John McCluskey caught; Report shows private prison was unacceptable

Thank God that last night, three weeks after it began, the private prison break ended. As much as she doesn't want to talk about it, it was Jan Brewer's call to shift some public prisons to private control. Her chief of staff and a top campaign aide both are lobbyists for the private prison industry, and it was her decision in January to allow the transfer of over 100 dangerous maximum security inmates, including murderers, rapists and other violent felons, to a medium security private prison that was built for DUI offenders.

We should salute the professionalism of law enforcement officers from several states and the Federal U.S. Marshal's Service, and a U.S. forest ranger that finally ended the private prison break yesterday after three weeks, two murders, a kidnapping, a shootout, auto theft and millions of dollars worth of man-hours. In contrast, this is how private prisons work:

Shortened hours that led to no patrols of the perimeter fences during shift changes, alarm systems that often did not work or resulted in false alarms, guards who took over an hour to respond when the alarm did go off, a prison door propped open with a rock...

Let's also not forget underpaid and poorly trained guards resulting in high turnover.

State prisons director Charles Ryan almost grudgingly had to admit that it was time to move almost 150 especially dangerous inmates, including all the convicted murderers, out of the 'medium-security' facility and back to a maximum security facility run by the state. No word on why it took them three weeks to even recognize it was time to do that.

The most telling paragraph:

Washington [spokesman for the private prison company] offered up this explanation for the blatant security failures: "We have a lot of new and young staff that have not yet integrated into our security practices, so we're going to go back to basics with that staff."

OF COURSE THEY DO!! I used to live near a private prison in New Mexico and they had people getting hired and moving on out of there almost like they do at a truck stop or a carnival. If you pay people just what you need to pay them to keep warm bodies present (which private prison companies do, after all they are mainly interested in maximizing profits) then an inexperienced workforce will be the usual situation, not something that is rare or remarkable. If anything, they probably have a more experienced than usual workforce now, because at least they have the recession to hold people in their jobs a little bit longer.

Once the economy picks up, they will leave even faster. If anyone remains there it will be the misfits and incompetents who can't get a job that pays any better. Anyone who is actually competent enough to be worth more will find a better paying job elsewhere, very likely with a state or federal prison or law enforcement agency.

Here's the absolute kicker: It took them SEVERAL HOURS to find this hole:



Private prisons are NOT the way to go. In a public prison with professional, career prison guards, there is nothing the inmates know that the guards don't know. Any other model is not as secure.

In defense of Mike Huckabee (a title I never thought I'd write.)

Occasionally I make a post in which I take a very unpopular position because I believe it is right.

Also occasionally I end up having to defend a conservative Republican because they were right about something.

And both of those are the case in this post.

A lot is being made in the media about the murder of four police officers in Washington State by Maurice Clemmons, an ex-con from Arkansas who was sentenced there to 95 years for a series of violent offenses but who subsequently had his sentence commuted by then-Governor Mike Huckabee (who ran for President in 2008 and may run again in 2012.) It's not the first time that Huckabee has been criticized for a pardon or sentence commutation; during last year's campaign he was criticized for letting a man go who later killed a woman in Missouri.

Certainly the families of the victims have a point that had Huckabee not commuted Clemmons' sentence to time served then the tragic events of this week would never have happened and four parents (and all four of the murdered officers were parents) would have tucked their children into bed last night instead of a grieving spouse having to explain to those children why daddy (or mommy, as one of the murdered officers was a woman) won't be there to tuck them in ever again.

And you can be sure that people working for Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty and any other potential 2012 Republican nominee is filing every story about this for use later (and yes, I'm sure that David Axelrod has been putting together a file on this story too, in case Huckabee gets far enough to be running against Obama in 2012.)

However, Huckabee is correct when he points out that the board which makes recommendations made this recommendation and he acted on it. Further the whole affair highlights a broader issue.

Governors have the right to make pardons and commute sentences. But (Huckabee apparently being an exception) most make very few or none. The reason why is obvious: Even if 999 out of a thousand pardons or commutations go on and live productive, meaningful lives (meaning among other things that we as taxpayers are no longer paying to keep them locked up) it is the one out of a thousand who does something like murder four police officers in cold blood that you will keep hearing about. Nowhere is the old adage "nobody remembers what you've done right but everyone remembers your mistakes" more apropos than in politics. So most Governors simply don't want to take the electoral risk, and often refuse to even go along with the recommendations of a pardons board that in may cases they hand-picked themselves. Many never issue a single pardon or sentence commutation the entire time when they are Governor. True that pardons boards are far from infallible but when the system gets to the point where the final arbiter (a state Governor) because of fear of being attacked in some future election automatically refuses to consider a pardon or commutation request when one comes up, then the system has defeated itself. Why even have a way on the books to get a commutation or pardon if the answer even before reading the application is "NO?"

