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.

Nonetheless, I sat in my prison cell and watched the day of your inauguration speech, as you stood on the landing of the U.S. Capitol and took your oath, I looked upon the background, high above you, and gazed upon the statue atop the Capitol building, a statue which represented the “Symbol of Freedom”, yet, was designed and built by a slave named Phillip Reid, who at the time of helping mold this symbol of America’s Freedom was not even himself free. I realized then and there that there has been many times throughout history that people have had to “assume” that they were part of this great American history when they were actually not.

In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, found in Article 21, it says, “Everyone has a right to take part in the government of this country, directly or through freely chosen representatives”.

For the past twenty-four (24) years I’ve had to watch a generation of young men come through here, including one of my own sons, all rotate around a “spirit” of not knowing what body of people, what spirit of country, and to whose true marching orders we are really meant to be part of.

It has become important to me as I reflect back and re-read your inaugural address speech and came upon the line which says, “What is required of Us now is a new era of responsibility—a recognition on the part of Every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world”. This has left me with two important questions: does that required “Us” mean me? Does that duty of “we” mean those who have been incarcerated, whether innocently or accordingly convicted?

Mr. President, it is my belief that you have created a “culture of obligation.” But, at this level of government (to me) the problem may be the issue of our “cultural gate keepers.” Those who are now responsible for the lives of over a million and a half young Black, Latino and poor white lives behind bars, of whom you did not mention in your inaugural address.

As we all witnessed in Oakland (California) a 26 year old Black man on parole, was willing to take the lives of four (4) police officers while sacrificing his own. There was no government restriction of rules, and/or monitoring bracelet that could have changed his mind because what appeared to be missing was a sense of “societal responsibility” and understanding that even our victims are an extended part of our family that we are responsible for.

The question is, why didn’t the prison system which held him, reach him “internally” at a level beyond rules and regulations prior to his release? Why was he willing to kill, “and be killed” so simply? What part of society was committed to reach back to him during his incarceration? At what point did the prison system educate him on being part of that We, Us, America that he was going to return to—or did they just hold him until his time was up and make sure he abided by prison rules? Who on the side of “right” gave him his marching orders upon release?

Mr. President, I once read in a news article that listed the top music artists you had on your iPod. Among them, it listed Jay Z. Well, with 24 years in prison, I’ve never seen an iPod, and neither have many of the men around me, but I do know that daily I see many very young males walking around me with “Spiritual iPods” that are playing in their ears, the songs of Notorious B.I.G. signing the words “You’re nobody unless somebody kills you”. Yet two things are clear, sadly, Biggie did become bigger in death, and that many of these kids who have never seen their families together during a Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner meet them for the first time in a casket with their eyes closed at a funeral. So, what troubles me is not so much that they’re willing to die, but that they don’t even want to leave here (prison) and get back to living.

Mr. President, as many focus on the budget today and talk about what will be taken from a generation decades from now if the American debt isn’t taken care of, someone should say that the “generation theft” is not just inheriting a financial debt, but leaving a generation without “even the hope” of being part of their own society.

How much money did this 26 year old parolee from Oakland ask for, before taking the lives of four police officers, of whom, now to their own families, no amount of money can replace? For me, in spite of a false conviction, and long before Bill Cosby and yourself spoke on Black fathers engaging their children, I did all I could to direct my own children toward a better life. Yet, none-the-less, in the year 2008, my middle son, Darrius Deshawn Jones, was shot in the head and murdered on the streets of Boston. Prior, I wrote from this prison cell all those “in Government” I could get to help, all by certified mail [over 60] only to get two (2) replies.

Why would a government body working under an oath to help, not even be willing to reply to me? I suggest, because like it was for slaves when the words “We the People” were written, they didn’t believe the right to protect my children, to maintain my family connection, or to “just be heard” was meant for me.

Still, I won’t be left to believe that at the most historical time in history, My President, would extend his hand to a community of people in another country, who may have helped knock down towers killing hundreds of people, nor create a video for Iran hoping to engage them in change and dialogue, wouldn’t want to “at least once” address the millions of young Black, Latino and poor in these prisons of the United States. In this era of responsibility of which you speak, is there a responsibility for us? And for those who oversee us?

I, for years, have expressed no desire to use my time here playing basketball, lifting weights, watching TV or playing card and board games. If I must be incarcerated, with no help in questioning my conviction, I believe I should be able to exercise my (alleged right) to the “pursuit of happiness” by doing what I can to reach these kids around me—as do others who feel they are just left in a system aging and waiting to die—while getting them to understand that crime and prison life are both just basically blank checks written out for those who try to cash them on inner city streets of poverty. Yet, Mr. President, there is no father program where I am, no family unification program, no mentoring or reconciliation programs—-So, I ask you—who is responsible for providing these “tools of responsibility” we need to change the Spirit of death growing behind these walls. Where is the stimulus money, or even the “will” of those in charge to see this change?

No, I am not willing to believe that the first Black President, of whom my murdered son did not get to see, and my inner city grandchildren will have to depend on, would talk so openly about the spirit of God in his inauguration address and then tell all of us throughout the country, (locked behind prison walls) to now fix our own lives by using the instruments of Pharaoh—telling us to make bricks without straw. I won’t believe that. Nor, am I asking you to do a job that those of us who have done years behind these walls can and should be able to do, in order to save our own children and stop a self destructive system within. I’m only asking that you also take “Presidency” over this often times hidden society, and require its leadership (with authority), that if they can’t get us fully prepared for a free society, that they at least be required to give us, in the words of Stevie Wonder, just enough—just enough—for the city. (Because the spirit of death is behind these walls, and on our inner city streets.)

Mr. President, like you have risen to learn about freedom, I have fallen to learn about captivity and exclusion. There are no web pages, facebooks, internet access, nor cable news shows for us to follow your lessons on “responsibility.” So, I send this letter out to the world, hoping to reach You.

I need to know, and so do so many of these men in here and heading back to society (need to know) that when you say you want black fathers to own their obligations to break the cycle of not being there for their children—are you also talking to those incarcerated?

When you say, “all deserve to pursue their full measure of happiness,” do you also mean those who strive to change while incarcerated? Mr. President, when you say—“What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility—a recognition, on the part of every American that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world.” Does that mean me? Those around me? And the Superintendent of my prison? And, if it does—when will you make that clear to those being held in distant woods all over the country, who may not know, you know, we even exist or feel they lack the proof that finally  this “Us & We” actually means “Us”!

Mr. President, Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “all I’m asking of America is to be true to what you said on paper”. On behalf of my children, grandchildren, family and the family of those around me who will inherit the spirit of what we leave behind, I am now asking you to ensure this country, its government and yourself will be “true to what you said on paper”—so that even those incarcerated here, (and those responsible for holding us) can get on the “right side of history” and leave here and come home with hope and the feeling of a nation.

You recently said you are a “big believer in persistence.” So am I! Which is why I write to you now. Unanswered letters have never stopped me!

Mr. President, please speak out to these prison institutions beyond Guantanamo Bay and deliver us safely to the future generation of our communities.

Sincerely,

Mr. Darrell A. Jones

A (Falsely) Incarcerated Father with One Less Son in the World
MCI-Norfolk
2 Clark Street
P.O. Box 43
Norfolk, MA 02056

Darrelljones67@gmail.com

Cc: To all those who ignored me before, and ever took an oath to protect, serve and claim freedom, justice, God and the Right to be America.

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.

The state with the highest number of adults involved with the correction system was Georgia, where one in 13 adults or 562,763 people were in the penal system in 2007, the Pew study said. There were 206,241 people involved in the penal system in Massachusetts.

The state ranks even higher when it comes to parolees and probationers living in the community.

Massachusetts had the third highest rate of community supervision with 1 in 28 adults or 179,854 people answering to parole and probation officers at the state and federal level.

Parole is a more cost-effective way of monitoring offenders, the study said. It costs $130.16 to incarcerate an adult for one day. That same figure pays for 18 days of parole supervision in the community, the report said.

The Pew Center said that for every dollar Massachusetts spent on prisons in 2008, it spent four cents on parole. The report, entitled One in 31: The Long Reach of American Corrections,” looked at prison populations at the federal, state and county level.

“At long last research that has proven what advocates have been saying for years: Let’s invest in people, not prisons,” said Lyn Levy, executive director of SPAN Inc., a non-profit service provider for ex-offenders. “It’s not only the right thing to do; it’s cost effective, it works, and it makes us safer.”

Nationally, Pew found that the exploding number of people on probation or parole has ballooned the American corrections system population to more than 7.3 million, or 1 in every 31 adults.

While most of those offenders live in the community as a probationer or parolee, the Pew report found that nearly 90 percent of state corrections dollars are spent on prisons.

In terms of the number of adults in a jail or prison, the state ranks much lower nationally at number 47. There were 26,387 adults behind bars in 2007 or 1 in 190 people.

The District of Columbia had the highest incarceration rate in that category with 1 in 50 adults or two percent of its population in a prison or jail.

The Pew report affirms state Department of Correction figures that indicate an exploding prison population. Last year, the state began installing bunk beds in single cells at the maximum security Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley to address systemwide overcrowding.

In 1982, one in 127 adults were invovlved in the Bay State correction system, Pew found.

The DOC, which runs 18 prisons, has a spending plan of $543 million for the fiscal year that ends in June. Gov. Deval Patrick’s budget proposal for Fiscal 2010 proposes a modest decrease in spending to $542 million.

The Parole Board supervises 8,000 parolees annually, according to its Web site. Its budget for this year is $19.4 million.

Office of the Commissioner of Probation figures show that the probation system supervised 256,952 people in Fiscal Year 2008. More than 28 percent of those probationers are juveniles or involved in the Probate and Family Court.

Probation’s operating budget is $142 million. Its proposed spending plan for the fiscal year that begins on July 1 is $151 million, according to the governor’s budget Web site.

lcrimaldi@bostonherald.com

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?&articleid=1155690&format=&page=1&listingType=Loc#articleFull

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.

But with most governors and Legislatures grappling with crushing budget deficits, what’s good for rural economies is often proving bad for states.

New York is facing a $13 billion deficit and a falling inmate population, and Governor David A. Paterson has proposed saving about $26 million by closing four of the state’s prison facilities, including Camp Pharsalia and nearby Camp Georgetown. Faced with the prospect of losing a big part of their economic base, small, distressed towns and cities are banding together with a common cry: “Save Our Prison!”

“This is a major impact on a small community,” said Paul Lashway, a Norwich resident and prison guard at Camp Pharsalia for the past 10 years. He is also a steward for the local correctional officers’ union.

The prison union is leading an effort that includes lobbying at the Legislature in Albany, direct mailing, and radio ads in the affected communities.

It’s a conflict being played out across the country. The number of inmates boomed in the 1980s and 1990s, in part because of high crime rates and stiff mandatory sentencing laws that particularly targeted drug offenders. States rushed to build additional prisons to keep up with what appeared to be a growth industry. And many struggling, mostly rural, communities came to see prisons as a substitute for the family farms and the small manufacturing plants that were vanishing.

The United States has the dubious distinction of being the country with the highest percentage of its citizens behind bars, more than 1 in 100, or 2.3 million people, according to the Pew Center on the States.

But crime rates have dropped sharply over the past two decades, and almost all states are facing budget deficits. Study after study has shown that giving nonviolent drug offenders treatment, instead of jail time, is far more effective at preventing repeat abuses. And it costs much more to keep a person incarcerated than to supervise him or her on probation.

As crime has receded as a major issue among voters, many state Legislatures, including the one in New York, are looking at rolling back mandatory drug sentencing laws. Some states, such as New Jersey, are experimenting with special “drug courts” for first-time offenders. Others, such as Rhode Island, have expanded “good time” early release programs or are allowing some prisoners to serve a portion of their sentences at home.

Some involved in the prison industry, as well as some in law enforcement, say this is the wrong time to be rolling back sentencing laws and closing prisons. “You know what happens in a recession,” Lashway said. “Crime goes up.” And what is heralded by most as good news – declining prison populations – is being greeted with a sense of foreboding in places where prisons have become big business.

Mayor Joseph P. Maiurano of Norwich has calculated the cost for his city and for surrounding Chenango County, one of New York’s poorest: Fifty-nine corrections officers, and their family members, may have to leave the area for jobs in other facilities. About 40 local businesses will lose funds from sales to the prisons. More than 50 local organizations benefit from the work the inmates provide.

Some researchers dispute whether correctional facilities serve a long-term economic benefit. Gregory M. Hooks, a sociology professor at Washington State University who has analyzed the economies of prisons, said that among other problems, the pool of free inmate labor eliminates the pool of low-paid manual labor jobs, further depressing local economies.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2009/03/23/plan_to_close_prisons_rankles_some/

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.

The bare facts of this matter — concerning both the scale of incarceration and its racial disparity — have been much remarked upon of late. Simply put, we have become a nation of jailers and, arguably, racist jailers at that. The past four decades have witnessed a truly historic expansion, and transformation, of penal institutions in the United States — at every level of government, and in all regions of the country. We have, by any measure, become a vastly more punitive society. Measured in constant dollars and taking account of all levels of government, spending on corrections and law enforcement in the United States has more than quadrupled over the last quarter century. As a result, the American prison system has grown into a leviathan unmatched in human history. This development should be deeply troubling to anyone who professes to love liberty.

