By Will Matthews
Today, according to some studies, nearly half of the tens of thousands of immigrants in detention every day are locked up in jails and detention systems operated by private prison companies. This explains the private prison industry's deep financial incentive to see the continued expansion of the system, even in the face of myriad abuses.
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Twenty-six journalists from across the nation gathered at John Jay College of Criminal Justice on Jan. 31st and Feb 1st, 2011 for the 6th Annual Harry Frank Guggenheim Symposium on Crime in America to discuss the conference theme: “Law & Disorder: Facing the Legal and Economic Challenges to American Criminal Justice.”
The journalists were joined by criminal justice professionals and speakers including New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, Hon. Sue Bell Cobb, Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court; Hon. Andre Davis, United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit; and Hon. Robert T. Russell, Associate Judge for Buffalo City Court and a pioneer of the nation’s Veterans Courts. They were joined by ACLU president Susan Herman; John T. Chisholm, District Attorney, Milwaukee County, Wisconsin; Daniel F. Conley, District Attorney, Suffolk County, Massachusetts; and George Gascon, newly appointed DA in San Francisco and the city’s former Police Chief.
Panels included:THE COURTS, PUBLIC SAFETY AND CIVIL LIBERTIES: CHALLENGES IN 2011, THE COURTS ON TRIAL: IS THE SYSTEM FAILING US?,TECHNO-CRIME FIGHTING: LAW ENFORCEMENT, CIVIL LIBERTIES, PUBLIC SAFETY AND THE WEB.
See the symposium agenda here.
Fellows ask colleagues follow-up questions in a closed forum.
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By Delores Mariano
The following is by a formerly incarcerated woman in California who writes about her complex emotions as she waits for her incarcerated daughter to walk through prison gates to freedom. The story was originally published in Counting the Years: Real-Life Stories about Waiting for Loved Ones to Return Home from Prison, an anthology in the Think Outside the Cell Series. The publisher, Resilience Multimedia, has generously allowed The Crime Reportto share. For more information, please visit www.thinkoutsidethecell.org.
As I sit and look out at the fences that once held me, I
remember the waiting, the calling of my name and prison
number for release. I had paid my dues, done my time, and
then the day had come for me to walk—or wheel, should I
say—through the gate in those fences.
My heart pounded that day, and my heart is pounding this
day, for I am on the freedom side of the fences waiting for my
daughter to walk out through that same gate. Those fences
hold more than the body. They hold the soul of a person—the
mind and every thought and hope of real freedom.
My daughter has had a drug addiction since she was
fifteen years old—that was fifteen years ago. She informed
me of this long addiction in a letter. How do I deal with her
and her addiction? I learned how to separate myself from my
addiction and leave it behind in the gutter, but has she been
able to do the same for her life? I don’t know. I have a fear of
seeing her, of expecting change and getting nothing but the
same old behavior, the same old garbage pouring out of her
mouth, out of her very soul.
I had to take custody of her baby daughter, only a few
months old. First, the baby’s father went to prison for not
completing a drug program. Then, my daughter went back
because of a violation that she could have avoided.
“Let go of the street life and its ways,” I cried to her. “You
don’t have to protect anyone but yourself.”
As usual, she would not listen. A toy gun and a knife in
the car, both belonging to her homeboy, got charged to her.
So she was sent away for a longer time than necessary.
I sit and stare at that gate and those fences that have held
her all these months. I wonder how she will be when she
walks through the gate. Will there be the hateful yelling,
and the pushing away of the baby she can’t deal with? Or
will she have truly changed? Will she be able to demonstrate
heartfelt love and acceptance of her child? Will she learn to
care for and love the child who looks at her pictures and calls
out “Mama?” I wonder.
Here she comes. My heart races; I am actually scared to
death. I don’t want her to come through that gate. Hey, someone
stop her; drag her back in, my mind screams.
But she’s through the gate and almost at the car.
My other daughter takes the baby to meet her. My newly released
daughter hugs her sister and picks up her baby, who cries out
“Mama.”
