Governor Brown, end sterilization abuse in California today

SB 1135 is a no-brainer. Governor Brown, end sterilization abuse in CA today.

by Bernadette Rabuy, September 12, 2014

For the past few years, California has been a well-known site of criminal justice reform. Beginning in 2006 and accelerating in 2009, the California prison population declined rapidly. In 2012, in response to a Supreme Court order to reduce unconstitutional prison overcrowding, Governor Brown signed the realignment law, which shifted incarcerated individuals with lower-level offenses from state prisons to county jails. While the results have been mixed, some counties have used the realignment law as an opportunity to adopt and experiment with alternatives to incarceration.

Yet, what is likely less well known is California’s shameful legacy of eugenics. Last year, the Center for Investigative Reporting found that from 2006 to 2010 the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation sterilized nearly 150 incarcerated females, permanently ending their chance of future pregnancy and doing so without required state approval.¹ Doctors in California prisons pressured incarcerated females—especially those who had served multiple prison terms—to undergo sterilization procedures. When asked about the cost of the procedures, Dr. James Heinrich, an OB-GYN at one of California’s prisons who has been accused of pressuring females to agree to sterilizations, told the Center for Investigative Reporting, “Over a 10-year period, that isn’t a huge amount of money compared to what you save in welfare paying for those unwanted children – as they procreated more.” While Dr. Heinrich claims he performed the procedures for the health and safety of the incarcerated females, the females who were under his care say otherwise. One woman, Kimberly Jeffrey, said a doctor at Valley State Prison pressured her while she was sedated and strapped to a surgical table for a C-section in 2010. Clearly, eugenics is not a practice of the past.

On August 25, we at Prison Policy Initiative sent a letter to Governor Brown in support of SB 1135 (Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson), which is currently sitting on his desk. SB 1135 will clarify the prohibition of sterilizations for the purpose of birth control on incarcerated individuals and will create greater safeguards to ensure that only sterilizations that are medically necessary will be performed. This includes annual reporting of sterilizations performed, broken down by race, age, method, and medical justification. We believe that, whether an individual is incarcerated or not, she should have the right to make her own choices regarding her reproductive life. Justice Now, an Oakland-based organization, has been at the forefront of the movement to end sterilizations for the purpose of birth control in California prisons. Through Justice Now’s leadership, SB 1135 has unanimously passed the California legislature. It now sits on Governor Brown’s desk, and we urge him to end sterilization abuse in California today.

1. This is not new for the state of California. Further back, from 1909 to 1964, about 20,000 women and men in California were stripped of the ability to reproduce. Historians say California’s eugenic leaders advised Nazi Germany in the 1930s.  ↩

Dallas Texas to consider banning free in-person visits, requiring expensive video visits instead

by Peter Wagner, September 9, 2014

Later this morning, Dallas County Texas will vote on a new telephone contract with Securus that will also ban free in-person visits and require families to pay for video visitation instead.

There have been two good stories this week:

• Dallas Morning-News: Dallas County considers using video chats for jail visitation (This article is a good introduction except that it subtly legitimizes the bizarre argument that the contract might not ban in-person visits.)
• Dallas Observer: Dallas County Set to Stop Most Face-to-Face Jail Visits, Charge Families for Video (This article squarely presents the evidence to address the fact that this contract will ban in-person visits.)

With the vote scheduled for this morning, our friends at SumOfUs collected 2,053 petitions from their Texas members in under 12 hours yesterday urging the county to reject a “contract that would substitute visiting hours for expensive corporate-sponsored video calls.”

To our friends in Texas, good luck today!

CenturyLink and Pay-Tel offer a peek down the rabbit hole of the prison phone industry

Where 96% isn't 96% and clients aren't clients.

by Leah Sakala, September 2, 2014

For most companies, forking over 96% of revenue would be a disaster. But prison and jail telephone companies don’t operate in a normal market by any stretch of the imagination.

