DOC Executive Director Raemisch names new Director of Parole
Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition
Westword
In what's being praised as a significant step toward reform, the
Colorado Department of Corrections is now instructing staff to no longer
consign mentally ill prisoners to administrative segregation. In a memo
to prison wardens issued earlier this week, a DOC official explains
that the "major mentally ill" must be sent to a residential treatment
program rather than being punished with ad-seg for misbehavior. That's a
sharp turnaround for the DOC, which has been criticized for using solitary confinement in recent years at a rate that's twice the national average.
"I am asking that, going forward, please ensure that your staff are
aware that offenders with MMI [major mental illness] Qualifiers cannot
be referred to Administrative Segregation placement," states interim
director of prisons Lou Archuleta in the memo.
Approximately 40 percent of the state's prisoners in ad-seg, or
23-hour-a-day isolation, are either developmentally disabled or have
received a diagnosis of serious mental illness. Some, like Troy Anderson and Sam Mandez,
have become the focal point of lawsuits and public attention because of
their many years of being buried in supermax confinement and lack of
treatment for chronic mental conditions.
DOC officials claim that they've greatly reduced the number of
prisoners housed in ad-seg over the last two years, an effort that began
under chief Tom Clements
before his murder last spring. The memo won't immediately change
anything for prisoners like Anderson and Mandez, but the ACLU of
Colorado, which obtained the memo on Thursday, hailed the move as "an
enormous step in the right direction." The organization has been pushing
the DOC to further restrict its use of ad-seg and beef up its
sputtering mental-health treatment resources.
"We remain concerned that the definition of major mental illness
adopted by CDOC is too narrow," ACLU staff attorney Rebecca Wallace
responded in a prepared statement, "and that there are still prisoners
in administrative segregation who are seriously mentally ill and should
not be placed in prolonged solitary confinement."
Read the full memo below.
ACLU Report
For the last 40 years, we have largely relegated health
problems like substance abuse and mental health disorders to the
criminal justice system. As a result, millions of people are burdened by
felony convictions due to drug use, and those who cannot afford to pay
for treatment have had to be locked in cells in order to get access to
necessary care.
Now, we have a chance to do something new. The Affordable Care Act
(ACA) represents a remarkable opportunity for criminal justice and drug
policy reform advocates to advance efforts to enact policy changes that
promote safe and healthy communities, without excessively relying on
criminal justice solutions that have become so prevalent under the War
on Drugs, and which fall so disproportionately on low-income communities
and communities of color. Even with its challenges, the ACA sets the
stage for a new health-oriented policy framework to address problems
such as substance use and mental health disorders by more appropriately
and effectively casting substance use and mental health disorders as
matters of public health and not of criminal justice. Our task is to
make the most of it.
The Denver Post
Colorado prison
wardens can no longer send prisoners with major mental illness to
solitary confinement, according to a memo distributed Thursday that
solidifies state policy years in the making.
The numbers of
mentally ill prisoners locked in cells alone for 23 hours each day has
steadily dropped this fall: from 40 in September to fewer than 30 in
November and now to just eight. The state wants the number at zero by
the end of the year.
The memo from interim director of prisons Lou
Archuleta to prison wardens said that "going forward," staff members
must not send prisoners with major mental illness to solitary
confinement, also called administrative segregation.
"This is an
enormous foundational step toward getting seriously mentally ill
prisoners out of solitary confinement and into treatment," said Rebecca
Wallace, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of
Colorado.
The Colorado Department of Corrections opened a
residential treatment program for mentally ill prisoners at Centennial
Correctional Facility in CaƱon City in January, shutting down a prior
program that treated mentally ill prisoners while they were held in
solitary confinement.
But progress stalled when, two months
later, corrections executive director Tom Clements was shot to death on
his doorstep. The suspect: a parolee released directly from solitary
confinement to the streets who was later killed by Texas deputies.
"We
were moving along, and Tom was killed. We were at a standstill," said
Kellie Wasko, the department's deputy executive director. After months
with an interim executive director, and then the hiring of new director
Rick Raemisch, "it was time to pick it back up and move on."
Since
this fall, the state has moved about 55 mentally ill prisoners into the
residential treatment program. The 240-bed program had about 160
prisoners in September and now has about 215.
The Coloradoan
DENVER — The number of Colorado inmates in solitary
confinement is declining and prison officials said Wednesday they’re
looking at changing policies to continue the trend.
Colorado
Department of Corrections officials told lawmakers Wednesday that there
were 662 inmates in solitary confinement in September, compared to
1,505 in September 2011. Those in solitary confinement, also called
administrative segregation, are now 3.9 percent of the total prison
population, said DOC Executive Director Rick Raemisch.
“We
are redefining the levels of administrative segregation, and we feel
that we can decrease this number substantially also,” he said.
Raemisch
also told lawmakers there are only eight inmates in solitary
confinement with a mental illness now, compared to 140 at the same time
last year.
“It’s quite an accomplishment,” he said.
The
mental health consequences of solitary confinement have received more
attention since the slaying of former Colorado DOC Director Tom Clements
in March. The suspect, Evan Ebel, was a former inmate who had been
released after serving eight years in prison, much of it in solitary
confinement. Ebel was later killed in a shootout with Texas authorities.
Clements
is credited with working on policies to reduce the solitary confinement
population. Some of the policy changes prison officials said they are
considering regarding solitary confinement moving forward is reducing
the number of daily hours an inmate is segregated to 18 or 20 hours,
instead of 23 hours. Officials are also examining what are the length of
the terms inmates serve in solitary confinement, and whether they’re
being placed there for violent or nonviolent crimes, said Kellie Wasko,
the deputy executive director of DOC.
Wasko
said prison officials are also looking at “what kind of cognitive
interventions can we offer to offenders” to inmates on solitary
confinement. She said the department plans to have a major rewrite of
solitary confinement rules completed by June 30, the end of the fiscal
year, but noted it’s a big undertaking.
“We’re turning a giant oil tanker 180 degrees,” she said.
Raemisch
also updated lawmakers on a plan to issue inmates state identification,
instead of a prison ID, by installing something like a department of
motor vehicles office in one of the DOC’s institutions. He said he
expects such a system to be in place next year.
He
also said the DOC is meeting with a vendor to explore issuing
cellphones with GPS to parolees to know their location at all times, and
have parolees take pictures of themselves to verify their identities
and location.
The Denver Post
Colorado's parole
officers are reaching out to prisoners in solitary confinement as
they're released from prison, and every prison will have a dedicated
parole officer to work with offenders, corrections officials said
Wednesday.
Executive director of corrections Rick Raemisch and
his executive staff on Wednesday unveiled their reform plans for the
state's troubled parole system during a hearing of the joint Judiciary
Committee.
Raemisch said his team is still working on overhauling
the rules for solitary confinement, also called administrative
segregation, but he already is pushing changes.
"The program that we are putting in place now will put us, I think, at the forefront of the nation," Raemisch said.
Parole officers have begun picking up prisoners when
they are released on parole from solitary confinement, he said. Those
high-level parolees, who during their prison terms were deemed too
dangerous to live with other prisoners, are then taken directly to their
assigned parole officer for immediate supervision, he said.
In
the past, the onus was on newly released prisoners to find their parole
office. Raemisch added that he also has begun requiring some prison
staffers to spend an hour in solitary confinement just so they can get
an idea of what it is like.
Community bulletin alerts also will go
out to law enforcement agencies when a prisoner is released straight
from administrative segregation to parole, Raemisch added.
Twenty-two
parole officers will staff all prisons beginning in the fiscal year
that starts in July, he said. They will help offenders obtain food
stamps and identification cards, and find work and housing.
"All
this stuff should be done before they get out of prison," Raemisch said.
"We need that strong case- management contact with parole officers
before they get out."
