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This Sociologist Spent Five Years on LA’s Hyper-Policed Skid Row. Here’s What He Learned.

by ImogeneSifford Posted on August 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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University of Chicago sociologist Forrest Stuart spent five years hanging out on Los Angeles’s grittiest streets for his new book, Down, Out and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row. (For a taste, read this short excerpt.) “I figured this was ground zero for trying to start over, for testing the American bootstraps story, and I wanted to see if and how it could work,” Stuart explains. I spoke with the young assistant professor about the things he learned amid the street people and cops.

Forrest Stuart

Mother Jones: Why did you choose Skid Row?

Forrest Stuart: I had worked with prisoner advocacy groups and in minimum-security prisons. I’d meet guys who would be released at 5 a.m. with no food, no nothing. If I were a guy who needed food or an addict who hadn’t had any treatment in prison, I would do whatever I had to do to survive, and maybe that would mean something illegal. So how do you start again? I had heard that the 50 blocks of its Skid Row was the place with the most parolees in the country, a neighborhood that is simultaneously one of the poorest and most aggressively policed locations in America. Shuttles run between Skid Row and LA’s Central Jail. I started by sitting in the courtyards, standing on the corners, hoping that people would strike up conversations. I started selling loose cigarettes, and people finally began talking to me.

MJ: What struck you during your time on the streets that might be useful to policymakers?

FS: Right away I started seeing how the police, in part just because of their numbers in Skid Row, were creating a situation I’d never seen before. Just as a guy was starting to get on his feet—for example, he had finally secured a bed at a shelter—some small infraction would cut him back.

It could be as little as getting a single ticket for loitering. For people living on dollars at day, to suddenly have to pay $150 for a sidewalk ticket is huge! If they don’t pay, they can be arrested. Not only do they have to spend time in jail, they usually lose their bed at the shelter or their room in low-rent apartments. In a lot of shelters or apartments, if someone doesn’t show up at the end of the day, the managers give away all their things. So now they’d be right back to square one. Broke, homeless, just trying to get a roof over their head. The bootstraps were cut.

For someone like you or me, you get a ticket, you pay it, it sucks. That ticket can mean we can’t have a drink tonight, or we have to cut back at the grocery store. Our interactions with police and the criminal justice system are generally just a nuisance. But once you go below a certain socioeconomic status, these seemingly trivial, mundane, momentary interactions with the police restructure everything.

The other really important complication is that some of the places that people need most—like a soup kitchen or homeless shelter—become really risky, because that’s where the police are, giving tickets and making arrests for small things like blocking the sidewalk. So people start to actively avoid those places. If the police are stopping and questioning you about, say, loitering, or not having ID, or for talking to a stranger (who happens to be the person handing out sandwiches) and you get hauled off to the station, you start to change your behavior for the worse. You start to avoid or refuse services.

MJ: So we’ve essentially made poverty illegal, and addiction, too—if you’re poor.

FS: We can can think about inequality as income and wealth. But there are a whole host of other things that you don’t see unless you are standing there watching it for a long time. When cities use misdemeanor arrests in low-income communities as a corrective, what they don’t understand is that these policies constrict every decision that someone with so few options has to make.

When I step out of my house, I think about what I might be teaching that day or what I’m going to have for dinner. In Skid Row most of the residents’ cognitive energy is directed to two things: “How do I stay off the cops’ radar” and “How do I stay safe—how do I avoid becoming a victim today?” Essentially, what people have to think about all the time is, how do I prove to police that I’m not a bad person? How can I be sure I don’t look like an addict? (Don’t pick at your clothes, don’t pick at your skin, don’t scratch your head.) It’s an incredible amount for a person to take in. It makes it really hard to concentrate on everyday things—like being a good employee if you do have a job, or pulling off a job interview.

Those of us in the middle class aren’t sitting on the sidewalk, because we don’t have to, or we have a job, or a home to go to. Plus, even if most of us did sit down on the sidewalk, or walk down the street picking at our clothes, we aren’t going to get that ticket. Those policies amount to a double criminalization of poverty.

MJ: What assumption do most people have that should be corrected?

FS: That everyone, or at least the majority of the people, have something wrong with them. Something that the rest of us don’t have—mental health problems, addiction, poor choices, work ethic. But that isn’t true. I’m 100 percent confident that if some of the stuff that happened to them had happened to me, my family or my students or my greater community could help me. There is very likely no way I’m going to end up on Skid Row, because I have so many safety nets. But take away your family and your supportive networks, and we are all one step away.

MJ: The mayor of LA says he’s serious about change. Do you agree?

FS: Mayor Eric Garcetti says “we are going to spend money” yet they don’t really have the money. That said, he has publicly committed to using the Housing First model. That should mean the administration increases transitional and permanent supportive housing. Getting people into homes has shown to work better than anything else so far. And it’s a lot better than the current system, which is to rely heavily on emergency shelters that have been turned into rehabilitation centers. If he follows through, that is a sign Garcetti might be serious.

But overall I’m scared and pessimistic because the city’s history, and Garcetti’s history, shows that whenever they increase funding for social services, they tie it to more-aggressive policing. When that happens, we start hearing city official and police officers saying things like, “There’s no excuse for you to be here, homeless, jobless, because all of you can walk across the street for social service” or “There’s something wrong with you” or “You are criminally negligent.” There are a whole lot of reasons why people don’t go into services. A lot of people see services and police as one and the same.

We need to stop treating homelessness as a policing and criminal-justice problem. We need to let the police do other stuff, and entrust social workers and helpers to address the issues. These are jobs cops don’t want to do. They don’t want to be walking around in piss and shit and dealing with mentally ill people.

