Tag Archives: prison

Lawsuit Alleges Cruel and Unusual Conditions for Mentally Ill in Montana Prison

by ShannonKortig Posted on April 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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A disability rights advocacy group sued Montana officials this week in federal court for allegedly placing mentally ill prisoners in extreme forms of solitary confinement for months and years at a time, often because the prisoners displayed symptoms of their illness or expressed suicidal thoughts. The prison’s psychiatrist also accused prisoners with well-documented mental illnesses of using their symptoms to get attention and ceased giving them medication, according to the lawsuit.

Disability Rights Montana, a federally mandated civil rights protection and advocacy group says that Montana State Prison’s treatment of prisoners amounts to “cruel and unusual punishment” and is unconstitutional. The group filed the lawsuit after conducting a year-long investigation with the ACLU of Montana. According to the Associated Press, the groups hope that the matter can be resolved through negotiations with the state, not through legal action. Prison officials are “taking the allegations seriously” according to the AP. Judy Beck, a spokeswoman for the Montana Department of Corrections, told Mother Jones that the state would file its response within 60 days and could not comment.

According to the lawsuit, prisoners are subject to solitary confinement in spaces that sometimes have blacked-out windows, as well as “behavior management plans”—whereby a prisoner is put in 24-hour solitary confinement with only a mattress, blanket, a suicide smock, and nutraloaf, a tasteless, controversial food product that civil rights groups have alleged is unconstitutional. (In 2003, the Montana Supreme Court also ruled that certain behavior management plans are illegal.) “One prisoner with serious mental illness explained that being placed in solitary confinement makes him feel like a young child locked in a closet with nothing to do and, as a result, he spreads feces on the walls of his cell to keep bad spirits away,” the complaint reads.

In a case outlined in the lawsuit, a 50-year-old prisoner sentenced “guilty but mentally ill” in 2006, was placed in a state hospital and diagnosed with schizophrenia. At the state hospital, staff allegedly described him as “polite, friendly, cooperative, and socializing appropriately with staff and peers.” But after he was suspected of stealing another patient’s jewelry, he was transferred to prison and placed in solitary confinement. In 2012, the prison’s doctor allegedly discontinued the prisoner’s antipsychotic medication, because he believed the man was “malingering.” The prisoner told mental health staff that he wanted to cry when placed in “the hole” because he did not “do hole time well,” according to the lawsuit.

In another case outlined in the lawsuit, a 43-year-old prisoner with a very low IQ score of 78, was transferred to prison from a community group home. There, he was placed in solitary confinement for more than three years for acts that the plaintiffs allege were related to his mental illness, such as “banging his head until it bled on his cell door while asking for real food instead of nutraloaf, crying and saying people on the floor were talking to him, and attempting suicide,” according to the lawsuit. The plaintiffs claim that the doctor also stopped giving the prisoner medication, on the basis that he was “simply malingering,” and “laughed at” the prisoner after he complained about losing his medication.

In 2011, a United Nations specialist on torture said that solitary confinement lasting more than 15 days should be abolished. He also said it shouldn’t be used at all on people with mental disabilities. According to the ACLU, “Isolation creates and exacerbates symptoms of mental illness in prisoners, undermining successful re-entry into society and jeopardizing public safety.”

A 33-year-old prisoner—with a long history of self-harm—who was mentioned in the lawsuit was transferred from the state hospital to prison, allegedly to keep him from harming himself. There, he was placed in solitary confinement for “significant periods of time.” In July 2011, he told mental health staff that he had “been in locked housing for way too long” and was worried about doing “something stupid.” In August, when he was taken out of solitary, he murdered another prisoner and was sentenced to life without parole.

About five years earlier, prior to being placed in extended solitary confinement, he filled out a “treatment planning worksheet” on how staff could help him get better at the prison’s Mental Health Treatment Unit, the plaintiffs claim. The prisoner wrote: “Groups with homework. Give me stuff to do so I can keep myself and my mind busy” and “be there to talk to me when I’m having problems.”

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Lawsuit Alleges Cruel and Unusual Conditions for Mentally Ill in Montana Prison

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Incompetent Scheming Is Just as Bad As Competent Scheming

by AlissaVigna Posted on March 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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A couple of months ago I wrote about new evidence suggesting that several big Silicon Valley firms had explicitly agreed not to hire away each others’ workers. This case has now gotten more attention, and Tyler Cowen comments about it:

I would suggest caution in interpreting this event. For one thing, we don’t know how effective this monopsonistic cartel turned out to be. We do know that wages for successful employees in this sector are high and rising. Many a collusive agreement has fallen apart once one or two firms decide to break ranks, as they usually do. More follows about how this might play out in the real world

Cowen is an economist, and I don’t want to knock him for doing some economic analysis. Still, this is the kind of thing that gives economics a bad name. Who cares if this scheme was effective? Maybe it was the Keystone Kops version of collusion. What matters is merely that they tried. These companies felt perfectly justified in conspiring to hold down wages in a tight labor market. Like so many titans of capitalism, they think free markets are great just as long as workers who are in high demand don’t get any fancy ideas about what that means.

