A hearing began yesterday on a lawsuit brought against the Mississippi Department of Corrections by six death row inmates and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The suit alleges that MDOC officials have knowingly subjected death row inmates to inhumane conditions leading to pain, suffering and mental instability and violated their constitutional rights...

Death row inmate William Holly said he knows he is not on Unit 32 at Mississippi State Penitentiary to be made comfortable, "but I didn't know it involved torture.".."There is the filth, with feces bubbling up in my toilet when those next to me flush their toilet," said Holly, 28.

Expert witness James J. Balsimo...testified that insects, filth, lack of water and showers, high temperatures and a lack of fans are among the shortcomings.

He also criticized the absence of a maintenance schedule to prevent water and sewer failures. Balsimo said the lack of a maintenance plan was evident when Unit 32 was without water and sewer for almost a week in June 2002.

Women with children under 18 represent the fastest growing prison population, and their absence leaves kids maternally incarcerated. It's not only the moms who are sentenced.

A Los Angeles janitor who was serving a prison sentence of 70 years to life for a robbery that he denied committing won his freedom Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court.

"Jason Kindle, 34, whose conviction was reversed by an appeals court last year, has been behind bars for three years. The prosecution moved to dismiss because the case against Kindle got weaker as new evidence became available."

1,250 first-time drug prisoners have been freed from jail in Michigan due to the state's repeal of its draconian mandatory minimum sentencing law. "The Legislature last month repealed Michigan's controversial 1973 drug sentencing law that forced judges to impose long mandatory minimum sentences based on the quantity of drugs involved in the crime. The crackdown was aimed at drug kingpins, but also imprisoned were hundreds of first-time non-violent offenders.... Many received longer prison terms than violent career criminals."

For more details on this, see our prior post here, and Families Against Mandatory Minimums ( FAMM).

The repeal will save Michigan $41 Million.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has surpassed California and Texas as the largest prison system in the United States, holding 164,011 prisoners as of November 7, according to recent Bureau of Prison population reports.

In 2000, BOP announced it would be building several new facilities a year in the coming years. In 2001, BOP received $883 million for new facilities. For 2002, the Bush administration "proposed spending one billion dollars for BOP construction and $31 million for INS detention construction ....The new generation of facilities cost an average of $110 million to build and can house 1,200 prisoners each."

A big thanks to Hamster for leading us to Death Behind Bars , about the death of Charlene Marquez, a 39 year old female inmate, and how it highlights the need for more drug-treatment programs.

"Her death highlights two serious problems, critics say. The first is the ease with which illegal drugs are smuggled into prison. It's a common problem across the country, one corrections personnel nationwide struggle to resolve. But the second has a more local flavor: Colorado's failure to fund drug-treatment programs adequately inside and outside the prison system. And it's a problem that is about to grow worse, as the state Legislature makes significant budget cuts in human-services programs in light of the state's economic woes .

Colorado currently ranks dead last in state dollars spent in drug treatment. (The state is officially listed as 49th because Georgia state officials neglected to turn data in on time. However, had Georgia turned information in on time, Colorado would rank 50th.)

Research shows that for every $100 Colorado spends on the consequences of drug and alcohol abuse, only 6 cents are spent on treatment programs, says Janet Wood, director of the Alcohol and Drug Abuse division of the Colorado Department of Human Services.

That investment is about to drop as state budget problems, exacerbated by a sluggish economy, have resulted in budget cuts in drug-treatment programs, both in the prison system and outside.

According to Allison Morgan, spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Corrections, 75% of inmates have some kind of drug or alcohol problem.

Research shows that most women in prison are victims of substantial physical and/or sexual abuse and have deep-seated emotional needs, Morgan says. DOC research shows that women who do have drug and alcohol problems typically need higher levels of treatment than male prisoners.

But there's another issue as well.

But some say prison is not conducive to recovery from addiction and that institutional drug-treatment programs face significant obstacles to success.

"Prison is not a therapeutic environment," said Christie Donner, co-coordinator of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, a project of the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center.... Donner says less than half of prisoners who need help with drug and alcohol problems receive it. Most receive it shortly before their release date, after they've already become hardened from exposure to prison culture. "People get warehoused for years, and when they get close to being released is when they're eligible for treatment," she said. "This notion that everyone who needs treatment gets it is not the truth. It's a very small percentage that are actually offered treatment.....

The New York Times reports today that infections in newly released inmates are a rising concern.

....jails and prisons have become giant incubators for some of the worst infectious diseases.

According to a study released today at a conference sponsored by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at least 1.3 million inmates released from jail or prison in 1996 were infected with hepatitis C. That was 29 percent of the 4.5 million cases nationwide.

Similarly, newly released inmates accounted for 35 percent of the 34,000 Americans with tuberculosis in 1996, the study found. And newly released inmates accounted for 13 to 17 percent of Americans infected with H.I.V. or AIDS, the study estimated.

The problem has become so acute that health care officials and prisoner rights groups are calling for widespread testing of prison populations for hepatitis C and faster treatment of prisoners.

This is a problem for everyone. Most inmates are not serving life sentences for murder. Most will be released at some point.

