February 2012 – Harvard Prison Legal Assistance Project

Month: February 2012

Compassion in California’s prisons

February 28, 2012 / Nina / Comments Off

Photo via Todd Heisler/The New York Time.

“Dementia in prison is an underreported but fast-growing phenomenon, one that many prisons are desperately unprepared to handle. It is an unforeseen consequence of get-tough-on-crime policies — long sentences that have created a large population of aging prisoners. About 10 percent of the 1.6 million inmates in America’s prisons are serving life sentences; another 11 percent are serving over 20 years.”

This week’s New York Times features an amazing story of compassion, caretaking and humanity in California’s prisons. Read the story here and explore the heart-breaking photographs from inside the state’s DOC here.

Illinois’ only supermax may shortly close!

February 22, 2012 / k-sue park / Comments Off

Tamms Correctional Center- AP

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn has proposed closing Tamms Correctional Center, the state’s only supermax prison. Even if driven by economic efficiency concerns, this action could put an end to prison conditions that have caused a mental health crisis, precipitated, among other reasons, by the fact that the 200 inmates held at Tamms have lived in almost continuous solitary confinement. Read more here.

Illinois residents can support this proposal and the Tamms Year Ten Committee’s work by following this link and making a call.

Everybody is talking about sentencing

February 18, 2012 / k-sue park / Comments Off

This week, the U.S. Sentencing Commission held a hearing in Washington, D.C. on federal sentencing after U.S. v. Booker, the Supreme Court decision that made the sentencing guidelines advisory instead of mandatory. Families Against Mandatory Minimum’s VP Mary Price testified that judges are using their discretion wisely and need to be able to continue to give individualized sentences. You can read her testimony here.

FAMM released this statement on President Obama’s new budget proposal, which endorsed the idea of expanding good time credit and compassionate release.

HLS professor and former judge of the U.S. District Court for Mass. Nancy Gertner was counsel of record in an amicus brief (PDF) submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in Dorsey v. U.S. and Corey Hill v. U.S. These decisions will determine whether the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 applies to defendants sentenced after the law was enacted, but whose crimes were committed beforehand. Gertner co-wrote the brief, which argues that denying such application will further “damage the legitimacy of the sentencing process,” with another former federal judge, Paul Cassell. Both authors sentenced defendants under the mandatory-minimum provisions of the 1986 Act, and have written previously to express their deep concerns about the damaging effects and racism of mandatory-minimum penalties for non-violent drug offenders.

Finally, FAMM President Julie Stewart recently published this op-ed in the Huffington Post last week. At a time when some Congress members argue that more prosecutorial discretion will reduce racial disparity, it calls attention to a powerful new study that suggests that much responsibility lies with prosecutors, not judges, for the disparity in sentences between black and white offenders.

Massachusetts sentencing bills are… still in negotiation

February 16, 2012 / k-sue park / Comments Off

For those of you following the current controversy over Massachusetts sentencing bills, Families Against Mandatory Minimums has this update:

As of last month, the conference committee that was trying to negotiate a compromise between the Senate and House sentencing bills had not made progress. As you know, the Senate bill included mandatory minimum reforms (along with many other issues) while the House bill only addressed habitual offenders.

The House leadership then announced that the House of Representatives would be debating and voting on a second sentencing bill that covered some of the other issues from the Senate bill.

But by early February, the House leadership said that the House members of the conference committee could negotiate a final bill after all, without the need for the House to take up a second sentencing bill. FAMM members did a terrific job of writing to their representatives in the House, urging them to include drug sentencing reforms.

Meanwhile, there has been an outpouring of concern about changes to the habitual offender law (also called the “three strikes” law) that both the House and Senate passed. FAMM has joined community leaders, clergy and activists in speaking out against mandatory maximum sentences. Click here for our fact sheet. (Lowell area members, we hope to see you at tonight’s community forum.)

Opposition to the habitual offender parts of the bills has slowed down the conference committee’s work – and rightly so. This is a critical criminal justice issue that needs to be fully considered.

