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Aging Inmates Strain Federal Prisons, Report Says

Aging Inmates Strain Federal Prisons, Report Says

By Del Quentin Wilber, Bloomberg News (TNS)

WASHINGTON — An aging population of inmates is straining a federal prison system that lacks the resources, staffing, and facilities to address its rapidly changing demographics, a U.S. government watchdog reported on Wednesday.

Inmates 50 and older are the fastest-growing segment of the prison population, increasing by more than 6,000, or 25 percent, from 2009 to 2013, while the number of younger inmates dropped by one percent, according to the report by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Older inmates account for about 31,000 of the 164,600 inmates who were in the Bureau of Prisons’ custody as of September 2013.

The report found that older prisoners are more expensive to detain, costing $24,538 annually, about $2,000 more than their younger counterparts. It also concluded that the Bureau of Prisons doesn’t have the staff or training to address the needs of aging inmates, and prisons don’t provide the proper programs for them.

Though older prisoners have the lowest recidivism rates, the report said, federal prison officials limit the number of aging inmates who can be considered for early release.

The growing population of such prisoners has adversely affected the system’s “ability to provide a safe, humane, cost-efficient, and appropriately secure environment for aging inmates and to assist aging inmates re-entering the community,” the report found.

The inspector general recommended that prison officials improve oversight and training of staff, study the effects of the aging population on its facilities, and develop programs to assist them during their detention and prepare them for release.

The Bureau of Prisons agreed with the inspector general’s recommendations, the report said.

The Justice Department spends a sizable portion of its $26 billion budget — about 30 percent — on detention and its prisoners. Under pressure to ease that financial and human burden, officials and lawmakers are seeking ways to decrease the inmate population by steering more drug offenders into treatment and other programs while reducing sentences for non-violent criminals.

Photo: Jeff Evan Gold via Twitter

The Literary Life (And Death) Of Susan Berman, Alleged Robert Durst Victim

The Literary Life (And Death) Of Susan Berman, Alleged Robert Durst Victim

By Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Time (TNS)

When she was killed 15 years ago, Susan Berman was a 55-year-old writer struggling to stay relevant. Now her work is suddenly at a premium. Paperback editions of her memoir Easy Street — which could be gotten for $10 or less Monday morning — are now priced at $50 and up at the online used bookstore AbeBooks.

Berman has gone from forgotten author to high-profile victim. On Monday, Los Angeles prosecutors charged Robert Durst, subject of the just-concluded HBO documentary The Jinx with Berman’s murder. He is in custody in New Orleans.

The Jinx told the life story of real estate scion Durst and of the deaths and disappearance of people close to him, with his cooperation. It concluded Sunday night with Durst saying, on tape but off screen, “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”

He appeared to be alluding to others covered in the documentary: His wife, who went missing in New York in 1972; Morris Black, his Texas neighbor whom he admitted to dismembering but whose murder he was acquitted of; and Susan Berman, who was found on Christmas Eve 2000 in her rented Benedict Canyon home, dead of a gunshot to the back of the head a day or two before.

Berman and Durst had been friends ever since meeting at UCLA in the 1960s. When his wife disappeared, Berman helped Durst wrangle calls from the media. When Berman was married at the Hotel Bel-Air in 1984, Durst gave her away. When Berman was broke, she turned to Durst, who loaned her $50,000.

Like many writers, Berman had up years and down years — although throwing a wedding in Bel Air is more up than most. Born in 1945, she was raised in Las Vegas by a father who she thought was a chic hotelier. She didn’t realize it then, but he was a gangster who’d kept company with Bugsy Seigel and Meyer Lansky, and was running the Flamingo and Riviera hotels for the mob. She was about 12 when he died of a heart attack; when her mentally unstable mother committed suicide a year later, Berman was orphaned.

Despite being largely on her own, she made it to UCLA and Berkeley and began carving out a respectable career as a journalist. In the 1970s, she worked for the San Francisco Examiner and then moved to the East Coast and found a place at New York Magazine. One of her more enduring stories, “Why I Can’t Get Laid in San Francisco,” seems to both elicit and resist sympathy.

