Who is the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition?
Our mission is to reverse the trend of mass incarceration in Colorado. We are a coalition of nearly 7,000 individual members and over 100 faith and community organizations who have united to stop perpetual prison expansion in Colorado through policy and sentence reform.
Our chief areas of interest include drug policy reform, women in prison, racial injustice, the impact of incarceration on children and families, the problems associated with re-entry and stopping the practice of using private prisons in our state.
The number of people who abuse painkillers in Colorado is on the rise and the problem is manifesting itself in a string of recent pharmacy robberies, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
"The Hooded Pain-Med Bandit," a young dark-haired man with a gun tucked in his waistband, has hit three Walgreens pharmacies in Wheat Ridge and Arvada since December, police say.
The latest occurred Feb. 12 in Arvada when he lifted his shirt, flashed the gun and ordered the pharmacist to hand over painkillers.
In Wheat Ridge, he specifically demanded Oxycontin and Vicodin.
"Obviously, this is concerning because an addict, or someone desperate, who is trying to steal narcotics is also armed," said Arvada police Cmdr. Aaron Jacks.
The numbers of people who died from prescription-drug abuse rose 95 percent in Colorado in almost a decade, according to the DEA.
In 2000, there were 228 deaths in the state linked to prescription drugs. By 2009, 445 people died from abusing painkillers in Colorado.
In Denver, 70 percent of the drug-related deaths are attributable to painkillers, said Kevin Merrill, acting special agent in charge of the DEA's Denver division.
A lack of cash and some philosophical objections have so far kept Colorado law enforcement agencies from implementing federal rules that would require more criminals to register as sex offenders for longer periods of time.
Complying with the rules contained in the federal Adam Walsh Act by July 1 would bring Colorado close to $500,000 in federal grant money.
But opponents argue that it will cost far more than that federal grant amount to comply with the rules.
A national chorus of state government groups and research institutions has raised concerns about the way the federal law treats juvenile offenders, potential constitutional conflicts and data showing sex-offender registration doesn't prevent repeat offenders.
Among the skeptics is Laurie Kepros, who oversees sexual offenses for the state public defender office.
"It's just not going to be cost-effective, and does it do us any good in terms of public safety?" Kepros said.
In December, Colorado got notice that its current system for handling sex offenders is far from being in line with what federal authorities want.
"Now we don't know what to do," she said.
Congress passed the Adam Walsh Act in 2006 in an attempt to organize hundreds of sex-offense statutes in 50 states into three uniform categories that indicate the crimes' severity.
The legislation establishes registration and reporting standards for those categories — in many cases more stringent than state requirements — and compels local law enforcement to do more to communicate with other jurisdictions when offenders are on the move.
Colorado's Sex Offender Management Board in 2008 advised against compliance with the federal law, but nonetheless acknowledged the benefits of a single, unified reporting and tracking system.
"The Adam Walsh Act will . . . ensure that law enforcement has access to the same information across the United States, helping prevent sex offenders from evading detection by moving from state to state," the panel wrote.
Only four states have complied
Though the federal government has pushed for five years for states to tighten reporting requirements, so far only four have complied: Ohio, South Dakota, Florida and Delaware.
Crimes where Coloradans can now petition to be removed from the registry after five years — like misdemeanor indecent exposure — would remain listed for at least 10 years.
Those convicted of unlawful sexual contact with a child younger than 15 would spend a minimum of 25 years registering as a sex offender instead of a 10-year minimum with good behavior, as state law now reads.
And new crimes like criminal invasion of privacy and kidnapping or false imprisonment of someone younger than 18 would become registerable offenses, even though Colorado prosecutors frequently file those charges in instances where no sex offense has occurred.
New York Times
JAY, Fla. — Before he went to jail, Danny Ivey had barely seen a backyard garden.
A California program helps inmates learn welding skills so they can repair leaky public water tanks.
But here he was, two years left on his sentence for grand theft, bent over in a field, snapping wide, green collard leaves from their stems. For the rest of the week, Mr. Ivey and his fellow inmates would be eating the greens he picked, and the State of Florida would be saving most of the $2.29 a day it allots for their meals.
Prison labor — making license plates, picking up litter — is nothing new, and nearly all states have such programs. But these days, officials are expanding the practice to combat cuts in federal financing and dwindling tax revenue, using prisoners to paint vehicles, clean courthouses, sweep campsites and perform many other services done before the recession by private contractors or government employees.
In New Jersey, inmates on roadkill patrol clean deer carcasses from highways. Georgia inmates tend municipal graveyards. In Ohio, they paint their own cells. In California, prison officials hope to expand existing programs, including one in which wet-suit-clad inmates repair leaky public water tanks. There are no figures on how many prisoners have been enrolled in new or expanded programs nationwide, but experts in criminal justice have taken note of the increase.
“There’s special urgency in prisons these days,” said Martin F. Horn, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction. “As state budgets get constricted, the public is looking for ways to offset the cost of imprisonment.”
Jim Crow laws that promoted segregation and stripped blacks of voting rights during the past two centuries were wiped off the books by 1960s civil-rights legislation, but they have reappeared in another guise, a race expert argued in several Denver forums this week.
Michelle Alexander, a civil-rights lawyer turned scholar, said America's racial caste system didn't disappear — it's just been redesigned as the criminal-justice system.
It continues to control and oppress young men of color, said Alexander, author of the 2010 book "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness."
The "war on drugs," three-strikes laws and other mandatory-sentencing measures instituted since the 1980s disproportionately punish poor minorities, she said.
In the past 30 years, the U.S. prison population has exploded from about 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for most of the increase. While denying any conspiracy, federal sentencing councils have nonetheless recognized that laws requiring harsher punishment for crack-cocaine possession than the powder version disproportionately affected black males, and some have been rolled back.
The racial dimension, Alexander said, is the most striking feature of mass incarceration.
What she calls selective prosecution has led to an astounding percentage of the African-American community being warehoused in prisons, she said.
Many are imprisoned for minor drug offenses committed just as frequently by white Americans, but the laws are enforced more often against minorities, she said.
The U.S. Department of Justice reports that boys born in 2001 face the following odds of going to prison: 1 in 17 for whites; 1 in 6 for Latinos; and 1 in 3 for African-Americans.
In Colorado, as of 2007, African-Americans made up 3.8 percent of the state's general population but 19.4 percent of the prison population, according to a Colorado Department of Corrections report.
The family of Marvin Louis Booker filed a lawsuit today against the city in Denver District Court following his death last summer in the new county jail.
"It seems like the officers have a license to kill," said Booker's father, Rev. Benjamin Booker, 82, in a news conference outside the courthouse this morning. "The officers ought to protect you, not kill you."
Booker, 56, a homeless street preacher who often recited Martin Luther King Jr. speeches, was jailed on charges of possession of drug paraphernalia.
While trying to retrieve his shoes in the early morning hours of July 9, he got into a scuffle with a booking deputy. Deputies shocked him with a Taser, struck him in the legs with nunchucks, put him in a carotid "sleeper hold" and lay atop him in an effort to control him. He stopped breathing.
The coroner's office ruled that his death was a homicide. Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey declined to charge the deputies.
