A federal judge in Michigan has found the state's the DOC in contempt of court. He ordered DOC to provide more prison doctors and nurses within four months. He's threatened the DOC with a $2 million fine.

He said a prisoner deserves to serve his sentence, not face delays in treatment.

"What he does not deserve is a de facto and unauthorized death penalty at the hands of a callous and dysfunctional health care system that regularly fails to treat life-threatening illness," Enslen wrote.

This isn't the Judge's first ruling taking the DOC to task.

Sometimes we focus more on prison abuses abroad than we do at home. The first is not more important than the second as Ira Robbins points out in the Baltimore Sun.

While the alleged human rights abuses of prisoners detained in Guantánamo Bay and the Middle East have sparked widespread criticism and debate in this country and abroad, surprisingly little attention has been focused on the treatment of citizens imprisoned within our borders. Each year, approximately 7,000 Americans die in U.S. prisons and jails. Some of these deaths are from natural causes, but many more result from mental disorders left undiagnosed and diseases left untreated.

The abhorrent quality of correctional health care not only violates prisoners' constitutional rights, it costs taxpayers millions of dollars and threatens the general health of communities surrounding these facilities. Understanding why prisoners die is an essential first step in identifying the major pitfalls of our health care system. Passing legislation to correct these problems is the crucial next step. Therefore, Congress should extend and strengthen the Deaths in Custody Reporting Act, or DICRA, before it expires at the end of this year.

Say Hello to Dicra:

With so many of his fellow Republicans behind bars, maybe Sen. Sam Brownback just wanted to see what it feels like to be in jail. The linked article suggests that Brownback wants to broaden his appeal to "values voters." Instead of obsessing about gay marriage and stem cells, Brownback is calling attention to the wasted potential of the people we lock away. Good for him.

The Kansas Republican plans to spend Friday night at Louisiana's notorious state penitentiary in Angola to highlight the problem of recidivism and programs that can help prisoners become law-abiding members of the community. ...

"There is a real need in our country to rebuild the family and renew our culture and there is a need for genuine conservatism and real compassion in the national discussion," Brownback said in a statement.

Rehabilitation is an odd issue for a Republican presidential candidate to embrace, given the party's "tough-on-crime" posturing during the last quarter century. Whether or not Brownback is serious in his belief that rehabilitation of offenders should be a goal embraced by the "culture of life," he deserves credit for advancing a humane position that his party usually ridicules.

Via Facing South, Pedro Parra-Sanchez, age 44 and a resident of California, moved to New Orleans to assist with the Katrina recovery. Six days later he was arrested for assault.

13 months later, he had still not seen a defense attorney -- or brought before a judge. He doesn't speak a lot of English. Other inmates alerted the Tulane law clinic. He finally was located and brought to court -- last week.

At his arraignment -- a court proceeding the law requires to take place within, at most, a month after charges are filed -- Parra-Sanchez could speak only through a translator about his extended stay in a prison system that officials from several agencies admitted simply lost him, failing to secure him the most basic American rights.

Apologies have been forthcoming:

At the hearing, Assistant District Attorney Greg Thompson expressed the prosecution's "formal apology" for Parra-Sanchez's "prolonged incarceration," while Criminal District Court Judge Darryl Derbigny called his time in jail "unacceptable."

What went wrong?

Prison Nation set a new record. It is a record in which we should take no pride.

A record 7 million people - or one in every 32 American adults - were behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of last year, according to the Justice Department. Of those, 2.2 million were in prison or jail, an increase of 2.7 percent over the previous year, according to a report released Wednesday.

More than 4.1 million people were on probation and 784,208 were on parole at the end of 2005. Prison releases are increasing, but admissions are increasing more.

Drug offenders accounted for 49 percent of the growth in the federal prison population from 1995 to 2003.

The feel-good story of the day. Lawrence Downes of the New York Times attends the fourth night of the Sing Sing inmates' production of Oedipus Rex.

Sing Sing is not known as a progressive place. But its theater program is a rarity in New York prisons. It relies on a nonprofit group, Rehabilitation Through the Arts, and the savvy benevolence of Sing Sing's superintendent, Brian Fischer.

