"Hey Dude, Where's My Car" actor Erik Aude is coming home.

He's been jailed in Pakistan on a drug charge since February, 2002. He served almost three years of a seven year sentence.

State Department officials said Monday that a Pakistani judge last week ordered a sentence of time already served and upheld a previously imposed fine of 50,000 rupees -- about $860.

Erik Aude had been hired to pick up leather samples from a manufacturer in Islamabad, Pakistan's capital city, his mother said. But after Aude picked up a suitcase containing the samples and got to the Islamabad airport, Pakistani customs officials found eight pounds of opium hidden in the sample suitcase's lining.

Sherry Aude said her son had no knowledge the drugs were there. She worked tirelessly to free her son, appealing to officials in Congress and holding rallies on her son's behalf and at the Pakistani consulate in Los Angeles.

For background, see our earlier post, Midnight Express Redux and Seamus McGraw's extensive article about Erik.

New York Governor George Pataki granted no clemencies this year to state inmates.

Traditionally, it is during the Christmas season that Mr. Pataki grants clemency, which he has done 31 times. This year, Mr. Pataki looked over several petitioners' cases but decided that none merited clemency.

With all the non-violent prisoners serving draconian sentences under the Rockefeller drug laws, it's hard to believe he couldn't find a few worthy of mercy. The marginal revisions to the law passed last month are no excuse. Only 400 prisoners are expected to be eligible for early release.

According to this 2002 Human Rights Watch Report, children are the hidden casualties of the Rockefeller drug laws:

Arkansas detainee Charlie Cook, awaiting trial on meth charges, began drawing and selling Christmas cards. He earned enough from their sale to enable him to post bond. His wife, also charged, had already made bond.

After visiting with prison missionaries, Cook became inspired to draw winter scenes as Christmas cards. Clarence Yoder, a Mennonite who had visited Cook in jail, liked the cards so much that he took them to his bakery and sold them for $2 each.

"We're trying to stay away from the people and circumstances that have contributed to some of the bad choices we've made in the past," Mrs. Cook told the Harrison Daily Times newspaper.

I've received some great Christmas cards from my jailed clients over the years. Some are creative, some demonstrate the client's emotional nature, some rise to the level of art. I keep them all.

Some enterprising inmates at the Walla Walla Prison in Washington State, fearing Martha Stewart would get a cookbook out first, stepped up plans for their own. "The Convict Cookbook" has been released, and is filled with recipes with names like "Po' Mans Burritos, Cell Block Fudge, Dope Fiend Sandwich and Prizzon Po Carcass Casserole."

The twist: The recpipes are all prepared without the use of a stove. Their only heat utensil is an immerser coil that they put in water to make it boil.

The book has 163 pages of recipes. The book includes short facts and insights into prison life. There is also an essay "Why Do We Cook in Our Cells? or Bad Guys, Good Taste?" by Rick Webb, one of the authors. He explains that while prison food is OK, it becomes monotonous over time, and cell cooking provides some variety and creativity for inmates.

Cooking food in a prison cell isn't easy. Some recipes can be cooked on radiator pipes. Others require the prison kitchen. Many of the recipes involve plastic bags standing in as mixing bowls.

All involve some ingenuity.These cookies are so named because heroin addicts often come to prison craving sweets," Dunn wrote.

The Department of Justice has released its 2003 prisoner statistics. The most astonishing figure: One of every 140 U.S. residents is now in prison or in jail.

The bulletin, "Prisoners in 2003 (NCJ-205335)," was written by BJS statisticians Paige M. Harrison and Allen J. Beck. It can be accessed here.

There are now more than 100,000 women in our nation's prisons and jails. The women's prison rate grew 3.6%, almost twice the rate of that for men.

Other findings included in the report:

• The total prison population is now approaching 1.5 million, up 2.1% this year.

• As of December 31, 2003, state prisons were operating at capacity to as much as 16 percent above capacity. Federal prisons were operating at 39 percent above capacity.

• The nation’s prison population is becoming more middle-aged. From 1995 through 2003, inmates between the ages of 40 and 54 accounted for more than 46 percent of the total growth in the U.S. prison population. Although the number of older inmates has been increasing, two-thirds of all prisoners were younger than 40 at the end of 2003.

Two states, Vermont and Maine, allow felons to vote even while serving their sentences. This year, voting numbers are up among the inmates:

"There's almost a childlike excitement here," said Kirk Wool, 44, one of the Vermonters in Kentucky, who is serving 29 to 73 years for a sexual assault conviction, and said he "hadn't begun voting until actually after my incarceration."

But now Mr. Wool, inmate No. 263524, says he feels so empowered by voting that "if I had chosen politics instead of crime, call it arrogance, but I believe with my ability to touch people, my ability to speak, I believe I very well could have been governor of the state of Vermont."

Not surprisingly, those inmates who are interested in their Government, are quite well versed on the issues. As the article notes, they have a lot of time on their hands.

Inmates pay attention, reading newspapers, watching television, and even perusing campaign leaflets that are mailed to registered voters like themselves.

One of the prisoners interviewed, who is serving a 35 year sentence for murdering two of his friends, explains why he voted for Bush. Apparently, this is not that unusual. The authors conducted a number of interviews and found more than a few conservatives among the inmates.