...experts say the high rate of communicable diseases among inmates is a critical issue for two reasons: the danger inmates pose of infecting others when they are released, and the opportunity to treat them that is largely being wasted. Dr. Greifinger said that Americans tended to forget that most inmates eventually return home. In 2000, about nine million people were released from jail and prison, according to Allen J. Beck, of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the statistical arm of the Justice Department.

For many of the poor, family life revolves around prison and the street. "In... the poorest communities around the country, prison is now a well-established rite of passage. A 2000 study by the U.S. Department of Justice found that about half of the nation's inmates are parents of children under 18. The study also found that almost 1.5 million children had a parent in prison, an increase of more than 500,000 children since 1991."

The Sunday Magazine of the New York Times has the story of two of these teen parents, Toney and Lolli, written by Adrian LeBlanc, who has "hung out" with them, in the journalistic sense, for the past ten years. A great read.

This is the text of the memorandum that went out December 20, 2002, to all federal judges from Kathleen Hawk Sawyer, Director of the Bureau of Prisons:

This memorandum informs you that the Bureau of Prisons (Bureau) is implementing a significant procedure change regarding inmate designations to community corrections centers (CCC) (also known as "halfway-houses"). The Bureau has had a practice of honoring some judicial recommendations to place inmates in CCCs for the imprisonment portions of their sentences. Effective immediately, this practice will no longer be followed. The Bureau will not use CCCs as a substitute for imprisonment.

This procedure change follows recent guidance from the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), finding that the term "community confinement" is not synonymous with "imprisonment." OLC has determined that the Bureau's practice of using CCCs as a substitute for imprisonment contravenes well-established case law, and is inconsistent with U.S.S.G. 5C1.1.

This procedure change will be implemented prospectively, with the following exception. Inmates designated to CCCs who, as of December 16, 2002, had more than 150 days remaining to serve on their prison terms, will be re-designated by the Bureau to prison institutions.

(Received from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, courtesy of Howard O. Kieffer, Executive Director, Federal Defense Associates )

A fight is brewing in the Arizona courts over the rights of inmates to use the web:

Critics say the Arizona measure violates the free-speech rights of inmates and their supporters and that it targets only prisoner-advocacy groups since the Corrections Department continues posting information about death-row inmates on its own website. David Fathi, an attorney for the ACLU's National Prison Project, calls the law unconstitutional. "It's not about prison security," he says. "It's not as if they're trying to prevent someone from sending instructions into prison for how to make a bomb, or plans on how to escape."

In December, a federal judge issued a temporary injunction and blocked enforcement of an Arizona law that prohibited all information about state prisoners from being published on the internet and banned communication between prisoners and organizations that might publish information about them on their web sites. In granting the injunction, the Court cited its fear that the law would cause irreparable harm to the First Amendment. As a result of the injunction, prisoners who violated the law couldn't be punished.

The ACLU brought the lawsuit last July seeking to invalidate the law, which "barred prisoners from corresponding with a 'communication service provider' or "remote computing service" and faced discipline if any person outside prison walls accessed a provider or service website at a prisoner’s request."

"The ACLU’s organizational clients are the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty, which has information about 45 Arizona prisoners on its website; Stop Prisoner Rape, a group that seeks to end sexual violence against individuals in detention; and Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, a group that organizes public education campaigns with the intention of abolishing the death penalty. All of the ACLU’s clients maintain websites with prisoner information."

Since the Judge's decision was in the form of a temporary injunction, in the next few months the Court will make a final ruling on the constitutionality of the statute.

As we have opined many times before, inmates do not lose all constitutional rights when they pass through the prison doors. Among the rights they retain are those guaranteed under the First Amendment. Unless the state has a compelling interest in regulating a certain kind of activity and does so with a law that is narrowly tailored to apply only to the conduct it's trying to prohibit, the law won't pass muster.

"We see these (laws) as periodic attempts to silence prisoners and keep the eyes of the public away from what goes on in our nation's prisons and jails, where two million American citizens live," said the ACLU's David Fathi.

Congressman Dan Davis (D-IL) is concerned about inmates getting jobs when they get out of prison. He will be re-introducing his bill, the Ex-Offender Self-Sufficiency Act, which would create 100,000 units of housing for convicts featuring job training and social services on site.

"We've got a serious criminal justice challenge,'' Davis said, noting that nearly half end up back in jail within three years. His district, which includes much of the central city, near north, south and west sides, is home to 40 percent of those ex-offenders. Even though more than 70 percent of them were convicted of nonviolent drug offenses, they are barred from many jobs.

"We need to have something for them to do,'' Davis said. "Otherwise it's almost inevitable they are going to be back in the penitentiary.''

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Prosecutors fumed as hundreds of low level felons were allowed to leave jails and prisons early as part of Gov. Paul Patton's plan to avert a $6 million deficit in the corrections budget.

``I feel wonderful, man,'' Kevin Ray Gibson, 26, told the Lexington Herald-Leader after his release four months early for burglary and trafficking in pain pills. ``I'm going to get out and get me a job. I got kids I need to take care of. I just need to get out and do right. It's a good Christmas present.''

Patton's ``conditional commutation'' covered 567 prisoners, all described as nonviolent offenders who, on average, were within 80 days of completing their sentences.