Three Strikes and Civil Rights

Guest post by Bill Boyarsky*

The racism within the police-court-prison system is one of America’s most neglected evils, as is the impact it has on the poor African-American and Latino communities that are home for so many released convicts.

I’m wondering if I’ve already lost some of my readers. Who cares about criminals? Some of the journalists I met last week said they get the same reaction from their editors.


I joined them at a symposium sponsored by New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s Center on Media, Crime and Justice designed to encourage better reporting of this neglected field…. My fellow attendees were journalists working for newspapers, radio stations and online operations. Some were staff reporters, others freelancers….

The main topic was how to report the long and repetitive controversy over California’s three-strikes law, a draconian statute approved by the voters in 1994 after the horrible murder of 12-year-old Polly Klass by an ex-convict. The killer had been released from prison after serving eight years of a 16-year sentence for a series of armed robberies. Previously, he served six years in prison after he attempted a rape, brutally assaulted a woman in the course of a burglary, and tried to kidnap another woman at gunpoint.

The solution to this was based on a sports analogy, except, in this case, the third strike means you’re in—in prison for a long time and often for a small offense. The law imposes a mandatory sentence of 25 years to life for anyone convicted of a felony if that person has two previous felony convictions. The third-strikes sentence has been imposed for nonviolent offenses—such as stealing videos, golf clubs or even a pizza—permitted by the law to be raised to felony status.

The discussions ranged far beyond three-strikes. Through all the conversations, an underlying issue, to me, was racism.

Racism has always been a powerful force in the web of police, prosecutors, judges, prison guards and wardens who make up the criminal justice system.

But beginning in the 1980s the war on drugs made it worse, with repeated raids on poor African-American and Latino neighborhoods while the police and prosecutors generally ignored economically better-off whites using cocaine in the safety of their homes.

Connie Rice, a civil rights attorney who heads the Advancement Project, has long fought for racial justice by police, prosecutors and the courts, as well as in the schools and other institutions. She told the journalists the war on drugs was based on crime suppression in poor, minority areas. Police stop young men and arrest them when they suspect drug possession. Arrests add up over the years to a third strike.

The three-strikes prosecutions, said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Irvine School of Law, focus disproportionately on African-Americans and Latinos. Thirty-seven percent of such inmates are African-Americans and 33 percent are Latinos. These statistics are in line with national figures showing that African-Americans and Latinos outnumber whites in prison by a margin of almost 2-to-1.

Veteran activist Tom Hayden, an expert on gangs, talked about the lack of jobs confronting convicts when they leave prison. A one-striker, returned to the old neighborhood unemployed and without prospects, is just a crime away from being a two-striker and then committing the third. “Deindustrialization has eliminated jobs people took after prison,” he said.

The journalists’ challenge, said Connie Rice, is “to connect the dots,” to put all these elements into a coherent, compelling story.

That’s a big challenge, and journalism may not be up to it. At the end of the meeting, the hard facts of life in today’s media climate intruded. One reporter said her editors weren’t interested in the subject because they didn’t think the readers cared. Another was a court reporter who wanted to explore how the system works on the streets. But her beat includes two courthouses, separated by many miles in a sprawling county. I doubt whether she has much time for prowling the streets. A third reporter talked about the strains imposed on the remaining members of a staff hit by layoffs.

Add to those obstacles Internet editors’ demands for quick and numerous short stories that will produce more hits and page views.

Despite the challenges, I left the room tremendously impressed with the energy of the reporters. One said he had thought of 21 story ideas during the symposium.

The journalists are today’s civil rights reporters, engaged in a job as big and challenging, but much more unglamorous, than that of an earlier generation. During the civil rights movement, it was easy to get people worked up about an African-American kid barred from a school or a church burned down. Today, it is almost impossible to stimulate the interest of editors and audiences in a black or Latino ex-convict hoping for a fresh chance rather than a third strike.

*Originally posted at Truthdig. Re-posted with written permission from Bill Boyarsky. 

Bill Boyarsky is a lecturer in journalism at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and is vice president of the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission. A former city editor, columnist, bureau chief and political writer for the Los Angeles Times , he was a member of reporting teams that won three Pulitzer prizes. In 2010, the Los Angeles Press Club honored his political columns at Truthdig by naming him as Online Journalist of the Year.

Steffan's Alerts #4: Supermax, school shooters and Asperger's

Click on a title to read the article abstract; click on a highlighted author's name to request the full article.

Ethics of solitary confinement and supermax prisons

The Journal of Forensic Psychology Practice has published online a new issue focusing on ethics in criminal justice settings. Sharon Shalev offers an analysis of ethics in solitary confinement and supermax prisons and calls for more active participation by health professionals in these settings.

Asperger’s Disorder and the criminal justice system

Criminology and Criminal Justice has published Laura Caulfield and Ann Browning’s review of the literature on the connection between Asperger’s Disorder and criminality as well as the criminal justice system’s understanding of the condition.

Serious assaults on prison staff

In the Journal of Criminal Justice, Mark Cunningham and colleagues examine assaults on prison staff occurring over a 14 month period in a state correctional system. They provide data on prevalence of serious assaults and characteristics of inmate perpetrators and staff victims.

Are school shooters and suicide bombers more alike than different?

Adam Lankford and Nayab Hakim posit that they are, based on their review of school shooters in the United States and suicide bombers in the Middle East. Their article appears in Aggression and Violent Behavior.

