NEWSPRISONER REENTRY

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.

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.

Efforts to improve opportunities for formerly incarcerated men and women fell short last year in Nebraska. But one lawmaker is not giving up -- and activists shouldn't either.

“The public is best protected when criminal offenders or ex-convicts are given the opportunity to secure public employment," says a new bill from Nebraska state Senator Brenda Council. The legislation says "that barriers to such employment should be removed to make rehabilitation feasible.” LB 189, the latest version of Council's "Ban the Box" bill -- referring to the box on a job application one's supposed to check if they've been convicted of a crime -- would give offenders a slightly better chance of getting a job and consequently a better chance of staying out of prison.

Introduced last week, the Criminal Offender Employment Act is Council’s second attempt at assisting criminal offenders in walking a law abiding path. Last year, I reported on the first proposed bill and over 100 Change.org members signed a petition in support. Unfortunately, that legislation was left to die last session. But this year Council is trying again, and with growing national support and some better media coverage, there's a good chance we can help her gain the votes she needs from her fellow Nebraska legislators.

The legislation as written would only apply to public employment and not the private sector. In this regard it’s fairly limited, though it is a step in the right direction. Under the proposed law, public employers would not be able to ask about criminal history on their application, though they would be allowed to discuss it later in the employment screening process. It would also bar employers from not hiring someone solely based on a criminal conviction -- unless it was a crime of “moral turpitude."

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."

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.

In his 20 years of work within prisons, Stephen Hartnett has learned that if we really want to know how to deal with crime, we need to start listening to prisoners. When we do, he says, “we find that they have stories to tell, and from these stories we can learn all we need to know about fighting crime and poverty.”

Hartnett, who is Chair of the University of Colorado Denver Communications Department and founding member of the Prison Communication, Arts, Research, and Education network (P-CARE), provides those behind bars with opportunities to tell their stories by facilitating writing workshops. He calls his work “community empowerment through the arts,” because by sharing their stories, incarcerated people can “engage with their communities like never before.”

For the last three years, Hartnett has been bringing students from his UC Denver Communications classes into the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility (DWCF), where they provide tutoring support to incarcerated learners. For the students, just as for the prisoners, this experience is always life changing.

According to Hartnett, virtually all of the women his team works with at DWCF have something in common – they “never had a shot at the American Dream.” They come from broken homes and have survived some form of abuse. Though they have a variety of backgrounds -- African American, Chicano, Latino, American Indian and White -- they all come from poverty, and all have experienced what it feels like to exist in the margins of American society. But Hartnett and his team are committed to empowering students to explore their own voices, and in doing so creating bridges between these women and the communities to which they will some day return.

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.

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?)

When Jerry Brown takes office January 3 as California's new governor, he'll be inheriting a state in complete disarray. And one of the more pressing puzzles Arnold Schwarzenegger will leave on Brown's desk is the state's overcrowded prison system and the revolving door of incarceration, parole and employment.

California has seen its prison population grow by more than 500 percent over the last three drug-war decades and eight million people in the state have criminal records. Next week, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a closely watched case that will determine whether prisoners' constitutional rights have been violated by overcrowded facilities. California could be required to shrink its prison population by as many as 40,000 people.

Regardless of the outcome in Schwarzenegger v. Plata next week, California -- like most states -- is staring down a stagnant economy and a towering unemployment rate. One way to climb out of this recession is to break the bind between poverty and crime and to stop the revolving door of prison. A new report from Berkeley Law School's Center for Criminal Justice outlines important steps the state can take to improve the path to gainful employment for people with criminal records.

Rina Palta and the rockstars at KALW public radio have been delivering important reporting on the California prison crisis over the last few years; two recent must-reads on jobs after prison are here and here.

I'm sure the governor-elect is just taking it easy over this holiday season, lounging in the pool and catching up on episodes of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (his constituents, after all). Email him a copy of this report -- he could probably use a good read while he's chilling over the holidays and these words might just sink in before he starts the real work in January.

(This is the first post in what will be an ongoing series examining the people and organizations working to provide alternatives to incarceration and opportunities for those behind bars. Please welcome Wendy Jason to the Change.org team!)

Doh-Boy is over a foot taller than I am and easily 150 pounds heavier. Intricate tattoos peek out from beneath his bright orange jail skivvies, the most visible of which is a bar of music that embraces the honey-colored flesh of his massive neck.

Upon meeting Doh-Boy for the first time, I could have easily been intimidated by his physical stature, not to mention the fact that he, like the 12 other men in the creative writing group, was an inmate in a high-felony pod at Albuquerque’s county jail. But there is something in Doh-Boy’s eyes -– a gentle sparkle -– that immediately provides a sense of comfort and safety.

Doh-Boy, like many others in this jail, is an artist. Songwriting is an outlet for his fear and pain; he has no idea when he will next be in front of a judge, let alone when he will get to kiss his baby goodnight or help put food on his fiancé’s table.