Correctional Forum

Another young female celeb goes to prison

Unlike Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, or Nicole Richie, Foxy Brown (pictured) is looking at some serious time -- a full year for egregiously violating her parole. From the AP:

"I'm not going to give you any more chances," Criminal Court Judge Melissa Jackson told the 28-year-old rapper. "I hope you turn your life around and never again have to stand in a court of law."

Just before the hearing began, Brown, her hands shackled to a scuffed brown belt that settled on the hips of her elegant gray pantsuit, asked the judge for yet another chance at freedom and promised to straighten out her life. Jackson had jailed her Aug. 22 to await the hearing.

"I'm willing to do whatever I need to do to change," Brown told the judge. She said she had made a lot of mistakes. "I realize that's not where I want to be. It's humbled me in ways I never imagined."

The judge replied, "Ms. Marchand, it's too little, too late. I'm glad you're learning something; that's a positive."

The judge found Brown had left the state without permission; had moved her residence from Brooklyn to Mahwah, N.J., without permission; had failed to notify the department of an arrest in Mahwah; had failed to report to probation officers, and had dropped court-ordered anger management sessions with a psychologist.

The one-year sentence means Brown, with time off for good behavior for her detention that began last month, will be eligible for parole in eight months.

Foxy Gets Locks-y

[Photograph by Jeff Fusco from Philadelphia Weekly]

Headlines about Rendell's proposal

Pa. considers sentencing changes in effort to turn around inmates [AP]

Rendell's plans aim to ease prison strain [PennLive]

Sentencing changes [Easton Express Times]

Suggested changes in sentencing could help local jails [Shamokin News Item]

Is this really necessary?

William Barnes, a tour guide at Eastern State Penitentiary, has been arrested for a crime he committed in 1966 and already served time for. The story is quite complicated and the Prison Society is working on a response, which will likely be broadcast on local news in Philadelphia later today or this evening.

When you see the video of Barnes, you realize the futility of this effort. It's sad that we espouse rehabilitation and restoration, but insist upon retribution instead.

Philadelphia City Paper story about Billy Barnes new life
CBS.com video interview with Billy Barnes about Eastern State riot

Tuesday's International: Headlines

France: Brother of French justice minister jailed for drug dealing: Rachida Dati (pictured) has made tougher sentencing on repeat offenders one of her priorities as justice minister. Her brother, Jamal, is one such offender. His sentence of one year, considered very tough in France, is a result of her new policies. [Expatica.com]

Ethiopia: Four Journalists Released From Prison on Conditional Pardon: The Committee to Protect Journalists, which named Ethiopia as the world's worst backslider on press freedom this year, welcomes the release of the writers who covered civil unrest. [allAfrica.com]

Barbados: Prison warders not paid since February: But they still have to pay for bus fare. [The Nation Newspaper]

France: French prison doctor gave paedophile Viagra before attack: A bizarre case of a repeat offense in France is bringing about talk of life imprisonment and chemical castration for sex offenders. Sarkozy is under great political pressure. [New Zealand Herald]

South African researchers question longer sentencing

According to Business Day, in Johannesburg, South Africa's prison population is expected to rise by 40,000 over the next 10 years. Two laws are partially to blame for this increase.

The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1997 provides for a mandatory minimum sentence of five, seven, 10, 15, 20, 25 years or life for offenses ranging from theft and corruption to rape and murder. Also included in the law are a number of features designed to keep magistrates and judges from undermining the intended severity of the sentences.

The Magistrates Amendment Act extends the sentencing jurisdiction at the magistrate's court, at both district and regional levels, by increasing the maximum penalties each court can impose. The increases in sentencing severity may be to blame for the increasing prison population.

Business Day cites an article in South African Crime Quarterly by Michael Tonry (pictured), professor of law and public policy at the University of Minnesota, who claims sentencing and punishment have little discernible effect on crime trends and patterns. In comparing sentencing policies and punishment practices between countries, Tonry finds South Africa's correctional system is very similar to that of the U.S., with a shared love for overcrowded prisons and comically long prison sentences. 

One of the reasons typically given for mandatory minimum sentencing is that it levels the playing field, but Tonry says there's no evidence to support that claim. "The primary function of such sentences is for governments to symbollically say 'we are doing something about crime'. This does not fool anybody. The percentage of people who say they are fearful to go out at night before and after the imposition of madatory sentencing does not seem to change," Tonry told Business Day.

To read the full article, go here.

