Thursday, April 16, 2009
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Critical Resistance fights to abolish prisons
Critical Resistance fights to abolish prisons
By Gloria Rubac
Oakland, Calif.
Published Oct 10, 2008 11:28 PM
At a massive, well-organized and politically radical conference
called CR10, some 3,000 prison abolitionists from coast to coast
gathered in Oakland, Calif., for three days of reflecting,
strategizing, collaborating and organizing around abolishing the
prison-industrial complex (PIC).
Soffiyah Elijah listens as Green
Party's presidential candidate
Cynthia McKinney speaks on
Cointelpro.
WW photos: Gloria Rubac
The conference was held on the 10th anniversary of the founding of
Critical Resistance, an organization formed in 1998 to launch a
movement to eliminate prisons, detention, policing and surveillance
used by the PIC to "solve" problems brought on by poverty, racism,
homelessness and sex and gender oppression.
CR10 included hundreds of workshops, a film series, performances,
meetings, strategy sessions, regional meetings and cultural
expressions from dance to drama, from spoken word to drumming.
The atmosphere in the opening plenary session was electric as it
opened with Native drumming. Then the Welfare Poets brought the house
down with their sharp-edged hip-hop dedicated to Hassan Shakur,
unjustly executed in Texas in 2006. From San Francisco 8 member Hank
Jones to former political prisoner Linda Evans to INCITE! Women of
Color Against Violence leader Andrea Smith to Palestinian- American
poet and activist Suheir Hammad, the speakers set the high political
tone for the weekend.
Second from left, Pam Africa, fourth
from left, Ramona Africa.
A standing ovation followed Miss Major, an elder, African American,
formerly incarcerated transgender activist of 35 years, who spoke of
her love and concern and activism for transgender women of color
locked in U.S. prisons.
The evening ended with Angela Davis igniting the crowd when she
called for an end to prisons in the United States. She was swarmed
afterward, particularly by youth of color who wanted photos and
autographs from a hero that they had read about and admired and were
now meeting in person.
During the entire conference the California Prison Focus and the
Prison Activist Resource Center had thousands of letters from
prisoners and a space where participants would read, answer and
process prisoners' mail.
A striking character of the conference was the large number of youth,
people of color and lesbian, gay, bi, and trans people who not only
attended CR10 in large numbers but who led and participated in
workshops, plenary sessions, security and entertainment.
At a workshop called "Live from Death Row," Barbara Becnel mesmerized
the large crowd by telling her story of friendship with California
death row prisoner Stanley Tookie Williams until she witnessed his
execution in 2005. She has just released a documentary on Williams
entitled "TRIBUTE: Stanley Tookie Williams, 1953-2005."
A death row prisoner from San Quentin called in live via telephone to
the workshop and spoke to the crowd.
Family members, journalists and activists involved in the Jena Six
case did a workshop organized by Jesse Muhammad with the Final Call
newspaper.
The Jericho Movement, which is holding activities at the United
Nations in New York the weekend of October 10-12, ran a workshop on
political prisoners along with the National Boricua Human Rights
Network.
Actors read parts from a new and graphic drama called "Lucasville:
the Untold Story of a Prison Uprising," which exposed how the state
of Ohio framed up five innocent men and put them on death row after a
1993 prison uprising.
Ramona Africa of the Move Organization and Pam Africa of
International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal held a
workshop on Abu-Jamal. They later held a community meeting at the New
Black World, a West Oakland social club, which featured Chairman Fred
Hampton Jr. of the Prisoners of Consciousness Committee and Julia
Wright, journalist, activist and daughter of author Richard Wright,
as well as music by the Welfare Poets.
There were several workshops on long-term isolation in prison, which
is usually referred to with expressions like solitary confinement,
Special Housing Units, supermaximum prisons, and supersegregation by
different departments of correction but which the men and women who
have to live under these conditions call "torture."
From the Angola 3 to the San Francisco 8, from Mumia Abu-Jamal and
Leonard Peltier to the Puerto Rican independentistas, political
prisoners were discussed all throughout the conference. A taped
message from political prisoner Sundiata Acoli, driven underground by
Cointelpro and one of the three Black Liberation Army members
ambushed by state police on the New Jersey turnpike in 1973, was part
of the closing plenary.
In a workshop on Cointelpro, Green Party presidential candidate
Cynthia McKinney told the standing-room- only crowd, "Our government
has been wrong since the founding of our country. ... This government
would stoop to the lowest level possible to achieve their goals.
Through Cointelpro, a heinous U.S. government program, they would
destroy families by locking people up, they would kill, they would
incarcerate. They do this with the help of the corporations and the
media, from the New York Times to the New Orleans Times Picayune.
This needs an open hearing!"
The three days invigorated, educated and inspired the thousands of
activists attending to carry on the struggle from county jails, to
ICE detention centers, to state and federal and military prisons.
As Ramona Africa told a crowd: "Do whatever you can for Mumia and for
all prisoners. Victory is never giving in. We must think strong and
be strong. We will win!"
By Gloria Rubac
Oakland, Calif.
Published Oct 10, 2008 11:28 PM
At a massive, well-organized and politically radical conference
called CR10, some 3,000 prison abolitionists from coast to coast
gathered in Oakland, Calif., for three days of reflecting,
strategizing, collaborating and organizing around abolishing the
prison-industrial complex (PIC).
Soffiyah Elijah listens as Green
Party's presidential candidate
Cynthia McKinney speaks on
Cointelpro.
WW photos: Gloria Rubac
The conference was held on the 10th anniversary of the founding of
Critical Resistance, an organization formed in 1998 to launch a
movement to eliminate prisons, detention, policing and surveillance
used by the PIC to "solve" problems brought on by poverty, racism,
homelessness and sex and gender oppression.
CR10 included hundreds of workshops, a film series, performances,
meetings, strategy sessions, regional meetings and cultural
expressions from dance to drama, from spoken word to drumming.
The atmosphere in the opening plenary session was electric as it
opened with Native drumming. Then the Welfare Poets brought the house
down with their sharp-edged hip-hop dedicated to Hassan Shakur,
unjustly executed in Texas in 2006. From San Francisco 8 member Hank
Jones to former political prisoner Linda Evans to INCITE! Women of
Color Against Violence leader Andrea Smith to Palestinian- American
poet and activist Suheir Hammad, the speakers set the high political
tone for the weekend.
Second from left, Pam Africa, fourth
from left, Ramona Africa.
A standing ovation followed Miss Major, an elder, African American,
formerly incarcerated transgender activist of 35 years, who spoke of
her love and concern and activism for transgender women of color
locked in U.S. prisons.
The evening ended with Angela Davis igniting the crowd when she
called for an end to prisons in the United States. She was swarmed
afterward, particularly by youth of color who wanted photos and
autographs from a hero that they had read about and admired and were
now meeting in person.
During the entire conference the California Prison Focus and the
Prison Activist Resource Center had thousands of letters from
prisoners and a space where participants would read, answer and
process prisoners' mail.
A striking character of the conference was the large number of youth,
people of color and lesbian, gay, bi, and trans people who not only
attended CR10 in large numbers but who led and participated in
workshops, plenary sessions, security and entertainment.
At a workshop called "Live from Death Row," Barbara Becnel mesmerized
the large crowd by telling her story of friendship with California
death row prisoner Stanley Tookie Williams until she witnessed his
execution in 2005. She has just released a documentary on Williams
entitled "TRIBUTE: Stanley Tookie Williams, 1953-2005."
A death row prisoner from San Quentin called in live via telephone to
the workshop and spoke to the crowd.
Family members, journalists and activists involved in the Jena Six
case did a workshop organized by Jesse Muhammad with the Final Call
newspaper.
The Jericho Movement, which is holding activities at the United
Nations in New York the weekend of October 10-12, ran a workshop on
political prisoners along with the National Boricua Human Rights
Network.
Actors read parts from a new and graphic drama called "Lucasville:
the Untold Story of a Prison Uprising," which exposed how the state
of Ohio framed up five innocent men and put them on death row after a
1993 prison uprising.
Ramona Africa of the Move Organization and Pam Africa of
International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal held a
workshop on Abu-Jamal. They later held a community meeting at the New
Black World, a West Oakland social club, which featured Chairman Fred
Hampton Jr. of the Prisoners of Consciousness Committee and Julia
Wright, journalist, activist and daughter of author Richard Wright,
as well as music by the Welfare Poets.
There were several workshops on long-term isolation in prison, which
is usually referred to with expressions like solitary confinement,
Special Housing Units, supermaximum prisons, and supersegregation by
different departments of correction but which the men and women who
have to live under these conditions call "torture."
From the Angola 3 to the San Francisco 8, from Mumia Abu-Jamal and
Leonard Peltier to the Puerto Rican independentistas, political
prisoners were discussed all throughout the conference. A taped
message from political prisoner Sundiata Acoli, driven underground by
Cointelpro and one of the three Black Liberation Army members
ambushed by state police on the New Jersey turnpike in 1973, was part
of the closing plenary.
In a workshop on Cointelpro, Green Party presidential candidate
Cynthia McKinney told the standing-room- only crowd, "Our government
has been wrong since the founding of our country. ... This government
would stoop to the lowest level possible to achieve their goals.
Through Cointelpro, a heinous U.S. government program, they would
destroy families by locking people up, they would kill, they would
incarcerate. They do this with the help of the corporations and the
media, from the New York Times to the New Orleans Times Picayune.
This needs an open hearing!"
The three days invigorated, educated and inspired the thousands of
activists attending to carry on the struggle from county jails, to
ICE detention centers, to state and federal and military prisons.
As Ramona Africa told a crowd: "Do whatever you can for Mumia and for
all prisoners. Victory is never giving in. We must think strong and
be strong. We will win!"
Prop. 5 calls for expanding drug-crime rehabilitation
Prop. 5 calls for expanding drug-crime rehabilitation
By Don Thompson
ASSOCIATED PRESS
October 11, 2008
SACRAMENTO – Eight years ago, 61 percent of California voters passed a novel initiative requiring treatment instead of jail or prison for tens of thousands of drug offenders.
Supporters of that initiative are back with a follow-up measure that would require even greater leniency.
Billionaire investor and liberal activist George Soros is helping fund Proposition 5 on the Nov. 4 ballot. The measure would prohibit sending paroled drug offenders back to prison for parole violations unless they commit a new felony, have a violent or serious record or are considered high risk by prison officials.
The initiative would shorten parole for most drug and property crimes, while lengthening it for violent and serious felons. It also would require the state to put hundreds of millions of dollars into treatment and rehabilitation programs for nonviolent drug offenders and parolees.
To opponents, it's another step down a dangerous path that fails to make drug users accountable for their actions and lets drug dealers off the hook. Without the threat of jail or prison time, offenders won't get serious about true rehabilitation, opponents contend.
At issue:
Proposition 5
Requires treatment instead of prison or jail for most drug offenders, including those on parole or probation. Costs $610 million through mid-2010 followed by annual increases. Prohibits sending drug offenders back to prison for parole violations unless they commit a new felony, have a violent or serious record or are considered high risk by prison officials.
Pro: Rehabilitation is more effective than jail for getting nonviolent offenders off drugs. Relieves prison overcrowding and saves the state money.
Con: Fails to make drug users accountable for their actions and lets drug dealers off the hook. Without the threat of jail or prison time, offenders won't get serious about rehabilitation.
Actor Martin Sheen, whose son Charlie nearly died of a drug overdose in 1998 but received court-ordered rehabilitation, is the initiative's most prominent opponent.
Sheen argues that it would discourage drug treatment by steering most addicts away from jail, even if they keep using drugs or refuse to attend rehabilitation programs.
“You have to be given a stern proposition. The judge will say to you, 'You're either facing jail or you're facing rehab.' That's the program that we've found to work,” Sheen said in a telephone interview.
The star of “The West Wing” also opposed Proposition 36, the 2000 initiative that required treatment for nonviolent first-and second-time drug offenders.
Supporters of that initiative developed Proposition 5 after seeing money for drug rehabilitation programs dwindle, from $145 million in the 2006-07 fiscal year to $108 million this year.
Last year, a University of California Los Angeles study recommended that the state increase money for Proposition 36 programs to about $228 million a year.
Nearly 20 percent of California's 171,000 inmates are imprisoned for drug offenses, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
“This is about treatment, and it's about breaking cycles of crime that are driven by a completely treatable condition,” said Margaret Dooley-Sammuli, deputy California director of the Drug Policy Alliance Network and a campaign manager for Yes on 5. “The fact that we provide so little treatment is unconscionable.”
Penny Sheridan of Sacramento has first-hand experience with rehabilitation programs and believes Proposition 5 is another step toward helping addicts. She cycled through county jail and prison for eight years because of a methamphetamine addiction she developed as a teenager.
The last time she tested positive for drugs, her parole officer sent her to inpatient rehabilitation for 90 days instead of back to prison. That was two years ago. Now she is off parole, has a steady job and is going back to college.
“I'm not a liability to society anymore,” said Sheridan, 34.
Proposition 5 would not come without a price to California taxpayers if voters approve it.
The initiative would trigger $610 million in new state spending for treatment through mid-2010, followed by annual increases that would track the state's population growth and cost of living. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office projected that state spending required by the measure eventually could top $1 billion a year.
Supporters say the cost would be offset by reducing the prison population 17 percent over four years because more drug offenders and parolees would be sent to diversion programs. The analysis says that could save $1 billion in annual prison costs and $2.5 billion for new prisons.
Former state corrections secretary Jeanne Woodford supports the initiative as a responsible way to ease prison crowding. At its core, the debate is over finding a balance between incarceration and treatment, she said.
Law enforcement officials say the initiative dangerously broadens diversion programs established under Proposition 36.
For example, those convicted of property crimes such as fraud, embezzlement, and auto and identity theft could get treatment instead of jail if they convince a judge that their crimes were related to drug use.
San Diego County District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis, a former drug court judge who is now president of the state prosecutors' association, calls it the “drugs made me do it” defense.
Additionally, parole would be shortened from three years to six months for nonviolent drug or drug-related property offenders, including dealers caught with up to $50,000 worth of methamphetamine. Marijuana possession would be reduced from a misdemeanor to an infraction, similar to a traffic ticket. Inmates could earn more time off their sentences by completing treatment programs.
Opponents also object that Proposition 5 would give drug users five tries at rehabilitation programs before they could be jailed, up from three in Proposition 36.
Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer, president of the state chiefs' association, said the initiative amounts to a “drug dealers' bill of rights.”
Some former drug addicts aren't convinced the proposition would work.
Wesley Williams Jr. of Culver City said he never would have kicked a cocaine habit that cost him his home, his family and his law career had a Los Angeles judge not sent him to jail for a week for flunking out of a rehabilitation program.
“With addicts, unless there are consequences to their actions, they are going to continue to use,” said Williams, 55, now a business owner.
By Don Thompson
ASSOCIATED PRESS
October 11, 2008
SACRAMENTO – Eight years ago, 61 percent of California voters passed a novel initiative requiring treatment instead of jail or prison for tens of thousands of drug offenders.
Supporters of that initiative are back with a follow-up measure that would require even greater leniency.
Billionaire investor and liberal activist George Soros is helping fund Proposition 5 on the Nov. 4 ballot. The measure would prohibit sending paroled drug offenders back to prison for parole violations unless they commit a new felony, have a violent or serious record or are considered high risk by prison officials.
The initiative would shorten parole for most drug and property crimes, while lengthening it for violent and serious felons. It also would require the state to put hundreds of millions of dollars into treatment and rehabilitation programs for nonviolent drug offenders and parolees.
To opponents, it's another step down a dangerous path that fails to make drug users accountable for their actions and lets drug dealers off the hook. Without the threat of jail or prison time, offenders won't get serious about true rehabilitation, opponents contend.
At issue:
Proposition 5
Requires treatment instead of prison or jail for most drug offenders, including those on parole or probation. Costs $610 million through mid-2010 followed by annual increases. Prohibits sending drug offenders back to prison for parole violations unless they commit a new felony, have a violent or serious record or are considered high risk by prison officials.
Pro: Rehabilitation is more effective than jail for getting nonviolent offenders off drugs. Relieves prison overcrowding and saves the state money.
Con: Fails to make drug users accountable for their actions and lets drug dealers off the hook. Without the threat of jail or prison time, offenders won't get serious about rehabilitation.
Actor Martin Sheen, whose son Charlie nearly died of a drug overdose in 1998 but received court-ordered rehabilitation, is the initiative's most prominent opponent.
Sheen argues that it would discourage drug treatment by steering most addicts away from jail, even if they keep using drugs or refuse to attend rehabilitation programs.
“You have to be given a stern proposition. The judge will say to you, 'You're either facing jail or you're facing rehab.' That's the program that we've found to work,” Sheen said in a telephone interview.
The star of “The West Wing” also opposed Proposition 36, the 2000 initiative that required treatment for nonviolent first-and second-time drug offenders.
Supporters of that initiative developed Proposition 5 after seeing money for drug rehabilitation programs dwindle, from $145 million in the 2006-07 fiscal year to $108 million this year.
Last year, a University of California Los Angeles study recommended that the state increase money for Proposition 36 programs to about $228 million a year.
Nearly 20 percent of California's 171,000 inmates are imprisoned for drug offenses, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
“This is about treatment, and it's about breaking cycles of crime that are driven by a completely treatable condition,” said Margaret Dooley-Sammuli, deputy California director of the Drug Policy Alliance Network and a campaign manager for Yes on 5. “The fact that we provide so little treatment is unconscionable.”
Penny Sheridan of Sacramento has first-hand experience with rehabilitation programs and believes Proposition 5 is another step toward helping addicts. She cycled through county jail and prison for eight years because of a methamphetamine addiction she developed as a teenager.
