Christopher Zoukis's Blog - Posts Tagged "doj"
Obama Orders Curbs on Solitary Confinement of Juveniles, Other Reforms
President Barack Obama on Jan. 25 announced he was ordering an end to most solitary confinement of juvenile prisoners in federal prisons and implementing other reforms recommended by a Department of Justice (DOJ) working group.
In a speech last July to the NAACP national convention, the president had announced he had asked Attorney General Loretta Lynch to lead a review of what he said was overuse of solitary confinement, and to develop strategies for reducing its use.
The newly-released DOJ report concludes corrections facilities may occasionally need to use solitary confinement for safety reasons, but adds the practice should be subject to reasonable limits and employed fairly and only rarely, as a last resort, not the default response. The Bureau of Prisons has reduced by almost 25% the number of federal prisoners in solitary, DOJ notes (using the term “restrictive housing”).
DOJ’s new restrictions on subjecting juvenile prisoners in the federal prison system to solitary confinement were taken from a section of a broader criminal law reform bill (S. 2123) introduced last October with bipartisan backing. Other reforms ordered by the president include: disallowing solitary confinement as a punishment for minor inmate misconduct; reducing maximum and minimum time limits on its use for more serious behavior; increasing the capacity of secure mental health facilities, so more inmates suffering from serious mental illness can be sent there for treatment; ordering wardens to draw up plans to maximize prisoners’ out-of-cell time; developing less restrictive housing units for prisoners nearing release; and publishing system-wide statistics on restrictive housing monthly on the Bureau of Prisons website.
To explain his actions, the president also contributed an op-ed article to the next day’s issue of the Washington Post. It began by recounting the story of Kalief Browder. Starting shortly before his 17th birthday, Browder spent three years in New York City’s Rikers Island jail, two of those years in solitary confinement. While a high school sophomore, he was arrested on charges of stealing a backpack – which he denied – but was never tried.
Unable to post bail, Browder languished at Rikers, where he claimed he was often mistreated by guards and inmates. In jail, he several times attempted suicide. After being released when prosecutors finally dropped charges, he returned home to the Bronx and began attending a community college, but within a few years, hanged himself at his mother’s apartment. The president noted solitary confinement “doesn’t make us safer” but stands as an “affront to our common humanity.”
The changes announced by the president are welcome and overdue, but will directly reach just a small part of the problem. Only a few dozen federal prison inmates are younger than 18; as of last December, the entire federal prison system had fewer than 10,000 inmates in restrictive housing. While the president notes American jails and prisons may hold 100,000 inmates in solitary confinement at any given time, most of them are in state or local facilities.
The real test will be whether the new White House action is followed by greater interest and action by states and localities, and whether DOJ and the Bureau of Prisons perform needed follow-up. Legislators and corrections officials in a growing number of areas have in recent years - whether prodded by litigation or by discovering its inhumaneness and ineffectiveness – begun to seek alternatives to solitary confinement. To help that effort, the latest DOJ report contains numerous examples of general principles and specific policy recommendations they would do well to consider.
Similarly, at the federal level, good intentions at the top are not a practical substitute for effective scrutiny of how well or poorly federal prison officials are carrying out the president’s new directives, and some parts of the plan will require new Congressional funding. Let’s all work for greater progress at both levels.
In a speech last July to the NAACP national convention, the president had announced he had asked Attorney General Loretta Lynch to lead a review of what he said was overuse of solitary confinement, and to develop strategies for reducing its use.
The newly-released DOJ report concludes corrections facilities may occasionally need to use solitary confinement for safety reasons, but adds the practice should be subject to reasonable limits and employed fairly and only rarely, as a last resort, not the default response. The Bureau of Prisons has reduced by almost 25% the number of federal prisoners in solitary, DOJ notes (using the term “restrictive housing”).
