Last week lawmakers lined up to promote their criminal justice reform bills at an event, which included both Republican and Democratic lawmakers and Piper Kerman, who wrote a memoir about her incarceration in a federal prison that inspired the groundbreaking Netflix series “Orange is the New Black.” Since crime is down and interest is high in decreasing the price tag … Read More
The Aftermath of California’s Prop. 47
The passage of Proposition 47 in California reduced felonies for low-level crimes like drug possession to misdemeanors thereby decreasing prison time from several years to up to a year in jail instead. The intention of Prop. 47 was to use the money saved from incarcerating drug offenders to rehabilitating them in programs for both substance abuse and mental illness. Nearly … Read More
Prop 47: California Voters Address Prison Reform
California voters are about to cast a momentous vote for prison reform with the passage of Proposition 47 on Tuesday, November 4th. The initiative to reduce penalties for illicit drug use and petty theft is part of a multi-million dollar campaign to revise sentencing laws in California and across the nation. Prop 47 would reclassify possession of heroin, meth, and … Read More
Treatment Instead of Jail for the Mentally Ill in Los Angeles County
It is time to stop housing people who are mentally ill and genuinely sick between the streets and our jails. This is an unconscionable waste of human life and money.
New Treatment for Mentally Ill Inmates: Reduce Pepper Spray
In an article in the Los Angeles Times, Paige St. John writes that California has decided to use special solitary confinement units to house mentally ill inmates as part of an attempt to comply with federal court orders to improve their care. Instead of using pepper spray to calm them down, isolation is the new treatment for the mentally ill. … Read More
Yoga and Addiction Recovery
I have been taking a yoga class in Santa Barbara from Mike Lewis, an instructor in recovery who also volunteers as a yoga instructor for inmates in the Santa Barbara County jail. As I have written before, Governor Brown has reduced the funding for rehabilitation classes in California’s jails and prisons so services such as yoga to help inmates deal … Read More
Deinstitutionalization Hasn’t Worked
The recent mass killings in Isla Vista, CA by a man who suffered from mental illness has once again raised the issue of the insanity of deinstitutionalization of the severely mentally ill. Deinstitutionalization (releasing severely mentally ill from psychiatric hospitals) began in 1955 with the widespread introduction of Thorazine, the first effective antipsychotic medication. The widespread use of Thorazine moved the … Read More
The Most Punitive Nation in the World
Robert A. Ferguson’s new book about our addiction to incarceration, Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment, asks a poignant question about our culture. Do we, as a people, have a drive to punish that is especially virulent? The statistics seem to indicate that we do. According to Ferguson, the United States is the world leader in locking up human beings behind … Read More
A Paradigm Shift: Prison Re-Entry Council Project
Last October, Salinas Valley State Prison in Soledad, California hosted the first “Council” with inmates in this level IV facility. SVSP houses some of the most dangerous inmates in California. Yet, in spite of its population, six Native Americans, four African Americans, an inmate from Honduras and a pre-op transsexual met together with a couple of Council leaders for a … Read More
The Plot from Solitary
Terry Gross of Fresh Air recently interviewed Benjamin Wallace-Wells about his article in New York Magazine entitled “The Plot From Solitary” about the inmate hunger strike in California prisons last July. Four prisoners in solitary confinement in Pelican Bay maximum-security Prison coordinated the massive hunger strike that involved 30,000 inmates throughout California prisons. Pelican Bay has 1000 isolation cells in its … Read More
“Project Vision” Confronts Vermont’s Heroin Epidemic
Governor Peter Shumlin devoted his entire State of the State message to the heroin crisis in Vermont. Rutland, a city of 17,000 in central Vermont is doing something about it. It has addressed its fight about heroin in the same way addicts do when they try to stop using–by admitting there is a problem. The city realized it could not … Read More
Fixing Our Criminal Justice System
Bill Keller of the New York Times recently wrote an opinion piece entitled “America on Probation” about the current effort to fix our criminal justice system. It’s about time because our prisons are an international disgrace. The following are some of the remedies he cited: Sentencing: The 70’s crack epidemic set off a binge of punitive sentencing laws which resulted in … Read More
Two Faces of Prison
Yesterday I received my weekly email bulletin from San Quentin. A prisoner who was serving a life term with the possibility of parole, Thomas Curby Henderson, “fell” off a fourth-story tier (imagine a catwalk 4 floors up) in the infamous West Block of the prison last Tuesday. “Fell” is a euphemism for “was thrown off.” Who pushed him to his … Read More
Shameful Profiling of the Mentally Ill
In the recent Sunday New York Times, Andrew Solomon reported that a Canadian woman was recently denied entry to the United States because she had been hospitalized for depression in 2012. She was told she could not visit unless she obtained medical clearance from one of three Toronto doctors approved by the Department of Homeland Security. A report from her … Read More
Our Addiction to Incarceration is Not Sustainable
The United States has 5% of the world population but 25% of its prison population in spite of the fact that the violent crime rate is the lowest it has been in 40 years. Since the mid-1970s the California prison population has grown by 750% driven by sentencing laws based largely on fear, ignorance and vengeance. But in other states, … Read More