The last time she tested positive for drugs, her parole officer sent her to inpatient rehabilitation for 90 days instead of back to prison. That was two years ago. Now she is off parole, has a steady job and is going back to college.
“I'm not a liability to society anymore,” said Sheridan, 34.
Proposition 5 would not come without a price to California taxpayers if voters approve it.
The initiative would trigger $610 million in new state spending for treatment through mid-2010, followed by annual increases that would track the state's population growth and cost of living. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office projected that state spending required by the measure eventually could top $1 billion a year.
Supporters say the cost would be offset by reducing the prison population 17 percent over four years because more drug offenders and parolees would be sent to diversion programs. The analysis says that could save $1 billion in annual prison costs and $2.5 billion for new prisons.
Former state corrections secretary Jeanne Woodford supports the initiative as a responsible way to ease prison crowding. At its core, the debate is over finding a balance between incarceration and treatment, she said.
Law enforcement officials say the initiative dangerously broadens diversion programs established under Proposition 36.
For example, those convicted of property crimes such as fraud, embezzlement, and auto and identity theft could get treatment instead of jail if they convince a judge that their crimes were related to drug use.
San Diego County District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis, a former drug court judge who is now president of the state prosecutors' association, calls it the “drugs made me do it” defense.
Additionally, parole would be shortened from three years to six months for nonviolent drug or drug-related property offenders, including dealers caught with up to $50,000 worth of methamphetamine. Marijuana possession would be reduced from a misdemeanor to an infraction, similar to a traffic ticket. Inmates could earn more time off their sentences by completing treatment programs.
Opponents also object that Proposition 5 would give drug users five tries at rehabilitation programs before they could be jailed, up from three in Proposition 36.
Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer, president of the state chiefs' association, said the initiative amounts to a “drug dealers' bill of rights.”
Some former drug addicts aren't convinced the proposition would work.
Wesley Williams Jr. of Culver City said he never would have kicked a cocaine habit that cost him his home, his family and his law career had a Los Angeles judge not sent him to jail for a week for flunking out of a rehabilitation program.
“With addicts, unless there are consequences to their actions, they are going to continue to use,” said Williams, 55, now a business owner.
Report: 1 in 3 inmates will offend again
Back to web version Saturday, Oct 11, 2008
Report: 1 in 3 inmates will offend again
The Associated Press
A report to Kentucky lawmakers says one in three state prison inmates
will be back behind bars within two years.
The Lexington Herald-Leader said a report requested last year by the
legislature' s Program Review and Investigations Committee was
presented Thursday.
The committee wanted an examination of programs that teach prison
inmates how to find jobs and housing after their release.
The report also said the re-entry programs vary widely from prison to
prison and are nonexistent for state inmates held in county jails,
where about one-third of them are housed.
The report was prepared by the Legislative Research Commission.
Information from: Lexington Herald-Leader, http://www.kentucky .com
Report: 1 in 3 inmates will offend again
The Associated Press
A report to Kentucky lawmakers says one in three state prison inmates
will be back behind bars within two years.
The Lexington Herald-Leader said a report requested last year by the
legislature' s Program Review and Investigations Committee was
presented Thursday.
The committee wanted an examination of programs that teach prison
inmates how to find jobs and housing after their release.
The report also said the re-entry programs vary widely from prison to
prison and are nonexistent for state inmates held in county jails,
where about one-third of them are housed.
The report was prepared by the Legislative Research Commission.
Information from: Lexington Herald-Leader, http://www.kentucky .com
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Death penalty cases piling up
Death penalty cases piling up
Chief justice says it's time to open review process to lower courts.
By Crystal Carreon - ccarreon@sacbee. com
Published 12:00 am PST Friday, January 11, 2008
Despite legal challenges to the death penalty, California's chief justice on Thursday pressed ahead with plans to alter how courts will vet the largest number of capital cases in the country.
Citing decades-long appeals and a backlog that threatens to overwhelm the high court, Chief Justice Ronald George told state commissioners that now is the time to relinquish the state Supreme Court's exclusive review of death penalty cases and open the process to the lower courts.
George, who addressed the Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice at a Capitol hearing, proposes amending the state Constitution to help fix a process he calls "dysfunctional. " He hopes to have the proposal on the 2008 general ballot or to find a legislator to sponsor the measure.
"The existing system for handing capital appeals in California is dysfunctional and needs reform," the chief justice told commissioners. "…(T)he current system is not functioning effectively. "
But skeptics suggested that spreading out capital cases to the appellate courts could add another layer to an already notoriously slow appeals process. A law professor at Thursday's hearing likened George's proposal to just "rearranging furniture."
With a surge in the death row population over the years – currently more than 660 inmates are awaiting execution – George told commissioners that death penalty reviews alone consume about 20 percent to 25 percent of the high court's caseload, up from about 5 percent to 10 percent about two decades ago.
He pointed out that the number of Supreme Court justices – seven – has remained the same since 1879, while there are 105 state Court of Appeal justices.
George said the state Supreme Court – even if it devoted itself exclusively to capital cases – would take about three to four years to chip away and process the existing backlog. About 400 death penalty appeals are pending in the Supreme Court.
He used words such as "peril," "critical" and "disadvantage" to describe how the high court's responsibility to litigate and set case law in crucial civil and criminal matters could be compromised by the massive death penalty caseload.
"If the Supreme Court cannot fulfill that role, California – its people, its government, its economy, its public safety – all would suffer," George said.
But Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Marshall later told commissioners that the proposal could, in effect, just add another tier of lengthy legal review.
"I understand the impetus," the professor said. "But, on some level, they are rearranging the furniture … ."
Under the current system, after a death sentence is handed down, an automatic appeal process begins in the state Supreme Court. If the court denies all relief, as it almost always does, the case then moves to the federal system.
The appeal then goes to the U.S. Supreme Court with a request for review. The constitutional case, known as "habeas corpus," goes to federal district court, then the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, before making its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Under the proposal, George said the high court will continue to be "hands-on" and will ultimately review the lower court's opinion. He recommended sending 30 capital cases to the lower courts initially.
Marshall, who had been influential in commuting death sentences in Illinois, said the state's unprecedented backlog stems from its breadth of more than 30 death penalty offenses, a range of special circumstances that include killing an officer in the line of duty to lying in wait.
Marshall proposed narrowing the scope of death penalty cases to only the "worst of the worst." That, he said, would greatly diminish the number of inmates at San Quentin's death row.
Earlier versions of capital punishment in California had fewer special circumstances, but voters in 1978 changed that, according to Sacramento attorney Donald H. Heller, who drafted the state's death penalty initiative.
"It's something the people wanted," Heller said. "The initiative was very broad in its scope."
Heller said at the time, he believed the Supreme Court's careful review of death penalty appeals would take about 10 years – not the 17 1/2-year average cited by legal scholars, the slowest process in the country.
He called George's proposal reasonable, saying it would not undermine rights to due process and fair hearings. Although Heller has since become a critic of capital punishment, he said if the state is to continue its practice, it needs to diminish the backlog.
"If you believe in the law, then you need to take into account what is clearly an unreasonable delay between sentence of death and a final decision of the California Supreme Court," he said after the hearing. "It's a process fraught with delay because no one wants to make a decision that could result in the death of an innocent person."
For the mother of Terri Lynn Winchell, a Lodi teen murdered in 1981, the time afforded to inmates is a luxury.
"It just wears you out; you want justice," said Barbara Christian, whose daughter's body was found in a vineyard 27 years ago this week. "Knowing that he's alive and well just keeps the pain alive."
Jurors convicted Michael Angelo Morales of the murder in 1983, and his execution was to be carried out in February 2006 before a last-minute legal challenge plucked Morales from the death chamber. The state's death penalty has been in limbo since then, pending legal challenges.
The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice will hold two more public hearings on the death penalty over the next two months. The commission was created by the state Senate to examine what leads to wrongful convictions.
http://www.sacbee. com/111/story/ 626308.html
Chief justice says it's time to open review process to lower courts.
By Crystal Carreon - ccarreon@sacbee. com
Published 12:00 am PST Friday, January 11, 2008
Despite legal challenges to the death penalty, California's chief justice on Thursday pressed ahead with plans to alter how courts will vet the largest number of capital cases in the country.
Citing decades-long appeals and a backlog that threatens to overwhelm the high court, Chief Justice Ronald George told state commissioners that now is the time to relinquish the state Supreme Court's exclusive review of death penalty cases and open the process to the lower courts.
George, who addressed the Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice at a Capitol hearing, proposes amending the state Constitution to help fix a process he calls "dysfunctional. " He hopes to have the proposal on the 2008 general ballot or to find a legislator to sponsor the measure.
"The existing system for handing capital appeals in California is dysfunctional and needs reform," the chief justice told commissioners. "…(T)he current system is not functioning effectively. "
But skeptics suggested that spreading out capital cases to the appellate courts could add another layer to an already notoriously slow appeals process. A law professor at Thursday's hearing likened George's proposal to just "rearranging furniture."
With a surge in the death row population over the years – currently more than 660 inmates are awaiting execution – George told commissioners that death penalty reviews alone consume about 20 percent to 25 percent of the high court's caseload, up from about 5 percent to 10 percent about two decades ago.
He pointed out that the number of Supreme Court justices – seven – has remained the same since 1879, while there are 105 state Court of Appeal justices.
George said the state Supreme Court – even if it devoted itself exclusively to capital cases – would take about three to four years to chip away and process the existing backlog. About 400 death penalty appeals are pending in the Supreme Court.
He used words such as "peril," "critical" and "disadvantage" to describe how the high court's responsibility to litigate and set case law in crucial civil and criminal matters could be compromised by the massive death penalty caseload.
"If the Supreme Court cannot fulfill that role, California – its people, its government, its economy, its public safety – all would suffer," George said.
But Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Marshall later told commissioners that the proposal could, in effect, just add another tier of lengthy legal review.
"I understand the impetus," the professor said. "But, on some level, they are rearranging the furniture … ."
Under the current system, after a death sentence is handed down, an automatic appeal process begins in the state Supreme Court. If the court denies all relief, as it almost always does, the case then moves to the federal system.
The appeal then goes to the U.S. Supreme Court with a request for review. The constitutional case, known as "habeas corpus," goes to federal district court, then the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, before making its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Under the proposal, George said the high court will continue to be "hands-on" and will ultimately review the lower court's opinion. He recommended sending 30 capital cases to the lower courts initially.
Marshall, who had been influential in commuting death sentences in Illinois, said the state's unprecedented backlog stems from its breadth of more than 30 death penalty offenses, a range of special circumstances that include killing an officer in the line of duty to lying in wait.
Marshall proposed narrowing the scope of death penalty cases to only the "worst of the worst." That, he said, would greatly diminish the number of inmates at San Quentin's death row.
Earlier versions of capital punishment in California had fewer special circumstances, but voters in 1978 changed that, according to Sacramento attorney Donald H. Heller, who drafted the state's death penalty initiative.
"It's something the people wanted," Heller said. "The initiative was very broad in its scope."
Heller said at the time, he believed the Supreme Court's careful review of death penalty appeals would take about 10 years – not the 17 1/2-year average cited by legal scholars, the slowest process in the country.
He called George's proposal reasonable, saying it would not undermine rights to due process and fair hearings. Although Heller has since become a critic of capital punishment, he said if the state is to continue its practice, it needs to diminish the backlog.
"If you believe in the law, then you need to take into account what is clearly an unreasonable delay between sentence of death and a final decision of the California Supreme Court," he said after the hearing. "It's a process fraught with delay because no one wants to make a decision that could result in the death of an innocent person."
For the mother of Terri Lynn Winchell, a Lodi teen murdered in 1981, the time afforded to inmates is a luxury.
"It just wears you out; you want justice," said Barbara Christian, whose daughter's body was found in a vineyard 27 years ago this week. "Knowing that he's alive and well just keeps the pain alive."
Jurors convicted Michael Angelo Morales of the murder in 1983, and his execution was to be carried out in February 2006 before a last-minute legal challenge plucked Morales from the death chamber. The state's death penalty has been in limbo since then, pending legal challenges.
The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice will hold two more public hearings on the death penalty over the next two months. The commission was created by the state Senate to examine what leads to wrongful convictions.
http://www.sacbee. com/111/story/ 626308.html
Inmates have a right to protest at Solano?
Inmates exercising rights
Strike follows change in CSP, Solano yard scheduling
By Kimberly K. Fu/The Reporter
An estimated 2,200 inmates at California State Prison, Solano are exercising their right to peaceful protest and sitting out work-related and other duties...The strike, initiated Monday...reportedly is linked to a recent change in yard scheduling.
"They're not happy about it, but at least they're doing something nonviolent in protest," said Lt. Tim Wamble, prison spokesman. "We're hoping and trying to get it to end any minute."
At issue is inmate access to the outdoors. At present, anywhere from 800 to 1,000 inmates can be on the yard at one time. The numbers pose a safety risk for both inmates and staff...prison officials implemented a plan which has no more than 600 inmates on the yard at one time...Inmates, however, apparently disagree and, since Monday, have refused to attend scheduled classes and programs or go to work.(TheReporter. com)
Gee. Paco could have sworn inmates are prohibited from demonstrations, strikes and protests. Now, according to the idiots at CSP Solano, inmates have a right to disrupt operations?
"They're not happy...at least they are doing something non-violent. ..we're hoping and trying to get it to end?"
Now, THERE'S some 'public information' that should REALLY inspire confidence among the populace. The casual, almost whimsical statement conjures up the image of Lt. Wamble, sitting barefooted on a porch swing with a straw protruding from his tobacco-juice moistened lips.
Insofar as Solano officials have decided to let the population strike, Paco wonders how their time cards will be documented. Under the law, each and every one of those 'stikers' must be assessed an unexcused absence and be docked 1 day (not to mention the disciplinary assessments they SHOULD receive for conducting an illegal strike). And yet, it is a forgone conclusion NOTHING WILL HAPPEN.
Paco recommends the immediate termination of Solano's warden for GROSS INCOMPETENCE. Lt. Wamble (see also Wamble), who apparently lateraled from CalTrans a hot second ago, should be reassigned to a position where he may benefit from some actual custody experience.
Posted by pacovilla at 04:59
http://ccpoa. blogspot. com
Strike follows change in CSP, Solano yard scheduling
By Kimberly K. Fu/The Reporter
An estimated 2,200 inmates at California State Prison, Solano are exercising their right to peaceful protest and sitting out work-related and other duties...The strike, initiated Monday...reportedly is linked to a recent change in yard scheduling.
"They're not happy about it, but at least they're doing something nonviolent in protest," said Lt. Tim Wamble, prison spokesman. "We're hoping and trying to get it to end any minute."
At issue is inmate access to the outdoors. At present, anywhere from 800 to 1,000 inmates can be on the yard at one time. The numbers pose a safety risk for both inmates and staff...prison officials implemented a plan which has no more than 600 inmates on the yard at one time...Inmates, however, apparently disagree and, since Monday, have refused to attend scheduled classes and programs or go to work.(TheReporter. com)
Gee. Paco could have sworn inmates are prohibited from demonstrations, strikes and protests. Now, according to the idiots at CSP Solano, inmates have a right to disrupt operations?
"They're not happy...at least they are doing something non-violent. ..we're hoping and trying to get it to end?"
Now, THERE'S some 'public information' that should REALLY inspire confidence among the populace. The casual, almost whimsical statement conjures up the image of Lt. Wamble, sitting barefooted on a porch swing with a straw protruding from his tobacco-juice moistened lips.
Insofar as Solano officials have decided to let the population strike, Paco wonders how their time cards will be documented. Under the law, each and every one of those 'stikers' must be assessed an unexcused absence and be docked 1 day (not to mention the disciplinary assessments they SHOULD receive for conducting an illegal strike). And yet, it is a forgone conclusion NOTHING WILL HAPPEN.
Paco recommends the immediate termination of Solano's warden for GROSS INCOMPETENCE. Lt. Wamble (see also Wamble), who apparently lateraled from CalTrans a hot second ago, should be reassigned to a position where he may benefit from some actual custody experience.
Posted by pacovilla at 04:59
http://ccpoa. blogspot. com
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Valley Fever
__._,_.___
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/ 2/contaminated- in-california- valley-fever- at-pvsp
Pleasant Valley State prison is located in rural Coalinga, California. The State Prison provides long-term housing and services for minimum, medium and maximum custody inmates.PVSP was opened in November 1994, and covers 640 acres. Number of custody staff =730; total number of prisoners=5188. With an annual operating budget of $173 million. The soil that this prison was built on is contaminated with the fungus known as Coccidiodomycosis.The technical name for Valley Fever is Coccidioidomycosis, or "Cocci" for short. It is caused by Coddidioides immitis, a fungus somewhat like yeast or mildew which lives in the soil. The tiny seeds, or spores, become wind-borne and are inhaled into the lungs, where the infection starts. Valley Fever is not contagious from person to person. It appears that after one exposure, the body develops immunity.Valley Fever is a sickness of degree. About 60 percent of the people who breathe the spores do not get sick at all. For some, it may feel like a cold or flu. For those sick enough to go to the doctor, it can be serious, with pneumonia-like symtoms, requiring medication and bed rest.Of all the people infected with Valley Fever, one or more out of 200 will develop the disseminated form, which is devastating, and can be fatal. These are the cases in which the disease spreads beyond the lungs through the bloodstream - typically to the skin, bones, and the membranes surrounding the brain, causing meningitis.I have numerous reports/medical records that indicate several state prisoners have been infected with Valley Fever and they are NOT getting proper treatment. Somehave died due to suffering complications from this disease. The state of California has done nothing to remedy this very serious and life threatening situation. I feel it is my responsibility to call attention to this. Please help me and others to spread the word in regards to whats going on there.I have been working on this issue now for over a year. In that time, I personally know of two men who have died due to Valley Fever, which can be prevented and treated. There are more that have been infected as everytime the soil is disturbed, the fungus becomes airborne. Here is a letter from a prisoner dated August 2006-I am currently being housed at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, CA. I guess I don't make enough money to live in a luxurious cell suite so I am one of many stuck on the E-beds. Living on the E-beds really sucks but it's much better than living in the gym day-care center. We have had our hands full with our shower program as well as staff. Staff hates us so bad, most of us just want to do our time and go home but there are a few kunckleheads here who don't belong here and staff knows that.I want the public and media to know whats going on at Pleasant Valley State Prison and I would like to see some action to prevent the spread of Valley Fever.
We have been reading in the newspapers statewide that the prison system is under investigation. I am so glad somebody has finally taken an interest in our well being. Since this has all been happening we are getting less and less program and showers are harder to come by. It almost makes no sense to go to school or vocation because getting a shower right away is a thing of the past. The quality of food is at its all time low. I really doubt it has any if at all nutritional value. Our lunches are ridiculous.
We have a warden who was run off at Corcoran state prison for corrupt activities and now he is allowing it over here. How the hell do they get away with this? We have a tower Corrections Officer who has been run off everywhere he has been and now he is doing the same things here. This man is a real idiot. Everything they can possibly do to us to mentally abuse us they do. The Green Wall is alive here. These people are criminals and they get paid to be.
Many people here have got Valley Fever, some have died from it, it's in the soil and they know it. We have tried to contact people on the outside but everybody is afraid of CCPOA. This is a mafia that needs to be stopped.
- a California prison, August 2006
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Prison Reform is NOT soft on crimeCarol Leonard
"If you can find money to kill people, you can find money to help people."--Tony Benn in Sicko
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Sunday, December 23, 2007
Prison releases 'DOA,' foe says
Prison releases 'DOA,' foe says
Dems, Republicans blast governor's inmate budget cut.
By Andy Furillo - _afuri...@sacbee.com_ (mailto:afuri...@sacbee.com)
Published 12:00 am PST Saturday, December 22, 2007
A Democratic legislative leader and a firebrand Republican promised tough
going Friday for a Schwarzenegger administration proposal to cut the state's
prison population by 28,000 over the next two years.
Early releases are "DOA" with Assembly Republicans, said Jose Solorio,
D-Santa Ana, chairman of the Assembly Public Safety Committee. He said Democrats'
reaction would range from raising questions to outright opposition of the
administration's budget proposal.
"Many of us are going to have some very strong concerns about whether it's
the direction we want to begin taking," Solorio said.
Meanwhile, Assemblyman Todd Spitzer, R-Orange, one of his party's leaders on
criminal justice issues, said the proposal to release the so-called
nonviolent, nonserious, non-sex offenders in the final 20 months of their terms would
undermine Assembly Bill 900. The $7.9 billion measure was enacted this year
to add 53,000 prison and jail beds and more fully establish rehabilitation as
the philosophical underpinning of California's correctional system.
"By letting people out 20 months early, which is supposed to be when they get
their re-entry skills, they're not going to get them at all, so recidivism
is going to get worse," Spitzer said. "This budget plan is a forfeiture of AB
900 principles, which was supposed to change how we treat criminality in
California."
Gubernatorial spokesman Adam Mendelsohn said Friday that the administration
still has not made a final decision on the budget proposal that would save the
state $1.112 billion over the next two fiscal years. The governor has called
for 10 percent spending cuts in every agency, which in the $9.9 billion
Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, almost certainly would require
substantial reductions in the inmate population of about 172,000 and the parolee
population of 127,000, and in a labor force of 64,000.
Mendelsohn said that, with the state facing a $14 billion deficit, the
governor faces difficult decisions as he prepares to unveil his budget proposal
Jan. 10.
"With raising taxes not being an option," Mendelsohn said, "you have to look
at very severe cuts."
Schwarzenegger was re-elected to office last year on a campaign that included
a no-new-taxes pledge. Republicans in the Legislature have vowed – and have
the numbers – to block any tax increases, which require two-thirds support of
lawmakers.
Also on Friday, Schwarzenegger's office announced that the state is $3.3
billion in the hole in the current fiscal year and that the governor is calling
for a special legislative session to begin Jan. 10 to address what he has
declared a "fiscal emergency."
According to details of the corrections budget proposal made available to The
Bee, the administration's plan calls for the release of lower-risk offenders
in the final 20 months of their terms to reduce the prison population by
22,159 in the 2008-09 fiscal year.
Schwarzenegger's budget writers also are proposing a shift to a "summary"
parole system that would result in far fewer offenders being sent back to prison
on technical violations and criminal infractions, but still would subject
them to searches by local police. That plan would reduce the prison population
by another 6,249 inmates.
Combined, the two proposals would reduce the payroll in the California
Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation by 5,854 employees. The two proposals
would require legislative approval. The budget bill requires a two-thirds
vote.
Under the state Penal Code, about 35 crimes are listed as "serious" or
"violent" for the purposes of the state's "three-strikes" law. Those offenders –
convicted on charges ranging from murder to rape, robbery, burglary or sex or
firearm offenses – would be excluded from the early releases.
Victims' advocates say that the exclusions aren't wide enough and that other
convicts serving time for elder, child and spousal abuse, stalking, false
imprisonment, weapons and other charges could still get out before their
statutory time is up.
San Bernardino County District Attorney Michael Ramos said local law
enforcement leaders have demanded that the administration "add exclusions" to the
definition of a lower-risk offender. As for early releases, Ramos said they
"won't happen without a fight" from county sheriffs and district attorneys.
Republican political consultant Ray McNally said that if the proposals go
through, Schwarzenegger's political career will be all but over.
"It's pretty clear, the governor has decided not to run for U.S. Senate or
other political office," said McNally, whose clients include the California
Correctional Peace Officers Association. "You can't release 22,000 people from
prison and expect to ever get elected to another office again. I think he's
made his decision to retire from politics."
The budget proposal came amid motions filed in two federal class-action cases
to cap the prison population because overcrowding is hindering the state's
effort to provide inmates with constitutionally adequate medical and mental
health care.
Inmates' rights lawyer Don Specter of the Prison Law Office, who is
representing plaintiffs in both suits, said the proposed early releases amount to
"nothing" as far as the federal cases are concerned.
"If and when it's part of the budget, we'll deal with it at that point,"
Specter said.
Trial on the motions had been scheduled for February, but the date was
vacated last week by a three-judge court that first must decide whether to order
the state to turn over thousands of documents to the plaintiffs.
Dems, Republicans blast governor's inmate budget cut.
By Andy Furillo - _afuri...@sacbee.com_ (mailto:afuri...@sacbee.com)
Published 12:00 am PST Saturday, December 22, 2007
A Democratic legislative leader and a firebrand Republican promised tough
going Friday for a Schwarzenegger administration proposal to cut the state's
prison population by 28,000 over the next two years.
Early releases are "DOA" with Assembly Republicans, said Jose Solorio,
D-Santa Ana, chairman of the Assembly Public Safety Committee. He said Democrats'
reaction would range from raising questions to outright opposition of the
administration's budget proposal.
"Many of us are going to have some very strong concerns about whether it's
the direction we want to begin taking," Solorio said.
Meanwhile, Assemblyman Todd Spitzer, R-Orange, one of his party's leaders on
criminal justice issues, said the proposal to release the so-called
nonviolent, nonserious, non-sex offenders in the final 20 months of their terms would
undermine Assembly Bill 900. The $7.9 billion measure was enacted this year
to add 53,000 prison and jail beds and more fully establish rehabilitation as
the philosophical underpinning of California's correctional system.
"By letting people out 20 months early, which is supposed to be when they get
their re-entry skills, they're not going to get them at all, so recidivism
is going to get worse," Spitzer said. "This budget plan is a forfeiture of AB
900 principles, which was supposed to change how we treat criminality in
California."
Gubernatorial spokesman Adam Mendelsohn said Friday that the administration
still has not made a final decision on the budget proposal that would save the
state $1.112 billion over the next two fiscal years. The governor has called
for 10 percent spending cuts in every agency, which in the $9.9 billion
Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, almost certainly would require
substantial reductions in the inmate population of about 172,000 and the parolee
population of 127,000, and in a labor force of 64,000.
Mendelsohn said that, with the state facing a $14 billion deficit, the
governor faces difficult decisions as he prepares to unveil his budget proposal
Jan. 10.
"With raising taxes not being an option," Mendelsohn said, "you have to look
at very severe cuts."
Schwarzenegger was re-elected to office last year on a campaign that included
a no-new-taxes pledge. Republicans in the Legislature have vowed – and have
the numbers – to block any tax increases, which require two-thirds support of
lawmakers.
Also on Friday, Schwarzenegger's office announced that the state is $3.3
billion in the hole in the current fiscal year and that the governor is calling
for a special legislative session to begin Jan. 10 to address what he has
declared a "fiscal emergency."
According to details of the corrections budget proposal made available to The
Bee, the administration's plan calls for the release of lower-risk offenders
in the final 20 months of their terms to reduce the prison population by
22,159 in the 2008-09 fiscal year.
Schwarzenegger's budget writers also are proposing a shift to a "summary"
parole system that would result in far fewer offenders being sent back to prison
on technical violations and criminal infractions, but still would subject
them to searches by local police. That plan would reduce the prison population
by another 6,249 inmates.
Combined, the two proposals would reduce the payroll in the California
Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation by 5,854 employees. The two proposals
would require legislative approval. The budget bill requires a two-thirds
vote.
Under the state Penal Code, about 35 crimes are listed as "serious" or
"violent" for the purposes of the state's "three-strikes" law. Those offenders –
convicted on charges ranging from murder to rape, robbery, burglary or sex or
firearm offenses – would be excluded from the early releases.
Victims' advocates say that the exclusions aren't wide enough and that other
convicts serving time for elder, child and spousal abuse, stalking, false
imprisonment, weapons and other charges could still get out before their
statutory time is up.
San Bernardino County District Attorney Michael Ramos said local law
enforcement leaders have demanded that the administration "add exclusions" to the
definition of a lower-risk offender. As for early releases, Ramos said they
"won't happen without a fight" from county sheriffs and district attorneys.
Republican political consultant Ray McNally said that if the proposals go
through, Schwarzenegger's political career will be all but over.
"It's pretty clear, the governor has decided not to run for U.S. Senate or
other political office," said McNally, whose clients include the California
Correctional Peace Officers Association. "You can't release 22,000 people from
prison and expect to ever get elected to another office again. I think he's
made his decision to retire from politics."
The budget proposal came amid motions filed in two federal class-action cases
to cap the prison population because overcrowding is hindering the state's
effort to provide inmates with constitutionally adequate medical and mental
health care.
Inmates' rights lawyer Don Specter of the Prison Law Office, who is
representing plaintiffs in both suits, said the proposed early releases amount to
"nothing" as far as the federal cases are concerned.
"If and when it's part of the budget, we'll deal with it at that point,"
Specter said.
Trial on the motions had been scheduled for February, but the date was
vacated last week by a three-judge court that first must decide whether to order
the state to turn over thousands of documents to the plaintiffs.
Schwarzenegger proposes to release 22,000 prisoners
Schwarzenegger proposes to release 22,000 prisoners
By Andy Furillo - afurillo@sacbee.com
Published 6:22 pm PST Thursday, December 20, 2007
In what may be the largest early release of inmates in United States history, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration is proposing to open the prison gates next year to some 22,000 low-risk offenders.
According to details of a budget proposal made available to The Bee, the administration will ask the Legislature to authorize the release of certain non-serious, non-violent, non-sex offenders who have less than 20 months to go on their terms.
The proposal would cut the prison population by 22,159 inmates and save the cash-strapped state $256 million in the fiscal year that begins July 1 and more than $780 million through June 30, 2010. Besides reducing the inmate population, the proposal also calls for a reduction in more than 4,000 prison jobs, most of which would involve correctional officers.
A gubernatorial spokesman said no final decisions have been made.
The administration, which is looking at across the board budget cuts to stem a budget deficit pegged as high as $14 billion, is looking for more savings in prison spending by shifting all lower-risk parolees into what officials are describing as a "summary" system. The shift also would require legislative approval.
Under "summary" parole, offenders would remain on supervised release and still be subject to searches by local law enforcement at any time, but they would not be returned to prison on a technical violation. It would take a new crime prosecuted by local law enforcement officials to return the offenders to prison.
A summary parole system would cut the daily average population of released offenders by 18,522 in the next fiscal year and result in a further prison population reduction of 6,249, according to the proposal. It would save the state $98 million in the 2008-09 fiscal year and $329 million through 2009-10. The number of job cuts in the parole proposal will hit 1,660.
Gubernatorial spokesman Adam Mendelsohn declined to confirm the proposal outlined to The Bee, but reaffirmed the administration's belief that all departments need to cut spending across the board by 10 percent next year. Schwarzenegger "has not made any decisions" on where the cuts will take place, Mendelsohn said, including whether they will involve the early release of inmates or staff cuts.
"He has not made any final determination on what his January budget will look like, but there are many, many scenarios that have been presented to the governor, and he is working extremely hard to figure out how we manage this budget situation through cuts and reduced spending," Mendelsohn.
The corrections budget proposal outlined Thursday would not cut any of the prison department's bond funding, including the recently enacted, $7.9 billion Assembly Bill 900 spending, nor would it affect the expenditures of the federal medical receiver, who is in charge of $1.5 billion of the agency's total portfolio. The Corrections Standards Authority and the Division of Juvenile Justice would also be excluded from the proposed cuts.
By Andy Furillo - afurillo@sacbee.com
Published 6:22 pm PST Thursday, December 20, 2007
In what may be the largest early release of inmates in United States history, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration is proposing to open the prison gates next year to some 22,000 low-risk offenders.
According to details of a budget proposal made available to The Bee, the administration will ask the Legislature to authorize the release of certain non-serious, non-violent, non-sex offenders who have less than 20 months to go on their terms.
The proposal would cut the prison population by 22,159 inmates and save the cash-strapped state $256 million in the fiscal year that begins July 1 and more than $780 million through June 30, 2010. Besides reducing the inmate population, the proposal also calls for a reduction in more than 4,000 prison jobs, most of which would involve correctional officers.
A gubernatorial spokesman said no final decisions have been made.
The administration, which is looking at across the board budget cuts to stem a budget deficit pegged as high as $14 billion, is looking for more savings in prison spending by shifting all lower-risk parolees into what officials are describing as a "summary" system. The shift also would require legislative approval.
Under "summary" parole, offenders would remain on supervised release and still be subject to searches by local law enforcement at any time, but they would not be returned to prison on a technical violation. It would take a new crime prosecuted by local law enforcement officials to return the offenders to prison.
A summary parole system would cut the daily average population of released offenders by 18,522 in the next fiscal year and result in a further prison population reduction of 6,249, according to the proposal. It would save the state $98 million in the 2008-09 fiscal year and $329 million through 2009-10. The number of job cuts in the parole proposal will hit 1,660.
Gubernatorial spokesman Adam Mendelsohn declined to confirm the proposal outlined to The Bee, but reaffirmed the administration's belief that all departments need to cut spending across the board by 10 percent next year. Schwarzenegger "has not made any decisions" on where the cuts will take place, Mendelsohn said, including whether they will involve the early release of inmates or staff cuts.
"He has not made any final determination on what his January budget will look like, but there are many, many scenarios that have been presented to the governor, and he is working extremely hard to figure out how we manage this budget situation through cuts and reduced spending," Mendelsohn.
The corrections budget proposal outlined Thursday would not cut any of the prison department's bond funding, including the recently enacted, $7.9 billion Assembly Bill 900 spending, nor would it affect the expenditures of the federal medical receiver, who is in charge of $1.5 billion of the agency's total portfolio. The Corrections Standards Authority and the Division of Juvenile Justice would also be excluded from the proposed cuts.
Friday, June 29, 2007
Comprehensive Prison Reform
Fact Sheet: More Rehabilitation, Fewer Victims
More than 97 percent of inmates in California’s prisons will be eligible for parole someday, meaning almost everyone who goes into prison eventually gets out. California’s 70 percent recidivism rate means that thousands of offenders return to our already overcrowded prisons—and that thousands of individuals and communities are victimized and revictimized every year. Rehabilitation is the key to ending this criminal cycle. The historic prison agreement (AB 900) struck on April 25, 2007 by legislative leaders and Governor Schwarzenegger significantly expands rehabilitation services to increase public safety and reduce crime.
This agreement ties rehabilitation to all 53,000 beds.
The $7.7 ($7.4 bonds/$350 General Fund) billion prison reform agreement will provide 53,000 prison and jail beds in two phases. Rehabilitation services—like substance abuse treatment, mental health services and vocational education—will accompany all new bed construction.
16,000 beds provide intensive rehabilitation just before parole.
Secure Re-Entry Facilities, small correctional centers built in local communities, are the legislation’s rehabilitation centerpiece. The legislation funds 16,000 new beds in these centers to provide focused rehabilitation in the critical few months just before offenders are paroled. Programs will include: job training and placement; GED coursework; anger management classes; family counseling; and housing placement.
* Currently 60,000 California inmates are serving the final 0-3 years of their sentences. Without rehabilitation, these offenders will leave prison with nothing more than $200 and a bus ticket.
* Re-entry is about accountability. Offenders considered for re-entry facilities must demonstrate commitment to becoming a productive citizen. Offenders will be offered specific counseling, programs and services to support this choice. Failure to participate will result in removal from the program.
* Re-entry facilities won’t bring offenders to our communities—because they’re already here. By law, inmates are already returned to their county of last legal residence. These offenders are coming back to our cities and towns whether they’re rehabilitated or not.
* Re-entry facilities will help inmates succeed after prison. Every re-entry facility will be designed to reduce recidivism, and every participating offender will have an individual plan to maximize their chances for parole success.
* Communities will be involved in every stage. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) is already in negotiations with more than 20 counties and cities that are interested in housing re-entry facilities. These agreements will be negotiated by county sheriffs and county administrative officers, and are subject to board of supervisor approval. Counties that agree to house re-entry facilities will receive preference in funding to expand and improve local jails.
16,000 “infill” beds make room for rehabilitation in our prisons.
The legislation adds 16,000 beds inside of existing prisons. This expansion will let CDCR move inmates out of bad beds and into permanent housing, enhancing staff safety. “Bad beds” are bunks housed, as a result of overcrowding, in prison gymnasiums, dayrooms, libraries and other spaces that once provided rehabilitation services.
* Infill beds are a top priority. All 16,000 new infill beds are scheduled to be constructed within the next 18 to 24 months.
* 4,000 beds (2,000 in prison and 2,000 aftercare beds) will be devoted to drug treatment. CDCR’s Division of Substance Abuse Programs serves over 10,000 inmates and parolees. These programs reduce drug and alcohol addiction and the massive costs associated with drug-related crime.
National experts are helping CDCR build the most effective programs.
A panel of national experts is currently working with CDCR to strengthen the agency’s rehabilitation programs. The panel will issue recommendations early this summer to help CDCR lower recidivism, access current efforts, and identify best practices and evidence-based programs to lower recidivism rates. The panel also will assist local government and law enforcement deal with paroled offenders. CDCR will use these recommendations to develop more effective programs and strengthen collaboration with local communities.
© 2006 State of California
http://gov.ca.gov/index.php?/fact-sheet/6089/
More than 97 percent of inmates in California’s prisons will be eligible for parole someday, meaning almost everyone who goes into prison eventually gets out. California’s 70 percent recidivism rate means that thousands of offenders return to our already overcrowded prisons—and that thousands of individuals and communities are victimized and revictimized every year. Rehabilitation is the key to ending this criminal cycle. The historic prison agreement (AB 900) struck on April 25, 2007 by legislative leaders and Governor Schwarzenegger significantly expands rehabilitation services to increase public safety and reduce crime.
This agreement ties rehabilitation to all 53,000 beds.
The $7.7 ($7.4 bonds/$350 General Fund) billion prison reform agreement will provide 53,000 prison and jail beds in two phases. Rehabilitation services—like substance abuse treatment, mental health services and vocational education—will accompany all new bed construction.
16,000 beds provide intensive rehabilitation just before parole.
Secure Re-Entry Facilities, small correctional centers built in local communities, are the legislation’s rehabilitation centerpiece. The legislation funds 16,000 new beds in these centers to provide focused rehabilitation in the critical few months just before offenders are paroled. Programs will include: job training and placement; GED coursework; anger management classes; family counseling; and housing placement.
* Currently 60,000 California inmates are serving the final 0-3 years of their sentences. Without rehabilitation, these offenders will leave prison with nothing more than $200 and a bus ticket.
* Re-entry is about accountability. Offenders considered for re-entry facilities must demonstrate commitment to becoming a productive citizen. Offenders will be offered specific counseling, programs and services to support this choice. Failure to participate will result in removal from the program.
* Re-entry facilities won’t bring offenders to our communities—because they’re already here. By law, inmates are already returned to their county of last legal residence. These offenders are coming back to our cities and towns whether they’re rehabilitated or not.
* Re-entry facilities will help inmates succeed after prison. Every re-entry facility will be designed to reduce recidivism, and every participating offender will have an individual plan to maximize their chances for parole success.
* Communities will be involved in every stage. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) is already in negotiations with more than 20 counties and cities that are interested in housing re-entry facilities. These agreements will be negotiated by county sheriffs and county administrative officers, and are subject to board of supervisor approval. Counties that agree to house re-entry facilities will receive preference in funding to expand and improve local jails.
16,000 “infill” beds make room for rehabilitation in our prisons.
The legislation adds 16,000 beds inside of existing prisons. This expansion will let CDCR move inmates out of bad beds and into permanent housing, enhancing staff safety. “Bad beds” are bunks housed, as a result of overcrowding, in prison gymnasiums, dayrooms, libraries and other spaces that once provided rehabilitation services.
* Infill beds are a top priority. All 16,000 new infill beds are scheduled to be constructed within the next 18 to 24 months.
* 4,000 beds (2,000 in prison and 2,000 aftercare beds) will be devoted to drug treatment. CDCR’s Division of Substance Abuse Programs serves over 10,000 inmates and parolees. These programs reduce drug and alcohol addiction and the massive costs associated with drug-related crime.
National experts are helping CDCR build the most effective programs.
A panel of national experts is currently working with CDCR to strengthen the agency’s rehabilitation programs. The panel will issue recommendations early this summer to help CDCR lower recidivism, access current efforts, and identify best practices and evidence-based programs to lower recidivism rates. The panel also will assist local government and law enforcement deal with paroled offenders. CDCR will use these recommendations to develop more effective programs and strengthen collaboration with local communities.
© 2006 State of California
http://gov.ca.gov/index.php?/fact-sheet/6089/
CDCR working to remove collect call connection fee's
Taxpayers for Improving Public Safety wrote:
You will be happy to know that due to ongoing discussions with the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, they have agreed to (and are advocating for), the removal of connection fees presently collected on every collect phone call from an institution.
This means several dollars will be saved on every inmate collect call.
While it is not yet final, the request has been submitted to the Senate Budget Committee, Sub-Committee 4, to be considered with all other budget items. The competition for dollars is fierce, and many lawmakers will not like giving up millions of dollars (especially for inmate families), but this request is a substantial positive step foward and TiPS will do all it can to keep this issue alive.
You will be happy to know that due to ongoing discussions with the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, they have agreed to (and are advocating for), the removal of connection fees presently collected on every collect phone call from an institution.
This means several dollars will be saved on every inmate collect call.
While it is not yet final, the request has been submitted to the Senate Budget Committee, Sub-Committee 4, to be considered with all other budget items. The competition for dollars is fierce, and many lawmakers will not like giving up millions of dollars (especially for inmate families), but this request is a substantial positive step foward and TiPS will do all it can to keep this issue alive.
Judges consider prison population cap
SACRAMENTO
Judges consider prison population cap
Tom Chorneau, Chronicle Sacramento Bureau
Thursday, June 28, 2007
(06-28) 04:00 PDT Sacramento -- A pair of federal judges considered imposing a population cap on the state's troubled prison system on Wednesday -- an order that could result in the early release of thousands of California's 170,000 prisoners.
In a joint hearing, U.S. District Judges Lawrence Karlton of Sacramento and Thelton Henderson of San Francisco heard arguments on the proposal, which has been offered as a means of solving the state's overcrowded prison system.
The judges, who are presiding over separate, long-running cases involving inmate abuse, both seemed at times to embrace the population cap idea although they did not issue a ruling Wednesday. A written order is expected in the coming days or weeks.
Karlton, who is overseeing a decadelong lawsuit over the state's failure to provide care to mentally ill inmates, was critical of the Legislature and the Schwarzenegger administration for their inability to address the overcrowding problem. But he also said the idea of a population cap was "very radical" and may not be acceptable given the number of inmates it could affect.
"There's been no evidence of change," he said. "At some point something has got to change."
At issue is control over the state's prison system, which has an inmate population nearly double the capacity it originally was designed for. Inmate advocates have argued that overcrowding makes it almost impossible for prisons to adequately provide health care to the general population and provide services to inmates who have mental health problems.
In some prisons, inmates sleep outside or on floors. Attorneys for inmates have said that California inmates have a suicide rate twice that of the rest of the nation, due in part to overcrowding.
In response, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders passed a $7.4 billion prison expansion program in May that will add 40,000 new prison beds and 13,000 new county jail beds.
Attorneys representing the state at Wednesday's court hearing told the judges that they needed more time to put the building program into motion.
Bill Maile, a spokesman for Schwarzenegger, said the governor remains optimistic that the judges will not order a population cap -- which the administration believes will result in the early release of inmates.
"The governor has consistently said that releasing dangerous prisoners early is not a solution to prison overcrowding, " Maile said. "A prison cap will not solve the problems identified by the plaintiffs in these cases."
Don Specter, director of the Prison Law Office in Marin County and who represents clients in the case, said a population cap will not necessarily result in early inmate release.
"You can also prevent more people from coming into the system -- a lot of the inmates are from parole violations," he said. "There's a lot of discretion about who you send to prison."
Specter noted that other states, including Texas and New York, are decreasing their prison populations without creating public safety problems.
A study that Schwarzenegger commissioned in 2004, and which was conducted by a committee headed by former Gov. George Deukmejian, found that the state's prison system could safely hold about 137,000 inmates.
Some analysts have suggested that a population cap would result in the release of about 35,000 inmates.
E-mail Tom Chorneau at tchorneau@sfchronic le.com.
http://sfgate. com/cgi-bin/ article.cgi? f=/c/a/2007/ 06/28/BAGQKQN7FC 1.DTL
Judges consider prison population cap
Tom Chorneau, Chronicle Sacramento Bureau
Thursday, June 28, 2007
(06-28) 04:00 PDT Sacramento -- A pair of federal judges considered imposing a population cap on the state's troubled prison system on Wednesday -- an order that could result in the early release of thousands of California's 170,000 prisoners.
In a joint hearing, U.S. District Judges Lawrence Karlton of Sacramento and Thelton Henderson of San Francisco heard arguments on the proposal, which has been offered as a means of solving the state's overcrowded prison system.
The judges, who are presiding over separate, long-running cases involving inmate abuse, both seemed at times to embrace the population cap idea although they did not issue a ruling Wednesday. A written order is expected in the coming days or weeks.
Karlton, who is overseeing a decadelong lawsuit over the state's failure to provide care to mentally ill inmates, was critical of the Legislature and the Schwarzenegger administration for their inability to address the overcrowding problem. But he also said the idea of a population cap was "very radical" and may not be acceptable given the number of inmates it could affect.
"There's been no evidence of change," he said. "At some point something has got to change."
At issue is control over the state's prison system, which has an inmate population nearly double the capacity it originally was designed for. Inmate advocates have argued that overcrowding makes it almost impossible for prisons to adequately provide health care to the general population and provide services to inmates who have mental health problems.
In some prisons, inmates sleep outside or on floors. Attorneys for inmates have said that California inmates have a suicide rate twice that of the rest of the nation, due in part to overcrowding.
In response, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders passed a $7.4 billion prison expansion program in May that will add 40,000 new prison beds and 13,000 new county jail beds.
Attorneys representing the state at Wednesday's court hearing told the judges that they needed more time to put the building program into motion.
Bill Maile, a spokesman for Schwarzenegger, said the governor remains optimistic that the judges will not order a population cap -- which the administration believes will result in the early release of inmates.
"The governor has consistently said that releasing dangerous prisoners early is not a solution to prison overcrowding, " Maile said. "A prison cap will not solve the problems identified by the plaintiffs in these cases."
Don Specter, director of the Prison Law Office in Marin County and who represents clients in the case, said a population cap will not necessarily result in early inmate release.
"You can also prevent more people from coming into the system -- a lot of the inmates are from parole violations," he said. "There's a lot of discretion about who you send to prison."
Specter noted that other states, including Texas and New York, are decreasing their prison populations without creating public safety problems.
A study that Schwarzenegger commissioned in 2004, and which was conducted by a committee headed by former Gov. George Deukmejian, found that the state's prison system could safely hold about 137,000 inmates.
Some analysts have suggested that a population cap would result in the release of about 35,000 inmates.
E-mail Tom Chorneau at tchorneau@sfchronic le.com.
http://sfgate. com/cgi-bin/ article.cgi? f=/c/a/2007/ 06/28/BAGQKQN7FC 1.DTL
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
ILLITERACY REINFORCES PRISONERS' CAPTIVITY
ILLITERACY REINFORCES PRISONERS' CAPTIVITY
State prisons are crowded with inmates lacking a basic education -- Their dismal job prospects mean they're likely to land back behind bars
- James Sterngold, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Click to ViewClick to ViewClick to View
(12-27) 04:00 PST Norco, Riverside County -- Gregory Davenport, a congenial 46-year-old in prison blues, shared with a visitor to the big state penitentiary here a common inmate's lament -- he left behind two well-educated daughters with whom he could not correspond because he could not read.
But Davenport, serving time for a burglary conviction, is one of the lucky ones. He has finally made progress in his long struggle with illiteracy, a breakthrough he described while holding one of the more sought-after prizes in California's overburdened corrections system -- a classroom seat. He had to wait a year to get into a class in a cramped trailer at the prison in Norco, the California Rehabilitation Center, but now he gets six hours a day of instruction and help with a learning disorder.
"When I came in, I couldn't read at all," said Davenport, who is from a rough neighborhood in Los Angeles. "Now I don't have to ask the other guys to read my letters for me. When I want to write a letter, I get my dictionary and I can do it myself."
Convicts typically enter the corrections system burdened with loads of heavy emotional baggage -- drug addiction, alcoholism, scars from childhood abuse, mental illness and family meltdowns. But the most common companions for those who have failed to find a place in the legitimate world are illiteracy and stunted educational backgrounds.
Roughly two-thirds of California's 173,000 inmates read below a ninth-grade level, according to corrections department figures, and more than half read below a seventh-grade level, making them functionally illiterate, unable to read and follow complex written directions. A total of 21 percent read below a third-grade level.
Research has shown that arming inmates with a solid education is one of the surest ways of reducing the rate at which they end up back behind bars after being released. Officially, California has embraced education as an important form of rehabilitation, but the reality is far different. Just 6 percent of inmates are in academic classes, and 5 percent attend vocational classes.
Some experts regard that as one of the saddest among a long list of failures in the deeply troubled prison system. Not only does an education make it much easier for a parolee to find and hold a decent job, but, unlike drug users, there are no relapses for those who escape illiteracy.
"There is not a lot of causal evidence that specifically says people with educational skills won't commit crimes, but there is definitely a strong correlation between educational ability and staying out of prison," said Peter Leone, a correctional education expert at the University of Maryland.
A comprehensive study by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy, the research arm of the Washington Legislature, found that general education programs reduced the recidivism rate by 7 percent and vocational programs by 9 percent, among the best records of in-prison programs.
The academic and vocational programs cost the state about $1,000 a year per inmate but, the study concluded, vocational education produced a net benefit to the state of $13,738 per participant, and the educational programs $10,669 per inmate, in the form of lower crime rates, fewer victims and less criminal justice spending.
California's shortcomings are particularly glaring given that there is a state law mandating that the corrections department bring inmates to at least a ninth-grade reading level by the time they are paroled.
But the law, which says the department should achieve a 60 percent success rate at a minimum, is virtually ignored. Many of the prison educators say there is almost a complete disconnect between such legislative goals and what actually happens inside the prison walls.
"If we were working in a perfect world, that would be something we would try and achieve," said Rob Churchill, acting superintendent of education at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
What has made the problem even more urgent is the overcrowding crisis. California's 33 prisons are operating at roughly double capacity. Dayrooms are often jammed with double bunks. Programs for the inmates, from medical care to drug treatment, are breaking down.
One result is that California has the worst recidivism rate in the country, close to 70 percent. That is a key reason that the prisons budget, now more than $8 billion a year, is rising faster than most other state spending.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency in the prisons this fall because of the spiraling problems, and the Legislature singled out education as one potential solution. For the current fiscal year, it appropriated $52.8 million for special recidivism reduction efforts, with the largest amount, $21.1 million, for education.
But then there is the reality: Enrollment in traditional academic and vocational classes is actually dropping, from 32,100 in fiscal 2001 to 21,800 in the past fiscal year.
And those figures may be overstating inmate participation. According to the Legislative Analyst's Office, inmates miss classes 24 percent of the time because of frequent lockdowns, which are often a result of dangerous overcrowding, and they miss 19 percent of classes due to teacher absences.
With classroom space sparse, waiting lists long and teacher vacancies high -- about 20 percent -- the corrections department has dabbled with a new approach. It has been trying to get some inmates into an alternative education program, called "bridging," as a stopgap.
Bridging focuses largely on life skills, not traditional subjects like math and reading. It involves handing inmates a packet each week and then expecting them to study on their own. While some say the program benefits a few highly motivated inmates, many experts say that it is difficult if not impossible to accomplish much because overcrowding makes dorms and cells noisy and cramped.
"Bridging is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen," said state Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, who is leading efforts to tackle the prison crisis. "I'm an educator and that program doesn't teach anything."
Mike Weaver, the principal of education programs at the California Rehabilitation Center, defended bridging, but only in some cases.
"Forty percent of my guys can't really read, so what good does it do to give them a packet and tell them to go study it?" Weaver asked.
But there are indications that bridging may serve a less obvious purpose.
One of the enticements to get inmates into programs is to offer credit, or reductions in sentences, for every day they are enrolled in a class. They can shave months off of sentences just by getting enrolled, even in the bridging program. Thus, the higher the enrollment numbers, the faster the department can push the inmates out.
The corrections department has long been adamant that it will not release inmates early just to ease overcrowding.
But the educational programs, especially the bridging program, appear to provide a way around this policy. That is particularly true in the reception centers, where inmates stay for a few months when they first enter prison.
There are no formal classes at the reception centers, and prison officials have pushed bridging programs in the centers to overcome that problem.
"The main purpose of bridging was to get them in a credit- earning status quickly," said Janet Blaylock, the assistant superintendent of prison education.
The overall system is so ill-equipped to actually achieve real goals that not only is the state corrections department missing its educational objectives, it does not even know by how much because it does not track the educational level of departing inmates.
"California has not done any type of research on educational outcomes," said Blaylock. "We don't have the infrastructure because we're not hooked up electronically. Any records we have are kept manually."
The prison at Norco is actually one of the better institutions in the state. With 4,001 inmates, the prison is operating at 221 percent of its design capacity, but it has been producing more than 100 graduates from its GED program a year -- there will be more than 200 in 2006 -- and has few teacher vacancies.
There is room for only 9 percent of the inmates in academic classes, but many of those who make it express satisfaction.
Leo Brown, 42, described how one of his daughters had graduated from high school last year, with another lined up to earn her diploma next year. His voice turned into a whisper when he added that he had entered prison reading at a fourth-grade level. Having gotten into a basic education class, he now reads at an eighth-grade level and has a shot at earning a GED.
"It don't look good if my kids have degrees I don't," Brown said. "It's hard to face sometimes where I'm at."
At Norco, 321 inmates are enrolled in academic classes and 247 are on waiting lists. Another 126 inmates are waiting to get into English as a Second Language classes. The situation is far worse on the vocational side, with 225 inmates enrolled and 348 on waiting lists.
"We could double or triple the vocational classes alone and they'd fill up immediately, but we don't have the space or the equipment," Weaver said.
The situation is much worse at many other prisons. At the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi (Kern County), for instance, there are 14 academic teacher vacancies, 36 percent of the authorized slots, and four vocational teacher vacancies. Some class conditions are almost unbearable.
"Our dayrooms have been invaded with bunks so we've been forced into holding some of the classes in the dining halls, and it's very, very tough," said Robert Lee, the principal. "The acoustics are terrible. Everyone is on those little hard seats at little metal tables. It makes it all very difficult."
He said that filling the teacher vacancies has been extremely difficult, in large part because salaries are too low.
"People like to say it's not a money issue, but it is a money issue," Lee said.
One of the tools the teachers at Norco use is inmate tutors and mentors. The inmates say that shame and embarrassment are among the biggest barriers to getting undereducated inmates to overcome illiteracy, and inmates who have been through that battle are sometimes best at being able to sympathize with the problem.
"I'm just another guy in blue," said Paul Krieger, 32, who is serving his fourth term in prison, this one for residential robbery, and is now working on a college degree. "I can talk to them. I know how it feels to be incarcerated. I feel inadequate as a father being in here. For most of these guys, they think an education is just another unattainable goal, and I can show them it's possible."
Gabriel Velasquez, a 20-year-old serving a sentence for robbery and assault, entered prison with a seventh-grade reading level. Next month, he will take the test for his GED and says he is confident he will pass, and that piece of paper will be a key to changing his life.
"People hide illiteracy," said Velasquez. "No one in here wants to look vulnerable."
E-mail James Sterngold at jsterngold@sfchroni cle.com.
Page A - 1
URL: http://sfgate. com/cgi-bin/ article.cgi? file=/c/a/ 2006/12/27/ MNGF6N6FSS1. DTL
State prisons are crowded with inmates lacking a basic education -- Their dismal job prospects mean they're likely to land back behind bars
- James Sterngold, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Click to ViewClick to ViewClick to View
(12-27) 04:00 PST Norco, Riverside County -- Gregory Davenport, a congenial 46-year-old in prison blues, shared with a visitor to the big state penitentiary here a common inmate's lament -- he left behind two well-educated daughters with whom he could not correspond because he could not read.
But Davenport, serving time for a burglary conviction, is one of the lucky ones. He has finally made progress in his long struggle with illiteracy, a breakthrough he described while holding one of the more sought-after prizes in California's overburdened corrections system -- a classroom seat. He had to wait a year to get into a class in a cramped trailer at the prison in Norco, the California Rehabilitation Center, but now he gets six hours a day of instruction and help with a learning disorder.
"When I came in, I couldn't read at all," said Davenport, who is from a rough neighborhood in Los Angeles. "Now I don't have to ask the other guys to read my letters for me. When I want to write a letter, I get my dictionary and I can do it myself."
Convicts typically enter the corrections system burdened with loads of heavy emotional baggage -- drug addiction, alcoholism, scars from childhood abuse, mental illness and family meltdowns. But the most common companions for those who have failed to find a place in the legitimate world are illiteracy and stunted educational backgrounds.
Roughly two-thirds of California's 173,000 inmates read below a ninth-grade level, according to corrections department figures, and more than half read below a seventh-grade level, making them functionally illiterate, unable to read and follow complex written directions. A total of 21 percent read below a third-grade level.
Research has shown that arming inmates with a solid education is one of the surest ways of reducing the rate at which they end up back behind bars after being released. Officially, California has embraced education as an important form of rehabilitation, but the reality is far different. Just 6 percent of inmates are in academic classes, and 5 percent attend vocational classes.
Some experts regard that as one of the saddest among a long list of failures in the deeply troubled prison system. Not only does an education make it much easier for a parolee to find and hold a decent job, but, unlike drug users, there are no relapses for those who escape illiteracy.
"There is not a lot of causal evidence that specifically says people with educational skills won't commit crimes, but there is definitely a strong correlation between educational ability and staying out of prison," said Peter Leone, a correctional education expert at the University of Maryland.
A comprehensive study by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy, the research arm of the Washington Legislature, found that general education programs reduced the recidivism rate by 7 percent and vocational programs by 9 percent, among the best records of in-prison programs.
The academic and vocational programs cost the state about $1,000 a year per inmate but, the study concluded, vocational education produced a net benefit to the state of $13,738 per participant, and the educational programs $10,669 per inmate, in the form of lower crime rates, fewer victims and less criminal justice spending.
California's shortcomings are particularly glaring given that there is a state law mandating that the corrections department bring inmates to at least a ninth-grade reading level by the time they are paroled.
But the law, which says the department should achieve a 60 percent success rate at a minimum, is virtually ignored. Many of the prison educators say there is almost a complete disconnect between such legislative goals and what actually happens inside the prison walls.
"If we were working in a perfect world, that would be something we would try and achieve," said Rob Churchill, acting superintendent of education at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
What has made the problem even more urgent is the overcrowding crisis. California's 33 prisons are operating at roughly double capacity. Dayrooms are often jammed with double bunks. Programs for the inmates, from medical care to drug treatment, are breaking down.
One result is that California has the worst recidivism rate in the country, close to 70 percent. That is a key reason that the prisons budget, now more than $8 billion a year, is rising faster than most other state spending.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency in the prisons this fall because of the spiraling problems, and the Legislature singled out education as one potential solution. For the current fiscal year, it appropriated $52.8 million for special recidivism reduction efforts, with the largest amount, $21.1 million, for education.
But then there is the reality: Enrollment in traditional academic and vocational classes is actually dropping, from 32,100 in fiscal 2001 to 21,800 in the past fiscal year.
And those figures may be overstating inmate participation. According to the Legislative Analyst's Office, inmates miss classes 24 percent of the time because of frequent lockdowns, which are often a result of dangerous overcrowding, and they miss 19 percent of classes due to teacher absences.
With classroom space sparse, waiting lists long and teacher vacancies high -- about 20 percent -- the corrections department has dabbled with a new approach. It has been trying to get some inmates into an alternative education program, called "bridging," as a stopgap.
Bridging focuses largely on life skills, not traditional subjects like math and reading. It involves handing inmates a packet each week and then expecting them to study on their own. While some say the program benefits a few highly motivated inmates, many experts say that it is difficult if not impossible to accomplish much because overcrowding makes dorms and cells noisy and cramped.
"Bridging is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen," said state Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, who is leading efforts to tackle the prison crisis. "I'm an educator and that program doesn't teach anything."
Mike Weaver, the principal of education programs at the California Rehabilitation Center, defended bridging, but only in some cases.
"Forty percent of my guys can't really read, so what good does it do to give them a packet and tell them to go study it?" Weaver asked.
But there are indications that bridging may serve a less obvious purpose.
One of the enticements to get inmates into programs is to offer credit, or reductions in sentences, for every day they are enrolled in a class. They can shave months off of sentences just by getting enrolled, even in the bridging program. Thus, the higher the enrollment numbers, the faster the department can push the inmates out.
The corrections department has long been adamant that it will not release inmates early just to ease overcrowding.
But the educational programs, especially the bridging program, appear to provide a way around this policy. That is particularly true in the reception centers, where inmates stay for a few months when they first enter prison.
There are no formal classes at the reception centers, and prison officials have pushed bridging programs in the centers to overcome that problem.
"The main purpose of bridging was to get them in a credit- earning status quickly," said Janet Blaylock, the assistant superintendent of prison education.
The overall system is so ill-equipped to actually achieve real goals that not only is the state corrections department missing its educational objectives, it does not even know by how much because it does not track the educational level of departing inmates.
"California has not done any type of research on educational outcomes," said Blaylock. "We don't have the infrastructure because we're not hooked up electronically. Any records we have are kept manually."
The prison at Norco is actually one of the better institutions in the state. With 4,001 inmates, the prison is operating at 221 percent of its design capacity, but it has been producing more than 100 graduates from its GED program a year -- there will be more than 200 in 2006 -- and has few teacher vacancies.
There is room for only 9 percent of the inmates in academic classes, but many of those who make it express satisfaction.
Leo Brown, 42, described how one of his daughters had graduated from high school last year, with another lined up to earn her diploma next year. His voice turned into a whisper when he added that he had entered prison reading at a fourth-grade level. Having gotten into a basic education class, he now reads at an eighth-grade level and has a shot at earning a GED.
"It don't look good if my kids have degrees I don't," Brown said. "It's hard to face sometimes where I'm at."
At Norco, 321 inmates are enrolled in academic classes and 247 are on waiting lists. Another 126 inmates are waiting to get into English as a Second Language classes. The situation is far worse on the vocational side, with 225 inmates enrolled and 348 on waiting lists.
"We could double or triple the vocational classes alone and they'd fill up immediately, but we don't have the space or the equipment," Weaver said.
The situation is much worse at many other prisons. At the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi (Kern County), for instance, there are 14 academic teacher vacancies, 36 percent of the authorized slots, and four vocational teacher vacancies. Some class conditions are almost unbearable.
"Our dayrooms have been invaded with bunks so we've been forced into holding some of the classes in the dining halls, and it's very, very tough," said Robert Lee, the principal. "The acoustics are terrible. Everyone is on those little hard seats at little metal tables. It makes it all very difficult."
He said that filling the teacher vacancies has been extremely difficult, in large part because salaries are too low.
"People like to say it's not a money issue, but it is a money issue," Lee said.
One of the tools the teachers at Norco use is inmate tutors and mentors. The inmates say that shame and embarrassment are among the biggest barriers to getting undereducated inmates to overcome illiteracy, and inmates who have been through that battle are sometimes best at being able to sympathize with the problem.
"I'm just another guy in blue," said Paul Krieger, 32, who is serving his fourth term in prison, this one for residential robbery, and is now working on a college degree. "I can talk to them. I know how it feels to be incarcerated. I feel inadequate as a father being in here. For most of these guys, they think an education is just another unattainable goal, and I can show them it's possible."
Gabriel Velasquez, a 20-year-old serving a sentence for robbery and assault, entered prison with a seventh-grade reading level. Next month, he will take the test for his GED and says he is confident he will pass, and that piece of paper will be a key to changing his life.
"People hide illiteracy," said Velasquez. "No one in here wants to look vulnerable."
E-mail James Sterngold at jsterngold@sfchroni cle.com.
Page A - 1
URL: http://sfgate. com/cgi-bin/ article.cgi? file=/c/a/ 2006/12/27/ MNGF6N6FSS1. DTL
10 years in prison for selling a light bulb
"If there was no drug war, dealers would have to get real jobs!" ~Kay Lee
REMEMBER THE TUCKERS and DEA Operation Green Merchant?
The Tucker Family, Drug War POWs
The DEA took the Tucker family's freedom and destroyed their legitimate business; the prison took their son's life, and the public paid highly for the priviledge. Gary Tucker's 10 year imprisonment cost the public a minimum of $150,000. That's not counting what his wife and son cost us.
Last year there were 7 million people in the justice net... Seven million in jail, prison, on probation or parole. Two million of them are not rapists, child molesters, thieves or killers - 2 million of them are offenders of a multitude of drug laws.
The $150,000 or so we wasted on Gary Tucker may not seem like a lot of money (ha!), but if we multiply that times 2 million people, the money wasted becomes vastly more significant. A policy that expensive should definately work, right? I can't even fathom the shattered lives of the drug war, yet after several generations of this prohibition, neither the supply nor the demand has been curtailed in the slightest. Who in the world wants to do this anymore? Kay Lee
FORGOTTEN MAN - 10 years in prison for selling light bulbs
http://atlanta. creativeloafing. com/gyrobase/ Content?oid= oid%3A10762
Steve Tucker served a 10-year prison sentence for selling light bulbs. Is America's drug war worth it?
BY SCOTT HENRY
scott.henry@ creativeloafing. com
Published 12.04.02
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A year has passed since Steve Tucker made his unheralded return to Atlanta. His one-bedroom flat, tucked into a sprawling Sandy Springs apartment complex, is furnished sparsely: a recliner, TV, computer and a small, picnic-style table that serves as both dining hutch and desk. The stark white static of the walls is interrupted only by three small, web-like dream catchers tacked to the Sheetrock.
It's the sort of Spartan minimalism one might expect of someone who, until recently, had to content himself with staring at bare cinderblock.
"Watch out, you're talking to a notorious ex-con." Wrapped in a sharp Middle Georgia twang, Tucker's voice betrays a suppressed smile. The slight, balding, 50-year-old Atlantan is hardly an intimidating figure.
But he's only half-kidding. Nearly a decade ago, he was sent to prison as a result of a once-infamous federal drug case that sparked national outrage for its rough interpretation of justice.
In the spring of 1994, the Tucker family received lengthy prison sentences -- 10 years for Steve, 16 years for his older brother Gary, and 10 years for his brother's wife, Joanne -- without possibility of parole, for the curiously worded federal crime of "conspiracy to manufacture marijuana."
Yet federal prosecutors never charged them with buying, selling, growing, transporting, smoking or even possessing marijuana. An 18-month DEA investigation had failed to turn up direct evidence connecting the Tuckers to even a single joint.
Instead, they were locked away for selling the lamps, fertilizer and gardening hardware from the small hydroponic supply shop Gary operated on Buford Highway that enabled their customers to grow pot.
In the mid-'90s, the Tucker case became a cause celebre among libertarian activists and other advocates of marijuana legalization. It served as an oft-cited, cautionary example of the runaway powers of the federal government and the worst excesses of the War on Drugs.
And yet, in the long years since, the Tucker case has faded from the radar. No TV cameras or microphones awaited Steve Tucker when he finally shed his prison uniform and came home.
His mother would rather it remain that way. "I'm just scared to death of the federal government," she says. At the same time, Doris Gore realizes her son has an important story to tell.
And he's determined to tell it. As he reads weekly accounts of federal agents in California arresting licensed medical-marijuana growers, he's convinced he must speak out.
"The feds don't like it when you buck them, but I'll be damned if they break me," Tucker says. "What kind of American would I be if I just kept my mouth shut?"
Steve Tucker's nightmare began with the American dream.
The funny thing is, the dream initially belonged to his older brother Gary, a balding Vietnam veteran with a house in the suburbs and a comfortable marriage. For nearly two decades, he and Steve had worked side-by-side, installing commercial fire-control systems for a Buckhead company. But by the fall of 1987, Gary was 40 and he yearned to be his own boss.
Gary's choice of businesses was pioneering: a store devoted to hydroponics, the technique of growing plants without soil or sunlight, using only powerful lamps, chemical nutrients and a self-contained irrigation system. It was, Gary decided after some research, the "wave of the future."
Whose future, however, was the question. While hydroponics is highly effective at boosting vegetable growth, the systems are so costly as to be of practical use only to orchid breeders. And, of course, to marijuana growers, who are lured by the promise of high yields that could be produced in basements and attics, away from the prying eyes of authorities.
Gary wasn't naive. He knew his customer base would include few deep-pocketed tomato enthusiasts. But just as Wal-Mart doesn't ask if the handgun ammunition it sells will be used for target practice or hold-ups, the Tuckers decided it was best to adopt a "don't ask, don't tell" policy.
"Look, we weren't stupid," Steve says with a weary smile. "We figured a percentage of our customers were growing pot. But we had store rules that if anyone asked us about marijuana, we'd ask them to leave. What someone was planning to do with fertilizer or grow lights wasn't our concern. Most of the stuff we were selling, you could buy at Home Depot. We had a legitimate business."
To finance the start-up, Gary mortgaged his home in Gwinnett and, in the spring of 1988, his business opened in a small shopping center on the edge of Norcross. It was the first hydroponics store in Georgia.
The name Gary chose for his store -- Southern Lights And Hydroponics -- was a nod to a successful Mid-Atlantic chain called Northern Lights, which itself was named after a particularly potent strain of Alaskan weed.
Steve, who had begun making child-support payments after his 10-year marriage ended in divorce, kept his regular job, but helped out weekends in his brother's store. Joanne, who worked for an insurance company, kept her husband's books.
To compensate for hydroponics' somewhat questionable image, Gary wouldn't allow High Times, rolling papers or Mr. Natural posters to be sold in the store. Any product or packaging that arrived bearing the familiar hemp-leaf silhouette would promptly be shipped back. Adding to Southern Lights' air of respectability, the brothers were invited to install working hydroponic exhibits for the agriculture departments of Gwinnett Tech and a local high school.
That's not to say the Tucker brothers didn't enjoy a joint now and again. Gary had first smoked during his tour in Vietnam and Steve would get arrested in 1991 for growing his own stash at home. For that offense, he would serve six months in a county work-release program.
"Getting busted was just my dumb luck," Steve explains. "I used to smoke pot, but I wasn't dealing. I never claimed to be 100-percent innocent, but I never conspired with anybody to do anything illegal."
What the Tuckers didn't know while they were busy preparing to launch Southern Lights was that, in Washington, the DEA was grappling with how to go after the booming number of marijuana growers who were taking their crops indoors to avoid aerial detection.
A veteran agent had hit on the answer while flipping through an issue of High Times: Cut the burgeoning industry's supply lines by focusing the agency's attack on stores selling grow lights and hydroponic gear, dozens of which advertised in the pages of head-shop magazines.
Over the next two years, the DEA subpoenaed UPS shipping records for stores across the country. Agents went undercover to browse through hydroponic shops, follow up leads on pot farms and casually ask everyone with long hair where one could buy seeds.
The agency's aggressiveness showed how far the pendulum had swung since the heyday of the marijuana-reform movement, a decade earlier. At the close of the '70s, 11 states -- following the advice of the American Medical Association and even then-President Jimmy Carter -- had decriminalized simple possession. In 1981, the first bill to legalize medical-marijuana use was introduced in Congress. Its lead sponsor was a young, conservative Georgia lawmaker named Newt Gingrich.
Under Ronald Reagan, however, the tide swiftly turned. Even while the CIA was secretly helping Nicaraguan Contras smuggle vast amounts of cocaine into the president's home state of California, the administration was cracking down on domestic pot smokers, pushing for "zero tolerance" drug laws and scolding Americans to "Just Say No." By the end of the '80s, even socially progressive Oregon had again outlawed weed.
One month after the first President Bush pledged to escalate the War on Drugs in a Sept. 5, 1989, speech televised from the Oval Office, Operation Green Merchant went public. More than 200 indoor growing operations and 30 indoor-gardening shops and mail-order houses found themselves overrun with DEA agents.
One high-profile businessman caught in that first wave of busts was Tom Alexander, the owner of a small hydroponics store in Oregon and publisher of Sinsemilla Tips, considered by some marijuana advocates to be the thinking-man' s High Times.
The DEA seized an estimated $55,000 in inventory from his store, but Alexander soon discovered it would be even more costly to fight the action in court. A few months later, he was forced to shutter his magazine as well.
Alexander had been financially ruined without ever being charged with a crime. It was an approach the feds would repeat with indoor-gardening stores from coast to coast, including all six locations of Northern Lights.
So perhaps Gary Tucker shouldn't have been surprised one day in the early weeks of 1992 when DEA Special Agent Kevin McLaughlin dropped by Southern Lights with an offer its owner wasn't expected to refuse. The feds would be much obliged, McLaughlin explained, if he'd let them install hidden cameras in the store so they could snoop on his customers. If he didn't, no effort would be spared in shutting down his 4-year-old business.
The conversation lasted probably all of five minutes, but its outcome would set into motion forces the Tuckers could scarcely imagine.
Gary would later tell his family that when he told McLaughlin to get lost, the agent "said they'd get him somehow," recalls his mother, Doris Gore.
Still disgusted by the idea of being pressured into being a government spy, Steve has never second-guessed his brother's response. "This isn't Nazi Germany," he says.
Sometime in late spring 1992, Gary Tucker realized his shop was being watched by a man sitting at a desk in an empty storefront across the street. Every time a car pulled into the Southern Lights parking lot, the mystery man would scribble something into a pad. From that point on, events unfolded quickly.
In May, Mike and Andrea Williams, customers who had become friends of Gary and Joanne, were busted by the DEA. The couple used a hydroponic system to grow marijuana for Mike, who was terminally ill and smoked to combat the pain and nausea.
One evening in July, the DEA's McLaughlin, accompanied by partner Mark Hadaway, paid a visit to Jorene Deakle, who worked with Gary as Southern Lights' store manager, and accused her and her husband of growing pot in their home.
Deakle testified two years later at the Tuckers' sentencing hearing that the agents had threatened to file charges and seize her house unless she agreed to spy on her employer for them. She said she was frightened into giving them names of Southern Lights customers she thought might be growing weed.
But the agents wouldn't let up, she testified, until she came with them to point out a house where she knew marijuana was being grown. As they were driving, Deakle told the judge, she picked a house at random so they finally would leave her alone.
The terrified Deakle called the agents several times a week to feed them tidbits of information; the investigation gained momentum. Agents followed customers home, pawed through their garbage, subpoenaed their utility bills and trained sophisticated infrared-imaging devices on their houses to look for concentrated heat sources.
Then the busts began in earnest, as one green thumb after another was caught red-handed. Don Switlick, a convicted drug trafficker, was found growing 114 plants with hydroponic equipment purchased at Southern Lights. Agents discovered a grow room in the Dawsonville home of Thomas Fordham, a high-school friend of Gary's. And, in September, Chuck Rothermel, who ran a car-customizing shop, was busted for a large crop of immature plants hidden in a nondescript warehouse he was renting in Forsyth County.
Of course, not every raid paid off. In one case, agents searched a startled family's home, only to discover that the husband was using the incriminating high-watt lamps in his tropical aquarium. In another, the suspect had never heard of the store; he'd been identified through his car, which his girlfriend had borrowed for the day.
Suffering from what Steve describes as a "nervous breakdown," Deakle mysteriously quit her job. The Tuckers would later find out she had also broken off contact with the DEA.
By October, Gary had adopted what could only be called an unusual business strategy, warning everyone who came into his store that they were being watched by federal agents. "We felt it was our obligation," Steve explains.
Gary even complained to the newspaper -- somewhat naively, in retrospect -- that the DEA was harassing customers buying legal products in an effort to drive him out of business.
McLaughlin responded by dropping by the store on occasion to remind the Tuckers of his promise to shut them down, Steve says. "He was always real cocky," he recalls. "Once, Joanne put him down, so he told her he'd killed her dog, just to upset her."
Their mother begged Gary to quit the hydroponics trade. "I wanted them to get rid of that store, but Gary said they weren't doing anything illegal," Doris Gore recalls. "He was adamant about keeping it open because he said it wasn't his business what other people did with the equipment he sold."
In December, Gary and Joanne went out to dinner and drinks with a friend, Mark Holmes, who kept steering the rambling, margarita-fueled conversation back to the subject of recreational marijuana use -- in large part because he was wearing a wire.
The DEA raided the Tuckers' home and store the following spring, carrying away boxes of business records, address books, photographs and various bric-a-brac. Southern Lights was padlocked, its entire inventory seized, and the agency began forfeiture proceedings against the couple's house, bank accounts, their new truck and a boat.
On June 18, 1993, nearly two years after Operation Green Merchant had arrived in Georgia, Gary, Steve and Joanne were arrested on federal drug conspiracy charges.
The Southern Lights investigation had uncovered, all told, more than 100 small, hemp-growing operations across north Georgia, and resulted in at least 30 arrests. Which meant at least 30 potential prosecution witnesses, who had already claimed many of the available drug-defense attorneys in Atlanta by the time the Tuckers went shopping for legal counsel.
Meeting by chance at a community gathering, Gary and Joanne were introduced to Nancy Lord, a trial lawyer and outspoken Libertarian activist who had been that party's 1992 vice-presidential candidate.
With only one major drug case on her resume, Lord had just moved to Atlanta to practice under the tutelage of prominent defense attorney Tony Axam. Lord and Axam signed on to separately represent Joanne and Gary, respectively. An acquaintance of Lord's was hired for Steve.
From the beginning, Lord was passionate about her assignment, appearing at press conferences and local forums to protest the Big Brother tactics of the federal drug war and attack the flimsiness of the government's case against the Tucker family.
Certainly, to the layperson, it would have appeared weak. Despite 18 months of constant surveillance, boxes of confiscated documents, dozens of confidential informants and the DEA's own terrified mole managing the store, the agency had failed to come up with any physical evidence linking Gary to his customers' crops.
No marijuana -- growing or dime-bagged -- was found in Southern Lights, Gary's house or Steve's apartment. No paper trail of drug deals. No incriminating messages. No videotaped handoffs of suspicious packages. No blurry photos of Gary inspecting a customer's harvest. No secretly recorded advice on the finer points of cultivating Maui Wowie.
After a $1 million investigation, the only tangible exhibits the feds had to show the jury were a set of precision scales that could have been used to weigh leafy contraband, and an old pipe that Gary and Joanne readily acknowledged they had used for smoking pot.
The government's sole weapon seemed to be a lengthy list of freshly indicted, former Southern Lights customers desperate to prove themselves useful enough on the witness stand for prosecutors to let them off lightly.
The Tuckers and Lord, however, failed to fully appreciate that federal conspiracy law is far less concerned with what you did than with what you knew.
"Conspiracy law has been the darling of federal prosecutors since the 1930s, because you don't need direct evidence to score a conviction," explains Axam, now recognized as one of Georgia's top death-penalty lawyers. "The reason they use it is because they may have no hard, physical evidence, but with conspiracy, they can bring in hearsay, rumor, innuendo."
Indeed, it's tough to imagine how anyone gets acquitted, considering the standard description of conspiracy law given to federal juries: "The fact that a defendant's acts appear not to be illegal when viewed in isolation does not bar his conviction. An act innocent in nature and of no danger to the victim or society suffices if it furthers the criminal venture."
Lord, who now specializes in patent law and FDA drug approval at her solo practice outside Las Vegas, admits she underestimated the far-reaching power of conspiracy law. "I was shocked that this little evidence could send someone up for 10 years," she says.
Still, why were prosecutors willing to let admitted pot-growers and convicted drug dealers off easy so they could nail a tax-paying businessman who hadn't been caught with any grass?
Doris Gore is convinced there was an element of vengeance in the DEA's pursuit of her sons because they had refused to roll over, to name names, to cop a plea. "They hated Gary because he wouldn't do what they said," she says.
She may be on to something. During the trial, Garfield Hammonds, then the Southeast's top DEA official, announced to the press that Gary was no mere entrepreneur: "He's a bum, he's a parasite, he's a master of deceit, he's a marijuana czar." Hammonds, who now sits on the state Board of Pardons and Parole, didn't return a CL phone call.
It didn't help that Joanne had followed Lord's lead in publicly baiting her accusers whenever the chance arose. "My husband is a political POW," she told one reporter. "We're fighting a political war, not a drug war."
Steve Tucker still believes he and Joanne were charged primarily as added leverage against Gary. When they wouldn't give him up, the government simply steamrolled over them as well.
Axam, who's since represented such high-profile defendants as Ray Lewis and Jamil Al-Amin, won't discuss the particulars of the Tuckers' defense, but he recalls vividly the feds' take-no-prisoners determination.
"The government had a clear policy that it didn't want hydroponics stores in business," he says. "If it looks long and hard enough at any industry it doesn't like, it can find those connections. "
Scheduled to begin in federal court in November 1993, United States v. Gary Tucker et al got off to a spectacularly inauspicious start.
On the morning of jury selection, activists with the Fully Informed Jury Association -- a radical libertarian group that believes juries should be empowered to dismiss charges and reject unjust laws -- were handing out flyers to everyone entering the Russell Federal Building, effectively disqualifying an entire day's jury pool for the Northern District of Georgia.
When Chief Judge William O'Kelly, who was to preside over the trial, was told Lord had been seen outside exchanging pleasantries with one of the activists, he was livid. Their courtroom relationship went downhill from there.
Resuming the first week of January 1994, the trial lasted four days. Assistant U.S. Attorney James Harper oversaw a parade of a dozen or so nervous plea-bargain witnesses, some of whom testified that Gary, and to a lesser extent, Steve and Joanne, had given them hemp-growing tips. Several claimed Gary had bought pot from them or traded hydroponic equipment for high-end herb. One said he'd glimpsed a freezer crammed with weed in the couple's garage. Another said Gary offered to look after his buds while he was out of town. A couple said Gary had privately confirmed that the vast majority of his customers were breaking the law.
The defense, spearheaded by Lord, scored too few points to overcome the damage. One witness didn't believe the Tuckers had done anything illegal. Another recalled bragging about his hemp garden, only to have Gary tell him to get rid of it. Several acknowledged hoping their testimony would spare them prison time.
One former Southern Lights customer, a 66-year-old ex-con we'll call "Bob" (who spoke to CL on condition he not be named), now says DEA agents tried to coax him into claiming the Tuckers were growing pot at their house, but stopped short of asking him to lie.
"'You help us and we'll help you,' is how they put it," he explains.
When asked to wear a wire into the store, Bob agreed -- then fled the state rather than aid an investigation he believed was intent on "railroading" the business owners.
Even though he eventually testified after police tracked him down, Bob received a four-year sentence, rather than the 18-month stretch he'd initially been offered.
"I disappointed [prosecutors] because I didn't say what they wanted me to," he says. "To my knowledge, the Tuckers didn't do anything other than sell chemicals and lights -- except for indulging."
Steve's own years behind bars have taught him not to be shocked at what someone might say on the witness stand.
"I was in prison with people who'd swear their own mother was Hitler if it would help them," he says, shaking his head. "I'll never have another close friend. I'll never be able to trust anyone that way, now that I've seen what people will do to protect their freedom."
While he concedes that he can't speak for his brother's actions, Steve insists he never offered growing advice or swapped weed with customers -- although he shared a joint on occasion.
Plain-spoken to the point of abrasive, Nancy Lord continued to criticize the DEA, pointedly suggesting that witnesses had been coerced to lie.
When the judge warned her at one point that Agent McLaughlin wasn't the one on trial, she shot back: "He should be." O'Kelly fumed that he was citing her for contempt. "If I go to jail, I go to jail," she shrugged.
"Nancy had some balls," Steve recalls, laughing. "She stood up to that judge."
But Lord now reflects that her confrontational style didn't serve her clients well, a point made painfully clear when O'Kelly told her he believed Joanne likely would have been acquitted if she'd been defended in a more professional manner.
"My problem was, I was too angry," Lord says. "I wanted to make a political statement -- to argue against the drug war -- and I thought the jury would go along with me. Now, I'd probably urge the Tuckers to re-examine taking a plea agreement."
The trial's low point came when Joanne took the stand in her own defense. The same woman who'd given tough-talking speeches defending her family and denouncing government scare tactics suddenly sounded uncertain and evasive when confronted by prosecutors.
"Joanne fell apart on the stand," Lord says. "It really was sad to watch."
Despite widespread criticism of the nation's ongoing War on Drugs, there's at least one battle Uncle Sam has convincingly won, depending on your definition of victory.
First taking effect in 1989, mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines -- combined with the elimination of federal parole -- ensure that even the most casual, recreational drug-user can be kept off his subdivision streets for many long years while paying his debt to society -- and there's not a damn thing any bleeding-heart federal judge can do about it.
Supposedly intended to iron out the sentencing inconsistencies between various district courts, mandatory minimums instead have only magnified the racial disparity of the prison population. More than 43 percent of all U.S. prison inmates are black males, and blacks outnumber whites in prison by a margin of more than 5-to-4, according to Department of Justice statistics released in July.
Bruce Harvey, Georgia's leading drug defense attorney, considers mandatory-minimum sentencing to be part of a collection of immoral federal laws whose combined impact is "nothing more than political genocide on a whole group of people -- and it's getting worse."
Because a federal drug offender's punishment now is effectively determined by the charges rather than a judge's experienced sense of justice, sentencing power lies in the hands of prosecutor, where it's frequently wielded to compel a defendant to make some agent's job easier.
Before the trial began, says Steve: "I was offered 24 months instead of 10 years if I'd testify against Gary. When I said no, they asked me to testify against Joanne. I mean, my brother or my brother's wife, what's the difference?"
Even after the jury had returned guilty verdicts against all three Tuckers, the prosecutors offered Steve one last deal: Give up the names of any pot-growers who had escaped their dragnet and get off with only two years.
"I figure I'm a man, I make my own decisions, and I'm not going to tear someone else down to spare myself some time," he says. "I said, 'I'll do my 10 years.'"
The way the Tuckers arrived at that sentencing threshold, however, involved a stunning use of statutory sleight-of-hand.
When the DEA would bust a pot farm, each plant -- from the tiniest seedling up to mature bushes in full flower -- would count as one kilo of hemp. Then the agents would break out the calculators: Assume an annual yield of five crops, multiply by the projected time the suspect had been growing, add in the number of actual plants confiscated, convert to kilos and voila!, all equaling one serious prison sentence.
In the Southern Lights case, for instance, one customer was caught growing 80 actual plants, which, after a run-in with the DEA's conversion chart, had blossomed into an "estimated" 1,200 plants, speaking of manufacturing marijuana.
The Tuckers had been charged in relation to 1,000 kilos -- exactly the amount needed to trigger a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years -- which consisted mostly of theoretical weed. Gary received an additional six years for masterminding the criminal enterprise.
"To this day, we don't know whose plants we were charged with," Steve says. Not that it mattered. Whoever they belonged to, there were plenty where those came from.
As Agent McLaughlin explained to the judge: "I stopped computing at 16,000 plants."
The one bright spot in the trial seemed to be the jury's decision to deny the federal forfeiture of Gary and Joanne's house, presumably because of the absence of evidence that it was paid for with drug money.
