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A Return To The Goal Of Reforming Inmates (The Los Angeles Times says two out
of three California parolees get sent back to prison within two years, and
some officials are reconsidering the discredited idea of rehabilitation -
known these days by aliases such as life skills, job training, and drug
treatment. Of the 160,000 inmates locked away in California's 33
penitentiaries, more than half will be getting out in the next two years.
Whenever prison experts, victims and politicians debate crime and punishment,
one of the assumptions is that rehabilitation has been tried and it failed.
But the history of rehabilitation in California shows that even in its heyday
it wasn't practiced on a wide scale.)
Date: Sun, 6 Jun 1999 09:29:24 -0700
From: owner-mapnews@mapinc.org (MAPNews)
To: mapnews@mapinc.org
Subject: MN: US CA: A Return To The Goal Of Reforming Inmates
Sender: owner-mapnews@mapinc.org
Reply-To: owner-mapnews@mapinc.org
Organization: Media Awareness Project http://www.mapinc.org/lists/
Newshawk: Jim Rosenfield
Pubdate: Tue, 1 Jun 1999
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 1999 Los Angeles Times
Contact: letters@latimes.com
Fax: (213) 237-4712
Website: http://www.latimes.com/
Forum: http://www.latimes.com/home/discuss/
Author: Mark Arax, Times Staff Writer
COLUMN ONE
A RETURN TO THE GOAL OF REFORMING INMATES
Officials Reconsider The Discredited Idea Of Rehabilitation As Two Out Of
Three California Parolees Are Back In Prison Within Two Years.
CORCORAN, Calif. - The white prison van pulled up to the train stop in
Corcoran, in the shadow of the big grain silos, and out walked two young
inmates just released from the state penitentiary down the block.
They were headed back home to Los Angeles, but there was one piece of
business left to transact with the guard setting them free. They each put
down their wrinkled grocery bag of worldly accumulations and reached out to
grab an envelope with two $100 bills tucked inside.
The wind blew one bill down the tracks and the tall inmate smiled nervously
as he tried not to seem too anxious about picking it up. They had no words
of wisdom about the toll of living inside America's deadliest prison or
their chance for success on the outside. "I'm just trying to go home," said
the shorter one, a barrio tattoo scrawled into his neck.
He cinched his belt tighter as the Amtrak train came to a slow halt. Then
the guard shook their hands and aboard they climbed, crossing the thin
divide between prisoner and parolee, between ward of the state and your
next-door neighbor.
The same scene, more or less, plays out each day in prison towns up and
down the state. Of the 160,000 inmates locked safely away in California's
33 penitentiaries, more than half will be getting out in the next two
years. Their prospects - and by extension ours - are not bright. In almost
every instance, studies show, the state is sending them home without the
skills to succeed - often illiterate, hooked on drugs and lacking any
education or job training to speak of.
Many are going straight from maximum-security cells and round-the-clock
lockdowns to a world of liberty without any real preparation or transition,
just the $200 in "gate money." The chance of a parolee committing a new
crime or violation in two years and crossing back over the line has been
rising and is now more than two out of three, statistics show.
In an effort to slow this revolving door of crime and the budget-busting
growth of prisons, the idea of rehabilitation is making a comeback of
sorts, three decades after becoming a dirty word. Known these days by
different aliases - life skills, job training, therapeutic drug treatment -
the notion of equipping inmates for success beyond bars is finding
acceptance again among penal experts and politicians of all stripes.
If the punishment pendulum hasn't quite moved to the middle, it has begun
to quiver. For the first time in a generation, the state Legislature has
significantly expanded inmate work and education programs, as well as
in-prison drug treatment and community after care. The increased funding,
though still slight, began in the Wilson administration and is projected to
grow under Gov. Gray Davis. The shift comes in the wake of studies showing
that inmate remedial programs do work.
"Nobody likes folks sitting in their cells with nothing to do, and right
now we have too many inmates who aren't involved in any programs," said Cal
Terhune, director of state corrections. "But we are making progress. In the
past few years alone, our drug treatment beds have gone from 400 to almost
5,000.
"We're seeing a push from the Legislature and the administration to find
some legitimate work training and educational programs that will cut down
on the number of parolees committing new crimes." The deprivations of
California's high-tech prisons - the recent push to take away more and more
basic privileges and just plain human contact - makes inmates dismal
candidates for good citizenship, corrections officials, legislators and
inmates agree.
Every few months, it seems, in San Luis Obispo one week and Rancho
Cucamonga and Modesto the next week, another parolee is caught up in
another heinous crime. And for every sensational headline, scores more
never make the papers - drug offenders and petty thieves caught red-handed
trying to feed their addictions and shipped back to prison to share cells
with murderers and rapists.
A Consensus Among Liberals, Conservatives
California is hardly unique in churning out convicts whose only honed skill
seems the ability to victimize again. Voices now urging a better balance
between punishment and programs can be heard across the country. But
because California boasts the nation's largest prison population and one of
the highest recidivism rates, a consensus has begun to build among prison
experts and top corrections officials past and present, liberal and
conservative.
They say that the state's focus on ever more harsh punishment - coupled
with the absence of remedial programs - has served California poorly. In
society's collective anger, they say, people seemed to have forgotten that
they can't lock 'em up and throw away the key forever, at least not for the
majority of convicts. At some point, sooner than later, they are ours again.
The choice is stark: a fast-growing prison system that will gobble up
spending for education and other cherished programs or one that makes a
better distinction between violent and nonviolent criminals and pays more
than lip service to drug treatment, job training and education.
"To attack crime, we need apprehension, detention and prevention, and in
recent years we've neglected prevention strategies," said state Atty. Gen.
Bill Lockyer. "We have two kinds of state convicts: the violent sociopath
for whom no remedial effort will work and the screwup who can be reached
through programs. Unfortunately, we've failed to distinguish between the
two." But even as the Legislature and the Davis administration have dipped
their feet in the waters of rehabilitation, some legislators want to make
life harder for convicts. Believing that prison isn't punishment enough, a
handful of Democrats and Republicans are trying to take away family visits
and television.
The state prison guard union supports television as an important pacifier
for inmates, but Assemblywoman Sally Havice (D-Cerritos) has introduced a
bill to ban TV and overnight family visits. The bill, which is stuck in
committee, states that such privileges send the wrong message to crime
victims and their families.
"Prisoners are in prison to be punished," said Joseph Cruz, a legislative
staffer who helped write the bill. Havice "also feels that TV isn't
teaching these prisoners anything." Many corrections experts such as Ray
Procunier, a champion of the death penalty who directed California prisons
for Gov. Ronald Reagan, see this as a serious miscalculation. Neglecting
inmates is one thing, he said, fueling a pentup rage is another.
"The politicians got no business making rules for prisons, that's the job
of the warden and the director," said Procunier, who went on to head four
other state prison systems during a 33-year career. "When they're watching
TV or exercising at least they're not stabbing anyone. Hell, we need some
carrots as well as sticks to keep them in line." Whenever prison experts,
victims and politicians debate crime and punishment, one of the assumptions
is that rehabilitation has been tried - and it failed. But the history of
rehabilitation in California shows that even in its heyday it wasn't
practiced on a wide scale.
What passed for inmate jobs in the 1960s were mostly janitorial tasks:
sweeping tiers, bringing hot water to cells, taking out kitchen garbage.
Less than 15% of the inmate population received academic education or
vocational training. A 1969 legislative report detailed machine shop
equipment that was "old and obsolete," the teaching of vocational skills
that were "often antiquated" and prison jobs that offered "little more than
idleness." Jim Esten worked as a vocational instructor teaching offset
printing at Soledad State Prison in 1973 and later watched the program's
demise. He said rehabilitative efforts did fall short but that today's
programs don't even pretend to reform inmates.
"Programs that utilize tools such as sheet metal and machine shop are now
deemed a threat to the security and safety of the institution," Esten said.
He said the vocational training of the past not only taught a viable trade
but helped ease racial tensions, with blacks, Latinos and whites working
side-by-side.
"What was so amazing was seeing all these guys who would never think of
eating together in the main dining hall suddenly sitting down next to each
other in the vocational dining room," Esten said. "Work made them feel good
about themselves and each other." Jerry Enomoto, corrections director from
1975 to 1980, said rehabilitation became linked with "fuzzy-headed
liberals" and that criminologists, some working from half-baked data, began
debunking programs aimed at reducing recidivism. "Nothing works" became an
easy catch phrase.
"Common sense just got lost in the turmoil of heinous crimes," said
Enomoto, who oversaw a system of 35,000 inmates, a quarter the size of
today's giant population. "In an environment of fear, it's hard for people
to be anything but scared and hollering for longer terms and more prisons.
Meaningful job and vocational training becomes hard to do." The death of
rehabilitation came in the late 1970s in the move from indeterminate to
determinate sentencing and the adoption of a system that classified inmates
not by their potential to reform but by the security risks they posed.
Overnight, as prisons such as Soledad took on a new role as keepers of
violent and high-risk prisoners, the machine shop and other programs closed
down because of security concerns.
At the time, the move from fluid to fixed sentencing was a rare coming
together of conservative and liberal voices. Conservative supporters of
fixed sentencing pointed to convicts who had been paroled too early only to
kill or rape again. Liberals had their own poster boys for fixed
sentencing, inmates with perfect prison records but who had remained behind
bars at the whim of the parole board.
