Recently in Prisons Category

Technically, the California Legislature has not actually legalized theft.  It has, however, reduced the consequences to the point that, for some people, it might as well be legal.

Ben Boychuk has this article in the City Journal on the brazen theft of his expensive new laptop from beneath his fingers at a Starbucks in Fontana.

It isn't easy looking at a photo lineup. But one mug shot was unmistakable. I paused for a long moment, and I must have had a strange look because the officer asked if I recognized someone. "Yes," I said. "That's the driver." Of all the forlorn faces staring up at me, his was the only one smiling.

"He was probably smiling because he knew he got one over on you with your computer," the officer said.

"I guess so. But why would he be smiling now, when he's under arrest?"

Florida prisons must provide inmate Bruce Rich with kosher meals under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), the Eleventh Circuit has held.  Jacob Gershman has this post at WSJ Law Blog. "Mr. Rich ... is a lifelong Orthodox Jew who observes the Sabbath and 'believes that keeping kosher is fundamental to the Jewish faith and is necessary to conform to God's will as expressed in the Torah,' his attorneys stated in an appellate brief."

Lifelong?  He has not always been so scrupulous about obeying God's will, such as "Honor your father and mother..." and "You shall not murder."  Exodus 20:12-13.  At least he didn't ask for sympathy because he is an orphan, the classic example of chutzpah.

I'm kind of surprised that Florida officials resisted as long as they did.  This is precisely why Congress included prisoners in RLUIPA, for better or worse.

What punishment should society impose on a prisoner, already in for life, who murders a correctional officer?

1) Death.
2) No punishment at all (i.e., a meaningless additional prison sentence).

A jury in Everett, Washington made the correct choice today.  Steve Miletich has this story for the Seattle Times.

Howard Mintz reports for the San Jose Mercury-News:

Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday followed through with his vow to turn to the U.S. Supreme Court in a bid to end years of judicial control over California's overcrowded prison system.

In a three-page filing, the governor and his top prison officials notified a three-judge panel the state is appealing an April order requiring California to shed at least 10,000 more inmates by the end of December. The attorney general's office now has 60 days to file its full legal arguments with the Supreme Court.

The special three-judge panel has threatened the governor with contempt if his administration does not comply with a 2009 order requiring California to reduce its inmate population to about 110,000 inmates to satisfy concerns that prisons are so overcrowded they fail to provide adequate medical and mental health care.

Brown, however, said in Monday's filing that the court "did not fully or fairly consider the evidence showing that the state's prison health care now exceeds constitutional standards."

Unlike most cases, where parties must ask the Supreme Court to take the case (a petition for writ of certiorari), Congress has placed prisoner release orders into that select group of cases where a party can appeal to the Supreme Court as a matter of right.  If the jurisdictional prerequisites are met, the high court has to take it.

In late April, a few members of our Foundation's Board and I toured San Quentin, the oldest prison in California and home to the state's death row.  While I have been through some other state prisons, San Quentin was different.  It was opened in 1852 as the state's first prison.  It was located on a 432 acre point facing the San Francisco Bay because, at the time, the city was overrun with crime.   Although it's obvious that the prison has been expanded over the years,  walking through the main gate into the actual prison compound is like stepping back in time.  The gate itself is original and large enough to accommodate a stagecoach.  Inside the compound is a grassy quad flanked by the gate wall, a cell block, a hospital and a building housing several small churches.  In addition to death row, which is isolated from the rest of the prison, roughly 4,500 inmates are housed inside the main prison.

Q:  What's worse than a bunch of defense-friendly Stanford Law students presenting Gov. Moonbeam with their "study" about the wonderfulness of Realignment?

One repeated concern the student researchers heard from numerous practitioners across the state is the challenge counties face in effectively supervising a new type of offender. As explained by second-year student Mariam Hinds, "Counties are dealing with a more criminally sophisticated and hardened caseload due to the fact that some realigned offenses are more serious than pre-Realignment offenses that would have been sentenced locally and some inmates being released back to the counties from prison on post-release community supervision have serious or violent criminal histories."

Denise Lavoie reports for AP:

A ruling ordering Massachusetts officials to provide sex-change surgery for a transgender inmate takes prisoners' constitutional rights to adequate medical care to "new heights," a government lawyer argued Tuesday to a federal appeals court.

Remember when Gov. Moonbeam told us about "realignment?"  Remember that we were all going to be safe?  That crime wasn't going to spike just because we were putting criminals back on the street?  Remember that?  Remember when "community supervision," strongly fortified with ankle bracelets, was going to do the job, keep tabs on everybody?  Don't need all this prison stuff  --  remember that?

The US Supreme Court decided one law-enforcement related civil case today.  In Millbrook v. United States, No. 11-10362, the high court held that a suit by a federal prisoner against the government for an alleged sexual assault by correctional officers can go forward under the Federal Tort Claims Act.  It comes within an exception to an exception to the FTCA's exception to sovereign immunity, if you pick your way through the statutes.

Justice Thomas wrote the opinion for a unanimous court.  The case was argued a little over a month ago, making this one of the more rapid decisions.

In the 1960s, America made a terrible mistake.  We believed too easily in experts who supposedly had the answers for corrections.  They knew how to "fix" criminals who were, after all, sick and not evil.  When the fixes were actually subjected to scientific scrutiny to determine which of them worked, the stunning answer was that none of them did.  In the meantime, lax sentencing contributed to the horrific rise in crime, a rise that was brought back down only after we got tough.

