abzug PostPosted: Mon May 01, 2006 8:31 pm

Hi--

Occasionally I'll see an article, or watch a news segment, or hear a radio program which has something to do with prison. Life in prison, sentencing policies, prisoner abuse, rehabilitation, the list goes on. I never know where to post it, and I feel like wherever I do it winds up getting lost to the people who might be interested in such issues. I know for me that Bad Girls has opened my eyes to the problems in our current justice system, and made me very concerned about some of these issues.

SO, I have taken it upon myself to create a thread where people can discuss issues related to prisons, prison systems, legal issues, prisoners rights, anything at all. Perhaps I'll be the only one reading and posting to this thread, but I hope not. Smile

To get things started, I wanted to post a link to this radio program which is a full hour on life in prison. Its an episode of a series called "This America Life" which is one of the most compelling hours of entertainment in ANY medium (including tv, film, music etc) which you could ever want. This particular episode is called "Lockup" and they have an incredibly moving segment on mothers in prison which made me cry (and I'm at work, which isn't a great environment for tears, let me tell you!), and which echoes a lot of the sentiments of the creators of Bad Girls. Here's the link to the page where you can listen to a streaming mp3 of the show:
http://www.thislife.org/pages/descriptions/99/119.html

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Porcupine Girl PostPosted: Tue May 02, 2006 11:05 pm

Here are excerpts from an article in my local newspaper regarding a class action lawsuit on behalf of female prisoners citing "grossly deficient" medical care.

From The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel


A "grossly deficient" medical system at Taycheedah Correctional Institution in Fond du Lac has left hundreds of women vulnerable to a highly contagious staph infection and subjected them to medical mistakes that have led to suicide or painful disabilities, a class-action lawsuit filed in federal court Monday alleges.

Women at Taycheedah receive poor gynecological care, and pregnant women are required to "remain shackled for most of their labor and to be re-shackled immediately after childbirth," the suit contends.

Inmates cited in the lawsuit include:

• Angela Enoch, an 18-year-old woman who killed herself in June 2005. Enoch had been placed in a segregation cell in a special mental health unit in the prison for five days before she died and "had been pleading for psychiatric help." She used the ripped seams from her pillow to strangle herself.

"A corrections officer observed her choking, but corrections staff unaccountably waited until there were five officers on the scene before entering Enoch's cell," the records state. "By that time, her face was blue. . . . They were unable to revive her."

• Tammy Young, 28, developed painful sores on her head that began to bleed and leak pus in November 2003. The sores became progressively worse. In September 2005, Young was told that she had a contagious, antibiotic-resistant staphylococcus bacterial infection known as MRSA. "The incidence of MRSA infection at TCI has soared in the past several years, and scores of women are currently infected," the lawsuit states.

• Kristine Flynn, 48, noticed a small lump in her right thigh in June 2005 and reported it to medical staff, who told her the lump was just fatty tissue. In February 2006, she was sent to the hospital for a biopsy on what was now a golf-ball sized tumor. The tumor was benign, but because of its size, doctors had to cut into nerves and tendons to remove it. "Medical staff have told Flynn that she will probably have problems with her right leg for the rest of her life," the suit states.

Serious problems with health care at Taycheedah have been long-standing and became public after the Journal Sentinel reported on the death of Michelle Greer, 29. Greer died of an asthma attack Feb. 2, 2000, on the floor of the prison's Prescott Hall dining room, still grasping an inhaler. She had told corrections officers multiple times that the inhaler was not helping. Corrections officers had contacted Taycheedah health services twice on her behalf and were told by nurses that it was not an emergency because Greer still could talk.

An eight-month investigation into state prison health care published in October 2000 by the Journal Sentinel documented one case after another in which gravely ill inmates throughout the state prison system were given questionable medical care and sometimes were ignored when they pleaded for help. In 2001, a legislative audit confirmed the problems found in the newspaper's investigation.

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abzug PostPosted: Wed May 03, 2006 1:25 am

That is just beyond appalling! Thanks for posting the article. I have to say, I am just horrified. I mean, we're talking about human beings here, being treated like they're worth nothing.

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Porcupine Girl PostPosted: Wed May 03, 2006 2:18 am

Taycheedah was the prison where our infamous Lawrencia "Bambi" Bembenek was housed for many years. I don't know if you remember the story, but she was a former cop (and briefly playboy bunny) attractive young blonde woman who was convicted of killing her husband's ex-wife. Many thought she was framed by the police dept (was a whistle blower while a cop) and that her husband did it to get out of the alimony. She escaped with a man she met while he was visiting his sister and ran off to Thunder Bay, Ont. Well, she ended up taking a conviction for second degree murder and was released with time served. She was active in prisoners rights when she was released, but then a series of weird things happened to her and she moved to the Northwest.

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abzug PostPosted: Fri May 05, 2006 3:08 am

Anyone want to go to this?
I don't know how many NYC folks are out there, but thought people might be interested in seeing this:

Rehabilitation Through The Arts celebrates its 10th year
RTA is holding its first ever New York City Benefit Performance on Monday, June 5, 2006 at 7:30PM at Playwrights Horizons Theatre, 416 West 42nd Street, NYC. It promises to be a fascinating and moving evening of theatre – a short program of scenes written and performed by former prisoner members of RTA, followed by a reception to meet the performers and other members of the RTA family.
http://www.p-c-i.org/rta_register.php

The Rehabilitation Through The Arts (RTA) program was founded in 1996 at Sing Sing Maximum Security Correctional Facility in Ossining, NY. This privately funded program was created to help fill the gap left after all publicly funded higher education and enrichment programs were withdrawn from the New York State Prison system. Volunteer Katherine Vockins, working in collaboration with the prison administration, other community volunteers/theater professionals and the prisoner population developed RTA to create a safe space to support inmates' growth and transformation through theater arts. It has been shown that the use of dramatic techniques leads to significant improvements in the cognitive behavior of the program's participants inside prison and a reduction in recidivism once paroled (see The Impact of RTA on Social and Institutional Behavior by Dr. Lorraine Moller).

RTA runs year round. Its goal is to use theater arts to offer prisoners a safe and supportive structure in which to build skills and develop leadership, community, and respect for self and for others and a sense of achievement. In the often brutalizing and harsh prison environment these are precious and rare attributes.

Prisoners meet with RTA staff, volunteers and guest artists twice a week in 2-hour increments in workshops and classes that include writing, reading, public speaking, improvisation, acting, directing, stage management, set design and more. In the workshops and classes, prisoners learn to communicate a compelling story fully and clearly through the structure and process of developing a play, or the freedom of journal writing or poetry. Perhaps more importantly, they discover that their own histories, experiences, imaginations and insights are dramatic, valuable and worth telling and hearing. Out of the workshops emerge original plays, monologues and performance pieces that are performed twice each year for the entire prison population and invited community guests.

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richard PostPosted: Sat May 06, 2006 6:14 pm

A post about private prisons in Britain
This post harks to one of the good storylines in Series 5 BG. I have 'cut and pasted' this link from the British Howard League for Penal Reform which is a report of Doncaster prison. Without giving too much away for those who haven't watched the series , these memorable lines from the series resonate in terms of this report- 'shit wages. No wonder your shareholders are happy." It is, of course, par for the course that the firm focusses on only what is in the contract. It looks like Shed got this one right.

http://www.howardleague.org/fileadmin/howa...12_April_01.pdf

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ekny PostPosted: Wed May 10, 2006 6:56 pm

Re: A post about private prisons in Britain
richard wrote:
It looks like Shed got this one right.


It looks like Shed got quite a lot right! cf also:

http://www.libcom.org/organise/prison/arti...vival-guide.php

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abzug PostPosted: Wed May 10, 2006 7:08 pm

Re: A post about private prisons in Britain
ekny wrote:
It looks like Shed got quite a lot right! cf also:

http://www.libcom.org/organise/prison/arti...vival-guide.php

Wow, great link, great article. Reminded me a lot of Nikki....

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ekny PostPosted: Wed May 10, 2006 7:09 pm

abzug wrote:
ekny wrote:
It looks like Shed got quite a lot right! cf also:

http://www.libcom.org/organise/prison/arti...vival-guide.php

Wow, great link, great article. Reminded me a lot of Nikki....


Me too, that's why I got so excited about it! ;) --e

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abzug PostPosted: Sat May 13, 2006 2:04 am

This article even mentions Bad Girls!
Locked in the past

The common sense view is that prisons work. But the evidence suggests they are failed, outdated and costly. Is it time to abolish them?

David Wilson
Wednesday February 15, 2006
The Guardian

"Common sense" justifications of prison suggest that "prison works" by incapacitation. It takes people out of society and thus gives communities a rest from those who have broken the law. It is also a deterrent: it makes those who might be thinking about committing a crime think again, by punishing those who do actually commit crimes. And it rehabilitates: it helps those who have committed crimes to think through the causes of their offending so as to change their behaviour by developing new skills, which they are then able to put to good use on release from custody.

These justifications are now so widespread and accepted among our politicians, media commentators and, indeed, many members of the public, that no one actually bothers to question whether they are actually true or not - whether they are "nonsense" rather than "common sense", and whether the one place that we can forget about "evidence-led practice" in relation to public policy is when prisons are discussed. After all, as a mountain of research testifies - much of it emanating from the Home Office - these justifications are, at best, aspirational and, at worst, simply lies.

It would be easy to unmask these false justifications by patiently pointing out the realities about who gets imprisoned and who does not; the relationship between the crime rate and the rate of imprisonment; what happens to people when they are inside; and especially what happens to them after they are released.

We would point to the fact that two out of every three young offenders are reconvicted within two years of leaving jail; that one out of every two adult men are similarly reconvicted; and that just under one out of every two women suffer the same fate. Would a school that failed to teach two out of every three of its pupils to read and write, or a hospital that killed one out of every two of its patients, continue to receive widespread political and popular support?

However, we also know that prison fails by almost every measure that it sets for itself; that prison is a useless, outdated, bloated Victorian institution that is well past its sell-by date. We know, in short, that prison is a fiasco. How then do we explain the continuing hold of prison on our collective imagination? And, more importantly, how do we create a scepticism about prison and what is claimed for it by its supporters?

Taking my inspiration from a range of contributions by European abolitionists - from Joe Sim to Nils Christie, Herman Bianchi and Louk Hulsman - I have been trying of late to create what has been described as a "politics of bad conscience" about prison, by appealing over the heads of politicians and other commentators directly to the public. Awful stories

In particular, I have tried to engage the public emotionally, when they think about prison and prisoners, by using the scandal of the numbers of people who die while incarcerated in England and Wales - either through taking their own lives, being murdered, or growing old and/or ill and then dying in custody. In short, I have tried to "muck-rake" by telling the awful stories of real people and what happens to them when they are locked up in our name and become part of the 76,000 people who are currently held in prisons in this country.

