NEWSALTERNATIVES TO INCARCERATION

Patricia Spottedcrow, the 26 year-old mother of four who was convicted of selling $31 of marijuana to a police informant, has had her 12 year prison sentence reduced to eight years with four years of probation.

While the reduction in her sentence shows understanding, it is not justice and does not go far enough. As Spottedcrow's attorney, Josh Welch puts it, she shouldn't be in jail at all:

"Nobody understands why this woman is serving this long of a sentence for this type of crime. Look at other states; you can commit this same crime and it's not illegal. That's insane. She sold $30 of marijuana for gas money and food money for her family. It's stupid. It's wrong. But you don't go to prison for eight or 12 years for that. You shouldn't go to prison period."

Since 1990, University of Michigan students have been offered unique, transformative opportunities to learn and create side by side with incarcerated youth and adults. Through coursework that often leads to participation in the university-sponsored Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), undergraduates have collaborated with professors, alumni and community members to facilitate arts-based workshops in 24 prisons, six juvenile facilities and seven under-resourced high schools across the state.

Professor Buzz Alexander, founder of PCAP, had been teaching a class, English 319, about the intersections of theater and social change for six years when two lifers at the Florence Crane Women’s Facility asked to register for the course. He consented, and each week during that semester traveled to the facility with two students to meet with the incarcerated women. During these meetings, students and professor engaged in improvisational theater activities, analyzing the racial, class and power dynamics at play in the situations they confronted. They explored their shared space, including the similarities and striking differences in the contexts of their lives.

In an argument that’s been going back and forth for years now, one side in New Orleans fought for a smaller prison, something that would have the potential to change the city’s notoriety as a hub of incarceration. The other side, mainly led by the local sheriff, Marlin Gusman, held onto the jail-culture, requesting sometimes a larger prison and other times, to keep the old one open.

The argument was finally resolved last week when the New Orleans City Council voted to approve a new facility, one that’s only a fraction of the size of the crumbling leviathan that it's to replace.

At one point in recent history, Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) used to hold inmates at both the local and state level, contained one bed for every 65 Orleans’ residents. The current institution has 3,500 beds and has served to make the city not just the most incarcerated in the United States, but the entire world.

In the tough-on-crime days of the 1990s, Virginia took a pretty drastic step. Through a series of rule changes and quiet policy shifts, the state essentially eliminated parole. Now a coalition of grassroots activists is working to bring back a path to freedom for prisoners who have shown improvement and potential.

In 1989, The Washington Post reports, 42 percent of prisoners reviewed for parole in Virginia received it. After the reforms in the mid-1990s, that number dropped to just 2 percent. There is now very little incentive for an individual to work hard while in prison to improve him or herself -- there's simply no way to hasten one's return back to the free world. A bill before the state legislature aims to change that.

SB796 would provide avenues for Virginia prisoners to earn sentence credits ("good time") for participating in education and treatment programs. Prisoners could earn up to 4.5 days off their sentence for each month they serve -- so a prisoner could shave a year and a half off their sentence over 10 years. It's not exactly swinging the prison doors open or embracing alternatives to incarceration, but it's a huge step in the right direction, especially in a state without parole.

A coalition of activists organized by the group Thousand Kites has been working hard to raise awareness and support for the bill across the state -- join them by signing their petition urging Virginia lawmakers to enact this important reform. And watch video from a recent rally after the jump.

Kelley Williams-Bolar was sentenced last week to 10 days in jail -- after being originally sentenced to five years behind bars -- 80 hours of community service and three years of probation for falsifying residency records so that her two daughters could attend a school outside of their district.

We all seem to agree that the sentence handed to Williams-Bolar, who wanted only to ensure that her daughters were safe at school, is absurd and unjust. We are shocked and angry, as evidenced by the outpouring of support for a letter calling for her to be pardoned.

This case forces us to look closely at the deeply embedded structural inequality and institutionalized racism that exists within our public education and judicial systems. It also beckons us into dialogue about the effectiveness of a punitive, retributive philosophy of justice that deems it appropriate to “make an example out of” a mom who is doing whatever she can to guarantee a bright future for her kids.

It was bound to happen: a fiscally responsible recommendation that promotes more judicial discretion and less incarceration has been labeled “soft on crime” by the Association of Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys.

The proposed legislation stands to save the state of Indiana over $1 billion in the coming years by encouraging alternatives to incarceration that actually promote rehabilitation and lower recidivism. But in taking plays from a tired and unsuccessful playbook, county prosecutors in the state have voted to oppose the measure.

Proposed changes were first recommended in a state commissioned report from the Pew Center on the States and the Council of State Governments Justice Center. Soon after the report was released, I reported that Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) was supporting the recommended changes, which include more judicial discretion in the least serious of offenses, bolstering incarceration alternatives like mental health and drug treatment centers, and tightening the reins on high risk offenders under community supervision -- all aimed at reducing the prison population, preventing recidivism and saving bundles of taxpayer money.

But rather than objectively evaluating the proposed changes and their benefits to the state, prosecutors have spoken out in opposition, claiming the recommendations would put the people of Indiana at risk -- and using the term we’ve all grown to hate: “soft on crime." They must have missed the part of the report that stated 55 percent of new incarcerations in the state are for nonviolent thefts and low-level drug offenses. Maybe they also overlooked the part showing Indiana’s incarceration rate is about three times higher than other states in the region.

