Think Outside the Cage

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.

If you would like to be involved please go to our website and become a member.

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Murdered prisons chief remembered at corrections conference in Colorado Springs

The theme of the International Corrections and Prisons Association conference is "Thinking Outside the Cell: Reducing the Use of Imprisonment," and it would have been right up Tom Clements' alley.
Clements, who was director of the Colorado Department of Corrections until he was shot to death in March, championed ways to decrease recidivism and give inmates every opportunity for successful re-entry to society.
He also helped bring the group's 15th annual conference to Colorado Springs.
"He would've been so proud to see everyone here. Tom would've been our host," said ICPA President Peter van der Sande said. "We lost an extremely inspirational person in corrections."
DOC Director Rick Raemisch introduced Gov. John Hickenlooper, who was in El Paso County Monday to attend the opening day of the summit and tour flood-damaged areas and recovery efforts. Hickenlooper praised Clements' legacy of reducing the number of inmates in solitary confinement by almost 50 percent in two years.
"Tom believed that everything that happened in the prison cell was supposed to prepare the inmate to return to society successfully," Hickenlooper said. "He wanted Colorado to be considered a terrible place to commit a crime, but a great place for a second chance."
More than 500 delegates representing 72 countries filled the conference halls of the Antlers Hilton in downtown for the weeklong summit. Chief among a the workshop subjects and discussion sessions, the issue of mental health in corrections was at the top of nearly every attendants' list of interests. A delegate from Canada led a workshop on alternative corrections approaches and programs for mentally disordered inmates, while a representative from Nigeria spoke about correctional services in Africa.
"Every nation and jurisdiction delivers justice differently, but the ICPA gives all of us the opportunity to network, build partnerships and learn from each other," said Canada Correctional Service Commissioner Don Head. "Mental health is at the top of our priorities, as the prisons system has become the default depository for mentally ill offenders on a global scale."
Head recounted speaking with Clements just a month before former prisoner Evan Ebel gunned him down at his Monument home. Headsaid the corrections director was excited about Colorado Springs hosting the international summit and going fly fishing with his Canadian counterpart.
More than 100 delegates will lead sessions through Friday.touching on astoundingly diverse subjects, such as "In the Mind of a Gang Leader," and "The Use of Segregation."
A tribute to Clements will take place Wednesday, with Raemisch, the governor's chief of staff Roxanne White and van der Sande making special presentations

Read more at http://gazette.com/murdered-prisons-chief-remembered-at-corrections-conference-in-colorado-springs/article/1508442#6Vf73hfkIbB5SU22.99

The theme of the International Corrections and Prisons Association conference is "Thinking Outside the Cell: Reducing the Use of Imprisonment," and it would have been right up Tom Clements' alley.
Clements, who was director of the Colorado Department of Corrections until he was shot to death in March, championed ways to decrease recidivism and give inmates every opportunity for successful re-entry to society.
He also helped bring the group's 15th annual conference to Colorado Springs.
"He would've been so proud to see everyone here. Tom would've been our host," said ICPA President Peter van der Sande said. "We lost an extremely inspirational person in corrections."
DOC Director Rick Raemisch introduced Gov. John Hickenlooper, who was in El Paso County Monday to attend the opening day of the summit and tour flood-damaged areas and recovery efforts. Hickenlooper praised Clements' legacy of reducing the number of inmates in solitary confinement by almost 50 percent in two years.
"Tom believed that everything that happened in the prison cell was supposed to prepare the inmate to return to society successfully," Hickenlooper said. "He wanted Colorado to be considered a terrible place to commit a crime, but a great place for a second chance."
More than 500 delegates representing 72 countries filled the conference halls of the Antlers Hilton in downtown for the weeklong summit. Chief among a the workshop subjects and discussion sessions, the issue of mental health in corrections was at the top of nearly every attendants' list of interests. A delegate from Canada led a workshop on alternative corrections approaches and programs for mentally disordered inmates, while a representative from Nigeria spoke about correctional services in Africa.
"Every nation and jurisdiction delivers justice differently, but the ICPA gives all of us the opportunity to network, build partnerships and learn from each other," said Canada Correctional Service Commissioner Don Head. "Mental health is at the top of our priorities, as the prisons system has become the default depository for mentally ill offenders on a global scale."
Head recounted speaking with Clements just a month before former prisoner Evan Ebel gunned him down at his Monument home. Headsaid the corrections director was excited about Colorado Springs hosting the international summit and going fly fishing with his Canadian counterpart.

