Archive for
Dana Kaplan – A Call to Action: Criminal Justice Reform
Category: Criminal Justice, Prison Reform |
Tags: call to action, criminal justice, Dana Kaplan, TED Talks, TEDx, video
Recipe for a Dark Future: Kids in Solitary Confinement
Amy Fettig of the National Prison Project and Matt Simpson, of the Texas ACLU have tackled a rough topic- one to which advocates for juvenile justice should pay heed — the plight of juveniles in solitary confinement.
16 and Solitary: Texas Jails Isolate Children is their examination of this problem, and I would venture to call it required reading. Using data from a recent report, Conditions for Certified Juveniles in Texas County Jails, by researchers at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, they provide even more ammunition in the battle to get our juveniles out of adult prisons.
Here is one key passage that I believe provides a good summation:
While in solitary confinement, children’s mental and physical health is severely compromised. The LBJ report notes the broad consensus among mental health experts that such long-term solitary confinement is psychologically harmful for adults. For children in solitary confinement, the impact is even more traumatic. Children experience time differently than adults, have a special need for social stimulation, and are damaged by forced isolation more quickly and severely than adults. It is also true that young people’s brains are still developing, which places youth at a higher risk of psychological harm when healthy development is impeded. But the psychological harm is not limited to developmental issues — it often means life or death. As the report notes, the risk of suicide and self-harm, including cutting and other acts of self-mutilation, increases exponentially for children in adult jails who are 36 times more likely to commit suicide than their counterparts in juvenile facilities.
Lives are quite literally on the line here. The difference between juvenile and adult psychology is thrown into stark relief when you look at the impact solitary confinement has on each. But that’s not all. In addition to the hazards these practices pose to the incarcerated, they also hold a dim outlook for those outside the prison bars.
Reviewing the data, the LBJ report notes ‘the impact of prolonged isolation may have mental health consequences that will make it difficult for these youth to reintegrate, and may increase the likelihood that they will recidivate.’ Solitary confinement hurts children and ultimately undermines public safety.
Once more it all comes down to foundations laid in childhood. Even though the rationale often presented is that the kids are put in solitary to protect them from the adult prison population (something that does need to occur), doing so simply damages them in other ways.
Children do not belong in adult facilities. As a matter of fact the vast majority would be better served by community programs, substance abuse / mental health aid, and other rehabilitation-oriented approaches. This is a fact proved over and over again by studies from both sides of the political aisle.
As publishers we have tried to address these issues both through our most recent book, Born, Not Raised, and through the news round-ups we present on this blog. We can only hope that by helping to put a human face on the kids behind bars we can mobilize people to make effective, and fiscally sensible, change.
Where is the world’s prison capital? Would you believe Louisiana?
Unfortunately I find it all too easy to believe. As long time readers are aware, I’m the member of the team who is not in San Diego. I’m located in my home town of New Orleans, a city as rich in culture as it is in tragedy.
Cindy Chang of the New Orleans Times-Picayune showed us just how bad things have become in her cover story yesterday.
Louisiana is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly triple Iran’s, seven times China’s and 10 times Germany’s.
The hidden engine behind the state’s well-oiled prison machine is cold, hard cash. A majority of Louisiana inmates are housed in for-profit facilities, which must be supplied with a constant influx of human beings or a $182 million industry will go bankrupt.
I’ve often written about creeping privatization in our justice system, and with good reason. How can actual justice be involved when the bottom line is to fill as many beds as possible? It’s basic common sense that the two are incompatible, and the latter is ethically questionable.
Even worse is the fact that this approach is funneling money away from programs that do work. Chang continues:
More money spent on locking up an ever-growing number of prisoners means less money for the very institutions that could help young people stay out of trouble, giving rise to a vicious cycle. Louisiana spends about $663 million a year to feed, house, secure and provide medical care to 40,000 inmates. Nearly a third of that money — $182 million — goes to for-profit prisons, whether run by sheriffs or private companies.
‘Clearly, the more that Louisiana invests in large-scale incarceration, the less money is available for everything from preschools to community policing that could help to reduce the prison population,’ said Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, a national criminal justice reform group. ‘You almost institutionalize the high rate of incarceration, and it’s even harder to get out of that situation.’
It pains me to see my hope at the forefront of such a misguided and disastrous trend, especially in these recent years after Hurricane Katrina and the levee failure. We now lock up more human beings than any place else in the world, and yet we still have one of the highest rates of violent and property crime in the entire United States. It’s just not working.
If you want a look at what the rest of the nation will look like if we do not reverse this trend of privatization, read Ms. Chang’s article. It is an extensive and disturbing piece of reporting that will send chills down your spine. I’d also recommend Charles Mondonado’s article in Gambit Weekly – Privatizing Louisiana’s Prisons.
