Arizona Prison Watch

Prisoner's Religious Rights Resources - Arizona.

2012-02-02T03:37:00.001-07:00

I've had some questions from AZ state prisoners and family members lately about religious rights and special diets in prison. Below is one good overview I found on pertinent law.

Here is also the link to the Columbia Human Rights Journal Jailhouse Lawyer's Manual: Chapter 27: Religious Freedom in Prison. If you know someone inside who's having trouble exercising their religious rights, print that chapter up and send it to them.

Also send them this intake form from the Arizona ACLU. They may not be able to help individual prisoners, but it helps them to document what's going on in the prisons in case they find there are patterns of abuse.

And here's the info prisoners need about complying with the Prison Litigation Reform Act and "exhausting administrative remedies".

This is the paperwork needed to file a Section 1983 Civil Rights complaint in US District Court (AZ). Tell Prisoners: DO NOT TAKE THIS STEP LIGHTLY. There are consequences if you do it without sufficient evidence or following procedure.

Finally, here are the relevant AZ Department of Corrections policies to know:

Inmate Religious Activities/Marriage Requests

Inmate Grievance Procedure

Unfortunately, even if they face retaliation, prisoners who want religious freedom will have to take this fight on from inside - we can't file grievances or civil rights complaints for them out here...

----From the First Amendment Center----

Prisoners' Rights: Overview

By David L. Hudson Jr.
First Amendment scholar

Whether it be religious diet, grooming, worship services, religious jewelry or even access to a chaplain before execution, inmates frequently challenge prison officials over what they allege are violations of their freedom of religion.

Two Muslim inmates sued California prison officials, saying they were forced to eat food forbidden by their religion. Christian inmates sued, claiming that Mississippi prison officials violated their First Amendment rights by refusing to allow inmate-led services and by prohibiting inmates from preaching. A Jewish inmate in Ohio sued prison officials after they cut his beard, which he says was necessary for his faith. Kentucky prison officials recently prohibited inmates from attending satanic services.

The Safley-O'Lone reasonableness standard

Often, inmates will sue under the First Amendment free-exercise clause. This clause generally prohibits the government from infringing on individuals’ rights to practice their religion freely. But prisoners do not have the same level of rights as normal citizens. Incarceration drastically changes the constitutional equation.

Prison officials are normally granted a good deal of discretion, particularly when they can show that their policies are necessary to further a legitimate safety concern. When a prison regulation clashes with an inmate’s religious freedom, the courts must strike a balance between the two.

The U.S. Supreme Court established the current standard for inmate First Amendment cases under a pair of 1987 decisions, Turner v. Safley and O’Lone v. Estate of Shabazz. In Safley, the Court examined restrictions on inmate correspondence and inmates’ right to marry. The Court established the following standard: “When a prison regulation impinges on inmates’ constitutional rights, the regulation is valid if it is reasonably related to legitimate penological interests.”

The Court identified several factors relevant to determining the reasonableness of the prison officials’ actions:

Whether there is a “valid, rational connection” between the prison regulation and the legitimate government interest put forward to justify it. The Court noted that the “governmental objective must be a legitimate and neutral one.” It added: “Prison regulations restricting inmates’ First Amendment rights [must be] operated in a neutral fashion, without regard to the content of the expression.”

Whether there are alternative means of exercising the right that remain open to prison inmates.

Whether accommodating prisoners’ constitutional rights will infringe on the rights of guards or other inmates and on the allocation of prison resources generally.

Whether there are alternative methods of accommodating prisoners’ rights at minimal cost to valid penological interests. The existence of easy alternatives can show that the regulation was an “exaggerated response” to prison concerns.

The Safley standard has been used in most lower courts examining prisoner First Amendment claims. One week after the U.S. Supreme Court decided Safley, the high court applied the Safley standard to a free-exercise of religion claim in O’Lone v. Estate of Shabazz.

In O’Lone, a group of Muslim inmates challenged New Jersey state prison policies that prohibited them from attending Jum’ah, a weekly Muslim religious ceremony. Prison officials determined that allowing inmates to leave outside work details to go inside the prison for the religious service would imperil safety and institutional order. They testified that inmates returning from outside work details created too much congestion and delays at the main gate, which is a high-risk area.

Applying the Safley standard, the high court majority ruled that “while we in no way minimize the central importance of Jum’ah to respondents, we are unwilling to hold that prison officials are required by the Constitution to sacrifice legitimate penological objectives to that end.”

The Supreme Court noted that the inmates could still “participate in other Muslim religious ceremonies.” The Court wrote: “We think this ability on the part of respondents to participate in other religious observances of their faith supports the conclusion that the restrictions at issue here were reasonable.”

Some prison-rights advocates say the Safley-O’Lone standard excessively favors prison concerns. “It simply gives too much deference to prison officials,” says Keith Defasio, director of Advocare, a Virginia-based group that works for prisoners' rights. “There is a lot of abuse of inmates’ freedom-of-religion rights.”

David Fahti, staff counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project, agrees that the Safley-O'Lone standard is too deferential. “Oftentimes, in the lower courts prison officials do not provide any evidence that their regulation serves a legitimate prison interest but simply come up with a post-hoc, speculative reason to justify the restrictive policy," he said.

"Prison officials often dream up plausible — and sometimes not very plausible — reasons for their actions.”

But the American Correctional Association contends that the Safley-O’Lone standard is the proper one. Its Web site reads: “The legal standard for establishing the validity of institutional rules on religious faith and practice should be the reasonableness standard provided in Turner v. Safley and O’Lone v. Shabazz.”

Marci Hamilton, a law professor who is challenging the constitutionality of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, says that the Safley-O’Lone standard is sufficient to protect inmates’ First Amendment rights.

“It is very hard for prison officials to keep order in prisons,” says Hamilton, a professor at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. “Inmates frequently rely upon religious defenses to any type of prison regulation.”

Statutes that provide even greater protection

Congress has passed two statutes that increase the protection of inmates’ First Amendment rights. These are the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 — RFRA — and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 — RLUIPA.

Both statutes provide that government officials cannot impose a substantial burden on inmates’ religious rights unless they show their regulation serves a compelling government interest in the least-restrictive way. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down RFRA as it applied to the states in its 1997 decision City of Boerne v. Flores. The Court determined that Congress did not have the authority to pass RFRA based on its enforcement powers under the 14th Amendment. According to the Court, Congress overstepped its authority in imposing such a law upon the states.

Many states, meanwhile, also passed their own RFRA laws, and those remain in effect. And while the Court said RFRA could not be applied to the states, the law passed by Congress still applies to the federal government, including federal prisons.

The Supreme Court's limiting of RFRA led Congress to pass another federal law, called RLUIPA. Unlike RFRA, Congress justified RLUIPA on both the spending and commerce clauses of the Constitution.

Many prison-rights and religious-freedom advocates applaud these laws. For example, Charles Haynes, senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, writes of RLUIPA: “It reaffirms and strengthens our national commitment to do all that we can to protect the right of every citizen to 'follow the dictates of conscience' in matters of faith.”

Fahti says that these laws are good because they make sure that “prison officials give some thought before passing rules and policies that burden inmates’ freedom of religion rights.”

Still, some believe that Congress went too far in passing both RFRA and RLUIPA. Professor Hamilton argues that the Safley-O'Lone standard was sufficient. She also believes that Congress exceeded its authority in passing RLUIPA as well as RFRA. She questions the viability of the legislation under the commerce clause. “The key problem is that the federal government is not regulating something that is part of the economy,” she says. “The Supreme Court has said that government regulation in and of itself is not economic for purposes of the Commerce Clause.”

Others, like Fahti, believe that RLUIPA is constitutional. “It is much less vulnerable to challenge than RFRA,” he says.

Several appellate courts have considered the constitutionality of RLUIPA. Most of these courts have upheld the statute. For example, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Mayweathers v. Newland in 2002 that “RLIUPA merely accommodates and protects the free exercise of religion, which the Constitution allows.”

Similarly, three-judge panels in the 4th and 7th Circuits have joined the 9th Circuit in upholding the constitutionality of RLUIPA. In Madison v. Ritter, the 4th Circuit ruled that “RLUIPA has the effect of lifting burdens on prisoners’ religious exercise, but does not impermissibly advance religion.”

In Charles v. Verhagen, the 7th Circuit upheld RFRA from constitutional challenges based on the establishment clause and the 10th Amendment. The court also ruled that RLUIPA was a valid exercise of Congress’ powers under the spending clause of the Constitution.

However, a three-judge panel of the the 6th Circuit ruled in Cutter v. Wilkinson that RLUIPA violated the establishment clause because it had “the primary effect of advancing religion.”

“One effect of RLUIPA is to induce prisoners to adopt or feign religious belief in order to receive the statute’s benefits,” the panel added.

The split in the federal appeals courts led the U.S. Supreme Court to take the Cutter case and address RLUIPA. In Cutter v. Wilkinson (2005), the Supreme Court ruled that the part of RLUIPA dealing with inmates “qualifies as a permissible legislative accommodation of religion that is not barred by the Establishment Clause.”

Currently federal prisoners can sue under RFRA and RLUIPA, while state inmates can sue under RLUIPA and state RFRA laws.

An effect of this development is that prison officials have to be more sensitive to inmate religious requests, or accommodate more requests than they would under the general Safley-O'Lone standard.

Another complaint lodged against RLUIPA is that it will lead to more and more spurious claims filed by inmates seeking favors based on religious beliefs. However, both RFRA and RLUIPA require, as a threshold matter, that the inmate’s request for accommodation be based on legitimate religious belief. Legal commentator Heather Davis explains that “this threshold inquiry is necessary to dispose of bogus claims undeserving of First Amendment protections.”

For example, some inmates who espouse white supremacy have claimed that, for religious reasons, they can share a cell only with a member of their own race. A federal appeals court rejected the claims of an Iowa inmate who claimed that his religious beliefs prohibited him from sharing a cell with an African-American inmate. The inmate sued under the First Amendment free-exercise clause and RFRA. The court rejected both claims in Ochs v. Thalacker, writing that prison officials had a compelling interest in not segregating inmates on a racial basis because they believe that random cell assignments are the best way to reduce gang activity and lessen racial tensions.

Should society care about inmates’ religious rights?

Whatever legal standard is used to resolve inmate freedom-of-religion lawsuits, some in society ask: “Who cares?” Many people believe that inmates forfeited their rights when they committed their crimes.

But others believe society should try to encourage inmates to practice their religious faith. “Let’s face it. Most inmates do get out of prison at some point,” Fahti says. “And the single best predictor of whether an inmate will do OK when they reenter society is whether they maintain community ties when they are in prison.

“There are many reasons why we should recognize the religious rights of inmates,” Fahti says.

“Our country was founded on principles of religious freedom. Many people came to this country to flee religious persecution in other countries. As long as a prisoner’s practice of religion does not interfere with prison security, there is simply no reason to deny an inmate’s religious rights.”

Added Advocare's Defasio, “Even though inmates are incarcerated for crimes, they should still be entitled to their constitutional dignities. Where are we as a democracy if we can give and take away constitutional rights?”

Updated October 2008

Related

Native Americans challenge prison's smoking ban

Inmates contend Maine officials denied them the right to build sweat lodge, seized religious items and temporarily confiscated ceremonial bowl. 05.16.03

No specially prepared meat for Islamic inmates, 3rd Circuit says

Three-judge panel finds that providing vegetarian meals instead is a reasonable accommodation of prisoners' religious beliefs. 09.12.03

6th Circuit strikes down religious-freedom law for prisoners

Law professor says Supreme Court may end up resolving split in appellate courts over constitutionality of RLUIPA. 11.10.03

Native American inmate challenges grooming policy

ACLU of Southern California files federal lawsuit on behalf of Billy Soza Warsoldier, who claims his religious beliefs would be violated if he cut his hair. 04.03.04

9th Circuit: Inmates can get mail printed from Internet

California officials fail to persuade judges that mail containing Web material might contain coded messages, which could pose safety issue. 04.21.04

Oklahoma inmates push prisons for kosher meals

Attorneys for state argue that serving Jewish fare would cost millions, might violate establishment clause, could cause riots. 07.13.04

9th Circuit sides with Indian prisoner vs. long-hair ban

California prisons' hair policy forced inmate 'to choose between following his religious beliefs and suffering continual punishment,' court holds. 08.02.05

Justices hear case involving prisoners' reading material

Alito sits out Beard v. Banks because he took part in 3rd Circuit case concerning denial of publications to help control unruly inmates. 03.27.06

State hasn't justified denying feast-day meats for Muslim inmate

Massachusetts high court says state constitution goes further than U.S. Constitution to protect religious freedom of prisoners. 04.11.06

N.D. high court: Prison can take away inmate's magazines

State justices find penitentiary rules on exchanging publications, displaying symbols are reasonable. 04.20.06

Convicted killer can't preach in R.I. prison

Calling decision 'somewhat of a close call,' federal judge says that compelling state interest in safety trumps inmates' religious-freedom rights. 06.08.06

High court limits inmate lawsuits in Calif. case

Prisoner claimed wrongful punishment interfered with his free practice of religion; Court says he missed grievance deadline. 06.23.06

Prisons can restrict inmates' reading matter

Justices vote 6-2 in Beard v. Banks that state policy doesn't violate free speech of troublesome inmates.

Quick look at ruling 06.28.06

Muslim inmate ordered to handle pork can sue staff
3rd Circuit: Defendants had 'fair warning' from other courts that they should 'respect, and accommodate when practicable' prisoner's religious concerns. 07.26.06

Supermax inmate defeats prison rules on reading material
Mark Jordan brought suit after officials refused to deliver printout of 'Justice Denied' essays; court agrees restriction is too broad. 10.31.06

4th Circuit upholds RLUIPA in siding with Va. inmate
State had challenged federal law after Ira Madison complained in 2001 lawsuit that prison officials were violating the act by denying kosher meals. 01.02.07

1st Circuit: R.I. inmate can sue over preaching ban
Unanimous three-judge panel rejects correction officials' argument that man's sermons presented security threat. 04.09.07

N.H. prison ordered to restore inmate's kosher diet
Federal magistrate sides with Orthodox Jewish prisoner, who argued officials violated First Amendment by revoking religious diet after catching him with non-kosher food. 05.06.07

Va. inmate can challenge denial of Thor's Hammer
By David L. Hudson Jr. Federal magistrate says Virginia prison officials may have violated Forest Fisher's rights under First Amendment, religious-freedom law. 06.05.07

R.I. inmate wins right to resume jailhouse preaching
Settling three-year legal battle, correction officials adopt policy allowing Wesley Spratt to preach at religious services under chaplain's supervision. 08.02.07

Vt. prisons to pay $25,000 to settle suit by Jewish inmate
Former prisoner said he was blocked from receiving kosher food from charitable group, restricted in his use of a menorah for Hanukkah. 04.04.08

9th Circuit revives inmate's RLUIPA suit
By Josh Tatum Unanimous three-judge panel reinstates Darin Greene's claim that California prison violated his rights by barring group worship by maximum-security prisoners. 04.16.08

8th Circuit backs Ark. inmate's religious-freedom claim
Court finds judge erred in dismissing discrimination complaint byprisoner punished for refusing to work on Sabbath. 10.03.08

N.J. inmate challenges ban on prison preaching
'The right to practice one's faith, or no faith at all, is fundamental and applies inside and outside the prison gates,' says ACLU official. 12.07.08

9th Circuit revives Nev. inmate's lawsuit over kosher diet
Jewish convert says prison officials violated his rights by refusing to serve kosher meals on grounds he couldn't show 'hereditary connection' to or 'substantial philosophical understanding' of religion. 12.11.08

Prisoner's religious objection won't stop DNA sampling
D.C. Circuit: 'Government's extraction, analysis and storage of (Russell) Kaemmerling's DNA information does not call for Kaemmerling to modify his religious behavior in any way.' 12.31.08

Calif. inmate can pursue retaliation claim
By David L. Hudson Jr. Federal judge says prisoner's free speech can be chilled by withholding of food. 02.17.09

4th Circuit sides with prison officials in dispute over 'insolent' letter
By David L. Hudson Jr. Panel notes that inmates receive reduced level of speech protection, deference to prison officials is paramount consideration. 03.11.09

R.I. prisoner accuses guards of punishing him for speaking out
Lawsuit filed by ACLU claims officials retaliated against Jason Cook for complaining publicly about prison reading-materials policy. 04.10.09

N.H. prison inmate loses challenge over kosher diet
Albert Kuperman's lawyers had argued that prison policy violated client's First Amendment right to practice religion. 11.27.09

N.J. prison officials agree to let inmate preach
Agreement, which settles lawsuit brought by ACLU, will allow convicted murderer to deliver sermons and morning messages under supervision of chaplain or approved volunteer. 12.01.09

Wis. inmate can't play Dungeons & Dragons behind bars
7th Circuit panel rejects Kevin T. Singer's claims that prison ban on role-playing game, materials violated his free-speech, due-process rights. 01.26.10

Ill. inmate can pursue religious-liberty lawsuit over pat-down
By David L. Hudson Jr. However, federal judge rejects Yaphet K. Jamal's sexual-harassment claim. 02.02.10

Prisoners' side struggles in reading-material case
By Tony Mauro Pennsylvania disciplinary policy that includes withholding publications from unruly inmates seems undamaged in arguments before Supreme Court justices. 03.28.06

'Lord Versatile' harnesses power of RLUIPA
By David L. Hudson Jr. Judge says Virginia inmate can use federal law to challenge prison's refusal to recognize his group as religion. 01.07.10

Religious liberty behind bars: How free should prisoners be?
By Charles C. Haynes Prisons can’t impose substantial burdens on free-exercise rights of prisoners unless the regulation serves a compelling state interest, such as prison safety. 07.25.04

UNSHACKLING Arizona: SB1184 makes it through committee.

