long time no blogging — i’m feeling a little guilt about that, but it is trumped by feeling overwhelmed by my schedule and projects these days.  we’re on a quarter system at oregon state, so we’re just entering week 5 of our spring quarter and hitting midterms.  as i wrote about earlier, i’m still holding an informal class in the girls’ correctional facility one night a week, and i’m also teaching the first inside-out class in a new (to the program) prison one night a week.  i’m also trying to organize community service-learning projects for my 45 delinquency students, which is a huge hassle but will hopefully be worth it.  i guess all of that is to say i’m still committed to public criminology, but most of it is incorporated into my teaching at the moment.

this story in the new york times caught my eye, however, and inspired me to log on and write this post.  at the age of 16, donald schmidt committed a terrible crime; he molested and drowned a 3-year-old girl while high on meth.  the strange part is that schmidt is now 37 years-old and has been incarcerated in juvenile facilities for more than two decades.

from the article:

Under California law, juvenile offenders who commit serious crimes can be kept in the system until they are 25. Mr. Schmidt’s detention, though, has been extended under a rarely invoked state code that allows continued detention if a jury finds the inmate has a “mental disorder, defect or abnormality that causes the person to have serious difficulty controlling his or her dangerous behavior.”

Because Mr. Schmidt was convicted as a juvenile and continued to be held under the mental health code, he cannot be transferred to an adult facility.

The code requires such petitions for extended detention to be renewed or rejected every two years. On Tuesday, prosecutors will again go to trial to argue that Mr. Schmidt should remain in juvenile custody, an argument they have made repeatedly, and successfully, since 1997, when he was first eligible for release.

in the earlier version of our pubcrim blog, chris and i both wrote about the civil commitment of sex offenders, but i don’t think i’ve ever heard of a case of a juvenile sex offender held for more than two decades in the juvenile system.  presumably, with petitions for extended detention renewed every two years, he could be held in juvenile custody his entire life. it must be tricky for staff members and incarcerated youth to figure out how to interact with him in the closed community of the institution.

what a strange and sad case.

where do you go to start a new life after 35 years in prison?  is it possible to pay the price for your crimes and to start again with a clean slate?  in this age of community notification, apparently not.

the new york times reported this story out of chichester, new hampshire:

A pastor in this quiet, picturesque New England town thought he was doing the Christian thing when he took in a convicted child killer who had served his time but had nowhere to go. But some neighbors of the Rev. David Pinckney vehemently disagree, one even threatening to burn his house down after officials could find no one else willing to take 60-year-old Raymond Guay.

the neighborhood is in an uproar and  town leaders are planning to ask state and federal officials to remove guay from the town.  rev. pinckney, for his part, is quite literally practicing what he preaches.  acting on faith, he has brought guay into his home to stay with him, his wife, and their four children, ages 13-18, for the next two months.

conrad mandsager, a man who formerly worked for prison fellowship added this perspective to the story:

Mandsager said he took in a violent criminal to live with his family of five in 1988. Sentenced for attempted murder and kept in solitary confinement for his role in a prison riot, the man turned his life around while living with Mandsager and working at a job through the Prison Fellowship, Mandsager said.

He disagrees with Chichester officials who say Guay would do better in a city with more jobs and other resources.

”You create more opportunities for problems by putting (convicts) in a larger city where there’s no accountability,” Mandsager said. He expects better results in a home like Pinckney’s, ”where there’s accountability and care and love for the guy.”

i hope there is a safe and happy ending to this story and that no one burns the reverend’s house down.

programs in which inmates work with dogs are fairly common and seem to benefit all involved, as both the animals and humans learn new skills and also learn to trust one another. project pooch is a local example in oregon; at maclaren youth correctional facility incarcerated youths work with rescued shelter dogs, training them to be canine good citizens and ready for adoption in permanent, loving homes. if you read the history of some of the dogs available for adoption, you’ll see that some of these animals were badly abused and face physical and emotional challenges. with the help of their young trainers, they are now doing great. and, it seems to be a reciprocal relationship — the trainers take enormous pride in their dog friends. i visited maclaren last summer and got to meet some of the young men and the dogs they were working with — it was a relatively happy space in a high-security juvenile prison.

the story that caught my eye this week was a similar program where inmates in colorado are working to prepare wild mustangs for private adoption and for use by the u.s. border patrol. here is the summary of the article:

The Wild Horse Inmate Program in Colorado prepares mustangs for private adoption and for use by the U.S. Border Patrol. Colorado inmates start out cleaning stalls and trimming hooves and can graduate to become full-fledged horse trainers. The recidivism rate for horse trainers is half the national rate of 68 percent, according to the Colorado Department of Corrections. “This program has taught me patience, perseverance,” said one inmate.

apparently, the bureau of land management “rounds up” 6,500 wild mustangs a year to control the population on the open range. and while adoption of mustangs that are not saddle-trained is declining, demand for saddle-broken horses is high.

i always like these programs. they are certainly about building skills, responsibility, and trust, but, they also seem to offer second chances, for both the animals and their inmate trainers. given how hard second chances are to come by for abandoned animals and incarcerated individuals, i am encouraged by the efforts to build these partnerships.

how i do love this story! an essay in the sunday new york times profiles a program where convicted criminals are granted probation in exchange for full participation in six twice-monthly seminars on literature. the offenders, along with judges, probation officers, an english professor, and a graduate student discuss fiction, memoirs, and poems, finding universal questions and important life lessons in the pages of the books they are assigned.

the program, changing lives through literature, is now in nine states and boasts a recidivism rate of less than 20 percent. the website offers advice on how to start your own program, texts to use, even lesson plans. i really like the fact that judges and probation officers read the books, attend the meetings, and join the conversation. in some ways this program reminds of inside-out, where we take our classes into prisons and university students and inmates share perspectives and learn the material of a college course together. it’s an amazing experience and really speaks to the transformative power of education and open minds.

i’m working on building literacy programs for adult men and their children at the oregon state penitentiary, and for young women in oregon’s primary juvenile correctional facility for girls. i’ve applied for grants and been promised funding from different sources to get the projects rolling, but have felt stymied in my struggles to fight through the bureaucracy and the inertia and get buy-in from potential participants.

the essay in the times reminds me that it’s worth it. words have power. stories have power. shared experiences bring very different people together. it’s worth the effort to bring literature into the lives of offenders. it may even open whole new worlds for them.

in november, i wrote about the 8-year-old boy from arizona who was charged with 2 counts of premeditated murder for the deaths of his father and his father’s roommate. you may remember that he apparently confessed to the crime while being questioned by two female police officers without a parent or legal representative in the room. i was cynical, and suggested we all remember the ryan harris case in chicago where the 7- and 8-year-old defendants eventually settled wrongful arrest suits for millions of dollars.

well, the boy in the arizona case is now 9-years-old and he has pleaded guilty to one count of negligent homicide. under the agreement, the boy pleaded guilty in the death of his father’s roommate and charges of premeditated murder for both deaths were dropped.

this is a bizarre case. bits from the news story:

The boy’s mother cried throughout the hearing and, through her lawyer, objected to the plea deal. But Superior Court Judge Michael Roca accepted it….

(Apache County Attorney) Whiting said he spoke with the Romero family before giving final approval to the plea deal, and they agreed it was in the child’s best interest for him not to be forced to admit to killing his father.

“If the kid is ever going to have a chance at a normal life, how is he going to deal with `I pleaded guilty to killing my dad,'” Whiting said….

