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FRESNO, Calif. — Standing on the footsteps of the Fresno County Jail, where he had just been released one recent afternoon, Juan Diaz rated the food inside a 2. The state prison at Coalinga, where he served three years on a weapons conviction, earned a 10.

Battle-hardened young men like Mr. Diaz, 33 — who is a member of the Bulldogs, the largest Hispanic gang in California’s Central Valley, and who spent the night in jail for missing a court date on charges of possessing a stolen car and methamphetamine — used to deride the downtown Fresno jail as “Club Snoopy.”

Spending years in jail instead of prison is an increasing possibility now, as California carries out the most far-reaching overhaul of its criminal justice system in decades. And that idea fills Mr. Diaz with dread.

“I’d go insane,” he said. “I would probably hang myself, seriously. I would probably do something stupid.”

Built for stays shorter than one year, the jail does not offer the kind of activities, work programs and amenities found in most prisons. “You’re stuck in a little cell,” Mr. Diaz said, while prisons with outdoor space provide plenty of “yard time.” Soup costs $1 here, compared with 30 cents at the canteen at Coalinga, which Mr. Diaz said he left in 2005. “My homie just got out a couple of months ago,” he said, “and the canteen went up only, like, 3 cents, 4 cents.”

Ordered by the United States Supreme Court to reduce severe overcrowding in its prisons, California began redirecting low-level offenders to local jails last October in a shift called realignment. Its prison population, the nation’s largest, has since fallen by more than 16 percent to 120,000 from 144,000; it must be reduced to 110,000 by next June.

Counties with already tight budgets are scrambling to house the influx of newcomers in facilities that were never designed to accommodate inmates serving long sentences, like a man who began serving 15 years for fraud recently in the Fresno jail.

Fresno County — a sprawling agricultural area surrounding the city, which is also facing financial problems and became a punch line for Conan O’Brien recently — is adding 864 beds to its chronically overcrowded jail. Under a longstanding federal consent decree that requires the Sheriff’s Department to release inmates when the jail reaches capacity, 40 to 60 people are let go early every day.

In a move watched by other states also facing prison overcrowding, California is handing its 58 counties money and leeway to decide how to handle the new arrivals. Liberal communities like San Francisco are using a greater share of the state money on programs and alternatives to incarceration. But most counties, particularly here in the conservative Central Valley, have focused on building jail capacity.

That troubles organizations on both sides of the political spectrum. Sheriff Keith Royal of Nevada County, the president of the California State Sheriffs’ Association, said members were worried about their capacity to provide “adequate treatment” in jails and about “litigation at the location level.” The American Civil Liberties Union warned that instead of making fundamental improvements to the criminal justice system, many counties risked simply repeating the state’s mistakes by reflexively putting people behind bars.

Criticized for its overemphasis on jails, a local committee overseeing realignment in Fresno recently approved using $848,000 from its state total of $20.8 million this year to expand drug rehabilitation programs for people released from jail. But even that relatively small amount is facing deep skepticism from the county’s Board of Supervisors, which will vote on the plan in September.

“Some people, you’re not going to change their behavior until they’re incarcerated and they have to pay the consequences,” said Debbie Poochigian, the chairwoman of the Board of Supervisors. “I believe we’re keeping our community safer because they’re not out there looking for their next victim.”

The county has used about 40 percent of its state money so far to reopen two of three jail floors that were closed a few years ago because of budget cuts. The priority, Ms. Poochigian said, should be to finance the reopening of the third floor. If Fresno runs out of space, she added, inmates could be transferred to jails in other counties or to private jails.

According to the Board of State and Community Corrections, the population in county jails rose by about 4 percent from an average of 71,293 in last year’s third quarter to 73,957 in the first quarter of 2012, the latest figures available. In Fresno, like elsewhere, about two-thirds are inmates awaiting trial.

Allen Hopper, a lawyer with the A.C.L.U. who co-wrote a study on the shift to jails, said the population at county jails could be significantly reduced by overhauling pretrial procedures. Many inmates, who present no risk, remain in jail simply because they cannot afford bail, he said, adding that alternatives like electronic monitoring and day reporting could free up jail space and save counties money.

But in counties where elected officials are afraid of appearing soft on crime, such alternatives are particularly sensitive.

“Everything is political,” said Sheriff Margaret Mims of Fresno County.

Sheriff Mims said she had become “less optimistic” about the shift to jails because of rising crime in the county, including burglaries and car thefts. Though law enforcement officials acknowledge that rising crime cannot be linked directly to the realignment policy, they say people engaging in nonviolent offenses like property crime no longer fear being sent to prison.