MJ: In your book excerpt that accompanies this interview, you write about Jackson and Leticia, a couple who found themselves on Skid Row and addicted to drugs after LA’s aerospace industry collapsed. Have you seen them since?

FS: Last time I saw Jackson was two years ago. He was in the soup kitchen. He told me that the cops started cracking down hard on the vendors. In the hope of avoiding the the cops, the vendors had started to focus on only selling DVDs rather than an assortment of items. They amassed duffel bags full of films, thinking that it would make their sidewalk shops more discrete. But having more than 100 bootlegged DVDs means more fines and jail time. So the vendors started going away for longer periods. Almost overnight, the cops wiped out another way poor people were making ends meet. Despite cycling through jail again, Jackson had been able to stay relatively clean. Leticia was still on drugs, but the two had managed to start the application process for SSI and transitional housing. But I’m still worried for Jackson. He’s got a long, uphill climb ahead of him.

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This Sociologist Spent Five Years on LA’s Hyper-Policed Skid Row. Here’s What He Learned.

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Inside Shane Bauer’s Gripping Look at the Workings of a Private Prison

by JadeChatman3601 Posted on June 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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In December 2014, Mother Jones senior reporter Shane Bauer started a job as a corrections officer at a Louisiana prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country’s second largest private-prison company. During his four months on the job, Bauer would witness stabbings, an escape, lockdowns, and an intervention by the state Department of Corrections as the company struggled to maintain control. Bauer’s gripping, revelatory investigation is the cover story of Mother Jones‘ July/August 2016 issue.

Why Mother Jones sent a reporter to work as a private prison guard

Using his real name and personal information, Bauer applied for jobs at private prisons to get an inside look at the secretive industry that holds nine percent of America’s prisoners. He was soon hired by CCA’s Winn Correctional Center, a medium-security prison that housed around 1,500 men. After four weeks of training, Bauer was placed in a unit where he and another officer were responsible for supervising more than 350 inmates. He was paid $9 an hour and routinely worked 12-hour days.

As a guard, Bauer got an unconstrained look at the workings of a private prison. Among the episodes and issues Bauer details in his article:

• Guards felt overworked and outnumbered. Metal detectors went unused. One of Bauer’s colleagues resorted to using two prisoners as unofficial “bodyguards.” Guards skipped required security checks and recorded checks that never occurred. As one guard in the segregation unit told him, “To be honest with you, normally we just sit here at this table all day long.”

• Louisiana paid CCA $34 per day for each prisoner at Winn. Staff-intensive activities such as work program and many vocational programs had been cut. Hobby shops were shuttered and the recreation yard and law library were often closed. “We just sit in our cells all day,” one inmate said. “What you think gonna happen when a man got nuttin’ to do?”

• A prisoner escaped, slipping past unwatched security cameras and guard towers that no longer had officers in them.

• “Believe it or not, we are required by law to take care of them,” Winn’s assistant warden said about inmates’ health needs. Yet one prisoner who had lost his legs and fingers to gangrene said his multiple requests for medical care had been ignored. (He’s suing CCA for neglect.) There were no full-time psychiatrists professionals on staff. Inmates with psychiatric issues often requested to be put on suicide watch, where they were held in segregation cells without a mattress or clothes.

• A rash of stabbings broke out, leaving inmates and guards fearing for their safety. Bauer witnessed incidents in which inmates attacked other inmates. CCA responded by sending in members of its Special Operations Response Team, a SWAT-like unit that kept order with shakedowns and pepper spray. These tactical officers “use force constantly,” Winn’s assistant warden told the guards, adding that, “I believe that pain increases the intelligence of the stupid, and if inmates want to act stupid, then we’ll give them some pain to help increase their intelligence level.”

• Eventually, the prison was put on an 11-day lockdown, and officials from the state Department of Corrections came in to monitor the prison. As one inmate told Bauer shortly after he came to Winn, “Ain’t no order here. Inmates run this bitch, son.”

Bauer’s article also includes profiles of guards and prisoners struggling to survive, “locked in battle like soldiers in a war they don’t believe in.” It also describes his reaction to the stress and risk of being a prison guard—a transformation that revealed the unsettling reality of one of America’s most difficult jobs. “More and more, I focus on proving I won’t back down,” he writes. “I am vigilant; I come to work ready for people to catcall me or run up on me and threaten to punch me in the face.”

Shortly after Bauer left Winn in March 2015, CCA announced that it was backing out of its contract to run Winn Correctional Center. Documents later obtained by Mother Jones show that the state had asked CCA to make numerous immediate changes at the prison, including filling gaps in security, hiring more guards and medical staff, and addressing a “total lack of maintenance.” Another concern was a bonus paid to Winn’s warden that “causes neglect of basic needs.”

Bauer’s article is the result of more than a year of reporting, writing, and fact checking. Read it here.

Bauer’s experience is also the subject of the upcoming episode of Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX airing on public radio stations across the country starting Saturday, June 25, and on the Reveal podcast on Monday, June 27.

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Inside Shane Bauer’s Gripping Look at the Workings of a Private Prison

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These Public Defenders Actually Want to Get Sued

by KayleighPlain Posted on April 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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In late November 2015, New Orleans police arrested a man named Joseph Allen for attempted murder in relation to one of the bloodiest nights the city had seen in years. Shots had broken out at a party in Bunny Friend Park, wounding 17 people. Allen was the first of several suspects to be detained after an eyewitness named him as a shooter.

Except that Allen hadn’t been in town at the time. Within a week of his arrest, his private attorney had tracked down footage of the 32-year-old shopping for baby clothes with his pregnant wife at three stores in Houston, Texas, putting him far from the crime scene. A week or so later, Allen learned that no charges would be filed against him—he was released from jail the next day.