The truth is, most people who receive a commutation prove the people who gave it to them right (it's not like it's easy to even get a recommendation from the appropriate board in the first place,) and don't go on and re-offend. And at that, there are many who might not even need to be there in the first place: Millions incarcerated. But do they all need to be? I have a friend who is a convicted felon. He's made some mistakes and paid for them but he's not dangerous or evil, and he just wants to live his life (despite all the hurdles that are in the way every time he applies for a job or tries to get anything else done.) That Governor Huckabee had the decency when he was Governor to recognize that there was some hope for those felons who had been cleared by the pardons board (and knowing that he was putting his political career at some risk but taking it anyway) is commendable and should be applauded.

I wrote several years ago about the tough life that people have when they leave prison anyway (the prison that follows prison.) It's almost like we want them to fail. This isn't about revenge or about wanting to save a few dollars on rehab or job placement programs. It's about what we can do to prevent the return to prison by people who could be doing something with their lives besides eating food and sleeping in guarded institutions (very expensive guarded institutions) that the rest of us pay for.

Clearly in the case of Maurice Clemmons, Mike Huckabee turned out to be wrong. But it was no mistake to (in the broader scheme) be willing to take seriously his role as arbiter of these kinds of decisions and make the best decision he could, even knowing that it could hurt his political career someday.

Governor should reconsider her prison transfer plan

The Governor's office has put forward a plan to reduce overcrowding in state prisons and save money by sending some prison inmates to county jails around the state.

I think it's a terrible plan, and I have to take issue with her office on this one, even though most of the time I've been supportive of the Governor's initiatives.

First of all, there is overcrowding in state prisons. However there is also overcrowding in county jails (that is certainly true here in Navajo county, where the jail is often full.) It is certainly true that a lot of prisoners don't need to be locked up and there are alternative forms of sentencing (and I wrote a post questioning whether all the people we incarcerate should be just a couple of months ago) but foisting the problem of which prisoners to keep in prison and which can be released to probation or some other status onto counties is the same kind of 'pass the buck' approach that we've seen at times from Washington and trying to make the problem 'local' does not constitute a solution. Looking at and modernizing sentencing guidelines is actually something that we should be doing both on a state and national level, but that isn't something that this plan does anything to address.

Cost is another issue. The state paying counties to house prison inmates is nothing new, and most county jails now include some state inmates. In general however these inmates are subject to careful monitoring, and the money that the state pays the counties is spent paying the extra costs. But with the significant number of new prisoners that are being recommended for transfer, it is likely that many counties will have to expand their facilities and hire more staff, and so far there is no indication that any money that the state sends them will be sufficient to cover all of this.

The most damning issue, in my opinion though is one of the categories of prisoners who will be tranferred. In some cases, I don't have a problem (for example they want to send repeat DUI offenders-- that's fine.) One category though is prisoners, often violent felons, in the last year of their sentence. The theory is that if they are in the last year (of presumably a much longer sentence) they will be less likely to behave violently, try to escape or do anything else that will tack anything onto their sentence. Unfortunately I don't see that as the case-- I've read plenty of stories about prisoners in the last year of their sentence doing things that earn them more time. Not all prisoners fit the stereotype of the patient older inmate scratching off numbers one by one on the wall of his cell. Many of them are impulsive or don't think things like that through very effectively. More ominously many are members of prison gangs or otherwise are more prone to be violent. Sending them into a county lockup will also give them a whole new pool of potential recruits. Besides all of that, some prisoners want to remain in prison because they can't function on the outside and they know that. So they will often commit crimes against guards or other inmates while in prison in order to buy themselves more time behind bars. These inmates are most likely to be dangerous in the last year of their sentence.

It is true that when prisoners get out of prison they often have no job prospects or any other way making a living except to return to a life of crime (a career path that is always available.) And we do need more job training programs, halfway houses and perhaps even an employment placement office for ex-convicts. But I'm not sure how having them finish their sentence in the county jail is going to help them when it comes time to find a job after they get out.

I am glad that under the leadership and at the recommendation of Mr. J.R. DeSpain, our county commission unanimously sent a letter to the Governor raising several objections to the plan. But ultimately it's not up to anyone in the county, but rather to bureaucrats in Phoenix. I hope that they and Governor Napolitano reconsider this decision and look for real solutions to prison overcrowding instead of handing the problem to the counties.