She hit her stride with Easy Street, her 1981 memoir about growing up in Las Vegas at the height of its glamour. The book had two subtitles — “The True Story of A Mob Family” in hardcover and “The True Story of A Gangster’s Daughter” in paperback — that explained what it was all about.

Because Berman grew up ignorant of her father’s mob ties, the book was a research project as well as memoir. It was filled partly with what she learned about him from his FBI files (the time in Sing Sing, the reputation as a heavy) and partly with the memories of having Liberace sing at her birthday and learning to play gin at age 4 with men she knew as uncles, but were in fact bodyguards.

“Susan Berman grew up in an emotional fog about her parents, her origins,” Carolyn See wrote in her L.A. Times review of the book. “She had been taught — somehow — to be both proud and ashamed of what she came from…. The story here, then, is not about crime but about a pitiably defenseless girl…who sets out to make sense of emotional disaster, to gain control over an enormous legacy of doom.”

The book wasn’t perfect: Kirkus Reviews found the combination of halcyon memories and frightening mafia tales awkward. See thought the writing was just too clunky in places. But in others, it charmed.

“As a first-generation Las Vegan I had known only the life he had chosen to give me,” Berman wrote. “The background sounds of my childhood were slot machines crunching, dice clicking, the songs of Sophie Tucker and the Andrews Sisters, and the carping of an ever-present hotel page…. To this day the desert air invigorates and exhilarates me like nothing else and hotel coffeeshops and floor shows give me a tranquilizing sense of security.”

The book was a success. From hardcover it went to paperback, and was optioned for $350,000. In 1983, Berman moved to L.A. to be closer to the business that seemed ready to embrace her.

As she told it, she was queuing up to register a script at the Writers Guild when she met the man who would become her husband. Mister (as he called himself) Margulies was 25; she was 38. She footed the bill for a lavish ceremony for hundreds of guests at the Hotel Bel-Air; Robert Durst gave her away.

She had all the trappings of success, but it didn’t last. Margulies was using heroin and in less than a year, the marriage was over. At 27, he died of an overdose. Next she had a long-term relationship with Paul Kaufman, becoming the de facto mother to his two children, but their finances and relationship collapsed in 1992.

Writers can spend an awful lot of time in Hollywood working on projects that never come to fruition. Kaufman and Berman had a Broadway musical in the works that never came together. There never was an Easy Street movie.

On shaky financial footing, Berman wrote a couple of pulpy novels. Avon published Fly Away Home in 1996 and Spiderweb in 1997; both tell the story of women who’ve lost someone close to them (a sister, a mother who may not have committed suicide) who try to find them in Los Angeles. They were not well-noticed; neither book was reviewed by the L.A. Times.

It was clear what people wanted from Berman: More mob stories. Despite the fact that her father had died in 1957, taking his mob ties with him, Berman continued to mine the gangster vein.

In 1996, she was a writer and co-producer of an A&E documentary that aired in two two-hour segments, “Las Vegas: Gamble in the Desert” and “Las Vegas: House of Cards.” Berman authored a companion book to the series, Lady Las Vegas: The Inside Story Behind the Neon Oasis, published that same year.

By 2000, Berman’s personal life was fraught with phobias (she didn’t like going above certain floors in buildings and over bridges) and anxieties. She had health fears and complained of allergies and worried over her dogs. Some relationships were tightly bonded, while with others she had drastic fallings-out. She engaged in an ongoing tussle with her Benedict Canyon landlord over, depending on who you asked, needed repairs or unpaid rent, which was finally resolved not long before Berman was killed.

Berman’s fatal mistake appears to have been agreeing to speak to Westchester County Dist. Atty. Jeanine Pirro. In 2000, Pirro had opened an investigation into the disappearance of Kathie Durst nearly two decades before. Kathie was married to Robert Durst, and when she went missing, Berman helped Durst field inquiries that came his way. According to New York Magazine, she even told one friend she’d provided his alibi.

