Hopefully the prison industrial complex will be finished next.

yours in struggle,

Abo & Mens Rea

Global Research, July 25, 2009

While the nation’s economy flounders, business is booming for The GEO Group Inc., a private prison firm that is paid millions by the U.S. government to detain undocumented immigrants and other federal inmates. In the last year and a half, GEO announced plans to add a total of at least 3,925 new beds to immigration lockups in five locations. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency and the U.S. Marshals Service, which hire the company, will fill the beds with inmates awaiting court and deportation proceedings. GEO reported impressive quarterly earnings of $20 million on February 12, 2009, along with an annual income of $61 million for 2008—up from $38 million the year before. But the company’s share value is not the only thing that’s growing. Behind the financial success and expansion of the for-profit prison firm, there are increasing charges of negligence, civil rights violations, abuse and even death.

Detaining immigrants has become a profitable business, and the niche industry is showing no signs of slowing down. The number of undocumented immigrants the U.S. federal government jails has grown by at least 65 percent in the last six years. In 2002, the average daily population of immigration detainees was 20,838 people, according to ICE records. By 2008, the average daily population had grown to 31,345.

Since 2003, more than a million people have been processed through federal immigration lockups, which are part of a network of at least 300 local, state and federal lockups, including seven contracted detention facilities. GEO operates four of those seven for-profit prisons.

Numerous investigations and reports have documented problems at GEOs immigration detention facilities.

At the company’s Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, federal prosecutors charged a GEO prison administrator in September 2008 with “knowingly and willfully making materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statements to senior special agents” with ICE, according to court filings. A February 2008 audit found that over a period of more than two years ending in November 2005, GEO hired nearly 100 guards without performing the required criminal background checks. The GEO employee responsible, Sylvia Wong, pleaded guilty. In the plea agreement the federal government stated that Wong falsified documents “because of the pressure she felt” while working at the GEO lockup to get security personnel hired at the detention center “as quickly as possible.”

Two months before the fraud charges, a study by the Seattle University School of Law and the nonprofit group OneAmerica reported that conditions at the Tacoma facility violated both international and domestic laws that grant detained immigrants the right to food, due process and humane treatment.

Federal immigration officials have the authority to incarcerate undocumented immigrants, asylum-seekers, and even lawful permanent residents while they await hearings with immigration judges or appeal decisions. ICE reports the average length of stay is 30 days, but detentions can last years, according to a November 2008 ICE fact sheet.

Pramila Jayapal, executive director with OneAmerica, took part in interviewing a random sample of more than 40 immigrants detained at the Northwest Detention Center, which holds approximately 1,000 immigrants at any given time.

“It’s a very giant concrete box. It’s just like a jail,” said Jayapal. “You’re only supposed to meet in the client area, which is only a few rooms.”

One inmate from Mexico, Hector Pena-Ortiz, told interviewers that guards had interrogated and handcuffed him twice, demanding that he sign immediate deportation papers despite the fact that he had a pending appeal. Under federal law, immigrants cannot be deported from the United States if their immigration legal cases are still pending. During one of the incidents, guards admitted to having a file on the wrong inmate, Pena-Ortiz said.

In addition to violations of legal rights, inmates cited food as a major concern. The vast majority of the 40 prisoners interviewed at the facility said rations were inadequate and sometimes rotten. Inmates with financial resources depended on food bought from the lockup’s commissary. Others went hungry. A man identified in the study as “Ricardo” said he had lost 50 pounds of his original 190-pound weight since arriving at the detention center.

ICE officially denied the claims in the report, but in 2005, annual agency inspections at the Northwest Detention Center documented problems with the quality and quantity of food and found that some meals were so poor, guards had to collect and replace them.

Looking for opportunities

The Tacoma lockup, site of the most recent GEO controversy, is located on top of a former toxic waste dump that borders coastal wetlands near the Port of Tacoma, Washington. In August 2008, the firm announced plans to expand its 1,030-bed Northwest Detention Center to 1,575 beds, “to help meet the increased demand for detention bed space by federal, state, and local government agencies around the country.”

Just four months after GEOs announcement, ICE notified government contractors that the agency was looking for a contractor-owned and -operated detention facility. According to federal procurement data, the new facility should be capable of providing 1,575 beds—the same number GEO was set to build—to be completed no later than September 2009—the same date GEO had set for the completion of its own construction project.

Lorie Dankers, ICE spokeswoman in Washington State, implied that the similarity in numbers and date was a coincidence. “I would never comment, nor have I in the past, on what GEO is doing and why they’re doing it. That’s a business decision that GEO made,” said Dankers. “To insinuate that there was some kind of connection, or that they has some inside information as to the request, that would be incorrect.”

Dankers added that ICEs request for more space is still in the “pre-solicitation” phase, meaning that there is no guarantee a contract will be offered, and the agency is simply requesting information from contractors to “gauge interest.”

“I don’t have any information one way or the other as to what would happen,” Dankers said. “I think often times, if I had to speculate, they see where there’s a need. I think they’re always looking for opportunities.”