Nancy Lord says the government's final dirty trick came when the DEA agreed to drop its claim to the property -- only to have the home seized by the state.
Steve and Gary's introduction to Club Fed was a temporary stay -- mingling with some of the same guys who'd snitched on them -- at the minimum-security prison camp next to the notorious Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.
"What you see in the movies about prisons is pretty much true about the Atlanta Pen," Steve says.
After a few months, they were transferred to Alabama, a trip Steve recalls with disbelief: "When I left the Atlanta Prison Camp, they gave me $75 and a set of street clothes. I took a cab, a bus and another cab, and reported to my new prison. If they could trust me to do that, obviously, I'm not the kind of guy who needs to be in prison."
Even as they settled into the cell they shared at Talladega Federal Correctional Institute, Gary and Steve's convictions were being condemned in newsletters and described in magazine articles, discussed at political forums and featured in a CNN special.
The family was the subject of a chapter in the 1998 book Shattered Lives: Portraits From America's Drug War. Co-author Mikki Norris of El Cerrito, Calif., says the Tuckers' case was one of the more disturbing she studied.
"It made me very paranoid to think that you could be convicted of completing a drug transaction without even knowing it," she says.
As the months and then years wore on, the media furor eventually died down and the brothers fell into the mind-numbing routine of prison life. To keep busy, Steve edited the inmate-produced newspaper, "Prose and Cons," and counted out his time: 54 days off each year automatically for good behavior, a year off for completing a voluntary drug-rehab course.
"You work, you eat, you read -- prison's a lot like a small town," he says. "I read over 600 novels, mostly psycho-thrillers, and I wrote a few, too."
But it wasn't all dull. In October 1995, much of the federal inmate population was following the progress of a congressional bill to reduce the penalties for crack possession -- retroactively, for many already serving time.
One morning, news came that the bill had failed; a foreboding silence fell over the prison the rest of the day, Steve recalls. That evening, he says, word spread throughout the cafeteria that a California prison was rioting in protest of the vote in Washington. A few minutes later, the whole place erupted.
"We feared for our lives that night," Steve says. "The inmates tore that prison to hell. It was really harrowing."
Later, they found out the rumor about the California prison had been a hoax. Instead, it was the Talladega riot -- which caused $3 million in damages and left several buildings burned -- that had touched off at least three similar episodes in other states.
That same year, the U.S. Sentencing Commission downgraded the conversion weight for a marijuana plant from 1 kilo to 100 grams. Gary petitioned to have his sentence reduced accordingly, but Steve didn't file his own request out of concern it might somehow hurt his brother's chances.
Finally, in 1998, Judge O'Kelly reduced Gary's sentence to 10 years. In the end, it didn't make any difference.
Last December, five days after Steve was released from the halfway house where he'd spent the last few months of his sentence, Gary died of cancer at Emory Hospital.
He had been sick for a nearly a year, but prison officials refused to take his illness seriously until it was too late, his mother says.
"They'd give him an aspirin and send him back to his cell until he'd pass out and then they'd take him to the hospital," Gore says.
Steve was able to see Gary toward the end, but Joanne -- who'd been transferred from a Connecticut woman's prison to a Macon halfway house -- wasn't allowed to visit her husband the week before he died.
The diagnosis was non-Hodgkin' s lymphoma, a cancer closely associated with exposure to Agent Orange, the deadly herbicide used in Vietnam. It would seem Gary's government had succeeded in killing him after all.
Even though his prison sentence has been served and he's returned to his old job, Steve Tucker wouldn't call himself a free man. Not when he has to call in every morning for the next four years so a recorded message can tell him whether he's been randomly selected to pee in a cup that day. Not since he had to give up his lifelong pastime of hunting because he can never again hold a gun. Not after he's seen politicians get elected on the promise to pass more draconian drug laws, and knowing he's forever lost his right to vote.
For the first time in nearly a decade, Steve brought his son and daughter, in their mid-teens, to spend Thanksgiving with his mother in Cochran, a half-hour south of Macon. He was required to seek written approval from his probation officer weeks in advance of the visit.
"When I got out, I had to learn my way around Atlanta again, but I went back to work like I'd never left; there was no adjustment problem," he says. "The hardest part is the probation, because you have to get permission to do just about everything."
In prison, Steve met guys who told him they had violated their probation on purpose because another 16 months in the big house was better than three more years of having people always looking over your shoulder, waiting for you to fuck up.
The thing about federal prison that made the biggest impression on Steve was how many inmates were much like himself: small-time, non-violent offenders serving big-time sentences for reasons that made little sense.
"Even if I was guilty, 10 years seems excessive when there were bank robbers who were in there for two or three years, and I got 10 years for selling light bulbs," he says, his voice rising as if framing a question.
"This drug war forced two little kids to grow up without their dad and my ex-wife to go without child-support for eight years, and for what?" he continues. "I'm not saying I'm above the law, but I know in my heart I'm not the type of person who needed to be in prison."
And yet, once there, the outrageousness of his circumstances blended into a background of statistics: He simply became another of the anonymous drug offenders who make up 57 percent of all federal inmates.
If anything, the War on Drugs has only built momentum through the political backing of such powerful interest groups as prison guard unions; the billion-dollar drug-testing industry; private prison construction and management companies; and, of course, the DEA, which commands a $1.8-billion budget and has, in the past 30 years, more than tripled the number of special agents on its payroll.
Over the last decade, drug convictions have accounted for more than 80 percent of the growth of the federal prison population, so it's hardly surprising that, as the drug war swirled outside, amassing new victims, Steve Tucker was essentially forgotten.
His sister-in-law, Joanne, now remarried and relocated, wants to forget as well. Declining to be interviewed, she explains: "Digging up something from 10 years ago isn't going to help anything now."
Trying to piece together a ruined life takes time, but there's a freedom that comes with starting over, and Steve is hoping to write his own second act.
He's looking for a literary agent to publish one of the novels he wrote in prison, a mystery set in a town modeled loosely on Cochran. As they say, you write what you know.
"People ask me if I'm going to write about everything I've been through, but I don't think so," he says wistfully. "Who wants to read about some guy who got busted for pot?"
REMEMBER THE TUCKERS and DEA Operation Green Merchant?
The Tucker Family, Drug War POWs
The DEA took the Tucker family's freedom and destroyed their legitimate business; the prison took their son's life, and the public paid highly for the priviledge. Gary Tucker's 10 year imprisonment cost the public a minimum of $150,000. That's not counting what his wife and son cost us.
Last year there were 7 million people in the justice net... Seven million in jail, prison, on probation or parole. Two million of them are not rapists, child molesters, thieves or killers - 2 million of them are offenders of a multitude of drug laws.
The $150,000 or so we wasted on Gary Tucker may not seem like a lot of money (ha!), but if we multiply that times 2 million people, the money wasted becomes vastly more significant. A policy that expensive should definately work, right? I can't even fathom the shattered lives of the drug war, yet after several generations of this prohibition, neither the supply nor the demand has been curtailed in the slightest. Who in the world wants to do this anymore? Kay Lee
FORGOTTEN MAN - 10 years in prison for selling light bulbs
http://atlanta. creativeloafing. com/gyrobase/ Content?oid= oid%3A10762
Steve Tucker served a 10-year prison sentence for selling light bulbs. Is America's drug war worth it?
BY SCOTT HENRY
scott.henry@ creativeloafing. com
Published 12.04.02
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A year has passed since Steve Tucker made his unheralded return to Atlanta. His one-bedroom flat, tucked into a sprawling Sandy Springs apartment complex, is furnished sparsely: a recliner, TV, computer and a small, picnic-style table that serves as both dining hutch and desk. The stark white static of the walls is interrupted only by three small, web-like dream catchers tacked to the Sheetrock.
It's the sort of Spartan minimalism one might expect of someone who, until recently, had to content himself with staring at bare cinderblock.
"Watch out, you're talking to a notorious ex-con." Wrapped in a sharp Middle Georgia twang, Tucker's voice betrays a suppressed smile. The slight, balding, 50-year-old Atlantan is hardly an intimidating figure.
But he's only half-kidding. Nearly a decade ago, he was sent to prison as a result of a once-infamous federal drug case that sparked national outrage for its rough interpretation of justice.
In the spring of 1994, the Tucker family received lengthy prison sentences -- 10 years for Steve, 16 years for his older brother Gary, and 10 years for his brother's wife, Joanne -- without possibility of parole, for the curiously worded federal crime of "conspiracy to manufacture marijuana."
Yet federal prosecutors never charged them with buying, selling, growing, transporting, smoking or even possessing marijuana. An 18-month DEA investigation had failed to turn up direct evidence connecting the Tuckers to even a single joint.
Instead, they were locked away for selling the lamps, fertilizer and gardening hardware from the small hydroponic supply shop Gary operated on Buford Highway that enabled their customers to grow pot.
In the mid-'90s, the Tucker case became a cause celebre among libertarian activists and other advocates of marijuana legalization. It served as an oft-cited, cautionary example of the runaway powers of the federal government and the worst excesses of the War on Drugs.
And yet, in the long years since, the Tucker case has faded from the radar. No TV cameras or microphones awaited Steve Tucker when he finally shed his prison uniform and came home.
His mother would rather it remain that way. "I'm just scared to death of the federal government," she says. At the same time, Doris Gore realizes her son has an important story to tell.
And he's determined to tell it. As he reads weekly accounts of federal agents in California arresting licensed medical-marijuana growers, he's convinced he must speak out.
"The feds don't like it when you buck them, but I'll be damned if they break me," Tucker says. "What kind of American would I be if I just kept my mouth shut?"
Steve Tucker's nightmare began with the American dream.
The funny thing is, the dream initially belonged to his older brother Gary, a balding Vietnam veteran with a house in the suburbs and a comfortable marriage. For nearly two decades, he and Steve had worked side-by-side, installing commercial fire-control systems for a Buckhead company. But by the fall of 1987, Gary was 40 and he yearned to be his own boss.
Gary's choice of businesses was pioneering: a store devoted to hydroponics, the technique of growing plants without soil or sunlight, using only powerful lamps, chemical nutrients and a self-contained irrigation system. It was, Gary decided after some research, the "wave of the future."
Whose future, however, was the question. While hydroponics is highly effective at boosting vegetable growth, the systems are so costly as to be of practical use only to orchid breeders. And, of course, to marijuana growers, who are lured by the promise of high yields that could be produced in basements and attics, away from the prying eyes of authorities.
Gary wasn't naive. He knew his customer base would include few deep-pocketed tomato enthusiasts. But just as Wal-Mart doesn't ask if the handgun ammunition it sells will be used for target practice or hold-ups, the Tuckers decided it was best to adopt a "don't ask, don't tell" policy.
"Look, we weren't stupid," Steve says with a weary smile. "We figured a percentage of our customers were growing pot. But we had store rules that if anyone asked us about marijuana, we'd ask them to leave. What someone was planning to do with fertilizer or grow lights wasn't our concern. Most of the stuff we were selling, you could buy at Home Depot. We had a legitimate business."
To finance the start-up, Gary mortgaged his home in Gwinnett and, in the spring of 1988, his business opened in a small shopping center on the edge of Norcross. It was the first hydroponics store in Georgia.
The name Gary chose for his store -- Southern Lights And Hydroponics -- was a nod to a successful Mid-Atlantic chain called Northern Lights, which itself was named after a particularly potent strain of Alaskan weed.
Steve, who had begun making child-support payments after his 10-year marriage ended in divorce, kept his regular job, but helped out weekends in his brother's store. Joanne, who worked for an insurance company, kept her husband's books.
To compensate for hydroponics' somewhat questionable image, Gary wouldn't allow High Times, rolling papers or Mr. Natural posters to be sold in the store. Any product or packaging that arrived bearing the familiar hemp-leaf silhouette would promptly be shipped back. Adding to Southern Lights' air of respectability, the brothers were invited to install working hydroponic exhibits for the agriculture departments of Gwinnett Tech and a local high school.
That's not to say the Tucker brothers didn't enjoy a joint now and again. Gary had first smoked during his tour in Vietnam and Steve would get arrested in 1991 for growing his own stash at home. For that offense, he would serve six months in a county work-release program.
"Getting busted was just my dumb luck," Steve explains. "I used to smoke pot, but I wasn't dealing. I never claimed to be 100-percent innocent, but I never conspired with anybody to do anything illegal."
What the Tuckers didn't know while they were busy preparing to launch Southern Lights was that, in Washington, the DEA was grappling with how to go after the booming number of marijuana growers who were taking their crops indoors to avoid aerial detection.
A veteran agent had hit on the answer while flipping through an issue of High Times: Cut the burgeoning industry's supply lines by focusing the agency's attack on stores selling grow lights and hydroponic gear, dozens of which advertised in the pages of head-shop magazines.
Over the next two years, the DEA subpoenaed UPS shipping records for stores across the country. Agents went undercover to browse through hydroponic shops, follow up leads on pot farms and casually ask everyone with long hair where one could buy seeds.
The agency's aggressiveness showed how far the pendulum had swung since the heyday of the marijuana-reform movement, a decade earlier. At the close of the '70s, 11 states -- following the advice of the American Medical Association and even then-President Jimmy Carter -- had decriminalized simple possession. In 1981, the first bill to legalize medical-marijuana use was introduced in Congress. Its lead sponsor was a young, conservative Georgia lawmaker named Newt Gingrich.
Under Ronald Reagan, however, the tide swiftly turned. Even while the CIA was secretly helping Nicaraguan Contras smuggle vast amounts of cocaine into the president's home state of California, the administration was cracking down on domestic pot smokers, pushing for "zero tolerance" drug laws and scolding Americans to "Just Say No." By the end of the '80s, even socially progressive Oregon had again outlawed weed.
One month after the first President Bush pledged to escalate the War on Drugs in a Sept. 5, 1989, speech televised from the Oval Office, Operation Green Merchant went public. More than 200 indoor growing operations and 30 indoor-gardening shops and mail-order houses found themselves overrun with DEA agents.
One high-profile businessman caught in that first wave of busts was Tom Alexander, the owner of a small hydroponics store in Oregon and publisher of Sinsemilla Tips, considered by some marijuana advocates to be the thinking-man' s High Times.
The DEA seized an estimated $55,000 in inventory from his store, but Alexander soon discovered it would be even more costly to fight the action in court. A few months later, he was forced to shutter his magazine as well.
Alexander had been financially ruined without ever being charged with a crime. It was an approach the feds would repeat with indoor-gardening stores from coast to coast, including all six locations of Northern Lights.
So perhaps Gary Tucker shouldn't have been surprised one day in the early weeks of 1992 when DEA Special Agent Kevin McLaughlin dropped by Southern Lights with an offer its owner wasn't expected to refuse. The feds would be much obliged, McLaughlin explained, if he'd let them install hidden cameras in the store so they could snoop on his customers. If he didn't, no effort would be spared in shutting down his 4-year-old business.
The conversation lasted probably all of five minutes, but its outcome would set into motion forces the Tuckers could scarcely imagine.
Gary would later tell his family that when he told McLaughlin to get lost, the agent "said they'd get him somehow," recalls his mother, Doris Gore.
Still disgusted by the idea of being pressured into being a government spy, Steve has never second-guessed his brother's response. "This isn't Nazi Germany," he says.
Sometime in late spring 1992, Gary Tucker realized his shop was being watched by a man sitting at a desk in an empty storefront across the street. Every time a car pulled into the Southern Lights parking lot, the mystery man would scribble something into a pad. From that point on, events unfolded quickly.
In May, Mike and Andrea Williams, customers who had become friends of Gary and Joanne, were busted by the DEA. The couple used a hydroponic system to grow marijuana for Mike, who was terminally ill and smoked to combat the pain and nausea.
One evening in July, the DEA's McLaughlin, accompanied by partner Mark Hadaway, paid a visit to Jorene Deakle, who worked with Gary as Southern Lights' store manager, and accused her and her husband of growing pot in their home.
Deakle testified two years later at the Tuckers' sentencing hearing that the agents had threatened to file charges and seize her house unless she agreed to spy on her employer for them. She said she was frightened into giving them names of Southern Lights customers she thought might be growing weed.
But the agents wouldn't let up, she testified, until she came with them to point out a house where she knew marijuana was being grown. As they were driving, Deakle told the judge, she picked a house at random so they finally would leave her alone.
The terrified Deakle called the agents several times a week to feed them tidbits of information; the investigation gained momentum. Agents followed customers home, pawed through their garbage, subpoenaed their utility bills and trained sophisticated infrared-imaging devices on their houses to look for concentrated heat sources.
Then the busts began in earnest, as one green thumb after another was caught red-handed. Don Switlick, a convicted drug trafficker, was found growing 114 plants with hydroponic equipment purchased at Southern Lights. Agents discovered a grow room in the Dawsonville home of Thomas Fordham, a high-school friend of Gary's. And, in September, Chuck Rothermel, who ran a car-customizing shop, was busted for a large crop of immature plants hidden in a nondescript warehouse he was renting in Forsyth County.
Of course, not every raid paid off. In one case, agents searched a startled family's home, only to discover that the husband was using the incriminating high-watt lamps in his tropical aquarium. In another, the suspect had never heard of the store; he'd been identified through his car, which his girlfriend had borrowed for the day.
Suffering from what Steve describes as a "nervous breakdown," Deakle mysteriously quit her job. The Tuckers would later find out she had also broken off contact with the DEA.
By October, Gary had adopted what could only be called an unusual business strategy, warning everyone who came into his store that they were being watched by federal agents. "We felt it was our obligation," Steve explains.
Gary even complained to the newspaper -- somewhat naively, in retrospect -- that the DEA was harassing customers buying legal products in an effort to drive him out of business.