Corrections officials from that era say that determinate sentencing removed
disparities. No longer was one inmate doing 25 years and another inmate
five years for the same crime. Unfortunately, they said, it also removed
judgment and flexibility from the process.
In the old system, inmates tried to impress the parole board with shiny
records of work and education. In the shift to determinate sentencing, many
of the incentives to achieve are gone. Whether an inmate has proven
himself, the clock typically dictates when he gets out. And no matter the
crime, parole is three years of supervision by agents so overwhelmed with
80 or more cases that they often lose track of the parolee.
Today, even if a convict is so inclined, the holes in job training and
education are so vast that little meaningful rehabilitation takes place,
according to interviews with inmates and corrections officials and
government studies.
The state's watchdog Little Hoover Commission concluded last year that
politicians and the public have so demonized convicts and fixated on
punishment that they have forgotten some basic math of public safety: Half
the inmates in state prison get out every two years; two of every three
come back before completing parole. A quarter of those returning have
committed new crimes, the remainder have violated some term of their parole.
Prison Population Is Soaring
The prison population, swelled by the three-strikes initiative and other
mandatory sentencing laws, is already double its design capacity, the study
found. If present trends continue, the number of men and women behind bars
will grow from 160,000 to 218,000 in the next seven years.
"It was the fact that half the inmates get out and more than half quickly
return, and the costs of those numbers, that really struck both Republicans
and Democrats on the commission," said James Mayer, who wrote the report on
the watchdog commission's year-long study.
It is no wonder that parolees are failing, he said. Seventy-five percent
have no job, 85% are substance abusers, 50% are illiterate.
Recidivism is practically built into a system in which less than 20% of
inmates are in academic programs or vocational training, the study
concluded. Prison industry jobs - producing furniture, milking cows,
grinding optical lenses - employ just 4% of the population. By far the
largest share of "programmed" inmates work as cooks, cleaners and
groundskeepers.
Although the Department of Corrections measures every inmate for security
risks, it fails to assess which programs could help them stay out of
prison, the study found. The effort to help inmates make a transition back
into the community is little more than a lecture about how to get a
driver's license.
"I've been back and forth to prison five times, done 16 years and what the
system calls 'job training' and 'continuing education' is a pathetic
excuse," said Johnathan Wilkerson, 40, who was paroled from Corcoran this
year after serving 12 years for robbery and attempted murder.
Inmates at High Desert State Prison in Susanville, for instance, say that
their desire to get job training has been frustrated by repeated 24-hour
lockdowns and a teacher shortage. Some inmates have waited more than a year
to get into a high school equivalency class. To fill the librarian slot,
the prison recently brought over the plumbing instructor. That forced the
plumbing class to shut down.
Gone, too, are the weight piles and the horseshoe pits and three sets of
bleachers - all removed in the name of making the prison harsher. "When I
want to read, I've got nowhere to sit because of the snow or the mud," one
Susanville inmate wrote The Times. "So I just read walking in circles, as
does everyone else." The penal system doesn't have to churn out inmates
destined to fail, prison reformers say. Rehabilitation, if staffed properly
and matched with the right inmates, does change lives and proof can be
found at the R.J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego.
In a corner of the medium-security facility, the Amity drug treatment
program has cut deeply into recidivism rates, according to the Little
Hoover Commission, the bipartisan agency that investigates state
operations. Correctional staff were skeptical of the 200-bed therapeutic
program based on the old Synanon model of group living and rigorous
encounter sessions. But after several months, surprise drug tests showed
drug addicts and gang leaders were staying clean even though drugs could be
easily purchased through the prison underground.
A year after completing the program, 66% of participants had stayed out of
prison, compared with only 34% of inmates not receiving treatment, studies
showed. State officials cited the program's success as a major reason for
opening an 1,800-bed drug treatment facility at Corcoran two years ago.
"If we can duplicate that success, the economic savings is huge," Lockyer
said.
Some respected criminologists and sociologists continue to cast a wary eye
at programs designed to change the behavior of convicts, arguing that the
criminal lifestyle is often deeply ingrained. Whether nurture or nature,
the bent toward crime is not easily deterred, they say.
Inmates who have succeeded on the outside say the public needs to
understand that most convicts must be taught like children, and that prison
is just about the worst environment to reform someone.
Renny Jones, who spent seven years in prison for arson, has parlayed his
inmate clerking skills into a good job with AT & T in Los Angeles. Married
and the father of two sons, he coaches basketball and teaches at his church.
But Jones, 40, said he never forgets that he is an excon, that he could
slip up any time. "It's a daily battle. People have to understand that the
skills needed to survive in prison are the very skills you have to give up
on the outside." "In prison, if someone walks by and brushes your leg, you
just can't let it rest or the next guy walking by is going to pinch you
somewhere else. It's an environment where you just can't go in and do your
time quietly. You have to answer every challenge, every single one. The
first time you don't answer it, it will answer you," he said.
Felix Gonzales, 46, has been clean for six years after being imprisoned
nearly half his life for drug crimes. The Bay Area resident said he owes
his survival to a residential drug treatment program for parolees in San
Francisco. The Milestones program slowly reintegrated him into society. He
now works as a roofer and a substance abuse counselor.
"I was a maniac but most of all I lacked self-esteem," he said. "It took a
lot of hard, hard work but I really enjoy my life today. Everything seems
to be in great balance." James Park, a former assistant warden at San
Quentin, said society has to stop looking for a magic bullet. A good
education program might save five out of 100 inmates and a counseling
program might save another 10. "Everything can work but nothing works
100%," he said. "Five percent here and 10% there and pretty soon you've got
some real numbers adding up."
[SIDEBAR]
California's Revolving Prison Door
More than two-thirds of felons on parole return to prison within two years.
Most returning convicts have violated parole terms and go back to prison
for an average sentence of six months. But a quarter of returning parolees
have committed a new crime and get a longer sentence.
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Why Your Child Could Wind Up In Jail (The June issue of Redbook magazine says
parents who are shocked to learn that their kids are hooked on drugs are even
more shocked by what happens when they cry for help. For every three
Americans in treatment, another six need help but can't get it. Only about a
sixth of all prisoners who urgently need treatment receive it, and the
treatment they do receive is inadequate. While criminal penalties aren't
discouraging drug use, they are discouraging some users from getting help,
even when it's a matter of life and death.)
Newshawk: Support MAP!
Source: REDBOOK
Copyright: 1999 Hearst Communications Inc.
Contact: redbook@hearst.com
Editorial address: 224 W. 57th St., New York, NY 10019
Website: http://www.redbookmag.com
Fax: (212) 247-1086
Pubdate: June, 1999
Author: Tessa Decarlo
REDBOOK REPORT: WHY YOUR CHILD COULD WIND UP IN JAIL
* Parents who are shocked to learn that their kids are hooked on drugs are
even more shocked by what happens when they cry for help.
Imagine that your child has a potentially fatal disease that's eating him
alive.
Now imagine that the only way to get him the treatment he needs is to have
him thrown in jail.
Even today, June Gertig, a lawyer living in Herndon, Virginia, can't quite
describe how heartsick she felt when she had her drug- and alcohol-addicted
son - then just 14 - arrested. "How do you feel when police - that you
called! - come and take your kid away in handcuffs, and all your neighbors
are watching?" she says. 'When you're wondering if your kid is going to be
raped in jail? When you honestly do not know if you have done the right
thing or some-thing so wrong that God will hold you in his sights forever?"
Like most of us, Gertig had never given much thought to U.S. drug policy.
She and her husband, Joseph, a social science researcher, live in a
well-to-do suburb of Washington, D.C., and their two older children
survived adolescence with no more than the usual bumps and scrapes. When
their youngest turned unhappy and defiant in junior high, flying into rages
and refusing to follow even basic rules, the worried couple took him to
individual and family therapy and had him evaluated for depression. Even
after they'd caught him drinking and smoking marijuana, they didn't want to
believe that substance abuse was the source of his problems. And none of
the therapists they consulted even raised the possibility. "We were
exhausted, angry, ashamed, and utterly terrified"' Gertig says. "But drug
addiction is so stigmatized, many parents prefer to believe their child has
a mental illness."
Meanwhile, their son was getting worse. He screamed obscenities at his
parents and punched holes in walls. He rarely attended school and got into
fights when he did. As his world fell apart, so did his family's. "Terrible
things came to seem normal," Gertig says. "I used to say, 'But at least
he's never hit me,' as if that were a measure of success. You look back,
and you can't believe what you put up with."
Finally, a therapist advised the Gertigs to send their son, by now a ninth
grader, to a drug and alcohol treatment program. But they soon discovered
that getting successful treatment is extraordinarily difficult. Programs
are scarce and vary widely in philosophy and quality, so finding the right
one can be a matter of trial and error. And treatment is expensive. Most
health insurance plans either refuse to cover it or offer minimal coverage,
limiting life-time benefits to $5,000, say, versus $1 million for other
illnesses. And treatment often doesn't work the first, second, or even
third time, particularly with adolescents. Within just a few months, the
Gertigs had liquidated their retirement accounts paying for four different
programs, including a one-week hospital stay, an intensive daily outpatient
program, and 30 days in a facility for addicts.
