Misunderstanding Prison Gang Culture

By a huge factor, is one explanation for this disastrous policy, now fortunately stopped, as reported by ABC7 News.

An excerpt.

“SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California prison officials have halted an experiment aimed at forcing warring prison gangs to get along with each other after the inmates wound up brawling and even rioting when allowed to mingle together in prison recreation yards, officials told The Associated Press.

“The effort started more than a year ago, with officials gradually allowing prisoners from the different gangs into the same exercise yards to try to get them to make peace. This permitted officials to reduce harsh restrictions that had kept gang members locked up in cells for lengthy periods without access to rehabilitation programs that could allow them to shorten their sentences.

“But the greater liberty generated the same result at several state prisons: Gang members brawled in what critics labeled “gladiator fights” that they allege prison officials deliberately set up to get the inmates to fight.

“The brawls led officials to stop the practice of trying to get the gang inmates to interact with each other in the prisons, Shaun Spillane, a spokesman for the corrections department’s inspector general, told the AP in an interview.

“Prison officials “are kind of at the point where they realize this isn’t working. Rather than getting the same result, they’re putting their heads together and trying to come up with a new approach,” Spillane said.

“The program is on hold so officials “can explore options to find a resolution to this and safely house these individuals,” said Terry Thornton, spokeswoman for the corrections department.

“She denied that officials set up inmates up to fight.

“I don’t know why they fight. We just expect our people to engage in positive behavior, engage in positive programs,” she said.”

Retrieved October 2, 2019 from https://abc7.com/california-halts-prison-gang-peacemaking-effort/5565096/

Mass Incarceration, Fact & Fiction

The real story behind the political trope, from City Journal.

An excerpt.

“Certain must-pass ideological litmus tests have arisen for the 25 declared candidates (so far) seeking the Democratic Party presidential nomination. Perhaps chief among them is subscription to the belief that the American criminal-justice system is racist and overly punitive. This Democratic unanimity makes sense in light of the criticism that many of the leading candidates have faced from activists, left-wing media, and other, more “woke,” presidential hopefuls for their earlier acceptance, or even endorsement, of proactive policing, quality-of-life enforcement, and incarceration as reasonable methods of combating crime.

“JOE BIDEN’S ROLE IN ’90S CRIME LAW COULD HAUNT ANY PRESIDENTIAL BID, ran a prescient 2015 New York Times headline. Doubtless sensing vulnerability, the former vice president and current Democratic front-runner made a Martin Luther King Day speech to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network this year, telling the audience that “I haven’t always been right” about criminal justice and that “white America has to admit there’s still a systematic racism, and it goes almost unnoticed by so many of us.”

“That hasn’t stopped some of Biden’s Democratic opponents (not to mention President Trump) from pushing the incarceration button. California senator Kamala Harris, one of his leading rivals, hit Biden for backing the 1994 omnibus crime bill, which, she says, contributed to “mass incarceration in this country.” Harris herself, though, has met criticism for being too tough on crime in her days as a prosecutor and as California attorney general. New Jersey senator Cory Booker—one of the most outspoken of the candidates on criminal-justice reform—has also had his reformist credentials questioned, with a recent Times story criticizing his “zero-tolerance” approach to crime when serving as Newark’s mayor from 2006 to 2013, citing ACLU complaints. But all the Democrats are striking the same chord. “More people [are] locked up for low-level offenses on marijuana than for all violent crimes in this country,” Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, another top-tier Biden challenger, declared at last year’s We the People Summit. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator known best for his left-wing economic populism, has described felon disenfranchisement as racist voter suppression. And South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg told Out that incarceration is “clearly worsening some of the patterns of racial inequality in our country.”

“Eight of the declared candidates contributed to a recent compendium published by the Brennan Center for Justice, titled Ending Mass Incarceration. The essays provide a useful summation of Democratic talking points on criminal justice. That the United States over-incarcerates is evidenced, reformers say, by the numbers: though it has about 5 percent of the global population, the U.S. houses about a quarter of the prisoners worldwide. America’s high incarceration rate, goes another assertion, is driven by the unjust enforcement of “low-level” and “nonviolent” offenses, particularly drug crimes. A further charge: the system is racist, given how much more likely blacks are to be behind bars compared with whites. Finally, they say that sentences have gotten way too long.

“True, for a subset of America’s prison population, incarceration does not serve a legitimate penological end, either because these individuals have been incarcerated for too long or because they should not have been incarcerated to begin with. Justice dictates that we identify these individuals and secure their releases with haste. But none of the above claims advanced by the presidential hopefuls is correct—and acting on any of them would be disastrous.

“Start with drugs. Contrary to the claims in Michelle Alexander’s much-discussed 2010 bestseller The New Jim Crow, drug prohibition is not driving incarceration rates. Yes, about half of federal prisoners are in on drug charges; but federal inmates constitute only 12 percent of all American prisoners—the vast majority are in state facilities. Those incarcerated primarily for drug offenses constitute less than 15 percent of state prisoners. Four times as many state inmates are behind bars for one of five very serious crimes: murder (14.2 percent), rape or sexual assault (12.8 percent), robbery (13.1 percent), aggravated or simple assault (10.5 percent), and burglary (9.4 percent). The terms served for state prisoners incarcerated primarily on drug charges typically aren’t that long, either. One in five state drug offenders serves less than six months in prison, and nearly half (45 percent) of drug offenders serve less than one year.

“That a prisoner is categorized as a drug offender, moreover, does not mean that he is nonviolent or otherwise law-abiding. Most criminal cases are disposed of through plea bargains, and, given that charges often get downgraded or dropped as part of plea negotiations, an inmate’s conviction record will usually understate the crimes he committed. The claim that drug offenders are nonviolent and pose zero threat to the public if they’re put back on the street is also undermined by a striking fact: more than three-quarters of released drug offenders are rearrested for a nondrug crime. It’s worth noting that Baltimore police identified 118 homicide suspects in 2017, and 70 percent had been previously arrested on drug charges.

“Not only are most prisoners doing time for serious, often violent, offenses; they’ve usually received (and blown) the second chance that so many reformers say they deserve. Justice Department studies from 2000 through 2009 reveal that only about 40 percent of state felony convictions result in a prison sentence. A Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) study of violent felons convicted over a 12-year period in America’s 75 largest counties shows that 56 percent of the offenders had a prior conviction record.

“Even though most state prisoners are serious and serial offenders, nearly 40 percent of inmates serve less than a year in prison, with the median time served about 16 months. Lengthy sentences tend to be reserved for the most serious violent crimes—but even 20 percent of convicted murderers and nearly 60 percent of those convicted for rape or sexual assault serve less than five years of their sentences. Nor have sentences gotten longer, as reformers contend. In his book Locked In, John Pfaff—a leader in the decarceration movement—plotted state prison admissions and releases from 1978 through 2014 on a graph. If sentence lengths had increased, the two lines would diverge as admissions outpaced releases; in fact, the lines are almost identical.

“Getting these facts straight is important, especially since reformers unfavorably contrast the U.S.’s criminal-justice system with those of other nations—Western European democracies, in particular—with significantly lower incarceration rates. Because so few American prisoners are serving time for trivial infractions, aligning America’s incarceration numbers with those of, say, England or Germany would require releasing many very serious and frequently violent offenders. Yet many in the decarceration camp have been calling for just such a mass release. The #cut50 initiative, founded by activist and CNN host Van Jones, aims to halve the prison population. Scholars at the Brennan Center have called for an immediate 40 percent reduction in the number of inmates.

“Such drastic cuts could produce significant crime increases, as communities lose the incapacitation benefits that they currently enjoy. Already, there’s no shortage of cautionary examples. In March, the New York Police Department released a montage of security-camera footage that captured ten gang members in East New York, a Brooklyn neighborhood, as they hunted down and killed a man in broad daylight. The chilling images show the victim, 21-year-old Tyquan Eversley (out on bail, facing a rap for armed robbery), running, as his armed assailants give chase. Eversley gets entangled in barbed wire after jumping a fence into someone’s backyard; one of his pursuers hurls what looks like part of a cinder block over the fence at him, as another points his gun over the top and fires five fatal rounds. The rock-slinging thug, according to the NYPD, is 25-year-old Michael Reid, who has since been identified and arrested. Reid, it was subsequently reported, had been recently released from federal custody and was wearing an ankle monitor at the time of the murder.”

Retrieved July 22, 2019 from https://www.city-journal.org/mass-incarceration

Story Behind the Story

No one does it better than Ann Coulter.

An excerpt.

If the left has its way in the next few years, there won’t be anyone left in prison because, you see, they’re overflowing with innocent black men locked up for “nonviolent drug crimes.” All of them!

Over the weekend, NBC News investigative reporter Leigh Ann Caldwell appeared on MSNBC’s “Kasie DC” to tell the story of Bill Underwood, loving parent and prison mentor, who has already spent nearly 30 years in prison for a nonviolent drug crime.

Caldwell reported:

“William Underwood, now 65 years old, was sentenced to life in prison without parole for a nonviolent drug-related crime. It was his first felony, but in the middle of the tough-on-crime era, the judge showed no leniency. With no hope of ever walking free again, Underwood has made the best of his time in prison, mentoring others and staying devoted to his children and grandchildren, as (his daughter) Ebony fights for his release.”

Another black body in prison for mere possession of a joint!

Actually, no one is in prison anywhere for possession of a joint, except in the pea-brain fantasies of chubby college coeds everywhere. We don’t have the prison space.

NBC’s Caldwell interviewed Underwood, noting how “for 30 years from inside prison walls, he still tried to be a father first.” The poor man concurred, saying, “That’s all I was ever taught, you know? Children first, first, foremost. That’s what I try to emulate.”

Can it be long before Ivanka pops up, lobbying for his release?

Despite what I’m sure was an exhaustive investigation, I was suspicious of Caldwell’s characterization of Underwood’s crime. My rule is: If you’re not telling me why someone was sentenced to life in prison, there’s probably a reason you’re not telling me.

All we got from Caldwell was: Here’s this great father behind bars; He just got caught up in something, we’re really not sure what it was — and here’s his daughter, Ebony, to tell us what a terrific father he is.

Considering that she’s arguing for Underwood’s immediate release into the general public, it seems odd that Caldwell doesn’t know what he’s in prison for, nor does she have the slightest interest in finding out.

Maybe at NBC they don’t have access to the internet. But I do! I spent a full 60 seconds doing a Nexis search on William Underwood.

Here are some excerpts from a Newsday article on Underwood’s conviction, dated Jan. 10, 1990:

“A rock band manager was convicted yesterday as the head of a vicious Harlem drug gang that prosecutors said carried out six murders, including the controversial slaying of a witness in 1983.”

Caldwell didn’t bother to mention Underwood’s SIX MURDERS?

NBC: We don’t have room for everything. These stories are only so long.

“William Underwood, 36, faces up to life in prison without parole for his conviction in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on charges of racketeering and operating a continuing criminal enterprise — the so-called federal narcotics ‘kingpin’ law.”

It’s weird that Caldwell never managed to turn up the fact that he was convicted of being the kingpin of a drug empire, distributing heroin throughout Harlem in the 1980s. “Yes, your honor, I was convicted of operating a CONTINUING CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE — but it’s my first offense.”

“A federal jury found him guilty of heading the murderous and now-broken Vigilantes drug gang … known for extraordinary violence. All told, police say, it may have killed as many as 23 people.”

I feel like Caldwell may not have gone the extra mile in researching this story.

The evidence against Underwood included the testimony of 50 witnesses, undercover video-recordings and confessions of Vigilante gang members — which is especially impressive, considering that he ordered the murder of witnesses preparing to testify against him. (I guess he couldn’t kill all 50.) In addition to killing witnesses, Underwood’s outfit killed customers, members of rival drug gangs and innocent passersby.

In a 1988 article titled, “Brutal Drug Gangs Wage War of Terror in Upper Manhattan,” The New York Times reported that Underwood’s heroin operation was “considered by law-enforcement experts to be the most dangerous drug gang in Harlem.” All told, the gangs were “believed to be responsible for as many as 523 slayings in upper Manhattan in the last five years.”

Retrieved July 17, 2019 from http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2019-07-17.html#read_more

And here is a link to a local crime and justice foundation lawyer who checked out these reported facts, all true… http://www.crimeandconsequences.com/crimblog/2019/07/a-poster-boy-for-the-long-sent.html#more

Unintended Consequences of Bad Criminal Justice Policy

California made a real bad legislative policy change a few years ago and the consequences are laid out in this article from MSN News.

An excerpt.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Ever since he stole his first car at age 10, Cody Garland has spent much of his life behind bars. Now 35, he has served time at eight different California prisons.

But the hardest stint, he says, was not in a state penitentiary. It was in a Sacramento County jail, where in 2016 he was sentenced to serve eight years for burglary, identity theft and other charges.

Medical care at the jail was even worse than in prison; untreated glaucoma left him legally blind, he says.

Solitary confinement — in a windowless room — was a common punishment; Garland says he lost track of whether it was day or night during a spell in solitary and began to hear voices.

Mental health help was hard to get, he alleged, even after he started swallowing shards of metal and tried to hang himself. He detailed the treatment in a lawsuit accusing the county of subjecting inmates to inhumane conditions — a claim the county denies.

“I’ve done a lot of prison time,” he says, “and this was the worst time I’d ever done.”

Garland is one of more than 175,000 people sentenced to county jails instead of state prisons in the last eight years because of sweeping changes to California’s justice system, according to an analysis of state data by The Marshall Project. The reforms were intended to ease prison overcrowding — and they have.

But the changes were also supposed to help people convicted of nonviolent crimes, by letting them serve their sentences close to home in county jails with lots of education and training programs.

It hasn’t worked out that way in some urban counties. Jails built to hold people for days or weeks — awaiting trial or serving short sentences for petty crimes — have strained to handle long-term inmates, many with chronic medical and mental health problems and histories of violence.

Statewide, assaults on jailers increased almost 90% from 2010, the year before prison downsizing began, to 2017, the most recent year for which there is complete data. Mental health cases, which had been declining in jails, have risen. County spending on medicine for inmates has jumped (to almost $64 million in 2017 from $38 million in 2010), and the cost of psychotropic medication has recently surged. Legal challenges over inmate treatment have expanded to about a dozen county lockups.

Deaths in California jails jumped by 26% in the years after they started receiving long-term inmates, peaking at 153 in 2014 before falling to 133 in 2017. That year, California had 17.7 deaths per 10,000 inmates; Texas, which has the second largest jail population, had 13.2.

Problems have been particularly acute in counties with old facilities, tight budgets and a lot of long-term inmates, including Sacramento, San Bernardino, Fresno and San Diego, which had a spate of suicides this spring. Los Angeles County has had to deal with the largest number of these inmates: 45,000, or about a quarter of the total since 2010.

For these counties, California’s prison changes have been “a budget buster,” said Mike Brady, a former official with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation who now works as a consultant. The jails now “have serious mental illnesses, violence. They’ve got gang issues. They’ve got developmental disabilities. They’ve got physical disabilities. They’ve got to change their whole physical plant. It’s a phenomenal expense.”

California’s experiment in prison downsizing has implications for states across the country as they try to cut the size of their prison systems. Some, like Texas, are tackling the issue because of the high cost of locking people up, while others, like Alabama, are under pressure to relieve overcrowding and violence. And in many regions, voters are concluding that prison populations, which include disproportionate numbers of people of color, reflect outdated “tough-on-crime” policies.

Retrieved June 2, 2019 from https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/californias-jails-are-so-bad-some-inmates-beg-to-go-to-prison-instead/ar-AAChUDx?ocid=spartandhp

Saints of the Day & The Supernatural Church

Here’s the saint’s calendar for March 18, 2019, and some versions, each focusing on individual saints, (all St. Cyril—Bishop, Confessor and Doctor of the Church—today) all wonderful; for they are the Church Triumphant.

The Catholic Church has many saints and reading about their lives has been a spiritual journey Catholics have been on since the publication of the Golden Legend, http://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/basis/goldenlegend/

From Butler’s Calendar of the Saints listing all of the saints of today. https://web.archive.org/web/20061020190006/http://www.catholic-forum.com/saintS/day0318.htm

From Butler’s Lives of the Saints, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Bishop, Doctor of the Church, “CYRIL was born at or near the city of Jerusalem, about the year 315. He was ordained priest by St. Maximus, who gave him the important charge of instructing and preparing the candidates for Baptism. This charge he held for several years, and we still have one series of his instructions, given in the year 347 or 318. They are of singular interest as being the earliest record of the systematic teaching of the Church on the creed and sacraments, and as having been given in the church built by Constantine on Mount Calvary. They are solid, simple, profound; saturated with Holy Scripture; exact, precise, and terse; and, as a witness and exposition of the Catholic faith, invaluable.” http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/lots/lots093.htm

From Franciscan Media, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, (c. 315 – March 18, 386), “The crises that the Church faces today may seem minor when compared with the threat posed by the Arian heresy, which denied the divinity of Christ and almost overcame Christianity in the fourth century. Cyril was to be caught up in the controversy, accused of Arianism by Saint Jerome, and ultimately vindicated both by the men of his own time and by being declared a Doctor of the Church in 1822.” https://www.franciscanmedia.org/saint-cyril-of-jerusalem/

From a most lovely site, really a daily devotional site offering much more than just saint of the day, Anastpaul https://anastpaul.wordpress.com/

One of my personal favorites, Tradition in Action, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, “The Fathers and the Doctors of the Church – St. Cyril is one of them – played an enormous role in setting the foundations for Scholasticism and establishing the Catholic State in the Middle Ages. They were received with ingratitude by their contemporaries, but they formed the basis for the great triumph of Catholic Civilization.” https://traditioninaction.org/SOD/j171sd_CyrilJerusalem_3-18.html

Here is what the 1962 Roman Missal says about St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Bishop, Confessor, and Doctor of the Church: “When he was a simple priest, St. Cyril used to instruct the Catechumens during Lent. He is still renowned for these admirable homilies, full of divine wisdom, precious documents for Catholic theology. The Arians exiled him thrice. He died A.D. 386.” (p. 1205) The Daily Missal and Liturgical Manual. (2004). Baronius Press: London: https://www.baroniuspress.com/book.php?wid=56&bid=4#tab=tab-1

The Supernatural Church

The following is excellent material for prison ministry, and especially for men doing natural life sentences.

Jacques Maritain—and his wife Raissa, a powerful and influential Catholic couple whose writings I really love, especially their joint written classic, Liturgy and Contemplation, which is available online at http://www.ewtn.com/library/THEOLOGY/LITCOM.HTM and whose celibate marriage was reminiscent of syneisactism (defined here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syneisaktism ) —describes it wonderfully:

“The Church Considered in Her Unity and Her Universality Has a Supernatural Personality Which Transcends That of Her Members

“1. No community of the merely natural order can be a person at the same time as a multitude of human beings. A nation subsists with the subsistence of all its individual citizens; it has a history, it has typical characteristics, common customs, it pursues a common end and has common interests: this history, these typical characteristics, these customs, this common end, these common interests are purely and simply those of its citizens, or of the great mass of them. And it has no divine mission, nor any promise of lasting always and of being constantly assisted by God.

“It is altogether different with the Church. The Church has a double subsistence: a natural subsistence like every human community,–that of the human persons who are her members; if all Christians were exterminated there would no longer be a Church here on earth. And she has, insofar precisely as she is the whole one and universal, of the organized multitude of those who live with her life, a supernatural subsistence, which presupposes but transcends the natural subsistence of the individual persons who are her members.” (p. 18)

Jacques Maritain. (1973). On the Church of Christ: The Person of the Church and Her Personnel. (Translator: Joseph W. Evans).University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame

A review of Maritain’s book in The Wanderer Newspaper is helpful:

An excerpt.

At a time of when strong ecclesiastical leadership is warranted as the West drifts further from its historical anchorage, the voice of Church seems to be muted or confused. With reason, Pope Francis has been accused of deliberate ambiguity, given that he has not responded to repeated calls for clarification of his teaching in Amoris Laetitia, and now as reported in the pages of this newspaper [see story by LifeSiteNews, The Wanderer, March 2, 2017, p. 1], the new head of the Jesuit Order, Fr. Arturo Sosa Abascal, seems to call into question the literal meaning of Christ’s teaching on the indissolubility of marriage (Matt. 19:3-6).

“The words of Jesus must be contextualized,” he has said in an interview. “Over the last century in the Church there has been a great blossoming of studies that seek to understand what Jesus meant to say.”

If doctrine must be replaced in favor of the “discernment” of the true meaning of the words of Sacred Scripture, what are we to make of Christ’s words at the Last Supper?

Given that the Church seems to be unsure of itself under its present leadership, Jacques Maritain’s treatise on the Church and her personnel is worth revisiting. “To speak of the ‘person’ of the Church,” Maritain says, “is to recognize a certain transcendence in time of a body that remains essentially the same. Just as a human being is not to be identified with the personality it manifests on a given day or at a given period in life, the visible Church cannot be identified with one council or one papacy.”

Maritain’s reflections on the subject are to be found in his last complete book, On the Church of Christ: The Person of the Church and Her Personnel. Published in English translation from the French in the year of his death (1973), it was ignored by the secular media and given scant attention in the Catholic press.

It followed by seven years the publication of Le Paysan de la Garonne, which had earned Maritain the enmity of the Catholic left for its critique of some of the theology developing in the wake of Vatican II. John Courtney Murray in We Hold These Truths (1960) noted happily that the Church in North America was not divided between left and right as it was with destructive consequences in Europe.

By the close of Vatican II, the European virus had spread to North America. Maritain, who had been the darling of the liberal Catholic intelligentsia because of his social philosophy, was suddenly ostracized, his later work ignored. For Maritain, a liberal social policy did not presuppose a liberal Catholic theology, certainly not one at war with the intellectual heritage of the Church. Many American scholars, otherwise cognizant of Maritain’s vast oeuvre, remain unaware of the publication of De l’Église du Christ.

In On the Church of Christ, Maritain speaks of the “profoundly troubled moment” at which he was writing. He calls himself “an old Christian philosopher who has thought about the mystery of the Church for sixty years.”

He is appalled by the appreciable number of Catholic intellectuals who in his judgment employ themselves to destroy the treasure of truth which is the Church’s responsibility to transmit. He would “have done with the tempest of widely diffused foolish ideas that have caused confusion among the faithful.” He would “have done with the demythization of doctrine and the secularization or profanization of a Christianity which our new doctors and spiritual guides would like to entrust to the hands of the sociologist, of the psychoanalysts, of the structuralists, of the Marcusists, of the phenomenologists, and of the pioneers of technocracy.”

The subtitle of On the Church of Christ is indicative of a distinction that is crucial to an understanding of the Church. “Churchmen will never be the Church,” writes Maritain. “One can take a detached view, making positive and negative assessments of the activity of Churchmen throughout the centuries while remaining confident of the holiness of the Church itself.”

This distinction runs through the work, that is, the difference between the “person of the Church” and “her personnel,” the difference between the Church visible to the intellect and the Church as visible, one can say, in the eyes of the public who know it only through the media.

“The Church visible to the intellect” is seen in the writings of Catholic scholars, laymen and laywomen, both on the Continent and throughout the English-speaking world, who have joined Raymond Cardinal Burke and other members of the hierarchy in calling for clarification from the Vatican. Many of these lay scholars, professors, for the most part, may be counted as disciples of Maritain.

Almost as if he were writing today, Maritain acknowledges that inexactness of language often leads some to attribute to the Church an act or decision of her directing personnel without distinguishing whether the act belongs properly to the perpetrator as its sole cause or as an instrument of the Church herself.

Retrieved March 17, 2019 from http://thewandererpress.com/catholic/news/featured-today/jacques-maritain-on-the-person-of-the-church-and-her-personnel/

Saints of the Day & A Prison Psychologist’s Perspective

Here’s the saint’s calendar for March 17, 2019, and some versions, each focusing on individual saints, (though all St. Patrick today) all wonderful; for they are the Church Triumphant.

The Catholic Church has many saints and reading about their lives has been a spiritual journey Catholics have been on since the publication of the Golden Legend, http://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/basis/goldenlegend/

From Butler’s Calendar of the Saints listing all of the saints of today. https://web.archive.org/web/20061019110802/http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/day0317.htm

From Butler’s Lives of the Saints, St. Patrick, Bishop, Apostle of Ireland. “IF the virtue of children reflects an honor on their parents, much more justly is the name of St. Patrick rendered illustrious by the innumerable lights of sanctity with which the Church of Ireland shone during many ages, and by the colonies of Saints with which it peopled many foreign countries; for, under God, its inhabitants derived from their glorious apostle the streams of that eminent sanctity by which they were long conspicuous to the whole world.” http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/lots/lots092.htm

From Franciscan Media, St. Patrick, (c. 386 – 461), “Details of his life are uncertain. Current research places his dates of birth and death a little later than earlier accounts. Patrick may have been born in Dunbarton, Scotland, Cumberland, England, or in northern Wales. He called himself both a Roman and a Briton. At 16, he and a large number of his father’s slaves and vassals were captured by Irish raiders and sold as slaves in Ireland. Forced to work as a shepherd, he suffered greatly from hunger and cold.

“After six years Patrick escaped, probably to France, and later returned to Britain at the age of 22. His captivity had meant spiritual conversion. He may have studied at Lerins, off the French coast; he spent years at Auxerre, France, and was consecrated bishop at the age of 43. His great desire was to proclaim the good news to the Irish.” https://www.franciscanmedia.org/saint-patrick/

From a most lovely site, really a daily devotional site offering much more than just saint of the day, Anastpaul https://anastpaul.wordpress.com/

One of my personal favorites, Tradition in Action, St. Patrick, “Patrick was the Apostle of a people, the light of Ireland, the father of this nation whose martyrdom will endure for ages. In him the gift of the apostolate shone. Christ put this gift in His Church and it will remain in her to the end times.” https://traditioninaction.org/SOD/j170sd_Patrick_3-17.html

Here is what the 1962 Roman Missal says about St. Patrick, Bishop, Confessor: “The holy Bishop Patrick is the Apostle and Patron of Ireland, He used with profit the talents recewived from God to convert the whole Irish people, which, thanks to him, has always been strongly loyal to the Holy See. He died A.D. 464.” (p. 1205) The Daily Missal and Liturgical Manual. (2004). Baronius Press: London: https://www.baroniuspress.com/book.php?wid=56&bid=4#tab=tab-1

There is an excellent article aout St. Patrick at Catholic World Report, https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2019/03/17/on-the-evangelization-and-re-evangelization-of-ireland/

A Prison Psychologist’s Perspective

Other than criminals themselves, people who work in prisons have the best vantage point to really understand the criminal mind; and the book, As I Live & Breathe, is an outstanding example of this.

People who do not understand that evil exists will eventually allow evil to move freely among us.

An excerpt.

“I’ve come to believe there are people among us that simply aren’t human. They’re unaffected by the emotions and motivations that are part of the normal human experience. These beings stab their children, stash them under their beds, and continue living in their home until the stench brings attention to their residence. They rape their three-year-old granddaughter and yet feel themselves justified when chronically yelling profane and degrading remarks at correctional officers. They call their elderly mother from prison and demand she talk dirty to them—a request that clearly causes distress to the mother. They impersonate a physician, gain access to communities of vulnerable refugees, and then target adolescents whom they later rape and kill. They stab another inmate so viciously and vigorously they have to stop sand rest in the middle of the attack before continuing with their mission. Only when enough staff arrive on the scene do they lay down the weapon and submit to restraints.

“It may be difficult for the average person to believe, but these individuals usually aren’t intellectually limited or seriously mentally ill. They often have a good sense of reality, organized thoughts, and an absence of delusions. They show no indication of experiencing hallucinations, excess energy or sleep/appetite disturbances. With the exception of the presence of a severe personality disorder, there’s no diagnosis for what plagues them.

“Their real problem is a fundamental incapacity to feel compassion, empathy, or genuine attachment—an inability to value others beyond the superficial use they can serve at any moment. There are theories as to cause and research to support the idea that their brains are wired differently. Regardless of the etiology, I know it exists in this extreme form. And, although those who’ve never actually worked with these individuals might disagree, there’s currently no realistic treatment for their dysfunction. At this level, it’s an unsolvable, unfixable problem. There’s no healing them. They cannot be refurbished or rehabilitated. And what makes them most dangerous, is they can disguise their depravity at will.

“I didn’t always believe in the existence of these convoluted examples of our species: these individuals with “as if personalities,” acting as if they are human. There was a time when I believed criminal behavior was primarily due to circumstances. I believed many of these people had a poor upbringing, had developed a drug addiction due to biochemical unluckiness, had made a series of bad decisions, or were the victims of social injustices.

“I also believed all inmates would benefit from the opportunity for self-improvement. If treated with respect, anyone could become a productive member of society, even if their society was limited to the world inside the walls of a prison. Many people have this same perspective—the fundamental belief that people are good or, at a minimum, can become good, given the right set of circumstances.

“Managing maximum-security inmates—those that are generally described as “the worst of the worst”—changed my view.” (pp. 9-11)

Marla Patterson. www.marlapatterson.com (2019). As I Live and Breathe: A Perspective from a Prison Psychologist. Moonshine Cove Publishing: Abbeville, South Carolina.