There is a truly frightening future being forged, and I am sitting on it’s leading edge. Please take a look at what is happening down here. Educate yourself before this model becomes the norm.
It is far more expensive to do nothing.
Category: Criminal Justice, Humane Exposures, Prison |
Tags: Gov. Jindal, Louisiana, prison capital, privatized prisons
Born, Not Raised Just Won an IPPY Award!
We are thrilled to announce that our newest book – Born, Not Raised: Voices from Juvenile Hall – has just won an Independent Publisher Book Award. To be precise, it won their Independent Voice Award!
What are the “IPPY” Awards? Here is a description taken from their website:
The ‘IPPY’ Awards were conceived as a broad-based, unaffiliated awards program open to all members of the independent publishing industry, and are open to authors and publishers worldwide who produce books written in English and intended for the North American market.
We have worked hard to share a vision of the human beings behind the statistics. It is one thing to hear about the number of people incarcerated in the U.S. and quite another to be brought face-to-face with women and kids in the system and hear about it in their own words. This is why we create the books that we publish.
While it’s an ego boost to receive an award, the really important thing is that the recognition will help get these personal narratives in front of more readers. We are confident that the social issues we write about can not only be addressed, but can also be addressed in a fashion that improves the lot of many unfortunates, while also reducing the cost burden on our state and federal tax base.
We are very proud of this award and would like to thank everyone over at Independent Publisher!
Category: Awards, Humane Exposures |
Tags: Independent Publishing, Independent Voice Award, IPPY Award
Homelessness, NIMBY, and Perpetual Children
Today I’d like to share an article by Pat LaMarche that touches on aspects of the homeless problem that we have not yet examined in depth.
In her recent column on Common Dreams, None of the Poor Children Matter, LaMarche comments on an increasingly common trend in US cities – the banishing from view of those in our society’s broken segments from the common view. This NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) mentality is one that we are seeing with increasing frequency, and its “out of sight, out of mind,” stance can only make an already intolerable situation worse.
Officials in Clearwater, Fla., are working diligently to put the hungry in their place. In this case that place is eight miles out of town at a facility near the county jail. The St. Vincent de Paul soup kitchen is — according to the well fed elitists running the town — ‘enabling’ the handout taking behavior of those just looking for a meal.
This practice of the ‘haves banishing the have-nots’ to the hinterland is just a part of a trend that is sweeping the country. Clearwater isn’t alone in Florida and the practice is spreading to other regions. Philadelphia, Pa., has been in the news recently for their cutting-edge political philosophy that feeding people not only enables them but downright insults them if done in the presence of those who don’t need assistance.
To shuffle off the homeless to a site eight miles out of town in this fashion is reprehensible, to say the least. This is especially true when you factor in the number of children counted among the homeless.
It is appalling to shunt aside starving kids like this. I think we can all agree that children are innocent and not responsible for their circumstances. Privation during formative years like this is a recipe for a lifetime of ills, both social and physical.
The point that LaMarche makes with poigniant personal narrative is that not all of these children are young. The developmentally disabled are effectively children all their lives, and are often thrust onto the streets when their parents or guardians pass away.
Many of the single women I worked with were permanently and equivalently 10, 11 or 12 years of age. Bonita — none of the names I’ll use here are real — told me when she showed up homeless at our once majestic hotel-turned-shelter, that she’d always wanted to live in a great big house with high ceilings and long stairways, but she didn’t know it would have so many homeless people in it.
You laugh or you cry in that line of work. Some days you do both.
I strongly advise reading this article, particularly for the story of the woman referred to simply as “Joan.” Trust me, it is a story that you need to read.
Drew Harwell of The Tampa Bay Times notes the ongoing battle between the city of Tampa and its homeless population: battle that involves the homeless being pushed further and further out of sight, despite their overwhelming numbers.
With more than 15,000 homeless people, the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater area has the highest rate of homelessness among metropolitan areas in the country, according to a 2012 report by the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
But Clearwater’s offerings for the homeless have shrunk as officials have pushed for consolidating services in places like Safe Harbor or a nearby tent city named Pinellas Hope — a practice critics deride as ‘warehousing.’ The Clearwater Homeless Intervention Project, a shelter and day center next to the soup kitchen that offered a number of services, closed last year after the city withdrew a $100,000 grant.
Are they deliberately trying to create new criminals? Think about it: if all of your options were suddenly gone and you had to resort to crime to put food in your children’s mouths wouldn’t you do it? Be honest.
By relocating food assistance eight miles out of town, the city is placing unnecessary hardship on people who already have a mountain of woes. The solution is to find a way to reintegrate them with day to day life, not to push them away in a fashion reminiscent of the way feudal lords in the Middle Ages treated their peasantry.