In his office down the street from the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, chief public defender Derwyn Bunton couldn’t help but think about what might have happened to Allen had he ended up with a public defender. In the wake of a budget crisis that had ravaged the Orleans Public Defenders Office several years earlier, Allen would’ve been lucky even to talk with one of the office’s overworked lawyers—there were 42 at the time—within any reasonable time frame. Only then would one of the office’s eight investigators have received a request to look into Allen’s case.

Bunton suspects his investigators wouldn’t have made it to Houston in time to obtain the store security footage that exonerated Allen. “I’m not going let people believe that everything is okay, that they get assigned a public defender and we’ve got that kind of resources,” Bunton told me, adding that two of the 10 Bunny Friend Park co-defendants are being represented by his office. “We don’t.”

Here’s how one Florida public defender’s office turned things around. Tristan Spinski

This past January, with more budget cuts looming, Bunton’s office did something drastic: It began turning away clients. The American Civil Liberties Union quickly responded with a federal lawsuit against the Orleans Parish defenders and the Louisiana Public Defender Board that oversees them. The suit alleges that rejecting new cases amounts to leaving people languishing in jail without counsel in violation of the Constitution. Late last month, Bunton told the Times-Picayune that his office cannot afford to represent itself in the lawsuit.

“The lawsuit itself can’t change anything,” concedes Brandon Buskey, an attorney for the ACLU. “The political actors in Louisiana have to step up. The lawsuit can put pressure on them. It can point out that the system is unconstitutional. But if the state wants a better system, it has to fix it.”

In a court filing—and an interview with Mother Jones—Bunton denies that his actions were unconstitutional. “Is it better to violate the constitution by being incompetent and ineffective?” he says. “I think where we would be violating the Constitution and ethics and professional standards would be to continue to take on cases we don’t have the resources to handle.”

Bunton’s move was just the latest in a string of decisions since last July designed to keep the lights on at the struggling defenders office, which represents more than 80 percent of New Orleans’ criminal defendants. It has been a rough turnabout for an office that as recently as five years ago was cited by the Southern Center for Human Rights as “an inspiration” for its “vigorous client-centered representation.” Even then, the office was looking at a shortfall for 2012 and had begun to cut back on staff. “Louisiana is an extreme at this moment,” says Marc Schnidler, executive director of the nonprofit Justice Policy Institute. “How they got to where they are—that tells the story of indigent defense in this country.”

Like many of their peers around the nation, the Orleans Parish public defenders are saddled with massive caseloads on a shoestring budget. In 2014, the office’s 51 attorneys juggled more than 22,000 cases—a whopping 431 per lawyer—which included nearly 8,000 felonies and nine death penalty cases. And while rejecting clients was seen as a last resort, Orleans is not the only one doing it. Fourteen of the state’s 42 judicial districts have cut back on their defender services and six have stopped taking certain cases, according to James Nixon, chair of the Louisiana Public Defender Board.

The way the state funds defense for its poor is deeply flawed, criminal justice experts agree. Louisiana is the only state where public defenders rely heavily on income sources that fluctuate significantly. In its 2015-16 fiscal year, Orleans Parish got just 40 percent of its budget from the state—which faces a new shortfall of at least $800 million for the upcoming fiscal year. The rest of the money had to be found locally. Nearly 40 percent of the defenders budget relied on local court fines and fees. But according to a state Supreme Court report, the number of traffic tickets filed in Louisiana courts—already low post-Hurricane Katrina—has dropped by 29 percent since 2009. This has translated to a shortfall for public defenders. “What you have is a local funding crisis,” Nixon told me.

The chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court noted in a recent annual report to the legislature that numerous defender offices could face insolvency. “We’re funding public defenders offices off the backs of folks who can’t afford a lawyer,” explains Clarke Beljean, a Plaquimines Parish defender who worked at the Orleans Parish office for six years. The Defender Board’s 2014 report called the situation “unstable, unreliable, and untenable.”

And this system was supposed to be an improvement.

Prior to Katrina, impoverished defendants in Louisiana didn’t even have access to full-time public defenders. Instead, parish-level defender boards enlisted private lawyers to handle those clients. New Orleans was served by the Orleans Indigent Defender Program, which consisted of 54 attorneys with a slim $2 million budget, working part time out of a room in the courthouse.

The hurricane disrupted everything. In Katrina’s wake, according to a 2012 evaluation, only six attorneys were left to handle more than 6,000 open cases in Orleans Parish. The local defender board resigned, a new reform-minded group took over, and the Indigent Defender Program became the Orleans Public Defenders office. In 2006, it won a $3 million Justice Department grant for rebuilding efforts and to fund 40 positions for two years. New lawyers were recruited, salaries were increased, and the original lawyers were told to give up their private practices and focus on public defense. The office, which was adorned with donated furniture and equipment, found new digs and shifted its philosophy to a client-based model, meaning that public defenders would now be connected with defendants within a day of their arrest and stick with them throughout their case—instead of being assigned to a courtroom and handling whatever cases came through in a given day. In 2007, the legislature established the state Public Defender Board to oversee similar district offices.

Bunton was named Orleans Parish chief public defender in late 2008. Bolstered by grants and city and state funding, the office grew into a 72-attorney shop with 20 investigators and a $9 million budget. “If we were a stock, we were trending up,” Bunton says. But four years later, the office was hit with large cuts at both the state and local level—including a drop in traffic-ticket revenue. Bunton tearfully broke the news to staff: He would have to lay off 27 people.

The remaining attorneys, who already worked 60- to 80-hour weeks, had to pick up the slack. “It’s like, you’re already trying to keep your head above water while holding however many pounds of weight on your back and then they throw you a baby. You’re like, ‘What do I do?'” says former Orleans defender Clarke Beljean, who survived the cutbacks that day. “And then they throw you another one. And then they throw you a few more, and they’re like, ‘What do you mean, you can’t hold these seven babies above water?’ Honestly, that’s the feeling.”