2012-02-01T21:04:00.001-07:00

Hooray!!!

---------from the AP via the Capitol Times---------

Committee approves pregnant inmates bill

By The Associated Press

Published: February 1, 2012 at 1:40 pm

A Senate committee unanimously approved a bill Wednesday morning that would ban state or county jails and prisons from shackling inmates or detainees while they’re being transported for delivery or during labor, delivery or postpartum recovery. The bill makes exceptions if medical staffers ask that the prisoner be restrained or a jail or prison official decides the prisoner or detainee might take off.

The bill follows a lawsuit that was filed last year against the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office by an inmate who says her rights were violated when she was shackled before and after her Caesarean section in 2009.

The Arizona Republic reported last December that the lawsuit claims Miriam Mendiola-Martinez was forced to leave the hospital with her hands and feet handcuffed. The lawsuit also claims Mendiola-Martinez was taken away without receiving pain medication. That was one impetus for the Senate bill, said Sen. Linda Gray, R-Phoenix, who sponsored the measure.

“To me, that was humiliating. She’s probably still in pain and that was unnecessary,” she said after the committee hearing on Wednesday.

Gray said the American Civil Liberties Union brought it to her attention.

The issue is something the organization has been tracking for a number of years, said Anjali Abraham, an ACLU lobbyist.

“We just want to ensure the safest delivery conditions for baby and mom. This is a population that often gets overlooked,” she said.

So far, 14 states have adopted similar restrictions, according to the ACLU. Bills to restrict shackling are being considered in Massachusetts and Florida this year.

The Arizona Department of Corrections, U.S. Marshals Service and Federal Bureau of Prisons have all adopted policies in the past decade that prohibit the shackling of women in labor.

The practice is “inhumane” and “Draconian,” said Imani Walker, the executive director of the Rebecca Project for Human Rights, a Washington D.C.-based group that lobbied the federal prison system to adopt restrictions on shackling pregnant prisoners.

Lawmakers in Arizona tried to pass a law restricting the practice last year, but the bill failed to make it out of a committee. This year, lawmakers from both parties have signed onto the Senate bill and a similar proposal that’s been introduced in the House.

Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Jeff Sprong said the agency is neutral on the bill after working on a compromise with lawmakers that allowed the use of a leg tether to be attached to an inmate’s ankle and the bed frame during postpartum recovery.

The bill stipulates that if restraints are used during the delivery process, they should be “done in the least restrictive manner necessary.”

Dr. Lisa Cookingham, who practices obstetrics and gynecology in the Phoenix area, testified at the hearing in support of the bill and said she cares for incarcerated patients on a regular basis.

In a recent case, she said one of her patients went into labor at six and a half months and needed an emergency delivery of the baby. Cookingham said officers initially refused her requests to remove shackles on the patient’s legs, which jeopardized the care of the mother and child.

“This unfortunately is not unique situation,” she said.

Cookingham said she appreciates the security measures, but feels they are often excessive and ignore health and safety concerns.

The bill advances to the Senate rules committee. From there, if it passes, the measure would move to the full Senate.

Out of the Darkness: Jessica's Operation Orange.

2012-02-01T20:02:00.000-07:00

I received a letter of support and encouragement today from the mother of a prisoner at Perryville who has dedicated herself to trying to prevent more fatal drunk driving accidents like the one she caused: Jessica's doing seven years right now for vehicular manslaughter. In the interest of spreading the word, her story from the website her family set up for Jessica's Operation Orange, is below. The family is also doing a lot of great stuff for the other women inside: check out the site if you want to help.

Thank you, Jessica Robinson and folks, for doing what you can to transform this tragic experience into one which prevents harm to others, and helps to heal our communities...
blessings to you all.

---------------------------

Jessica's Story

The day that changed lives…

Monday, September 1st, 2008 was my first day of Radiography School. That summer I was accepted along with only 29 other students into Pima Medical Institutes Radiography program. The first week of the program was your typical introductory week of getting settled in and getting to know each other. That Friday, September 5th, the last day of introductory week we had a potluck and each student was asked to present a poster of our goals and where we wanted our lives to be in 5 years.

Very early that Friday morning, before heading to school, I went to the grocery store to purchase a chocolate cake for the potluck. At the potluck there was so much food and so many colorful posters scattered around the classroom. My poster had my goals of graduating from Radiology school, buying a house, meeting Mr. Right and getting married, having children and traveling. I had no idea that in less than 24 hours my life would be altered forever…

When the potluck ended, my cake was unopened so I decided I would take it and say hello to the ladies at the office I used to work in which was just down the street. I only stayed for a few minutes to say hello and dropped off the cake.

I then went to work at my regular job. On Fridays I only worked until 6:00pm. After work I headed home to get changed and freshen up, I was going to a concert with friends that night! I arrived at the concert venue and met with my friends. The concert was sold out, and I was the only one with a ticket but did not want to go alone, I sold my ticket and we decided to go out for Sushi.

We were finally seated for dinner around 8:30, we had a drink while waiting for a table at the restaurant, and I had a drink with dinner. We sat and chatted for a couple of hours, and at around 10:30 a co-worker called and wanted us to meet at a different restaurant. There was a guy who was with us who does not drink so he drove us to our next meeting place. Once at the other establishment, a friend ordered me a beer. I took one drink of it but decided I would not drink it because I knew I would be driving later that evening.

Around 1:00am our friend drove me back to my vehicle at the Sushi restaurant. I got in my car and headed home. I had been awake for almost 18 hours and was definitely feeling it. Only minutes from reaching home my eyes started to get heavy and for an instant I closed them, taking my eyes off of the road. When I opened them I was approaching a truck right in front of me, I tried to steer around it but it was too late. Glass breaking, tires screeching, my voice screaming, then silence…

Is this a bad dream? It wasn’t... I was there, hanging upside down in my seat, the car had rolled. This was not a dream, this was real, I was alive but someone else was not.

All of the details are not important, but the message of it all is. I went out that evening and I drank and I got behind the wheel of my car and drove. Because of my actions, my careless decision to drink and drive, it cost someone else their life. Not only did it cost someone their life, it robbed someone’s family and friends of their loved one.

We are not invincible; we are not made of steel. If you think you are, you are mistaken. If you think you can drink and drive, don’t ever think that you can or that it is okay. If you DO drink and drive, YOU MIGHT AS WELL SIGN YOUR OWN DEATH CERTIFICATE OR PLEA AGREEMENT TO GO TO PRISON!

I did not physically die on September 6, 2008 but I felt like I did. Due to my actions I faced severe repercussions, not only criminally, but even worse I faced the repercussions emotionally. The mental anguish alone was and always will be a huge obstacle.

Here I am 2 ½ years later, writing this from my prison cell, an 8 by 12 room that I will spend the next 5.8 years in. I was charged with vehicular manslaughter - a class 2 Felony - to which I received a 7 year prison sentence. Not only did I receive a 7 year sentence, but I sentenced myself to a lifetime of grief.

I am not asking you, I am begging you; please do not make the same mistake I made. Please spread the message to everyone you know. DO NOT DRINK AND DRIVE. EVER.

If everyone will help me to spread this message, then what I am in here for will not go for waste.

Please ask yourself the next time you want to order a drink and you are the driver, is it really worth it?

Mission

Our mission is to make people aware of the dangers and consequences of drinking and driving and to help other families who have loved ones that are incarcerated or facing incarceration.

Write to Jessica at:

Jessica L Robinson
ADC # 256178
Unit Lumley 24-D-164
ASPC Perryville
PO Box 3300
Goodyear, AZ 85395

For Questions, comments or help, email us at:
info@jessicasoperationorange.com

Want a Jessica's Operation Orange Bracelet?
Make a donation and we will mail you one! :)
Send your donation to:

Jessica's Operation Orange
PO Box 2103
Higley, AZ 85236

UNSHACKLE US! SB 1184: Rights for pregnant prisoners.

2012-01-31T19:18:00.001-07:00

----------Legislative ALERT From the ACLU of Arizona------------

Every woman deserves safe and humane conditions in which to deliver her child.
And every child deserves safe delivery conditions that don’t risk his or her entry into this world.

But pregnant inmates—and their children—don’t always get those conditions. Pregnant inmates are sometimes shackled at the wrists and/or ankles while they give birth. This practice is extremely dangerous to both mother and baby and can cause major problems during delivery. This practice is almost always unnecessary. This practice has been opposed by the American Medical Association, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Correctional Association, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and the U.S. Marshals Service. This practice has already been banned by a handful of other states.

Tomorrow morning at 9 AM, an Arizona Senate health committee will try to do something about the practice of shackling pregnant inmates. SB 1184 (prohibited restraints; pregnant prisoners) prohibits the use of restraints on pregnant inmates while they are being transported to a medical facility to deliver their baby, during labor and delivery, and during postpartum recovery. The bill is sensible and reasonable, and even includes a safety exception to allow for the limited use of restraints if it is absolutely necessary for the safety of medical and corrections personnel. The bill also has significant bipartisan support. Most importantly, SB 1184 goes a long way to ensuring safe conditions for mother and baby in a population that is all too often overlooked.

Tell Arizona’s legislators that you support the safety and well-being of all children and their mothers. Tell Arizona’s legislators that they can do the same by voting “YES” on SB 1184. There are two ways to do so.

If you have an account with the Legislature's request-to-speak system, log in and register your support. You can reach the log-in page by following this link: http://alistrack.azleg.gov/rts/login.asp

Contact the members of the Senate Public Safety and Human Services Committee and ask them to vote “YES” on SB 1184. Here is the contact information for members of the committee:

Linda Gray (**committee chair and sponsor of the bill**)—email: lgray@azleg.gov; phone: 602-926-3376
Adam Driggs (vice-chair)—email: adriggs@azleg.gov; phone: 602-926-3016
Nancy Barto—email: nbarto@azleg.gov; phone: 602-926-5766
Rich Crandall—email: rcrandall@azleg.gov; phone: 602-926-3020
Leah Landrum Taylor—email: llandrum@azleg.gov; phone: 602-926-3830
Linda Lopez—email: llopez@azleg.gov; phone: 602-926-4089

In liberty,

Anjali Abraham
Public Policy Director

ASPC-Florence Death in Custody: Karot Phothong, 37.

2012-01-31T14:01:00.001-07:00

Condolences to this man's family. Please contact the ACLU of Arizona about your loved one's death; they are filing a class action suit against the state for medical and psychiatric neglect of prisoners. One big concern has been the doubling of the suicide rate under the current administration. Violence has skyrocketed as well.

Feel free to contact me anytime if you wish to organize with other families who have had similar experiences with the Arizona Department of Corrections, or if you wish to share more of Karot's story.

Finally, suicide can be a devastating thing to survive, whatever the circumstances surrounding it. You might want to check out Survivors of Suicide, Tucson for support coping with your loss. For more information about them, contact the executive director, Tyler Woods at 520-861-663.

Take care,

Peggy Plews

(arizonaprisonwatch@gmail.com / 480-580-6807).

Karot Phothong

-----------------------------

ARIZONA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS

1601 W. JEFFERSON

PHOENIX, ARIZONA 85007

(602) 542-3133
www.azcorrections.gov

JANICE K. BREWER, GOVERNOR CHARLES L. RYAN, DIRECTOR

NEWS RELEASE

For more information contact: Bill Lamoreaux
blamorea@azcorrections.gov

January 31, 2012

Inmate Death Notification

Florence, Az. – Inmate Karot Phothong, 37, ADC #98842, was found unresponsive in his housing unit Saturday. He was pronounced dead from a possible suicide after medical responders attempted life saving measures.

Phothong, sentenced out of Pima County, was serving 12 years for aggravated assault. He came to ADC Sept. 9, 2005 and was held at the Central Unit, ASPC-Florence.

The death is under investigation by the department.

-----------------

AZ legs Ash & Gray support new limits to shackling pregnant prisoners.

2012-01-30T23:02:00.000-07:00

It's about time. With two strong Republicans at the helm on this, we might actually see it pass the legislature this year. This shows, by the way, that some things done by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office actually can be reined in by proper legislative oversight - not everyone has to wring their hands and whine about being powerless in the face of the man abusing people. Thanks to Representative Cecil Ash and Senator Linda Gray for being willing to take this on.

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Bill limits shackling of pregnant inmates

by Alia Beard Rau

Jan. 30, 2012

The Arizona Republic | azcentral.com

A bipartisan group of lawmakers hopes Arizona will join 14 other states in limiting how and when jails can shackle pregnant women.

Democrats have tried unsuccessfully to push legislation for the past two years. But this year, the effort may see some success. Republicans are sponsoring bills in both the House and Senate. And for the first time, the issue has been granted a hearing.

The Senate Public Safety and Human Services Committee will hear Senate Bill 1184 Wednesday morning. Sen. Linda Gray, R-Glendale, is both the committee’s chairwoman and the bill’s primary sponsor, giving it a strong chance of passing at least the committee.

Rep. Cecil Ash, R-Mesa, is sponsoring a similar House Bill 2528.

The Senate bill would ban any state or county correctional institution from using restraints on a prisoner or detainee in her final trimester of pregnancy or during labor, delivery and postpartum recovery unless medical staff request the restraints or a corrections officer determines that the situation “presents an extraordinary circumstance” such as being a substantial flight risk. It would ban leg or waist restraints in all circumstances during labor or delivery.

“This practice is not just dangerous to the mother but it’s also dangerous to the baby being born,” ACLU of Arizona Public Policy Director Anjali Abraham said. “If you’ve had a baby or been in the labor room with a woman, you know their biggest priority is having that baby. They are not going to jump off the bed and take off.”

The proposed legislation would most impact county jails. The Arizona Department of Corrections instituted restrictions on shackling women in labor or postpartum recovery in 2003. The Federal Bureau of Prisons restricted it in 2008.

The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office has some concerns with the Senate bill, Deputy Chief Ray Churay said.

“We’re not super opposed to this,” Churay said. “There are just some adjustments we would ask for.”

He said some of the bill’s definitions are too vague. They’d like to see the bill require that a medical professional determine whether a woman is in labor, and they want Gray to clarify the definition of postpartum recovery so it does not ban law enforcement from shackling a woman who must remain in the hospital following her child’s birth for reasons unrelated to the delivery.

Churay said the county already does not routinely use leg or waist restraints on pregnant women. But he said the bill could impact a common practice of using a leg tether to lock the women to their hospital bed during postpartum recovery. He said the tether is long enough to allow a woman to walk to the bathroom and around the room.

“They are in a situation where security is very, very limited,” Churay said of inmates in the hospital. “We’ve never had a complaint about the leg tether from hospital staff or from an inmate. We have to take all precautions, and we believe the tether is necessary.”

The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office is facing a federal lawsuit over the shackling issue. Miriam Mendiola-Martinez filed a lawsuit in December alleging that county employees exhibited deliberate indifference to her medical needs and violated her constitutional rights against cruel and unusual punishment when she was shackled before and after her Caesarean section.

Criminal Damage and Deaths in Custody: Letter to my Sentencing Judge.

2012-01-28T18:43:00.002-07:00

Resistance Alley, Phoenix, AZ

(June 4, 2011)

January 26, 2012

Honorable Gloria G. Ybarra
Phoenix Municipal Court
300 W. Washington St.
Phoenix, AZ 85003

Dear Judge Ybarra,

I sure hope you’re having a good day. This is kind of long.

I appeared in your court this morning prepared for trial, but the charge I contested was dropped so I ended up entering a plea unexpectedly. When you asked if I had anything to say before you entered your sentencing orders, I was kind of at a loss for words. I’m not very experienced at being prosecuted and don’t know what the proper procedure is, but since my thoughts have caught up with me now, in the still of the night, I hope it isn’t too late to enter them into my official court record. My crime was one of civil disobedience, so this action just isn’t finished until my statement for sentencing is in your hands. This is it.

I first began investigating and blogging about Arizona’s state prisons 2 ½ years ago when Marcia Powell died at Perryville Prison. Marcia was a 47 year-old mentally ill sex worker with a long history of drug and prostitution convictions and no family willing to claim her body once she was gone. She got 27 months for offering a cop a $20 blow job, doing much of it on the maximum security yard at Perryville. Marcia was supposed to be on a 10-minute suicide watch when she was left in an uncovered cage, largely ignored, for nearly four hours in the mid-day sun. It was at least 107 degrees that day. By the time someone noticed her unconscious on the ground, Marcia had defecated on herself, her organs were overheated and failing, and she had second degree burns all over her body. She went into a coma and passed away that night after the director of the Arizona Department of Corrections removed her from life support.

"Free Marcia Powell"

Remembering women who have died

from suicide and the violence of neglect

at Perryville state prison in Goodyear, AZ.

(November 18, 2011)

In the wake of Marcia’s death, 16 ADC employees were disciplined, 7 of whom were referred for criminal prosecution. No one ended up being charged, unfortunately; they all got their jobs back, in fact - except for the deputy warden, who was allowed to retire. Conflicting testimony was one reason no one was prosecuted - all the prisoners said the guards ignored Marcia’s pleas for water and relief from the sun; the guards had another story, of course. 10,000 pages of ADC investigative material, and the county attorney couldn’t make a single case out of it to hold anyone responsible - not even on a misdemeanor.

What happened to Marcia affected me deeply; there, but for the grace of God, went I.

I had been a teenage alcoholic and addict, and traded my sex a few times in my life to get high and get by. What I did as a teen to support my habit could have landed me in prison for 20 years - not rightfully so, mind you, but there nonetheless. I’m manic-depressive, as well - I’m just lucky I sobered up young, had good health insurance, and was never criminalized. The places I landed when I got into trouble all had heated bedrooms, not icy cold cells; we were traumatized and ill, not fundamentally bad; we were watched by psychiatric aides, not guards - and they didn’t lock us in cages to “wait us out” through the hours or days when we most wanted to die. I was blessed where Marcia wasn’t - I wasn’t that far from where she ended up though.

