Smarter on Crime

Courts Push Back on California Prisons

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By Bernice Yeung | Crowdfund this with Spot.Us
Part of the Prisons & Public Health news blog
How will California resolve its chronic prison overcrowding problems? With court-imposed deadlines ahead, the answer is as murky as ever. Sept. 18 Deadline Looms
In August, following class-action litigation filed by California inmates, a federal court found that the state’s prisoners were receiving Constitutionally sub-par health and mental health care because of overcrowding, and issued an order requiring the inmate population to be lowered by more than 40,000 over the next two years. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger filed a motion to delay the order, which the district court denied; a further appeal filed with the U.S. Supreme Court was also turned down last week.

Nation

Across the Heartland, U.S. Military Suicides Spike

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From Ohio to Texas, newspapers around the United States are running local stories on a surge in suicides and trauma involving members of the U.S. military. The Cleveland Plain Dealer is looking at the apparent suicide of Army Pvt. Keiffer Wilhelm. At Fort Hood, in Texas, multiple soldiers have committed suicide every year since the Iraq war began, the Austin American Statesman reports. The Indianapolis Star did a four-part series in September that detailed how Sgt.

Democracy & Civics

Public Transit Users Looking for a Lift

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Got a clunker? At least until late August, that could get you cash. Ride the bus or rapid transit? Too bad, so sad; you pay instead. Across the country, local governments are reducing service and raising fares for municipal bus, train and light rail lines, according to a new study by Transportation for America, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Smarter on Crime

Calif. Prison Woes Tracked in Newspaper’s Interactive Maps

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By Bernice Yeung | Crowdfund this with Spot.Us
Part of the Prisons & Public Health news blog
The Sacramento Bee has posted some new online maps in advance of the potential release of 27,000 California inmates due to budget cuts, and another 40,000 thanks to a federal court order to curb prison overcrowding. Last week’s map, “An overview of California prisons,” reveals the capacity of prisons throughout the state, as well as prisoner demographics and stats on their crimes, simply by rolling your mouse over each facility listed. According to the map, the California Medical Facility in Vacaville is the least overcrowded, at 118 percent of capacity. Meanwhile, the Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy is the most overcrowded, operating at 233 percent above capacity. Earlier this month, the Bee also published the interactive map, “Counties with the most residents in prison,” which notes that Kings County has highest ratio of its residents in prison with 9.4 inmates per 1,000 county residents.

Democracy & Civics

Costa Rica's Ecotourism Marred by Development, Evictions

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Costa Rica’s lauded ecotourism industry is under new, and not always positive, scrutiny. Community-based ecotourism is getting raves for creating jobs in agricultural areas, where tourists delight in glimpsing and sharing a day in the life of a Costa Rican farmer, Inter Press Service reports. President Oscar Arias approved a law in July to support “agro-ecotourism” as a way to let small farmers and some indigenous communities share in the tourism boom. Yet another law protecting coastal resources is being used to remove impoverished communities living on beachfront plots on or near ecotourism destinations. Lacking titles to land they say their families have occupied for decades, residents near the Ostional Wildlife Refuge, a haven for sea turtles on Costa Rica’s northern Pacific coast, are set for removal.

Featured

Cell Block Hospital

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Chronically ill parolees in California often return to communities that lack adequate health services — and budget woes are expected to force the early release of thousands of inmates from the state’s overcrowded prisons. Our “Prisons & Public Health” news blog tracks the issue.Photo: Mule Creek State Prison/cdcr.ca.gov

Featured

Better Health Care, Better Prisons?

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By Bernice Yeung | Crowdfund this with Spot.Us
Part of the Prisons & Public Health news blog
In a recent New York Times op-ed, columnist Nicholas Kristof cites the case of Curtis Wilkerson as an example of lopsided budget priorities (“Priority Test: Health Care or Prisons?”), wherein health care is considered too expensive, yet long and costly prison terms are the norm. Wilkerson, you see, is a California inmate who became entangled in the state’s three-strikes laws; he’s now serving a life sentence for stealing a $2.50 pair of socks (strike one and two both involved abetting a robbery in 1981 when he was 19). California doles out $49,000 a year on each inmate housed in a state prison, and $216,000 a year on each young person incarcerated through the juvenile justice system, Kristof notes, while in contrast, the Bay Area’s Urban Strategies Council has found that only $8,000 is spent on each Oakland public school student. Prison spending has been growing for decades in California and across the country [PDF], along with incarceration rates, under the “tough on crime” banner. Yet as many public-policy makers are beginning to realize, being tough on crime doesn’t mean that they’re being safer or smarter about it.

Democracy & Civics

Homeless Gain Further Hate Crime Protections

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Homeless people are gradually being included in hate crimes laws, as the number of fatal attacks on the homeless remains steady even as overall attacks decline. Last November, Newsdesk.org tracked reports of sometimes deadly attacks on homeless people around the nation, and noted both skepticism about claims of a trend in hate crimes, as well as new protections against such attacks. At the state level, these included emerging regulations in Florida, California, Massachusetts, Alaska, Ohio and Washington. Now, other states are starting to give homeless individuals the same legal status afforded other groups protected by hate-crime legislation, according to recent reports in the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. In May, Maryland became the first to take action, when a Republican lawmaker added homelessness to a hate-crimes bill — to illustrate what he thought was the absurdity of assigning certain groups protected-class status.

Smarter on Crime

Alameda Plans Ahead for Parolee Surge

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By Bernice Yeung | Crowdfund this with Spot.Us
Part of the Prisons & Public Health news blog
With 40,000 inmates slated for release in the next two years due a federal court order targeting overcrowding in California prisons, what to do with all those convicts re-entering society is at the top of peoples’ minds. (In fact, the state has to come up with a plan of action by mid-September, although it will likely appeal the order.)
This is on top of the nearly 140,000 inmates released annually to California communities. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has also indicated that he’d consider the early release of even more inmates to help cut $1.2 billion from the state budget. For years, the state’s more savvy cities and counties have convened reentry task forces to improve public safety by helping parolees transition more smoothly. One of the most proactive efforts comes out of Alameda County — which receives about 7,000 parolees a year — and which has paid particular attention to the health and mental health needs of the formerly incarcerated.

Newsdesk News

Newsdesk.org Receives Major Grant

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[Download a PDF of this press release]
Newsdesk.org has been selected by the Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation to receive a $25,000 grant in support of the nonprofit, public-interest news service News You Might Have Missed (NYMHM). The Foundation’s generous gift will be used to develop NYMHM as a daily service that can earn income through syndication; this will support the production and promotion of important but overlooked news, and help improve coverage of underserved communities. A Vision for New Public Media
Syndication is at the heart of the LOCAL.NEWSDESK.ORG proposal to create new public-media infrastructure for local/regional journalism, at a time of crisis for the news industry. Local.Newsdesk.Org is a 2009 finalist in the WeMedia/Changemakers “Pitch-It” contest. It envisions a network of independent but affiliated online news bureaus that put professional journalists to work, and connect them more effectively to their communities.