In treatment, the boy gradually revealed how out of control his young life
had become. Besides using large quantities of alcohol and marijuana, he had
taken psychedelics and committed a number of petty crimes his family
prefers not to discuss. Yet no single program seemed to work. Periods of
good behavior were followed by relapses and further treatment attempts.
"Looking back, I can see that things improved, slowly and sometimes
erratically," Gertig says. "But at the time it seemed like a roller coaster
of dashed expectations."
The desperate couple decided their son needed a longer stay in a
residential program, but they'd already spent more than $50,000 trying to
help him and couldn't afford the $30,000 or more that private treatment
would cost. Luckily, their county is one of the few in Virginia to offer a
publicly subsidized six-month residential program for adolescents. But -
like most public programs - this one had a long waiting list, six months or
more. The only way to get their son admitted sooner was to have a juvenile
court judge send him there.
The Gertigs by now knew enough about their son's activities to have grounds
for calling the police, but first they had to struggle with their own anger
and fear. "To get your kid what he needs to get better, you have to send
him to jail-imagine if they did that for diabetes!" Gertig exclaims. "But
at least my husband and I are white, middle-class professionals, and we
were fairly sure that if we turned in our son he would get treatment,
rather than prison time. If we were poor or black, I'm not sure we would
have taken the risk."
Even so, a treatment bed for their son didn't open up until three months
after his arrest. Their son was furious about being left in custody during
the long wait. "I didn't think we could keep him safe anywhere else,"
Gertig says. She was right to be scared. Six weeks after he was arrested,
he was sent home under house arrest (against the Gertigs' wishes) to wait
out the next month and a half. Despite his parents' vigilance, he managed
during that time to "huff" inhalants to the point of unconsciousness.
But when he finally did enter treatment, it worked - because of the longer
stay, Gertig believes, and a better fit between patient and program. Now
19, her son has completed high school, is working full-time, and is going
to college at night. He and his parents are proud of his recovery, but June
Gertig is still angry. "The way our country deals with substance abuse is
madness," she says. "We spend our resources on criminalizing drug use, not
preventing it or helping people recover from it."
A DISEASE OR A CRIME?
For June Gertig, an important moral of her family's story is this:
Addiction is a disease that can be treated successfully.
There is extensive research showing that chemical dependency is remarkably
similar to diabetes, high blood pressure, and other chronic ailments often
caused by a combination of poor choices (unhealthy diet, smoking, lack of
exercise) and genetic susceptibility. Recent studies show that addiction
alters the biochemistry of the brain and that relapses are the predictable
result, not of moral collapse, but of those biochemical changes. Further,
when addiction is treated as a chronic brain disease, those changes can be
reversed. Last year, a group of prominent doctors affiliated with Brown
University presented conclusive evidence that addiction can be controlled
with a mix of medication, therapy, and behavioral changes - and that such
treatment works at least as well as similar strategies for treating diabetes
and other chronic diseases.
Whatever the scientific evidence, addiction still looks to many Americans
more like a crime than a disease. Of the $17 billion federal anti-drug
budget, only 20 percent is spent to help people stop using drugs; most of
the rest goes to law enforcement. Drug arrests have pushed the U.S. jail
and prison population to over 1.8 million people, of whom an estimated 1.2
million are alcohol or drug abusers. Few of these people are violent,
high-level dealers: More than 90 percent of all drug arrests are of
nonviolent offenders guilty only of possession or of dealing small
quantities to support their own habits.
While some families, like June Gertig's, must criminalize their loved ones
in order to help them, many more people in the grip of addiction are being
slammed with criminal penalties instead of getting help.
When he was 19, Tim Bobby of Valparaiso, Indiana, discovered that his
heroin sniffing had slipped into full-fledged addiction. He and his mother,
Susan, had been trying to arrange for treatment when one of his friends
called, begging for help obtaining drugs. It turned out to be a police
setup, and Tim was arrested with two packets of heroin, each about the size
of a pea. Though he'd never been in trouble with the law before, he was
charged with felony drug dealing and threatened with 20 years in prison.
Susan Bobby, a systems analyst and single mom - had enough savings to hire
a good attorney - who got the sentence reduced to three years in prison
(which Tim has just finished serving), plus four years probation.
Unlike most prisoners (see "Treat or Punish? Do the Math," next page), Tim
managed to get treatment behind bars and began working on a college degree.
But his status as a convicted felon will brand him for life and bar him
from realizing his ambition of becoming a lawyer. His drug offense will
also disqualify him for federal college loans. "This isn't the way to deal
with a kid's drug problem,' his mother fumes. "It's just a jobs program for
jail guards.'"
THE REAL CASUALTIES OF THE DRUG WAR
Paradoxically, the get-tough approach has had little impact on the nation's
drug problem. Over the past decade, the rate at which people are using and
becoming addicted to drugs has not changed. And illegal drugs, says Ernest
Drucker, editor of the medical journal Addiction Research, are "cheaper,
more powerful, and more available today than at any time in the past 25
years."
Even more alarming, the number of young people experimenting with heroin
and other hard drugs has been rising steadily. "By the time they leave high
school, almost 50 percent of kids will have tried at least one illegal
drug," says Kendra Wright of Family Watch, which monitors the impact of
drug policies. Criminalizing drug use, she argues, just compounds its
consequences. "Does it make sense to ruin their lives over a few moments of
rebellion and poor judgment?"
Andy Baltzell of Yukon, Oklahoma, was caught with $90 worth of amphetamines
after a friend who asked for help getting drugs turned out to be a police
informant. The slight, sweet-faced 21-year-old had been arrested once
before for being in a car with someone else who had a small quantity of
drugs in his pocket; his second offense got him sent to prison for 15
years. "He wouldn't ever talk about it, but I believe he was gang-raped in
there," says his mother, Judy Chancellor. He attempted suicide twice, then
was moved to a maximum-security facility where he often refused to leave
his cell for weeks at a time. He was released after four years for good
behavior, but his ordeal left him deeply depressed. "He said, 'I don't feel
like a man anymore,'" his mother recalls bitterly. "Ten months after he got
out, he took his life."
Chancellor now lobbies for mandatory treatment instead of jail for
low-level drug offenders. "It's been six years since my son's passing, but
I don't want to let society, lawmakers, any of them forget," she says. "The
real crime is what we're doing to nonviolent offenders like Andy."
While criminal penalties aren't discouraging drug use, they are
discouraging some users from getting help, even when it's a matter of life
and death. As a result, drug-related deaths have quadrupled over the past
20 years. One victim was Jared Lowry of Houston, who, like Tim Bobby,
thought he could experiment with heroin without becoming addicted. When
Jared tried to get help, his family discovered that their insurance didn't
cover a suitable program, so Jared tried to quit on his own. Hoping to make
a fresh start, he moved to Austin, Texas, found a job, and seemed to be
doing well.
Then, just a few weeks after his twenty-first birthday, his mother,
Jennifer Daley, got the kind of phone call every parent dreads: Her son had
died of a heroin overdose. She later learned that Jared's relapse probably
wouldn't have been fatal if he'd gotten medical attention. But instead of
calling 911, his friends had driven him around town for several hours
trying to revive him. "They drove right by a hospital, but they didn't take
him in," Daley says. "I think they were too scared of what might happen to
them."
Daley might have tried to get her son's friends prosecuted for his death.
Instead, she is working with Family Watch on a memorial for Jared and other
young overdose victims in Houston this fall, an event she hopes will draw
attention to the dangers of punitive drug laws. "What's the point of making
other parents unhappy by taking their kids away?" she says. "I'd rather try
to change people's minds about the billions of dollars our country is
wasting on policies that don't protect our children."
THE VALUE OF A UFE
Maia Szalavitz, now a New York writer and television producer, is a former
cocaine and heroin addict whose drug use spanned the mid-1980s, when AIDS
was in the headlines but little was being done to help addicts avoid the
terrible risk they took each time they used a dirty needle. She points out
that one of the most insidious costs of the drug war is the continuing spread
of AIDS and hepatitis C by addicts sharing needles, which they often feel
compelled to do because of laws against needle possession. Needle exchange
programs, which provide drug users with clean needles, have been proven by
a series of government funded studies to dramatically reduce the spread of
disease without increasing drug use. There are now 113 such programs
nationwide, but many politicians - including President Bill Clinton -
oppose them, arguing that needle exchanges send a 'soft on drugs' message.
Szalavitz did not contract HIV during her years of use, but she knows her
escape was a narrow one and resents the assumption behind opposition to
programs like needle exchange - that addicts are expendable, that they will
never recover. "I was outraged that in their eyes my life meant so little."
Jo Anne Engelbert, a college professor in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, says
her son is a casualty of such callousness. He struggled with drugs during
his school years, went into treatment after he graduated from high school,
relapsed, and took off for the other side of the country. "He realized if
he stayed here he was going to break my heart," she says. After five years
in California, much of it spent living on the streets, he called his mother
and asked her to help him reclaim his life. Fortunately, she'd continued to
pay for his health insurance, which covered a second course of treatment.
Her son has been clean and sober for ten years, but as a result of sharing
needles he is HIV positive.
Engelbert recently told her story at a rally protesting New Jersey governor
Christine Todd Whitman's ban on needle exchange. "I spoke about the horror
of a person wanting to give up addiction and coming out of this season of
hell with HIV," she says. "I talked about how politicians like Whitman are
willing to write off huge numbers of people who are dehumanized, demonized,
and allowed to die. After I spoke, my son threw his arms around me and we
both cried."
NO MORE SECRETS
One reason we may be slow to recognize the worth of these young addicts is
that we rarely hear the success stories of people like Szalavitz. Secrecy
is a tradition in the recovery movement, but it comes at a high cost. In
1996, a bill was introduced in Congress that would have required health
plans to cover addiction and mental illnesses equally with other medical
conditions. The mental health part of the bill passed easily, but parity
for drug treatment was quickly jettisoned. "We were told that the mental
health side got 3,000 phone calls," recalls Robin Ihara, friend of Gertig's
who'd gone through a similar ordeal with one of her sons. "The substance
abuse side got three." Recovered addicts and their families weren't seen as
vote-casting constituency.
That is beginning to change. In the fall of 1997, Gertig helped found the
Substance Abuse and Addiction Recovery Alliance (SAARA), which quickly
attracted several hundred members across northern Virginia and was among 18
fledgling groups in 15 states to receive a grant last year from the federal
Center for Substance Abuse Treatment.
Virginia may soon become the sixth state to pass a bill requiring insurers
to cover drug treatment, thanks at least in part to support from SAARA
members. (At press time, the bill needed only the governor's signature.)
And though she is not a demonstrative person, June Gertig agreed to testify
last summer before the U.S. Senate in support of a similar federal bill.
While her story is one most families would probably prefer to keep to
themselves, Gertig has come to believe that openness is essential to
solving the drug problem. "If I can't say who I am, then I'm encouraging
the stigma surrounding addiction instead of fighting it," she says. "People
need to know that when they talk about addiction, they are talking about my
family and people like us."
[Sidebar] FOR HELP:
Center for Substance Abuse Treatment www.treatment.org 800-662-HELP
Drug Policy Foundation www.dpf.org 202-537-5005
Family Watch www.familywatch.org 703-354-4002
Lindesmith Center www.lindesmith.org 415-921-4987
November Coalition www.november.org 509-684-1550
[Sidebar] TREAT OR PUNISH? DO THE MATH
For every three Americans in treatment, another six need help but can't get
it. Only about a sixth of all prisoners who urgently need treatment receive
it, and the treatment they do receive is inadequate. Annual cost to
incarcerate One addict: $25,900. Annual cost to provide long-term
residential treatment for one addict: $6,800. Cost to decrease U.S. cocaine
consumption 1 percent by eradicating sources of supply: $783 million. Cost
to decrease cocaine consumption 1 percent by increasing drug treatment: $34
million. Tax payer savings for every $1 invested in drug Treatment: $7.46.
How much your insurance premium might go up if treatment for addiction were
covered equally With other illnesses: 0.2%.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
A Crime Against Women (The June issue of Glamour magazine says Amy Pofahl's
MDMA-kingpin husband cut a deal that dumped her in prison for a quarter
century, and freed him after four years. She and thousands of other women
guilty of relatively minor crimes end up doing more time than men due to a
controversial federal law, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, and particularly
a 1998 amendment adding "conspiracy" to the list of offenses covered.)
Date: Mon, 31 May 1999 22:02:35 -0700
From: owner-mapnews@mapinc.org (MAPNews)
To: mapnews@mapinc.org
Subject: MN: US: A Crime Against Women
Sender: owner-mapnews@mapinc.org
Reply-To: owner-mapnews@mapinc.org
Organization: Media Awareness Project http://www.mapinc.org/lists/
Newshawk: Support MAP!
Source: Glamour
Copyright: 1999 Conde' Nast Publications, Inc.
Pubdate: June 1999
Contact: Letters@Glamour.com
Fax: (212) 880-6922
Mail: Glamour, 350 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10017
Websites: http://www.swoon.com/ http://www.phys.com/
Note: Websites of mentioned organizations:
Criminal Justice Policy Foundation
http://www.cjpf.org/
The Sentencing Project
http://www.sentencingproject.org
Families Against Mandatory Minimums
http://www.famm.org/
A CRIME AGAINST WOMEN
You Be the Jury: Does This Woman Deserve To Be Locked Up For 24 Years?
A harsh law punishes women unjustly and lets drug lords off easy.
Amy Pofahl's Drug-Kingpin Husband Cut A Deal That Dumped Her In Prison For
A Quarter Century - And Freed Him After Four Years. Glamour Investigates
How She And Thousands Of Other Women Guilty Of Relatively Minor Crimes End
Up Doing More Time Than Men Due To A Controversial Federal Law.
HERE IS AN INTENSE CALIFORNIA SUN on the morning. I pass the two rows of
gleaming razor wire, the metal-detector arch, the armed guards and two
vault-like doors before arriving at a brick patio inside FCI Dublin, a
low-security womens' federal correctional institution outside of Oakland.
Amy Pofahl stands on the other side of the terrace, her feet next to a
patch of pansies with a sign stuck in it that reads, "No Inmates Allowed
Beyond This Point." She was once an exceptional beauty and a very wealthy
woman, and even in her regulation beige work shirt and slacks, she is still
striking - graceful and leggy, with silken hair that drapes her shoulders
in countless shades of gold. With her top two buttons undone, revealing a
glimpse of her simple white T-shirt, she looks like she is ready to leave
on a safari, which couldn't be further from the truth. Amy last saw freedom
eight years ago, when she was a 30-year-old nightclub promoter in Los
Angeles. Now, the toll of her long incarceration shows on her face,
particularly on her lazy eyelids, which are as creased as crackled pottery.
As the warden's assistant and I approach Amy, he points to her neckline and
commands, "Button your shirt." She complies with a slow hand. Later, she
whispers to me, "Being in here is very much like that. Everything starts to
focus on these little things like how to wear your shirt. And whenever
you're trying to focus on something that's maybe going to get you
free....." Then her eyes leave mine, and she flutters the long fingers of
her right hand in the air, pawing for emotional control.
Amy Pofahl broke the law, but she is not a hardened criminal. Like
thousands of women in prison today, she is a once-productive member of
society who made a series of bad decisions, all for a man she loved.
Unbeknownst to Amy, for most of the time she was married to him, Charles
"Sandy" Pofahl - a Stanford University Law School graduate and wealthy
Dallas businessman with whom she exchanged rings when she was 25 and he was
44 - was the mastermind of a secret and illegal international syndicate that
made and distributed the drug MDMA, or Ecstasy. Sandy revealed his
involvement to Amy after his arrest on February 16, 1989, three years into
their marriage. But then he begged her to handle some financial matters
that she felt might be shady while he awaited trial. Out of love, she
agreed. "I have the kind of personality that was just right for him to rely
on," she explains. "It's a flaw in my character. I'll jump off and do
things and ask questions later."
It's bad enough that Amy became criminally embroiled in an operation her
husband ran and had kept her in the dark about. What's worse is that Sandy
Pofahl, an Ecstasy kingpin who directed nearly two dozen accomplices to
smuggle millions of pills into America, served just four years in prison.
Amy Pofahl, his blindly loyal wife who did nothing even remotely like that,
got 24 years with no chance of parole.
Women Bear the Burden
It is a peculiar facet of the federal sentencing guidelines that women,
many of them young, who are convicted in drug rings often draw much longer
sentences than men. Almost always, their connection to the drug ring is as
a gofer, delivery person or patsy for the men they love. As a result, there
are more women in prison today than at any time in the nation's history.
The latest data, from July 1998, shows that 146,507 women are serving time
in federal, state and local facilities, up from 63,015 a decade earlier
Nearly half of that increase is drug-related, according to the Bureau of
Justice Statistics, part of the U.S. Department of Justice. This is
certainly the most unanticipated and least logical consequence of the war
on drugs.
At the height of crack cocaine's terrible march through American cities in
the mid-eighties, entire neighborhoods succumbed to crime of such violence
and scope that it seemed as if the fabric of American civilization was in
danger of unraveling. Congress responded by passing The Anti-Drug Abuse Act
of 1986, which removed sentencing discretion from federal judges and
established a schedule of mandatory-minimum prison sentences in drug cases,
based solely on the type and quantity of drug involved. The only way
defendants can earn a "downward departure," or reduced sentence, is to give
substantial assistance in the prosecution of other drug dealers.
The Anti-Drug Abuse Act has drawn sharp criticism, largely because it
penalizes low-level participants and drug users as harshly or - as in Amy
Pofahl's case - more harshly than people guilty of running major drug
operations. The mandatory-minimum sentences established by the Act have
been slammed by the American Bar Association, the U.S. Sentencing
Commission, Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and an
astonishing 86 percent of federal judges. Barry R. McCaffrey, the four-star
general who heads the Office of National Drug Control Policy, has called
mandatory minimums "bad drug policy and bad law," and decried the fact that
they dominate the drug-war budget: Some $35 billion a year are spent on
incarcerating drug convicts, many of whom McCaffrey considers mere foot
soldiers for big-time dealers.
Even the congressional staffer who wrote the law, Eric Sterling (now
president of The Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, a Washington, D.C.,
think tank), works tirelessly today to undo his legacy. "The statute has
been profoundly misused," he says. "The price has been a tremendous
injustice and a tremendous tragedy for the [less culpable] individuals,
their children, their parents, their siblings and their spouses."