Canceled contracts

And opportunities, like prisoners, abound. GEO owns more than 62,000 prison beds in the United States, with approximately 3,000 beds used for detained immigrants. The company also claims a global market share of 25 percent of the private corrections industry. Currently, the Northwest Detention Center incarcerates immigrants mainly from Oregon, Washington and Alaska, according to Dankers.

In the last five years, criminal immigration prosecutions have surged by 388 percent according to federal court data obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University in New York. The most recently available court information shows that there were 11,454 prosecutions in September 2008 alone. Adding to GEOs profitability and prospects are immigration laws introduced in the 1990s, the expanding use of immigration detention without bond, and a greater emphasis on prosecutions after 9/11.

The company’s relationship with government officials has also proven valuable in winning corrections contracts.

In 2006, while on the state payroll as director of prisons at the Colorado Department of Corrections, Nolin Renfrow helped GEO obtain a $14 million-per-year contract to detain 1,500 inmates in a proposed state prison project in the northern part of the state. Renfrow was moonlighting for GEO—with an expected compensation of $1 million—when a 2007 state audit and news reports uncovered the public servant’s business deal.

The audit found that Renfrow’s actions could “arguably present a conflict of interest and result in a breach of … the public trust,” because state law prohibited an “employee from assisting any person for a fee or other compensation in obtaining any contract.”

The county district attorney with jurisdiction over Renfrow declined to press criminal charges, but in the wake of the scandal, officials with the state’s corrections department rescinded the contract.

Prisons as money makers

Immigrant facilities are not the only GEO lockups that have sparked claims of negligence and abuse.

In 2007, the firm settled a lawsuit with the family of an inmate for $200,000. LeTisha Tapia, a 23-year-old woman incarcerated at the GE0-owned Val Verde Correction Facility in southern Texas, told her family in July 2004 that she had been raped and beaten after being locked in the same cell-block with male inmates. Shortly after, she had hung herself in her cell. The nonprofit Texas Civil Rights Project sued GEO on behalf of Tapia’s family.

“The jail drove this young woman to kill herself,” charged the family’s attorney, Scott Medlock, in a February 15, 2006 press release from the Texas Civil Rights Project. “GEO cuts corners by hiring poorly trained guards, providing inmates with cut rate medical care, and running their facility in a grossly unprofessional manner.” Citing confidentiality provisions in the settlement, Medlock refused further comment.

More recently, in 2008, civil liberties attorneys sued the company for failing to provide adequate medical attention to inmates outsourced from Washington, DC, to the Rivers Correctional Institute, located in North Carolina and overseen by GEO through a contract with the federal Bureau of Prisons. That same year, Idaho state authorities removed 125 inmates from a GEO prison after an investigation—spurred by the suicide of a detainee at the facility—revealed poor staff training and healthcare.

“Pretty immediately when people started going to Rivers we started to get letters about how bad the healthcare was, and just how people were really scared of dying there,” said Deborah Golden, an attorney with the DC Prisoners Project, a group that is representing inmates in the legal case against GEO. One inmate named in the report, Keith Mathis, claims he was denied medical treatment for a cavity until the tooth became infected and caused an open ulcer on his face that eventually “burst open,” requiring surgery and three days hospitalization.

“The more we looked into the situation the more we realized it was a systemic problem,” said Golden. “I suspect that it’s a pattern all over. When you try to run prisons as money makers what you do is cut back on the most expensive thing you can, which is medication and medical care.”

GEO has said it will not publicly comment on pending legal cases or abuse claims by third parties, including nonprofit groups. Company spokesman Pablo Paez says that on the subject of business plans, “we have no comment beyond what’s in our public disclosures.”

Despite a wide array of grievances and tragedies, GEO has accrued contracts worth more than $588 million in federal tax dollars since 1997, according to available federal procurement data. And as long as federal officials continue to remand a growing number of inmates and immigrants over to private businesses, without imposing strict oversight, GEO will likely remain profitable.

This segment is entitled. “Nada for Gaza: McKinney Israel Trip”

It was recorded on July 20th, 2009 and produced by Prison Radio.

Story from Toronto Sun
Joe Warmington, Pete Fisher and Andrea Houston
22nd July, 2009

An inmate is dead from a suspected drug overdose after prisoners at Warkworth penitentiary took control of a portion of the prison, including its infirmary, in an uprising overnight.

The “disturbance” began at 9 p.m., said Ann Anderson, assistant warden of management services for Warkworth Institution.

No further information on the man, including name, age or the suspected drug taken, is being released until next of kin are notified, Anderson said.

The situation involved 211 inmates, about a third of the prison population, who refused to come in from the recreation yard and reached an internal fence, Anderson said. The remaining inmates were secured in their cells.

All inmates were back in their cells by about 4:10 p.m., Anderson said.

After Warkworth gained control of the facility, 13 inmates were sent to an outside hospital, nine with suspected drug overdoses and four with unrelated medical conditions, Anderson said.

Anderson said a “state of emergency” was called based on the various medications kept in the health centre.

