Author: Te-Ping Chen

New York is the “safest big city in America,” as Mayor Bloomberg would repeatedly have you know. So he must be feeling pretty gratified now that cops have finally been able to start going after those last low-grade perpetrators left in the mix: middle-school students.

Or something like that. This week, they decided to haul a 12-year-old girl in Queens out of her school in handcuffs and detain her. Why? Well, they had to rush the classroom because, you see, a girl named Alexa Gonzalez was…doodling in class.

Just some bizarre extension of the Broken Windows theory? Let one kid doodle, and before you know it, they’ll be rioting in the streets?

But hey, let’s be fair. It could’ve gotten ugly there. “I love my friends Abby and Faith,” the suspect had written on her desk, with a lime-green Magic Marker. And that was even before she added, “Lex was here, 2/1/10” — and drew a smiley face.

(more…)

In the same week that the U.K.’s David Cameron raised brows with his call to create floating prisons, looks like another politician has jumped the shark. This time, it’s California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, weighing in with an equally outlandish solution to California’s prison problems: outsource inmates to Mexico.

Quoth the Governator:

“[We’ll] pay them to build the prisons down in Mexico and then we have those undocumented immigrants be down there in a prison…”

Schwarzenegger predicts the move would save the state $1 billion, which in turn (he said) could be spent on higher education.

For a state that currently spends some $35,500 a year to incarcerate a prisoner — from a total $8 billion prison budget that outstrips higher-education spending altogether — one could see the appeal.

(more…)

“Vote Tory! More Prison Ships For All!”

It’s not the likeliest of election slogans, but that’s the message that the U.K.’s Conservative leader, David Cameron, is actually gunning for these days. Saddled with a prison overcrowding problem that rivals even the United States, the U.K. is now considering setting inmates out to sea.

It’s a measure that Cameron is advancing over a previous attempt to ease overcrowding by allowing certain non-violent offenders to be released from prison up to 18 days early. Prison ships, says Cameron, are a “timely and cost-effective” solution. (You know a debate on criminal justice has reached its bizarre apotheosis when a politician starts to call the prospect of building a giant barge, filling it up with guards and prisoners, and directing them to set sail on the ocean “cost-effective.”)

Fortunately, even some members of the U.K.’s right are dismissing Cameron’s plans as tinged with delusion. Cameron’s own Shadow Prisons Minister, Alan Duncan, has dubbed the prison ship proposal “repulsively simplistic.” The last U.K. prison boat was, after all, retired in 2005, after being rejected by the country’s prison inspector as being unfit for habitation, due to lack of fresh air and space for exercise.

Even the right-wing MP John Redwood has come out against Cameron’s proposal, saying that there should be fewer people in jail altogether. His argument? People “who commit crimes by taking money or property that does not belong to them do not deserve to be in jail and should pay compensation instead”.

The smarter option for Cameron might be to take a nice long sit and read through what his colleagues in Parliament have produced — a report, two years in the making, that focuses on strategies to shrink the prison population through alternative sentencing and reentry programs. For now, it’s a pretty low moment when, faced with the very real questions of justice and recidivism, the best public policy option a prominent politico can come up with is a floating jail.

Photo Credit: Ahmed Rabia

If you knew a young boy down the street had been raped, would you joke about it? If you knew your friend’s sister was being raped, would you help her?

What if you made both of those people wear prison jumpsuits — what about then?

That’s what a new campaign from JUST DETENTION International (JDI) wants to know. Long a cultural staple, prison rape jokes — never funny to begin with — start to look even more like an appalling vestige of the past when confronted with the real stats. Try this one on for size: the Justice Department’s January report says that over 12% of kids in juvenile prisons are sexually abused while in custody. In some facilities, like Maryland’s Backbone Mountain Youth Center, that figure vaults as high as 36%.

Human Rights Watch wrote a searing report on the subject of male rape in prison a number of years back, which is well worth a re-visit. Here’s one man’s account, excerpted below:

When I first came to prison, I had no idea what to expect. Certainly none of this. I’m a tall white male, who unfortunately has a small amount of feminine characteristics. And very shy. These characteristics have got me raped so many times I have no more feelings physically. I have been raped by up to 5 black men and two white men at a time. I’ve had knifes at my head and throat….

This is a man who was in prison for a D.U.I. offense (his third). HRW has more, including the case of Rodney Hulin, whose 17-year-old son hanged himself after being sodomized and repeatedly abused by other inmates, and his requests for protective custody denied.

By all means, civil liberties and human rights advocates should continue to keep the pressure up on Guantanamo, and in calling the White House out on its limp-noodle stance on investigating past torture and abuse. But it’s important not to forget, either, that greatest number of mass atrocities visited on prisoners by the American justice system happen right here in this country, on our soil.

Photo Credit: Just Detention International