Assessing intervention targets in sex offender treatment

Melissa Grady and colleagues review the psychometric properties and validation of measures commonly used in sexual offending treatment programs. The authors offer recommendations on measures to assess core treatment areas in their new article in Aggression and Violent Behavior.

Treatment for child sexual abuse victims and their families

In the same issue of Aggression and Violent Behavior, Poonam Tavkar and David Hanson offer information on effective treatment options for victims of child sexual abuse and their non-offending family members.

Steffan's alerts are brought to you by Jarrod Steffan, Ph.D., a forensic and clinical psychologist based in Wichita, Kansas. For more information about Dr. Steffan, please visit his website.

Good news on young criminals

Desistance the rule, with or without incarceration 

The most thorough study to date, just released by The U.S. Department of Justice, brings lots of good news about criminal desistance among serious adolescent offenders.

The most important finding is that even adolescents who have committed serious offenses are not necessarily on track for adult criminal careers. Only a small proportion of the offenders studied continued to offend at a high level throughout the followup period.

The other critical finding was that incarceration is for the most part unnecessary and ineffective:

Longer stays in juvenile facilities did not reduce reoffending; institutional placement even raised offending levels in those with the lowest level of offending.

Instead, the study found, interventions that combined community-based supervision and substance abuse treatment helped youthful offenders stay in school, get jobs, and avoid further offending.

"Pathways to Desistance" is a multidisciplinary project that intensively followed 1,354 serious juvenile offenders ages 14 to 18 (184 girls and 1,170 boys) in metropolitan Arizona and Pennsylvania for 7 years after their convictions. Data included multiple interviews with the young offenders and their families, and analyses of official records. Edward Mulvey, Ph.D., director of the Law and Psychiatry Program at the University of Pittburgh Medical School, authored the study, which was just released by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

The findings should be welcome news not only for young miscreants and their loved ones, but also for taxpayers, as it supports the current move toward less expensive community interventions as an alternative to costly juvenile prisons.

Steffan's Alerts #3: Women, children, fire-setting and the public

Click on a title to read the article abstract; click on a highlighted author's name to request the full article.

JAAPL: Plethora of mental health and law offerings

As always, the new issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law is a goldmine for those interested in law and mental health matters. All articles may be accessed for free online. Topics include use of the DSM in litigation and legislative settings, rational understanding and competency to stand trial, treatment of sexual offenders, hebephilia and the DSM-5, competency of pregnant women with psychosis, diversion of women into substance abuse treatment, and analyses of several recent legal rulings, to name a few.

Sins of the father

In a new issue of the British Journal of Criminology, Sytske Besemer and colleagues examine whether children whose parents have been incarcerated are later involved in the criminal justice system at disproportionate rates compared to children whose parents have been convicted but never imprisoned in the Netherlands and England. After controlling for a number of possible intervening variables in their longitudinal study, the authors provide data showing that children in the latter--but not the former--country are adversely affected by their parents' incarceration.

Advancing understanding and predictive utility of childhood firesetting

Although mental health professionals have long held that deliberate fire setting by children is prognostic of future conduct problems, Ian Lambie and Isabel Randell review how science in this area has progressed -- or not progressed -- in a new issue of Clinical Psychology Review. They call for future research to address the relationship between youth firesetting and future antisocial behavior as well as to update best practices in assessing and intervening with children who set fires.

Factors involved in reporting rapes

Data from a national survey of 3,001 women in 2006 indicated that the rate of reporting rape has not significantly changed since the 1990s. In a new issue of Journal of Interpersonal Violence, lead author Kate Wolitzky-Taylor explores barriers and predictors of reporting sexual assaults to law enforcement.

Criminal justice response to female offenders

In a forthcoming issue of Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, Shabnam Javdani, Naomi Sadeh, and Edelyn Verona advance theory on the legal and social policy factors involved in the increasing arrest rates of girls and women.

Public's views on sentencing practices

Does the public really support tougher sentencing of offenders? Preliminary data suggests this is not the case in Australia when members of the public are provided details about the personal lives of offenders. In a new issue of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Austin Lovegrove sampled several hundred participants through their review and discussion of judges' sentences on six offenders in four actual cases.

Steffan's alerts are brought to you by Jarrod Steffan, Ph.D., a forensic and clinical psychologist based in Wichita, Kansas. For more information about Dr. Steffan, please visit his website.

Economy, abuse scandals drive sea change in US juvie lockups

As USA Today’s Martha Moore reports:

 States sending juvenile delinquents back where they came from

 

Photo credit: Richard Ross

California, seeking to close a $26 billion deficit, and New York, with a $10 billion budget gap, are moving to close state youth prisons for good and instead let local governments lock up young offenders.

State youth lockups are easy targets for cost-cutters and reformers: They cost a lot and, according to data showing high rates of repeat offenders, accomplish little….

New York has been under pressure to improve its juvenile justice system since a 2009 federal investigation -- sparked by the death of a 15-year-old boy -- found that state youth prisons used excessive force. States including Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania have reduced the number of kids sent to state lockups by offering financial incentives to counties to keep youthful offenders in local programs. Ohio, for instance, has reduced the number of juveniles in state lockups from almost 1,800 in 2007 to 736 this year.

Photo credit: Richard Ross

But New York City and California would go a step further by virtually eliminating the state's role.

California once had the largest number of young people in lockups: from 10,000 in 2005 to 1,200 now. It has cut that number dramatically after a 2007 law required the release of non-violent offenders.