Fast-forward 50 years, and those who do not remember this history are working to condemn the nation to repeat it, over the vehement objection of those who do remember.  One of the programs touted to rehabilitate criminals so we won't need to lock so many up is halfway houses.  Or maybe not.  Sam Dolnick has this story in the NYT:

The federal government and states across the country have spent billions of dollars in recent years on sprawling, privately run halfway houses, which are supposed to save money and rehabilitate inmates more effectively than prisons do.

But now, a groundbreaking study by officials in Pennsylvania is casting serious doubt on the halfway-house model, concluding that inmates who spent time in these facilities were more likely to return to crime than inmates who were released directly to the street.

The findings startled the administration of Gov. Tom Corbett, which responded last month by drastically overhauling state contracts with the companies that run the 38 private halfway houses in Pennsylvania. The system costs more than $110 million annually.

Pennsylvania's corrections secretary, John E. Wetzel, who oversaw the study, called the system "an abject failure."

Thanks to Michael Santella for the link.

Tony Rizzo reports for the Kansas City Star:

Eric Lee Bederson made his initial appearance Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, where he faces six counts of distribution of child pornography.

Bederson, 35, has been in prison since June 2000, according to California Department of Corrections records.

*                                  *                                  *

California inmates are not given Internet access, but some have used smuggled cellphones to access the Web, officials said.

The nightmare scenario for all involved in fighting violent crime is that one of those criminals may come after you personally or your family.  Front-line police officers are at the greatest danger, of course, and killing a police officer in the line of duty is, quite rightly, a capital offense in many states.

But others further removed from the front lines are not immune.  Kirk Mitchell, Jeremy P. Meyer and Jordan Steffen report for the Denver Post:

The executive director of the Colorado Department of Corrections, Tom Clements, was shot and killed as he opened the door to his Monument home Tuesday night.

Clements' distraught wife, Lisa, told a 911 dispatcher that the gunman rang the doorbell and then shot her husband in the chest, according to a dispatcher's recording. She told the dispatcher she was not sure if the gunman was in the house.

Deputies received the 911 call at 8:42 p.m.

Authorities arrived at the home minutes later. They found Clements and his wife inside the home on a set of stairs.

Medical crews started performing CPR on Clements while deputies worked to secure the area and search for a suspect. Clements died at the home.

One of the reasons I was so grateful when Kent invited me to become a contributor on this blog is that CJLF is an organization with which anyone who cares about justice for criminals and safety for ordinary people would be delighted to be affiliated.  Of late, Kent and CJLF's staff have done a super job of publishing story after story of the predictable (and predicted) disastrous results of California's prison "realignment."  "Realignment," readers will recall, is the deliberately opaque word used to denote the legalized jailbreak California's liberal-dominated government gleefully undertook in the aftermath of Plata.

Republican lawmakers proposed a package of bills on Tuesday intended to counter what they see as a growing threat to public safety from sending some inmates to county jails instead of state prisons. The 13 bills seek to counter the effects of prison realignment in 2011 by improving supervision of parolees and increase penalties for sex offenders and those who illegally possess or sell firearms.The measures also would send more convicts back to prison to ease the burden on local jails while protecting counties from lawsuits.

 

The proposals have the backing of Diana Munoz, mother of Brandy Arreola, 21, of Stockton, who was permanently injured last year by her boyfriend, Raoul Leyva, a parole violator who had been released early from jail because of overcrowding.

Leyva, 34, was convicted last month of attempted voluntary manslaughter and injuring a spouse, with enhancements for causing brain injury and paralysis.

"If realignment didn't exist ... my daughter would be living her life normally," Munoz said as her daughter sat in a wheelchair by her side. "The state is responsible for what's happened to her. They should never have let him out." 

Prof. Cecilia Klingele of Wisconsin Law School responded to my critical assessment of her SSRN piece (an assessment I discussed in my earlier entry) with this comment on Sentencing Law and Policy:

A small clarification. The paper does not suggest that community supervision (or any lesser sentence) should replace prison in cases where it is warranted for just punishment or public safety. The paper discusses the proper (and improper) use of community supervision in typical cases involving people whose crimes are minor, whose culpability is low, and/or whose threat to public safety is minimal; and for those who have served their sentences and are transitioning back to their communities. When community supervision is used, of course it should be thoughtful, well-resourced, and carefully executed. My point is that it is often used in ways and for people who would be better punished in differently, be it through jail time, fines, or unconditional discharge. If anything in the paper misleads on that point (or any other), I welcome suggestions for revision and clarification.

Hat tip to Doug Berman at Sentencing Law & Policy for pulling the curtain back on the actual agenda of the "incarceration nation" crowd.  This is the group, generally flourishing in academia, the media and (of course) the defense bar, that has been telling us for years that prison is vastly overused in this country, and that we would be just as safe, not to mention more frugal and more humane, to use community supervision instead.  In order to sell this idea, these folks have assured us that community supervision would consist of stringent and carefully monitored oversight of offenders.

To decrease the overuse of imprisonment, sentencing and correctional practices should therefore limit, rather than expand, the use of community supervision in three important ways.

First, terms of community supervision should be imposed in fewer cases, with alternatives ranging from fines to unconditional discharge to short jail terms imposed instead. Second, conditions of probation and post-release supervision should be imposed sparingly, and only when they directly correspond to a risk of re-offense. Finally, terms of community supervision should be limited in duration, extending only long enough to facilitate a period of structured re-integration after sentencing or following a term of incarceration.