Some of the prisoners have the same concerns as those on the outside:

by TChris

Our prisons too often house the mentally ill, who need treatment, not warehousing. And too often prisoners are subjected to conditions that would impair the mental health of even the most stable person. Exposing the mentally ill to those conditions leads to tragic consequences, as illustrated by the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.

The box is the most severe punishment in prison: the final threat, the ultimate time out. It is a small barren chamber set apart from the general population with a concrete floor, a steel door and no clock to mark the time. The essential quality of the box is isolation -- a gloved hand passes food through a slot in the door; a caseworker's muffled voice filters through the holes in a small Plexiglas window. Inmates are allowed few personal possessions. Lights are never fully extinguished. It is four walls for 23 hours a day -- a psychologically punishing experience by design. For people like Jessica Roger, it can also be an incubator of psychosis.

The linked article tells Jessica Roger's story -- a story that has become too common, of a mentally ill inmate who was "punished for exhibiting symptoms of illness that the system has failed to treat." Jessica attempted suicide in the box four times before being sent to a prison hospital, where she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder and other mental illnesses.

Jessica was returned to complete her punishment in the small airless cell that had broken her. Within days, she again attempted suicide.

She succeeded on her last attempt. The linked article uses Jessica's story to illuminate the broader problem: society's reliance on the criminal justice system to address the poor and homeless who suffer from untreated mental illness. As the article notes: "Today some 250,000 Americans with mental illness live in prisons, the nation's primary supplier of mental-health services."

by TChris

The abusive treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib is shocking, but it underscores the need to examine the abuse of prisoners within our borders. The ACLU of Mississippi hopes to do just that by starting a prison accountability project to improve inmates' living conditions. The need for improvement is clear.

[Margaret Floyd] said [her son] was handcuffed and beaten twice by guards at Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. The Corinth woman said she sent lawyers to the prison to check on her son, who's now 30, and found he had "a busted head" and bruises on his arms and had been kicked in the ribs.

A recent lawsuit resulted in the improvement of conditions for death row prisoners at Parchman, who were "subjected to excessive heat, human excrement, biting insects and the rants of psychotic prisoners."

Mississippi has the third highest per capita rate of incarceration, behind Louisiana and Texas.

The AP has obtained e-mails to Jeb Bush advising him of the problems with Florida's felon voting list and urging him to kill the plan before it went live.

In a May 4 e-mail obtained by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Florida Department of Law Enforcement computer expert Jeff Long told his boss that a Department of State computer expert had told him "that yesterday they recommended to the Gov that they 'pull the plug'" on the voter database.

The e-mail said state election officials "weren't comfortable with the felon matching program they've got," but added, "The Gov rejected their suggestion to pull the plug, so they're 'going live' with it this weekend."

There were 48,000 names on the list. At least 2,500 were ex-felons who had had their voting rights restored.

Most were Democrats, and many were black. Hispanics, who often vote Republican in Florida, were almost entirely absent from the list due to a technical error.

The list was killed in July, but that won't end all the problems. So spread the word,

Election officials have said that anyone who feels they have been inadvertently removed from the voter rolls on Nov. 2 will be allowed to use a provisional ballot that will be examined later to determine eligibility.

A whole new batch of toys for prison guards to play with is now available, courtesy of a new publication by the National Insitute of Justice, the research arm of the Department of Justice. It's called Department of Defense Nonlethal Weapons and Equipment Review: A Research Guide for Civil Law Enforcement and Corrections and is available here.

The report is little more than our Justice Department acting as an ad agency for the corporations that developed such weapons for DOD, enabling them to sell the weapons to police and prison guards.

These weapons are developed to control or disperse large crowds in open settings, and are utterly unsuited for use inside the confines of a closed environment like a prison or jail. What may be appropriate for war become instruments of torture in a prison setting, yet there has never been any discussion or acknowledgment of this by the DOJ, corrections professionals, and certainly not by the manufacturers themselves. Defense lawyers frequently see prison guards and jail deputies misusing tasers, mace, etc., especially in understaffed facilities.

From the report's introduction:

The Washington Post has an editorial on the death of quadriplegic Jonathan Magbie, a first-offender serving a ten day sentence for possessing (using) pot. While failing to cast blame on the Judge, it asks:

But did Mr. Magbie deserve jail? Why was he sent to the hospital? Why did the hospital discharge him and refuse to take him back? Why did two days elapse before he could get his ventilator? Why is his case closed?

27 year-old Jonathan Magbie became a quadriplegic while still a kid after being hit by a drunk driver. He got by with constant help from his relatives and an electric wheelchair, which he controlled with his chin. Drug Policy Alliance reports (after reviewing a Washington Post article on the case.)

Magbie was arrested more than a year ago for possession of marijuana. He was in a car at the time of his arrest. Police found cocaine and a gun in the car. Though the Post does not explicitly mention that Magbie was not driving, nor that the gun was not Magbie's, the man could move nothing but his head -- making it safe to assume he was a passenger in a car in which someone else was transporting a gun. Magbie was finally tried on the marijuana charge 11 days ago. As a first-time offender in DC, according to the Post, he could expect to receive probation. What he received, though, amounted to a death sentence.