April 1st, 2009
Dear Mr. President
Congratulations, and may “hope achieved” spring down to us. Mr. President, as you’ve learned personally, some believe hope is not a strategy. But, today, after 24 years of incarceration (with my innocence maintained and my faith strained, yet still intact), I write you from a state prison facility to let you know that along with the reality of a mass incarceration of Americans (2.3 million United States inmates), primarily Black male, that as of this day “hope” may just be the only strategy left and/or available to save the generation of children I see in here around me today.
Some many years ago, as I sat in a solitary confinement cell, I picked up a Bible and read a verse (in Proverbs) which said, “where there is no vision the people perish”. It is that matter of both “vision” & “perish” that has invited me to write you today.
Mr. President, in the United States Constitution, it begins with a line that says, “We The People”. In the Declaration of Independence, there is also a line which says, “We hold these truths to be self evident that ‘all men’ are created equal.” Yet, the reality of both of the above is that at the time this was being said, they (the drafters), didn’t mean my grandmother, grandfather, mother, nor me. At the time the word “we” was being used, the country was divided into two groups of people. One group who were still, in fact, considered slaves and three fifths of a human being. But, all this I am sure you already know, as does our country. (more…)
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Populations an economic lifeline for rural regions
By Keith B. Richburg; By Laura Crimaldi
Boston Herald
Monday, March 2, 2009
An astonishing one in 24 Bay State adults were either behind bars or under community supervision at the end of 2007, costing taxpayers $1.25 billion, according to a national study published today.
The report, prepared by the Pew Center on the States, ranked Massachusetts fifth in the country in terms of the number of adults in prison or jail or under the supervision of probation or parole. The study said that $1.25 billion was spent on corrections at the state and federal level in 2007 statewide.
“In any year, spending $1.25 billion dollars on corrections is stunning. In a fiscal crisis, this kind of spending is unacceptably foolish. If finances is what finally moves the state to revamp its correctional policies, so be it,” said Leslie Walker, executive director of Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services.
The Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, which oversees the state’s prisons and parole system, could not immediately provide comment on the study. State workers are not required to come into work today until noon. (more…)
Posted in
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By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post / March 23, 2009
NORWICH, N.Y. – On most mornings here, for about as long as anyone can remember, a green minibus has arrived from the outskirts of town and discharged a crew of young men in look-alike gear: green pants and green or red sweat shirts.
They rake leaves in the fall and shovel snow in the winter. They paint buildings and clean up debris. They helped put a roof on the county courthouse.
The work crews are inmates from the nearby Camp Pharsalia, a minimum-security state prison tucked into a hillside a dozen miles outside town. For the City of Norwich, like other rural Upstate New York communities, the 110-inmate Pharsalia and other prison camps have become something of an economic lifeline, for decades providing not just labor but also jobs, in a region where work is hard to come by. (more…)
by Glenn Loury
Lead Essay
March 11th, 2009
Cato Unbound
The most challenging problems of social policy in the modern world are never merely technical. In order properly to decide how we should govern ourselves, we must take up questions of social ethics and human values. What manner of people are we Americans? What vision would we affirm, and what example would we set, before the rest of the world? What kind of society would we bequeath to our children? How shall we live? Inevitably, queries such as these lurk just beneath the surface of the great policy debates of the day. So, those who would enter into public argument about what ails our common life need make no apology for speaking in such terms.
It is precisely in these terms that I wish to discuss a preeminent moral challenge for our time — that imprisonment on a massive scale has become one of the central aspects of our nation’s social policy toward the poor, powerfully impairing the lives of some of the most marginal of our fellow citizens, especially the poorly educated black and Hispanic men who reside in large numbers in our great urban centers. (more…)
Release Type: Pew Press Release
Pew Contact: Jessica Riordan, Communications (215) 575-4886; jriordan@pewtrusts.org
Washington, DC – 02/28/2008 – For the first time in history more than one in every 100 adults in America are in jail or prison—a fact that significantly impacts state budgets without delivering a clear return on public safety. According to a new report released today by the Pew Center on the States’ Public Safety Performance Project, at the start of 2008, 2,319,258 adults were held in American prisons or jails, or one in every 99.1 men and women, according to the study. During 2007, the prison population rose by more than 25,000 inmates. In addition to detailing state and regional prison growth rates, Pew’s report, One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008, identifies how corrections spending compares to other state investments, why it has increased, and what some states are doing to limit growth in both prison populations and costs while maintaining public safety.
(more…)
The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture? by Atul Gawande, New Yorker Magazine, March 30, 2009
The following is a section from ”Hellhole” featuring MA resident Bobby Dellelo describing his experiences at Walpole.
“…Recently, I met a man who had spent more than five years in isolation at a prison in the Boston suburb of Walpole, Massachusetts, not far from my home. Bobby Dellelo was, to say the least, no Terry Anderson or John McCain. Brought up in the run-down neighborhoods of Boston’s West End, in the nineteen-forties, he was caught burglarizing a shoe store at the age of ten. At thirteen, he recalls, he was nabbed while robbing a Jordan Marsh department store. (He and his friends learned to hide out in stores at closing time, steal their merchandise, and then break out during the night.) The remainder of his childhood was spent mostly in the state reform school. That was where he learned how to fight, how to hot-wire a car with a piece of foil, how to pick locks, and how to make a zip gun using a snapped-off automobile radio antenna, which, in those days, was just thick enough to barrel a .22-calibre bullet. Released upon turning eighteen, Dellelo returned to stealing. Usually, he stole from office buildings at night. But some of the people he hung out with did stickups, and, together with one of them, he held up a liquor store in Dorchester. (more…)
Good evening,
My name is ,,, and in the last 22 years I have served time under 6 governors, 4 DOC Commissioners, and perhaps 100 different ideologies and studies on how best to change this system. Now nearly some 5 years after the Commission on Corrections Study; created by Gov. Mitt Romney, the philosophy most often heard as to why many of those changes haven’t happened are because – “Nothing changes over night!” But sadly, some things do. On January 15th of this year my second oldest son was shot and killed on the streets of Boston. He died and moments later my entire family life was changed forever. Throughout the city of Boston and other cities many families lives have also been “changed overnight,” from a sudden loss of a love one. With that said, I know there are some very influential and professional people in this room who can not afford to pay for another study. So I offer you my own brief study based on years of great loss to myself, my family, and other I have encountered. For me it’s too late to cast blame that will have to be someone else’s job for tonight. (more…)
My name is Lois Ahrens. I am the founder and Director of The Real Cost of Prisons Project, a Northampton-based national organization. With Donald Petigny-Perry, I also organized the Western Massachusetts CORI Education Project.
The Real Cost of Prisons Project created three comic books focusing on drug policy, the financing and siting of prisons and the incarceration of women. 125,000 comic books have been printed and more than 100,000 have been sent free of charge to people around the country. More than 15,000 have been sent to prisoners including some to prisoners in Massachusetts. (more…)
Good evening. My name is Mallory Hanora and I am a member of Reflect and Strengthen. Reflect and Strengthen is a collective of young, working class women from the urban neighborhoods of Boston who take a holistic approach to organizing in order to create personal and social transformation. Our programming focuses are political education, healing from trauma, creative expression, community building, and campaign work to end racial disparities in the juvenile justice system. (more…)
Pine Street Inn is the area’s largest provider of service to homeless individuals in the area. Many of those we serve come to us directly from prison. An analysis of 3 nine-month periods over the past 3 years shows a significant rise in those who self-report incarceration prior to admissions. Over a two year period there was a 43 % increase between April – December. In 2007, 231 guests reported they had been incarcerated in the last 6 months and in 2008, 230 have thus far reported incarceration in the past 6 months. Alarmingly, these data show an upward trend that could present 1 out of 4 guests as coming to this homeless shelter almost directly from prison. It should be noted that these data are self-reported and the numbers are most likely higher. (more…)
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