By Jessa Rae for Art against Incarceration (8/10)

Last week, I wrote about a rape survivor's restorative/transformative response to her attack. I want to share a few words with you about that post.

I have rarely been as moved as over the past few days. I want to thank the survivors of violence who reached out to me via e-mail to share your own stories. Words cannot adequately express my gratitude for your compassion and your courage. I also received messages from others who felt that I offered a “naive” and “dangerous” view. Some of you felt very strongly that had the mother who I wrote about been armed, she would have prevented the attack. Others suggest that I am absolving rapists from their crimes. Still others advocated castration or the death penalty for rapists.

I am going to take some time to process all of this. I promise to write something in the next few days to share more about how I have come to the views that I have in spite of or because of my own experiences with violence. But today is not the day to delve into all of that.

In the meantime, I wanted to share a couple of updates of what has happened with the Powderhorn Park community. The Star Tribune recently published an editorial titled “Powderhorn Park residents urge peaceful, constructive action”:

Few would blame Powderhorn Park residents if they were promoting more policing or longer sentences for convicted criminals. From the outside looking in, some might even recommend that more neighbors carry guns for protection or that they leave the neighborhood altogether and find a safer place to live.

The frightening Thanksgiving Eve sexual assault of a woman in the park and the attempted rape of two teen girls nearby is more than enough to shake one’s sense of safety and security.

But instead of talk about fleeing the city, becoming vigilantes or locking up criminals forever, area residents are standing up for their community and taking a different approach. Following the lead of a courageous mom who refuses to be a victim, community members have instead decried violence, celebrated their neighborhood and encouraged compassion.

During a Wednesday night vigil, several hundred people gathered to connect with each other and reclaim their park. Rather than give in to anger, neighbors viewed the incidents as opportunities to “understand, heal and grow,” in the words of the vigil’s organizers. That’s a good example for other communities grappling with tough crime problems.

In this case, four teen boys, ages 14 to 16, were charged in connection with the sexual assault and attempted robbery of the 45-year-old woman and the attacks on two teenaged girls in a nearby garage. The mom was assaulted in front of her 10-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter while they were cross-country skiing in the park.

A self-described student of nonviolence and restorative justice, the mother who was attacked said the vigil should be a “celebration of our community and our park … a place for nature and creativity.” She also wrote in an e-mail that she saw her assailants as “hurting, scared children” who need support.

Her neighborhood has seen that kind of attitude yield results. For a decade before funding ran out, the Powderhorn Neighborhood Association worked with law enforcement to divert those guilty of lower-level street crimes into a restorative-justice program.

Neighbors talked with customers of prostitutes and young offenders about the impact of their crimes, then helped decide how the offenders would fulfill the community-service sentences. As a result, the Powderhorn area saw a significant drop in street crime.

That doesn’t mean that the four juveniles being held for the November assaults shouldn’t be punished and held accountable.

Nor does the unusually reasoned neighborhood response mean residents should not take smart steps to improve safety. To that end, neighborhood organizers are sensibly encouraging precautions in the park, such as traveling in larger groups and having additional lighting and volunteer foot patrols.

Certainly the Powderhorn neighborhood is not the first metro community to respond to a horrible crime with candlelight vigils and calls for peace. But the compassion and fierce defense of the neighborhood by residents is a reminder that the power of a united community will always triumph over hate and fear.

The following is an article about the community vigil.

You may have recently read that Illinois’ prison population has surged in the past year.  The reasons for this spike in population are a case study in spinelessness, political demagoguery, and public ignorance.

I didn’t write about this issue during our recent gubernatorial elections because I was just so outraged and despondent that all I could articulate was “what the f@c*?”  This would not have shed any particular light so I refrained from writing.  With some distance, I will try to offer a more coherent  presentation of our situation in this state in the hopes that it can serve as a cautionary tale for others who engage in criminal legal reform work across the country (particularly in California at this time).

Background

Adam Dorster offers a review of what happened when Illinois corrections’ administrators used a version of the “Meritorious Good Time Release (MGT)”  program to discharge some prisoners in 2009.