Millions incarcerated. But do they all need to be?

So it's here.

The day when 1%, 1 out of a hundred of the U.S. adult population is incarcerated.

NEW YORK (AP) -- For the first time in history, more than one in every 100 American adults is in jail or prison, according to a new report.

The report, released Thursday by the Pew Center on the States, said the 50 states spent more than $49 billion on corrections last year, up from less than $11 billion 20 years earlier. The rate of increase for prison costs was six times greater than for higher education spending, the report said.

Using updated state-by-state data, the report said 2,319,258 adults were held in U.S. prisons or jails at the start of 2008 -- one out of every 99.1 adults, and more than any other country in the world....

"For some groups, the incarceration numbers are especially startling," the report said. "While one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for black males in that age group the figure is one in nine."

The nationwide figures, as of January 1, include 1,596,127 people in state and federal prisons and 723,131 in local jails -- a total 2,319,258 out of almost 230 million American adults.

There are of course some people for whom there is no other option than to keep them in prison-- incorrigible, violent criminals. But what we've done in seeking to always get tougher and tougher on crime is create a system which threatens to collapse under its own weight.

To cite one example, using the statistics cited in the report, it costs $21,000 per inmate to house them, including security, food clothing and medical care. Those costs fall on the rest of the population to pay, and together with years of tax cuts and otherwise tight state budgets it is quickly becoming far too burdensome for many states to pay.

The standard response from many staunch conservatives when you cite prison costs is to 'make them pay.' They want to create more work crews so the inmates can 'pay' for their stay. Of course this is ridiculous. I'm not against putting inmates to work, but when organized into work crews it takes additional security, as well as the costs of transportation, and if anyone really thinks that the value of the work they do picking up litter on the side of the road is valuable enough to offset these higher costs they are really out of touch with reality. Work crews are for the benefit of the inmates who we want to incentivize to stay out of prison in the future, and of society in general (or to satisfy those who want to make sure prison isn't a 'walk in the park'). But financially they only add to the bill. Imagine how much your employer would be in the hole if they had to post a crew of licensed and trained guards to watch you do menial and simple tasks while providing secure transportation to and from your work site every work day, even if they didn't have to pay you.

The second response from staunch conservatives is that limiting appeals and hastening the death penalty would reduce the prison population. This also fails to recognize numerical reality. I remember reading a few years ago that if you took every person on death row at that time in the country and executed them immediately, the prison population would be back where it was in two weeks. I don't know if that statistic is still true, but I'm sure it is not too far different from that. Even if we ignore the flaws in a death penalty system in which over a hundred people who had been on death row have by now been exonerated, the numbers are so small that arguing over them in the context of the prison population is like waiting until a flood goes through your house and then arguing over whether turning the sink off will do anything about the flood. Just as a matter of scale, it won't.

There are three questions we can ask here. The first is how we got into this situation, The second is whether locking this many people up is an effective way to fight crime and worth what it is costing us,and the third is what we can do instead of incarcerating people.

The answer to the first question is that it is a confluence of many factors. The most obvious is that during the 1990's we spent a lot of money to build more prisons. More prisons so that we could lock up more inmates for a longer time, and then we passed legislation like mandatory decades long prison sentences for selling drugs and three strikes laws to help stock the new prisons and make sure that they all became just as full as the old ones. Getting tough on drugs has really made a difference in the prison population, and even today half of all crimes are drug crimes-- and many ordinary addicts (and even most sellers got there by being addicts) spend a lot of time in prison, and ironically don't get any help with breaking their addiction (so as soon as they are out they are able to renew it-- and maybe get back to prison.)

But that is not the only explanation. It is also true that in the 1970's and 1980's, we shut down many of the mental institutions. This came about by an unlikely alliance of liberals and conservatives. The liberals felt that locking someone up in one indefinitely was a moral dilemma-- even more so given the expose of abuses that had occurred in some mental institutions, and painted in the worst possible light by movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The conservatives felt that the mental institutions were expensive and with a typical Social Darwinist attitude felt that the best therapy was to let the mentally ill or deficient survive in the real world and compete against everyone else on equal footing. The result has in fact been a tragic miscalculation by both sides. The prison system is where the highest concentration of mentally ill individuals end up, and as we see their conditions of confinement are much worse than they ever were in the old mental hospitals. Furthermore, rather than learning to survive in the real world, many, perhaps most of them have proven that they are not suited for life on the outside and have gone to a place where they require much more security and supervision than where they were. And to put the cherry on top, the only chance that they might improve is through treatment, but the budget for that is cut by legislatures as they try to figure out ways of paying for more and better prisons.


The answer to the second question is to note that while crime did in fact go down during the 1990's (the period of new prison construction), it is much lower still in industrialized countries that don't lock so many people up. So at best the idea that it prevents crime is limited to the obvious fact that while a person is locked up they aren't on the outside committing a crime. But it doesn't go beyond that, and then we have to ask whether it is legitimate to spend thousands of dollars per year just to make sure someone doesn't steal any more pizza (the now infamous crime that earned a hapless prisoner in California the first 'three strikes and you're out' life sentence.)


The answer to the third sentence is that there are better ways of dealing with some criminals-- especially non-violent offenders, primarily drug offenders. According to the article, Texas and Kansas are leaders in looking for more efficient ways to treat criminals without locking them all up. Often various combinations of fines (which add money to the system rather than subtracting from it), probation and other punishments are more appropriate than prison or jail time. This is a good start. But we also need to combat recidivism by giving prisoners help with reforming their lives after they leave prison. Crime is always available as a career path, so we have to make sure that there are other career paths available to them. I once wrote a post entitled, "The prison which follows prison" in which I pointed out that no matter how much people like to run down rehabilitation programs, we have to keep trying because it is certain that virtually everyone in prison-- other than the very few who will stay there until they die-- will sooner or later be back out among us. We certainly should do everything we can to make sure that rehab programs are as efficient and as successful as possible, but given the cost of failure, not trying is not an option (though ironically, programs designed to provide education and job training to prisoners are invariably among the first to face cuts from misguided state legislators who are focused on that year's budget and willing to shunt aside the costs associated with their decisions-- both the economic and human costs-- to future years, and future legislators.) As I wrote in my post on prisons linked to above,

Now, I'm not going to stupidly sit here and say that if we funded more of these things, you wouldn't still have recidivism. Some people are habitual criminals and you could hand them a million dollars in cash and make them the CEO of a Fortune 500 Company, and the next day they would still be out running a con, knocking over a liquor store or beating someone up or raping or killing someone.

People like that need to be in prison, and there is little anyone can do to change that. But I am saying that regardless of the success rate (or failure rate) of rehabilitation programs, we as a society have an obligation to TRY. Because except for lifers or people on death row, the rest of the prison population will sooner or later be out among the rest of us, either rehabilitated or not.

We also should consider re-establishing (and/or expanding where they still exist) state mental hospitals. That way people who need treatment rather than incarceration will be able to get it (and it goes without saying that a prison atmosphere, with all the attendant sources of added stress and danger is probably not the ideal atmosphere to recover from a mental illness). A great deal more is known about mental illness and the psychology and biochemistry of the brain than was known in the past, so it would be much more difficult for someone to 'fake' their way into a mental institution in order to avoid prison. In any case though, to not invest in mental health care because we are worried about someone who doesn't need it 'gaming' the system is like not building a building because you are worried there might be termites someday. The way to handle it is to prosecute fraud aggressively when it is found, but not deny the benefits of treatment to the hundreds of thousands who need it because you are worried about a few 'McMurphees' (to also refer to the afformentioned movie.)

We also have to do a much better job of integrating prisoners back into society after they leave prison. There are far fewer halfway houses now than there were, and as I wrote in the previous prison post linked to above,

However, in some cases, we seem to be going beyond the pale in meting out punishment AFTER the punishment that the legal system decreed has been paid. In other cases, we are, simply by the mechanisms we put in place in society, setting them up to fail and return to crime (a career choice which is, after all, always available if no other options are).

For example, we say that convicted felons have the right to seek employment. However, we have for years cut the budgets for prison programs that seek to educate inmates about a trade (I have first hand knowledge of several educational institutions that suspended or ended their prison programs because of state or Federal budget cuts). We have also cut funding for job placement programs and halfway houses for prisoners. So, not surprisingly, when people who get out of a long term in prison with nothing to show on their resume other than a long stint in prison, have trouble getting a job, they often find that the easiest, and perhaps the only, way to earn a living wage, is through returning to a life of crime.

