New Prison Rape Prevention Regulations Will Spare Many Years of Pain–Here’s Why

I’ve written several times on this site about the issue of prison rape. Most recently, I brought up  the Department of Justices foot-dragging in implementing the Prison Rape Commissions’ recommendations on rape prevention. Among both correctional staff and inmates rape  is too often an accepted and expected consequence of being in jail. It’s just the old predator/prey food chain. In an excellent article entitled “Rape Should not be Part of the Penalty for Prisoners”  The Advocate  cogently spells out  why these regulations are so vital. These new rules for prevention will–I hope–relieve the suffering of so many prisoners, young and old.

Keeping Juvenile Offenders and Their Families Connected

Arizona’s legislature recently passed a law charging prison visitors a onetime $25 fee as a way to help close the state’s $1.6 billion budget deficit. Middle Ground Prison Reform, a prison advocacy group, challenged the law in court as a discriminatory tax, but a county judge upheld its constitutionality.

Fees like that, slapped on prisoners and their families, couldn’t be more counterintuitive. But then again, so many of our criminal justice policies are just that. Since it is mostly the poor, the desperately poor who fill US prisons, the $25 fee is one more economic hardship offenders’ families have to struggle with. It becomes another bill they have to scramble to pay—that is if they can.

These kinds of charges (and Arizona isn’t the only jurisdiction trying to shift the cost of incarceration to the poor) have even graver consequences. When a family can’t pay the fee their contact with their loved one is limited, essentially cutting an offender off from the only supports he or she has in the outside world.

Psychologists have long known how central it is for an individual to have nurturing people in his or her life in order to develop emotionally, psychologically and socially. This need for a supportive network is even more essential when we talk about the young people who are locked away from family and loved ones in our nation’s prisons and detention centers.

As anyone who has worked with kids in the penal system knows on a gut level, it is crucial to have families and other supportive community members involved in young offenders’ lives as they serve their time. Now, that commonsense intuition has been given empirical strength by studies done by such juvenile justice groups as the Vera Institute of Justice which have demonstrated that maintaining young people’s connection to families is a major factor in helping kids stay out of jail once they are released.

But it’s easy to question whether these families are really such a positive influence. After all, if they were doing such a great job what are their kids doing in jail?

It’s an easy assumption to make until you see some of those family members in the prison visiting room with their sons and daughters. I got to do that at least twice a year when the jailhouse high school where I taught for ten years in a county adult facility had its open house for families and caregivers.

The place was packed with mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters, or the people who stepped into those roles when circumstances—AIDS, death, addiction, incarceration, abandonment, all the things that ravage the lives of the poor and disenfranchised—demanded it. It wasn’t easy for many of them to get there. Meals had to be missed. Second jobs skipped. Long cross-county bus rides with tickets to pay for, transfers to be negotiated, at night, often in bad weather. The grandmother of one of my students, Leon, a skinny 15 year old who was finally making progress in class, had to travel over an hour on three buses to get there. It was a trip I knew she faithfully made twice a week to see her grandson. “I wouldn’t miss a visit with my boy for anything,” she told me, reaching over and giving Leon’s hair a playful tug. “But now you tell, Mr. Chura, how’s he doin in class?” That set Leon squirming.

It was a conversation I had over and over during those family visits. Miguel’s uncle who gave me his phone number and urged me to call him if Miguel wasn’t in school. Luis’ mother, frail and  in a wheelchair, holding her son’s hand, telling me how when Luis got out of jail she was moving her whole family out of state to get away from the gangs that ran wild in the streets. “I just want my boys to be safe,” she said, her English halting but her fear and determination palpable.

It was hard to hear in the visiting room sometimes with people chattering in several different languages, children running around, little brothers squealing when their big brother in his funny orange jump suit picked them up, mothers crying, locked-up sons trying to explain, promise, console. It was hard to hear but it was easy to know what was going on: Families—fragile, fragmented, strained, mending—were desperately trying to stay a family.

Many of those visitors would be willing to admit that they hadn’t done such a good job at maintaining the family bond, but that they did the best they could given the problems they had to face. Like Luis’ mother the determination was there but the resources weren’t. If we as a nation are serious about reducing crime (and not just by increased incarceration) it is important that we not put more obstacles in the way of young inmates’ families but rather that we give them the opportunities and resources to develop and sustain those crucial connections. It’s an investment that’s worth losing 25 bucks over.

Originally appeared on Juvenile Justice Information Exchange

Kids in Adult Lockups Get a Voice: Their Lives Portrayed

MSNBC has done a documentary, “Young Kids, Hard Time” on young offenders who are doing time in adult jail. Young people caught up in the adult  criminal justice system have so few advocates in the face of such a huge, punishing monster and so few people have any real concept of what life in these facilities is like for them that something like this documentary can only  help to erode some of America’s hardheartedness and ignorance.

Restorative Justice: A Film About the Power of Real Justice

Concrete Steel and Paint is a powerful and beautifully made film about restorative justice, a concept that has the power to change the lives of  offenders and of victims and their families that so many people just don’t understand. Check out the trailer for the film and visit the website to see what I mean about its transformative ability to restore harmony, compassion and true justice in society.

“I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Kids in Adult Loockup” Receives Award and Recognition

I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine has won a 2010 PASS Award from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. The award is given to works that focus “America’s attention on the complex problems of the criminal and juvenile justice systems and child welfare.”  The Council itself does important advocacy work and I appreciate their recognition.

Juvenile Justice: An Issue that the Young Generation Cares About

Since the paperback publication of I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup I’ve been doing a lot of events at schools and colleges, talking to students who feel very strongly about the need for our criminal justice system to be reformed when it comes to young offenders. They are keenly aware of the injustice of locking kids up in prisons with no opportunity to change their lives around.

Indeed, they should be concerned. It is their generation that is being incarcerated, and it will be their generation who will be the responsible both morally and economically for those young people as they keep returning to jail and then become adults in the system.

I find their concern and passion about this issue heartening. Many wish to become professionals in the criminal justice or human services field so that they can make a difference. Others are active in social justice movements. Their intelligence and compassion around these issues is inspiring.

One such student has written extensively about this issue on her blog, Colleen’s Blog. It was brought to my attention by a colleague because this high school senior as a part of a social justice curriculum read my book and wrote extensively about the issues it raises. Aside from the great insights this blogger expresses I think her posts are worth reading because they show that not all our schools and their students are failing, the way the education reformers keep warning us.

With young people like the ones I’ve been meeting and talking with and students like Colleen I hope that the next generation will not be obsessed with being “tough on crime” but rather with being “smart on crime.”

Ex-offenders and the Ballot Box

I’ve worked with “slow” learners all of my 26 years as a teacher. But nothing matches the lack of understanding, insight and plain common sense that many of our politicians and their constituents show when it comes to the treatment of ex-offenders, people who by the law of the land have served their time, paid their dues, made amends, learned their lesson, been punished—whatever language matches your view of justice.

I’m thinking about ex-offenders and voting rights. In many states men and women who have been incarcerated are denied one of the basic rights of any democracy: to help select who will govern your daily life. Meanwhile, ex-offenders are expected to stay out of jail, rebuild their lives, and become productive members of the community even though they can’t fully be a part of that community.

I’m not too sure how many people see the irony in that logic. The kids I taught for ten years in the county jail did. Most of them had been labeled “slow,” and yes, most of them probably weren’t able to articulate what irony is (then again, I’m not too sure how many other Americans could either.) Still, these kids knew it when they saw it.

Anyone who has been locked up hears plenty about respect for society, for the law, for other people and their property, and so they should since that respect is essential for civil communities and nations. But at the same time inmates and ex-offenders are not afforded that same respect when it comes to jobs, housing and voting rights. Or as my students would put it, “What goes ‘round, in this case, definitely doesn’t come ‘round.”

The ACLU reports that many states continue to deny voting rights to ex-offenders and that that denial can extend anywhere from the length of time the person has been incarcerated up to a lifetime in ten states. While Virginia’s new leader, Governor McDonnell, intents not only to continue the process already in place of allowing former inmates to apply for a restoration of their voting rights but to actually streamline it, Iowa is about to take a step backward. Newly elected Governor Branstad declared during the gubernatorial race that he would rescind his predecessor’s 2005 executive order restoring voting rights to ex-offenders. He seems set to follow through on that regressive and oppressive promise despite the urgent call from over 20 civil rights groups to reconsider.

Maybe it’s the teacher in me, but whenever I hear stories like Iowa’s governor rescinding voting rights, I can’t help thinking, “What lesson are we trying to teach?”

Most offenders have been disenfranchised all their lives. They’ve never felt a part of any society. Many come from backgrounds of deprivation, living in neighborhoods devastated by poverty, violence, addiction and disease, neighborhoods abandoned by the larger community. The schools they attended, or in so many cases were kicked out of or fled from on their own, weren’t much better. And not coincidently the majority of locked up men and women are people of color.

The way they are treated during incarceration as well as when they are released only reinforces the lessons they’ve had drummed into them since childhood—that they are outcasts, outsiders, and eventually outlaws. A basic concept in all human relations is that the way we treat people is the way they’ll act. When my jailhouse students and I discussed this idea in a communications lesson they summed it up crudely but cogently, “Treat people like shit and they’ll act like shit.”

And so we’re back to the slow learners. Too often people are puzzled and angered at the high rate of recidivism among young offenders.  “Why can’t these kids just learn their lesson and stay out of jail?” But I’m not too sure who’s the slow learner here. It looks to me as though those repeat offenders may have learned the lesson we’re teaching all too well. Perhaps it’s our policymakers, and ultimately we the voters, who are the slow learners as we continue to fail to recognize the damaging effects the criminal justice system has on all its citizens. A small but significant step in correcting our national ignorance would be to restore voting rights to ex-offenders and so restore a small portion of the respect and dignity they’ve been denied.

Originally posted on Beacon Broadside

To the Young Who Want to Die: A Powerful Piece from Prison Culture

Ones of the best criminal justice blogs around is Prison Culture. It is political, critical, historical yet personal in its outlook. Each entry explores an aspect of our prison system, often putting it in a larger context. This latest piece on Prison Culture “To Young to Who Want to Die,” looks at the hopeless state so many at-risk kids live in using the words of poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Worth a read.

Juvenile Justice One Kid at a Time: A Success Story, Interrupted

The statistics are grim, but the reality behind those numbers is even grimmer for the many young people locked up in US adult prisons. Since publishing I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup, about my years teaching in a New York county jail, I spend a lot of time writing, talking and hearing from families, professionals, and the young people themselves about the failures of our child welfare and criminal justice systems.

Depressing, discouraging stuff. That’s why I need to tell you about Andrew.  Andrew is a young African American in his late 20s. He’s got a home, an education, and a profession. Andrew is a success.

But it wasn’t always that way. As a very young child his schizophrenic mother was placed in long term care and Andrew was shuffled around to various family members until eventually he ended up in the foster care system. There he was moved from home to home to home. Then at 16 he was placed in an overcrowded and understaffed foster care facility where kids like him were warehoused. But he supposed it was better than being homeless. At least he had food and shelter. He even learned some things, mostly how to get into trouble, serious trouble.

Andrew would be the first to admit that he did stupid stuff. You might say that the first time he got arrested, the time he hopped a cab with a buddy who then pulled a knife and robbed the cabby, really wasn’t his fault. But he wouldn’t agree. Wrong place, wrong time, still makes a crime. And there was no way to excuse the other felonies he committed after that, felonies that landed him in state prison.

Andrew was just another young, black male fulfilling the destiny society defined for him: broken-down family, raised in the ‘hood, poor, uneducated, unemployed and unemployable. America has a place for kids like him—jail or the grave.

But somewhere along the way he realized he didn’t want either fate. During one of his county bids he enrolled in school and got himself into counseling with our school social worker. He studied for his GED and achieved it. With that first taste of success Andrew peeked over the top of the box society had put him in and glimpsed a different way to live. He began to recognize in himself the young man the social worker kept hinting at to him: someone who had survived a mentally ill mom, a neglectful family, a broken foster care system, and a punishing criminal justice system; someone who was ripe to make changes. Through his own efforts and the social worker’s encouragement both while he was in jail and after he was released, Andrew began to do what he had to do to change.

And change he did. He enrolled in community college and excelled even while working 2 or 3 part-time jobs at a time to support himself. For awhile he slept in the back of the pizzeria where he worked or in a rented room he shared with a couple of other homeless young guys. After finishing his associate’s degree he earned a scholarship to a Bronx college where he received his BA in social work, again while holding down multiple jobs.

Andrew didn’t stop there. He got another scholarship, this time to Fordham University’s Graduate School of Social Work. In 2008 he earned his MSW as well as the recognition of the New York State Social Work Educators Association as the “Social Work Student of the Year.”  He now works at a county Youth Bureau helping at-risk kids navigate the minefield of the streets.

Andrew is a success by anybody’s standards. By the standards of our penal system he’s a damn miracle. But we’re an unforgiving and shortsighted nation, and so our tenacious stereotypes of ex-offenders, reinforced by CORI laws which give employers the right to deny felons jobs, has limited Andrew’s possibilities in state social service agencies and academia. While interviewers acknowledge his personal, academic and professional accomplishments, that’s as far as it goes. In America, once a felon always a felon.

Andrew got where he is because of his resolve and hard work and because someone had faith in him and acted on that faith. Unfortunately our criminal justice system doesn’t provide that kind of support even though it is in the best interest of the society it is committed to protect.

But just because the prison system doesn’t—or won’t do it—that doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook.  Teachers, social workers, youth advocates, clergy and their congregations, community activists, family members, neighbors, employers, concerned citizens, we all need to push to have these exclusionary laws changed; to challenge our own and society’s attitudes about ex-offenders; and to take a chance in whatever way we can on some kid once locked-up now locked-out of the world. One kid by one kid: It’s a slow, chancy process. Maybe it’s even futile. But then again, there’s always Andrew.

Originally posted on Beacon Broadside

A Picture is Worth Thousands: Some Hard Graphics on Incarceration

Prison Culture is one of the best sites around on criminal justice. It combines the public side of incarceration with the personal, i.e. the effects of the system on all our lives. Recently Prison Culture posted a graphic representation of facts about the US criminal justice system. Laid out so clearly and simply it’s hard to ignore the impact of our broken system of justice on us as a country. It’s worth taking a look at.