....As I watched, I wondered what it would be like to be defined by my own worst sins. It struck me that when people are locked up for horrible crimes, a lot of goodness and beauty necessarily get locked up too. It also seemed that the Theban society onstage - though afflicted by plague, vengeance and divine cruelty - was probably gentler and saner than the one the inmates knew. Its members clearly cared for one another, and were not numb to grief.

A good reminder that we are all more than the sum of our misdeeds.

Society does a lousy job of providing mental health care to those who need it most -- those whose mental health problems limit their employability, leaving them without access to the kinds of jobs that come with health insurance. Left untreated, the mentally ill often run afoul of the law. Those who go to prison seldom receive meaningful mental health care, so prisons become warehouses for the mentally ill.

Federal courts have ordered California's prisons to classify and treat mentally ill inmates, but the prisons are overcrowded and the state's efforts to comply with the orders have been insufficient, to put it mildly. Frustrated advocates for inmates have petitioned the courts to cap the prison population on the theory that solving overcrowding will make more resources available for mentally ill inmates.

Here's an eye-opening report by Nick Turse at Tom Dispatch on the Bush Planetary Lock Up:

In a remarkably few years, the Bush administration has been able to construct a global detention system, already of near epic proportions, both on the fly and on the cheap."

...."Even with a couple million prisoners under its control, the U.S. prison network lacks the infrastructure or manpower of the Soviet gulag or the orderly planning of the Nazi concentration-camp system. However, where it bests both, and breaks new incarceration ground, is in its planet-ranging scope, with sites scattered the world over -- from Europe to Asia, the Middle East to the Caribbean.

Dozens of prison inmates helped fight two fires in Napa Valley this week. One of them suffered respiratory problems as the result of his heroic work. California inmates are also helping firefighters battle a raging fire in Riverside County.

Work release programs (common in jails, less so in prisons) are a useful way to help prisoners remain integrated with society, and inmates who are typically bored out of their minds might relish any opportunity to avoid the mundane life that prisons offer. It's tempting to wonder whether California allows inmates to do this dangerous work because it attaches little value to their lives, but it's reassuring to know that the inmates at least receive training in firefighting before they're put to work.

California's motivation for the program appears to be related less to rehabilitation than to a shortage of California firefighters. Given the overcrowding in California's prisons, the state should consider an early release program for inmate firefighters who prove their value to society -- and communities should commit to hiring them after their release.

To ease overcrowding in its prisons, Great Britain is about to bring back prison ships, also known as "floating jails."

The government has advertised for contractors to provide up to 800 places on ships in England and Wales.

Britain closed its last prison ship in 2005.

The director of the Howard League for Penal Reform has criticised the Home Office's decision to advertise for spaces on ships and warned it could lead to more prisoner re-offending.

Britain used prison ships in the U.S. during the Revolutionary War.

If you thought the U.S. used dogs only to scare detainees in foreign prisons, think again. Five states allow the use of dogs not only to scare, but to bite inmates.

Dogs are allowed to terrify and even bite unruly prisoners who refuse to leave their cells in five U.S. states, a human rights group said on Tuesday, comparing the policy to abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

U.S.-based Human Rights Watch said it was unaware of any other nation where such a practice exists, describing it as a well-kept secret and drawing similarities to U.S. soldiers terrorizing Iraqi prisoners with dogs.

"At Abu Ghraib, it was not intended for them to bite the prisoner. Here we're using dogs to terrify. If the intimidation by the dog doesn't work, then the dog goes in and bites," said Jamie Fellner, Human Rights Watch director of U.S. programs.

The states are Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, South Dakota and Utah.

by TChris

California's prisons are desperately overcrowded, a condition that guarantees full employment for members of the state's powerful corrections union. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency yesterday, prefatory to execution of a plan to send prisoners to rented cells in other states, away from family and support networks that might give them a chance of avoiding a return to crime when they're eventually released. This short-term thinking only perpetuates a long-term problem.

Donald Specter, director of the Prison Law Office, is right: "as serious reform, there is nothing about this that makes sense." Sending a few thousand prisoners to be housed in other states won't solve the problem. The governor should be exploring alternatives to incarceration so that drug offenders are diverted from the prison sytem, as well as early release programs for nonviolent prisoners, including those who are serving "third strike" sentences for minor crimes.

Here are more ideas that are better than the governor's: