Melanie Lowery, was a battered woman who killed her husband to get him to stop beating her and sodomizing her 9 yr. old son. After serving 14 years at Alabama's Tutwiler Prison, she was granted parole last month by the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles that has granted virtually no paroles in the past 5 years to people convicted of violent crimes.

Melanie was granted parole because of her perfect prison record and the facts of her case. Attorney General Troy King, a young, politically ambitious conservative Republican in the mold of his predecessor Bill Pryor (after his contentious appointment to the 11th Circuit), decided to oppose the parole, and demanded the parole board reconsider their decision. The Birmingham News reports the sad decision.

Too many of our nation's mentally ill population are languishing in jails because there is no other place to put them when they have been accused of a crime. Georgia has taken a big step.

A $17.8 million facility set to open next month at Central State Hospital will help in the effort to remove mentally ill inmates from county jails, officials said last week....The forensic services division accepts inmates referred by state courts, offering both short-term and long-term treatment. It also performs pretrial mental evaluations of people charged with crimes.

In an innovative solution to a growing problem of providing inmates with thir right to access legal materials, Lexis-Nexis has partnered-up with a company called Touch Sonic Technologies to create legal research kiosks for inmates. From a press release we received not long ago:

As part of LN focus on the state corrections market, LexisNexis and Touch Sonic Technologies® launched a new legal information kiosk that will change the way prisons comply with court mandates requiring inmate access to the law. The new wall-mounted kiosks with shatterproof touch screens in corrections facilities have already been installed in Hawaii and Riverside County, California.

The kiosks, called the TSTLL, were developed specifically for prisons by Touch Sonic Technologies and feature legal research from LexisNexis. Most prison libraries offer legal books, which can be damaged or lost, and are quickly outdated. With these kiosks, corrections departments are expected to save hundreds of thousands of dollars on costly law books, while offering comprehensive and current legal information to inmates. States also stand to save money with fewer prisoner complaints about lack of access to legal research, which comprise substantial numbers of the inmate lawsuits filed.

Someone needs to tell the Los Angeles District Attorney's office that the state has a severe budget crisis on its hands. Apparently, the DA is living on Mars and hasn't heard.

Wesley Wheaton is a Canadian citizen recently paroled after serving nine years on a sex offender charge. He's up for deportation. The D.A. is objecting. He wants Wheaton civilly committed to the state mental hospital in California, instead of being sent back to Canada.

If I were a California resident, I'd be pretty angry. If I were Gov. Arnold, I'd pick up the phone and tell this DA to worry about how to solve the state's prison crisis rather than costing the state more money to house those who have done their time and will be saying goodbye to California courtesy of the immigration authorities.

How, you ask, can the state keep offenders in jail after they served their time?

California's Sexually Violent Predator Act, which took effect in 1996, allows judges or juries to commit repeat sex offenders to state hospitals after they finish serving their prison sentences. The process is twofold. After being paroled, an offender is transferred to a county jail, where he is arraigned and then participates in a hearing to determine if there is probable cause to believe he may commit new sexually violent crimes. If probable cause is found, the offender undergoes a full trial to determine whether he should be committed to a hospital for two years.

Canada is willing to take Wheaton back with the requirement that he attend a rehabilitative program.

Here's another atrocity arising in a Texas jail:

A mentally ill Dallas County jail inmate was cut off from drinking water for nearly two weeks and denied psychiatric medication for almost two months, according to an internal investigation. He nearly died.

How far have race relations come in the last century? In Nevada, they are going backwards. The medium security High Desert State Prison has implemented a new policy -- inmates are housed according to race.

According to several corrections officers, all black inmates are now being housed in separate pods, or units, while whites have been moved to their own units and Hispanics to theirs. The prison houses nearly 2,000 inmates, according to the Nevada Department of Corrections' Website.

The prison responds with a half-heart denial which is not so much as a denial as a lame justification:

Howard Skolnik, spokesman for the prison, said it's not intentional segregation. "We've moved inmates around based on behavior," Skolnik said."

[hat tip Kevin Hayden of American Street]

Another glaring example of inept and inadequate medical care provided to America's prisoners.

A pulled tooth led to the June death of a Solano State Prison inmate, according to a coroner's report released Monday on what the inmate's family and two Bay Area lawmakers say may be an extreme example of inept medical care inside California prisons. In a bizarre chain of events that is still being probed by the prison's internal affairs officers, the extraction of inmate Anthony Shumake's wisdom tooth caused swelling in his neck that made it difficult to breath and eventually led to heart failure, a doctor with the San Joaquin County coroner's office has concluded. Shumake, who was from Richmond, died June 28 at Doctor's Hospital in Manteca.

Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley said, "You should not die from a tooth extraction...It's either negligence or incompetence."

Last week a court-ordered study of the California prison system was released which found that "several prison doctors were incompetent and that medical care was shoddy in many places. " While Gov. Arnold did not create these problems, they are now continuing on his watch. He has promised reform. We'll be following his progress.

There is an annual reunion of guards and former inmates at Alcatraz, the famous island prison in San Francisco. This year's reunion was one of the biggest:

Armando Mendoza, 78, was one of seven former inmates, 10 onetime guards and 73 men and women who were children of correctional officers who came back to the island Saturday for the annual Alcatraz alumni reunion.

The gathering -- part nostalgia, part bitter history -- is perhaps one of the strangest alumni gatherings you could find. Ex-guards greeted ex- cons like old friends, people told old stories about the cold weather, others told stories about murders and stabbings, and the warden's daughter recalled how the place was so safe outside the main cell block that Alcatraz families never locked their doors. "This is living history,'' said Ricardo Perez, supervising ranger for the National Park Service. "The public has the chance to hear firsthand accounts of life on the Rock.''

Today, Alcatraz is a tourist attraction with 5,000 visitors a day. I took the TL kid there as a kid and we both were fascinated. The article is particularly worth reading for the story of Mr. Mendoza--originally from East L.A. and sentenced to 30 years without parole in 1957 for drug dealing.

An article in the New York Times Magazine today asks a very interesting question: Is it time for America to Decarcerate?

There is a movement afoot today, albeit a tiny one, that aspires to get rid of prisons altogether. The members of this movement call themselves ''abolitionists,'' borrowing the term applied to steadfast opponents of slavery before the Civil War. Since the 80's, an international group of abolitionists -- lawyers, judges, criminologists -- has been holding conferences every few years. According to ''Instead of Prisons,'' published by the Prison Research Education Action Project in 1976, the first article of the abolitionist catechism is that imprisonment is morally objectionable and indefensible and must therefore be abolished. Are these people moral visionaries, like their 19th-century namesakes? Or are they simply nuts?

DNA has freed another inmate on death row--this time in Louisiana. Ryan Matthews was sentenced to death as a teenager. After seven years, his claims of innocence have been confirmed:

A man sentenced to death as a teenager was freed Monday by DNA evidence, and said he had been certain from the beginning that he would be vindicated. For more than seven years, Ryan Matthews has said he had nothing to do with the 1997 robbery and murder of a grocer. He said he knew that someday he would be freed.

Jurors were told that no physical evidence linked Matthews to the holdup and murder of Tommy Vanhoose. But two witnesses identified him as the gunman, and a co-defendant, Travis Hayes, told police that he drove the getaway car after Matthews, then 17, shot Vanhoose. Ultimately, DNA found in a ski mask that was tossed from the getaway car was found to match that of Rondell Love, who is serving time for an unrelated killing. In addition, Matthews' lawyers said, other inmates have told investigators that Love bragged about killing Vanhoose.

While the DA has a year to revisit the case, he says the DNA evidence precludes a jury from finding guilt against Matthews beyond a reasonable doubt.

Update: The NCADP reports Matthews is the 115th prisoner freed from death row after being found innocent. From their press release received by email:

Truly, Linda Lyons--a jailhouse librarian--stands shoulders and heads above the remaining prison guards. A prison riot erupted at Crowly, Colorado, which is run by a private Company in Tennessee. The prison guards ran away, and forgot they had left a woman librarian behind.

As inmates at Crowley County Correctional Facility grew restless and agitated in the exercise yard on the evening of July 20, officers of the private company charged with managing the prison withdrew to regroup. "They ran," said inmate Robert Horn, serving five years for passing bad checks. "They just abandoned the place." All but one.

As a peaceful protest devolved into arson and riot over five hours, prison librarian Linda Lyons kept sole watch over 37 male inmates. Although she radioed her location, her supervisors from the private Corrections Corporation of America made no move to retrieve her. They then failed to notify an elite anti-riot team from the Department of Corrections that she had been left behind.

by TChris

A new book by Reuters correspondent Alan Elsner, Gates of Injustice, is reviewed here. The book paints an ugly portrait of America's prison system.

To get a sense of the magnitude of this problem, according to Elsner's calculations, the U.S., with five percent of the world's population, has 25% of the world's prisoners.

As Elsner points out, the cost of running the U.S. prison system is now more than $57 billion per year. This compares with the entire federal Department of Education budget of only $42 billion. ... California, it appears, spends $6000 per year per student attending university, while spending $34,000 per year for every prisoner it holds behind bars.

The "corrections industry" has become a big business, but it's often the kind of business the begs the firing of the CEO.

According to Elsner, "hundreds of thousands of men are raped each year. . . Racist and neo-Nazi gangs run drugs, gambling and prostitution rings from inside their prison cells, buying and selling weak and vulnerable fellow inmates as sex slaves, while authorities turn a blind eye." As a result, individual prisoners once released are often more violent, more addicted, angrier and less able to function in society than they were when they entered the system.