NEWSPRISON CONDITIONS

Imagine living in a prison with clogged toilets that overflow. Or taking a shower with your feet in stagnant water that won't drain. Then imagine that you started a petition on Change.org to change those conditions and over 10,000 people signed on in support. But when you asked prison officials to meet and discuss these issues with you, they refused.

It's hard to believe but officials at the California Division of Juvenile Justice are refusing to allow just two young people currently housed at their Ventura, CA facility to attend a meeting with DJJ officials and representatives from the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. Lino Silva is one of the youths who is not being allowed to attend this meeting.

Lino started a petition that now has more than 10,000 signatures and asks the Division of Juvenile Justice to address the Ventura facility’s broken toilets, stagnant water, sewage, and exposure to chemical agents. So what was the DJJ's response?

Blanca Gonzalez's son spent years at California's Kern Valley State Prison, where she says he was sickened by the foul water he was forced to drink – water that the state knows is contaminated with arsenic, a carcinogen that can cause serious skin damage and circulatory system problems. And she wanted to do something about it.

But where to start? For years California officials have been promising to fix the facility's water problem – promising to provide its more than 5,000 inhabitants water that meets the standards of the EPA and World Health Organization. And for years they have failed to deliver, extending and then extending again their self-imposed deadlines for when they “anticipate” resolving the issue; indeed, just this year the supposed deadline for installing water treatment equipment has been extended from October 2011 to February 2012 – and then again to August 2012.

After reading an article last fall about Kern Valley State Prison's dirty water, Gonzalez contacted your humble criminal justice editor here at Change.org, asking that I write more about the problem. And for weeks … well, I didn't – hey, I'm a busy guy, alright? But after a few more friendly reminders, her persistence paid off. And now her campaign is drawing the attention of California's top prison officials.

California officials first learned that the water at Kern Valley State Prison was contaminated with arsenic – twice the level considered safe by the World Health Organization – soon after the facility opened in 2005. Now one of the top prison officials in the state tells Change.org the problem will be fixed.

The problem with that, though? We've heard it before.

In December 2008, the prison's warden at the time, Anthony Hedgpeth, issued a memo pledging action to fix the contaminated water problem. “We anticipate resolving the problem by June 2009,” the memo stated, noting that exposure to arsenic can cause skin damage and circulatory system problems, as well as increase the risk one will develop cancer. Indeed, according to the EPA, long-term arsenic exposure can cause “cancer of the bladder, lungs, skin, kidneys, nasal passages, liver and prostate.”

Arsenic contamination is a particular population when dealing with a captive population – like the more than 5,000 men incarcerated at Kern Valley State Prison – that can't switch to bottled water or other alternative sources of water.

But despite the pledge to address the issue ... nothing happened.

For more than five years, prisoners at Kern Valley State Prison have been forced to drink water that the state of California knows is laced with arsenic, a known carcinogen. And for more than five years, officials have chosen not to do anything about it.

They have, however, talked about how they “anticipate” doing something about it.

In an April 2008 memo to incarcerated men and employees at the facility, located in Delano, California, then-warden Anthony Hedgpeth noting that the prison's drinking water contained roughly twice the level of arsenic permitted by the EPA. “This is not an emergency,” the memo stated, even as it proceeded to note that drinking the water over an extended period – like, say, a prisoner with no other options – may cause “skin damage or circulatory system problems,” in addition to causing cancer.

The water at Kern Valley State Prison contains twice the federally accepted level of arsenic, a known carcinogen. But the 5,000 men imprisoned at the “state-of-the-art” Central California facility have no choice: they have to drink it.

And it's not as if prison officials just learned about the issue last week. In fact, tests on the water discovered the problem soon after the prison opened in 2005. The powers that be have just chosen to do nothing about it.

Not that there haven’t been promises. In a 2008 memo informing both incarcererated men and prison employees of the problem, then-warden Anthony Hedgpeth said that “[w]e anticipate resolving the problem by June 2009.” Notice that ambiguous phrasing --“anticipate resolving” -- instead of a simple declarative sentence like, say, “we will resolve the problem.”