The Riot Act Proclamation was read around 5:50 a.m., meaning the institution could use whatever force necessary to gain control of the situation, Anderson said.

Anderson would not say what, if any, force was used to gain control of the facility.

“The inmates were compliant and came back into their cells with the assistance of our emergency response team (ERT),” she said.

It was a tense scene overnight as corrections staff, armed in riot gear and firing tear gas, tried to regain control of the prison as firefighter and ambulance stood by.

Warkworth ERT as well as ERT teams from Millhaven, Joyceville and Kingston penitentiaries responded, Anderson said. The OPP were on the perimeter.

“(The inmates) got into the hospital area and took control,” said one emergency services worker standing outside the front gate.

Four inmates were transferred to hospital in nearby Campbellford as correctional workers battled to regain control of the prison.

The four were suffering from suspected narcotics overdoses, Anderson said. As of 1 p.m., staff had gained control of all but 50 inmates.

“The medical centre was breached and we now have correctional officers keeping inmates in the yard to prevent another breach,” she said. “There have been no demands from inmates. There will be an investigation as to why.”

“They are burning anything they can get their hands on,” a firefighter on scene said, adding he understands the inmates’ recreation centre may have been torched.

It was a tense scene overnight as corrections staff, armed in riot gear and firing tear gas, tried to regain control of the prison as firefighter and ambulance stood by.

Fires burned throughout the night inside the walls in a yard area from where you could hear inmates cheering and yelling “let it burn.”

The riot squad entered just after 6 a.m.

The institution will remain on lockdown until management is assured it’s safe to return to a normal routine, Anderson said.

The Correctional Service of Canada will be conducting an internal investigation to determine the cause of the incident, including the death in custody, Anderson said.

Warkworth is a medium-security institution that has 568 inmates and 340 staff. No staff were hurt in the takeover.

http://www.torontosun.com/news/canada…26216.html

Al-Jazeera English

When Ayman al-Shurafa was taken to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, few outside Chicago had heard of Barack Obama.

By the time Obama, a junior senator from Illinois, announced he was running for president in 2007, al-Shurafa, a Palestinian, had already spent five years in the jail and had been cleared for release by the administration of George Bush, the then-president.

When Obama became president almost two years later and said he would close the prison, 34-year-old al-Shurafa was still being held on the US naval base but should have been one of the first detainees to leave.

Although he had admitted to attending a training camp in Afghanistan, the Pentagon assessed that he posed no threat and should be released. But in the strange world of Guantanamo Bay, degrees of innocence and guilt are only part of the story.

Al-Shurafa’s case helps to explain why, six months after ordering the closure of Guantanamo Bay, Obama has made so little tangible progress to this end – only 11 of the 242 prisoners he inherited from the Bush administration have been released during his tenure.

Despite being born and raised in Saudi Arabia, al-Shurafa is Palestinian by nationality. His family and friends live in Jeddah, but the Saudi government has so far refused to allow his return from Guantanamo, saying he is not a Saudi national and has no residency rights in the country.

The Palestinians say he would be welcome in the Occupied Territories, but the Israelis will not allow him to enter.

Stateless

Ayman al-Shurafa is one of dozens of “stateless” inmates

Al-Shurafa has been rendered stateless by the stamp of Guantanamo, despite having never been convicted of a crime.

He desperately wants to return to his family in Saudi Arabia, but convincing the authorities of his suitability is no easy task while he is held incommunicado on the other side of the world.

Al-Shurafa’s predicament is not unusual. Around 60 of the remaining 229 prisoners cannot return to their countries of origin. While some are not welcome by their governments, others fear what will happen when they arrive.

In 2007, a Tunisian Guantanamo prisoner called Abdullah bin Omar al-Hajji was returned, against his will and over his lawyers’ objections, to Tunis.

He had not lived in the country for 20 years and despite having been cleared by the Bush administration, he was immediately arrested by state security forces and taken into custody.

His interrogators beat him and threatened to rape his wife and daughters if he did not confess to terrorist offences.

He is still in jail today, based on evidence gathered by means of torture. Tunisia continues to demand the return of its remaining nationals in Guantanamo.

Unsurprisingly, none of them want to go, and their only hope of safe release lies in finding another country to offer them asylum.

Diplomatic impasse

That is easier said than done. The Obama administration has been exerting diplomatic pressure on countries that might offer such prisoners a home.

But it has failed to secure an agreement even with countries which have proven links with the prisoners, let alone those with which they do not.

The result has been that smaller and more obscure countries are being considered. Even tiny Palau is a contender to take former detainees, allegedly in return for a multi-million dollar aid package.

Obama’s efforts to persuade countries to offer a home to Guantanamo asylum-seekers have partly been hobbled by the political climate in the US, where congressmen have balked at the suggestion of bringing prisoners to their shores.

For many countries, the idea of taking Guantanamo prisoners while the US refuses to do the same is unacceptable. In an article written earlier this month, Gilles de Kerchove, the EU’s counter-terrorism coordinator, summed up Europe’s position.