McLaughlin responded by dropping by the store on occasion to remind the Tuckers of his promise to shut them down, Steve says. "He was always real cocky," he recalls. "Once, Joanne put him down, so he told her he'd killed her dog, just to upset her."
Their mother begged Gary to quit the hydroponics trade. "I wanted them to get rid of that store, but Gary said they weren't doing anything illegal," Doris Gore recalls. "He was adamant about keeping it open because he said it wasn't his business what other people did with the equipment he sold."
In December, Gary and Joanne went out to dinner and drinks with a friend, Mark Holmes, who kept steering the rambling, margarita-fueled conversation back to the subject of recreational marijuana use -- in large part because he was wearing a wire.
The DEA raided the Tuckers' home and store the following spring, carrying away boxes of business records, address books, photographs and various bric-a-brac. Southern Lights was padlocked, its entire inventory seized, and the agency began forfeiture proceedings against the couple's house, bank accounts, their new truck and a boat.
On June 18, 1993, nearly two years after Operation Green Merchant had arrived in Georgia, Gary, Steve and Joanne were arrested on federal drug conspiracy charges.
The Southern Lights investigation had uncovered, all told, more than 100 small, hemp-growing operations across north Georgia, and resulted in at least 30 arrests. Which meant at least 30 potential prosecution witnesses, who had already claimed many of the available drug-defense attorneys in Atlanta by the time the Tuckers went shopping for legal counsel.
Meeting by chance at a community gathering, Gary and Joanne were introduced to Nancy Lord, a trial lawyer and outspoken Libertarian activist who had been that party's 1992 vice-presidential candidate.
With only one major drug case on her resume, Lord had just moved to Atlanta to practice under the tutelage of prominent defense attorney Tony Axam. Lord and Axam signed on to separately represent Joanne and Gary, respectively. An acquaintance of Lord's was hired for Steve.
From the beginning, Lord was passionate about her assignment, appearing at press conferences and local forums to protest the Big Brother tactics of the federal drug war and attack the flimsiness of the government's case against the Tucker family.
Certainly, to the layperson, it would have appeared weak. Despite 18 months of constant surveillance, boxes of confiscated documents, dozens of confidential informants and the DEA's own terrified mole managing the store, the agency had failed to come up with any physical evidence linking Gary to his customers' crops.
No marijuana -- growing or dime-bagged -- was found in Southern Lights, Gary's house or Steve's apartment. No paper trail of drug deals. No incriminating messages. No videotaped handoffs of suspicious packages. No blurry photos of Gary inspecting a customer's harvest. No secretly recorded advice on the finer points of cultivating Maui Wowie.
After a $1 million investigation, the only tangible exhibits the feds had to show the jury were a set of precision scales that could have been used to weigh leafy contraband, and an old pipe that Gary and Joanne readily acknowledged they had used for smoking pot.
The government's sole weapon seemed to be a lengthy list of freshly indicted, former Southern Lights customers desperate to prove themselves useful enough on the witness stand for prosecutors to let them off lightly.
The Tuckers and Lord, however, failed to fully appreciate that federal conspiracy law is far less concerned with what you did than with what you knew.
"Conspiracy law has been the darling of federal prosecutors since the 1930s, because you don't need direct evidence to score a conviction," explains Axam, now recognized as one of Georgia's top death-penalty lawyers. "The reason they use it is because they may have no hard, physical evidence, but with conspiracy, they can bring in hearsay, rumor, innuendo."
Indeed, it's tough to imagine how anyone gets acquitted, considering the standard description of conspiracy law given to federal juries: "The fact that a defendant's acts appear not to be illegal when viewed in isolation does not bar his conviction. An act innocent in nature and of no danger to the victim or society suffices if it furthers the criminal venture."
Lord, who now specializes in patent law and FDA drug approval at her solo practice outside Las Vegas, admits she underestimated the far-reaching power of conspiracy law. "I was shocked that this little evidence could send someone up for 10 years," she says.
Still, why were prosecutors willing to let admitted pot-growers and convicted drug dealers off easy so they could nail a tax-paying businessman who hadn't been caught with any grass?
Doris Gore is convinced there was an element of vengeance in the DEA's pursuit of her sons because they had refused to roll over, to name names, to cop a plea. "They hated Gary because he wouldn't do what they said," she says.
She may be on to something. During the trial, Garfield Hammonds, then the Southeast's top DEA official, announced to the press that Gary was no mere entrepreneur: "He's a bum, he's a parasite, he's a master of deceit, he's a marijuana czar." Hammonds, who now sits on the state Board of Pardons and Parole, didn't return a CL phone call.
It didn't help that Joanne had followed Lord's lead in publicly baiting her accusers whenever the chance arose. "My husband is a political POW," she told one reporter. "We're fighting a political war, not a drug war."
Steve Tucker still believes he and Joanne were charged primarily as added leverage against Gary. When they wouldn't give him up, the government simply steamrolled over them as well.
Axam, who's since represented such high-profile defendants as Ray Lewis and Jamil Al-Amin, won't discuss the particulars of the Tuckers' defense, but he recalls vividly the feds' take-no-prisoners determination.
"The government had a clear policy that it didn't want hydroponics stores in business," he says. "If it looks long and hard enough at any industry it doesn't like, it can find those connections. "
Scheduled to begin in federal court in November 1993, United States v. Gary Tucker et al got off to a spectacularly inauspicious start.
On the morning of jury selection, activists with the Fully Informed Jury Association -- a radical libertarian group that believes juries should be empowered to dismiss charges and reject unjust laws -- were handing out flyers to everyone entering the Russell Federal Building, effectively disqualifying an entire day's jury pool for the Northern District of Georgia.
When Chief Judge William O'Kelly, who was to preside over the trial, was told Lord had been seen outside exchanging pleasantries with one of the activists, he was livid. Their courtroom relationship went downhill from there.
Resuming the first week of January 1994, the trial lasted four days. Assistant U.S. Attorney James Harper oversaw a parade of a dozen or so nervous plea-bargain witnesses, some of whom testified that Gary, and to a lesser extent, Steve and Joanne, had given them hemp-growing tips. Several claimed Gary had bought pot from them or traded hydroponic equipment for high-end herb. One said he'd glimpsed a freezer crammed with weed in the couple's garage. Another said Gary offered to look after his buds while he was out of town. A couple said Gary had privately confirmed that the vast majority of his customers were breaking the law.
The defense, spearheaded by Lord, scored too few points to overcome the damage. One witness didn't believe the Tuckers had done anything illegal. Another recalled bragging about his hemp garden, only to have Gary tell him to get rid of it. Several acknowledged hoping their testimony would spare them prison time.
One former Southern Lights customer, a 66-year-old ex-con we'll call "Bob" (who spoke to CL on condition he not be named), now says DEA agents tried to coax him into claiming the Tuckers were growing pot at their house, but stopped short of asking him to lie.
"'You help us and we'll help you,' is how they put it," he explains.
When asked to wear a wire into the store, Bob agreed -- then fled the state rather than aid an investigation he believed was intent on "railroading" the business owners.
Even though he eventually testified after police tracked him down, Bob received a four-year sentence, rather than the 18-month stretch he'd initially been offered.
"I disappointed [prosecutors] because I didn't say what they wanted me to," he says. "To my knowledge, the Tuckers didn't do anything other than sell chemicals and lights -- except for indulging."
Steve's own years behind bars have taught him not to be shocked at what someone might say on the witness stand.
"I was in prison with people who'd swear their own mother was Hitler if it would help them," he says, shaking his head. "I'll never have another close friend. I'll never be able to trust anyone that way, now that I've seen what people will do to protect their freedom."
While he concedes that he can't speak for his brother's actions, Steve insists he never offered growing advice or swapped weed with customers -- although he shared a joint on occasion.
Plain-spoken to the point of abrasive, Nancy Lord continued to criticize the DEA, pointedly suggesting that witnesses had been coerced to lie.
When the judge warned her at one point that Agent McLaughlin wasn't the one on trial, she shot back: "He should be." O'Kelly fumed that he was citing her for contempt. "If I go to jail, I go to jail," she shrugged.
"Nancy had some balls," Steve recalls, laughing. "She stood up to that judge."
But Lord now reflects that her confrontational style didn't serve her clients well, a point made painfully clear when O'Kelly told her he believed Joanne likely would have been acquitted if she'd been defended in a more professional manner.
"My problem was, I was too angry," Lord says. "I wanted to make a political statement -- to argue against the drug war -- and I thought the jury would go along with me. Now, I'd probably urge the Tuckers to re-examine taking a plea agreement."
The trial's low point came when Joanne took the stand in her own defense. The same woman who'd given tough-talking speeches defending her family and denouncing government scare tactics suddenly sounded uncertain and evasive when confronted by prosecutors.
"Joanne fell apart on the stand," Lord says. "It really was sad to watch."
Despite widespread criticism of the nation's ongoing War on Drugs, there's at least one battle Uncle Sam has convincingly won, depending on your definition of victory.
First taking effect in 1989, mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines -- combined with the elimination of federal parole -- ensure that even the most casual, recreational drug-user can be kept off his subdivision streets for many long years while paying his debt to society -- and there's not a damn thing any bleeding-heart federal judge can do about it.
Supposedly intended to iron out the sentencing inconsistencies between various district courts, mandatory minimums instead have only magnified the racial disparity of the prison population. More than 43 percent of all U.S. prison inmates are black males, and blacks outnumber whites in prison by a margin of more than 5-to-4, according to Department of Justice statistics released in July.
Bruce Harvey, Georgia's leading drug defense attorney, considers mandatory-minimum sentencing to be part of a collection of immoral federal laws whose combined impact is "nothing more than political genocide on a whole group of people -- and it's getting worse."
Because a federal drug offender's punishment now is effectively determined by the charges rather than a judge's experienced sense of justice, sentencing power lies in the hands of prosecutor, where it's frequently wielded to compel a defendant to make some agent's job easier.
Before the trial began, says Steve: "I was offered 24 months instead of 10 years if I'd testify against Gary. When I said no, they asked me to testify against Joanne. I mean, my brother or my brother's wife, what's the difference?"
Even after the jury had returned guilty verdicts against all three Tuckers, the prosecutors offered Steve one last deal: Give up the names of any pot-growers who had escaped their dragnet and get off with only two years.
"I figure I'm a man, I make my own decisions, and I'm not going to tear someone else down to spare myself some time," he says. "I said, 'I'll do my 10 years.'"
The way the Tuckers arrived at that sentencing threshold, however, involved a stunning use of statutory sleight-of-hand.
When the DEA would bust a pot farm, each plant -- from the tiniest seedling up to mature bushes in full flower -- would count as one kilo of hemp. Then the agents would break out the calculators: Assume an annual yield of five crops, multiply by the projected time the suspect had been growing, add in the number of actual plants confiscated, convert to kilos and voila!, all equaling one serious prison sentence.
In the Southern Lights case, for instance, one customer was caught growing 80 actual plants, which, after a run-in with the DEA's conversion chart, had blossomed into an "estimated" 1,200 plants, speaking of manufacturing marijuana.
The Tuckers had been charged in relation to 1,000 kilos -- exactly the amount needed to trigger a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years -- which consisted mostly of theoretical weed. Gary received an additional six years for masterminding the criminal enterprise.
"To this day, we don't know whose plants we were charged with," Steve says. Not that it mattered. Whoever they belonged to, there were plenty where those came from.
As Agent McLaughlin explained to the judge: "I stopped computing at 16,000 plants."
The one bright spot in the trial seemed to be the jury's decision to deny the federal forfeiture of Gary and Joanne's house, presumably because of the absence of evidence that it was paid for with drug money.
Nancy Lord says the government's final dirty trick came when the DEA agreed to drop its claim to the property -- only to have the home seized by the state.
Steve and Gary's introduction to Club Fed was a temporary stay -- mingling with some of the same guys who'd snitched on them -- at the minimum-security prison camp next to the notorious Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.
"What you see in the movies about prisons is pretty much true about the Atlanta Pen," Steve says.
After a few months, they were transferred to Alabama, a trip Steve recalls with disbelief: "When I left the Atlanta Prison Camp, they gave me $75 and a set of street clothes. I took a cab, a bus and another cab, and reported to my new prison. If they could trust me to do that, obviously, I'm not the kind of guy who needs to be in prison."
Even as they settled into the cell they shared at Talladega Federal Correctional Institute, Gary and Steve's convictions were being condemned in newsletters and described in magazine articles, discussed at political forums and featured in a CNN special.
The family was the subject of a chapter in the 1998 book Shattered Lives: Portraits From America's Drug War. Co-author Mikki Norris of El Cerrito, Calif., says the Tuckers' case was one of the more disturbing she studied.
"It made me very paranoid to think that you could be convicted of completing a drug transaction without even knowing it," she says.
As the months and then years wore on, the media furor eventually died down and the brothers fell into the mind-numbing routine of prison life. To keep busy, Steve edited the inmate-produced newspaper, "Prose and Cons," and counted out his time: 54 days off each year automatically for good behavior, a year off for completing a voluntary drug-rehab course.
"You work, you eat, you read -- prison's a lot like a small town," he says. "I read over 600 novels, mostly psycho-thrillers, and I wrote a few, too."
But it wasn't all dull. In October 1995, much of the federal inmate population was following the progress of a congressional bill to reduce the penalties for crack possession -- retroactively, for many already serving time.
One morning, news came that the bill had failed; a foreboding silence fell over the prison the rest of the day, Steve recalls. That evening, he says, word spread throughout the cafeteria that a California prison was rioting in protest of the vote in Washington. A few minutes later, the whole place erupted.
"We feared for our lives that night," Steve says. "The inmates tore that prison to hell. It was really harrowing."
Later, they found out the rumor about the California prison had been a hoax. Instead, it was the Talladega riot -- which caused $3 million in damages and left several buildings burned -- that had touched off at least three similar episodes in other states.
That same year, the U.S. Sentencing Commission downgraded the conversion weight for a marijuana plant from 1 kilo to 100 grams. Gary petitioned to have his sentence reduced accordingly, but Steve didn't file his own request out of concern it might somehow hurt his brother's chances.
Finally, in 1998, Judge O'Kelly reduced Gary's sentence to 10 years. In the end, it didn't make any difference.
Last December, five days after Steve was released from the halfway house where he'd spent the last few months of his sentence, Gary died of cancer at Emory Hospital.
He had been sick for a nearly a year, but prison officials refused to take his illness seriously until it was too late, his mother says.
"They'd give him an aspirin and send him back to his cell until he'd pass out and then they'd take him to the hospital," Gore says.
Steve was able to see Gary toward the end, but Joanne -- who'd been transferred from a Connecticut woman's prison to a Macon halfway house -- wasn't allowed to visit her husband the week before he died.
The diagnosis was non-Hodgkin' s lymphoma, a cancer closely associated with exposure to Agent Orange, the deadly herbicide used in Vietnam. It would seem Gary's government had succeeded in killing him after all.
Even though his prison sentence has been served and he's returned to his old job, Steve Tucker wouldn't call himself a free man. Not when he has to call in every morning for the next four years so a recorded message can tell him whether he's been randomly selected to pee in a cup that day. Not since he had to give up his lifelong pastime of hunting because he can never again hold a gun. Not after he's seen politicians get elected on the promise to pass more draconian drug laws, and knowing he's forever lost his right to vote.
For the first time in nearly a decade, Steve brought his son and daughter, in their mid-teens, to spend Thanksgiving with his mother in Cochran, a half-hour south of Macon. He was required to seek written approval from his probation officer weeks in advance of the visit.
"When I got out, I had to learn my way around Atlanta again, but I went back to work like I'd never left; there was no adjustment problem," he says. "The hardest part is the probation, because you have to get permission to do just about everything."
In prison, Steve met guys who told him they had violated their probation on purpose because another 16 months in the big house was better than three more years of having people always looking over your shoulder, waiting for you to fuck up.
The thing about federal prison that made the biggest impression on Steve was how many inmates were much like himself: small-time, non-violent offenders serving big-time sentences for reasons that made little sense.
"Even if I was guilty, 10 years seems excessive when there were bank robbers who were in there for two or three years, and I got 10 years for selling light bulbs," he says, his voice rising as if framing a question.
"This drug war forced two little kids to grow up without their dad and my ex-wife to go without child-support for eight years, and for what?" he continues. "I'm not saying I'm above the law, but I know in my heart I'm not the type of person who needed to be in prison."
And yet, once there, the outrageousness of his circumstances blended into a background of statistics: He simply became another of the anonymous drug offenders who make up 57 percent of all federal inmates.
If anything, the War on Drugs has only built momentum through the political backing of such powerful interest groups as prison guard unions; the billion-dollar drug-testing industry; private prison construction and management companies; and, of course, the DEA, which commands a $1.8-billion budget and has, in the past 30 years, more than tripled the number of special agents on its payroll.
Over the last decade, drug convictions have accounted for more than 80 percent of the growth of the federal prison population, so it's hardly surprising that, as the drug war swirled outside, amassing new victims, Steve Tucker was essentially forgotten.
His sister-in-law, Joanne, now remarried and relocated, wants to forget as well. Declining to be interviewed, she explains: "Digging up something from 10 years ago isn't going to help anything now."
Trying to piece together a ruined life takes time, but there's a freedom that comes with starting over, and Steve is hoping to write his own second act.
He's looking for a literary agent to publish one of the novels he wrote in prison, a mystery set in a town modeled loosely on Cochran. As they say, you write what you know.
"People ask me if I'm going to write about everything I've been through, but I don't think so," he says wistfully. "Who wants to read about some guy who got busted for pot?"
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