What's wrong with us?

Why do we lock so many people up?

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China's extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)

San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner.

The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England's rate is 151; Germany's is 88; and Japan's is 63.

The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

Immigrant prisons

A few weeks ago Washington Post ran a series of stories about the lack of proper medical care in the prisons we're using to lock up suspected illegal immigrants and their families.

Keep in mind that many of these prisons (most?) are privately owned prisons with government contracts to warehouse immigrants.

When the jails fill up

Harris County Texas has overflowing jails. They've been overcrowded to the extent of becoming a constitutional violation for decades. When I was teaching at Sam Houston State in the early 90's I did some work on a jail/prison population forecasting project ("Techniques for Forecasting an Urban Jail Population During Periodsof Policy Disequilibrium", presentation to Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, March 12, 1992, with C. M. Friel and Disaggregated Forecasts of the Harris County Jail Population: 1992-1997. Prepared for Commissioners Court, Harris County Texas, May 1991, 1-114, with C. M. Friel and M. Bodapati.)

Back then they were blaming the overcrowding conditions on state prison policy.

But the State of Texas has fixed their prison population problems (to some extent) and Harris County is still with overcrowded jails. Much of the jail population is detainees -- people who have not been convicted of a crime but just can't make bail. Judges could move to reduce bail requirements to relieve overcrowding.

But that would be easy. And cheap. Better to just contract with out of state jails to house them. That way they are far enough away from friends and family so that we can be sure they won't be able to make bail. Gives them incentive to plead guilty to save the county the trouble of actual trials.

Patting themselves on the back in Kansas

Kansas seems to have discovered a fundemental truth about prison over-crowding -- if you don't send as many people to prison you won't need to build as many prisons.

Legal theory

For those of you who doubt my frequent claims that law has nothing to do with logic or rational thought, read this.

Harris County

Back when was a graduate student in criminal justice at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas myself and a couple of other graduate students spent a few minutes one afternoon trying to count the number of police agencies in Harris County (Houston). We counted over 50 before we had to stop to go to class. And we hadn't even counted railroad police yet.

It's a very over-policed area, every suburban city has a police department, every school district or university campus has it's own police department, eight constables (in Texas each political precinct has a constable, an elected official which is essentially a precinct level sheriff), various federal agency offices with their own police powers, etc, etc.

It's really no surprise at all that Harris County jails have been dangerously overcrowded for over 20 years. I did some unpublished writings on jail overcrowding in Harris County in the early '90's^*. Nothing's really changed.



^*"Techniques for Forecasting an Urban Jail Population During Periods of Policy Disequilibrium", presentation to Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, March 12, 1992, with Charlie Friel.

Disaggregated Forecasts of the Harris County Jail Population: 1992-1997. Prepared for Commissioners Court, Harris County Texas, May 1991, 1-114, with C. M. Friel and M. Bodapati.

American myths

One of the great myths of America is that of a frontier country, a place where anyone can go and reinvent themselves, can become a part of society no matter what their background.

That has long been a myth of the country and was very strong myth of the SouthWestern US as I was growing up in Texas. No matter who badly you might screw up you can come to Texas and redeem yourself. That's the magic of the great story of the Alamo -- Crockett, Travis, and Bowie had all come to Texas to escape personal failures and even criminal prosecution in the case of Travis.

That's just not the way the country works anymore though. If you screw up there's nothing you can do about it. They'll get you eventually.

In the 33 years since her escape from a Georgia women's prison, Deborah Ann Gavin Murphey was able to evade authorities and keep most of her past to herself, carving out a small-town life in East Texas where she worked as a nurse and raised two children.

She offered a few clues about her past to her husband and partner of 32 years, Richard Murphey.

He knew she was a military brat and he had met members of her family.

And before they were married, he knew she had spent time in prison.

But he didn't learn the full story until this week, after federal agents arrested his wife at the couple's home in tiny Frankston, about halfway between Tyler and Palestine. It turns out, she walked out of the Georgia Women's Correctional Institution in 1974, where she was serving time for an armed robbery conviction.

"It's like a whirlwind around here," Murphey, 63, said Friday as he spent another day learning more about his wife while also trying to find her an attorney.

Deborah Murphey sits in the Anderson County Jail awaiting transfer back to Georgia.