Under the agreement, the judge will decide later whether the boy will be institutionalized or live with relatives. He will receive diagnostic evaluations and mental health examinations when he’s 12, 15 and 17. The reviews are intended partly to determine whether the boy will pose any danger in the future.

i guess i’m surprised that the plea was accepted against the express wishes of the boy’s mother. and, while the boy didn’t have to admit to killing his father, he did essentially admit to committing murder (at age 8!). won’t that significantly hinder his chance for a “normal life”?

and now, another case with an extremely young defendant. an 11-year-old pennsylvania boy is charged with shooting and killing his father’s pregnant girlfriend. the victim, 8 months pregnant, was shot in the back of the head while lying in bed. the boy, jordan brown, was charged as an adult with criminal homicide and criminal homicide of an unborn child. the boy is currently being held in a county jail. the jail warden, aware that his 300-inmate jail cannot offer proper care for a pre-adolescent defendant, plans to ask the judge to move the 11-year-old jordan brown to a juvenile detention center.

these cases certainly test our notions of youth, accountability and consequences. what is the right thing to do with child defendants? is there any hope that they can go on to lead productive adult lives in the community? what is or what should be society’s role in these situations? big questions, all, but i think the answers might go a long way toward revealing the hidden assumptions about crime, justice, and punishment in the united states today.

today’s “modern love” column in the new york times is written by a former inmate who, by his own admission, had “eight felonies, and at least twice that many misdemeanors…(had) been to prison five times, all for nonviolent drug and drug-related offenses.”  while the column is about the development of a particular relationship, what i found interesting was the author’s discussion of trying to build any kind of romantic relationship in light of his rocky past.  matthew parker writes:

When I got out of prison in 2002, I was narcotics-free for the first time since I was a teenager, and achingly lonely. Yet I had never had a normal relationship, and I was clueless about how to get myself into one. My 11 years of forced celibacy in prison and decades of drug use had left me inept when it came to women. I sometimes had junkie girlfriends, but junkies rarely find love because their love is the narcotic. Everything else is secondary.

I experimented with various forms of dating, including online, but remained lonesome because most of the women I managed to meet could not come to terms with my past.

this struck me as a piece of the reentry puzzle that may deserve more attention.  i don’t know what the answer is, but i can well imagine the frustration of trying to build relationships after a long incarceration.  if inmates who complete their sentences have “paid” for their crimes, do they deserve a second (or third, or fourth) chance at life and love?  would you be okay with your sister or daughter — or brother or son — dating a former felon?

well, depending on how you look at it, glenn proctor is either the luckiest guy on the planet or the unluckiest.  according to a story in the seattle post-intelligencer, proctor, 21, “was released last week having spent 11 months in jail for the killing in which prosecutors now believe he played no part.”  apparently, proctor was in the wrong place at the wrong time — and he became the wrong suspect in the shooting of 39-year-old dar’rel miller. 

after spending nearly a year locked up for a crime he did not commit, proctor’s got a pretty good attitude about the whole thing, saying:  “I look at it as a learning experience. I know I don’t ever want to place myself in that situation again.”  the story continues:

Proctor doesn’t deny being at the transit center. He regrets being there, regrets losing a year of his life for following some people who made trouble, regrets that a woman died that day. But he insists he had no idea that an argument would end in blood and killing.

Behind bars on $1 million bail, Proctor burned through two public defenders before Zumwalt was assigned his case. His earlier attorneys, he said, tried to sell him on a plea deal — a manslaughter plea that would have shaved years off a potential sentence for the second-degree murder charge he faced — that he had no interest in.

nearly a year in jail is a long time for an innocent man.  but, there are many worse stories, and few happy endings.  proctor feels his time in jail made him stronger — i hope he holds on to the courage of his (non) convictions, and makes a success of his second start of adulthood.

working as i did with one of the key figures in labeling theory, i should know better.  but, in my earlier post on “girl trouble” about starting classes in a correctional facility with teenage girls, i let the bad press infiltrate my thoughts, and i became particularly nervous about starting this new endeavor.

happily, our first night of class went well.  9 female OSU students and 7 girls from the correctional facility will be studying “gender and crime” with me this quarter.  after some introductions, we spent time last night talking about topics they would like to cover and ideas for potential group projects we can work on together.  one element that came through loudly to me is that the 7 incarcerated girls individually and collectively have a lot to say, and they would like to find a way to have their voices heard.