Darold Killmer, attorney for the Booker family, said the family is only seeking justice and has not specified how much money they are seeking.
Undersheriff Gary Wilson said an internal investigation is continuing. He said new officers were added to the Internal Affairs Bureau to investigate the case. Meantime, all deputies who were involved in Booker's restraint remain on paid leave. Beyond that, the department declined to comment on the suit.
Members of the Booker family traveled from around the country to attend the news conference and several members including two siblings who are also pastors spoke. Marvin Booker was a pastor himself.
"Brutality must cease," said Rev. Spencer Booker, a pastor at Bethel AME Church in Kansas City, Mo.
Prof. Michelle Alexander, civil rights advocate and author of "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness," is in Denver to make her case that a racial caste system still exists in America.
Sponsored by The Veterans of Hope Project, Iliff School of Theology and several other Denver organizations, Alexander will speak on racial justice at several events Wednesday and Thursday.
Iliff will host a brown-bag lunch and conversation with Alexander, "Words of Wisdom, Actions of Hope: A Challenge to Communities of Faith," 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Iliff Great Hall, 2201 S. University Blvd..
At 7-9 p.m. Wednesday, Park Hill United Methodist Church will host a public forum with Alexander and co-panelists Christie Donner, Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition executive director, and Francisco Gallardo of the Gang Rescue and Support Project. Admission is free but donations are encouraged. The church is at 5209 Montview Blvd.
At 10:30 a.m. to 12 p.m. Thursday, Alexander will issue "A Challenge to the Youth Community" and will take questions from students at Manual High School, 1700 E. 28th Street.
Space is limited, so RSVP for events by calling 303-765-3194 or emailing gsmith@iliff.edu.
This is still one of the most disturbing story's I have ever heard.
SCRANTON, Pa. — A former juvenile court judge who sent large numbers of children to detention centers was convicted Friday of racketeering for taking a $1 million kickback from the builder of the for-profit lockups, in what prosecutors said was a "kids for cash" scheme that ranks among the biggest courtroom frauds in U.S. history.
Former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella, 61, left the bench in disgrace two years ago after he and a second judge, Michael Conahan, were accused of using juvenile delinquents as pawns in a plot to get rich.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has dismissed 4,000 juvenile convictions issued by Ciavarella, saying he sentenced young offenders without regard for their constitutional rights.
Federal prosecutors accused Ciavarella and Conahan of taking more than $2 million in bribes from the builder of the PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care detention centers and extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars from the facilities' co-owner.
A federal jury in Scranton convicted Ciavarella of 12 counts, including racketeering, money laundering and conspiracy, but acquitted him of 27 counts, including extortion. He is likely to get a prison sentence of more than 12 years, according to prosecutors.
Ciavarella insisted the payments were legal and denied that he incarcerated youths for money — a position he defiantly clung to even after he was convicted of a charge, racketeering, that federal prosecutors often use to go after mobsters.
He was allowed to remain free pending sentencing, a decision that galled parents of juveniles who appeared before the judge. Ciavarella often ordered youths he had found delinquent to be shackled, handcuffed and taken away without giving them a chance to say goodbye to their families.
Some of the children he ordered locked up were as young as 10.
The mother of a former defendant who was jailed by Ciavarella — and who later killed himself — confronted the judge on the courthouse steps, screaming obscenities.
Sandy Fonzo's son, Edward Kenzakowski, was a 17-year-old all-star wrestler with no prior record when he landed in Ciavarella's courtroom for possession of drug paraphernalia. She said her son never recovered from the months he served at the detention centers and a wilderness camp.
The Sentencing Project
(excerpted)
Today, 7.2 million men and women are under correctional supervision. Of this total, five million are monitored in the community on probation or parole and 2.3 million are incarcerated in prisons or jails. As a result the nation maintains the highest rate of incarceration in the world at 743 per 100,000 population. The scale of the correctional population results from a mix of crime rates and legislative and administrative policies that vary by state. In recent years, lawmakers have struggled to find the resources to maintain....
In the state of Colorado, the number of mentally ill or developmentally disabled prison inmates in solitary confinement has more than doubled in about 10 years.
According to the Colorado Department of Corrections, in 1999, 15 percent of inmates in solitary confinement were mentally ill or developmentally disabled. In 2008, it was 37 percent.
Most people`s exposure to solitary confinement is from pop culture: In reality in Colorado it is 23 hours of daily isolation with no human contact. There are about 1,400 people in solitary confinement in Colorado today. They will spend an average of 16 months there, according to the department.
Solitary confinement is more expensive than regular prison -- the low end of the increased costs is about $15,000 per inmate. And 41 percent of prisoners released from solitary are really released: They`re put on parole or their time has been served, they head right back into the community, rather than back into general prison population to readjust to human contact.
For the mentally ill, it is an overwhelming prospect.
Sen. Morgan Carroll, D-Aurora, is sponsoring a bill that would address this issue. The proposal has the support of a coalition that includes state branches of the ACLU, Mental Health America and the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition.
We hope the proposal gets its due: As drafted so far, the law would create a process to evaluate inmates for mental health issues, while still allowing wardens to confine people who are a security risk. It would ensure that those so confined would be put back into the general prison population before their release from prison.
It`s easy to dismiss what goes on inside prison walls if you`ve never been inside them. It`s easy, too, to take a "tough on crime" stance that is absolute in nature. People who seem most opposed to prison reform find some comfort in thinking that once a person is put in prison, they get whatever it is they deserve.
This is clouded thinking, for several reasons. Lawyers, judges and juries work out various convictions and sentences for those who run afoul of the law, even those who do so heinously. Many will be sent to prison, some for the rest of their lives, but most for various lengths of time. But none of those convicted is sentenced to a place of torture; none is sentenced to be raped or otherwise assaulted; none is sentenced to mental abuse.
9 News
STERLING - The Colorado Department of Corrections says it will review how it notifies next of kin after 9Wants to Know spoke with the family of a murdered inmate who said a prison employee at the Sterling Correctional Facility incorrectly told them the death was not bloody.
"We certainly, as a department, are always looking at operations... and if this is an area we can improve on we will," Katherine Sanguinetti, spokesperson with the Colorado Department of Corrections, said.
She did not say the prison made a mistake.
A photo sent to 9Wants to Know on Tuesday showed the blood-covered scene where inmate Cleveland Flood was found. Blood covers one wall and a sink in the cell and Flood's body is shown lying on the floor.
Flood, 38, was found dead about midnight on Saturday. He lived in the Denver area before going to prison and was serving a 48-year prison sentence for burglary.
9Wants to Know confirmed Wednesday that Flood was stabbed multiple times.
"It certainly has raised awareness in the department, this family's reaction," Sanguinetti, said after the family spoke out on 9NEWS.
The family says a prison official lied to them.
Flood's mother told 9Wants to Know that a DOC employee told her Flood did not die a bloody death.
"I asked her, 'Was there any blood?' She said, 'No there was no blood. There was nothing wrong with him. That's why we don't know if it was a homicide or suicide,'" Linda Sanchez said Tuesday.
Sanchez told 9Wants to Know Wednesday she was happy with the decision to review the department's next of kin notification policy.