How parolees fare during their first two weeks goes a long way toward determining whether they'll succeed or fail, he said.
The changes in policy follow the slaying of former corrections
chief Tom Clements in March, allegedly by a parolee who had spent years
of his prison term in administrative segregation.
The Denver Post reported in September
that more than 100 prisoners were released straight from solitary
confinement to parole in the past year. The Post also found that
Colorado parolees have committed new crimes including murder, used drugs
and disappeared for months without getting sent back to prison.
The
number of prisoners in solitary has dropped to 662 in September from
1,505 two years ago, or 3.9 percent of the overall prisoner population
compared with 7 percent in 2011.
Steve Hager, interim director of parole, testified that improvements have been made since the newspaper's reports.
He said a backlog in risk assessments for parolees identified by The Post has been eliminated. Hager said supervisors now are doing timely audits of parole officer casework.
Corrections officials also are reviewing intensive supervision
standards and electronic monitoring rules, and are monitoring the
results of a new fugitive unit that rounds up parole absconders, Hager
said.
Gov. John Hickenlooper has proposed increasing funding for
parole by $10 million next year, a 25 percent boost, to bring total
annual spending to $49.4 million. Raemisch said he is still developing
plans for how to spend that new money and is waiting for results of a
study on parole officer staffing to make final recommendations.
House
Minority Leader Mark Waller, a Republican from Colorado Springs,
expressed skepticism about whether the proposed $10 million spending
increase is needed. He said Raemisch could have told legislators during
legislative hearings in September that more money was needed, but he
didn't back then.
"I was left with the impression that more
dollars weren't necessary to enhance public safety," Waller said during
Wednesday's committee meeting.
California Ships Prisoners Out of State to "Reduce" Its Prison Population
Danielle Rigney's son was arrested and sentenced to six years in prison when he was 19. He spent two years imprisoned in California. Each weekend, family members or friends drove four hours to visit him. "He got to see his sisters growing up; he got to keep up with their lives," she told Truthout. "We constantly talked about the future." In addition to weekly visits, Rigney's son also had a job in the prison and was on the waiting list for college classes and a technical training course.
In July, however, Rigney arrived at the prison only to be told that her son had been transferred to La Palma Correctional Facility, one of two Arizona private prisons owned by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). Now each visit requires round-trip plane tickets and costs Rigney's family nearly $1,000. Neither his father nor his elderly grandfather, who were able to visit him regularly in California, can make the 15-hour trip. His friends, who also visited him regularly, also cannot afford to visit him.
Rigney is not the only Californian with an incarcerated loved one out of state, but she is one of the handful of family members able to afford to visit. "I've visited three times so far," she said. "There have been, at most, ten other visitors when I've been there." In comparison, she noted that the visiting rooms at the California prisons were full.
As of November 20, 2013, California housed 8,302 of its state prisoners in private prisons in Arizona, Mississippi and Oklahoma. It sends more prisoners out of state than Hawaii, Idaho and Vermont combined.
The Atlantic
The story of Sam Mandez is appalling on so many different levels it's
hard to know where to begin. Convicted for a murder no one has ever
proven he committed, sentenced to life without parole at the age of 18
because the judge and jury had no other choice, confined for 16 years in
solitary for petty offenses in prison, made severely mentally ill by
prison policies and practices, left untreated in that condition year
after year by state officials, Mandez personifies the self-defeating
cruelty of America's prisons today.
And yet Mandez is not alone in his predicament. All over the nation,
in state prisons and federal penitentiaries, officials are failing or
refusing to adequately diagnose and treat inmates who are or who are
made mentally ill by their confinements. The dire conditions in which
these men and women are held, the deliberate indifference with which
they are treated, do not meet constitutional standards. And yet there
are thousands like Mandez, symbols of one of the most shameful episodes in American legal history.