Bunton’s lawyers routinely exceed the maximum recommended caseloads that many experts view as excessive. In 2015, the office had four attorneys handling roughly 9,500 misdemeanors—a rate nearly six times the recommended limit of 400 per lawyer. The offices’s 55 felony defenders had 7,705 cases that year, which falls within the 150-felony limit, but the office recently lost more lawyers, including veterans whose high-level cases had to be redistributed. Three months into 2016, the office projects that the 39 remaining felony attorneys are already exceeding the 150-case limit, its spokeswoman told me. As of April 3, the office had refused 53 cases and put another 56 on a waiting list.

A 2009 Department of Justice report noted that, to properly defend 91 percent of the city’s indigent defendants—private attorneys working pro bono would presumably handle the rest—the Orleans office would need an $8.2 million budget and 70 staff attorneys. In real life, Bunton’s office is projected to end up with just $5.9 million—$1 million less than it expected. About 30 percent of the shortfall is expected to come from subpar revenue from fines and fees. Meanwhile, the office has one-third fewer attorneys than the DOJ recommended, and about half as many as the DA’s office employs.

In a letter to city and state officials last June, Bunton outlined a cost-cutting plan he said would “likely cause serious delays in the courts and potentially constitutional crises” for criminal justice in New Orleans. A month later, his office imposed a hiring freeze. To make ends meet, the defenders office even resorted to crowd-funding. In September, after the comedian John Oliver did a segment about the problem on his HBO show, it raised just over $86,000 to help the office narrow its budget gap. At a November 20 hearing, Bunton asked the courts to stop sending his office new cases. In January, hoping to stave off further hardship, the New Orleans City Council shelled out $200,000 for the defenders. Jo-Ann Wallace, executive director of the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, says that Orleans Parish’s decision to turn away clients as a last resort is consistent with “their ethical obligation to provide zealous representation.”

On the state level, the Public Defenders Board is facing cuts that could range from 30 percent to 62 percent, Nixon told me. Under the latter scenario, two judges wrote in an op-ed, the board could “force the complete elimination of juvenile defense services statewide.” A final budget is due from the legislature in July.

As the Orleans office waits for the ax to fall, Bunton is ethically torn about the choices he’s been forced to make. “It sucks,” he says. “I don’t do this job to tell people no.” In fact, he’s embraced the ACLU lawsuit as a way to pressure state officials. Indeed, over the past decade, deluged defenders’ offices in Florida, Missouri, and Montana have turned away clients as a way to get legislators’ attention. It has worked, too. In 2013, Florida’s Supreme Court ruled that Miami-Dade County’s efforts to turn down cases was justified.

But what to do with those defendants in the meantime? Last week, private attorneys assigned to represent seven poor clients in Orleans Parish filed court motions requesting compensation—or permission to withdraw from the cases. Tulane law processor Pamela Metzger told CityLab that the clients in custody should be released: “You can’t make lawyers do this for free, or ask them to spend out of their own pocket for overhead and costs.” Assistant DA David Pipes countered, “It is their job to protect the rights and interests of their clients in their individual cases…If that means that a private lawyer must defend the poor without the certainty of knowing they are going to be paid, that is preferable to seeing justice denied, criminals turned loose, or victims and defendants languishing in uncertainty.”

On April 8, New Orleans Judge Arthur Hunter ordered the release of the seven clients, concluding that their rights to an effective attorney should not rest on “budget demands, waiting lists, and the failure of the legislature to adequately fund indigent defense.” He added,› “We are now faced with a fundamental question, not only in New Orleans, but across Louisiana. What kind of criminal justice system do we want? One based on fairness or injustice, equality or prejudice, efficiency or chaos, right or wrong?”

“There’s no such thing as Cadillac justice and Toyota justice. There’s justice, and there is injustice,” Bunton says. “And we are not going to be complicit in any injustice.”

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These Public Defenders Actually Want to Get Sued

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The Surprising Gaps in HIV Care for Louisiana Prisoners

by PhyllisFontenot Posted on March 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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With the highest diagnosis rate of any state, Louisiana is a hotbed for new HIV cases, and the groups at greatest risk of infection are the same as those most likely to be imprisoned in the state’s sprawling corrections system: people who inject drugs, sex workers, the poor and racial minorities. But a new report from Human Rights Watch found that for some HIV-positive Louisiana prisoners, medical care is delayed or non-existent, depending on the facility where they are housed.

Louisiana’s nine state-level prisons operate testing programs and transfer inmates to HIV case management resources when they are released. However, only a handful of the state’s 104 parish jails conduct regular testing, with some HIV-positive inmates experiencing treatment that is “delayed, interrupted, and in some cases denied altogether,” according to the report.

That’s significant because more than 40 percent of Louisiana’s incarcerated population is housed in parish jails—including 16,877 convicted offenders and a whopping 12,602 pre-trial detainees at the end of last year. Officials in the Louisiana Department of Corrections told Human Rights Watch that all HIV-positive inmates are transferred from parish jails to states prisons. Yet, Human Rights Watch researchers found that jail inmates don’t get HIV care in state prisons unless the inmates already know their status and choose to disclose it, or until they develop symptoms.

What’s more, in some cases, when inmates did disclose their status, some still did not receive testing or medication unless a friend or family member could bring their pills into the jail. Although the East Baton Rouge Correctional Center has a large medical staff, it does not test new arrivals, the jail’s director of medical services Linda Otteson told researchers. “We cannot afford to treat them if they are positive,” Otteson said.

The result? Parish jail inmates can go weeks or months without treatment, potentially resulting in higher viral loads, increased resistance to medication, and a greater likelihood of infecting others, according to the report.