DOJ’s new restrictions on subjecting juvenile prisoners in the federal prison system to solitary confinement were taken from a section of a broader criminal law reform bill (S. 2123) introduced last October with bipartisan backing. Other reforms ordered by the president include: disallowing solitary confinement as a punishment for minor inmate misconduct; reducing maximum and minimum time limits on its use for more serious behavior; increasing the capacity of secure mental health facilities, so more inmates suffering from serious mental illness can be sent there for treatment; ordering wardens to draw up plans to maximize prisoners’ out-of-cell time; developing less restrictive housing units for prisoners nearing release; and publishing system-wide statistics on restrictive housing monthly on the Bureau of Prisons website.
To explain his actions, the president also contributed an op-ed article to the next day’s issue of the Washington Post. It began by recounting the story of Kalief Browder. Starting shortly before his 17th birthday, Browder spent three years in New York City’s Rikers Island jail, two of those years in solitary confinement. While a high school sophomore, he was arrested on charges of stealing a backpack – which he denied – but was never tried.
Unable to post bail, Browder languished at Rikers, where he claimed he was often mistreated by guards and inmates. In jail, he several times attempted suicide. After being released when prosecutors finally dropped charges, he returned home to the Bronx and began attending a community college, but within a few years, hanged himself at his mother’s apartment. The president noted solitary confinement “doesn’t make us safer” but stands as an “affront to our common humanity.”
The changes announced by the president are welcome and overdue, but will directly reach just a small part of the problem. Only a few dozen federal prison inmates are younger than 18; as of last December, the entire federal prison system had fewer than 10,000 inmates in restrictive housing. While the president notes American jails and prisons may hold 100,000 inmates in solitary confinement at any given time, most of them are in state or local facilities.
The real test will be whether the new White House action is followed by greater interest and action by states and localities, and whether DOJ and the Bureau of Prisons perform needed follow-up. Legislators and corrections officials in a growing number of areas have in recent years - whether prodded by litigation or by discovering its inhumaneness and ineffectiveness – begun to seek alternatives to solitary confinement. To help that effort, the latest DOJ report contains numerous examples of general principles and specific policy recommendations they would do well to consider.
Similarly, at the federal level, good intentions at the top are not a practical substitute for effective scrutiny of how well or poorly federal prison officials are carrying out the president’s new directives, and some parts of the plan will require new Congressional funding. Let’s all work for greater progress at both levels.
Top Justice Official Bans Term like ‘Felon’ and ‘Convict'
The Assistant Attorney General who runs the section of the Justice Department responsible for programs assisting the re-entry into society of released inmates recently took to the op-ed pages of the Washington Post to announce a policy change: her section will stop referring to the people it’s trying to help with terms such as “convicts,” “offenders,” or “felons.”
According to Karol Mason, who since 2013 has headed DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs, the change reflects the belief that such labels represent a psychological barrier to becoming reintegrated back into mainstream society.
In her May 4 op-ed, she voiced her view that labels attached to those who have done time in jails or prisons can “drain their sense of self-worth” and “perpetuate a cycle of crime” that prevents achieving the goals of re-entry. The changed terminology was not meant to condone past criminal behavior for which those responsible need to be held accountable, Mason wrote, but instead to make it easier for those who have repaid their debt to society by serving out their sentence to get on with rebuilding their lives.
While noting the American Bar Association’s criminal justice section has compiled a list of 46,000 obstacles to re-entry facing former inmates, Assistant Attorney General Mason says in talking with formerly incarcerated persons, she frequently hears there is no harsher punishment that being “permanently branded a ‘felon’ or ‘offender’.”
As a result, Mason said she had issued a directive telling employees to use care in how they refer to those trying to achieve re-entry, since the language used can influence how successful they are. So instead of terms like “felon,” “convict” or “offender,” more positive terms such as “individual who was incarcerated” or “person who committed a crime” would be used by the Office of Justice Programs in its speeches and written and electronic communications.
In her Washington Post article, Mason also expressed the hope that similar usages would be adopted by other agencies and groups. (Moore’s article was later amended to clarify that, despite her reference to having issued an “agency-wide policy,” the ordered change would only be mandatory in her Division, not in the entire Justice Department).