If European countries are to take prisoners, he wrote, “we in the EU expect the US to do likewise; if it is safe to release these people in Europe, it is safe to do so in the US”.

From the perspective of many potential host countries, the resettlement issue has become a case of “do as I say, not as I do”, with Washington asking other countries to do what it itself finds politically impossible.

Forced repatriation?

Domestic opposition in the US has meant detainees cannot be sent there [EPA]

Lawyers for the remaining prisoners warn that as time runs out, Obama may attempt to return them to countries where they will not be safe.

Cori Crider, an attorney from the UK-based legal charity Reprieve, which represents more than 30 detainees, says that the new administration’s intentions are far from clear.

“Closing Gitmo (sic) shouldn’t mean sending prisoners from the frying pan into the fire,” she said.

“But as the osmotic pressure increases on the US to move people out of Guantanamo, the risk of quick and dirty solutions in places like Algeria or Tunisia is greater than ever.”

And resettlement is not the only diplomatic barrier facing Obama. Hammering out conditions for what should be straightforward repatriations is also taking time.

Ninety-four of the remaining prisoners are Yemeni, and brokering a deal on their fate is essential.

Return to Yemen is one option. But the country has been identified by US security agencies as a potential new theatre of operations for al-Qaeda, and Ali Abdullah Saleh, the Yemeni president, is facing a gathering secessionist movement in the south.

The US want any men returned from Guantanamo to be monitored by Yemeni authorities, but Saleh has not yet demonstrated the will to do so.

Many of the Yemenis in Guantanamo have shared Saudi heritage and reaching a deal on their fate with Riyadh could be key to the prison’s timely closure. So far none has been forthcoming. They, too, are waiting in limbo before they can go home.

Hopes fading

In the midst of the political and diplomatic wrangling over Guantanamo’s closure, it is easy to forget that at the centre of this story are 229 human beings. Crider says many of the prisoners are losing faith in Obama’s promises.

“Many of them thought the new administration might finally be the light at the end of their tunnel, but most of them have started to lose hope again,” she says.

Just last month one of the Yemeni prisoners, Mohammad al-Hanashi, could take no more and committed suicide.

It was a stark reminder that every day Guantanamo Bay remains open increases the human cost of a system built on an inherent contradiction – that even if you are found innocent, you are still treated as if you were guilty.

This contradiction lies at the heart of the lack of progress being made on closing the prison. It must be resolved if Obama’s January deadline is to be met.

Andrew Wander is a Reprieve Media Fellow working on Al Jazeera’s Public Liberties and Human Rights Desk.

Reprieve is a legal charity based in London that represents more than 30 prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and investigates US secret prisons worldwide.

Instead of waking up to his son, he woke up to “… high fences and razor wire.” Robin Long, released from Miramar Marine Corps Air Station, said the hardest part of his 12 months in the brig was being away from his young son. He had fled to Canada in opposition to the Iraq war. By Tony Perry July 11, 2009 Reporting from San Diego — Army deserter and antiwar activist Robin Long said Friday that the most difficult part of his 12 months behind bars was being away from his young son. Long, 25, released Thursday from the brig at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station, said he missed celebrating Christmas and other special occasions with his 3-year-old son, Ocean.

Robin Long Robin Long Meeting reporters outside the Veterans Museum and Memorial Center in San Diego, Long said he wished every morning that he could see his son running toward him and hear his voice. “Instead I woke up to reveille and I saw high fences and razor wire,” said Long, from Boise, Idaho. “This punishment was for having a moral opposition to the Iraq war.” Long enlisted in 2003 and was trained as a tank crewman but fled to Canada in 2005 when his unit was on the verge of deploying to Iraq. He said his views about the war had changed since his enlistment. Long said that, like much of the American public, he began to doubt the wisdom of the war when the U.S. was unable to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Long said he was influenced by a quotation attributed to Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” In Canada, Long sought refugee status but was turned down.

The decision by the Canadian government to deport him to the U.S. for court-martial caused a political furor in Canada. He is considered the first U.S. deserter to be deported by Canada during the Iraq war. Long said he plans to enroll in a school in San Francisco to learn massage therapy. He also plans to reunite in Seattle with his wife, Renee, and their son and to continue speaking out against the Iraq war. His wife, a Canadian citizen, has remained in Canada to receive care for multiple sclerosis. As a convicted felon, Long may be barred from reentering Canada, but he said he plans to appeal. Although he was sentenced to a dishonorable discharge from the Army, he is still on active duty but not being paid. Long said he had no major complaints about his treatment in the brig. “The food was horrible and it was a filthy place to be,” he said. “But I was treated pretty well.”

LA Progressive

In Part 1 of this two-part Q&A, UC Berkeley Law Professor Jonathan Simon talked about criminal sentencing and parole as practiced today in California. He concludes here by discussing the social and fiscal impacts of our approach to crime and punishment, the current opportunity for prison reform, and some ideas for meaningful change.

Q. California’s budget crisis, together with the federal judiciary concern about California prison overcrowding, have focused critical attention on the state’s massive penal system. In light of these developments, what are the prospects for meaningful reform?