Two inmates have been separated from the general prison population and are under investigation in connection with the murder, 9Wants to Know has learned.
The main obstacle to getting black America past the illusion that racism is still a defining factor in America is the strained relationship between young black men and police forces. The massive number of black men in prison stands as an ongoing and graphically resonant rebuke to all calls to "get past racism." exhibit initiative, or stress optimism. And the primary reason for this massive number of black men in jail is the War on Drugs.
STERLING - The Colorado Department of Corrections has launched an investigation into who sent 9Wants to Know a graphic investigative picture of a bloody inmate murdered in his cell at the Sterling Correctional Facility.
Cleveland Flood, 38, was found dead about midnight on Saturday, according to Katherine Sanguinetti, spokesperson with the Colorado Department of Corrections (DOC). Flood lived in the Denver area before going to prison and was serving a 48-year prison sentence for burglary.
Two inmates have been separated from the general prison population and are under investigation in connection with the murder, 9Wants to Know has learned.
Sanguinetti was unable to say where in the prison the death happened or how Flood died, due to the on-going investigation. She also was unable to release the name of the suspects, but says they are inmates at the correctional facility.
Sanguinetti says the death is being investigated as a homicide, which is standard procedure at DOC facilities.
"This [the murder] is something we take very seriously," Sanguinetti said.
Flood's mother told 9Wants to Know that DOC employee Mary Cox first told her Flood did not die a bloody death.
"I asked her, 'Was there any blood?' She said, 'No there was no blood. There was nothing wrong with him. That's why we don't know if it was a homicide or suicide,'" Linda Sanchez said Tuesday.
A photo sent to 9Wants to Know showed the blood-covered scene where the victim was found. Blood covers one wall and a sink in the cell.
The DOC considers the picture very sensitive to its investigation, Sanguinetti said.
"When something like this happens it is hard on everyone: the victim's family, the staff who has investigated the incident and other inmates," Sanguinetti said of the crime scene photo being released.
The Logan County Coroner's Office says an autopsy was conducted, but the cause of death is pending the result of tests.
Flood is originally from Denver. He has an extensive criminal history, including seven burglary, one vandalism and one contraband convictions, plus two escape convictions for failing to check in during parole.
Sanchez says she wants more information from the prison and not knowing what happened to her son makes the pain stronger.
"I don't know what to do. That's my baby and it's hard. It's really hard," Sanchez said as she clutched a picture of her son.
"Now that he's gone, I sit here and pray for him," she said.
Sterling Correctional Center is the same prison where Douglas Alward escaped in August. In a 9Wants to Know investigation, the investigators showed it was Alward's seventh escape from custody.
When Alward was captured, the head of the Department of Corrections ordered a top-to-bottom review of guard and inmate security policies.
The DOC says there were four murders in their facilities statewide last year. The DOC houses about 23,000 inmates.
A suspect is being held in connection to the death of another inmate at the Sterling Correctional Facility.
Katherine Sanguinetti, a spokesperson with the Colorado Department of Corrections, says 38-year-old Cleveland Flood was found dead around midnight Saturday. She was unable to say where at the prison the death happened or how Flood died, due to the on-going investigation. She also was unable to release the name of the suspect, but says it is another inmate at the correctional facility.
Sanguinetti says the death is being investigated as a homicide, which is standard procedure at Department of Corrections' facilities.
The Logan County Coroner's Office says an autopsy was conducted on Monday, but the cause of death is pending the result of tests.
Gov. John Hickenlooper proposes shutting down the medium-security prison in Fort Lyon that treats aging and ill inmates as part of correctional budget-cutting plans that would save $10 million.
Closing the prison would save $3 million next year. Hickenlooper also proposes axing prison educational programs to save another $3 million.
Only two years after former Gov. Bill Ritter expanded a program for mentally ill parolees as part of his own cost-cutting plan, Hickenlooper proposes cutting it to save $2.6 million.
An additional $1.3 million will be cut in administrative costs.
"These are challenging times, and the DOC will continue to move forward, not only upholding public safety, but strengthening it," said Tom Clements, executive director of the Department of Corrections.
Katherine Sanguinetti, DOC spokeswoman, drove to the 485-bed Fort Lyon Correctional Facility in southeastern Colorado on Tuesday to tell its 204 employees that the prison would close by Aug. 31, she said.
Employees will be offered positions at other prisons across the state where there are vacancies, she said.
"For a small county like ours, it's pretty devastating," Bent County Commissioner Thomas Wallace said.
Republican critics of the governor jumped on the decision, claiming it showed Hickenlooper cared little for rural Colorado.
"The governor of Denver, John Hickenlooper, has revealed what he thinks of rural southeastern Colorado: absolutely nothing," said outgoing GOP state chairman Dick Wadhams.
Hickenlooper is forming a committee including economic-development experts to review options for using the facilities, Sanguinetti said. The closing of the prison, which is one of Bent County's biggest employers, will be a major economic jolt to the community.
Sanguinetti said the state will return ownership of the prison, which used to be a Veterans Affairs hospital, to the federal government.
Some of the elderly and mentally ill who receive care at the prison will move to the Denver Reception and Diagnostic Center or the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility in Cañon City.
Among the educational programs that could be eliminated are about 50 vocational programs throughout the state's prison system, Sanguinetti said.
The DOC acknowledged that eliminating the programs could leave fewer employment options for departing inmates, perhaps increasing recidivism.
The parole re-entry program tries to help inmates move smoothly back into society but failed to yield projected cost savings.
When he climbed a tree and ranted incoherently, doctors in one emergency room said it was a "psychotic reaction" to mushrooms and sent him home.
When he quit school, couldn't keep a job and got into squabbles that were all someone else's fault, another doctor said he was manipulating his parents. Try tough love, he advised.
It wasn't until J. disfigured himself in a bloody attempt at self-annihilation that the 19-year-old Denver man got the diagnosis — schizophrenia — and the treatment he needed.
It shouldn't have to be that way, his mother said.
Too often for the seriously mentally ill, getting the right treatment, and enough of it, is tougher than coping with the condition itself.
Roadblocks, like stigma and ignorance, combine with budget cuts and profit motives that have decimated care options. For those with insurance, psychiatrists and psychologists are hard to find; for those without, they're practically nonexistent. The nation's troubled history and inconsistent laws merge with civil-liberties concerns to make mandatory treatment unheard of for troubled individuals who don't believe they are ill.
That's one reason a mother and son decided to tell their story, though she said the stigma of mental illness made them fear being identified, except by their fist initials.
She came forward, too, because of the shootings in Tucson last month that left six people dead and wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 12 others. Jared Loughner, the man accused in the shootings, is widely believed to be mentally ill.
"The Loughner parents could have been us," J.'s mother, A., wrote in an e-mail. "The only difference between our stories is that our son was not only the perpetrator of a terrible violent act, but was the victim of his sick mind as well."
Bipolar disorder affects about 5.7 million American adults, or about 2.6 percent of the U.S. population, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.
"Budget cuts continue to happen, we've reduced rates paid to Medicaid providers, we're not funding the care providers for the indigent, we've reduced appropriations to federally qualified health centers," said former state Sen. Moe Keller, who is with the nonprofit Mental Health America of Colorado.
