OMNI,
JUSTICE SYSTEM, JUVENILE
JUSTICE, DEBTORS’ PRISON, SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, MENTALLY ILL IN PRISON, MASS
INCARCERATION, AND MORE USA NEWSLETTER #4, March 9, 2015.
COMPILED BY DICK BENNETT
FOR A CULTURE OF PEACE and JUSTICE.
What’s at
stake: The struggle for fairness within
the struggle for democracy.
Blog:
War Department/Peace Department
War Department/Peace Department
Newsletters
See
Justice Newsletter
Index:
For a knowledge-based peace, justice, and ecology
movement and an informed citizenry as the foundation for change.
Contents Prisons and
Jails Newsletter #4, March 9, 2015
George Will’s
Questions to Nominee Loretta Lynch
One Felon’s
Story by Hannah
Criminal (In)Justice
Money
Timothy Noah
Reviews Taibbi’s The Divide, Money
Distorts Criminal Justice System
Hedges,
Disproportionate Sentences
California
Reduces Some Felonies to Misemeanors
Solitary Confinement
Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement
Keith LaMar, 21
Years in Solitary
Debtors’ Prison
Greenwald’s
Film, To Prison for Poverty
Debtors’
Prison: Nobody’s Reading Dickens?
Mentally Ill in Prison
Christie
Swanson, Effort to Keep Mentally Ill Out of Jails in Arkansas (see Comstock
below)
Mass Imprisonment
Simon, Mass Incarceration on Trial
Truthout
Against Mass Imprisonment
Juvenile Justice
Peace Alliance,
Carol Chodroff, for Youth Promise Act, Youth Prison Reduction
Neil Bernstein,
Burning Down the House, End Juvenile
Incarceration (her previous book:
Children of the Incarcerated)
Children of the Incarcerated)
Privatized Prisons
The Nation, Prison Profiteers
Chris Hedges, Prison
Food: Aramark
Arkansas Prisons and Jails: Overcrowding
Jon Comstock’s
Suggestions for Reform in Arkansas, Prison Overcrowding
Newsletters 1-3
George
Will: Questions for attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch
President Barack Obama listens at right as US Attorney Loretta Lynch speaks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, Saturday, Nov. 8, 2014. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)
Senate
confirmation hearings put nominees on notice that, as a Michigan state
legislator reportedly once said,
“I’m watching everything you do with a fine-toothed comb.” Loretta Lynch,
a talented lawyer and seasoned U.S. attorney, should be confirmed as attorney
general. Her hearing, however, should not be perfunctory. Questions like the
following would highlight some festering problems: [I have reproduced only the items on prisons. Full column: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-questions-for-attorney-general-nominee-loretta-lynch/2015/01/09/a3c1e11c-9774-11e4-aabd-d0b93ff613d5_story.html?hpid=z2 –Dick]
George F. Will writes a
twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs. He began his
column with The Post in 1974, and he
received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1977. He is also a contributor to
FOX News’ daytime and primetime programming. View Archive
● Much
ink and indignation have been properly expended concerning the torture of some
detainees by counterterrorism personnel. But what about the promiscuous use —
currently impacting thousands of prisoners — of long-term solitary
confinement in prisons? In 1890, the Supreme Court said of such
punishment: “A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even
a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to
impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still
committed suicide.” Given its deranging effects, does this practice constitute
torture as defined by federal law —
conduct “specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or
suffering”?
● Years
pass, studies are written and vows are made, yet the scandal of prison rape
persists. When will the government stop this crime against inmates in its
custody?
● The
U.S. incarceration rate is
nearly five times Wales and England’s, nine times Germany’s, 14 times Japan’s.
In 2010, more than 200,000 inmates — approximately the nation’s total number of
prisoners in 1970 — were over the age of 50. How can this be necessary?
● When
choosing between two evils, Mae West said, “I always pick the one I never tried
before.” The number of drug offenders in federal prisons is 20 times the number in 1980 and
accounts for more than half of our federal mass incarceration. The “war on drugs”
is horrendously expensive (in money and shattered lives) and hardly effective
(drug prices fall as quality rises). Is it time to consider decriminalizing
some controlled substances?