Cash for prisons

February 15, 2012 / k-sue park / Comments Off

A June 2005 file photo of the Lake Erie Correctional Institution in Conneaut, Ohio, which the state sold to Corrections Corporation of America last year.

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) is the nation’s largest operator of for-profit prisons; it is a “Wall Street giant” that has grown more than five-fold during the last fifteen years. After 9/11, it capitalized on anxieties about national security and anti-immigrant sentiment to contract with the government to build private detention facilities; by 2009, almost half of all immigrants detained by the government were in facilities managed by private contractors (read more here). Between 2001 and 2005, CCA’s increased its lobbying expenditures more than sevenfold, from $470,000 to nearly $3.4 million. The Huffington Post observes that “[i]n recent years, Corrections Corporation of America has made it clear that it sees opportunity in the new era of state budget crises.”

CCA recently sent this letter to 48 states, offering to buy their prisons. Like “cash for keys” offers to foreclosure victims, the long-term costs of this exchange for states will be far greater than the cash states could take away in hand now. If the reasons that harnessing the private profit goal to and giving up public management of the prison system will be costly aren’t obvious, consider that to keep generating profits from the prison system, it will have to continue to grow, which means that the nation’s prison population will have to continue to rise, while incentives to invest in conditions that could decrease recidivism– shorter sentences, less crowded conditions, educational opportunities, reentry programs, even adequate food, healthcare and staffing, just to name a few– disappear. This would not only mean an exacerbation of the worst tendencies we have described in prior posts, but also, given the increasing power of CCA’s lobbying arm, a diminished likelihood of legislative prison reform.

Read more about this utterly depressing and horrifying prospect here.

Hundreds die in Honduras prison fire

February 15, 2012 / k-sue park / Comments Off

Gustavo Amador/European Pressphoto Agency

A fire at a central Honduras prison has caused over 300 deaths, and this tragedy has drawn attention to the broader crises of overcrowding and violence in the nation’s carceral system.

The New York Times covers the story, with a photo slideshow that includes images of prisoners’ relatives watching the fire from outside the prison fences.

Massachusetts Considers Raising the Age at which Defendants are Sentenced as Adults

February 8, 2012 / rjudge / Comments Off

Brandon Kennedy, who went to jail for 28 months on drug charges when he was 17.

Massachusetts is one of only 13 states where criminal cases involving 17-year-olds are handled in the adult justice system rather than juvenile justice system. Fortunately, though, this may change; the state legislature is considering a bill that would increase the age of criminal responsibility in Massachusetts to 18. This follows on the heels of a recent Citizens for Juvenile Justice Report showing that there is a 47 percent greater likelihood of a teen being arrested again if the adolescent is charged in the adult system versus the juvenile system. The report also said younger inmates are more likely to be sexually victimized.

Currently, 500 17-year-olds are sent to adult jails or prisons in Massachusetts every year.

Click here to read more and hear WBUR’s radio coverage.

Three strikes in Massachusetts

February 8, 2012 / Nina / Comments Off

There’s a lot of news and action circulating about the three strikes bill here in Massachusetts. Luckily, Blackstonian just released a special edition on the legislation, featuring Judge Gertner and Charles Ogletree among other prominent thinkers and activists. For more on the issues, visit Smart on Crime MA.

Juvenile-in-Justice Project

February 6, 2012 / k-sue park / Comments Off

We rarely see images of incarcerated children like this.

You can take a look at more of photographer Richard Ross’ work and watch a video in which he is interviewed here.

The Incarcerated Elderly

February 1, 2012 / k-sue park / Comments Off

The dramatic increase in prison population in the U.S. over the past few decades means that there is now an unprecedentedly large geriatric prison population for which prisons do not have the resources to care. Last week, Human Rights Watch released a report on this issue using data from nine states and twenty prisons; you can access the full report and the press release here. Colorlines also comments and provides some useful infographics.

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