"I seen her yesterday and she's not doing good," Murphey said of his wife.

On Wednesday, a federal fugitive task force arrested Deborah Murphey, 53, more than three decades after she simply walked away from prison — her sixth escape, authorities said.

The cold case had made it into the hands of Atlanta-based Jason Watson, a Georgia corrections employee assigned to the newly formed U.S. Marshal Service's Southeast Regional Fugitive Task Force, a few months ago.

Watson said Murphey's case had been open but no significant development pinpointing her whereabouts occurred until late September, when another member received a tip that she was living in Frankston.


Married in McKinney
The former Deborah Gavin was convicted of an armed robbery that she has since told her family she didn't commit.

"She was passed out in the back seat," Murphey said of the crime that landed his wife in prison. "She met this boy and this girl. When the car stopped, it was surrounded by police. She had found out they had stopped and robbed the store somewhere."

After her prison escape in 1974, she fled to Tennessee and Florida. She made her way to her mother's home in Irving, near Dallas the next year. While living there, Deborah Gavin met Murphey, a construction worker, through friends. He offered her a job as a construction helper at his job in Plano.

Shortly after the two became a couple in 1975, she told Murphey she had been in prison and had escaped at least once.

"I knew she had been in the pen and she had gotten out, went to Louisiana and then she got caught," Murphey said.

But she said nothing about her last escape until after the two were married by a McKinney justice of the peace in 1984.

"It was awhile after we got married," Murphey said. "I was kind of tongue-tied."

The couple eventually relocated to East Texas, where the woman with an eighth-grade education got into the University of Texas at Tyler, earning a nursing degree in 1994.

On her application for a Texas nursing license, Deborah Murphey checked the "No" box when asked: "Have you ever been convicted of a crime other than minor traffic violations?"

The Texas Board of Nursing Examiners did not do background checks at that time. Her license has since been renewed, but was to expire next year.

Background checks on nursing license applicants became mandatory in 2004. Murphey's record had not been checked at the time of her arrest this week, according to the board.

The couple had two children, a boy and girl, now grown. "They didn't know nothing until Wednesday," their father said.

Murphey did tell her husband that the prison was involved in a sex abuse scandal involving correctional officers and inmates. Officials confirm that a sex abuse scandal forced the prison to close in the 1990s. Murphey said he never asked his wife if she had been abused.

"She didn't tell me," he said. "I didn't want to know."

But one of her siblings, living in Oklahoma City, informed Murphey this week that she was sexually abused at the prison.


'The marshals are here'
Murphey worked as a nurse until two years ago, when a back injury forced her to quit her job at East Texas Medical Center in Tyler. She's had heart problems and one kidney removed because of cancer.

She was home alone Wednesday.

The marshals' task force first posed as municipal workers to verify Deborah Murphey was indeed Gavin the fugitive.

Once they confirmed her identity, they regrouped and approached the two-story home again. They identified themselves and informed her she was about to be arrested.

She walked back into the house, telling officers she had to place the family dog, Roxy, in another room. She returned, Watson said, with a 12-gauge shotgun.

She told the officers she was afraid and would put down the gun if they let her talk to her husband.

Murphey was working in Tyler when his wife called to say she would not be home when he returned from work.

"She said: 'The marshals are here and they're going to arrest me,' " Murphey said.

Life without parole

What's wrong with the United States?

In December, the United Nations took up a resolution calling for the abolition of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for children and young teenagers. The vote was 185 to 1, with the United States the lone dissenter.

Indeed, the United States stands alone in the world in convicting young adolescents as adults and sentencing them to live out their lives in prison. According to a new report, there are 73 Americans serving such sentences for crimes they committed at 13 or 14.

John Lott is scary

He's on CSPAN2 right now, giving talk on his book Freedonomics.

What's scary about the guy is that he has no concept of the idea that human beings might be less than rational in the way they go about making life decisions. He really thinks everybody is hyper-rational. And, he's the chief economist for the US Sentencing Committee.

No wonder our prisons are overflowing.

Scary

Update: More on this here.

Felony Redneck

Feeding Gin to a baby is not exactly good parenting, it certianly qualifies as really stupid.

It might even be criminal. But does everything stupid have to be a felony? Is there some kind of limit on how many people we want to put in prison for stupid behavior?

What does compliance mean?

This is just an amazing newspaper article about the Harris County Jail in Texas (Houston).

Last year, after the jail failed to meet state certification standards for the third year in a row, the commission ordered officials to comply with the state-ordered guard-to-inmate ratio of 1-48.

This really doesn't seem like a tough regulation to comply with. If you can't hire enough guards, for whatever reason, you just start releasing people. Every jail, and Harris County is no exception, is full of people whose only crime is that they don't have the cash to make bail. The county has a tremendous level of control over both how many people get locked up and how many sheriff's deputies are assigned to the jail.

But are they expected to comply in order to be considered in compliance? No, of course not.

County officials appealed and, after they announced an aggressive hiring and overtime effort, the jail was ruled to be in compliance with state standards.

They just have to pretend that they intend to comply at some point in the future.

Read the whole article. That's not the only problem.

Maybe if we make English the official language we can pass a low that requires words to actually mean whatever they mean. Probably not though.

Criminilazation of America

I'm not sure I like the idea of criminilazation of bad mothering.

A driver reported seeing someone pick up a child from the side of Interstate 12 on Wednesday about 40 miles east of Baton Rouge and put him in a van. Authorities feared they were dealing with a kidnapping, said Jason Ard, the Livingston Parish sheriff's spokesman.


Investigators found the boy had actually been dropped off as punishment. The van traveled a short distance down the highway before the mother got out and retrieved him, Ard said. It was unclear exactly how long the child was out of the car but Ard said Friday it was probably only a few minutes.

Parents have a hard job. They get frustrated. They don't know what to do. We don't help things any by they'll go to jail if they make a bad parenting decision.

I'm pretty sure I was never put out of the car on the side of the road when I was a kid. But, you know, it's possible I was and just don't remember it. It was certianly threatened more than once.

The mother in question here didn't leave the child. She put him out of the car, parked, and walked back to pick him up. At least that's what the description sounds like what happened.

Prison time? Don't we have better things to worry about?

Advanced prison management in Kansas

If there isn't enough contraband in your prison all you have to do is make something scarce. Toilet paper would work.

Toilet paper is becoming a sought after commodity at the Hutchinson Correctional Facility after officials began limiting inmates to one roll at a time to trim costs.


Officials say the prison has long had a limit, but they learned recently that it hadn't been enforced. Increased enforcement began this month.


Under the prison policy, inmates are restricted to four rolls of toilet paper each month or on an "as-needed" basis.


Steve Schneider, public information officer for the prison, said officials also restated restrictions on other personal items, including soap and toothpaste, as a result of stockpiling and overuse.


The increased enforcement has angered many of the more than 1,600 inmates housed at the facility.


"Some take this for granted," inmate Carl Kennedy said in a letter to The Hutchinson News. "But in here it's part of a safeguard for widespread infections. We use it to blow our noses, clean sinks, toilets and tables."


Prison officials said the policy could save the prison nearly $600 each month if each inmate uses one less roll each month.

Even if they do save $600 in toilet paper costs, somehow I think this will end up costing them more than just the cost of toilet paper. Forest. Trees. Look.

Life in prison for a crime committed when you're 13 years old

Can a typical 13 year old really fully understand the consequences of his actions?

Tyler Edmonds Mississippi Supreme Court just overturned the conviction of Tyler Edmonds for a murder that occured when he was 13. He had confesed by later recanted.

His appeal was based on a claim of an unfair trial. A number of points related to expert testimony were raised.

Basically the trial judge didn't allow the defense to put on experts on false confessions but did allow the the prosecution to put on an expert pathologist who isn't even a pathologist and is clearly an incompetent boob (that part was clear to at least one member of the Mississippi Supreme Court).

The prosecution expert actually was allowed to testify that he could determine that two people held the gun as it was fired by a simple examination of the bullet wound. I don't know where they get juries in Mississippi, but hearing that kind of nonsense as evidence should have been enough for an immediate not guilty verdict.

There were also some severe procedural problems with the way the confession was extracted by police in violation of some specific laws Mississippi has about the interrogation of juviniles.

The whole thing was a mess.

