By Dianne Frazee-Walker A 2008 traffic stop landed a Mexican immigrant woman a $490,000 settlement and a possible resident visa. The financial settlement is the outcome of a 5-year legal battle over Ms. Villegas’s civil rights being violated while she was detained for 6-days in a Nashville jail. Ms. Villegas’s nightmare began when authorities discovered
Maj. Michael Gruver is all too familiar with the desperate howls and chilling sounds of clinking on steel bars as he makes his routine strolls down the halls of solitary confinement. Gruver, a correctional employee of the William P. Clements unit in the state of Texas oversees some of the men housed in isolation. Gruver admits working with a large mental health population can be grueling. There are a lot of mentally ill inmates at the Clements Unit.
Clements officers are qualified to deal with mentally ill inmates after completing a mere two and a half weeks of training. The main objective of the training is for equipping correctional officers to protect mentally ill inmates from harming themselves and others.
The Texas Tribune, a non-profit news organization has produced evidence from an extensive investigation of 99 Texas prisons that Texas prisons with high occurrences of violent behavior are linked to mental illness.
The research conducted for the six-year period of 2006-2012 indicates the prisons that reported the most significant numbers of violent related episodes within the walls of their facilities have significantly larger mentally ill populations. Image courtesy vtdigger.org
These troubling statistics worry Michele Deitch, prison expert at the University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. Deitch is questioning the competency of correctional administration to effectively address mentally ill inmates and maintain security.
Deitch claims the situation is too dire to overlook.
According to Texas Department of Criminal Justice data, out of the five facilities with the highest concentration of violence-related reports, three of them are psychiatric units. The William P. Clements Unit which houses 1,800 mentally ill inmates out of an inmate population of 3,500 is one of the five facilities in the category of high-violence. The prison not only houses mentally ill inmates but it also has a wing dedicated to G-5 offenders, those considered the most dangerous. The prison has 448 cells for isolation; as of September 21, 2013, 435 of them were occupied.
In the past several weeks I have been researching the sex offender laws applicable to sex offenders living in Rhode Island and in South Carolina. While not surprising, the laws are anything but rational and they are certainly not empirically based. This goes across the board, not merely in Rhode Island or South Carolina but
By Cindy Scharr, Delaware County Daily Times CHESTER — District attorneys from Southeastern Pennsylvania on Wednesday urged state and federal lawmakers to increase funding for early education programs for at-risk children in an effort to boost high school graduation rates and reduce the prison population. “We can continue with the status quo, which is leading
By Bob Sloan
THE USE OF PRISON LABOR HAS BEEN increasing throughout the nation for the past fifteen-plus years. More and more factories are being built behind prison fences, with thousands of prisoner-made products sold to consumers annually – including apparel, processed foods, electronics, cabling, automotive and aircraft wiring, flooring, motorcycles, furniture, modular office systems … the list goes on.
Recently, a situation involving the use of prison labor in Nevada has drawn the attention of business owners and state officials alike after several steel companies discovered that one of their competitors had been using prison labor to cut costs and secure contracts.
The labor was provided by prisoners working in Silver State Industries – Nevada’s prison industry program – at the High Desert State Prison in Indian Springs. The prisoners were paid minimum wage while employees on the outside receive between $17 and $20 per hour for the same type of jobs.
With all the glitz and glimmer of Las Vegas, Nevada is still vulnerable to the current economic downturn and has an unemployment rate exceeding 10%. The discovery that prisoners were competing against local unemployed steel workers caused consternation among the local workforce. It also caught the attention of the state’s news media, which in turn attracted the attention of Nevada’s Board of State Prison Commissioners, which consists of Governor Brian Sandoval, Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto and Secretary of State Ross Miller.
The use of prison labor surfaced when Brian Connett, the chief executive of Silver State Industries, publicly announced the Nevada Department of Corrections (NDOC) was proud to be part of the world-class 550-foot-tall “SkyVue Observation Wheel” project being built in Las Vegas. The NDOC is involved in the SkyVue project because the project’s steel contractor, Alpine Steel LLC, is using prison labor to fabricate components for what is destined to be a new “land-mark” on the Las Vegas skyline.
The North Carolina Department of Correction works with UNC-Chapel Hill’s Friday Center for Continuing Education to provide a variety of tuition-free university courses and educational services to inmates. Only those incarcerated in the North Carolina prison system qualify for the Correctional Education Program.
Since 1974, 167 participants in Correctional Education’s on-campus study-release program have earned college degrees, including three doctorates and eighteen master of arts or master of science degrees. Many have gone on to thrive in professional jobs. The recidivism rate of study-release participants is only 7 percent. Image courtesy twitter.com
Incarcerated individuals must meet academic and sentence criteria for eligibility. The academic criteria are a GED score of at least 250, a WRAT reading grade level of at least 10.0, or prior college (or community college) academic credits. The sentence criteria exclude all Class A and Class B felons, as well as other adult offenders whose parole eligibility and discharge dates are more than 10 years in the future. The 18- to 25-year-old individuals funded by Federal Youth Offender Act grants must be within five years of parole eligibility or discharge date.
Qualified inmates should contact a Programs or Education staff member, preferably their case worker, at their correctional facility
Following a competitive bidding war between California state mental hospitals and state prisons, both seeking psychiatrists to treat their mentally ill patients, the prison system has emerged as the winner – largely due to a federal court order to improve prisoner mental health care. However, the term “winner” is misleading because it is both patients at understaffed state mental hospitals and California taxpayers who turned out to be the losers.
The federal district court in the long-running Coleman case [Coleman v. Schwarzenegger, U.S.D.C. (E.D. Cal.), Case No. CIV S-90-0520 LKK JFM P] found that a major cause of understaffing at California prison mental health facilities – understaffing that was tied to excessive and preventable prisoner deaths – was the inadequate wages offered under then-existent state pay schedules, which made it hard to attract qualified psychiatrists.
There was not a long line at the unemployment office in California for out-of-work psychiatrists, however, so the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) had to try to entice such gainfully employed professionals away from their comfortable city offices where clients were able to walk in, to stark prison environments where their patients were violent criminals. In December 2006 the district court ordered the state to boost the wages for prison psychiatrists, which jumped from a monthly base pay of $13,311 to $24,267 for chief psychiatrists – an 82% increase. State mental hospitals were not included in the order.
Consequently, the CDCR wound up offering prison psychiatrists higher wages than psychiatrists employed in state mental hospitals – causing the latter to jump ship from hospitals to prisons to partake of the increased salaries. Predictably, this had a devastating effect on staffing levels in state mental hospitals. In fact, at least two patient suicides were linked to the vastly increased patient-to-staff ratios at the hospitals; one of those deaths resulted in a lawsuit and a $975,000 settlement with the state.
NEW YORK, NY (USA) – 14 October 2013 – In observance of 2013 International Men’s Day which will be celebrated in over 70 nations throughout our global village under the theme, “Keeping Men And Boys Safe”, Raising Great Men™ has issued a “Call To Action To Women” to support the emotional and mental well-being of
The other day a Prison Law Blog reader presented a question. “My father is preparing to serve a sentence in a federal prison camp. He doesn’t have a lot of money or other resources. What will the Federal Bureau of Prisons provide him for his basic needs?” Obviously, a good question. In fact, it’s sad