Cincinnati’s Fair Hiring Campaign rallied last Thursday, February 25, to ask Mayor Mark Mallory and his appointed Civil Service Commission to end their policy of denying city jobs to qualified applicants with felony convictions.

Over fifty Cincinnati residents, myself included, arrived at Cincinnati’s City Hall for the Commission’s 9 am meeting only to find that the Commission had abruptly canceled its section for public comment.  “Ain’t council chambers the people’s house?” asked one individual in the crowd.  Leaders of the Fair Hiring Campaign negotiated for two minutes of speaking time before the Commission.

Former offenders face employment barriers both de facto and de jure even for seemingly ancient convictions that have no relevance to the job. These restrictions hinder the ability of millions of Americans (one in 99 is currently incarcerated) to reintegrate successfully after completing their sentences.

For at least three years, the City has opposed proposed changes to its no-felon hiring policy.  Frustratingly, the Mayor denies that such a policy even exists.

Ironically, by condemning rehabilitated people to unemployment and under-employment, the no-felon hiring policy ends up increasing the burden on the City’s own overloaded criminal justice and public welfare systems.

Proposed changes would allow city government to consider an applicant’s evidence of rehabilitation. “We’re not asking for guaranteed jobs,” Stephen JohnsonGrove of the Ohio Justice & Policy Center told the Commission.  “We just want fair consideration for people with old and irrelevant criminal records.”

After speaking to the Commission, the group walked to the Mayor’s office to present over 1000 letters from Cincinnatians supporting a fair hiring policy.

The no-felon hiring policy is based on fear, not evidence.  Depending on a person’s age and offense, research finds that after a certain period of time s/he is no more likely to offend than same-aged members of the general population.  For 18-year-olds arrested for robbery in 1980, that point was 7.7 years. Yet people convicted of crimes less serious than robbery still face barriers decades later.

Employment barriers don’t make us any safer.  They serve, instead, to punish people years after they have paid their debt to society.  “You can get over an addiction,” one person told me, “but a conviction stays with you for life.”

A Minnie Mouse lookalike outside Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel striking with union local 681.

Eight Disneyland Hotel workers of UNITE HERE Local Union 11 in Anaheim, California, engaged in a week-long hunger strike to highlight their two-year dispute on health care and other labor issues with the Walt Disney Company.  The eight workers ended their hunger strike on Tuesday, as five more began fasting.

The workers want to keep the health plan that their union provides (paid for in lieu of pay raises), while Disney proposes deducting health care costs from workers’ wages. Disney maintains that their plan would cost $250 a month per family, while the union estimates $500.  Workers typically earn $11-13 an hour.

The Disney dispute mirrors an exacerbating national trend: Employment no longer guarantees satisfactory health care coverage.  Between 2001 and 2007, insurance premiums rose 78% while wages rose 19%. As health care costs rise, employers drop benefits, contributing to the number of uninsured Americans.

One in six full-time workers, or 21 million people, were uninsured for all 12 months of 2008.  Astoundingly, 45% of the nation’s 46 million uninsured actually worked full-time. And the percentage of Americans who receive health insurance through their employer has decreased from 64% in 2000 to 59% in 2008.

The Disney workers seem determined not to become another statistic.

In memory of Howard Zinn, who died yesterday, I reread an address he gave at Johns Hopkins University in November 1970, titled, “The Problem is Civil Obedience,” and reprinted in Voices of a People’s History of the United States.

Zinn discussed his frustration with the so-called “problem of civil disobedience.”  That’s “topsy-turvy,” he said, just plain backwards, like a protester getting clubbed by the police and then getting arrested for assaulting a police officer.

Here’s Zinn:

Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. And our problem is that scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where the schoolboys march off dutifully in a line to war. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.

Facing injustice, we are oblivious if not complacent – a stance that stems from undue deference for the law, as if it were holy.  “There is nothing sacred about the law,” Zinn said.  “The law is not made by God, it is made by Strom Thurmond.”

“Prison officials don’t need a gun; they already have full control over you,” said a former Michigan prisoner who was raped by a correctional officer. She shared her experience with Just Detention International (JDI), an organization working to end the sexual abuse of detainees in prisons and jails around the globe.