● In
California, which spends almost as much on corrections and rehabilitation as on
universities, approximately 2,000 people who have committed no violent or
otherwise serious crime are serving 25 years to life under the state’s “three
strikes and you’re out” law. It mandates such sentences for any third felony.
Do you think that mandatory — and often draconian — minimum sentences prevent
judges from judging? And that the threat of such sentences, by extorting guilty
pleas, can vitiate the right to a trial?
ONE FELON’S STORY by Hannah McGhee
Nov. 22, 2014
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Hello everyone!
. . .
The link to my
story is provided at the bottom of this message. If you have any
questions or comments about my article you may contact me at my email
address, hmcghee@uark.edu,
or my phone number, (901) 461-1928, or you may contact my professor, who is
copied on this email, at bjschult@uark.edu.
Thank you again
and I wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving!
Sincerely,
Hannah McGhee
CRIMINAL
(IN)JUSTICE
[See preceding newsletters—Stuntz, et al.]
[See preceding newsletters—Stuntz, et al.]
MONEY
The Justice
Gap
The Divide, by Matt Taibbi
Reviewed
By TIMOTHY NOAH APRIL
10, 2014
·
Email
“Low-class people do low-class things.” What’s notable in this
reflexive dismissal of those with modest means are not the words themselves.
Rather, please turn your attention to the person whom Matt Taibbi, in his
ambitious new book
documenting America’s unequal administration of justice to rich and poor, quotes saying them: a
private attorney hired by New York State to defend low-income people in
criminal court. We never learn his name, but Taibbi calls him Waldorf because
he resembles the grouchy old balcony heckler on “The Muppet Show.”
Waldorf’s casual contempt for his defendants (and tacit approval
of the sloppy policing dragnet that puts them at his mercy) is voiced at the
conclusion of a grimly comic vignette worthy of Joseph Heller — one of many
deeply reported, highly compelling mini-narratives of dysfunction within the
criminal justice system that make “The
Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap” as infuriating as it
is impossible to put down.
A 35-year-old black man named Andrew Brown is arrested for
“obstructing pedestrian traffic” in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Brown, having been
similarly harassed by the cops countless times before, refuses to provide ID
and accept a summons, and is consequently brought into court. Once there, Brown
explains to Waldorf that he was talking to a friend outside his own apartment
building after getting off work, and that, given the lateness of the hour
(shortly before 1 a.m.), there wouldn’t have been any pedestrian traffic on
Myrtle Avenue to obstruct.
None of this seems to register with Waldorf. “What are you
arguing?” he asks. He wonders aloud whether Brown was “being a wise guy” with
the cops, and expresses surprise that a person such as Brown would have a job.
He advises his client to pay the $25 fine.
Brown refuses and explains it all over again to the judge. The
judge turns to Waldorf and asks whether Brown will pay the $25 fine. Waldorf
explains, for the second time, that Brown won’t pay, his manner suggesting that
for the life of him he can’t figure out why not.
Only then does the judge bestir himself to ask the arresting
officer whether he saw any other people on the sidewalk that night. No? “O.K.,
then,” the judge sighs. “Not guilty.” Out in the hallway, Taibbi asks Waldorf
why white people never get arrested for obstructing pedestrian traffic.
Oblivious to the lesson that has just played out, and puzzled as to why Taibbi
would want to include any of this in a book, Waldorf replies, “Low-class people
do low-class things.”
Taibbi wrote “The Divide”
to demonstrate that unequal wealth is producing grotesquely unequal outcomes in
criminal justice. You might say that’s an old story, but Taibbi believes that,
just as income disparities are growing ever wider, so, too, are disparities in
who attracts the attention of cops and prosecutors and who doesn’t. Violent
crime has fallen by 44 percent in America over the past two decades, but during
that same period the prison population
has more than doubled, skewing heavily black and poor. In essence, poverty itself is being criminalized.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the income distribution, an epidemic of
white-collar crime has overtaken the financial sector, indicated, for instance,
by a proliferation of record-breaking civil settlements. But partly because of
an embarrassing succession of botched Justice Department prosecutions, and
partly because of a growing worry (first enunciated by Attorney General Eric
Holder when he was Bill Clinton’s deputy attorney general) that any aggressive
prosecution of big banks could destabilize the economy, Wall Street has come,
under President Obama, to enjoy near-total immunity from criminal prosecution.