CRIPA AZ STATE PRISONS

E. Roosevelt St. Artwalk

(April 2, 2011)

Since then I’ve done extensive research on the violence and neglect in the Arizona Department of Corrections. When I discovered from an analysis of state records that the suicide and homicide rates doubled almost immediately under the current administration - which wasn’t interested in any dialogue about my research or conclusions - I began pushing the ACLU and the Department of Justice hard to intervene. For a long time, my appeals for help were met by silence or answered with form letters. The body count kept growing. I began to draw the names of the dead in murals on the sidewalks of justice - the legislature, courthouses, the police department and jail, and the ADC itself. I put down memorials in chalk all over town, then made postcards out of them and sent them across the country, calling media, lawmakers, activists - anyone I could think of for help. I even engaged the Phoenix police in my quest for assistance - quite often, in fact. None of the prisons I have issue with are in their jurisdiction, but I didn’t think that should stop them. They still could have helped open doors.

By last spring, when I finally painted the names of the dead across my alley, this was all deeply personal to me. Because I write about prison deaths, trying to humanize the prisoners as much as possible, I hear from their families a lot. Daily I’m exposed to the secondary trauma of working with survivors of prison violence; I live with the mother of a prisoner who was murdered by the West Side Crips at ASPC-Lewis two summers ago. Her son, Dana Seawright, was caught by the gang in a relationship with a Mexican prisoner, and by refusing to hurt someone to prove his loyalty to his own race, he died from a double hate crime for being true to himself. So the names I lay down on the earth in my murals are more than just criminals: I have spoken with many of their parents, lovers, teachers, siblings and kids. I know too many of their stories. Each time I add a new name to my list, I am acutely aware that - whatever their crime - it is still someone’s father or son, mother or sister, loved one or friend - someone I will be hearing from soon.

"Please Send Help"

Phoenix Police Parking Lot

(October 1, 2011)

On May 10, a meeting was held of the Maricopa County Commission of Justice System Intervention for the Seriously Mentally Ill. My analysis of suicides and homicides in the state prisons as of that date revealed that not only had they doubled under the current administration, but that prisoners with serious mental illness were at particularly high risk of being victims of both. I went to the meeting to tell them this, first stopping outside to chalk a memorial for them. The meeting was being held at the Old County Courthouse on W. Washington St.

I should note here that I’ve been exercising my free speech rights all over the sidewalks of Phoenix for a little over 2 years now; it rinses right off with the occasional desert rain. It took the Phoenix Police and County Attorney’s Office awhile to decide that my chalk alone didn’t warrant arrest or prosecution for criminal damage; bank security guards around town took a little longer to catch on. So I wasn’t too surprised when - not long into my project that morning - a deputy came running out of the courthouse waving his radio in the air and yelling “you can’t do that here!”

Old County Courthouse, Phoenix.

(May 10, 2011)

Before I knew it, he took his foot and rubbed out the name of a young mentally impaired boy who had killed himself just a week after arriving in adult prison. Within minutes I was surrounded by deputies and daring them to take me to jail for trespassing, furious about what I considered to be desecration. Honestly, it was at that moment that I decided the next time I put that kid’s name down on the ground, no one was going to be able to smudge it out. The deputies backed down after the presiding judge for the day told them to leave me be. They washed all the names away as soon as I went inside.

And so, a week or two later, I began to paint my back alley - first with a memorial spanning about 20 feet. Then, inspired by the graffiti of resistance around me (we have enlightened vandals in our neighborhood), I figured that if I was going to go to jail for criminal damage, I might as well do it right. I spent that next week decorating my alley and getting it ready for a small demo at June Artwalk, when I invited the Graffiti Detectives to arrest me. I even decked it out with anarchy symbols. I figured if I did enough damage I’d be charged with a felony, and could then take my case to Maricopa County’s Superior Court. There I planned to use my prosecution to confront the judiciary about packing all these people into prisons without taking any responsibility for assuring that there’s ample mechanisms for protecting their rights and lives behind bars. I wanted them to call for a judicial investigation into the homicides, suicides, and medical neglect in the state prisons. Seriously.

"Resistance Alley: SOS"

Phoenix, AZ

Artwalk

(June 4, 2011)

I don’t know why I thought my plan might work, or why I was willing to risk felony charges and state custody to try to get the courts more involved; it was kind of extreme. I think it had something to do with finding out at the time that my mother’s brain cancer was terminal, and feeling powerless to fight it - one friend observed that I picked fights with as many cops as I could around then. My mom’s illness aside, though, I felt like I was rushing another gunshot victim to the ER, day after day, and instead of escorting me there or summoning an ambulance, every time the police stopped me they just chided me for property damage - I wasn‘t finding that very helpful, and often told them so. Anyway, I actually wrote to the Superior Court - and chalked their walk a few times - and I don’t think they’re doing a thing.

I clearly wasn’t thinking things out too well when I planned to turn to criminal mischief in order to enlist their assistance - I was kind of manic last spring from not sleeping enough after Mom got sick. By mid-May I wasn’t all that organized or realistic about my strategies for instigating social change. I was just simmering with rage at the Department of Corrections, arguably the most heavily-fortified institution in Arizona, and easily the most well-funded. Director Chuck Ryan has a billion dollars at his disposal to fight me with - not to mention all the courts, cops, guns, laws and lawmakers in the state on his side - and I was out of ideas for soliciting help. I was utterly powerless to do anything myself, yet felt completely responsible for each new life lost that didn‘t have to be. For the death rates from suicide and homicide alone to normalize again, at least one in every two would have to be prevented. Among many in the mental health field, suicide is 100% preventable - that, at least, should be our goal.

Artwalk, Phoenix

(June 4, 2011)

I didn’t really care at the time about the possible consequences to my life of committing a felony or two; I also didn’t think my neighbors would mind much what I was doing. When I wasn’t grieving, I was just plain mad. “The City” could go to hell as far as I was concerned. The potential that my outdoor décor would cause anyone harm - beyond, perhaps, a little consternation - seemed pretty minimal next to the crimes of the evil empire I was deploying my artistry against. It still does, I have to say…though I guess that sounds a lot like I’m simply minimizing and justifying my own criminal conduct. That much I stand guilty of as well, then.

This may not be the wisest thing for me to say, since I still have to answer to you on this matter, but I’d still paint the town tomorrow if the circumstances seemed to call for it. I am, for the most part, an anarchist at heart, and want to see the art of resistance flourish all over the place. Phoenix is feeding a good number of people to the prisons and jails every day, and nothing about how the city has responded to this crisis has changed since I started. Not that I plan to repeat this action - I just don’t want to end up in Chuck’s custody myself. That would make what I do a whole lot harder.

Anyway, following my Artwalk demonstration, the Graffiti Detectives tried to accommodate my desire to get into Superior Court by folding all my charges into a single felony. I really appreciated that at the time, and told them as much. I think Bill Montgomery either didn’t want to be part of my theater, though, or he just knew I was a little compromised by certain stressors (I was actually sending him postcards of my graffiti trying to provoke him into prosecuting me sooner rather than later…). Or maybe I’m giving him too much credit for caring one way or the other, and his people just thought I’d be a nuisance to deal with so they dumped me on your court instead. I’ve picked on him and his prosecutors in my blogs before, though - I would have thought they’d love to get their hands on me. That speaks well of their professionalism, I suppose.

Anarchy: No Justice/ No Peace

Resistance Alley Artwalk

just to be provocative

(June 4, 2011)

In any case, I’m grateful not to be facing prison for even a day or the brand of “felon” for the rest of my life. Sgt. Kaddatz and Detective Rowe could have actually lodged more complaints against me than they did because I vandalized my alley again later that month, impatient for them to file the first set of charges so I could take my fight to court. I’ve chilled out since then, by the way. I still chalk sidewalks - I just stay away from painting them. The Graffiti Detectives showed a lot of restraint, I thought - especially considering how hard a time I gave them when they didn’t arrest me. I didn’t think my intersecting privileges should exempt me from what any young Latino male might go through in my shoes, so I got a little provocative and baited them a few times. I’m kind of grateful to be a well-educated middle-class white woman today, though, because if I was anyone else I would have probably been tasered or shot by now.

"Prisoners Dying: SOS"

The Phoenix Center

(April 23, 2011)

I’ve come down a lot since then, of course - otherwise you would have been seeing me in court in pink socks and stripes. I got really depressed after my Mom died this summer, and my financial situation deteriorated so my energy has gone increasingly into basic survival. My court proceedings this fall and winter have been tedious and anti-climactic, to say the least - I haven’t had the kind of manic drive to orchestrate what I initially envisioned I‘d be doing with all this. One of the problems with my bi-polar disorder is that the fallout from my grandiosity and expansiveness usually catches up to me just as I’m crashing the hardest and am the least able to explain myself - I get way in over my head, and can‘t account for how I got there. I actually haven’t had much to say of late, believe it or not.

"Demolish the Prisons"

ACLU-AZ, Phoenix

(April 26, 2011)

Since my protest in June, the ACLU and the Prison Law Office have at least decided to file suit against the AZ Department of Corrections over the medical and psychiatric neglect of their prisoners, the abuse of solitary confinement, and the skyrocketing suicide rates under Chuck Ryan. I think my research and imprisoned correspondents were more influential in helping them take that step than all my protests and postcards were - but the fact that there’s an emerging and impassioned prisoner rights movement here must have helped convince them that Arizona isn’t a lost cause. That’s part of what I do with my blogs: I bear witness, and try to make this struggle - and the people we’ve relegated to the darkness - more visible.

MLK Day Memorial

Margaret T. Hance Park, Phoenix

(January 16, 2011)

Both before and after my June Artwalk action, I tried to get the Phoenix Police to prompt my guy at the DOJ more about investigating the prison homicides, to no avail. The Capitol Police aren’t any help, either. I have to hand off the high assault and homicide rates to someone before I can let myself retire from all this, and I just don’t know yet if the DOJ is going to agree to CRIPA Arizona over the rampant prison violence. The state prosecutor association’s recent attempt to blame it all on an inherently more violent inmate population is a distortion of data, at best - it’s more propaganda crafted to justify locking increasing numbers of people away. ADC statistics actually show a decrease, not an increase, in the number of violent offenders committed to their custody in the past two years.

I’m afraid the problem behind the escalating violence in Arizona’s prisons lies in the institutional culture that‘s been cultivated there, and how the ADC does business these days - not in who their customers are. Their policies and programs (or lack thereof), and their fees and penalties all reflect more than indifference - there’s a deep and pervasive contempt for prisoners and their families under this regime. Chuck Ryan himself is a bully, encouraging subordinates to behave the same way towards their staff and prisoners alike. He actually had a mentally ill Supermax prisoner prosecuted for arson who tried to kill himself by setting himself on fire after begging for a year to get out of solitary. The court added a year and a half onto his existing 10-year sentence, and even ordered that the guy pay the state restitution for his medical care in the amount of $1.8 million. He was prosecuted while chained to a bed and recovering from burns over 80% of his body.

Who will represent the dead?

Arizona State Legislature, Phoenix

(February 22, 2011)

Anyway, I still have some work to do on the prisons, but will refrain from engaging in acts of civil disobedience that may have a negative impact on my neighbors or community. As for the taxpayer dollars involved in policing and prosecuting me - really, I think the money would have been much better spent by the city getting someone to investigate the state prisons like I asked them to in the first place. The Phoenix Police could have at least contacted DPS or the DOJ to express their concern about the homeless mentally ill people they’re helping send off to prison - where they’re being assaulted, castrated and killed - so it’s not just my voice falling on deaf ears about all this (there are a lot of us clamoring out here these days, actually). A phone call requesting that the proper law enforcement agency conduct an investigation is all I’ve asked them to make. Instead, today there’s a few more lawsuits against the ADC, a few more names for my murals, and a few more families grieving their dead than there were when I demonstrated in June. I’m just a civilian needing law enforcement assistance or the persuasive power of an informed judiciary - why is that so hard to get here?

I’m not too happy with either the courts or the cops in this state, frankly. A whole squad of detectives turned out to protect the pavement and dumpsters from my paintbrush at Artwalk in June, yet none of them will try to help me stop this death toll from climbing. If I presented evidence identifying suspects in an unsolved homicide in Buckeye or Tucson proper - or non-law enforcement corruption at the state level - they would have facilitated interagency communication about it without hesitation. Prisoners draw silence and blank stares, though. A well-placed phone call six months ago could have saved lives - still can, really. Here we are, though, half a year later, and instead of nailing the folks with the guns and badges and power who are doing real criminal damage to people‘s lives, the city is still prosecuting me and ignoring the evidence that I‘ve compiled against far more guilty parties.

What is wrong with this place?

"Criminal Damage"

Resistance Alley, Phoenix

(June 10, 2011)

The answer to that, I think, has to do with the fundamental disregard we have for human life in Arizona - except to the extent to which a living, breathing being means somebody’s profit. That’s a bigger issue, of course, requiring an organic solution like revolution. There’s nothing the DOJ or ACLU combined can do about a terrified, self-interested, ignorant electorate like ours. Look at how our laws reinforce dehumanization of certain populations, too - it’s pervasive. It’s “criminal damage” to impede access to water for livestock in Arizona, and yet you can be prosecuted for littering if you try to assure access to water in the desert for human beings…specifically, for migrants. Brown-skinned ones. That’s pretty twisted.

So is the state constitution. We need to amend the Victim’s Bill of Rights to include prisoners in the definition of “victim,” or we’ll never get justice for victims of police and prison violence, neglect and abuse. Persons “in custody for an offense” are exquisitely vulnerable to trauma and victimization, and will continue to be so as long as we diminish their rights that way. They and their survivors (in cases resulting in death) are the only class of people excluded from the rights afforded all other crime victims. That’s only because the perpetrators in those cases are most likely cops, not because one becomes suddenly less deserving of life or safety once taken into state custody. I can’t believe that most Arizonans - if they knew about Shannon Palmer, Tony Lester, Marcia Powell, Brenda Todd, Susan Lopez, Duron Cunningham, and Dana Seawright, to name a few - would continue to deny prisoners and their loved ones the same rights they would preserve for themselves and their children. Maybe that’s the next place I’ll go with my murals - a public education campaign of a slightly different kind.

Well, I guess that’s my statement, for better or worse - the one I would have read at sentencing if I saw it coming today. Sorry it’s so long. I hope it’s not too late to enter it into my court record. It’s also going up on my blogs. It’s just intended to be explanatory, not to excuse me in any way. I was ready to take full responsibility for everything I did - I really was prepared to go to prison if I needed to, in order to advance my cause. Thank God (and the County Attorney‘s Office, of course) that I didn’t.

In any case, I didn’t mean to wait until after you sentenced me to articulate why I did what I did, and what I am and am not remorseful for (yes, my neighbor's wall, no, the alley and dumpster - I made great improvements to the scene). Maybe that’s not very fair of me; I think you’re supposed to get the last word in. Hopefully it wouldn‘t have made you any less inclined to cut me loose with only restitution and community service. You can always take it out of me the next time, though - I’ll be back again with the Occupiers soon. I was arrested filming the police at their Hance Park protest this fall…

Abolish the Phoenix Camping Ordinance!

Margaret T. Hance Park, Phoenix

(October 15, 2011)

I guess there’s one more thing I need to say, actually - whether or not it gets me into trouble. Please try not to send any more mentally ill people like me and my brother to Joe’s jail. He’s killing us in there, too, you know - some violently, like Marty Atencio, and some quietly - like those who cycle in and out of there for years dying inside, unnoticed. We aren’t “safer” or getting “cared for” in there as opposed to being on the streets, for the most part. Rather, behind bars we are in constant danger of violence, trauma and despair.

I don’t know why there isn’t anything the judiciary can do about guys like Arpaio and Ryan, since you entrust us so confidently to their custody. Once you get our fingerprint and designate us as property of the state, it seems you’re pretty much done with us, too. Surely if you can order cops into our private homes to enforce drug laws, you can send them into our public jails and prisons to enforce important laws that protect vulnerable persons from neglect and abuse, and promote the civil rights of all. It would seem to be your legal duty, in fact, to make sure that the places you lock us away in for our punishment - or our protection - aren’t routinely violating our rights to health, safety, sanity, and life, and that when you do learn of such things, you have them investigated further, or you dig into it yourself. We deserve to be treated with some humanity, whatever our crime.

Sadly, I heard a Municipal Court judge this week say she couldn‘t order or otherwise compel the jail to give a mentally ill prisoner his meds, even though his attorney said he was decompensating rapidly without them. That’s deeply troubling. She can’t convince or coerce the jail to give him essential medical care, but she’s empowered to imprison him for the next nine months on a Rule 11 getting restored to the level of competency that the MCSO destroyed. He would be punished if he was non-compliant with treatment in there, but the jail staff get off hurting him scott free. That’s stealing a piece of a man’s life from him because he’s ill, not because he’s a criminal. He hadn’t even been sentenced. How does that resemble justice? If that judge can’t have a clerk call Magellan or Correctional Health Services and get that guy his injection before he gets sicker, then she should at least have ordered someone to make a civil rights complaint on his behalf - not just leave him to unravel in jail between hearings like that. That’s real criminal damage.