The style of Berman’s murder — a single shot to the back of the head — made it easy to speculate that it was a long-delayed mafia payback. But most of the players she’d known were long gone, and she’d written about them so glowingly — Easy Street was not much cause for a vendetta.

It was, instead, a kind of celebration. Easy Street was Berman’s story, the one she revisited and reshaped and told again and again. As interest grows and it becomes increasingly inaccessible — hardcover copies are $75-$300 — perhaps someone will decide to keep her work alive in an e-book.

Photo: Author Susan Berman and Robert Durst, who has been charged with her murder. (HBO)

Documentary Role In Durst Case Is Unclear

Documentary Role In Durst Case Is Unclear

By Victoria Kim and Joel Rubin, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

LOS ANGELES — When the makers of the HBO documentary The Jinx discovered an old letter that appeared to link New York real estate scion Robert Durst to a Los Angeles killing, their first instinct was to keep it from authorities.

They locked the letter away in a bank safe deposit box and strategized how to confront Durst with it.

“Nobody is going to know that we have this document,” director Andrew Jarecki says on camera to members of his film crew. “We interview Bob, we bring it up, we have it on film, and now we have something that the LAPD is going to really want because … we’ve got Bob reacting clean to this hugely important piece of evidence.”

The scene made for gripping television and left no doubt that a key piece of evidence implicating Durst was inextricably tied to the six-part television series.

As Los Angeles prosecutors filed murder charges against Durst on Monday, it remained an open question how much of the evidence uncovered in the documentary, which also included arguably incriminating statements by Durst, will make its way into the courtroom.

Legal experts said the prosecution probably will try to limit how much it relies on the documentary in order to keep Durst’s defense team from raising doubts about the film’s accuracy and from challenging the unusual role the filmmakers played in building the case against Durst.

For their part, the filmmakers said they expect they will be called as witnesses, and they canceled a raft of planned interviews, saying it would be inappropriate to comment.

The documentary and the questions it raises loomed in the background Monday as Durst remained in a New Orleans jail after his arrest there Saturday.

Wearing an orange jail suit, Durst appeared before an Orleans Parish magistrate and waived his right to fight extradition to California.

“Fighting extradition when you’re already in the U.S. makes no sense,” Chip Lewis, one of Durst’s attorneys, told the Los Angeles Times before the court hearing.

When Durst will arrive in Los Angeles is unclear. Louisiana officials announced late Monday that he had been booked on two weapons-related charges: being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm and possession of a weapon with a controlled dangerous substance. The substance was a small amount of marijuana, a Louisiana State Police spokeswoman said.

In Los Angeles, Durst is accused of the execution-style killing of a friend, Susan Berman, in her Benedict Canyon home in December 2000. At the time Berman was killed, New York authorities were planning to interview her to learn what she knew about the 1982 disappearance of Durst’s first wife, Kathleen.

The charges include allegations that Durst lay in wait and killed Berman because she was a witness to a crime. Durst could face the death penalty if he is found guilty.

Los Angeles police rejected any suggestion that the timing of last weekend’s arrest was influenced by the HBO documentary.

“We based our actions on the investigation and the evidence,” Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief Kirk Albanese said. “We didn’t base anything we did on the HBO series. The arrest was made as a result of the investigative efforts and at a time that we believe it was needed.”

Sunday’s finale of The Jinx revolved largely around the letter, which Durst wrote to Berman the year before she was killed. In the documentary, Jarecki zeroes in on similarities between the handwriting on the letter’s envelope and an anonymous note sent to Beverly Hills police at the time of Berman’s killing that alerted them to “a cadaver” in her house.

On both, Berman’s address was written in distinctive block handwriting, and the writer made the same mistake, misspelling the word “Beverly” as “Beverley.”

When confronted, a visibly shaken Durst admitted he penned the writing on the envelope to Berman but denied writing the note to police. He then left the interview to use the bathroom. Appearing not to notice that his wireless microphone was still recording, he is heard muttering to himself, “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”

“There it is, you’re caught,” he said at another moment. “What a disaster.”