Here, as in other areas of social policy, the United States is a stark international outlier, sitting at the most rightward end of the political spectrum: We imprison at a far higher rate than the other industrial democracies — higher, indeed, than either Russia or China, and vastly higher than any of the countries of Western Europe. According to the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, there were in 2005 some 9 million prisoners in the world; more than 2 million were being held in the United States. With approximately one twentieth of the world’s population, America had nearly one fourth of the world’s inmates. At more than 700 per 100,000 residents, the U.S. incarceration rate was far greater than our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia, which each have a rate of about 500 per 100,000.) Other industrial societies, some of them with big crime problems of their own, were less punitive than we by an order of magnitude: the United States incarcerated at 6.2 times the rate of Canada, 7.8 times the rate of France, and 12.3 times the rate of Japan.

The demographic profile of the inmate population has also been much discussed. In this, too, the U.S. is an international outlier. African Americans and Hispanics, who taken together are about one fourth of the population, account for about two thirds of state prison inmates. Roughly one third of state prisoners were locked up for committing violent offenses, with the remainder being property and drug offenders. Nine in ten are male, and most are impoverished. Inmates in state institutions average fewer than eleven years of schooling.

The extent of racial disparity in imprisonment rates exceeds that to be found in any other arena of American social life: at eight to one, the black to white ratio of male incarceration rates dwarfs the two to one ratio of unemployment rates, the three to one non-marital child bearing ratio, the two to one ratio of infant mortality rates and the one to five ratio of net worth. More black male high school dropouts are in prison than belong to unions or are enrolled in any state or federal social welfare programs. The brute fact of the matter is that the primary contact between black American young adult men and their government is via the police and the penal apparatus. Coercion is the most salient feature of their encounters with the state. According to estimates compiled by sociologist Bruce Western, nearly 60% of black male dropouts born between 1965 and 1969 had spent at least one year in prison before reaching the age of 35.

For these men, and the families and communities with which they are associated, the adverse effects of incarceration will extend beyond their stays behind bars. My point is that this is not merely law enforcement policy. It is social policy writ large. And no other country in the world does it quite like we do.

This is far more than a technical issue — entailing more, that is, than the task of finding the most efficient crime control policies. Consider, for instance, that it is not possible to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of our nation’s world-historic prison buildup over the past 35 years without implicitly specifying how the costs imposed on the persons imprisoned, and their families, are to be reckoned. Of course, this has not stopped analysts from pronouncing on the purported net benefits to “society” of greater incarceration without addressing that question! Still, how — or, indeed, whether — to weigh the costs born by law-breakers — that is, how (or whether) to acknowledge their humanity — remains a fundamental and difficult question of social ethics. Political discourses in the United States have given insufficient weight to the collateral damage imposed by punishment policies on the offenders themselves, and on those who are knitted together with offenders in networks of social and psychic affiliation.

Whether or not one agrees, two things should be clear: social scientists can have no answers for the question of what weight to put on a “thug’s,” or his family’s, well-being; and a morally defensible public policy to deal with criminal offenders cannot be promulgated without addressing that question. To know whether or not our criminal justice policies comport with our deepest values, we must ask how much additional cost borne by the offending class is justifiable per marginal unit of security, or of peace of mind, for the rest of us. This question is barely being asked, let alone answered, in the contemporary debate.

Nor is it merely the scope of the mass imprisonment state that has expanded so impressively in the United States. The ideas underlying the doing of criminal justice — the superstructure of justifications and rationalizations — have also undergone a sea change. Rehabilitation is a dead letter; retribution is the thing. The function of imprisonment is not to reform or redirect offenders. Rather, it is to keep them away from us. “The prison,” writes sociologist David Garland, “is used today as a kind of reservation, a quarantine zone in which purportedly dangerous individuals are segregated in the name of public safety.” We have elaborated what are, in effect, a “string of work camps and prisons strung across a vast country housing millions of people drawn mainly from classes and racial groups that are seen as politically and economically problematic.” We have, in other words, marched quite a long way down the punitive road, in the name of securing public safety and meting out to criminals their just deserts.

And we should be ashamed of ourselves for having done so. Consider a striking feature of this policy development, one that is crucial to this moral assessment: the ways in which we now deal with criminal offenders in the United States have evolved in recent decades in order to serve expressive and not only instrumental ends. We have wanted to “send a message,” and have done so with a vengeance. Yet in the process we have also, in effect, provided an answer for the question: who is to blame for the maladies that beset our troubled civilization? That is, we have constructed a narrative, created scapegoats, assuaged our fears, and indulged our need to feel virtuous about ourselves. We have met the enemy and the enemy, in the now familiar caricature, is them — a bunch of anomic, menacing, morally deviant “thugs.” In the midst of this dramaturgy — unavoidably so in America — lurks a potent racial subplot.

This issue is personal for me. As a black American male, a baby-boomer born and raised on Chicago’s South Side, I can identify with the plight of the urban poor because I have lived among them. I am related to them by the bonds of social and psychic affiliation. As it happens, I have myself passed through the courtroom, and the jailhouse, on my way along life’s journey. I have sat in the visitor’s room at a state prison; I have known, personally and intimately, men and women who lived their entire lives with one foot to either side of the law. Whenever I step to a lectern to speak about the growth of imprisonment in our society, I envision voiceless and despairing people who would have me speak on their behalf. Of course, personal biography can carry no authority to compel agreement about public policy. Still, I prefer candor to the false pretense of clinical detachment and scientific objectivity. I am not running for high office; I need not pretend to a cool neutrality that I do not possess. While I recognize that these revelations will discredit me in some quarters, this is a fate I can live with.

So, my racial identity is not irrelevant to my discussion of the subject at hand. But, then, neither is it irrelevant that among the millions now in custody and under state supervision are to be found a vastly disproportionate number of the black and the brown. There is no need to justify injecting race into this discourse, for prisons are the most race-conscious public institutions that we have. No big city police officer is “colorblind” nor, arguably, can any afford to be. Crime and punishment in America have a color — just turn on a television, or open a magazine, or listen carefully to the rhetoric of a political campaign — and you will see what I mean. The fact is that, in this society as in any other, order is maintained by the threat and the use of force. We enjoy our good lives because we are shielded by the forces of law and order upon which we rely to keep the unruly at bay. Yet, in this society to an extent unlike virtually any other, those bearing the heavy burden of order-enforcement belong, in numbers far exceeding their presence in the population at large, to racially defined and historically marginalized groups. Why should this be so? And how can those charged with the supervision of our penal apparatus sleep well at night knowing that it is so?