Gov. Jerry Brown's budget called for the state to close its four juvenile prisons, currently housing about 1,200 youths, by 2014 and send money to the state's 58 counties to run their own lockups. After protests from counties, a revised proposal announced last week would keep some state youth prisons open and allow counties without secure lockups for youths to pay to send kids to the state juvenile prison. Counties that want to run their own youth lockups could use state money to do that instead.

In New York, where 700 youths are in state lockups, Gov. Andrew Cuomo wants to close juvenile prisons despite local opposition over lost jobs. Meanwhile, New York City, which accounts for more than half the youths in state custody at a cost of $270,000 per youth per year, wants to opt out of the state system entirely.

A system run by the city — with funding from the state — would be cheaper and more effective if only because it would be nearby, says John Feinblatt, criminal justice coordinator for Mayor Michael Bloomberg. "Some of these kids have tough relationship with the families, but what you don't want to do is break those relationships any further than they are broken, he says. "What you want to do with a 14-, 15-year-old is build on what connections already exist."

Photo credit: Richard Ross

The city's plan is modeled on Detroit, which began handling almost all its juvenile cases in 2000 and where the number of youth sent to state facilities dropped from more than 730 in 1998 to 18 in 2009.

The proposals have roused opposition from people who don't want to see jobs lost when state youth prisons close. And juvenile justice advocates are divided on whether it's a good idea to get rid of the state programs altogether.

"I've seen too many kids die because the state wasn't appropriately regulating what was going on at the local level,'' says Barry Krisberg, a Berkeley law professor and juvenile justice expert.

Counties in California say they cannot handle more kids, especially the violent offenders still in state youth prisons. "You're asking them to take back kids that they've rejected. It's like asking the school principal to take back the kids that they've expelled," says Dan Macallair, executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, an advocacy group.

Advocates fear that losing the state youth prisons mean that county prosecutors will increasingly charge juveniles in adult court. The number of juveniles tried as adults has already increased in California. Even though state youth prisons are bad, advocates say, prisons are worse….

Photo credit: Richard Ross

Some advocates say the California state youth agency has been so bad for so long that it should be scrapped for good. "Right now we're dooming them all to certain hell." says Jakadi Imani, executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland. Eliminating the state system means "we open up the possibility that kids will actually get help." …

County programs have their own problems. Los Angeles' youth detention system has already been investigated by the Justice Department.

Alameda County, where Oakland is located, will build a youth lockup to accommodate kids that would have gone to state youth prisons, says David Muhammad, the county's head of probation. "A huge concern is, you close (the state agency) completely, fund the counties to supervise this population but only fund it for five years. What happens after that?"

The full story is HERE.

Photos are from Richard Ross's marvelous exhibit, Juvenile-in-Justice (HERE).

New column: Ethics and captive populations

A recent photo in the Los Angeles Times pictured a psychologist administering therapy to a group of men locked in cages the size of phone booths. An expert advised that the cages should be called "therapeutic modules," lest the prisoners "feel like animals and respond accordingly." The arrangement is the prison's response to a judicial mandate to provide treatment to mentally ill prisoners. But as the photo illustrates, much prison therapy is far removed from traditional treatments that psychologists are trained to provide.

So begins my "Ethics Corner" column in the current issue of California Psychologist magazine, which evolved out of a blog post a few months ago, "Prison therapy: It's all in the name." The full column is HERE. I have also created a stand-alone web page of selected resources on correctional ethics (HERE).

Wearing body armor and sitting just out of urination range, psychologist Daniel Tennenbaum tries to engage Vacaville prisoners to sing along with "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay." Photo credit Los Angeles Times.

A plug for the CPA: For those of you in California, I hope you will think about joining the California Psychological Association if you are not already a member. The CPA gives psychologists a voice, has local associations that facilitate networking (and socializing), and provides a number of member benefits, including the Ethics Committee's free hotline.

Supermax: Hell on earth or . . . not as bad as we thought?

I thought everyone knew that being locked up alone in a tiny cell -- sometimes for years at a stretch -- is bad for one's psyche.

But I was wrong. Based on a one-year project with the Colorado Department of Corrections, a group of researchers says there is a dearth of evidence to support the popular notion that solitary confinement exacerbates psychiatric symptoms among mentally ill prisoners. Although the prisoners they studied did manifest problems, these were preexisting and so could not be attributed to the effects of administrative segregation confinement, the researchers contend.

I was dubious when I heard the researchers present their study, "One-Year Longitudinal Study of the Psychological Effects of Administrative Segregation," at the APA's annual convention last year. Having worked in a Segregated Housing Unit ("SHU") for mentally ill prisoners, I saw with my own eyes the rapid and profound mental deterioration of mentally ill prisoners assigned to the SHU.

Even prisoners who had no preexisting mental disorders fell apart when subjected to prolonged isolation. I will never forget one youngster, a first-timer incarcerated for violating probation in a minor stolen property case, who was sent to the SHU for protection after he reported being raped by his cellmate. They ended up taking him out on a stretcher following a serious suicide attempt. The last time I saw him, when I visited him on the medical ward of a maximum-security prison, he was completely changed from the happy-go-lucky kid I had known.

But he started out healthy. Maybe, contrary to popular wisdom, the mentally ill -- at least those in Colorado -- have more robust psyches than everyone else. Or maybe they are asocial or masochistic. Anyway, I'm just telling you my own personal anecdotes. That's not science.

