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Tag: incarceration
The Poor Get A Moment

The Poor Get A Moment

WASHINGTON — Will we regard poverty as a haunting national problem, or will the focus groups continue to tell politicians of all stripes to talk only about the middle class because mentioning the poor is politically toxic?

Might the condition of low-income Americans galvanize religious people to see alleviating poverty and righting social injustice as moral issues? The habit in political writing when discussing “moral issues” is to refer only to abortion or gay marriage. But what implicates morality more than the way we, as a society and as individuals, treat those who are cut off from the ladders of advancement and the treasures of prosperity?

And can we find a way of thinking constructively about the role of family breakup in setting back the life chances of poor kids while still recognizing that family life itself is being battered by rising economic inequality, the loss of well-paying blue-collar jobs, racism, and mass incarceration?

These are some of the questions I am left with after moderating a discussion about poverty at Georgetown University this week. For all the obvious journalistic reasons, it’s not my habit to write about events in which I participate. But this particular panel was a bit different from the usual policy talkfest.

It included Robert Putnam, the author of Our Kids — a book that should focus our energies on the growing opportunity gap between lower-income and better-off children — and Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute, who has been urging his fellow conservatives to “declare peace on the safety net.” It also happened to include the President of the United States.

Others can judge more objectively how the discussion went. What’s obvious is that presidents don’t usually do panels and that the spirit of this one broke from so much of what we’ve grown accustomed to, in its civility and even good humor. Yet I was also reminded how far we have to go before we achieve anything close to consensus about what is to be done to liberate the least among us.

The fact that it took place at all is a tribute to religious leaders (particularly the Catholics and evangelicals involved in organizing the Poverty Summit, as the event sponsoring the panel was called) who are trying to push the alleviation of poverty to the top of the faithful’s agenda. Something is stirring in the religious world. Pope Francis certainly has something to do with this, but there’s also the tug of history. Religious groups were long at the forefront of our nation’s movements for civil rights and economic justice. People of faith are reassuming their rightful place in these struggles.

President Obama clearly wants to push that trend along. He acknowledged that he might be “self-interested” in this: He is closest to religious Christians on social justice questions and furthest away on abortion and same-sex marriage. But he insisted that religious Americans have a “transformative voice” that could alter the nation’s trajectory on poverty.

He also mentioned that social justice concerns have “incredible appeal, including to young people.” The panel took place on a day when the Pew Research Center issued a report showing a remarkable decline of religious affiliation. Among the youngest millennials (those 25 and under), 36 percent are now religiously unaffiliated. A broader religious agenda might bring some of them back.

Yet the session also highlighted the political and intellectual barriers to action. Brooks offered moving words urging his fellow conservatives to treat the poor as “brothers and sisters,” not as “liabilities to manage.” Obama welcomed Brooks’ witness, but noted the reluctance of so many conservatives to spend new public money to open up opportunity for the needy. “There’s been a very specific ideological push not to make those investments,” he said.

The family issue remains neuralgic. Obama spoke powerfully about being “a black man who grew up without a father” and “the cost that I paid for that.” But his words can’t settle the ongoing and often divisive argument over whether family difficulties should be seen primarily as a cause of poverty or as the effect of poverty itself. That the right answer is complicated doesn’t make things any easier.

Still, this doesn’t take away from the small miracle that the concerns of the poor briefly slipped into a political discussion usually focused far more on the doings of billionaire donors. Americans with low incomes can’t get much nourishment from words, and sentiments don’t create jobs. But for a moment, they weren’t invisible.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

Photo: Franco Folini via Flickr

Clinton Calls For End To ‘Mass Incarceration’ As Riots Become Campaign Issue

Clinton Calls For End To ‘Mass Incarceration’ As Riots Become Campaign Issue

By Evan Halper, Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton focused her presidential campaign Wednesday on the unrest in Baltimore, vowing to work to upend the criminal justice system by ending the “era of mass incarceration” and equipping every police officer on the street with a body camera.

Her speech at Columbia University in New York City marked the unveiling of Clinton’s first major policy proposal as a presidential hopeful, coming as candidates are under pressure to confront racial disparities in the criminal justice system highlighted by the violence in Baltimore.

“What we have seen in Baltimore should, and I think does, tear at our soul,” Clinton said. “The patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable….We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.”

Baltimore erupted in rioting Monday night, following the funeral of Freddie Gray, an African American man who was mortally injured while in police custody.

Clinton’s plan also stems from the “listening tour” she has been on since launching her campaign this month. In round-table meetings with residents in the early ­voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, the issue of drug abusers whose troubles were compounded by mental health problems played prominently.

“Our prisons and our jails are now our mental health institutions,” Clinton said. “I was somewhat surprised in both Iowa and New Hampshire to be asked so many questions about mental health.”

Clinton is joining a chorus of politicians demanding that police officers everywhere be equipped with body cameras.

“For every tragedy caught on tape, there surely have been many more that remained invisible,” she said. “This is a common-sense step.”

The sentencing reforms Clinton will champion focus on nonviolent offenders. She said they will include shifting people found guilty of such drug crimes from lockups to treatment and rehabilitation programs. Other alternative punishments would also be explored for low-level offenders, particularly minors, a Clinton campaign aide said.

Sentencing reform has broader political appeal than it once did. Tea party Republicans concerned about government overreach have joined Democrats in raising concern about inequities in the criminal justice system. Sen. Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican running for president, is among those pushing for sentencing reform. Paul, whose ideology leans libertarian, argues the United States locks up too many people for minor offenses for too long a time.

Clinton alluded to the idea’s inter-party appeal in her speech Wednesday.

“There seems to be a growing bipartisan movement for common-sense reform,” she said. “Without the mass incarceration that we currently practice, millions of fewer people would be living in poverty.”

Clinton repeatedly returned to what she says is racial injustice at the core of the existing policies, citing statistics that highlight how much harder the criminal justice system is on blacks than whites.

“We have allowed our criminal justice system to get out of balance,” she said. “These recent tragedies should galvanize us to come together as a nation to find our balance again.”

Photo: Utility, Inc. via Flickr

As Death Row Runs Out Of Room, California Governor Covets Space Left By The Newly Sprung

As Death Row Runs Out Of Room, California Governor Covets Space Left By The Newly Sprung

By Paige St. John, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

With no executions in nearly a decade and newly condemned men arriving every month, the nation’s largest death row has run out of room.

Warning that there is little time to lose, Governor Jerry Brown (D-CA) is asking the California Legislature for $3.2 million to open nearly 100 more cells for condemned men at San Quentin State Prison. The proposed expansion would take advantage of cells made available as the state releases low-level drug offenders and thieves under a law voters approved last year.

California’s death penalty has been the subject of a decade of litigation. One case led to a halt to executions in 2006. Another resulted in a federal judge’s ruling last July that the state’s interminably slow capital-appeals system is unconstitutionally cruel. Through it all, the death row population has grown from 646 in 2006 to 751 today.

“Until the litigation is resolved, this cost-effective proposal allows (the state Corrections Department) to safely house condemned inmates going forward,” corrections department spokeswoman Terry Thornton said last week.

But critics of Brown’s handling of the state’s stalled death penalty say his proposal doesn’t address deeper problems with the California system. “This is a failure of Governor Brown to do the things within his power to move things forward,” said Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a group that has sued California seeking to force the state to resume executions.

There are 731 men and 20 women on California’s death row. The women are housed in a maximum security unit at the Central California Women’s Facility near Chowchilla, and Brown’s proposal would not affect them.

Condemned men live at San Quentin, housed apart from other inmates in three cellblocks that Brown’s budget plans note would have overflowed already if the state last summer had not, under court order, opened a 25-cell psychiatric unit for death row inmates.

San Quentin’s death row can accommodate 715 inmates. Last week, prison officials said, 708 inmates were in those cells. Twenty-three others were scattered across the state for court hearings or held in long-term medical facilities or at prisons in other states.

The governor’s budget proposal anticipates an average of 20 new arrivals on death row yearly. He proposes putting them in 97 cells on the first two tiers of the five-tier South Block. A small portion of the funding would go to increase security, including modifying showers so condemned inmates can be shackled as they bathe. Most of the money would be spent to increase staff, and the expansion would begin in July.

“Based on the critical nature of the bed shortage, it is not feasible to delay the approval and implementation of this proposal,” the governor’s budget document says. If expansion is delayed, “San Quentin would not have beds to accommodate the condemned should any return from court, outside medical facilities, or if SQ receives any newly condemned inmates.”

The proposed expansion of death row is possible because California’s prison population outside of death row has fallen sharply, a result of court-ordered releases to reduce overcrowding and a measure approved by voters last fall allowing the release of some low-level felons. Meanwhile, without executions, the ranks of California’s condemned continue to swell.