Despite Fresno County’s conservative attitude toward crime, the policy shift has fueled a debate about alternatives to incarceration by grouping various agencies in the committee overseeing the change, said Emma Hughes, a criminologist at California State University, Fresno, who is working as a consultant for the county.

Linda Penner, the chief probation officer and chairwoman of the realignment committee, said that having secured money to reopen two jail floors, the committee had the political room to approve the $848,000 for the rehabilitation program.

“Do I think we’re all getting on the same page in reckoning with the fact that we have to create alternatives to detention?” she said. “Yes.”

Inside the Fresno jail’s north wing, where the newly reopened facilities are, each floor is composed of six two-level “pods” housing 72 inmates. In one pod, men were lying on three-level bunk beds, watching television, playing cards or doing push-ups. They are given an hour a day at an indoor gym on each floor. Inmates in the jail’s older wings get only three hours a week, split between an indoor gym and a rooftop basketball court.

Violence among inmates has risen since the policy shift, Sgt. Terry Barnes said, attributing it to inmates’ realization that they might spend years in a place with few of the activities and amenities they enjoyed in prison.

“They’re very frustrated with the idea that this is it,” said Sergeant Barnes, a corrections officer who has worked at the jail for 24 years.

Outside the jail, David Otero, 35, was chaining his bicycle to a handrail before visiting his brother inside. Mr. Otero said he himself had spent seven months in the jail and 38 days at a state prison for a hit-and-run conviction in 2006. Prison had better amenities, he said, but there was “a lot more politics” there than in Club Snoopy.

His brother, who spent more than 10 years in prison on various drug convictions, was now serving his second year in jail for robbery, Mr. Otero said. He and his mother visit often, giving his brother money for the canteen.

“If he knows he’s a block away from his mom and his brother, who can visit him anytime, that’ll have a direct impact,” Mr. Otero said. “We’re just up the street.”

In California, County Jails Face Bigger Load,
NYT,
5.8.2012,
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/06/
us/in-california-prison-overhaul-county-jails-face-bigger-load.html

William Heirens,

the ‘Lipstick Killer,’

Dies at 83

March 7, 2012
The New York Times
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

William Heirens, the notorious “Lipstick Killer” who in 1946 confessed to three horrific murders in Chicago and then spent the rest of his life — more than 65 years — in prison despite questions about his guilt, was found dead on Monday in the Dixon Correctional Center in Dixon, Ill. He was 83.

He was pronounced dead at the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center, where an autopsy was to be performed, the Cook County medical examiner’s office said. Mr. Heirens was known to have had diabetes.

Mr. Heirens’ notoriety stemmed from the separate killings of two women, Josephine Ross and Frances Brown, in 1945. At the scene of the second murder, that of Miss Brown, someone had used lipstick to scrawl on a wall: “For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.”

The reports of a “lipstick killer” terrified Chicago as the press took note of other unsolved murders of women. Then, about two weeks after the Brown murder, on Jan. 7, 1946, a 6-year-old girl named Suzanne Degnan was discovered missing from her bedroom at her North Side home. A ladder was found outside the window. The police later determined that the killer had strangled her and taken the body to the basement of a nearby building, where it was dismembered. Her head was found in a sewer; other body parts were found scattered about the neighborhood.

The newspapers called the killing the crime of the century, and though the police questioned a parade of suspects, there was no arrest.

Almost six months later, Mr. Heirens (pronounced HIGH-rens), a 17-year-old student at the University of Chicago, was apprehended at the scene of a burglary in the girl’s neighborhood. The police charged him with the murder after determining that his fingerprints were on a $20,000 ransom note that had been left behind at her home.

While he was in custody, The Chicago Tribune, citing what it called “unimpeachable sources,” reported that Mr. Heirens had confessed to the Degnan murder. Four other Chicago newspapers published similar articles, basing them on The Tribune’s account. The outcry against him mounted.

Mr. Heirens, who said he was beaten and given “truth serum” in jail, disputed the newspaper accounts, saying he was about to sign a confession in exchange for one life term but rebelled at “being forced to lie to save myself.” He was then charged with the Brown and Ross murders, saying they had incriminating physical evidence against him, including crime-scene fingerprints and a handwriting analysis. Offered three consecutive life terms in exchange for a guilty plea, he accepted, on the advice of his lawyers. Later he said he had done so only to avoid a death sentence if he had gone to trial.

“I confessed to live,” he said.