If you’re just getting caught up on the controversy, here’s a little background. For decades, governors and prison directors in Illinois have utilized a program known as “Meritorious Good Time (MGT),” which allows prison officials to award up to 180 days of good conduct credit to inmates “for meritorious service in specific instances as the Director deems proper.” That means that incarcerated individuals who behave well while behind bars can have his or her sentence shortened. Before 2009, the Illinois Department of Corrections (DOC) followed an unwritten policy requiring that inmates must serve at least 61 days before any credits could be awarded. (Those 61 days did not typically include time spent at a local jail while the prisoner was awaiting trial and sentencing.)

Last year, officials in the Quinn administration launched MGT Push, an accelerated program in which hundreds of inmates were given the good-conduct credit immediately upon entering prison, before they had a chance to exhibit solid behavior. An AP report last fall found that some of the inmates let out of prison early thanks to MGT Push had violent records and committed additional violent crimes after being let out. In all, the state released 1,745 inmates out of prison before the Quinn administration halted the initiative last winter. The inmates served an average of 36 days less than was required by a judge or jury.

Well you can just imagine what happened when the press got a hold of this story.  Media reports suggested that this was a “secret early release” program instituted by the Governor and his corrections administrators. The main culprit was an article by the AP in December 2009 that alleged just this.

During the Democratic Primary season in early 2010, Governor Quinn’s opponent Dan Hynes used this program as a club to assail Quinn as soft on crime and as a bad manager.

Below is another ad by Dan Hynes striking the same note:

Then his general election challenger, Bill Brady, took it to a  whole other level trying to basically make this into Quinn’s version of Willie Horton.

Just last month, long time lawyer and criminal justice reform advocate Malcolm Young wrote a comprehensive and scathing report highlighting the media and politicians’ complete overreaction to and basic demagoguery of this issue.   He concludes that this was no a political scandal.

The report dated Oct. 28 claims that most news stories on early prisoner release have been false and the issue has wrongly turned into a scandal. Malcolm Young, director of the Program for Prison Reentry Strategies at the university’s Bluhm Legal Clinic, wrote the report, saying the controversy on the issue “resulted in ill-advised legislative and administrative decisions that may actually increase risks to public safety.”

“Contrary to media reports, MGT-Push has not been responsible for a single illegal or premature release of dangerous criminals or for the commission of additional violent crime,” Young writes. “MGT-Push did not cut prison sentences by months or years. It did not add to the public risk or endanger public safety. And it was not ‘secret.’ ”

Malcolm Young offers further context and critical information about the actual MGT program:

Young’s report says MGT Push was simply an alteration of the old MGT program, which had been in place since the 1970s. Randle, the former IDOC director who resigned on Sept. 2, simply did away with an IDOC practice of waiting until an inmate had served 60 days in prison to award the MGT credits, Young notes. Though many prisoners released under MGT Push had served only a few weeks or months in prison before their release, many had already served much more time in county jails while awaiting sentencing, Young says, meaning that prisoners who seemed to have been released early had actually served most of their sentences in county jails.

Vernell R. Robinson, a former inmate sentenced in Sangamon County and released under MGT Push, was sentenced to five years in prison on a narcotics conviction in 2007, and he served only 14 days in state prison before his release. However, he also served 817 days in the county jail before being transferred to prison, according to IDOC. Robinson’s time in the county jail counted toward his prison sentence, and the addition of MGT credits when he was transferred to prison met the legal requirement that he serve at least half of his sentence before being released. [Click for an explanation of Robinson’s release.]

For more about the report, you can read here. For more background about this fake scandal, you can listen to this story on WBEZ.

Illinois’ Current Prison Situation

Currently, Illinois finds itself in a position where our prisons are overflowing and our state is broke.

While most states are currently reducing their prison populations, Illinois has added more than 3,000 individuals to its prisons, bringing its total population to 48,510 as of November 29th 2010.

It turns out that the suspension of the MGT  and other release programs is primarily responsible for this year’s spike in prisoners.  I attended a presentation yesterday where Malcolm Young contended that by 2012 Illinois’ prison population would have an extra 9,000 individuals taking it to about 54,000 because of the suspension of the MGT.  At an average cost of $25,000 per prisoner to tax payers, this state simply cannot afford to sustain this level of incarceration.  For just one year, Illinois will need an additional $56 million to cover these costs.  In 2009, taxpayers spent more than $1 billion on state prisons. What are we to do?