This punitive turn in the nation’s social policy is intimately connected, I would maintain, with public rhetoric about responsibility, dependency, social hygiene, and the reclamation of public order. And such rhetoric, in turn, can be fully grasped only when viewed against the backdrop of America’s often ugly and violent racial history: There is a reason why our inclination toward forgiveness and the extension of a second chance to those who have violated our behavioral strictures is so stunted, and why our mainstream political discourses are so bereft of self-examination and searching social criticism. An historical resonance between the stigma of race and the stigma of prison has served to keep alive in our public culture the subordinating social meanings that have always been associated with blackness. Many historians and political scientists — though, of course, not all — agree that the shifting character of race relations over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries helps to explain why the United States is exceptional among democratic industrial societies in the severity of its punitive policy and the paucity of its social-welfare institutions. Put directly and without benefit of euphemism, the racially disparate incidence of punishment in the United States is a morally troubling residual effect of the nation’s history of enslavement, disenfranchisement, segregation, and discrimination. It is not merely the accidental accretion of neutral state action, applied to a racially divergent social flux. It is an abhorrent expression of who we Americans are as a people, even now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

My recitation of the brutal facts about punishment in today’s America may sound to some like a primal scream at this monstrous social machine that is grinding poor black communities to dust. And I confess that these facts do at times leave me inclined to cry out in despair. But my argument is intended to be moral, not existential, and its principal thesis is this: we law-abiding, middle-class Americans have made collective decisions on social and incarceration policy questions, and we benefit from those decisions. That is, we benefit from a system of suffering, rooted in state violence, meted out at our behest. Put differently our society — the society we together have made — first tolerates crime-promoting conditions in our sprawling urban ghettos, and then goes on to act out rituals of punishment against them as some awful form of human sacrifice.

It is a central reality of our time that a wide racial gap has opened up in cognitive skills, the extent of law-abidingness, stability of family relations, and attachment to the work force. This is the basis, many would hold, for the racial gap in imprisonment. Yet I maintain that this gap in human development is, as a historical matter, rooted in political, economic, social, and cultural factors peculiar to this society and reflective of its unlovely racial history. That is to say, it is a societal, not communal or personal, achievement. At the level of the individual case we must, of course, act as if this were not so. There could be no law, and so no civilization, absent the imputation to persons of responsibility for their wrongful acts. But the sum of a million cases, each one rightly judged fairly on its individual merits, may nevertheless constitute a great historic wrong. This is, in my view, now the case in regards to the race and social class disparities that characterize the very punitive policy that we have directed at lawbreakers. And yet, the state does not only deal with individual cases. It also makes policies in the aggregate, and the consequences of these policies are more or less knowable. It is in the making of such aggregate policy judgments that questions of social responsibility arise.

This situation raises a moral problem that we cannot avoid. We cannot pretend that there are more important problems in our society, or that this circumstance is the necessary solution to other, more pressing problems — unless we are also prepared to say that we have turned our backs on the ideal of equality for all citizens and abandoned the principles of justice. We ought to be asking ourselves two questions: Just what manner of people are we Americans? And in light of this, what are our obligations to our fellow citizens — even those who break our laws?

Without trying to make a full-fledged philosophical argument here, I nevertheless wish to gesture — in the spirit of the philosopher John Rawls — toward some answers to these questions. I will not set forth a policy manifesto at this time. What I aim to do is suggest, in a general way, how we ought to be thinking differently about this problem. Specifically, given our nation’s history and political culture, I think that there are severe limits to the applicability in this circumstance of a pure ethic of personal responsibility, as the basis for distributing the negative good of punishment in contemporary America. I urge that we shift the boundary toward greater acknowledgment of social responsibility in our punishment policy discourse — even for wrongful acts freely chosen by individual persons. In suggesting this, I am not so much making a “root causes” argument — he did the crime, but only because he had no choice — as I am arguing that the society at large is implicated in his choices because we have acquiesced in structural arrangements which work to our benefit and his detriment, and yet which shape his consciousness and sense of identity in such a way that the choices he makes. We condemn those choices, but they are nevertheless compelling to him. I am interested in the moral implications of what the sociologist Loïc Wacquant has called the “double-sided production of urban marginality.” I approach this problem of moral judgment by emphasizing that closed and bounded social structures — like racially homogeneous urban ghettos — create contexts where “pathological” and “dysfunctional” cultural forms emerge, but these forms are not intrinsic to the people caught in these structures. Neither are they independent of the behavior of the people who stand outside of them.

Several years ago, I took time to read some of the nonfiction writings of the great nineteenth century Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. Toward the end of his life he had become an eccentric pacifist and radical Christian social critic. I was stunned at the force of his arguments. What struck me most was Tolstoy’s provocative claim that the core of Christianity lies in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: You see that fellow over there committing some terrible sin? Well, if you have ever lusted, or allowed jealousy, or envy or hatred to enter your own heart, then you are to be equally condemned! This, Tolstoy claims, is the central teaching of the Christian faith: we’re all in the same fix.

Now, without invoking any religious authority, I nevertheless want to suggest that there is a grain of truth in this religious sentiment that is relevant to the problem at hand: That is, while the behavioral pathologies and cultural threats that we see in society — the moral erosions “out there” — the crime, drug addiction, sexually transmitted disease, idleness, violence and all manner of deviance — while these are worrisome, nevertheless, our moral crusade against these evils can take on a pathological dimension of its own. We can become self-righteous, legalistic, ungenerous, stiff-necked, and hypocritical. We can fail to see the beam in our own eye. We can neglect to raise questions of social justice. We can blind ourselves to the close relationship that actually exists between, on the one hand, behavioral pathology in the so-called urban underclass of our country and, on the other hand, society-wide factors — like our greed-driven economy, our worship of the self, our endemic culture of materialism, our vacuous political discourses, our declining civic engagement, and our aversion to sacrificing private gain on behalf of much needed social investments. We can fail to see, in other words, that the problems of the so-called underclass — to which we have reacted with a massive, coercive mobilization — are but an expression, at the bottom of the social hierarchy, of a more profound and widespread moral deviance — one involving all of us.

Taking this position does not make me a moral relativist. I merely hold that, when thinking about the lives of the disadvantaged in our society, the fundamental premise that should guide us is that we are all in this together. Those people languishing in the corners of our society are our people — they are us – whatever may be their race, creed, or country of origin, whether they be the crack-addicted, the HIV-infected, the mentally ill homeless, the juvenile drug sellers, or worse. Whatever the malady, and whatever the offense, we’re all in the same fix. We’re all in this thing together.

Just look at what we have wrought. We Americans have established what, to many an outside observer, looks like a system of racial caste in the center of our great cities. I refer here to millions of stigmatized, feared, and invisible people. The extent of disparity in the opportunity to achieve their full human potential, as between the children of the middle class and the children of the disadvantaged — a disparity that one takes for granted in America — is virtually unrivaled elsewhere in the industrial, advanced, civilized, free world.

