Shelter space sparse for solo homeless women in Denver - The Denver Post

Shelter space sparse for solo homeless women in Denver - The Denver Post

On Monday night, when the temperature dropped to 5 degrees in metro Denver, as many as 35 solo homeless women were turned away from city shelters.

Although the number of unaccompanied homeless women in the metro area has tripled since 2007 — to 1,606 from 552, according to the 2009 Metro Denver Homeless Initiative's point-in-time survey — there are only 241 shelter beds for solo women available in Denver.

Emergency-shelter beds "are extremely limited for women," said Geoff Bennett, director of the Samaritan House. "There are many more men's beds than there are beds for women."

When the beds fill up, some of the women may receive motel vouchers, but they must meet certain criteria. And if they don't, they must fend for themselves.

On some cold days, they go to The Gathering Place — a homeless resource center on High Street, near East Colfax Avenue — to work the phones, looking for a place to bunk.

On Tuesday afternoon, facing a forecast overnight low of minus 5, Laurallee Rucker said she was thinking about getting arrested on a misdemeanor so she'd have a warm place to stay.

Bernadette Ortega said she had slept on the street for the past three nights of single-digit temperatures, huddled in a cardboard box outside a downtown church.

On Tuesday afternoon, unable to find a bed for the night, she panhandled on Colfax, trying to get $42 for a hotel room.

"It's really messed up," Ortega said, frustrated at her inability to find shelter. "No matter how early you get up, whoever you call, the beds are already full."

For the first time, the city this year funded 15 overflow emergency beds at The Delores Project, the city's largest shelter for solo women.

Women who can't get an emergency bed may be eligible for motel vouchers. But not every woman qualifies. Some women are on a do-not-readmit list because they have caused problems in the past. And experts said the vouchers are available only to people who have lived in Denver for 60 days.

Each person is limited to 12 nights of motel vouchers annually, although "we're not going to be hard and fast with that on a night like tonight," said Denver Human Services spokeswoman Jamie Glennon. "We are trying to do everything possible to get these women connected to services. We want to make sure these women are indoors during the cold weather."

American's Prison Spree Has Brutal Impact

National Journal

The trend toward long-term imprisonment of nonviolent offenders has made us no safer while ruining countless lives.

by Stuart Taylor Jr.

Saturday, Nov. 14, 2009

The November 9 Supreme Court arguments on whether it is cruel and unusual to impose life in prison without parole on violent juveniles who have not killed anybody understandably got prominent media coverage.
But a far more important imprisonment story gets less attention because it's a running sore that rarely generates dramatic "news." That is our criminal-justice system's incarceration of a staggering 2.3 million people, about half of them for nonviolent crimes, including most of the 500,000 locked up for drug offenses.
Forty percent of these prisoners are black, 20 percent are Hispanic, and most are poor and uneducated. This has had a devastating impact on poor black families and neighborhoods, where it has become the norm for young men -- many of them fathers -- to spend time in prison and emerge bitter, unemployable, and unmarriageable. (These numbers come from studies cited by Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a reform group.)

America imprisons seven times as many people as it did in 1972, several times as many per capita as other Western nations, and many more than any other nation in the world.

Yes, violent criminals should be locked up for long enough to protect the rest of us. But the mass, long-term imprisonment of nonviolent, nondangerous offenders in recent decades and excessive terms for others has made us no safer while ruining countless lives and converting potentially productive citizens into career criminals.

The 13-year-old rapist and the 17-year-old serial robber-burglar who are serving life without parole in two Florida cases inspired impassioned comments from justices with opposing views. But the outcome may not have much impact on these two prisoners or anyone else. Even if the Court strikes down their sentences, the state will be free to resentence them to serve, say, 40 years before being eligible for parole, and thereafter to deny successive parole applications until they die. And even if the Court upholds life without parole, the state will be free in the future to relent and release them.