Study under fire

The report just came out, and already it is generating a lot of heat from those who fear it will be used to legitimize continued warehousing of mentally ill prisoners in SHU's. The ACLU has issued a statement pointing out that the Colorado findings contradict a sizeable body of research, not to mention common sense.

Two leading experts on prison conditions, psychiatrists Terry Kupers and Stuart Grassian, are publicly assailing the study as fatally flawed. They criticize the researchers for not conducting interviews with the prisoners who were the subjects of the year-long study.

"The methodology of the study is so deeply flawed that I would consider the conclusions almost entirely erroneous," said Kupers, author of Prison Madness: The Mental Health Crisis Behind Bars. "And far from finding 'no harm,' there were many episodes of psychosis and suicidal behavior during the course of the study -- the researchers merely minimize the emotional pain and suffering because they judge the prisoners to have been already damaged before they arrived at supermax."

Grassian, the former Harvard professor who coined the term segregation psychosis and who has done research with hundreds of prisoners in solitary confinement, said he notified the researchers of several severe methodological flaws, including a failure to analyze contradictory data, but the flaws were not addressed.

Grassian said the prison's own records document almost two incidents of suicidal or self-destructive behavior for every three prisoners in solitary confinement (63%), compared with less than one incident for every ten prisoners (9%) in the general population.

Since the supermax craze took off in the early 1990s, almost every U.S. state has signed on to the dubious concept, and an estimated 25,000 American prisoners are now locked 24/7 in these tiny, antiseptic cubicles. Although SHU housing was originally intended for relatively short terms of confinement, nowadays prisoners may remain in these constantly lit and electronically surveilled sensory deprivation holes for years -- or even decades. A federal court recently agreed to hear a challenge brought by a man named Tommy Silverstein who has spent a whopping 27 years in solitary confinement.

If they had just talked with the prisoners …

While the Colorado correctional researchers were busy tabulating survey data instead of talking with the prisoners themselves about their subjective experiences, a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley took the exact opposite approach, and -- not surprisingly -- came to diametrically opposed conclusions.

Keramet Reiter's series of in-depth interviews with former SHU prisoners in California, far and away the world's leader with about 3,330 SHU prisoners, was part of her research into the rise of supermaximum confinement in America.

The settings that the men chose was telling in and of itself: After years in tiny, concrete-filled boxes, almost all asked to meet her either outdoors of close to a window.

Reiter told UC reporter Cathy Cockrell that she was moved by the former prisoners' tragic accounts of the effects of sensory deprivation.

"People spoke of having no clocks, daylight, or seasons to mark the passage of time; growing pale from lack of sunlight; and being amazed at the sight of a single bird, insect, or even the moon, after months or years of virtually no exposure to the natural world."

But, hey, maybe if they had been mentally ill to start with, they wouldn't have minded ad-seg so much. Just a serene vacation, away from the hubbub and stress of general population housing.

Not a vacation I would ever want to take but, hey, that's just me.

Further readings:

• Keramet Reiter: Parole, snitch or die: California’s supermax prisons and prisoners, 1987-2007, July 7, 2010

• Atul Gawande, New Yorker magazine: Hellhole: The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture? March 30, 2009

• National Public Radio series: "Life in Solitary Confinement"

• Solitary Watch: On Bradley Manning, Solitary Confinement, and Selective Outrage, by Jean Casella and James Ridgeway, Jan. 2, 2011

Drawings: (1) Prisoner sketch by Herman Wallace, Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola; (2) prisoner sketch, Pelican Bay, California; (3) prisoner sketch, Tommy Silverstein, ADX federal supermax, Florence, Colorado; (4) prisoner sketch, Pelican Bay, California; (5) my (comparatively crude) sketch of a suicidal prisoner whom I observed chained to the floor of a bare concrete "protective" cell.

My Psychology Today post, at my blog Witness, is HERE. For more frequent posts by me on this and other topics, subscribe to my Twitter feed, HERE.

Prison therapy: It's all in the name

Look at the above picture. What do you see? You should see a monkey in a cage. (More precisely, a capuchin monkey rescued from a laboratory.)


Now look at the second picture. If you again see a cage (or two), your eyes are playing tricks on you. These are not cages. They are "therapeutic modules." It's the California prison system's response to a judicial mandate to provide treatment to mentally ill prisoners.

Using the correct term is important, according to a psychiatric expert quoted by Jack Dolan in today's Los Angeles Times: "If you call them cages, people inside might feel like animals and respond accordingly."

Pictured here is music therapist Daniel Tennenbaum, wearing a flak vest as he strums a sing-along rendition of Otis Redding's "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay":

... I had nothin to live for
And look like nothing's gonna come my way ...
Look like nothing's gonna change
Everything still remains the same ...

I'm just sitting on the dock of the bay
Wasting time

One wonders whether the "therapeutic module" euphemism is truly for the benefit of the prisoners, or more for the psychologists providing window dressing, who want to think that therapeutic healing is possible under such cruel and inhumane conditions.

And if mere renaming can alter reality, then Mina over at Psydoctor8 has a better idea. We could refer to the prisons as "Hawaii." Then, the prisoners might feel like hula dancers instead of caged animals.

Juvenile In Justice: An online gallery

Art professor Richard Ross is traveling the United States and photographing juvenile institutions. The project, Juvenile In Justice, is partially funded by the Guggenheim Foundation and the Annie E. Casey Foundation and will be published next year. The 196 photos in the online gallery are well worth checking out. While you are there, visit his related collection, Architecture of Authority. Stunning stuff.

From the top: Los Angeles, California; Cook County, Illinois; Biloxi, Mississippi

Prison overcrowding: Chickens coming home to roost

U.S. Supreme Court to hear critical California case

When is the last time you heard of prisoners and prison guards teaming up in a legal case?

They are united on the same side in a case set to be argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday.

The case concerns prison overcrowding in California, where about 164,00 prisoners are crowded into facilities designed to hold less than half that number. The state is fighting a federal district court that the massive population must be cut by 40,000 to allow for minimally adequate mental health and medical treatment.

“The case is being widely watched across the U.S, as other states grapple with California-style problems: tough sentencing laws that filled up prisons even as the economy battered state budgets,” write Joanna Chung and Bobby White in today’s Wall Street Journal. Eighteen states have filed briefs backing California in the case of Schwarzenegger vs. Plata, arguing that releasing prisoners would threaten public safety.

The issue of inadequate mental care in California prisons has been in the courts since 1991, when Ralph Coleman filed a lawsuit that was eventually merged with prisoner Marciano Plata’s similar lawsuit of 2001. The district court appointed an independent expert to oversee prison health care. That expert, law professor Clark Kelso, believes the court-ordered reductions in the prisoner population are needed to achieve "sustainable constitutional health care" in the face of continued prison construction.

As Chung and White report:

The rare alliance of California's powerful prison guard union and the inmates illustrates the severity of the situation, legal experts say. "It should not be a surprise to anyone that the chickens have come home to roost after a series of disastrous policy choices that has landed California in this position," says David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Prison Project, which has filed a brief on behalf of the inmates….

Tough sentencing laws enacted by the state during the 1990s, including the three-strikes-and-you're-out law, as well as a parole crackdown that's returned violators to return to prison even for minor infractions, fueled the dramatic rise of California's prison population….

When Edmund G. "Jerry" Brown Jr. first was governor in the 1970s, California's prisons housed more than 20,000 inmates. When Mr. Brown, who won back his old job in this month's elections, returns to office in January, he will oversee more than 160,000….

The California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the 30,000-strong prison guard union, says the state's current strategy of building more prisons at home and shipping overflow inmates to out-of-state private penitentiaries won't solve the long term trend. Ryan Sherman, an association spokesman, says: "You can't build your way out of this.... We need real reform, not a numbers game."

Mr. Sherman wants the state to invest in more medical staff and equipment to address the poor conditions that instigated the lawsuits. While the prison population rose dramatically over the last few year he says the state never kept pace with investments in doctors and nurses and better health facilities.

Meanwhile, the state California faces a $6 billion shortfall for the current fiscal year ending June 30 and a $19 billion shortfall for the next fiscal year, according to the nonpartisan state Legislative Analysts Office.

"The way that California ends up dealing with this problem will be an example for other states with massive budget problems and overcrowded prisons to watch and learn from," says Anthony S. Barkow, head of New York University law school's center on criminal law, which filed a brief on behalf of the inmates.

Hat tip: Kathleen

Postscript: An update on Tuesday's hearing can be found HERE. Meanwhile, as reported HERE, California is responding to the threat of a population cap by frantically shipping prisoners to private prisons in other states. Medical and mental health care is much worse in these privately run institutions, where violence is not only tolerated but may be encouraged, according to an Associated Press news story (with video of an incident in a private prison in Idaho). (By the way, did you know that the private prison industry, hankering for more captive bodies, helped author Arizona's anti-immigrant law? That fascinating story is HERE.) KALW radio has some good background on the crisis, including an audiotaped report on medical care at San Quentin.

Abuse rampant in California prisons

Mentally disabled prisoners in California are routinely beaten, robbed, sexually assaulted and deprived of food and sanitation. And in a "climate of indifference," prison officials have virtually ignored a 2001 court order mandating that they identify and protect these most vulnerable prisoners.

That was the opinion a federal judge issued last week in refusing to lift the 9-year-old court order. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer's ruling followed a 6-day trial. The judge cited one instance in which a mentally disabled prisoner lost 35 pounds in five months because his cellmate was stealing his food and guards only laughed at him when he requested their help.

Sacramento Bee series: Prisoner abuse widespread

The judicial ruling echoes a stellar investigative series by reporter Charles Piller of the Sacramento Bee, who obtained and analyzed thousands of pages of documents and interviewed dozens of insiders, including confidential sources. The resulting picture of the inside of California prisons is not pretty:

• Guards fabricating rule violations that extended the time of prisoners they didn't like, including prisoner activists

• Prisoners losing "good time" credits for breaking minor rules, such as stepping across a line on the concrete

• A rigged system in which nearly all prisoners charged with rule violations are found guilty, and appeals or complaints against guards are fruitless

• Light discipline even when officers severely injure or kill prisoners

In one case, an officer needlessly punched a prisoner in the head, broke his elbows, and then lied about it in reports. The penalty? A 12-day suspension.

"The degree of civilization in a society
can be judged by entering its prisons."

-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1860)

Undermining the appeals process, according to prisoners and former officers, is prisoners' fear of retaliation. Edgar Martinez, a former prisoner at High Desert, claimed that guards trampled his belongings and strip-searched him in a snow-covered yard. He said he watched guards provoke fights among inmates and tell others, "this [complaint] needs to go away or we're going to make your life a living hell." Afterward, Martinez said, he was too terrified to protest the mistreatment.