This trend of warehousing is one we intend to watch closely, as it is antithetical to every reputable finding on the subject of homelessness.
LaMarche is host of Maine’s The Pulse Morning Show (available online at zoneradio.com) and is also the author of Left Out In America: The State of Homelessness in the United States. Ms. LaMarche was the Green Party’s vice-presidential candidate in the 2004 U.S. presidential election.
If you are interested in learning more about the homeless issue in the US, you might wish to check out downTown U.S.A.: A Personal Journey with The Homeless, the first in our trilogy of books about modern-day social ills.
Category: downTown U.S.A., Homelessness, Humane Exposures, Mental Health |
Tags: developmental disability, homelessness, NIMBY, Pat LaMarche
Federal Intervention Requested at Orleans Parish Prison
Tuesday evening the Southern Poverty Law Center filed for a preliminary injunction against the New Orleans sheriff’s office. This filing pointedly requested the intervention of a federal judge due to the severity of the allegations.
This action come a mere one month after the SPLC filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman over unsafe and unconstitutional jail conditions. Allegations that were supported by a Department of Justice inspection a few weeks later that found “inadequate staffing levels in jail facilities, pervasive violence and substandard mental health care.”
These findings were hardly shocking to anyone who was paying attention back in 2009 when prior DOJ investigations revealed a similar level of unconstitutional activities. In the intervening time, to the intense frustration of advocates, there was practically no public communication from the feds or local authorities about how to resolve the problems.
This latest filing by the SPLC requests U.S. District Judge Lance Africk to both grant investigating attorneys “expedited discovery” and hold a hearing about the conditions in jail within the next 90 days. (It is worth noting that Gusman’s office had asked last month for an extension of the original lawsuit.)
As if the findings prompting the lawsuit were not enough, reports are now filtering in about escalating violence in the facilities under scrutiny – violence that seems to have a level of retribution in its make-up.
Laura Maggi, a reporter for The Times-Picayune, brings us the unpleasant details:
Since the lawsuit, there has been an ‘uptick’ in violence, while inmates who need mental health care continue to be neglected, wrote Katie Schwartzmann, managing attorney for the law center. For example, the filing accuses jail deputies of anally raping an inmate with an object, beating up another shackled inmate and failing to protect three inmates attacked by other inmates.
One of the original plaintiffs, inmate Kent Anderson, signed an affidavit that deputies have threatened him since the lawsuit, saying they could move him back to a jail facility where he believes isn’t safe. ‘Since my lawyers filed the lawsuit, things have been hell for me. Deputies tell me, ‘You want to complain about things? You want to tell your lawyers? We’ll send you back to Old Parish Prison,” according to the affidavit.
Our justice system is flat out broken, there is no other way to truthfully describe it. Conditions of overcrowding and violence are found across the nation, and often in facilities housing not only male offenders, but also those incarcerating women and youths.The situation in Orleans Parish Prison is a horrible reminder of this fact.
Talking about the Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative (JDAI)
Bart Lubow, Director of Juvenile Justice Strategy for the Annie E. Casey Foundation talks about the Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative (JDAI) at an April 2012 conference in Houston dedicated to the topic. JDAI is currently the the most widely replicated juvenile justice system reform project in the nation, with initiatives in 38 states.
Racism in Memphis: Shelby County Juvenile System on the Hot Seat
The Memphis’ juvenile jail has been found decidedly wanting in a recent federal investigation. According to it’s findings, there have been problems at the Shelby County Juvenile Court for years, mainly concerned with overly harsh discipline, inadequate protection of the incarcerated, and a strong dose of racism in the way that the inmates are treated.
Thomas Perez, head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division in Washington, reported Thursday that both his attorneys and outside consultants found “systemic civil-rights violations as well as patterns of discrimination against black youths, who are more likely to be detained, to receive tougher punishments and to end up in the adult system.”
Beth Warren at The Commercial Appeal gives us a bit more detail on the DOJ findings:
Detention officers have used restraint chairs to strap down juveniles and pressure-point control tactics, such as bending a youth’s wrist backward to induce pain, according to a three-year investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. Both, as practiced in Memphis, are unconstitutional, according to the report by the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.
The report also found dangers in the physical layout of the jail, such as its two-level design with a balcony.
‘There is no systematic suicide-proofing of the building, no education to detention staff regarding necessary precautions and no plans to correct these risks,’ according to the report.
These issues are of grave concern, but even worse is the widespread racism endemic in the justice system. Unlike the situation inside the facility, the racist component begins on the streets. Just look at the arrest findings (via WREG TV, Memphis)
Black juveniles who were arrested in Memphis and surrounding Shelby County were twice as likely as whites to be detained in jail and twice as likely to be recommended for transfer to adult court, where a conviction generally brings harsher punishment, Perez said.