Treatment options dwindle
Over the past decade, as budget crises have ebbed and flowed, the state has cut millions, restored a bit, then cut millions more, from mental health programs.
Not only has the state shut down beds at both psychiatric hospitals — at Fort Logan, the adolescent and geriatric units have closed — but funding for community outpatient treatment centers has been slashed as well.
Former Montrose District Attorney Myrl Serra will stand trial in July on allegations of sexual misconduct involving three women who worked for him.
After a morning hearing, Chief Mesa District Judge David Bottger ruled that there was "certainly reasonable evidence" to bind Serra over for trial in spite of defense attorneys' attempts to show that one of his alleged victims had tried to initiate an affair with Serra and that she had changed her story over a six-month period.
That witness denied those allegations and testified during the preliminary hearing Friday that in April Serra called her into his office, unzipped his pants, then grabbed her hand and forced her to touch his genitals. She testified that she backed out of the office with her eyes closed and immediately told a female coworker what had happened. She also took pictures of her reddened wrist with her cell phone.
The witness nervously rocked back and forth during her testimony as defense attorney Colin Bresee asked her detailed questions about the encounter. He hammered on the discrepancy between what she initially told her coworkers — that Serra had tried to get her to touch his genitals, versus a later account she gave to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation in which she said he actually forced her.
Bresee also asked if she had tried to initiate a sexual encounter with her boss and noted that she had texted him 63 times about letting the office staff leave early on that day. She denied wanting to have an affair with Serra.
Serra faces seven counts, including felony and misdemeanor unlawful sexual conduct, indecent exposure, criminal extortion and official misconduct related to allegations from the three female employees in the DA's office.
Only the one count of unlawful sexual misconduct involving physical force was addressed in the preliminary hearing Friday because that was the only one of the charges eligible under Colorado law for such a hearing.
Serra's other two alleged victims had similar complaints. They allege Serra held out the threat of losing their jobs if they did not comply with his wishes for sexual favors.
Serra, who appeared relaxed, and smiled and laughed with his attorneys during parts of the hearing Friday, was arrested Sep. 30. He was ordered to stay away from his alleged victims and his former offices in the 7th Judicial District that includes Montrose, Delta, Gunnison and San Miguel counties. Serra resigned in January after a state representative from Montrose threatened to have him impeached.
The Veterans of Hope, with the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition and others co-sponsors are bringing
Professor Michelle Alexander to Denver February 22-24, 2011
A civil rights advocate and litigator, Professor Alexander, in her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, makes a case that a new legal caste system is dangerously alive in America. In the “age of colorblindness” a felon is placed in a lifelong caste system with penalties and restrictions much like the Jim Crow system of old. Even more importantly, she challenges “we the people” to be concerned and committed in responding to the destructive realities of the “war on drugs” and the mass incarceration with a social movement. Professor Alexander and her message have struck a powerful chord throughout the nation.
Professor Alexander holds degrees from Vanderbilt University and the Stanford Law School. She was the recipient of the 2005 Soros Justice Fellowship and now holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University. Earlier she served as director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, and directed the Civil Rights Clinics at Stanford Law School, where she was an associate professor. She is a former law clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court, and has appeared as a commentator on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and PBS.
The following is a schedule of events in Denver. These events are free and open to the public.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 – 4-6pm – Professor Michelle Alexander presents – Mass Incarceration:A Challenge to the Profession of Law. A Q&A and book signing will follow at the University of Denver, Sturm College of Law Forum, 2255 E. Evans, Denver.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011 – 11-1:30p – Brown Bag Lunch and Conversation with Professor Alexander – Words of Wisdom, Actions of Hope: A Challenge to Communities of Faith – Iliff School of Theology - Great Hall, 2201 S. University Blvd., Denver. Space is limited so please RSVP to 303-765-3194.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011 – 7-9pm – Public Forum – Park Hill United Methodist Church, 5209 Montview Avenue (near the corner of Montview & Glencoe), Denver. Professor Alexander will present: A Challenge to the Denver Community. Dr. Rachel Harding will moderate a panel discussion and open a community response period. Panelists include Michelle Alexander, Christie Donner, Executive Director of CCJRC and Francisco Gallardo of GRASP (Gang Rescue and Support Project).
Thursday, February 24, 2011 – 10:30a-12:00p – Manual High School, 1700 E. 28th Avenue, Denver – High school students will ask Prof. Alexander questions about her book and she will respond with A Challenge to the Youth Community.
For more information or to RSVP for any of the events, please call 303-765-3194 or vohproject@iliff.edu.
Some anniversaries provide an occasion for celebration, others a time for reflection, still others a time for action. This June will mark forty years since President Nixon declared a "war on drugs," identifying drug abuse as "public enemy No. 1." As far as I know, no celebrations are planned. What's needed, indeed essential, are reflection -- and action
It's hard to believe that Americans have spent roughly a trillion dollars (give or take a few hundred million) on this forty-year war. Hard to believe that tens of millions have been arrested, and many millions locked up in jails and prisons, for committing nonviolent acts that were not even crimes a century ago. Hard to believe that the number of people incarcerated on drug charges increased more than ten times even as the country's population grew by only half. Hard to believe that millions of Americans have been deprived of the right to vote not because they killed a fellow citizen or betrayed their country but simply because they bought, sold, produced or simply possessed a psychoactive plant or chemical. And hard to believe that hundreds of thousands of Americans have been allowed to die -- of overdoses, AIDS, hepatitis and other diseases -- because the drug war blocked and even prohibited treating addiction to certain drugs as a health problem rather than a criminal one.
Reflect we must on not just the consequences of this war at home but abroad as well. The prohibition-related crime, violence and corruption in Mexico today resemble Chicago during alcohol Prohibition -- times fifty. Parts of Central America are even more out of control, and many Caribbean nations can only hope that they are not next. The illegal opium and heroin markets in Afghanistan reportedly account for one-third to half of the country's GDP. In Africa, prohibitionist profiteering, trafficking and corruption are spreading rapidly. As for South America and Asia, just pick a moment and a country -- and the stories are much the same, from Colombia, Peru, Paraguay and Brazil to Pakistan, Laos, Burma and Thailand.
Wars can be costly -- in money, rights and lives -- but still necessary to defend national sovereignty and core values. It's impossible to make that case on behalf of the war on drugs. Marijuana, cocaine and heroin are effectively cheaper today than they were at the start of the war forty years ago, and just as available now as then to anyone who really wants them. Marijuana, which accounts for half of all drug arrests in the United States, has never killed anyone. Heroin is basically indistinguishable from hydromorphone (aka Dilaudid), a pain medication prescribed by physicians that hundreds of thousands of Americans have consumed safely. The vast majority of people who have used cocaine did not become addicts. Each of these drugs is less dangerous than government propaganda claims but sufficiently dangerous that they merit intelligent regulations rather than blanket prohibitions.
If the demand for any of these drugs were two, five or ten tim
Struggling with chronic budget crises, lawmakers in more and more states are embracing sentencing and other reforms in a bid to hold down corrections costs. But while sentencing reform has long been the domain of "bleeding heart" liberals, now conservatives are driving those efforts in some states.