Yet too many Americans have concluded, in effect, that those languishing at the margins of our society are simply reaping what they have sown. Their suffering is seen as having nothing to do with us — as not being evidence of systemic failures that can be corrected through collective action. Thus, as I noted, we have given up on the ideal of rehabilitating criminals, and have settled for simply warehousing them. Thus we accept — despite much rhetoric to the contrary — that it is virtually impossible effectively to educate the children of the poor. Despite the best efforts of good people and progressive institutions — despite the encouraging signs of moral engagement with these issues that I have seen in my students over the years, and that give me hope — despite these things, it remains the case that, speaking of the country as a whole, there is no broadly based demand for reform, no sense of moral outrage, no anguished self-criticism, no public reflection in the face of this massive, collective failure.

The core of the problem is that the socially marginal are not seen as belonging to the same general public body as the rest of us. It therefore becomes impossible to do just about anything with them. At least implicitly, our political community acts as though some are different from the rest and, because of their culture — because of their bad values, their self-destructive behavior, their malfeasance, their criminality, their lack of responsibility, their unwillingness to engage in hard work — they deserve their fate.

But this is quite wrongheaded. What we Americans fail to recognize — not merely as individuals, I stress, but as a political community — is that these ghetto enclaves and marginal spaces of our cities, which are the source of most prison inmates, are products of our own making: Precisely because we do not want those people near us, we have structured the space in our urban environment so as to keep them away from us. Then, when they fester in their isolation and their marginality, we hypocritically point a finger, saying in effect: “Look at those people. They threaten to the civilized body. They must therefore be expelled, imprisoned, controlled.” It is not we who must take social responsibility to reform our institutions but, rather, it is they who need to take personal responsibility for their wrongful acts. It is not we who must set our collective affairs aright, but they who must get their individual acts together. This posture, I suggest, is inconsistent with the attainment of a just distribution of benefits and burdens in society.

Civic inclusion has been the historical imperative in Western political life for 150 years. And yet — despite our self-declared status as a light unto the nations, as a beacon of hope to freedom-loving peoples everywhere — despite these lofty proclamations, which were belied by images from the rooftops in flooded New Orleans in September 2005, and are contradicted by our overcrowded prisons — the fact is that this historical project of civic inclusion is woefully incomplete in these United States.

At every step of the way, reactionary political forces have declared the futility of pursuing civic inclusion. Yet, in every instance, these forces have been proven wrong. At one time or another, they have derided the inclusion of women, landless peasants, former serfs and slaves, or immigrants more fully in the civic body. Extending to them the franchise, educating their children, providing health and social welfare to them has always been controversial. But this has been the direction in which the self-declared “civilized” and wealthy nations have been steadily moving since Bismarck, since the revolutions of 1848 and 1870, since the American Civil War with its Reconstruction Amendments, since the Progressive Era and through the New Deal on to the Great Society. This is why we have a progressive federal income tax and an estate tax in this country, why we feed, clothe and house the needy, why we (used to) worry about investing in our cities’ infrastructure, and in the human capital of our people. What the brutal facts about punishment in today’s America show is that this American project of civic inclusion remains incomplete. Nowhere is that incompleteness more evident than in the prisons and jails of America. And this as yet unfulfilled promise of American democracy reveals a yawning chasm between an ugly and uniquely American reality, and our nation’s exalted image of herself.

—

Glenn C. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences at Brown University

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/03/11/glenn-loury/a-nation-of-jailers/

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.

As prison populations expand, costs to states are on the rise.  Last year alone, states spent more than $49 billion on corrections, up from $11 billion 20 years before.   However, the national recidivism rate remains virtually unchanged, with about half of released inmates returning to jail or prison within three years.  And while violent criminals and other serious offenders account for some of the growth, many inmates are low-level offenders or people who have violated the terms of their probation or parole. 

“For all the money spent on corrections today, there hasn’t been a clear and convincing return for public safety,” said Adam Gelb, director of the Public Safety Performance Project.  “More and more states are beginning to rethink their reliance on prisons for lower-level offenders and finding strategies that are tough on crime without being so tough on taxpayers.”

According to the report, 36 states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons saw their prison populations increase in 2007.  Among the seven states with the largest number of prisoners—those with more than 50,000 inmates—three grew (Ohio, Florida and Georgia), while four (New York, Michigan, Texas and California) saw their populations dip.  Texas surpassed California as the nation’s prison leader following a decline in both states’ inmate populations—Texas decreased by 326 inmates and California by 4,068. Ten states, meanwhile, experienced a jump in inmate population growth of 5 percent or greater, a list topped by Kentucky with a surge of 12 percent. 

A close examination of the most recent U.S. Department of Justice data (2006) found that while one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, the figure is one in nine for black males in that age group. Men are still roughly 13 times more likely to be incarcerated, but the female population is expanding at a far brisker pace. For black women in their mid- to late-30s, the incarceration rate also has hit the one-in-100 mark. In addition, one in every 53 adults in their 20s is behind bars; the rate for those over 55 is one in 837.

The report points out the necessity of locking up violent and repeat offenders, but notes that prison growth and higher incarceration rates do not reflect a parallel increase in crime, or a corresponding surge in the nation’s population at large. Instead, more people are behind bars principally because of a wave of policy choices that are sending more lawbreakers to prison and, through popular “three-strikes” measures and other sentencing laws, imposing longer prison stays on inmates.

As a result, states’ corrections costs have risen substantially.  Twenty years ago, the states collectively spent $10.6 billion of their general funds—their primary discretionary dollars—on corrections.  Last year, they spent more than $44 billion in general funds, a 315 percent jump, and more than $49 billion in total funds from all sources. Coupled with tightening state budgets, the greater prison expenditures may force states to make tough choices about where to spend their money.  For example, Pew found that over the same 20-year period, inflation-adjusted general fund spending on corrections rose 127 percent while higher education expenditures rose just 21 percent.

 “States are paying a high cost for corrections—one that may not be buying them as much in public safety as it should.  And spending on prisons may be crowding out investments in other valuable programs that could enhance a state’s economic competitiveness,” said Susan K. Urahn, managing director of the Pew Center on the States. “There are other choices.  Some state policy makers are experimenting with a range of community punishments that are as effective as incarceration in protecting public safety and allow states to put the brakes on prison growth.”

According to Pew, some states are attempting to protect public safety and reap corrections savings primarily by holding lower-risk offenders accountable in less-costly settings and using intermediate sanctions for parolees and probationers who violate conditions of their release.  These include a mix of community-based programs such as day reporting centers, treatment facilities, electronic monitoring systems and community service—tactics recently adopted in Kansas and Texas.  Another common intervention, used in Kansas and Nevada, is making small reductions in prison terms for inmates who complete substance abuse treatment and other programs designed to cut their risk of recidivism.

Pew was assisted in collecting state prison counts by the Association of State Correctional Administrators and the JFA Institute.  The report also relies on data published by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Association of State Budget Officers, and the U.S. Census Bureau.

To view the entire report, including state-by-state data and methodology, visit the Public Safety Performance Project’s web Site.

Launched in 2006 as a project of Pew’s Center on the States, the Public Safety Performance Project seeks to help states advance fiscally sound, data-driven policies and practices in sentencing and corrections that protect public safety, hold offenders accountable, and control corrections costs.

The Pew Charitable Trusts applies the power of knowledge to solve today’s most challenging problems.  Our Center on the States identifies and advances effective policy approaches to critical issues facing states.  Online at www.pewcenteronthestates.org.

ASSOCIATED REPORT:
One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008

http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org/news_room_detail.aspx?id=35912

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.

“What a disaster that thing was,” he recalls, laughing. They put the store’s owner and the customers in a walk-in refrigerator at gunpoint, took their wallets, and went to rob the register. But more customers came in. So they robbed them and put them in the refrigerator, too. Then still more customers arrived, the refrigerator got full, and the whole thing turned into a circus. Dellelo and his partner finally escaped. But one of the customers identified him to the police. By the time he was caught, Dellelo had been fingered for robbing the Commander Hotel in Cambridge as well. He served a year for the first conviction and two and a half years for the second.

Three months after his release, in 1963, at the age of twenty, he and a friend tried to rob the Kopelman jewelry store, in downtown Boston. But an alarm went off before they got their hands on anything. They separated and ran. The friend shot and killed an off-duty policeman while trying to escape, then killed himself. Dellelo was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. He ended up serving forty years. Five years and one month were spent in isolation.

The criteria for the isolation of prisoners vary by state but typically include not only violent infractions but also violation of prison rules or association with gang members. The imposition of long-term isolation—which can be for months or years—is ultimately at the discretion of prison administrators. One former prisoner I spoke to, for example, recalled being put in solitary confinement for petty annoyances like refusing to get out of the shower quickly enough. Bobby Dellelo was put there for escaping.

It was an elaborate scheme. He had a partner, who picked the lock to a supervisor’s office and got hold of the information manual for the microwave-detection system that patrolled a grassy no man’s land between the prison and the road. They studied the manual long enough to learn how to circumvent the system and returned it. On Halloween Sunday, 1993, they had friends stage a fight in the prison yard. With all the guards in the towers looking at the fight through binoculars, the two men tipped a picnic table up against a twelve-foot wall and climbed it like a ladder. Beyond it, they scaled a sixteen-foot fence. To get over the razor wire on top, they used a Z-shaped tool they’d improvised from locker handles. They dropped down into the no man’s land and followed an invisible path that they’d calculated the microwave system would not detect. No alarm sounded. They went over one more fence, walked around a parking lot, picked their way through some woods, and emerged onto a four-lane road. After a short walk to a convenience store, they called a taxi from a telephone booth and rolled away before anyone knew they were gone.

They lasted twenty-four days on the outside. Eventually, somebody ratted them out, and the police captured them on the day before Thanksgiving, at the house of a friend in Cambridge. The prison administration gave Dellelo five years in the Departmental Disciplinary Unit of the Walpole prison, its hundred-and-twenty-four-cell super-maximum segregation unit.

Wearing ankle bracelets, handcuffs, and a belly chain, Dellelo was marched into a thirteen-by-eight-foot off-white cell. A four-inch-thick concrete bed slab jutted out from the wall opposite the door. A smaller slab protruding from a side wall provided a desk. A cylindrical concrete block in the floor served as a seat. On the remaining wall was a toilet and a metal sink. He was given four sheets, four towels, a blanket, a bedroll, a toothbrush, toilet paper, a tall clear plastic cup, a bar of soap, seven white T-shirts, seven pairs of boxer shorts, seven pairs of socks, plastic slippers, a pad of paper, and a ballpoint pen. A speaker with a microphone was mounted on the door. Cells used for solitary confinement are often windowless, but this one had a ribbonlike window that was seven inches wide and five feet tall. The electrically controlled door was solid steel, with a seven-inch-by-twenty-eight-inch aperture and two wickets—little door slots, one at ankle height and one at waist height, for shackling him whenever he was let out and for passing him meal trays.

As in other supermaxes—facilities designed to isolate prisoners from social contact—Dellelo was confined to his cell for at least twenty-three hours a day and permitted out only for a shower or for recreation in an outdoor cage that he estimated to be fifty feet long and five feet wide, known as “the dog kennel.” He could talk to other prisoners through the steel door of his cell, and during recreation if a prisoner was in an adjacent cage. He made a kind of fishing line for passing notes to adjacent cells by unwinding the elastic from his boxer shorts, though it was contraband and would be confiscated. Prisoners could receive mail and as many as ten reading items. They were allowed one phone call the first month and could earn up to four calls and four visits per month if they followed the rules, but there could be no physical contact with anyone, except when guards forcibly restrained them. Some supermaxes even use food as punishment, serving the prisoners nutra-loaf, an unpalatable food brick that contains just enough nutrition for survival. Dellelo was spared this. The rules also permitted him to have a radio after thirty days, and, after sixty days, a thirteen-inch black-and-white television.

“This is going to be a piece of cake,” Dellelo recalls thinking when the door closed behind him. Whereas many American supermax prisoners—and most P.O.W.s and hostages—have no idea when they might get out, he knew exactly how long he was going to be there. He drew a calendar on his pad of paper to start counting down the days. He would get a radio and a TV. He could read. No one was going to bother him. And, as his elaborate escape plan showed, he could be patient. “This is their sophisticated security?” he said to himself. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”

After a few months without regular social contact, however, his experience proved no different from that of the P.O.W.s or hostages, or the majority of isolated prisoners whom researchers have studied: he started to lose his mind. He talked to himself. He paced back and forth compulsively, shuffling along the same six-foot path for hours on end. Soon, he was having panic attacks, screaming for help. He hallucinated that the colors on the walls were changing. He became enraged by routine noises—the sound of doors opening as the guards made their hourly checks, the sounds of inmates in nearby cells. After a year or so, he was hearing voices on the television talking directly to him. He put the television under his bed, and rarely took it out again.

One of the paradoxes of solitary confinement is that, as starved as people become for companionship, the experience typically leaves them unfit for social interaction. Once, Dellelo was allowed to have an in-person meeting with his lawyer, and he simply couldn’t handle it. After so many months in which his primary human contact had been an occasional phone call or brief conversations with an inmate down the tier, shouted through steel doors at the top of their lungs, he found himself unable to carry on a face-to-face conversation. He had trouble following both words and hand gestures and couldn’t generate them himself. When he realized this, he succumbed to a full-blown panic attack.

Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, received rare permission to study a hundred randomly selected inmates at California’s Pelican Bay supermax, and noted a number of phenomena. First, after months or years of complete isolation, many prisoners “begin to lose the ability to initiate behavior of any kind—to organize their own lives around activity and purpose,” he writes. “Chronic apathy, lethargy, depression, and despair often result. . . . In extreme cases, prisoners may literally stop behaving,” becoming essentially catatonic.