When he did confess, his memory seemed ragged. Time after time during the plea bargaining, prosecutors brought up details from The Tribune article, which he then incorporated into his testimony. Mr. Heirens recanted his confession soon afterward and maintained his innocence for the rest of his life while being denied parole or clemency numerous times. He questioned the validity of the fingerprints and other evidence, as have public interest lawyers who supported him.

In one clemency petition in 2002, his lawyers from the Northwestern University Center on Wrongful Convictions alleged more “prosecutorial misconduct, incompetent defense counsel, unprecedented prejudicial pretrial publicity, junk science, probably false confessions and mistaken eyewitness identification.” But others could not ignore his detailed admissions of guilt, even if he had retracted them. “He is the yardstick by which all evil is judged,” Thomas Epach, a Chicago police official, said at the 2002 clemency hearing.

Suzanne Degnan’s family fought all efforts to release him. Betty Finn, Suzanne’s older sister, said at the 2002 hearing, “Think of the worse nightmare that you cannot put out of your mind, you’re not allowed to put out of your mind.”

William George Heirens was born on Nov. 15, 1928, in Evanston, Ill. His father’s flower business failed, and the family teetered on the edge of poverty. In interviews, William said that his parents had fought frequently and that he had burglarized houses to relieve the tension he felt at home. He did not try to sell the things he stole, he said.

He was placed in two Roman Catholic youth detention centers. At the second, he proved to be an excellent student, skipping his senior year of high school. He was admitted to the University of Chicago at 16, with plans to major in engineering. In interviews, Mr. Heirens said his mother had led him to believe that sex was dirty. When he kissed a girl, he said, he would burst into tears and vomit. He said one reason he broke into houses was to play with women’s underwear.

In the burglary in which he was arrested, the police testified that he had aimed a gun at an officer and twice pulled the trigger, but that the weapon misfired. He was additionally convicted of assault with the intention of killing a police officer.

After Mr. Heirens went to jail, his parents and brother changed their names to Hill. He left no known survivors.

While serving one of the nation’s longest prison terms, Mr. Heirens became the first prisoner in Illinois to earn a degree from a four-year college. He also managed the prison garden factory and set up several education programs. In recent years, his diabetes damaged his eyesight, and he used a wheelchair. He told The New York Times in 2002 that he had learned that prison friendships were fleeting.

“Most of them, you hear for a little while, and then they kind of fade out,” he said. “Usually when they get out, they try to forget they were ever in.”

William Heirens, the ‘Lipstick Killer,’ Dies at 83,
NYT,
7.3.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/us/
william-heirens-the-lipstick-killer-dies-at-83.html

Report Details Wide Abuse

in Los Angeles Jail System

September 28, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

LOS ANGELES — One inmate said he was forced to walk down a hallway naked after sheriff’s deputies accused him of stealing a piece of mail. They taunted him in Spanish, calling him a derogatory name for homosexuals.

Another former inmate said that after he protested that guards were harassing a mentally ill prisoner, the same deputies took him into another room, slammed his head into a wall and repeatedly punched him in the chest.

And a chaplain said he saw deputies punching an inmate until he collapsed to the ground. They then began kicking the apparently unconscious man’s head and body.

The examples are just a fraction of dozens of detailed allegations of abuse in Los Angeles County’s Men’s Central Jail and Twin Towers, according to a report that the American Civil Liberties Union is expected to file in Federal District Court here on Wednesday. The Los Angeles County jail system, the nation’s largest, is also the nation’s most troubled, according to lawyers, advocates and former law enforcement officials.

“This situation, the length of time it has been going on, the volume of complaints and the egregious nature are much, much worse than anything I’ve ever seen,” said Tom Parker, a retired F.B.I. official who led the agency’s Los Angeles office for years and oversaw investigations into the Rodney King beating and charges of corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department. “They are abusing inmates with impunity, and the worst part is that they think they can get away with it.”

The system has a long history of accusations of abuse and poor conditions. The A.C.L.U. filed a federal lawsuit 35 years ago, and an agreement eventually allowed the organization to place monitors inside the jails. But those monitors say that they receive six or seven complaints a week now, primarily from the two large jails in downtown Los Angeles that house thousands of men. The F.B.I. has also begun to investigate several episodes in the jails.

Sheriff Lee Baca has repeatedly dismissed any suggestion of a systemic problem in the jails, saying that all allegations of abuse are investigated and that most are unfounded.

This week, The Los Angeles Times reported that F.B.I. agents sneaked a cellphone to a prisoner as part of an investigation. Sheriff Baca reacted to the investigation angrily, saying that the agency did not know what it was doing and was putting prisoners and guards in danger.

