By William Fisher
It couldn’t have taken more than a two-minute visit to the web site of The Innocence Project to persuade most rational adults that the death penalty is not only cruel and unusual, but a costly and ineffective way to deter murder.
That’s the gist of a new report from the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC). It’s entitled “Struck by Lightning: The Continuing Arbitrariness of the Death Penalty Thirty-Five Years After Its Re-instatement in 1976.” Richard Dieter, DPIC’s executive director, is the report’s author.
For those whose memories may be a bit hazy on this subject, the U.S. did have a moratorium on executions from 1972 to 1976, when the United States Supreme Court approved the reinstatement of the death penalty.
The moratorium came about in a 1972 court case, Furman v. Georgia, in which the United States Supreme Court decision that ruled on the requirement for a degree of consistency in the application of the death penalty. The case led to a de facto moratorium on capital punishment throughout the United States,
The moratorium came to an end when Gregg v. Georgia was decided in 1976. The Supreme Court consolidated Jackson v. Georgia and Branch v. Texas with the Furman decision, and thus also invalidated the death penalty for rape.
Gregg v. Georgia, et al reaffirmed the United States Supreme Court's acceptance of the use of the death penalty in the United States, upholding, in particular, the death sentence imposed on Troy Leon Gregg. Referred to by a leading scholar as the July 2 Cases and elsewhere referred to by the lead case Gregg, the Supreme Court set forth the two main features that capital sentencing procedures must employ in order to comport with the Eighth Amendment bar on "cruel and unusual punishments." The decision essentially overturned the de facto moratorium on the death penalty imposed by the Court in its 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia 408 U.S. 238 (1972).
The report notes that by the end of the 1960s, all but 10 states had laws authorizing capital punishment, but strong pressure by forces opposed to the death penalty resulted in an unofficial moratorium on executions for several years, with the last execution during this period taking place in 1967. Prior to this, an average of 130 executions per year occurred.
From 1930, the first year for which statistics are readily available from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, to 1967, 3,859 persons were executed under civil (that is, nonmilitary) jurisdiction in the United States. During this period of nearly half a century, over half (54%) of those executed were black, 45 percent were white, and the remaining one percent were members of other racial groups -- American Indians (a total of 19 executed from 1930-1967), Filipino (13), Chinese (8), and Japanese (2), the report says, adding:
The vast majority of those executed were men; 32 women were executed from 1930 to 1967. Three out of five executions during that period took place in the southern U.S. The state of Georgia had the highest number of executions during the period, totaling 366 -- more than nine percent of the national total. Texas followed with 297 executions; New York with 329; California with 292; and North Caroline with 263. Most executions -- 3,334 of 3,859 -- were for the crime of murder; 455 prisoners (12%) -- ninety percent of them black -- were executed for rape; 70 prisoners were executed for other offenses.
Athough the death penalty had earlier been held unconstitutional because of its arbitrary and unpredictable application, the Court was willing to sanction new systems that states had proposed to make capital punishment less like “being struck by lightning” and more like retribution for only the “worst of the worst” offenders.
The Court also deferred to the states’ judgment that the death penalty served the goals of retribution and deterrence.
After three and a half decades of experience under these revised statutes, the randomness of the system continues. Many of the country’s constitutional experts and prominent legal organizations have concluded that effective reform is impossible and the practice should be ended. In polls, jury verdicts and state legislative action, there is evidence of the American people’s growing frustration with the death penalty. A majority of the nine Justices who served on the Supreme Court in 1976 when the death penalty was approved eventually concluded the experiment had failed.
Nonetheless, in 1976, the newly reformed death penalty was allowed to resume. However, it has proved unworkable in practice. Keeping it in place, or attempting still more reform, would be enormously expensive, with little chance of improvement. The constitution requires fairness not just in lofty words, but also in daily practice. On that score, the death penalty has missed the mark.
Four states have abolished the death penalty in the past four years, and nationwide executions and death sentences have been cut in half since 2000. A review of state death penalty practices exposes a system in which an unpredictable few cases result in executions from among thousands of eligible cases. Race, geography and the size of a county’s budget play a major role in who receives the ultimate punishment.Many cases thought to embody the worst crimes and defendants are overturned on appeal and then assessed very differently the second time around at retrial. Even these reversals depend significantly on the quality of the lawyers assigned and on who appointed the appellate judges reviewing the cases.
In such a haphazard process, the rationales of deterrence and retribution make little sense.
In 1976, the newly reformed death penalty was allowed to resume. However, it has proved unworkable in practice. Keeping it in place, or attempting still more reform, would be enormously expensive, with little chance of improvement. The constitution requires fairness not just in lofty words, but also in daily practice. On that score, the death penalty has missed the mark.
The latest edition of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's "Death Row USA" shows that the number of people on death row in the United States is continuing to slowly decline, falling to 3,242 as of October 1, 2010. In 2000, there were 3,682 inmates on death row. Nationally, the racial composition of those on death row is 44% white, 42% black, and 12% Latino/Latina. California continues to have the largest death row population (714), followed by Florida (394) and Texas (322). Pennsylvania (220) and Alabama (204) complete the list of the states with the five largest death rows in the country. California and Pennsylvania have not carried out an executiion in over five years. Death Row USA is published quarterly by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The report contains the latest death row population figures, execution statistics, and an overview of recent legal developments related to capital punishment.
Four states in the past four years have abolished the death penalty, bringing the total of states without capital punishment to sixteen. As growing costs and
stark unfairness become harder to justify, more states are likely to follow that path.
The post-Gregg death penalty in the United States has proven to be a failed experiment.
The theory that with proper guidance to juries the death penalty could be administered fairly has not worked in practice. Thirty-five years of experience have taught the futility of trying to fix this stem. Many of those who favored the death penalty in the abstract have come to view its practice very differently. They have reached the conclusion that if societyʼs ultimate punishment cannot be applied fairly, it should not be applied at all.
There have been 272 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States.
• The first DNA exoneration took place in 1989. Exonerations have been won in 34 states; since 2000, there have been 205 exonerations.
• 17 of the 272 people exonerated through DNA served time on death row.
• The average length of time served by exonerees is 13 years. The total number of years served is approximately 3,521.
• The average age of exonerees at the time of their wrongful convictions was 27.
Races of the 272 exonerees:
161 African Americans
80 Caucasians
21 Latinos
2 Asian American
4 whose race is unknown
• The true suspects and/or perpetrators have been identified in 122 of the DNA exoneration cases.
• Since 1989, there have been tens of thousands of cases where prime suspects were identified and pursued—until DNA testing (prior to conviction) proved that they were wrongly accused.
• In more than 25 percent of cases in a National Institute of Justice study, suspects were excluded once DNA testing was conducted during the criminal investigation (the study, conducted in 1995, included 10,060 cases where testing was performed by FBI labs).
• About half of the people exonerated through DNA testing have been financially compensated. 27 states, the federal government, and the District of Columbia have passed laws to compensate people who were wrongfully incarcerated. Awards under these statutes vary from state to state.
• 22 percent of cases closed by the Innocence Project since 2004 were closed because of lost or missing evidence.
Seventeen people have been proven innocent and exonerated by DNA testing in the United States after serving time on death row. They were convicted in 11 states and served a combined 209 years in prison – including 187 years on death row – for crimes they didn’t commit.
Kirk Bloodsworth served eight years in Maryland prison – including two years on death row – for a murder and rape he didn’t commit, before he was exonerated in 1993.
Rolando Cruz, and his co-defendant Alejandro Hernandez, served more than 10 years on Illinois death row for a murder they didn’t commit before DNA testing proved both men innocent in 1995.
Verneal Jimerson and Dennis Williams were sentenced to death in the infamous Ford Heights Four case in Illinois for a pair of 1978 murders they didn’t commit. Jimerson was cleared in 1995 after a decade on death row and Williams served more than 17 years on death row before he was freed in 1996.
Robert Miller spent nine years on Oklahoma’s death row for a murder and rape he didn’t commit before he was cleared by DNA testing in 1998.
Ron Williamson spent a decade on Oklahoma’s death row for a murder he didn’t commit before DNA testing secured by the Innocence Project proved him innocent in 1999. His co-defendant, Dennis Fritz, was sentenced to life and spent 11 years in prison before DNA cleared him as well.
Ronald Jones, an Innocence Project client, served a decade on Illinois death row for a murder and rape he didn’t commit before DNA testing proved his innocence and led to his release in 1999.
Earl Washington, a Virginia man with limited mental capacity, was sentenced to death after he allegedly confessed to committing a 1982 murder he didn’t commit. He served a decade on death row, once coming within nine days of execution before receiving a stay. He would serve a total of 17 years behind bars before DNA testing obtained by the Innocence Project cleared him in 2000.
Frank Lee Smith died of cancer on Florida’s death row after serving 14 years for a murder and rape he didn’t commit. He was cleared by DNA testing obtained by the Innocence Project 11 months after his death.
Charles Irvin Fain served more than 17 years on death row in Idaho for a murder and rape he didn’t commit before DNA testing proved his innocence in 2001.
Ray Krone served a decade in Arizona prison – including four years on death row – for a murder and rape he didn’t commit before DNA testing proved his innocence in 2002.
Nicholas Yarris served more than 21 years on Pennsylvania’s death row before DNA testing proved his innocence and led to his release in 2003.
Ryan Matthews served five years on Louisiana’s death row for a murder he didn’t commit before he was exonerated by DNA testing in 2004. His co-defendant, Travis Hayes, was sentenced to life in prison and served eight years before he was cleared in 2007.
Curtis McCarty served 21 years in Oklahoma prison – including nearly 18 years on death row – for a murder he didn’t commit before DNA tests secured by the Innocence Project led to his exoneration in 2007. He was convicted twice and sentenced to death three times based on forensic misconduct.
Kennedy Brewer, an Innocence Project client, served 15 years behind bars – including seven years on death row – for a murder and sexual assault he didn’t commit before DNA testing from 2001 finally led to his exoneration in 2008.
Michael Blair served 13 years on death row for a murder he didn’t commit before DNA testing obtained by his lawyers at the Innocence Project proved his innocence and led to his exoneration in 2008.
These DNA exoneration cases have provided irrefutable proof that wrongful convictions are not isolated or rare events, but arise from systemic defects that can be precisely identified and addressed. For more than 15 years, the Innocence Project has worked to pinpoint these trends.
Eyewitness Misidentification Testimony was a factor in 75 percent of post-conviction DNA exoneration cases in the U.S., making it the leading cause of these wrongful convictions. At least 40 percent of these eyewitness identifications involved a cross racial identification (race data is currently only available on the victim, not for non-victim eyewitnesses). Studies have shown that people are less able to recognize faces of a different race than their own. These suggested reforms are embraced by leading criminal justice organizations and have been adopted in the states of New Jersey and North Carolina, large cities like Minneapolis and Seattle, and many smaller jurisdictions. Read more.
Unvalidated or Improper Forensic Science played a role in approximately 50 percent of wrongful convictions later overturned by DNA testing. While DNA testing was developed through extensive scientific research at top academic centers, many other forensic techniques – such as hair microscopy, bite mark comparisons, firearm tool mark analysis and shoe print comparisons – have never been subjected to rigorous scientific evaluation. Meanwhile, forensics techniques that have been properly validated – such as serology, commonly known as blood typing – are sometimes improperly conducted or inaccurately conveyed in trial testimony. In other wrongful conviction cases, forensic scientists have engaged in misconduct. Read more.
False confessions and incriminating statements lead to wrongful convictions in approximately 25 percent of cases. In 35 percent of false confession or admission cases, the defendant was 18 years old or younger and/or developmentally disabled. Twenty-two of the first 265 DNA exonerees pled guilty to crimes they did not commit. The Innocence Project encourages police departments to electronically record all custodial interrogations in their entirety in order to prevent coercion and to provide an accurate record of the proceedings. More than 500 jurisdictions have voluntarily adopted policies to record interrogations. State supreme courts have taken action in Alaska, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Wisconsin. Illinois, Maine, New Mexico, and the District of Columbia require the taping of interrogations in homicide cases. Read more.
Snitches contributed to wrongful convictions in 19 percent of cases. Whenever snitch testimony is used, the Innocence Project recommends that the judge instruct the jury that most snitch testimony is unreliable as it may be offered in return for deals, special treatment, or the dropping of charges. Prosecutors should also reveal any incentive the snitch might receive, and all communication between prosecutors and snitches should be recorded. Fifteen percent of wrongful convictions that were later overturned by DNA testing were caused in part by snitch testimony.
When the death penalty was permitted to go forward in 1976, many distinguished legal scholars warned that the task of creating an objectively fair system for deciding which criminals deserved to die and which should be allowed to live was impossible. A majority of those on the Supreme Court that approved the experiment ultimately concluded the attempt to fix the death penalty had failed.
Thirty-five years later a strong body of empirical evidence confirms that race, geography, money, politics, and other arbitrary factors exert a powerful influence on determining who is sentenced to death. This is the conclusion not only of experts, but increasingly that of the general public as well. Unfairness ranks near the top of the American publicʼs concerns about
the death penalty.
As the use of the death penalty has declined, the rationale for its continuation has disappeared. With defendants already facing life without parole, no one is likely to be deterred by an added punishment that is rarely imposed and even more rarely carried out many years later, and that is dependent on so many unpredictable factors. Nor does the wish for retribution justify a death penalty that is applied so sporadically. The reality is that those in society generally, and those families of murder victims in particular, who look to an execution to counter a terrible homicide will very likely be disappointed.”
Thus, the report concludes, receiving the death penalty is still like being struck by lightning.
END
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Wednesday, July 06, 2011
BAHRAIN: King Tries to Placate Anti-Government Demonstrators
By William Fisher
A day after Bahrain’s King Hamed announced the creation of an independent commission to investigate allegations that protesters' rights were violated during the anti-government demonstrations that erupted in February, riot police fired tear gas and stun grenades to disperse thousands of opposition supporters gathered near the square that was the epicenter of the nation's Shiite-led demonstrations earlier this year.
The White House is backing the “peace commission” and has urged the monarchy to meet some of the opposition's demands. But the king's appeal for dialogue got a cool reception from opposition groups. The leaders of the biggest Shiite party, Al Wefaq, have not yet decided whether they will join the talks.
At the same time, Bahrain's rights groups reported that another protester died on Thursday as a result of injuries he sustained during the unrest. Human Rights Activist Nabeel Rajab said the protesters at Manama's Pearl Square chanted: "Down, down Hamad." They also demanded the release of all demonstrators, opposition leaders and activists detained during the deadly crackdown on the Shiite-led campaign for political freedom and greater rights.
In an apparent concession to demonstrators’ demands, the trials of 47 doctors, nurses and other health professionals have been moved from military to civilian courts. The medical staff are charged with participating in an effort to topple Bahrain's monarchy by treating Bahrainis injured in the demonstrations and to prevent them from testifying as to what they saw.
In his speech Wednesday, the king said Bahrain is committed to reform and respecting human rights. In another move to draw the reluctant opposition into the talks, authorities on Thursday halted bringing anti-government protesters to trial at a special tribunal with military prosecutors and transferred the cases to civilian courts, a lawyer said. The practice has been criticized as unfair by rights activists and the Persian Gulf kingdom's Western allies.
The special tribunal was set up in March, when Bahrain's Sunni rulers imposed martial law to help quash protests by Shiites demanding political freedoms and greater rights. The trials of dozens of opposition figures, human rights activists and Shiite professionals continued even after the emergency laws were lifted earlier this human rights.
But the government accused the protesters of pushing the country into a "state of chaos" with the street marches and sit-ins during the turmoil.The king said the government would not interfere in the commission's probe into what he called the "unfortunate events" of February and March. The commission is to report its findings by Oct. 30.
The opposition condemned the announcement and demanded the investigation of the killing, torture, detention, inhuman treatment of the Saudi-backed Bahraini forces on Shiite Muslims of Bahrain from February to June 30th, rather than the government intention to probe only February and March incidents.
The leaders of the biggest Shiite party, Al Wefaq, have not yet decided whether they will join the talks.
The Financial Times quotes officials as saying the five-member commission will be headed by high-profile legal professor Cherif Bassiouni, a US-based UN war crimes expert nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in international criminal justice.
The other members are Nigel Rodley, a British lawyer and professor and member of the UN Human Rights Committee; Philippe Kirsch, a Canadian lawyer who was a judge on the International Criminal Court; Mahnoush Arsanjani, who has worked as a senior UN legal officer; and Badria al-Awadhi, a Kuwaiti lawyer.
The commission’s public report, which can include recommendations for prosecutions, will be submitted to the king by October 30. The monarch said the commission had set its own parameters and would operate independently.
The official Bahraini news agency said the Commission’s mandate is “to engage in fact finding and it has access to all concerned government agencies, government officials, government files and records. It is also free to meet with any person it deems appropriate, including but not limited to, representatives of civil society, human rights organizations, political groups, labor unions, and alleged victims and witnesses of alleged violations of internationally protected human rights.”
In connection with its work, “the Commission will be able to meet with alleged victims and witnesses of alleged violations in secrecy and in accordance with measures that it shall develop to protect the privacy and security of individuals it meets with, in line with international human rights norms.”
The Royal Decree said “the government shall not interfere in any way with the work of the Commission nor shall it prevent access to it by anyone seeking to make contact with the Commission or its staff. Moreover the government shall facilitate the Commission’s and its staff’s access to such places and people as the Commission deems appropriate.”
In his decree establishing the Commission, the king said, “The events which took place in February and March were distressing to us, as they were to all our people and to all friends of Bahrain everywhere. The events were unprecedented in our history, and came at a time when the Kingdom was taking broad strides forward in all areas. For ten years, we have sought reform of the institutions of Bahrain. We have a Constitution which is compliant with all international treaties on human rights to which Bahrain is a party. Our economic progress has also been remarkable, and we can be proud of an unemployment rate which has remained below 4%.”
He continued: “There can be no doubt that citizens have the right to express their views through peaceful and legitimate means. Citizens have the right to put their demands without being met violently; and in return, freedom must be exercised responsibly. Freedom of expression must not be exploited as a way to disturb public order, threaten civil peace, undermine economic interests or damage state facilities. During recent events, rumors were circulated to claim that some were right and others wrong. Given this situation, we cannot continue in our progress without healing these wounds and uncovering the whole truth.”
The majority Shiite population of Bahrain claims it has been routinely discriminated against, citing inability to obtain senior jobs in government or industry and “redline” housing that excludes them from the most desirable housing.
The tiny Persian Gulf kingdom is of strategic importance to the US, being home to the US fifth Fleet. That is one reason the US has been urging reconciliation. There are others, including Bahrain’s friendship with Saudi Arabia, whose troops are currently assisting the Bahrainis in putting down the unrest. Bahrain is also a producer of oil.
A day after Bahrain’s King Hamed announced the creation of an independent commission to investigate allegations that protesters' rights were violated during the anti-government demonstrations that erupted in February, riot police fired tear gas and stun grenades to disperse thousands of opposition supporters gathered near the square that was the epicenter of the nation's Shiite-led demonstrations earlier this year.
The White House is backing the “peace commission” and has urged the monarchy to meet some of the opposition's demands. But the king's appeal for dialogue got a cool reception from opposition groups. The leaders of the biggest Shiite party, Al Wefaq, have not yet decided whether they will join the talks.
At the same time, Bahrain's rights groups reported that another protester died on Thursday as a result of injuries he sustained during the unrest. Human Rights Activist Nabeel Rajab said the protesters at Manama's Pearl Square chanted: "Down, down Hamad." They also demanded the release of all demonstrators, opposition leaders and activists detained during the deadly crackdown on the Shiite-led campaign for political freedom and greater rights.
In an apparent concession to demonstrators’ demands, the trials of 47 doctors, nurses and other health professionals have been moved from military to civilian courts. The medical staff are charged with participating in an effort to topple Bahrain's monarchy by treating Bahrainis injured in the demonstrations and to prevent them from testifying as to what they saw.
In his speech Wednesday, the king said Bahrain is committed to reform and respecting human rights. In another move to draw the reluctant opposition into the talks, authorities on Thursday halted bringing anti-government protesters to trial at a special tribunal with military prosecutors and transferred the cases to civilian courts, a lawyer said. The practice has been criticized as unfair by rights activists and the Persian Gulf kingdom's Western allies.
The special tribunal was set up in March, when Bahrain's Sunni rulers imposed martial law to help quash protests by Shiites demanding political freedoms and greater rights. The trials of dozens of opposition figures, human rights activists and Shiite professionals continued even after the emergency laws were lifted earlier this human rights.
But the government accused the protesters of pushing the country into a "state of chaos" with the street marches and sit-ins during the turmoil.The king said the government would not interfere in the commission's probe into what he called the "unfortunate events" of February and March. The commission is to report its findings by Oct. 30.
The opposition condemned the announcement and demanded the investigation of the killing, torture, detention, inhuman treatment of the Saudi-backed Bahraini forces on Shiite Muslims of Bahrain from February to June 30th, rather than the government intention to probe only February and March incidents.
The leaders of the biggest Shiite party, Al Wefaq, have not yet decided whether they will join the talks.
The Financial Times quotes officials as saying the five-member commission will be headed by high-profile legal professor Cherif Bassiouni, a US-based UN war crimes expert nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in international criminal justice.
The other members are Nigel Rodley, a British lawyer and professor and member of the UN Human Rights Committee; Philippe Kirsch, a Canadian lawyer who was a judge on the International Criminal Court; Mahnoush Arsanjani, who has worked as a senior UN legal officer; and Badria al-Awadhi, a Kuwaiti lawyer.
The commission’s public report, which can include recommendations for prosecutions, will be submitted to the king by October 30. The monarch said the commission had set its own parameters and would operate independently.
The official Bahraini news agency said the Commission’s mandate is “to engage in fact finding and it has access to all concerned government agencies, government officials, government files and records. It is also free to meet with any person it deems appropriate, including but not limited to, representatives of civil society, human rights organizations, political groups, labor unions, and alleged victims and witnesses of alleged violations of internationally protected human rights.”
In connection with its work, “the Commission will be able to meet with alleged victims and witnesses of alleged violations in secrecy and in accordance with measures that it shall develop to protect the privacy and security of individuals it meets with, in line with international human rights norms.”
The Royal Decree said “the government shall not interfere in any way with the work of the Commission nor shall it prevent access to it by anyone seeking to make contact with the Commission or its staff. Moreover the government shall facilitate the Commission’s and its staff’s access to such places and people as the Commission deems appropriate.”
In his decree establishing the Commission, the king said, “The events which took place in February and March were distressing to us, as they were to all our people and to all friends of Bahrain everywhere. The events were unprecedented in our history, and came at a time when the Kingdom was taking broad strides forward in all areas. For ten years, we have sought reform of the institutions of Bahrain. We have a Constitution which is compliant with all international treaties on human rights to which Bahrain is a party. Our economic progress has also been remarkable, and we can be proud of an unemployment rate which has remained below 4%.”
He continued: “There can be no doubt that citizens have the right to express their views through peaceful and legitimate means. Citizens have the right to put their demands without being met violently; and in return, freedom must be exercised responsibly. Freedom of expression must not be exploited as a way to disturb public order, threaten civil peace, undermine economic interests or damage state facilities. During recent events, rumors were circulated to claim that some were right and others wrong. Given this situation, we cannot continue in our progress without healing these wounds and uncovering the whole truth.”
The majority Shiite population of Bahrain claims it has been routinely discriminated against, citing inability to obtain senior jobs in government or industry and “redline” housing that excludes them from the most desirable housing.
The tiny Persian Gulf kingdom is of strategic importance to the US, being home to the US fifth Fleet. That is one reason the US has been urging reconciliation. There are others, including Bahrain’s friendship with Saudi Arabia, whose troops are currently assisting the Bahrainis in putting down the unrest. Bahrain is also a producer of oil.
Tuesday, July 05, 2011
EGYPT: ARAB SPRING MORPHS INTO SUMMER OF CONFLICT
By William Fisher
It should have been expected that the various groups who demonstrated in such a strong, unified position in Tahrir Square and elsewhere in Egypt would begin to show their differences after Mubarak resigned.
After all, they won! So what to do now?
Governing is a lot harder than demonstrating. And, besides, they weren’t the government; the army was.
During the Tahrir Square uprisings, the Army became the darlings of the protesters. They didn’t fire on the protesters. In fact, it was the Army who kept pro-Mubarak forces from physically attacking those who wanted him out.
Now the worm has turned once again. Crowds of full-throated critics of the Army are out in Tahrir Square again in large numbers.
They insist that the demonstrators arrested in previous demonstrations be tried in civilian, rather than military courts. They scream when they learn that the cops who are on trial for mishandling demonstrators have been freed on bail. They insist on an apology from the Ministry of Interior for their mismanagement of the security police during the demonstrations. They’re furious at the supreme military council for abusing prisoners taken into custody during the demonstrations and sentenced to substantial prison terms for what the opposition characterizes as “nothing.” And they’re equally up in arms about the “virginity tests” the military police administered to women taken into custody (the army now says it is discontinuing this practice.)
Then there’s the fierce battle about whether a new Constitution should be written before or after Parliamentary elections.
Michele Dunne of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – one of the more perceptive of the Western think-tanks – has put the problem succinctly. She says that “there are other coalitions forming as well that for the most part pit non-Islamist parties against the (Muslim) Brotherhood in a struggle over constitution first (or at least electoral delay) versus elections first.”
She explains: “Constitution-firsters, mostly liberals and leftists, argue there is little sense in electing two houses of parliament and a president when the constitution to be written subsequently is likely to change the political system significantly enough to require all new elections within as little as a year. Behind their procedural argument is a fear that the FJP (the Freedom and Justice Party organized by the Muslim Brotherhood) will do well in parliamentary elections and thereby have the largest say in shaping the constitution.”
“Thirty-six different youth and political groups have joined the “Free Front for Peaceful Change” in backing a “Constitution First” campaign, which is seeking 15 million signatures to support a revised timetable. The coalition has threatened to bring a million protestors back into Tahrir Square on Friday, July 8 to protest, but the military leadership might still meet at least some of their demands before that,” she says.
Election-firsters, she continues, “led by the FJP, counter that a new constitution can only be legitimate if underpinned by elections; the current system mandates that the elected parliament choose a 100-member constituent assembly that would oversee the constitution’s writing, to be followed by a popular referendum on the document. They also argue that prioritizing constitution writing would violate the will of voters in the March 2011 referendum when three-quarters of voters supported constitutional amendments specifying the holding of parliamentary elections within six months.”
She concludes, “ Political forces in Egypt today face a dilemma: either proceed ahead expeditiously to elections in order to end the post-revolutionary rule of the military or slow down the electoral timetable and prioritize the writing of a new constitution. New political parties want more time to organize; parties, movements associated with the January revolution, and civil society groups are also pushing for guarantees concerning the content of the new constitution and the process by which it will be written.”
There are also a host of potentially central issues that must be resolved if they are to become part of the new Constitution. One of the most critical is the future role of the Army. This issue has been discussed in the series of meetings the ruling junta has held with the growing number of new political parties. The Supreme Council, which now rules Egypt, has made it clear that it wants to get out of the governance business as soon as possible. But conservative political interests are proposing that the military should continue to play a central role in the country’s affairs and that this role should be explicit in the new Constitution. The least threatening role has been likened to a referee, or to the last best option for resolving serious disputes.
But, in my view, this is a bad idea. The Supreme Council has already demonstrated that it is not skilled in governance. It does not wish to govern. Moreover, realistically, if the country ever finds itself in really calamitous trouble, the Army would be turned to, whether the arrangement was codified or not.
After all, the Generals who sit on the Supreme Council are Hosni Mubarak’s fellow officers. They all learned from the same teachers. And one of the things they learned particularly well is how to deal with dissent. Egypt has been there, done that. Today it needs a fresh start. And a fresh cast of characters.
It should have been expected that the various groups who demonstrated in such a strong, unified position in Tahrir Square and elsewhere in Egypt would begin to show their differences after Mubarak resigned.
After all, they won! So what to do now?
Governing is a lot harder than demonstrating. And, besides, they weren’t the government; the army was.
During the Tahrir Square uprisings, the Army became the darlings of the protesters. They didn’t fire on the protesters. In fact, it was the Army who kept pro-Mubarak forces from physically attacking those who wanted him out.
Now the worm has turned once again. Crowds of full-throated critics of the Army are out in Tahrir Square again in large numbers.
They insist that the demonstrators arrested in previous demonstrations be tried in civilian, rather than military courts. They scream when they learn that the cops who are on trial for mishandling demonstrators have been freed on bail. They insist on an apology from the Ministry of Interior for their mismanagement of the security police during the demonstrations. They’re furious at the supreme military council for abusing prisoners taken into custody during the demonstrations and sentenced to substantial prison terms for what the opposition characterizes as “nothing.” And they’re equally up in arms about the “virginity tests” the military police administered to women taken into custody (the army now says it is discontinuing this practice.)
Then there’s the fierce battle about whether a new Constitution should be written before or after Parliamentary elections.
Michele Dunne of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – one of the more perceptive of the Western think-tanks – has put the problem succinctly. She says that “there are other coalitions forming as well that for the most part pit non-Islamist parties against the (Muslim) Brotherhood in a struggle over constitution first (or at least electoral delay) versus elections first.”
She explains: “Constitution-firsters, mostly liberals and leftists, argue there is little sense in electing two houses of parliament and a president when the constitution to be written subsequently is likely to change the political system significantly enough to require all new elections within as little as a year. Behind their procedural argument is a fear that the FJP (the Freedom and Justice Party organized by the Muslim Brotherhood) will do well in parliamentary elections and thereby have the largest say in shaping the constitution.”
“Thirty-six different youth and political groups have joined the “Free Front for Peaceful Change” in backing a “Constitution First” campaign, which is seeking 15 million signatures to support a revised timetable. The coalition has threatened to bring a million protestors back into Tahrir Square on Friday, July 8 to protest, but the military leadership might still meet at least some of their demands before that,” she says.
Election-firsters, she continues, “led by the FJP, counter that a new constitution can only be legitimate if underpinned by elections; the current system mandates that the elected parliament choose a 100-member constituent assembly that would oversee the constitution’s writing, to be followed by a popular referendum on the document. They also argue that prioritizing constitution writing would violate the will of voters in the March 2011 referendum when three-quarters of voters supported constitutional amendments specifying the holding of parliamentary elections within six months.”
She concludes, “ Political forces in Egypt today face a dilemma: either proceed ahead expeditiously to elections in order to end the post-revolutionary rule of the military or slow down the electoral timetable and prioritize the writing of a new constitution. New political parties want more time to organize; parties, movements associated with the January revolution, and civil society groups are also pushing for guarantees concerning the content of the new constitution and the process by which it will be written.”
There are also a host of potentially central issues that must be resolved if they are to become part of the new Constitution. One of the most critical is the future role of the Army. This issue has been discussed in the series of meetings the ruling junta has held with the growing number of new political parties. The Supreme Council, which now rules Egypt, has made it clear that it wants to get out of the governance business as soon as possible. But conservative political interests are proposing that the military should continue to play a central role in the country’s affairs and that this role should be explicit in the new Constitution. The least threatening role has been likened to a referee, or to the last best option for resolving serious disputes.
But, in my view, this is a bad idea. The Supreme Council has already demonstrated that it is not skilled in governance. It does not wish to govern. Moreover, realistically, if the country ever finds itself in really calamitous trouble, the Army would be turned to, whether the arrangement was codified or not.
After all, the Generals who sit on the Supreme Council are Hosni Mubarak’s fellow officers. They all learned from the same teachers. And one of the things they learned particularly well is how to deal with dissent. Egypt has been there, done that. Today it needs a fresh start. And a fresh cast of characters.
Sunday, July 03, 2011
The Corrupt Corporate Incarceration Complex
By William Fisher
Seventeen year-old Hillary Transue did what lots of 17-year-olds do: Got into mischief. Hillary’s mischief was composing a MySpace page poking fun at the assistant principal of the high school she attended in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
Hillary was an honor student who’d never had any trouble with the law before. And her MySpace page stated clearly that the page was a joke. But despite all that, Hilary found herself charged with harassment. She stood before a judge and heard him sentence her to three months in a juvenile detention facility.
What she expected was perhaps a stern lecture. What she got was a perp walk -- being led away in handcuffs as her stunned parents stood by helplessly. Hillary told the New York Times, “I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare. All I wanted to know was how this could be fair and why the judge would do such a thing.”
It wasn’t until two years later that she found out why. In Scranton, Pa. two judges pleaded guilty to operating a kickback scheme involving juvenile offenders. The judges, Mark Ciavarella Jr. and Michael Conahan, took more than $2.6 million in kickbacks from a private prison company to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers. Since 2003, Ciaveralla had sentenced an estimated 5,000 juveniles. Conahan was accused of setting up the contracts. Many of the youngsters shipped off to the detention centers were first-time offenders. The two judges received sentences of seven years each and are also being sued by numerous parents of the children involved.
PA Child Care is a juvenile detention center in Pittston Township,
Pennysylvania. It was opened in February 2003. It has a sister company,
Western PA Child Care, in Butler County, Pennsylvania. Treatment at both facilities is provided by Mid Atlantic Youth Services. Gregory Zappala took sole ownership of the company when he purchased co-owner Robert Powell's share in June 2008.
In July 2009 Robert Powell pled guilty to failing to report a felony and being
an accessory to tax evasion conspiracy in connection with $770,000 in kickbacks he paid to Ciavarella and Conahan in exchange for facilitating the development of his facilities.
The child care facilities have also been criticized for their costs, which ranged as high as $315 per child per day. Butler county paid Western PA Child Care about $800,000 in payments between 2005 and 2008. Butler county did not renew Western PA Child Care's contract after an extension of the contract ran out at the end of 2008. The juvenile detention center Hillary was sent to was a private-for-profit facility run by one of the more than 50 companies operating in the five billion dollar private prison industry.
These companies have names you’ve probably never heard of -- like Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO.
Ironically, it’s the federal and state criminal justice systems that produce the private prisons phenomenon and create the opportunity for private operators to capitalize. What they are capitalizing on is America’s obsession with handing out long prison sentences out of all proportion to the crimes committed.
Today, the United States has locked up more prisoners than any other country in the world -- 2.3 million-plus people locked up in state and federal prisons and county jails. This has predictably resulted in a shortage of publicly-owned prison beds – a shortage increasingly being filled by companies that charge so many dollars for each convict sent their way.
Detainees include immigrants who have applied for asylum in the U.S. and others awaiting hearings before being deported. The number of people detained has soared to more than 400,000 a year. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), part of the sprawling Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the average detention is about one month, although some detainees are kept for years. The cost of detention is estimated to be $1.7 billion annually.
In the past five years, the nation’s largest private prison company has partnered with the federal government to detain close to a million undocumented people waiting to be deported or appear before an immigration judge. In the process, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) has made record profits. Critics suggest that CCA cuts corners on its detention contracts in order to increase its revenue at expense of humane conditions. Thanks to political connections and lobbying, it dominates the immigrant detention industry. CCA now has close to 10,000 new beds under development in anticipation of continued demand.
Judith Greene, a policy analyst with Justice Strategies, a nonprofit sentencing-reform advocacy group in New York, says, "Profits by no means created the machinery of mass incarceration, no more than defense contracts invented war, but the huge profits to be made by incarcerating an ever-growing segment of our population serves the system very well."
"Profits oil the machinery, keep it humming and speed its growth," she adds.
For-profit prison companies claim to be able to provide prison and detention services to cities, counties, states and the Federal Government for less money – an idea that cash-strapped communities apparently find irresistible.
Yet studies throughout the country show that private prisons are only marginally less expensive than public prisons and are often substantially more expensive. The second issue is a medical care regimen that, until recently, allowed the government such wide discretion that it could deny urgent care, including biopsies for suspected cancers and treatment of heart conditions.
Moreover, a panoply of hidden subsidies is rarely calculated into the private prison industry’s cost claims. According to a study by Paul Wright, the founder and editor of "Prison Legal News," a prisoners’ rights advocacy newsletter, at least 44, or 73 percent, of the 60 facilities (studied) had received a development subsidy from local, state and/or federal government sources. Subsidies were found in 17 of the 19 states in which the 60 facilities are located.
Facilities operated by the two largest private prison companies, CCA and GEO, were frequently subsidized. Among the facilities in this study, 78 percent of CCA's and 69 percent of GEO’s prisons were subsidized, suggesting that these companies had been aggressive in seeking development subsidies.
According to the not-for-profit Private Corrections Institute, “the private prison industry relies on a number of allies and research studies to justify its claims of cost savings and proficiency; however, most of these sources have industry connections or vested financial interests.”
For example, it claims, the Reason Foundation, a strong proponent of prison privatization, has received funding from private prison firms. The American Correctional Association (ACA) receives sponsorship money from CCA, GEO and other private prison companies for its bi-annual conferences.
Former University of Florida Prof. Charles Thomas conducted supposedly impartial research on the private prison industry until it was learned that he owned private prison stock, had been paid $3 million for consulting for a private prison firm, and served on the board of Prison Realty Trust (a CCA spin-off). Thomas was fined $20,000 by the Florida Commission on Ethics and stepped down from his University position.
Private prisons are paid according to filled beds. So they are constantly pushing for more inmates – while officials of publicly owned prisons are trying to shed prisoners to relieve overcrowding and reduce expenses.
Private prisons seek to save money by hiring less experienced staff. The result of that policy can be seen in the disproportionate numbers of poorly controlled prison riots, by unsanitary health conditions, by substandard record-keeping, by high employee turnover, and by the number of deaths in detention.
A June 2004 study by academics Curtis R. Blakely and Vic W. Bumphus found that private prison turnover among correctional officers was 43 per cent while turnover in public sector prisons were only 15 per cent. Turnover in for-profit prisons was linked to lower staff pay and less training. Moreover, the study found, “Pay, training, and turnover may all contribute to the higher levels of violence seen in the private sector.”
One big area where for-profit prison firms skimp is on labor costs, according to Paul Wright. “While employees at state-run prisons get union-scale salaries, private-prison guards typically earn $7 to $10 per hour,” he says, adding: "They have low wages and high turnover and very little in the way of benefits or training."
Wright, 43, was once a prisoner himself, serving 17 years of a 25-year term for killing a cocaine dealer he was trying to rob. Today, he is an advocate for prisoner rights and over the years has filed numerous legal challenges against the industry and won.
"The private-prison industry is marked by corruption," he says. "Their premise is they can run prisons cheaper than the government, but taxpayers don't realize any of those savings. Any savings the private-prison industry obtains is basically profits for their shareholders."
For-profit prisons are private corporations and thus not subject to external oversight. They are not obligated to produce their internal records for public scrutiny and are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act at the Federal level because that law applies only to documents in the government’s possession.
Political pressure from interests in US border states has forced President Obama to exceed the record of former President George W. Bush in deporting illegal aliens. That surge has resulted in a windfall for the private prison industry. Today a substantial slice of its current growth can be attributed to its activities in the immigration detention field.
Private prisons have become a major influence in shaping critical legislation related to illegal immigration. The industry’s lobbyists have played a leading role in drafting a number of recent anti-immigrant laws, for example, Arizona’s SB-1070, and similar laws in Georgia, Alabama, and other states.
Under the Alabama measure, police must detain someone they suspect of being in the country illegally if the person cannot produce proper documentation when stopped for any reason. It also will be a crime to knowingly transport or harbor someone who is in the country illegally. The law imposes penalties on businesses that knowingly employ someone without legal resident status. A company's business license could be suspended or revoked. And the law requires Alabama businesses to use a database called E-Verify to confirm the immigration status of new employees.
Lee Fang reports in “Think Progress” that, in December 2009, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) — a powerful front group that helps corporate representatives craft template legislation for state lawmakers, funded partially by the private prison industry — hosted Arizona State Sen. Russell Pearce (R) and began debate on legislation that would provide broad powers to local police to arrest anyone who might look like an immigrant. ALEC then distributed the template legislation to its members. The January/February 2010 edition of ALEC’s magazine highlights the draft version of SB1070 — the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” — as model legislation.
It was Pearce who introduced ALEC’s “template” as the infamous SB1070 law. Notably, the ALEC task force which helped Pearce devise his racial profiling law included Laurie Shanblum, a CCA lobbyist. CCA previously played an important role in privatizing many of Texas’ prisons.
An investigation by Arizona’s KPHO-TV found more ties between SB1070 and the private prison industry: Paul Senseman, Arizona’s Gov. Janet Brewer’s deputy chief of staff, was a former lobbyist for CCA (his wife is still a lobbyist for CCA), and Chuck Coughlin, Brewer’s campaign chairman, runs the lobbying firm in Arizona that represents CCA.
CCA was set to receive well over $74 million in tax dollars in FY2010 for running immigration detention centers. In a recent presentation, Pershing Square Capital, a hedge fund with a large financial stake in CCA, suggested that CCA’s profitability depends on increasing numbers of immigrants sent to prison. Many of the legislators helping to earn CCA more profits with radical anti-immigrant bills mirroring SB1070 have been recipients of private prison industry cash or have worked closely with the CCA-funded ALEC organization.
“When detentions increased following the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and the Pentagon”, author Mark Dow writes, “private prison profiteers saw another opportunity. The (then) Chairman of the Houston-based Cornell Companies spoke candidly in a conference call with other investors: ‘It can only be good…with the focus on people that are illegal and also from Middle Eastern descent…In the US there are over 900,000 undocumented individuals from Middle Eastern descent…That’s half of our entire (US) prison population…The Federal business is the best business for us…and the events of September 11 (are) increasing that level of business…”
Efforts to reach the CEOs of the two leading private prison companies, CCA and GEO, to invite comment on this article were unsuccessful. However, their websites present a comprehensive picture of the companies’ vision of their operations. Both are doing extremely well. GEO’s revenues for 2010 rose 11 per cent to $1.27.billion. CCA’s revenues in 2009 rose to $1.670 billion. The companies’ annual reports and 10-K filings present a robust picture of these operations and strike an optimistic note for the future.
Beau Hodai, considered an authority on the private prison industry, noted in Prison Legal News last year that private prison leaders had substantially increased their spending on lobbying.
For example, he writes, “From January 2008 to April 2010, CCA spent $4.4 million lobbying the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, the Office of the Federal Detention Trustee, the Office of Budget Management, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and both houses of Congress. Of the 43 lobbying disclosure reports filed by CCA during this period, only five do not expressly state intent to monitor or influence immigration reform policy or gain Homeland Security or ICE appropriations.”
The private prison industry’s operation of immigration detention centers has been less than stellar – a lot less.
For example:
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas and El Paso co-counsel Mike Torres and Leon Schydlower filed a lawsuit on behalf of the survivors of Jesus Manuel Galindo. Named as defendants were the federal government and the GEO Group, the administrator of the West Texas for-profit prison where Galindo, 32, died on December 12, 2008, after suffering a seizure in solitary confinement where he had been placed for complaining about the facility’s failure to provide him medication to control his epileptic seizures.
At least nine immigrant prisoners have died in the Reeves County Detention Center in the last five years. The GEO Group has had at least six facilities in Texas shuttered or contracts canceled. The state of Idaho pulled its inmates from the Dickens County Correctional Center in the spring of 2007 in the wake of the suicide of inmate Scot Noble Payne and a subsequent investigation into "squalid" conditions at the lock-up. Idaho also cut its contract the Bill Clayton Detention Center in Littlefield, Texas after the 2008 suicide of Randy McCullough. In October 2007, the Coke County Juvenile Justice Center was shuttered by the Texas Youth Commission after a damning investigation into conditions at the youth detention center.
