NEWSCRIME PREVENTION

Cell phones and prisoners keep popping up in the news these days. Corrections officials paint cell phones as a crisis, saying prisoners are using them to orchestrate crimes, to smuggle drugs and weapons into prison and -- gasp! -- to update Facebook profiles.

The real reason prisoners want cell phones, however, is to talk to their families. A former Florida prisoner recently told the Broward New Times that phones are being used far more often to keep in touch with loved ones than to commit crimes. "The vast majority were used by inmates desperate to stay in touch with, and hold on to, their wives and children," the long-serving prisoner, who didn't give his name, told a reporter.

What's driving prisoners to use cell phones rather than prison phones? The cost. As you may know, states and phone companies conspire to pull hefty profits from poor families and prisoners who just want to stay in touch. At last count, only six states pass up commissions from phone companies. As the ACLU pointed out in a blog post this summer, the phone companies and corrections departments win in these deals, while everyone else loses. "Prisoners and their families suffer financial hardship or fall out of touch, and when sentences expire, prisons release a more alienated and less rehabilitated group of prisoners into society."

Scott Henson recently suggested at Grits for Breakfast that prisons allow restricted, monitored access to smartphones, rather than trying -- and failing -- to restrict them. "One of the key indicators regarding successful reentry is whether the offender retained ties with friends and family while on the inside who can help them succeed
when they get out," Henson said an in intereview. "Facilitating communication with those people while inside reduces recidivism and therefore future crime."

Now in its 16^th season, Shakespeare Behind Bars (SBB) has produced 16 plays within the confines of Kentucky’s Luther Luckett Correctional Complex. William Shakespeare, says SBB Founder and Producing Director Curt Tofteland, was “all about this journey of what it means to be human.”

Shakespeare never shied away from expressing every dimension of human emotion through his stories. Though there isn’t much space or tolerance for the expression of feelings other than anger in prison, SBB actors get the rare opportunity to fully embody raw emotion by taking on the roles of Shakespeare’s characters. Quickly the line between acting and reality begins to blur.

Tofteland sees the work of SBB as being “fundamentally about transformation and change of the human heart, soul and psyche.” Like all of us, incarcerated folks have stories to tell – ones of happiness, suffering and survival. For most of those behind bars, these stories remain locked away, suffocated by silence. “The moment an individual enters the correctional system they begin the journey as the voiceless other,” laments Tofteland.

There are over two million people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails. Most people never think about these men and women. Some of us do, often considering their plights and advocating for a more humane and equitable criminal justice system. But even the most impassioned activists often forget the other lives involved in prisoners' stories -- that the effects of incarceration reach far beyond the razor wire. In fact, some of those most impacted are the children who wait for the return of their imprisoned parent. According to a study by The Sentencing Project, in 2007 more than 1.7 million children in the U.S. had a parent in prison or jail.

Judy Dworin and a team of teaching artists at the Hartford, CT-based Judy Dworin Performance Project, Inc. (JDPP) are utilizing the arts to provide members of this oft-ignored group with a forum for self-expression, trust-building and restored family connection. While providing collaborative arts residencies for women incarcerated at York Correctional Institution (YCI), Dworin began to understand how traumatic the forced separation of parent and child is for all involved.

Wanting to create a space for incarcerated parents and their children to explore their feelings and nurture their relationships, JDPP collaborated with Families in Crisis (FIC) and the Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy at Central CT State University (IMRP) to lead a pilot project consisting of a series of eight simultaneous workshops in which mothers at YCI and their children in Hartford communicated through dance, song, poetry and visual arts.

When a violent crime is committed with a gun in the U.S., there's a good chance that the weapon came from one of 10 states with weak gun control laws.

A new report from a coalition of big-city mayors crunches data on guns used in crime and finds that these 10 states supplied the guns used in 49 percent of out-of-state crimes, controlled for population. The states are Mississippi, West Virginia, Kentucky, Alaska, Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia, Indiana, Nevada and Georgia -- and they have, on average, just one or two of the 10 laws used by other states to deter gun trafficking.

It’s a groundbreaking report on behalf of a cause that some mayors -- most notably, New York City's Michael Bloomberg -- have pushed for years: stricter gun laws By examining and digesting this previously secret government data, the mayors have landed a blow in the gun-reform movement by providing evidence that loose gun laws lead to crime.

The group launched an interactive mapping feature to allow us to slice the data for our state and region -- I urge you to check out your state at www.tracetheguns.org. (Read more after the jump.)

How would you define a rape? Perhaps as any forcible sexual act involving penetration? Well, the FBI thinks that's a little too broad. Instead, they define rape as "the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will." Historically this has only applied to sexual intercourse in the most basic respect -- not oral, anal, or vaginal rape by an object. This also means that any rape against a male doesn't count for purposes of FBI record keeping.