Castle Rock considers revoking licenses of medical-marijuana dispensaries - The Denver Post

Castle Rock considers revoking licenses of medical-marijuana dispensaries - The Denver Post

Sen. Romer says bill would cut number of pot clinics - The Denver Post

Sen. Romer says bill would cut number of pot clinics - The Denver Post

Job Fair For Veterans

Job Fair for Veterans

The 4th Annual Hire Vets First Job Fair will be held on December 10, 2009 from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at the Police Protective Association at 2105 Decatur Street, Denver, CO 80211.  The event and parking are free and the location is RTD accessible.  Come network with  more than 46 employers.  For more information, please visit the Health and Human Services Department website at: http://www.broomfield.org/hhs/HireVetsFirst_Dec_2009.pdf

Veterans Deserve Best Treatment For Addiction

DET News
U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a Michigan Democrat, has been a leader in expanding the availability of treatment for Americans suffering from heroin addiction. In 2000, he co-sponsored with Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, the Drug Addiction Treatment Act -- groundbreaking legislation that allows community-based physicians to treat opioid-dependent patients with buprenorphine. Buprenorphine is similar to methadone, which has more than 40 years of proven effectiveness, but which may only be used by comprehensive treatment programs; both medications have a high degree of success in treating dependency on heroin and prescription painkillers such as OxyContin, Percocet and Vicodin.
In 2006, Levin sponsored another bill that substantially increased the number of patients for whom physicians can prescribe buprenorphine. At that time, he noted "the great success of buprenorphine treatment" and continued, "It is tragic if the personal and community benefits of this new anti-addiction medication ... are limited because of artificial limits on its use."

Unfortunately, precisely such "artificial limits" persist, and one of the greatest barriers to care is our Department of Defense. In clear defiance of congressional intent and ignoring decades of proven efficacy of medication-assisted treatment, the Department's TRICARE insurance plan refuses to pay for any maintenance treatment for addiction. And who are the people desperately seeking and needing help, but being denied coverage? American military, veterans and their families, including survivors of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice in defense of their country and been killed in action.

Ex Con Tries Talking Sense Into Wayward Teens

The Gazette
Tillman Clifton sits down with eight teenagers in a room in Colorado Springs municipal court.
The kids, ages 13 to 17, have been sent here by Teen Court for offenses ranging from shoplifting to fighting to marijuana possession.

They look like there are plenty of places they’d rather be. Two brothers slouch in their chairs, never taking off their coats. A girl sits anxiously on the edge of her seat. One boy, sitting the farthest away, is wearing a pair of woolen gloves. He swivels his chair constantly.

But when Clifton starts to speak, the teens seem riveted as the 35-year-old ex-convict and former Chicago gang member tells them his life story as part of a program called “Straight Talk.”
He tells them his mother was a crack addict. He and his brothers and sisters went to live with her after their parents split up.

“We had Christmas 12 times a year — at the beginning of each month when the food stamps came in,” he explains. On those days, his mother would bring back buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken and videos.
By the end of the month, the kids learned to beg food from neighbors, he said.

When a friend was badly beaten by a drug dealer, his friends started walking the streets in twos and threes for protection. When they got a chance to inflict payback on the dealer, they took it.
“So before we realized it, we had become a gang. We weren’t just a group of friends any more,” he said. “We quickly forgot what we had started for and became what we didn’t want to be.”

Prisoners Story Not An Isolated Case

The Denver Post
It would be easier never to have heard of Tommy Silverstein.
The convicted bank robber is locked in the federal Supermax in Florence until 2095 for killing two fellow inmates and fatally stabbing a guard.
I don't defend the former member of the Aryan Brotherhood, considered one of the country's most dangerous prisoners. I'm far less interested in him than in his quarter-century in extreme isolation and in what those conditions mean about us and our system.
Silverstein, 57, has lived behind bars since age 20. He spent 26 years under a "no human contact order."
He did a year in a federal pen in Atlanta, where he was permitted no books or clothes. Then came a transfer to Leavenworth, where his 6-by-7-foot basement cell was infested with rats.
Next, he spent 15 years in another cell at Leavenworth known as the Silverstein Suite. He lived under constant surveillance and the buzz of 24-hour fluorescent lighting.
Guards refused to speak to him as a way of honoring the guard he killed.
Silverstein transferred in 2005 to a similar lockdown in the secretive Range 13 at Florence where only one other prisoner, World Trade Center bomber Ramsey Yusef, was housed. Each was locked in cages within cages in the most restrictive unit of the country's highest security prison.
Silverstein taught himself to read, write and sketch in prison. He never knew how long his isolation would last or what he could do to end it.
"A