The horror of prison rape has been well-documented by Human Rights Watch (hat tip, Te-Ping Chen at change.org). But in American popular culture, the issue of prison rape (when it’s not being ignored), is somehow considered funny, the subject of late-night, drop-the-soap humor. Humor can bring relief to conversations of uncomfortable facts, but it can also dehumanize and trivialize.

Just Detention International (note the name’s double entendre) seeks to change that dynamic with a moving new campaign. JDI prepared three sets of images.

The first set challenges the view that prison rape is somehow not really rape:

The second highlights the health of rape victims:

The third targets the alleged humor of people being raped:

Prison rape has reached epidemic proportions in US jails and prisons. Some 60,500 (4.5%) of the 1.3 million people in federal and state prisons were sexually abused in 2006, according to a 2007 Department of Justice study. By one account, one in five male prisoners is sexually abused at some point during his incarceration. Meanwhile, HIV is four times more prevalent, and Hepatitis C is eight to 20 times more prevalent, in US prisons than in society overall.

Among juveniles in U.S. youth prisons, according to a just-released Department of Justice study, one in eight reported being sexually victimized in the past 12 months (or if they were incarcerated for fewer than 12 months, since they were admitted). Eighty percent of these victims were abused by prison staff.

Kudos to Just Detention International for humanizing people in prison by depicting them in something other than prison garb. Rape is awful whether it happens to women or men, free or imprisoned. “No matter what crime someone has committed,” says JDI, “sexual violence must never be part of the penalty.”

Steep tuition raises at California universities have spurred widespread student protests and sit-ins.  These actions were reportedly “the tipping point” that prompted Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to ask a very good question:

Thirty years ago 10 percent of the general fund went to higher education and 3 percent went to prisons.  Today almost 11 percent goes to prisons and only 7 1/2 percent goes to higher education.  Spending 45 percent more on prisons than universities is no way to proceed into the future.  What does it say about a state that focuses more on prison uniforms than caps and gowns?

Unfortunately, in this State of the State address, Schwarzenegger found only half the answer.  He proposed a constitutional amendment to prohibit California from spending more on prisons than on higher education. To achieve that goal, he recommended privatizing at least some of California’s prisons.  “Competition and choice are always good,” Schwarzenegger optimistically declared.

Other states have tried privatization.  And cost-savings promised by private prisons “have simply not materialized,” according to the Department of Justice (p.68).  But while cost-savings have been scarce, security breaches have been abundant.  One survey found 49% more inmate-on-staff assaults and 65% more inmate-on-inmate assaults in private facilities than in comparable public ones.

Private corporations seek profits by cutting corners.  They attract less-qualified workers by providing inferior wages and benefits than state agencies.  The California Correctional Peace Officers Association has already condemned Schwarzenegger’s proposal.  Private prisons also generate profits by cutting prisoners’ food, medicine, drug treatment, GED classes, and reentry planning.

That’s a mistake.  Inmate welfare is not just a Constitutional requirement; it’s smart policy.  Education, drug treatment, and release planning reduce recidivism.

The California student protests against tuition hikes succeeded in capturing Schwarzenegger’s attention.  California students shouldn’t stop there.  The current proposal pits the interests of students against those of prisoners.  Both groups in fact seek a shared outcome: greater access to public education.

There’s a better way to reduce prison costs: reduce the prison population (e.g., Michigan in recent years).  End lengthy sentences for nonviolent offenders.  Expand probation, parole, and “specialty courts” that emphasize treatment over incarceration for addicted and mentally ill offenders.  Schwarzenegger is right to question prison costs, but his privatization proposal isn’t the answer.

The imprisonment of 2.3 million American citizens, comprising 1 in 99 adults, has been a “success,” according to columnist Ross Douthat in the New York Times:

For a generation now, conservatives, not Dukakis-style liberals, have been making policy on crime. They’ve built more prisons, imposed harsher sentences and locked up as many lawbreakers as possible. Their approach has worked. The violent crime rate has been cut by nearly 40 percent since its early-1990s peak. The murder rate is at its lowest point since Lyndon Johnson was president.