Those of you who've read the posts in my Beyond Incarceration series know that I'm a huge advocate for prison arts initiatives. Art has the power to change lives -- not just of those who are incarcerated, but of those entering prisons from the outside to share their passion for creative expression.

I've experienced this myself, having facilitated a creative writing group in a county jail, and I hope that my stories will inspire readers to get involved, either through volunteering their time with a prison arts organization or by speaking out to ensure that prison arts and education programs get the funding they need to survive. The book I review here is a testament to just how valuable these programs are -- to prisoners and to us all.

Judith Tannenbaum and Spoon Jackson come from vastly different backgrounds, and their day-to-day lives share few commonalities. They are an unlikely duo, it seems - folks who wouldn’t typically cross paths. But Spoon and Judith are connected by something that will forever keep them bound: the shared experience of a space that allowed them to be fully human and completely real. And they found this space in the most unlikely of places: San Quentin.

Spoon and Judith first met 25 years ago, when Judith, a shy and at times anxious Jewish woman, was asked to facilitate a poetry class in the prison through California’s now-defunct Arts-in-Corrections program. Spoon, a quiet, solitary African American man who had only recently learned to read beyond a sixth grade level, was one of her students. In By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives, Judith and Spoon weave a heartfelt story of art, friendship, meaning, and hope. Their memoir is not only a beautiful story of human possibility, but also a candid first-hand account of the shortcomings of both our criminal justice and education systems.

(Update: New Orleans has long been the incarceration capital of the U.S., imprisoning more people per capita than anywhere else in the country. But in a vote on February 3, the city council approved a new 1,400 bed jail that is less than half the size of the decaying facility it will be replacing, rejecting a proposal from the sheriff to build an even bigger jail after dozens of Change.org members and other activists urged them to consider alternatives to incarceration.)

New Orleans continues to make great strides toward a more focused -- and more efficient -- criminal justice system.

Last month, the city council voted to allow police officers to issue tickets -- rather than make arrests -- for low-level, non-violent crimes. This is a major shift for a city that has long lived a sort of double-life between the anything-goes vibe of the French Quarter to the quick arrests and tough sentences for crimes both minor and major.

As a report from the city's Metropolitan Crime Commission found in December, New Orleans police in recent years have arrested thousands of people over things like traffic tickets, minor warrants from other jurisdictions and other offenses not likely to ever make it to court. And while law enforcement and court resources are expended on the paperwork of these minor offenses, attention is distracted from major crime investigations. Although violent crime dropped in New Orleans in 2010, it could fall much further -- and these reforms will help make that happen.

Elizabeth and I have both written about these reforms, and more than 140 Change.org members have sent New Orleans' leaders a petition urging them to reconsider plans to expand the parish prison. Avoiding one-day jail stays for minor offenses could free up money from the jail expansion and from the red tape that follows every arrest. Those funds could instead be spent on crime prevention, alternatives to incarceration and law enforcement work on the cases that really matter. Add your name to the petition here.

The Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) was born in 1975 at Green Haven Prison in upstate New York. A group of prisoners concerned about increasing numbers of young offenders in the criminal justice system sought the support of local Quakers and began developing a program to teach youth about nonviolent conflict resolution. Together the volunteers and the prisoners created the first AVP workshop.

Since then, AVP has grown exponentially. Today, AVP workshops are held in prisons in 41 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands, as well as in more than 50 other nations around the world. Last year some 14,400 people participated in AVP workshops in correctional facilities, communities, and schools.

According to the AVP manual, AVP is a voluntary process of “seeking and sharing, and not of teaching.” Working to empower people to lead nonviolent lives through affirmation, respect, community building, cooperation and trust, AVP encourages every person's innate power to positively transform themselves and the world. This belief, termed “transforming power,” affirms that each of us can choose to respond to conflict in a positive, nonviolent way. This notion can be empowering to incarcerated people because it reminds them that they have the power to break the cycle of violence that landed them behind bars -- and reminds them that they deserve a life free from the pain of violence.

Texas has turned a few heads in recent years by becoming a leader in community corrections and alternatives to incarceration. The time has come to double down on these gains, however, and state prison officials are hesitating.

Texas saw its prison population drop by 1,257 from 2008 to 2009. Judges now have sentencing alternatives in their arsenal, and they're using them. The state legislature expanded community treatment and diversion programs in 2007, and the strategy has paid off. There's still a long way to go, of course, and like most criminal justice policies, the progress could evaporate in a second with a few bad moves or one heinous high-profile crime.

Once reforms succeed in keeping people in their community rather than prison and in offering alternative paths to productive lives, the next step is to shrink the prison behemoth that we've built over the last three decades. Fewer prisons means less money spent locking people up. That frees up money for schools (which are the best diversion from prison), for drug treatment, for parole officers and for pre-release education.

But there are signs that Texas prison officials (and legislators facing a grim budget picture) might not be willing to take the next logical step. Scott Henson pointed on Sunday at Grits for Breakfast to an unwise blanket declaration from Texas Board of Criminal Justice chairman Oliver Bell that the state won't be closing any prisons to deal with budget shortfalls. So Bell and friends plan to lay off corrections officers, freeze pay for others, cut prison programs and stall badly needed repairs but they won't close a single prison? They're leading the state back in the wrong direction.

Join me in calling on Texas Department of Criminal Justice Director Brad Livingston to consider closing prisons before he resorts to layoffs and program cuts. As the state makes great strides in preventing needless incarceration, it should also be willing to cut unnecessary facilities.