Read more at http://gazette.com/murdered-prisons-chief-remembered-at-corrections-conference-in-colorado-springs/article/1508442#6Vf73hfkIbB5SU22.99

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Monday, October 28, 2013

Ethan Nadelmann: We Hit A Drug Policy Tipping Point

Reform Conference 2013

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

With 2.3 Million People Incarcerated in the US, Prisons Are Big Business | The Nation

With 2.3 Million People Incarcerated in the US, Prisons Are Big Business | The Nation
“Global Tel* Link. You have a collect call from: ‘Tim.’ An inmate in Shelby County Correctional Facility…. If you wish to accept and pay for this call, dial zero now.”
I don’t know how many times I heard the same robotic voice speak these words since last fall. I was researching the story of Timothy McKinney, a Memphis man facing his third death-penalty trial for the killing of an off-duty police officer in 1997. Tim would call from Shelby County Jail, to answer my questions and to do what anyone facing trial would want to do: air concerns about his case, vent. Sometimes he would call multiple times a week. Because the phone calls were limited to fifteen minutes at a time, a couple of times he hung up and called right back, so we could keep talking.
The calls were expensive, more than a dollar per minute, depending on the time of day. In order to accept one, I had to set up a prepaid account with Global Tel* Link, or GTL, “The Next Generation of Correctional Technology.” If Tim called and my account was out of money, the automated voice would prompt me to replenish it via credit card, while he waited on the other line. “By accepting an inmate call, you acknowledge and agree that your conversation may be monitored and recorded,” the company advises.
I dealt with Global Tel* Link for only a few months. But for Tim’s relatives, this had been their reality for years. GTL makes more than $500 million a year exploiting families like his, who face the choice between paying exorbitant phone rates to keep in touch with incarcerated loved ones—up to $1.13 per minute—or simply giving up on regular phone calls. Like many other telecommunications companies that enjoy profitable monopolies on prison and jail contracts across the country, GTL wins its contracts by offering a kickback—or “commission”—to the prison or jail systems it serves. As an exhaustive 2011 study in Prison Legal News explained, the kickback is “based on a percentage of the gross revenue generated by prisoners’ phone calls…. [The] commissions dwarf all other considerations and are a controlling factor when awarding prison phone contracts.”
The higher a kickback, in other words, the more likely a company is to win the contract. These high kickbacks translate into higher phone rates for family members—usually the very people who can least afford it. Like the vast majority of those who pass through the massive jail and court complex known as 201 Poplar in downtown Memphis, Tim’s family was not wealthy. When it came time for his trial last spring, his mother would be in court every day, only to leave straight for her night job, cleaning office buildings.
Global Tel* Link is one of five companies profiled in a new video series called “Prison Profiteers,” a collaboration between Beyond Bars—a Brave New Films project—the ACLU, and The Nation. With 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States, prisons are big business; the goal of the series is to expose the myriad ways people enrich themselves off crime and punishment. Defenders of for-profit prison services pitch them as superior, efficient, money-saving options for cash-strapped states and localities that can ill-afford the costs of mass incarceration. (And indeed, historically, state-run services have often proven abysmal in themselves.) But not only do such privatized services often end up more expensive in reality, they can incur huge unseen costs to inmates and their families.

Monday, October 21, 2013

Paralyzed inmate says keeping him locked up serves no purpose

As you may remember this story was first reported a few years ago in the Westword in a story written by Alan Prendergast Paralyzed.
the Denver Post

A prolific car thief says keeping him in prison is extremely expensive and serves no purpose because he can no longer swipe cars after he was paralyzed by a policeman's bullet.
And Darrell Havens, 26, has an unlikely ally: David Michaud, a former Denver police chief who later was appointed state parole board chairman.
"I don't see the point in keeping him locked up," Michaud said. "The cost is enormous. His risk to the community is minimal."
But opponents of Havens' fourth request for an early medical parole release argue that his punishment is appropriate after he nearly ran over a police officer. They say he should get no allowances because of injuries he caused.
Colorado Department of Corrections authorities say Havens' medical care costs the state about $22,000 a year. If he serves his entire 20-year sentence for first-degree assault, it would cost nearly a half-million dollars. Havens is eligible for parole in 2016.
Arvada police have argued that Havens was shot because he nearly ran over a police officer while trying to escape in a stolen Audi, and that even after he was arrested, he managed to break the law by smuggling marijuana into prison.
The Denver Post interviewed Havens at the Denver Reception and Diagnostic Center last week. Havens, who uses a wheelchair, said by the age of 16 he was stealing and burglarizing cars to buy cocaine, and by 18 he stole about 50 cars and had graduated to methamphetamine.
Havens had a record of putting victims and himself in harm's way when he stole cars. Undercover officers were following him on Aug. 4, 2006, when he plowed into the side of a car. Despite permanent injuries including paralysis in his right arm, Havens was stealing cars again within weeks after coming out of a seven-week coma, he acknowledged.
On Jan. 3, 2007, more than a dozen officers set up a sting in which Havens thought he could trade a stolen black Audi for an "8 ball of meth" and $200. Instead the plan called for boxing him in behind a Target store at Interstate 70 and Kipling in Arvada and arresting him. Havens claims members of the task force rammed his car before he realized what was happening. Paralyzed, he couldn't take his foot off the gas pedal, he said.
But several officers said Havens refused to stop and was very close to running over Arvada Officer Bill Johnson when the officer fired nine times, striking Havens in the mouth, chest and neck, according to court documents.
Havens was charged with attempted murder and pleaded down to first-degree assault in an agreement in which he was given a 20-year sentence in 2008.
In 2010, because of the high cost of caring for a paralyzed man with only partial use of his left arm, prison officials requested that Havens be released before his scheduled parole eligibility date because of special medical needs, Michaud said. The parole board initially voted to release him on parole.
But when Arvada Police Chief Don Wick and former Jefferson County District Attorney Scott Storey learned of the decision, they objected.
"We understand Mr. Havens' physical condition, but serving less than one and a half years of a 20-year sentence flies in the face of the original sentence," Storey wrote in a March 22, 2010, letter to Michaud.
One of the arguments by police was that Havens proved he was still capable and willing to break the law when he had someone sneak marijuana into him while he was in prison — twice. Arvada police declined to comment, citing ongoing civil litigation.
But Michaud said marijuana smuggling doesn't make Havens a dangerous criminal. He said parolees regularly violate more serious laws and are not sent back to prison.
"I didn't see where that rose to the level that Havens should be denied parole," he said. But the parole board voted a second time and rejected his parole.
Havens has refiled for early parole release. He said his sister, who is a medical aide, would take over his care, and he has Medicaid.
In the past three years, DOC has granted special medical paroles 17 times for seriously ill offenders.
Each day in prison, Havens must be bathed and dressed. He takes a cocktail of drugs to control pain and reduce the spasms in his left leg.
"I require help from inmates to put on my boxers and pants," he said.

Read more: Paralyzed Denver inmate says keeping him locked up serves no purpose - The Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_24351879/paralyzed-denver-inmate-says-keeping-him-locked-up#ixzz2iOE6jemd
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Preview: International Drug Policy Reform Conference in Denver

Westword

The first retail sale of recreational marijuana in Colorado has yet to be rung up, but the state is already reaping some convention business as a result of its groundbreaking reforms of drug laws. Next week more than a thousand elected officials, health care professionals, students, drug war veterans and policy wonks from thirty countries will descend on downtown Denver for the International Drug Policy Reform Conference -- four days of panels and analysis of drug policies that will also be a celebration of Colorado's key role in the reform movement.
The biennial conference, slated for October 23-36 at the Sheraton Denver Downtown, is the brainchild of the Drug Policy Alliance, which has been active in marijuana legalization movements around the country -- and was directly involved in the successful effort to pass Amendment 64 last year.

Ethan Nadelmann.