People like Shahid Aziz, who was murdered by his cellmate Peter McCann at HMP Leeds in March 2004, in circumstances that echo the racist murder of Zahid Mubarek at Feltham young offender institution in 2000; former prisoner Stuart Ware, the 67-year-old co-founder of the Pacer 50plus support network, who has described what is happening to the growing number of older people in our prisons as "not civilised"; and Pauline Campbell, a former college lecturer who now, like a modern-day suffragette, protests outside every women's jail to draw attention to the numbers of women who have taken their own lives in custody.

One such woman was Campbell's own daughter, Sarah, who took her own life in January 2003 in Styal prison. Campbell told me she demonstrates to show that "prisons are unsafe places that constantly fail to uphold the duty of care that the Prison Service has to all prisoners. People must speak out. It's medieval."

Yet how successful will this muck-raking be? The chances of making much of an inroad into the debate about prisons and prisoners look bleak, but this does not mean that those of us who favour prison contraction and eventual abolition should simply give up. Rather, it means trying to engage with the public in ever more creative ways - including, for example, using the public's fascination with prime-time TV series, such as Bad Girls, to create space in which the case for prison reform can be outlined and explained.

It also means not being seduced by those politicians or academics who would have us believe that prison can be "re-legitimised" by looking at, for example, how to measure a prison's "moral performance". This type of theorising, no matter how well intentioned, merely contributes to the false justifications that continue to fill up our penal production line with those who have been socially excluded, all in the vain hope that "something is being done" about their lack of education, their mental health issues, and their addictions.

Finally, it means engaging with a range of non-governmental organisations, pressure groups and service providers to provide our academic and campaigning support in their continuing battles with the Home Office and with those that have yet to come with the new National Offender Management Service. But let's also be honest: prisons have got to go.

http://society.guardian.co.uk/crimeandpuni...1709611,00.html

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SimoneIsAnAngel PostPosted: Fri May 19, 2006 8:05 pm

Seems theres a real life Fenner out there...
Let's hope he never worked in a woman's prison!


From www.skynews.co.uk

UK News
Prison officer John Hall A Rapist And A Paedophile
Updated: 19:18, Friday May 19, 2006

A sex-crazed senior prison officer has been jailed for life for a series of rapes, kidnappings and attempted kidnappings of women and young girls.

John Hall, 35, raped women and tried to snatch girls off the street while serving as a prison officer at various jails.

The married man was found guilty of raping five women at an earlier trial, which could not be reported for legal reasons.

He later admitted seven further sex attacks on young girls.

Hall was told by a judge at Leeds Crown Court he would not be eligible for parole for at least 12-and-a-half years.

Mr Justice Goldring added: "I want to make this absolutely clear, the sentence I pass is one of life imprisonment.

"It should be plainly understood that you might never be released at all."

Little reason was given by the defence as to a motive for committing the crimes.

Psychiatric reports on Hall had found he was not mentally ill although he suffered from a "deep-seated feeling of inadequacy".

His defending barrister said: "Apart from this desperate defect in his character, he has lived an industrious, law-abiding and thoroughly useful life."

He admitted, however, Hall had "an enormous character flaw that he was unable to control".

Investigations are ongoing into further offences he may have committed outside the West Yorkshire area.

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SimoneIsAnAngel PostPosted: Fri May 19, 2006 8:10 pm

The Times May 19, 2006


£2.8m award for prisoner who tried to kill himself
By Richard Ford, Home Correspondent



COMPENSATION payments to prisoners have doubled in the last year to more than £4 million, while the total legal bill to the Prison Service has reached £20 million a year, The Times has learnt.
The total litigation bill is enough to run one of the large jails in England and Wales.



One prisoner received £2.8 million compensation after a failed suicide attempt, which is equal to the previous prison service record payout in 2002.

The payment was made in an out-of-court settlement to a prisoner who self-harmed and claimed for miscellaneous injury against the Prison Service. The service estimates that the costs alone of the case will be more than £1 million.

It is understood that a large proportion of the cash payout is a recognition that the inmate requires long-term medical care.

A Prison Service spokesman refused to comment on the latest award, saying that as it was an out-of-court settlement the details of the action and identity of the prisoner and prison were confidential.

Compensation for prisoners is now six times higher than three years ago as the service is hit by a rising number of claims from inmates, including an increase in those alleging that their human rights have been breached.

Among personal injury claims made was one by a prisoner who had had his finger bitten off by a horse.

An inmate in one of the top security jails currently has 15 outstanding claims against the service. Derek Ramsden, head of the Prison Service’s operational litigation unit, said that the “litigation culture” in society was reflected in prisons and there were plenty of would-be amateur lawyers in jails encouraging fellow prisoners to bring claims.

He added: “Accidents happen, but now people often look for someone to blame rather than themselves. And that is true of society as a whole, not just within the service.”

Mr Ramsden disclosed that more than 1,000 cases are being brought against the Prison Service every year and the figure is on the rise.

The most common claim is for personal injury, he said. “Personal injury can cover a multitude of sins: slipping or falling down stairs, a chair collapsing, falling off a ladder or through a ceiling — we even had one prisoner that had his finger bitten off by a horse,” Mr Ramsden said.

Other previous high awards include more than £1 million given to Gregg Marston, 43, who was left crippled when a doctor failed to send him for an urgent examination.

But the latest figures will fuel public concern about the fairness of the criminal justice and the perception that it is biased in favour of the offender rather than the victim. Many of the claims are for relatively trivial mishaps.

Latest official figures show that overall out-of-court settlements to prisoners in publicly run jails totalled £4,010,233 in 2005-06. This figure is double the sum paid out in 2004-05 and almost six times the sum paid in 2003-04.

Payments included £72,000 to prisoners who had slipped, tripped or fallen; £3,000 to inmates who had a sports injury; £113,000 to those assaulted by staff; £76,000 to those unlawfully detained and £215,000 in medical negligence claims.
Legal costs and payouts for claims by staff, prisoners and third parties cost the Prison Service £16 million in 2005-2006, with a further £4 million set aside for unsettled claims. In 2004-05 the figure was £12.6 million.



Mr Ramsden said the latest claim trend is prisoners complaining about prison officers opening mail from lawyers or the court without the inmate being present, which is illegal.

Prisoners are also using the Human Rights Act to challenge findings of guilty imposed by independent adjudicators for breaking jail rules. The prisoner wants the ruling struck from the record as it can affect their parole application.

Philip Davies, Conservative MP for Shipley, criticised the prison service for settling so many cases out of court. “Clearly the prison service is not challenging some of these claims. We do not know how many of these claims are spurious because they are not contested,” he said.

The Prison Service spokesman said: “Each compensation claim received by the Prison Service is treated on its individual merits. Legal advice is sought and, on the basis of that advice, a decision is made on whether or not the claim should be defended.”

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abzug PostPosted: Fri May 19, 2006 8:27 pm

Very interesting articles! This was my favorite part of the Fenner one:

Quote:
Psychiatric reports on Hall had found he was not mentally ill although he suffered from a "deep-seated feeling of inadequacy".

Yup, I think that description fits good ole Jim to a T! I assume this guy worked in a men's prison? Because there wasn't any information about his treatment of prisoners under his care (which of course I'm interested in, being obsessed with this show and all!)

As for the litigation article, I was particularly interested in the way they emphasized the frivolous claims, rather than the medical malpractice or prison guard assault claims. It shows a real anti-prisoner bias.

I'm not in favor of frivolous lawsuits, but I do like the idea that the prisoners have some legal recourse outside the prison's punishment system if they don't receive the right medical treatment, or are abused by guards.

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ekny PostPosted: Sat May 20, 2006 5:28 pm

I found this quite moving. --e

http://www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/pdf%20...na%20Samuel.pdf


Also, I just found this which should be very useful (least for me!).
http://www.hmprisonservice.gov.uk/prisonin...x.asp?noflash=1

Finally, buried w/in the site is a link to the Prisoner's Information Handbook for females. I think someone else might have posted this link in another thread in which case sorry for the repeat. The gov't link is a little hinky: try this instead.

http://www.hmprisonservice.gov.uk/assets/d...0pib_female.pdf

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NZ Bad Girl PostPosted: Sun May 21, 2006 4:00 am

Vegemite?

WTF...

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3675253a11,00.html

abzug PostPosted: Thu May 25, 2006 1:21 am

Only in NYC
From The New Yorker

DEPT. OF REHABILITATION
BIG HOUSES
by Kate Julian

These have been wild years for New York real estate, and with building limited, as ever, to either up or over, instead of out, condo and co-op conversions keep getting more creative. (The list includes not only warehouses, schools, and churches but also the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Bible depot, the old New York Cancer Hospital, and an Ex-Lax factory.) Now developers are poised to break residential real estate’s last taboo: the correctional facility. As Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz said this spring, referring to the site of the vacant House of Detention in Boerum Hill, “It would be foolish if the city does not take advantage of this super-hot real-estate market.”

Markowitz may have been inspired by his neighbors across the river: the old Parkside Correctional Facility, in Harlem, is already being turned into condos. (The building will be known as 10 Mount Morris Park West.) Its developers’ efforts thus far offer an early playbook for anyone interested in breaking into the correctional-conversion sector.

One: Pick the right neighborhood. Prisons aren’t usually in affluent residential districts, so if the housing is to be high end (most of the Mount Morris condominiums will list for more than a million dollars) it will need to be in a neighborhood (like the Mount Morris Park Historic District) that is already being gentrified.

Two: Allow some time to pass. A healthy interval between the departure of the last inmates and the condominium offering should help avert buyer anxiety. (Parkside has been closed for seven years.)

Three: Remove any fixtures that say “penal institution.” Some reminders of Parkside’s past were disposed of early on. (“We were not able to keep the cage on the roof,” Beyhan Karahan, the architect, said. “It was already so damaged, and we didn’t know what to do with it in an upscale residency, frankly.”) But, six months into construction, the prison’s front door was covered with a metal grate and still said “Parkside Correctional Facility” in peeling blue letters.

Four: Structural obstacles may prove substantial. With ceilings as low as eight feet three inches high, the dimensions of 10 Mount Morris are geared more to institutional efficiency than to luxury living. In an effort to preëmpt such criticism, the developers like to emphasize the unit’s “loftlike” open floor plans. “The original windows, which were really beautiful, from the nineteen-twenties”—when Parkside was a sanitarium—“were taken down,” Karahan said. “When it became a prison, they put up glazed aluminum ones, like train windows, for security reasons.” Several windows were bricked over. During a recent walk-through, a construction manager gestured at a fresh hole in the exterior wall. “We had to break it open,” he said. “When it was a jail, they didn’t even care about the park views. It was all crazy!”

