After Inmate Suicides in New York and Ohio, Calls for Probes into Local Jails

After a Nassau County inmate with a history of mental illness committed suicide last week — the county’s fourth inmate suicide in 12 months — a state legislator and inmate advocates are calling for a federal investigation:

“Given the fact that the feds have had involvement in the facility, it makes sense for them to take a look at what is or is not going on that might be helpful,” said Assemb. Jeffrion Aubry (D-East Elmhurst), chairman of the Assembly’s committee on correction.

The U.S. Justice Department had closely monitored the jail both for overcrowding and, more recently, after finding gross civil rights violations stemming from the 1999 beating death of an inmate and problems with [Nassau University Medical Center]’s inmate medical care.

The DOJ’s earlier monitoring efforts in Nassau County were concluded in 2005.

Meanwhile, the ACLU of Ohio is seeking information about procedures at the Summit County Jail after an apparent inmate suicide:

[Michael Carl] O’Neill, 51, was taken off life support Tuesday, about two days after he jumped from a second-story ledge from a visitation area inside the jail. The Akron man was being held over the weekend on public-drunkeness-related charges and was assigned to a cot in the open area.

On Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union wrote Alexander expressing concern of potential overcrowding issues. The group is seeking the department’s policies on inmate housing and any mental health evaluation given to O’Neill.

”Housing inmates in a large common area typically used for other purposes raises red flags over potential safety flaws and indicates that the jail may be dangerously overcrowded,” ACLU of Ohio Legal Director James Hardiman said Friday.

More Holiday Reading on Prison Law and Policy

The Pace Law Review has published a special issue on prison oversight, available for download here. The articles include a piece on how prison inspections interact with prisoners’ rights; case studies from Canada, New York, and California; and a piece on the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission. The issue also includes two very useful resources: a 68-page (!) annotated bibliography of research findings on prison oversight from around the world, and a 50-state inventory of existing correctional oversight mechanisms within the United States.

Families, Survivors Commemorate Anniversary of Attica Uprising

photo credit: Bronayur at the English language Wikipedia

Nearly forty years after the Attica prison riot, survivors and families of those who died are gathering at the prison in upstate New York today for their annual memorial service. In total, 43 people were killed at Attica — 11 corrections officers and 32 inmates — with 39 of those deaths on Sept. 13, 1971, when state authorities stormed the prison. As the Village Voice noted in introducing a package of first-person remembrances on the occasion of the uprising’s 30th anniversary, there followed a 27-year legal battle at the end of which New York State distributed $8 million in compensation among 502 injured prisoners and relatives.

New York Passes Legislation to End Prison-based Gerrymandering

Yesterday, the New York State Senate passed a bill to count prisoners in their home communities during next year’s legislative redistricting process — rather than counting prisoners where they are incarcerated, which inflates the districts in which prisons are located at the expense of other districts. The bill had already passed in the State Assembly and now goes to Gov. David Paterson for his signature. New York is the third state to pass legislation this year addressing prison-based gerrymandering, after Maryland and Delaware.

From the Prisoners of the Census blog:

The new law will help New York correct past distortions in representation caused by counting incarcerated persons as residents of prisons, such as the following:

Seven of the current New York State Senate districts meet minimum population requirements only by claiming incarcerated people as residents.

Forty percent of an Oneida County legislative district is incarcerated, and 50 percent of a Rome City Council ward is incarcerated, giving the people who live next to the prisons more influence than people in other districts or wards.

States that Don’t Fix Prison-based Gerrymandering May Face Lawsuits

If you want political power, you should move to City Council Ward 2 in Anamosa, Iowa. There, you’ll only have to share your City Council representative with 57 other constituents! In any of Anamosa’s other three wards, you’d have to share your representative with about 1,370 other constituents. How is this possible? Through the magic of prison-based gerrymandering. Anamosa’s Ward 2 contains a state penitentiary home to about 1,320 inmates, who get factored into the population count for the purpose of City Council districting even though they can’t vote, and are unlikely even to be from Anamosa.

That’s an extreme instance of prison-based gerrymandering, but it’s not as extreme as you might think. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund has produced an informative publication, Captive Constituents (PDF download), that outlines the democracy-distorting effects of counting prisoners where they’re incarcerated when drawing state and local election districts. As the example of Anamosa demonstrates, prison-based gerrymandering is not primarily an urban-rural or racial issue. It dilutes the votes of everyone who doesn’t live in a district with a prison — like the rural Iowans who live in Anamosa City Council Wards 1, 3, and 4.

That said, prison-based gerrymandering undeniably has unique effects on urban minority communities.

The Judge’s Case for Criminal Justice Reform

[B]y incarcerating thousands of children in facilities, the largest of which closely resemble adult prisons, New York State is harming its children, wasting money, and endangering its public.

— New York task force on juvenile justice. Quoted by Jonathan Lippmann, Chief Judge, State of New York, in this recent New York Law Journal commentary on the need for juvenile justice reforms in the Empire State. More from Judge Lippmann:

How New York Cut Prison Rolls and Crime at the Same Time

From the Crime Report:

How did New York State manage to cut its prison population while reducing crime? Send many fewer drug offenders to prison and have many more minor offenders serving shorter sentences, experts told a “smart justice” symposium yesterday near Washington, D.C. The session was sponsored by the CNA consulting firm in Alexandria, Va., which is working with the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance on a “smart policing” initiative.