Throw the book at them. If their scheme didn’t work, it just means they’re incompetent plotters. But they’re plotters nonetheless.

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Incompetent Scheming Is Just as Bad As Competent Scheming

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Conservatives Are the Big Roadblock to Improving Head Start

by Caroline73G Posted on March 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Robert Gordon and Sara Mead say that Head Start is better than a lot of its critics give it credit for:

But this much is true: Head Start could do better….Evaluations suggest that strong state preschool programs sustain gains in reading, math, or both in ways that Head Start doesn’t. There’s no reason to think Head Start can’t produce similar results. In fact, some individual Head Start programs already do: Kids in them achieve vocabulary gains more than twice the Head Start average. But it will require some changes.

Some of the program’s defenders may bristle at such talk, for fear that any questioning of Head Start’s effectiveness will reinforce the arguments of Paul Ryan and those eager to downsize or even eliminate the program. But now is the time to talk about improving Head Start. Replicating results from the best Head Start programs would be a big boost for our nation’s poorest youngsters, enabling many more of them to start school much better prepared.

This is the eternal problem. There are plenty of liberals who would like nothing more than to make Head Start—and pre-K programs in general—better than they are today. In fact, if there’s any group which should be most concerned about making sure that taxpayer dollars are spent efficiently and that social programs show real results, it’s liberals.

So why is there often so much resistance to improvement? Obviously inertia is part of it. Most of us tend to get a little lazy once we find a comfort zone. But there’s a more substantive reason too: As Gordon and Mead say, defenders of social welfare programs know that acknowledging problems won’t lead to kumbaya sessions with conservatives where we all agree on improvements. It merely gives conservatives fodder for arguments to cut spending on the poor.

This sounds simpleminded and uncharitable. So be it. But the plain truth is that there are vanishingly few conservatives who are genuinely dedicated to improving social welfare programs. They just want to cut taxes and cut spending. Sometimes this is out in the open. Sometimes it gets hidden in the language of “block grants.” Sometimes it’s buried even further in spending caps that obviously starve domestic programs without admitting that any particular program will ever get cut. But one way or another, it’s there.

So what’s the answer? I wish I knew. But as long as conservatives remain dedicated to using problems with social programs as nothing more than convenient excuses to get the Fox News outrage machine rolling, progress is going to be hard to come by.

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Conservatives Are the Big Roadblock to Improving Head Start

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Chart of the Day: Social Security Is More Important Than Most People Think

by ShelbyNorthcott Posted on March 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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EBRI’s annual Retirement Confidence Survey is out, and you can find it here if you want to read the whole thing. In a nutshell, retirement confidence dropped sharply in 2008 when the Great Recession started, and finally started to increase a bit this year for the first time since then. Nonetheless, the number of people who are confident they have enough to retire on is still around 55 percent, way below the 70 percent number that felt this way during the 90s and aughts.

There are plenty of interesting facts and figures about retirement in the report, and I’ve excerpted an interesting pair of charts about worker expectations below. These numbers have bounced around a bit over the years, but generally speaking, only about a third of active workers think Social Security will be a major part of their retirement. In reality, about two-thirds of actual retirees report that Social Security is a major part of their income. Keep that in mind the next time you hear someone blithely talking about cutting Social Security benefits, especially among low-income workers.

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Chart of the Day: Social Security Is More Important Than Most People Think

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It’s Time For Some Obamacare Success Stories

by cassidy281 Posted on March 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Vincent Rizzo, who suffers from Type 2 diabetes, has gone without health insurance for 10 years. “We got 30 denial letters,” his wife says. But then along came Obamacare, and now both Rizzos are covered for $379 a month, with a $2,000 family deductible. Michael Hiltzik compares their story to that of all the Obamacare horror stories making the rounds:

You haven’t heard Rizzo’s story unless you tuned in to NBC Nightly News on New Year’s Day or scanned a piece by Politico about a week later. In the meantime, the airwaves and news columns have been filled to overflowing with horrific tales from consumers blaming Obamacare for huge premium increases, lost access to doctors and technical frustrations — many of these concerns false or the product of misunderstanding or unfamiliarity with the law.

