism. Architects can help ensure that prisons don’t succumb to our worst instincts — that they are not about spending the least amount of money to create the most horrendous places possible, in the name of vengeance — but promote rehabilitation and peace.

Designing execution chambers is something else. They require their own deathly architecture. If architects refuse to design them, that doesn’t mean that they won’t be built, any more than the refusal by doctors and pharmaceutical companies to participate in executions has stopped executions from happening. But Ms. Dreiling said it herself: “Many, if not most, architects enter this profession because it is a calling. They believe they can make the world a better place, they believe they can enhance the lives of people on a daily basis, where they live, work and play.”

So is it really too much to ask that the organization representing architects take a stand against projects whose sole purpose is to do the reverse?
 

A version of this article appears in print on February 17, 2015, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: For Architects, a Debate Over Humane Prison Design.

Prison Architecture and the Question of Ethics,
FEB 16, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/17/arts/design/prison-architecture-and-the-question-of-ethics.html

Warning Signs Overlooked

in Hiring for New York City Jails

 

JAN. 15, 2015

The New York Times

By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

and MICHAEL WINERIP

A recent applicant for a job as a correction officer at New York City jails had several friends who were gang members. Another had been arrested four times and had been fired from a job as a security guard for stealing from the business he was supposedly guarding.

Another was found psychologically unfit to be a correction officer but was hired anyway. On her personnel file it was written that she was a “family friend of Norman Seabrook,” the powerful leader of the union for city correction officers.

Despite such red flags, each of these applicants became a correction officer, along with dozens of other people with questionable backgrounds, including those with gang affiliations, criminal histories and significant psychological problems, according to a report by the city’s Department of Investigation to be released on Thursday.

In a review of 153 applications of people the Correction Department recently hired, city investigators found that more than one-third had problems that either should have disqualified them or needed further scrutiny. Ten had been arrested more than once; 12 had previously been rejected by the New York Police Department, six of them for “psychological reasons”; and 79 had relatives or friends who were current or former inmates, a potential security threat, officials said.

The investigation found hiring practices to be in disarray: There was no screening for gang affiliation; most of the application process was not computerized; and employment screeners did not monitor phone calls between inmates and applicants.

Not even the deputy commissioner who oversaw hiring could explain how the evaluation system worked.

The findings underscore the profound dysfunction at Rikers Island and help explain how a culture of violence and corruption has come to flourish in the city jails.

“This is perhaps the most serious challenge facing the Department of Correction, both because we’ve got hard numbers demonstrating a lot of correction officers being hired despite obvious disqualifiers such as gang affiliation, prior arrest, relatives who are incarcerated and failing psychological exams,” said Mark Peters, the Department of Investigation commissioner. “But also because all of the other problems that we’re trying to fix can’t get fully resolved until we solve this problem first.”

The report is the latest in a series of damning revelations about the city jails. The New York Times has documented hundreds of cases involving abuse and neglect of inmates by guards and wrongdoing by senior staff members. In December, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, announced he would sue the city over conditions at the jails.

Over the past year, the Investigation Department has arrested or referred for discipline 23 Rikers staff members accused of excessive force, smuggling of contraband, or falsification of documents and evidence.

The report indicated that the Correction Department’s system of screening applicants lagged far behind the Police Department’s. The report also said the police had a much better trained and equipped unit of employment investigators, who receive special instruction for conducting background checks and identifying gang affiliation.

Unlike the jail agency, the Police Department has a unit that visits an applicant’s references and home.

Though officers at both departments have similar starting salaries, the report said the police did a much better job finding qualified candidates. The Police Department takes part in job fairs and outreach programs at colleges and with community groups, and maintains a website that has information about salaries, hiring and a video tour of the Police Department.

The Correction Department disbanded its recruitment unit in 2009 because of budget cuts. A contact phone number for job applicants, 877-NY1-BOLD, provided inaccurate information about hiring examinations and referred callers to a defunct website, the report said.

While the Police Department screens social media accounts of applicants, the report said that at the Correction Department, “case coordinators lacked access to social media sites including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter.” Instead, correction officials asked applicants to display their social media accounts on their own phones.

“The contrast in the D.O.C. and N.Y.P.D. process is striking,” the report said.

At the Correction Department, applicants are supposed to be ranked on a scale of one to five. Investigators asked several correction officials, including the deputy commissioner who oversaw hiring, Alan Vengersky, which was the top score, one or five. No one knew, Mr. Peters said.

It did not really matter, he said, since 90 percent of applicants received a three.

According to Correction Department guidelines, applicants must display “proof of good character and satisfactory background.” But one applicant was found to have had multiple arrests and previously worked at a strip club that had been the subject of criminal investigations, the report said.

Other disqualifiers for employment are a felony conviction, a conviction for a violent crime or domestic abuse and false statements on application forms. Rules also prohibit applicants from having an “unduly familiar” relationship with an inmate and require any potential conflicts of interest to be reported.

One of the applicants initially claimed she knew no one incarcerated at Rikers. In fact, investigators discovered that an inmate had called her cellphone 20 times. The report said that the deception was “completely ignored” and that she was hired.

In another case, an applicant had failed city psychological exams four times for “poor stress tolerance.” Investigators recommended rejecting her for what they called her poor adjustment “to the demands of adulthood”; she was hired anyway.

Correction officials estimated there were dozens of staff members with gang affiliations, the report said. “Gang membership is potentially the greatest threat to D.O.C.’s security because gang members generally place their gang allegiance above their C.O. duties,” the report said.

Once applicants pass the screening process, they must complete several months at the department’s training academy in Queens before being assigned posts at city jails. Most of the 153 applicants examined by the Investigation Department came from one academy class and have been on the job a year. All but five remain employed at the department. The report did not identify any of the officers by name.

Mr. Peters said the shortcomings documented were most likely departmentwide. “There is no reason to think that the problems in this class were unique, and indeed there’s considerable anecdotal evidence to suggest they are not,” he said in an interview.

All of the officers described in the report were hired before the current correction commissioner, Joseph Ponte, took over last April. “Improving staff recruitment, training and retention is a key part of my agenda of meaningful reform,” Mr. Ponte said on Wednesday. “At the end of the day, our performance is only as strong as the men and women who fill the posts that keep our facilities operating 24/7.”

Mr. Peters credited Mr. Ponte for taking steps to address the problems after seeing the report last week. The department has started screening applicants for gang membership and pledged to computerize the screening process, the report said.

Mr. Ponte plans to adopt stricter standards for employment that would make it easier to disqualify applicants who had prior convictions, been fired from other jobs or were in contact with two or more inmates, the report said. There are also plans to put in place a formal training program for staff members involved in the hiring process.

“If you want to ultimately break the cycle of violence, contraband smuggling, evidence tampering that all of us have been concerned with, you’ve got to make sure that you have consistently qualified officers of the highest integrity,” Mr. Peters said. “If you don’t have that as your foundation, everything else is an unfathomably hard battle.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 15, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Warning Signs Overlooked in Hiring for the City’s Jails.

Warning Signs Overlooked in Hiring for New York City Jails,
NYT, JAN 15, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/15/nyregion/
hired-for-new-york-jails-despite-warning-signs.html

Rikers Inmate Found Dead

Despite Suicide-Watch Alert

JAN. 2, 2015

The New York Times

By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

The warning was sent at 4:45 p.m. on New Year’s Eve: A Rikers Island inmate, distraught over an imminent prison sentence, was threatening to harm himself and was possibly suicidal.

According to jail policy, correction officers should immediately have put the inmate, Fabian Cruz, on round-the-clock suicide observation. That did not happen. Rather, a full 24 hours after a mental health clinician sounded the alarm, Mr. Cruz was found dead in his cell, lying face up, a bedsheet wrapped around his neck, according to jail employees and internal documents.

The death underscores the dysfunction that continues to pervade the Rikers Island jail complex even as New York City officials scramble to fix it amid intense scrutiny by the federal Justice Department, which is now suing the city, charging widespread abuse and neglect of inmates.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has proposed a series of changes, including added surveillance cameras, more therapeutic programs for inmates and additional training for correction officers, to improve conditions at Rikers. Last year, he allocated $32 million for more guards and improved mental health services.

But Mr. Cruz’s death, which was confirmed on Friday by the Correction Department, appears to have resulted from a failure to follow basic policy. The department would not comment on the circumstances surrounding the death.

Jail records show that Mr. Cruz, 35, was visited by a mental health clinician at the Robert N. Davoren Center at Rikers on Wednesday afternoon. In a report, the clinician wrote that the inmate had been found to have an adjustment disorder. While he did not appear to be “in acute emotional distress,” the clinician wrote, he had threatened to harm himself.

The clinician immediately sought to have him put on suicide watch and moved to a mental observation unit at a different jail in the complex “as a precautionary measure against acts of self-harm or accidental death,” the report said. Inmates on suicide watch are supposed to be monitored at all times.

At least four times when clinicians went to the new unit to give him therapy, he was not there, according to jail records. That was because Mr. Cruz was never moved or put on suicide watch, officials said.

A Correction Department employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the death, said a doctor had asked a correction officer to transfer Mr. Cruz to a suicide-watch unit. The officer failed to do so, and on Friday she was put on modified duty and prohibited from working with inmates, the employee said.

At 4:24 p.m. on New Year’s Day, a correction officer put out an emergency alert for an inmate who “was not breathing,” jail records say. A doctor, a physician assistant and a nurse arrived six minutes later to find Mr. Cruz on the floor, his head on a pillow, with a sheet tied to the toilet. The officer, the records say, found Mr. Cruz hanging by the sheet, cut him down and started CPR. Mr. Cruz was pronounced dead at 4:50.