Second, almost ninety per cent of these prisoners had difficulties with “irrational anger,” compared with just three per cent of prisoners in the general population. Haney attributed this to the extreme restriction, the totality of control, and the extended absence of any opportunity for happiness or joy. Many prisoners in solitary become consumed with revenge fantasies.

“There were some guards in D.D.U. who were decent guys,” Dellelo told me. They didn’t trash his room when he was let out for a shower, or try to trip him when escorting him in chains, or write him up for contraband if he kept food or a salt packet from a meal in his cell. “But some of them were evil, evil pricks.” One correctional officer became a particular obsession. Dellelo spent hours imagining cutting his head off and rolling it down the tier. “I mean, I know this is insane thinking,” he says now. Even at the time, he added, “I had a fear in the background—like how much of this am I going to be able to let go? How much is this going to affect who I am?”

He was right to worry. Everyone’s identity is socially created: it’s through your relationships that you understand yourself as a mother or a father, a teacher or an accountant, a hero or a villain. But, after years of isolation, many prisoners change in another way that Haney observed. They begin to see themselves primarily as combatants in the world, people whose identity is rooted in thwarting prison control.

As a matter of self-preservation, this may not be a bad thing. According to the Navy P.O.W. researchers, the instinct to fight back against the enemy constituted the most important coping mechanism for the prisoners they studied. Resistance was often their sole means of maintaining a sense of purpose, and so their sanity. Yet resistance is precisely what we wish to destroy in our supermax prisoners. As Haney observed in a review of research findings, prisoners in solitary confinement must be able to withstand the experience in order to be allowed to return to the highly social world of mainline prison or free society. Perversely, then, the prisoners who can’t handle profound isolation are the ones who are forced to remain in it. “And those who have adapted,” Haney writes, “are prime candidates for release to a social world to which they may be incapable of ever fully readjusting.”

Dellelo eventually found a way to resist that would not prolong his ordeal. He fought his battle through the courts, filing motion after motion in an effort to get his conviction overturned. He became so good at submitting his claims that he obtained a paralegal certificate along the way. And, after forty years in prison, and more than five years in solitary, he got his first-degree-homicide conviction reduced to manslaughter. On November 19, 2003, he was freed.

Bobby Dellelo is sixty-seven years old now. He lives on Social Security in a Cambridge efficiency apartment that is about four times larger than his cell. He still seems to be adjusting to the world outside. He lives alone. To the extent that he is out in society, it is, in large measure, as a combatant. He works for prisoners’ rights at the American Friends Service Committee. He also does occasional work assisting prisoners with their legal cases. Sitting at his kitchen table, he showed me how to pick a padlock—you know, just in case I ever find myself in trouble.

But it was impossible to talk to him about his time in isolation without seeing that it was fundamentally no different from the isolation that Terry Anderson and John McCain had endured. Whether in Walpole or Beirut or Hanoi, all human beings experience isolation as torture….”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=1

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.

When Gov. Deval Patrick ran for election he promised to consider the best ideas no matter the source and “TO LISTEN.” Tonight I ask you to listen no matter what you may think of the source.

It’s dishonest to tell the public that various policies and laws will ensure their safety anymore. Many prison solutions of today will have to fall outside of the law enforcement system. Articles quoting Mayor Menino have said, “It seems to him this new criminal mind has no respect for human life anymore.” Police Commissioner Davis and others have said “The new criminal has no more code of honor respecting neither the lives of women nor children,” but this isn’t news to me because many studies miss the “HEARTBEAT” of a hidden philosophy based on hopelessness and a more harden criminal philosophy that emerged during the “Rock Breaking Era,” of Gov. Weld. Now that same philosophy and prison experience has seeped into our outside youth culture. This thinking can’t be addressed form Central Office nor can a superintendent order a cell shake down to find it.

Bottom line some have just embraced the worst of themselves along with whatever the DOC can throw at them until their release. WE NEED MORE REALITY BASED PROGRAMMING. Presently CORI laws may be center stage on reentry, but the struggle is not on just finding employment, but for many helping them [to] find themselves before they leave here.

There are issues that are not seen in the 2004 Harshbarger Final Commission Report or else where that must be implements such as:

1. The need for a grieving program dealing with family loss behind bars. Many prisoners like myself have loss family members and children while incarcerated. Some simply shut down never having dealt with those losses in this environment. We need to address that issue before they take on the shock of that reality when they get home. This must be addressed.

2. There is no mediation programs established in the system. When inmates fight they are sanctioned with loss of visits and/or other privileges. Some are separated throughout the incarcerations, or allowed to sign waivers and simply sent on there way, but statistics show, and Police Commissioner Davis and others have suggested that a lot of community killings appear to be retaliatory. The question is, how many of those retaliatory killings may stem from unresolved prison conflicts? We need a community supported mediation program in here sooner if not immediately for these young men today.

3. The practice of just mixing inmates without consideration of those here supporting change is like asking us to walk forward in sideway shoes.
 
As past Commissioner Dennehy found out regarding both inmate and staff alike, there are two prison populations. One group “Both Staff and Inmate,” looking for a life change and another just wanting things to be left alone. Yet, there is no designated prison facility for those who are program, life change, and community invested to be housed together. An inmate striving to educate himself and work on his rehabilitation and reconciliation with his community may find himself housed with another inmate whose only agenda is watching TV and exercising in the gym or main yard. A pilot or “Test Block” should be established at various facilities to create a new statistic on how such housing unit can be effective to the goal of both prison life and reentry itself. These solutions require strengthen more opportunity to develop self responsibility, and then funding and supporting those programs that can show a more productive set of statistics for that particular program inmate turnout to the public. It’s time statistic are gathered on a lot of these already online programs within the DOC and compared to how many returnees to the prison system have actually completed them prior.

Truth is what’s needed here are “Character Corrections” while some unified effort between this department (DOC) and its inmate population must be established or in the end the past culture will continue changing the lives of all of our children with in the communities in a negative way. RESPONSIBILITY to these youth inside and outside of this prison from central office to the cell block is all of our jobs. I remain committed, but it is a lonely fight without support from those up top.

Sincerely,
MA Prisoner

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. 

A request for comic books is why I was first contacted by someone from the Lifers Group at Norfolk Prison. Over several years, I corresponded with various members of the Group. Approximately 7 moths ago, one of the Group’s members, asked me to speak. He would submit an application and I would hear from the staff member in charge. The application was submitted on June 9, 2008. After waiting almost two months, I called the staff member. He said the request was denied but I could appeal the decision by writing to the Assistant Superintendent. In my conversation, he said my request was denied for three reasons: 1) it was made directly by the Lifers Group rather than by me; 2) the subject of the talk, submitted by the Lifers Group, was unacceptable and 3) because of the organization I represented—The Real Cost of Prisons Project. I briefly want to address each of the reasons for denial.

