Peace and Justice of La Luz » Prison Issues http://pajoll.org A Non-Profit for Civic Betterment Tue, 20 Jul 2010 23:21:31 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 What Our Prison Policies Have Cost Us http://pajoll.org/2008/07/what-our-prison-policies-have-cost-us/ http://pajoll.org/2008/07/what-our-prison-policies-have-cost-us/#comments Sat, 26 Jul 2008 20:48:05 +0000 Republished http://pajoll.org/?p=37 Bruce Western, Boston Review Those coming home from prison, now about 700,000 each year, face an narrowed array of life chances. Mostly returning to urban neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, men with prison records are often out of work. The jobs they do find pay little and offer only a fraction of the earnings growth that usually supports the socially valuable roles of husband and breadwinner. Ex-prisoners are often in poor health, sometimes struggling with mental illness or chronic disease. A University of California, Berkeley study attributes most of the black-white difference in AIDS infection to racial disparities in incarceration. In many cases people with felony records are denied housing, education, and welfare benefits. In eleven states they are permanently denied the right to vote.
The social penalties of imprisonment also spread through families. Though formerly incarcerated men are just as likely to have children as other men of the same age, they are less likely to get married. Those who are married will most likely divorce or separate. The family instability surrounding incarceration persists across generations. Among children born since 1990, 4 percent of whites and 25 percent of blacks will witness their father being sent to prison by their fourteenth birthday. Those children, too, are to some extent drawn into the prison nexus, riding the bus to far-flung correctional facilities and passing through metal detectors and pat-downs on visiting day. In short those with prison records and their families are something less than full members of society. To be young, black, and unschooled today is to risk a felony conviction, prison time, and a life of second-class citizenship. In this sense, the prison boom has produced mass incarceration–a level of imprisonment so vast and concentrated that it forges the collective experience of an entire social group.
Viewed in historical context, mass incarceration takes on even greater significance. The prison boom took off in the 1970s, immediately following the great gains to citizenship hard won by the civil rights movement. Growing rates of incarceration mean that, in the experience of African-Americans in poor neighborhoods, the advancement of voting rights, school desegregation, and protection from discrimination was substantially halted. Mass incarceration undermined the project for full African-American citizenship and revealed the obstacles to political equality presented by acute social disparity.
Skeptics may concede that mass incarceration injured social justice, but surely, they would contend, it contributed to the tremendous decline in crime through the 1990s. Indeed, the crime decline of the ’90s produced a great improvement in public safety. From 1993 to 2001, the violent crime rate fell considerably, murder rates in big cities like New York and Los Angeles dropped by half or more, and this progress in social wellbeing was recorded by rich and poor alike. Yet, when I analyzed crime rates in this period, I found that rising prison populations did not reduce crime by much. The growth in state imprisonment accounted for 2-5 percent of the decline in serious crime–one-tenth of the crime drop from 1993 to 2001. The remaining nine-tenths was due to factors like the increasing size of local police forces, the pacification of the drug trade following the crack epidemic of the early 1990s, and the role of local circumstances that resist a general explanation.
So a modest decline in serious crime over an eight year period was purchased for $53 billion in additional correctional spending and half a million new prison inmates: a large price to pay for a small reduction. If we add the lost earnings of prisoners to the family disruption and community instability produced by mass incarceration, we cannot but acknowledge that a steep price was paid for a small improvement in public safety. Several examples further demonstrate that the boom may have been a waste because crime can be controlled without large increases in imprisonment. Violent crime in Canada, for example, also declined greatly through the 1990s, but Canadian incarceration rates actually fell from 1991 to 1999. New York maintained particularly low crime rates through the 2000s, but has been one of the few states to cut its prison population in recent years.
More importantly, perhaps, the reduction in crime was accompanied by an array of new problems associated with mass incarceration. Those states that have sought reduced crime through mass incarceration find themselves faced with an array of problems associated with overreliance on imprisonment. How can poor communities with few resources absorb the return of 700,000 prisoners each year? How can states pay for their prisons while responding to the competing demands of higher education, Medicaid, and K-12 schools? How can we address the social costs–the broken homes, unemployment, and crime–that can follow from imprisonment? Questions such as these lead us to a more fundamental concern: how can mass imprisonment be reversed and American citizenship repaired?

]]> http://pajoll.org/2008/07/what-our-prison-policies-have-cost-us/feed/ 0 ACLU of New Mexico Sues for Better Safety and Services in Juvenile Justice Facilities http://pajoll.org/2007/12/aclu-of-new-mexico-sues-for-better-safety-and-services-in-juvenile-justice-facilities/ http://pajoll.org/2007/12/aclu-of-new-mexico-sues-for-better-safety-and-services-in-juvenile-justice-facilities/#comments Thu, 27 Dec 2007 23:38:54 +0000 Republished http://pajoll.org/2007/12/27/aclu-of-new-mexico-sues-for-better-safety-and-services-in-juvenile-justice-facilities/ ACLU (11/19/2007)
ALBUQUERQUE, NM – The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of New Mexico sued the New Mexico Children Youth and Families Department (CYFD) today for failing to ensure safe living conditions and essential rehabilitation services for young people in state juvenile justice facilities. The lawsuit charges CYFD with breaching the terms of a contract it signed with the ACLU in February 2006 requiring the agency to establish minimally adequate mental health services and protect youth from physical assaults and threats of violence. CYFD entered into the 2006 agreement in order to avoid being sued for rights violations at that time, said the ACLU.

“This lawsuit seeks to make sure that youth in our juvenile justice system get a fair shot at redirecting their lives and overcoming mistakes they made in their past,” said ACLU of New Mexico Executive Director Peter Simonson. “New Mexico puts its most troubled kids in prison because we don’t have adequate mental health services. Kids are unnecessarily incarcerated and our juvenile detention facilities become training grounds for lifelong criminals instead of centers of genuine rehabilitation.”

Filed in Santa Fe District Court, the ACLU’s lawsuit seeks two basic reforms:

The establishment of minimally adequate community mental health services for the 3,000 children and youth on probation or parole due to delinquent acts, in order to avoid the unnecessary incarceration of youth due to their mental illness; and

A Fundamental improvement of the safety, medical care and mental health care provided to the approximately 300 children and youth held in delinquency facilities.

The lawsuit cites several instances of guard-on-youth violence, including a March 2007 incident in which staff at the Santa Fe County Juvenile Detention Center assaulted a 17-year old resident who is developmentally delayed and suffers from auditory hallucinations. Guards picked the youth up by his armpits and repeatedly slammed his head into a metal classroom door. CYFD rejected a complaint that the ACLU filed on the resident’s behalf, except to criticize staff for failing to videotape the “take down.”

Simonson said, “Hopefully your children don’t wind up in one of these facilities. But if they do, you want to know that the staff is going to protect them, not brutalize them. You want to know that they’re going to get the tools they need to address emotional problems and make productive behavioral adjustments.”

Representing the ACLU are attorneys Daniel Yohalem and Lee Hunt of Santa Fe, ACLU Co-Legal Director Phil Davis of Albuquerque, and Alice Bussiere and Maria Ramiu of the Youth Law Center of San Francisco. Yohalem is former Legal Director for the Children’s Defense Fund.

A copy of the complaint can be found online at:
www.aclu-nm.org/PDF/Complaint11_20_07

]]> http://pajoll.org/2007/12/aclu-of-new-mexico-sues-for-better-safety-and-services-in-juvenile-justice-facilities/feed/ 0