Archive for Humane Exposures

| August 30, 2010
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California to Shift Prison Population?

JailInteresting things are happening in the California penal system. Both sides of the aisle, left and right, have plans for a big change in the way the prison system works. Of course, much of this is being fueled by the massive deficit facing the state.

It seems that the shortage of cash on the part of the government has those in power trying to find ways to shift the prison population into less costly venues. Michael Gardener, a writer for the San Diego Union-Tribune, explores the details in his recent piece in Sign on San Diego:

The state’s plans to ship low-risk prisoners to local jails could cost counties revenue and are raising fears that inmates may be released early. Transferring non-sex offender prisoners to county jails are centerpieces of dueling plans put forward by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state Senate Democrats as they scramble to close a $19 billion budget gap.

The foundation of both proposals is to save the state money by offering counties incentives — including cash and greater alternative sentencing authority — to accept more prisoners.

The initiatives are drawing resistance from San Diego County supervisors, statewide law enforcement groups and Republican lawmakers.

‘Counties are very concerned and very suspicious,’ said Greg Cox, a San Diego County supervisor.

A variety of arguments, pro and con, are being presented by both the media and the political class. Suppporters stress that, if implemented, plans like this would give the counties greater lattitude to explore alternative methods such as drug treatment, supervised probation, and others methods that are slowly gaining steam as our prisons fill past the bursting point with mostly non-violent offenders.

On the flip side, the counties are wary of state-proposed programs due to the fact that state payments have usually lagged well behind the costs burden that the programs represent. The cost trail will be important to examine, since it will be one of the major factors fueling this debate. Another one, and by far the most important from a human standpoint, is the offenders themselves. While the phrase “early release” ring warning bells for many in California, it is important to examine whether these people truly need to be incarcerated.

What are your thoughts? If you live in California, we would particularly like to hear your pros and cons on this subject.

Source: “State’s plans to send prisoners to county jails worry officials,” Sign On San Diego, 08/25/10
Image by Tim Pearce-Los Gatos, used under its Creative Commons license.
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| August 27, 2010
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Troubled Education in San Diego School District

SchoolSo many issues trace back to childhood. The opportunities, the lack thereof, early life traumas, and all the other factors that can impinge on early life, create the building blocks from which the adult is sculpted. Educational opportunities are particularly key, especially during the early years when the mind is so hungry for knowledge.

The Constitution of the State of California guarantees free education. In 1984, the state Supreme Court handed down a decision that refined the legal interpretation to include extracurricular activities offered by public schools. It is an interpretation that the ACLU claims many schools are ignoring.

Tanya Sierra, a staff writer for Sign On San Diego’s Watchdog blog, tells us more:

This month, the ACLU wrote to the San Diego Unified School District in response to a report by The Watchdog that highlighted how fees for uniforms, spirit packs, gym clothes, cheerleading outfits and other items persisted despite a district policy saying such charges violate the state Constitution’s guarantee of free schooling.

[If you’d like to read the letters the ACLU sent to Poway, Grossmont and San Dieguito school districts there are downloadable PDFs of them on the same page as the Watchdog article.]

Corey G. Johnson, a reporter for CaliforniaWatch who specializes in K-12 education, notes that this is not a fresh issue. He has been reporting on it since early this year:

As we wrote in February and in June, numerous instances of school districts disregarding this law has surfaced. Earlier this month, ACLU legal director David Blair-Loy sent the San Diego Unified School District a letter asking for officials to stop several examples of ‘pay to play’ that were found at local schools. The group also asked for the money collected to be refunded to the parents.

The request followed a San Diego Union-Tribune investigation that found schools openly charging fees on their websites, despite a recent local grand jury investigation that slammed the practice.

San Diego superintendent Bill Kowba agreed that the practice was wrong and said the district will cease charging the fees and offer refunds where appropriate.

Situations like these need to be brought into legal compliance. The socialization entailed by extracurricular activities is an important part of childhood development, and access to them is already protected by law.

Source: “ACLU takes school fee effort north and east,” Sign On San Diego Watchdog blog, 08/18/10
Source: “More schools accused of pay-to-play catch ACLU’s gaze,” California Watch, 08/23/10
Image by House of Sims, used under its Creative Commons license.
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Category: Education, Humane Exposures, Public School | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| August 26, 2010
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Blueprint for Student Success: Did It Work?

Old SchoolIt is no secret that American schools are in deep trouble. Programs touting major turnarounds in the system seem to pop up regularly in urban and rural areas everywhere. No Child Left Behind (NCLB)  is one of those programs, one which has received both positive and negative press. Today, we are going to take a quick look at one of NCLB’s early attempts: The San Diego Unified School District‘s short-lived “Blueprint for Student Success.” A new evaluation of that program has been released by the Public Policy Institute of California, addressing the ongoing debate about that program’s effectiveness.

The Blueprint for Student Success ran from 2000 to 2005. It included a variety of  interventions: pedagogical coaches for teachers, extended school days and school years for students in schools with low reading performance, summer intensives for those with poor English skills, and double- or triple-length English periods. High sounding words indeed, but what reality did the program leave in its wake?

Reporter Sarah Sparks, who has covered the education beat for over five years, reports on in her article in Education Week:

San Diego’s turnaround story had all the hallmarks we’ve come to know: high-profile superintendent Alan Bersin and his New York City transplant-turnaround specialist Anthony Alvarado pushed wholesale changes; a furious teachers union protested the ‘my way or the highway’ terms; parents feared the intensity would frustrate and disengage students and the reading focus would hamstring students’ progress in other core subjects. After budget cuts and a school board election shake-up, funding for the blueprint programs dried up and Bersin was driven out a year before his contract expired.

Yet five years later, University of California, San Diego economics professor Julian Betts and his team have released a calm, nuanced evaluation of both the interventions’ effectiveness and the validity of the criticisms that led to its demise. The researchers found the interventions did not lead to lower scores in math, though they did lead to high school students taking fewer foreign language courses. The programs did not cause more students to miss school or drop out. And the overall effectiveness was a mixed bag.

Betts states that the program was quite effective at the elementary school level, although extremely expensive. Results that showed up to a cumulative 12.6% increase were found in the middle school programs. Great news when viewed in a vacuum, but lets pull back a bit and take a slightly wider perspective. Sparks continues:

Moreover, [Betts] thought many of the ‘quite significant gains’ made in elementary and middle school would have been ‘eroded away by the negative effects in high school.’  The same programs so effective in lower grades — extended-session literacy block and core — actually brought down reading achievement for students in high school; for English learners, in particular, the block periods were associated with a drop of 4.9 percentile points a year.

The irony? Early budget cuts meant the extra funding and extended-year portions were cut from the blueprint after only a few years, while the detrimental extended sessions in high school stayed around for years.

That certainly changes the perspective now, doesn’t it?

Source: “Autopsy of a Turnaround District,” Education Week, 08/19/10
Image by dullhunk, used under its Creative Commons license.
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| August 25, 2010
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The Man and His Birds

PigeonHUMANE EXPOSURES offers a penetrating look at society’s disenfranchised, questioning how long we can ignore the broken segments of our population, and at what cost. To aid in that endeavor, we have now launched our new YouTube channel, on which we will be sharing a wide variety of film clips and resources.

In The Fisher King, there is a scene with Tom Waits playing a disabled and homeless veteran. As he sits in his wheelchair, tin cup extended, he explains to Jeff Bridges’ character that “they’re paying so they don’t have to look.” It is a scene that really makes you think about how many things pass through your field of vision every day that you just don’t see. How many times have we assuaged your conscience with a few well-placed coins, and put it out of your mind? Probably so often that it escapes our notice that it’s not an object but a fellow human being that we’re “not seeing.”

Take a moment to recapture these escaped visions, look through the window we present to see a whole new world that exists uneasily in the same space as the one we walk through every day. For instance, how many people that walk past this man have actually noticed his amazing affinity for birds?

Video is a powerful tool for education. Seeing actual people and hearing their words often has a far greater impact than reading plain text. One proponent of this approach is Mark Horvath, whose work was featured this last Sunday on the front page of Google (as reported by The Huffington Post):

Activist and frequent HuffPost blogger Mark Horvath has dedicated years of his life to telling stories of the homeless through video (and an active twitter account @hardlynormal).

Despite an active following, Horvath’s message hasn’t quite made it into the mainstream. That’ll change this Sunday, when Horvath will be taking over YouTube’s homepage ‘with videos that smash stereotypes about America’s most forgotten citizens.’

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then how many is a video worth?

Source: “YouTube Dedicates Homepage To Homelessness On Sunday, August 22,” The Huffington Post, 08/20/10
Image by OliBac, used under its Creative Commons license.

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| August 24, 2010
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“Cash for Kids” Scandal Fuels Changes in PA Juvenille Court System

My trusty gavelPennsylvania has had its woes when it comes to its juvenile justice system. One of the worst and highest profile problems it has suffered was the much publicized “Cash for Kids” scandal. Here is a condensed rundown via Wikipedia, in case you missed it on the news:

[Judge Mark] Ciavarella pled guilty on February 13, 2009, pursuant to a plea agreement, to federal charges of honest services fraud, wire fraud and tax evasion in connection with receiving $2.6 million in kickbacks from Robert Powell and Robert Mericle, the co-owner and builder respectively, of two private, for-profit juvenile facilities. More specifically, the crimes charged were: conspiracy to deprive the public of the ‘intangible right of honest services,’ or corruption, and conspiracy to defraud the United States by failing to report income to the Internal Revenue Service. Ciavarella tendered his resignation to Governor Ed Rendell on January 23, 2009, prior to official publication of the charges.

What we would like to look at today is the repercussions of the scandal. In the aftermath of this hijacking of the justice system, the state of Pennsylvania is scrutinizing its handling of juvenile cases. The 10-year run of harsh sentences and unconstitutional rulings has inspired the formation of a task force composed of state advocates and county officials. Its aim? To overhaul the PA juvenile court system.

Michael Sisak, a staff writer for The Standard Speaker, has penned a nice article about the latest efforts. He writes:

Juveniles no longer appear in court without an attorney. Prosecutors, not court employees in the juvenile probation office, determine criminal charges. And infractions on school campuses are no longer painted with the same broad brush of ‘zero tolerance’ that guaranteed placement at a juvenile detention facility for even the most minor offenses.

‘Every case is going to be looked at individually, and those cases that do come through the system are going to be treated on an individual basis,’ District Attorney Jackie Musto Carroll said Wednesday, after a two-hour meeting with the task force at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre.

Sisak’s article is well worth the read, as he examines the steps being taken in detail. Importantly, he looks at both the pros and the cons to provide a balanced picture of the state of affairs. Among other things, he notes the slightly frosty reception of the local school administrators on the subject of ending “zero tolerance.” Their stated position in a meeting with the members of the Juvenile Justice Victim Response Task Force was that the change in policy engender a perception of weakness in their response to school violence.

What do you think? Can Pennsylvania pick up the pieces of its juvenile justice system? Is it on the right track in the approach it is taking to doing so? Let us know, we love comments!

Source: “Juvenile system changes take hold,” StandardSpeaker.com, 08/18/10
Image by steakpinball, used under its Creative Commons license.
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Category: Humane Exposures, Juvenile Justice, Prison, Prison Reform | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| August 23, 2010
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Digital Prisoner Tracking: Orwellian Surveillance or a Step Forward?

Maggots in my Sweet Potatoes: Women Doing TimeOne of the persistent issues in the American penal system is that it is massively overcrowded. A plethora of reasons for this abounds, as a simple Google search will show. The solutions have been in shorter supply.

Graeme Wood, a contributing editor for The Atlantic magazine, has a very interesting column in the September issue (available to us now courtesy of the magazine’s website). In it, he looks at the concept of “turning prison inside out” by using electronic surveillance. For those of you who recall the ankle unit worn by Martha Stewart after her trial, that is the kind he talks about.

Should we bring more inmates out of prisons and into society — if they can be properly monitored with an ankle device? Will this have a positive, tangible effect on recidivism? On prison overpopulation? As crime rates have gone down, the average sentence term has grown longer, leaving our penal system overloaded with inmates.

This would not be as large of an issue if inmates were reformed. Unfortunately, that is rarely the case, as Wood notes:

But that isn’t the case either: half of those released are back in prison within three years. Indeed, research by the economists Jesse Shapiro of the University of Chicago and M. Keith Chen of Yale indicates that the stated purpose of incarceration, which is to place prisoners under harsh conditions on the assumption that they will be ‘scared straight,’ is actively counterproductive. Such conditions — and U.S. prisons are astonishingly harsh, with as many as 20 percent of male inmates facing sexual assault — typically harden criminals, making them more violent and predatory. Essentially, when we lock someone up today, we are agreeing to pay a large (and growing) sum of money merely to put off dealing with him until he is released in a few years, often as a greater menace to society than when he went in.

It would seem that finding alternatives to incarceration makes good economic sense. Could the use of devices like this allow us to ease the pressure on our strained-to-bursting jails and prisons? Wood outlines a tripod of benefits from using the tracking devices, summed up at the end of the following excerpt from his article:

Devices such as the ExacuTrack, along with other advances in both the ways we monitor criminals and the ways we punish them for their transgressions, suggest a revolutionary possibility: that we might turn the conventional prison system inside out for a substantial number of inmates, doing away with the current, expensive array of guards and cells and fences, in favor of a regimen of close, constant surveillance on the outside and swift, certain punishment for any deviations from an established, legally unobjectionable routine. The potential upside is enormous. Not only might such a system save billions of dollars annually, it could theoretically produce far better outcomes, training convicts to become law-abiders rather than more-ruthless lawbreakers. The ultimate result could be lower crime rates, at a reduced cost, and with considerably less inhumanity in the bargain. [Emphasis ours.]

It is a good argument, and Wood presents a lot of upsides to the approach. Still, there are also all the issues endemic to a surveillance society a well. An argument could be made that this is a slippery slope, with the increasing usage possibly hiding just below the horizon.

As it happens often with social justice issues, benefits must be weighed against the more Orwellian factors when considering this situation. Which side do you find more logical? Let us know, leave a comment!

Source: “Prison Without Walls,” The Atlantic, 09/10
Image copyright Susan Madden Lankford, from the book “Maggots in my Sweet Potatoes: Women Doing Time.” Used with permission.
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Category: Humane Exposures, Maggots in My Sweet Potatoes, Prison, Prison Reform | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| August 20, 2010
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Common Ground: Housing the Most Vulnerable

downTown U.S.A.: A Personal Journey with the Homeless

So, what is Common Ground doing? How is it providing a roof to some of the most vulnerable homeless on the streets?

Kara A. Mergl, Director of Research and Evaluation at Common Ground, writes the following on the 100,000 Homes blog:

I guess you can say it all began back in 2003 when Common Ground began piloting its Street-to-Home method. West Midtown Manhattan and the Times Square area of NYC certainly did not look the same back then as they do now.  The program’s major strides were made between 2005, when Becky Kanis made her first NPR appearance, and 2007, when the number of homeless in Times Square decreased by 87%; from 55 street homeless down to just 7. Today, there is only one remaining homeless individual still sleeping on the streets. New York City’s Department of Homeless Services recognized the success of this method and in 2007 deployed it across all five boroughs. The question remained, however, if this method would succeed outside of New York City.

The ability to replicate results is important. Common Ground’s expanded efforts yeilded tangible and positive results in a variety of urban areas, including Los Angeles County:

Other communities, such as Denver, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., began to take notice. One of the first partnerships around this method was with Los Angeles County and Project 50. Project 50, championed by supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, brought together 24 public and private agencies with the shared goal of identifying and housing the 50 most vulnerable homeless individuals living on the streets of Skid Row. At the one-year anniversary of the initial registry, by all measures, Project 50 was a success; 49 individuals housed and an 88% retention rate.

The LA effort proceeded one person at a time. Maurice Lewis was the first people to be handed a key through the program. Aged 54, Lewis had been living on the streets for about a year when he was approached. He said he had spent years “drinkin’ and druggin’,” and also he had heard voices periodically.