In a recent letter to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), prison and jail phone company CenturyLink explained that it won its contract with the Escambia County, Florida, jail by promising to kick 96% of call revenue back to the jail. To make up for this loss, CenturyLink explains, the company relies on “ancillary fees to cover costs that otherwise could not be recovered in per-minute rates after deducting the County’s required commissions.” (For more on how commission payments and ancillary fees go hand in hand, check out our second report on the industry.)

Now, a 96% kickback/commission must sound very attractive from a sheriff’s point of view. But, as Pay-Tel founder Vince Townsend explained at last month’s FCC workshop, hidden fees can put sheriffs at a major disadvantage. Because the fee revenue is kept separate from the calling revenue, fee revenue lies entirely outside of the commission system. In other words, the only reason why CenturyLink can promise to kick back 96% of the calling revenue to Escambia County is because the company is collecting 100% of the fee revenue. And while CenturyLink claims to have disclosed all its ancillary fees as part of the contract negotiation process, corporate transparency is the exception in this market, not the norm.

Mr. Townsend pointed out that even a sky-high commission percentage turns out to bring in far less money to a correctional facility once the telephone company has kept the fee revenue for itself. Using $100 of gross revenue as an example, he explained:

I couldn’t do this to my clients*…. If I was scraping 60% of the money off the top [in fees] before I paid them commissions, I couldn’t do that. I respect them too much to do that because it is total deception to go in to somebody and say, “Oh, I’m going to give you 80%!” Well, what’s the 80% on? It’s really on $40. What’s 80% of $40? [The actual commission percentage is] 32%.

But one day they’ll wake up [about how hidden fees reduce commissions], and when they do I’m glad I’m on my side and not doing that.

Now, from the companies’ perspective charging high rates and hefty fees sounds like a profitable way to exploit a literally captive market. It turns out, however, that using some of the techniques found in normal markets can be good for business *and* good for families and communities. The experience of states like New York has found that making phone calls more economically accessible stimulates business. Other prison and jail communications companies are choosing strategies like offering discounts on high-volume holidays to introduce their services to new customers, and lowering fees to increase use of their services.

These normal-market-type tactics are unfortunate anomalies in the prison phone industry, but the movement for fair prison and jail communication policy is making steady progress. The FCC’s first order ruled that the prison and jail phone service fees must be based on the actual cost of doing business, which does not, the order emphasized, include handing over the majority of calling revenue to prison and jail systems. On the state level, places like Alabama are also taking statewide action to rein in the industry’s fees and kickbacks.

Be sure to stay tuned to see how the FCC and states’ next steps keep the ball rolling towards a fairer and more just prison and jail phone market.

*Just to clarify, Mr. Townsend refers to the correctional facilities as his “clients,” but of course who’s paying all the money that is turned into kickbacks and fee revenue? The families of incarcerated people.

PPI’s Aleks Kajstura presents at FCC workshop on further regulation of the prison phone industry

Aleks Kajstura gave an invited presentation of our research on two different workshop panels, highlighting the importance of fees and comprehensive reform.

by Leah Sakala, August 20, 2014

While the Federal Communications Commission’s historic ruling to rein in the prison telephone industry last summer was a huge step forward, there’s lots more to be done. That’s why last month the Commissioners held a Workshop on Further Reform of Inmate Calling Services to gather additional information from experts and industry participants (transcript).

Prison Policy Initiative Legal Director Aleks Kajstura gave an invited presentation of our research on two different workshop panels, highlighting the importance of addressing the wide spectrum of “ancillary fees” in regulation and explaining why fair phone charges must extend to both prisons and jails:

A particular highlight from the workshop was Darrell Baker, the Director of the Alabama Public Service Commission, who described his Commission’s strong new regulation to bring down prison and jail phone call rates and fees in his state.

We commend the FCC for continuing to work towards comprehensive regulation of this deeply broken industry. As we’ve recently blogged, even after the FCC’s initial order was issued last year industry players have wasted no time raising charges and devising new ways to put basic communication out of reach for the families of incarcerated people around the country. And, as Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton pointed out in her remarks at the workshop, a lot is at stake in the struggle for fair communications policy:

We have documented that of all the approaches, the many approaches that are used to reduced recidivism, the one that we can document has the greatest effect is stimulating communication from behind those bars with people in the greater society who will support them and who love them.

Stay tuned (and sign up for our newsletter for the latest updates!) as we continue to fight alongside our colleagues for fair prison and jail communications policy.

How the prison phone industry incentivizes bad policy

Verizon says no; but the industry and sheriffs say yes to ripping off poor families and endangering public safety.

by Sarah Hertel-Fernandez, August 12, 2014

The prison and jail communications industry all too often isolates those incarcerated and preys on their families. Despite the FCC issuing a cap on phone rates last year, the companies are raising their fees and innovating exploitative new practices like video-only visitation. Regulation of the cost and quality of communication is more necessary than ever.

The evidence is continuing to mount, and it’s also coming in from some unlikely sources. Verizon, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the country and a previous participant in the prison phone industry, submitted this powerful amicus curiae in an ongoing lawsuit where the industry is trying to halt the FCC’s preliminary regulations. Verizon supports the FCC’s conclusion that “site commissions are not reasonably and directly related to the provision of inmate calling services” and so cannot be “recovered” by inflating rates charged to their end users– the families and friends of those behind bars. After all, “[t]he FCC is required to ensure that the charges for the interstate telecommunications services are ‘just and reasonable'”; and as the company explained in a blog post: “Everyone benefits when inmates successfully transition out of the prison system [and that] affordable contact with family and friends while in prison can help make that happen.”

Verizon isn’t alone. A growing number of state and local governments are losing patience with the system. Lee Romney wrote this great article for the LA Times on how government officials in San Francisco are pushing back against predatory rates. California already bans state prisons from accepting commissions, and is considering a bill to ban county jails from accepting commissions and require them to award contracts to phone companies that offer the lowest cost of service for those incarcerated. Opponents of the bill say that the commissions are used to fund inmate services, but as lead sponsor Assemblyman Quirk says: there are better sources of funding “than taxing grandma”.

But the industry is always evolving. Cari Wade Gervin’s article for Metropulse reports on a disturbing new trend: in Knox County, Tennessee, video visits have replaced in-person visits entirely. She follows the money trail for the implementation of this program.

The plan will supposedly save both the families and facilities money, and in theory will increase overall accessibility and safety. In practice, the exorbitant and unregulated fees charged to the families reduce accessibility. And of course, left off the county’s balance sheet are the incredibly damaging psychological and social costs of eliminating in-person visits.

The kicker is this: Video visitation isn’t a random choice on the part of the Knox County Sheriff. It has been massively incentivized by companies — in this case, installation and future maintenance would be provided by Pay-Tel for free, “provided every 15-minute video session would cost $5.99. The county would receive 43.75 percent of those fees… Any revenues go straight to the county’s general fund.” Metro Pulse asked PPI Director Peter Wagner for his reaction: “This is such a uniformly bad idea, I’m kind of speechless.”

Gervin delved deeper into how the profit motive is skewing correctional priorities in her companion blog post: Tech Friends, the company that provides the kiosks used in Knox County, sells their units with the insidious-sounding promise that they will Reduce Inmate Movement and Reduce Jail Traffic. “Seriously,” writes Gervin, “it actually says that part of the point of video visitation is reduce visitors.”

David Carliner Award presentation

The American Constitution Society has posted the video (and some pictures) from my remarks accepting the David Carliner Award.

by Peter Wagner, August 12, 2014

In June, I was honored to receive the American Constitution Society’s 2014 David Carliner Public Interest Award. The award “recognizes outstanding public interest lawyers whose work best exemplifies its namesake’s legacy of fearless, uncompromising and creative advocacy on behalf of marginalized people.”

David Carliner (1918-2007) was one of the great public interest lawyers of the 20th Century. He challenged segregation and state bans on interracial marriage, and he fought for the rights of immigrants and the LGBT community. As the founder of the National Capital chapter of the ACLU and the International Human Rights Law Group (now GlobalRights), he was a strong defender of civil liberties and human rights at home and abroad. Carliner liked to say that one shouldn’t mind being an agitator since agitators are the ones who get the dirt out.