While Rizzo was working her way to thousands of dollars in annual savings, for example, Southern California Realtor Deborah Cavallaro was making the rounds of NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, CBS, Fox and public radio’s Marketplace program, talking about how her premium was about to rise some 65% because of the “Unaffordable” Care Act. What her viewers and listeners didn’t learn was that she hadn’t checked the rates on California’s insurance exchange, where (as we determined for her) she would have found a replacement policy for less than she’d been paying.

So why do we hear so much about folks like Cavallero, and Bette from Spokane, and the infamous Julie Boonstra? Good question. More to the point, with Obamacare’s website problems largely solved, and with the initial signup period coming to a close with a relatively high participation rate, will we start hearing these stories soon? Especially in swing states where the horror stories are getting so much play? Click the link for some speculation.

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It’s Time For Some Obamacare Success Stories

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Chart of the Day: Republicans Stick Together No Matter What Kind of District They Represent

by HalleyR55yl Posted on March 23, 2014

Mother Jones

Here’s an interesting chart from Ryan O’Donnell. It shows voting patterns for members of Congress based on what kind of district they represent. Among Democrats, as you’d expect, their voting records become more progressive as their districts become more strongly Democratic (blue line). What’s more, there’s a sharp break at zero. When a district becomes even slightly majority-Democratic, voting records become sharply more progressive.

But you see nothing of the kind among Republicans. The red line is nearly flat. There’s virtually no difference in their voting records regardless of how strongly Republican their district is. Even when they represent moderately Democratic districts, it doesn’t matter. They still vote monolithically conservative.

Now, it’s possible that this is merely an artifact of Republicans being the out-of-power party. When you’re faced with a president of the opposite party, maybe it’s just easier to maintain a united front of obstruction. Someone could shed some light on this by creating a similar chart for 2001-06, when it was House Democrats who were facing a president of the opposite party.

But I suspect that’s not it. Or at least, not the whole story. Modern Republicans are both more cohesive and more ideological than Democrats (virtually none have a progressive score above 20, while lots of Democrats have scores below 80). Nor do they pay a price for this. Voters in pinkish districts don’t seem to mind electing members of Congress with strongly red voting records. I guess they figure that as long as they vote against higher taxes, it doesn’t much matter if they waste time on lots of symbolic sops to the tea party.

Could Democrats in light bluish districts act the same way? They sure don’t seem to think so. Comments?

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Chart of the Day: Republicans Stick Together No Matter What Kind of District They Represent

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America’s Worst Prison Closed 51 Years Ago Today. Except It Didn’t.

by Seymour89E Posted on March 21, 2014

Mother Jones

Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary was conceived as a place to put the worst of the worst. The prisoners that kept starting problems at the other prisons. Put them all together, the thinking went. It wasn’t a place for rehabilitation. It was a place to isolate the infection. Over the 29 years it operated, starting in 1934, “Hellcatraz” earned a reputation so fearsome, it has a powerful hold on the American imagination to this day.

Alcatraz was finally shuttered, 51 years ago today, not because it was brutal, though it was, or because living conditions were inhumane, though they were. It simply cost too much.

This isn’t a secret. But it’s easy to forget. Because people tend to know three things about Alcatraz: 1) It was brutal 2) No one escaped and lived to tell about it, and 3) It’s closed. Lost along the way was “very inefficient from a budgetary standpoint.”

You could be forgiven for assuming that one morning in the spring of 1963, everyone woke up and said, “hey, wait a minute, let’s treat our prisoners better!” Maybe JFK was there and the wind was blowing in his hair and he smiled, and Bobby was there too, and he looked very serious and maybe one of them quoted Dostoyevsky’s line that “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” and then they shut the prison and went sailing and Jackie was there and everyone was happy. But that didn’t happen. Everyone was fine with the prisoners being treated the way they were.

And 51 years later, so are we, really. The United States operate 1,800 prisons and 3,000 jails. Like Alcatraz, they aren’t about rehabilitation. They’re about punishment. 80,000 people are held in solitary confinement every year. As many as half of all sexual assaults in prisons are carried out by prison guards. One fourth of the people incarcerated on Earth are incarcerated in the United States. We have 2.3 million Americans behind bars. They aren’t held on an island off San Francisco, they’re held at ADX Florence, or Pelican Bay, and Rikers Island, where an inmate recently baked to death in his cell.

Baked to death.

Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary—the one that Clint Eastwood broke out of and Nicolas Cage broke into—may be dead. But what we mean when we talk about Alcatraz is very much alive.

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America’s Worst Prison Closed 51 Years Ago Today. Except It Didn’t.