State and federal courts since 2006 have barred the state from using its three-drug lethal-injection protocol. Brown in 2012 asked an advisory board to investigate a single-drug method, but none has been proposed, and the state lacks a court-approved method for executions.

The constitutionality of the state’s capital punishment system is also being challenged. A federal judge last July ruled that the appeals process is so slow that executions have become unlikely and random. Condemned inmates often wait years for lawyers to be appointed to their appeals and years more for the state Supreme Court to decide their cases. State Attorney General General Kamala Harris is challenging the ruling in the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. She argues that the lengthiness of the appeals process prevents capital punishment from being arbitrary.

Forty-nine inmates have died of cancer, drug overdose, suicide, or other causes since the last execution, including two this month. Teofilo Medina Jr., 70, who murdered three store clerks for petty cash during a robbery spree in 1984, died of cancer March 22. Leon Cooper, 54, convicted of the 1998 rape and murder of his stepdaughter, died March 18 at a Marin County hospital. Officials have not said what caused his death.

Brown’s proposal is scheduled for a hearing in late April before a budget subcommittee led by state Senator Loni Hancock, a Berkeley Democrat and a vocal opponent of the death penalty. Last month, she and other lawmakers told a federal court that the state cannot adequately fund its capital punishment system and should abandon the effort.

But because the process continues, Hancock said in a written statement, the Legislature must pay for more death row cells.

“California is in a Catch-22 situation. We are required by the Courts to address prison overcrowding and we are required by law to provide certain minimum conditions for housing death penalty inmates,” Hancock wrote. “The Legislature can’t avoid its responsibilities in these areas, even though the courts are currently considering the constitutionality of the death penalty, and I hope will agree to end it.”

Photo: Mark Boster via Los Angeles Times/TNS

Inmates To Butchers: Bill Would Create Meat Processing Program

Inmates To Butchers: Bill Would Create Meat Processing Program

By Jenna Ross, Star Tribune (Minneapolis) (TNS)

SAGINAW, Minnesota – The men filed into the locker room, throwing on red aprons and rubber boots.

“Same jobs as yesterday,” supervisor Michal Jasek told them.

One guy heaved a huge bucket from the walk-in refrigerator. Another started the bandsaw. Then they broke down the hundreds of chickens they had slaughtered that morning — slicing skin, cutting bone, weighing wings.

The workers at this meat-processing shop, part of the Northeast Regional Corrections Center, are inmates. Some state lawmakers hope they will become the next generation of butchers.

Under a bill introduced this month at the Legislature, work shifts at this minimum-security facility would become a formal curriculum, training the men for jobs in meat processing after they’re out. New workers are needed in the industry, some experts say, as the demand for local meat grows and the owners of slaughterhouses and butcher shops grow old.

Two-thirds of the owners of Minnesota’s small meat-processing facilities are at or near retirement age, according to a recent survey by the Agricultural Utilization Research Institute. Just one-third have succession plans, the survey shows.

“There’s a need to take some action here and make sure that we don’t lose this vital part of the agricultural infrastructure,” said Paul Hugunin, with the Minnesota Department of Agriculture.

Each year, about 600 men serve short sentences at the Saginaw corrections center, a work farm started in the 1930s that sits on 3,200 acres north of Duluth. They grow hay on about 400 acres.

They plant potatoes, corn, and carrots. They raise chickens, turkeys, and pigs.

The inmates eat much of the meat for lunch and dinner, but the facility also butchers animals for farmers, for a fee.

The idea of a formal training program sprang from Representative Jason Metsa (DFL-VA), who was trying to think of “creative ways to attract more farmers to our area.” He’s pairing the pilot program with the corrections center’s request for a new $1.2 million food-processing building — pitching a USDA-inspected facility as the answer to local farmers’ laments about a lack of meat-processing spots in northeastern Minnesota.

Keith Nelson, a St. Louis County commissioner, told the House Agriculture Policy Committee last week that some producers in his district have to travel 250 miles round-trip to have their chickens readied for sale.

“There’s a lot of us around that could gain a great deal of value from such an operation,” said Nelson, a beef farmer who serves on the correction center’s board.
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PHYSICAL WORK

Knives, regulations, and a map of the Czech Republic hang in Jasek’s office in the meat-processing plant. After growing up there, in a village of 300 people, Jasek traveled by bus and train for hours each day to study meat processing, part of a three-year degree.