 

Saints of the Day & Prisons as Mental Hospitals

Here’s the saint’s calendar for February 6, 2019, and several versions, each focusing on individual saints, all wonderful; for these are the Church Triumphant.

The Catholic Church has many saints and reading about their lives has been a spiritual journey Catholics have been on since the publication of the Golden Legend, http://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/basis/goldenlegend/

From Butler’s Calendar of the Saints listing all of the saints of today. https://web.archive.org/web/20060923063352/http://catholic-forum.com/saints/day0206.htm

From Butler’s Lives of the Saints, St. Dorothy, Virgin, Martyr, http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/lots/lots049.htm

From Franciscan Media, also St. Paul Miki & Companions, https://www.franciscanmedia.org/saint-paul-miki-and-companions/

From a most lovely site, really a daily devotional site offering much more than just saint of the day, Anastpaul https://anastpaul.wordpress.com/

Here is what the 1962 Roman Missal says about St. Titus, Confessor, Bishop, “St. Titus, Bishop of Crete, was one of the most faithful disciples of St. Paul. The Apostle wrote to St. Titus a letter included in Holy Scripture. He died A. D. 101” (p. 1178) The Daily Missal and Liturgical Manual. (2004). Baronius Press: London. To get this for your library, go to the source: https://www.baroniuspress.com/book.php?wid=56&bid=4#tab=tab-1

Prisons as Mental Hospitals

This did not happen in a vacuum as public leadership decided a few decades ago to close all the mental hospitals in favor of community mental health, which, despite doing some good, has resulted in much worse, as this story from CAL Matters notes.

An excerpt.

Jeffrey Jurgens stood in a cage in an orange jumpsuit, screaming that he was Jesus Christ. From her seat in the Sacramento courtroom, his mother watched through tears.

Joanna Jurgens knew how important it was for the district attorney prosecuting Jeffrey for stealing a car—and the judge deciding his fate—to see the extent of her son’s illness. But it was torture to watch.

For years, she had begged judges to steer Jeffrey, who has schizoaffective disorder, into long-term treatment. She worried he would get hurt. She feared he could hurt someone else.

Joanna, 56, knew Jeffrey, who was 22 at the time of that 2014 hearing, did not belong behind bars. But after struggling to stabilize him through treatment in the community, she’d become convinced the criminal justice system was her last hope.

These days, the main path to treatment at a state psychiatric hospital is through jail. However controversial those state hospitals may be, many families conclude they are the best option for their loved ones.

“That is a sad state of affairs in our society, that only when you get locked up does it become a priority to get you treatment,” said Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey, who said she’s heard many parents describe similar feelings of desperation.

Perhaps nowhere is California’s mental health crisis more evident than in its criminal justice system. After decades of failure to create and fund policies that effectively help people with serious mental illnesses, many now say the jails and prisons have become the state’s default mental institutions.

Close to a third of California’s inmates have a documented serious mental illness,  according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

“We’re going to end up with an incarceration system that’s mainly dealing with people that have serious mental health problems,” said Democratic Sen. Jim Beall of San Jose. “It’s our own fault, in a way, for not having a good mental health system.”

In the past five years, the number of people in California who were deemed incompetent to stand trial after arrest—and ordered sent to state hospitals for treatment—increased by 60 percent, state figures show. Judges make such referrals when doctors determine that defendants are unable to understand legal proceedings or cooperate with their attorneys—the goal generally being that they get stabilized and then return to stand trial.

Often this leaves people who need mental health treatment stuck in county jails. Inmates in Jeffrey’s condition can wait in limbo for months, or even years, before being sent to a state hospital.

Five years ago, an average of 343 inmates with mental illness were awaiting placement. Last year, that number shot up to 819.

The increasing number of people incompetent to stand trial may also reflect changing attitudes among public defenders, who now see questioning someone’s competency as an avenue to a more therapeutic environment, said David Meyer, professor with the USC Institute of Psychiatry, Law, and Behavioral Science. Forty years ago, “we would never, ever refer somebody for incompetency proceedings if we could in any way get away with it,” he said. “People would be incarcerated for mental health treatment at a state hospital for a longer time than they would serve if they simply pled guilty.”

One major reason for the growing waitlist is that, while the number of state hospital beds has increased, it has not kept pace with the need. State hospitals now have more than 6,200 beds—a significant portion of which are reserved for other needs. In recent years the state has added about 700 hospital and “jail-based competency restoration” beds.

A few decades ago, fewer than half of state hospital patients came from the criminal justice system. Today more than 90 percent of them do—with more than a fifth of those individuals found incompetent to stand trial. The next largest group were tried and found not guilty by reason of insanity.

“We have hundreds of people sitting in our (community) hospitals right now who could benefit from a long-term stay at a state hospital, but we can’t get them in there,” said Sheree Lowe, vice president of behavioral health for the California Hospital Association.

That said, many experts believe state hospital stays are so restrictive and expensive that solutions to the crisis must be found elsewhere. The broader issue is that society is “letting people get so sick” that they end up in jails and emergency rooms, Lowe said.

Jennifer Mathis, director of policy and legal advocacy at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, describes state hospitals as “kind of like living in prison.”

“It’s not really a life on a long-term basis,” she said, but added that many families have gone so long without good community mental health services for their loved ones that they see no other real option.

State data show that 47 percent of the inmates who were found incompetent to stand trial last year had no Medi-Cal mental health services during the six months before they landed in jail. Almost half were unsheltered; in many cases, the charges they faced were directly related to their homelessness and untreated psychosis, according to the Department of State Hospitals.

Retrieved February 5, 2019 from https://calmatters.org/articles/california-mental-health-treatment-in-prisons/

Saint of the Day & Proposed Criminal Justice Legislation is Bad

Today, December 6, 2018, is the feast day of St. Nicholas of Bari (270 AD-343 AD) according to Lives of the Saints by Fr. Alban Butler (first published in 1887 under the title Lives of the Saints–With Reflections for Every Day in the Year), read here http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/lots/lots375.htm and a more detailed article from Tradition in Action at https://traditioninaction.org/SOD/j050sdNicholas12-6.htm

The definitive article though is at the Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11063b.htm and here is the Wikipedia link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Nicholas

Reading about these saints is a wonderful daily reflection; such marvelous lives the saints lived, such an army, the Church Triumphant, who has our back in heaven.