“Patient most likely committed suicide,” an internal jail report said. “He hanged himself.”

About two weeks earlier, Mr. Cruz pleaded guilty to one felony count of attempted first-degree criminal sexual act. According to prosecutors, he repeatedly sexually abused his girlfriend’s daughter over a period of three years, starting when the girl was 14. Under a plea arrangement, he was to be sentenced on Jan. 12 to five years in prison, according to the Staten Island district attorney’s office. In April, he had also been sentenced to two and a half to five years in prison on separate burglary and other charges, but he was kept at Rikers until his death.

Mr. Cruz’s hanging comes after several deaths that have drawn attention to abuse of inmates at Rikers, particularly those with mental illness. Last February, a homeless Marine veteran with schizophrenia died when temperatures in his cell soared above 100 degrees. Five months earlier, another inmate with mental illness was found in his cell, naked and covered in feces. He died shortly after. Investigators determined that he had been locked in his cell for seven days without food or medication.

Though violence at Rikers Island has been on the rise for years, suicides have been relatively rare. In October, the city announced a three-year, $400,000 initiative to develop new policies for reducing suicide and self-harm by inmates.

At the time, the correction commissioner, Joseph Ponte, said of suicides, “Far too often inside correctional institutions, violent sentinel events occur that could have been avoided.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on January 3, 2015, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Rikers Inmate Found Dead Despite Suicide-Watch Alert.

Rikers Inmate Found Dead Despite Suicide-Watch Alert,
NYT, 2.1.2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/03/nyregion/
rikers-inmate-found-dead-after-threatening-to-harm-himself.html

An Enemy of Reform in New York Jails

 

JAN. 1, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The Justice Department’s decision in December to join a class-action suit against New York City’s Correction Department has prepared the way for reforms proposed by Mayor Bill de Blasio to root out corruption and brutality at the notorious Rikers Island jail complex. Success depends heavily on the cooperation of Norman Seabrook, the president of the politically powerful correction officers’ union and a longtime supporter of the disastrous status quo.

Mr. de Blasio’s correction commissioner, Joseph Ponte, says that he and Mr. Seabrook have come to an agreement on needed reforms. But the union leader’s record of bullying, his attempts to undermine Mr. Ponte’s predecessors, and his history of shielding abusive officers from justice suggests that he will not be a willing partner in remaking what the Justice Department has described as a “deep-seated culture of violence” in the jail system. Which means this: Federal oversight could well be needed to complete the job.

Mr. Seabrook’s shameful record was set forth in detail in a recent report in The Times by Michael Schwirtz and Michael Winerip. Among the many examples of his stewardship was his vigorous campaign to undermine Florence Finkle, the correction department’s chief investigator who resigned in August after she tried to replace a policy of handling brutality cases internally with a tougher system that would have exposed offending officers to criminal prosecution by the district attorney. Mr. Seabrook helped to scuttle some of Ms. Finkle’s investigations and arranged for the transfer one of her top deputies.

In a particularly brazen move in November 2013 apparently aimed at preventing an inmate from testifying against two officers, Mr. Seabrook shut down the bus service that ferried inmates back and forth to the courts, causing hundreds of them to miss their court dates. When Ms. Finkle left the office, the de Blasio administration replaced her with a former Police Department official — and childhood friend of Mr. Seabrook’s — who had no prosecutorial experience.

Criminal prosecutions of correction officers are rare, but Mr. Seabrook apparently would prefer none at all. Thanks to his lobbying efforts, the State Legislature in 2014 approved a bill that would move jurisdiction for Rikers criminal cases from the office of the Bronx district attorney, whom, Mr. Seabrook dislikes, to the district attorney in Queens, where he thinks the officers will be treated more fairly. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, describing it as unconstitutional, rightly vetoed the bill, which would have prevented Bronx County from prosecuting offenses within its borders.

Mr. Seabrook was able to amass and wield enormous power because city officials viewed the jail system as a low priority during most of his two decades as union president. That began to change last summer when The Times published a grisly account of 129 inmates who had been seriously injured in incidents with officers during an 11-month period in 2013. Less than a month later, a much anticipated investigation by the Justice Department revealed a harrowing story in which adolescents were sadistically beaten by officers as a matter of routine. The United States attorney in Manhattan has gone to court to make sure the city ends these abusive practices.

Mr. Seabrook is intimately linked to these practices. For that reason alone, federal officials now investigating the jail system should not hesitate to take over direct supervision if the reform effort flags and the city is not up to the job.

An Enemy of Reform in New York Jails,
NYT,
1.1.2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/02/opinion/
an-enemy-of-reform-in-new-york-jails.html