Five: Open houses can be risky, as the comments of neighbors and passersby may startle prospective buyers. Michael Johnson, who co-owns the S.R.O. across the street from 10 Mount Morris, said to a recent visitor, “Some of my neighbors didn’t like the jail, but the men in my building loved it, because the women prisoners would flash them sometimes through the windows. One lady tried to escape by jumping out.”

A final note: Keep an eye out for prisons with potential, even if they haven’t been vacated. The Bayview Correctional Facility, on West Twentieth Street, for instance, has a rooftop garden, and, on a clear day, residents can see the Statue of Liberty. The Lincoln Correctional Facility, on 110th Street, has an exercise area on the roof with a panoramic view of Central Park. Brian Fischer, who worked at Parkside for many years, recalls his former workplace fondly. “The women didn’t want to leave,” he said recently. “It had a great view, and the place was air-conditioned.” Fischer is now the superintendent of Sing Sing. “Talk about property values—we’re on the river. Unbelievable.”

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abzug PostPosted: Thu May 25, 2006 4:35 pm

Songbirds, A UK Women's Prison Documentary/Musical
I started a thread for this, but also figured it couldn't hurt to post it here....

Songbirds
An hour-long documentary by Brian Hill

In the past ten years, the female prison population in the UK has risen by 173%. Prison is a different experience for women, who are more likely to suffer mental health difficulties and to self-harm than men. Nearly half have children under 16 and far more women prisoners are foreign, many of them drug mules. The stories told by the women of Downview Prison in Surrey have been transformed into a musical by the team that produced Feltham Sings. Mixing music and interviews, director Brian Hill, lyricist Simon Armitage and composer Simon Boswell facilitate each prisoner to find a unique musical voice. The result raises questions not only about sentencing, but about the effectiveness of prison itself.

For those who live in NYC, this documentary is being screened in Brooklyn (Williamsburg neighborhood) on July 29th, as part of the Rooftop Films series. I'm totally going.
http://www.rooftopfilms.com/show_06-songbirds.html

I've been reading this amazing book called "13 Women: Parables From Prison." A lot of the stories are from women who were incarcerated in the US in the 1970s, but a lot of the issues they touch on in terms of prison policies, sentencing and parole, and just generally the circumstances which land women in prison, are definitely applicable today. (In fact, the book was published in 2004.) I think its particularly a good read for fanfic writers out there, because of the added understanding of what these women in prison are going through, and what they've suffered after leaving.

One of the women who is featured in an early chapter is a lesbian poet. They included a few of her poems, and one in particular I thought was quite good, and reminded me of the scene at the end of season 5 when all the prisoners are rejoicing about Yvonne's escape. Anyway, here it is, including the introductory section from the book:

Like most prisons, CIW [The California Institute for Women] boasts an abudnance of security hardware--double chain-link fences topped with coiled razor wire, armed guards in watch towers, cameras, laser detectors and so on. Anyone with the ingenuity to get past all that surveillance is much admired. Additionally, the prison attempts to prevent escapes by having regular locked counts of the prisoners. Each woman must go to her individual cell (sixty in each unit), sit on her cot, and face the narrow wicket in her door. This ritual occurs four times a day and begins with the guard walking up the corridor between rows of cells and calling out "Count Time! Count Time!" If the guard finds that someone has fone missing, she calls out "Frozen Count! Frozen Count!"--which means that no one will be able to leave her cell until the escapee is located. Following is Norma's poem about one woman's successful escape:

THE GONE ONE
"Count Time! Count Time!"

One hundred twenty feet
scuttling toward respective cells,
outlined with goodnight embraces and kisses
(called "queer actions" by our keepers).
Instant silence as the whole shuts it mouth.

No voices now.

In crepe-soled hush puppy oxfords
the Guard clomps ninety-seven steps
peeking in cells along the way
making a mark for each head she sees.
Totaling her marks she seeks a count
of sixty marks to equal sixty heads.

Furious pencil frightened guard
Her count refuses to be but fifty-nine.

"Frozen Count."

Fifty-nine hearts speed up to jolt
Fifty-nine bodies erect listening in the dark.

"Frozen Count."

The whole freezes.

Count again you female St. Peter!

Face red, steps angry
Pencil still furious unable to make sixty
Out of the true total fifty-nine.

A Sister is Gone.

Gritty bitch, traitor to us cowards
Run, gone one, run, while I sleep
with a smile just for you.

In particular, I liked the St Peter imagery (granting the escaped prisoner entry to heaven) and the phrase "traitor to us cowards" because, well, because its so multi-layered yet simple.

Anyway, its a great book. Here's the link to Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/155365142.../qid=1149779656

This was in the news today:
Will Alsop's Creative Prison
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329491907-110427,00.html

My first instinct was shamefully one of "well, where's the punitive aspect". But then I thought that it would make a great experiment.
Like the guy says, the other model the extra punitive one doesn't work anyway.

I'm not very up to date in terms of what alternatives to the current system have been reserached. But does anybody think he might be onto something here or is he completely off his architect head?

When I first read that article, I also felt a little troubled. Instinctively like. But now I've had some more time to think about it, and you're right. If we stop thinking about prisons as being purely punishment, and instead go to the other extreme and see them as being purely rehabilitative, then this kind of architecture and facilities would be the right start. People act and feel a certain way based on their environment, so if you're trying to get incarcerated folks to stop their "offending behavior" (as Helen Stewart would say), then this is the place to start.

As for whether prisons should be purely rehabilitative, well, that's another interesting question to ponder. I would think if they are structured and strict, and able to enforce standards of behavior as well as provide the rehabilitative training, education etc, then its alright. Because there is something troubling about reading about prisons which sound more like country clubs or summer camps. But on the other hand, even if its like a summer camp, if you're not allowed to leave, and you can't see your family or friends or have your own bed and choose your own food, then its prison and its punishment, plain and simple.

Well on the structure of prisons I favour a certain amount of discipline but feel the aim should be for rehabilitation - especially in women's prisons where so many women experienced some kind of abuse in the early years.

To change tack a litttle: I heard an interesting news item today about a private members bill in NZ put forward by a leftie Green MP with quite a radical background of street activism & blue collar politics. It raised questions for me about the point in BG series 7 where it seems that some Brit prisons allow mothers to stay with their children for 18 months after birth & others like G Wing only 9 months. What does Brit law actually say about this?

Here's a print report about the NZ Bill aiming to extend breast feeding in prisons, in a mother & baby unit to 2 years.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3706569a6160,00.html

Bill to allow inmate mums to breastfeed
21 June 2006

The National Party says it will support to select committee a bill allowing female inmates to care for and breastfeed their babies in prison.

The bill has been drafted by Green MP Sue Bradford who is confident of support from across the political spectrum for her Corrections (Mothers with Babies) Amendment Bill.

The bill was drawn from the ballot for members' bills last week and will be debated for the first time on June 28.

"I have already received fantastic support from community groups like Parents Centre New Zealand as well as from many groups working in the prison system and I am delighted that it is now garnering political support," Ms Bradford said yesterday.

National MP Katherine Rich said the party's caucus had decided there was merit in looking at the issue further.

It would support the bill to the select committee stage but reserved its decision beyond that.

Mrs Rich said most countries allowed mothers to keep their babies with them in prison – with babies ranging from 18 months old to six years of age.

"Research indicates that maternal separation causes long-term difficulties while keeping babies with their mothers allows better bonding and a better start in life."

National's law and order spokesman Simon Power said the party was looking for evidence of the role the mother/baby unit could play in rehabilitation of inmates.

It would need to be convinced that reciprocal arrangements with the mother and the Corrections Department were tough enough to ensure the child's wellbeing at all times, he said.

Ms Bradford said there was research to show that allowing a mother to keep her baby could make a crucial difference to her rehabilitation and could often provide a relatively safe and secure environment for the baby.

New Zealand was lagging behind much of the rest of the world in establishing this practice, she said, and the bill would bring New Zealand in line with World Health Organisation guidelines.

"If passed, my bill will require mothers wishing to keep their babies with them to enter into a parenting agreement, and each case will be considered invidividually to find the best solution for the welfare of the baby," she said.

Her bill would allow women in prison to breastfeed until their babies were two years old.

On the radio Sue Bradford cited egs of policies where babies can stay with their mothers from 2-6 years - she mentioned an Aussie state & some Asian and possibly Sth American countries (can't remember exactly) but it didn't mention the UK. A critic raised the possibility of women rorting such policies by deliberately getting pregnant when they know they're probably going to prison.

There was also an item on TV last night about the big increase in numbers of women in prison in NZ. Partly due to more women committing violent crimes, some of them by women on P (which may have been drug sensationalising by the media). The numbers of women in NZ prisons has about doubled in the last 10 years.


http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/411365/757505

<snipped>

Fraud and dishonesty have traditionally made up most female offending, but tougher sentencing laws and more serious crime have swelled the prison population.

Women were arrested for 6,700 violent offences last year - an increase of more than 2,000 on 10 years ago.

The Youth Court is also reporting a sharp increase in female offenders, and there is a warning about the rising number.

"The consequences of putting women in jail are actually somewhat greater for a society than they are for men, because it means there are a whole lot of children out there who are probably going to have to go into care or are at risk," criminologist Gabrielle Maxwell says.

The Corrections Association also says that attacks on prison staff by female inmates are increasing.

In September there were three assaults on staff at Arohata Women's Prison, which is more than every men's prison except one.

From the NY Times today--definitely reminds me of Denny's whole plotline in season 5....

July 21, 2006
Behind Bars, He Turns M&M’s Into an Art Form
By ADAM LIPTAK
CRESCENT CITY, Calif., July 16 — The morning after the opening of a show of his recent work, the artist was in his studio, a concrete cell in the Pelican Bay State Prison, where he is serving three life terms in solitary confinement for murder and for slashing a prison guard’s throat. He was checking his supplies, taking inventory.

His paintbrush, made of plastic wrap, foil and strands of his own hair, lay on the lower bunk. So did his paints, leached from M&M’s and sitting in little white plastic containers that once held packets of grape jelly. Next to them was a stack of the blank postcards that are his canvases.

On Friday night, more than 500 people had jammed into a gallery in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, to assess 25 of Donny Johnson’s small, intense works. There was sangria, as well as big bowls of M&M’s. By evening’s end, six of the postcard paintings had sold, for $500 each.

“They are made with these chocolate pigments,” said Adolfo Caballero, an owner of the gallery. “He has really created a new kind of technique, because he doesn’t have access to conventional materials.”

