NEWSPRISON OVERCROWDING

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?

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."

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.

(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.

Federal education stimulus dollars are flowing into Alabama -- but the biggest winner isn't a school or college. It's the prison system.

Alabama this year diverted $118 million in federal dollars orignally intended for education to instead pay for correctional officers' salaries and benefits, prisoner health care and other corrections costs. I'm all for providing a safe, humane environment in prison, and Alabama certainly needs help in this arena -- the state has the country's most crowded prisons and spends the least per inmate. But pouring cash into a crowded prison system only perpetuates the cycle of incarceration. Alabama needs innovation to break free of the budget sinkhole of prison.

Alabama judges took a big step forward when they got together earlier this year to discuss how they can lead on promoting alternatives to incarceration in the state. But apparently politicians still aren't getting the message, as they continue sinking millions of dollars into prisons --stealing the funds from poor, helpless little kindergartners. Won't somebody please think about the children?

Please join me in urging incoming Alabama Governor Robert Bently to shift the state's direction on prison spending, exploring innovations that will shrink prison budgets and populations while reducing crime and improving the state's economy.

(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.)

The New Orleans City Council will consider a measure this week to avoid arrests for thousands of low-level crimes, including marijuana possession and prostitution. The city has been making solid strides toward reforming its criminal justice system, and this proposal would help police focus on more serious crime by giving minor, non-violent offenders a summons to appear in court, rather than formally arresting them.

Please join me in calling on New Orleans leaders to pass this measure and to refrain from unnecessarily expanding the city's jail.

A victims advocate told WDSU-TV that the city's move was tantamount to the "decriminalization" of certain offenses and would harm the city's quality of life. But in fact, this is more like "de-arrest-ification." The penalties will be the same if the suspect is convicted, but these crimes will no longer carry the de facto punishment of a night in jail (and the accompanying stigma), a missed day of work and time away from one's family, all for being merely suspected of a crime. We need to move away as a culture from the perception that harsh treatment is the only way to stop crime.

New Orleans is the world's most incarcerated city and Elizabeth wrote in this space last week about competing proposals to build a new city jail. More than 100 Change.org members have already urged the city council to build a smaller jail -- switching from arrests to summonses will help the city use fewer jail cells to achieve justice.

Most Oklahomans believe the state places entirely too many non-violent offenders behind bars. And the figures bear them out, with Oklahoma imprisoning more people per capita than all but two other states in the country, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, with most first-time felons sent to prison for simple drug offenses.

The combination of an all-too-lucrative prison industry and a gang of politicians eager to demagogue their way into public office with “tough-on-crime” platforms has proved particularly harmful to women in the state -- so much so that Oklahoma now leads the nation in placing women behind bars. And with the U.S. leading the world with its more than two million prisoners, that means the state has the ignoble distinction of topping the globe in terms of female incarceration.

A new non-profit journalism outfit with an eye toward the public interest hopes to change that with an investigative series probing how Oklahoma came to imprison so many women -- and what that means for the children they leave behind. Called Oklahoma Watch, the group launched the series -- its first -- on Sunday, with its work appearing on public radio stations and in newspapers across the state.

And journalists involved in the new project have their work cut out for them.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard heated arguments yesterday on whether a special federal court overreached when it ordered the state of California to reduce its prison population by 40,000 -- and all accounts point to a court divided along the usual lines.

The court's conservative justices questioned the connection lower courts made between prisons packed at 195 percent of capacity and the failure to deliver medical and mental health care. Meanwhile, the liberal justices called the state's bluff in asking for more time.

California attorney Carter Phillips had only just begun when he called the lower court order "premature." Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg quickly reminded him that this issue has been pending for 20 years, SCOTUSblog reports. “How much longer do we have to wait? Another 20 years?” she demanded. Ginsburg and her fellow bleeding heart criminal-lovers on the bench went on to explore compromises (give the state more time to fix the problem? allowing 145 percent capacity rather than the court-ordered 137.5 percent?)

The ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center filed a class action lawsuit in federal court this week alleging that GEO Group, the nation's second-largest private prison operator, was subjecting young prisoners to "barbaric, unconstitutional conditions" at a Mississippi facility.

The lawsuit presents a laundry list of abuse at the 1,400-bed Walnut Grove Correctional Facility in north Mississippi. And it goes straight after GEO for allowing assaults and denying medical care and education while racking up healthy profits at the prison. The facility was built with $41 million in taxpayer dollars, while GEO has now earned more than $100 million in profit from its management, the suit estimates. The 1,400 boys and young men held there were all sentenced as adults, but two-thirds of them were convicted of non-violent crimes.