Filmmakers said they provided investigators with the incriminating letter, which Berman’s stepson found in a box of her belongings, about two years ago, roughly the same time that prosecutors said they began reinvestigating the cold case with the LAPD.

The question of how LAPD detectives failed to discover the letter during their investigation into the murder turned an uncomfortable spotlight on the department. Asked for comment, Chief Charlie Beck declined, saying only that he hoped “that question and others will get answered in due time.”

Peter Arenella, a University of California, Los Angeles law professor and a nationally recognized expert on criminal law, said the timing of when the filmmakers began cooperating with police could become a thorny issue in a trial. If Jarecki and his team are viewed as having collaborated or assisted the police, they could be seen as having acted, if unwittingly, as agents of the government.

A judge then could rule that the interviews Jarecki did with Durst amounted to “unreasonable questioning and de facto interrogation” by the government, Arenella said. That could be grounds for Durst to claim his constitutional rights had been violated and that his statements should not be admitted as evidence.

Unaired footage Jarecki shot during interviews with Durst or others that did not make it into the final cut of the documentary could become a point of contention in the case, said Loyola Law School professor Stan Goldman, an expert on criminal procedure and evidence issues.

If prosecutors want to use Durst’s aired comments at trial, Durst’s attorneys probably will seek to review the unaired material to build their defense and explore whether the filmmakers presented any information in a misleading way or omitted favorable information about their client, Goldman said.

Close watchers of the documentary have already raised questions about whether Jarecki misrepresented for dramatic effect the timing of the climactic interview in which he confronts Durst with the letter.

In the documentary, Jarecki appears to persuade a reluctant Durst to sit for the interview by leveraging the possibility of sharing footage he shot of Durst in 2013 that Durst wanted to use in a legal proceeding. However, Jarecki and producer Marc Smerling said in interviews that the final confrontation with Durst took place in 2012. Jarecki also gave reporters differing answers to the question of how much time passed before an editor belatedly discovered Durst’s bathroom comments.

Goldman cited Michael Jackson’s 2005 criminal trial in Santa Barbara, Calif., on child molestation charges, in which defense attorneys used outtakes of British TV interviewer Martin Bashir’s documentary to make the case that Jackson had been unfairly portrayed as a pedophile.

That documentary, Goldman recalled, “included fragments of any sentence that made him sound guilty.”

The late pop singer’s defense attorneys closed their case by playing outtakes from the documentary that they believed showed Jackson in a different light.

If Jarecki and HBO executives refuse to hand over unaired footage from The Jinx, Goldman said, material that did air in the documentary could be excluded from the trial as well, including the bathroom comments. A judge, he said, is unlikely to allow prosecutors to present the documentary without also giving defense attorneys the opportunity to evaluate the context in which the statement was made.

But he and Arenella said Durst and his lawyers would be on weak legal ground trying to argue that a jury should not hear the bathroom mutterings because they were made in private. Arenella said a judge would probably rule that Durst had no expectation of privacy because he had signed a legal waiver allowing the filmmakers to use his comments.

“I think it’s very likely that it’ll end up before a jury,” Arenella said.
___

Staff writers Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Richard Winton and Kate Mather contributed to this report.

Robert Durst, a wealthy New York real estate heir, has been arrested and charged with the murder of his friend Susan Berman. The crime was allegedly commited by Durst inside this Beverly Hills home in 2000. (Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

Robert Durst Murder Case Complicated By HBO’s Big Role

Robert Durst Murder Case Complicated By HBO’s Big Role

By Richard Winton, Shelby Grad, and Meredith Blake, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

LOS ANGELES — How do you prosecute a cold-case murder when key evidence comes from a major cable television network?

That’s the question Los Angeles prosecutors will have to answer as they bring Robert Durst to trial in the 2000 slaying of writer Susan Berman.

Durst has been a focus of investigators from the very beginning. In the months after the slaying, police officials said they wanted to interview Durst. Four years ago, detectives said Durst remained at the center of the case.