The New York experience bolsters the growing evidence against the lazy assumption that reducing the number of people sent to prison will yield an increase in crime (or the converse, that sending more people to prison will yield a decrease in crime). In the past 20 years or so, crime has declined almost everywhere in the U.S., both in states that have been increasing their prison populations and states that have been reducing their prison populations. Since 1999, Kansas, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York have reduced their prison populations by 5-20%, with no increase in crime.

Of course, there’s no way to do a perfectly controlled experiment. But economists can use modeling to estimate the extent to which one factor influences another. At a panel talk I recently attended at Stanford, Berkeley economist Stephen Raphael shared his estimate that only about 20% of the crime drop of recent years can be attributed to higher rates of imprisonment. Freakonomics economist Steven Levitt’s estimate is about 25% (PDF p. 4). As the Sentencing Project has concluded (PDF p. 8):

While incarceration is one factor affecting crime rates, its impact is more modest than many proponents suggest, and is increasingly subject to diminishing returns. Increasing incarceration while ignoring more effective approaches will impose a heavy burden upon courts, corrections and communities, while providing a marginal impact on crime. Policymakers should assess these dynamics and adopt balanced crime control policies that provide appropriate resources and support for programming, treatment, and community support.

Latest Ruling in Erie County Suicides Litigation: Buffalo Jail Must Let in Federal Inspectors, But County Attorney Can Come Too

I’ve been keeping up with ongoing litigation brought by the DOJ Civil Rights Division over a string of suicides in the Erie County jail in Buffalo, N.Y. — the jail has a suicide rate five times the national average, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The most recent issue has been whether the DOJ would be granted unfettered access to the jail to investigate conditions. Here’s the latest update: district judge William Skretny has ruled that federal inspectors must be granted access to the jail facility. But Judge Skretny also ruled that the county is free to send along its own representative — e.g., a county attorney. Prisoners’ rights advocates are concerned:

“I don’t see this as a good thing,” said Karima Amin, co-chairwoman of the Erie County Prisoners Rights Coalition. “With the county attorney standing by, I think employees will be intimidated. They’ll say anything the county attorney wants them to. … Retaliation is real.”

Skretny’s 11-page ruling does not address the issue of whether county attorneys can be present while prisoners are being interviewed. That issue will have to be clarified before the Justice Department inspectors visit the jail March 22-23, according to U.S. Attorney Kathleen M. Mehltretter. …

Many of the people in the jail are young, first-time offenders or others who have never been convicted of a crime, Amin said.

“Any one of our sons or daughters could wind up in that predicament after a first offense,” she said. “I’ve seen it many times. I’ve seen many people whose entire attitude about the jail changes in a heartbeat when one of their own children is locked up.”

Spotlight on Executive Detention, Part I: “Broken ICE”

Although this blog focuses on conditions for people being detained as part of the criminal trial process, or who are serving a criminal sentence, the United States of course detains people for many other reasons. Among those people are the 300,000 men, women, and children in immigration detention, and the hundreds of War on Terror detainees who have been held at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. Although these forms of executive detention often raise different legal questions than the criminal justice system, ultimately none of these issues are separable: they are all part of the same national conversation about liberty and security, and in that way they all inform each other.

So, I thought I would take a break from prison/jail news this morning, and highlight two recent articles about executive detention. (I’ll do this in two separate posts, so this is Part I.) First, immigration detention, which raises particularly salient human rights concerns not only because of the conditions of confinement in many of the facilities ICE uses, but also because it catches in its net so many families and even young children. In The Nation, Jacqueline Stevens has this commentary entitled “Broken ICE,” on America’s thoroughly broken system of immigration detention, focusing on one New York facility:

In January, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced that by February 26 it would be transferring roughly 250 detainees from the privately run Varick Detention Center in Manhattan to the Hudson correctional center in Kearny, New Jersey. About 12,000 people annually, mostly New Yorkers who would be held at the Varick center, will now be distributed to facilities outside the city. ICE claims it is making the transfer to provide “outdoor recreation space and visitation services,” but civil rights advocates paint a darker picture.

“We view this as a lose-lose situation,” says Udi Ofer of the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), which, along with numerous other New York civil rights organizations, is disturbed that ICE is shifting people from one intolerable facility to another and not releasing them. The groups also worry that the move will deprive the Varick inmates of their free legal services.

DOJ Lawyers: String of Suicides in Buffalo Jail Is a “Real Crisis”

I’ve blogged briefly about the DOJ’s ongoing litigation over conditions in the Erie County Holding Center, the Buffalo, N.Y., jail where several inmates have committed suicide in recent years. Here’s a more detailed report from the Buffalo News:

Justice Department attorneys asked District Judge William M. Skretny to decide as quickly as possible to allow federal investigators to inspect the county’s jail in downtown Buffalo to determine if its suicide-prevention procedures are adequate.

In court papers, Justice Department attorneys refer to the proliferation of suicides at the jail as a “real crisis” that should be addressed as soon as possible.

That statement drew an angry denial from Sheriff Timothy B. Howard, who said there is no crisis at the jail. In a telephone interview, he lashed out at Justice Department investigators.

“I do not believe the Department of Justice has been working with us in a cooperative way,” Howard said. “They say, ‘We want to help you, but you can’t be there when we do.’ They want to question people in our facility without county attorneys being present . . . No other employer would stand for that.” …

County officials deny the allegations, saying the lawsuit is based on hearsay and fictionalized events. [County Attorney Cheryl A.] Green has accused the federal government of trying to force county taxpayers to provide jail prisoners with “the amenities, conveniences and services of a good hotel.”