"The Trial of Officer Kevin Gerster"

Maricopa County Central Courthouse, Phoenix

(March 11, 2011)

Having one’s “hands tied” by the politics of dealing with an incompetent but popular elected sheriff - or the governor’s appointed chief disciplinarian, for that matter - doesn’t keep them free of the blood of prisoners when one knows specifically who is suffering, how, where, and what could be done to alleviate it. Even I accept that responsibility when a plea for help arrives in my post office box, and I have no power to exert but that which I create myself - in fact, I‘m just another convicted criminal now. I’m not the one putting all these people in jail and prison, either. I think the feigned helplessness of people who could intervene meaningfully if they tried is an excuse for laziness or cowardice. It also explains why we have to beg the feds to investigate every law enforcement agency, detention center, and penal institution in this state in the first place - our own people won't do the job when it's clearly called for.

So, that’s basically what my crime - this particular crime of expression, anyway - was all about. While I take responsibility for making amends where I offended and restitution where I harmed, I don’t think I’m the one who needs to be rehabilitated here. Please share my concerns with your colleagues and ask them to be more pro-active in the future when it comes to the well-being of the vulnerable people they order confined in the custody of those who have already shown they will neglect, torment and kill us with startling frequency.

"Please stop killing your prisoners"

Arizona Department of Corrections:

Central Office, Phoenix

(November 22, 2011)

Thank you for your time and patience with me. I wouldn’t have been so candid with most judges, I don’t think, so I sure hope you’re as cool as you seem to be; I mean no disrespect. If anything, take it as a sign that I trust you to be able to handle it, which is saying a lot for someone with your kind of power.

Take care,

Peggy Plews
Prison Abolitionist

Abandoned Tent City Guard Tower

Maricopa County Jail, Phoenix

(April 4, 2011)

Perryville Prison Deaths in Custody: Forrest Day, 19.

2012-01-28T08:23:00.000-07:00

Forrest Day, at 16.

UPDATED 9/31/12:

At the age of 16, despite being too young to be trusted to drink, drive, smoke, vote, or even get away with skipping school, Forrest Day was prosecuted as an adult for the death of her 8 month old baby. As recounted in the article below, she put her son in the bathtub then got distracted elsewhere in the house by writing poetry - behavior characteristic of a child. It's not even as if she went out partying and left him home alone, beat or shook him, or even filled up the tub.

It doesn't appear that Forrest was even accused of intending to hurt her child. You don't have to will a person harm in order to be charged with negligent homicide, of course, though I suspect they hit her so hard to begin with in order to coerce her into a plea deal on the felony child abuse charge - which I also think was a stretch in this circumstance.

This case may not be entirely a matter of Andrew Thomas' office overreaching again, though. It looks like the state law requires prosecutors to file charges in adult court when certain felonies and violent crimes are involved - when that happens, though, it appears as if that court then has discretion over where the case is heard.

In any event, Forrest's prosecutor was Suzanne E. Cohen. Her office with the Maricopa County Attorney is at: 301 W. Jefferson St., Phoenix, AZ 85003. She's just applied to be nominated as a judge, so this would be a good time to write to her about her take on charging children like Forrest as adults (according to the DOJ's research, it doesn't reduce juvenile crime). Cohen just helped prosecute the Baseline Killer and got a few death sentences, so there's a good chance she could end up on the Superior Court bench in the next couple of years.

Forrest was sentenced to probation, and then to prison, by Michael Kemp, a judge from Juvenile Court. I can't tell from the records who actually made the decision to let the state prosecute her as an adult, though. If you have questions about why he did what he did and what he thinks about charging children like her as adults - kids with no criminal record or intent - direct them to him. He can be reached at:

Northwest Regional Center (NW)

14264 W. Tierra Buena Lane
Surprise, AZ. 85374

(602) 372-9400

Within less than 6 months of being charged, facing decades in prison if convicted on both counts, Forrest pled guilty to class 3 felony child abuse. Here's the news article on her plea. In return, the state dropped the homicide charges and she was sentenced to 7 years of probation; upon entering her plea she was sent home with her parents and essentially ordered, ironically, to resume the life of a "normal" teenager.

For those of you who have never been on probation or parole, it's not as easy as you may think to abide by. Forrest violated hers within a year, just before her 18th birthday. I don't know what she did to get into trouble with the court - she apparently wasn't charged with a new crime. She did get pregnant again, though, and wanted to keep her unborn daughter - forbidden by the judge. She was only allowed to see her at the hospital once she was born.

Forrest was committed to the custody of the AZ Department of Corrections on November 10, 2010, soon after having her second child. For breaking her probation, Kemp gave her 3 1/2 years in state prison on the original child abuse conviction. For neglecting her child at the age of 16, the rest of us condemned her to live - and die - with the guilt and stigma of killing her son as if she had intended to. We just can't seem to dole out enough punishment in Arizona to satisfy the electorate here, and it looks like we're letting the legislature get away with refusing to address sentencing reform again this session, so we do share some responsibility here...

Sadly, Forrest committed suicide on January 27, 2012 at Perryville Prison on the maximum security yard, Lumley. She was only 19 years old. Hers was one of three prison suicides last week, in fact; she was the youngest. Our condolences go out to Forrest's parents and other loved ones. I can't think of anything more devastating than surviving the loss of one's child.

This weekend a friend of Forrest's family left a comment at the bottom of another post, speaking to the beautiful soul she knew her to be, that is better placed here:

-------------from Arizona Prison Watch--------------

Tina Schwindt has left a new comment on your post "Criminal Damage and Deaths in Custody: Letter to t...":

"I am a close personal friend of the Day family and I want to thank you for trying to bring this tragedy to the people's attention. Forrest wasn't a bad person, she had a lapse in judgement, just like millions of other 16 year old kids do every day. She was funny, kind, loving, artistic and so much more. I believe that the state wanted to use her as an example to other young mothers and it backfired horribly. This young girl never should have been put behind bars in an adult prison with the women who actually committed murder freely and willingly. She did not take her babies life intentionally, it was just a horrible accident.

Accidents happen every day to a multitude of people, for instance the mother whose 2 year old baby got out of the house 4 years ago and tumble onto Thomas road and was hit and killed by a car. The mother had several children and didn't notice the baby gone until it was too late, but she never got charged for any crime.

I want people everywhere to know that Forrest was an amazing young woman who wanted to go to culinary school to make her life better, but she will never get that opportunity now. I also wanted to say that Forrest gave birth to a beautiful baby girl right before she was incarcerated and the baby is the spitting image of her mommy. The family has custody of the baby, and I can only imagine that they feel very blessed by this wonder born from tragedy. Thank you so much for letting me speak my mind. You are doing a wonderful thing here!"

----------from the Arizona Republic archives (2009)--------

Police: Teen mom was writing poem when baby drowned

Jackee Coe

May. 6, 2009

The Arizona Republic

A 16-year-old Avondale girl facing felony child abuse and negligent homicide charges was distracted by writing poetry while her 8-month-old son drowned in the bathtub, according to a police report.

Forrest Day, pleaded not guilty at her arraignment Wednesday, following her indictment on April 23. Day will be tried as an adult and is due back in court June 18.

Day's son, Elijah James Day, drowned about 3:30 p.m. Feb. 21 after she set him down in the bathtub, turned the water on with the drain unplugged and left the room, according to the Avondale police report.

Day told investigators she was looking for a towel but got sidetracked with poems she was writing, the report states. After checking on Elijah after about five minutes, she said she went into her bedroom, saw her poetry book and started reading some old poems. She said she was gone for about 20 minutes this time.

Day said she went from her room to the living room, to her sister's room, and then outside on the back porch trying to find a quiet place to write. She eventually went into her parents' bedroom and closed the door behind her, according to police documents.

Day's 9-year-old brother and his friend were playing video games in the living room when the friend heard the water running in the bathroom and told her brother. Her brother went to the bathroom and found Elijah floating face down in the water.

He pulled him out of the water and yelled for his sister, the report says. Day tried CPR but when it didn't work, she took him across the street to a neighbor's house. The neighbor called police and administered CPR until police arrived.

Elijah was unresponsive to attempts to revive him, according to the report. He was airlifted to St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, where he was pronounced dead at 4:36 p.m.

Day was "hysterical and crying," the report states. She told police she gave Elijah a bath almost daily but this was the first time she left him alone in the bathtub.

She faces one count of Class 2 felony child abuse, a dangerous crime against children; and one count of negligent homicide, a Class 4 felony.

New Yorker: Gopnick and the Caging of America

2012-01-27T14:12:00.000-07:00

Excellent piece on the problems of mass incarceration in our country. Thank you, New Yorker.

--------------

The Caging of America

Why do we lock up so many people?

by Adam Gopnik

The New Yorker

January 30, 2012

A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.

That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.)

Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.

How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? There’s a fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history and sociology of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the American zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century, apportioning blame in two directions. There’s an essentially Northern explanation, focussing on the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and its “reformist” tradition; and a Southern explanation, which sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued by other means. Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern revisionist tract “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” traces two ancestral lines, “from the North, the birthplace of rehabilitative penology, to the South, the fountainhead of subjugationist discipline.” In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.

William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School who died shortly before his masterwork, “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice,” was published, last fall, is the most forceful advocate for the view that the scandal of our prisons derives from the Enlightenment-era, “procedural” nature of American justice. He runs through the immediate causes of the incarceration epidemic: the growth of post-Rockefeller drug laws, which punished minor drug offenses with major prison time; “zero tolerance” policing, which added to the group; mandatory-sentencing laws, which prevented judges from exercising judgment. But his search for the ultimate cause leads deeper, all the way to the Bill of Rights. In a society where Constitution worship is still a requisite on right and left alike, Stuntz startlingly suggests that the Bill of Rights is a terrible document with which to start a justice system—much inferior to the exactly contemporary French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which Jefferson, he points out, may have helped shape while his protégé Madison was writing ours.

The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles. The Declaration of the Rights of Man says, Be just! The Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead of announcing general principles—no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done—it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice. You can get off if the cops looked in the wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your joint, but you have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life. You may be spared the death penalty if you can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren’t guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong. Even clauses that Americans are taught to revere are, Stuntz maintains, unworthy of reverence: the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” was designed to protect cruel punishments—flogging and branding—that were not at that time unusual.

The obsession with due process and the cult of brutal prisons, the argument goes, share an essential impersonality. The more professionalized and procedural a system is, the more insulated we become from its real effects on real people. That’s why America is famous both for its process-driven judicial system (“The bastard got off on a technicality,” the cop-show detective fumes) and for the harshness and inhumanity of its prisons. Though all industrialized societies started sending more people to prison and fewer to the gallows in the eighteenth century, it was in Enlightenment-inspired America that the taste for long-term, profoundly depersonalized punishment became most aggravated. The inhumanity of American prisons was as much a theme for Dickens, visiting America in 1842, as the cynicism of American lawyers. His shock when he saw the Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia—a “model” prison, at the time the most expensive public building ever constructed in the country, where every prisoner was kept in silent, separate confinement—still resonates:

I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

Not roused up to stay—that was the point. Once the procedure ends, the penalty begins, and, as long as the cruelty is routine, our civil responsibility toward the punished is over. We lock men up and forget about their existence. For Dickens, even the corrupt but communal debtors’ prisons of old London were better than this. “Don’t take it personally!”—that remains the slogan above the gate to the American prison Inferno. Nor is this merely a historian’s vision. Conrad Black, at the high end, has a scary and persuasive picture of how his counsel, the judge, and the prosecutors all merrily congratulated each other on their combined professional excellence just before sending him off to the hoosegow for several years. If a millionaire feels that way, imagine how the ordinary culprit must feel.

In place of abstraction, Stuntz argues for the saving grace of humane discretion. Basically, he thinks, we should go into court with an understanding of what a crime is and what justice is like, and then let common sense and compassion and specific circumstance take over. There’s a lovely scene in “The Castle,” the Australian movie about a family fighting eminent-domain eviction, where its hapless lawyer, asked in court to point to the specific part of the Australian constitution that the eviction violates, says desperately, “It’s . . . just the vibe of the thing.” For Stuntz, justice ought to be just the vibe of the thing—not one procedural error caught or one fact worked around. The criminal law should once again be more like the common law, with judges and juries not merely finding fact but making law on the basis of universal principles of fairness, circumstance, and seriousness, and crafting penalties to the exigencies of the crime.

The other argument—the Southern argument—is that this story puts too bright a face on the truth. The reality of American prisons, this argument runs, has nothing to do with the knots of procedural justice or the perversions of Enlightenment-era ideals. Prisons today operate less in the rehabilitative mode of the Northern reformers “than in a retributive mode that has long been practiced and promoted in the South,” Perkinson, an American-studies professor, writes. “American prisons trace their lineage not only back to Pennsylvania penitentiaries but to Texas slave plantations.” White supremacy is the real principle, this thesis holds, and racial domination the real end. In response to the apparent triumphs of the sixties, mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow. Blacks are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites. “The system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage,” the legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes. Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of “formal control” (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for life to a system of “invisible control.” Prevented from voting, legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back through the prison system. The system, in this view, is not really broken; it is doing what it was designed to do. Alexander’s grim conclusion: “If mass incarceration is considered as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.”

Northern impersonality and Southern revenge converge on a common American theme: a growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible. No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:

Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.

Brecht could hardly have imagined such a document: a capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.

Yet a spectre haunts all these accounts, North and South, whether process gone mad or penal colony writ large. It is that the epidemic of imprisonment seems to track the dramatic decline in crime over the same period. The more bad guys there are in prison, it appears, the less crime there has been in the streets. The real background to the prison boom, which shows up only sporadically in the prison literature, is the crime wave that preceded and overlapped it.

For those too young to recall the big-city crime wave of the sixties and seventies, it may seem like mere bogeyman history. For those whose entire childhood and adolescence were set against it, it is the crucial trauma in recent American life and explains much else that happened in the same period. It was the condition of the Upper West Side of Manhattan under liberal rule, far more than what had happened to Eastern Europe under socialism, that made neo-con polemics look persuasive. There really was, as Stuntz himself says, a liberal consensus on crime (“Wherever the line is between a merciful justice system and one that abandons all serious effort at crime control, the nation had crossed it”), and it really did have bad effects.
Yet if, in 1980, someone had predicted that by 2012 New York City would have a crime rate so low that violent crime would have largely disappeared as a subject of conversation, he would have seemed not so much hopeful as crazy. Thirty years ago, crime was supposed to be a permanent feature of the city, produced by an alienated underclass of super-predators; now it isn’t. Something good happened to change it, and you might have supposed that the change would be an opportunity for celebration and optimism. Instead, we mostly content ourselves with grudging and sardonic references to the silly side of gentrification, along with a few all-purpose explanations, like broken-window policing. This is a general human truth: things that work interest us less than things that don’t.

So what is the relation between mass incarceration and the decrease in crime? Certainly, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, many experts became persuaded that there was no way to make bad people better; all you could do was warehouse them, for longer or shorter periods. The best research seemed to show, depressingly, that nothing works—that rehabilitation was a ruse. Then, in 1983, inmates at the maximum-security federal prison in Marion, Illinois, murdered two guards. Inmates had been (very occasionally) killing guards for a long time, but the timing of the murders, and the fact that they took place in a climate already prepared to believe that even ordinary humanity was wasted on the criminal classes, meant that the entire prison was put on permanent lockdown. A century and a half after absolute solitary first appeared in American prisons, it was reintroduced. Those terrible numbers began to grow.

And then, a decade later, crime started falling: across the country by a standard measure of about forty per cent; in New York City by as much as eighty per cent. By 2010, the crime rate in New York had seen its greatest decline since the Second World War; in 2002, there were fewer murders in Manhattan than there had been in any year since 1900. In social science, a cause sought is usually a muddle found; in life as we experience it, a crisis resolved is causality established. If a pill cures a headache, we do not ask too often if the headache might have gone away by itself.

All this ought to make the publication of Franklin E. Zimring’s new book, “The City That Became Safe,” a very big event. Zimring, a criminologist at Berkeley Law, has spent years crunching the numbers of what happened in New York in the context of what happened in the rest of America. One thing he teaches us is how little we know. The forty per cent drop across the continent—indeed, there was a decline throughout the Western world— took place for reasons that are as mysterious in suburban Ottawa as they are in the South Bronx. Zimring shows that the usual explanations—including demographic shifts—simply can’t account for what must be accounted for. This makes the international decline look slightly eerie: blackbirds drop from the sky, plagues slacken and end, and there seems no absolute reason that societies leap from one state to another over time. Trends and fashions and fads and pure contingencies happen in other parts of our social existence; it may be that there are fashions and cycles in criminal behavior, too, for reasons that are just as arbitrary.

But the additional forty per cent drop in crime that seems peculiar to New York finally succumbs to Zimring’s analysis. The change didn’t come from resolving the deep pathologies that the right fixated on—from jailing super predators, driving down the number of unwed mothers, altering welfare culture. Nor were there cures for the underlying causes pointed to by the left: injustice, discrimination, poverty. Nor were there any “Presto!” effects arising from secret patterns of increased abortions or the like. The city didn’t get much richer; it didn’t get much poorer. There was no significant change in the ethnic makeup or the average wealth or educational levels of New Yorkers as violent crime more or less vanished. “Broken windows” or “turnstile jumping” policing, that is, cracking down on small visible offenses in order to create an atmosphere that refused to license crime, seems to have had a negligible effect; there was, Zimring writes, a great difference between the slogans and the substance of the time. (Arrests for “visible” nonviolent crime—e.g., street prostitution and public gambling—mostly went down through the period.)