The public is grossly misinformed and ignorant about prisons in Illinois.  This should not come as any surprise.  People in this state are no different than their counterparts across the U.S.  This means that the citizenry can easily be manipulated about criminal legal issues.  Something is going to have to give…

Lessons from the Fake Scandal

1. The American public needs a massive re-education about our criminal legal system (including prisons). Malcolm Young has written that “[t]he controversy that MGT-Push engendered was based on incorrect facts and misunderstandings of how the criminal justice system operates, including who decides what a sentence to prison will be, and what it will mean in terms of actual time behind prison bars.”   We are going to need to introduce education about the criminal legal system in our schools at all levels.  In addition, grassroots efforts to educate the general public about prisons and the criminal legal system are sorely needed.

2. Advocates and organizers need to be fearless and vocal. Those of us who are organizing around criminal legal issues need to be unafraid to speak truth to power.  Too many of us (I include myself in this criticism) were either silent or ineffective during this entire sorry process.  There was no advocate rapid response team to mobilize to fight back against the terrible reporting that created this fake scandal in the first place.

3. Spineless politicians should be voted out of office.  Pat Quinn caved to political pressure to force Superintendant Michael Randle out of his job in September.  Randle was one of the only IDOC administrators that we have had in this state who really seemed to be responsive to criticisms about the department and its operations.  He was in the process of instituting a number of critical reforms within the DOC.  My friend, Erica Meiners, who is a prison abolitionist often quotes a Canadian abolitionist who has said that we do reform work because there are “real bodies” in prisons.  Meiners rejects as misguided any attempts to pit prison abolitionists against prison reformers.  I agree that it is about adopting a both/and approach rather than an either/or one.  This is why I have so little patience or time for the minority contingent of prison abolitionists who sometimes disparage the work of reformers.  They are only a small contingent of people but they are out there.  Anyway I digress…

We need to punish elected officials like Hynes and Brady who use demagoguery as their political weapon of choice.  In this case, thankfully, the voters of Illinois defeated both Hynes and Brady.  As for Governor Quinn, one can only hope that he stiffens his spine in the future and reinstates the MGT program.  It is critical to do so if we are to staunch this consistent increase in our prison population.

4. The Media are primary culprits for spreading misinformation and lies about prisons and the criminal legal system.  The Associated Press reported (falsely) that the Illinois Department of Corrections was secretly releasing violent offenders.  They reported this in the midst of an election season.  This was akin to yelling fire in a crowded theater.  They knew what the response to such a report would be and they got just that type of hysterical and hyped up response.  The AP and our local media should have to suffer the consequences of creating a fake scandal.  The consequences of the suspension of the MGT is having a real impact on real people.  To date, I have not seen any RETRACTIONS from the AP about its original story in December.  We need the media to be held accountable by the public for printing actual facts rather than sensationalized B.S.

Conclusion

I have been closely following the debates happening in California regarding its prison overcrowding situation.  Prison Law Blog is doing some of the best reporting about the current Supreme Court case regarding California’s prisons.  I encourage those interested in this topic to follow it.

I think that Californians especially those of you who are reformers and abolitionists should pay close attention to what happened here in Illinois this year.  Avoid our mistakes.  They have real consequences for many, many people.

Update: I received a couple of e-mails asking for a reference to the original Malcolm Young study. You can access his study HERE.

Hat tip to my friend Eva for posting this on Facebook right before Thanksgiving.  As those who read this blog regularly know, I am obsessed about hair issues.  File this one under completely RIDICULOUS.

Here’s the article:

Again, thanks to publicity and pressure, the Virginia Department of Corrections has backed away from an oppressive policy.

Citing the better management of bed space, the department announced that it has relocated 31 inmates from isolation to two-person cells in units where they also will have some privileges that were previously denied them.

The terrible deed that had landed them in isolation? Refusing to cut their hair.

The Associated Press reported this past summer that 48 inmates were being segregated from the rest of the prison population for violating the grooming policy. Many were Rastafarians who do not shave or cut their hair for religious reasons (the majority of Rastafarian inmates were said to have complied with the policy).

Several other faiths also believe in letting the hair grow.

The department feared that inmates could hide drugs or weapons in their hair, or get rid of the hair to drastically alter their appearance if they escaped.

While there is legitimacy to the department’s concerns, it is hard to believe that those concerns are so acute as to require punishment by isolation.

