The LA Times today.
No easy fix for the jail system
Jim Newton
Times Staff Writer
December 30, 2006 - Excerpts:
Charged with administering a jail system that shuffles repeat offenders through custody, fails to supply adequate medical care to many inmates and imposes burdens on courts and taxpayers, Los Angeles County leaders this week reverted to the strategies that have gotten them this far:
In the end, said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, the big fix for the county's jail woes may be in replacing Men's Central Jail, the antiquated and overflowing facility at the center of the system. But cost estimates top $1 billion, and the county does not have that money to spend, he said.
Sheriff Lee Baca disagrees. The disrepair in the county's jails, he said, is symptomatic of a larger, statewide retreat from leadership in public safety.
Those comments, along with others from top county officials, reflect the degree of helplessness that many in power feel with regard to local jails, whose troubling problems were illustrated by a series of stories published this month in The Times.
Meanwhile, conservatives fault civil libertarians and illegal immigrants; liberals bemoan a system that denies basic services, such as medical care, to inmates — many of them not even convicted of crimes.
"This is a concentrated form of what's in the community," he said of the county's inmate population. "We're the end result of a violent society."
Inmates in jails and prisons in the USA are the only population guaranteed health care as a constitutional right, but the problems of care delivery in outside hospitals, such as simply keeping decent records, are ten times worse in the inmate population - and less well funded. The effects fall heavily on the poor.
The LA Times had a previous article "Health Care Suffers at L.A. Jails." The Washington post did a piece on the problems of California on June 11, 2006: California's Crisis in Prison Systems a Threat to Public
"When it comes to prison systems, California is the 800-pound gorilla," said Alexander Busansky, a former prosecutor who is executive director of the U.S. Commission on Safety and Abuse, a think tank that works to improve prison conditions. "The problem in California is that hope is lost."
As the prison population grew and rehabilitation stopped, the Department of Corrections turned into an organization with "no other pretensions but human warehousing," said Franklin Zimring, a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley.
Also in April, U.S. District Judge Thelton E. Henderson in San Francisco took over the prisons' medical system, declaring that inmates were receiving inadequate care. Now, the judge is believed to be so exasperated with the slow pace of rehabilitation and with prison overcrowding that he is considering putting the entire system under federal control, said several sources familiar with the judge's plans.
A map of the overcrowding is here.
The problem is not just one of California, but nationwide.
According to a study published in the Baltimore Sun on June 1, 2003, and quoted here,
Locked up in the Land of The Free
With a record-setting 2 million people locked up in American jails and prisons, the United States has overtaken Russia and has a higher percentage of its citizens behind bars than any other country.
Overseas, U.S. imprisonment policy is widely seen as a blot on a society that prides itself on valuing liberty and just went to war to overturn Saddam Hussein's despotic rule in Iraq.
The latest statistics support that view. The new high of 2,019,234, announced by the Justice Department in April, underscores the extraordinary scale of imprisonment in the United States compared with that in most of the world.
Today the United States imprisons at a far greater rate not only than other developed Western nations do, but also than impoverished and authoritarian countries do.
On a per capita basis, according to the best available figures, the United States has three times more prisoners than Iran... Maryland has more citizens in prison and jail (an estimated 35,200) than all of Canada (31,600), though Canada's population is six times greater.
"This is a pretty serious experiment we've been engaged in," says Vincent Schiraldi, director of the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington think tank that supports alternatives to prison. "I don't think history will judge us kindly."
Bruce Western, a sociologist at Princeton University, says sentencing policies have had a glaringly disproportionate impact on black men. The Justice Department reports that one in eight black men in their 20s and early 30s were behind bars last year, compared with one in 63 white men. A black man has a one-in-three chance of going to prison, the department says.
For black male high school dropouts, Western says, the numbers are higher: 41 percent of black dropouts between ages 22 and 30 were locked up in 1999.
"I think this is one of the most important developments in race relations in the last 30 years," he says.
For some, however, this captive population is a cheap workforce. Eric Schlosser, in The Atlantic Monthly, in December, 1998 published an article on the "Prison-Industrial Complex".
Correctional officials see danger in prison overcrowding. Others see opportunity. The nearly two million Americans behind bars—the majority of them nonviolent offenders—mean jobs for depressed regions and windfalls for profiteers
The bullet point data from that article, and various background statistics, are reported here.
United States has approximately ... the combined populations of Atlanta, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Des Moines, and Miami behind bars - it is more more people than any other country in the world -- perhaps half a million more than Communist China.
70% of the prison inmates in the United States are illiterate 200,000 inmates suffer from a serious mental illness 60% to 80% has a history of substance abuse
80% of prisoners in California are African-Americans
technorati tags:prison, jail, racism, poverty, mentalillness, drugabuse, corrections, healthcare, inmates, statistics, socialjustice, disparities, policy
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