Not coincidentally, Moore’s article was published hard on the heels of National Re-entry Week, which the Justice Department declared for April 24-30, in the name of raising public awareness of the challenges faced by former prisoners.
Even before the change was announced, a similar controversy was bubbling in journalistic circles. Margaret Love, a former pardon attorney for DOJ and a veteran clemency lawyer, in a blog entry took to task the New York Times for using the term “felons” in the headline of its front-page story on Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe’s order ending disenfranchisement of ex-prisoners.
In response, Bill Keller, the former Times executive editor and the current editor-in-chief for the criminal justice-focused The Marshall Project conceded she probably had a point that casual use of such labels for such persons makes it more difficult for them “to assimilate and live within the law.”
According to Karol Mason, who since 2013 has headed DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs, the change reflects the belief that such labels represent a psychological barrier to becoming reintegrated back into mainstream society.
In her May 4 op-ed, she voiced her view that labels attached to those who have done time in jails or prisons can “drain their sense of self-worth” and “perpetuate a cycle of crime” that prevents achieving the goals of re-entry. The changed terminology was not meant to condone past criminal behavior for which those responsible need to be held accountable, Mason wrote, but instead to make it easier for those who have repaid their debt to society by serving out their sentence to get on with rebuilding their lives.
While noting the American Bar Association’s criminal justice section has compiled a list of 46,000 obstacles to re-entry facing former inmates, Assistant Attorney General Mason says in talking with formerly incarcerated persons, she frequently hears there is no harsher punishment that being “permanently branded a ‘felon’ or ‘offender’.”
As a result, Mason said she had issued a directive telling employees to use care in how they refer to those trying to achieve re-entry, since the language used can influence how successful they are. So instead of terms like “felon,” “convict” or “offender,” more positive terms such as “individual who was incarcerated” or “person who committed a crime” would be used by the Office of Justice Programs in its speeches and written and electronic communications.
In her Washington Post article, Mason also expressed the hope that similar usages would be adopted by other agencies and groups. (Moore’s article was later amended to clarify that, despite her reference to having issued an “agency-wide policy,” the ordered change would only be mandatory in her Division, not in the entire Justice Department).
Not coincidentally, Moore’s article was published hard on the heels of National Re-entry Week, which the Justice Department declared for April 24-30, in the name of raising public awareness of the challenges faced by former prisoners.
Even before the change was announced, a similar controversy was bubbling in journalistic circles. Margaret Love, a former pardon attorney for DOJ and a veteran clemency lawyer, in a blog entry took to task the New York Times for using the term “felons” in the headline of its front-page story on Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe’s order ending disenfranchisement of ex-prisoners.
In response, Bill Keller, the former Times executive editor and the current editor-in-chief for the criminal justice-focused The Marshall Project conceded she probably had a point that casual use of such labels for such persons makes it more difficult for them “to assimilate and live within the law.”
Justice Department Probing Orange County’s Use of Jailhouse Informants
On Dec. 15, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced its Office of Civil Rights has launched an investigation of the sheriff’s office and the district attorney’s office in Orange County, California, over repeated claims law enforcers there have systematically used jailhouse informants in ways that violate defendants’ rights.
Authorized by a 1994 crime law, the civil “pattern or practice” probe will look into two claims: first, that the agencies violated inmates’ right to counsel under the Sixth Amendment by using informants to get incriminating statements from inmates who have retained legal counsel, contrary to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Massiah v. United States, and second, that prosecutors didn’t disclose leniency promises made to the jailhouse informants, contrary to their constitutional duty to share with defense counsel any potentially exculpatory information, as spelled out in the Supreme Court’s landmark Brady v. Maryland decision.
The probe stems from a long-simmering political and legal controversy around the sheriff’s and prosecutor’s office practices on use of jailhouse informants, which critics have called unconstitutional or even fraudulent. For three years, an assistant public defender in the county has argued the agencies ran a secret informant system involving perjured testimony by both jailhouse informants and police officers who, he charged, lie “with shocking frequency” in presenting false testimony by informants and covering up their wrongdoing.