In a 2007 case, guards viciously beat several prisoners and denied them adequate medical treatment, yet not a single one filed a complaint, according to a former lieutenant named Gerald Edwards. Prisoners know that filing a complaint may lead to retaliation, including being shipped off to a different prison dominated by racial or ethnic enemies.

Behavior modification units a living hell

If routine conditions are bad, they are nothing compared to the cruelty, corruption and racism that Piller found when he investigated the so-called behavior modification units.

High Desert State Prison. Photo credit: Ben Kutchins, "Prison Town USA"

These are the units where recalcitrant prisoners, disproportionately African American, are subjected to "extreme isolation and deprivation -- long periods in a cell without education, social contact, TV or radio." A prisoner at the Salinas Valley unit went five months without exercise, sunlight or fresh air, according to his successful lawsuit. At the High Desert facility, prisoners described "hours-long strip-searches in a snow-covered exercise yard. They said correctional officers tried to provoke attacks between inmates, spread human excrement on cell doors and roughed up those who peacefully resisted mistreatment. One said guards contaminated prisoners' food with dirt and insects and starved those who complained.

Many of the prisoners' claims were backed by legal and administrative filings, and signed affidavits, which together depicted an environment of brutality, corruption and fear." As Edward Thomas, a former prisoner in the High Desert unit, described it, it was "like something that happens in a concentration camp."

"Black monkey unit": Abuse based on skin color

While about a third of California prisoners are black, blacks comprised a majority of prisoners subjected to the High Desert behavior unit. Guards referred to the unit as the "black monkey unit" and joked about how the "monkeys" are "always hanging around in there" -- a macabre reference to suicide attempts by prisoners of color.

"Guards seemed to view behavior modification as a license to make inmates as miserable as possible to compel obedience," Piller reported.

"Several inmates described an incident when staff left one inmate on the floor with rectal bleeding and refused to take him to get medical attention," according to the report of a group of state researchers. When guards arrived, "they said 'It's the f---ing n----- again, let him die.' And they left him there."

Their July 2007 visit to High Desert shook up the state researchers, said one, a sociologist who lectures at UC Davis and has more than 25 years of corrections research experience. Norm Skonovd said he had never seen a similar case. The researchers were allegedly chastised when they reported what they had seen, and were told to tone down and bury the prisoner allegations of abuse. Skonovd claims he suffered professional retaliation.

Correctional abuse: A cause of violence and recidivism?

Prisoners said the behavior modification units were so dreaded that they would act out so they would be placed in "the hole" instead. This, the researchers noted, could lead to more violence behind bars. Indeed, although the units were "sold to lawmakers as a way to reduce recidivism," their brutality would likely lead to more anger and, hence, more convicts returning to prison, the researchers theorized.

For you blog readers who aren’t from California, why should you care?

Because, like Milan is to the fashion industry, so California is a trendsetter for the global prison industry. You all know by now that the USA is the world's premiere Prison Nation, locking up 1 out of 100 residents. But if California were a country, we would rank seventh in the world -- behind the USA, China, Russia, and a handful of others. (That's by raw numbers. If you go by proportion of the population incarcerated, we fall further back; only one out of every 36 adult Californians is under correctional control, compared with a whopping one out of 13 adult Georgians. Hint: Maps showing rates of incarceration for U.S. states look eerily similar when juxtaposed with maps showing states' proportions of African Americans. Click on the links to see for yourself.)

I highly encourage all of you to read the Bee series (available HERE). Muckraking journalism is practically dead these days, with the daily news biz more and more resembling interchangeable strip malls along the highways -- corporate-owned, homogenized, and full of quick-and-dirty crime bytes. And the prison news beat is especially hard to cover, because access is so highly controlled and critical information subjected to censorship (as "Red Hog" reported in Committing Journalism).

I wonder how Dostoyevsky would have rated the civilization level of modern California.

Report: Sexual abuse rampant in U.S. prisons

I will never forget "Sean," a young man I treated in prison. When he first arrived after a minor theft conviction, the 19-year-old was assigned a cell with an older convict who saw him as fresh meat. When Sean reported being raped, he was moved to a segregation housing unit for safety. Solitary housing was like torture for this active young man. After months without stimulation, he tried to hang himself. He was punished by being transferred to a harsher prison.

Sean came to mind when I saw the report released today from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reporting epidemic levels of sexual abuse of prisoners across the United States. At least 88,500 prison and jail inmates were abused last year, many repeatedly. Several facts in the report, mandatory under the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, are worth highlighting:

• Guards commit much of the abuse
• Women prisoners are more at risk from other prisoners, while men are most at risk from guards
• Gay, transgender, and effeminate prisoners are at heightened risk, as are prisoners with histories of sexual abuse
• Much of the abuse happens on the first day
  

Graphics credit: Just Detention International

The news comes as no surprise to the folks at Just Detention International, an organization dedicated to ending sexual abuse behind bars. They receive dozens of letters a week from prisoners who are being sexually abused.

• William in Texas wrote that he would misbehave to get locked in the hole just to get away from the guard who was sexually abusing him. He has tried to kill himself, and fears telling his longtime girlfriend.

• James, a gay prisoner in Michigan, has been raped more than 20 times by numerous prisoners. "Do you know what it's like to see their faces each day? Seeing the look they give me? Knowing that they smile and laugh,” he wrote.