Why does the FBI’s definition matter? It matters for several reasons, including the fact that this limited definition is standing in the way of an accurate measure of rapes across the country and even, perhaps, affecting how police agencies handle reports of rape by victims in their communities.

This week the Senate crime and drugs subcommittee met with several women's rights organizations, victims’ advocate groups and other interested parties to discuss the problems of under reported rapes. At issue was recent stories of major police agencies downplaying rape rates in their cities and even sweeping cases under the rug. The FBI's definition of "forcible rape" was also discussed, as their Uniform Crime Report has perhaps erroneously indicated a dramatically falling trend in rapes, with numbers declining over 6 percent since 2005.

While the FBI recognizes other acts as a form of sexual assault, rape is the only crime which they classify as a Part I offense in the Uniform Crime Report, an annually published record of crime rates across the country.

Law enforcement agencies nationwide submit data to the FBI for inclusion in the UCR. Despite this report being completely voluntary, there is said to be a 93 percent participation rate. And though there are always shortcomings and margins of error with any system designed to track crime, the UCR is considered the go-to report when politicians, reporters or other officials need to cite crime statistics. Because of this, it would be in the self serving interest of some agencies to show lower crime rates, to reflect that their crime control techniques are really working when they really aren't.

But the police wouldn’t do that -- would they?

Over the past few years, several metropolitan police forces have come under s

A must-watch new video from Reason.tv checks in with UCLA Professor Mark Kleiman, who shares in a short seven minutes his philosophy on preventing crime through a system that guarantees short, consistent sentences for crimes. I hope policymakers are listening.

Kleiman is one of the leading thinkers on criminal justice reform in America today, and his ideas are worth a look. I don’t agree with everything he says, but his plan to reduce the American prison population significantly through short, sure sentences is right on target. Severe sentences are the enemy of swift sentences, he says, because we use so many resources to hand down a 25-year sentence, when a one-year sentence could have the same impact.

“It’s a little strange that the people who are loudest about opposing wasteful government spending haven’t noticed that 25-year sentences are wasteful government spending,” Kleiman says.

Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck has seen the future of policing, and it lies in predicting crime before it happens.

'Predictive policing' is suddenly popping up everywhere, with computer scientists exploring models that predict crime and departments like Beck's LAPD jockeying for federal grants to explore the potential of predicting the future.

The L.A. Times explored the controversial issue in a long piece on Saturday. And while there's plenty to be concerned about with this trend, there's also a hope that it could lead to smarter law enforcement. Like many law enforcement tools and innovations -- it could be a huge benefit, if we use it right.

For at least 15 years, police have been mapping crime and crunching data using systems like CompStat, and this data-based policing quite likely played a role in the recent declines in violent crime. We know better where to deploy patrols and when, and therefore we prevent some crimes of opportunity. Predictive policing is the logical next step. Using computer models and data on previous crimes, physical environments and more, scientists say they'll be able to predict crimes, helping police anticipate criminal activity and prevent it.

I'm a big fan of using data to improve our criminal justice system, and law enforcement agencies are right to explore the possibilities here. But a few red flags pop up, too.

Crime-tracking and mapping software like CompStat has changed policing. So when will the data revolution reach our courts?

In an excellent New York Times op-ed, Amy Bach writes that while we use sophisticated statistics to assess schools and hospitals and set overall public policy, our courts are still stuck in the Stone Age. They operate as the legal equivalents of obsolete, wood-paneled vacuums — missing countless chances to learn from the successes and failures of other courts. And it doesn't need to be this way.

To change the system, Bach (author of Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court) proposes creating a "justice index" to measure local courts on issues like cost, recidivism, crime reduction and collateral consequences, including whether people lose their jobs or homes after contact with the criminal justice system.

It's a brilliant idea, and I hope courts and policy-makers are listening. Courts are meant to protect the public, and that means they should be helping to reduce crime and improving peoples' lives. Instead, we've come to expect that our court system exists as a dense bureaucracy riddled with inequalities and endless delays.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton issued a preliminary injunction against four sections of Arizona's controversial immigration law, SB 1070. This decision has been widely reported, but less widely understood.

So here's two things you might not have heard about the challenge Arizona's law is facing.

The first thing you need to understand is that the judge didn't invalidate the law in its entirety, she just ruled that four out of six provisions in the law were unlikely to succeed in the long run, so they shouldn't take effect. The four provisions she issued the injunction against are the controversial aspects of the law — the provisions that require police officers to check immigration status of everyone they arrest, make it a crime to lack immigration papers, make it illegal for an undocumented immigrant to solicit work, and allow police to arrest anyone they have probable cause to believe can be deported.

The sections that she upheld are pretty uncontroversial and deal with Arizona's efforts to stop human trafficking and the process of illegal, U.S.-bound immigration in the first place.

The second thing that's important to know — something that's been grossly under-reported — is why the judge came to the conclusions she did. They boil down to the fact that to the judge, it's more important to effectively fight terrorism than harass undocumented immigrants.