Instead, small acts of social engineering, designed simply to stop crimes from happening, helped stop crime. In the nineties, the N.Y.P.D. began to control crime not by fighting minor crimes in safe places but by putting lots of cops in places where lots of crimes happened—“hot-spot policing.” The cops also began an aggressive, controversial program of “stop and frisk”—“designed to catch the sharks, not the dolphins,” as Jack Maple, one of its originators, described it—that involved what’s called pejoratively “profiling.” This was not so much racial, since in any given neighborhood all the suspects were likely to be of the same race or color, as social, involving the thousand small clues that policemen recognized already. Minority communities, Zimring emphasizes, paid a disproportionate price in kids stopped and frisked, and detained, but they also earned a disproportionate gain in crime reduced. “The poor pay more and get more” is Zimring’s way of putting it. He believes that a “light” program of stop-and-frisk could be less alienating and just as effective, and that by bringing down urban crime stop-and-frisk had the net effect of greatly reducing the number of poor minority kids in prison for long stretches.

Zimring insists, plausibly, that he is offering a radical and optimistic rewriting of theories of what crime is and where criminals are, not least because it disconnects crime and minorities. “In 1961, twenty six percent of New York City’s population was minority African American or Hispanic. Now, half of New York’s population is—and what that does in an enormously hopeful way is to destroy the rude assumptions of supply side criminology,” he says. By “supply side criminology,” he means the conservative theory of crime that claimed that social circumstances produced a certain net amount of crime waiting to be expressed; if you stopped it here, it broke out there. The only way to stop crime was to lock up all the potential criminals. In truth, criminal activity seems like most other human choices—a question of contingent occasions and opportunity. Crime is not the consequence of a set number of criminals; criminals are the consequence of a set number of opportunities to commit crimes. Close down the open drug market in Washington Square, and it does not automatically migrate to Tompkins Square Park. It just stops, or the dealers go indoors, where dealing goes on but violent crime does not.

And, in a virtuous cycle, the decreased prevalence of crime fuels a decrease in the prevalence of crime. When your friends are no longer doing street robberies, you’re less likely to do them. Zimring said, in a recent interview, “Remember, nobody ever made a living mugging. There’s no minimum wage in violent crime.” In a sense, he argues, it’s recreational, part of a life style: “Crime is a routine behavior; it’s a thing people do when they get used to doing it.” And therein lies its essential fragility. Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.” Conservatives don’t like this view because it shows that being tough doesn’t help; liberals don’t like it because apparently being nice doesn’t help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.

One fact stands out. While the rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. “New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,” Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison. The logic is self-evident if we just transfer it to the realm of white-collar crime: we easily accept that there is no net sum of white-collar crime waiting to happen, no inscrutable generation of super-predators produced by Dewar’s-guzzling dads and scaly M.B.A. profs; if you stop an embezzlement scheme here on Third Avenue, another doesn’t naturally start in the next office building. White-collar crime happens through an intersection of pathology and opportunity; getting the S.E.C. busy ending the opportunity is a good way to limit the range of the pathology.

Social trends deeper and less visible to us may appear as future historians analyze what went on. Something other than policing may explain things—just as the coming of cheap credit cards and state lotteries probably did as much to weaken the Mafia’s Five Families in New York, who had depended on loan sharking and numbers running, as the F.B.I. could. It is at least possible, for instance, that the coming of the mobile phone helped drive drug dealing indoors, in ways that helped drive down crime. It may be that the real value of hot spot and stop-and-frisk was that it provided a single game plan that the police believed in; as military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it’s a good plan. But one thing is sure: social epidemics, of crime or of punishment, can be cured more quickly than we might hope with simpler and more superficial mechanisms than we imagine. Throwing a Band-Aid over a bad wound is actually a decent strategy, if the Band-Aid helps the wound to heal itself.

Which leads, further, to one piece of radical common sense: since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime. Neither the streets nor the society is made safer by having marijuana users or peddlers locked up, let alone with the horrific sentences now dispensed so easily. For that matter, no social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two. Would we actually have more fraud and looting of shareholder value if the perpetrators knew that they would lose their bank accounts and their reputation, and have to do community service seven days a week for five years? It seems likely that anyone for whom those sanctions aren’t sufficient is someone for whom no sanctions are ever going to be sufficient. Zimring’s research shows clearly that, if crime drops on the street, criminals coming out of prison stop committing crimes. What matters is the incidence of crime in the world, and the continuity of a culture of crime, not some “lesson learned” in prison.

At the same time, the ugly side of stop-and-frisk can be alleviated. To catch sharks and not dolphins, Zimring’s work suggests, we need to adjust the size of the holes in the nets—to make crimes that are the occasion for stop-and-frisks real crimes, not crimes like marijuana possession. When the New York City police stopped and frisked kids, the main goal was not to jail them for having pot but to get their fingerprints, so that they could be identified if they committed a more serious crime. But all over America the opposite happens: marijuana possession becomes the serious crime. The cost is so enormous, though, in lives ruined and money spent, that the obvious thing to do is not to enforce the law less but to change it now.

Dr. Johnson said once that manners make law, and that when manners alter, the law must, too. It’s obvious that marijuana is now an almost universally accepted drug in America: it is not only used casually (which has been true for decades) but also talked about casually on television and in the movies (which has not). One need only watch any stoner movie to see that the perceived risks of smoking dope are not that you’ll get arrested but that you’ll get in trouble with a rival frat or look like an idiot to women. The decriminalization of marijuana would help end the epidemic of imprisonment.

The rate of incarceration in most other rich, free countries, whatever the differences in their histories, is remarkably steady. In countries with Napoleonic justice or common law or some mixture of the two, in countries with adversarial systems and in those with magisterial ones, whether the country once had brutal plantation-style penal colonies, as France did, or was once itself a brutal plantation-style penal colony, like Australia, the natural rate of incarceration seems to hover right around a hundred men per hundred thousand people. (That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get lower in rich, homogeneous countries—just that it never gets much higher in countries otherwise like our own.) It seems that one man in every thousand once in a while does a truly bad thing. All other things being equal, the point of a justice system should be to identify that thousandth guy, find a way to keep him from harming other people, and give everyone else a break.

Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime.

“Oh, I have taken too little care of this!” King Lear cries out on the heath in his moment of vision. “Take physic, pomp; expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” “This” changes; in Shakespeare’s time, it was flat-out peasant poverty that starved some and drove others as mad as poor Tom. In Dickens’s and Hugo’s time, it was the industrial revolution that drove kids to mines. But every society has a poor storm that wretches suffer in, and the attitude is always the same: either that the wretches, already dehumanized by their suffering, deserve no pity or that the oppressed, overwhelmed by injustice, will have to wait for a better world. At every moment, the injustice seems inseparable from the community’s life, and in every case the arguments for keeping the system in place were that you would have to revolutionize the entire social order to change it—which then became the argument for revolutionizing the entire social order. In every case, humanity and common sense made the insoluble problem just get up and go away. Prisons are our this. We need take more care. ♦

Beau Hodai: ALEC's persona non grata

2012-01-27T13:49:00.001-07:00

The Indigenous call-out in Arizona to resist ALEC

(November 2011)

Inside ALEC: Naked Contempt for the Press and Public in Scottsdale

TRUTHOUT.org

Wednesday 11 January 2012

by: Beau Hodai, PRWatch | Report

"Mr. Hodai had a history at the conference--not a very pleasant history. He was considered to be a persona non grata..."

-- Westin Kierland General Manager Bruce Lange to Olivia Ward of the Toronto Star.

Evicting the Press, Part 1: Meet Mr. Black

Scottsdale, Arizona--A suburb awash in money and golf courses, set against the backdrop of the jagged mountains surrounding Phoenix.

I was sitting in a sports bar of the Westin Kierland Resort and Spa, swapping journalism stories with Olivia Ward of the Toronto Star on one of the bar's overstuffed leather couches. Over the course of an hour, the bar filled with conventioneers from the American Legislative Exchange Council's 2011 States and Nation Policy Summit (SNPS). (A new story on Westin's connections to other ALEC corporations is available here.)

My assignment was to cover the 2011 SNPS, taking place at the resort from November 29 through December 2. ALEC had refused to grant me media credentials. Nevertheless, I was a paid guest at the resort.

Most of the ALEC members trickling into the bar were fresh from the ALEC "Holiday Gala." As drinks were consumed and new rounds were ordered by guys with ALEC badges, the place began to take on a distinct "Animal House" vibe.

Ward and I were just about to head to our rooms for the night when I saw Phil Black, director of Kierland's security team, approach two uniformed police officers just outside the entrance to the bar. The cops had arrived an hour earlier, glanced at Ward and me, then stationed themselves by the door.

Black entered the bar and headed straight towards me. "Would you mind coming with me, sir?"

Once outside the bar, we were joined by the cops and I was shuffled up the stairs.

"What's this all about?" I asked with Black facing me; a cop to either side, just behind me.

"We understand that you've attempted to enter ALEC events and been asked to leave numerous times," said Black.

This was not true. I had been on my best behavior. And, I had known, since my first meeting with Black the night before, that I was being watched.

Police with a Photo Array of Personas Non Grata

The previous night, I had passed by some cops. When I glanced back I caught one of the cops staring, a look of intense and painful concentration on his face, at a sheet of paper. The paper displayed an array of photos. As was later explained to me by a cop working the resort, it was a photo array of personas non grata provided to the cops via ALEC.

Moments later, after passing the cluster of cops, I was flagged down by a man who asked me who I was, why I was in Scottsdale, where I was from, what line of business I was in.

I gave vague answers and asked who he was.

"Oh, I'm with the hotel," said Black. "Have a nice stay."

Uniformed Police as Bouncers

The next night, I had wandered back into the ballroom where a swirling galaxy of well-dressed lawmakers and lobbyists were hobnobbing, some with neat single malts in hand. There was no indication posted anywhere that this party was limited to ALEC members. Nevertheless, I had been tailed through the ballroom by a cop. As I stepped outside for a smoke, I heard a voice behind me.

"Sir, are you part of the delegation?" It was a uniformed police officer later identified as Phoenix Police Department (PPD) Sergeant Lowe. I explained that I was not a member of ALEC, but that I was a guest at the resort. Lowe explained that the party was private and asked me to return to resort common areas.

Making my way to the door, Lowe in tow, I was approached by two women with resort security.

"Hi ... you're the one on the motorcycle, right? You're with ALEC? You're a guest at the resort? Just so you know, this is a private function, so we just ask that all our regular guests stay in the main area... Okay?"

No problem. I left.

"The ALEC People Don't Want You Here ..."

So, when Black accosted me at the bar the following night and claimed I had been asked to leave numerous ALEC events at the hotel, I explained that this was the extent of my one and only 'incident' and nodded to Sgt. Lowe over my left shoulder. "Ask him," I said.

"Nevertheless," said Black. "The ALEC people don't want you here ... and we understand that your reservations were made under false pretenses."

I asked Black why--given the fact that I had not been accused of any crime--I was surrounded by armed, uniformed cops. Were Phoenix police usually engaged in evicting hotel guests who were suspected of having made hotel reservations under supposedly "false pretenses?" Must be a slow night....

And, how could a person even make a hotel reservation under false pretenses, I asked. I had given the front desk my valid photo driver's license and my credit card for incidental expenses. I was planning to stay in the resort for two days and those two days had been paid for by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).... "False pretenses?"

Black would not elaborate further, limiting his conversation only to statements emphasizing the resort's urgent need for me to vacate the premises immediately.

Black said that he would--with the help of these nice police officers--escort me up to my room and help me pack.

I was, as Sgt. Lowe explained, being "trespassed"--which meant that I was being formally advised that I was not welcome on Kierland property. If I returned, or refused to leave following this advisory, I would be arrested and charged with criminal trespassing.

ALEC's Corporate Connections

ALEC bills itself as being the nation's largest bipartisan legislative membership organization, dedicated to the advancement of "federalism" and "Jeffersonian ideals."

The simple reality of ALEC is that the organization serves as an intermediary, a conduit through which roughly 2,000 state legislators (the vast majority of which are Republicans) are connected with legions of lobbyists representing more than 300 global and national corporations.

Corporations pony up enough cash to help pay the travel, room, and dining expenses of hundreds of state lawmakers at luxury resorts through "scholarships" facilitated by ALEC. After closed-door meetings between lobbyists and politicians voting as equals on "model legislation," politicians often return to their home state to introduce those bills covering almost every area of law.

For ALEC’s winter meeting in sunny Arizona, corporate sponsors included dozens of global corporations, such as AT&T, Time Warner Cable, State Farm Insurance, Johnson and Johnson, the American Bail Coalition, Diageo, UPS, Exxon Mobil, American Petroleum Institute, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. and AstraZeneca-- to name a few. ALEC’s operations are also underwritten by billionaires Charles and David Koch (who control Koch Industries, including "Koch Companies Public Sector").

ALEC has come under increased scrutiny in recent years in the media due to its tremendous influence over dramatic changes to the law being pushed in states across the country. Public awareness of ALEC jumped dramatically this past summer after the In These Times investigation of ALEC’s "Publicopoly" and the Center for Media and Democracy's detailed exposé of ALEC model bills, legislators, and lobbyists through ALECexposed.org, after a whistleblower came forward.

And, as a result of growing public malcontent with lawmaker malleability in the face of corporate greed, lawmakers attending ALEC events have been met ever more frequently by members of the public voicing their displeasure with the organization’s role in facilitating the cozy relationship between politicians and corporations.

The 2011 States and Nation Policy Summit was no exception to this trend.

Outside: Public Dissent Met with Pepper Spray

On November 30, the first full-fledged day of the conference, rows of police in full riot gear stood along along Kierland's eastern gate, providing a living buffer between the public and the guests at the posh hotel. Helicopters swarmed above the resort. Flanking both entrances were assembled a couple hundred protesters decrying undue corporate influence over elected lawmakers. These protesters were from several activist groups loosely united under the banner of "Occupy ALEC"--in most part an offshoot of "Occupy Phoenix" and a group known as "AZ-Resist."

Inside the resort ALEC conventioneers gathered for lunch and a speech by ALEC alum and Arizona Governor, Jan Brewer.

Brewer welcomed the conventioneers to Arizona, “the state too strong for any union sponsored boycotts to bring down! And their presence is so eloquently so in demonstrating.

They're out there ... they're out there," said Brewer scornfully. "Anyway, thank you all for coming today. And thank you to all you from the business community, I certainly thank you for your private sector sponsorship."

Recently retired Louisiana State Representative and outgoing ALEC national chairman, Noble Ellington, claimed the protests showed ALEC was doing something right:

"It is just so exiting and I hope you feel the same way that ALEC is on the move," drawled Ellington. "We've got things goin' our way and we're bound to be doing something right, or we wouldn't have the helicopters flying around and the demonstrators..."

Uproarious applause.

"Would you join with me in thanking Novartis for this luncheon today? They have been some really good friends to ALEC and we thank them so much..." said Ellington.

ALEC Director of Communications Kaitlyn Buss then sang the national anthem.

By the time Buss hit her high note, "For the land of the Freeeeeeeeee...," Phoenix police officers were treating protesters outside to the second round of pepper spray of the day.

Betsy Schuler, a former school teacher, was pepper sprayed as officers were moving barricades into the crowd. Schuler said an officer reached over the barricade and started pepper spraying the non-violent protesters. Schuler got a face full of the stuff. The officer, recalled Schuler, stood behind police barricades, smiling smugly.

Schuler was a part of a delegation of Unitarian Universalists who had joined the protests as peacekeepers.

According to Phoenix Police Department spokesman Sgt. Trent Crump, the first of a series of confrontations between the police and the protesters had occurred a few hours earlier that morning.

According to Bret "Buddha" Cary, a small business owner and an organizer with Occupy Phoenix, a group of anarchists had brought a large black canvas banner ("Shut Down ALEC") supported by a framework.

The anarchist moved toward the front of the protests and put the banner between the police and the protesters.

At first, police tried to push the banner back with their own barricade. Eventually, an officer reached over the police barricade and grabbed hold of the banner, tearing it apart. The cop then began throwing pieces of the banner back at the protesters.

A protester screamed, "No! No! No!" as pepper spray was sent out in bright orange streams to the crowd.

Cary and others tried to obtain the name of the officer who had reached over the barricade and grabbed the banner but the officer would not divulge his name and retreated to Westin grounds, smiling smugly at the protesters from a distance. Following the incident, Cary filed a complaint with PPD internal affairs. He has received no response to his complaint.

Inside: Public Dissent Met with Laughter

By the time Arizona House Majority Whip and ALEC Public Sector Chair, Rep. Debbie Lesko, kicked off her remarks on the Novartis stage, several protesters had been placed under arrest and loaded into paddy wagons.

"We have some critics--we saw a few of them outside--because a group recently wrote a large report criticizing ALEC," said Lesko ("ALEC in Arizona: The Voice of Corporate Special Interests in the Halls of Arizona’s Legislature," by Common Cause and People for the American Way). "And so, what better way is there to explain Arizona's involvement in ALEC by reading right from that very report?! So, here we go..."

"'Arizona has one of the highest concentrations of ALEC legislators of any state in the United States.'"

Uproarious applause.

"'At least 50 of the 90 legislators now serving in the legislature are ALEC members....'"

More uproarious applause.

"Yay Arizona," said Lesko. "Two-thirds of the Republican leadership in the Arizona House and Senate are ALEC members and the last three Arizona Senate presidents--including the current one--all served in ALEC roles."

Lesko did not mention that Senate President Russell Pearce had just been thrown out of office in a special recall election. Pearce had been criticized for pushing through the controversial SB 1070 immigration bill, for sitting on the ALEC Public Safety and Elections Task Force alongside Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation's foremost operator of private immigrant detention and prison facilities, the scandal surrounding the Fiesta Bowl and his ties to special interest lobbyists, among other things.

"Way to go Arizona!" shouted Lesko.

Uproarious applause.

Earlier that morning, Ezra Kaplan, a college student and Arizona resident, was one of those arrested and charged with criminal trespass.

Kaplan was working as part of the media chain for the Occupy ALEC protest.