A. This is a very exciting moment. Two seemingly independent but powerful forces are opening the policy window. One, as you say, is the budget situation: over recent decades, Californians have seen the portion of the state discretionary budget devoted to Corrections grow from below three percent in 1980 to almost 10 percent today. During relatively prosperous times, this high cost was not very visible. But now, with our epic budget deficit requiring service cuts all over the state, the more than $8.5 billion annually that the state spends to maintain its giant adult correctional system is becoming more of a problem.

Simultaneously, we have the Plata-Coleman mega litigation. Five separate lawsuits have clicked together into one monster lawsuit about prison overcrowding, and a three-judge panel has suggested that only a reduction in the population of California prisons can make the constitutional violations remediable. These federal judges issued a preliminary ruling, earlier this year; in it they suggest they will order the state to reduce its prison population by 20,000 to 50,000 (although they probably won’t tell the state how it has to achieve that reduction.)

These developments seem to create an enormous opportunity for change. But for how long and to what end? Let’s say the judges order California to reduce the prison population by even as many as 30,000 or 40,000. It might be possible to handle that, partly by sending California prisoners to private prisons in other states. (It might require changing the law — but that could be done.) And surely there would be an effort to keep some parolees from going back to prison, for at least awhile, to comply with the court’s ruling.

But my fear is that in the next boom cycle (which we tend to have in California), the basic lie that underlies our system — that the status quo, our current penal process, is making us safer — will remain the powerful force it has been in California politics. And as a result, 10, 15 years from now we’ll have a bigger prison system than ever, maybe some of it located in Mexico or Arizona or someplace where it’s cheaper to run prisons.

Unless we confront this basic story/promise/lie that’s been sold so effectively to Californians over the last three decades, everything is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. We’re still stuck with this colossal penal system that is starving us fiscally, when there are all these other things we need to fund.

Q. Is racism a strong driver behind the ‘ruling through crime’ mentality?

A. Yes. Some would say “Look, the civil rights movement broke down a traditional system of racial domination associated with Jim Crow in the South and with ghetto police enforcement in the North. And mass imprisonment, governing through crime, became replacement tools, basically, to maintain a racially unequal and separate society. I think there’s a lot to that argument.

But what has also developed in our society is a mandate for crime control that clearly has won a huge constituency, across racial and ideological divides. Think of the federal sentencing guidelines for crack vs. powder cocaine — where you have to possess 500 grams of powder cocaine, but only five grams for crack cocaine, to get a mandatory minimum sentence of five years. Today this is exhibit #1 in many people’s minds of racial bias in our justice system — since crack cocaine is overwhelmingly associated with black users and sellers, while powder cocaine remains associated with rock stars, investment bankers, and white users generally. Yet the entire Congressional Black Caucus supported the five-gram limit for crack cocaine. The scourge of crack was hurting black neighborhoods, and tough crime laws seemed to be the way the government could respond.

Q. What criminal-justice reforms would you like to see in California?

A. The most important thing we can do is use the penal code to set firmer limits on who can be sent to prison, as opposed to being dealt with through jail or probation at the county level. Currently our law gives county-level prosecutors huge discretion to select charges that will send local criminals to state prison, where the state pays all of the costs of incarceration. This has the terrible result of producing an ever-growing state prison population and an ever-growing group of people who, having been in a California prison, are deemed permanently dangerous.

Prison should be reserved for those who pose such a threat of violence that they cannot reasonably be worked with in the community. We should actively subsidize counties (as we did in the 1970s) to keep more of their offenders in the county system — where they can remain better integrated into the families and community resources they will eventually need to engage with in order to stay crime free.

UC Berkeley Law Professor Jonathan Simon

Beyond that, we need to revamp some of the institutions that are routinely directing people into the criminal-justice system. This is especially true of our schools, which have become gateways to criminal-justice custody through disciplinary regimes and test-based pressures to force out weaker students. Another example is our mental health system, which has been allowed to atrophy, leaving many of the untreated mentally ill on a pathway toward criminalization and incarceration. A renewed and reformed mental health system could reduce both violence and mass imprisonment in the United States.

The book I co-edited with two Berkeley colleagues, (After the War on Crime: Race, Democracy, and a New Reconstruction), elaborates on ways we could move forward from our war-on-crime approach.

Q. Talk about your blog and what you’re trying to accomplish with it.

A. Many people think that after 9/11 the war on terror became the vehicle for transforming how America was governed. But in Governing Through Crime (subtitled How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear) I argue that the war on terror has been an extension of the war on crime, which had already transformed American democracy along all the same lines. I try to show the ways in which American government, and even civil society, have been transformed and distorted by the war on crime, how the overcrowded prison is just one manifestation of this larger way of organizing our democracy.

So in my blog I keep a critical eye on the daily news and events, using the framework of “governing through crime” — this awareness that we have become trapped in ways of thinking and responding, ever since the late ’60s — to help illuminate the public dialogue.