Most prison art, the kind created in crafts classes and sold in gift shops, tends toward kitsch and caricature. But there are no classes or art supplies where Mr. Johnson is held, and his powerful, largely abstract paintings are something different. They reflect the sensory deprivation and diminished depth perception of someone held in a windowless cell for almost two decades.

They pulse, some artists on the outside say, with memory and longing and madness. Others are less impressed, saying the works are interesting examples of human ingenuity but fall short of real artistic achievement.

Mr. Johnson, 46, has something of the middle-aged biker about him, with long slicked-back hair, unfortunate tattoos, a growing paunch and an unruly beard that puts one in mind of ZZ Top or a garden gnome.

He was in a changeable mood on Saturday, eager to hear about the opening but also aware that it was, in the scheme of his life and future, a small thing. He spoke with easygoing and sometimes lighthearted candor, punctuated with wariness and flashes of despair. He declined to discuss the details of his crimes, though he admitted to a past attraction to drugs and violence.

When the conversation turned to his paintings, though, he held his own in the art-speak department. “I love myth and chaos and space,” he said.

Mr. Johnson was 20 when he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in 1980, drawing a sentence of 15 years to life. According to court papers, he and two friends had stabbed an acquaintance to death after a party in San Jose, in a dispute over the sale of cigarettes laced with PCP.

Nine years later Mr. Johnson was charged with the nearly fatal stabbing of one guard and with assaulting another. That case went to trial, with Mr. Johnson saying he had been startled and, thinking he was under attack by a gang member, had acted in what he thought was self-defense. He was convicted and sentenced to two additional terms of nine years to life. His chances of ever being paroled, he said, are small.

The prison here is an expanse of grim concrete bunkers, spread out over 275 acres not far from the California coast and the Oregon border. It is as sterile and monochrome as Mr. Johnson’s paintings are bursting out with color.

About 3,300 of the state’s most dangerous prisoners are held at Pelican Bay, which is among the toughest prisons in the nation. But even here there are varying levels of security. The problem prisoners, including Mr. Johnson, are held in the Security Housing Unit, which everyone calls the SHU (pronounced like “shoe”).

He lives in an 8-by-12-foot concrete cell. His meals are pushed through a slot in the door. Except for the odd visitor, with whom he talks through thick plexiglass, he interacts with no one. He has not touched another person in 17 years.

Asked about his circumstances growing up, Mr. Johnson assessed his current state instead. “I am of the dungeon class,” he said.

In “Donny: Life of a Lifer,” a short book he wrote in 2001, Mr. Johnson said the lack of sensory stimulation and human contact in the SHU was a form of torture. “I’d cut off my right arm,” he wrote, “to be able to hold my mother.”

His art, he said on Saturday, is a solace, an obsession and a burden.

He orders his supplies from the prison commissary once a month. The M&M’s are 60 cents a pack, and he gets 10 packs at a time. He puts from one to five of the candies in each of the jelly containers, drizzles a little water in and later fishes out the chocolate cores, leaving liquid of various colors, which get stronger if they sit for a couple of days.

He has tried other candy, but there are perils. “It’s the same process with Skittles,” he said, “but I end up eating them all.”

Sometimes he experiments with other materials. “Grape Kool-Aid in red M&M color makes a kind of purple,” he wrote in a letter to a reporter not long ago. “Coffee mixed with yellow makes a light brown. Tropical punch Kool-Aid granules can be made into a syrup and used as a paint wash of sorts. But it’s a bear to work with and it’s super-sticky and it never dries.”

And there are frustrations. “If lint gets in a piece, I feel like screaming,” he wrote.

While prison officials will not allow Mr. Johnson to have conventional art supplies or much of anything else in the SHU, they have not interfered with his work or stopped him from mailing his paintings to his family and friends. The prison will not let him keep the proceeds from his sales, Mr. Johnson said, and he intends to donate the money to the Pelican Bay Prison Project, a nonprofit group that will use it to help the children of prisoners.

On the outside, the paintings have drawn admiration and even awe.

“It has the vibration of color you find in van Gogh’s work,” said Mr. Caballero, the Mexican gallery owner. “Sometimes it looks like Motherwell. Sometimes it looks like de Kooning. And there is also something of Munch.”

Stephen A. Kurtz, a semiretired psychoanalyst who has worked with prisoners and helped arrange the show in Mexico, said he generally had no use for their art.

“The prison art I’ve seen is very stereotypical: women with breasts out to the next block and beefy guys with them,” Mr. Kurtz said.

Mr. Johnson’s work, he said, is a different matter. “It reminds me,” he said, “of Pollock in the early-to-mid-1940’s, when he was in Jungian analysis.”

Mr. Johnson’s circumstances and materials may influence viewers’ perceptions, and not everyone is convinced that he is the real thing.

“I’m not really responding to it aesthetically,” said Brooke Anderson, director and curator of the Contemporary Center at the American Folk Art Museum, “but I’m totally responding from its place of origin. It kind of reminds me of spin art. It feels very psychedelic, like the 1970’s hippie culture.”

Mr. Johnson is working in a rich tradition of art produced in prisons and asylums, Ms. Anderson continued.

“Time and the availability of time,” she said, “has an awful lot to do with an explosion of expression.”

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/article1206290.ece
Prison service 'institutionally corrupt'
By Alison Purdy, PA
Published: 31 July 2006

You could say that they could have watched Bad Girls and save themselves the pain of commisioning a report. But I am afraid (and heppy at the same time) that it is reports like this that are behind Bad Girls.

Its amazing how accurate the show seems in the context of a report like this. Sadly, as much as we may have been annoyed that Fenner and Di stuck around so long, it seems frighteningly realistic.

An amazing radio story about a nurse who worked in a prison and fell in love with a (male) inmate. Definitely echoes of Helen and Nikki on this. Here's the link if you want to listen to a streaming mp3:
http://audio.wbez.org/tal/122.m3u

And here's a transcription of it. Ira Glass is the host, who is interviewing the nurse, Ann. The prisoner's name is Charles.

Ira: When Ann met Charles, they were not supposed to fall in love. It was forbidden that they fall in love. Capulets and Montagues. Jets and Sharks. David Addison and Maddie Hayes on Moonlighting, Scully and Mulder, Anna Karenina, you know the story. The day they met, she was a nurse in the Texas prisons. He was a prisoner, a support service inmate. First day on a new assignment, working in the infirmary.

Ann: They're called SSIs, which is a janitor service there. And there was four new ones came in that day, and they come bee-boppin' down through the hall and started to the back of the infirmary, and I asked them just where they thought they were going, and he said 'Honey, you did take my head off a time or two that day.' So, you know, that was the first time I'd ever seen him.

Ira: Was this the kind of thing where the first time you looked at him you thought, 'Huh, I wonder who that is?'

Ann: No. (laughs) No.

Ira: She'd see him around, mopping, clearing out trash. And then as always happens in these kinds of stories, fate threw them together. Together, in a situation where it was the two of them, against the world.

Ann: We worked together for a couple of months, and then got into a situation that involved some real sticky stuff that I'd rather not get real specific about. But he told me some information about some stuff that had taken place while I was out of the infirmary one evening, which brought, by the time I got through facing off people, it brought a lot of heat on both of us.

Ira: And did the two of you actually blow the whistle on somebody in a way that, you know, people got disciplined and punished? Officers, I mean.

Ann: We blew the whistle, yes, but the officer got a promotion instead of getting disciplined.* They basically totally isolated us both, because I took the word of an inmate over that of an officer, and they don't like that.

Ira: And so did that mean you wound up having a lot of time alone with eachother?

Ann: We wound up being we were the only two to talk to, you know? We talked to eachother. And I really got to know what kind of person he was. And that he will stand up for truth, when other people will kind of skirt around it, he will face what's coming down, just so the truth comes out.** At great personal risk to him.

-----------------

OK, that's it, can't type anymore, because this is taking forever, but it does give you a taste, so you can decide if you want to listen to the show....

* How disturbing is that?! All the stuff with Fenner is more realistic than we'd like to think, I'm afraid.

** Very Nikki-like. Btw, if you continue to listen, Charles is in jail for killing the man who raped his niece. Also very Nikki-like. :) I mean, :( because of the horrible situation, but you know what I mean....

Wow, umm, as I am listening to this whole thing, you HAVE to hear it, because it gives a real sense of how restricted a prisoner and prison employee are, in terms of opportunities to be alone together, to visit, to communicate etc. Whatever moments Helen and Nikki were able to steal were FAR more than Ann and Charles. Amazing.

Calls for women's prisons to be closed
Reuters Wednesday August 2, 11:07 AM


LONDON (Reuters) - The government should begin closing women's prisons because the majority of female offenders are convicted for non-violent offences and could be treated in the community, a charity said on Wednesday.

The Howard League for Penal Reform urged the government to think radically about how to deal with female offenders because under the current system, two thirds of women released from prison are reconvicted within two years.

It also said the current system failed to keep women prisoners safe and did not meet their rehabilitation needs.

Frances Cook, director of the charity, called for "a properly planned closure programme for women's prisons" and "the transfer of resources to community... projects that meet women's needs and, unlike prison, do successfully reduce re-offending."

Cook said only those who pose a danger to the public should remain in custody.

"The vast majority can be managed safely in the community where they can make amends for their offending and help to heal the damage done by crime."

The group looked into the impact that imprisonment has on women, girls and their families.

A spokeswoman for the Home Office said the government was aware there were people in prison who "ought not to be there" including vulnerable women.

She said there were plans to remove some of those.

"Custody will remain appropriate for women who are serious or persistent offenders," she said. "However, the government is keen to encourage greater use of community alternatives for women wherever possible."

She said more than nine million pounds had been allocated for new initiatives for women.

The women's prison population in England and Wales increased by 147 percent from 1994 to 2004, the charity said. Some 4,600 woman and girls are currently in prison.

Hi Ekny, Interesting article. It always perplexed me why less serious offenders like Zandra, Crystal or even Rachel were lumped in with other hardened criminals. Rehabilitating them in such a milieu is difficult as they are always overlooked. In these cases maybe rustication is in order?

Perhaps so, yes--it seems others might agree with you there as well. I think a lot of the problem might not be to do with some overarching way "the system" is structured but about simple numbers/economics: with so few women in prison in Britain, they're pretty much going to have to lump them all together. Which obviously is Not a Good Thing.

From the NY Times. How F&^KED up is this?!

August 13, 2006
Panel Suggests Using Inmates in Drug Trials
By IAN URBINA
PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 7 — An influential federal panel of medical advisers has recommended that the government loosen regulations that severely limit the testing of pharmaceuticals on prison inmates, a practice that was all but stopped three decades ago after revelations of abuse.