Tuesday's International: No ifs, ands, and especially butts

Irish engineering college student Patrick Devine was working in Senegal when he got chicken pox, and had part of his toe amputated. But that was just the beginning of a bad week. At the end of it, he got put in a Senegalese prison. His infraction? He mooned the governor's house on a dare -- apparently not a humorous college prank in that part of the world, but a crime punishable by jail time. For three weeks, he's been sharing a cramped cell with 40 other prisoners, and there's no end in sight. Diplomats are working on it, from Nigeria, but it's tough to know when Devine, 19, will be released.

[Devine is pictured here with the class he was teaching in Senegal. He's the white guy in the back.]

Tech crime

Time was, computer piracy was viewed with indulgence. Kids today, you know? Not anymore. Twenty-six-year-old Justin Harrison will go to federal prison for almost four years for making fake copies of Microsoft Windows CDs. From Bloomberg News:

Microsoft sued Harrison in federal court last year for selling labels removed from legally sold products to put on counterfeit copies of the company's software. It notified him by letter in 2005 that the practice was illegal, and police later seized 60 illicit labels and 579 counterfeit copies in a raid, the complaint said.

"Harrison was able to pass off sales of unauthorized software as if fully licensed and supported by the manufacturer," Nahmias, the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, said in a statement. "Unless they contacted the manufacturer, the end users of the software would be unaware that the software they were using was unlicensed."

The law Harrison broke is new, and his conviction is the first of its kind. His lawyer will appeal.

Georgia man gets prison time for selling unauthorized software

California screamin'

From the news section of the Drug Policy Alliance's website:

A handful of California politicians are trying to undermine the state's successful treatment-instead-of-incarceration initiative, Proposition 36, in a budget battle that could culminate in a vote at the end of this month.

Republicans in the state Senate have introduced a proposal to end state funding for the program, despite the fact that Prop. 36 has saved taxpayers $1.8 billion and kept tens of thousands of Californians out of prison in just six years. State-contracted research shows the program saves $2.50 for every $1 invested in it.

It seems California Republicans are set on having overcrowded prisons and not saving the taxpayers any money. To read the whole article, go here.

[image by randomgbear via Wikipedia Commons]

Michel Foucault on "Disciplinary Society"

Parts One and Two of a lecture Michel Foucault gave in 1983 on his most widely recognized work, Discipline and Punish. Foucault addresses the origins of the prison system as a facet of the then-emerging "disciplinary society." He argues that the modern prison system, itself descended from the 18th century model of incarceration, has its roots in disciplinary organizations such as school and the army.

Supermax

There are 31 of them around the country. They are home to the worst criminals. They are practically impossible to get out of, even harder than getting off a casino floor. They are called supermax prisons.

There is only one federal supermax prison, which is in picturesque Florence, Colorado. Ted Kaczynski, Richard Reid, John Walker Lindh, Ramzi Yousef, and Eric Rudolph (unabomber, shoe bomber, American taliban, 1993 WTC attack planner, and Olympic Park bomber, respectively) call it home. But these celebrity inmates are just a small fraction of the approximately 500 men housed within miles of walls. Most came here from other prisons because they were deemed a lethal threat, a high-escape risk, or both.

Inmates at ADX Florence spend 22-plus hours per day alone in their cells, with little sunlight and even less access to the outside world. One former inmate at ADX Florence, Charles Harrelson, struck up a sort of friendship with an attorney named Robert Tiernan.

Tiernan told ABC News what the late Harrelson revealed about his life inside the walls: "The doors on the bathrooms lock on the outside instead of in. There is just no way out ... they go inside a pit, like an empty swimming pool, to exercise, so that you don't know where you are ... Part of the plan here is sensory deprivation."

There are plenty of supporters of these institutions, however. Twenty-one out of 27 comments about the article were in favor of supermax prisons, and the conditions therein. Some even called for harsher punishment, such as reinstating the chain-gang, or forcing inmates to fight one another to the death in an 'Extreme Cage Match' with no tap-out.

But supermax prisons like ADX Florence are not without critics. Some call them inhumane, and several states have been sued, with lawsuits most often citing the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In 2005, Ohio supermax inmates won a U.S. Supreme Court case, citing the 14th Amendment -- the right to due process. They argued and the Court agreed that isolation constitutes an atypical hardship. Inmates now have the right to appeal before being placed in isolation due to the Court's ruling.

In 2006, Eric Rudolph wrote a letter to the Colorado Springs Gazette saying the isolation was driving him insane. He wrote: "It is a closed-off world designed to isolate inmates from social and environmental stimuli, with the ultimate purpose of causing mental illness and chronic physical conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and arthritis."

To read the article, go here. To read the comments, or post one of your own, go here.

[image by G3oWORK via flickr]