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There’s a Reason that Right-Wing Crackpots are More Newsworthy Than Lefty Crackpots

by Amilianp2t Posted on March 21, 2014

Mother Jones

Dave Weigel is tired of the liberal press getting all hot and bothered every time some fringe Republican nutball says something stupid. Fair enough. But today he provides yet another example and then makes a problematic comparison:

To date, nearly 90,000 people have “liked” or “shared” a story tagged “Candidate Who Blames Gay Rights for Tornadoes Scores Big GOP Win.” The candidate is Susanne Atanus, “who believes that God dictates weather patterns and that tornadoes, autism and dementia are God’s punishments for marriage equality.”

What’s missing from the story? Atanus’ status as a fringe candidate. She’s running in Illinois’ 9th District, which covers the liberal northern suburbs of Chicago….Susanne Atanus will never, ever serve in Congress.

….Both parties are going to be cursed with a few idiot candidates this year….In 2012 the declining Tennessee Democratic Party accidentally nominated a conspiracy-minded flooring installer for U.S. Senate. The media did not hustle down to Nashville and Memphis to cover him. No Democrat in another state was asked whether they agreed with this candidate about the NAFTA superhighway or the “Godless new world order.”

Why didn’t the media hustle down to Nashville to interview Mark Clayton? Wikipedia does as good a job as anyone explaining it:

Tennessee’s Democratic Party disavowed the candidate over his active role in the Public Advocate of the United States, which they described as a “known hate group”. They blamed his victory among a slate of little-known candidates on the fact that his name appeared first on the ballot, and said they would do nothing to help his campaign, urging Democrats to vote for “the write-in candidate of their choice” in November.

In the case of Clayton, nobody thought he represented the secret id of the Democratic Party. And the local party went out of its way to make sure Clayton was well and truly shunned as a crackpot they wanted nothing to do with.

Has anything similar happened in Illinois? Has the Republican Party denounced Atanus and urged voters to cast their ballots for someone else? No they haven’t. Actually, yes they have. See update below. Do reporters believe that Atanus does indeed represent a significant segment of the modern Republican base? Yes they do. Is this fair? Well….yes. It kind of is fair, isn’t it?

As it happens, I think that fringey right-wing candidates get less attention than Weigel believes. Sure, HuffPo plays them up, for the same reason they have a whole staff devoted to finding and posting sideboobs. It’s clickbait for the online hordes. But does the rest of the media obsess about the Susanne Atanuses of the world? Not really. Not if you’re a normal, casual news consumer, rather than an omnivore like Weigel and all the rest of us bloggy denizens. And to the extent they do cover the right-wing crackpots more than the lefty variety, the truth is that it’s pretty justified. These folks represent a real constituency, and the mainstream of the Republican Party, far from disowning them, practically falls all over itself to insist that they have nothing but admiration and respect for their willingness to stand up and fight for traditional values without compromise. That makes them worth a story.

UPDATE: Hey, it turns out that the media did write about Mark Clayton. The liberal media, that is. Here is MoJo’s own Tim Murphy writing on the day after the primary.

UPDATE 2: Weigel points out that the chairman of the Illinois GOP did indeed denounce Atanus after her gaffe. Fair point. Still, she’s hardly the first conservative to blame our problems on God’s wrath against liberal hedonism. It’s not unreasonable to think she represents a persistent strain of conservative thought and therefore deserves a bit of attention.

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There’s a Reason that Right-Wing Crackpots are More Newsworthy Than Lefty Crackpots

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Raw Data: Inflation Continues To Be Really, Really Low

by ShayneWoolnough Posted on March 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Apropos of nothing in particular, here’s a chart that shows the inflation rate over (a) the past three decades and (b) the past three years. This is just to remind people that although the headline unemployment number has declined, there’s really no sign yet of labor market tightness. No matter what your preferred measure of inflation is, it’s (a) lower now than it has been for a long time, and (b) still on a downward path. Inflation is simply not a problem right now, and inflationary expectations continue to be well anchored.

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Raw Data: Inflation Continues To Be Really, Really Low

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Obama Ratchets Up Sanctions on Russia

by Sheeritwern Posted on March 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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From the New York Times:

President Obama on Thursday announced he would expand sanctions against Russia, targeting individuals who support the government and a bank with ties to these associates, delivering on his warning earlier this week that it would ratchet up costs on Russia if it moved to annex the breakaway province of Crimea.

….Mr. Obama also said he had signed a new executive order that would allow him to impose sanctions Russian industrial sectors, presumably including its energy exports — a step that would dramatically tighten the economic pressure on Russia.

I expect we’ll quickly get a pro forma response about how weak and vacillating this is from Bill Kristol, John McCain, and Charles Krauthammer. I can’t quite get straight precisely what they want, but whatever it is, it’s something higher on the belligerence scale than whatever the appeaser-in-chief is offering up.

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Obama Ratchets Up Sanctions on Russia

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