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The Surprising Gaps in HIV Care for Louisiana Prisoners

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6 Years Ago, New York Banned the Shackling of Pregnant Inmates. So Why Are These Women Still Being Restrained?

by LelaSandoval Posted on October 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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When Maria Caraballo delivered her daughter in 2010, she was handcuffed to the hospital bed.

“They didn’t even remove my cuffs for me to hold my baby,” says Caraballo, who at the time was serving a prison sentence in New York. “I had to hold my baby with one hand for two to three seconds. They didn’t take my handcuffs off until after I was stitched up and in the prison ward, and I didn’t see my baby until the next day.”

Caraballo gave birth to her daughter a year after it became illegal to shackle incarcerated women during childbirth in New York. But her experience wasn’t necessarily unique: New evidence published earlier this year suggests many women continue to be shackled in violation of the law. And now, six years after restraining pregnant inmates was first restricted in the state, an anti-shackling bill is once again headed to the governor’s desk.

Handcuffs, waist chains, and ankle shackles are commonly used to restrain inmates who are transported out of prison, whether it’s for a trial, facility transfer, or medical attention. And though it’s hard to imagine someone making a break for it during labor, shackles are routinely used to restrain women inmates during childbirth, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which has called the practice “inhumane.” It’s “almost never justified by the need for safety and security for medical staff, the public or correctional officers,” the ACLU has said.

The medical community agrees. “Physical restraints have interfered with the ability of physicians to safely practice medicine by reducing their ability to assess and evaluate the physical condition of the mother and fetus, and have similarly made the labor and delivery process more difficult than it needs to be,” wrote the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in a 2007 statement, “overall putting the health and lives of the women and unborn children at risk.”

The American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, and the American College of Nurse Midwives also oppose shackling during childbirth, as do the National Commission on Correctional Health Care and the American Correctional Association, two of the country’s primary prison accreditation organizations.

In the last decade, more states have passed laws restricting the use of shackling on inmates during childbirth. New York became the sixth state to ban restraints during birth when in 2009 then-Gov. David Paterson signed the Anti-Shackling Bill, which prohibited shackling during labor, delivery, and recovery. And since the passage of New York’s ban, at least 15 states followed suit.

But a study published earlier this year by the Correctional Association of New York (CA), a nonprofit organization with the authority to inspect prisons, found that 23 of the 27 women inmates interviewed who’d given birth while incarcerated had been shackled in violation of the law. There are an estimated 30 births each year under the supervision of state and local corrections, according to the correctional association.

“The 2009 law did seem to curtail the practice of shackling during delivery in the hospital” says Tamar Kraft-Stolar, director of the association’s Women in Prison project. “But we found that many women experienced shackling during labor, and many experienced it right after they gave birth and on the way back to the prison.”

Kraft-Stolar attributes the continued shackling of these women to a lack of education. Some correctional officers may not know about the law, and without oversight, there’s no way to enforce it. That’s why Kraft-Stolar and other criminal justice reform advocates are hopeful that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo will sign Assembly Bill 6430, an update to the 2009 law that would ban the use of restraints on pregnant inmates at any point during their pregnancy and until eight weeks after childbirth.

Passed by both chambers of the state legislature in June and now waiting for the governor’s signature, the bill would also require that every pregnant inmate be notified of her right to not be shackled. It would allow shackling in extraordinary circumstances—with the approval of both the superintendent and chief medical officer and only when a woman is threatening to hurt herself or someone else. However, each incident would have to be reported to the state.

The legislation has a long list of backers, including New York’s correctional officers’ union, which recently expressed its support.

“While it is our duty to monitor all inmates at all times, there are better uses of limited resources than to continue a practice that applies to several dozen pregnant inmates in our prisons who do not pose an immediate threat to the safety and security of our officers and our facilities,” the union said in a statement earlier this month.

And Kraft-Stolar says the legislation can only do so much. “The best solution to the problem of shackling is to not lock women up in the first place,” she says. “Prisons are breeding grounds for human rights violations, and the best way to avoid those violations is to keep people out of prison.”

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6 Years Ago, New York Banned the Shackling of Pregnant Inmates. So Why Are These Women Still Being Restrained?

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Girls Are the Fastest-Growing Group in the Juvenile Justice System

by MarielBrookfiel Posted on October 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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Over the past 20 years, there’s been a promising decline in arrests of youths in the United States. The reasons for the drop are elusive, but one factor might be a renewed interest within the juvenile justice system in paying better attention to child welfare before kids are drawn to crime. States are also seeking alternatives to traditional punishment once kids are in the system.

But a new report out this week finds that for young girls, the trend is going in the opposite direction. The proportion of girls in the juvenile justice system has increased at every stage of the process over the last 20 years, from arrests to detention and probation.

National Women’s Law Center/ National Crittenton Foundation

The report’s authors, Boston College law professor Francine Sherman and Annie Balck, a policy consultant at the National Juvenile Justice Network, attribute the gender gap to the juvenile justice system’s long-standing “protective and paternalistic” approach to dealing with delinquent girls. The system tends to detain girls, the authors write, because they’re seen as needing protection. It’s a strategy that is ill-suited to the personal histories of trauma, physical violence, and poverty that lead many girls into bad behavior. Even when the system acknowledges these factors, there are limited options available beyond traditional arrests and detention.

This report highlights several disparities in the treatment of girls in the system. For instance, there’s a gender gap in the detention of girls for low-level crimes: Nearly 40 percent of detained girls were brought in on status offenses (behavior that is only illegal when you’re under 18), compared with just 25 percent of boys.

National Women’s Law Center/ National Crittenton Foundation

Among girls in the system, there’s also stark racial inequity. In 2013, African American girls, the fastest-growing segment of the juvenile justice population, were 20 percent more likely to be detained than white girls, while American Indian girls were 50 percent more likely.

