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By Michael Abramowitz
The heads of Greenville and Pitt County law enforcement met with community leaders and other city and county officials at City Hall on Wednesday for the first of several discussions about an initiative to help ex-offenders effectively re-enter and reintegrate into the community.
The discussion was hosted by Greenville Police Chief William Anderson, who said the police department is motivated by its directive to achieve City Council's primary goal of a safe community.
“From a more practical perspective, a re-entry program makes sense because these people are going to be released and come back into society,” Anderson said. “One of the established objectives is to create jobs and housing opportunities for adults and youth re-entering the community from the correctional system,” Anderson said.
The department has no experience with this kind of initiative, so it is taking the position of a facilitator, Anderson said. The hope is to bring the ideas together for experts to present a plan to provide job and housing opportunities for non-violent offenders to the city manager and council.
“We decided to gather experts in related fields who might bring ideas to the table, give us some idea how to approach this initiative,” Anderson said.
Among those invited to the discussion with key law enforcement officers were Merrill Flood, director of community development, city manager Wayne Bowers, Ernest Lee, outreach director for Pitt Community College, George Harris, of the county Department of Social Services, Joseph Dawson, of the Pitt County Development Department and Deborah Moody and Lessie Bass, both of the Lucille Gorham Intergenerational Center.
Joyce Jones, director of the nonprofit STRIVE program (Support and Training Result in Valuable Employees), which provides contracted job-readiness training for a broader segment of the population beyond ex-offenders, also participated in the discussion.
In their first meeting, Jones and the panel listened to Dennis Gaddy, founder of CSI (Community Success Initiative), a Raleigh-based organization that focuses on re-entry training for ex-offenders.
Gaddy, once a practicing attorney from Robeson County, served a six-year prison term in the 1990s for what he described as “poor financial decisions.”
His organization focuses on efforts to inspire people to discover their potential, set worthwhile life goals and take positive actions toward them, Gaddy said, based on a core set of principles for personal growth.
CSI focuses on “hard” and “soft” aspects of re-entry for ex-offenders, as Gaddy described them. In addition to practical vocational training, they are prepared with personal presentation and interactive skills, trained to fill out assessment documents and go through the application and interview process, he said.
Gaddy encouraged the panel to include ex-offenders in the planning stages of their re-entry program.
“You won't fully understand your program's needs until you hear from them,” he said.
He also recommended the use of services and agencies that are already working with people to provide the types of resources from which ex-offenders will need to draw.
“If an organization already has a resume writing class or skills assessment tools available, it makes sense to collaborate with them,” Gaddy said.
Anderson provided what he believes are some important reasons for the community to support efforts for a re-entry program.
“Recidivists commit, on average, at least two additional crimes before being rearrested and sent back to prison. An unemployed ex-offender is three times more likely to return to prison than one who is employed,” Anderson said.
The cost to the community would amount to an average of $35,000 per recidivist, he said.
Anderson was asked how he would respond to those who might see this approach to dealing with criminal as too unconventional for police involvement.
“This is an unconventional time. We've said before that we're going to have to do things differently and be creative. We can't just say we're going to lock them up and be done with it because that's not going to solve the problem,” Anderson said. “Why not come up with ideas to help ex-offenders succeed in life, so they don't go out and commit another crime?”
Once again, Anderson looked outward toward the community at-large to become involved and be receptive to change.
“To me, we have to look at the bigger picture. We could, as a community, stick our heads in the sand and say it's not our problem, but it is,” he said.
The chief praised the city council for embracing the idea of working with ex-offenders.
“The fact that this directive comes from the city council shows that they are progressive. They realize that we can't do things the way they've been done in the past. I happen to support them,” he said.
City Manager Wayne Bowers had an answer for taxpayers who might balk at spending their money on criminals while law-abiding people experience difficult economic challenges that are likely to worsen during the coming year.
“We don't want to give ex-offenders priority over other folks, but we need to give them a chance to compete for jobs,” Bowers said, “because it benefits all of us to keep them gainfully employed rather than supporting them in prison.”
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OMAHA, Neb. - Three people cleared in the 1985 rape and murder of a Beatrice woman have lost nearly 20 years of their lives to the state's prison system. They'll likely have to readjust to life on the outside without the state's financial help.
