(Credit: Columbus Dispatch)

Teenage inmates in adult prisons endure higher rates of sexual abuse by staff members than adult inmates do, according to a new study from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. Because of the vast under-reporting of such abuses, the true number is likely to be much higher.

While 1.8 percent of 16- and 17-year-olds in adult prisons reported being assaulted by another inmate, 3.2 percent were abused by staff. Gay and bisexual inmates were abused at even higher rates. Inmates diagnosed with serious psychological distress were also prime targets for victimization by staff members and inmates alike.

The Prison Rape Elimination Act, passed in 2003, created the first national standards to curb sexual violence in prison. Because teenagers are considered prey in adult prisons, PREA stipulated that minors should be removed from all adult jails and prisons. Ten years later, the October 2013 deadline for state and local prison facilities to certify compliance with PREA is just a few months away. Yet inmates, primarily those who are 16 and 17 years old, continue to live under constant threat of rape in adult prisons. Three-quarters of sexually victimized youth in the DOJ study reported they were abused more than once, and nearly half said staff used force to get what they wanted.

One former juvenile inmate who was raped and abused in prison explains that the horrors they experience spill over into society at large:

Placing juveniles in adult facilities has devastating consequences not only for the youth but also for the communities from which they came. Eighty percent are released before their 21st birthday, and 95 percent are released before they turn 25. They’re coming back into society indelibly marked by what they’ve experienced — either traumatized by sexual assault, or hyper-violent from having learned to fend off the threat.

Critics of PREA note that the bill has no way to enforce its standards to curb sexual assaults and is completely dependent on self-reporting by the agencies holding the prisoners. Anecdotal evidence suggests the true number of assaults is suppressed by youths who are afraid to report. It’s no wonder many choose not to report, as a 2005 DOJ study found that few prosecutors are willing to prosecute cases that cannot prove staff members threatened overt physical force to rape inmates because the penalty is so low. Staffers who are charged will often be released on low bonds or receive short sentences because their victims were inmates. Even when staffers were clearly caught sexually abusing prisoners, only about 56 percent were referred to prosecutions.

Jeffrey Skilling

Even when Jeffrey Skilling was first sentenced for conspiring in one of the largest corporate fraud schemes in modern history, he received less jail time than some low-level drug offenders sentenced to harsh mandatory minimums. But this week, Skilling reached a deal with the Department of Justice to cut his 24-year sentence to as little as 14 years, in exchange for abandoning the onslaught of appeals he has launched at his own expense. Reuters reports:

The agreement … could result in Skilling’s freedom in late 2018, with good behavior.

In exchange, Skilling, 59, who has long maintained his innocence, agreed to stop appealing his conviction. The agreement would also allow more than $40 million seized from him to be freed up for distribution to Enron fraud victims.

A resentencing became necessary after a federal appeals court upheld Skilling’s conviction but found the original sentence too harsh.

Once ranked seventh on the Fortune 500 list of large U.S. companies, Enron went bankrupt on December 2, 2001 in an accounting scandal that remains one of the largest and most infamous U.S. corporate meltdowns.

Thousands of workers lost their jobs and retirement savings, and images were beamed around the globe of staff carrying possessions out of Enron’s downtown Houston office tower, past the company’s “crooked E” logo.

Even in 2006, when Skilling was first sentenced, his legal defense was deemed one of the most expensive in history at $65 million, and in the years since he has taken his case to the Supreme Court and back on appeal after appeal. By settling, the Department of Justice not only saved itself the considerable expense of continuing this legal battle; it also gets access to the more than $40 million in seized assets Skilling had previously not agreed to surrender. As a consequence of these negotiations, Skilling’s sentence is even more disparate from the 25-year-plus sentences of drug defendants charged for low-level offenses like selling their own pain pills to an undercover informant.

If Skilling’s reduced sentence is approved by a judge during his June hearing, as is likely, Skilling will nonetheless not have had an ideal run with the criminal justice system. His lawyers made a persuasive argument that the statute initially used to convict him was overly broad. And his sentence was disproportionately high relative to alleged Enron scandal mastermind Andrew Fastow, who got only six years in prison after he testified against both Skilling and Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay. But more severe versions of these problems plague countless criminal defendants, who, rather than having the leverage to shorten their sentence or the legal resources to take down a statute, are coerced into plea deals under threat of draconian prison terms.

A major U.S. private prison operator known for inmate abuse, violations, and disregard for the truth reported a 56-percent spike in profit in the first quarter of 2013, due in part to its new strategy for drastically reducing its taxes, the Associated Press reports. During a conference call touting its success, representatives at GEO Group boasted that the company continues to have “solid occupancy rates in mid to high 90s” and that they are optimistic “regarding the outlook for the industry,” in part due to a “growing offender population.” GEO Senior Vice President John Hurley assured investors during the call:

We have a longstanding partnership with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the United States Marshal Service and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE. … We continue to see meaningful opportunities for us to partner with all three of these federal agencies, notwithstanding the various issues with the federal budget, which we believe will have no material negative impact on our business. The federal bureau of prisons continues to face capacity constraints coupled with a growing offender population.

The federal prison population has swelled 790 percent since 1980, in large part due to draconian drug and immigration laws. And the United States maintains the title of the world’s number one jailer. Private prison operators nonetheless remain enthusiastic about the prospects of high incarceration rates for business. Representatives on this call shied away from the strong language fellow prison firm Corrections Corporation of America used during its investor call in February, when CEO Damon Hininger assured a strong “continued demand for beds” even after immigration reform. GEO executives explained that they are now taking the position that “discussing our approach and strategies about any particular procurement is really not in the best interest of our company or our shareholders.”

Following a trend of corporations achieving dramatic tax reductions by becoming a real estate investment trust (REIT) – a mechanism historically reserved for firms holding real estate as an investment — both GEO and fellow prison operator Corrections Corporation of America successfully persuaded the Internal Revenue Service recently that they are essentially holding real estate, analogizing prisoners to renters paid for by the government. In reality, the job of running a prison is only nominally about the facility where it’s housed, and primarily about ensuring humane prisoner treatment, inmate rehabilitation, and public safety. But private prison corporations charging “rent” to house prisoners make no more or less money depending on whether they achieve these goals, particularly not when immense political spending to lobby for incarceration and privatization outweighs the public pressure from widely reported abuses at private facilities.

Leading the movement to fight back against the private prison industry, New Hampshire rejected all bids last month to house private prisons in the state, and passed a bill in the House to prohibit the private facilities that profit from incarceration. But the bill died in the Senate Thursday along party lines, with opponents saying they wanted to retain the flexibility to contract with private facilities in the future. The New Hampshire Union Leader reports:

Supporters of the bill said private prisons often maximize profits at the expense of prisoners who are separated from their families. They said private prisons focus on driving costs down while paying scant attention to rehabilitating inmates, which the state has an incentive to do to keep them out of corrections system once they are released.

But opponents say the state should not tie its hands and it needs the flexibility in the future, particularly in an emergency if a prison burned.

Senate Finance Committee Chair Sen. Chuck Morse, R-Salem, said there are no contracts on the horizon for using private prisons or turning the state’s prison system over to a private company to manage.

The bill is not needed, he said, adding that the discussion began two years ago when former Gov. John Lynch proposed looking into prison privatization.

Opponents also said they wanted to have the option to use private prisons in the event of an emergency, even though the bill contained a provision that explicitly allowed the state to transfer inmates to a private facility in an emergency. New Hampshire’s new governor has been vocal in her opposition to private prisons, and under her leadership, the state recently rejected every proposal to site private prisons in the state, citing their insufficient understanding of court-mandated standards of inmate care. A legislative change, however, would have prevented new proposals from being solicited and considered next year.

Private prisons have a perverse incentive to lobby for imprisonment in a country that already has the world’s highest rate of incarceration. In 2012, both GEO Group and Management & Training Corp. contributed to the campaigns of Republican state officials whose agency commissioned studies of private prison proposals. And Corrections Corporation of America had in the past contributed to the campaigns of then-Gov. John Lynch, who had solicited the private prison bids. As of April 2012, all three private prison firms had at least two lobbyists in the state.

Under two new laws signed Thursday, young offenders and adults arrested for minor offenses in Georgia will no longer be sent to prison. Instead, they will be directed into community-based rehabilitative programs meant to address underlying problems.

After January 1, young people arrested for minor offenses will enter social service programs, skipping the criminal justice system entirely. Those arrested for low-level crimes like drug possession will be diverted into community-based rehab programs. Teenagers who have committed felonies in which no one is hurt will face a maximum of 18 months in prison plus intensive probation for a year and a half. If someone is harmed, the juveniles could be sent to prison for up to 5 years.

The youth law is expected to save $85 million over five years and reduce the juvenile prison population by 640 teenagers, at a rate of $91,000 a year per bed. Currently, there are 1,820 minors in juvenile facilities in Georgia. The youth recidivism rate, now at 65 percent, is also supposed to drop.

Georgia’s school to prison pipeline is among the worst in the nation, with schools frequently using the criminal justice system to discipline kids for minor infractions. A juvenile court judge from Georgia testified last year that one-third of the cases before him were school-related minor offenders who had been arrested by campus police. He also noted an “appalling” racial disparity in the arrests, which were 80 percent African American. As arrests increase, high school graduation rates have plummeted.

The other new law establishes alternative program options for adults arrested for non-violent crimes. As of July 1, judges will be given more discretion over drug-related cases, which often have mandatory minimum prison sentences. Instead, expensive prison beds will be reserved for the most violent criminals, while less serious offenses like drug possession, burglary, forgery, or shoplifting will have less severe penalties depending on the scale of the crime.

Gov. Nathan Deal (R) has made a more humane and effective prison system a top priority. At the bill signing, Deal choked up as he described how families have “been cast aside by the system that was in place.” Now that he has signed these two cornerstone bills into law, the governor is already working with community groups on legislation to smooth the transition of inmates back into society and reduce recidivism rates. He has also pledged $10 million in funding for “accountability courts” to make sure defendants work, seek treatment and stay sober.

Sentencing reform has attracted rare bipartisan support all over the country, as conservatives look for ways to cut costs while liberals oppose excessively harsh and ineffective sentencing. In the past two years, 35 prisons have shuttered in 15 states. However, other states have embraced the private prison industry, which has an abysmal record for security and inmate abuse, and may actually increase incarceration rates.

Poor management of a federal “Compassionate Release” program is clogging federal prisons and causing inmates to die behind bars who should have been considered for at-home care, according to a new audit from the Department of Justice’s Inspector General. The report identified “multiple failures” in the program, noting that prisons are not even required to inform inmates that a policy exists for releasing low-risk inmates who are severely ill or have other “extraordinary circumstances” such as a dying family member or a child destined for foster care. Of the 208 inmates approved for the program, 28 died in custody before their release due to delays, according to the report.

Earlier this year, a review by advocacy groups found that compassionate release is exceedingly rare, turning sometimes short stints in prison into life sentences. While even tough states like Texas let out about 100 people per year on medical parole, the entire federal system releases on average around two dozen people, out of a population of more than 218,000 inmates. The report provided jarring examples of inmates with compelling stories who died in prison, in spite of the pleas even of the judge who sentenced them. Releasing severely ill low-risk inmates is not only humane and poses very low risk; it also saves prison systems the significant medical costs they carry.

Jonathan Boyer spent seven years in a Louisiana jail before he even saw a trial in the case against him. A Louisiana court found that the bulk of this delay was caused by the state’s failure to pay for the lawyer to which Boyer was constitutionally entitled, but it nonetheless concluded that the delay was not the state’s fault. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case on an important question about whether states can be faulted for dodging their constitutional responsibility to provide legal representation to indigent defendants. But today, the court dodged this question and instead dismissed the case altogether as improperly granted.

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor points out in her four-justice dissent, “It is important for States to understand that they have an obligation to protect a defendant’s constitutional right to a speedy trial.” As a consequence of today’s decision, Louisiana will feel no more compelled to live up to its obligation than it did yesterday, in spite of a documented crisis in the Louisiana criminal justice system. Sotomayor, a former prosecutor, explains:

The Court’s failure to resolve this case is especially regrettable, because it does not seem to be an isolated one. Rather, Boyer’s case appears to be illustrative of larger, systemic problems in Louisiana. The Louisiana Supreme Court has suggested on multiple occasions that the State’s failure to provide funding for indigent defense contributes to extended pretrial detentions. There is also empirical evidence supporting that assessment. In New Orleans Parish, for example, a recent study found that more than 22 percent of pending criminal cases were more than one year old. Another study found that the average time between felony arrest and trial in Calcasieu Parish, the jurisdiction where Boyer was tried, was 501 days in the years before Boyer’s arrest. More broadly, the public defender system seems to be significantly understaffed.

Against this backdrop, the Court’s silence in this case is particularly unfortunate. Conditions of this kind cannot persist without endangering constitutional rights.

Louisiana is not the only state in which paltry funding for criminal defendants undermines both the availability and quality of legal representation. A 2012 Brennan Center for Justice study found that public defenders often spend an average of less than six minutes per arraignment in cases where defendants plead guilty, and the sequester has hit already-overburdened public defenders particularly hard. Nor is Louisiana the only state rife with lengthy pretrial detentions of defendants who have not yet been convicted of any crime. A recent New Jersey study found that 75 percent of the state’s jail inmates are those in pretrial detention who have not yet been convicted of a crime, and that they spend an average of 10 months in jail before trial thanks to state backlogs. Even with extended pretrial detention, judges facing ever-greater caseloads and longtime judicial vacancies lament that they are forced to resort to “assembly-line” fashion sentencing, meaning “you  herd everybody into the courtroom and you start sentencing just running down the row.”