The authors also argue that detention is uniquely harmful to youths, and can lead to catastrophic consequences for girls. One study cited in the report found that girls who had been detained were five times more likely to die by age 29 than children who had not. For Latina girls, that likelihood increased—they were nine times more likely to die by age 29 than the general population. Detention is a drastic and developmentally incorrect measure to take, the report’s authors maintain, because in most cases the crimes girls commit are the result of past trauma that isn’t being properly addressed. Few have been found delinquent for more serious offenses such as assault.

The report cites a 2014 study of traumatic experiences in justice-involved youth. In the study, 31 percent of girls reported a personal experience of sexual violence in the home, 41 percent reported being physically abused, and 84 percent reported experiencing family violence. Girls reported having been sexually abused at a rate 4.4 times higher than boys.

“Greater restriction is rarely the answer and cannot address the violence and deprivation underlying so many girl offenses,” write the authors. To reverse the growing gender gap in juvenile justice, they say, “systems must craft reforms that directly address the root causes of their behavior and provide an alternate, non-justice-system path for girls’ healthy development and healing.”

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Girls Are the Fastest-Growing Group in the Juvenile Justice System

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Inside the Landmark Court Case That Will End Indefinite Solitary Confinement in California

by JustinKrauss Posted on September 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, 10 California inmates succeeded in stopping the decades-long use of indefinite solitary confinement in the state’s prison system. In a landmark settlement to a class-action suit they filed in 2012, California must now institute widespread reforms—which advocates hope will be a catalyst for change across the nation.


Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America’s Prisons.


Interactive: Inside a Solitary Cell


What Extreme Isolation Does to Your Mind


Documents: 7 Surprising Items That Get Prisoners Thrown Into Solitary


Maps: Solitary Confinement, State by State


VIDEO: Shane Bauer Goes Back Behind Bars at Pelican Bay

See more MoJo coverage of solitary confinement.

As part of the settlement, prison officials can isolate an inmate only if he or she commits a serious or violent infraction. Any perceived rule violation must be then proven in a hearing. Even those who do end up housed in the so-called Secure Housing Unit (SHU) will have different living quarters. The “high-security but nonisolation environment” will allow prisoners movement without restraints, the same amount of time away from their cells as the general prison population, access to educational and recreational programs, and physical contact with their visitors.

The settlement also bars the prison from housing inmates in these units for more than 10 years and will officially put an end to indeterminate stays. Instead, there will be a two-year program that provides incremental steps with increasing privileges to return to the general population.

Most inmates currently serving time in solitary are expected to qualify for removal under the settlement agreement—including all who have served more than 10 years—and they will be transitioned out over the next year.

“It is a remarkable feat of political organizing. This whole movement and the result is because of their collective action,” said Alexis Agathocleous, counsel on the suit and the deputy legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “It’s a huge step forward, in terms of how solitary confinement is used in California, but I really think it also sets up the model for how reform can occur around the country.”

As my colleague Shane Bauer wrote in an award-winning 2012 feature, thousands of inmates idle alone inside small concrete cells within the Security Housing Unit at California’s notorious Pelican Bay State Prison. Confined to the windowless rooms for 22.5 hours a day, prisoners in solitary are allowed only a short daily reprieve from their cells for exercise, inside another small cement room that is equipped with a camera to monitor their activities.

Gabriel Reyes spent more than 17 years living this way, without access to direct sunlight, physical contact with another person, rehabilitation and education programs, and even phone calls from his family. “Unless you have lived it, you cannot imagine what it feels like to be by yourself,” he wrote in 2011, “between four cold walls, with little concept of time, no one to confide in, and only a pillow for comfort—for years on end. It is a living tomb.”

Reyes ended up at Pelican Bay after burglarizing an empty house in 1995. It was his third conviction, and, under California’s “three strikes” law, it landed him 25 years to life. But it wasn’t this crime—or any other—that got him thrown into the SHU. Like many of the more than 1,100 prisoners housed there, Reyes was put in solitary simply for being suspected of being part of a gang.

Using the “Predictive Behavior Model,” prison officials could isolate inmates for just about anything they thought showed signs of gang involvement: associating with the wrong person, having certain kinds of tattoos, or even reading books and poetry that officials deemed suspect was enough to land a prisoner “in the hole.” And, at Pelican Bay, you could stay there for the rest of your life.

Researchers have documented the devastating and permanent mental- and physical health detriments caused by isolation, and, according to a 2013 Government Accountability Office report, there’s no evidence that the use of solitary confinement makes prisons safer. Still, around 80,000 inmates are currently housed in solitary units around the country, costing tax payers in the process: Pelican Bay spends an additional $12,300 per inmate per year.

Reyes has been fighting to change the system for years, along with many other inmates who have endured long stints in the SHU. After coordinating by talking through pipes or yelling from cell to cell, he and nine other inmates—who have each spent more than a decade in solitary—launched two hunger strikes and were eventually joined by more than 12,000 inmates across California.

Finally, in 2012, with the help of a legal team that included support from the Center for Constitutional Rights and California Prison Focus, the group of inmates decided to take legislative action—and now indefinite solitary confinement may be done with for good.

The prisoners themselves, including many of those whose suit brought about this settlement, will now be able to oversee its implementation. As inmate representatives they will also regularly meet with California prison officials to offer insights into prison conditions and programs.

While this settlement is a huge win in the fight to put an end to solitary confinement, advocates emphasize the battle is not over.

“It is a really big deal—and something that we hope will act as a tipping point,” said attorney Charles Carbone, co-counsel on the suit. “I am hoping what we did here in California not only cures the issue of solitary confinement and the practice of isolating prisoners, but also starts or leads a larger conversation about the prison epidemic.”

