We can't even believe this is true, but it is. Junior Allen stole a black and white tv set in 1970. A North Carolina judge sentenced him to life in prison.

Mr. Allen, now 63 years old, has now been in prison 33 years for stealing that tv set. Last week, the North Carolina Parole Commission denied him parole for the 26th straight year. Here's more on the case.

Let this man go home.

Governor Arnold has made some decisions on the abysmal California prison situation:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger asked the U.S. attorney here Friday to investigate allegations that officials at Folsom State Prison orchestrated a riot two years ago and then conspired to cover it up. Facing a wave of troubles in all corners of California's far-flung penal system — the nation's largest — he moved on several other fronts as well.

The governor said he was reversing an earlier decision to greatly reduce the state's lone correctional watchdog agency and would instead restore its funding and give it new law enforcement powers, including the authority to issue subpoenas and seek search warrants.

In a third move, administration officials announced plans to phase out the use of steel-mesh cages to confine unruly juveniles in the California Youth Authority. The cages, used only in California, were singled out recently as dehumanizing by experts who studied the juvenile system.

Howard Dean lost the support of a big union today, as Kerry wins in Washington State and may also win Michigan:

Sen. John Kerry won the Washington caucuses with ease on Saturday, lengthening his lead in the Democratic presidential race while launching a sharp attack against President Bush. The Massachusetts senator also reached for victory in Michigan caucuses, hoping for a two-state sweep.

Howard Dean, shut out in the primary season to date, suffered a fresh blow when the head of a major union decided to withdraw his support. Democratic officials said Gerald McEntee, head of the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, delivered the news to the former

Yesterday we wrote about Roderick Johnson, a black, gay male who endured being raped in a Texas prison nearly every day by more than 100 men over an 18 month period.

Today we learn that a Texas grand jury has refused to indict anyone in the case.

Gina DeBottis, the chief of the state's Special Prosecution Unit that prosecutes prison crimes, said the grand jury considered allegations concerning sexual assault by convicts and organized criminal activity. None of the 49 convicts alleged to have committed the attacks against Roderick Johnson was indicted, she said Thursday.

In April 2002, seeking compensation, Johnson filed a lawsuit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and more than a dozen prison officials. He alleged officials looked the other way while he was repeatedly beaten and raped by prison gangs who sold him as a sex slave while he was incarcerated at the Allred Unit near Wichita Falls. The lawsuit is pending in federal court in Wichita Falls.

Prison officials have denied the allegations and on Thursday for the first time made public their investigative report refuting Johnson's allegations with new ones -- that he had consensual sex with several of the alleged attackers, that he concocted his story for money, that he even wrote letters to two convicts he alleged raped him.

He consented to sex with "several" of the inmates? What about the remaining ones who raped him? Out of the 49 inmates investigated, not one was indicted. Not a single guard or prison official. We smell a whitewash.

Roderick Johnson is doing something about the indignities he suffered in a Texas prison. A gay, black man, Johnson was raped by more than one hundred men--nearly every day for 18 months. He's suing the Texas Department of Corrections and developing a program to "aid the re-integration of troubled young adults into mainstream society as productive, responsible citizens."

Hearing him speak, however, it seems the lawsuit embodies not an attempt at payback, but a demand for justice. "What's done is done," said 35-year-old Johnson. "I have harsh feelings, but I'm not vengeful."

....he was placed in Allred Prison, a maximum-security facility outside Wichita Falls, Texas. For Johnson, it was like being thrown into a viper's nest, he said. "I was in prison with people serving two life sentences," Johnson said. "They don't care about anything. Their lives are over."

At first he tried to survive as an independent - someone unaffiliated with any of the various gangs that Johnson said controlled the atmosphere inside. Soon, Johnson took another role, one forced upon him by inmates because of his sexuality, he said. "I became a 'she'," Johnson says. "In their eyes, I'm a woman."

Some of the inmates made him clean their cells and cook their food, he said. Then the rapes began. According to Johnson's lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, he was raped nearly every day for 18 months. He attempted seven times to convince a prison committee to move him into the safekeeping wing of the prison, where vulnerable prisoners such as known homosexuals and ex-police officers remain segregated from the general population. Each time, the committee refused his appeal.

A Colorado sheriff's officer has been suspended for using an inmate for target practice with his taser gun.

A Chaffee County sheriff's officer was suspended Tuesday and could be fired for allegedly using an inmate for Taser practice at a training session. Detentions officer Scott Glenn was placed on administrative leave after an investigation by Sheriff Tim Walker, the same day the sheriff learned of the allegation from The Denver Post.

"It was extremely poor judgment," Walker said. "There's no way a detention officer should ever use an inmate in that capacity."

Thomas Montoya, a prisoner serving an 18-month sentence from a probation violation relating to a 1999 domestic-violence-related assault, said he was shocked with a Taser during a sheriff's training class on Oct. 17, 2003. "Imagine 50,000 volts traveling through your body. Would it hurt?" said Montoya, who suffered no injury but said he was left with a burn mark.

We say fire the bum.

In a first for Ohio, the city of Cleveland is considering a law that would take city contracts away from companies that discriminate against ex-offenders. The proposed law bars companies with city contracts to refuse work to an applicant solely because of a criminal record.

If the law passes, companies who fail to comply could have their contracts with the city terminated and other benefits, such as tax abatements or grants, discontinued. Companies could still ask about an applicant's criminal record and would not be penalized for failing to hire an applicant whose previous crime relates to a job.

Maureen Black, a deputy director with the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, said the proposed law would complement existing efforts to link ex-offenders with jobs and job training, and incentive programs for companies who hire ex-offenders.

We hope this passes, and spreads to other cities and states. It's a much needed reform that benefits all of us.

The Commission appointed by Mass. Governor Mitt Romney to look into the murder of Priest John Geoghan in his prison cell issued its report today. The report finds:

...failures in the inmate classification system, disciplinary procedures and internal investigative practices by the Department of Correction all contributed to the circumstances that led to Geoghan's slaying Aug. 23.

...Defrocked pedophile priest John Geoghan never should have been moved to the dangerous-inmate unit where he was strangled and beaten to death by another prisoner last year....

...A series of "overzealous and unwarranted" discipline reports by a handful of guards led to the frail, 68-year-old Geoghan being classified as one of the state's most dangerous prisoners, and landed him in a cell unit with murderer Joseph Druce, investigators found.

Prisoners at an Arizona prison have released one of the two hostages they have been holding for almost a week. The other, a female corrections officer, is still inside.

The male corrections officer, whose name was not released, climbed down a ladder placed against the tower and walked to freedom at the Lewis prison facility, about 45 miles southwest of Phoenix, officials said. He was taken to a nearby hospital.

A female corrections officer was still being held hostage by the two inmates who forced their way into the observation tower at Arizona's second largest prison early last Sunday.....The medium- to high-security prison, which houses about 4,500 inmates, has been in lockdown since the incident started.

A bad situation. We hope that the female officer is released unharmed.

This has to be the most depressing column we've read all week--America's Prison Habit :

Since 1980 the U.S. prison and jail population has quadrupled in size to more than 2 million. In the process, prisons have embedded themselves into the nation's economic and social fabric. A powerful lobby has grown up around the prison system that will fight hard to protect the status quo.

....Major companies such as Wackenhut Corrections Corp. and Corrections Corp. of America employ sophisticated lobbyists to protect and expand their market share. The law enforcement technology industry, which produces high-tech items such as the latest stab-proof vests, helmets, stun guns, shields, batons and chemical agents, does more than a billion dollars a year in business.

With 2.2 million people engaged in catching criminals and putting and keeping them behind bars, "corrections" has become one of the largest sectors of the U.S. economy, employing more people than the combined workforces of General Motors, Ford and Wal-Mart, the three biggest corporate employers in the country. Correctional officers have developed powerful labor unions. And most politicians, whether at the local, state or national level, remain acutely aware that allowing themselves to be portrayed as "soft on crime" is the quickest route to electoral defeat.

Then there's the booming "prison town" business-

Eric Alterman and Laleh Ispahani make an excellent argument for restoring the right to vote to ex-felons in Is the Right to Vote a Criminal Matter? over at Center for American Progress.

Former felons are by and large without a voice in our contemporary debate and so few seem to find their disenfranchisement a political problem worth examining. This is the case, amazingly, even when the confusion — and deliberate chicanery this confusion can invite — can put the wrong man in the White House.

For more, see the Human Rights Watch report "Losing the Vote: The Impact of Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States."

This is very sad. A 78 year old former FBI agent recently charged in a 20 plus year old murder case died while awaiting a psychological evaluation by the court to see if he was fit to stand trial.

A retired FBI agent accused of helping his former mob informants arrange the murder of a Tulsa businessman died a week after he was extradited to Oklahoma to face charges, a hospital spokeswoman said Saturday.

H. Paul Rico, 78, died late Friday, a few hours after a Tulsa County judge put the murder case on hold pending a psychological evaluation to determine if Rico was competent to stand trial.

His family said he had congestive heart failure and had lost 53 pounds since his arrest Oct. 9 in Florida, where he had been living.

....During his arraignment Wednesday, conducted by video feed from the Tulsa County jail, Rico sat in a wheelchair and occasionally moaned but said nothing. His attorney, Garvin Isaacs, at one point interrupted the judge, saying: "I am telling you this man is sick, extremely sick." He requested an emergency medical furlough, saying his client was ailing and needed help; the judge ordered the psychological evaluation.

Isaacs said during that hearing that Rico, who had a pacemaker, was disoriented after being beaten Dec. 5 by an unknown assailant in the Miami-Dade County Jail, but that he had recovered his mental competency and "wants a jury trial to clear his name."

Prosecutors offered this handy excuse: