by Leah Sakala, May 8, 2013
The newest Prison Policy Initiative report exposes the prison phone industry’s hidden fees, which saddle the families of incarcerated people with staggeringly high phone bills.
by Leah Sakala, April 17, 2013
North Country Public Radio’s Brian Mann talks with Peter Wagner about an encouraging trend towards declining prison populations.
by Leah Sakala, March 25, 2013
The Massachusetts Department of Corrections plans to begin using drug sniffing dogs to screen families and friends who come to visit loved ones in prison. We submitted a letter urging Department of Corrections Commissioner Louis Spencer to halt this harmful and degrading policy in its tracks.
by Peter Wagner, March 21, 2013
March 21, 2013
Commissioner Luis S. Spencer
Massachusetts Department of Corrections
50 Maple Street, Suite 3
Milford, MA 01757-3698
Dear Commissioner Spencer,
I am writing as the Executive Director of the Prison Policy Initiative based in Easthampton, MA to strongly urge the Massachusetts Department of Corrections to immediately cancel the plan to use dogs to screen visitors to Department of Corrections facilities. This policy will unnecessarily deter family visits and thereby make it harder for people released from custody to successfully rejoin their communities.
Social science research has repeatedly found that allowing incarcerated people to preserve family and community ties is essential for facilitating reentry and reducing recidivism. In-person visits allow family members to stay in touch and maintain their relationships through periods of incarceration.[1] Using dogs to search family members, friends, clergy, volunteers, and other visitors is deeply invasive and degrading, and can turn essential family visits into potentially traumatizing experiences. For example, a child who is deeply afraid of dogs will resist visiting an incarcerated parent if he or she must undergo canine screening. Subjecting visitors to dog screening not only harmful, but also unnecessary, as the vast majority of correctional systems around the country maintain secure facilities without resorting to such extreme measures.
Additionally, the nation’s leading correctional professional organizations all agree that correctional facilities should encourage, not discourage, community members who wish to visit their loved ones in prison. The American Correctional Association, for example, urges correctional facilities to support “successful family and community reunification.”[2] The Re-Entry Policy Council, a joint project of the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Department of Labor, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, created to facilitate incarcerated individuals’ reintegration in the community, recommends that correctional institutions “help to re-establish, expand, and strengthen relationships between prisoners and their families.” [3]
The dog sniffing visitor screening policy runs in entirely the wrong direction. Rather than encourage, it will discourage crucial family contact, impeding reentry and contributing to increased recidivism. It should be canceled immediately. Thank you for your consideration of this important matter.
Sincerely,
Peter Wagner
CC: Governor Deval Patrick and Chief of Staff Brendon Ryan; Andrea Cabral, Executive Secretary of Public Safety.
[1] See, for example, Minnesota Department of Corrections, Effects of Prison Visitation on Offender Recidivism, November 2011. Available at: https://mn.gov/doc/data-publications/research/publications/?id=1089-272991
[2]American Correctional Association, “Public Correctional Policy on Reentry of Offenders,” resolution 2001-3, passed August 15, 2001, reviewed and amended Aug. 16, 2006 and August 6, 2011. Published in American Correctional Association, Public Correctional Policies 2012, 79. Available at: https://www.aca.org/government/policyresolution/PDFs/Public_Correctional_Policies.pdf
[3] Council of State Governments, Reentry Policy Council, Policy Statement 13 in Report of the Re-Entry Policy Council: Charting the Safe and Successful Return of Prisoners to the Community (New York: Council of State Governments, January 2005). Available at: https://csgjusticecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/report-of-the-re-entry-policy-council-charting-the-safe-and-successful-return-of-prisoners-to-the-community.pdf
by Leah Sakala, January 28, 2013
Can your organization sign on to a letter calling on the Census Bureau to complete the research necessary to end prison gerrymandering in 2020? The next census isn’t for seven more years, but the research and planning is taking place right now and the Bureau >needs to hear from your organization. Thank you!
by Leah Sakala, November 15, 2012
At a Nov. 15th phone justice rally in Washington D.C., we, along with our partners at SumOfUs, delivered signatures from 36,690 people across the country calling on the FCC to rein in predatory prison phone rates. And it looks like the FCC will act soon — Commissioner Mignon Clyburn announced that the FCC Chairman has circulated a prison phone regulatory proposal that the commission will now vote on.
by Leah Sakala, October 30, 2012
We worked with Josh Begley to create an info graphic showing that the states that bar the most people from the polls are likely to be the same states that cast the deciding vote for president on November 6, 2012
by Leah Sakala, September 24, 2012
The New York Times cited “The Price to Call Home: State-Sanctioned Monopolization in the Prison Phone Industry” in an editorial calling on the Federal Communications Commission to cap prison calling rates.
by Leah Sakala, September 11, 2012
A new Prison Policy Initiative report reveals that the monopolistic prison phone industry’s high calling rates are jeopardizing public safety and taxing poor communities. The report calls on the FCC to set price caps that would allow incarcerated people to increase their chances of success upon release by staying connected to their families.
by Peter Wagner, May 10, 2012
This piece was originally prepared as one in a series of guest posts for the Prison Law Blog.
New York City’s “stop and frisk” policing strategy is getting a lot of attention. A police officer notes a “reasonable suspicion,” whatever that is, and then stops the person, asks some questions and then often frisks him or her.
It’s not hard to see where allegations of racial profiling come from. It’s the subject of a class action lawsuit, and last week 20 people, including Cornel West, were convicted for a civil disobedience protest last year against stop and frisk.
“Stop and frisk” is a major NYC initiative that is growing:
The majority of the people being stopped and frisked are Black and Latino, and that’s been a consistent fact:
A lot of the news coverage has been less than effective in explaining the racial disproportionality in New York City’s stop and frisk. For example, Blacks are 52% of stops, but 23% of the population. Latinos are 31% of stops, but 29% of the population. Whites are 9% of the stops and 33% of the population. The eyes of 90% of the readers of this paragraph have glazed over and I suspect that 100% of the people reading aren’t quite sure exactly what the significance is.
The most useful comparison is to compare the relative number of people in each racial and ethnic group who are stopped by the police in a given year. Now it’s quite clear just how big the problem is:
Blacks in New York City are 8 times as likely to be stopped by the police as Whites. And the disparity gets larger when we look at just stops that result in frisks:
And even larger still when we look at police stops that result in the use of force:
The disparity in the use of force isn’t warranted by differential rates of offending, as we found that Latinos and Blacks were more likely than Whites to experience the use of force without being arrested.
The different experiences of Blacks, Latinos and Whites with stop and frisk are no doubt part of why ending stop and frisk is a priority for Black and Latino voters, but not for politicians who want White support.
And what do New Yorkers get for giving up their civil liberties? It’s not a lot in the way of public safety. 93% of the stops in 2010 did not result in arrest, and the majority of the arrests were for petty offenses. And guns, the main justification for “stop and frisk”? Guns are found in a tiny portion of the stops, about 1 out of every thousand stops in 2011. And the trend isn’t positive. While the police point to the tiny annual increase in the number of gun seized, the percentage of stops that result in a gun being found is plummeting:graph showing that while the number of guns seized during stop and frisks has grown a little from 2003 to 2011, the portion of stops that result in a gun seizure has plummeted:
I have no doubt that good police work can find illegal guns. Wholesale “stop and frisk,” though undermines Black and Latino trust in the police without improving public safety. That’s a poor investment in police resources.
Mayor Bloomberg is famous for his big-business style fixation on data and on seeing a high return on investment. Yet, for some reason, he has been reluctant to hold policing strategies up to that same cost vs. results standard. Will his successors be any different?
[* Updated on May 18, 2012 to use Census figures that more closely correspond with how the NYPD assigns people to a race and ethnicity and to add graphs about the racial disparity in frisks and in the use of force.]
The author is Executive Director of the Prison Policy Initiative. This article is one in a series of short articles exploring under-discussed facts about the criminal justice system.
States fall far short of their duty to meet the health needs of incarcerated people.
The bail industry exploits cracks and loopholes in the legal system to avoid accountability, while growing its profits.
Criminal justice policy in every region of the United States is out of step with the rest of the world.
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