Pelican Bay Prison Project

The New York Times
November 8, 2004

Despite Drop in Crime, an Increase in Inmates
By FOX BUTTERFIELD

The number of inmates in state and federal prisons rose 2.1 percent last year, even as violent crime and property crime fell, according to a study by the Justice Department released yesterday.

The continuing increase in the prison population, despite a drop or leveling off in the crime rate in the past few years, is a result of laws passed in the 1990's that led to more prison sentences and longer terms, said Allen J. Beck, chief of corrections statistics for the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics and an author of the report.

At the end of 2003, there were 1,470,045 men and women in state and federal prisons in the United States, the report found. In addition, counting those inmates in city and county jails and incarcerated juvenile offenders, the total number of Americans behind bars was 2,212,475 on Dec. 31 last year, the report said.

The report estimated that 44 percent of state and federal prisoners in 2003 were black, compared with 35 percent who were white, 19 percent who were Hispanic and 2 percent who were of other races. The numbers have changed little in the last decade.

Statistically, the number of women in prison is growing fast, rising 3.6 percent in 2003. But at a total of 101,179, they are just 6.9 percent of the prison population.

Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University, said one of the most striking findings in the report was that almost 10 percent of all American black men ages 25 to 29 were in prison.

Such a high proportion of young black men behind bars not only has a strong impact on black families, Professor Blumstein said, but "in many ways is self-defeating." The criminal justice system is built on deterrence, with being sent to prison supposedly a stigma, he said. "But it's tough to convey a sense of stigma when so many of your friends and neighbors are similarly stigmatized."

In seeking to explain the paradox of a falling crime rate but a rising prison population, Mr. Beck pointed out that F.B.I. statistics showed that from 1994 to 2003 there was a 16 percent drop in arrests for violent crime, including a 36 percent decrease in arrests for murder and a 25 percent decrease in arrests for robbery.

But the tough new sentencing laws led to a growth in inmates being sent to prison, from 522,000 in 1995 to 615,400 in 2002, the report said.

Similarly, the report found that the average time served by prison inmates rose from 23 months in 1995 to 30 months in 2001.

Among the new measures were mandatory minimum sentencing laws, which required inmates to serve a specified proportion of their time behind bars; truth-in-sentencing laws, which required an inmate to actually serve the time he was sentenced to; and a variety of three-strikes laws increasing the penalties for repeat offenders.

In the three states with the biggest prison systems, California, Texas and Florida, the number of newly admitted inmates grew last year, but the number of those released either fell or remained stable, Mr. Beck said.

Several states with small prison systems had particularly large
increases in new inmates, led by North Dakota, up 11.4 percent, and Minnesota, up 10.3 percent.

New York had a 2.8 percent decrease in new inmates, reflecting the continued sharp fall in crime in New York City, Mr. Beck said.

Over all, Mr. Beck said, the prison population is aging. Traditionally the great majority of inmates are men in their 20's and early 30's, but middle-aged inmates, those 40 to 54, account for about half of the increase in the prison population since 1995, he said.

This is a result both of the aging of the general American population and of the longer sentences, Mr. Beck said.

But the number of elderly inmates is still small, despite longer
sentences and more life sentences. Those inmates 65 and older were still only 1 percent of the prison population in 2003.

The New York Times
July 4, 2004
California Report Criticizes Prisons as 'Dysfunctional'
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SACRAMENTO, July 3 (AP) - The California prison system is "dysfunctional," and the agency that oversees it should be disbanded, said a report released Thursday.

The 350-page "Reforming Corrections" report offered more than 200 recommendations to overhaul a system that has been damaged by "too much political interference, too much union control and too little management courage, accountability and transparency."

George Deukmejian, who oversaw the state's prison expansion as governor from 1983 to 1991, is chairman of the 40-member panel, which was appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. It presented a long-term strategy to improve public safety and save money by lowering one of the nation's highest reimprisonment rates of former inmates. It also placed a new emphasis on inmate education and rehabilitation.