I consider the award both a big personal honor and a milestone for the criminal justice reform movement. I went to law school a decade ago when prison populations were going up, and up, and up seemed like the only future. Both the powers that be — and the established progressive movement — were ignoring criminal justice advocates and the idea of criminal justice reform. Things have changed, and it was an honor to celebrate that fact with more than a 1,000 progressive attorneys — including some of the colleagues who encouraged my work over the last decade.

The ACS recently made the video of the award presentation and my remarks available:

(The video starts with ACS President Caroline Fredrickson introducing the award, then David Carliner’s granddaughter Sarah Remes, presenting the award at 3:13, and then my remarks start at 6:30.)

And here are some pictures from that evening:

I met Justice Sotomayor at a reception prior to the award Ceremony.		The award was presented by David Carliner’s granddaughter, Sarah Remes.

Get to Know Our Summer Intern, Sophia Robohn

by Bernadette Rabuy, August 11, 2014

Today, I had the opportunity to sit down with Sophia Robohn, a Hampshire College student who has been interning at Prison Policy Initiative. Read below to learn more about Sophia.

What brought you to Prison Policy Initiative?

I’m completing a Reproductive Rights Activist Service Corps (RRASC) internship through the Civil Liberties and Public Policy Program at Hampshire College.

Can you tell me more about the internship program?

RRASC sends interns to disciplines that intersect with reproductive rights and gender equality. These disciplines include immigrant rights, local food, and education.

What are some of your interests?

I study medical anthropology and women’s health at Hampshire College. I am heavily involved in feminist studies and activism at Hampshire College as well as emergency medicine.

What projects have you been working on at Prison Policy Initiative?

I have started research on the way school boards district when they have prisons within their boundaries and how that affects the principle of “one person, one vote.” This has included calling everyone from school board secretaries to court judge executives to find district maps, population data, and how they use Census Bureau data to draw their districts.

Why are school boards important?

While there tends to be more interest in congressional districts, school boards can be more heavily impacted by redistricting. I have also seen the way that local politics interfere with school boards. At the end of the day, school boards are responsible for important tasks such as determining school budgets as well as curricula.

What has surprised you about the work you’ve done?

There is a widespread lack of knowledge on how places district and the history of redistricting among school boards. I’ve had superintendents ask me to send them their own district maps because they don’t have a copy. I’ve talked to school board secretaries who know nothing about how their school board is set up or elected.

What has been particularly challenging about the work?

The most difficult part about understanding how school districts work is knowing who to call and when to do so when it seems like you have run out of options. From that, I’ve learned that it’s important to find out if the school district used a demographer or if the district drew the lines themselves. Sometimes, this is in crayon or marker, making maps difficult to decipher. For example, Warrior Run School District in Union County, Pennsylvania has a map that is particularly hard to read and drawn in marker. For El Reno School District in Oklahoma, the map is on the back of a newspaper clipping and is over 20 years ago. Another challenge is finding the right words to say. For example, precinct can mean a polling place in one school district, and, in another school district, it can mean an actual district with boundaries. Terms vary by state and even by county.

What are some questions that you are still hoping to explore?

I’m hoping to learn more about why school boards choose districts over at-large representation in certain areas of the country.

Thank you for your time. Best of luck!

Thank you! I’m really excited about the work I did at Prison Policy Initiative this summer, and I will be on the lookout for future work on prison gerrymandering.

Thanks to Sophia, we will have updates coming soon to our Prisoners of the Census page. Stay tuned!

John Oliver takes on the U.S. prison system

Awesome piece with one small mistake on the difference between prisons and jails.

by Peter Wagner, August 4, 2014

In case you missed it, two weeks ago comedian John Oliver did an amazing 17 minute piece on the U.S. prison system on his Last Week Tonight program:

Now as Cari Gervin notes on the Metro Pulse blog, one thing that Oliver gets wrong is the difference between prisons and jails:

It’s a good piece, and it should make you infuriated—the state of mass incarceration in this country is atrocious. Privatizing—and profiting from—locking up people is really screwed up. But there’s one point Oliver misses. Right after showing a clip from Sesame Street, Oliver says, “At least Sesame Street is actually talking about prison. The rest of us are much happier completely ignoring it, perhaps because it’s so easy not to care about prisoners. They are by definition convicted criminals.”