In some states, exonerated inmates are entitled to government compensation. But there's no such law in Nebraska, leaving the three to make it on their own.
Heather Weigand of the Life After Exoneration Program helps the wrongfully convicted rebuild their lives. She said there's evidence that exonorees experience the same trauma as torture victims and war veterans.
She backs the idea of payments to the exonorated. She says they're victims who are re-victimized by not having services available.
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BOSTON- Massachusetts' soaring prison population is renewing calls for changes to the state's mandatory minimum sentences.
Many of the sentencing laws were passed in the 1980s and 1990s, part of a national crackdown on drug crimes. One result is that inmates are remaining behind bars longer, driving up the prison population.
In 2003, there were less than 10,000 inmates in Massachusetts. The estimated population could top 12,000 next year. That's for a prison system with a capacity of less than 8,000.
Department of Correction Commissioner Harold Clarke said the steadily rising population of prisoners, many with no history of violence, will force the system to double-bunk inmates.
He said sentencing reforms could help ease the problem.
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By MELISSA HAYES
MOUNT HOLLY — County officials have suspended a work program that had prisoners washing linens from the Medical Examiner's Office after a jail employee filed an official complaint.
Three weeks ago, the county Medical Examiner's Office in Westampton began sending medical scrubs and linens, including some that contained blood, to the Burlington County Jail in Mount Holly for laundering.
“It was a cost-saving idea that was suggested,” said Ralph Shrom, a spokesman for the county Board of Freeholders. “The medical examiner indicated that they would screen to make sure anything that could be potentially hazardous was not sent there and actually was eliminated, thrown away.”
Shrom said a little over a week ago County Administrator Augustus Mosca received a letter from a jail employee who raised health concerns about prisoners laundering items with human blood on them.
Shrom said county officials do not believe the program is a health hazard, but have suspended it to investigate the complaint.
He added that the prisoners never actually washed any bloodstained linens, although that was the intention of the program.
“There was a bag of bloody linens that was sent to the jail and someone at the jail sent it back to the medical examiners,” he said, adding the prisoners declined to wash the items. “It wasn't laundered.”
Shrom said Mosca, who was not available for comment Friday, suspended the program pending further discussions with the county Health Department and Medical Examiner's Office.
A representative from Police Benevolent Association No. 249, which represents the corrections officers at the Burlington County Jail, did not return a call seeking comment.
Prisoners continue to participate in a work-release program at a laundry facility at Buttonwood Hospital in Pemberton Township.
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Inmates are interviewed by jailers in the booking office at the Harris County Jail, where officers maintain a database of inmates who tell jailers during booking that they are in the U.S. illegally.
Federal immigration officials allowed scores of violent criminals — some ordered deported decades ago — to walk away from Harris County Jail despite the inmates' admission to local authorities that they were in the country illegally, a Houston Chronicle investigation found.
A review of thousands of criminal and immigration records shows that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials didn't file the paperwork to detain roughly 75 percent of the more than 3,500 inmates who told jailers during the booking process that they were in the U.S. illegally.
Although most of the inmates released from custody were accused of minor crimes, hundreds of convicted felons — including child molesters, rapists and drug dealers — also managed to avoid deportation after serving time in Harris County's jails, according to the Chronicle review, which was based on documents filed over a period of eight months starting in June 2007, the earliest immigration records available.
Other key findings in the investigation include:
•In 177 cases reviewed by the Chronicle, inmates who were released from jail after admitting to being in the country illegally later were charged with additional crimes. More than half of those charges were felonies, including aggravated sexual assault of a child and capital murder.
•About 11 percent of the 3,500 inmates in the review had three or more prior convictions in Harris County. Many had repeatedly cycled through the system despite a history of violence and, in some cases, outstanding deportation orders.
The investigation found that the federal government's system to identify and deport illegal immigrants in Harris County Jail is overwhelmed and understaffed. Gaps in the system have allowed some convicted criminals to avoid detection by immigration officials despite being previously deported. The problems are national in scope, fueled by a shortage of money and manpower.
In reaction to the Chronicle's findings, U.S. Rep. Ted Poe, R-Humble, said ICE needs more resources to target immigrants convicted of crimes.
"There's no question about it," Poe said. "Criminals from foreign countries who get caught after committing a crime and prosecuted should go to the top of the list of people we deport."
ICE removed 107,000 convicted criminals from the U.S. in the 2008 fiscal year, which ended in September. But during the same time frame, ICE sent home more than two times as many illegal immigrants without criminal records, prompting criticism from some members of Congress.
Kenneth Landgrebe, ICE's field office director for detention and removal in Houston, said officials are doing the best they can with the resources they have. ICE trained nine Harris County jailers this summer through a federal program that empowers local law enforcement to act as immigration agents.
The Houston ICE office set a record by removing 8,226 illegal immigrants with criminal records from Southeast Texas last year, an increase of about 7.5 percent from fiscal 2007.
"No agency has enough law enforcement officers to do the job the way they'd like," Landgrebe said. "If you look at law enforcement in general — at Houston or New York City or Los Angeles police — do they apprehend every criminal that commits a crime? No. Do they arrest every person that speeds in a traffic zone? No.
"We have to prioritize what we handle," Landgrebe said.
ICE officials estimated that between 300,000 and 450,000 inmates incarcerated in the U.S. are eligible for deportation each year.
Though ICE has improved screening in federal and state prisons in recent years, the agency estimates it screens inmates in only about 10 percent of the nation's jails.
This spring, ICE officials announced a plan to identify and deport the most serious offenders in the nation's prisons and jails, estimating it would cost between $930 million and $1 billion and take about 3 1/2 years.
Congress is pressuring ICE to move faster.
"The present situation is unacceptable," said Rep. David Price, D-N.C., chairman of the House Homeland Security appropriations committee.
"The highest priority for ICE should be deporting people who have proven their ability and their willingness to do us harm. Immigration is a very, very contentious issue, but this seems to be one thing almost everyone agrees is a priority."
Yet, the Chronicle's review found hundreds of missed opportunities to deport convicted criminals, perpetuating a cycle of crime and violence.
•Armando De La Cruz, a Mexican national, told jailers on two occasions in 2007 that he was undocumented. Both times, he was convicted of assaulting his wife and released after serving his jail time. De La Cruz is now back in Harris County Jail, charged with raping a woman at knife point behind a southeast Houston apartment complex in July, and attempting to rape another woman less than a week later. His defense attorney, Ricardo Gonzalez, did not return phone calls.
•Pedro Alvarez, a convicted sex offender from El Salvador who was first deported in 1991, racked up eight convictions in Harris County over a span of two decades and was allowed to walk free from jail multiple times — as recently as the spring of 2007. Immigration officials finally charged him with re-entry after deportation in February. Sandra Zamora Zayas, the attorney who represented Alvarez in federal court in South Texas, did not return phone messages.
"It's just amazing how long it took them to catch up with him," the mother of a 5-year-old girl Alvarez sexually assaulted in 1988 said in an interview with the Chronicle, after learning about Alvarez's extended criminal history.
Miguel Mejia Rodriguez, 36, is locked up on the fifth floor of the San Jacinto Jail downtown, accused of raping and sodomizing a second-grader.
It is the fourth time in 12 years that Rodriguez, an unemployed drifter from Zacatecas, Mexico, has landed in Harris County Jail. Over the years, Rodriguez has served time for drug possession, theft, trespassing and indecent exposure. He told jailers he was in the country illegally in December 2006, after a security guard caught him touching himself in an apartment complex parking lot, records show.
But ICE officials did not file paperwork to detain Rodriguez. He was released after serving his 25-day sentence.
"I never lied about who I am, or where I'm from. I'm 100 percent Mexican," Rodriguez said in a jail interview with the Chronicle in September, after he was accused of the rape and sodomy of a 7-year-old.
According to court records, the girl told a friend Rodriguez started abusing her after her mother died in 2005, while he was living with her family.
The girl was hospitalized and treated for syphilis, court records show. In an interview with Houston police detectives, Rodriguez admitted to contracting syphilis from a woman he met in a Houston cantina, but he denied raping the girl. He said she was a "troublemaker" who lied because he punished her when she misbehaved.
When he was arrested on the sexual assault charge in July 2007, Rodriguez again told jailers he was in the country illegally, records show. In June, nearly a year after his arrest, ICE officials filed paperwork to detain Rodriguez, who is scheduled for trial in December.