Sheriff Baca discussed the matter with a Justice Department official in a meeting on Tuesday. Nicole Nishida, the sheriff’s spokeswoman, said that the department thoroughly investigated all complaints of abuse that it received and that most were unsubstantiated.

With California under an order from the United States Supreme Court to shed thousands of inmates from the state prisons, county jails are expected to receive many more inmates in the next year, which could aggravate overcrowding and other problems. Officials from the Sheriff’s Department have said that they will not place inmates from the state in the Men’s Central Jail, which they concede is an antiquated building.

But lawyers from the A.C.L.U. say that the Los Angeles County system is, in many ways, even worse than the state prisons that have been found unconstitutional. They say that many complaints are never properly investigated, and that often the very guards accused of abuse are in the room when an inmate is interviewed about the complaint.

In the last several months, the civil rights group has amassed 70 declarations from former prisoners and civilians who witnessed beatings. The statements suggest few patterns — the complaints span all times of day and multiple units in the jail. But, the A.C.L.U. says, the guards do seem to use the same terms repeatedly, shouting, “Stop resisting!” and “Stop fighting!” while they hit inmates, even when inmates are not moving or are in handcuffs.

Paulino Juarez, a Roman Catholic chaplain who has worked in the jail since 1998, was visiting an inmate’s cell early one morning in February 2009 when he heard several thumps and gasps in the hallway. When he moved to the cell door, he saw three deputies hitting a man and yelling, “Stop fighting!”

“But he wasn’t fighting; he wasn’t even defending himself,” Mr. Juarez said in an interview. “When they saw me, they froze. I was frozen, too. I didn’t say anything. I was too shocked, and I was terrified.”

Mr. Juarez filed a report with the Sheriff’s Department but did not hear anything about it for several months. More than two years later, during a meeting with his supervisor and Sheriff Baca, Mr. Juarez was told that the department found that the inmate had resisted going into his cell. There was no record of Mr. Juarez’s report, although a guard indicated in the file that the chaplain had exaggerated what he had witnessed. He was told that the inmate, whose name he did not know at the time, had later been released.

“I really don’t trust anymore,” Mr. Juarez said. “They always say inmates are liars and nobody believes them. But I saw them treated like this.”

While the sheriff has repeatedly dismissed complaints from prisoners, the number of civilians who have witnessed beatings has steadily increased, showing the brazenness of many of the guards in the jails, said Peter Eliasberg, legal director for the A.C.L.U. Foundation of Southern California.

This year, Esther Lim, the current monitor for the A.C.L.U., said she saw several deputies beat a man inside the Twin Towers jail, next door to Men’s Central, as if he were a “human punching bag.” The attack was widely reported in the local news media, and at the time a spokesman dismissed it, saying that Ms. Lim should have reported it sooner and that the inmate was attacking the deputies.

Mr. Eliasberg and Ms. Lim said that inmates who were beaten were routinely placed for several days afterward in isolation, known as “the hole,” and were often accused of assaulting the guards.

The A.C.L.U. plans to call for a wide-ranging federal investigation, and for Sheriff Baca to resign.

    Report Details Wide Abuse in Los Angeles Jail System,
    NYT, 28.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/28/us/
    aclu-suit-details-wide-abuse-in-los-angeles-jail-system.html

Months to Live

Fellow Inmates

Ease the Pain of Dying in Jail

October 18, 2009
The New York Times
By JOHN LELAND

COXSACKIE, N.Y. — Allen Jacobs lived hard for his 50 years, and when his liver finally shut down he faced the kind of death he did not want. On a recent afternoon Mr. Jacobs lay in a hospital bed staring blankly at the ceiling, his eyes sunk in his skull, his skin lusterless. A volunteer hospice worker, Wensley Roberts, ran a wet sponge over Mr. Jacobs’s dry lips, encouraging him to drink.

“Come on, Mr. Jacobs,” he said.

Mr. Roberts is one of a dozen inmates at the Coxsackie Correctional Facility who volunteer to sit with fellow prisoners in the last six months of their lives. More than 3,000 prisoners a year die of natural causes in correctional facilities.

Mr. Roberts recalled a day when Mr. Jacobs, then more coherent, had started crying. Mr. Roberts held his patient and tried to console him. Then their experience took a turn unique to their setting, the medical ward of a maximum security prison. Mr. Roberts said he told Mr. Jacobs to “man up.”