Despite that record – ironically, on the very day the lawsuit was filed -- the company was awarded a contract by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to operate a new 600-bed "civil" detention center in Karnes County, Texas. Texas has more for-profit prisons than any other state.
In another case, a former immigration detention guard was convicted of sexually abusing female detainees in the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, near Austin, Texas, which is managed by Corrections Corporation of America. The resident supervisor, Donald Dunn, 30, was charged with three counts of official oppression and two counts of unlawful restraint, the Austin American-Statesman reported.
The ACLU said CCA officials were violating policy by allowing female immigration detainees to be isolated with male staff members. After an ACLU investigation into sexual abuse at the Hutto facility, Vanita Gupta, Deputy Legal Director of the ACLU, said the charges show additional need for reform.
Then there is the issue of death in detention. Nina Bernstein, writing in The New York Times, alleged that ICE officials, fearful of media scrutiny, conspired to conceal the details surrounding the deaths of a number of detained immigrants who died in privately-run detention centers.
Bernstein wrote that “…it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.”
The documents were obtained by The Times and the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act. They relate to most of the 107 deaths in detention counted by ICE October 2003, when the agency was created within the Department of Homeland Security. The documents also revealed ten deaths in detention that had never been disclosed by the government. The ACLU says the number of deaths has increased since then.
The article details a litany of abuses. For example:
“As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the reporter’s inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity.”
“In another case that year, investigators from the agency’s Office of
Professional Responsibility concluded that unbearable, untreated pain had been a significant factor in the suicide of a 22-year-old detainee at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, and that the medical unit was so poorly run that other detainees were at risk.”
“The investigation found that jail medical personnel had falsified a medication log to show that the detainee, a Salvadoran named Nery Romero, had been given Motrin. The fake entry was easy to detect: When the drug was supposedly administered, Mr. Romero was already dead.”
“Yet those findings were never disclosed to the public or to Mr. Romero’s
relatives on Long Island, who had accused the jail of abruptly depriving him of his prescription painkiller for a broken leg. And an agency supervisor wrote that because other jails were ‘finicky’ about accepting detainees with known medical problems like Mr. Romero’s, such people would continue to be placed at the Bergen jail as ‘a last resort’.”
Another case concerns Yusif Osman, who was a U.S. legal resident from Ghana and had been living in Los Angeles for five years. After a companion carrying false ID landed him in an immigration detention center run by CCA. Osman was facing deportation on smuggling charges, an allegation he denied. While at the immigration detention center outside San Diego, he died suddenly. His story highlights the poor care some immigrants have received in the scores of immigration facilities across the United States.
Near midnight on a California spring night, armed guards escorted Yusif Osman into an immigration prison ringed by concertina wire at the end of a winding, isolated road. During the intake screening, a part-time nurse began a computerized medical file on Osman, a routine procedure for any person entering the vast prison network the government has built for foreign detainees across the country. But the nurse pushed a button and mistakenly closed file #077-987-986 and marked it "completed" -- even though it had no medical information in it.
Three months later, at two in the morning on June 27, 2006, the native of Ghana collapsed in Cell 206 at the Otay Mesa immigrant detention center outside San Diego. His cellmate hit the intercom button, yelling to guards that Osman was on the floor suffering from chest pains. A guard peered through the window into the dim cell and saw the detainee on the ground, but did not go in. Instead, he called a clinic nurse to find out whether Osman had any medical problems.
When the nurse opened the file and found it blank, she decided there was no emergency and said Osman needed to fill out a sick call request. The guard went on a lunch break.
The cellmate yelled again. Another guard came by, looked in and called the nurse. This time she wanted Osman brought to the clinic. Forty minutes passed before guards brought a wheelchair to his cell. By then it was too late: Osman was barely alive when paramedics reached him. He soon died.
His body, clothed only in dark pants and socks, was left on a breezeway for two hours, an airway tube sticking out of his mouth. Osman was 34.
The next day, an autopsy determined that he had died because his heart had suddenly stopped, confidential medical records show. Two physicians who reviewed his case for The Washington Post said he might have lived had he received timely treatment, perhaps as basic as an aspirin.
Privately, Otay Mesa's medical staff also knew his care was deficient. On Page 3 of an internal review of his death is this question:
Did patient receive appropriate and adequate health care consistent with community standards during his/her detention ...?
Otay Mesa's medical director, Esther Hui, checked "No."
The ACLU records that “One man was brought in with such high blood pressure that if he was not in custody, he would have been sent to an emergency room immediately. He was denied treatment and shortly thereafter her suffered a massive heart attack and died.”
The ACLU said he was denied treatment because the treatment he needed – a coronary artery bypass – was not considered an ‘emergency’ procedure, the only condition under which care could be provided.
Another detainee had for over a year been denied a biopsy to detect a possible cancer. He died soon afterward.
The medical neglect they endure is part of the hidden human cost of increasingly strict policies adopted following the Sept. 11 attacks. A Washington Post investigation found that detainees have less access to lawyers than convicted murderers in maximum-security prisons and some have fewer comforts than al-Qaeda terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The Post investigation, carried out by Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein, found that the most vulnerable detainees, the physically sick and the mentally ill, are sometimes denied the proper treatment to which they are entitled by law and regulation. They are locked in a world of slow care, poor care and no care, with panic and coverups among employees watching it happen.
The investigation found a hidden world of flawed medical judgments, faulty administrative practices, neglectful guards, ill-trained technicians, sloppy record-keeping, lost medical files and dangerous staff shortages. It is also a world increasingly run by high-priced private contractors. There is evidence that infectious diseases, including tuberculosis and chicken pox, are spreading inside the centers.
Nurses who work on the front lines see the problems up close. "Dogs get better care in the dog pound," said Catherine Rouse, a contract nurse at an Arizona detention center who quit after two months last year because she saw what she regarded as "scary medicine" in the prison: patients taken off medications they needed and nurses doing tasks they were not qualified to do. "You don't treat people like that. There has to be some kind of moral fiber," Rouse said.
Bob Libal, senior organizer for Grassroots Leadership in Austin, Texas – considered by many to be the “guru” of private prison opposition – summed up the situation as he sees it. He told Truthout, "A litany of human rights abuses, scandals, and lawsuits have plagued private prisons corporations, particularly in Texas, where there are more private prisons, detention centers, and jails than in any other state," he said, adding:
"Unfortunately, the private prison industry has fought even the most limited oversight and transparency measures. Furthermore, the largest private prison corporations - CCA and GEO - spend millions of dollars each year on lobbying and campaign contributions that ensure that their interests - an ever increasing flow of prisoners and detainees into private beds - are met."
ACLU Attorney David Shapiro told Truthout that two issues play a major role in creating an environment in which death and deprivation in detention become inevitable. The first issue is the absence of any enforceable standards for the maze of 400 federal, municipal, county and private jails used by ICE to house immigrants.
The second issue is a medical care regimen that, until recently, allowed the government such wide discretion that it could deny urgent care, including biopsies for suspected cancers and treatment of heart conditions. As a result of an ACLU lawsuit, there is now a new document that defines the medical care to which detainees are entitled. But lack of independent oversight casts doubt on the extent to which the new regimen is being followed.
The Obama administration has declined to produce system-wide enforceable standards for the prisons its uses to house immigrants. Shapiro declined to speculate on the administration’s rationale, but others have said that it is based on the wide differences between the various types of facilities used by the government. It has also failed to produce a medical care program that is binding on ICE personnel and its contractors. A number of the reported deaths in detention have been caused by ICE’s failure to provide timely medical interventions in emergency situations. Some observers believe that the rationale for deciding against providing “long term” medical care – for example, biopsies – is that ICE detention is largely short-term.
Yet ICE and its DHS parent department have acknowledged that many immigrants are held in custody for years. ICE has also admitted many of the deficiencies in its detention system and have vowed to initiate reforms. But Shapiro contends that the most recent documents obtained by the ACLU show that ICE’s culture of secrecy has not changed.
Bernstein’s New York Times article says that the documents show how officials — some still in key positions — used their role as overseers to “cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.”
As of today, there are no legally enforceable rules governing immigration detention, despite an order by a federal judge to create such rules. The Obama administration refused the judge’s order, which followed a petition filed in court by former detainees. Instead, ICE chose to follow an inspection system instituted during the administration of George W. Bush. That system relies in part on private contractors. Judge Denny Chin ruled that the agency’s failure to respond to the plaintiffs’ petition for two and a half years was unreasonable.
DHS contended that rule-making would be ”laborious, time-consuming and less flexible” than the review process now in place. It said its current inspection system would “provide adequately for both quality control and accountability.”
According to Paromita Shah of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, one of the plaintiffs, the government’s decision “disregards the plight of the hundreds of thousands of immigration detainees.” She claims that the absence of enforceable rules is the major cause of problems of mistreatment and medical neglect. “The department has demonstrated a disturbing commitment to policies that have cost dozens of lives,” she says.
In the view of numerous observers, ICE is itself a highly dysfunctional unit. Thus far the promises of significant operational changes have not come to fruition. The agency remains opaque.
But it is precisely this condition that presents private prison contractors with growing opportunities to pitch their services. Increasing numbers of alleged illegals are being detained by ICE and its various programs, such as 287(g), which enlists local police forces to suss out people in this country who they say shouldn’t be.
As to the future of the private prison industry, its reach is vast – from the teenager in Pennsylvania to the undocumented worker in Arizona. The ACLU’s Shapiro told Truthout, "The main thing the government should do is stop using private prisons. They are a failed experiment and have contributed to mass incarceration, horrid conditions, and escalating costs. At minimum, greater oversight and transparency are critical."
But President Obama continues to use detention and deportation as a political tool to curry favor with the hard right. In the process, myriad injustices are being committed. And with the 2012 election looming, it seems unlikely that Washington has the appetitite to actually fix any of the headaches caused by ICE and its for-profit prisons.
In a chapter from a forthcoming book, Alex Friedmann, associate editor of Prison Legal News, writes, “The most harmful effect of private prison companies is that they have made imprisonment-for-profit politically and socially acceptable, thereby creating an insidious industry that benefits from incarceration while instilling the notion that justice literally is for sale and crime does in fact pay.”
He adds, “Hopefully, at some point in the future we will look back on the time when private prisons were considered sensible and wonder how such a destructive concept was allowed to exist. For now, though, we must deal with the harsh reality of the private prison industry, including its many flaws and harmful effects on prisoners, our justice system and society as a whole.”
This article originally appeared in Truthout.org
Seventeen year-old Hillary Transue did what lots of 17-year-olds do: Got into mischief. Hillary’s mischief was composing a MySpace page poking fun at the assistant principal of the high school she attended in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
Hillary was an honor student who’d never had any trouble with the law before. And her MySpace page stated clearly that the page was a joke. But despite all that, Hilary found herself charged with harassment. She stood before a judge and heard him sentence her to three months in a juvenile detention facility.
What she expected was perhaps a stern lecture. What she got was a perp walk -- being led away in handcuffs as her stunned parents stood by helplessly. Hillary told the New York Times, “I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare. All I wanted to know was how this could be fair and why the judge would do such a thing.”
It wasn’t until two years later that she found out why. In Scranton, Pa. two judges pleaded guilty to operating a kickback scheme involving juvenile offenders. The judges, Mark Ciavarella Jr. and Michael Conahan, took more than $2.6 million in kickbacks from a private prison company to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers. Since 2003, Ciaveralla had sentenced an estimated 5,000 juveniles. Conahan was accused of setting up the contracts. Many of the youngsters shipped off to the detention centers were first-time offenders. The two judges received sentences of seven years each and are also being sued by numerous parents of the children involved.
PA Child Care is a juvenile detention center in Pittston Township,
Pennysylvania. It was opened in February 2003. It has a sister company,
Western PA Child Care, in Butler County, Pennsylvania. Treatment at both facilities is provided by Mid Atlantic Youth Services. Gregory Zappala took sole ownership of the company when he purchased co-owner Robert Powell's share in June 2008.
In July 2009 Robert Powell pled guilty to failing to report a felony and being
an accessory to tax evasion conspiracy in connection with $770,000 in kickbacks he paid to Ciavarella and Conahan in exchange for facilitating the development of his facilities.
The child care facilities have also been criticized for their costs, which ranged as high as $315 per child per day. Butler county paid Western PA Child Care about $800,000 in payments between 2005 and 2008. Butler county did not renew Western PA Child Care's contract after an extension of the contract ran out at the end of 2008. The juvenile detention center Hillary was sent to was a private-for-profit facility run by one of the more than 50 companies operating in the five billion dollar private prison industry.
These companies have names you’ve probably never heard of -- like Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO.
Ironically, it’s the federal and state criminal justice systems that produce the private prisons phenomenon and create the opportunity for private operators to capitalize. What they are capitalizing on is America’s obsession with handing out long prison sentences out of all proportion to the crimes committed.
Today, the United States has locked up more prisoners than any other country in the world -- 2.3 million-plus people locked up in state and federal prisons and county jails. This has predictably resulted in a shortage of publicly-owned prison beds – a shortage increasingly being filled by companies that charge so many dollars for each convict sent their way.
Detainees include immigrants who have applied for asylum in the U.S. and others awaiting hearings before being deported. The number of people detained has soared to more than 400,000 a year. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), part of the sprawling Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the average detention is about one month, although some detainees are kept for years. The cost of detention is estimated to be $1.7 billion annually.
In the past five years, the nation’s largest private prison company has partnered with the federal government to detain close to a million undocumented people waiting to be deported or appear before an immigration judge. In the process, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) has made record profits. Critics suggest that CCA cuts corners on its detention contracts in order to increase its revenue at expense of humane conditions. Thanks to political connections and lobbying, it dominates the immigrant detention industry. CCA now has close to 10,000 new beds under development in anticipation of continued demand.
Judith Greene, a policy analyst with Justice Strategies, a nonprofit sentencing-reform advocacy group in New York, says, "Profits by no means created the machinery of mass incarceration, no more than defense contracts invented war, but the huge profits to be made by incarcerating an ever-growing segment of our population serves the system very well."
"Profits oil the machinery, keep it humming and speed its growth," she adds.
For-profit prison companies claim to be able to provide prison and detention services to cities, counties, states and the Federal Government for less money – an idea that cash-strapped communities apparently find irresistible.
Yet studies throughout the country show that private prisons are only marginally less expensive than public prisons and are often substantially more expensive. The second issue is a medical care regimen that, until recently, allowed the government such wide discretion that it could deny urgent care, including biopsies for suspected cancers and treatment of heart conditions.
Moreover, a panoply of hidden subsidies is rarely calculated into the private prison industry’s cost claims. According to a study by Paul Wright, the founder and editor of "Prison Legal News," a prisoners’ rights advocacy newsletter, at least 44, or 73 percent, of the 60 facilities (studied) had received a development subsidy from local, state and/or federal government sources. Subsidies were found in 17 of the 19 states in which the 60 facilities are located.