One of my real complaints is that when we govern through crime, we sound tough, but we’re really giving everybody a break, especially government. When we say that we want government to be tough on crime, we mean that we want prison sentences to be long and the rhetoric to be sharp. But we don’t actually hold government accountable for reducing crime. If we did, we wouldn’t put up with prisons that produce 70 percent recidivism rates. We would long ago have said

Likewise, when we lock people up in prison, we’re really letting them off the hook as well. I have a friend, an activist for mothers and children of inmates, who basically argues that when you send a man to prison, he doesn’t have to take care of his kids, he doesn’t have to work, he doesn’t have to worry about the elderly in his community. You’re creating an adolescent fantasy for him, where he’s going to get strong, do bad stuff, and basically hang out with the boys. Someone’s going to feed him every day, do his laundry. It’s anything but responsibility.

I don’t expect President Obama to directly confront crime issues, because he’s so politically pragmatic. But one of the things that excites me about Obama is when he talks about a new accountability for government. In doing that, he may start weaning us of this habit of letting government off the hook. If people start demanding to know what they’re actually getting for our public investments in crime repression, I think the war on crime will become less popular.

Cathy Cockrell

Cathy Cockrell is a writer for the UC Berkeley NewsCenter. She lives in Oakland.

Republished with the author’s permission from UC Berkeley News.

See Q&A part 1: Why Parole Does Not Work in California.

Couterpunch

In his Republic, Plato’s allegory of the cave describes how the limited perception of man leaves him measuring the world with only the distorted reflections of reality.  The trouble with prison, as it is perceived, is the shadows are further distended by a variety of prisms that bend reality to suit a host of preconceptions, special interests and self-fulfilling prophecies.  The end result of this shape-shifting is a system that produces failure as a matter of course, that pretends to protect the mass of society, and that destroys whole communities in its voracious appetite.  The trouble with prison is prison.

I serve the other death penalty – life without the possibility of parole – for killing a man in a fistfight when I was 19 years old.  In that I will never get out, I am freed to speak a more direct and unfiltered truth than those who must convince a panel of unsympathetic officials they should be returned to the real world.  My 29 years of direct experience, coupled with a powerful thirst to come to grips with my own personal truth and gain an intellectually valid grasp of this world, have taught me a series of lessons.  While I do not claim to have unchained myself completely from the bonds of ignorance, I believe I can read and interpret accurately the tortured shapes on the dull concrete walls of this particular cave.

People are put in prison because nothing else works.  This is the foundational misperception that supports the prison edifice.  The truth is far less simple.  There are prisoners whose lifetime of dangerous behavior leaves prison as the only choice for society.  But these are a tiny minority in the sea of pathetic misfits and perennial losers walking the yards.

Most prisoners are uneducated, riddled with unresolved traumas and ill-treated mental health problems, drug and alcohol addictions, and self-esteem issues that are beyond profound, bordering on the pathological far too often.  The vast majority has never received competent health care, mental health care, drug treatment, education or even an opportunity to look at themselves as human.  Were any of these far less draconian interventions even tried, before the descent into this wretched cave, no doubt many of my peers would be leading productive lives.  Nothing else works is not a statement of fact; it is the declaration of an ideology.  This ideology holds that punishment, for the sake of the infliction of pain, is the logical response to all misbehavior.  It is also a convenient cover story behind which powerful special interest groups hide.

Prison employees benefit by our failure.  This startling fact contains within it a monstrous truth.  These well-organized government workers created the victims’ rights movement, a sad shill for the prison-industrial complex.  Using the handful of politically active victims of crime to obscure their actual agenda, propositions are passed, laws are changed, and policies that could prevent victimization in the first place are suppressed.  Both of these groups, working in tandem with the corporations that supply and construct prisons, pour millions of dollars into the political process to achieve a system guaranteed to fail.  But this failure by any other measure – high rates of recidivism, high rates of internal disorder, growing prison populations serving longer sentences – results in greater profits to the corporations, increased membership in the unions, and ever growing piles of dollars to buy still more influence.

After reading a small library of books and studies on the subject, along with my direct experience, it is clear only three rehabilitative programs have proof of success.  Increased and enhanced visiting to build and maintain family ties, higher education, and quality drug and alcohol treatment constitutes this golden triad.  It is not a closely held secret that these work to lower recidivism and, thus, prevent victimization; rather, this is well known.  Nevertheless, the special interest groups lobby incessantly against all three.  In my 29 years, visiting has deteriorated from a slightly unpleasant experience to a hostile and traumatic acid bath that quite effectively destroys family ties.  Higher education is virtually nonexistent but for those few with the substantial resources needed to purchase it.  In those rare cases where innovative ways have been found to bring education back into the prisons the special interest groups have mounted vicious campaigns to terminate the programs.  The opposition to drug and alcohol treatment, much more widely supported in the body politic, is subtler.  Using the proven method of compulsory participation by the least amenable, those programs that are instituted are crippled in the normal chaos of prison.  All of this opposition stands behind the banner of protecting victims’ rights, as if only the desire for revenge by past victims of crime matters, over even the potential losses of future victims.