Arrested while Trying to Film, Taunted by Infiltrator

“There were several gentlemen sitting on the ground, kind of locking arms in peaceful protest. At one point, two officers decided to pick up a metal barricade and slant it down on top of [the seated protesters], pushing them to the ground, trying to get them to move," said Kaplan.

Kaplan entered the area between the banner and the police line and to capture this brutality on film.

Kaplan was taking pictures as police suddenly moved their barrier toward protester banners. Kaplan was caught between the two lines.

"I was basically standing there, with my hands above my head, peacefully and calmly talking to the officers, telling them 'I'm trying to get out,'" said Kaplan.

Kaplan says he was pushed to the ground by police "with a knee on my head and a knee on my neck," and cuffed by no less than three officers. As he was laying on the ground with officers on his back nonsensically shouting, "Stop resisting!" he looked up and saw a man in plain clothes. "Yeah, stop resisting, Ezra," the man taunted.

Kaplan was at a loss as to how this man knew his name. His name had not yet been taken by police, and he had not yet been booked for any alleged crime. (According to Kaplan, the police took his camera and continue to hold his camera as "evidence.")

Police spokesman Crump later said police action had been directly informed by real-time intelligence obtained from plainclothes PPD personnel interspersed through the crowd.

Crump claims these plainclothes officers reported that protesters were engaging in “illegal activity” behind the banner:

"They were doing things like shaking paint cans, and they were using poles to stick them under the pedestrian walkway gate that we put up. And they were trying to do that hiding behind those banners. And so those banners were pulled down when they tried to [push police barriers]. And that is when pepper spray was deployed at those who were the ones engaging in aggressive behavior."

Protesters have uniformly stated that the crowd had no poles or sticks until after police reduced their banners to a mass of rubble (consisting mainly of poles and sticks).

According to Crump, the Phoenix Police Department has made over 100 arrests and expended nearly $250,000 in overtime pay to officers since the outset of Occupy Phoenix and related protests in mid October.

Native Americans and Others Protest ALEC State Co-Chair Salt River Project

photo credit: Censored News

On December 2, an additional 12 protesters were arrested by Tempe police on trespassing charges during a related protest at Salt River Project (SRP) offices in Tempe, Arizona.

SRP Manager of State Government Relations Russell Smoldon serves on ALEC’s corporate board and is the ALEC Arizona private sector chair, tasked with extracting donations from lobbyists and their clients to pay for “scholarships” for ALEC legislators.

From the Novartis stage at the ALEC luncheon, Smoldon lobbied his fellow lobbyists:

"[Gov. Brewer is] the author of a new book. And every time I speak, I am required to put in this plug," said Smoldon. "Her new book is entitled, 'Scorpions for Breakfast.' If you go to JanPAC.com--J-A-N-P-A-C-dot-com--you can contribute to the governor's PAC, which will do great things for America. And, for a $100 contribution, you will get an autographed copy of the book from the governor."

Evicting the Press, Part 2: Rejoining Mr. Black's Inquisition

Hodai: "Surely you can see this is an odd time to be kicking someone out..."

Black: "That's one person's opinion. This is a 24-hour business."

Hodai: "That's a hell of a statement."

I was, by no means, the only reporter in attendance at the ALEC conference to face near arrest or harassment by police.

Almost Arresting a Reporter After He Interviewed Protesters?

Bob Ortega, of the Arizona Republic, stepped outside the Westin's eastern gate on the morning of November 30 to scope out the ALEC occupation. Ortega was one of the few reporters to be credentialed by ALEC for coverage of the conference.

Following the incident where the police tore down the protesters’ banner, Ortega attempted to return to the conference. He was stopped by police in riot gear, pepper spray in hand, at the Westin gate.

The cops told Ortega that he could not enter the grounds. Ortega showed them his ALEC-issued press credentials, identified himself and identified the paper he represented.

"I don't care who you are, turn around and leave or you're going to be arrested," retorted one of the officers.

Ortega persisted in arguing his point, explaining that he had permission from both ALEC and Kierland security to attend the conference-- at which point a cop grabbed him by the arm from behind.

"Okay, you've been warned," said the cop, who commenced to march Ortega off to a waiting paddy wagon.

Ortega narrowly escaped arrest by convincing one of the cops to check with hotel security before sending him off to Maricopa County Jail.

Renting a Real Cop?

This brings us to the interesting arrangement between PPD, Kierland and ALEC.

A few days before the conference, ALEC Senior Director of Membership and Meetings Chas Cirame sent out an advisory to conference attendees stating that, due to planned protests at the event, ALEC would be hiring additional security personnel to protect conference attendees. Cirame advised attendees to wear their ALEC identification badges at all times at the resort.

I had been on the lookout for additional security to see what firm of private spooks ALEC would employ. I had no idea ALEC had actually rented themselves real cops.

As was explained by Black during my eviction: all of these PPD officers on the Westin’s grounds--uniformed and armed--were actually off-duty and being paid, as one cop put it, "really well," to help ALEC and Westin keep undesirables out of the hair of conference attendees.

These were true 'rent-a-cops'-- the best money could buy.

Badgering a Reporter about a Talk over Drinks?

While Sgt. Lowe, another cop and Black supervised me packing in my room, two other officers harangued Ward outside the bar, wearing PPD uniforms but not disclosing that their services were rented for the night.

"Do you know this man? Do you know this man," a rented cop demanded of Ward, referring to me.

"Do you know this man? Do you know this man???" he continued.

Channeling the persona of her British mother, Ward let loose a fusillade of indignation:

"What do you mean? How dare you ask me such a question?! Are you putting me up on some sort of morality charge?! I am a Canadian citizen. Are you telling me that in the Westin hotel, I am not allowed to sit with a man to whom I am not married?!? I have continually attended meetings [at the conference] where I have been told that this is the land of the free and that Arizona is one of the free-est states in the union. So, what is going on here? Why are you asking me these questions?!"

"So, you know this man?" said the cop.

The officers eventually abandoned this cutting-edge line of interrogation and told Ward was told she was "free to go."

Claiming a Reporter "Presented a Threat?"

Ward later received somewhat more cogent answers to her questions from the resort’s General Manager Bruce Lange:

"Mr. Hodai was considered to be a persona non grata from the conference," Lange told Ward ("America's Secret Political Power," Toronto Star, December 17, 2011). "Not by the hotel, not by the police. ... He clearly presented a threat to the conference, based on his history."

Lange did not elaborate as to what "history" he was referring to.

Lange could not be reached for comment.

When asked why Ward had been interrogated by police under contract with the Westin during my eviction, Kierland Director of Communications Stephanie Dowling parried with this spin:

"Our main objective, our goal with anything--and we certainly understand everyone's concerns in this situation--is to protect our property and our guests, regardless of what organization they represent. That includes our friends from the media and everyone else. The safety and security of our guests is our number one priority--so, if there was any reason, or any situation that might have affected that--that would drive [hotel security's] reasoning behind asking someone to leave."

When asked what threat to the "safety and security" of conference attendees a reporter like me posed, Dowling declined to discuss the matter further, stating that the hotel would never compromise the privacy of a guest by discussing that guest's eviction with the press.

Hodai: "Well, I tell you what: I am that guest and I give you permission to speak to me, as a member of the press, about what happened."

Dowling: "Well, I do really appreciate you calling..."

It should be noted that Black later flatly denied he had ever said ALEC did not want me on the premises.

Evicting a Paying Hotel Guest Whom ALEC Did Not Want Nearby

According to Dowling, the argument that my reservation had been made under "false pretenses" stemmed from the fact that my reservation had initially been made under a different name. The Center for Media and Democracy had openly reserved a room at the Westin for its Executive Director, Lisa Graves, reserved with a CMD credit card. This reservation was later openly changed (by Westin personnel, at the request of CMD) to my name and pre-paid by CMD. There was nothing false or misleading about this process.

According to Dowling, the reservation was also problematic because it had been made as part of the "ALEC block."

CMD had clicked through to the hotel through an open reservation portal from the ALEC website. The portal did not require ALEC membership or ALEC approval and was open to anyone.

According to Dowling, during the conference ALEC personnel reviewed the hotel reservation roster and identified me as being "not part of the conference.” Dowling asserted that according to ALEC, CMD had falsely claimed to be a member of ALEC at the time the reservation made. CMD unequivocally denies this assertion and notes that it made no such statements to any Westin personnel.

A Mere "Miscommunication?"

"I don't know where the miscommunication came from. I do know that that was the information that we were given by ALEC," said Dowling.

When asked if it is standard Westin practice to throw paid guests out on the street in the middle of the night due to "miscommunications," Dowling asserted that Westin would never do such a thing without good cause and without alternative accommodations offered.

No such accommodations were offered in my case--unless those other accommodations were at the Maricopa County Jail.

And, just as the Westin has been unable to elaborate on what "safety" threat I posed to the ALEC conference, at least some of the cops involved in the eviction seemed to know that the situation was absurd. They knew I had committed no crime. These were just guys working on their off time, looking to take home a little more pay.

This was not true of Sgt. Lowe. He was committed to the notion I posed an imminent threat to the safety of the conference, not that I was being booted and threatened with arrest because I was a journalist who had caused some discomfort to the powers of the hour due to my past reporting on ALEC.

You've Been "Trespassed"

As I was being escorted from my room to the curb, Lowe asked for my ID--purportedly to file a report detailing how I had been "trespassed."

(Lowe never filed any such report with PPD. The only report detailing the activities of off-duty law enforcement in relation to this incident are maintained by Westin. Westin declined to disclose any portion of these reports.)

Lowe said it struck him as odd that I would carry an audio recorder. He said individuals in law enforcement carried recorders, "such as I am recording this entire conversation with you," showing me a little silver recorder tucked into his utility belt.

Lowe went on to assert that the only non-law enforcement people he knew of who carried audio recorders were those who were expecting trouble.

I explained that reporters routinely carry recorders--that this was not a violation of law.

"Do you, by any chance have journalistic credentials," asked Lowe.

ALEC had refused to credential me, despite my long-standing work as a reporter.

"Most folks who claim to be journalists, if they stumble on a story are actually able to say 'hey, I have media credentials,'" explained Lowe. "If they are carrying a recorder, they are carrying credentials at the same time. You see my dilemma?"

I did not see his dilemma.

"My dilemma is believing your story," Lowe retorted. "You understand that?!"

He was getting red.

Outside, I waited for Graves to pick me up at the curb, where she too would be threatened while attempting to take photos of the evicting officers. Waiting with me were Lowe, three other rented cops, along with Black and two members of his resort security team. Seven Westin Kierland security personnel in all--at least four of them with guns--all working at the behest of ALEC, all for one reporter. I was flattered.

Criminal justice reform: legislative committee hearings

2012-01-26T20:38:00.001-07:00

This came to me through the grapevine today...if you're an Arizona voter, please act.

-----From Arizona State Representative Cecil Ash----

Friends of Criminal Justice Reform:

Presently I have several bills waiting to be heard by the MAPS Committee (Military Affairs and Public Safety) The committee chairman is Representative David Gowan from District 30.

The Chairman of a committee has the power to decide whether or not a bill will be heard in his committee. If a chairman does not calendar a bill, it will die in committee and never even be heard by our representatives to decide the merits of a given bill for themselves. Gowan will need to decide in the next few days whether or not to hear these bills which have been assigned to his committee:

HB2521 pertains to earned release credits. Currently, the director of the department may grant early release on the ratio of one day for every seven days served - regardless of whether the offense is violent or nonviolent, no one can get released earlier than 85% of their sentence even if they are a model prisoner. This bill would offer a highly motivating incentive for inmates convicted of a nonviolent offense to stay out of trouble and participate in rehabilitative programs, by giving them a release credit of one day for every three days served instead of one day for every 7 days. This would not apply to prisoners convicted of serious, violent or aggravated felonies as defined in Sec. 13-706.

The Arizona Auditor General estimates that such a change could result in significant cost savings for taxpayers: For every day that an inmate spends on community supervision (parole) rather than prison, the State would save an estimated $4.62, which represents the difference between the daily marginal cost of housing an inmate in a state-operated prison compared to supervising an inmate on parole in fiscal year 2009.

HB2522 pertains to prescriptive sentencing. As many of you know, one of the policies driving our high incarceration rate is mandatory sentencing — laws that remove a judge’s ability to hand down an appropriate sentence, and instead obligate a one-size-fits-all approach. The current prescriptive sentencing provisions have led to many unduly harsh and lengthy sentences which are an affront to what is fair and just. The purpose of this bill is to simplify the sentencing statutes by eliminating the strict intermediate prescriptive categories of sentencing, leaving the “mitigating” category as the minimum sentence, and leaving the “aggravated” category as the maximum sentence. This would broaden the range of of sentencing options available to the judges and give them a "safety valve," so that they could more appropriately fit the sentence to the severity of the crime instead of being cornered by a technicality that results in a breach of justice. It is important to note that this modification would NOT stop judges from applying the more severe mandatory or prescriptive provisions where appropriate,

HB2523 eliminates the $25 background check required for visitors to inmates in the Arizona Department of Corrections.
HB2531 allows the director of the Department of Correction to parole inmates whose physical disabilities have incapacitated them, so that they are no longer a threat to the safety of the public.

PLEASE email Rep. Gowan, the committee chair, and ask him to give these bills a hearing. If any of the other members of the committee are your representatives, please contact them as well and identify yourself as a constituent from their district.

(DO NOT FORWARD THIS EMAIL TO A STATE REPRESENTATIVE OR SENATOR, but create your own email with your own reasons and your own story for supporting the bills that you choose to support)

The deadline for bills to be heard in their assigned committees is February 17^th. After that, if a bill has not passed out of its committees, it is dead. These bills have been assigned to multiple committees, making it even harder to get them through the process, so time is of the essence.

PLEASE CALL or EMAIL TODAY.

David Gowan District 30, Chair dgowan@azleg.gov

Terri Proud District 26, Vice Chair tproud@azleg.gov

Jeff Dial District 20 jdial@azleg.gov

Ruben Gallego District 16 rgallego@azleg.gov

Albert Hale District 2 ahale@azleg.gov

Jack W. Harper District 4 jharper@azleg.gov

Richard Miranda District 13 rmiranda@azleg.gov

David Burnell Smith District 7 dsmith@azleg.gov

David Stevens District 25 dstevens@azleg.gov

Thank you for your help!

Sincerely,

Cecil Ash

State Representative

Legislative District 18

AZ House of Representatives

1700 W. Washington, H-313
Phoenix, Arizona 85007

602-926-3160, cash@azleg.gov

ASPC-Eyman: Deaths in Custody - Alfonzo Farmer, 23

2012-01-25T19:41:00.001-07:00

ARIZONA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS

1601 W. JEFFERSON

PHOENIX, ARIZONA 85007

(602) 542-3133

www.azcorrections.gov

JANICE K. BREWER, GOVERNOR CHARLES L. RYAN, DIRECTOR

NEWS RELEASE
For Immediate Release

For more information contact:
Bill Lamoreaux
blamorea@azcorrections.gov

January 23, 2012

Inmate Death Notification

Florence, Az. – Inmate Alfonso Farmer, 23, ADC #219587, was found unresponsive in his housing unit Sunday. He was pronounced dead from an apparent suicide after medical responders attempted life saving measures.

Farmer, sentenced out of Maricopa County, was serving 22 years for 2nd degree murder and aggravated assault. He came to ADC July 23, 2007 and was held at the Browning Unit, ASPC-Eyman.

The death is under investigation by the department.

Women's health in prison: Breast Cancer Behind Bars

2012-01-25T09:32:00.000-07:00

The following article was just published on Truthout by Vikki Law, author of "Resistance Behind Bars: The struggles of incarcerated women," and editor of Tenacious, a national zine written by and for women in prison.

In light of some of the distressed correspondence I've been receiving lately from women at Perryville prison complaining of serious medical neglect, I'll be making a point of researching and posting more on women's health in prison here in coming weeks.

In the meantime, for a first-person account on women's health care in Arizona state prisons, see Sue Ellen Allen's book "The slumber party from hell."

Thank you for this, Vikki. Can't wait for this state to finally be sued. What they've done to our people is criminal.

----from Truthout---

Breast Cancer Behind Bars: How a Prison Sentence Can Become a Death Sentence

Wednesday 25 January 2012

by: Victoria Law, Truthout

Imagine finding a lump in your breast. Imagine that your efforts to schedule a medical check-up are stymied and you have to wait weeks, if not months, for that initial exam. In the meantime, the lump continues to grow. Imagine that, when you finally do see a doctor, you are told that you have breast cancer. When you walk out of the office, you are locked into your prison cell with no more information or sympathy than when you walked in. This is the daily reality for women in prison

In 2006, a Department of Justice (DOJ) study found that women in prison are at significantly greater risk for cancer than their male counterparts. Out of every 10,000 incarcerated women, 831 had cancer, compared to 108 per 10,000 men. Of those, 91 of every 10,000 women behind bars reported having had or currently having breast cancer. Given that 114,979 women were behind bars at the end of 2009, this would mean that over 1,000 women have had or currently have breast cancer.

Despite these numbers, prevention, screening, diagnosis, care, pain alleviation and rehabilitation for breast cancer remain virtually nonexistent in prisons. In 1998, a study at an unnamed Southern prison found that, although many were at high risk because of family histories, women were not provided with a clinical breast exam, information or basic education on self-examination upon admittance. Seventy percent of women who should have had mammograms under standard medical procedure had never been tested. [Williams, Roma D, Terry D. Mahoney, and R. M. Williams, Jr, "Breast Cancer Detection Among Women Prisoners in the Southern United States," Family & Community Health 21.3 (1998): 32.] Even women who enter prison already diagnosed with cancer must fight to receive lifesaving medical care.