The Crime
On July 26, 1992, an elderly woman named Frida Winter was murdered in
her home in Greeley, Colorado. The police recovered fingerprints from
the scene and later found some of Winter's things in a culvert near her
home. But for years the investigation went nowhere in large part because it was flawed in nearly every way.
Other fingerprints from Winter's home were not recovered. Leads were
not adequately pursued. Logical suspects were not properly questioned.
At the time of Winter's death, Sam Mandez was 14 years old.
Four years later, the police caught what they considered a break.
Fingerprints from Winter's home finally found a match in a police
database—and the match was Sam Mandez, who had just turned 18. They
brought him in for intense questioning. But Mandez had a strong alibi.
He and his grandfather had painted part of Winter's home in 1991, a year
before her death. There was good reason for his prints to have been on
the window that was broken on the night of Winter's death. Mandez had
been in trouble with the law before—but never for a violent crime.
There were no eyewitnesses. There was no confession. There was no
evidence of any kind that Mandez had murdered Winter. But there was one
other link between them. Among the items recovered from that culvert
after Winter's death was a matchbook from a business in Henderson,
Nevada. The Mandez family had relatives there. The cops said this proved
that Mandez had been inside Winter's house on the night of her death:
He had burglarized her home, and thus, under a dubious extension of
Colorado law, he was necessarily guilty of first-degree murder.
The Trial
The trial of Sam Mandez was a travesty. Prosecutors could have
processed him through the juvenile justice system—he was only 14 at the
time of his alleged crime, remember—but chose instead to charge him as
an adult under Colorado's felony-murder rule. That rule is a legal
contrivance created by state lawmakers to broaden the scope of murder
laws. Under it, any death occurring during the commission of a felony
makes every defendant committing that felony susceptible to a charge of
first-degree murder.
So prosecutors did not need to prove at trial that Mandez had
murdered Winter or even that he intended to murder Winter. They did not
need to solve the crime for jurors. What they did need to do was observe the constitutional command of Brady v. Maryland,
which forbids prosecutors from withholding evidence that could
exculpate the defendant. They failed—a critical prosecution witness
changed his story at the last minute, but that fact was not disclosed to
Mandez's lawyer until the witness had testified. A foul, sure, but no
harm, the court ruled.*
The Denver Post
WASHINGTON — Health insurance companies now must cover mental illness and substance abuse just as they cover physical diseases.
The
Obama administration issued new regulations Friday that spell out how a
5-year-old mental health parity law will be administered.
Health
and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the rule should put
an end to discrimination faced by some mental health patients through
higher out-of-pocket costs or stricter limits on hospital stays or
visits to the doctor.
The law, signed by President George W. Bush,
was designed to prevent that. But mental health advocates said health
insurers at times sidestepped lawmakers' intentions by delaying requests
for care and putting in place other bureaucratic hurdles.
the denver post
Gov. John
Hickenlooper wants to increase spending on parole operations by 25
percent in the next fiscal year — a move that could lead to more parole
officers, an overhaul of re-entry services and more treatment for
parolees.
The governor's proposed state budget would increase
parole spending by $10 million to bring the total amount spent up to
$49.4 million.
In budget documents, officials with the Colorado
Department of Corrections said they still are forming a plan to spend
the proposed funding.
"Division resources, structure, and
operations, in some instances, are not properly positioned to manage the
significant risk inherent with the parole population," department
officials state in the documents.
They add: "Current
facility/re-entry preparation is inadequate to ameliorate offenders
sufficiently to meet the demands of parole."
Steve Hager,
interim director of the parole division, declined requests for comment.
Corrections spokesman Roger Hudson said Hager is waiting until plans
for spending the money are finalized. Officials hope the final plan will
be ready for submission to the legislature by Jan. 15, Hudson said.
"We're
very interested to see what they come up with," said State Sen. Pat
Steadman, a Denver Democrat who is chairman of the Joint Budget
Committee, which recommends funding priorities for the legislature.
Lawmakers must approve any funding increase before it becomes final.
Murdered prisons chief remembered at corrections conference in Colorado Springs