With recidivism rates well beyond two-thirds, the assumption for all prisoners is that of failure.  It is written into the policies of prison that force parolees back to failed situations, that site prisons far from the urban areas most prisoners come from, and provide no after-parole assistance.  When I first came into the California state system in the late ‘70s, a parolee received a decent set of clothes, a bus ticket and $200 in cash.  Today’s parolee receives a sweat suit unsuitable for a job interview and $200; out of which is deducted the cost of his bus ticket and decades of devaluation.  The parolee, having received no real substance abuse treatment, no serious education or training, no useful mental health counseling, and holding barely enough money for a short stay in a flophouse, is cast back out into the real world to swim or, more likely, sink.  The aid that would make the transition more likely successful is denied, ostensibly, to save money.  The pennies it would take to reestablish the parolee vanish next to the fifty thousand a year it costs to re-incarcerate the parole violator.

Yet again, sadly, it becomes clear on close inspection that without our mass failure the gears of the prison-industrial complex would stop.  Jobs would be lost, rural communities devastated, and the flow of political contributions would dry up.  From the perspective of those who depend on our failure to sustain themselves, our success would be a disaster.  In my state, an admitted extreme example, on any given day about half the prison population are parole violators, a majority of whom have broken no law but rather violated one of the vast web of confusing and devious tripwire rules they must navigate around on the other side of the fences.

Failure is expected, a bad enough thing, to be sure.  Worse, failure is celebrated and lauded.  The primary rationale of parole divisions is to lock as many ex-cons as possible back into the prisons.  There are gang task forces, and drug task forces, and absconder recovery units, and high control teams, all of which operate on a presumption of failure.  These black-clad, helmeted law enforcement platoons prowl the alleys and back streets of the inner cities hunting down parolees.  They justify the over-application of picayune rules as preventing the assumed major crimes the parolee is bound to commit, eventually.  After the high-fives and backslapping are over, parole officers content themselves with their sense of exacting a frighteningly prospective form of justice.  The now current convict heads back for another year or two of dehumanization for forgetting to report he moved or talking to his cousin also on parole.

The prison system dresses itself in a cloak of respectability by claiming to protect society from the “worst of the worst.”  At a certain level, this is true.  There are some irredeemables, those who should not be allowed to prey on society ever again.  The trouble with this assertion, and the direction it has taken, is there just aren’t enough worst of the worst to justify the concrete and razor wire empire, not to the extent it has grown.  The definition of who fits into this excluded class has expanded dramatically over the years, along with the borders of the system.  Now, along with the serial predator is housed the serial drug addict and the serial shoplifter and the serial loser, all serving extraordinarily long sentences on prison yards devoid of even a semblance of rehabilitation.  This in the name of protecting society.

Policies are enacted that are purposely brutal by staff who have been trained to view prisoners as less than human, to believe that their real role is to exact revenge, who see us in all ways the enemy, the dangerous other.  This message, that we are not fully human, is pressed into us every moment of every day in a multitude of ways from the mundane (being forced to wear pants with “PRISONER” stamped on the leg in neon orange lettering) to the profound (being prevented from conducting a business or owning property).  This results in a diminishing of our consciousness to that of the unwelcome alien.  From inside this dark recess, it is near to impossible imagining rejoining humanity.  As one state senator in California observed, “If you were to set out to design a system to produce failure, this would be it.”  It is not surprising this elected official represents an area that has disproportionately suffered due to these policies and was a professor of psychology before assuming office.

Whole communities have been decimated, literally, by the policies of the system.  People of color, the poor and the dispossessed, are represented in numbers far exceeding their share of society.  It starts on streets patrolled by an occupying force of police who view these people as less than, as suspects first and foremost.  Arrests are made for the most trivial offenses, for the little acts of rebellion and frustration not uncommon to young people everywhere.  But down on the occupied bottom of society there is no call made to mommy and daddy.  No well-dressed lawyer will show up in court with a privately contracted psychologist to explain junior’s learning disability.  A bored, too often hostile, public defender will convince the youth to take a plea bargain that 20 years later becomes the first strike in a life sentence for boosting a ham.  Once a name has a criminal justice system number affixed to it, the move from possible suspect to probable offender is complete.  In some of the worst off communities, every third or fourth man, and a growing number of women, carry a number on their shoulders.

As the mass of people in this country who labor to carry a number grows so, too, does the harm caused and exacerbated by the prison system.  No longer a tiny fringe of malcontents and unrepentant thugs, we who have sprung from the electrified fences and gun towers, from inside the racially polarized and ganged-up yards, who have spent a significant portion of our lives locked into tiny concrete boxes bending over and spreading our cheeks, are a growing segment of the real world.  We have spouses and children, parents and siblings, and our influence on the collective consciousness is solidifying.  It is seen in the glorification of violence and the fascination with acts of irrational and pointless rage that fills the media and dominates the lives of prisoners.  It is heard in the adoption of jailhouse terms applied to schools put on “lockdown” and street cops “kickin’ it with the homies.”  It is felt in the tighter ring of controls that encircle the lives of free people in the real world, a disturbing reflection of the world of prisoners.