It had more to fear, ironically, when George W. Bush was president.
The argument isn’t laid out in a particularly rigorous or
nuanced manner, but it seems plausible enough. Taibbi, a longtime Rolling Stone
writer who is currently developing a publication about political and financial
corruption for First Look Media, has in the past written in a blustery style
that put me off, but here the gonzo affectation is kept largely in check. What
I failed to notice previously — or perhaps what Taibbi shows off to especially
good effect here — is what a meticulous
reporter he can be, with a facility for rendering complex financial
skulduggery intelligible. Especially noteworthy are Taibbi’s detailed accounts
of self-dealing amid the dismantlement of Lehman Brothers — which involved,
among other things, hoodwinking Lehman’s bankruptcy judge — and of a vicious
harassment campaign waged by hedge fund managers against the employees of a
Canadian insurance company whose stock they’d shorted. In both instances, one
is struck that, however tricky the standard of proof may be for the
white-collar criminal class, the evidence available nowadays in the form of
compromising email communications would make Eliot Ness weep with gratitude.
And yet the gangsters got away.
Taibbi is similarly
skillful at explaining how bureaucratic imperatives in the criminal justice
system can spin scarily out of control. In New York City, you start with a
“broken windows” theory that says cracking down on petty crime can prevent
little criminals from becoming big criminals. Possibly because that’s right,
violent crime goes down. But paradoxically, that makes a cop’s life more
difficult rather than less, because criminals are getting harder to find even
as new computer systems are enabling the police commissioner to keep track of
which precincts are making the most arrests. The solution turns out to be
aggressive use of a stop-and-frisk policy that gives cops a blank check to
“search virtually anyone at any time.” The police start behaving “like
commercial fishermen, throwing nets over whole city blocks.” Some of the fish
get prosecuted or ticketed for ever-pettier offenses; 20,000 summonses, for
instance, are handed out annually for riding a bicycle on the sidewalk. But
most fish aren’t guilty of anything and must grow accustomed to being routinely
cuffed and ridden around in a police van before they are tossed back into the
water. These fish are, of course, typically black and poor. Anecdotal evidence
suggests that throwing a similar fishnet over entire Wall Street firms would
produce a criminal yield at least as high as any random ghetto block. But
innocent Wall Street fish would have a much bigger megaphone with which to
proclaim their constitutional rights, and guilty Wall Street fish would have
much better lawyers.
One theme implicit in Taibbi’s reporting is the extent to which
the justice system’s newer kinds of inequalities are driven by technology. Computers
encourage both the government and the banks to operate on a scale at which
consideration of individual circumstance isn’t really possible. The result is
unstoppable error by government (say, the frequent miscalculations that leave
welfare recipients at constant risk of being wrongly accused of fraud) and
unstoppable fraud by banks (say, robo-signing endlessly repackaged and resold
mortgages and credit card debt). For both government and banks, such scaling up
inevitably creates injustices for certain individuals, but so long as the
victims are powerless there won’t be much of a legal or political reckoning.
The person tossed into jail for welfare fraud he didn’t commit or tossed out of
his house because he was mistakenly judged not to be paying his mortgage may or
may not get it all sorted out in the end, but even if he does the feedback loop
won’t impose too much pain.
We may be approaching a day when any kind of personal attention
from a large institution that wields substantial control over your life becomes
a luxury available only to the few, like a bespoke suit or designer gown.
THE DIVIDE
American
Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap
By Matt Taibbi
Illustrated by Molly Crabapple
416 pp. Spiegel & Grau. $27.
Timothy Noah is a contributing writer for MSNBC.com and the author of “The Great
Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It.”