The Price of Loyalty
The primary reason women have been hit hard by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act is
that the original statute was amended in 1988 to add "conspiracy" to the
list of offenses covered. Technically, a conspirator knows about criminal
activity and has agreed to participate. But federal prosecutors have been
able to convict people they believe simply should have known about the
ongoing crimes, says Marc Mauer, an authority on crime trends at The
Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group. Frequently,
that means the wife or girlfriend of a dealer ends up behind bars, says
Monica Pratt, of the national organization Families Against Mandatory
Minimums. "Almost half of the women in prison today under mandatory-minimum
sentences have been convicted of conspiracy. Taking messages for a drug
dealer, driving him to a bank to deposit his money - that can make you just
as liable as the dealer," she says.
In part because of the crackdown on "conspirators," the female prison
population is growing faster on average than the male population - 7
percent versus just 4.5 percent a year since 1990. Also, of the 8,207 women
currently serving time in federal prison, 60 percent have been convicted of
drug charges.
Casualties of the drug war include women such as Kemba Smith, 27, a former
Virginia debutante. She ended up facing the same stiff penalties as some of
the principal dealers in her college boyfriend's drug ring, even though
evidence at her sentencing showed that he beat her, and that out of fear,
she sometimes participated in illegal activities for him. She was convicted
not of specific crimes related to those few incidents, but for many
offenses the drug ring had collectively committed. At the age of 24, she
was sentenced to 24-and-a-half years without parole. By comparison, the
average maximum sentences that state courts handed down for rape and
robbery in 1996 were 11-and-a-half and eight-and-a-half years,
respectively, while the average minimum state sentence actually served for
rape was only six years, and for robbery, five.
Why are women like Pofahl and Smith receiving such long sentences? Because
when wives and girlfriends are caught in the net, especially, if they
genuinely know little about the drug operation, they seldom have the kind
of information to trade for a "downward departure." So the law that was
meant to crush drug-world master-minds actually rewards them with shortened
sentences, while their less culpable sweethearts are vigorously punished.
Even if women have information to trade for reduced sentences, however,
they often decline to cooperate out of loyalty. In 1989, Serena Nunn, now
29, refused to inform against her boyfriend, Ralph Nunn (no relation), a
member of a Minneapolis drug ring. "I would not hurt someone else to save
myself," Serena said. "I'm just not made like that." For her minimal role,
she got a 16-year sentence. Had she informed on her boy friend, she might
have received as few as eight months. Instead, Marvin McCaleb, a senior
partner in the drug ring, informed on Ralph Nunn, who received a 25-year
sentence. McCaleb, who had previously been convicted and served time for
manslaughter, major drug dealing and rape, got seven years - less than
half Serena's sentence.
In response to such cases, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif ), a long-time
advocate of Kemba Smith, introduced a bill in Congress last month to
eliminate mandatory minimums. "If you had to define injustice at the turn
of the century," says Eric Sterling, "these cases are Exhibit A: the
girlfriends of king-pins who get sentences that are two and three and four
times longer than the guys who head it all up."
The End of Innocence
Amy Pofahl was once a shy girl from little Charleston, Arkansas, where her
mother was the newspaper editor and her father served a term as mayor. She
preferred her 4-H Club activities to dating, and only begrudgingly attended
her junior and senior proms. That changed when, after a year of college,
she moved to Dallas, a 19-year-old with dreams of becoming a model. At a
party in March 1985, she struck up a conversation with another guest, Sandy
Pofahl. He was 19 years older, a balding businessman who reminded her of
Gene Hackman. But he had tremendous magnetism. "I was feeling emotions I
never felt before. I thought he was the greatest thing in the whole world,"
Amy says.
A few days later, they met for dinner at Cafe Pacific, one of Dallas'
finest restaurants, and he handed her an Ecstasy tablet. Although it was
sold legally as a diet aid at the time, Ecstasy is a psychedelic drug, like
LSD, that fosters feelings of intimacy and love. Popularized in the
eighties by San Francisco marriage therapists, it was sold in night clubs
and herb shops until it was outlawed in October 1986. Using the drug
tightened the bond between Amy and Sandy. They were engaged within eight
days and married before the year was out. "She called and said, 'You're
just going to love him. He's my soulmate!'" recalls Amy's mother, Nancy
Ralston. "When we met him and realized he was not a big, handsome man, I
thought, It must be love!"
He bought Amy a blue Mercedes and made her sales vice president of one of
his businesses, Commonwealth Bancorp, specializing in home-improvement
loans. She earned $4,000 a month plus commission.
Sandy Pofahl was one of the frenetic entrepreneurial high-fliers who
distinguished Texas in the eighties. He had graduated from Stanford before
storming the business community in Dallas. By the time he met Amy, he owned
or co-owned businesses including a mortgage lending company, an oil and gas
business, a computer software company, a computer hardware company, a real
estate brokerage and a half-dozen other concerns. He and Amy lived in a
sprawling home in Highland Park, Dallas' most exclusive suburb, and
traveled the world. "These were people who in Texas we call highfalutin,"
says an attorney familiar with the case. And though Amy says they never
tried any harder drugs, the Pofahls continued taking Ecstasy at a time when
it was exceedingly popular and entirely legal.
Sandy entered the Ecstasy business in early 1985, several months before he
and Amy were married. Together with Morris Key, Ph.D., a Dallas chemist,
Sandy established Ecstasy International Export and Import Organization
(EIEIO) and sank nearly a million dollars into start-up costs. Their main
plant was in Guatemala, and they employed a network of above-board
distributors. In October of 1986, however, Ecstasy was added to the Drug
Enforcement Agency's (DEA) list of illegal drugs. Despite this, Amy says
neither she nor Sandy stopped taking it occasionally. Still, Amy has
consistently said she was unaware that Sandy and Key continued with their
business, and her protestations seem credible: "Sandy went from one
business meeting to another, all day long. It was impossible to keep up
with his affairs," she says. "it was like being Jane Fonda married to Ted
Turner." EIEIO eventually established production contacts in Germany, where
it was easier to get the necessary materials, smuggling millions of
?pills? into America over the next two years, according to federal
authorities. "I knew he had access to Ecstasy, and he had said he could get
as much as he wanted, but I didn't think he was manufacturing it," Amy says.
Meanwhile, their marriage was crumbling. Friends say Sandy had a drinking
problem, which fueled grossly inappropriate behavior. "I couldn't stand
him," remembered Cathy Johnston, a friend from North Dallas. "It seemed
like anytime you'd even get close to him, he'd try to touch you, I found
him obnoxious. But Amy was in love with the creep."
In love or not, by January 1988 Amy had had enough of Sandy's drunken
flirtations. She moved to Los Angeles, leaving Sandy behind. She thrived
there, and was soon throwing such glamorous parties in her home that the
owners of Tramp, the exclusive Hollywood supperclub that Jackie Collins
opened, hired her as their promoter. She earned $80,000 a year and hosted
celebrities from Jean-Claude Van Damme to Eddie Murphy. "She knew
absolutely everybody," says a soap opera star who befriended her then and
still keeps in touch. "I liked her independence; I loved that she was out
there doing this on her own."
But Sandy's spell was not easily broken. He wrote letters with lovelorn
salutations like "Dear Better Than Bestest" and visited her often. He even
signed the lease on a $42,000-a-year house in the Hollywood Hills to be
close. His campaign worked. "If Sandy could get within a 20-foot radius of
me, he could just completely melt my heart," she says.
Amy agreed to move into the rented home with him, but before she did, Sandy
left on a mysterious business trip to Germany. A week later, on February
16, 1989, he was taken into custody by German federal agents. Two days
later, his partner, the chemist Key, was arrested in New York City and
extradited to Germany for trial. When word of the charges reached Amy, she
was blown away - not by her husband's criminal activity, but about the
danger the man she adored was now facing. "I was going to do whatever I
needed to do to help him. I didn't care what he'd done," she said.
Kept in the Dark
Other members of the EIEIO drug ring were rounded up by the DEA, but many
didn't even know Amy Pofahl's name. When agents from the U.S. attorney's
office interviewed her husband and Key in their German prison, both said
that Amy - like all wives and girlfriends - was told nothing about the
Ecstasy operation. Daniel Bernard, one of Sandy's main U.S. distributors,
would later write in an affidavit: "I never believed Amy to be
knowledgeable as to the particulars. Quite the contrary. I personally
observed numerous attempts made by Mr. Pofahl to shield Amy from his MDMA
enterprise, and I aided his endeavor to hinder Amy from knowing about the
operation."
But after Sandy's arrest, Amy, who had moved into the rented house alone,
became very involved. Sandy anticipated (wrongly, as it turned out) that he
would be offered a chance to post bail. So he sent his wife a series of
coded faxes imploring her to help recover his hidden drug profits and
cryptically telling her where to find them. Amy wanted him out on bail
badly enough to take the risk. "What kept going through my mind is that
incarceration is worse than losing someone to death," she says, fighting
back tears. "You know that they're unhappy, and you know there's nothing
you an really do." Besides, she convinced herself that as his wife trying
to help him ferret out cash, she would not be breaking any laws. The crime,
she reasoned in her distress, remained his responsibility.