Fifty-two-year-old Margaret DeLuca had already been diagnosed with stage 3A breast cancer and undergone a left-breast mastectomy before arriving at Clinton Correctional Facility in New Jersey. "She knew exactly what she needed, but was unable to get it," stated Bonnie Kerness, a human rights advocate and coordinator of the American Friends Service Committee's (AFSC) Prison Watch Project, who helped DeLuca fight for proper medical care. Their advocacy resulted in incremental improvements in DeLuca's medical care but did not change the prison's health care system. [Interview with Bonnie Kerness, December 28, 2011]

Like DeLuca, 57-year-old Sue Ellen Allen entered Arizona's Estrella Jail with a diagnosis of breast cancer (hers was Stage 3B). She had also undergone six sessions of chemotherapy and was awaiting a mastectomy. Two and a half months later, she was awoken at midnight, then handcuffed, shackled and transported to another jail. At 9 AM, she was moved to the hospital for the mastectomy.

"I am locked in a room alone, freezing. I ask for a blanket. No, they snarl. Why is everyone so nasty?" she recounted. "I haven't eaten in twenty hours, I haven't slept, I'm freezing and facing surgery alone." After the mastectomy, Allen should have begun chemotherapy, but the jail delayed it to avoid shouldering the costs. Allen did not receive chemotherapy until she was transferred to the Perryville prison three months later.

The chemotherapy made Allen sick.

"On my way back to my yard, I collapse, vomiting. A guard comes and asks if I can walk the three blocks to medical. There are no wheelchairs." Allen collapsed and vomited twice while walking to the medical unit. Staff watched her, but the only acknowledgment she received about her condition was when a sergeant asked, "What's the issue, Allen?"

Allen made it to the medical unit, where she continued to vomit into a wastebasket. The prison's doctor was not available to administer the shot that would stop Allen's vomiting. Allen continued to vomit for an hour. "Even the nurse is frustrated. She says there is no other emergency. He's doing paperwork." When the doctor arrived an hour later, Allen recounts, he was obviously irritated. "He acts like I'm faking and reluctantly administers the shot. Eventually, I am sent back to my room alone. I am dismissed."

Allen underwent three more chemo treatments. "Despite the rigid schedule, never is the medication ready on time, nor is the newly discovered chemo diet ready. I have to spend my sickest days walking to Medical, begging for what I'm missing. When I'm supposed to be healing, I'm worn out battling for proper treatment."

Allen is one of the more fortunate; she survived the ordeal. When 36-year-old Christina found a lump in her breast in April 2002, Perryville's medical staff ignored her concerns. By the time she was taken to the hospital in September, the lump had grown so large that the hospital skipped the chemotherapy and performed an immediate mastectomy. By then, however, the cancer had already spread to her other breast. Christina died the next year, three months after being released from prison. "If her cancer had been diagnosed and treated when she discovered her lump, maybe she'd still be alive," Allen wrote.

While breast cancer survivors and advocates outside prison would be horrified at these obstacles and delays, Allen received relatively prompt treatment under what passes as current standards for prison health care. Sherrie Chapman, a woman incarcerated in California, waited much longer.

In 1985, Chapman, who had a family history of breast cancer, found a lump in her right breast. She alerted the prison's doctor, who dismissed her concerns. Chapman persisted in demanding that the lump be further examined. In 1994, when the lumps were visibly protruding from her right breast, she finally received a mammogram. The radiologist at the outside hospital found "extremely dense breast parenchyma" and recommended a follow-up mammogram within one year. Chapman was unable to convince the prison's medical department that she needed the follow-up mammogram until late 1994. This time, the radiologist recommended immediate follow-up tests. The prison's doctor, however, refused to order a biopsy, ultrasound or fine needle aspiration. The prison labeled her a "drug seeker" for her repeated requests for something stronger than Motrin for the pain in her breast.

In 1995, Chapman was examined by a different prison doctor, who immediately ordered a biopsy. By that time, the cancer had spread to both breasts and metastasized in her neck, forcing her to undergo two mastectomies. Post surgery, guards signed her out against medical advice to return her to the prison. Staff ignored chemotherapy appointments. In addition, her uterus began to hemorrhage. Medical staff allowed her to bleed for 18 months before performing a hysterectomy. In 2000 and 2001, Chapman discovered other growths in her neck and shoulder areas. The prison doctor's response? "You've just got swollen glands. Don't worry; they're not cancerous."

Chapman appeared before the parole board in June 2002. The board rejected her and admonished her to use the self-help available in the prison, ignoring the fact that, by then, she was too ill to participate in groups that required regular attendance. She died on December 12, 2002, at the age of 45, under the custody of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), with a prison guard posted in her room.

Women have not quietly accepted this gross medical neglect and failure. They have attempted to advocate for themselves and draw attention to the issue. In California, Chapman testified before the legislature about the dangerous medical care in the state's women's prisons. She also filed a lawsuit against the CDCR and the prison doctor for ignoring her initial complaints about painful breast lumps. Chapman won and was awarded a $350,000 settlement. Her efforts also led to several magazine articles exploring the failures of the prison health care system to address the needs of those battling cancer. [See: "A Cancer Grows," in The Nation, and A. Clay Thompson, "Cancer in the Cells," San Francisco Bay Guardian February 24, 1999 (not available online)]

Breast cancer survivors imprisoned in other states have had less success in finding advocates and attorneys to help them push for change. Allen wrote letters to numerous lawyers, all of whom declined to file suit. "Most firms don't have the resources to fight the state," she noted.

Allen did not allow the lack of legal support to deter her from trying to change the culture of prison indifference and isolation. Recognizing that each woman battled both breast cancer and the prison's life-threatening and indifferent medical care, Allen began a cancer support group. The process of starting such a group would be simple enough on the outside, but behind bars, nothing is ever straightforward. "It took me a year of begging," Allen recounted, "but I finally got permission." The group, which quickly grew to include 14 other women, met once a month with an outside volunteer from the American Cancer Society.

Allen remembered that women were initially reluctant to attend: "They didn't expect anyone to help them or care. They didn't know how to talk about their fears." The support group provided them with a space to talk - and to vent. "There is no place in prison to vent," said Allen. The volunteer also brought information about cancer, enabling the women to understand the protocols and procedures of cancer treatment and to know what questions to ask. Given that women are told nearly nothing about their illnesses, treatments and recuperation, such information is invaluable. [Interview with Sue Ellen Allen, December 27, 2011]

Looking back, she notes that, with the exception of Christina, all of the support group members were white. Although white women are more likely to get breast cancer (125 per every 100,000), African-American women are not far behind, with 116 per 100,000 diagnosed. Latinas, who make up the largest proportion of Arizona's women's prison population, have a rate of 91 per 100,000. Given these statistics, Allen wonders how many women of color remain undiagnosed.

Although Allen was unable to find an attorney or legal group to help file suit against the Arizona Department of Corrections, other prisoners' attempts to change the prison's medical care system over the years finally sparked outside action. In October 2011, Prison Law Office, a legal advocacy group for prisoners nationwide, sent a letter to Arizona Corrections Director Charles Ryan. The letter listed dozens of specific allegations of deliberate indifference to prisoners' health needs and asked Ryan to agree to a court injunction to address problems as a way to avoid a lawsuit in federal court. On November 17, 2011, Arizona's Department of Corrections signed an agreement to investigate the medical claims. Prison Law Office and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Arizona agreed to delay any lawsuit for three months.

In New Jersey, DeLuca reached out to the AFSC to help her advocate for the care she needed. "It was a partnership between inside and out, which is often the most effective way to obtain change," Kerness remembered. Although their efforts did not improve the overall quality of prison medical care, it did have a ripple effect within the circle of women around DeLuca. Through her example, other women became aware of the power of advocacy and their ability to help outside supporters advocate on their behalf. [Interview with Bonnie Kerness, December 28, 2011] Sadly, many women battling breast cancer and other serious medical issues lack outside support. Breast cancer survivors and advocates need to recognize that, for women with breast cancer and other life-threatening illnesses, a prison sentence may mean a sentence to death by neglect. Then they need to speak out and take action to help women inside successfully fight for their lives.

How Brewer's latest budget slams our kids: Children's Action Alliance

2012-01-19T19:47:00.001-07:00

I love the Children's Action Alliance. They've done a lot of good work challenging racial disparities in the juvenile justice and foster care systems and the prosecution of kids as adults, and they've built a series of handouts tailored to each legislative district to look at the number of kids in poverty, education levels of parents, voting history for First Things First and the last state sales tax increase, etc. In my own district, LD14, 46% of the children are living in poverty. I had no idea my own neighbors were hurting that bad.That's staggering.

They really stay on top of legislation and duke it out at the capitol for youth each year, and there are a lot of good reports and statistics on their site for anyone interested in the issue of juvenile justice in Arizona, so check them out. If you are media and have questions about any of these issues, call Amy Kobeta at the CAA, not me. She's their vice president, and handles communications, messaging, etc. Her contact info is:

Children's Action Alliance
4001 North Third Street, Suite 160
Phoenix, AZ 85012
caa@azchildren.org
Phone: (602) 266-0707
Fax: (602) 263-8792

---------from the Children's Action Alliance in Phoenix-----

How Governor Brewer's Budget Recommendation Impacts Kids (January 19, 2012)

Governor Brewer's budget proposal continues most of the past cuts to children's health, education, and security. KidsCare and child care remain frozen. There is no state funding for full-day Kindergarten or preschool and no inflation funding for K-12 schools. Grandparents raising grandkids continue to go without help and the poorest mothers and children continue to be left behind.

Her budget uses current year funds to pay off some debt early, to upgrade some technology, and to build new prison beds. She also proposes investments in specific areas of behavioral health, early reading, and child protective services. Her proposal offers no plan for balancing the budget in future years -- no proposal to meet state priorities as the temporary sales tax expires and new tax cuts kick in. Ongoing revenues remain below ongoing expenditures -- even with the budget cuts in place.

Click here for a summary of the Governor's budget recommendation.

Stay tuned next week as the Legislature begins its budget hearings.

------------------

Also, check this link out to see how kids fared under our last AZ legislature. There's a list of state lawmakers and a ranking of their votes for Arizona's children on this handout:

2011 Legislative Wrap-up: Who's for kids and who's just kidding?

And finally, go here to access links to all the newspapers in Arizona, and send them an old fashioned letter to give the state a piece of your mind about how kids here are being treated. The Children's Action Alliance also has a page to coach you through writing a good one.

Blacking out for SOPA...

2012-01-18T18:56:00.001-07:00

I won't be blacking out this site in solidarity only because I don't have the technology to leave a marker telling people where I've gone for how long and why. So, instead I'm posting the following information from Wikipedia about why they're protesting the Stop On-line Piracy Act (SOPA) over the next 24 hours, and won't be posting anything else here for the next day out of respect for their blackout (and those of the 7000 other websites lining up with them).

Be sure to contact your congressional representatives during the blackout (midnight 1/18 to midnight 1/19) from the link below and tell them you don't support SOPA, PIPA, or any such legislation

--------------from Wikipedia-----------

SOPA and PIPA - Learn more

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

< Wikipedia:SOPA initiative

What effect is the blackout having, so far?

The purpose of the blackout is twofold: to raise awareness of SOPA and PIPA among the general public, and to encourage people to share their views with their representatives. It's too early to tell what the ultimate impact will be, but here are some early indicators, as of 1PM PT January 18:

More than 10,000 people have commented on the Wikimedia Foundation's blog post announcing the blackout. We have not done a content analysis, but at-a-glance it looks like the overwhelming majority support the blackout;
Almost immediately after the blackout launched, it became a trending topic on Twitter, globally, with hashtags including #factswithoutwikipedia, #SOPAstrike and #wikipediablackout. Trendistic says at one point, #wikipediablackout constituted 1% of all tweets, and Hotspots shows that SOPA has accounted for a quarter-million tweets hourly since the blackout began;
Google News contains 7,200 articles on the blackout;
More than 90 million people have seen the Wikipedia blackout page
More than five million people have looked up their elected representatives' contact information via the Wikipedia tool.

Why is Wikipedia blacked-out?

Wikipedia is protesting against SOPA and PIPA by blacking out the English Wikipedia for 24 hours, beginning at midnight January 18, Eastern Time. Readers who come to English Wikipedia during the blackout will not be able to read the encyclopedia. Instead, you will see messages intended to raise awareness about SOPA and PIPA, encouraging you to share your views with your representatives, and with each other on social media.

What are SOPA and PIPA?

SOPA and PIPA represent two bills in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate respectively. SOPA is short for the "Stop Online Piracy Act," and PIPA is an acronym for the "Protect IP Act." ("IP" stands for "intellectual property.") In short, these bills are efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by foreign web sites, but, in our opinion, they do so in a way that actually infringes free expression while harming the Internet. Detailed information about these bills can be found in the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act articles on Wikipedia, which are available during the blackout. GovTrack lets you follow both bills through the legislative process: SOPA on this page, and PIPA on this one. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to advocating for the public interest in the digital realm, has summarized why these bills are simply unacceptable in a world that values an open, secure, and free Internet.

Why is the blackout happening?

Wikipedians have chosen to black out the English Wikipedia for the first time ever, because we are concerned that SOPA and PIPA will severely inhibit people's access to online information. This is not a problem that will solely affect people in the United States: it will affect everyone around the world.

Why? SOPA and PIPA are badly drafted legislation that won't be effective at their stated goal (to stop copyright infringement), and will cause serious damage to the free and open Internet. They put the burden on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the unnecessary blocking of entire sites. Small sites won't have sufficient resources to defend themselves. Big media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for their foreign competitors, even if copyright isn't being infringed. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won't show up in major search engines. And, SOPA and PIPA build a framework for future restrictions and suppression.

Does this mean that Wikipedia itself is violating copyright laws, or hosting pirated content?

No, not at all. Some supporters of SOPA and PIPA characterize everyone who opposes them as cavalier about copyright, but that is not accurate. Wikipedians are knowledgeable about copyright and vigilant in protecting against violations: Wikipedians spend thousands of hours every week reviewing and removing infringing content. We are careful about it because our mission is to share knowledge freely. To that end, all Wikipedians release their contributions under a free license, and all the material we offer is freely licensed. Free licenses are incompatible with copyright infringement, and so infringement is not tolerated.

Isn't SOPA dead? Wasn't the bill shelved, and didn't the White House declare that it won't sign anything that resembles the current bill?

No, neither SOPA nor PIPA is dead. On January 17th, SOPA's sponsor said the bill will be discussed in early February. There are signs PIPA may be debated on the Senate floor next week. Moreover, SOPA and PIPA are just indicators of a much broader problem. In many jurisdictions around the world, we're seeing the development of legislation that prioritizes overly-broad copyright enforcement laws, laws promoted by power players, over the preservation of individual civil liberties.

How could SOPA and PIPA hurt Wikipedia?

SOPA and PIPA are a threat to Wikipedia in many ways. For example, in its current form, SOPA would require Wikipedia to actively monitor every site we link to, to ensure it doesn't host infringing content. Any link to an infringing site could put us in jeopardy of being forced offline.

I live in the United States. What's the best way for me to help?

The most effective action you can take is to call your representatives and tell them you oppose SOPA and PIPA, and any similar legislation. Type your zipcode in the locator box to find your representatives' contact information. Text-based communication is okay, but phone calls have the most impact.

I don't live in the United States. How can I help?

Contact your local State Department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or similar branch of government. Tell them you oppose SOPA and PIPA, and any similar legislation. SOPA and PIPA will affect sites outside of the United States, and actions to sites inside the United States (like Wikipedia) will also affect non-American readers -- like you. Calling your own government will also let them know you don't want them to create their own bad anti-Internet legislation.

Is it still possible to access Wikipedia in any way?

Yes. During the blackout, Wikipedia is accessible on mobile devices and smart phones. You can also view Wikipedia normally by disabling JavaScript in your browser, as explained on this Technical FAQ page. Our purpose here isn't to make it completely impossible for people to read Wikipedia, and it's okay for you to circumvent the blackout. We just want to make sure you see our message.

I keep hearing that this is a fight between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Is that true?

No. Some people are characterizing it that way, probably in an effort to imply all the participants are motivated by commercial self-interest. But it's obviously not that simple. The proof of that is Wikipedia's involvement. Wikipedia has no financial self-interest at play here: we do not benefit from copyright infringement, nor are we trying to monetize traffic or sell ads. We are protesting to raise awareness about SOPA and PIPA solely because we think they will hurt the Internet, and your ability to access information online. We are doing this for you, because we're on your side.

In carrying out this protest, is Wikipedia abandoning neutrality?

We hope you continue to trust Wikipedia to be a neutral information source. We are staging this blackout because (as Wikimedia Foundation Trustee Kat Walsh said recently), although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not. For over a decade, Wikipedians have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history. Wikipedia is a tremendously useful resource, and its existence depends upon a free, open and uncensored Internet. SOPA and PIPA (and other similar laws under discussion inside and outside the United States) will hurt you, because they will make it impossible for sites you enjoy, and benefit from, to continue to exist. That's why we're doing this.

I have a question that isn't answered here, or, I would like to send feedback to Wikipedia.

You can reach Wikipedia editors at info-en(at)wikimedia(dot)org. If you need a response, please be patient: we may have trouble keeping up with the mail.

What can I read to get more information?

Try these links:

As of 6AM PT, January 18, Google has more than 4,600 articles about the blackout. Here are a few:

Why is Wikipedia staging a blackout and what is SOPA?, from the National Post
Wikipedia joins blackout protest at US anti-piracy moves, from the British Broadcasting Corporation
Wikipedia blackout over US anti-piracy bills and FEATURE: Websites blackout over 'SOPA censorship', from Al Jazeera
Wikipedia, Craigslist, other sites go black in SOPA protest, from the Los Angeles Times
Google Rallies Opposition to Murdoch-Backed Anti-Piracy Bill, from BusinessWeek
SOPA protest: The Net strikes back, from Politico
Wikipedia blackout a 'gimmick', MPAA boss claims, from the Guardian
Wikipedia 24-hour blackout: a reader and Why we're taking Wikipedia down for a day, from the New Statesman
Internet-wide protests against SOPA/PIPA are kicking up a storm, by the Hindustan Times
SOPA, PIPA: What you need to know, from CBS News
Protest on Web Uses Shutdown to Take On Two Piracy Bills, from the New York Times
Protesting SOPA: how to make your voice heard, from Ars Technica
Why We've Censored Wired.com, from Wired

Write a letter, save a life: Restoration Project - Florence

2012-01-02T10:53:00.001-07:00

Sunday, JAN 8 2-4pm

Letter writing to people in detention

Arizona Worker's Rights Center

331 East Willetta St, PHX

Florence Restoration Project

People in detention have said that receiving letters and visits can be solace, encouragement, the difference between staying and fighting their case and signing "voluntary" deportation orders. Some people in detention have said that guards in detention centers treat them better when they know that they have support from the outside.

Join the Phoenix Restoration Project for our first monthly letter-writing party and come get connected with a penpal who is currently in detention. We will connect volunteers with people inside of detention centers who have expressed interest in writing ongoing letters with a new friend on the outside.

The detention system works to isolate people and keep their stories hidden. By reaching out to people on the inside, we let them know that we remember them and their struggle, even though the system works to keep them out of sight and out of mind.

If you have not been to a Restoration Project training before, please come at 2pm for a brief training and q&a about things to keep in mind when becoming penpals with someone in detention.

We will provide contact information of people interested in writing and receiving letters, paper and envelopes, postage, and snacks.

Bring a friend (or two) and if you are able, please bring stamps to share!

The conviction of Tony Lester: A juror's regrets.

2012-01-02T07:16:00.000-07:00

Most readers are already well aware of Tony Lester's story. Tony was sentenced to the Arizona Department of Corrections in 2010 for 12 years on assault charges stemming from a suicide attempt during a psychotic episode the previous year - the friends who tried to stop him from cutting his throat got hurt themselves, grabbing the knife.

In Arizona, people with mental illness are almost ten times more likely to be locked behind bars than admitted to the state hospital when they need help. Not surprisingly, instead of being admitted to a psychiatric hospital that night, Tony was put in jail, then criminally prosecuted. Tony was so ill when this happened that it took nine months to restore him to sufficient competency in the wake of the incident to be tried for it. Soon after he arrived in state prison - receiving no treatment there for his mental illness - Tony killed himself.

This weekend one of the people on his jury posted the comment below to the MSNBC website following the piece Wendy Halloran did at KPNX on his suicide...the comment after it was left by Tony's aunt. This seems to be a call for sentencing reform and more diversion of the mentally ill from the criminal justice system in the first place...

---------------from MSNBC.com----------------

Did officers' inaction, lack of training contribute to inmate's death?

By M. Alex Johnson
msnbc.com

"Investigators' interviews with correctional officers at a state prison in Tucson, Ariz., suggest that the officers' indifference and lack of basic first aid training allowed an inmate to bleed to death after his second suicide attempt.
The recorded interviews were obtained by KPNX-TV, the NBC affiliate in Phoenix, which has spent much of the past year digging into the suicide of Anthony Clayton Lester, 26, in July 2010.

The station reports that Lester, who was serving a 12-year sentence for aggravated assault, had a long history of mentally illness and had tried to kill himself the previous month. But he was taken off his medications and was removed from a suicide watch two days before his death..."

(view the rest of the article and other comments here)

READER COMMENTS:

anonymous juror

My Grandson sent me this link to view and after I viewed this I felt that I had no other choice than to find the courage to post this comment. I was one of the jurors on this Anthony Lester criminal case. I sat through this entire trial and heard all the testimony, and I found that there was reasonable doubt in this case and that I and another juror voted not guilty on several deliberation votes, it was another juror on this panel that swayed our votes to vote guilty. There were two victims in this case, we came back with a not guilty verdict on the second victim immediately and it took us a few days to come back with the guilty verdict after we were persuaded to vote guilty.

Like I said before after hearing all the testimony in this case there was a reasonable doubt and now knowing that Anthony Lester was sentenced to a twelve year prison sentence has made me sick and I feel as if we had a hand in this too, the only way to vindicate myself from this incredible tragedy is to tell how I feel and perhaps this young man may forgive us for what we did to him. Knowing now that he was his mother's only child has just ripped my heart apart and taken his daughter's father away from her has made me feel completely saddened by this knowing now how extremely ill he really was. I am so ashamed, I hope his mother will forgive us and his daughter will some day know this truth, that if we the jurors would have known that by finding Anthony Lester guilty of this crime than we automatically sentenced him to a minimum seven year prison sentence. We could see that he was ill and we thought that he would get probation and get the help he needed.

I think that jurors should be told what would result if they find someone guilty of a crime that this could have a great bearing on the verdict. I have struggled with this decision that I made for the last two years, wishing that I could change my verdict, wishing that I stuck to my gut instincts instead of being convinced by a fellow juror to change my verdict. This is something that I will live with the rest of my life and I pray that Anthony's mother and family will find in their hearts to forgive me. I know the next time that I sit on a jury that I will not let someone sway my vote so easily.

I thought prison would take care of someone so ill as Anthony Lester, after viewing this story done by channel 12 news this has sickened me even more that is why I felt I needed to post this comment. Thank-you channel 12 for reporting this story maybe now Anthony Lester's story will help make changes in the criminal system, it certainly needs it. May Anthony Lester Forgive Us for what we did to him.

#122 - Sat Dec 31, 2011 1:42 PM EST

----------------------------

Patti Jones

Just when you think that this could get much worse, than here comes more to grasp. I am completely and utterly speechless. I read your posted comment yesterday "Anonymous Juror" and I just wanted to wait until I could completely be able to post something that was not out of anger. I do not hold anger or any bitterness towards you for what you thought was the right thing. I could only imagine the inner turmoil that you must have felt and continue to feel knowing by changing your verdect the way that you did changed the course of so many lives, perhaps yours the most. If there is one thing that I have learned from this is to forgive and try to help bring the much needed changes, so that no other mentally-ill person will suffer the way Tony has. I will not judge your actions their is only one judge. And if we all try to live a righteous life than the reward will be phenomenal. I know Tony did come to grips with this at the end of his life. I do thank-you for coming out now to speak the truth, I knew that the system all around has let our Tony down.

I will always feel until the day that I die that Tony NEVER deserved that twelve year prison sentence that was handed down to him. But I feel that by you finally speaking out will now help us finally have Justice for Tony and now there can be many more lives like Tony saved. So I commend you on speaking out, and perhaps if you write to your legislatures this could help change these laws. You need to forgive yourself, I refuse to become angry and bitter. Tony would not have wanted this, it is about change in such a broken system. Peace. Patti Jones

#123 - Sun Jan 1, 2012 2:58 PM EST

Re-entry for youth with disabilities.

2011-12-30T22:38:00.002-07:00

For the full report on re-entry programs for youth with disabilities in the juvenile justice system, go here.

------------from Education Week-------------

After Jail, Youth With Disabilities Need Special Support to Stay Out

By Nirvi Shah

December 30, 2011

Education Week

When young people with disabilities end up in the juvenile justice system, they're less likely to return to youth prisons after their sentence is up if they have jobs or go to school quickly after being released, a new paper says.

However, comprehensive programs that help these youth go from prison to the outside world are scarce, says this piece from Project Forum at the National Association of State Directors of Special Education. And juveniles with disabilities have a high recidivism rate—more than the 55 percent rate for youth without disabilities.

The report looks closely at the practices in four states—Arizona, Georgia, Hawaii, and Oregon—when it comes to supporting all juveniles, including those with disabilities, who are leaving the justice system.

Some common practices the report found in states with programs intended to reduce recidivism for these young people include: a continuum of supports for youth that begins in prison and keeps going once they leave; transition facilitators or coordinators who are dedicated to working with these youth; and programs for reentering society that are comprehensive, addressing education, employment, social and behavioral skills, mental health, substance-abuse issues, housing, and transportation. Another common theme in the report? Budget problems often keep these programs from going long-term.

Here are some details of individual state's programs:

•Before youths' release, Arizona's Department of Juvenile Corrections assigns them a transition coordinator who establishes a relationship and supports them after they leave. Four of these coordinators travel the state and work with parole officers, the state director of special education, and school districts to ensure these juveniles are enrolled in the right programs at the end of their sentences. These coordinators even go to students' IEP meetings.

•Georgia's "Think Exit at Entry" program provides educational planning, progress reviews, transition facilitators, and other supports to youth in the juvenile justice system, including those with disabilities. The program has been scaled back since a federal grant expired in 2007, although some parts of it have kept going because of the partnerships already established among state agencies.

•Hawaii's Olomana School serves students in the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility, and youth participate in regular meetings about their behavior and school work. Because the state runs all schools in Hawaii, transferring records back to schools when students are released is seamless—and transfer of records is critical to a successful reentry for students with disabilities, the report says.

•Oregon's Project STAY OUT—Strategies Teaching Adolescent Young Offenders to Use Transition Skills—is specifically for youth with an IEP, 504 plan, or mental health diagnosis. Youth work on self-determination skills, social skills, finding work, and other goals. One study found that 66 percent of STAY OUT participants were either employed or in school during the first six months after their release from juvenile justice programs, the very things that are likely to keep them from returning.

Hawaii AG report blasts "humonetarianism" and dependence on private prisons

2011-12-28T22:18:00.000-07:00

This document could go a long way towards changing the Hawai'i prison system; I'm impressed that it was released by the state Attorney General. That, in turn, could have ripples elsewhere - certainly in Eloy, AZ, where Corrections Corporation of America incarcerates nearly 2000 Hawai'ians. Eloy has real problems - as does CCA.18 Hawai'ian prisoners are suing employees at Saguaro prison there for torture, and one is suing for sexual assault (the guard who perpetrated it was actually prosecuted).

All either Eloy or CCA seem to be concerned with is the money they can make in Arizona, of course, not reducing crime or victimization in Hawai'i or human rights abuses in their own community. If Hawai'ian legislators don't get on the ball with sentencing and prison reform, they should be called out as either incompetent or corrupt - no one can afford for any of them to be indifferent to the prison crisis anymore.

Read the report this links to, then find your state legislators here.

Call or write to them here:

Senate Clerk's Office

State Capitol, Room 10
415 South Beretania Street
Honolulu, HI 96813
(808)586-6720 phone
(808)586-6719 fax
sclerk@capitol.hawaii.gov

House Clerk's Office
State Capitol, Room 27
415 South Beretania Street
Honolulu, HI 96813
(808)586-6400 phone
(808)586-6401 fax
hclerk@capitol.hawaii.gov

The key term is "evidence-based practice". Good luck. I hope you manage to wage a successful boycott of Eloy and CCA by the time this battle is over. Israel outlawed private prisons because the profit motive is in direct opposition to human rights concerns - maybe Hawai'i will abandon them as well, for all the right reasons.

---from Hawaii.gov---

Hawaii’s Imprisonment Policy and the Performance of Parolees

Who Were Incarcerated In-State and on the Mainland

Here's the Executive Summary:

This study examined the records of the 660 persons who were released on parole in the State of Hawaii between July 1, 2005 and June 30, 2006 (Fiscal Year 2006). It addresses two main questions: What are the demographic and criminal history profiles of parolees who have been incarcerated in Hawaii and in private prisons out of state? And, how do the recidivism rates of these two groups compare? Using records obtained from the Hawaii Paroling Authority, the Department of Public Safety, and the Department of the Attorney General, parolees were tracked for three to four years after their release from prison.

The study found that:

- 54 percent of Hawaii’s prisoners are incarcerated in private prisons on the mainland — the highest percentage among all U.S. states.

- As of the end of 2009, it cost approximately $118 per day to incarcerate an inmate in Hawaii, and at least $62 per day to incarcerate him or her in a private prison on the mainland. Note, however, that unlike the in-state per day cost, the private prison cost estimate is not all-inclusive.

- 75 percent of Fiscal Year 2006 parolees never served time in a private prison on the mainland, while 25 percent did serve time there.

- Of the one-quarter of parolees who have been imprisoned on the mainland, 70 percent served half or more of their time there.

- The average time served on the mainland was 3.5 years.

The analysis of the parolees’ demographic and criminal history profiles found that:

- Parolees averaged 56 total prior arrests and 24 convictions per parolee, including an average of 20 prior felony arrests and 8 felony convictions.

- Parolees in the mainland cohort had somewhat more felony arrests and felony convictions per person than did parolees in the Hawaii cohort.

- Parolees in the mainland cohort had been convicted of fewer property and drug crimes, and more violent and “other” offenses, than had the parolees in the Hawaii cohort.

- The average maximum sentence for parolees who had been incarcerated on the mainland was longer: 10.9 years, versus 8.5 years for the Hawaii cohort.

- The average time served by the mainland cohort was longer: 6.2 years, versus 3.2 years for the Hawaii cohort.

- The mainland cohort included substantially more males than did the Hawaii cohort: 20 male parolees for every female parolee in the mainland group, versus 4 male parolees for every female parolee in the Hawaii group.

- As compared to their male counterparts, female parolees in both cohorts were more likely to be property and drug crime offenders.

- There were no statistically significant differences in ethnicity between the two parole cohorts. Most notably, Native Hawaiians comprised 40 percent of each cohort.

The analysis of recidivism found that:

- Parolees in the mainland cohort received significantly lower scores on the Level of Service Inventory-Revised (LSI-R). Hence, mainlanders had fewer needs for service and a lower average risk of recidivism than did parolees in the Hawaii cohort.

- In the aggregate, the LSI-R scores predicted recidivism fairly well.

- A little more than half of parolees in both cohorts failed on parole within three years.

- The average time to recidivism in both cohorts was about 15 months.

- The recidivism rate for the mainland cohort (53 percent) was slightly lower than the recidivism rate for the Hawaii cohort (56 percent), but this difference is not statistically significant.

- There was more recidivism among the mainland cohort for parolees in the higher-risk LSI-R categories.

- There was more recidivism among the mainland cohort for violating conditions of parole.

- Nearly half of all rearrests were for violating the conditions of parole.

- In both cohorts, older people recidivated less than did younger people. Age is a powerful ally of efforts to stop criminal offending.

- There were few significant differences between the two cohorts in acts of misconduct committed while in prison.

- Parolees in the mainland cohort were more likely to violate parole conditions than were parolees in the Hawaii group.

- Furlough programs were related to significantly lower rates of recidivism among mainland parolees, but not among parolees who were imprisoned only in Hawaii.

Recommendations from this study:

- Since there is no empirical justification for the policy argument that private prisons reduce recidivism better than public prisons, the State of Hawaii should decide whether to continue, discontinue, expand, or contract its reliance on private prisons based on other criteria. While cost is one criterion, it is not the only one that is important to consider.

- It is ill-advised to rely on a framework for thinking about corrections (herein termed humonetarianism) that stresses short-term financial savings at the expense of programs aimed at improving the prospects for offenders’ rehabilitation and the satisfaction of their basic needs and rights. Long-term savings are often found in forward-thinking policies and programs.

- The State of Hawaii needs to calculate more inclusive and accurate estimates of the cost of incarceration in-state and in private prisons on the mainland.

- Much more research needs to be done in order to adequately describe the contours and consequences of Hawaii’s correctional policy. One high priority is a study that explores who gets sent to prison (and where). The present study examined only persons who were released on parole.

- The State of Hawaii should conduct more research about its correctional policies and outcomes, especially given a policy world that is increasingly evidence-based.

- The Department of Public Safety and the Hawaii Paroling Authority need an integrated records management system. At present, inmates’ records are often incomplete, scattered, and difficult to locate.

ADC updates “Private Versus Public Provision of Services” Report

2011-12-27T01:27:00.000-07:00

----------NEWS RELEASE-------------

ARIZONA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS
1601 W. JEFFERSON
PHOENIX, ARIZONA 85007
(602) 542-3133
www.azcorrections.gov

JANICE K. BREWER
GOVERNOR

CHARLES L. RYAN
DIRECTOR

For more information contact:

Bill Lamoreaux
blamorea@azcorrections.gov

For Immediate Release
December 21, 2011
ADC releases Biennial Comparison Report

Pursuant to A.R.S. § 41-1609.01, on December 21, 2011, the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) submitted the Biennial Comparison of “Private Versus Public Provision of Services” Report to the Joint Legislative Budget Committee (JLBC).

In 2009, Charles Ryan the newly appointed ADC Director found that a formal,
comprehensive biennial report comparing private and public provision of services, required by A.R.S. § 41-1609.01(K)(M), had not been completed and submitted to JLBC since the law was originally enacted. In order to comply with the statutory requirement and produce the report, it was necessary for Director Ryan to develop the tools needed to capture sufficient data to measure and compare private and public prisons. This included creating a new prison operations inspection program and annual audit process that could be used both to ensure operational compliance and to collect and to measure data for the required comparison. In addition, it was necessary to revise existing processes and develop new processes to reliably capture and report event-driven and outcome-based comparative prison data. This included enhancements to the significant incident reporting (SIR) process, collection of assault data and mortality data, and revision of internal data collection tools for inmate programs and services. Once annual audit data was available for calendar year 2011 and comparative data was available for fiscal years 2010 and 2011, the biennial comparison required by A.R.S. § 41-1609.01 was completed.

The report is available on the Department of Corrections website.

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