Except… facts are stubborn things.

Mass incarceration has indeed lowered the crime rate, but not by much.  According to The Sentencing Project (pdf), three-quarters of the decline in violent crime can be attributed to factors other than incarceration, such as economic opportunity and treatment programs.  Between 1998 and 2003, for example, states with stable or decreasing incarceration rates experienced the same average drop in crime as states with increasing incarceration rates.

In addition, “80% of the crime prevented by the incarceration of each additional prisoner is for nonviolent offenses,” continues The Sentencing Project, citing research.  That undercuts Douthat’s implication that lower violent crime and murder rates can be attributed primarily to increasing rates of incarceration.

Douthat also ignores the “war on drugs,” a conspicuous oversight given its centrality to the lock-‘em-up ideology.  The war on drugs is by most accounts a policy failure with no end in sight. While drug offenders packed our prisons, drugs became deadlier and more widespread.  “If anything,” writes Georgetown law professor David Cole, “the war on drugs has probably increased the incidence of crime; about half of property crime, robberies, and burglaries are attributable to the inflated cost of drugs caused by criminalizing them.”

Mass incarceration is a human rights disaster that exacerbates race and class disparities.  It would be widely condemned, Cole hypothesizes, if its effects weren’t “concentrated on the most deprived among us.”  Ending this shameful chapter in American history involves not just alternatives to prisons, as Douthat ultimately recommends, but an honest account of their impact on crime.

A singing crowd forced Sheriff Joe Arpaio out of a forum at Arizona State University this week:

PHOENIX — A night aimed at discussing First Amendment issues with the controversial Maricopa County Sheriff ended with protesters disrupting the session and Sheriff Joe Arpaio walking out. …  After 45 minutes of questioning Monday night, a group of protesters started to sing and chant in the back of the room, interrupting Sheriff Arpaio’s response to questions about illegal immigration.  …  ”Is this legitimate?” the protesters sang, to the tune of Bohemian Rhapsody, a popular ballad by Queen.

Was the action constructive? Or did protesters miss a chance to query the notorious sheriff on the inhumane conditions he maintains at the county jail, his shackling of female inmates giving birth, or his immigration sweeps that even the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency finds excessive?

In his 16-year reign, Joe Arpaio has faced heated commentary both locally and nationally for his abuses.  Nothing has changed. A Q&A would not have accomplished much in this case. Sometimes depriving someone of a platform says much more than a tightly worded comment at the event microphone.

Low-wage workers and community supporters gathered in more than forty cities across the U.S. on Thursday to condemn wage theft, the illegal underpayment or non-payment of wages.  The National Day of Action to Stop Wage Theft was organized by Interfaith Worker Justice, a national alliance.  Wage theft is a national crime wave that robs millions of workers of billions of dollars.

Low-wage workers in New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles were cheated of an average $51 a week, according to a recent report co-authored by several universities, entitled, “Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers: Violations of Employment and Labor Laws in America’s Cities.”  Among the workers surveyed, 1 in 4 were paid less than the legally-required minimum wage, and 3 out of 4 who worked overtime hours were not paid the legally-required overtime.

Employers were creative in stealing wages: promising higher wages but paying only the minimum, paying less than minimum wage, not paying for all hours worked, misclassifying workers as exempt from overtime pay, deducting equipment or transportation “fees” from paychecks, stealing tips, misclassifying workers as independent contractors, or simply not paying workers at all.

In July, Rep. George Miller (D-CA) introduced the Wage Theft Prevention Act (H.R. 3303), which begins the statute of limitations from the date the employer is notified instead of the date of the theft. Under current law, delays result in permanent loss of back pay.  Legislation is also moving at the state-level.  In Ohio this week, State Senator Morano introduced the Wage Protection Act, empowering the state commerce department to investigate more complaints.

But advocacy for workers happens at the day-to-day level by affiliates of the national Interfaith Worker Justice, such as the Cincinnati Interfaith Workers’ Center, which canvassed yesterday across the city to reach low-income workers.  Since 2005, the small organization has taken over 500 wage theft reports and helped recover over $500,000 in unpaid wages.  The Cincinnati group aims to empower workers to challenge dangerous working conditions and educate workers about how to defend their rights, including the rights of immigrants.

