An interesting article in the NYTimes last week made me think about marriage and incarceration and the inevitable link to how we send people to prison for years due to the so-called “war on drugs.”

Charles Blow, NYTimes columnist, quoted public health expert Ernest Drucker’s well-known 2011 book, A Plague of Prisons with the following stats:

■ “The risk of divorce is high among men going to prison, reaching 50 percent within a few years after incarceration.”

■ “The marriage rate for men incarcerated in prisons and jails is lower than the American average. For blacks and Hispanics, it is lower still.”

■ “Unmarried couples in which the father has been incarcerated are 37 percent less likely to be married one year after the child’s birth than similar couples in which the father has never been incarcerated.”

And guess why so many black and Hispanic men are in prison? You got it, the so-called “drug war.” Or as Blow calls it “the disastrous drug war,” or “a war on marijuana waged primarily against young black men, even though they use the drug at nearly the same rate as whites.” With television and the media, “reefer” has been glamorized to “reefer madness,” and indeed the sentencing of reefer is madness.

The drug war has brutalized so many with lengthy sentences. How can these sentences not affect marriage and families? Take for example Stephanie Nodd who according to her page on Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM)’s website served 21years of a 30-year sentence in a federal prison in Florida for a crack cocaine conspiracy she had been involved in for just one month. FAMM was able to influence the Sentencing Commission to make new guidelines and Stephanie was released.

But unlike Stephanie, so many prisoners are saddled with unjust sentences for crimes involving drugs and they languish behind bars without hope or they get out, like Stephanie did but after serving years. Years. Decades. And like Stephanie, many aren’t the drug dealers we portray on TV.

Mass incarceration certainly destroys families and Blow also points out how those who’ve been arrested for drugs can’t get financial aid, i.e. can’t afford to go to college without taking out loans at very high rates, and also have more debt. This affects black students more than Latino and white students: 81% vs. 67% or 64%. And another guess what. The more educated you are, the less likely you are to be involved in crime, go to prison and stay out once you’re out.

Incarceration also causes more debt to those on their way to marriage or to existing families. Think of the phone bills, the transportation, the lost income. How people stay together if one partner is imprisoned is almost more amazing than how they break up. Add to that the stress of the unjust sentences from the so-called “drug war,” and bingo, marriage is handicapped.

As Blow points out “One can’t bemoan the breakdown of the family without at least acknowledging the structural and systematic forces working against its cohesion.” He means the black family. I’ll add to that any family facing an unjust drug sentence in a society that supposedly supports marriage.

Newest post on Boston Magazine celebrates our “champion of change,” Senator James Eldridge who was recognized for his work for disaster victims—but in Massachusetts, he’s championing equally innovative policies….

Eldridge has come up with some excellent ideas to decrease violence, arrest and imprisonment, too, all dependent on legislators passing some leading-edge criminal justice bills filed earlier this year. They hit on lessening solitary confinement, expunging the records of the falsely accused, and establishing a commission to examine correction officer and prisoner suicides.

See the whole article at

It’s been all over the papers and many bloggers are tackling the horrendous conditions in California. A prison system that in 2011 was ordered by the Supreme Court to figure out what to do with 30,000 people who because of the system’s overcrowding were suffering “cruel and unusual punishment.” As Laura Gottesdiener wrote in the Huffington Post , “The state’s 140,000 inmates, jam-packed into 33 prisons only built to hold 80,000 individuals…commit suicide at double the national inmate average, experience unprecedented rates of lock-downs, receive inadequate medical treatment and sometimes live in continuous fear of violence.”

image from thebusysignal.com

In early July, the infuriating news broke that between 2006-2010, doctors who were under contract with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) sterilized nearly 150 female inmates without anyone’s approval. Corey G. Johnson, writing for The Center for Investigative Reporting wrote that these doctors were paid $147,460 to perform the procedure that “at least 148 women received tubal ligations…during those five years – and there are perhaps 100 more dating back to the late 1990s, according to state documents and interviews.”

And it doesn’t get better for prisoners, or for that matter, for any of us who care about how we treat those behind bars. California holds nearly 12,000 people in solitary confinement at a cost of over $60 million per year. The prisoners recognize that they have committed crimes but they are suffering under extreme isolation. U.S. News and World Report called these cells “living tombs.” I wrote about Massachusetts’ current attempts and need to get rid of these dangerous solitary conditions recently online at Boston Magazine.

On one of the best websites about their plight, Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity says about California’s Secure Housing Unit (SHU), “The cells have no windows, and no access to fresh air or sunlight. The United Nations condemns the use of solitary confinement for more than 15 days as torture, yet many people in California state prisons have been encaged in solitary for 10 to 40 years.”

The hunger strike began on July 8th when more than 30,000 prisoners in 15 prisons refused meals. As reported on Democracy Now, as they entered their 13th day, about 2,500 prisoners from across the state were still on indefinite hunger strike, calling for Governor Jerry Brown and the CDCR to meet their demands about the inhumane conditions they are suffering. But as Lois Ahrens of the Real Cost of Prisons Project said in an email, California officials are trying in any way they can to discredit the strike. Brown has not been moved to act. Strikers’ lawyers are not being allowed into the prisons. Soon it will be into the third week.

Jules Lobel, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and lead attorney representing Pelican Bay prisoners in a lawsuit challenging long-term solitary, appeared on Democracy Now.  said  “If you’re found guilty of murdering somebody in prison, you’re given a definite term, which can be no more than five years in solitary. If you, on the other hand, are simply labeled by some gang investigator as a member of some gang—and that could be done simply because you have artwork or because you have a tattoo or because you have a birthday card from somebody who’s in a gang, anything like that—you then are given an indefinite sentence, which can go on for years and years and years and decades.”

This is not the first hunger strike for California. In 2011, over 12,000 prisoners and their family and community members participated in statewide hunger strikes protesting the inhumane conditions in solitary.  The core demands for the current strike, one of the largest  ever, are below, in their own words from the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity website.

1. End Group Punishment & Administrative Abuse
2. Abolish the Debriefing Policy, and Modify Active/Inactive Gang Status Criteria -Perceived gang membership is one of the leading reasons for placement in solitary confinement. The practice of “debriefing,” or offering up information about fellow prisoners particularly regarding gang status, is often demanded in return for better food or release from the SHU. Debriefing puts the safety of prisoners and their families at risk, because they are then viewed as “snitches.”
3. Comply with the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons 2006 Recommendations Regarding an End to Long-Term Solitary Confinement – (my note– Why is this not so???)
4. Provide Adequate and Nutritious Food –
5. Expand and Provide Constructive Programming and Privileges for Indefinite Secure Housing Unit (SHU) Status Inmates.

While this strike rages on, another horrible plague has struck California’s prisoners. While Governor Brown has said that California has the greatest health care for prisoners “in the world,” San Francisco Bay View reported that over 3,300 prisoners in such facilities as Avenal and Pleasant Valley State Prison are at high risk of infection or death from valley fever. Since 2006, 62 behind bars in California have died from this disease which undoubtedly is related to overcrowding and other unhealthful conditions. And 80% have been African-American, reported the Bay View.

Many have joined rallies and protests and signed petitions– all found at the websites I’ve mentioned above. However, while we complain of 100 degree heat and take solace in our air conditioned homes, prisoners are suffering — and not just for their crimes.

Look at these dismal figures about parole in Massachusetts: " In 2010, the board granted parole to lifers 33.1 percent of the time; in 2012, 19.3 percent of the time; and as of May 25, 2013, only 14.3 percent of the time." And here's why:

In 2011, Deval Patrick made a mistake.

My new article in Boston Magazine's July issue, and online "Locked Up with Nowhere to Go"
 

Please see my new post on Boston Magazine‘s about sentencing 17 year-olds as juveniles instead  of as adults and housing them with adults in jails, prisons and other lock-ups.

Here’s how it begins: “When it comes to incarceration, Massachusetts has recognized 17 as the age of adulthood since 1846. Of course, anyone who has a 17-year-old might question that assumption, as have citizens in 38 states across the U.S. Even some states we think of as far more conservative than Massachusetts—Arizona, Alabama, and Mississippi, for example—send lawbreakers younger than 18 to juvenile instead of adult court.

In May, the Massachusetts House of Representatives voted unanimously that most 17-year-olds could no longer be tried and sentenced as adults…”