But it wasn’t until HBO began broadcasting its documentary series about Durst, The Jinx, when the interest really began to build. The documentary uncovered key pieces of evidence likely to play a big role in the prosecution:

The similarities between an envelope from a 1999 letter Durst sent to Berman, a crime writer, and an anonymous note sent to Beverly Hills police at the time of the December 2000 killing alerting them they would find “a cadaver” in Berman’s house. Both were written in distinctive block handwriting. And in both the writer made the same mistake, misspelling the word “Beverley.”

Durst is off-camera, caught on microphone muttering to himself, “Killed them all, of course.”

It’s clear from the documentary that the filmmakers debated what to share with authorities and when.

After the second “Beverley” was found, they discussed on camera whether police already had it in their files.

“Is there any there any chance this letter is already in the cops’ files?” one says.

“No chance, no chance,” another member of the team replies.

The film then shows them putting the letter in a safe deposit box.

“Nobody is going to know we have this document,” one of the filmmakers says. “So what about we interview Bob, we bring it up, we have it on film and now we have something the LAPD really is going to want.”

He says this strategy would get Durst’s reaction without “800 levels of discovery.”

Another big question is when the filmmakers obtained the so-called “confession” from Durst and when police learned about it. The New York Times reported that the filmmakers “found” the incriminating audio two years after the interview was conducted. The paper also said the filmmaker agonized over when to bring in authorities, adding “they began speaking to Los Angeles investigators in early 2013.”

Prosecutors and police have said little about the arrest, so it’s hard to know how much evidence they collected independent of the HBO series.

In an interview with The Times before the series was broadcast, the director, Andrew Jarecki, said his views of Durst’s guilt or innocence evolved during the making of the film.

“My opinions didn’t get formed until pretty late in the game. That’s something you’ll see, my evolution personally,” he said. “I kind of want the audience to get there on their own. At the end, they may agree with us, they may not, but they’re not going to be scratching their heads.”

He also described how Durst came to join the project:

“I got together with Bob and his lawyer for the first time at the Lambs Club (in Manhattan) for breakfast. The lawyer says, ‘Bob, I think this is a terrible idea, but since you’ve told me that you’re going to do it, all I can do is give you a list of restrictions that I think you should put on the project.’ Bob interrupts him: ‘I don’t care if he puts it on a billboard on Times Square, let him do what he wants.'”

The Berman killing has been a 15-year murder mystery.

On Christmas Eve 2000, Berman’s body, with a single gunshot wound to the head, was found by police in her small home. She lived alone, and police were alerted only after neighbors spotted one of her dogs running loose and her door open. At the time, police said they believed she may have been killed a few days earlier, that nothing appeared to be missing from her home and that the assailant entered without signs of a struggle.

At the time of her death, authorities in New York were trying to talk to the L.A. writer about the disappearance of Durst’s wife.

In 1982, Kathleen Durst vanished shortly after she began talking about her desire to get a divorce from her husband. She had been fighting with her husband the night she disappeared, according to a good friend, who said Durst was worried about what her husband might do to her.

Berman acted as an “informal spokesman” for Durst, calling to give his side of the story to media outlets and people who suspected that he had a role in his wife’s disappearance. Durst and Berman went to school together at UCLA.

Less than a year after Berman died, garbage bags with dismembered body parts of Durst’s neighbor were found floating in the water off Galveston. A receipt in one of bags and a bloody trail leading to his apartment led to Durst being charged with murder.

Durst quickly posted bail and went on the lam. He was arrested soon after in a Pennsylvania grocery store, where police said he was caught shoplifting a chicken sandwich and a Band-Aid, despite having $500 with him. Durst was returned to Texas, where he admitted to shooting and dismembering Morris Black, but claimed he inadvertently shot Black while struggling to wrestle a gun away from the man.

The 2003 trial was a spectacle in which his attorneys argued that after the killing a previously undiagnosed mental condition had propelled Durst into a traumatized state similar to an out-of-body experience. The trial was capped by four days of testimony by Durst in which he claimed he had no memory of cutting up Black’s body.

(c)2015 Los Angeles Times, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Photo courtesy of HBO