Facilities operated by the two largest private prison companies, CCA and GEO, were frequently subsidized. Among the facilities in this study, 78 percent of CCA's and 69 percent of GEO’s prisons were subsidized, suggesting that these companies had been aggressive in seeking development subsidies.
According to the not-for-profit Private Corrections Institute, “the private prison industry relies on a number of allies and research studies to justify its claims of cost savings and proficiency; however, most of these sources have industry connections or vested financial interests.”
For example, it claims, the Reason Foundation, a strong proponent of prison privatization, has received funding from private prison firms. The American Correctional Association (ACA) receives sponsorship money from CCA, GEO and other private prison companies for its bi-annual conferences.
Former University of Florida Prof. Charles Thomas conducted supposedly impartial research on the private prison industry until it was learned that he owned private prison stock, had been paid $3 million for consulting for a private prison firm, and served on the board of Prison Realty Trust (a CCA spin-off). Thomas was fined $20,000 by the Florida Commission on Ethics and stepped down from his University position.
Private prisons are paid according to filled beds. So they are constantly pushing for more inmates – while officials of publicly owned prisons are trying to shed prisoners to relieve overcrowding and reduce expenses.
Private prisons seek to save money by hiring less experienced staff. The result of that policy can be seen in the disproportionate numbers of poorly controlled prison riots, by unsanitary health conditions, by substandard record-keeping, by high employee turnover, and by the number of deaths in detention.
A June 2004 study by academics Curtis R. Blakely and Vic W. Bumphus found that private prison turnover among correctional officers was 43 per cent while turnover in public sector prisons were only 15 per cent. Turnover in for-profit prisons was linked to lower staff pay and less training. Moreover, the study found, “Pay, training, and turnover may all contribute to the higher levels of violence seen in the private sector.”
One big area where for-profit prison firms skimp is on labor costs, according to Paul Wright. “While employees at state-run prisons get union-scale salaries, private-prison guards typically earn $7 to $10 per hour,” he says, adding: "They have low wages and high turnover and very little in the way of benefits or training."
Wright, 43, was once a prisoner himself, serving 17 years of a 25-year term for killing a cocaine dealer he was trying to rob. Today, he is an advocate for prisoner rights and over the years has filed numerous legal challenges against the industry and won.
"The private-prison industry is marked by corruption," he says. "Their premise is they can run prisons cheaper than the government, but taxpayers don't realize any of those savings. Any savings the private-prison industry obtains is basically profits for their shareholders."
For-profit prisons are private corporations and thus not subject to external oversight. They are not obligated to produce their internal records for public scrutiny and are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act at the Federal level because that law applies only to documents in the government’s possession.
Political pressure from interests in US border states has forced President Obama to exceed the record of former President George W. Bush in deporting illegal aliens. That surge has resulted in a windfall for the private prison industry. Today a substantial slice of its current growth can be attributed to its activities in the immigration detention field.
Private prisons have become a major influence in shaping critical legislation related to illegal immigration. The industry’s lobbyists have played a leading role in drafting a number of recent anti-immigrant laws, for example, Arizona’s SB-1070, and similar laws in Georgia, Alabama, and other states.
Under the Alabama measure, police must detain someone they suspect of being in the country illegally if the person cannot produce proper documentation when stopped for any reason. It also will be a crime to knowingly transport or harbor someone who is in the country illegally. The law imposes penalties on businesses that knowingly employ someone without legal resident status. A company's business license could be suspended or revoked. And the law requires Alabama businesses to use a database called E-Verify to confirm the immigration status of new employees.
Lee Fang reports in “Think Progress” that, in December 2009, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) — a powerful front group that helps corporate representatives craft template legislation for state lawmakers, funded partially by the private prison industry — hosted Arizona State Sen. Russell Pearce (R) and began debate on legislation that would provide broad powers to local police to arrest anyone who might look like an immigrant. ALEC then distributed the template legislation to its members. The January/February 2010 edition of ALEC’s magazine highlights the draft version of SB1070 — the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” — as model legislation.
It was Pearce who introduced ALEC’s “template” as the infamous SB1070 law. Notably, the ALEC task force which helped Pearce devise his racial profiling law included Laurie Shanblum, a CCA lobbyist. CCA previously played an important role in privatizing many of Texas’ prisons.
An investigation by Arizona’s KPHO-TV found more ties between SB1070 and the private prison industry: Paul Senseman, Arizona’s Gov. Janet Brewer’s deputy chief of staff, was a former lobbyist for CCA (his wife is still a lobbyist for CCA), and Chuck Coughlin, Brewer’s campaign chairman, runs the lobbying firm in Arizona that represents CCA.
CCA was set to receive well over $74 million in tax dollars in FY2010 for running immigration detention centers. In a recent presentation, Pershing Square Capital, a hedge fund with a large financial stake in CCA, suggested that CCA’s profitability depends on increasing numbers of immigrants sent to prison. Many of the legislators helping to earn CCA more profits with radical anti-immigrant bills mirroring SB1070 have been recipients of private prison industry cash or have worked closely with the CCA-funded ALEC organization.
“When detentions increased following the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and the Pentagon”, author Mark Dow writes, “private prison profiteers saw another opportunity. The (then) Chairman of the Houston-based Cornell Companies spoke candidly in a conference call with other investors: ‘It can only be good…with the focus on people that are illegal and also from Middle Eastern descent…In the US there are over 900,000 undocumented individuals from Middle Eastern descent…That’s half of our entire (US) prison population…The Federal business is the best business for us…and the events of September 11 (are) increasing that level of business…”
Efforts to reach the CEOs of the two leading private prison companies, CCA and GEO, to invite comment on this article were unsuccessful. However, their websites present a comprehensive picture of the companies’ vision of their operations. Both are doing extremely well. GEO’s revenues for 2010 rose 11 per cent to $1.27.billion. CCA’s revenues in 2009 rose to $1.670 billion. The companies’ annual reports and 10-K filings present a robust picture of these operations and strike an optimistic note for the future.
Beau Hodai, considered an authority on the private prison industry, noted in Prison Legal News last year that private prison leaders had substantially increased their spending on lobbying.
For example, he writes, “From January 2008 to April 2010, CCA spent $4.4 million lobbying the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, the Office of the Federal Detention Trustee, the Office of Budget Management, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and both houses of Congress. Of the 43 lobbying disclosure reports filed by CCA during this period, only five do not expressly state intent to monitor or influence immigration reform policy or gain Homeland Security or ICE appropriations.”
The private prison industry’s operation of immigration detention centers has been less than stellar – a lot less.
For example:
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas and El Paso co-counsel Mike Torres and Leon Schydlower filed a lawsuit on behalf of the survivors of Jesus Manuel Galindo. Named as defendants were the federal government and the GEO Group, the administrator of the West Texas for-profit prison where Galindo, 32, died on December 12, 2008, after suffering a seizure in solitary confinement where he had been placed for complaining about the facility’s failure to provide him medication to control his epileptic seizures.
At least nine immigrant prisoners have died in the Reeves County Detention Center in the last five years. The GEO Group has had at least six facilities in Texas shuttered or contracts canceled. The state of Idaho pulled its inmates from the Dickens County Correctional Center in the spring of 2007 in the wake of the suicide of inmate Scot Noble Payne and a subsequent investigation into "squalid" conditions at the lock-up. Idaho also cut its contract the Bill Clayton Detention Center in Littlefield, Texas after the 2008 suicide of Randy McCullough. In October 2007, the Coke County Juvenile Justice Center was shuttered by the Texas Youth Commission after a damning investigation into conditions at the youth detention center.
Despite that record – ironically, on the very day the lawsuit was filed -- the company was awarded a contract by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to operate a new 600-bed "civil" detention center in Karnes County, Texas. Texas has more for-profit prisons than any other state.
In another case, a former immigration detention guard was convicted of sexually abusing female detainees in the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, near Austin, Texas, which is managed by Corrections Corporation of America. The resident supervisor, Donald Dunn, 30, was charged with three counts of official oppression and two counts of unlawful restraint, the Austin American-Statesman reported.
The ACLU said CCA officials were violating policy by allowing female immigration detainees to be isolated with male staff members. After an ACLU investigation into sexual abuse at the Hutto facility, Vanita Gupta, Deputy Legal Director of the ACLU, said the charges show additional need for reform.
Then there is the issue of death in detention. Nina Bernstein, writing in The New York Times, alleged that ICE officials, fearful of media scrutiny, conspired to conceal the details surrounding the deaths of a number of detained immigrants who died in privately-run detention centers.
Bernstein wrote that “…it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.”
The documents were obtained by The Times and the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act. They relate to most of the 107 deaths in detention counted by ICE October 2003, when the agency was created within the Department of Homeland Security. The documents also revealed ten deaths in detention that had never been disclosed by the government. The ACLU says the number of deaths has increased since then.
The article details a litany of abuses. For example:
“As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the reporter’s inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity.”
“In another case that year, investigators from the agency’s Office of
Professional Responsibility concluded that unbearable, untreated pain had been a significant factor in the suicide of a 22-year-old detainee at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, and that the medical unit was so poorly run that other detainees were at risk.”
“The investigation found that jail medical personnel had falsified a medication log to show that the detainee, a Salvadoran named Nery Romero, had been given Motrin. The fake entry was easy to detect: When the drug was supposedly administered, Mr. Romero was already dead.”
“Yet those findings were never disclosed to the public or to Mr. Romero’s
relatives on Long Island, who had accused the jail of abruptly depriving him of his prescription painkiller for a broken leg. And an agency supervisor wrote that because other jails were ‘finicky’ about accepting detainees with known medical problems like Mr. Romero’s, such people would continue to be placed at the Bergen jail as ‘a last resort’.”
Another case concerns Yusif Osman, who was a U.S. legal resident from Ghana and had been living in Los Angeles for five years. After a companion carrying false ID landed him in an immigration detention center run by CCA. Osman was facing deportation on smuggling charges, an allegation he denied. While at the immigration detention center outside San Diego, he died suddenly. His story highlights the poor care some immigrants have received in the scores of immigration facilities across the United States.
Near midnight on a California spring night, armed guards escorted Yusif Osman into an immigration prison ringed by concertina wire at the end of a winding, isolated road. During the intake screening, a part-time nurse began a computerized medical file on Osman, a routine procedure for any person entering the vast prison network the government has built for foreign detainees across the country. But the nurse pushed a button and mistakenly closed file #077-987-986 and marked it "completed" -- even though it had no medical information in it.
Three months later, at two in the morning on June 27, 2006, the native of Ghana collapsed in Cell 206 at the Otay Mesa immigrant detention center outside San Diego. His cellmate hit the intercom button, yelling to guards that Osman was on the floor suffering from chest pains. A guard peered through the window into the dim cell and saw the detainee on the ground, but did not go in. Instead, he called a clinic nurse to find out whether Osman had any medical problems.
When the nurse opened the file and found it blank, she decided there was no emergency and said Osman needed to fill out a sick call request. The guard went on a lunch break.
The cellmate yelled again. Another guard came by, looked in and called the nurse. This time she wanted Osman brought to the clinic. Forty minutes passed before guards brought a wheelchair to his cell. By then it was too late: Osman was barely alive when paramedics reached him. He soon died.
His body, clothed only in dark pants and socks, was left on a breezeway for two hours, an airway tube sticking out of his mouth. Osman was 34.
The next day, an autopsy determined that he had died because his heart had suddenly stopped, confidential medical records show. Two physicians who reviewed his case for The Washington Post said he might have lived had he received timely treatment, perhaps as basic as an aspirin.
Privately, Otay Mesa's medical staff also knew his care was deficient. On Page 3 of an internal review of his death is this question:
Did patient receive appropriate and adequate health care consistent with community standards during his/her detention ...?
Otay Mesa's medical director, Esther Hui, checked "No."
The ACLU records that “One man was brought in with such high blood pressure that if he was not in custody, he would have been sent to an emergency room immediately. He was denied treatment and shortly thereafter her suffered a massive heart attack and died.”
The ACLU said he was denied treatment because the treatment he needed – a coronary artery bypass – was not considered an ‘emergency’ procedure, the only condition under which care could be provided.
Another detainee had for over a year been denied a biopsy to detect a possible cancer. He died soon afterward.
The medical neglect they endure is part of the hidden human cost of increasingly strict policies adopted following the Sept. 11 attacks. A Washington Post investigation found that detainees have less access to lawyers than convicted murderers in maximum-security prisons and some have fewer comforts than al-Qaeda terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The Post investigation, carried out by Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein, found that the most vulnerable detainees, the physically sick and the mentally ill, are sometimes denied the proper treatment to which they are entitled by law and regulation. They are locked in a world of slow care, poor care and no care, with panic and coverups among employees watching it happen.
The investigation found a hidden world of flawed medical judgments, faulty administrative practices, neglectful guards, ill-trained technicians, sloppy record-keeping, lost medical files and dangerous staff shortages. It is also a world increasingly run by high-priced private contractors. There is evidence that infectious diseases, including tuberculosis and chicken pox, are spreading inside the centers.
Nurses who work on the front lines see the problems up close. "Dogs get better care in the dog pound," said Catherine Rouse, a contract nurse at an Arizona detention center who quit after two months last year because she saw what she regarded as "scary medicine" in the prison: patients taken off medications they needed and nurses doing tasks they were not qualified to do. "You don't treat people like that. There has to be some kind of moral fiber," Rouse said.
Bob Libal, senior organizer for Grassroots Leadership in Austin, Texas – considered by many to be the “guru” of private prison opposition – summed up the situation as he sees it. He told Truthout, "A litany of human rights abuses, scandals, and lawsuits have plagued private prisons corporations, particularly in Texas, where there are more private prisons, detention centers, and jails than in any other state," he said, adding:
"Unfortunately, the private prison industry has fought even the most limited oversight and transparency measures. Furthermore, the largest private prison corporations - CCA and GEO - spend millions of dollars each year on lobbying and campaign contributions that ensure that their interests - an ever increasing flow of prisoners and detainees into private beds - are met."
ACLU Attorney David Shapiro told Truthout that two issues play a major role in creating an environment in which death and deprivation in detention become inevitable. The first issue is the absence of any enforceable standards for the maze of 400 federal, municipal, county and private jails used by ICE to house immigrants.
The second issue is a medical care regimen that, until recently, allowed the government such wide discretion that it could deny urgent care, including biopsies for suspected cancers and treatment of heart conditions. As a result of an ACLU lawsuit, there is now a new document that defines the medical care to which detainees are entitled. But lack of independent oversight casts doubt on the extent to which the new regimen is being followed.
The Obama administration has declined to produce system-wide enforceable standards for the prisons its uses to house immigrants. Shapiro declined to speculate on the administration’s rationale, but others have said that it is based on the wide differences between the various types of facilities used by the government. It has also failed to produce a medical care program that is binding on ICE personnel and its contractors. A number of the reported deaths in detention have been caused by ICE’s failure to provide timely medical interventions in emergency situations. Some observers believe that the rationale for deciding against providing “long term” medical care – for example, biopsies – is that ICE detention is largely short-term.
Yet ICE and its DHS parent department have acknowledged that many immigrants are held in custody for years. ICE has also admitted many of the deficiencies in its detention system and have vowed to initiate reforms. But Shapiro contends that the most recent documents obtained by the ACLU show that ICE’s culture of secrecy has not changed.
Bernstein’s New York Times article says that the documents show how officials — some still in key positions — used their role as overseers to “cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.”
As of today, there are no legally enforceable rules governing immigration detention, despite an order by a federal judge to create such rules. The Obama administration refused the judge’s order, which followed a petition filed in court by former detainees. Instead, ICE chose to follow an inspection system instituted during the administration of George W. Bush. That system relies in part on private contractors. Judge Denny Chin ruled that the agency’s failure to respond to the plaintiffs’ petition for two and a half years was unreasonable.
DHS contended that rule-making would be ”laborious, time-consuming and less flexible” than the review process now in place. It said its current inspection system would “provide adequately for both quality control and accountability.”
According to Paromita Shah of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, one of the plaintiffs, the government’s decision “disregards the plight of the hundreds of thousands of immigration detainees.” She claims that the absence of enforceable rules is the major cause of problems of mistreatment and medical neglect. “The department has demonstrated a disturbing commitment to policies that have cost dozens of lives,” she says.
In the view of numerous observers, ICE is itself a highly dysfunctional unit. Thus far the promises of significant operational changes have not come to fruition. The agency remains opaque.
But it is precisely this condition that presents private prison contractors with growing opportunities to pitch their services. Increasing numbers of alleged illegals are being detained by ICE and its various programs, such as 287(g), which enlists local police forces to suss out people in this country who they say shouldn’t be.
As to the future of the private prison industry, its reach is vast – from the teenager in Pennsylvania to the undocumented worker in Arizona. The ACLU’s Shapiro told Truthout, "The main thing the government should do is stop using private prisons. They are a failed experiment and have contributed to mass incarceration, horrid conditions, and escalating costs. At minimum, greater oversight and transparency are critical."
But President Obama continues to use detention and deportation as a political tool to curry favor with the hard right. In the process, myriad injustices are being committed. And with the 2012 election looming, it seems unlikely that Washington has the appetitite to actually fix any of the headaches caused by ICE and its for-profit prisons.
In a chapter from a forthcoming book, Alex Friedmann, associate editor of Prison Legal News, writes, “The most harmful effect of private prison companies is that they have made imprisonment-for-profit politically and socially acceptable, thereby creating an insidious industry that benefits from incarceration while instilling the notion that justice literally is for sale and crime does in fact pay.”
He adds, “Hopefully, at some point in the future we will look back on the time when private prisons were considered sensible and wonder how such a destructive concept was allowed to exist. For now, though, we must deal with the harsh reality of the private prison industry, including its many flaws and harmful effects on prisoners, our justice system and society as a whole.”
This article originally appeared in Truthout.org
Thursday, June 30, 2011
BAHRAIN: We All Owe Maryam
By William Fisher
Her name is Maryam Alkhawaja.
She is a young Bahraini woman who risks her life every day to send me and other journalists emails about the brutal repression of a long-aggrieved people and the kangaroo courts that are throwing their lives away.
Why does she do it?
She gives a simple answer: Injustice and brutality drives her nuts. She can’t be an observer. She needs to act.
And act she does, one, two, three times a day, all at huge and immediate risk.
Yesterday, her communiqué must have been especially tough to write. With journalistic lack of emotion, she reported the trials of her friends and colleagues. They were among the peaceful demonstrators from Bahrain’s Shia majority who have spent the last three months pushing against the Sunni royal family for basic human rights and a voice in the governance of their tiny country.
Eight of those tried by the military court were sentenced to life in prison. One of those eight was her father, Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, the founder
of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. “After the sentence was read, my father raised his fist & shouted “WE SHALL CONTINUE ON THE PATH OF PEACEFUL RESISTANCE!”, Ms. Alkhawaja told the New York Times.
Thirteen other activists were sentenced by the same court to terms of between two and 15 years in jail. Just one of the 21 men sentenced on Wednesday was a Sunni. The state news agency described them as “plotting to topple the government.”
In March, prominent members of the Shiite Muslim community took to the streets, peacefully to demand political concessions from the Royal family. They were met with, first, teargas, truncheons and rubber bullets and, later, with live ammunition fired randomly into crowds of demonstrators, killing and wounding scores.
Discrimination against the Shia majority is sometimes blatant, sometimes subtle, but it is always present. Shiites are barred from senior posts in both government and business. Housing is redlined. Shiites tend to have been ghettoed into property on the Eastern part of the island, just across the water from the sizable Shia community in Saudi Arabia.
So determined was the King and his entourage to stifle the outbursts, he called in army units from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, courtesy of the Gulf Cooperation Council.
At the military trials, the verdicts were immediately condemned by rights groups who said all those found guilty had been campaigning to end discrimination at the hands of the Sunni dynasty.
Rights groups have urged Bahrain to halt the special military court proceedings, with Human Rights Watch deeming them a violation of international law.
"Most defendants hauled before Bahrain's special military court are facing blatantly political charges, and trials are unfair," said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.
The trials were held despite the government pronouncing the end of three months of martial law earlier this month, which had given the exclusively Sunni security forces extra powers of detention and arrest.
Activists called for protesters to again take to the streets in Manama in defiance of the verdicts and the government, which has vowed to continue a crackdown on dissent.
Up to 30 doctors and nurses from key city hospitals were last week also put on trial accused of subversion and of using government facilities for political purposes. These health care professionals were attempting to treat the wounds created by government security forces during demonstrations. It is thought the government does not want them to be able to see the wounds, making it impossible for them to testify to their severity and nature.
Government security services have surrounded a main hospital, preventing new patients and visitors to enter or leave. Meanwhile, it is reported that security police have been systematically moving wounded patients to another hospital where their conditions can be kept secret. There is no verdict in this trial as yet.
Meanwhile, the Obama Administration has been playing nice with one of the leaders of the Bahraini Royal family. He is Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa. The 41-year-old royal graduated from American University in Washington, speaks fluent English,. And is said top be the most “Westernized” member of the Royal family.
Prince Salman met last week with President Obama and his national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon,Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Why, asks the New York Times, does the president “engage with a royal family that has led such a brutal crackdown?” Especially, it adds, “Given Mr. Obama’s lofty rhetoric about the historic significance of the
uprisings in the Arab world.”
Partly, the Times writes, “It is an acknowledgment of geopolitical reality. Bahrain’s royal family is unlikely to topple, if only because the Sunnis who rule Saudi Arabia will not tolerate their neighbor being run by a Shiite-led government. Bahrain is also home to the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet. And it is close to Saudi Arabia, Washington’s most powerful ally in the region.” We could go on for quit a time debating the meaning of “ally, ” but that’s for another time.
For now, The Times says, “administration officials are clinging to the hope that, perhaps against the odds, Bahrain’s leaders — or at least the crown prince — may be willing to undertake democratic changes.”
“You have somebody in the crown prince who’s credible, who seems to want to do the right thing,” one senior administration official told The Times.
Leslie Campbell, regional director for the Middle East and North Africa at the National Democratic Institute, which is active in Bahrain, told The Times that the prince is on “a world tour to convince people that Bahrain is turning over a new leaf when in fact the hard-liners are conducting business-as-usual at home.”
According to The Times’ account, the Crown Prince was most upset that the crackdown “had tarnished Bahrain’s image, particularly since the government had worked so hard over the past decade to present Bahrain as an enlightened Persian Gulf kingdom.”
Image? Image? Who talks about image when people are being murdered and thrown into prison for the rest of their lives for the simple demand of a voice in the future of their country?
Image is for PR people, not statesmen.
If the president persists in hanging his hopes for a peaceful resolution on the slender reed of Bahrain’s image, he is going to be disappointed.
But the people of Bahrain are going to be even more disappointed. It would be a fool’s errand to expect anything from them but save the bitterest anti-American feelings. And these may still be around long after the Royal Family is history.
This article originally appeared in Prism Magazine.
Her name is Maryam Alkhawaja.
She is a young Bahraini woman who risks her life every day to send me and other journalists emails about the brutal repression of a long-aggrieved people and the kangaroo courts that are throwing their lives away.
Why does she do it?
She gives a simple answer: Injustice and brutality drives her nuts. She can’t be an observer. She needs to act.
And act she does, one, two, three times a day, all at huge and immediate risk.
Yesterday, her communiqué must have been especially tough to write. With journalistic lack of emotion, she reported the trials of her friends and colleagues. They were among the peaceful demonstrators from Bahrain’s Shia majority who have spent the last three months pushing against the Sunni royal family for basic human rights and a voice in the governance of their tiny country.
Eight of those tried by the military court were sentenced to life in prison. One of those eight was her father, Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, the founder
of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. “After the sentence was read, my father raised his fist & shouted “WE SHALL CONTINUE ON THE PATH OF PEACEFUL RESISTANCE!”, Ms. Alkhawaja told the New York Times.
Thirteen other activists were sentenced by the same court to terms of between two and 15 years in jail. Just one of the 21 men sentenced on Wednesday was a Sunni. The state news agency described them as “plotting to topple the government.”
In March, prominent members of the Shiite Muslim community took to the streets, peacefully to demand political concessions from the Royal family. They were met with, first, teargas, truncheons and rubber bullets and, later, with live ammunition fired randomly into crowds of demonstrators, killing and wounding scores.
Discrimination against the Shia majority is sometimes blatant, sometimes subtle, but it is always present. Shiites are barred from senior posts in both government and business. Housing is redlined. Shiites tend to have been ghettoed into property on the Eastern part of the island, just across the water from the sizable Shia community in Saudi Arabia.
So determined was the King and his entourage to stifle the outbursts, he called in army units from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, courtesy of the Gulf Cooperation Council.
At the military trials, the verdicts were immediately condemned by rights groups who said all those found guilty had been campaigning to end discrimination at the hands of the Sunni dynasty.
Rights groups have urged Bahrain to halt the special military court proceedings, with Human Rights Watch deeming them a violation of international law.
"Most defendants hauled before Bahrain's special military court are facing blatantly political charges, and trials are unfair," said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.
The trials were held despite the government pronouncing the end of three months of martial law earlier this month, which had given the exclusively Sunni security forces extra powers of detention and arrest.
Activists called for protesters to again take to the streets in Manama in defiance of the verdicts and the government, which has vowed to continue a crackdown on dissent.
Up to 30 doctors and nurses from key city hospitals were last week also put on trial accused of subversion and of using government facilities for political purposes. These health care professionals were attempting to treat the wounds created by government security forces during demonstrations. It is thought the government does not want them to be able to see the wounds, making it impossible for them to testify to their severity and nature.
Government security services have surrounded a main hospital, preventing new patients and visitors to enter or leave. Meanwhile, it is reported that security police have been systematically moving wounded patients to another hospital where their conditions can be kept secret. There is no verdict in this trial as yet.
Meanwhile, the Obama Administration has been playing nice with one of the leaders of the Bahraini Royal family. He is Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa. The 41-year-old royal graduated from American University in Washington, speaks fluent English,. And is said top be the most “Westernized” member of the Royal family.
Prince Salman met last week with President Obama and his national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon,Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Why, asks the New York Times, does the president “engage with a royal family that has led such a brutal crackdown?” Especially, it adds, “Given Mr. Obama’s lofty rhetoric about the historic significance of the
uprisings in the Arab world.”
Partly, the Times writes, “It is an acknowledgment of geopolitical reality. Bahrain’s royal family is unlikely to topple, if only because the Sunnis who rule Saudi Arabia will not tolerate their neighbor being run by a Shiite-led government. Bahrain is also home to the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet. And it is close to Saudi Arabia, Washington’s most powerful ally in the region.” We could go on for quit a time debating the meaning of “ally, ” but that’s for another time.
For now, The Times says, “administration officials are clinging to the hope that, perhaps against the odds, Bahrain’s leaders — or at least the crown prince — may be willing to undertake democratic changes.”
“You have somebody in the crown prince who’s credible, who seems to want to do the right thing,” one senior administration official told The Times.
Leslie Campbell, regional director for the Middle East and North Africa at the National Democratic Institute, which is active in Bahrain, told The Times that the prince is on “a world tour to convince people that Bahrain is turning over a new leaf when in fact the hard-liners are conducting business-as-usual at home.”
According to The Times’ account, the Crown Prince was most upset that the crackdown “had tarnished Bahrain’s image, particularly since the government had worked so hard over the past decade to present Bahrain as an enlightened Persian Gulf kingdom.”
Image? Image? Who talks about image when people are being murdered and thrown into prison for the rest of their lives for the simple demand of a voice in the future of their country?
Image is for PR people, not statesmen.
If the president persists in hanging his hopes for a peaceful resolution on the slender reed of Bahrain’s image, he is going to be disappointed.
But the people of Bahrain are going to be even more disappointed. It would be a fool’s errand to expect anything from them but save the bitterest anti-American feelings. And these may still be around long after the Royal Family is history.
This article originally appeared in Prism Magazine.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
JORDAN: Abdullah’s Survival Strategy
By William Fisher
Jordan’s King Abdullah II and his new government appear to be racing the clock to begin enacting political and economic reforms before the largely peaceful street demonstrations turn ugly.
Whether his proposed reforms will be seen by the people as going far enough, and whether he can light a fire under his government to actually begin implementing the first serious reforms – these are the key questions that remain to be seen.
The recommendations were produced by a 52-member National Dialogue Committee. They include proposing an increase in the number of seats in Parliament from 120 to 130, call for an independent panel of retired judges appointed by royal decree to oversee elections, instead of the Interior Ministry, and a new draft law to make it easier to form political parties and encouraging participation by women.
Some of the reforms proposed by the King are not new – some are a decade old -- and may thus be easier to implement. But most of these were ignored in the past by the government elites who actually make things happen. Their delay has been a source of frustration for the young King.
Marwan Muasher, former Jordanian Foreign Minister, has commented on this phenomenon. He asks: “Could reform efforts have taken a different course in Jordan? In a country where the king has broad powers over all branches of government, his expressed frustration over the struggling reform efforts begs the question of why the status quo remains intact.”
He continues: “This decade-long process, initiated by the King, has
been largely ignored by an ossified layer of elites seeking to protect their own interests. The clear discrepancy between the king’s directives to the seven prime ministers he had entrusted to form governments in his twelve years of power—and the actual record of reform completed by these respective governments—points to a structural problem that is all too often ignored.”
“These elites have become recalcitrant, self-appointed guardians of the state who believe they alone should decide how the country ought to evolve. They have no qualms about opposing the directives of the leaders or systems that created them in the first place if those leaders are seen as adopting policies that threaten their interests,” he charges, adding:
“An examination of the political reforms conducted by successive governments in Jordan over the last decade suggests that, in most cases, the king’s directives were ignored, diluted, and, at times, directly opposed. This does not imply that the objectives of this class and the monarch were always in contradiction, but suggests that the rentier system has, over time and through entrenchment, created monsters who will only acquiesce as long as the system perpetuates the old policy of favors.”
So Abdullah has now responded by firing the entire government and appointing replacements he hopes with be more sympathetic to the reforms he has already proposed and others that will certainly be forthcoming.
The King charged Marouf Al Bakhit, an ex-army general and former prime minister, with forming a new government. Marwan Muasher says his major task is “to take speedy practical and tangible steps to unleash a real political reform process that reflects [Jordan’s] vision of comprehensive reform, modernization and development.”
King Abdullah has he was committed to pushing ahead with democratic reforms, but believed street pressure for change was a recipe for chaos. Again and again, he has admonished would-be street demonstrators that outpourings of this kind are likely to hinder rather than speed the pace of reform.
The monarch, speaking in a televised speech marking his 12 years as ruler and ninety years since the state’s creation, said he backed a new electoral law proposed by a government-appointed panel that would allow for a cabinet to be elected by a parliamentary majority rather than being chosen by him.
"We hope these recommendations ensure a modern electoral law that leads to a parliament that is representative of all Jordanians," he said.
Parliaments are currently elected under laws that ensure a pliant pro-government assembly composed of tribal loyalists.
The Islamist-led opposition has expressed disappointment over the limited nature of the reforms proposed by the committee that they boycotted and which came after weeks of street protests earlier this year calling for political changes, Reuters reported.
Vis a vis Parliament, the proposals unveiled thus far amount to tinkering around the edges. But if “fix Parliament” is not high on Abdullah’s “to do” list, many of his proposals will have minimal effect—and probably won’t placate those inclined toward demonstrations. The parliamentary proposals the King put forward would preserve a gross under-representation of Jordan’s cities. The reason is that Jordan’s major cities are where Palestinians and members of the Muslim Brotherhood live. The King’s formula would aim to preserve the strength of rural, sparsely populated tribal areas, where his support is strong.
Michele Dunne of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace put it well when she told us, “What King Abdullah has proposed are reforms to the electoral system and laws, which will go part of the distance toward satisfying demands on those specific issue. But there is nothing so far on the issue underlying lack of faith in politics: the fact that the elected parliament has little real power.”
An even stronger note of skepticism comes from Samer Shehata, a professor of Arab Politics at Georgetown University. He told us, “Obviously I'm highly suspicious of autocrats making promises about reform. Autocrats usually don't put themselves out of business.”
This is the situation King Abdullah faces, as expressed in the U.S. State Department’s annual Human Rights report:
“The government respected human rights in some areas, but its overall record continued to reflect problems. The government restricted citizens' right to change their government, and the electoral law led to significant under-representation of urban areas and citizens of Palestinian origin in the Chamber of Deputies. Domestic and international NGOs reported cases of arbitrary deprivation of life, torture, poor prison conditions, impunity, arbitrary arrest and denial of due process through administrative detention, prolonged detention, and external interference in judicial decisions. Citizens continued to describe infringements on their privacy rights. Restrictive legislation and regulations limited freedom of speech and press, and government interference in the media and threats of fines and detention led to self-censorship, according to journalists and human rights organizations. The government also continued to restrict freedoms of assembly and association. Religious activists and opposition political party members reported a decline in government harassment; however, legal and societal discrimination remained a problem for women, religious minorities, converts from Islam, and some persons of Palestinian origin. Local human rights organizations reported widespread violence against women and children. The government restricted labor rights, and local and international human rights organizations reported high levels of abuse of foreign domestic workers.”
It would seem that King Abdullah and his government have a long and difficult road ahead.
This article was originally published in Prism Magazine.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II and his new government appear to be racing the clock to begin enacting political and economic reforms before the largely peaceful street demonstrations turn ugly.
Whether his proposed reforms will be seen by the people as going far enough, and whether he can light a fire under his government to actually begin implementing the first serious reforms – these are the key questions that remain to be seen.
The recommendations were produced by a 52-member National Dialogue Committee. They include proposing an increase in the number of seats in Parliament from 120 to 130, call for an independent panel of retired judges appointed by royal decree to oversee elections, instead of the Interior Ministry, and a new draft law to make it easier to form political parties and encouraging participation by women.
Some of the reforms proposed by the King are not new – some are a decade old -- and may thus be easier to implement. But most of these were ignored in the past by the government elites who actually make things happen. Their delay has been a source of frustration for the young King.
Marwan Muasher, former Jordanian Foreign Minister, has commented on this phenomenon. He asks: “Could reform efforts have taken a different course in Jordan? In a country where the king has broad powers over all branches of government, his expressed frustration over the struggling reform efforts begs the question of why the status quo remains intact.”
He continues: “This decade-long process, initiated by the King, has
been largely ignored by an ossified layer of elites seeking to protect their own interests. The clear discrepancy between the king’s directives to the seven prime ministers he had entrusted to form governments in his twelve years of power—and the actual record of reform completed by these respective governments—points to a structural problem that is all too often ignored.”
“These elites have become recalcitrant, self-appointed guardians of the state who believe they alone should decide how the country ought to evolve. They have no qualms about opposing the directives of the leaders or systems that created them in the first place if those leaders are seen as adopting policies that threaten their interests,” he charges, adding:
“An examination of the political reforms conducted by successive governments in Jordan over the last decade suggests that, in most cases, the king’s directives were ignored, diluted, and, at times, directly opposed. This does not imply that the objectives of this class and the monarch were always in contradiction, but suggests that the rentier system has, over time and through entrenchment, created monsters who will only acquiesce as long as the system perpetuates the old policy of favors.”
So Abdullah has now responded by firing the entire government and appointing replacements he hopes with be more sympathetic to the reforms he has already proposed and others that will certainly be forthcoming.
The King charged Marouf Al Bakhit, an ex-army general and former prime minister, with forming a new government. Marwan Muasher says his major task is “to take speedy practical and tangible steps to unleash a real political reform process that reflects [Jordan’s] vision of comprehensive reform, modernization and development.”
King Abdullah has he was committed to pushing ahead with democratic reforms, but believed street pressure for change was a recipe for chaos. Again and again, he has admonished would-be street demonstrators that outpourings of this kind are likely to hinder rather than speed the pace of reform.
The monarch, speaking in a televised speech marking his 12 years as ruler and ninety years since the state’s creation, said he backed a new electoral law proposed by a government-appointed panel that would allow for a cabinet to be elected by a parliamentary majority rather than being chosen by him.
"We hope these recommendations ensure a modern electoral law that leads to a parliament that is representative of all Jordanians," he said.
Parliaments are currently elected under laws that ensure a pliant pro-government assembly composed of tribal loyalists.
The Islamist-led opposition has expressed disappointment over the limited nature of the reforms proposed by the committee that they boycotted and which came after weeks of street protests earlier this year calling for political changes, Reuters reported.
Vis a vis Parliament, the proposals unveiled thus far amount to tinkering around the edges. But if “fix Parliament” is not high on Abdullah’s “to do” list, many of his proposals will have minimal effect—and probably won’t placate those inclined toward demonstrations. The parliamentary proposals the King put forward would preserve a gross under-representation of Jordan’s cities. The reason is that Jordan’s major cities are where Palestinians and members of the Muslim Brotherhood live. The King’s formula would aim to preserve the strength of rural, sparsely populated tribal areas, where his support is strong.
Michele Dunne of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace put it well when she told us, “What King Abdullah has proposed are reforms to the electoral system and laws, which will go part of the distance toward satisfying demands on those specific issue. But there is nothing so far on the issue underlying lack of faith in politics: the fact that the elected parliament has little real power.”
An even stronger note of skepticism comes from Samer Shehata, a professor of Arab Politics at Georgetown University. He told us, “Obviously I'm highly suspicious of autocrats making promises about reform. Autocrats usually don't put themselves out of business.”
This is the situation King Abdullah faces, as expressed in the U.S. State Department’s annual Human Rights report:
“The government respected human rights in some areas, but its overall record continued to reflect problems. The government restricted citizens' right to change their government, and the electoral law led to significant under-representation of urban areas and citizens of Palestinian origin in the Chamber of Deputies. Domestic and international NGOs reported cases of arbitrary deprivation of life, torture, poor prison conditions, impunity, arbitrary arrest and denial of due process through administrative detention, prolonged detention, and external interference in judicial decisions. Citizens continued to describe infringements on their privacy rights. Restrictive legislation and regulations limited freedom of speech and press, and government interference in the media and threats of fines and detention led to self-censorship, according to journalists and human rights organizations. The government also continued to restrict freedoms of assembly and association. Religious activists and opposition political party members reported a decline in government harassment; however, legal and societal discrimination remained a problem for women, religious minorities, converts from Islam, and some persons of Palestinian origin. Local human rights organizations reported widespread violence against women and children. The government restricted labor rights, and local and international human rights organizations reported high levels of abuse of foreign domestic workers.”
It would seem that King Abdullah and his government have a long and difficult road ahead.
This article was originally published in Prism Magazine.
Monday, June 13, 2011
DOCTORS ON TRIAL IN BAHRAIN
By William Fisher
Ayat Al-Qormezi, a 20-year-old Bahrain poet, who recited poems critical of Bahrain's rulers, was sentenced yesterday (Sunday) to a year in prison by a special security court set up during Bahrain's crackdown on Shiite protesters calling for greater rights.
The tribunal's decision sent a message that the Sunni monarchy is not easing off on punishments linked to the unrest despite appeals for talks with Shiite groups in the strategic Gulf island kingdom, which is home to the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet.
The official Bahrain News Agency said Ayat al-Qurmezi was convicted of anti-state charges, including inciting hatred. She can appeal.
Two former parliament members, Jawad Fairooz and Mattar Mattar, also went on trial as part of wide-ranging arrests and trials of perceived enemies of the ruling system. Both are members of the main Shiite political group, Wefaq, whose 18 lawmakers resigned to protest the harsh measures against protesters..
The U.S. has condemned the violence, but has stopped short of any tangible punishments against the rulers in one of Washington's military hubs in the Persian Gulf.
In another action of major consequence, medical personnel who treated the many Bahrainis injured in antigovernment protests during the months of unrest in this tiny but strategically important Gulf nation go on trial today (Monday) charged with taking part in efforts to overthrow the monarchy.
Legal medical, health, and human rights groups have labeled these court proceedings as “show trials” similar to those held for dissidents in the Soviet Union from 1934 to 1939. A feature of Stalin's Reign of Terror was a series of "show trials" in which political opponents were forced to plead guilty to activities designed to undermine state security.
The 47 Bahraini health professionals were arraigned in a closed hearing in a security court.
They are largely members of the country’s Shiite majority, which had been demonstrating to achieve greater freedom, equal rights and an elected government from the Sunni monarchy. Bahrain is about 70 per cent Shiite and 30 per cent Sunni Muslims. But the country is governed by a Sunni monarchy.
During the unrest, in which government security forces fired live ammunition, wounding or killing dozens of protestors, medical professionals said it was their duty to treat everyone and rejected accusations that treating protesters was the same as supporting their cause.
Those injured by government forces were frequently brought to the (name) hospital, but that unit has been under the control of the government’s security personnel. In some cases, these officers intervened in the physicians’ treatment and ordered that no further treatment be given.
Then many of the doctors, nurses and the patients were moved by the government to other hospitals in an effort to keep them from being able to prevent patients from identifying the wounds they had received at the hands of security services, Similarly, doctors and nurses were to be silent about the nature of the injuries they treated.
But most of the doctors and nurses refused, saying they had a responsibity to provide the best care they could to the wounded and injured.
Meanwhile, bloggers and other members of the press continue to the harassed by security forces and in many cases, arrested, tried before Kangaroo security courts and sentenced to substantial jail terms.
Ayat Al Cormozy, a 20 years old student and poet, was arrested last March by Bahraini security forces after she had recited poems in the Pearl Roundabout criticizing in it the Bahraini authorities. Ayat had been detained in an unknown place and without any specific charges until the Bahraini authorities had informed her family that she would be prosecuted in a martial court on Thursday 2 June as the first sitting of the court. This prosecution took place only two days after the lift of emergency law according to which these martial courts were held. The court has indicted the young poet of “touching on Bahraini King and participating in illegal demonstrations” and decided to postpone the hearing to Monday 6 June 2011.
This prosecution came after the lift of the notorious emergency law which had been imposed in 15 March 2011 and according to which 600 opponent activists were arrested and around 2000 persons were fired from their jobs because of their participation in the demonstrations that had broken out in the kingdom since last February and which had been violently suppressed by the security forces.
Ayat Al Cormozy is the second woman to be prosecuted in a martial court in the wake of the last events in Manama after that Galila Salman, an activist, had been sentenced to four years jail for possessing forbidden singing records and not obeying the orders of the police officers in the street in 12 May 2011.
The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) said the “Human rights situation in Bahrain is in ongoing deterioration and the lift of emergency law was merely a trial from the authorities to improve their image while they are actually still following suppressive measures and holding martial courts in fighting freedom of expression”
ANHRI added “Bahraini authorities should stop attacking human rights activists and opponents and prosecuting martial courts against civilians, and should release immediately all activists and arrested demonstrators, and allow a suitable environment for freedom of opinion and expression without adopting prosecution, or arrest or jail policies. It is not logic that the Bahraini authorities calls for dialogue with different political movements while the opposition leaders are in jail.”
In the past few days, the authorities have arrested more photographers and photo-journalists who had been covering the pro-democracy demonstrations taking place in Bahrain since mid-February. The aim of these targeted arrests is to limit the dissemination of news reports, photos and video of the protests and the government crackdown.
Reporters Without Borders calls for the immediate release of these photographers and of all the other people who have been arrested for circulating information about the protests and repression. The press freedom organization also calls on the courts to overturn the conviction of Hassan Salman Al-Ma’atooq, a photographer who has been sentenced to three years in prison.