i was humbled when they spoke eloquently of their frustration at being stereotyped as troublemakers and really victimized by the girls in the facility who tried to escape last month.  they are aware it makes the institution, the girls, and the staff look bad, and they were angry the other girls injured employees of the facility who are there to help them.  it was a mature conversation and reminded me anew about the power and impact of negative labels.  by bringing our “magnificent seven” into this college experience, i’m hoping we can offer these individuals new, positive labels to counter the negative stereotypes and bolster self-images in progress.

in the first version of our pubcrim blog, i wrote a number of posts (see here, here, here) about food in prisons. chris is credited as the author of one of these posts after the big blog move, but he’s not responsible for writing it or for the opinions it contains.

prison food was a hot story in oregon in 2007, as the man responsible for buying the food for all oregon prisons was accused of shady dealings and of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks. while buying distressed and expiring food for inmate consumption (and feeding them fish clearly marked as ‘bait’ and ‘not for human consumption’) fred monem collected more than $600,000 in kickbacks over a period of 5 years. monem and his wife were indicted by a grand jury; monem left his wife behind, fleeing and becoming one of the fbi’s most wanted fugitives.

i bring this up because of a story out of alabama today. here’s the first line from the associated press: A federal judge ordered an Alabama sheriff locked up in his own jail Wednesday after holding him in contempt for failing to adequately feed inmates while profiting from the skimpy meals. the sheriff denied that imates were improperly fed, but testified that he legally pocketed about $212,000 over three years with surplus meal money. apparently, the state pays sheriffs $1.75 a day for each prisoner they house and lets the elected officers pocket any profit they can generate.

At the hearing, 10 prisoners told Clemon meals are so small that they’re forced to buy snacks from a for-profit store the jailers operate. Most of the inmates appeared thin, with baggy jail coveralls hanging off their frames.

Some testified they spent hundreds of dollars a month at the store, which Bartlett said generates profits used for training and equipment.

Inmates told of getting half an egg, a spoonful of oatmeal and one piece of toast most days at their 3 a.m. daily breakfast. Lunch is usually a handful of chips and two sandwiches with barely enough peanut butter to taste.

clearly, one of the pains of imprisonment is dealing with prison/jail food. but, it does seem to me there should be more oversight of all corrections agencies to make sure that inmates aren’t being starved to make a profit for corrupt officials. i wonder how the alabama sheriff will feel after spending time in his own jail, forced to eat the food he has chosen to serve.

january will bring new challenges. i will be taking 8 or 9 oregon state university students (all female) into our state’s primary girls’ correctional facility to share class once a week with 8 female inmates. i’ve taught a number of inside-out classes with adult males in the maximum-security penitentiary, and my dissertation research was with violent males in an end-of-the-line juvenile facility, but working with young females will be a whole new experience.

i chose/volunteered to do this for many good reasons, and i am hopeful that we will have a positive outcome for all involved. this facility just reopened in february to house the majority of the females committed to close custody by the oregon youth authority. oya is planning to implement gender-specific programming in the facility, and i am hoping to build strong connections and to get my students involved from the beginning.

the latest news, however, is that eight girls in the facility assaulted and injured three staff members in a premeditated escape attempt. apparently, they staged a fake fight and then attacked the staff members with homemade weapons. the girls ranged in age from 13-17. all three male staff members needed medical attention; one had a head wound that required 32 staples to close it.

i’m not sure what to think of this. strange as it may sound, i feel completely safe in the maximum-security men’s prison, but somehow these teenage girls seem more volatile and more of a risk to work with. it may have something to do with the numbers. i have 15 students in the penitentiary at any given time out of approximately 2300 inmates. the girls’ facility only holds about 70, so to have eight involved in an aggressive escape attempt is to have more than 10% of the population plotting against the staff. i’ll have eight girls in my class, but my girls/young women will presumably be a different eight than those involved in the escape attempt, and it’s likely that most of them will be 18 or older (oregon youth authority can hold young people up to age 25).

it’s a lot to think about before our first class session in january. if anyone has any thoughts or advice for working with this population, i’d love to hear it.