It's not just about dollars. Although fiscal concerns are a driving force among conservatives, there are also signs they are recognizing and confronting the failures of our drug and criminal justice policies. In a recent Washington Post op-ed, none other than former House Speaker Newt Gingrich wrote of "more humane, effective alternatives" to the national imprisonment binge.
Still, as their states bleed red ink, some of them are shifting from "tough on crime" to "smart on crime." Leading the charge is a newly formed advocacy group, Right On Crime, endorsed by big conservative names including Gingrich, taxpayer advocate Grover Norquist, and former drug czar William Bennett.
Based in Texas, Right On Crime is touting the success the Lone Star State has had with sentencing reform to make such reforms more palatable to conservatives. In 2003, the state passed legislation ordering that small-time drug offenders be given probation instead of prison time, and in 2007, the state rejected prison-building in favor of spending $241 million on treatment programs for offenders.
Crime rates declined at the same time the incarceration rate did. And the state has saved about $2 billion by not building an additional 17,000 prison beds it once thought it needed.
Now, conservatives in other states are pushing similar reforms -- Right on Crime identifies 21 states it says are engaged in "conservative" sentencing and corrections reforms.
"The fiscal argument is resonating with conservatives and liberals alike these days," said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project. "Prison and corrections spending is the big elephant in the room right now; it is ripe for cuts."
But it's not just the fiscal argument, said Mauer. "Some of this is in keeping with conservative philosophy, and much of their concern about incarceration has focused on drug policy. The drug war encompasses the whole country, but the federal system is an enormous part of it. Conservatives view it as taking over areas of policy that should best be left to the states," he said. "And then there are sort of libertarian conservatives who don't think the government should be telling us what is appropriate behavior."
he exterior walls of a one-time Denver lumberyard have become a legal canvas for graffiti artists to spray-paint their creations with the owners' blessing.
At least four of the buildings that made up Kroonenberg Lumberyards on West Jewell Avenue between South Acoma and South Bannock streets are now "permission walls" where graffiti is encouraged.
"There has been a lot of gang-banger graffiti over there, so to prevent that, we have had some people come and do more artistic stuff," said Steven Cook, one of the property owners.
Attractive to property owners because they help prevent unwanted graffiti on other parts of a business, permission walls have become popular in cities across the country in recent years.
The walls are marked clearly as "permission walls" and are self-managed by graffiti creators, who appreciate the opportunity to see their work as art rather than vandalism. They function as a living, constantly rotating museum exhibit.
At the same time, business owners who create the walls hope they will encourage a managed clustering of graffiti, and prevent it from being applied on unwanted parts of the business.
Graffiti vandalism is a persistent and ugly problem in neighborhoods throughout Denver. The city spends about $1.4 million a year getting rid of graffiti, said Public Works Department spokeswoman Daelene Mix.
"It creates the illusion that the community doesn't care, doesn't take care of itself; it is much more than just scribbling on a wall," said City Councilman Paul Lopez, whose southwest Denver district has struggled with the problem.
Colorado's medical-marijuana wars began anew at the state Capitol on Thursday with the first public hearing on a bill that makes changes to the state's dispensary regulations.
When the hearing opened, the measure — House Bill 1043 — would have made a number of industry-friendly changes to the rules, including making it easier for felons to own dispensaries and exempting long-standing dispensaries from buffer-zone rules around schools.
But Rep. Tom Massey, a Poncha Springs Republican who is sponsoring the legislation, quickly announced that he had rewritten the bill. Gone were the loosened restrictions on felons. Gone was the grandfathering of dispensaries in buffer zones.
was less industry-friendly but one that owners of large dispensaries still joined with law enforcement officials in cautiously supporting.
"A good compromise," said Josh Stanley, owner of the Budding Health chain of dispensaries, "is when everybody is not exactly happy."
But the bill outraged marijuana activists and some small-dispensary owners, who said the changes would force dispensaries to close, hurt patient access and boost the black-market trade in marijuana.
A number of activists used the hearing as an opportunity to express concerns about issues not addressed in the bill.
They criticized a different bill filed this week at the Capitol that would ban the sale of marijuana-enhanced food and drinks, a major industry niche in Colorado. They blasted proposed Department of Revenue regulations that would require all medical-marijuana transactions at dispensaries to be videotaped.
"We have a situation where our medical-marijuana program is run by the state tax collector, and you've really taken all the medicine out of it," said Laura Kriho of the Cannabis Therapy Institute.
Prohibiting convicted felons from working in Colorado schools seems like a pretty easy notion to support.
After all, people who have committed crimes such as child abuse or indecent exposure have no business working in schools.
And while we like most of the ideas in a bill introduced by statehouse Republicans to disqualify certain convicted felons from school employment, we have concerns the bill might be too draconian in how it addresses drug convictions.
First, a little background.
House Bill 1121 would prohibit Colorado school districts from employing support staff, such as custodians and lunch workers, who have felony convictions for child abuse, crimes of violence, unlawful sexual behavior, indecent exposure and drug crimes.
Those prohibitions mostly are already in place for teachers, except for the felony drug crime prohibition. The bill would prohibit hiring teachers with prior felony drug convictions and define the circumstances under which current teachers with old convictions could be fired.
To be sure, a felony drug conviction is a serious matter. However, we can envision a circumstance in which someone embarking upon a second career as a teacher might have an old drug conviction from days when drug laws were more harsh.
Such a concern would also hold true for a support staffer who, decades ago, had a drug conviction but has had a clean record since then.
In years past, possession of even small amounts of certain illegal drugs could have resulted in felony convictions.
We wonder if there isn't an appropriate statute of limitations, so to speak, to be placed on such a conviction, at least if it is related to personal consumption as opposed to dealing drugs.
At the very least, legislators should consider making an old drug conviction — one that happened 10 or 20 years ago — to be a condition that could prohibit employment, not shall prohibit.
That way, school districts would not be forced to fire or decline to hire people who had an isolated drug possession years ago but otherwise have gone on to lead productive lives.
The other thing to keep in mind about this bill is the additional burden it will place on the Colorado Department of Education, which already is struggling to conduct background checks on people who've applied for teaching licenses. Additional mandates cannot come without additional resources.
With those caveats, we think the bill is another tool districts could use to ensure the safety of children.
Jane Urschel, deputy executive director of the Colorado Association of School Boards, told us that CASB also supports the bill.
Urschel said she did not see the bill setting off a "witch hunt," but rather would give districts a way to get rid of individuals with serious criminal backgrounds who may have slipped through checks.
The bill has been introduced, in slightly different forms, in two prior legislative sessions only to be defeated. We hope that with a little tweaking, the third time will be the charm for this effort.
Smart on Crime: Recommendations for the Administration and Congress
I’m pleased to let you know that The Sentencing Project today joined with more than 40
of the nation’s leading criminal justice reform organizations to release a comprehensive
report examining the nation’s criminal justice system.
The new report, Smart on Crime: Recommendations for the Administration and Congress, reviews federal policy and offers recommendations for reform in 16 key criminal justice areas. These include sentencing policy, juvenile justice, reentry, and overall systems change.
The Smart on Crime document will be used in our advocacy work with members of
Congress and the Administration as we try to advance our agenda for reform.
I hope you find this publication useful in your work. I’d encourage you to be in touch
with our Director of Advocacy, Kara Gotsch, at to discuss how we can support your efforts in the area of policy reform.
On Tuesday, February 8th the Independence Institute’s Justice Policy Initiative, the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, and the Pew Center on the States came together again to hold a panel event at the University Club to discuss the work by the Colorado Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice (CCJJ) and sentencing reform in 2011. Despite the bad weather, a large crowd showed up to listen to the expert panelists give their take on what the Colorado legislature might have in store this legislative session.
Panelists included Colorado State Representative and CCJJ member Mark Waller, Colorado State Senator and CCJJ drug policy task force member Pat Steadman, Maureen Cain, Policy Director Colorado Criminal Defense Bar and CCJJ task force member, Tom Raynes, Executive Director, Colorado District Attorneys Council, and CCJJ member, Christie Donner, Executive Director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition.
For those of you unable to make it, we’ve compiled the presentations by each speaker in individual podcasts. Feel free to download these podcasts and share them with others who might be interested. Additionally, here is a link to the pictures presented in slide show format. Introductory remarks by Mike Krause of the Independence Institute’s Justice Policy Initiative. Panelist #1: Colorado State Senator and CCJJ drug policy task force member Pat Steadman. Panelist #2: Colorado State Representative and CCJJ member Mark Waller. Panelist #3: Executive Director of the Colorado District Attorneys Council Tom Raynes. Panelist #4: Policy Director of the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar and CCJJ task force member Maureen Cain. Panelist #5: Executive Director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition Christie Donner.
I have a neighbor named Adam. He lives a couple doors down in a house he turned into a showcase. He also has a four-unit apartment building a block away. I've never had a neighbor who works so hard at being neighborly. He is the guy who helps you design your garden and bakes extra batches of pumpkin bread to deliver, still warm, around the block. He's the guy you tell you're going to be out of town and can he please watch the house.
I offer this background so you know up front where my bias lies.
A couple of Saturdays ago, when it was still gorgeous out, Adam was stopped by a police officer as he was pushing a wheelbarrow of gardening tools from his house to the apartments.
She doesn't know Adam from, well, Adam. She gets out of her vehicle, asks him where he's going. Right up here, he says, to work in my garden. She says there's been a lot of burglaries in the neighborhood, asks him why he has a wheelbarrow full of tools. She asks his name. He repeats that he is going to work in his garden and asks why she needs his name.
(Mistake No. 1, the peanut gallery chimes. Never question a cop.) The next thing you know, she's ordering him to turn around. He's asking her why. She's saying, I told you about the break-ins, turn around, put your hands behind your back.
She brings his hands up to his head, tells him to lace his fingers and spread his legs. She kicks his feet apart. He's humiliated now, protesting that he hasn't done anything wrong and any neighbor can vouch for him. But she's calling for backup, patting him down, retrieving his wallet, ordering him to sit down and give her his identification, which does not have his current address on it. She tells him he has two years to get a new license after moving.
She'll run his information and find nothing. A backup officer will arrive. Neighbors will vouch for Adam. The two officers will tell him he can go, but not before Adam, a dark-skinned, black-haired Latino from Texas, says he thinks this is racial. Not before the police officer tells Adam that when he takes the police academy test, he can tell her how to do her job. He retorts, angry, that it doesn't take a lot of brainpower to pass the test and that he's filing a complaint. She asks him what he's going to write in the complaint. He asks whether he is free to go. She doesn't answer. He repeats his question several times before she says, yes, you can go.
"Have a nice day," she calls as he walks away.
A couple things. This is Adam's account, one he has described in a complaint to the Office of the Independent Monitor. The police officer will no doubt have a different recollection.
Adam just mailed his complaints and the Denver Police Department has not had time to look into it, but spokesman Sonny Jackson says, "Flip the script. What if he had been a burglar, and she didn't stop him?" He says it sounds like a missed opportunity between two people who have the same goal of bettering the neighborhood.
Second, there hasn't been a rash of burglaries in our neighborhood. The department's own statistics show that. Burglaries were down in 2010 over 2009. In December, there was a spike, which was true across town. In January, there were two burglaries. Does that prove the officer was racially profiling Adam? Can't prove it. Can't disprove it. That's the problem with racial profiling. All you need is a pretext.
A bill up for review in the House Judiciary Committee would emphasize the option known as “restorative justice,” which favors restitution and encourages a dialogue with victims instead of imprisonment. Colorado law already allows the restorative justice options for juveniles during advisement, plea entry, sentencing or probation, but House Bill 1032 would make some of those provisions mandatory and it would make the option available to adults.
Rep. Pete Lee, a Democrat from El Paso County, said incarceration doesn’t always prevent people from reoffending and it doesn’t encourage criminals to take responsibility.
“We have a criminal justice system that has incarcerated far too many people and has shown an intolerably high recidivism rate,” he said.
The bill was scheduled to be heard this afternoon. It will require that juveniles, adults and victims be advised in court and in school districts about the restorative justice option. The bill would also direct the state Department of Corrections to implement a policy to establish victim-offender dialogues.
One example that Lee has cited for restorative justice is that of a ninth-grade student who was caught with a pellet gun at school. The offense would have led to his expulsion, but Lee said the school decided instead to allow the student to take responsibility for what he did and make up for it by talking to middle-school students about bullying and violence in schools.
WASHINGTON — Federal judges have been retiring at a rate of one per week this year, driving up vacancies that have nearly doubled since President Barack Obama took office. The departures are increasing workloads dramatically and delaying trials in some of the nation's federal courts.
The crisis is most acute along the Southwestern border, where immigration and drug cases have overwhelmed court officials. Arizona recently declared a judicial emergency, extending the deadline to put defendants on trial. The three judges in Tucson, the site of last month's shooting rampage, are handling about 1,200 criminal cases apiece.
"It's a dire situation," said Roslyn Silver, the state's chief judge.
In central Illinois, three of the four judgeships remain vacant after two of Obama's nominees did not get a vote on the Senate floor.
Chief Judge Michael McCuskey said he is commuting 90 miles between Urbana and Springfield and relying on two 81-year-old "senior" judges to fill the gap.
"I had a heart attack six years ago, and my cardiologist told me recently, 'You need to reduce your stress,' " he said. "I told him only the U.S. Senate can reduce my stress."
The Broomfield Police Department has lost or mishandled 257 pieces of court evidence and property in its evidence room, including guns, drugs, cash and DNA samples, according to an internal audit and memos obtained by 9News.
"What happened to all that property? I hope someday we know," Broomfield Police Chief Tom Deland said. "To be perfectly honest with you, we've got a lot of room for improvement here, and that's what we're working on right now."
The Police Department conducted its first audit of the evidence/property room in more than a decade in July after the department noticed that it was overflowing with 37,000 pieces of evidence. Before the audit began, officers had to destroy more than 5,000 pieces of evidence from old cases and discovered there were 15,000 additional pieces of old evidence that needed to be disposed of later, according to a memo written by Sgt. Gene Pearson.
Getting arrested for robbery may have been the best thing that ever happened to Dale Edgin.