In this particular case, Boyer was ultimately convicted of robbing the man who was shot dead after he picked up Boyer while hitchhiking. But not everybody who is held in pretrial detention will ultimately be found guilty, and a decision in this case could have set precedent about the withholding of state funding to lengthen pretrial detention.

While no opinion accompanied the court’s order to dismiss the case as “improvidently granted,” at least three justices who signed onto a concurring opinion apparently dismissed the case because they did not agree with the factual determinations of the Louisiana court. In a concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito said the delay was Boyer’s fault, and not the state’s, because he requested several continuances of his trial. Appeals courts typically not disturb the factual findings of a lower court except in the rare circumstances when they were “clearly erroneous.” In this case, even Louisiana had conceded in state court that the lack of funding was the primary cause for delay. On appeal, Louisiana backtracked to again dispute the facts, and Alito, Scalia, and Thomas accepted the state’s argument. This opinion suggests that at least three justices decided to skirt answering an important legal question in order to question an already-decided factual determination.

After years of litigation, private prison operator Corrections Corporation of America has agreed to a $600,000 settlement to compensate inmates at a Colorado facility for alleged prison staff-inflicted injuries that landed 13 inmates in the hospital. The injuries resulted from a six-hour 2004 riot that prison officials had failed to prepare for, even though they were warned it was likely to occur, according to the complaint. The injured inmates said they were not even involved in the riot. CBS Denver reports:

Thirteen inmates were taken to the hospital after the riots at the prison located about 45 miles east of Pueblo. [...]

The rioting began when more than 100 inmates refused to return to their cells. Then the situation escalated as inmates set fires and attacked other prisoners.

Guards used tear gas and rubber bullets to try to get the inmates under control. The riot was limited to prison grounds. No inmates escaped.

Court documents reveal that supervisors at the prison ignored a warning that conditions were ripe for a riot despite those signs coming from both inmates and correctional officers.

The problem was that hundreds of prisoners that were transferred from Washington state were angry about being so far away from home. They were also upset that an 18-year-old transferred inmate was placed into isolation earlier that day.

Inmates said they were cuffed, dragged through water and left to sit in their cells that were then flooded with water.

The inmates said they have been pushing for change in the private prison system.

“I would gladly take no money if I knew that CCA was going to be no more, not only in Colorado but everywhere. It really should be up to states to run their own prisons, to supply their own correctional officers and to keep their own inmates in check instead of having someone who has labeled you as a number and is just trying to earn money off of you,” said plaintiff Vance Adams.

CCA is the largest U.S. private prison firm, and the settlement comes in the latest allegation of abuse, violations, and abysmal living conditions at CCA and other private prison facilities. Private prisons are incentivized to maximize profit from imprisonment, spending their resources to lobby for more incarceration and garner new contracts, rather than providing the optimum conditions for rehabilitation. Lawmakers who are the beneficiaries of generous private prison contributions, meanwhile, are incentivized to look the other way as troubling conditions persist.

In a scathing consent decree last year, a federal judge described a Mississippi juvenile detention facility run by private prison company GEO Group as “a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions to germinate, the sum of which places the offenders at substantial ongoing risk.” A year later, a report by court monitors concluded that Walnut Grove Corrections Facility is still rife with safety concerns, in spite of some progress:

WGJCF continues to be plagued with clear signs of instability as evidenced by, among other things, high rates of inmate assaults, lockdowns, contraband control issues, and management of special populations. The assault rate at WGJCF for 2012 was the highest of all the MDOC facilities. Through the first two months of 2013, assaults involving weapons continue to occur at alarming levels. During the reporting period, there have been at least two facility lockdowns related to serious group assaults at the facility. Inmates continue to routinely be found in possession of serious contraband such as cell phones, weapons, and drugs. For example, in December 2012, a cache of contraband was detected that included, among other things, eight hack-saw blades, 12 cell phones, 22 cell phone chargers, five bags of tobacco, and one knife.

Since last year’s consent decree and the ensuing negative press, Mississippi announced that it would end its contract with GEO, and it removed all children to a state-run detention center. But rather than end private management of that and 2 other GEO-run facilities, the state contracted with another private prison operator, Management and Training Corporation (MTC).

Like all private prison firms, MTC has an incentive to profit from imprisonment rather than rehabilitate. The monitor’s report contains data showing that most of the state’s private prisons have assault rates that are two to three times that of publicly run facilities. At Walnut Grove, there are 27 assaults per 100 inmates, as compared to 7 inmates per 100 – the highest rate in any publicly run facility. Many public facilities have had one or zero assaults per hundred inmates. Mississippi has six private prison facilities, and the nation’s second-highest incarceration rate. Walnut Grove is one of a number of private facilities that have seen alarmingly high levels of abuse, violations and abysmal living conditions.