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Inside the Landmark Court Case That Will End Indefinite Solitary Confinement in California

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I Hung Out With the Prisoners Who Fight California’s Wildfires

by AmadoMcfall Posted on August 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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On the main road through Lower Lake, a town of 1,294 people in the heart of Northern California’s Lake County, spray-painted signs reading, “THANK YOU FIREFIGHTERS!” hang from fences and windows. Over the past month, the town, just north of Napa’s vineyards and south of the forests of Mendocino, has seen two of the biggest fires in the state’s recent history decimate roughly 70,00 acres of land.

The fires are mostly out now, but in recent media coverage of them, a surprising statistic came out: More than 30 percent of California’s wildfire fighters are state prisoners—low-level felons who volunteered to spend their sentences doing the manual labor of forest fire prevention and response rather than remaining behind bars.

The roughly 4,000 inmate firefighters receive a sentence reduction and $1 per hour while fighting fires, saving the state $80 million per year. After passing a physical exam and going through the same two-week training course that civilian firefighters do, they’re sent to one of 44 “fire camps” across the state—barracks-style quarters that serve as a home base from which to fight fires. Last week, I went to check out the camp in Lower Lake, called Konocti Camp.

A “thank you” sign in front of a Lower Lake sandwich shop. All photos by Julia Lurie

Konocti Camp’s yurts, where inmates who traveled from other camps slept during the Rocky and Jerusalem fires.

The first thing I noticed about Konocti was that it doesn’t feel like a normal prison. There are no fences or barbed wire around the perimeter, which separates the camp from nearby vineyards. Inmates wander freely within the camp during their leisure time; they line up to be counted every two hours. There’s an outdoor gym area, a rec room, an arts and crafts room (complete with hand saws), and a garden that grows much of the cafeteria’s produce. When there’s a big fire nearby, inmates from other fire camps come to stay, sleeping in yurts spread across the fields.

Escape attempts are exceedingly rare; prisoners know that if they misbehave, they’ll be sent back to a typical prison. “I’m trying to do everything right to stay here,” one inmate told me. (That said, attempts do happen. Last week, a juvenile in a similar program in Washington shot himself with a stolen gun after escaping from a fire camp.)

Konocti camp commander Jeff Auzenne worked for more than a decade as a state prison guard before coming to Konocti. “Inside the walls, you don’t really see a difference in these guys as far as their attitudes, and who you can help and who you can’t help,” he says. “Here, you see a lot of potential in these guys, and you can tell the guys you can really help.”

Inmates work out during their free time.

â&#128;&#139;Inmates line up to be counted at noon.

The fires have been so extreme this year that inmates from other states have come to help fight them. Above, inmates from a Nevada fire crew wait to hear if they will stay at camp or move to another fire.

Inmates are divided into fire teams, groups of about 15 people who live and work together. When fighting an active fire, the teams rotate through 24-hour shifts, primarily cutting “fire lines,” or four-foot-wide trails of dirt through vegetation on the edge of the fire to contain the blaze. They use hand tools and typically go where bulldozers can’t—which is to say, on steep inclines and dense terrain.

Members each have roles named after the tools they use, from the “saw,” who cuts down vegetation with a chainsaw, to the “Pulaskis,” who break down the wood with Pulaski pickaxes. At the camp, the teams are supervised by prison guards, but at fires, they’re overseen by Cal Fire captains. “It’s more unity here than it would be in the yard because we’ve gotta work together,” says Norbert Wilson, in charge of a Pulaski. “It’s kind of a brother bond.”

Norbert Wilson, second from the left on the top row, is in charge of cutting up vegetation with a pickaxe.

I was surprised by how few black inmates I saw, given that African Americans make up 30 percent of the prison population in California. Bill, a spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, says the agency doesn’t keep track of the racial breakdown of the camps because it changes so often. “I’ve never paid much attention to the ethnic background of the firefighters when I’ve been at a camp,” he wrote in an email. “Their ability and willingness to do the job is the most influential factor in who is there…Remember, they all volunteer.”

From camp, I tagged along with a fire crew as they worked through the afternoon in a spot near the recent fires, doing fire prevention work. They completed tasks like widening roads or cutting away dry vegetation from particularly risky areas.

A hill in Lake county that was scorched by the Rocky Fire earlier this month.

Each fire team has at least one chainsaw to cut down vegetation. While working, crews are overseen by fire captains, not prison guards.

Inmate firefighters cut down a dead tree.

Inmates hand dead vegetation down the fire team line.

Inmates stand in line while sipping Gatorade at the end of the work day.

The work, both on active fires and on a normal prevention day, is exhausting and unrelenting. “For my first fire, it took us three and half hours, switchbacks, to the top of the mountain,” says Robert Gabriel, an inmate from East Los Angeles. “Once we got there, it was just torching.” The chief told them they could take a quick nap if they wanted, but Gabriel thought, “I’m not even gonna close my eyes, man!” He adds, “There are times where it’s like, ‘Man, did I really sign up for this?'”

Still, the inmates I spoke with unanimously said they would rather be at fire camp than in a typical prison. “Not having the locked door, and being able to go out and play pool, shoot hoops—it’s just a closer step to freedom,” says Gabriel.

Inmates Robert Gabriel and Samuel Serna take a break from their work.

Some inmates work full time in a handful of coveted, camp-only positions—cooking, cleaning, and otherwise keeping up the camp. Keith Collier, an inmate from Hayward, California, works in the camp’s wastewater treatment plant, doing a similar job to what he did before he was sent to prison for five years for a DUI. “I was able to continue my career here,” he tells me. “That’s the whole reason I came to this camp.”