One judge, reviewing charges made about official handling of the county’s largest multiple murder case in 2014, found “significant” errors in the prosecutor’s handling of the case —calling it a “comedy of errors” — and ordered the entire county district attorney’s office removed from the case. The prosecutor’s office then responded by challenging the judge’s suitability to preside over scores of subsequent murder cases, and a state appeals court later upheld the prosecutor’s right under state law to do so.
In at least five cases, possible constitutional rights violations have led to reduced sentences — or in one case release on parole — for inmates convicted on murder charges. A year ago, numerous civil rights, civil liberties and church groups, backed by prominent law practitioners and academics, had petitioned Attorney General Loretta Lynch for a DOJ probe of the Orange County law enforcement agencies. The county bar association has also strenuously criticized the agencies.
In announcing the DOJ probe, the head of the department’s Civil Rights Division observed any systematic failure to safeguard an accused person’s right to counsel and a fair trial harms public faith “in the integrity of the justice system.” DOJ acknowledged the Orange County district attorney has agreed to cooperate with the investigation and provide full access to office records.
The Orange County situation also gave impetus to a new state law (AB 1909), passed by the legislature and signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown on Sept. 30, making it a felony for a prosecutor in California to knowingly falsify or withhold material evidence. California laws already made that a misdemeanor for the general public, and a felony for state law enforcement officers. Prosecutors can already face judge-imposed sanctions and be reported to the state bar, which can lead to disbarment. The new law, however, is the first in the nation specifically targeting prosecutors, who can now be sentenced to up to three years for the new offense in California.
Authorized by a 1994 crime law, the civil “pattern or practice” probe will look into two claims: first, that the agencies violated inmates’ right to counsel under the Sixth Amendment by using informants to get incriminating statements from inmates who have retained legal counsel, contrary to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Massiah v. United States, and second, that prosecutors didn’t disclose leniency promises made to the jailhouse informants, contrary to their constitutional duty to share with defense counsel any potentially exculpatory information, as spelled out in the Supreme Court’s landmark Brady v. Maryland decision.
The probe stems from a long-simmering political and legal controversy around the sheriff’s and prosecutor’s office practices on use of jailhouse informants, which critics have called unconstitutional or even fraudulent. For three years, an assistant public defender in the county has argued the agencies ran a secret informant system involving perjured testimony by both jailhouse informants and police officers who, he charged, lie “with shocking frequency” in presenting false testimony by informants and covering up their wrongdoing.
One judge, reviewing charges made about official handling of the county’s largest multiple murder case in 2014, found “significant” errors in the prosecutor’s handling of the case —calling it a “comedy of errors” — and ordered the entire county district attorney’s office removed from the case. The prosecutor’s office then responded by challenging the judge’s suitability to preside over scores of subsequent murder cases, and a state appeals court later upheld the prosecutor’s right under state law to do so.
In at least five cases, possible constitutional rights violations have led to reduced sentences — or in one case release on parole — for inmates convicted on murder charges. A year ago, numerous civil rights, civil liberties and church groups, backed by prominent law practitioners and academics, had petitioned Attorney General Loretta Lynch for a DOJ probe of the Orange County law enforcement agencies. The county bar association has also strenuously criticized the agencies.
In announcing the DOJ probe, the head of the department’s Civil Rights Division observed any systematic failure to safeguard an accused person’s right to counsel and a fair trial harms public faith “in the integrity of the justice system.” DOJ acknowledged the Orange County district attorney has agreed to cooperate with the investigation and provide full access to office records.
The Orange County situation also gave impetus to a new state law (AB 1909), passed by the legislature and signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown on Sept. 30, making it a felony for a prosecutor in California to knowingly falsify or withhold material evidence. California laws already made that a misdemeanor for the general public, and a felony for state law enforcement officers. Prosecutors can already face judge-imposed sanctions and be reported to the state bar, which can lead to disbarment. The new law, however, is the first in the nation specifically targeting prosecutors, who can now be sentenced to up to three years for the new offense in California.