Actually, 428,000 of the people locked up each day are presumed innocent. They have either just been arrested and are trying to make bail, or they are too poor to make bail and are being held until trial. Now this population is a portion — 18% — of the 2.4 million people who are locked up, but the speed at which people churn through jails adds up to big numbers: jails lock up 12 million people over the course of a year. That’s a lot of people, and as Cari Gervin notes: “conditions in local jails are often much worse—and more restrictive—than state or federal prisons”. She attributes the conditions to the fact that “municipal budgets are even more strapped than state budgets” although I’d make the point that because jails are all operated independently, there is less oversight and less attention paid to identifying and following best practices.

Now one of the worst practices is the idea of making families pay to visit their loved ones, and that’s something that to my knowledge exists only in jails, as I can’t imagine a state prison system banning in-person visitation and requiring people to use expensive paid video visitation instead. But sadly, a number of jails do this, and that’s the subject of Cari Gervin’s excellent cover story in Metro Pulse about the Knox County, Tennessee jail.

Toward the end of the Last Week Tonight video, Oliver sits on a stoop talking to puppets about their parents in jail. “That’s actually a zoo, that’s different,” Oliver says to an crocodile complaining that his “daddy’s in jail and people pay money to see him.”

The comedic effect gets lost when you consider just how much money people have to pay to see their incarcerated human relatives.

Eddie Ellis, 1941-2014

Remembering Edwin "Eddie" Ellis.

by Peter Wagner, July 25, 2014

Photo of Edwin “Eddie” Ellis speaking at Citizens Against Recidivism, Inc. (Photo: Citizens Against Recidivism, Inc.)

I was saddened to read this morning of the passing of Eddie Ellis, one of the first people to encourage my work to end prison gerrymandering, frequently inviting me to his On the Count radio program on WBAI.

Being on his program, and having Eddie introduce me to other important activists in New York City was a great honor for a young law student and then young lawyer, but I don’t think I ever told him that I was a fan of his long before he starting telling people to read my Importing Constituents report.

I first learned of Eddie Ellis from footage when he was still incarcerated in the excellent film The Last Graduation about the value of higher education in prisons and the horrible decision by the Clinton administration and Congress to end Pell Grants for incarcerated people, thereby shutting down very cost-effective college programs nationwide.

Eddie, a former Black Panther, served 23 years for a murder he didn’t commit. After his release, Eddie hit the ground running, continuing the work he started when he was on the inside. As the New York Times summarized a decade ago:

Rather than talk in broad sociological terms of crime and punishment, Mr. Ellis and his prison colleagues prefer to sketch out a sociological whirlwind: 47 percent prisoner recidivism rooted in an annual traffic of 26,000 prisoners going in and 23,000 coming out…

Out-of-Date Strategies

“The fact that must be faced, then, is that at least 11,000 new crimes are going to be committed by these guys coming out, most of them in their home neighborhoods,” Mr. Ellis stressed. “So what we do in the prisons can’t be done in the abstract, removed from these neighborhoods and their Afrocentric and Latino cultures.” Traditional prison strategies, he argued, are 50 years out of date and geared for the “Jimmy Cagney” days when Italian and Irish prisoners were the white majority in a much smaller, pre-drug-culture prison population.

The study groups within the prisons have crafted room for their activities from the tolerance for reform that followed the Attica prison riot of 1971. The chief groups, sometimes operating with church or civil rights sponsors, meet regularly in Green Haven, Eastern, Sing Sing, Woodbourne, Walkill and Auburn prisons. Each year they sponsor a seminar rooted in their nontraditional approach and attended by outside specialists.

…

[Ellis is interested] in shaping fresh changes in prison and tapping what he and some prison administrators see as a thoughtful talent pool of first-hand experience residing behind bars. Even more, as he exults in being back on the streets of Harlem, his beloved birthplace, Mr. Ellis keeps his departing galley-ship image of the prison system in mind.