My face smiles that expected smile of “Welcome home.” But
we both know this is not even close to a welcome home—it
is more “Please stay here and away from me.” I force the fear
down. I watch her approach the car. Her face reveals no real emotion—
no tears, just that empty stare. She looks as though she
knows she is somewhere else but does not know what to do
with her new surroundings. Her look telegraphs that she is
the same as before—bipolar. I remember the arguments and
disagreements we had about her medications. Her illness could
be controlled by taking two lousy pills a day. She refuses to
take them; she denies she has a problem.
My heart is pounding with each step she takes.
She climbs into the car and starts yelling in my ear: She
“hates” me; I am “rotten;” she “can’t wait to get home” and
“get away” from me. She says she is going to her friends, where
she knows she is wanted. All the money we sent to her, the letters she wrote saying
she’s sorry, the visit I fought to get to see her, even though
my record would have normally prohibited it—all forgotten.
Nothing matters to her except the fact that I was a lousy
mother and her addiction and incarceration are both my fault.
It is the same thing all over again.
Being bipolar can keep people in addiction, in a private
prison of mental torture. And women in prison are often not
given the right medication for their illness; some with mental
disorders have been given a drug that causes spontaneous
abortion. My daughter was one of these women, not knowing
she was pregnant until she aborted.
Yes, my daughter has been through a lot, but I can’t feel for
her. All I hear and see is someone who needs help and can’t
get it; someone who needs help and won’t reach out and take
it; someone who will blame someone else for the rest of her
life and not take responsibility for her own actions.
Our family will suffer along with her, unless I separate us
from her and let her go her own way. I live in fear that, once
again, she comes through that gate maybe worse for the treatment
she received and did not receive.
I will give her this last ride home. Then it is up to her to
not get behind those fences and that gate again. I will not be
here waiting on the outside, tearing my heart out in love and
getting hatred in return.
Her madness and my fear accompany my beloved daughter
whom I love with all my heart and wish she could love me
back—or at least love her daughter, whom she pushes aside
as she goes out the door to the gangsters in the streets who,
she says, “love me so much.”
She was on the way to her homeboy’s house the other night
when someone came up to him in the driveway and emptied
the clip of a gun into him. Payback for deeds done in the past
caught up with him, and almost with my daughter, who had
done nothing to deserve payback for those deeds.
May he rest in peace and may she learn to change her ways
before death catches up with her.
My fear of my daughter’s release from that prison gate is now fear of the unknown on
the streets. I hate this lifestyle she has chosen. She cannot even see
what it holds for her.
For more information, please visit www.thinkoutsidethecell.org.
Read full entry »State and local law enforcement agencies are responsible for six of every 10 immigrants detained in the United States, according to a report released Tuesday by the Obama administration.
The New York Times says the report paints a picture of a costly, inappropriately penal system that is growing without basic tools for management and monitoring, while the government office nominally in charge struggles with high turnover and a lack of expertise.
Though the administration has indicated that it wants to concentrate immigration enforcement on serious criminal offenders, the report shows that one of the largest and fastest-growing segments of the population in detention is noncriminals picked up in the enforcement programs the government has embraced. Those figures are among the surprises in the 35-page report, produced for Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security. The report shows that 60 percent of the 380,000 people detained during the 2009 fiscal year had been turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement by state and local police, mostly through the Criminal Alien Program.
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Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has interrogated 4,000 prisoners -- including pre-trial, and thus presumably innocent, detainees -- at New York's Rikers Island every year since 2004, according to a new report by East Harlem Against Deportation. The group, led by New York State Senator Jose Serrano, who represents Manhattan's immigrant-heavy East Harlem neighborhood, was created in May of this year in response to what the neighborhood felt was increasing immigration enforcement by local police and corrections officials.
"Immigration Reform Starts Here: City and State Policy Recommendations to Protect New York Immigrants and Their Families," recommends limiting ICE's ability to question pre-trial detainees, and outlines a sample framework for how NYPD might more effectively build trust within the immigrant community.
Use The Crime Report for more information on Immigration, Family Detention and ICE.