Proposed Criminal Justice Legislation is Bad

Following up on Tuesday’s post, this article from the Wall Street Journal furthers the case.

An excerpt.

First, do no harm” is a well-known motto of medical professionals. If only our politicians followed it as well.

Democrats and Republicans in Congress are eager to pass something this year under the banner of “criminal-justice reform.” But bipartisan support isn’t an automatic Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Members on both sides of the aisle can, and sometimes do, team up to pass bad bills, and the so-called First Step Act is a good example. The more we learn about it, the worse it looks.

By a vote of 360-59 in May, the House passed a version of the legislation designed to curb recidivism by helping inmates return to society. It provides for more rehabilitation programs and vocational training, for example. Prison conditions also would improve under the bill: Inmates would be placed in facilities located closer to their families, and women would no longer be shackled during childbirth. So far, so good.

But once the First Step Act moved to the upper chamber for consideration, what had been a federal prison-reform measure morphed into a sentencing-reduction bill. For starters, the Senate bill eliminates mandatory life-without-parole penalties for repeat drug offenders and reduces mandatory-minimum sentences for other serious drug offenses.

On Monday, Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard pointed out that the bill would give prison wardens the authority to deem violent criminals no longer dangerous and make them eligible for early release. “At the very least,” he writes, “this loophole undercuts the claim by supporters of the bill that ‘violent criminals and sex offenders’ would not qualify for shortened sentences.”

Among those supporters are President Trump and many Republicans in Congress who have made common cause with Barack Obama, Eric Holder and others on the activist left in denouncing “mass incarceration.” Some on the right believe that locking arms with liberal criminal-justice crusaders will help Republicans win minority votes. Others, like libertarian-leaning Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky, point to the high costs of locking people up. But you do not help minority communities by going easy on the very people who prey on them. It is black and brown people who benefit the most when violent crime drops.

The costs of incarceration should be measured against the cost of letting criminals go free. The relevant comparison is not between, say, schooling and a prison cell. Rather, it’s between the cost of imprisonment and the cost of criminal activity. What are the costs of stolen or damaged property, lives lost, or families living in fear after dope pushers take over a housing project? And what price will unelected judges and prison wardens pay when their decisions backfire?

Also lost in this debate is sympathy for the law-abiding residents of violence-plagued ghettos who believe that these criminals are not so much victims of “society” or “institutional racism” as they are victims of their own character flaws. The left-wing Sentencing Project reported in 2014 that when Americans were surveyed on whether courts “deal too harshly or not harshly enough with criminals,” 73% of whites and 64% of blacks responded, “not harshly enough.” If nearly two-thirds of black respondents feel that the criminal-justice system goes too easy on lawbreakers, perhaps the mass-incarceration activists aren’t speaking for those in the black community after all.

Until recently, the most vocal opponent of the First Step Act was GOP Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas. But the more Republicans learn about the sentencing provisions in the measure—and how different it is from the version that passed the House—the less they like it. I’m told that Republican critics now include, among others, Sens. John Kennedy of Louisiana, Marco Rubio of Florida, Ben Sasse and Deb Fischer of Nebraska, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Ted Cruz of Texas, Richard Shelby of Alabama and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. Law-enforcement agencies like the National Sheriffs’ Association also are pressing for changes to the bill. Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, has kept his opinion to himself, but his staff has disseminated articles critical of the legislation.

Retrieved December 5, 2018 from https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-the-senate-surrender-on-criminal-justice-1543966360

Saint of the Day & Releasing Prisoners

Today, December 4, 2018, is the feast day of St. Barbara, Virgin, Martyr (Third Century) according to Lives of the Saints by Fr. Alban Butler (first published in 1887 under the title Lives of the Saints–With Reflections for Every Day in the Year), read here http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/lots/lots373.htm

There is a more detailed article from Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Barbara

The definitive article though is at the Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02284d.htm

Reading about these saints is a wonderful daily reflection; such marvelous lives the saints lived, such an army, the Church Triumphant, who has our back in heaven.

Releasing Prisoners

Ann Coulter nails the untenable logic included in the latest proposed criminal justice reform.

An excerpt.

In the systematic dismantling of common sense in America, Jared Kushner’s “sentencing reform” bill is the coup de grace — a Mack Truck hurtling down the highway about to take out thousands of Americans. The Idiot Army is already in place to fight and win this battle.

Jared and the hip-hop artists currently advising him have decided that too many people are in prison. If you think you’ve heard this before, you have: Genius insights of this sort have preceded nearly every major crime wave this country has experienced, from Philadelphia to California to a bloody period known as “the Warren Court.”

As anyone with an amoeba’s understanding of recent history knows, beginning in the early ’60s, assorted heads-up-their-asses liberals jettisoned logic, common sense and a basic understanding of human nature by releasing criminals from the prisons where they belonged.

Instead of punishing criminals, we would give them social services, education and job training — with the implied understanding that they wouldn’t move next door to any of the reformers. The experts assured a disbelieving public that these policies would reduce crime.

As Thomas Sowell writes in The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, the stage was set. Liberal criminologists’ soft-on-crime policies were in place. We only needed empirical evidence.

“THE RESULTS: Crime rates skyrocketed. Murder rates suddenly shot up until the murder rate in 1974 was more than twice as high as in 1961. Between 1960 and 1976, a citizen’s chances of becoming a victim of a major violent crime tripled.”

Prior to this period, crime had been declining for three decades.

Thousands of Americans were murdered, raped, assaulted, disfigured and robbed as a direct result of the exact same policies that Jared and his assistant, Donald Trump, are trying to foist on the country right now.