Reporters Without Borders has learned that a military court imposed the sentence on Ma’atooq on 12 May after convicting him on four charges including two relating to his work as a photographer – fabricating photos of injured people and disseminating false photos and information. Aged 29, he has been held since 23 March.
Reporters Without Borders has also learned that Mohamed Ali Al-Aradi, who works for the newspaper Al-Bilad, was arrested on 8 May, and that, Abdullah Hassan, who was recently fired from the newspaper Al-Watan, was arrested on 14 May. He had been injured on 13 March while covering clashes between demonstrators and the security forces. Mohamed Salman Al-Sheikh, a photographer who heads the Bahrain Society of Photography, is meanwhile still being held. He was arrested at his home in Sanabis, a village west of Manama, on 11 May. Photographer Nedhal Nooh, a member of the Bahrain Society of Photography, was summoned for interrogation on 18 May in West Riffa (a city to the south of the capital). He has been held ever since.
Fadel Habib, a columnist who writes mainly about educational issues for Al-Wasat, was arrested at a check-point on 20 May and was released last night.
Naziha Saeed, a journalist who works for Radio Monte-Carlo and France24, was summoned and interrogated for nearly 12 hours on 22 May. She has often talked about the government-orchestrated repression in the foreign media in recent months.
The photo-journalist Mazen Mahdi was summoned and questioned for two hours on 22 May, mainly about is Twitter activities during demonstrations, his work for DPA and his alleged links with Lebanese and Iranian media. He was handcuffed and blindfolded, beaten several times and threatened with torture. Mahdi was previously detained briefly in March for taking photos of thugs smashing shop windows.
Reporters Without Borders has learned that Ali Abdulkarim Al-Kufi, a member of the Bahrain Society of Photography, and Hassan Al-Nasheet were released on 20 May after being held for five days. Al-Wasat journalist Haydar Mohamed was released on 22 May.
The trial of three of the opposition newspaper Al-Wasat’s most senior journalists – editor Mansour Al-Jamari, managing editor Walid Nouihid and local news editor Aqil Mirza – began before a criminal court on 18 May. They are accused of disseminating false information that undermined the country’s international image and reputation (http://en.rsf.org/bahraini-and-syri...). Jamari told Reuters that the prosecutors have added the charge of intending to cause instability in Bahrain, which carries a two-year sentence.
Jamari acknowledged to Reuters that six articles with false information did appear in Al-Wasat but he said all six were emailed to the newspaper together with bogus phone numbers from the same IP address in what appeared to be a deliberate plot to get the newspaper to publish wrong information.
Founded in 2002, Al-Wasat was banned on 3 April, one day after the national television programme “Media Watch” accused it of trying to harm Bahrain’s stability and security. The Information Affairs Authority, a government agency that regulates the media, reversed this decision and gave Al-Wasat permission to resume publishing on 4 April under new editors. The newspaper’s board initially announced that the newspaper would close, but subsequently said it would continue operating.
Another hearing was held on May 22 in the trial of 21 human rights activists and opposition members. After witnesses gave evidence, the court adjourned until 25 May. The defendants present in court included the blogger Abduljalil Al-Singace. Fellow blogger Ali Abdulemam, regarded as one of the country’s Internet pioneers, is also a defendant but he is being tried in absentia. Despite the judge’s instructions to the contrary, it seems that most of the detainees have been in solitary confinement.
The following are still detained: Faysal Hayyat,Ali Jawad, Abdullah Alawi and Jasem Al-Sabbagh, who were arrested after being forced to resign from the newspaper Al-Bilad. Ali Omid, Hani Al-Tayf, Fadel Al-Marzouk, Hossein Abdalsjad Abdul Hossein Al-Abbas, Jaffar Abdalsjad Abdul Hossein Al-Abbas, Hamza Ahmed Youssef Al-Dairi and Ahmed Youssef Al-Dairi, who are all online forum administrator or moderators.
Photographer Hossein Abbas Salem, and Abbas Al-Murshid, a freelance journalist and writer who contributes to several online forums. He was arrested on 16 May.
All of this activity took place against a background of a demonsration by more than 10,000 pro-democracy activists, during which the leader of the Gulf nation's main Shiite political party urged backers to press ahead with peaceful protests for greater political rights after fierce crackdowns by security forces.
TIME Magazine wrote, “The event carried twin messages in a nation wracked by unrest since February when protesters took to the streets, inspired by successful uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia.
“The Sunni monarchy controlling Bahrain allowed the rally in a bid to ease
tensions and open dialogue with Shiite-led groups. For opposition forces, the
gathering was a chance to voice their demands and show resolve after facing
relentless pressure from the Western-backed government, including martial
law-style rules removed earlier this month,” TIME wrote.
“The strategic island kingdom — home to the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet — has been in lockdown mode for months as Sunni rulers launched massive arrest sweeps and military patrols to quell the protests. The crackdown included bringing in a 1,500-story Saudi-led military force to back up Bahrain's embattled leadership, which claims that Shiite power Iran seeks to make gains by the unrest.” TIME reported.
At least 31 people have died in the unrest since February.
Ayat Al-Qormezi, a 20-year-old Bahrain poet, who recited poems critical of Bahrain's rulers, was sentenced yesterday (Sunday) to a year in prison by a special security court set up during Bahrain's crackdown on Shiite protesters calling for greater rights.
The tribunal's decision sent a message that the Sunni monarchy is not easing off on punishments linked to the unrest despite appeals for talks with Shiite groups in the strategic Gulf island kingdom, which is home to the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet.
The official Bahrain News Agency said Ayat al-Qurmezi was convicted of anti-state charges, including inciting hatred. She can appeal.
Two former parliament members, Jawad Fairooz and Mattar Mattar, also went on trial as part of wide-ranging arrests and trials of perceived enemies of the ruling system. Both are members of the main Shiite political group, Wefaq, whose 18 lawmakers resigned to protest the harsh measures against protesters..
The U.S. has condemned the violence, but has stopped short of any tangible punishments against the rulers in one of Washington's military hubs in the Persian Gulf.
In another action of major consequence, medical personnel who treated the many Bahrainis injured in antigovernment protests during the months of unrest in this tiny but strategically important Gulf nation go on trial today (Monday) charged with taking part in efforts to overthrow the monarchy.
Legal medical, health, and human rights groups have labeled these court proceedings as “show trials” similar to those held for dissidents in the Soviet Union from 1934 to 1939. A feature of Stalin's Reign of Terror was a series of "show trials" in which political opponents were forced to plead guilty to activities designed to undermine state security.
The 47 Bahraini health professionals were arraigned in a closed hearing in a security court.
They are largely members of the country’s Shiite majority, which had been demonstrating to achieve greater freedom, equal rights and an elected government from the Sunni monarchy. Bahrain is about 70 per cent Shiite and 30 per cent Sunni Muslims. But the country is governed by a Sunni monarchy.
During the unrest, in which government security forces fired live ammunition, wounding or killing dozens of protestors, medical professionals said it was their duty to treat everyone and rejected accusations that treating protesters was the same as supporting their cause.
Those injured by government forces were frequently brought to the (name) hospital, but that unit has been under the control of the government’s security personnel. In some cases, these officers intervened in the physicians’ treatment and ordered that no further treatment be given.
Then many of the doctors, nurses and the patients were moved by the government to other hospitals in an effort to keep them from being able to prevent patients from identifying the wounds they had received at the hands of security services, Similarly, doctors and nurses were to be silent about the nature of the injuries they treated.
But most of the doctors and nurses refused, saying they had a responsibity to provide the best care they could to the wounded and injured.
Meanwhile, bloggers and other members of the press continue to the harassed by security forces and in many cases, arrested, tried before Kangaroo security courts and sentenced to substantial jail terms.
Ayat Al Cormozy, a 20 years old student and poet, was arrested last March by Bahraini security forces after she had recited poems in the Pearl Roundabout criticizing in it the Bahraini authorities. Ayat had been detained in an unknown place and without any specific charges until the Bahraini authorities had informed her family that she would be prosecuted in a martial court on Thursday 2 June as the first sitting of the court. This prosecution took place only two days after the lift of emergency law according to which these martial courts were held. The court has indicted the young poet of “touching on Bahraini King and participating in illegal demonstrations” and decided to postpone the hearing to Monday 6 June 2011.
This prosecution came after the lift of the notorious emergency law which had been imposed in 15 March 2011 and according to which 600 opponent activists were arrested and around 2000 persons were fired from their jobs because of their participation in the demonstrations that had broken out in the kingdom since last February and which had been violently suppressed by the security forces.
Ayat Al Cormozy is the second woman to be prosecuted in a martial court in the wake of the last events in Manama after that Galila Salman, an activist, had been sentenced to four years jail for possessing forbidden singing records and not obeying the orders of the police officers in the street in 12 May 2011.
The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) said the “Human rights situation in Bahrain is in ongoing deterioration and the lift of emergency law was merely a trial from the authorities to improve their image while they are actually still following suppressive measures and holding martial courts in fighting freedom of expression”
ANHRI added “Bahraini authorities should stop attacking human rights activists and opponents and prosecuting martial courts against civilians, and should release immediately all activists and arrested demonstrators, and allow a suitable environment for freedom of opinion and expression without adopting prosecution, or arrest or jail policies. It is not logic that the Bahraini authorities calls for dialogue with different political movements while the opposition leaders are in jail.”
In the past few days, the authorities have arrested more photographers and photo-journalists who had been covering the pro-democracy demonstrations taking place in Bahrain since mid-February. The aim of these targeted arrests is to limit the dissemination of news reports, photos and video of the protests and the government crackdown.
Reporters Without Borders calls for the immediate release of these photographers and of all the other people who have been arrested for circulating information about the protests and repression. The press freedom organization also calls on the courts to overturn the conviction of Hassan Salman Al-Ma’atooq, a photographer who has been sentenced to three years in prison.
Reporters Without Borders has learned that a military court imposed the sentence on Ma’atooq on 12 May after convicting him on four charges including two relating to his work as a photographer – fabricating photos of injured people and disseminating false photos and information. Aged 29, he has been held since 23 March.
Reporters Without Borders has also learned that Mohamed Ali Al-Aradi, who works for the newspaper Al-Bilad, was arrested on 8 May, and that, Abdullah Hassan, who was recently fired from the newspaper Al-Watan, was arrested on 14 May. He had been injured on 13 March while covering clashes between demonstrators and the security forces. Mohamed Salman Al-Sheikh, a photographer who heads the Bahrain Society of Photography, is meanwhile still being held. He was arrested at his home in Sanabis, a village west of Manama, on 11 May. Photographer Nedhal Nooh, a member of the Bahrain Society of Photography, was summoned for interrogation on 18 May in West Riffa (a city to the south of the capital). He has been held ever since.
Fadel Habib, a columnist who writes mainly about educational issues for Al-Wasat, was arrested at a check-point on 20 May and was released last night.
Naziha Saeed, a journalist who works for Radio Monte-Carlo and France24, was summoned and interrogated for nearly 12 hours on 22 May. She has often talked about the government-orchestrated repression in the foreign media in recent months.
The photo-journalist Mazen Mahdi was summoned and questioned for two hours on 22 May, mainly about is Twitter activities during demonstrations, his work for DPA and his alleged links with Lebanese and Iranian media. He was handcuffed and blindfolded, beaten several times and threatened with torture. Mahdi was previously detained briefly in March for taking photos of thugs smashing shop windows.
Reporters Without Borders has learned that Ali Abdulkarim Al-Kufi, a member of the Bahrain Society of Photography, and Hassan Al-Nasheet were released on 20 May after being held for five days. Al-Wasat journalist Haydar Mohamed was released on 22 May.
The trial of three of the opposition newspaper Al-Wasat’s most senior journalists – editor Mansour Al-Jamari, managing editor Walid Nouihid and local news editor Aqil Mirza – began before a criminal court on 18 May. They are accused of disseminating false information that undermined the country’s international image and reputation (http://en.rsf.org/bahraini-and-syri...). Jamari told Reuters that the prosecutors have added the charge of intending to cause instability in Bahrain, which carries a two-year sentence.
Jamari acknowledged to Reuters that six articles with false information did appear in Al-Wasat but he said all six were emailed to the newspaper together with bogus phone numbers from the same IP address in what appeared to be a deliberate plot to get the newspaper to publish wrong information.
Founded in 2002, Al-Wasat was banned on 3 April, one day after the national television programme “Media Watch” accused it of trying to harm Bahrain’s stability and security. The Information Affairs Authority, a government agency that regulates the media, reversed this decision and gave Al-Wasat permission to resume publishing on 4 April under new editors. The newspaper’s board initially announced that the newspaper would close, but subsequently said it would continue operating.
Another hearing was held on May 22 in the trial of 21 human rights activists and opposition members. After witnesses gave evidence, the court adjourned until 25 May. The defendants present in court included the blogger Abduljalil Al-Singace. Fellow blogger Ali Abdulemam, regarded as one of the country’s Internet pioneers, is also a defendant but he is being tried in absentia. Despite the judge’s instructions to the contrary, it seems that most of the detainees have been in solitary confinement.
The following are still detained: Faysal Hayyat,Ali Jawad, Abdullah Alawi and Jasem Al-Sabbagh, who were arrested after being forced to resign from the newspaper Al-Bilad. Ali Omid, Hani Al-Tayf, Fadel Al-Marzouk, Hossein Abdalsjad Abdul Hossein Al-Abbas, Jaffar Abdalsjad Abdul Hossein Al-Abbas, Hamza Ahmed Youssef Al-Dairi and Ahmed Youssef Al-Dairi, who are all online forum administrator or moderators.
Photographer Hossein Abbas Salem, and Abbas Al-Murshid, a freelance journalist and writer who contributes to several online forums. He was arrested on 16 May.
All of this activity took place against a background of a demonsration by more than 10,000 pro-democracy activists, during which the leader of the Gulf nation's main Shiite political party urged backers to press ahead with peaceful protests for greater political rights after fierce crackdowns by security forces.
TIME Magazine wrote, “The event carried twin messages in a nation wracked by unrest since February when protesters took to the streets, inspired by successful uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia.
“The Sunni monarchy controlling Bahrain allowed the rally in a bid to ease
tensions and open dialogue with Shiite-led groups. For opposition forces, the
gathering was a chance to voice their demands and show resolve after facing
relentless pressure from the Western-backed government, including martial
law-style rules removed earlier this month,” TIME wrote.
“The strategic island kingdom — home to the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet — has been in lockdown mode for months as Sunni rulers launched massive arrest sweeps and military patrols to quell the protests. The crackdown included bringing in a 1,500-story Saudi-led military force to back up Bahrain's embattled leadership, which claims that Shiite power Iran seeks to make gains by the unrest.” TIME reported.
At least 31 people have died in the unrest since February.
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