Read full entry »The New York Times follows up on the case of Xiu Ping Jiang, a waitress with no criminal record and a history of attempted suicide who spent 18 months locked away in an immigration jail in Florida. Often in solitary confinement, she sank ever deeper into mental illness, relatives say, not eating for days, or vomiting after meals for fear of being poisoned. With no lawyer to plead for asylum on her behalf, she had been ordered to be deported to her native China, from which her family says she fled in 1995 after being forcibly sterilized at age 20. Too ill to obtain the travel documents needed for the deportation to take place, she was trapped in an immigration limbo.
The Times published an article in May about her ordeal. She is now free on bail, living in Brooklyn with her older sister, Yun, a United States citizen, and receiving the medical and psychiatric help she needs while awaiting a fresh immigration hearing close to home — this time with a lawyer. And her case is being held up as an example of the system’s worst and best approaches toward the mentally ill, as advocates press the Obama administration for change.
Read full entry »The Obama administration's plan to streamline federal detention for immigration violators could impact Utah jails and a company based in the state, reports the Salt Lake Tribune. The government now scatters tens of thousands of people designated for deportation among 350 jails, prisons and contract facilities with little federal oversight. But over the next five years, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to drop that number and move undocumented immigrants into their own facilities, which will resemble locked-up dorms more than prison cells.
The move may mean Weber, Washington and Utah county jails would house fewer immigrants awaiting deportation and receive less federal funding. It could also impact the business of Management & Training Corp., a Centerville-based company that runs two out-of-state ICE lockups. But federal officials say they are months away from determining the details. What is known is that ICE wants fewer locations, but more regulations and oversight. And it plans to make the changes within its existing $3 billion detention budget.
Read full entry »The Obama administration faces daunting challenges in trying to improve detention conditions for accused illegal immigrants, starting with greater oversight of places like a facility at Eloy, Az., run by Corrections Corporation of America, reports the New York Times. "The rampant problems of medical and mental health care aren’t just going to go away if there’s more oversight," said David Shapiro of the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project, which has called for legally binding rules on conditions in immigration detention. “There have to be consequences."
The administration’s three-to-five-year goal is a vastly different detention system, no smaller in size but less penal in character than the current sprawling mix of jail and prison cells. At the same time, Janet Napolitano, secretary of homeland security, is expanding immigration enforcement. For now, officials said they would continue to rely on the same prison companies and county jails to house people facing possible deportation for immigration violations. The Times explores in detail a problematic case from Eloy.
Read full entry »The New York Times says the Obama administration will announce an ambitious plan today to overhaul the much-criticized way the nation detains immigration violators, trying to transform it from a patchwork of jail and prison cells to what its new chief called a “truly civil detention system.” Officials will review the federal government’s contracts with more than 350 local jails and private prisons, with an eye toward consolidating many detainees in places more suitable for noncriminals facing deportation — some possibly in centers run by the government.
The plan aims to establish more centralized authority over the system, which holds about 400,000 immigration detainees over the course of a year, and more direct oversight of detention centers that have come under fire for mistreatment of detainees and substandard — sometimes fatal — medical care. "We’re trying to move away from ‘one size fits all,’ ” said one Immigration and Customs Enforcement official.
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A new primer from the Immigrant Justice Network illuminates the "Dangerous Merger" between the criminal justice system and immigration enforcement system. The paper touches on such phenomenon as the "Criminal Alien" program and how ICE contracts with local jails increase racial profiling.
Click here to read the primer.
Use The Crime Report for more resources on Family Detention, Deportation, Immigration and Racial Profiling.
Read full entry »This source list includes a broad range of immigration experts and advocates, from academics and pro-immigrant groups to organizations that seek to limit the numbers of legal and illegal immigrants. The nexus of illegal immigration and local law enforcement has emerged as a political hot topic, with local law enforcers charging that the federal government has ceded its enforcement responsibilities to the locals. Likewise, the broad issue of crime among illegal immigrants also has emerged as a subject of scrutiny. For resources specific to crime, law enforcement and illegal immigration, see the source listings below for the Police Foundation’s “Local Police” initiative and Arizona State University’s project on Local Policing, Local Communities and Immigration. A number of academics listed below are conducting research on crime and immigration. They include Kristin Butcher, Scott Decker, Daniel Mears, Anne Morrison Piehl, Rubén G. Rumbaut and Robert Sampson.
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