Then-Princeton professor John DiIulio Jr. looked at the consequences of a single order by a Carter-appointed judge, Norma Shapiro, that put a population cap on Philadelphia prisons in the 1990s. In an 18-month period between 1993 and 1994, 9,732 prisoners released as a result of Judge Shapiro’s order were re-arrested for committing 79 murders, 90 rapes, 701 burglaries, 959 robberies, 1,113 assaults, 2,215 drug offenses and 2,748 thefts.

It took more than a decade of Reagan and Bush judges, Republican mayors and governors, and the endless complaints of ordinary people to produce the low crime rates we have today. Their formula was: Do the precise opposite of whatever the ACLU, the Brennan Center for Justice and The New York Times recommend.

In New York City alone, at least 10,000 people — mostly minorities — are not dead because Rudy Giuliani revived the idea of punishment for criminals, in lieu of understanding them.

Progressive young hipsters living in Brooklyn today have no concept that their trendy neighborhoods would be uninhabitable war zones but for Mayor Giuliani. If you don’t have order and safety in big cities, you can’t have anything else.

In 1991 the U.S. murder rate was well over twice what it is today.

Normal person: Thank God we started putting criminals in prison again!

Jared: LET’S RELEASE THEM.

A 2014 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that, within five years of release, 82 percent of property offenders, 77 percent of drug offenders, 74 percent of public order offenders and 71 percent of violent offenders were arrested for a new crime — after not getting caught committing God knows how many others.

This is not rocket science. Lock up criminals and they can’t commit any more crimes. As a New York Times headline put it in 2004 with characteristic cluelessness: “Despite Drop in Crime, an Increase in Inmates.”

Retrieved November 23, 2018 from http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2018-11-21.html#read_more

Saint of the Day & Giving Books to Prisoners

Today, November 15, 2018, is the feast day of St. Albert the Great, Bishop, Confessor & Doctor of the Church, (c. 1193 – November 15, 1280), (and the teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas) according to the 1962 Roman Missal, and you can buy a copy of the 1962 Missal at Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Roman-Missal-1962-English-Latin/dp/0954563123/ref=sr_ and there is an article about him at Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albertus_Magnus

The definitive piece though is from Tradition in Action at https://traditioninaction.org/SOD/j230sd_AlbertusMagnus_11-15.html

Reading about these saints is a wonderful daily reflection; such marvelous lives the saints lived, such an army, the Church Triumphant, who has our back in heaven.

Giving Books to Prisoners

Very nice work being done by this nonprofit in Appalachia, as reported by BuzzFeed. (Hat tip to Stacy)

An excerpt.

There’s a scene in The Shawshank Redemption — that 1994 feel-good prison break classic — when after more than six years of effort, our scrappy inmate-hero, Andy (Tim Robbins), finally receives funding to begin building a prison library. Soon, bookcases are being assembled, boxes of dusty used novels are being unpacked, and Andy is rattling off where to file the works of authors like Robert Louis Stevenson and Alexandre Dumas (whose name is initially pronounced “dumbass” by the inmate doing the filing).

“By the spring, Andy had transformed a storage room smelling of rat turds and turpentine into the best prison library in New England,” a dulcet voiceover from Morgan Freeman tells us, as the camera pans to a bustling room filled with inmates plucking books from well-stocked shelves and crowded around hand-carved wooden reading tables.

Reality, though, isn’t so charmingly bespoke. Today, prison libraries are hit-or-miss, more often falling on the “miss” side: frequently barebones, stacked with outdated textbooks, or littered with battered romance novels. Some prisons are even attempting to do away with libraries entirely, instead placing the burden on inmates to pay for e-books. In Pennsylvania, inmates have to pay for a $147 tablet in order to read books.

“The quality of the libraries is very uneven. People don’t have access to the books they really want to read, particularly if they’re on a specific subject. Some prisons try to do interlibrary loan, but it’s a very delayed service and, again, limited,” explains Katy Ryan, a professor at West Virginia University and cofounder of the Appalachian Prison Book Project.

Ryan shows me a recent letter from an inmate in Tennessee describing the library at his correctional facility. “Our library here isn’t very big, and besides, getting to it takes an act of Congress,” he says in nimble, attentive handwriting. “I am an indigent inmate and have no T.V., radio, etc., so books are my life. A fellow inmate said you guys could help me get some new reading material.”

Fortunately, he’s written to the right place.

The Appalachian Prison Book Project (APBP) is a nonprofit organization based in Morgantown, West Virginia, that sends free books to incarcerated people across six states in Appalachia: Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia. Founded in 2004 by Ryan and fellow professor (and recently elected Morgantown deputy mayor) Mark Brazaitis, APBP was born out of a class Ryan taught on the literature of incarceration.

“While reading works from formerly incarcerated or currently incarcerated people, we learned how important books were to them,” Ryan explains. “I mentioned to the students that I didn’t know if a prison book project existed in West Virginia. It turns out, there wasn’t one in the entire region. So, we carved out those six states, and committed ourselves to sending books to people who wanted them.”

Ryan’s all-volunteer organization started its work from a church basement, then operated briefly out of a graduate student’s apartment, then finally found a home inside the Aull Center, a historic building in downtown Morgantown where the small, donated office space — which Ryan says has “an ineffable spirit” and volunteers frequently reference in magical terms — is stacked high with incoming letters and outgoing books. At any given time, there are up to a dozen volunteers, all of whom have been trained in the APBP system, matching inmate request letters with books on hand — or putting out feelers to rustle up a book on the topic (or by the author, or in the language) requested. The majority of books donated are from the local Morgantown community, but APBP also regularly receives packages filled with novels, how-to guides, and beyond from across the country. Soft-covered books are preferred to hardbacks (which are more difficult to get into prisons), and when it comes to anything small-press or handmade — comic books, zines — staples are a no-go. The entire process is powerful in its simplicity: Once a letter is paired up with a proper book, volunteers simply record it in a handwritten log as a “match,” then deliver it to the post office.

Retrieved November 13, 2018 from https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sarahbaird/appalachian-nonprofit-sends-free-books-prison-inmates