The LA Times reporter Christopher Goffard did a great four-part series on these efforts, from which we glean the rundown — in plain English — on how the program works from the standpoint of someone being aided by it:

The terms of Project 50 were explained to him: We have a room for you, your very own. You don’t have to see a shrink. You don’t have to attend substance abuse counseling. All that’s required is that 30% of your income — in Lewis’ case, a $221 monthly general relief check from the county — go toward rent.

The effort is far from over. As the next stage begins, teams of volunteer with be registering the homeless in San Diego. Applying the Plan to End Chronic Homelessness, prepared by the United Way in 2006, is the next step. Training sessions will be held for almost 150 members of the community and civic leaders during the week of September 19.

This training will prepare them for the three consecutive days of pre-dawn excursions onto the streets, during which they will survey and talk with the homeless. The data collected will be used to ID the most vulnerable of that population and get them into housing over the weeks or months following the survey.

If you are interested in more information or in volunteering to assist with the survey, you can check out the San Diego Clean and Safe website.

Source: “Project 50: Four walls and a bed,” LA Times, 08/01-07/10
Image copyright Susan Madden Lankford, from the book “downTown USA: A Personal Journey with the Homeless.” Used with permission.
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| August 19, 2010
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America’s Prison Plight

Maggots in my Sweet Potatoes: Women Doing TimeIt is no secret that the American prison system is rife with problems. It is the personal stories of women in our penal system that led our own Susan Madden Lankford to create Maggots in my Sweet Potatoes: Women Doing Time, in which she juxtaposes black-and-white images taken in jails with quotes and personal narratives from the incarcerated.

This window into the incarcerated life, its hardships, and its social ramifications, is especially important in the modern day, a day when our penal system is bursting at the seams. David C. Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project in Washington, D.C., attributes this to the “Three Strikes” laws and other mandatory minimum-sentencing laws. He asserts that the overly harsh sentencing is responsible for not only causing the prison population to skyrocket, but is also culpable for the fact that approximately one in 11 of the imprisoned are there for life.

There are many aspects to this breakdown. Craig Welkener of AOL News brings us some of the disturbing facts in his recent opinion piece on the subject. Take particular note of the last two items, which directly affect imprisoned females:

The problems with today’s prisons are well documented. Conditions are deplorable. Here are a few facts:

  • Federal prisons are being operated at 160 percent capacity. Mandatory minimum sentences are putting thousands of nonviolent offenders in prison, for disproportionately long terms.
  • Approximately two-thirds of prisoners released each year will be back behind bars in some form before three years have passed.
  • Mental health care is woefully inadequate.
  • Prison rape is a moral outrage rampant across America. More than 60,500 inmates reported sexual abuse in 2007 (the actual number of rapes is likely far higher), and nearly 1 out of every 8 juveniles in custody became a victim of sexual assault from 2008 to 2009, according to a Department of Justice study.
  • Most states still allow the shackling of women during labor and delivery, often causing permanent scars. This unnecessary and humiliating procedure is opposed by the American Medical Association, the Rebecca Project for Human Rights and virtually anyone else who knows about it.

In short, the system is not working.

Those last two items in particular seem like something from the Middle Ages, yet they are faced daily in modern America. All of the factors listed by Welkener contribute to the additional trouble that former inmates have in reintegrating themselves back into society.

Take a look inside these walls, a bracing look at fellow humans fighting circumstances that dehumanize: Take a look at Maggots in my Sweet Potatoes: Women Doing Time. Unfiltered and presented in the words of the jailers and the imprisoned, it will take you into the chiaroscuro world of the female inmate, a world never seen before in quite this way.

Source: “Opinion: Why Obama Should Take on Prison Reform,” AOL News, 08/17/10
Image copyright Susan Madden Lankford, from the book “Maggots in my Sweet Potatoes: Women Doing Time.” Used with permission.
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Category: Humane Exposures, Juvenile Justice, Prison, Prison Reform, Women's Issues | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| August 18, 2010
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Addressing Homeless Issues: IDignity Assists With Identification Woes

HomelessThere are many social obstacles for the homeless. Things that we take for granted in our day-to-day lives may suddenly become seemingly insurmountable problems. In many cases, it can turn out to be something no one thinks of.