The proposed change includes provisions intended to prevent problems that plagued earlier programs. Nevertheless, it has dredged up a painful history of medical mistreatment and incited debate among prison rights advocates and researchers about whether prisoners can truly make uncoerced decisions, given the environment they live in.

Supporters of such programs cite the possibility of benefit to prison populations, and the potential for contributing to the greater good.

Until the early 1970’s, about 90 percent of all pharmaceutical products were tested on prison inmates, federal officials say. But such research diminished sharply in 1974 after revelations of abuse at prisons like Holmesburg here, where inmates were paid hundreds of dollars a month to test items as varied as dandruff treatments and dioxin, and where they were exposed to radioactive, hallucinogenic and carcinogenic chemicals.

In addition to addressing the abuses at Holmesburg, the regulations were a reaction to revelations in 1972 surrounding what the government called the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, which was begun in the 1930’s and lasted 40 years. In it, several hundred mostly illiterate men with syphilis in rural Alabama were left untreated, even after a cure was discovered, so that researchers could study the disease.

“What happened at Holmesburg was just as gruesome as Tuskegee, but at Holmesburg it happened smack dab in the middle of a major city, not in some backwoods in Alabama,” said Allen M. Hornblum, an urban studies professor at Temple University and the author of “Acres of Skin,” a 1998 book about the Holmesburg research. “It just goes to show how prisons are truly distinct institutions where the walls don’t just serve to keep inmates in, they also serve to keep public eyes out.”

Critics also doubt the merits of pharmaceutical testing on prisoners who often lack basic health care.

Alvin Bronstein, a Washington lawyer who helped found the National Prison Project, an American Civil Liberties Union program, said he did not believe that altering the regulations risked a return to the days of Holmesburg.

“With the help of external review boards that would include a prisoner advocate,” Mr. Bronstein said, “I do believe that the potential benefits of biomedical research outweigh the potential risks.”

Holmesburg closed in 1995 but was partly reopened in July to help ease overcrowding at other prisons.

Under current regulations, passed in 1978, prisoners can participate in federally financed biomedical research if the experiment poses no more than “minimal” risks to the subjects. But a report formally presented to federal officials on Aug. 1 by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences advised that experiments with greater risks be permitted if they had the potential to benefit prisoners. As an added precaution, the report suggested that all studies be subject to an independent review.

“The current regulations are entirely outdated and restrictive, and prisoners are being arbitrarily excluded from research that can help them,” said Ernest D. Prentice, a University of Nebraska genetics professor and the chairman of a Health and Human Services Department committee that requested the study. Mr. Prentice said the regulation revision process would begin at the committee’s next meeting, on Nov. 2.

The discussion comes as the biomedical industry is facing a shortage of testing subjects. In the last two years, several pain medications, including Vioxx and Bextra, have been pulled off the market because early testing did not include large enough numbers of patients to catch dangerous problems.

And the committee’s report comes against the backdrop of a prison population that has more than quadrupled, to about 2.3 million, over the last 30 years and that disproportionately suffers from H.I.V. and hepatitis C, diseases that some researchers say could be better controlled if new research were permitted in prisons.

For Leodus Jones, a former prisoner, the report has opened old wounds. “This moves us back in a very bad direction,” said Mr. Jones, who participated in the experiments at Holmesburg in 1966 and after his release played a pivotal role in lobbying to get the regulations passed.

In one experiment, Mr. Jones’s skin changed color, and he developed rashes on his back and legs where he said lotions had been tested.

“The doctors told me at the time that something was seriously wrong,” said Mr. Jones, who added that he had never signed a consent form. He reached a $40,000 settlement in 1986 with the City of Philadelphia after he sued.

“I never had these rashes before,” he said, “but I’ve had them ever since.”

The Institute of Medicine report was initiated in 2004 when the Health and Human Services Department asked the institute to look into the issue. The report said prisoners should be allowed to take part in federally financed clinical trials so long as the trials were in the later and less dangerous phase of Food and Drug Administration approval. It also recommended that at least half the subjects in such trials be nonprisoners, making it more difficult to test products that might scare off volunteers.

Dr. A. Bernard Ackerman, a New York dermatologist who worked at Holmesburg during the 1960’s trials as a second-year resident from the University of Pennsylvania, said he remained skeptical. “I saw it firsthand,” Dr. Ackerman said. “What started as scientific research became pure business, and no amount of regulations can prevent that from happening again.”

Others cite similar concerns over the financial stake in such research.

“It strikes me as pretty ridiculous to start talking about prisoners getting access to cutting-edge research and medications when they can’t even get penicillin and high-blood-pressure pills,” said Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News, an independent monthly review. “I have to imagine there are larger financial motivations here.”

The demand for human test subjects has grown so much that the so-called contract research industry has emerged in the past decade to recruit volunteers for pharmaceutical trials. The Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, a Boston policy and economic research group at Tufts University, estimated that contract research revenue grew to $7 billion in 2005, up from $1 billion in 1995.

But researchers at the Institute of Medicine said their sole focus was to see if prisoners could benefit by changing the regulations.

The pharmaceutical industry says it was not involved. Jeff Trewitt, a spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a drug industry trade group, said that his organization had no role in prompting the study and that it had not had a chance to review the findings.

Dr. Albert M. Kligman, who directed the experiments at Holmesburg and is now an emeritus professor of dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, said the regulations should never have been written in the first place.

“My view is that shutting the prison experiments down was a big mistake,” Dr. Kligman said.

While confirming that he used radioactive materials, hallucinogenic drugs and carcinogenic materials on prisoners, Dr. Kligman said that they were always administered in extremely low doses and that the benefits to the public were overwhelming.

He cited breakthroughs like Retin A, a popular anti-acne drug, and ingredients for most of the creams used to treat poison ivy. “I’m on the medical ethics committee at Penn,” he said, “and I still don’t see there having been anything wrong with what we were doing.”

From 1951 to 1974, several federal agencies and more than 30 companies used Holmesburg for experiments, mostly under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania, which had built laboratories at the prison. After the revelations about Holmesburg, it soon became clear that other universities and prisons in other states were involved in similar abuses.

In October 2000, nearly 300 former inmates sued the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Kligman, Dow Chemical and Johnson & Johnson for injuries they said occurred during the experiments at Holmesburg, but the suit was dismissed because the statute of limitations had expired.

“When they put the chemicals on me, my hands swelled up like eight-ounce boxing gloves, and they’ve never gone back to normal,” said Edward Anthony, 62, a former inmate who took part in Holmesburg experiments in 1964. “We’re still pushing the lawsuit because the medical bills are still coming in for a lot of us.”

Daniel S. Murphy, a professor of criminal justice at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., who was imprisoned for five years in the 1990’s for growing marijuana, said that loosening the regulations would be a mistake.

“Free and informed consent becomes pretty questionable when prisoners don’t hold the keys to their own cells,” Professor Murphy said, “and in many cases they can’t read, yet they are signing a document that it practically takes a law degree to understand.”

During the Holmesburg experiments, inmates could earn up to $1,500 a month by participating. The only other jobs were at the commissary or in the shoe and shirt factory, where wages were usually about 15 cents to 25 cents a day, Professor Hornblum of Temple said.

On the issue of compensation for inmates, the report raised concern about “undue inducements to participate in research in order to gain access to medical care or other benefits they would not normally have.” It called for “adequate protections” to avoid “attempts to coerce or manipulate participation.’’

The report also expressed worry about the absence of regulation over experiments that do not receive federal money. Lawrence O. Gostin, the chairman of the panel that conducted the study and a professor of law and public health at Georgetown University, said he hoped to change that.

Even with current regulations, oversight of such research has been difficult. In 2000, several universities were reprimanded for using federal money and conducting several hundred projects on prisoners without fully reporting the projects to the appropriate authorities.

Professor Gostin said the report called for tightening some existing regulations by advising that all research involving prisoners be subject to uniform federal oversight, even if no federal funds are involved. The report also said protections should extend not just to prisoners behind bars but also to those on parole or on probation.

Professor Murphy, who testified to the panel as the report was being written, praised those proposed precautions before adding, “They’re also the parts of the report that faced the strongest resistance from federal officials, and I fear they’re most likely the parts that will end up getting cut as these recommendations become new regulations.”

I found this article very heartening. Of all the work that inmates do in prison, this seems to be the most rewarding, emotionally etc. From the NY Times....

October 31, 2006
Trained by Inmates, New Best Friends for Disabled Veterans
By STEPHANIE STROM
CONCORD, Mass., Oct. 27 — Rainbow looks like any other Labrador retriever, but she is not a pet. Trained by a prison inmate, her mission is to help Roland Paquette, an injured veteran of the conflict in Afghanistan, stay on his new feet, the ones he got after an explosion destroyed his legs.

While veterans who lose their sight or hearing or must use a wheelchair have long had “service” dogs as companions, Rainbow is one of the first dogs in the country trained to work with someone who uses both a wheelchair and prosthetics to get around.

Mr. Paquette’s hope is that eventually Rainbow will allow him to abandon his canes altogether and rely only on the metal handle attached to the harness she wears around her torso.

“I’d much rather be able to walk with her at my side than with the canes,” said Mr. Paquette, who is 28. “It makes me less obvious.”

Rainbow is the first graduate of a new program, Canines for Combat Veterans, at a tiny nonprofit group here called Neads, or New England Assistance Dog Services. The organization has been training service dogs for the disabled since 1976.

“I think we’re going to have to double the number of dogs we train to meet the need,” said Sheila O’Brien, Neads’s executive director. “Because of advances in medicine, a lot more veterans are surviving their injuries than ever before, and we want to be able to help as many of them as we can.”

In late 2001, President Bush signed a law authorizing the Veterans Administration to underwrite programs like Canines for Combat Veterans. But the Veterans Administration is still studying the matter, so Neads must raise all the money for its program from private sources.

It sells naming rights for its dogs — Rainbow got her name after a group of Rainbow Girls from Rhode Island, an organization affiliated with the Masons, held pancake breakfasts and other events to raise $500 for the right.

That fund-raising has proved so successful that Ms. O’Brien has doubled the price to name a dog, but she said it cost up to $17,000 to buy and train a dog. Recipients of dogs are expected to raise about $9,500 for their animal with the help of the organization.

Ms. O’Brien also hopes to double the size of a program in which service dogs are trained by prison inmates. Puppies begin their training in the Neads “nursery,” where they are housebroken and introduced to basic skills. Then about 80 percent of the dogs go to live in a prison cell with an inmate who completes their training.

It takes about half the time to train dogs in prison as it does in foster homes, Ms. O’Brien said, because of the more intensive training they get from inmates.

Inmates are enthusiastic about the program. “It’s great to do something that really helps someone else, especially a guy like him,” said Thomas Davison, who trained Rainbow at the Northeast Correctional Center here. “I’ve never had a chance to do that, and I wasn’t sure I could handle the responsibility.”

Kathleen M. Dennehy, the state correction commissioner, said the program had profound effects on the culture of a prison.

“Officers stop by to pat the dogs, they smile, maybe they strike up a conversation with the inmate training the dog,” Ms. Dennehy said. “It establishes a basic human connection.”

James J. Saba, superintendent at Northeast, is unsure, however, whether the program, already in six prisons in Massachusetts, can be expanded.

“We have 268 inmates in this prison alone, which is already too many,” Mr. Saba said. “And for every puppy, we lose a bed because the dogs take the place of an inmate in the cell.”

Mr. Paquette and Rainbow visited Mr. Davison and the four other inmate trainers at the prison on Thursday. Mr. Davison gave him a few pointers and handed over the toys he had bought the dog with the $28 a week he received for training her.

“She was ready to do this at 9 months,” Mr. Davison said proudly. “She’s a good dog.”

Mr. Paquette promised, “I’ll take good care of her.”

Mr. Paquette joined the military several months after the Sept. 11 attacks, leaving a job he had recently taken. “I felt like a hypocrite sitting around on the couch in front of the TV and saying, ‘Go do it,’ when I wasn’t,” he explained.

He became a medical sergeant on a Special Forces team and headed for Afghanistan in the spring of 2004. He said he treated hundreds of soldiers and thousands of local residents for “everything from the common cold to gunshot wounds.”

On Dec. 28, 2004, an explosion went off under the vehicle in which he was riding, severely injuring his legs. Yet he considers himself lucky that the impact was muted by the engine block, that an orthopedic surgeon happened to be on hand to perform the initial amputation and that new medical techniques have calmed the irritated nerves in his legs that threatened to keep him from walking.

“At least I’m here, and I’ve got Rainey,” he said, using his nickname for Rainbow.

He said that he had been nervous about meeting her — “sometimes chemistry just doesn’t work” — and that the first day of their partnership had been difficult. He had expected to get a bigger dog, who could support his weight, and Rainbow accidentally pulled him over when he was walking with her. The next day, however, Rainbow and Mr. Paquette clicked, taking turns outdoors using just a cane and her harness. The dog appeared to respond well to Mr. Paquette’s commands and looked to him more and more for direction.

He stayed in his wheelchair during his visit to Mr. Davison the next day because the Neads trainers were worried that Rainbow would pull him down again in her excitement to see her prison trainer. She was indeed happy to see him but largely remained at Mr. Paquette’s side.

The next challenge will be introducing her to Mr. Big, the German shepherd-Great Dane mix that is the Paquettes’ pet. He has been sent to obedience school in preparation for her arrival.

In about 10 days, Mr. Paquette and Rainbow will take off for their new life together, first in Albuquerque and then in San Antonio, where Mr. Paquette and his wife, Jennifer, and their daughter, Kristen, 17, and son, T. J., 11, are moving for his new job with an intelligence and security firm.

The Army has recently completed a new center in San Antonio specializing in amputation, the Intrepid Center, and Mr. Paquette expects to be an advertisement for service dogs.

“I’ve got a feeling that lots of guys who see me with Rainbow are going to want a dog,” he said.

This whole initiative is incredibly cool, I think. Bringing the arts into prison in a very meaningful way. And there's a very Sylvia-like character towards the end. You'll know who I mean when you get there. From the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/arts/music/12whit.html

November 12, 2006
Music
25 to Life, With Time Off for Puccini
By MICHAEL WHITE

DUBLIN

EVEN in sunshine the approach to Mountjoy Prison is a bleak experience. Under clouds and rain the place chills the heart. And as I rang the doorbell (a surreal touch, but how else do you get into prison as a free man?) on a sodden Irish morning, it felt like that standard horror-movie scene where the innocent tries the knocker at a gothic mansion. Not that Mountjoy is exactly gothic, but its 19th-century granite grimness serves as well. As it was meant to.

Mountjoy — known here as “the Joy” — is a relic of British rule. It was built in 1850 to strike fear into the hearts of a turbulent people and was kept busy in the early 1920s executing the most turbulent among them. What is called the hang-house still stands, “complete with everything except the rope,” as I was told by the cheerful guard who showed it to me and who demonstrated the mechanism with a certain pride. And so do the 1850s cells, radiating out from a central hub where the “auld triangle,” immortalized in verse by Brendan Behan, hangs on the wall.

Everything at Mountjoy feels so museumlike it’s hard to believe that it still functions. But it does: the largest, roughest, toughest prison in the Irish system. Life is better these days for the female inmates, who occupy a recently built annex. But for the 450 men, things are much as they were a century ago, with one notable exception. A century ago they would have spent their days picking oakum. Now the inmates of the Joy are making opera.

Specifically they are making the set and costumes for “La Bohème,” which opens next Saturday at the Gaiety Theater here. Opera in the prisons of the British Isles is not entirely new: several small-scale touring companies have built reputations and secured government financing by taking professional singers behind bars to work on modest productions with prisoners. But the Mountjoy project is of a different order, initiated by Opera Ireland, which is the nearest Ireland gets to a national company, and involving a second prison in faraway Perugia, Italy.

It started in 2004, when the Italian film director Porzia Addabbo became interested in a project at the maximum-security jail in Perugia, Maiano. “I had a friend teaching art to the inmates,” Ms. Addabbo explained, “and he had them design an imaginary production of ‘La Bohème.’ I filmed the project. RAI” — the Italian television company — “took the film, and it was shown at the Milan Future Festival in November 2004. All very good. But I wanted to take it further, to see if these people could design something that would actually work onstage. How to make it happen? I didn’t know.”

But Ms. Addabbo did know an Irish theater producer, Joe Mitchell, who offered to knock on doors in Ireland.

“I ended up sitting with Google looking for politicians with an interest in prison issues,” Mr. Mitchell said “and I found a senator, Mary Henry, who had previously been president of the Penal Reform Trust and even spoke Italian. So I thought, this was meant to be. She set up a meeting with the governor of Mountjoy. Opera Ireland came on board, as did the province of Perugia. And we had ourselves an international project.”

The deal was for Maiano prisoners to design costumes and sets for a new “Bohème,” for Mountjoy prisoners to turn the designs into reality and for Opera Ireland to put the whole thing onstage as part of its season at the Gaiety Theater. “It’s national stereotyping really, getting the Italians to design and the Irish to construct,” Mr. Mitchell said, “but that’s how it worked, in prison as in life.”

It took a year to put it all together. “It hasn’t been the easiest project I’ve ever done,” Mr. Mitchell said. “I’d never been inside a prison before, and it was daunting. These places aren’t designed to make you feel comfortable. But it’s been a profound experience, and I know that when the curtain goes up on Nov. 18th it will have been worth it.”

David Collopy, the chief executive officer of Opera Ireland, agreed, though handing his sets and costumes over to inexperienced amateurs carried a significant risk. Opera Ireland is, for all its status, a small company serving a small public, with only four full-scale productions a year. “Which makes this ‘Bohème’ 25 percent of our annual output,” Mr. Collopy said. “So yes, you might think we were mad. And prison reform is not part of our remit. But when we were approached to do this, I couldn’t help remembering the moment in that film ‘Shawshank Redemption’ where the guy plays Mozart over the prison speaker system, and everything comes to a blissful halt.”

Mr. Collopy knows how sentimental that sounds, but his experience bore it out. The prisoners he worked with took a strong interest in the production, and not just because, as a prisoner named Mark advised me, the key to prison life is “finding how to stop the boredom.” (My access to the prisoners was granted only on the condition that they not be asked their full names, what crimes they had committed or how long their sentences were.)

Standing in the prison workshop, surrounded by Parisian garret window frames intended for Acts I and IV of “Bohème” and the commercial garden ornaments it usually turns out, Mark said he was skeptical at first. “I expected opera to be boring,” he explained. “I’d change the TV channel if it was on. But I’d really like to see one now because I think I’d understand it. The feelings, the passion: I think I get it now.”

Over in the women’s workshop, where every inch of space is filled with hanging racks of 1970s student fashion, band uniforms and gendarmes’ caps (slightly misshapen and not quite what the Royal Opera at Covent Garden would expect, but no doubt perfectly fine in sympathetic lighting from a distance), a prisoner, Jackie, said she would like to see an opera too.

“I always had a healthy curiosity about it, and now I’ve started asking questions, it’s turned unhealthy,” she said. “I can’t get enough. It’ll be dreadful when it’s over, because we’ll all feel empty, back on the scrap heap again. Working on the opera, people have taken us for who we are, not what we’ve done. And that’s been great.”

Their response has convinced Mr. Collopy that he made the right decision. “We’ve had people working on these sets and costumes who can barely read and write,” he said, “who sign their names with a cross and who thought they had no skills. Now they’ve discovered they can do things they’d never imagined. There’s a lot of wasted talent in prison. So we’re making use of it.”

The “making use” is slightly sensitive, as Opera Ireland’s response to questions on the subject indicates. “We’re not in this for publicity or cheap labor,” Dieter Kaegi, the company’s artistic director, took pains to say. “We’ve had some money from the Department of Justice, but it only amounts to a few thousand euros. Most of the money we’ve provided ourselves, together with a lot of effort. We’ve done it because we believe in it.”

And perhaps no one believes in it more than Ms. Addabbo, who is the overall stage director for the production. She refuses to refer to her collaborative team as prisoners. They are crew. And they are good.

“There’s a carpenter in Mountjoy,” she said, “who I’d work with in any professional context. And in Maiano there are two men who had no contact with theater at all but have great instinct for what the audience must see, how to close the set and achieve focus. And they’ve worked with real heart.”

It wasn’t just backstage tech work either.

“We’ve argued about the characters,” Ms. Addabbo said, “about the rights and wrongs of what Rodolfo does in leaving Mimi. Most people took the practical view that he should work to support her. Some wanted to change the end so Mimi shouldn’t die. Everyone was in love with Musetta, probably because she’s strong and gets her way. And one thing that affected me deeply was the way the older crew, some of them in prison since they were very young, identified with young love and the energy of youth.

“In the end it was decided to set the production very specifically in 1977, because that was when one of the men in Maiano graduated from university and, he argued, it was a year of freedom, of hope, of taking to the streets with what you believed.”

The only problems she encountered, she said, were logistical. Supply shipments had to be thoroughly searched by guards, and space was at a premium.

“Prisons don’t have 12-meter rooms for scenery painting,” she explained. “We had to take over the gym for things like that. Then we had to cut the sets into small sections to get them through the prison doorways.”