Keith Collier works in the camp’s wastewater treatment plant. He’ll return to his family in Hayward, California, next week.

Rudy Quintanilla is the head gardener at the camp, growing a variety of produce used in the kitchen, from tomatoes and peppers to melons and pumpkins. “I’ve been in the camp so long that I know what type of tomato calls for what type of recipe,” he says, showing me the camp’s many varieties of tomatoes.

A landscaper before he went to prison, also for a DUI, Quintanilla says he plans to keep up landscaping when he leaves.

Rudy Quintanilla is in charge of the garden, which cuts the camp’s food costs.

Inmates sit down for hot meals at breakfast and dinner, and the food comes in massive servings to keep them energized. Food is notoriously better at camp than in normal prisons.

California inmates serve dinner to the fire team from Nevada.

When a camp expands during a fire, inmates eat outside.

Benjamin, a cook at the camp, preps for tonight’s meal: fried chicken and corn.

When I met Benjamin, the head cook, he was preparing for the night’s dinner: fried chicken, corn on the cob, potato gratin, and ranch-style beans. Benjamin is in prison for burglary; before his incarceration, he was a chef at a Las Vegas casino.

Mid-conversation, he turned to the guard giving me a tour and smiled. “I got good news,” he said. “I’m going home, man! In a month.”

“Good for you,” said Commander Auzenne, who’d been giving me a tour. “Bad for us, good for him.”

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I Hung Out With the Prisoners Who Fight California’s Wildfires

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California Just Restored Voting Rights to 60,000 Ex-Felons

by EddyAtfxhxwqthx Posted on August 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Yesterday, about 60,000 former felony offenders in California were officially granted the right to vote. Earlier this week, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla announced that the state would settle litigation over laws that had barred low-level felony offenders under community supervision from voting.

In 2011, California lawmakers passed bills to reduce overcrowding in state prisons by diverting low-level felony offenders to county jails and community supervision, in which recently released prisoners are monitored by county agencies. Then-Secretary of State Debra Bowen told election officials in December 2011 to extend the state’s ban on felon enfranchisement to those offenders, noting that being under community supervision was “functionally equivalent” to parole. Civil rights groups filed a lawsuit last year to challenge Bowen’s directive.

Last May, an Alameda County Superior Court judge ruled in favor of the offenders, noting that community supervision was different from parole and that the intention of the 2011 law “was to reintroduce felons into the community, which is consistent with restoring their right to vote.” The state appealed the ruling. Padilla’s announcement means the state will drop its appeal and issue new directives to election officials. “If we are serious about slowing the revolving door at our jails and prisons, and serious about reducing recidivism, we need to engage—not shun—former offenders,” Padilla said in prepared remarks.

Lori Shellenberger, voting rights director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s California chapter, says California’s about-face puts it at the front of the movement to restore voting rights to former convicts. “The intent of that law was to improve reentry and improve the prospects for people,” Shellenberger says. “If you’re living and working in your community, and you’re paying taxes, but you’re not given a political voice, it undermines the purpose of that sentencing.”

The state’s decision marks a significant victory for ex-felons at a time when voting rights are under scrutiny across the nation. The Sentencing Project estimates that nearly six million Americans cannot vote as a result of previous criminal convictions. And voter ineligibility disproportionately affects people of color, especially blacks; 1 in 13 African-Americans can’t cast a ballot.

Efforts are picking up to restore the vote to some felons who have done their time. In Florida, which has some of the nation’s strictest voting laws, momentum is gaining behind a ballot initiative that would grant the vote to more than 1.6 million people with past felony convictions. In March, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) introduced a bill that would give former convicts released from all prisons the right to vote in federal elections.

Still, the path to reenfranchisement remains rough for ex-felons. In May, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan vetoed a bill that would have restored voting rights to 40,000 residents with past convictions. Last year, the ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging a 2011 decision by Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad to reverse a 2005 executive order that restored voting rights for all former felons. The case centers on Kelli Jo Griffin, who was charged with perjury in 2013 after registering to vote in a city election. Earlier that year, Griffin completed a five-year probation for a minor drug offense. She was later acquitted of perjury. Currently, to regain the right to vote in Iowa, ex-felons now must undergo a comprehensive process that includes an application, a criminal background check, and providing proof of paid fines. Of the 14,350 former offenders who have applied for restoration of voter rights since Branstad’s order, just 40 have regained eligibility.

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California Just Restored Voting Rights to 60,000 Ex-Felons

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Here’s What Sandra Bland’s Death Says About Our Broken Bail System

by ShaniTasman Posted on July 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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If Sandra Bland indeed committed suicide after spending three days in a Texas jail, as the Harris county medical examiner determined last week, her death fits a pattern: Half of all suicides behind bars occur within the first 14 days of custody. Twenty-three percent happen within the first 24 hours following an arrest. And like two-thirds of the 750,000 people in US jails, Bland had not yet been convicted of any crime.

Bland had two options to get out of jail. The court set a $5,000 bond. If she had the money, which she didn’t, she could have posted it and gotten it back when she appeared for trial. Alternately, she could have paid a bail bondsman a 10 percent fee to post bond for her—$500 that she or her family would not get back. Her family’s attorney has said that they were working on trying to secure the fee to have her released.

This system, in which people either stay locked up or pay money to a private company to get out, is almost entirely unique to the United States. The Philippines is the only other country with something similar. In Canada, acting as a bail bondsman can earn you two years in prison on a charge equivalent to bribing a juror. “We don’t have a system currently that does a decent job of separating who is dangerous and who isn’t,” Tim Murray, director of the Pretrial Justice Institute, told me when I wrote about the commercial bail industry. “We only have a system that separates those who have cash and those who don’t.”

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Here’s What Sandra Bland’s Death Says About Our Broken Bail System

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