Indeed, the department conceded so in explaining its policy change:

“While there remains a need for consequences when offenders choose not to adhere to VADOC policy, it was determined that offenders whose only offense [emphasis added] is failure to comply with the grooming policy should be housed and managed separately from the general population but did not require housing in segregation,” said department spokesperson Larry Traylor.

Other prisons have proved that hair length is not an issue. Only about a dozen states have policies limiting hair length, and some of these make accommodations for religious beliefs, according to the American Correctional Chaplains Association and reported by the AP. Federal prisons do not have restrictions on hair growth.

Yet in Virginia, some 10 inmates have spent 11 years in isolation. Eleven years just for not cutting their hair.

Now the 31 inmates involved in the transfer to new prison quarters will be housed two to a cell. They will not have all the privileges of other prisoners, but they can possess more personal property, will be able to move around inside their unit and will have access to educational and other programs.

But even this more enlightened policy might cause problems — for the prisoners, that is. Those who have been long in isolation could have trouble adjusting to a shared cell and increased unit activity.

If they have trouble adjusting to this kind of life, imagine what difficulty they would encounter being returned to society. This is another tragedy of the policy: Not only were inmates punished for a relatively minor violation, and one that for many was part of their religious faith. They also were deprived of the social contact and educational privileges that might have helped them prepare for release.

The department did the right thing in changing its policy. It’s a tragedy, however, that the change was so long in coming.

Eva made the appropriate connection though when she titled her Facebook post: “School and prisons alike trying to cut everybody’s hair!”  Several young people have been suspended from school over hair issues.  What is it with American institutions like schools, prisons, and the military and their obsession with controlling people’s hair styles?  It’s about enforcing conformity at all cost and controlling people.

One has to wonder how many other departments of corrections across the U.S. have this same policy of hauling prisoners into isolation for “grooming” violations.  It can’t only be happening in Virginia.  If anyone is aware of similar cases in other parts of the country, please let me know.

It’s killing me but this is offered without comment:

DES MOINES, Iowa —

There probably won’t be any squeeze tests involved, but Iowa prisons could soon be stocking prison-made toilet paper in a new endeavor to save taxpayers money and provide jobs to inmates.

The Des Moines Register reported Thursday that inmates at prisons in Anamosa and Mitchellville are testing a single-ply tissue processed at a Missouri prison.

“Our challenge is to seek out new things that we can do, and, well toilet tissue is a high-consumption item,” said Roger Baysden, director of Iowa Prison Industries.

Baysden said there have been no complaints about the product from the Cross Roads Correctional Center at Cameron, Mo., and Iowa inmates could start processing toilet paper next year — if the Legislature supports the idea.

Iowa inmates already make dozens of products, including license plates and office furniture. Iowa Prison Industries, which receives no taxpayer money, employs about 600 inmates and generates about $22 million in revenue each year.

Iowa’s nine prisons hold about 8,900 inmates and have around 2,800 employees. The prisons use about 900,000 rolls of toilet paper annually. Processing it in-house would save about $100,000 a year compared with buying it from a vendor. It would also create jobs for about 50 inmates.

Al Reiter, the associate warden at Anamosa, said Prison Industries would buy 1-ton rolls of toilet tissue from paper mills. Special toilet paper-processing equipment, costing about $350,000, would rewind it, slice it into smaller rolls and package it.

“It’s not nice and fluffy, but the state is saying that this is an acceptable roll of toilet paper,” Reiter said.

John Scott, administrator for Missouri Vocational Enterprises, which operates jobs programs in Missouri’s prison system, said his agency has been supplying toilet paper since 2005.

“In our estimation, we have been very successful,” he said.

If the Iowa plan is as successful as Missouri’s, it’s possible inmate-made toilet paper could be used elsewhere in state government, Baysden said.

Even people who know very little little about prisons might have heard the term “the hole.” Anyone who has seen a terrible movie about prisons will know that this usually refers to “isolation” when prisoners are kept in a cell usually by themselves for 23 hours a day. Well now that states are broke, it looks like we are going to extend a version of the “hole” to all prisoners. From a recent article about prisons in Washington State:

All eight major prisons in Washington began a one-day lockdown Tuesday, Nov. 16, as part of the Department of Corrections’ effort to help balance the state budget.