Katherine Anne Bridges, deaf and mute, was just 19 in the fall of 2004 when she told Harris County authorities that Jeremias Fuentes, her boyfriend, tried to grab their 6-month-old baby boy from her arms and kicked her in the face. He hid her emergency phone so she couldn't call for help. Fuentes was sentenced to 20 days in jail.
Nearly three years later, in August 2007, Fuentes was arrested again, suspected of interfering with case workers trying to interview Bridges about abuse allegations. Fuentes, 36, told jailers he was an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, records show. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail. He was released after ICE didn't file paperwork to detain him.
On the morning of Nov. 26, 2007, a medical examiner puzzled over the writing scrawled on Bridges' palm. It read in part: "Payback because ... help me."
The evening before, Bridges' body had been found facedown in the bedroom closet of her southwest Houston apartment complex. She had blood in her brown hair and a dozen stab wounds on her face, neck, chest and back. A knife rested on the baby crib.
Detectives questioned Fuentes, who admitted he stabbed Bridges, but he said it was self-defense. In December, immigration officials filed the paperwork to detain Fuentes, who declined a request for a jail interview. He is scheduled for trial in February.
Andy Kahan, director of the Houston Mayor Crime Victims Office, said he hoped Bridges' case could be a ''catalyst for change" and encourage local authorities to work more closely with ICE to ensure inmates with violent criminal histories are vetted before release.
"There were numerous opportunities to do the correct thing, and that's have him deported, and that didn't happen. And as a result, a woman paid dearly with her life," Kahan said.
Matthew Baker, an assistant field office director for ICE in Houston, said agents try to screen out as many violent criminals as possible to avoid preventable crimes. Many illegal immigrants are identified by ICE in the state's prison system, he added, even if they are not caught while in jail.
"No one can measure the cases where we picked up and removed someone and prevented that carjacking or that drunk driving accident that kills a family," Baker said. "There are hundreds of thousands of incidents that we prevent every year; those are not measured because they don't happen."
While the Chronicle's review found cases involving hardened criminals who slipped through the deportation net, the investigation also revealed that 43 percent of suspects who were arrested and admitted being in the country illegally were charged with misdemeanors and had no prior criminal record in Harris County.
Immigrant advocates cautioned against stereotyping illegal immigrants based on high-profile cases. Most research has found that recent immigrants are far less likely than their U.S.-born counterparts to commit crimes and end up in prison.
In Texas, foreign nationals made up approximately 15 percent of the state's population in 2005, and about 7 percent of state prison offenders.
"Many people see it as a profound insult when someone who is here without permission commits a heinous crime," said Rebecca Bernhardt, director of policy development for the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas. "To be outraged at the individual who committed that crime is an appropriate response. But to be angry at everybody who is just here trying to work to support their family and comes from the same background as that defendant is a mistake."
The nation's system for identifying and deporting immigrants convicted of crimes is largely secretive. ICE officials refuse to disclose the names or basic immigration history of people detained and marked for deportation, citing privacy protections in federal law.
To better understand how ICE screens inmates, the Chronicle obtained a copy of a database, maintained by the Harris County Sheriff's Office, of inmates who tell jailers during booking that they are in the U.S. illegally.
The Sheriff's Office voluntarily started questioning inmates about their legal status and created the database in September 2006, after a previously deported felon killed Houston police officer Rodney Johnson. During the booking process, inmates are asked whether they are in the country illegally. If they answer 'yes,' their name and jail ID number is entered into a database that is shared with ICE agents in Houston.
The Chronicle compared the entries in the Sheriff's Office database with immigration ''holds" placed by ICE with the Sheriff's Office. An immigration hold is essentially a request by ICE agents that law enforcement notify them before releasing an inmate. ICE officials confirmed that jailers notify them before releasing immigrants who are marked for possible deportation.
The Houston Police Department, which runs the city's jails, notifies ICE only about suspects with immigration warrants and previously deported felons.
Of the more than 80,000 bookings into Harris County Jail during the review period, about 3,500 — less than 5 percent — admitted to being in the country illegally. ICE filed paperwork to detain roughly 900 of the 3,500. During the review period, the agency also filed paperwork to detain 2,500 suspects not included in the database, indicating that many immigrants who are eligible for deportation do not disclose that they are here illegally.
ICE, however, could not confirm whether the inmates marked for ''holds" actually were deported.
Landgrebe, the ICE official, also questioned the quality of the information in the Sheriff's Office database, because it was based only on inmate responses and was entered by some jailers without immigration training.
ICE officials would not answer specific questions about ICE staffing at the Harris County or city jails but said screening has improved in recent months. In October, the Sheriff's Office started testing a Homeland Security database that gives jailers access to millions of immigration records. The county's participation in the federal government's 287(g) program, which trains jailers to act as immigration agents, also is expected to help improve screening, ICE officials said.
Harris County Sheriff-elect Adrian Garcia, who defeated incumbent Tommy Thomas in the November general election, said he plans to evaluate the office's participation in the program after he takes office in January.
Thomas said he believes the program is necessary — at least until ICE has the resources to improve screening.
''In a perfect world, I'd like to see our borders secured to where we have someone we find to be here illegally, we turn them over to ICE and have them deported," Thomas said. ''But that's not something that's happening at this day and time."
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By Tom Schneider
CARLSBAD — A new commissary system installed at the Eddy County Detention Center will improve efficiency, eliminate the need for jail staff to act as go-betweens for inmates making commissary purchases and allow inmates instant access to information about their own commissary accounts.
The new computerized Cobra system, installed and operated by Swanson Services Corp. of El Paso, will let inmates see how much money they have deposited on account for commissary purchases and give them access to a complete menu listing which products are available for purchase and which items are out of stock.
Detention personnel will no longer be required to manage inmate accounts, since the inmates will be able to do it themselves, according to Warden D.P. Lyons.
"In the past, with 200 inmates we had to send around 200 sheets of commissary order forms with a menu of all the items available," Lyons said. "Hopefully they would fill them out legibly, and then we had to go and collect them all.
"Then someone had to go over them by hand, and for example, if 50 inmates had ordered one tea bag and they were out of tea bags, someone had to go around to each inmate that had ordered a tea bag and give them a credit," he said.
"The new machine will monitor each individual inmate's account how much money they have on the books as well as display all the items that are available through the commissary," he said. "Each inmate comes to the machine individually."
Since staff will no longer be handling funds, the possibility of human error is eliminated, Lyons said.
"What it'll do is reduce the time our records people have needed to divert from other duties to see to inmate accounts," he said. "It will free them up for other duties related to security or records management."
"This will save us at least four hours per week, if not more," said records supervisor Kendra Stell.
A cashier machine will be installed at the detention center to allow family members to deposit funds into an inmate's account without needing to physically give the money to a staff member. Before Cobra, Lyons said, the process of depositing money for an inmate was complicated, involving a number of accounting and security steps intended to make sure funds went where they were supposed to go.
"The new machine will work like a reverse ATM, but instead of taking money out, they put money in," said Arturo Jaimes, systems resource manager for Swanson Services. "Family members can put money via cash or credit card directly into an inmate's account."
The machines also use touch screen technology, Jaimes said, and are equipped with a fingerprint reader that uses biometric technology to identify inmates. Access is available in both English and Spanish.
Lyons said Swanson Services is providing the machines to the detention center at no cost to Eddy County. The $5,000 machines will be available for use as long as the county contracts with Swanson to use its commissary services, he said.
Manny Rios, operational sales manager for Swanson, said the Carlsbad correctional facility is the first in the state to install the Cobra system.
"Other facilities from around the state will be coming here to see how this works," he said. "Other facilities will follow what has been done here."
"Eddy County is the trend setter," Lyons said.
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UMATILLA, Ore. — Oregon prison officials say nine inmates were put in a segregation unit and a housing unit at Two Rivers Correction Institution was placed in lockdown after fighting broke out.
Superintendent Don Mills says the fights began at dinner Thursday, and the lockdown was continued into Friday so the Oregon State Police could investigate.
He says prison officials couldn't determine whether, as he put it, "this was an individual or group conflict."
The unit locked down was No. 9. Officials say no one was injured.
He said inmates got meals in their cells and had access to mail and health and legal services.
Two Rivers is a minimum- to medium-security prison with a capacity of about 1,600.
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