A call for research and action by psychology

Just ahead of the report's release, two psychologists published an article in Psychology, Public Policy, and Law calling for more attention to the problem. "To date, psychology has been largely silent on the issue of prison rape," wrote Tess Neal and Carl Clements of the University of Alabama.

In their article, "Prison Rape and Psychological Sequelae: A Call for Research," Neal and Clements call for research into the "rape subculture" that makes sexual victimization more prevalent in American prisons than elsewhere in the world:

It appears that prison rape in the United States is a much more serious problem than it is in other countries. This fact calls for comparative analysis of systems to look for correlates of victimization rates. What is it about the U.S. prison system that exacerbates the problem of prison rape? Some would argue that inordinately high incarceration rates, and policies that capture more persons with mental disorders is part of the systemic problem. Can these conditions be reversed?

They go on to discuss the "serious and long-lasting" effects of prison rape, "with potentially devastating physiological, social, and psychological components":

Many rapes are violent, bloody, and physically traumatic to victims. Gang rapes are often characterized by extreme abuse and may be particularly traumatic. In addition, the threat and reality of contracting HIV/AIDS has added a new dimension of physical and psychological terror for victims. Loss of social status in the prison facility, labeling, stigmatization, and further victimization are other potential consequences for victims…. The postrape symptoms of prison rape survivors may be even more complex and pervasive than those of other types of sexual assaults based on the fact that many victims are repeatedly assaulted, experience negative social reactions from the prison community, including many staff, and may be perceived as homosexual. The humiliation and perceived loss of one's masculinity, as well as the extensive victim blaming found in prisons could perpetuate the negative psychological effects, possibly increasing the risk of developing PTSD.

The role of expert witnesses

Under the 1994 U.S. Supreme Court case of Farmer v. Brennan, prison administrations are liable when they practice "deliberate indifference" to prison rape. Neal and Clements discuss how expert psychological testimony may be useful in such civil litigation, the authors explain, both to explain the psychological sequelae experienced by prisoners and to discuss the environments that foster prison rape. Further research is also needed into the legal atmosphere surrounding such litigation, they note:

Courtroom dynamics in these atypical cases (e.g., when a male prison rape survivor is a plaintiff filing suit against prison officials) need to be examined. Public biases should be identified so that they can be countered with informative testimony to dispel them. Investigations using the diagnosis of PTSD in these circumstances should be initiated to learn more about how jurors respond to the traumatic aspects of prison rape victimization. As research uncovers more accurate descriptions of the psychological sequelae of such victimization, researchers should examine how jurors respond to these new descriptions in a courtroom setting

The full report by BJS statisticians Allen J. Beck and Paige M Harrison is HERE; selected highlights and a press release are HERE. Correspondence concerning the Psychology, Public Policy, and Law should go to Tess Neal of the University of Alabama.

Related blog posts:

• Prison pipeline for transgender youth (March 26, 2008)
• Researching prison rape (Aug. 10, 2009)
• Reports of sexual assault in prison implicate guards (Aug. 18, 2007)

APA Dispatch II: Whither juvenile forensics?

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling this May in Graham v. Florida, restricting life without parole sentences for juveniles, relied in part upon scientific evidence from developmental psychology and neuroscience. In ruling that juveniles are categorically different from adults, the high court was assisted by amicus briefs from the American Psychological Association and other professional organizations including the American Psychiatric Association and the National Association of Social Workers.

The APA's position, which the Supreme Court also validated in its 2005 ruling in Roper v. Simmons outlawing the death penalty for juveniles, is that juveniles' diminished culpability is based on three basic differences from adults:

1. Immaturity: Juveniles are more impulsive and less likely to reason judiciously about risk
2. Vulnerability: They are more likely to be influenced by peer pressure
3. Changeability: They are still developing, and are more amenable to rehabilitation than adults

At this week's APA convention, the American Psychology-Law Society (Division 41) hosted a cutting-edge track on juvenile justice. The dynamic sessions raised intriguing issues about how the growing acceptance of adolescent immaturity and difference will affect forensic practice in the juvenile justice system.

Bryan Stevenson: "Huge implications" of Graham case

In an eloquent presentation, NYU law professor Bryan A. Stevenson, founder of Alabama's Equal Justice Initiative, expressed optimism that Graham and the twin case of Sullivan v. Florida, in which he was counsel, signal that the tide is turning away from the punitive Superpredator hysteria of the 1980s. He encouraged the APA to continue its public policy advocacy by bringing legal attention to the impacts of trauma, violence, and neglect on youngsters.

Hopefully, the capacity crowd of psychologists will attend to the implications of Stevenson’s other take-home messages: Mass incarceration has radically changed American society, creating a class of "new untouchables." And the victims of this sea change are overwhelmingly poor and minority. Indeed, he asserted, wealth -- not criminal culpability -- largely drives criminal sentencing. In Louisiana, for example, of the juveniles serving life without parole for crimes other than homicide at the time of the Graham decision, 94 percent are African American. Most are incarcerated for rape, with 71 percent of the victims being white.

Tom Grisso: "Forensic examiners beware"

Forensic psychology guru Tom Grisso sounded a more cautionary note about Graham's implications. The high court's adoption of a categorical approach to juveniles is at odds with the discretionary, individualized method at the core of forensic assessment, he pointed out.