---

---

sick trip," is how he describes conditions about which he's suing the Bureau of Prisons for cruel and unusual punishment. There are good reasons why prisons use isolation, which prevents violence and provides a disincentive for inmates to kill guards.
But there are better reasons against it, one of which is it may amount to legalized torture. Social contact, the argument goes, is an identifiable human need. People — even the worst of us — need people.
American POWs call isolation as agonizing as physical abuse. Condemned worldwide, isolation units "impose pointless suffering and humiliation" and "reflect a stunning disregard of the fact that all prisoners . . . are members of the human community," reads a report by Human Rights Watch.
A bipartisan federal commission on prison policies deemed extreme confinement to be "expensive and soul destroying," and recommended that prisons "end conditions of isolation."
"When we think about people being waterboarded overseas by our government, the idea of sitting in a cell with three meals a day doesn't seem that bad," says Laura Rovner, professor at DU law school's civil-rights clinic. "But that doesn't account for the scars you can't see or the devastating human erosion."
Silverstein's case has sat for two years as prosecutors try to dismiss it in court. Meantime, Rovner and her students bring a level of human contact that he hadn't had since before most of the 20-somethings were born.
His gratitude comes weekly in letters to the clinic penned in meticulous handwriting and in sketches that are exquisite both in their pain and tenderness.
It's tempting not to look closely at the self-portraits, and not to let yourself feel the loneliness. It's easier not to think about the artist with the steady ballpoint and all the other prisoners whose lives we're draining of meaning.

Details Emerge In Prison Murder

Westword
Last week, we reported on the bludgeoning death of inmate Ronald Ferguson, a convicted child molester, at the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility outside of Canon City.
A fifty-year-old habitual offender serving time for kidnapping and sexual assault on a child, Ferguson was struck repeatedly in the head with a metal bar; his alleged assailant, Kevin Lust, is serving a life sentence for the murders of his wife and ex-fiancee.
Now, inmate sources have come forward with more details that raise questions about general security issues at Territorial and whether Ferguson was being set up for attack. If their reports are correct, Ferguson begged corrections officers to protect him from Lust, given a history of altercations between the two, but was ignored.
"Apparently, these guys got into a fight some 7-8 months ago in the kitchen," one inmate writes. "They were separated and sent to different units."

Medical pot supporters rally at state Capitol - The Denver Post

Medical pot supporters rally at state Capitol - The Denver Post
DENVER—Acknowledging that they have an image problem, supporters of medical marijuana held a rally at the Colorado Capitol on Friday to support better regulation of their industry. About a dozen people braved subfreezing temperatures on the west steps of the Capitol to speak on behalf of the Colorado Patients and Providers Coalition, which says it wants to reassure Coloradans that the medical marijuana industry is legitimate. 

Ohio To Switch To One Drug Lethal Injection

Columbus Dispatch

Ohio will switch to a single drug instead of a three-drug cocktail in its new execution procedure, according to documents filed in federal court this morning.
Executions will use a single drug, thiopental sodium, "in an amount sufficient to cause death," Attorney General Richard Cordray's office said in filing in U.S. District Court in Columbus. The drug is an anesthetic.
The new procedure will be in place by Nov 30.
The new procedure is similar to one used in euthanizing pets a massive dose of an anesthetic. The drug is also sometimes used in medically-induced comas.
Ohio will be the first state in the U.S. to use the one-drug procedure.
The state filing also listed a new backup procedure, if the first one doesn't work or can't be used.
The backup method involves an injection with a needle into a large muscle such as the arm or upper thigh.   It was described as "much like a flu shot." One of the drugs to be used is Dilaudid, a commonly used painkiller.
"I have full confidence that this protocol will allow my staff the ability to fulfill our legally mandated obligation in carrying out the execution process for the state of Ohio," said Terry Collins, director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.
Department of Rehabilitation and Correction officials announced the new execution procedures this afternoon. The state has been considering a major overhaul of lethal injection procedures since problems forced a halt in the Sept. 15 execution of Romell Broom of Cleveland.
It was the first time in modern U.S. history that an execution had to be abandoned after it was started.
State officials have been consulting with Dr. Mark Dershwitz, a University of Massachusetts professor of anesthesiology, in developing a new process.
Ohio would become the first state to make major changes in a three-drug execution process that was essentially copied by 35 states from Oklahoma, where it was developed by an anesthesiologist in 1977.

Medical marijuana gets a boost from major doctors group -- latimes.com

Medical marijuana gets a boost from major doctors group -- latimes.com The American Medical Assn. on Tuesday urged the federal government to reconsider its classification of marijuana as a dangerous drug with no accepted medical use, a significant shift that puts the prestigious group behind calls for more research.

The nation's largest physicians organization, with about 250,000 member doctors, the AMA has maintained since 1997 that marijuana should remain a Schedule I controlled substance, the most restrictive category, which also includes heroin and LSD.