As is established in numerous reports over recent years, when you put juveniles into adult facilities the recidivism rate spikes. In other words, a much larger percentage of them are arrested again after release. The simple fact is that placing youth in facilities with adult offenders creates a training ground for criminals.
Perez has publicly stated that the goal is not to place blame, but to find a way to fix the problem. We will be keeping an eye on Shelby County and will let you know how well he does.
Image by Vector Portal, used under its Creative Commons license
Category: Criminal Justice, Juvenile Justice |
Tags: "racial disparity", juvenile jail, Memphis, racism, Shelby County, Shelby County Juvenile Court, Thomas Perez
Born, Not Raised – The Trailer
It is finally here! Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to present the Born, Not Raised video trailer!
So, what did you think?
Category: Born Not Raised, Humane Exposures |
Tags: book, incarceration, juvenile justice, recidicism, trailer, video
News Roundup: Juvenile Justice
First of all we would like to thank everyone who made our signing at Warwick’s Books such a success! It means a lot to see what we do inspiring such a reaction. Thank you all!
There seems to be a lot going on this week, and juvenile justice is taking the lead in news stories everywhere. Today, rather than focus on just one story, we would like to present a survey of the current top stories.
First stop, West Virginia.
The state’s juvenile justice system will soon be examined by a court-hired monitor, due to worries that it focuses more on punishment than rehabilitation. This is an approach that is both more expensive and less effective over time.
State Supreme Court administrative director Steve Canterbury is quoted in The Charleston Daily Mail as making a vital point on the subject:
‘I know that many citizens get very frustrated and they have the misconception that ‘rehabilitation’ means ‘mollycoddling,’ but real rehabilitation programming is stringent and demanding and at the end of the day that investment pays off in dividends because you don’t have to keep paying for the continued recidivisms of juveniles who have not been rehabilitated,’ he said.
Orlando, Florida.
In a move forward, Orlando is implementing a new program that allows cops on the street to write a ticket for many juvenile infractions that before now would have resulted in time behind bars. Geared toward “slightly troubled kids,” the option is only available to first-time offenders. Even so, the projected cost savings are sizable.
WFTV notes some of the details in their coverage of the story:
The civil citation will require things like restitution, community service and courses to correct juvenile behavior. These are much cheaper than tying up the court system, according to officials.
‘We see many, many children mess up and many of them don’t need to go deeper into the juvie justice system,’ said Secretary Wansley Walters of the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice.
Texas
The Lone Star State has taken some good strides towards a better system of juvenile justice in recent years, so it is a fitting place for nearly 700 of the nation’s top juvenile-justice reformers to gather. Such is the case this week, as some of the most engaged minds on this topic meet in Houston to share their strategies for reducing the number of troubled youths who end up incarcerated.
Bart Lubow, director of the Juvenile Justice Strategy Group at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which is hosting the Houston gathering, says just locking kids up mostly doesn’t work.
‘Our reliance on incarceration is a failed policy. It doesn’t work for the kids; it doesn’t work for public safety; it doesn’t work for taxpayers, because it’s enormously expensive.’
New York
While advocates gather in Texas, New York is the site of a two-day conference for journalists, hosted on the campus of The John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s Center on Media, Crime and Justice. The Juvenile Justice Information Exchange is blogging it, and I highly advise checking out their coverage. Here is a little of what to expect:
While the conference, Kids Behind Bars, Where’s the Justice in America’s Juvenile Justice System?, is primarily meant for journalists, many of the topics will be of interest not only to those in the field, but the general public as well.
Speakers on Monday include: Mark Soler, executive director of the Center for Children’s Law & Policy; Vincent Schiraldi, commissioner of New York City’s Department of Probation; Ricardo Martinez, co-director, Padres & Jovenes Unidos and David Utter, director of policy, the Florida office of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Also of note: The Crime Report is also blogging the event, if you’d like a different perspective.
California
As all know, there has been a lot of furor in The Golden State about the closure of a number of facilities dedicated to housing juvenile offenders. KALW public radio has today’s “must read,” article on the subject – an interview with one of the state’s most noted juvenile justice reformers:
Only three of California’s state facilities still remain open, holding a total of about 800 to 900 youth, and soon the state will hand down responsibility of juvenile offenders to counties. But [Barry] Krisberg, the Director of the of Research and Policy at the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute at UC Berkeley’s School of Law, isn’t so sure that this realignment is the wisest decision. Turnstyle sat down with him to discuss the coming changes to California’s juvenile justice system and what they will mean for both the state of California and its counties.
So there you go, some of the top news on the subject of juvenile justice this week. I’m sure that as budgetary constraints get tighter and election season ramps up we will be seeing a lot more stories on the subject. We can only hope that the legislators of our nation remember that it truly is more expensive to do nothing!