In any case, by the end of the summer of 1989, she had collected more than
$780,000 from the various places Sandy had stashed it, and had hidden the
cash in attics and shoe boxes in Dallas and Los Angeles. But then she found
out that Sandy would not be offered bail, and she was stuck with the dirty
cash. "The money," she says, "became this enormous albatross."
Having secretly monitored Amy's actions, federal authorities descended on
her one afternoon in September 1989. She arrived home to find agents
rifling through her things. The list of seized items included six Ecstasy
tablets found in one of Sandy's coats and $7,000 in cash earmarked for rent
on the house, which, of course, was leased in Sandy's name. She recalls an
agent saying, "You're in deep, sister."
One who questioned her was Charlie Strauss, an assistant U.S. attorney from
Waco, Texas. "She was told we were just interested in what knowledge she
had, and we wouldn't use it against her husband," Strauss remembers. "Had
she come to the table at that time - cooperated, been truthful, honest and
candid - I would say there's a probability she wouldn't have been
prosecuted." Amy says she didn't believe them. She says they wanted her to
visit Sandy to collect incriminating information. (Strauss could not
confirm this.) Out of love and respect for her marriage, she says, she
refused.
Sandy, it turned out, had fewer compunctions. In exchange for a promise of
leniency, he soon told German and American authorities everything he knew
about the operation, from the street dealers to the smugglers. He also
offered information about his wife's handling of his money. Rewarding him
for the assistance, German authorities handed him a six-year sentence.
Sold Out and Set Up
In a vague note he sent to Amy, Sandy told her he'd come clean about
everything, and encouraged her to cooperate, too. She was livid that she'd
covered for him for no reason, but she did nothing. She did not know how
much trouble she was in. "Once they had him and he had told them
everything, I was sure they didn't want me anymore." On the contrary, they
were building a major case against her based upon her husband's sworn
statements. Federal authorities seized her car and plundered her bank
accounts, asserting that the money was ill-gotten. They even confiscated
her wedding ring. Agents asked Tramp regulars if they'd ever seen her
dealing drugs. Nobody had, but she lost her job anyway.
For about 19 months, federal agents kept on the pressure, and Amy nearly
broke down. Her bank account empty and her credit cards canceled by the
bank, she started spending the money she had collected at Sandy's behest.
Early in 1990, she says, she asked her attorney to tell the authorities
that she would direct them to the remaining cash if they in return would
stop investigating her. Strauss says the message never got to him. "Either
she's lying, or she misunderstood, or somebody's given her some
misinformation," he says. "But those overtures never came to us."
Fearing that her arrest was imminent but still convinced of her own
innocence, Amy fled. She recognizes in retrospect that this was a mistake,
but at the time, she says, sitting around and waiting to be indicted was
just too stressful. "Every time I tried to do something to make it better,
I got in deeper. I never made a right decision in this whole thing." On the
lam for about three months, she found her way to Florida. But the isolation
from friends and family soon caused her to despair, so she headed back to
Marina Del Rey resolved to fight. Agents from the DEA arrested her thereon
March 27, 1991, and charged her with conspiracy to import and distribute
MDMA and money laundering. She was shipped to Waco, Texas, to await trial.
Her court-appointed attorney, John Hurley, urged her to plead guilty in
hopes of a reduced sentence. She refused. "How would you like to be told
you need to plead guilty to something you feel you're absolutely positive
you didn't do?" she asks rhetorically.
At trial, there was no evidence that she ever had direct contacts with
Ecstasy manufacturers or importers or personally sold the drug after it
became illegal. But her efforts to retrieve her husband's money were well
documented. Sandy, still in his German jail cell, was not called to testify
by prosecutors. He wrote to Hurley, pleading with the lawyer to be called
as a witness on Amy's behalf. For some reason, Hurley did not take him up
on the offer. (Hurley refused to comment for this article.) A jury of eight
women and four men found Amy guilty on all counts. According to the
mandatory-minimum sentencing laws, her involvement in the "conspiracy" made
her just as culpable as if she had built the organization herself. Unable
to weigh her relative conduct, a federal judge was forced to hand Amy a
24-year sentence. If she had been found guilty of money laundering alone -
the only charge alleging her direct involvement - she would probably have
received a sentence of just five years.
Today, even the prosecutor, Charlie Strauss, seems chagrined that Amy
received such a harsh punishment. "I don't think Amy was the linchpin
here," he says. "If she were not married to Sandy, she would not have done
this. She got involved through her association with him."
Life Behind Bars
At FCI Dublin, Amy Pofahl shares a closet-size room with another prisoner,
their beds just a foot apart opposite a sink and an open toilet. Amy has
been an exemplary prisoner with only two minor reprimands, the more serious
for feeding sardines to the cats that dart between the squat prison buildings.
Amy has had plenty of time to reconsider her actions. She now concedes that
the government's money-laundering case against her, charging that she
removed and spent money from Sandy's vaults, is valid. "From my soul, I
knew that the money was illicit, and I did spend it, and if that
constitutes money laundering, absolutely. Absolutely, I regret it," says Amy.
"I've thought about the whole thing a million times," she continues. "It's
going to sound phony, but it's really truth - I just feel now that my
loyalties were displaced."
Sandy Pofahl, meanwhile, served only four years and three months in a
German prison, and although the authorities there expected him to serve
another 17-and-a-half years behind bars in America, the Justice Department
elected not to require more time because he had cooperated with U.S.
authorities. He left prison in 1993 and spent two years in the Netherlands,
while his attorneys confirmed that he would not be prosecuted in America.
He returned in 1995 and has since rebuilt his legitimate business empire in
Dallas. The first time Amy heard anything from him after her conviction was
two years ago, when she was served with divorce papers. After 12 years of
marriage, Sandy cited irreconcilable differences.
In a guarded, hour-long phone interview with Glamour, Sandy Pofahl rejected
any responsibility for Amy's incarceration. He put the onus on her, despite
his well-documented pleas for Amy to retrieve his ill-gotten cash. (Sandy's
faxes asking for Amy's help were used as evidence against both of them.)
"She had a need to help," he says, explaining Amy's attempts to free him
from a German prison. "I went over to Germany, and I truly don't know what
happened when I was over there." Asked why he chose a divorce filing as his
first contact with her after his release, he said: "I was considering
getting married ... so I needed to divorce her. It was important for both
of us to get our lives going."
Sandy finally visited Amy a year and a half ago when he was in the San
Francisco Bay area for a school reunion at Stanford. She agreed to see him
because she had questions: Why had he told authorities about her role
gathering up his funds? Why had he implicated her instead of protecting
her, as she had protected him? They sat beneath a craggy pine tree on a
terrace behind the FCI Dublin visitors center. He was nervous. She was
suspicious. When he tried to kiss her on the side of the head, she pulled
away. "It was heartless," Amy recalls. "I said, 'Sandy you could clarify a
few things for me!' He was dead set against it and wanted to talk about
surface stuff. I said, "In case you haven't noticed, there's razor wire
around this little place where I live. Stop acting like we're sitting at a
sidewalk cafe in Los Angeles, because I would really like to talk to you
about some of the things that happened."'
Sandy showed no sign of guilt or remorse, Amy says. Regardless, she harbors
no anger - at her ex-husband, the prosecutor or anybody else. But it is
harder for her mother, Nancy Ralston, to let go "I pray that I will not be
bitter. But its difficult, it's very difficult."
Endless Sentence
Only one other target of the EIEIO prosecution besides Amy is still behind
bars. Amy herself has filed two appeals citing incompetent legal counsel
and plans to seek other remedies, but in truth, her chances of early
release are slim. If she serves the full term of her sentence as expected,
she'll be 55 years old when she gets out in 2015. Even if she were set free
tomorrow, Amy would have already spent twice as many years behind bars as
her husband, a fact she knows will never be changed.
"I have regrets, of course I have regrets," Amy tells me on the last day of
our prison visit, her voice heavy with emotion. "I'm getting to the period
in my life where I just feel like I'm losing my youth and the opportunity
to have children and to set up some kind of a future. I lost the prime
years of my life. Nothing's worth losing that, nothing."
-------------------------------------------------------------------
When They Get Out (The June issue of Atlantic Monthly features a sequel to
the magazine's December cover story, "The Prison-Industrial Complex." The
politics of opinion-poll populism has encouraged elected and corrections
officials to build isolation units, put more prisons on "lockdown" status,
abolish grants that allowed prisoners to study toward diplomas and degrees,
and generally make life in prison as miserable as possible. People haven't
become more antisocial; their infractions and bad habits are just being
punished more ruthlessly, without any thought about rehabilitation. Since
fewer than 10 percent of prisoners are sentenced to life, we can expect that
more than 90 percent of prisoners will be released. Without making
contingency plans for it - without even realizing it - we are creating a
disaster that instead of dissipating over time will accumulate with the
years.)
Date: Sun, 23 May 1999 20:15:57 -0700
From: owner-mapnews@mapinc.org (MAPNews)
To: mapnews@mapinc.org
Subject: MN: US: When They Get Out
Sender: owner-mapnews@mapinc.org
Reply-To: owner-mapnews@mapinc.org
Organization: Media Awareness Project http://www.mapinc.org/lists/
Newshawk: Tom O'Connell
Pubdate: June, 1999
Source: Atlantic Monthly, The (US)
Copyright: 1999 by The Atlantic Monthly Company.