A version of this review appears in print on April 13, 2014, on
page BR13 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Justice
Gap. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
DISPROPORTIONATE SENTENCES
Hedges writes: "The 28 men in my class have cumulatively
spent 515 years in prison. Some of their sentences are utterly disproportionate
to the crimes of which they are accused."
READ MORE
READ MORE
Prop. 47 passes,
reducing some crime penalties
Cells within the Men's Central
jail in Los Angeles. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
California voters lift felony penalties for drug possession
#Prop47
Petty theft, drug possession in California no longer a felony
#Prop47
Proposition
47, to reduce sentences for some crimes, passes, AP reports.
Penalties for common drug and theft crimes in California will be reduced from potential felonies to misdemeanors, shortening the time some offenders spend behind bars.
Crimes covered by the measure include drug possession and the following offenses when less than $950 is involved: shoplifting, check and credit fraud, forgery, theft and possession of stolen goods.
As with other misdemeanors, the new maximum sentence will be one year in jail, down from a maximum of three years. Those with histories of violence or sex offenses will be ineligible for the lighter sentences.
Most offenders affected by this measure already serve their sentences in county jails, and many are released early.
Penalties for common drug and theft crimes in California will be reduced from potential felonies to misdemeanors, shortening the time some offenders spend behind bars.
Crimes covered by the measure include drug possession and the following offenses when less than $950 is involved: shoplifting, check and credit fraud, forgery, theft and possession of stolen goods.
As with other misdemeanors, the new maximum sentence will be one year in jail, down from a maximum of three years. Those with histories of violence or sex offenses will be ineligible for the lighter sentences.
Most offenders affected by this measure already serve their sentences in county jails, and many are released early.
However,
anyone already serving prison time for a felony conviction on a reclassified
crime may be able to petition for a new sentence -- even those incarcerated
under the state's “three strikes” law.
Any reductions in state prison spending that result from Proposition 47 will go to a fund for crime victims, the state jails commission and the California Department of Education.
Any reductions in state prison spending that result from Proposition 47 will go to a fund for crime victims, the state jails commission and the California Department of Education.
SOLITARY CONFINEMENT
[See Newsletter #3 for three articles on SC]
Lisa Guenther, Solitary
Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives. U of Minnesota P, 2013.
Why the living death of
solitary confinement is both a form of political and racial violence and an
attack on the structure of being itself
In this profoundly
important and original book, Lisa Guenther examines the death-in-life
experience of solitary confinement in America
In an unusually vigorous interrogation
of philosophy and the social sciences, Lisa Guenther addresses one of humanity’s greatest inhumanities and
its perversely long, extensive history in America Orlando
SHARE
Keith LaMar has been in solitary confinement for more
than 21 years.
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DEBTORS’
PRISON
ROBERT GREENWALD FILM, TO
PRISON FOR POVERTY
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Dear Dick --
This
season reminds us that there are a lot of things to be thankful for.
For instance, not having to go to jail for minor infractions like parking tickets. But sadly, that's not the reality for everyone. We live in a world where government and corporations continue to make money off of those who are poor, hungry and desperate. To Prison for Poverty exposes two private probation companies who exploit and make million of dollars off of people who can’t afford small fines.
As we
give thanks this holiday season, let's continue to challenge the systems that
profit off of poverty.
Want to take more action? Sign up to host a screening. Together we can continue to exposed poverty profiteers and give everyone more to be thankful for. Thanks for all that you do. Robert Greenwald, President Brave New Films |
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Brave
New Films · 10510 Culver Blvd, Culver City, CA 90232, United States
|
DICKENS AND DEBTORS’PRISON, Google Search, Nov.
25, 2014.
Dickens' readers were not aware of his intimate relationship to
the prison, the story ... Itself a close and confined prison for debtors,
it contained within it a much ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debtors'_prison
Wikipedia
A mid-Victorian depiction of the debtors' prison at
St Briavels Castle. .... The father of the English author Charles Dickens was
sent to one of these prisons (the ...
www.washingtonmonthly.com/.../debtors_prisons_...