Offenders will remain in their cells all day except during meals.

There will be a scheduled one-day lockdown each month between now and the end of the budget cycle, which ends June 30, 2011.

The lockdowns will allow the Department of Corrections to expand the number of staff members who are impacted by temporary layoffs.

“This is just one of many unprecedented steps we’re taking to reduce spending and help the state overcome a historic budget crisis,” Prisons Director Bernie Warner said. “We will be adequately staffed to operate the prisons safely. Offenders just won’t have access to programs, education or work.”

I am certain that if any cost savings are achieved through this, you will see this practice catch on like wildfire across the country.

The Department of Corrections and other agencies that receive most of their operational funds from the state’s general fund are required to reduce across-the-board spending by 6 percent between now and the end of the budget cycle.

For the Department of Corrections, that means reducing spending by $53 million while still incarcerating more than 16,000 offenders in prisons and supervising more than 19,000 offenders in communities.

“The impact these budget cuts have had on our staff has been significant, even before this current round,” Warner said. “But we believe actions like these modified lockdowns will allow us to reduce spending without compromising safety for both the staff and offenders.”

Hello Washington State, how about rethinking your criminal legal system to ensure that you have LESS PEOPLE UNDER CORRECTIONAL SUPERVISION? This would be the smart thing to do. But of course, we never do the smart or sensible thing do we?

During the lockdowns, offenders will not be able to attend education classes, participate in treatment programs or go to work.

While that saves money in the short term, prison administrators say access to programs and work is important to prison safety.

“Offenders who work and participate in programs are less likely to cause trouble,” Warner said. “That’s why we work hard to provide effective programs and training for offenders to participate in. Having one-day lockdowns each month will still allow offenders plenty of opportunities to work and participate in programs.”

The prisons that will be on lockdown will be Airway Heights Corrections Center, Clallam Bay Corrections Center, Coyote Ridge Corrections Center, Monroe Correctional Complex, Stafford Creek Corrections Center, Washington Corrections Center, Washington Corrections Center for Women and Washington State Penitentiary. The state’s five minimum-security work camps will operate as usual.

Sigh…

I recently saw an item about athletes who had supposedly “rebounded from incarceration.” I am always so troubled by these types of articles because the underlying assumption is that prison actually does some “good” for people. It does not. I am reminded of a question that I read from a blogger some time ago which asked: “And when will we understand that jail, no matter who's inside, makes nothing better?” This is a question to always keep at the forefront of our minds.

I recently wrote again about Michael Vick, imploring him to stop acting as a pitchman for prisons. That post generated some of the most vitriolic e-mails that I have gotten to date. I mostly received e-mails from irate people suggesting that I was trying to prevent Vick from “telling the truth” about the rehabilitating functions of prison. Apparently, these are people who are very invested in the dominant culture’s lies about the value of prisons. I will tell you something about this. I’ll bet you $100 that if you got Michael Vick away from the TV cameras for 10 minutes, that he would tell a very different tale of his incarceration experience. The man is trying to rebuild a public athletic career and he is looking for redemption from a public that is very invested in prisons. What do we expect him to say in public but prison “changed” me and made me “better?” What if he came out instead and said: “You know what, prison did nothing but teach me to be a better prisoner?” How marketable would he be in the NFL? Sorry people but I know of what I write. I am truly not blaming Vick for this situation. I would like him to refrain from extending the reach of the prison industrial complex. However, I completely understand what he is doing in trying to rebuild his livelihood. Do I wish that he would speak out about the rank racism in the criminal legal system? Of course I do. But will that cost him dearly? Yes.

Some time ago, I saw this poster by info jocks. At the time, I wondered if they even understood how racist this is. I doubted it at the time and still do. The poster depicts an all-criminal lineup of football players. Three guesses as to how many of these are young black men? Do you give up? Out of the 11 members of their all-criminal lineup, 10 are black men and one is white. What does this suggest to you? Critics will suggest that most of the NFL is comprised of black players. This is true. Yet 30% of the NFL is white so you would expect at least three white players represented on the all-criminal lineup, no?

Disproportionate minority contact within the criminal legal system extends to ALL sectors of our society. Even rich black athletes and entertainers are caught within the net of this system. This should provide proof positive to the skeptics of the potency of racism in the criminal legal system.