Tellingly, the same memo declares: “This is not an emergency,” never mind the fact that arsenic is known to damage the circulatory system and to cause “cancer of the bladder, lungs, skin, kidneys, nasal passages, liver and prostate,” according to the EPA. And promises aside, nothing has been done to address the problem of the prison poisoning its prisoners. In the meantime, prison officials have pressed for a massive expansion of Kern Valley State Prison, at an annual cost to taxpayers of $86 million.

Priorities.

A report from Hawai'i's state auditor recently turned up some disturbing news: prisoners in the state are regularly held past the end of their sentences.

Unfortunately, this is nothing new in Hawai'i; the state paid more than half a million dollars in 2002 to 180 prisoners who had been held too long. But it's disappointing to see the practice continuing. A new lawsuit alleges that nine more prisoners were held past their sentence completions and -- even more troubling -- the state auditor's report examined 985 prisoner records at Hawai'i's Halawa prison and found 280 prisoners whose release date had passed. Even one day over a sentence is too long.

Hawai'i has had a prison overcrowding problem for years, perhaps in part because the state's facilities are full of non-violent offenders who shouldn't be there. Because the state doesn't have enough cells to house all of its prisoners, it has been sending thousands of them to private facilities on the mainland. About 35 percent of the state's prisoners are housed on the mainland -- most at an Arizona facility run by our old friend, the Corrections Corporation of America.

The painful budget cuts on the horizon in California could have an upside for criminal justice reformers.

When new California Governor Jerry Brown announced $12.5 billion in proposed state funding cuts last week, he included a call to close the state's juvenile prison system by 2014. Community based alternatives to incarceration have been shown to reduce crime and long-term recidivism (in Missouri, for example), and Brown's proposal would move California in that direction. This is progressive leadership, and Brown deserves congratulations for raising the dialogue on juvenile justice alternatives.

But the deal is far from done. The state legislature holds the keys to the budget, and the Ella Baker Center launched a petition on Change.org calling on state lawmakers to keep this critical cut in the final budget. The Baker Center has advocated for this reform for seven years, and wisely points out in this blog post that Brown's announcement "is not merely a victory of activists and politicians. The real champions are the mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts and uncles that would not give up on their children or our state."

Brown's proposed budget, however, does not mess with another costly, wasteful pillar of the state's justice system: the death penalty. The ACLU of Northern California is calling on Brown to raise the abolition of the death penalty to his budget plans, potentially saving taxpayers more than $125 million per year (plus $400 million on a ridiculous proposed new death row). Sign the ACLU's petition here.

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.

Betsie Gallardo is just 24 years old and she's dying of cancer. But thanks to the efforts of activists across the country, she will be spending her final days surrounded by her family in Indiana, rather than by prison guards in a Florida jail cell.

Betsie was imprisoned by the state of Florida for assaulting a cop with a deadly weapon – the weapon being her saliva. After a 2009 car accident, Betsie – a Haitian immigrant born with HIV – spat at a police officer, which was enough to get her a five – count 'em – five year prison sentence, despite the fact that HIV cannot be transmitted by spitting on someone. That's not to say it's not rude, but it sure as hell isn't deadly.

Soon after being imprisoned, Betsie was diagnosed with terminal cancer. To make matters worse, prison officials in Florida – not exactly renowned for their empathy toward the incarcerated – began obstructing Betsie's visitations with her family. Not only were they providing her substandard medical care, denying her the IV nutrients she needed just to subsist, but they were working to ensure she died alone.

But then the word got out about her treatment. After Betsie's adoptive mother, Jessica Bussert, reached out to the good folks at the Bilerico Project, activists across the country, including just under 700 Change.org members, began bombarding prison officials and Florida lawmakers with demands that Betsie be granted medical clemency so she may spend her final days with her loved ones. And they succeeded.

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."