In changing its policy, the group said its goal was to clear the way to conduct clinical research, develop cannabis-based medicines and devise alternative ways to deliver the drug.

"Despite more than 30 years of clinical research, only a small number of randomized, controlled trials have been conducted on smoked cannabis," said Dr. Edward Langston, an AMA board member, noting that the limited number of studies was "insufficient to satisfy the current standards for a prescription drug product."

The decision by the organization's delegates at a meeting in Houston marks another step in the evolving view of marijuana, which an AMA report notes was once linked by the federal government to homicidal mania. Since California voters approved the use of medical marijuana in 1996, marijuana has moved steadily into the cultural mainstream spurred by the growing awareness that it can have beneficial effects for some chronically ill people.

This year, the Obama administration sped up that drift when it ordered federal narcotics agents not to arrest medical marijuana users and providers who follow state laws. Polls show broadening support for marijuana legalization.

Thirteen states allow the use of medical marijuana, and about a dozen more have considered it this year.

The AMA, however, also adopted as part of its new policy a sentence that admonishes: "This should not be viewed as an endorsement of state-based medical cannabis programs, the legalization of marijuana, or that scientific evidence on the therapeutic use of cannabis meets the current standards for a prescription drug product."

Denver Council Crafting Regulations For Pot Shops

The Denver Post
Denver City Council members suggested today that they would bar those convicted of recent felonies from getting into the business of dispensing medical marijuana.
The council held no formal vote on a package of proposed regulations for medical marijuana dispensaries from Councilman Charlie Brown and agreed to meet in committee again Dec. 16 to continue hashing out the issue.
A full set of regulations likely will go before the council in January for final consideration.
Brown originally had submitted a proposal that required applicants for a marijuana dispensaries to state whether they had "ever been convicted of a felony, or of violating any federal, state or local law governing the manufacture, distribution, possession or use of controlled substances."

Sensitive that the issue would be debated, Brown noted on his draft proposal that the issue was subject to further discussion on just what should be a disqualifying conviction.

The broad language struck a few council members as too onerous.
Council members settled on felony convictions as the place to draw the line and further decided such a disqualifying conviction would be within five years of completion of a felony sentence.

Councilman Chris Nevitt said he thought using recent felonies as a disqualification was a compromise that would work, but he cautioned against overregulating the industry.
Nevitt said the city doesn't do criminal background checks for those who want to open up donut shops or jewelry stores. Further, he said medical marijuana once was deemed illegal by state officials so it wouldn't be a surprise if some of those getting into the business might have had brushes with the law.

Senate Committee To Debate Criminal Justice Commission

This Thursday, December 3, members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee will debate Senate Bill 714, The National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009.

Senate Bill 714 will establish a `National Criminal Justice Commission’ to “undertake a comprehensive review of the criminal justice system … and make reform recommendations for the President.” The lead sponsor of this measure, Democrat Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, has remarked that this review ought to include a debate of federal marijuana policy, including regulating marijuana like alcohol.

It’s been many years since a federally appointed commission has taken an objective look at American criminal justice policies, and it’s been nearly 40 years since federal lawmakers have undertaken a critical examination of U.S. marijuana policy. Please take time today to urge your United States senators to support Senate Bill 714. If your senators sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee, then it is especially important that that they hear from you.

Medical pot advocates roll out poll showing support - The Denver Post

Medical pot advocates roll out poll showing support - The Denver Post

Medical marijuana advocates released a poll Monday they said shows overwhelming support — by a 2-to-1 margin — for licensing and regulating cannabis dispensaries popping up across Colorado.

The poll comes as lawmakers are drafting legislation to regulate the burgeoning industry, a response to legal developments that have left local governments and medical marijuana dispensaries seeking clarity.

"There's vast public support for responsibly regulated medical marijuana," said Matt Brown, executive director of Coloradoans for Medical Marijuana Regulation, a coalition of dispensaries and growers that helped sponsor the poll.

However, Attorney General John Suthers, a Republican who has opposed medical marijuana as violating federal law, made little of the poll results.

"It's easy to say in a vacuum that voters support the type of medical marijuana distribution system that the dispensary owners advocate, but the devil is in the details," Suthers said. "Once the voters understand the full extent that the current system is being abused to allow healthy young people to procure marijuana, they will be much less likely to support it."

The telephone poll of 500 likely Colorado voters asked just one question regarding medical marijuana.

In the survey, which had a margin of error of 4.38 percent, respondents were first told there were "some proposals that voters might be voting on in the election next November."