Washington Monthly
Apr 7, 2013 - The latest creepy relic from the darkest recesses of the Dickensian past
that appears to be making a comeback these days are debtors' prisons.
www.theatlantic.com/...debtors-prisons...dickens.../283204/The
Atlantic
Jan 21, 2014 - The result is a form of the statewide "debtors' prison"
you've probably read about in Dickens (whose father,
incidentally, spent time in such a ...
Advocates Work To Keep Mentally
Ill Out Of Jail
STAFF
PHOTO DAVID GOTTSCHALK An inmate at the Washington County Jail in one of four
isolation cells in A pod stands and waits for lunch Nov 25 in Fayetteville.
Officials say Arkansas’ criminal justice system isn’t equipped to deal with a
crush of calls dealing with mentally ill people. With no other options,
officers often must arrest the person because there is nowhere else for them to
go.
Sunday, December 7, 2014
Too many mentally ill people who aren't criminals go to Arkansas
jails.
It costs taxpayers because a jail bed and jail medical care are
more expensive than a treatment bed. It frustrates law enforcement who aren't
trained and equipped to handle the mentally ill inmates. And it incarcerates
people for being sick.
At
A Glance
Prison
Forum
Former
Circuit Judge Jon Comstock will host a public form on the state’s criminal
justice system from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday. “Promises: Prison, Parole
and Probation” will be held in the Shewmaker Center at NorthWest Arkansas
Community College in Bentonville. Inmates with mental illness are just one
topic to be discussed by a panel of judicial system experts.
Source:
Staff Report
At
A Glance
Task
Force
The
Judicial Equality for Mental Illness task force is a coalition of stakeholders
including members of law enforcement, mental health professionals, judiciary
and families addressing the problem of person with persistent or episodic
mental illness who end up incarcerated.
The
group meets on the second Wednesday of each month and rotates between
the Washington and Benton county jails. The next meeting is Jan.
13 at the Washington County Jail in Fayetteville.
More
information about the task force can be found atwww.facebook.com/JEMICoalitionNWA.
Source:
Staff Report
At a time
when state legislators are considering a new, $100 million prison, mental
health advocates offer a partial solution to the overcrowding problem: a
statewide network of regional crisis centers with Northwest Arkansas serving as
a pilot program.
These centers
would be staffed 24-7 and be a place law enforcement officials could take
people in mental crisis. Individual could go there for help. Each center would
include up to 16 residential beds for patients, which would be partially paid
for with Medicaid dollars.
Sen. Uvalde Lindsey, D-Fayetteville, is working with Sen. Jon
Woods, R-Springdale, on a proposal to create a $150 drug court fee, which would
double the number of drug courts in Arkansas. Mental health programs such as
the crisis centers could also be partially paid for through the fee, Lindsey
said.
"This is
a lot less expensive way to divert some people from the criminal justice system
than building a new jail," he said. "I think prisons are the best
training grounds for criminals."
Charlie
Green, interim director of the Arkansas Division of Behavioral Health Services,
said the agency is requesting an additional $3.8 million to expand services,
including crisis intervention, which could include the crisis centers. He said
the state spends over a half a billion dollars annually on mental health
services.
"We like
to divert people away from more expensive and less effective care," he
said. "We're going to work hard to educate our new and returning
legislators on the importance of intervening as early as possible."
MASS
INCARCERATION
[See
Newsletter #3: Alexander, The New Jim Crow]
Available: July 2014
224 pages
Also available as an e-book
Share:
Jonathan Simon is the Adrian A.
Kragen Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the
author of Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the
Future of Prisons in America (The New Press...See more
Mass
Incarceration on Trial
An innovative look at the radical
Supreme Court ruling on California prison conditions as a national wake-up call
on mass incarceration, by the award-winning author of Governing Through Crime.
“One of the outstanding
criminologists of his generation.” —Nikolas Rose, London School of Economics
For nearly
forty years, the United States has been gripped by policies that have placed
more than 2.5 million Americans in jails and prisons designed to hold a
fraction of that number of inmates. Our prisons are not only vast and
overcrowded, they are degrading—relying on racist gangs, lockdowns, and
Supermax-style segregation units to maintain a tenuous order. In short, mass incarceration has proven to be a
fiscal and penological disaster.