Contact: letters@theatlantic.com
Website: http://www.theatlantic.com/
Author: Sasha Abramsky
Page: 30
WHEN THEY GET OUT
How prisons, established to fight crime, produce crime - a sequel to our
December cover story, "The Prison-Industrial Complex"
by Sasha Abramsky
P0PULAR perceptions about crime have blurred the boundaries between fact
and politically expedient myth. The myth is that the United States is
besieged on a scale never before encountered, by a pathologically criminal
underclass. The fact is that we're not. After spiraling upward during the
drug wars, murder rates began falling in the mid-1990s; they are lower
today than they were more than twenty years ago. In some cities the murder
rate in the late twentieth century is actually lower than it was in the
nineteenth century. Nonviolent property-crime rates are in general lower in
the United States today than in Great Britain, and are comparable to those
in many European countries.
Nevertheless, horror stories have led to calls for longer prison sentences,
for the abolition of parole, and for the increasingly punitive treatment of
prisoners. The politics of opinion-poll populism has encouraged elected and
corrections officials to build isolation units, put more prisons on
"lockdown" status (in which prisoners are kept in their cells about
twenty-three hours a day), abolish grants that allowed prisoners to study
toward diplomas and degrees, and generally make life inside as miserable as
possible. Marc Mauer, the assistant director of the Sentencing Project, an
advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.. says, "Fifty years ago
rehabilitation was a primary goal of the system." Nowadays it's not. "The
situation we're in now is completely unprecedented," Mauer says. "The
number going through the system dwarfs that in any other period in U.S.
history and virtually in any other country as well." In 1986, according to
figures published in the Survey of State Prison Inmates (1991), 175,662
people were serving sentences of more than ten years; five years later
306,006 were serving such sentences. People haven't become more antisocial;
their infractions and bad habits are just being punished more ruthlessly.
Crime, however, is a complex issue, and responses to it that might
instinctively seem sensible, or simply satisfying, may prove deeply
counterproductive. Locking ever more people away will in the long run
increase the number of Robert Scullys in our midst.
Robert Scully grew up near San Diego. in the affluent town of Ocean Beach.
From a very early age he used drugs, and before he was a teenager, he had
been on the streets and then in juvenile facilities run by the California
Youth Authority. From heroin use and dealing he moved to robbery; by the
time he was twenty-two, in the early 1980s, he was in San Quentin. In
prison Scully degenerated, eventually using a contraband hacksaw blade to
escape from his cell, and attacking another other inmate with a homemade
knife.
At about the same time, California began opening what it called maximum
security facilities - dumping grounds for troublesome inmates. Scully wound
up in solitary confinement in a prison named Corcoran. The guards there, as
recently reported in the Los Angeles Times, are alleged to have taken it
upon themselves to organize gladiatorial combat among prisoners in the
exercise yard; they would sometimes break up the battles by shooting into
crowds of prisoners. Scully was shot twice. He was placed in a "security
housing unit" cell, where for close to twenty-three hours a day he was
deprived of all human interaction. In 1990, soon after the "supermax"
prison at Pelican Bay had opened in the redwood forests northeast of the
old Victorian timber town of Crescent City, Scully was moved again, into a
tiny bare cell with a perforated sheet-metal door and a hatch through which
his food was served. In the supermax even exercise was solitary. He stayed
there four years. At the time of his release, in 1994, he had spent the
previous nine years in isolation. A month later he was arrested for
violating parole by consorting with an armed acquaintance, and went
straight back to Pelican Bay.
Scully re-emerged on March 24, 1995, by now a human time bomb. He was
picked up by Brenda Moore, the girl friend of a fellow inmate, and they
began driving south, along Highway 101, toward San Diego, where Scully was
supposed to check in with his parole officer. They never made it. Five days
later they arrived in Sebastopol, a town an hour north of San Francisco.
There, late at night, they loitered around a restaurant until the owner,
fearing a robbery, called the police. The pair drove off to a nearby
parking lot. Soon after, as they sat in their truck, Deputy Sheriff Frank
Trejo, a middle-aged grandfather looking forward to his retirement, pulled
into the lot.
Trejo asked to see the woman's license, and as she fumbled for it,
according to investigators, he suddenly found a sawed-off shotgun pointing
at his face. He was made to back up until he was between the two vehicles
and get on his knees, and Scully shot him in the forehead. Scully and Moore
ran across a field, broke into a house, and took a family hostage. The next
afternoon, with police surrounding the area, Scully negotiated his surrender.
Robert Scully evolved into a murderer while housed in Pelican Bay. There he
experienced some of the harshest confinement conditions known in the
democratic world. Highly disturbed to start with, he was kept in a sensory
-deprivation box for years on end. Psychologists and psychiatrists called
in by his defense team believe that he simply lost the ability to think
through the consequences of his actions. He became a creature of brutal and
obsessive impulse. At Scully's trial Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist who
has spent much of his career studying the effects of isolation on
prisoners, and who has testified in class-action lawsuits against
departments of corrections across the country, argued that sensory
deprivation and social isolation had caused Scully to regress until he was
a violent animal capable only of acting on instinct, with no ability to
plan beyond the moment. His incarceration had created what Grassian termed
"a tremendous tunnel vision." Pelican Bay Chief Deputy Warden Joe McGrath
estimates that every month thirty-five inmates are, like Scully, released
from isolation directly back into the community.
Since 1985 America's prison population, not counting the more than half a
million people in jails at any one time, has increased by about six or
seven percent yearly. Truth-in-sentencing laws mandate that many prisoners
serve 85 percent of their sentences before being eligible for parole; all
the same, figures over the past decade indicate that on average more than
40 percent of prison inmates are released in any given year. Assuming that
these statistical relationships remain constant, we can make certain
predictions. In 1995 a total of 463,284 inmates were released. To use a
worst-case scenario, some 660,000 will be released in 2000, some 887,000 in
2005, and about 1.2 million in 2010. Even factoring in lower release rates
because of three-strikes laws and truth in sentencing and even taking into
account estimates that 60 pet-cent of prisoners have been in prison before,
there will still be somewhere around 3.5 million first-time releases
between now and 2010, and America by then will still he releasing from half
a million to a million people front its prisons each year (not to mention
hundreds of thousands more from short stints in Jail). That is an awful lot
of potential rage coming out of prison to haunt out future.
0N a gray morning in September, with the tropical storm Frances hovering
over the Gulf Coast, I rode with Larry Fitzgerald, the sixty-vear-old
public relations officer for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, to a
parking lot deep inside the Estelle Unit of the Huntsville Complex, seventy
miles north of Houston. Surrounding the car was a landscape of rolled
razor-wire fences, surveillance cameras, bleak watchtowers, and gray
concrete buildings. Fitzgerald told me that he was tired; the previous
evening he had attended an execution, his sixtieth in the five years he
had been with the department. We got out of the car and flashed our IDs at
the camera. A series of heavy electronically operated doors clicked open,
one after another. We went through one, and it closed behind us before a
second opened. We entered a sterile hallway lit by fluorescent ceiling
lights, the air smelling the way one would expect it to smell in a place
where the outside had been utterly banished. There the warden and several
hefty corrections officers met us and we proceeded into the bowels of the
prison, away from outdoor light, away from outdoor sounds, deep into the
computer-controlled hidden hell at the heart of America's burgeoning
incarceration establishment.
There are up to 660 men living in isolation behind the metallic-blue and
Plexiglas doors of the Estelle Unit's admininistrative segregation
cells, the high-security facility at Huntsville that opened in August Of
1997. (Texas is currently developing five "Supermax" units that will
eventually hold more than 3,000 people.) Depending on their status - there
are three levels - men get from three to seven hours of exercise a week, and
from two to eight hours of visits a month. The rest of the time they remain
in their cells.
"The scurity here," Fitzgerald told me with satisfaction. "is better than
Alcatraz. Alcatraz didn't have the electronic things we have now. The art of
incarceration has definitely improved." The inmates, disciplinary cases from
the broader prison system, are men removed not just from the outside society
but from the rest of Texas's 140,000-plus prisoners, as close to being
vanished spirits as any resident of a medieval dungeon. On them is being
performed one of the most astounding social experiments in America's history:
isolated for about twenty-three hours a day in bathroom-sized quarters, fed
through hatches in their doors, provided with virtually no sensory stimuli
for months or years on end, deprived of full meals as punishment for breaking
rules, made to dress in paper gowns if they dare to rip up their uniforms,
many quite simply seem to go insane. While I was touring the unit, a
desperate prisoner "self-mutilated," slashing at the veins in his hands until
his blood spurted over the walls, the floor, and the steel seat of the cell
he was in, like a peculiarly vivid Jackson Pollock painting.