Another problem is that many people frankly expect and even want felons to fail. That is part of their dogma. As I blogged (ironically defending a campaign worker for conservative Republican Fred Thompson),

First and foremost, it's a matter of time. I wrote a post once, called "the prison that follows prison" that dealt with how hard it is for a convicted felon in America to become a productive member of society, or for that matter to be anything other than a convicted felon in the eyes of most people. For that matter, unless he's had his rights restored, Philip Martin would not be allowed to vote in most states. But look, his last conviction was TWENTY-FOUR years ago! TWENTY-FOUR bloody years ago! Do we EVER forgive anybody, or let them move ahead with their lives? The man has kept out of trouble for nearly a quarter of a century, and some people want to haul up what he did in 1979 or 1983. Guess what? Besides it being a long time ago, he was also a lot younger then. Sometimes younger people do foolish things, and then they learn from them. All the evidence is that Philip Martin did learn from his mistakes.

The attitude that prevailed towards Philip Martin prevails in the eyes of many if someone has ever been convicted, of anything (for the record he had two drug convictions that are decades old.)

It is understandable that many people would prefer to hire someone who is not a convicted felon. However, it seems as though our entire societal structure, between our indifference to the difficulties faced by those who genuinely want to make a living within the law and without committing any crimes, and our active hostility to those who may have once upon a time (even decades in the past) made a mistake, almost seem to be telling felons that they are always felons, and cannot ever fully repent.

A system which neither forgives nor forgets, and continues to punish people forever no matter how hard they try to change.

It's a good thing that God doesn't use the same standard of justice.

Godspeed that we rescue the prisoners

Today U.S. forces were searching for three people, either three U.S. troops or two U.S. troops and an Iraqi interpreter, who were captured in an attack on a patrol consisting of seven Americans and the interpreter. The rest of the patrol was killed in the ambush.

I think that all Americans are hopeful at this point that the search will be successful and the missing personnel will be recovered.

If that does not happen, past episodes of this sort of thing do not point to a promising outcome.

Early in the war, six Americans including Jessica Lynch were taken prisoner. Lynch was seperated from the others and according to author Rick Bragg, who studied the pattern of her injuries, was sexually assaulted while under sedation in the hospital. Lynch was subsequently rescued by American soldiers. The other five (four men and a woman) were beaten bloody and forced to make anti-American statements on Iraqi television. Later they were joined by two more POW's, whose Apache helicopter was shot down over central Iraq.

And those eight, as horribly as they were treated, were still treated in a way that looks good compared to subsequent American prisoners in Iraq-- likely because as prisoners of Saddam Hussein's army their captors had at least some semblance of the rule of law in how they treated prisoners.

In April 2004, the first capture by insurgents occured. They captured Sgt. Keith Maupin, of Batavia, Ohio and another soldier (the other soldier was apparently shot to death shortly after capture-- either he resisted or the insurgents decided they'd have an easier time escaping with one prisoner than with two.) Maupin's execution was purported to be shown on Al Jazeera, but the U.S. army has called into question the authenticity of the video and still lists Maupin as missing.

On October 23, 2006 US Army soldier Ahmed Qusai al-Taayie was kidnapped by insurgents. It is no secret that muslim extremists hold a special level of hatred for muslims who fit into western society, and it seems certain that as a member of the U.S. army, Taayie was specifically targetted. His fate is unknown, but it is likely quite gruesome.

On June 16, 2006 in Yusufiyah, Iraq, three U.S. soldiers were ambushed. One of the three, David Babineau was killed in the ambush (though apparently shot at close range, possibly after he was unable to defend himself.) Babineau was the lucky one, however, as the bodies of PFC Kristian Menchaca and PFC Thomas Tucker were found three days later; According to the Iraqi defense Ministry they had been 'killed in a barbaric way,' and 'slaughtered' by being tortured to death. Their bodies had been so mutilated by the torture that DNA analysis was needed to confirm their identities.

And that is just the U.S. soldiers who have been captured in Iraq, not the scores of contractors, civilian workers or Iraqis working with the U.S. who have met similar fates.

Again, let's all pray that the latest prisoner hunt by the army is successful and that they are rescued before anything like this happens.

Let's also remember three other things:

1. The muslim extremists in Iraq have no compunction about doing anything to anybody. In other words, Saddam Hussein may be gone, but there is nothing he did that isn't still being done in Iraq.

2. Conservatives will argue that this justifies our use of torture against prisoners. That is false. First, those prisoners by and large have not been convicted of anything and some of them may well be innocent. And second, even if they are guilty, it is hard to see the logic in arguing that because we are fighting a viscious enemy we must do the same as they do. Certainly the highest levels of the U.S. government knew very well what was happening in German occupied Europe in WWII, but they never suggested that we put captured Nazi soldiers in gas chambers.

3. We've been fighting in Iraq for years, and things are not getting better. The sooner we leave, the sooner we won't have to read stories like this.