A landmark 2011 Supreme Court decision, Brown
v. Plata, has opened an unexpected escape route from this trap of
“tough on crime” politics and points toward values that could restore
legitimate order to American prisons and ultimately lead to the dismantling of
“mass incarceration.” Berkeley law professor Jonathan Simon—an internationally
renowned critic of mass incarceration and the war on crime—argues that, much
like the epic school segregation cases of the last century, this new case
represents a major breakthrough in jurisprudence. Along with twenty years of
litigation over medical and mental health care in California prisons, the
2011 Brown decision moves us from a hollowed-out vision of
civil rights to the threshold of human rights.
Exposing the
priority of politics over rational penal policy—and debunking the premise that
these policies are necessary for public safety—this perceptive and
groundbreaking book urges us to seize the opportunity to replace mass
incarceration with a system anchored in the preservation of human dignity.
Praise
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JUVENILE
JUSTICE
SUPPORT THE YOUTH
PROMISE ACT
National Action Call Saturday w/ Carol
Chodroff
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END PRISON
PRIVATIZATION
[See Newsletter
#3, Hartman and other newsletters]
Fight the Prison Profiteers
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Oct 12 (1 day ago)
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ARKANSAS
PRISONS AND JAILS
New Options - Prison Overcrowding
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Feb. 18, 2015
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Just wanted you to be aware of my effort. If you can support
any of these, or have questions, let me know. Thanks.
From: Jon Comstock <jon@joncomstock.com>
Date: Wednesday, February 18, 2015 at 10:37 PM
To: <gasperb@blr.arkansas.gov>
Cc: <jon.woods@senate.ar.gov>
Subject: New Options - Prison Overcrowding
Date: Wednesday, February 18, 2015 at 10:37 PM
To: <gasperb@blr.arkansas.gov>
Cc: <jon.woods@senate.ar.gov>
Subject: New Options - Prison Overcrowding
Brent,
Senator Jon Woods requested that I reach out to you regarding the
potential for new legislation that would help reduce prison population in a way
that is logical, fair and safe for the public.
In the order of priority:
Proposals 1 and 2 would accelerate the “parole eligibility”
of many inmates who have in fact served significant portions of their sentence.
These Proposals do not guarantee early release, but are dependent on the
Parole review process.
Proposal 3 deals with reducing probation case loads.
Proposal 4 deals with allowing fines/costs/parole/probation
fees to be managed as “civil” matters (rather than criminal) and allow
satisfaction through Community Service.
Proposal 5 addresses a needed rollback of some of the parole
revocation policies enacted in last 2 years as a result of serious break-down
in the Parole process for a certain individual.
Proposal 6 deals with fact that many sentences in Arkansas are in
excess of Arkansas’ Sentencing Guidelines.
Proposal 1:
1. Currently, “eligibility” for parole consideration is
driven by the term of the sentence imposed by the Court, which is often driven
by Arkansas’ rule that an inmate must serve “50% of the sentence imposed” or
“70% of the sentence imposed”.
2. Fact: There is a lot a variation in actual sentencing
from county to county, judge to judge, as Arkansas’ Sentencing Guidelines are
discretionary, not mandatory.
2. Modify this to make “eligibility” for parole consideration (not
an automatic release) dependent on Arkansas’ Sentencing Guidelines.
[This would put all persons convicted of same crime on an equal
footing for parole consideration. Prosecutors and others would of course
still be able to object if they had reasons to do so.] [For example, if a
sentence was imposed of 20 years, and the Guidelines call for 15 years, then
“eligibility” would be calculated on 15 years.] Immediately, a large pool
of inmates who have served significant portions of their sentences would be
eligible for parole consideration.
Proposal 2:
1.
Currently the Department of Corrections awards “good time credits”
to inmates for positive conduct on the part of the inmate.
2.