One example is the issue of identification. Most of us, at one point or another, have had to replace a lost ID. It is never a fun process. Now imagine how much worse it would be if you did not have a home or copies of the paperwork required to get a new ID. Suddenly, the possibility of a job is out of reach, the ability to cash a check is lost, and so many other aspects of modern society become inaccessible.

As we watch the numbers of the homeless swell during the nation’s economic woes, we are also seeing some interesting responses to their plight. Since modern society makes carrying ID essential for conducting one’s normal day-to-day affairs, the idea of an ID Clinic seems almost inevitable.

The first instance of an effort to assist the homeless with the paperwork required for daily life is the brainchild of Jacqueline Dowd, who founded IDignity in Central Florida. The project aims at navigating the paper trail along with the homeless, making sure that the correct forms are filled, and providing advice and guidance through the process.

Here’s a partial description of the program from the IDignity website:

Volunteers will serve in a wide variety of roles including: introducing the process to clients, filling out forms for clients, assisting agencies or shepherding clients through the process. Interestingly, most of the volunteers leave these events feeling that they have been served themselves and regularly return with a desire to do more. It is estimated that in order to continue the program through 2010 it will cost an average of $12,000 per event.

The documents that IDignity provides are required to apply for employment or school, obtain access to most shelters, vote, seek help from many social service programs, open a bank account or cash a check, secure housing or overcome many other obstacles to becoming self-sufficient.

Below is a short video interview with Jaqueline Dowd conducted by Mark Horvath. If you are unfamiliar with Horvath, he, formerly homeless himself, has developed InvisiblePeople.tv to give a face to the issue of homelessness. Horvath also writes regularly for The Huffington Post on the subject.

The lack of identification can be like a brick wall, confining a person to the areas outside of normal society. Effectively imprisoned, these people cannot interact with our communities in most of the ways needed for them to pull themselves back into mainstream culture. With more people becoming homeless at a frightening rate, in this increasingly documentation-oriented age, ideas like this need to be explored.

Does it prove effective? The Mayor of Orlando thinks so (from the IDignity website):

‘One of the biggest challenges for the homeless is lack of a personal identification card. The IDignity program is helping more than 200 people per month gain that ID which links them to critical services. It’s been so successful other Florida communities are borrowing our model.’ — Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyers State of the City address on February 18, 2010.

What are your thoughts? Had this aspect of the homeless condition escaped you until reading this? Let us know!

Source: “Without Identification, People Can’t get off the Streets,” The Huffington Post, 08/15/10
Image by pedrosimoes7, used under its Creative Commons license.

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| August 17, 2010
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The LA Homeless Shelters Now Must Accept Service Animals

Guard Dog

Joel John Roberts is the CEO of PATH Partners (an alliance of agencies that deal with homelessness), as well as the author of the book titled How To Increase Homelessness. He is also the publisher of Poverty Insights, a national online journal on homelessness, housing, and poverty, and he covers the “LA Homelessness” beat for Examiner.com.

Roberts brings us news of the results of a lawsuit that’s been filed in mid-July of 2009. The suit was brought by the Housing Rights Center (HRC), and presented under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act, and the  Fair Housing Act.

The issue? The ability of the disabled homeless to bring their service animals into shelters.

Roberts reports on Examiner.com:

‘It’s a serious and systemic problem,’ commented Michelle Uzeta, Director of Litigation for HRC. ‘These shelters put people with disabilities in the impossible position of having to choose between the service animals that provide them with needed disability-related assistance and the ability to access emergency shelter services.’

Recently, a settlement occurred with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), the joint city and county authority on homelessness that directs all LAHSA-funded agencies to provide reasonable modifications to their policies and facilities for homeless people with service animals.

While the critics cite a variety of objections to this mandate — including disruption of the shelter environment — from a legal standpoint, is seems that the issue is settled. There is a disproportionate percentage of the homeless that are physically or mentally disadvantaged, and a number of them rely on service animals to function on a daily basis.

What do you think? Seeing-eye dogs are allowed on public transportation, so should they be allowed into homeless shelters? Should other service animals have a place in these environments?

Source: “Los Angeles homeless agencies mandated to take in service animals,” Examiner.com, 07/30/10
Image by libookperson, used under its Creative Commons license.

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