In Minnesota, there is no such educational program for butchers and meat cutters — who, on average, make $18.53 an hour, according to the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development. One in Pipestone shut down. But the University of Minnesota offers a broader meat-science degree.

Jasek, a St. Louis County employee, assigns the inmates simple tasks, he said. Some stay only a few weeks. Others he can train more thoroughly.

“It’s hard work,” he said, folding his broad-knuckled hands. “Physically demanding work.”

Partly because of those demands, it’s tough to find skilled help, said Mike Lorentz, chief executive of Lorentz Meats, a meat processing plant in Cannon Falls that specializes in organic and high-end protein. So he’s glad the proposal is raising the issue.

The meat-processing industry is diverse — ranging from small retail shops to Hormel Foods’ plants — so the training varies, too, Lorentz said. Working at an urban butcher shop might require wine-pairing knowledge, he said, while at Hormel, an employee might do a single cut all day long.

“For us, it’s harder to train people up,” said Lorentz, whose 30,000-square-foot facility employees 90 people. “The challenge with the bill is, who are you helping?”
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RISE OF LOCAL MEAT

At the farmers market in Grand Rapids, Jane Grimsbo Jewett sells beef, pork, and chicken. But beforehand, her cows and pigs must travel to a meat processor in Foley — a 115-mile drive each way. The chickens trek to a processor 75 miles away.

“It’s costly in terms of fuel and time,” Grimsbo Jewett said.

But Grimsbo Jewett, a research fellow at the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture, knows that building and upgrading meat processing facilities is costly, too. “A lot were built in the 1950s — or even earlier — and requirements have changed a lot,” she said.

About 41 percent of Minnesota’s small processing facilities have clocked more than 50 years, the survey by the Agricultural Utilization Research Institute shows. The Department of Agriculture offers grants to processors to buy new equipment or expand or upgrade their facilities, Hugunin said.

Southeastern Minnesota offers farmers “pretty good” options for meat processing, said Jan Joannides, executive director of Renewing the Countryside, a nonprofit. But in northeastern Minnesota, “there are real gaps in terms of availability.”

In particular, there are few USDA-inspected facilities, “the gold standard,” as Joannides put it. That inspection allows the meat to be sold in other states. Facilities inspected by state employees according to federal standards can sell to grocery stores and at farmers markets, just not across state lines.

There are few of either in northeastern Minnesota, said Jennifer Stephes, meat inspection supervisor for the Department of Agriculture. Her office has heard from farmers and local producers there looking for closer options.

“There’s this growing interest among the public and among policymakers in having more local foods,” Joannides said. “There are farmers out there willing to do it. But oftentimes it’s the middle part that’s a bottleneck.”

A lack of inspectors might be contributing to the problem, Grimsbo Jewett said. Governor Mark Dayton’s (DFL-MN) budget calls for five more meat inspectors, an increase of $250,000, citing “a significant increase in requests for inspections in the past six months.”
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‘YOUNG AND DUMB to ‘SOLID’

During a midafternoon break, the men gathered in the room with the smoker, opening its door to grab a few browned birds. They spread them on a sheet of butcher’s paper, sliced them open, and dug in.

They paired the chicken with dark coffee, drunk from white mugs scrawled with their names and nicknames. Shawn Wirta’s mug says, “BOSS.”

Wirta was 17 years old and drunk when he crashed his grandparent’s Buick, hitting a car turning into a driveway on Arrowhead Road in Duluth. A passenger in that car, a 22-year-old man, flew through the back window and died.

“It is what it is,” Wirta said last week, shaking his head.

He came to this work farm in Saginaw a “young and dumb” kid. But 18 months of meat processing taught him about hard work. “When I came out of here at 19 years old, I was solid,” he said. “I got out of here wanting to work. It fills up your day, it takes up your time, it keeps you out of trouble.”

Wirta nabbed a job as a butcher, after “showing them what I could do,” he said. He skinned hogs for a season, moving on to sausage making. “I could pretty much cut up any animal you want me to cut up.”

He was sent back to Saginaw for leaving the state, not allowed under his probation. In a month, when he’s released and his probation ends, Wirta plans to spend time with his three-year-old daughter, who visits him here twice a week. Then he’ll head back to his farm in Florida, where he raises goats and chickens.

Photo: Jerry Holtvia via Minneapolis Star Tribune/TNS