Currently, due to the law that requires that “50% of the
sentence imposed” or “70% of sentence imposed”be served PRIOR to parole
consideration, a large number of inmates have earned “good time” but are not
given full credit as it does not trump the 50% or 70% rules.
3.
Modify this to allow an inmate 100% of all “good time credits”
awarded by Department of Corrections to further shorten the “parole
eligibility” date, from the eligibility date calculated by using the Arkansas
Sentencing Guidelines (as set forth in Proposal 1 above.) .
4.
[For example, if a sentence was imposed of 20 years, and the
Guidelines call for 15 years, then “good time” credits would be subtracted from
the Guideline eligibility date.]
Proposal 3:
Designed to address the need for additional parole officers.
1. Currently, the Department of Community Corrections has a
large number of probationers on “annual reporting” due to their professional
assessment that the probationer is very low risk.
2. These persons still require work on the part of DCC and
are counted in the probationer officer’s case load.
3. Currently, Arkansas law allows the Court to terminate
early a probation term, but this typically happens rarely, and then only when
the State and the Defendant file an Agreed Request with the Court.
3. Modify internal rules within DCC to notify
probationers on “annual reporting” status that they may APPLY to
the Court, with notice to the Prosecutor, for “early termination” of probation.
[This does not require a change in any law.]
Proposal 4:
Designed to address the incarceration of probationers and
reincarceration of parolees for NON-PAYMENT of fines and fees.
1. Currently, both the Department of Corrections and DCC
spend inordinate time and effort in the collection of fines and fees, which
often result in further imprisonment.
2. While non-payment should be addressed effectively, it
should not be the basis for imprisonment.
3. Modify the law to provide that (a) fines, costs and fees
result in the State having a “civil lien” just like any civil judgment; and (b)
failure to pay results in a “civil” (not criminal remedy), including in the
appropriate case, the right of the court to find an individual in civil
contempt; and (c) allow to be satisfied by Community Service.
Proposal 5:
Designed to rollback certain parole revocation policies enacted in
last two years.
1. Currently, it is reported that “parole revocations” have
increased by 400% as a result of a dramatic reaction to a failure in the Parole
process regarding a single person who committed murder while on parole.
2. Conduct thorough review of the rules that were enacted,
that may genuinely be deserving of further review and modification.
Technical Violators Program or something equivalent should be reinstated.
Proposal 6:
Designed to address fact that sentencing in Arkansas often exceeds
the Arkansas Sentencing Guidelines.
1. Currently, most criminal cases are disposed of by plea
bargain, that often result in sentences in excess of the State’s Sentencing
Guidelines.
2. During the in-court sentencing of most individuals,
Guidelines are often not addressed with the Defendant. The Sentencing
Commitment Order is routinely prepared by the Prosecutor’s office and submitted
to the Judge to sign several days after the in-court sentencing.
2. Modify the law to require the Judge, at the time when the plea
is accepted in open court, to require the disclosure to the Defendant the
relationship between the State’s Plea Offer and the Sentencing Guidelines, AND
require the Judge to state into the record all material facts on which he or
she relied to impose a sentence greater than the Guidelines.
Thank you for your consideration. I would be glad to expand
on the rationale for any of the proposed changes if you request.
Jon Comstock
479.659.1767
Contents of Prisons
and Jails Newsletter #1
A Nation Behind
Bars (8)
Contents of Prisons and Jails Newsletter
#2
Private Prisons
Webster,
Wrongful Convictions
Garrett,
Convicting the Innocent
Solitary
Confinement
Contents #3, 2.3 Million in Prison, Many
in Solitary Torture, Many in Prisons for Profit
Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration. . . .
Incarceration
Stats 2011, 330,000 for Drugs 2011
Stuntz, Collapse of American Criminal Justice
Rothberg,
Solitary Confinement, Prison Isolation Units, Torture
Ridgeway,
Solitary Confinement
“Herman’s
House,” PBS/POV Film, Solitary Confinement Torture
Hartman,
Capitalism and Prisons for Profit
END PRISONS
NEWSLETTER #4
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