Facing a long jail term, Edgin got something else: a diagnosis, medication and treatment — for the first time — for the mental illness that by then had made a mess of his life.
In a rare stroke of luck, Edgin's arrest came just as a newly assembled team of mental health and criminal justice professionals were starting a project that they were calling Mental Health Court.
When they asked him to join, Edgin figured that he had little to lose. "I was homeless. I was desperate. I'd had mental-health issues all my life," he said.
Last month, the 18th Judicial District's Mental Health Court celebrated its first anniversary, trumpeting tens of thousands of dollars in savings to taxpayers, along with a couple dozen success stories like Edgin's.
The program, a collaboration between the staffs at Arapahoe/Douglas Mental Health Network and the 18th Judicial District, diverts the mentally ill away from prison. The goal, those behind it say, is to shut the revolving door that moves the mentally ill in and out of jail or prison but rarely addresses the disease at the root of their crimes.
A chance to commit to treatment under the supervision of a judge is offered to people with serious mental illness who are charged with felonies that don't involve violence or sex crimes. In exchange, they stay out of prison.
In its first year, roughly 30 people participated, which means they plead guilty to a crime, live in secure housing, submit to drug tests, take part in therapy and allow virtually every element of their lives to be scrutinized. Not complying can mean jail.
In most cases, it also means getting off street drugs and staying on court-ordered medications.
Many people with serious mental illnesses have trouble working, have no insurance and receive only spotty health care. Many don't believe they are sick, so they don't think they need medications.
Many get relief from their symptoms through illegal drugs, just as Edgin once did.
"I was addicted to everything. Heroin, cocaine, meth," he said.
Barbara Becker, supervisor of the criminal justice team at Arapahoe/Douglas Mental Health, said nearly everyone had substance abuse problems when they started. "All but two of them. And I question one of those two."
The state's Department of Corrections harbors an "overt culture of sexual abuse" by prison guards, and department leaders have done little to stop it, according to a lawsuit pending in federal court.
Ten female Colorado prison inmates sued the department last month, claiming repeated acts of sex abuse by male corrections officers.
The complaint details more than a dozen instances in which it claims officers in two prisons — the Denver Women's Correctional Facility and the since-closed, privately run Brush Correctional Facility — coerced women into performing sex acts on them.
The officers made threats to have the women "written up" or to make life difficult if the women did not submit, according to the lawsuit.
Meanwhile, Department of Corrections officials failed to take "substantive remedial actions" to stop it, the lawsuit charges.
The department and the company that ran the Brush facility, GRW Corp., continued to employ officers suspected of abuse and failed to improve surveillance systems to reduce blind spots where abuse could occur, the suit says.
"This conduct amounts to deliberate indifference to the rights of inmates," the lawsuit claims. ". . . The conduct is so grossly reckless that future misconduct was and is virtually inevitable."
The inmates, who are represented by the Denver law firm Irwin and Boesen, are seeking to have the case certified for class-action status.
Katherine Sanguinetti, a Corrections Department spokeswoman, said the department will not comment on ongoing litigation.
Wilson Quarterly by Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig(when you log on you will have to subscribe to read the whole article)
The old divide between hard and soft strategies is breaking down under a wave of new thinking about how to control crime.
What is the more cost-effective way to control crime? Is it to focus on making crime unattractive by threatening offenders with long prison terms? Or to make the law-abiding life more attractive by providing better education and job opportunities? It’s an old debate. The federal crime commissions of the 1960s emphasized crime’s links with poverty and racism, and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs were central to his war on crime. But ultimately the “hawks” won the debate about how to wage that war, as they did later in helping to launch President Richard M. Nixon’s war on drugs. The result has been plain to see, with the rate of imprisonment surging to unprecedented heights.
Now the debate has been reopened. It is not so much that the public views mass incarceration, with its disproportionately high levels of imprisonment for blacks and Hispanics, as immoral or racist. Rather, the dreary fact is that, in the face of gaping budget deficits, the states can no longer afford to support huge prison populations. It seems like a good time for the economists to weigh in, in part because their perspective provides a way to get past the stale debates over whether to adopt “tough” or “soft” solutions.
Fort Collins officer accused of perjury in Masters' case pleads "absolutely innocent" - The Denver Post FORT COLLINS — Police Lt. Jim Broderick told a district judge Friday he is prepared to prove his innocence against claims that he manufactured a murder case against Tim Masters.
When Weld District Judge James Hartmann asked Broderick if wanted to enter a plea to the remaining seven felony perjury charges against him, Broderick responded: "Absolutely innocent, your honor."
No trial date was set Friday, but Hartmann did schedule a May 2 motions hearing. He also scheduled a March 2 hearing dealing with a prosecution subpoena of Fort Collins police records related to the case.
Broderick, 53, is accused of repeatedly lying during the prosecution of Masters, who was convicted in 1999 of the murder of Peggy Hettrick in 1987. Masters, who was 15 when Hettrick was murdered and mutilated, served nearly 10 years in prison before the conviction was overturned in 2008 when DNA testing pointed to another potential suspect, who has not been identified.
Broderick was indicted in June for perjury related to the original arrest affidavit filed against Masters, during a preliminary hearing and during the murder trial.
Broderick's lawyers say prosecutors have withheld contradictory information, and they have attacked the validity of witnesses used against Broderick.
Broderick declined to comment after Friday's hearing.
Last week, Hartmann tossed one count listed in the indictment against Broderick. That charge alleged Broderick committed perjury in the affidavit he drafted in 1992 for a warrant to arrest Masters.
But his lawyers argued that Broderick never took an oath that the information in the indictment was true. Broderick drafted the affidavit at the request of Fort Collins Detective Linda Wheeler-Holloway because she considered Broderick to be a better writer.
Wheeler-Holloway presented the affidavit to a district judge and was given the oath.
The affidavit states there were "sexual-homicide profile characteristics that point to Timothy Masters" and that "the FBI Behavioral Science Unit was consulted in March 1987 for a profile on this case and were . . . given drawings and facts surrounding the investigation."
It's popular with adolescents, provides a marijuana-like high, is available online and on Colorado store shelves, and it's legal — for now.
As Spice and other synthetic cannabinoids show increasingly public impacts — at Colorado poison control, among probationers and teen addicts, and recently at the Air Force Academy — law enforcers are looking for ways to nip demand for the drug in the bud.
Colorado authorities say they suspect increased use of Spice, plant material sprayed with THC-like chemicals, though that spike also coincides with the first tests available to screen for the tough-to-track substance.
Ban in the works
With no quality-control standards on the drug, some samples have tested 100 times more potent than marijuana, and the worst side effects have been more severe, said Tamar Wilson, staff attorney with the Colorado District Attorneys' Council.
Her group wants to outlaw any form of synthetic cannabinoid and is pushing a bill to make penalties for possession even harsher than those for marijuana. A bill has not yet been filed in Colorado but is already drawing bipartisan support.
"People are going to emergency rooms because of Spice," Wilson said. "This is not a marijuana substitute, though that may be why people initially try it. Young people are getting it and bringing it to schools. We realized it really is a significant problem."
Should the planned legislation pass, Colorado would join 11 other states that ban synthetic cannabinoids.