Many of the new ideas were borrowed from the federal prison system and other states.

California spends nearly $6 billion a year for its 32-prison system, the nation's largest, with 163,000 inmates and nearly 50,000 employees.

The report called for an end to the so-called code of silence that protects abusive guards and suggested a renewed attention to ethics.

Panel members also want detailed background investigations of guards, renewed efforts to recruit candidates with high moral standards, a requirement that employees sign a code of conduct and new discipline for employees who retaliate against whistleblowers.

"Quite frankly, we found a lot of things that were wrong," said the panel's director, Joseph Gunn.

The report proposed eliminating the California Youth and Adult Correctional Agency, which oversees state prisons, and replacing it with a new Department of Correctional Services run by a 10-member commission. Members would conduct public meetings every two months and open the operations to public view.

The report, three months in the making, followed forums and interviews with 470 people in California and other states.

For more than a year the California system has been shaken by negative reports and scandals, including videotaped beatings of inmates, accusations of abuse cover-ups and questionable bidding practices.

Lance Corcoran, a spokesman for the corrections officers' association, faulted the report as being overly critical of the department and the union.

"Even though California ranks near the bottom in overall staffing levels, we don't have the major problems like hostage takings, escapes and whole prison takeovers that other states have," Mr. Corcoran said. "I think overall we're doing a good job in California."

The New York Times

May 17, 2004

The Dark Side of America

The sickening pictures of American troops humiliating Iraqi prisoners have led inevitably to questions about the standards of treatment in the corrections system at home, which has grown tenfold over the last 30 years and now jails people at eight times the rate of France and six times the rate of Canada. Conditions vary widely from state to state and community to community. But as The Times's Fox Butterfield reported recently, some of the chilling pictures from Iraq — such as the ones of inmates being paraded around naked — could have been taken at some American prisons. And humiliation by prison guards is far from the first thing on most American inmates' list of worries.

The nearly 12 million people who pass through the corrections system each year are often subject to violent attacks by other inmates, and prisoner-on-prisoner rape is endemic. Drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis, easily transmitted in tight spaces, have become a common problem. Illegal drugs ferried in by prison employees — and used by inmates who share needles — have made prison a high-risk setting for H.I.V. infection and most recently the liver-destroying hepatitis C.

Some prisons have actually cut back on testing for disease, rather than risk being required to treat large numbers of infected inmates at bankrupting costs. That means, of course, that released inmates will unknowingly pass on diseases to others. By failing to confront public health problems in prison, the country could be setting itself up for new epidemics down the line.

It is hard to quantify how many American prisoners are abused, or allowed to suffer from untreated illnesses, since the system operates largely in the shadows, outside public scrutiny. The maze of federal, state and local institutions defies easy assessment.

Things are more transparent in Europe, thanks to a powerful, independent prison commission, informally known as the Committee for Prevention of Torture. Established in 1987, The C.P.T. has unlimited access to places of detention, including prisons, juvenile centers, psychiatric hospitals and police station holding areas. Human rights violations — including medical problems — quickly become public. Such a system is long overdue in the United States.

The need for such a body was underscored last year, when Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act, ordering the Justice Department to collect data on this serious problem and to create a mechanism for dealing with it. Prison officials predictably play down rape as a problem, but a harrowing report from Human Rights Watch suggested that prisoner-on-prisoner rape accompanied by savage violence was commonplace, and that officials often looked the other way.

Psychiatric care for psychotic inmates is poor to nonexistent. A recent study by the Correctional Association of New York found that nearly a quarter of inmates assigned to disciplinary lockdown — confined to small cells 23 hours a day — were mentally ill. Their symptoms worsened in isolation; nearly half had tried to commit suicide. Dissociated and sometimes violent, these people are dumped onto the streets when they finish their sentences.

The prison system can no longer be seen as the province of prison officials who cover up or mismanage problems that eventually come back to haunt the rest of the society. The country needs to formulate national prison standards and create an independent body that enforces them, if only by opening prisons to greater public scrutiny.

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