Radley Balko of Reason has some history with the prosecutions claimed pathologists from another case and he has a good write up of this case.

My concern isn't so much with the unfair trial as with the whole idea of treating a crime committed by a 13 year old as a trial committed by an adult.

That's just absurd. I realize that the law in the US does allow it. But that doesn't mean the law makes any sense at all or has any moral authority at all. There is something wrong with us as a country, as a people, when we allow the kind of fiction that says a 13 year old has the mental capacity of an adult simply because we think he might have done something terrible. It's just wrong and we're wrong for tolerating it.

Get out of jail for a fee card

In California it seems to be the norm to just buy your way out of jail. I guess Paris Hilton was drinking in the wrong county.

Don't solve it, criminalize it

This is the true American Way.

If government is faced with a problem and doesn't really know how to solve it, then just criminalize it. That way you replace a tough problem with an easy one -- everybody knows how to build more jails.

Homeless? Just put them in jail. Problem solved.

Some problems are inherently hard to solve, maybe even impossible to solve. Building more jails might look a solution, but it doesn't really solve anything.

Another Innocent Man Spends 20 Years in Prison

He eventually got released though. This one wasn't released because of DNA exoneration, this one was released because the witness recanted. That's something that almost never happens.

Jail beatings are more common than most think

Two cops beat up a guy in jail for not paying a traffic ticket. They were provoked, he said something rude to him.

Two Jefferson County sheriff's deputies have been suspended without pay over the beating of an inmate that was caught on videotape.
...
Authorities said the video showed Cole punching the man in the face multiple times after a verbal confrontation.

A few years ago I had a period of pretty severe depression and was homeless and living in my car in Austin, Texas. I got a lot of tickets during that period, and didn't pay them. So I'd go to jail on a traffic warrant. It's a cycle that's hard to get out of when you're broke, not only do you have tickets to pay, they impound your car when they arrest you on the warrant, so you have two and impound fees to pay before you pay the most recent ticket.

But, anyway, the jail was very overcrowded, often with 5 men in a two bed cell. But they had a suicide watch cell that was visible to the guards with about 6 beds and typically only 2-3 inmates. So after the first arrest on a traffic warrant (it happened to me 5-6 times in a period of a few months) I asked to see the jail nurse and I'd tell her I was depressed and concerned that I might become suicidal (not that I was suicidal, that might have gotten me locked up in a mental hospital). So I'd get assigned to the suicide watch cell and get to sleep in a bed rather than on the floor next to the toilet.

One day when I was being booked the jailer ignored me when I asked to see a nurse. I refused to tell him anything about my medical history, insisting on seeing the nurse, and I think he got mad about that. He put me in a holding cell with about 20 inmates and benches for about 15. I was standing near the door.

He came up to the door to add another recent arrestee and told me to move back. "When can I see a nurse?", I asked. "Move back, asshole", he responded. I moved back, and said over my shoulder, "Fuck you".

He'd opened the door, he yelled for more guards, left the handcuffed new inmate in the hall, and knocked me down. About 5-6 guards came in and held me down while he grabbed my head by my hair and hit my face against the concrete floor a couple of times. Even though I was nuts I knew enough to know that resistance was pretty much suicidal.

Later I did see a nurse, told her where the scrapes on my face came from. Of course nothing was done about it. It very seldom is, such assaults on inmates for verbal abuse are pretty frequent in most jails.

TDC firing felons

Texas has so many prisons that they simply hire enough guards. They have a larger percentage of open slots for corrections officers than any other state.

That's why the Texas Youth Commission got a little slack in background requirements for their hiring -- the juvenile prison system had even more problems finding qualified people to hire than the adult system. Little things like felony convections got overlooked.

Then they started getting some problems. Things like guards, staff, and administrators getting into some sexual escapades with the juvenile inmates.

Now they're firing all those felons they previously hired, even the ones that haven't been raping
kids.

Hawkins said some of the agency staffers suspected of abusing youths had criminal records and some didn't.

They should be covering the ass of the inmates. Instead they're covering their own ass.

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Parole

A revocation of parole means you go back to prison. It seems that the standards to revoke a parole are even looser than you might suspect. You have to actually do anything to have your parole revoked, just having a cop accuse you of doing something is enough.

Is there any wonder our prisons are full?