So-called designer drugs such as Spice — also known as K2 and other brand names — by nature are tough to track.
They are created in laboratories to produce effects similar to more traditional drugs but remain different enough on a molecular level to escape detection in urine tests.
And because chemists can tinker with those chemical formulas, such drugs can also be tough to ban.
The federal Drug Enforcement Administration in November gave notice that it would move to reclassify five popular chemical varieties of Spice as controlled substances.
Producers now advertise new versions of the drug that skirt the compounds on the DEA's target list.
"Folks that are manufacturing designer drugs, they're in it to make money," said Mike Turner, a DEA spokesman. "It's possible they could tweak a molecule or whatever. We would just act on those as those come about."
WESTWORD
In January 2010, Scott Howard, a 39-year-old federal prisoner, made his way briskly into a hearing room in the Robert F. Kennedy Justice Building in Washington, D.C. He was neatly dressed in blazer, slacks and tie, and quite nervous about what he was about to do. He was determined to not think about it too much, to just get it over with — like so much else that he'd been through over the past few years.
The room was teeming with Department of Justice attorneys, law enforcement agents and corrections officials. Not exactly Howard's kind of crowd; he'd tried to tell his story to such people before, only to be labeled a liar and a whiner. But the participants also included members of Congress, medical professionals, prison activists, counselors and sexual-assault survivors.
They'd all come to take part in a "listening session" on the wishfully titled Prison Rape Elimination Act. Passed in 2003, PREA created a national commission to study the causes and costs of sexual assault behind bars and to come up with federal policies to attack the problem. Seven years and several blown deadlines later, backers are still waiting for United States Attorney General Eric Holder to adopt new standards incorporating the commission's findings.
Howard had been invited to join the discussion because of his experiences behind bars — in particular, the three nightmarish years he'd spent in Colorado state prisons, doing time for fraud. It would be the first time he'd ever discussed his ordeal publicly.
When his name was called, he went to the microphone, trying to keep his hands steady as he studied the pages in front of him. "Thank you for allowing me to participate," he began.
He explained that, although living in a halfway house, he was still in the custody of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons: "Before I was taken into BOP custody, however, I served time in the Colorado Department of Corrections, and it was there that I was repeatedly raped, assaulted and extorted by members of a large, notorious gang."
The gang was the 211 Crew, a white supremacist group found in many Colorado prisons. 211 leaders pressured him for money and demanded that he help them in an ambitious $300,000 fraud scheme; their threats soon turned into physical attacks, then sexual assaults. He was forced to perform oral sex on gang members and anally raped.
"I spent well over a year trying to get protection by writing to officials," he said. "My efforts to report were mostly fruitless — and often put me at greater risk. Because I am openly gay, officials blamed me for the attacks. They said as a homosexual I should expect to be targeted by one gang or another."
Howard didn't tell the whole squalid story. He didn't mention the evidence of staff involvement with the gang that made his efforts to seek protection even dicier. He didn't go into how, once he finally started "naming names," as prison investigators demanded, they accused him of crying rape to cover up his own criminal activities. He barely referred to his last day as a Colorado prisoner, when, he says, he was put in a cell with one of the gang leaders and sexually assaulted again. Despite being a bare summary, the statement was still graphic — and powerful. At times his voice choked up, but Howard kept reading.
When it was over, he sat in the gallery and listened to other testimony by experts and survivors. Then the DOJ officials began asking questions, and some of the questions were directed at Howard. He was astonished. They'd actually paid attention. They'd even taken notes.
"That was very important," he says now. "Having people listening to me and asking questions — it made me feel like I was being taken seriously at last."
A lot of people are taking Howard seriously these days. Since his talk in Washington a year ago, he's emerged as a highly visible "survivor speaker" for Just Detention International, a nonprofit active in the campaign to stop sexual abuse in prison, and a caustic critic of Colorado's DOC and its treatment of rape victims. Last summer he settled a civil-rights lawsuit against several DOC officials for $165,000.
The settlement came as Howard's attorneys were seeking a hearing to investigate how and why the Colorado Attorney General's Office had failed for years to produce a critical document in the case — a 2005 entry in Howard's inmate file that corroborated his claims of seeking help and being ignored. The document, which only surfaced after a private law firm got involved in the defense of a second Howard lawsuit, also casts doubt on the veracity of several sworn affidavits filed by case managers and supervisors claiming that Howard never told them that he was being threatened and extorted.
Winning his case was a major victory for Howard. Finding the proof that he wasn't lying was even greater vindication, though. Behind bars, all kinds of crimes are committed in secret, and prisoners soon learn to keep quiet about them. Exposing the most heinous violations can be almost impossible when staff attitudes about rape and homosexuality are as convoluted as those of the predators — and Howard says that's what made the Colorado prison system particularly dangerous for him.
"In Colorado, corrections officers labeled openly gay people as troublemakers," he says. "You can't believe them, they get in relationships and then claim rape — and so on. The message goes out to the inmate population that these are people to victimize because they already have a bad reputation among staff, and nobody's going to believe them."
******
Almost from the moment he hit the yard at the Fremont Correctional Facility in late 2004, Scott Howard knew he was in trouble. The medium-security prison was run differently from anything he'd seen before. And too many people he didn't know already knew who he was and what he'd done.
Fremont wasn't Howard's first rodeo. He arrived there in the middle of a ten-year tour of state and federal prisons, the result of a fraud spree in Colorado, Wisconsin, Tennessee and elsewhere. His criminal history also involved jail stays in Florida and Texas, where he reportedly tried to post as bond collateral the car he was accused of stealing.
Howard grew up in a small town in Tennessee, where his sexual orientation was a poor fit with the prevailing Baptist culture. He left home, acquired a taste for gambling and the high life, and was busted in Florida in 1991, at age 21, after he stole a friend's credit card and used it to hire a limo. He soon graduated to computer hacking and more sophisticated forms of identity theft.
In the late 1990s, Howard discovered major security flaws in the payroll systems of large corporations, which often relied on outside agencies to issue paychecks to temporary staff. He used a Trojan program to steal data from corporate websites, then submitted payroll requests to staffing agencies, either in his own name or someone else's. It was a surprisingly simple and lucrative scam, as long as he moved quickly to the next pigeon before the fraud could be detected.
"It was a traveling crime," Howard says. "It took me to thirty cities in a year. I was in my twenties, and it was fun back then. It was also very stupid and very high-risk."
The scam unraveled in Wisconsin in 1999. A woman at a temp agency noted that Howard's zip code didn't match the address he submitted with a check request. When he came to pick up his money, he was arrested. A check for $40,000, issued by the Hershey Corporation, was found in his pocket.
Sentenced to eight years, Howard soon came up with an even more audacious plan to collect cash while behind bars. He filed a bogus tax return, claiming a $17,155 refund — and the Internal Revenue Service actually paid it. The next year he asked for $1.2 million, complete with forged letters on charity letterheads acknowledging enormous contributions.
This time the IRS took a closer look. Howard soon had federal time piled on top of his state sentence. But first he had another stint in Colorado, stemming from a payroll fraud in Denver that had been uncovered after his Wisconsin arrest. That's what brought him to the yard at Fremont — and a sense of impending doom.