But these problems offered an unexpected benefit, she added. “In Mountjoy you’d have officers and inmates scratching their heads together over some technical difficulty, and this creates a neutral zone for both sides. It defuses the tension between jailor and jailed. Time and again I saw this and was impressed.”

Getting the officers on board is the critical task in any prison project. You can expect a certain liberality of temperament from the governors, but the guards are likely to dismiss arts initiatives as nothing but extra work, imposed on them by naïvely well-intentioned people who forget why prisoners are behind bars.

“In fact my first response was ‘No, it’s too much to take on,’ ” said Richard Keane, the affably avuncular Mountjoy officer who gave me my tour of the hanging house and who, for the last 22 years, has been in charge of the prison workshop. “To make three transportable stage sets for the Gaiety, which is the largest theater in Ireland, as well as 80 or more costumes — I said we can’t do it. Then didn’t they just talk me round?

“I’ve never been to an opera in my life, but they brought us DVDs of two different stagings to get the point of the characters, and we all got hooked — not least because there’s all sorts in that story, as there are in here. From philosophers to seamstresses, you find every kind of person in a prison. So for the past year ‘La Bohème’ has been our life. Ask any of them here.”

Unfortunately for Mark and Jackie they won’t make it to the Gaiety Theater to see the curtain rise on their work. Mountjoy isn’t in the habit of letting its prisoners out for the night. But there may be other opportunities for them to develop their newfound interest.

“This has been a good collaboration,” said Mr. Collopy, the opera executive, “and I don’t think we can let it end here. I’m not saying we’ve turned everyone at Mountjoy and Maiano into opera buffs or that discovering Bohème makes everything right with the world, but it’s certainly opened up something for the people we’ve worked with. It’s had impact. So we have to look at possibilities.”

As one obvious possibility Opera Ireland’s 2007-8 season includes Jake Heggie’s prison-based piece, “Dead Man Walking,” in a production whose details haven’t yet been fixed. Mountjoy could help with that in one way or another.

Meanwhile Jackie in the women’s workshop has a more pressing argument for Opera Ireland to come back. “They promised me a reward for all these costumes,” she said, “a cream slice. And I haven’t had it yet.”

Inmates set for 'cold turkey' money
The Press Association
Monday November 13, 01:34 AM

Prisoners are poised to win undisclosed pay-outs after suing the Home Office because they were forced to stop taking drugs in jail, it was revealed.
Drugs charity DrugScope said the group of six inmates and former inmates who used heroin and other opiates were on the verge of settling out of court with the Prison Service.

The case - alleging the "cold turkey" withdrawal treatment they were forced to undergo amounted to assault - was scheduled to start at the High Court.
The size of the payouts under discussion has not been revealed. But the compensation levels are due to be finalised on Tuesday or Wednesday, legal sources said.

High Court judge Mr Justice Langstaff gave the go-ahead in May for a full hearing of the case. It focused on six test cases chosen from a total pool of 198 claimants. When finally resolved this week, all 198 may be handed compensation by the Prison Service - with sums potentially running into tens of thousands of pounds.
Mr Justice Langstaff said in May: "All claim that their treatment was handled inappropriately and so they suffered injuries and had difficulties with their withdrawal."

Barrister for the claimants Richard Hermer told the court at the time: "Many of the prisoners were receiving methadone treatment before they entered prison and were upset at the short period of treatment using opiates they encountered in jail. Imposing the short, sharp detoxification is the issue."

The prisoners were bringing the action based on trespass, because they say they did not consent to the treatment, and for alleged clinical negligence.

They also claimed human rights breaches under Articles 3 and 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which ban discrimination, torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and Article 8, which enshrines the right to respect for private life.

A Home Office spokeswoman said: "It would be inappropriate to comment because the litigation is still ongoing."

I can't decide if I think this is a good thing or a bad thing. It's not like they have a separate wing for black prisoners, right?

Gay and Transgender prison to close

The unit, was opened in the 1970s in reply to complaints of abusive treatment of gays in the prison system
30-Dec-2005
Ross von Metzke, Chief Correspondent

One of the America's few jail facilities specifically for gay or transgender prisoners is closing on Rikers Island, prompting complaints from gay rights activists who say it is still a much-needed safe haven.

The unit, which opened on the city's island prison complex in the late 1970s in reply to complaints of abusive treatment of homosexuals in the prison system, stopped accepting new inmates last month at the direction of Department of Correction Commissioner Martin Horn.

The facility could be shut entirely within the next few weeks. The prison has accommodation for up to 146 prisoners, but was holding 126 when it began emptying on November 28th of this year. As of Thursday, 56 prisoners remained.

Plans call for the specialized unit to be replaced with a new protective custody system that would be available to prisoners who feel threatened, regardless of their sexual orientation.

The change has alarmed members of some civil liberties and gay rights groups, who note that the new protective housing would likely be more restrictive than the old unit.

Prisoners whose safety was at risk would be locked in their cells for 23 hours a day, rather than be allowed to mingle with other inmates. Prisoners could avoid the extra restrictions by staying in the jail's general population, but there, they might be subject to harassment or worse, activists said.

"We're not talking about people calling you names," said D. Horowitz, a legal fellow at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. "People should not be punished for wanting to be safe."

Eighteen groups sent a letter to Horn on Thursday asking him to reconsider, including the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Legal Aid Society, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

Correction Department spokesman Tom Antenen said the unit, which held only a fraction of the gay inmates at Rikers, was being done away with as part of a broader restructuring of the jail's prisoner classification system.

"Jail administrators have no intention of ignoring Rikers inmates who say they feel threatened because of their sexuality," Mr Antenen said.

"If that is the case, and they need to be protected from the general population, then we will endeavour to provide the best possible security," he said. That could include a "23-hour lockdown," or it might entail moving them to a different city facility.

Specialized housing units for gay prisoners are rare in the U.S., although jails in a few other places do have them. The Federal Bureau of Prisons does not maintain such units anywhere in the country, nor do state prisons in New York.

I thought this chunk from the Independent needed to be posted. Bear in mind that it is likely that this guy is likely to have spent a lifetime in a culture not given to overstatement and he uses very strong language. The picture he paints is very striking and all the more believable to me as I do a comparatively lowly job for the government. It paints a scathing picture of a government agenda driven by right wing tabloids and a privatising agenda. This ought to be cross referenced to a top army general being equally scathing about government policy towards Iraq.

.....................................................................................................................
Lord Ramsbotham exclusive: Justice system is absurd. Broken. Chaotic Published: 30 November 2006 Independent.

The former prison chief lambasts a justice system in meltdown after Tony Blair's decade of failure on crime and punishment
Yesterday's announcement that the prison population now exceeds 80,000 is the latest low point in what one can only describe as the Government's headlong and self-induced race to absurdity as far as the conduct of imprisonment is concerned.

The reasons for this dreadful figure are not hard to find. If you produce legislation that results in longer prison sentences, more people will be in prison. If you do not resource prisons, to enable them to conduct work, education and training, prisoners are more likely to reoffend, as proved by the fact that the reoffending rate among adult males has gone up from 55 per cent to 67 per cent in the past five years. If you continue to have a dysfunctionally organised prison service, you will continue to have dysfunctional organisation of an overstretched system. And so on.

Many people have been warning the Government about this for years but, instead of listening to those with practical experience, it has preferred to take advice from people who know nothing about running large organisations, let alone an operational service. When, as now, the whole is run by a home secretary who, within weeks of taking office, publicly described the Home Office and the overburdened immigration service as not being fit for purpose, and recently disparaged the probation service to prisoners in Wormwood Scrubs, you do not exactly have a recipe for getting out of what is an increasingly dire situation.

Leaders undermine the morale of their own troops at their peril. If, at the same time, you continue to bombard them with a continuous torrent of flawed legislation, much of which replaces previous legislation before the ink on it is dry, you create a mess that can only be cleared up by long-term planning, based on discussion with those who understand not only what needs to be done but how it might be done. That requires ditching current plans that are marching the whole system into even greater chaos.

The result of all the upheaval in the Home Office over the past decade is we have a prison service left in a state of shambles. Every time a governor changes in a prison, then the regime in that prison changes, and all the good work that is under way is in danger of being ditched - it's a ridiculous way of trying to introduce systems that are meant to prevent reoffending.

The probation services are overstretched - there are 300 fewer officers and 1,500 more bureaucrats than five years ago. Now they face a new period of uncertainty as the Government threatens to hand some of their services to the private and voluntary sectors. In addition, they are being asked to focus on the most serious "heavy" offenders, because of pressure from the press, rather than the repeat offenders who cause real concern to the public."

Too bad. You'd think they were eager to repeat our mistakes.

Hi Ekny. Your post is very likely to be right. The hallmark of the Blair government is that if a reorganisation is shown to fail spectacularly, it has to be repeated to fail a second and third time. For this reason, I wouldn't care to think what goes through what passes through the minds of the so called leaders. Take a look at this which I took this off the website of the union I belong to.

There are distinct resonances of BG Series 4 and 5 though reality actually exceeds fiction. If Shed had written this into BG, reviewers would criticise it for being over the top and sensationalising things. The last paragraph but one is definitely written into the script for Karen's verbal protests.


1 Dec 2006

The public are to be offered the chance to buy shares in new prisons under a "buy to let" scheme being considered by the Home Office, it emerged yesterday.

The idea has been suggested in an attempt to overcome the refusal of the chancellor, Gordon Brown, to find extra money for the Prison Service, specifically for 8,000 new prison places at a time when the service is at breaking point.

The plan envisages that the public can be tempted to invest in a new-style property company that would build jails and then rent them out to private prison operators. Supposedly, this would then provide investors with a guaranteed dividend from the "rental income".

Clearly the destruction at Harmondsworth immigration detention centre earlier this week – would not feature in any future prospectus!

A PCS Prison Service Group spokesperson said “With a total of 10 private prisons, Britain already has the most privatised prison system in Europe. Rather than invest in measures which we know will tackle re-offending and the record high prison population crisis, this harebrained scheme will now be another opportunity for the government to deliver more prison work to the privateers.

In the Prison Service we are told that there has to be cost savings in order to compete with the private sector – which in practice means our pay, staffing numbers and our conditions.

If staff ever needed evidence of the ‘madness of privatisation’, the threat to jobs & conditions and the need to support the national PCS campaign – this is it!

Wow, that is about the sickest idea I ever heard. It's going to create a perverse situation where all the "investors" are economically motivated to have MORE people in prison!!!! Blech. Prisons are not something which should be profit centers. The market can not solve every problem, as some conservatives seem to think.

Couldn't agree with you more,especially your last comment, abzug. There's the lyrc of a song that comes to me from time to time,"the lunatics have taken over the asylum.'

