A federal judge has issued an injunction preventing the Bush Administration from ending the "shock incarceration program" until it has complied with the Administrative Procedure Act. Sentencing Law and Policy has the details. Background from Professor Berman is here. We addressed it here.

You can download the decision here.

The Hall of Shame award today goes to San Quentin for its prison health clinics. A new report by independent examiners shows that despite court orders, they operate in filthy conditions. San Quentin should be closed. It will be interesting to see Gov. Arnold Schwarznegger's reaction to the report. If he's serious about prison reform, this is a good place to start.

Doctors and nurses misdiagnosed illnesses, gave patients the wrong medications, neglected them for months and even years or delayed sending them to emergency rooms until they were fatally ill, the experts discovered.

The examiners watched a dentist examine inmate after inmate while wearing the same pair of gloves. Records were in such disarray that doctors reported that they could not find medical files for at least 30% of the inmates they examined.

Based on visits to the prison earlier this year, the experts' April 8 report documented filthy clinics and patient housing. Dental examinations are done in a place without light or water; inmates are initially evaluated in a room without a sink for washing hands; nurses until recently used a broom closet as an examination room; and wheelchair-bound patients cannot roll into the hospital cells on their own because the doors are too narrow.

by TChris

A prison reform group, United for No Injustice, Oppression or Neglect (U.N.I.O.N.), is using the courts, as well as political activism, to call attention to the dismal conditions in California prisons. The group's director, B. Cayenne Bird, realized how deplorable prison conditions have become after her son was incarcerated.

Bird, a self-proclaimed human rights journalist for 30 years, formed U.N.I.O.N. in 1998. She said part of the goal is to get families of prisoners together in a voting block so that the state's prisons can be reformed. "There's enough there to create a voting group," she said.

Scores of U.N.I.O.N. members join Bird at rallies at the state Capitol, and the organization also frequently pickets at prisons where it feels an inmate has suffered a preventable death.

The group has filed lawsuits in at least three cases on behalf of inmates who died while in a prison's care.

Despite attempts by Gov. Arnold to push rehabilitation over punishment, particularly for drug offenders, correction officials have decreed that beginning today, parole violators will return to jail instead of being afforded alternatives such as drug treatment programs.

Beginning Monday, parole violators will no longer be diverted into drug treatment programs, halfway houses and home detention instead of being returned to prison...

Officials say there was no evidence the alternative programs worked. It sounds like what really happened is that crime victims advocates and the all-powerful Prison Guards Union teamed up to cause a ruckus.

First Florida, now Texas. The faith-based prison concept is catching on. Is it only for Christians? I'm not buying this distinction by the corporation that will run the prison, Dallas-based Corrections Concepts, Inc.

Corrections Concept's mission statement says it will use Christian principles to help inmates prepare for the outside world and makes no mention of evangelization or Christianity.

I think the language is a ploy to ensure the plan passes First Amendment consitutional muster. It still sounds like a Christian prison to me.

A prosecutor in Oregon has asked the Court for permission to allow up to 15 newly released sex offenders a year to live in his home for up to 60 days each while they try to find jobs and housing.

It is my hope, if I did this first, we might find others would who would be willing to do it," he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. "I wasn't able to see any other viable alternatives."

....Fisher said he isn't looking forward to opening his home to offenders, but hopes it could move the county toward a long-term solution. "Some means need to be found to transition these people back to society," Fisher told the Statesman-Journal. "From a gut perspective, I'm probably less afraid than the general public of these people. Rightly or wrongly, they are seen as inhuman monsters but mostly they're pathetic human beings."

His offer will be discussed by county officials at a meeting on Friday.

The SanFrancisco Chronicle approvingly notes California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared a change will take place in the California Department of Corrections, through a shift from focusing on punishment to rehabilitation. He will even change the name from California Department of Corrections to California Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections.

Compared to Gray Davis, Schwarzenegger has a far better record of allowing parole for some who have been convicted of murder.