1. It was the belief of the person submitting the application, that the Lifers Group could directly request a speaker. This turned out to be untrue. The procedure is for a prospective speaker to approach the administration at Norfolk. The speaker must not be directly asked by a member of the Group. Doing so can result in a denial. Somehow, people on the outside must know of the Lifers Group, know that they would like to have a speaker and then find and contact the appropriate person at the prison and make a request. This appears to be a rather large barrier to speaking to the Lifers Group.

2. The topic the Lifers Group wrote on the application was for me to report on a national conference focusing on maximum security prisons and other forms of prison segregation. The conference was organized by the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia. On June 29th, I spoke with the Deputy Superintendent for Programs at Norfolk; she informed me that the only subject one could speak to the Lifers about was “re-entry.” I said I could speak about this topic based on my work with the CORI Education Project and would send an appeal letter and documentation about my work in this area and await her response.  In the intervening months, I made numerous calls to the prison checking on the status of my appeal. In September, I received permission to speak and did so on October 7th, 5 months after the original request was made. More than 150 men attended the talk including many Long Termers. While “re-entry” issues are not a priority for the Lifers, I think the large audience reflected their desire for contact with the outside.

3. As I noted, initially I was turned down because the person filling out the application wrote that I was to speak on behalf of the Real Cost of Prisons Project. The Real Cost of Prisons Project is an educational organization begun in 2000, which brings together justice activists, artists, researchers and people directly experiencing the impact of mass incarceration to create educational materials and other resources which explore the immediate and long-term costs of prisons. We believe that all people benefit from knowing more about the circumstances of their life. This includes Lifers, who, it seems to me need continued contact with people from the outside to maintain their mental health and intellectual engagement so that they can do their time in a way that does not negate or even destroy their humanity.

We know that for men and women serving lesser sentences, contact with the outside through classes, talks and letters is a crucial component to their ability to come back home with a more positive and expanded view of themselves and the world. While a workshop on CORIs is important, more important is the intellectual and emotional growth which regular contact with people from the outside can help to foster.

Over the last 20 years, prisons and even most jails have become fortresses. Prisoners have far fewer opportunities to be part of GED programs, Pell Grants ended despite the fact that year they proved be a major deterrent to recidivism and relevant vocational programs are scarce.  Add to this the obstacles placed in the way of people who want to speak and create programs on non-religious subjects. It seems to me, that these limitations run counter to the goals of successful re-entry and do not serve the people of the Commonwealth. 

http://realcostofprisons.org

Our constituency is disproportionately impacted by incarceration and violence.  It is impossible to divide our community into “victims” and “offenders.”  Families and blocks have endured both sides of harm.  Homes and neighborhoods are ripped apart by jail as much as crime.  Therefore, re-entry needs to be a collective process with the constant engagement of community organizations whose work is rooted in accountability and support.  In addition to substance abuse treatment and job training, inmates must have the opportunity to rebuild relationships with community members who can welcome them back and hold them accountable for changing their behavior.  People in prison must have the opportunity to hear from the community about the impact of the harm they caused so that we can live together without further harm.  Doing so means someone is taking full responsibility for their actions. Then, they must have the opportunity to intentionally think about changing their actions with the people they will be living amongst, plan for that change, and have tangible support for implementing changes in their life and community.

I want to testify in support of restorative justice practices like healing circles, victim offender dialogues, and programming designed and delivered by community organizations.  We the community are ultimately responsible for the success of a person re-entering, and are most deeply affected when a person is unstable, unhealthy, and without opportunity.  Therefore we should have a stake in the process before a person ever gets out of an institution.  
Community organizations who can demonstrate an expertise in re-entry and accountability work should be formally included in the plan of the Commissioner.  Since these agencies, mine included, are often a part of providing services for an individual once they’ve left prison,  it is only logical we need to play a role on the inside as well.  Community organizations need to be given the resources and institutional access to guide inmates through transition with support and services. Without funding and consistent presence in institutions, these community based programs will not be sustainable or achieve their full impact.
Re-entry reform is impossible without CORI reform and access to employment, education, and housing.  We cannot continue to punish people who have already served their time with a record that prevents them holding a job or building their future.  We cannot force people back into illegal economies without options or support. 

Because Reflect and Strengthen’s expertise is gender-specific programming for young women, I would like to testify that re-entry programs must be gender specific, developmentally appropriate, and culturally relevant.  We need to focus on the quality of programs for juveniles and their connection to the community so that DYS does not become an automatic gateway to the adult system.  Community agencies must be empowered to provide consistent support during and after DYS commitment. In order to stop thinking of jail as the place for services and treatment, community agencies like Reflect and Strengthen and others testifying tonight must be able to do our work within the system and maintain connections with young people when they are released.

In summary, I want to support restorative justice practices during the re-entry process coupled with programming designed and delivered by community agencies.  These agencies must be given resources and institutional access.  We cannot forget the needs young people, especially young women.  We also must reform CORI and provide people in prison with access to education, health care, housing, and employment.

Thank you.

http://www.reflectandstrengthen.org

Our primary mission once someone comes in the door is to get them out the door.  This population presents the greatest challenges.  Their criminal history and subsequent incarceration reported in the CORI present significant roadblocks to securing both employment and housing. The CORI law, even with reform, remains a barrier to employment; people with CORIs are often denied public housing.  With no job and no place to live, people often re-offend because other options such as jobs, education and housing are not within their reach.  Job and housing support programs need to be completed in the prison system, not started in the homeless shelters.  In tight fiscal times, we need to look at investing public dollars in places where positive outcomes can be proven.  Ex offenders ending up on the street and in shelter is the least desirable outcomes.  If that cannot be done resources need to be adequately integrated with resources in shelters so that they can move these men and women into jobs and housing.

For the past few years, sex offenders have been discharged to the shelters and to the streets.  This is a set up that often leads to another offense. Even when people are assigned a probation parole officer, shelters and the streets cannot provide any level of monitoring or supervision.  It remains a great concern and it is a public safety issue.  Shelters are not clinically equipped to meet the needs of sex offenders.  Research shows that treatment can occur in a variety of settings and at various stages in the criminal justice system. It is estimated that whereas treatment of sex offenders costs about $5,000 per year, incarceration costs more than $20,000 per year per offender ($43,000 in Massachusetts) (www.csom.org) .Other states have taken a much more proactive approach to this issue and we need to take a look at evidence based practices that reduce recidivism for this group, including housing with monitoring as needed.    A number of studies have found that treatment saves more money than it costs: about $4 is saved for every dollar spent on treatment services (McGrath et al., 2003).

Re-entry can only work with an integrated system.  The Department of Corrections must create housing and job outcomes for prisoners.  Discharge to a homeless shelter cannot be an appropriate outcome.

Respectfully submitted,
Lyndia Downie
President
Pine Street Inn
http://www.pinestreetinn.org