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.

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!

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.

So, what did you think?

Youth violence and staff uses of force spiked in 2011 at Maryland’s most troubled juvenile detention centers, according to an annual report by the state’s Juvenile Justice Monitoring Unit, part of the attorney general’s office. The number of incident reports filed rose 25 percent from 2010 to 2011 across the state’s juvenile justice system to nearly 8,000, while some of the more violent categories of incidents increased even more.

Violent incidents noted in the report include:

• Systemwide, the number of melees and other large group disturbances doubled. (179 instances reported.)
• The Victor Cullen Center, a reform school in Frederick County, increased it’s use of handcuffs as restrains more than five times as often as in 2010. Youth-on-youth attacks there doubled, and assaults on staff members tripled.

Four particular hot spot facilities house roughly three quarters of the incarcerated youth population.

Cheltenham, Cullen, the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School in Baltimore County and the Baltimore City Juvenile Detention Center — four centers highlighted in the report because of their size or rates of violence — hold about 350 youths at any given time.

Overall, there are typically about 450 youths in state detention centers at a time, while 900 are in rehabilitation programs and reform schools. There are 5,700 released on probation to the community.

Forty to fifty percent of the roughly 230 youths detained at Cheltenham and the Baltimore facility at any time are not sentenced to the facility. They are, instead, waiting to be placed in a group home, substance abuse program or other type of treatment plan.

Once placed in a detention center, a person’s interim stay telescopes. While meant as a temporary measure, there is severe overcrowding in other youth facilities as well. This means that a stay meant to only last a few weeks frequently becomes a much longer wait for an opening to occur somewhere else.

While in the detention centers overcrowding is also a factor. Thirty-six thousand youths were referred to the department by the courts during the 2011 fiscal year. Since the department is required by law to accommodate any youth a juvenile court orders to be placed there, the problem becomes obvious.

I will once again refer to Mr. Dance’s excellent examination of the subject:

Many of the facilities have been stretched well beyond their capacity. The Hickey School, designed for 72 youths, housed more than that for nearly seven months of 2011, hitting a high of 97, according to the report. At Cheltenham, two of the main housing structures double up youths in 24 rooms meant for single occupancy, filling the buildings as much as 85 percent beyond capacity.

So we have kids that are just in there while waiting for a space at a group home who are incarcerated with violent offenders. This creates an environment where violence is rapidly learned as a means of self defense. Youth that would never have taken that path find themselves walking it in such an environment. Not only that, but it also is often the first step on the path to recidivism.
 Image Source: Vectorportal, used under it’s Creative Commons license

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In downTown:USA we looked at the homeless problem and found a distressing number of mothers and families living on the streets. We also found a disproportionate number of veterans. Now, a few years later, the crossover between these two groups is growing.

Eric Tucker and Kristen M. Hall, of The Associated Press, covered this story recently and uncovered some extremely disturbing data:

Female veterans make up about 8 percent of all veterans, or about 1.8 million, compared to just 4 percent in 1990. The number of homeless female veterans has more than doubled from 1,380 to 3,328 between fiscal year 2006 and fiscal year 2010, according to a December U.S. Government Accountability Office report that found many with young children and nearly two-thirds between ages 40 and 59.

Male veterans encounter numerous obstacles when trying to reintegrate into normal life. Female veterans face all of these and many more as well. Tucker and Hall continue

Female service members, who in wars with increasingly blurred front lines return with post-traumatic stress disorder, face unique challenges, advocates say. Many have suffered sexual assault and remain too traumatized to share common space with men. Many are single mothers struggling to find housing for themselves and their children. They’re also more likely to be jobless: Unemployment for female veterans who’ve served since September 2001 was 12.4 percent last year, slightly higher than for their male counterparts.

Part of the problem is that the VA is a system built around male soldiers and their needs, not women. Some examples of this include:

• Current law doesn’t allow the VA to reimburse providers for housing children, creating a financial disincentive to do so. A recent GAO report notes that over 60% of existing grant and per diem programs serving homeless women that it surveyed didn’t house children.
• One hour south of a major military installation lies Nashville, TN. There are only seven transitional beds for homeless single women veterans in Nashville.
• The Department of Housing and Urban Development housing voucher program is a great resource that has helped house thousands of veterans and their families. It is limited, however, to those in the most extreme need. Usually this need is one that requires ongoing attention, such as substance abuse or mental health problems.

Many of these women are mothers, attempting to care for their children while living on the street. While it is tragic to see anyone homeless who has defended our country, it is doubly so to see this impact their children as well. I think we can all agree that this is not the way for an innocent child to grow up.

The topics we have covered in our trilogy – homelessness, women in prison, and juvenile justice – are some of the great challenges that face our communities. By shining a spotlight on the destructive cycles that contribute to these issues we hope to not only educate, but to also motivate people into making a difference.

When these issues are addressed two key things happen:

• The economic burden on society is lightened.
• The social burden on society is lightened.

It is that rare animal in the political arena: a truly bipartisan “win-win” scenario.