"When we first picked Denver to host the 2013 biennial conference, we thought it quite unlikely that we'd be convening in the first state (with Washington) to legalize marijuana," reads a statement released by DPA executive director Ethan Nadelmann. "But Colorado's voters ensured a warm welcome with their vote last November. Now drug policy reformers from across the country and around the world are eager to attend our conference in Denver -- not to get high in the Mile High City but to spend three days at the world's leading drug policy reform gathering and demonstrate their support for Colorado's global leadership." Scheduled programs include a roundtable focusing on which states might move forward with marijuana legalization in 2014 or 2016; a discussion of international drug decriminalization efforts, with top-ranking officials from Guatemala, Uruguay and elsewhere; panels dealing with jury nullification, drug culture, drugs and HIV, the criminal justice system and more. For a complete list of sessions on tap, check out the official schedule. Many of the speakers have yet to be identified, but what's a drug policy reform conference without some last-minute inspirations?
One event attendees can count on: a "victory walk" down the Sixteenth Street Mall on Thursday, October 24, starting at 1 pm, "to celebrate the legalization of marijuana in Colorado, Washington, and Uruguay, as well as recent harm reduction and sentencing reform victories in Colorado." After forty years of failed wars on drugs, an autumnal stroll in support of "harm reduction" strategies might not be a bad idea at all.
Additional information regarding next week's action can be found on the conference website.

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

How Prisons Change the Balance of Power in America

The Atlantic
What has it really cost the United States to build the world’s most massive prison system?
To answer this question, some point to the nearly two million people who are now locked up in an American prison—overwhelmingly this nation’s poorest, most mentally ill, and least-educated citizens—and ponder the moral costs. Others have pointed to the enormous expense of having more than seven million Americans under some form of correctional supervision and argued that the system is not economically sustainable. Still others highlight the high price that our nation’s already most-fragile communities, in particular, have paid for the rise of such an enormous carceral state. A few have also asked Americans to consider what it means for the future of our society that our system of punishment is so deeply racialized.
With so many powerful arguments being made against our current criminal justice system, why then does it persist? Why haven’t the American people, particularly those who are most negatively affected by this most unsettling and unsavory state of affairs, undone the policies that have led us here? The answer, in part, stems from the fact that locking up unprecedented numbers of citizens over the last forty years has itself made the prison system highly resistant to reform through the democratic process. To an extent that few Americans have yet appreciated, record rates of incarceration have, in fact, undermined our American democracy, both by impacting who gets to vote and how votes are counted.
The unsettling story of how this came to be actually begins in 1865, when the abolition of slavery led to bitter constitutional battles over who would and would not be included in our polity. To fully understand it, though, we must look more closely than we yet have at the year 1965, a century later—a moment when, on the one hand, politicians were pressured into opening the franchise by passing the most comprehensive Voting Rights Act to date, but on the other hand, were also beginning a devastatingly ambitious War on Crime.

From Voting Rights to the War on Crime

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 gave the federal government a number of meaningful tools with which it could monitor state elections and make sure that states with a particularly grim history of discriminatory voting practices would make no voting policy without its approval. The act had been intended to combat the intimidation and legal maneuvers—such as passage of poll taxes, literacy requirements, and so-called “Grandfather clauses”— that had left only 5 percent of black Americans, by the 1940s, able to vote, despite passage of the 14^th and 15^th amendments after the Civil War.

But the very same year that Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he also signed another Act into law: the Law Enforcement Administration Act (LEAA), a piece of legislation that, well before crime rates across America hit record highs, created the bureaucracy and provided the funding that would enable a historically and internationally unparalleled war on crime.

So, at the very same moment that the American Civil Rights Movement had succeeded in newly empowering African Americans in the political sphere by securing passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, America’s white politicians decided to begin a massive new war on crime that would eventually undercut myriad gains of the Civil Rights Movement—particularly those promised by the Voting Rights Act itself.

From the War on Crime to Mass Incarceration

Thanks to LEAA and America’s post-1965 commitment to the War on Crime, and more specifically, thanks to the dramatic escalation of policing in cities across the nation as well as the legal changes wrought by an ever-intensifying War on Drugs, between 1970 and 2010 more people ended up in prison in this country than anywhere else in the world. At no other point in this nation’s recorded past had the economic, social, and political institutions of a country become so bound up with the practice of punishment.

Colorado Population Report -- SEPTEMBER

Monthly Population Report

Think Outside the Cage

Who is the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition?

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Murdered prisons chief remembered at corrections conference in Colorado Springs

Monday, October 28, 2013

Ethan Nadelmann: We Hit A Drug Policy Tipping Point

Reform Conference 2013

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

With 2.3 Million People Incarcerated in the US, Prisons Are Big Business | The Nation

Monday, October 21, 2013

Paralyzed inmate says keeping him locked up serves no purpose

Preview: International Drug Policy Reform Conference in Denver

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

How Prisons Change the Balance of Power in America

Colorado Population Report -- SEPTEMBER

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