“We’ve had enough textbook penology,” he said, trying to urge an outside world sick of the deepening rut of crime and punishment to consider alternative perspectives from some of the system’s resident experts.

The organization that Eddie founded, the Center for Nu Leadership, has a longer obituary.

FCC hears how high cost of calls can end parental rights

David Carliner Award Finalist Barbara Graves-Poller tells the FCC that New York prison phonecall price gouging routinely causes people to lose their parental rights.

by Peter Wagner, July 24, 2014

One of the highlights of the American Constitution Society Conference in Washington DC was quite serendipitous. I was at the conference to accept the David Carliner Public Interest Award, and I had the opportunity to have an amazing dinner with David Carliner’s family and the finalist for the award, Barbara Graves-Poller. Barbara mentioned her travel plans for the next day, and I recognized that on my way to a family event I’d be driving directly past the same New York City airport she needed to get to. I offered her a ride, and we had a long conversation about the intersections between our work that led to three collaborations. First I’m excited to announce that Barbara joined the Prison Policy Initiative advisory board. Secondly I’d like to share how Barbara’s work in family law provided powerful support to our work on regulating the prison phone industry. (Stay tuned for collaboration #3.)

Barbara is a supervising attorney at MFY Legal Services in New York City, where she specializes in providing legal representation to “kinship caregivers”, i.e., “grandparents and other relatives caring for children whose biological parents are unavailable due to incarceration, illness, death or other causes.” In so many cases in our poorest communities, incarceration is what rips families apart.

Now, I’ve been working to bring fairness to the prison and jail telephone industry for a long time, but what Barbara said next still shocked me: In New York, high phone costs can cost incarcerated parents their parental rights.

Barbara sent a three page letter to the Federal Communications Commission, alerting them to this important additional reason why further reductions in the unnecessary cost of calling home from prison or jail is necessary. The whole letter is a must read, but check out this excerpt first:

I. Inmates’ Relatives Often Serve as Informal “Kinship Caregivers” for Children and Cannot Bear the Expense of Uncapped Collect Calls

…

Taken together, the poverty and lack of social supports that define the kinship caregiver community make unreasonably high telephone bills particularly burdensome. As a consequence, low-income family members may be discouraged from taking in children with incarcerated parents, thus resulting in an increase in the foster care population, or restrict communications between children and their parents in prison.

II. Inmates Who Cannot Communicate with their Children or the Children’s Caregivers Routinely Lose their Parental Rights

Under New York Domestic Relations Law S 111(2), a parent who fails to visit or communicate with his or her child or designated caregiver for six months is deemed to have forfeited his or her parental rights. See In re Annette B., 828 N.E.2d 661 (N.Y. 2005). Incarcerated parents are not exempted from this rule and bear the burden of convincing a judge that they were unable to communicate with their children or provide financial assistance while in prison. Furthermore, nothing in the Domestic Relations Law requires foster care agencies to facilitate communications between incarcerated parents and their children. Indeed, many foster care agencies currently do not accept collect calls. Foster parents have discretion to accept collect calls but are not required to incur such expenses as a condition of caregiving.

Accordingly, inmates with children in the foster care system and kinship care arrangements risk losing their parental rights if they or their children’s caregivers cannot afford to pay for telephone communications. Time and again, New York courts terminate parental rights of currently and recently incarcerated parents because of the parent’s failure to communicate within the statutory period set forth in the Domestic Relations Law. In In re Yamilette MG., 986 N.Y.S.20 485, 487 (N.Y. App. Div. 2014), for example, the appellate court made clear that a father’s “incarceration did not absolve him of the responsibility to provide financial support for the child, according to his means, and to maintain regular contact with the child or the petitioner.” It made no inquiry into the father’s ability to afford calls while incarcerated, nor did it require proof that the foster care agency helped to facilitate communications between the father and child….

Thank you, Barbara, for sharing your experience with the FCC, and thank you Carliner Family and the American Constitution Society for making this connection.

And stay tuned for what the FCC does next.