“I had to make decisions on whether to pay rent or buy food,” said Cincinnati resident Frazier Kidd, who explained his struggle after being cheated of promised wages.  “Thou shalt not steal,” said Kim Bobo, Director of the national Interfaith Worker Justice.  “It’s a pretty straightforward message.”

“America’s Toughest Sheriff” Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, whose cruelty we profiled in July, will be making fewer arrests on behalf of America.

Last month, the US Department of Homeland Security restricted Arpaio’s 287(g) contract.  Named for section 287(g) of the 1996 Immigration and Nationality Act, the 287(g) program authorizes police officers of participating agencies to act as immigration enforcement agents.  Under the new contract, Arpaio’s deputies may no longer make immigration arrests in the field, only among inmates in his jails.

Nevertheless, Arpaio appears poised to continue harassing communities of color with his notorious, racially profiling “sweeps.”  That’s not surprising given previous investigations showing Arpaio would rather use limited public safety funds to round up taxpaying people instead of promptly replying to 911 calls.

In restricting Arpaio’s ability to make immigration arrests, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) apparently responded to numerous complaints, including a high-profile letter to President Obama criticizing the entire 287(g) program.  In a feat of organizational prowess, the letter was signed by over 500 advocacy groups organized by the National Immigration Law Center.

But stripping Arpaio of his full contract does not go far enough.  Rampant abuses of police power across the U.S. (such as in Cobb County, Georgia, as the ACLU documented) indicate that Arpaio was not just a bad apple, but that 287(g) is a racist and counterproductive program that should be terminated altogether.

Read the rest of this article »

The high walls of prison complexes don’t just keep prisoners in; they keep the public out. That’s nowhere more true than in long-term solitary confinement – prisons within prisons – where people can spend years alone and forgotten.

The ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and Rights For Imprisoned People with Psychiatric Disabilities, have long organized against solitary confinement, often euphemized by administrators as “segregation” or “the special housing unit” but known to prisoners as “the box” or “the hole.” Thanks to one ACLU lawsuit, it is now illegal in Indiana to keep mentally ill prisoners in extreme isolation.

Atul Gawande called long-term solitary confinement nothing short of torture in a powerful New Yorker article, “Hellhole.” I sought to add to Gawande’s account by describing ordinary life in solitary confinement. I interviewed Ohio inmate Sean Swain who’s had “seven or eight” stints in “solitary confinement since 1991, as well as Shirley Pope, director of Ohio’s Correctional Institution Inspection Committee (CIIC), authorized by the state legislature to inspect prisons.

In Ohio in 2007, approximately 1 in 25 prisoners lived in isolation at any one time. It’s not known how many people live in isolation at some point during their sentence. Some 25,000 U.S. prisoners are isolated at “supermax prisons,” with another 50-80,000 at other prisons, according to Gawande’s article.

Swain detailed the conditions: Insects swarmed around lighting fixtures. Tube-lighting was never shut off.  Soap and toilet paper were sometimes lacking. Prisoners used bedsheets as towels. And as the CIIC confirmed, prisons have begun to double-bunk solitary cells due to overcrowding. Prisoners can now spend 23 hours a day with another person, in a cell designed for single occupancy.

The article also looks at why the mentally ill end up in isolation, “in spite of the known mental-health deterioration stemming from long-term isolation.” As one expert explained to me, “Their behavior is destined to deteriorate under those conditions. Then their poor behavior is used to justify why they should be there.”

Read the article at the International Network of Street Newspapers. It appeared in Cincinnati’s Streetvibes, published by the local Coalition for the Homeless.

Image: “Captive” by Todd Tarselli, American Journal of Public Health.

Mentally ill youth routinely suffer neglect and violence at juvenile prisons.  At the Ohio River Valley Juvenile Correctional Facility in rural Ohio, reported the New York Times, a mentally ill teenager screamed obscenities into the padded walls of his solitary confinement cell.  Such scenes are as tragic as they are commonplace.

Disturbingly, the number of mentally ill youth in juvenile prisons is expected to rise – not only in Ohio but in at least 31 other states where legislatures have slashed the budgets of already-strained mental health systems.  These systems provide access to supported housing, medications, case management, counseling, diagnostic assessments, crisis intervention and crisis residential services.

I spoke with a psychiatrist at the same Ohio River Valley Juvenile Correctional Facility last fall while registering residents older than 17 to vote.  He lamented that many of his patients would lose access to psychiatric care when they returned home because their parents couldn’t afford their medications.

A strong community mental health system would defray these treatment costs for families and thus help protect these kids from re-offending for lack of health care.  Research indicates that model community-based mental health services reduce arrests, jail stays, and hospitalizations. Yet last month in its biennial budget, Ohio cut funding for such programs by an astounding 34%.

Before the budget vote, hundreds of advocates rallied on June 24 at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus, warning that the proposed cuts would come at a heavy price for the state’s vulnerable citizens.  Their placards proclaimed that “Treatment works, people recover.” Ohio legislators did not heed their call.

Predictably, parents, clinicians, and courts have nowhere else to turn but to the juvenile justice system.  But that system cannot handle an influx of mentally ill youth. A class action lawsuit settled last year against the Ohio Department of Youth Services, S.H. v. Strickrath (pdf), revealed unconstitutional levels of mental health care, among other problems, in these so-called “new asylums.”

In this recession, legislators across the country have eliminated programs that support the poor and the mentally ill.  These budget decisions are not inevitable; they are our choices, our responsibilities. When we treat sick kids as criminals, we don’t just set them up to fail but intimate, falsely, that the failure is their fault.

How do wars impact the soldiers who fight them?

An astounding 37% of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans entering US Veterans Affairs hospitals between 2002 and 2008 received mental health diagnoses, according to a new study of 290,000 veterans in the American Journal of Public Health.  Over one in five (22%) were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 4 to 7 times the pre-Iraq rate; 17% were diagnosed with depression.  Some veterans were diagnosed with both or other conditions.  Those with greater combat exposure were more likely to suffer from PTSD.

Meanwhile, an investigation by the Colorado Springs Gazette, entitled, “The hell of war comes home,” found a sharp rise in violent crime among Iraq War veterans.  One former soldier, Anthony Marquez, “used a stun gun to repeatedly shock a small-time drug dealer in Widefield over an ounce of marijuana, then shot him through the heart.”  Since 2006, ten members of Marquez’s 3,500-soldier unit have been arrested for murder, attempted murder, or manslaughter.

The battalion is overwhelmingly made up of young men, who, demographically, have the highest murder rate in the United States, but the brigade still has a murder rate 20 times that of young males as a whole.

The killings are only the headline-grabbing tip of a much broader pyramid of crime. Since 2005, the brigade’s returning soldiers have been involved in brawls, beatings, rapes, DUIs, drug deals, domestic violence, shootings, stabbings, kidnapping and suicides.

Read the rest of this article »

Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the self-proclaimed “toughest sheriff in America,” has made a name for himself by being tougher on prisoners than on crime. Since 1993, he has overseen law enforcement and county jails in Maricopa County, Arizona, an area of nearly four million people that includes Phoenix. William Finnegan profiles (subscription only) the 77-year-old sheriff in The New Yorker’s July 20 issue.

Arpaio seems to delight in dehumanizing others. After winning his first election in 1993, he built a tent-city jail in an area where temperatures can rise to 135 degrees. He banned cigarettes, hot lunches, coffee, and salt and pepper, rejecting a study he had commissioned when it found harsh jail conditions ineffective at reducing recidivism. He gave inmates just two meals a day, each at 30 cents a head. He instituted black-and-white striped uniforms, but added pink underwear and pink socks. Several times he humiliated prisoners by marching them between facilities in the pink underwear alone. The prisoners nicknamed him “Hitler.”

Deaths and injuries in Arpaio’s jails have already cost Maricopa County taxpayers $43 million in court and settlement expenses. Arpaio’s officers have used stun guns against prisoners who were already immobilized in restraint chairs. As Finnegan writes, “The Phoenix New Times found that, between 2004 and 2008, the county jails of New York, Chicago, Los Angles, and Houston, which together house more than six times as many inmates as Maricopa, were sued a total of forty-three times. During the same period, Arpaio’s department was sued over jail conditions almost twenty-two hundred times in federal district court.”

Inmates in Maricopa County’s jails have shaken off the threat of retaliation and engaged in civil disobedience. In one of the largest US prison hunger strikes this past Cinco de Mayo, 500 inmates refused the morning meal and 900 refused the evening meal. Activists outside the jails have organized candlelight vigils, written letters, demonstrated at county meetings, and picketed Arpaio’s offices. On February 28, the National Day Laborers Organizing Network and El Puente Arizona organized a “March to Stop the Hate” focusing on Arpaio’s treatment of undocumented immigrants. Some 3,000 people rallied in downtown Phoenix.

Zack de la Rocha, of Rage Against the Machine, spoke at that march:

In the latest Arpaio investigation, the US Department of Justice is reviewing his discriminatory profiling in the arrest and treatment of possibly undocumented people. Perhaps we might one day thwart this mockery of a ‘public safety’ official, who takes pride in the detestable quality of his jail food and in situating his open-air tent-city jail beside a dump, who diverts limited county dollars away from investigating violent crime or even responding promptly to emergency calls, to instead raid workplaces in search of undocumented yet taxpaying immigrants.

Who the real “criminal” is, one hardly has to wonder.

[Editor's note: This post is revised from a draft that we published earlier today at the author's request. - ES]

We’re number one. The United States has the world’s highest incarceration rate, five times higher than the U.K.’s and almost nine times higher than France’s (p. 35). One in every 99 American adults, or 2.3 million people, resides in state or federal prisons or in local jails. One in every 31 American adults is involved in the criminal justice system, whether parole, probation, or incarceration.

Despite the exceptional number of prisoners in the United States—indeed, because of it—some states have sought to build more prisons. Current prisons are overcrowded, they say. That’s true. Ohio prisons, for example, hold 50,919 people, but have the capacity for just 38,665. It becomes impossible to provide adequate medical, psychological, educational, or vocational services – or focus on anything beyond food, housing, and safety. Violence also appears to rise.

But there’s another, often overlooked, way to confront prison overcrowding. Instead of building more prisons, we need to reduce the number of prisoners. Advocacy groups like Architects / Designers / Planners for Social Responsibility, with their Prison Alternatives Initiative, have highlighted the counter-productive aspects of incarceration. Lawsuits, criminal justice research, and growing awareness of the increasing costs of incarceration, have spread that message.

1. Legal action: Legal groups have used the Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment to challenge prison overcrowding. In California, after the Prison Law Office filed suit, the court ordered the release of 57,000 prisoners.  The Southern Center for Human Rights recently filed a federal class action lawsuit on behalf of prisoners at Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer, Alabama. The facility, designed for 968 people, was holding 1,681 in December 2008, operating at 173.7% capacity. The lawsuit explained:

Because of overcrowding, three men are crammed into cells that were designed for two. These cells measure approximately 8 x 12 feet. Men do not have enough room to sit upright on their beds or to dress. … The smell of feces often permeates the cells, and overflowing toilets back up into adjoining cells. … Prisoners are packed so tightly into cellblocks that the tension and volatility results in weekly stabbings, fights, and assaults.

2. The criminal justice research also challenges the lock’em-up approach. Incarceration appears to have accounted for only a fourth of the decline in violent crime in 1990s. Drug treatment and school completion programs, meanwhile, have proven more successful and cost-effective than incarceration. In addition, incarceration has significant negative effects—such as fraying family ties and destroying employment prospects—that contribute to future criminal behavior.

3. Budget woes. Some states, facing shortfalls, have sought cheaper alternatives such as greater use of probation and parole, and “specialty courts” that emphasize treatment over incarceration for offenders with addiction, mental illness, or DUIs. These programs save money. The Pew Center on the States calculated that nationally, criminal justice costs averaged $29,000 a year for prisoners, compared with $2,750 a year for probationers and $1,250 a year for parolees. Monitoring probationers in the community is 23 times less expensive than locking them up.

The budget-crisis may be an opportunity to finally do the right thing.

[Image from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.]