The inmates are often tormented by headaches. Many quite clearly can no
longer focus their thoughts on anything. Some weep, others obsess; the more
resilient, like David Prater, a twenty-six year-old lifer who has a degree
in finance from the University of Texas, read as much and as often as
possible to while away the days. But they are a minority. The average IQ of
Texas prison inmate is 92, and many do not even know how to read. From what
I could tell, many of those guarding them aren't much smarter. As prisoners
from the nearby low-security unit mopped up the blood from the cutting,
guards made jokes about the "mutiIator." An officer with the rank of
captain assured me that all the inmates were pschologically assessed when
they came into Estelle, that if they were mad they would be at the
psychiatric unit upstate, and that since they were here, ipso facto, they
weren't mad. As he completed this logical circle, the entire "Level 3"
unit behind us was rent by the howls and screams of the close-to-naked
inmates. It was a hideous sound that would have been familiar in the
lunatic asylums of bygone centuries. For the French philosopher Michel
Foucault, who explored the histories and social functions of both the
asylum and the prison in Western culture, the similarity would probably
have iluminated his notion that both institutions function at least in
part to reassure the outside population of its "normality" in contrast to
the horror caged within.
WILLIAM Sabol, a researcher at the Urban Institute, in Washington. D.C.,
think tank, has recently begun studying imprisonment and release statistics
for ninety metropolitan areas. Over the next few years he will focus on
releases in Baltimore, a city with a very high incarceration rate,
exploring the effects of release on different communities. For Sabol, the
biggest concern is not that already devastated inner cities will be further
damaged but that certain strugging blue-collar areas and middle-class black
districts, of whose young men large numbers have been imprisoned during the
war on drugs, wiII be unable to reabsorb the ex-cons while retaining their
civic character. "When these men return," Sabol explains, "they're less
likely to get jobs and there's a higher likelihood of disruption of the
family. What we're interested in is will it tip the scales against those
neighborhoods that are marginal?" Faced with a growing population of
ex-felons. people with resources will probably flee these communities,
thereby expanding the areas of devastation.
Since fewer than 10 percent of prisoners are sentenced to life, we can
expect that more than 90 percent of prisoners will be released. Releasing,
over several decades, millions of people who either never acquired job
skills or lost their skills in prison, and all will face employers'
uspicion, is almost guaranteed to produce localized but considerable
economic problems. Currently, among black men aged twenty-five to
thirty-four with less than a high school education, the jobless rate is
around 50 percent. If those in prison and jail are included, the figure
rises above 60 percent. If incarceration rates ever start to drop, and
fewer people are entering prison than are being released, then according to
the most basic principles of supply and demand, wage levels in areas
already suffering chronically high levels of unemployment will plummet as
the competition for scarce jobs increases.
The sociologists Bruce Western, of Princeton University, and Katherine
Beckett, of Indiana University, are convinced that the economic problems of
mass release actually run much deeper. In January of this year they
published a paper titled "How Unregulated Is the U.S. Labor Market? The
Penal System as a Labor Market Institution," in which they argued that one
of the reasons America's unemployment statistics look so good in comparison
with those of other industrial democracies is that 1.6 million mainly
low-skilled workers - precisely the group least likely to find work in a
high-tech economy - have been incarcerated, and are thus not considered part
of the labor force. Rendering such a large group of people invisible, the
authors claimed, creates a numerical mirage in which unemployment
statistics are as much as two percent below the real unemployment level,
and which has been made possible only by what Beckett terms an American
"intervention in the economy - the growth of the prison system comparable
financially to Western Europe's unemployment benefit and welfare programs."
If mass imprisonment is what the urban scholar Mike Davis, in his book
Ecology of Fear, terms "carceral Keynesianism - using prison building and
maintenance as an enormous public-works program to shore up an economy in
which blue-collar jobs have been exported to the Third World - then mass
release may well prove its undoing."
Eddie Ellis, a onetime Black Panther who was recently released after
serving out a twenty-five-year sentence for murder, believes that the
cities are sitting on volcanoes. Now a full-time organizer in the
Harlem-based Cominunity Justice Center, Ellis told me when we met that
starting around the year 2005, New York is going to see the release of wave
after wave of inmates, at the rate of about 30,000 a year who were
incarcerated after 1990. "That's when they began phasing out the programs
(education in prison, vocational training, and the like). By 1994 to 1995
they no longer existed. These are the people we're talking about coming out
in such a horrendous condition. The next wave that comes out, we're looking
at a serious influx of people into a few communities that not only will
devastate these communities but will have a larger consequence for the
whole city." The welfare reforms of 1996 drastically curtailed felons'
access to welfare money, and specifically barred addicts from access to
Medicaid and many drug-rehabilitation programs. Ellis predicts rising
epidemics, as ex-prisoners without work or Medicaid spread TB, HIV, and
hepatitis.
To complete a grim picture, wholesale incarceration decimates voter rolls.
In all but four states prisoners convicted of felonies lose the right to
vote. In more than thirty states they can reapply only when they're off
parole. Those who find work while on parole will-like much of the black
population of the pre-civil rights South-be paying taxes into a political
system stern in which they have no say. In California alone, close to a
quarter of a million people are disenfranchised by such laws.
The situation is even worse in twelve states - almost half of them southern -
where a felony can result in disenfranchisement for life. The history of
these disenfranchisement laws can he traced straight back to the post-Civil
War South: because of the dispropoitionate number of black men in prison
today, the laws continue to affect not just individuals but the aspirations
and political influence of entire communities. In a study released last
October, the Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group
based in New York, reported that theoughout the country two percent of
adults, or approximately four million people, are disenfranchised: within
the black nmale community the figure is 13 percent, or 1.4 million men. In
seven states - Alabama, Florida, Iowa, Mississippi, New Mexico, Virginia, and
Wyoming - fully a quarter of all black men are permanently, ineligible to
vote. In Florida alone 204,600 black men, and in Texas 156,600 black men,
have lost the vote.
The political implications for the next century are troubling. Already the
inner cities, where on an average more than a quarter of all black men are
disenfranchised, have seen their power as voting blocs shrivel. And since
today's young are tomorrow's old, the problem can only get worse. 1n 1997
the Justice Department estimated that 29 percent of black males born in
1991 would spend some time in prison. Only four percent of white males
would do so. In some cities in the states in which convicted felons are
pemanently disenfranchised, as older, pre prison-born blacks die out, the
proportion of black men of all ages who lack the right to vote will rise to
about one third by 2020. 1n certain parts of sonic Southern cities - Houston,
Memphis, Miami and New Orleans, for example - it may be as many as half.
Conceivably, an overwhelmingly black town could have an electoral register
dominated by a white minority.
Quite simply, mass incarceration followed by mass release into
subcitizenship will undermine the great democratic achievements of the past
half century. In effect, even if not in intent, after the brief interregnum
of the civil rights years, the South, with the rest of the country in tow,
is once again moving toward excluding huge numbers of African-Americans
from the political process. Marc Mauer, of the Sentencing Project, says,
"It's a wonder there's any black representation at all, given the numbers."
RECENTLY I met several ex-prisoners in New York City who were putting their
lives back together under the auspices of the Fortune Society, a nonprofit
organization that runs one of the country's most successful and intensive
post-release programs. Some of the people I met had done terrible things:
others had merely taken foolish wrong turns. Regardless, talking with them
gave each one a human face. It helped me to understand that most of these
ex-cons are damaged people with hopes and fears and dreams that perhaps can
be coaxed out of them in a nurturing environment like Fortune's.
The most extraordinary of the people I met was a thirty-nine-year-old named
Edmond Taylor, who had served a total of eighteen years in a variety of New
York's toughest prisons for crimes ranging from drug dealing to violent
assault. Out of prison for the past couple of years, Taylor has dedicated
himself to change; he works full time as a counselor, helping other
prisoners to adjust to life on the outside, and he is regarded by Fortune's
executive director, JoAnne Page, as one of her great success stories.
Taylor came to meet me straight from counseling a distrauaht woman who'd
been told at a job interview that the company wouldn't hire her because she
had a felony conviction. He said, "If I can save just one person a year,
I'm happy."
A highly articulate man, more capable than most of understanding what led
him into violence and helped to destroy half his life, Taylor explained
that he had spent nearly four years in "the box," some of that time in
Clinton Dannemora prison, near the Canadian border, for being what he
described as "a vocal critic" of conditions within the prison. Describing
his reaction to being released from isolation back into the general prison
population, he said. "First there's fear, then there's anger, and the anger
takes over. It's violent anger. Very quick. No thought of the magnitude of
the consequence of the violence. An individual bumped me rushing to get to
the gym, and I rushed up behind him and hit him with a pipe. He went into a
coma." Taylor went straight back into the box. I asked how long it had
taken him to recover from isolation. He looked surprised by the question,
and said,"Honestly, I've still not recovered. I've been out of isolation
five and a half years. Ms. Page is my boss. If she was to confront me when
I had a lot on my mind, anger would come up before rational thought. Anger.
Strike back. Now it's not so much physical as verbal. In another situation
it would cause me to lose my job." Then Taylor told me a shameful secret.
Shortly after he got out of prison. he was living with his brother. His
brother criticized him for some of the attitudes he'd brought out of prison
with him. "I felt fed up, and I attacked him." Taylor said. "I grabbed him,
choked him, lifted him off his feet, threw him to the ground. I pummeled
him, causing him to get several stitches above the eye. I grabbed a kitchen
knife - I don't remember any of this: he told me afterward - and put it to
his neck and said, 'I should kill you. I hate you.' The realization that I
put my hands on my baby brother, the only person at that time who'd ever been
in my corner . . ."
Edmond Taylor sees a future of violent chaos, with a large, uneducat