In only 15 months, he has already released 94 "lifers" -- 15 times more than Davis did during a much longer period....Schwarzenegger's willingness to release even those convicted of capital crimes is a significant step with broad national implications. It will reinforce an emerging national movement to make rehabilitation rather than punishment a central focus of the criminal-justice system.

... At the same time, the lifers whom Schwarzenegger has released still leave more than 27,000 inmates serving indeterminate life terms in California. It is an astonishingly high number. Incarcerating them costs the state nearly $1 billion a year.

by TChris

Inmates serving time or awaiting trial or sentencing have enough problems without these:

• A Union County, New Jersey jail guard has been charged with (among other crimes) sexually assaulting five female inmates while on duty.

• The Perry County Detention Center in Hazard, Kentucky is in such a state of "total chaos" -- dirty, overcrowded, insufficient beds, nonfunctioning fire alarms, and inmates wandering about unsupervised -- that the state pulled 50 inmates out of the institution.

• Part of the Allegheny County Jail had to be quarantined after an outbreak of chickenpox.

Meanwhile, the Department of Agriculture may use its rural development fund, flush with an infusion of cash intended for disaster relief, to loan money to three Virginia counties to pay for a regional jail.

Is an execution chamber just another room? Some architects don't think so. In September, 2004, they initiated a boycott of prison design. Lux Lotus has an interview with architect and boycott supporter Raphael Sperry.[Via Alternet's Peek.]

by TChris

A semiannual report of possible civil rights violations by the Justice Department asks whether federal prison guards and wardens are discriminating against Muslim prisoners.

In one instance at the unidentified federal prison, the warden "unjustly and inappropriately" ordered an inmate transferred to special housing similar to solitary confinement for more than four months, Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said. The move came five days after the inmate talked to Fine's investigators.

Fine's report provides evidence that the Bureau of Prisons simply refuses to address the mistreatment of Muslim prisoners. Fine "documented the mistreatment of Arabs and Muslims detained at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn" more than a year ago, but no prison officials have been disciplined.

Imagine going to prison for 11 years, and while there, taking courses, learning a trade and excelling at it. You should be a shoo-in for getting a new start of life as a law-abiding citizen when you get out. Not in New York, not if you want to be a hairstylist and have been to prison.

Mr. [Marc] La Cloche served 11 years in New York prisons for first-degree robbery. While behind bars, he turned his life around. He learned a trade, barbering. He even had the image of a barber's clippers and comb tattooed on his right arm.

In 2000, as he prepared to be freed, he applied for a required state license. He was denied it. But that decision was reversed when reviewed by a hearing officer. For a while after his release, Mr. La Cloche worked in a Midtown barber shop. That job did not last long.

New York's secretary of state, who has jurisdiction in these matters, appealed the granting of the license and won. Mr. La Cloche's "criminal history," an administrative law judge ruled, "indicates a lack of good moral character and trustworthiness required for licensure." In plain language, the fact that Mr. La Cloche had been in prison proved that he was unworthy for the trade that the state itself taught him in prison.

Where is Joseph Heller when we need him?

A high-level commision has been appointed to study U.S. prison conditions. This is welcome news.

A high-level commission yesterday began a year-long examination of violence, sexual abuse, overcrowding and inhumane treatment in U.S. prisons, in an investigation provoked in part by reports of misconduct by U.S. corrections officers assigned to serve in military detention centers overseas.

The privately organized commission, which has attracted interest in its work from the Justice Department and key lawmakers, is headed by former attorney general Nicholas deB. Katzenbach and John J. Gibbons, a former federal appeals court judge. Its aim is to recommend prison reforms from local to federal levels after holding at least four public hearings around the country.

Why is it needed? Check out these stats:

• More than 34,000 assaults were committed by prisoners against other inmates in a 12-month period covering parts of 1999 and 2000;
• The number of prisoner assaults against staff in that period was 27 percent higher than the previous 12 months.
• More than a million people were sexually assaulted in prisons over the past two decades.
• Eleven inmates died in restraint chairs in the 1990s.
• Corrections officers have reduced life expectancies and higher rates of alcoholism than other law enforcement officers.