A focus on rehabilitation and reintegration into society has been proven fiscally conservative; the savings over the long term are incontrovertible. At the same time the focus on social factors such as generational cycles of neglect or abuse appeals to the classic liberal stance. This is one area where, no matter how toxic our politics may become, both sides of the aisle have reason to get on board.

How can you help? For one thing you can join the discussion. In the interest of reaching as many people as possible we have been branching out into the world of social media. Join us on our Facebook Page, Google+ Page, or Twitter. Ask us questions, share your stories, or just follow along as we keep you abreast of the latest news on these topics.

Of course we would love it if you would buy our books and share them with friends as well. I highly advise our most recent effort – Born, Not Raised: Voces  from Juvenile Hall – because there is a lot of legislation going on right now across the U.S. that concerns our juvenile justice system. As state budgets get tighter, some are embracing the financial logic in our proposals, while others are backsliding to older, less effective strategies.

It is important to get informed on these issues, as in one way or another they impact all of us in the end.

We look forward to hearing from you!

The Colorado State Senate deserves kudos for taking another step toward stripping the state’s district attorneys of their ability to “direct file” the cases of juvenile offenders into the adult prison system.

The measure has two major positive effects. First of all it raises the age at which a juvenile can be charged as an adult from 14 to 16 years old. Second it reduces the number of youth offenders that can be direct-filed into the adult prison system. While the direct-file option is not completely off the table, it would be reserved for truly extreme cases such as murder or violent sex crimes.

Everything that brings this closer to Gov. John Hickenlooper’s desk is a positive step for the state.

Eli Stokolis of Fox 31 reports:

Supporters of H.B.1271 have pointed to a recent study by the Colorado Juvenile Defender Coalition based on a review of 3,000 cases between 1993 and 2011, showing that direct file has disproportionately affected teenagers of color and that nearly all of the cases — a whopping 95 percent — lead to plea bargains before the case ever goes before a judge.

‘Some of the decisions made in 1993 were overreacting to the circumstances,’ said Sen. Evie Hudak, D-Westminster. ‘Direct File puts children in adult jails which do not have separate areas for juveniles; they do not provide educational services.

‘We need to treat children differently than adults,’ Hudak continued. ‘The victim may be an adult, the crime may be adult-like, but the perpetrator is a person who has not been fully formed yet. They are juveniles!’

It should be noted that the number of direct-file cases has dropped by more than half over the last year, mainly due to 2010 legislation expanding the number of factors that must be considered by the district attorneys.

Even so, the remaining cases still constitute way too many wasted lives.

We applaud the Colorado Senate and look forward to the day that Gov. John  Hickenlooper has the opportunity to sign it into law.

Now those facilities are preparing for closure as their responsibilities will be shifted to the county level. The three remaining state facilities in California house between 800 and 900 young people. Krisberg does not think this is wise.

Youth Radio / Youth Media International recently interviewed Krisberg about this issue and its potential repercussions (via The Huffington Post). While he has been critical of the Department of Juvenile Justice in the past he does note two distinct changes that have occurred in recent years. Changes that alter the picture drastically.

First is the fact that the population of youth offenders currently incarcerated is only a small percentage of what it has been in the past. He states that this is because many of the youth he had been advocating for have since been moved out of DJJ and into county programs, a move he cites as successful. According to him, the remaining youth are part of “a very small core of very troubled young people, and so I think that people need to pay attention to the fact that these are not the youth who have been in the system in the past.”

The second change is that over the past eight years significant improvements have been, made whereas with county facilities it would be a matter of starting from square one. This means abandoning the advances made in education and medical care, for one thing. It also means that gains made in reducing the use of force and isolation might as well not have happened.

The entire interview is recommended reading, but I particularly wanted to share Mr. Krisberg’s answer when he was asked about recidivism.

I think the question is the content of the program. Are people being treated decently and humanely? Are they given the kind of resources they need?

I’m a big fan of the Missouri Department of Juvenile Justice Model, to the extent that that we move away from treating young people as inmates and prisoners and start understanding that are going to rejoin our communities pretty quickly and be citizens, that’s the key. In terms of closer to home, the way to deal with that is to create opportunities for reentry.

To me the number one problem is that when you put someone in a high security locked facility you take away all of their decision-making. Then you turn them loose after years of not even having to do any of the basics like set an alarm clock or figure out what you’re going to eat for lunch. It’s really a shock to the psyche to be under such a controlled environment and then be thrown into the chaos of communities. Therefore I think the best programs prepare youth for going home by giving them more responsibility, more freedom, more opportunity to demonstrate that they can succeed. We haven’t done that in California. We haven’t done that around the country.

This is part of the core problem. How does a person readjust to table manners, the job search, possible homelessness, and the general social interactions of day-to-day life, after time spent incarcerated? Is it any wonder that so many of these kids find the appeal of their old gang, and the secure social structure it seems to represent, as a valid choice?

Image by Davynin on Flickr, used under it’s Creative Commons license