Grisso demonstrated his point through a mock cross-examination. On the stand, the mock expert conceded that the research of Laurence Steinberg, Elizabeth Cauffman, and others on adolescent immaturity is now widely accepted in the field, as shown by Supreme Court's rulings in Graham and Roper. Next, Grisso produced a New York Times op-ed co-authored by Steinberg, reiterating Roper's conclusion that psychologists "are unable to distinguish between the young person whose crime reflects transient immaturity and the rare juvenile offender who may deserve the harsh sentence of life without parole." In the script, the expert was left speechless and incapable of defending her individualized opinions about risk.

Grisso said forensic psychologists must be aware of this debate, and think about how to answer such questions in court. The outlook for prediction is not as bleak as the APA's advocacy efforts might suggest, he asserted, as experts do have a reliable basis on which to give probability estimates, especially about more short-term risk.

Good news for juveniles with a sex crime

A panel of juvenile sex offender experts was more upbeat about the implications of the scientific research on adolescent difference. As with general criminality, they said, research has not identified methods to accurately predict which juveniles will reoffend sexually. Indeed, none of the factors that predict sex offender recidivism in adults (multiple victims, male victims, young child victims, personality disorder, sexual deviance, etc.) predict recidivism for juveniles.

But this inability to differentiate is not bad news, because what we can say is that the overwhelming majority -- 93 percent -- of juveniles who have committed a sex crime will not reoffend sexually as adults.

An audience member who works in the civil commitment industry expressed incredulity at the cumulative research, saying many of the men in his civil detention facility began their offending careers in their teens.

That may be true, responded researcher Michael Caldwell. But the directionality cannot be reversed. All NBA stars may have played basketball in the ninth grade. But we cannot predict by watching a group of ninth-graders play basketball which, if any, of the players will become basketball superstars.

(A summary of the presentation, "Juvenile Offenders are Ineligible for Civil Commitment as Sexually Violent Predators," is online HERE; it contains a slough of good references. The PowerPoint presentation is HERE.)

Judges launch crusade to save children of color

The most optimistic presentation I attended was a symposium of family court judges who are at the forefront of a movement to reduce the vastly disproportionate representation of minority children in the child welfare system, from which many graduate to juvenile delinquency and adult criminal courts.

The remarkable Hon. Katherine Lucero of San Jose, California said she became active in this movement when she realized she was serving as part of the vast "cradle-to-prison pipeline," processing children who would end up poor, homeless, drug addicted, illiterate, pregnant at a young age, delinquent, and -- ultimately -- incarcerated. When she looked out at her courtroom filled with children of color, her training that justice is blind was cognitively dissonant, making her feel like she was living "in a delusion."

The equally inspiring Hon. Nan Waller of Portland, Oregon said the movement challenges the basic historical tenet of the child welfare system, which promotes removal from families -- so-called "child rescue" -- rather than family strengthening. Most of the mothers who lose their children are suffering from severe trauma that they medicate with drugs. Rather than "cookie-cutter" quick-fixes, including automatic referrals for psychological evaluations and parenting classes, these women need support and help obtaining even basic resources such as housing, transportation, and health care, the judges said.

Assisted by a research and advocacy project of the National Council on Juvenile and Family Court Judges, these and other judges are using a combination of model courts, wraparound services, community interventions, training in implicit race bias at all levels of the system, and other creative methods to reduce the number of children who are placed in foster care. Already, their data show they are having an impact in their respective communities.

Alarming call for preventive detention of children

In the discussion period following their presentation, the judges said they are turning away from ordering psychological reports except when a parent has a genuine, severe mental disorder. They gave two reasons for this. First, psychological evaluations are costly. Second, and more important, the judges do not find it helpful to "slap" pathologizing psychiatric labels on parents. They expressed curiosity as to whether and how we in the field of psychology are working to address the effects of poverty and racism in the populations we serve.

Sadly, the honest answer is that many forensic practitioners and scholars are not adequately addressing the impact of larger social forces -- poverty, race, trauma -- on the people we evaluate, treat, and/or study. Perhaps the sparse attendance at the judges' presentation as compared with other seminars in the forensic juvenile justice track is an indicator of this neglect.

Indeed, at a more well-attended session came a chilling proposal at the polar opposite extreme: To establish a system to preventively detain dangerous juveniles. Raising this "public safety" proposal was attorney Christopher Slobogin, a co-author of the forensic psychology stalwart Psychological Evaluations for the Courts. It will formally air in a book, Juveniles at Risk: A Plea for Preventive Justice, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Slobogin has good intentions, I am sure; he believes such a model will treat juveniles more fairly and help stem the erosion of the separate juvenile justice system.

But the proposal has potentially far-reaching unintended consequences. It myopically ignores what the family court judges and attorney Stevenson are so painfully aware of: The differential treatment of poor and minority children. It is hard to accurately predict juvenile risk, and actuarial risk prediction tools are especially inaccurate when applied to juveniles. This is just the type of nebulous decision-making situation in which implicit (unconscious) biases are most salient, research shows. Forensic psychological evaluations would provide a scientific veneer, masking racial and class biases in deciding who is labeled as dangerous and who is not.

Rather than locking up kids for crimes they have not (yet) committed, we should be working to give young victims of trauma and abuse -- and their families -- the practical resources and tools they need to lead productive lives. Let's hope the field of psychology and public policymakers heed the pleas of the judges and attorneys in the trenches who are fighting to save kids before they get sucked into the "cradle-to-prison pipeline" in the first place.