So Helen wasn't SO crazy to put Rachel back on the wing, rather than in solitary.

Inmate suicides linked to solitary
Posted 12/27/2006 10:59 PM ET
By Kevin Johnson, USA TODAY
The number of suicides in the nation's two largest state prison systems is ticking upward, and authorities in California and Texas are linking the increase to the rising number of inmates kept in solitary confinement.

In California, which has the largest state prison system with about 170,000 inmates, there have been 41 suicides this year, the most in at least six years and a 17% increase from 2005. Although an estimated 5% of California's inmates are housed in solitary confinement — also known as "administrative segregation" — 69% of last year's suicides occurred in units where inmates are isolated for 23 hours a day, according to state Department of Corrections records. About half the suicides this year were in such units.

In Texas' prison system, which has 169,000 inmates, there have been 24 suicides this year, up from 22 in 2005. Most of the inmates who killed themselves were in some form of solitary confinement, says John Moriarty, inspector general for the prison system.

Texas prisons also are reporting a 17% increase in attempted suicides: 652 so far this year, compared with 559 in 2005. The number of attempted suicides this year is the most in nearly a decade, according to state prison records. Statistics on attempted suicides in California prisons were not immediately available.

The figures from California and Texas are fueling a debate over whether solitary confinement is the best way to control or punish violent or dangerous inmates, particularly those who are mentally ill.

More than 70,000 of the 1.5 million inmates in state and federal prisons are kept in isolation, a reflection of get-tough policies designed to separate rival gang members and those who have gotten into fights while behind bars.

Isolated inmates typically have significant restrictions on visitors and get little help in dealing with the psychological problems that can be caused by isolation. They usually are allowed out of their cells for no more than an hour a day to exercise alone; their exposure to TV and reading material also is limited.

"Are we housing the mentally ill in prison facilities?" Moriarty asks. "I think the answer is yes. But I don't know if that's the best place for them to be."

Moriarty, whose office investigates every inmate death in Texas, says stress from isolation and increasing numbers of inmates with long sentences have contributed to the rise in suicides. "Length of sentence is a big factor. There is despair about not getting out."

The increase in inmate suicides in California has triggered recent changes in segregation units. In October, guards began checking inmates housed in solitary confinement every 30 minutes, rather than every hour, says Shama Chaiken, the state prison system's chief psychologist for mental health policy.

Some segregation cells also will be modified to remove shelving, vent openings and other features that offenders could use in hangings, the most common form of suicide in California prisons, Chaiken says. This month, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced a $1 billion plan that includes 10,000 new beds in prison medical and mental health units.

A few jurisdictions have credited expanded mental health programs with reducing prisoner suicides. After Kentucky set up a mental health program for those in the state's 83 county jails in 2004, suicides in the jails fell 47%, according to The (Louisville) Courier-Journal.

There have been 13 suicides this year in the 188,000-inmate federal prison system, the same total as in 2005. Florida, the third-largest state system with 90,000 inmates, has had nine prison suicides this year; it had eight last year.

Totally stands to reason, don't you think? Why they need deaths upon deaths & a bunch of studies to 'prove' something as evident as the nose on your face is beyond me. Lock someone up for weeks on end with absolutely no respite, and what exactly do they think is going to happen? Score one for our practical Scot.

Ok, people into this thread will want to take a look...

http://www.theprisonfilmproject.com/index.html

This is a very clearly-written, well laid-out set of pages. Following are the references to BG I could find, though it's definitely worth checking out anyway. They also have a current (!) and nice set of links to other prison-related websites & projects. --e


-------------
From the page on the Women in Prison Film:
http://www.theprisonfilmproject.com/prison...nprisonfilm.htm


"[...] Overall, the nature of the depiction of women in prison has changed over the years, from the more serious dramas during the early decades, for this subgenre from the 1930s to the 1950s, to some less noteworthy films in the 1970s and 1980s. Through the 1990s and into the new millennium, as America continues its race towards mass incarceration, women continue to be caught up in the ever expanding prison-industrial complex. How this will be reflected in film is less clear.

Can the women's prison film raise serious issues about criminal incarceration? Or is this sub-genre now hopeless trapped in the category of exploitation cinema?

In recent years Britain has seen few if any film treatments of women's experience of prison. However, women's prison drama continues to have a strong showing on television, most recently with the popular and now long running series Bad Girls. What influence these dramatic representations of prison have on popular perceptions of the role and value of prison within the criminal justice system is surely an issue worthy of serious consideration."

-----------
http://www.theprisonfilmproject.com/prison...rtsandminds.htm

On another page, author David Wilson, co-editor of Images of Incarceration, a book we've previously cited (in one of those threads I can't remember & can't search for!) for its article 'In Praise of Bad Girls', makes passing reference to the show in his website article 'Hearts and Minds: Restorative Justice in Film'. Though the article's downloadable, that version does not include the reference to BG. In the article he discussed the idea of restorative justice vs punitive justice. I found the BG reference a bit oblique, since his use of the word 'conference' wasn't defined in context (or is too British for me), but basically think he was saying: the whole text of the show Bad Girls raises the issue of restorative justice, as it shows that punishment--prisons as they current exist--simply doesn't work.


"You need really to have seen He Got Game to appreciate why it is a Restorative Justice movie. The questions for discussion posed by the film include: Did Jake deserve to go to prison for the crime he committed?’; ‘Does Jake deserve early release, and if so, why?’; and ‘What does He Got Game say about why we punish and what punishment is intended to achieve?’ True He Got Game doesn’t show a restorative conference (although that has been done by the ITV prison drama Bad Girls). But the film does raise some relevant questions for debate and it would be a shame if its debating points were to be overlooked through a failure to recognise that they are there in the film."

--------
There's another paper on this page
http://www.theprisonfilmproject.com/resour...ssayspapers.htm

which contains several even more passing references to BG, simply as part of larger lists. ('Prison Film: Reconnecting Image with Reality', The Prison Film Project 2002)

The Guardian ran a brief article on prison reform last February I just stumbled across. It contains a short reference to the show:

http://society.guardian.co.uk/crimeandpuni...1709611,00.html
from 'Locked in the Past', David Wilson, 15/2/6

"The chances of making much of an inroad into the debate about prisons and prisoners look bleak, but this does not mean that those of us who favour prison contraction and eventual abolition should simply give up. Rather, it means trying to engage with the public in ever more creative ways - including, for example, using the public's fascination with prime-time TV series, such as Bad Girls, to create space in which the case for prison reform can be outlined and explained."

Scarily, the neighborhood I live in is one of the ones identified as "neon-orange" in this article from The New Yorker.
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/arti..._talk_macintyre


CRIMINAL JUSTICE DEPT.
RAP MAP
Issue of 2007-01-08
Posted 2007-01-01

From water pipes to porn shops, cartographers have charted almost every aspect of local urban life, giving rise to a sort of cottage industry: the New York City specialty map. The latest—and one you are not likely to see unless you run in criminal-justice circles—is a rendering of the city that breaks down, block by block, the home addresses of all New Yorkers incarcerated in a given year. This map won’t get you from Century 21 to the Met. But it does reveal that more prison-bound Bronx residents lived in walkups than in any other type of building, that Staten Island is the most law-abiding borough, and that Brooklyn—nicknamed “the borough of churches”—ran up the state’s highest bill in prison costs.

Eric Cadora and Charles Swartz, co-founders of the Brooklyn-based Justice Mapping Center, collaborated on the project with an architect named Laura Kurgan, at Columbia’s Spatial Information Design Lab. “What started out as a scholarly inquiry has turned into a national initiative,” said Cadora, whose team has mapped twelve cities so far. Their New York is a digital crazy quilt of “bright-against-black”: the areas least touched by incarceration in 2003, the year they chose to study (Riverdale, Bay Ridge, the West Village), appear black and gray; those more so (Coney Island, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Hell’s Kitchen) neon orange.

Recently, the mapmakers gathered at Columbia, and Cadora, a substantially built man with a fondness for Camel Lights, turned the face of his laptop to reveal the map. “Zero-value areas”—places where no one went to prison—were shaded black. “You see them crop up all across the city, but they never make up an entire neighborhood,” he said, invoking what might otherwise be a bragging point among New Yorkers: “There is always something going on somewhere.” The exceptions? “What I jokingly call ‘the Mafia neighborhoods’ of South Brooklyn,” he said, “where you’ve got one or two guys going away from an entire neighborhood. Also, this.” He pointed to a dark strip of the Upper East Side—the blocks in the Seventies and Eighties that border Central Park.

Just above was Harlem, the area with the highest rate of incarceration in the city: forty-four people from a single block along East 120th Street headed upstate. Such high-density spots are known as million-dollar blocks, because it takes upward of that in state expenditures to pay for their residents’ lockups. They are, unfailingly, in the city’s poorest neighborhoods—Brownsville, the South Bronx, and South Jamaica among them—great splashes of orange, by the map’s gauge.

Cadora and his team calculated every block’s prison costs by multiplying the minimum sentence of each incarcerated person by his estimated annual prison fees ($32,400), then adding these numbers together. By this logic, a serial killer on Fifth Avenue who gets a life sentence could make up his own million-dollar block. The borough with the most million-dollar blocks is Manhattan (“mainly because the blocks are so small”); the city’s most expensive block in 2003, a housing project along Harlem River Drive, not far from Yankee Stadium, cost the state $6.2 million and had forty-nine of its six hundred and eighty-nine male residents put behind bars.

The map’s data are largely gleaned from prison entry forms. Early in the study, Cadora noticed that an inordinate amount of people gave the same home address, in Queens. Curious, he looked up the address and found not a residential building but an institution: Rikers Island. Why so many New Yorkers would call a jail known as the House of Pain home is “a whole ’nother story,” Cadora said. “A lot are probably homeless, and one of the hugest problems for anyone coming out of prison is finding a place to live.” Cadora and his team believe that their map depicts a system spending millions to imprison people but little on the communities to which they return.

Cadora clicked on a map of New York State that charted the migration patterns of Brooklyn criminals: thousands of lines sprang from Kings County to prisons all over—Attica, Watertown, Great Meadow. The image was striking, like a bird’s spread wing. (“We’ve had art galleries ask to exhibit the maps,” Kurgan said.) Cadora has been pleased by the reaction of legislators. “It’s no longer just about getting tough or being soft on crime,” he said. “It’s ‘What are we going to do about Bed-Stuy?’ ”

Who'd be a Prison governor?

Although the job has an image problem, high-flying graduates are now running our jails, says Ian Wylie
Ian Wylie
Saturday April 8, 2006

Guardian
There are moments in our working lives when the power to lock someone up and throw away the key seems an appealing perk. But on some days even the chippiest of prison governors must feel they're the ones serving the sen