Mr. Jacobs, serving two to four years for passing forged checks, cursed at him, telling him, “‘I don’t want to die in jail. Do you want to die in jail?’ ”

“I said no,” said Mr. Roberts, who is serving eight years for robbery. “He said, ‘Then stop telling me to man up,’ and he started crying. And then he said that I’m his family.”

American prisons are home to a growing geriatric population, with one-third of all inmates expected to be over 50 by next year. As courts have handed down longer sentences and tightened parole, about 75 prisons have started hospice programs, half of them using inmate volunteers, according to the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization. Susan Atkins, a follower of Charles Manson, died last month in hospice at the Central California Women’s Facility at Chowchilla after being denied compassionate release.

Joan Smith, deputy superintendent of health services at the Coxsackie prison, said the hospice program here initially met with resistance from prison guards. “They were very resentful about people in prison for horrendous crimes getting better medical care than their families,” including round-the-clock companionship in their final days, Ms. Smith said.

The guards have come to accept the program, she said. But still there are challenges unique to the prison setting. Some dying patients, for example, divert their pain medication to their volunteer aides or other patients, who use it or sell it, said Kathleen Allan, the director of nursing. She added that patients can be made victims easily, “and this is a predatory system.”

But she said the inmate volunteers bond with the patients in a way that staff members cannot, taking on “the touchy-feely thing” that may be inappropriate between inmates and prison workers.

At Coxsackie, 130 miles north of New York City, administrators started the hospice program in 1996 in response to the AIDS epidemic using an outside hospice agency, then changed to inmate volunteers in 2001. The change saved money and was well-received by the patients.

Perhaps more significant, said William Lape, the superintendent, was the effect the program had on the volunteers. “I think it’s turned their life around,” Mr. Lape said.

John Henson, 30, was one of the first volunteers. When he was 18, Mr. Henson broke into the home of a former employer and, in the course of a robbery, beat the man to death with a baseball bat. When he entered prison, with a sentence of 25 years to life, he said, “I thought my life was over.”

At Coxsackie he met the Rev. J. Edward Lewis, who persuaded him to volunteer in 2001. “You go in thinking that you’re going to help somebody,” Mr. Lewis said, “and every time they end up helping you.”

Before hospice, Mr. Henson said he had given little thought to the consequences of his crime. Then he found himself locked in a hospital room with another inmate, holding the man’s hand as his breathing slowed toward a stop.

Like many men in prison, the dying man had alienated his family members, who rejected his efforts to renew contact. In the end, he had only Mr. Henson for companionship. When the prison nurse declared the man dead, Mr. Henson broke down in tears.

“They just came out,” he said. “I don’t even know why I was crying. Partly because of him, partly because of things that died within me at the same time.”

Mr. Henson, dressed in prison greens and with his blond hair buzzed short, spoke directly and without hesitation.

“I was just thinking about why I’m in here and the person’s life that I took,” he said. “And sitting with this person for the first time and actually seeing death firsthand, being right there, my hand in his hand, watching him take his last breath, just caused me to say, ‘Wow, who the hell are you? Who were you to do this to somebody else?’ ”

Ms. Allan, the nursing director at Coxsackie, said that with a number of inmate volunteers, “You can identify in each of these guys something inside them driving them to do this. It’s a desire to redeem themselves, so even when it gets hard they’re able to plow through it. “

She added, “I think Mr. Henson made me a better mother.”

Benny Lee, 38, has spent half his life in prison for manslaughter, and for most of that time, he said, “the only thing I regretted was getting caught.” Four months ago he began as a hospice volunteer, feeling he needed a change. “I’m trying to offer some payback,” he said.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Lee was scheduled to sit with Eddie Jones, 89, who was dying from multiple causes. Mr. Jones, who was convicted of murder at age 70, said, “I can talk with them better than staff members, because staff members have their minds made up about how things should be.”

Mr. Lee said he does not know how Mr. Jones’s death will affect him. “I’m hoping it will have an effect, period,” he said. “Growing up and in prison, I put up walls. But I have to be more emotionally receptive to these guys. This is going against everything I’ve tried to do. But I realize it’s a change I have to make.”

Mr. Lee said hospice was forcing him to learn to trust people.

“It’s helping me mature,” he said. “My views of life and death are changing. I was unsympathetic when it comes to death. I’ve had friends die, and I was callous about it. Now I can’t do that. I’ve come to identify with these guys, not because we’re inmates, but because we’re human beings. What they’re going through, I’ll go through.”

Fellow Inmates Ease the Pain of Dying in Jail,
NYT,
18 October 2009,
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/
health/18hospice.html

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