Prison is insatiable and unquenchable.  It devours everything in its path and swallows whole anything that attempts to deter it.  All these years I have spent inside I have observed just how effectively the system crushes its opposition.  The well meaning and good hearted eventually surrender to the overwhelming force and terrible despair.  Not least of which, that pouring out of the desperate flailing of prisoners ourselves as we beat our heads against the walls of our internal exile with a maniacal ferocity.  We internalize the separation and removal, the assumed less-than status, and hold up the idiotic and vainglorious pride we pretend to like clowns’ make-up to hide our shame.  Some of us profess to be immune to the battering we endure; many of us deny it happening in spite of the obvious bruises.  In the end, the vast majority of us become exactly who we are told we are: violent, irrational, and incapable of conducting ourselves like conscious adults.  It is a tragic opera with an obvious outcome.

The talk lately making the rounds in political circles, among the power brokers and well heeled, is of reviving the idea of rehabilitation.  The past decades of exploding costs and terrible outcomes, particularly as schools and old folks homes are closed to bridge budget shortfalls, has allowed the concept of using prison to correct, to heal and restore, to be taken seriously again. This is a good thing.  It is long overdue.  But it is an idea that will have to battle powerful forces determined to diminish it into a shadow without substance.  It will face the added complexity of implementation managed by guards and administrators, teachers and counselors who fundamentally reject the notion that prisoners are capable of being restored.  Along with this uphill climb, dragging along the recalcitrant, will be the added obstacle of the special interest groups defending their world of failure.  The simple truth is the less of us the less of them.  If we stop coming back their world will collapse.

Still, the greatest struggle to effect change will be convincing the mass of prisoners, the millions of men and women who have been brainwashed into believing they simply cannot become better.  At the head of this mass will be the seeming leadership from our own ranks, those who have used the status quo to achieve a perverse success.  They are the drug dealers and negative leaders, the phony writ writers, the whole group of profiteers and self-servers who will seek to undermine positive change because in it they glimpse the end of their domination of the dysfunction.  That they aid and assist the special interest groups, the organized revenge groups and the corporations profiting off of our collective misery is obvious.  Heedless, they will seek to maintain the failed system through acts of atavistic violence and jackass resistance.  They might succeed in stifling change, and not for the first time.  This is the modern world of prison, constructed after 25 years of surrendering to fear mongers and manipulators.  It is a fearsome mess.

The trouble with prison is, indeed, prison itself.  The way prison is managed and envisioned.  The idea that by humiliating and brutalizing damaged people some possible good could result is simply a falsehood, a lie perpetrated by interests who benefit from failure.  It has never worked.  It is not working now.  It will never work.  No amount of money poured down society’s communal drain will buy success.  No minimum number of broken bodies and tortured spirits will purchase rehabilitation.  No pyre of burnt offerings, no matter how large and hot, will somehow result in better people walking out the front gate in their gray sweat suits.  The problems are systemic and resilient.  Nothing short of radical and sustained reform will be enough to overcome the resistance of a system built to fail.  It may not be possible, but to not try is to condemn thousands upon thousands of our fellow human beings to a witches’ brew of victimizations, in here and out there.  To not try would be an act of cowardly capitulation to bullies and thugs.  To not try is to become like those who have erected this system, who keep it going, who must somehow sleep with what they have do.

Kenneth Hartman has served over 29 continuous years in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation on a life without the possibility of parole sentence. He is the founder of the Honor Program at California State Prison-Los Angeles County, and serves as the Chairman of its Steering Committee. He is currently leading The Other Death Penalty Project, a grassroots organizing campaign conducted by LWOP prisoners with the ultimate goal of abolishing life without parole sentences. He can be reached at: prisonhonorprogram@hotmail.com.

In an interview with C-Span television, Obama suggested it would require a bipartisan effort to create a legal and institutional structure under which the detainees could be tried.

“It’s a messy situation. It’s not easy,” he said.

Obama traced the problems to “poor decisions” made by the previous administration in the period right after the September 11, 2001 attacks “because people were fearful.”

He said “I think we cut too many corners and made some decisions that were contrary to who we are as a people,” he said.

“We’ve got a lot of people there who we should have tried early, but we didn’t. In some cases, evidence against them has been compromised,” he said.

“They may be dangerous, in which case we can’t release them. And so, finding how to deal with that I think is going to be one of our biggest problems,” he said.

But he said he was confident that the detainees could be tried by US military commissions or in US civilian courts “if we approach this in a way that isn’t trying to score political points, but is trying to create a legal and institutional framework with checks and balances, respectful of due process and rule of law.”

His comments came just two days after he clashed with former vice president Dick Cheney on the issue in dueling, back-to-back debates.

Cheney attacked Obama’s approach to the “war on terror” as increasing the risk to Americans and defended the harsh interrogations of detainees that tainted evidence gathered against them.

Meanwhile, Senate Democrats joined Republicans in refusing funds for Obama to close Guantanamo, demanding a more detailed plan from the administration amid widespread congressional resistance to transferring detainees to prisons in the United States.