Abusive Youth Services International granted more prison contracts in Florida

Troubled Youth Prison Company Wins Even More Contracts:

Despite voluminous evidence that inmates have suffered violence, sexual abuse and neglect inside the facilities of a private juvenile prison operator, the state of Florida has in recent weeks awarded fresh contracts to the company. 

Since late October, Florida has granted Youth Services International two new contracts to operate youth prisons, while signaling that YSI is in line to win a third contract to run a facility near Miami. The decision came after The Huffington Post published an extensive investigation that documented more than two decades of abuse at the company's juvenile and adult facilities. 

Florida's Department of Juvenile Justice has continued to award tens of millions of dollars worth of prison contracts to YSI, despite a civil rights investigation by the Justice Department and probes into negligence and violent conditions by authorities in at least five states. In the past year alone, the company has already received four new contracts in Florida totaling nearly $37 million.

Some background on the James Slattery, the owner of Youth Services International:

Over the past quarter century, Slattery’s for-profit prison enterprises have run afoul of the Justice Department and authorities in New York, Florida, Maryland, Nevada and Texas for alleged offenses ranging from condoning abuse of inmates to plying politicians with undisclosed gifts while seeking to secure state contracts. 

In 2001, an 18-year-old committed to a Texas boot camp operated by one of Slattery’s previous companies, Correctional Services Corp., came down with pneumonia and pleaded to see a doctor as he struggled to breathe. Guards accused the teen of faking it and forced him to do pushups in his own vomit, according to Texas law enforcement reports. After nine days of medical neglect, he died. 

That same year, auditors in Maryland found that staff at one of Slattery’s juvenile facilities coaxed inmates to fight on Saturday mornings as a way to settle disputes from earlier in the week. In recent years, the company has failed to report riots, assaults and claims of sexual abuse at its juvenile prisons in Florida, according to a review of state records and accounts from former employees and inmates.

Over 3,000 US prisoners serving life without parole for non-violent crimes

This is just incredibly absurd:

A few months later Jackson was convicted of shoplifting and sent to Angola prison in Louisiana. That was 16 years ago. Today he is still incarcerated in Angola, and will stay there for the rest of his natural life having been condemned to die in jail. All for the theft of a jacket, worth $159. 

Jackson, 53, is one of 3,281 prisoners in America serving life sentences with no chance of parole for non-violent crimes. Some, like him, were given the most extreme punishment short of execution for shoplifting; one was condemned to die in prison for siphoning petrol from a truck; another for stealing tools from a tool shed; yet another for attempting to cash a stolen cheque. 

“It has been very hard for me,” Jackson wrote to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as part of its new report on life without parole for non-violent offenders. “I know that for my crime I had to do some time, but a life sentence for a jacket value at $159. I have met people here whose crimes are a lot badder with way less time.”

How could anyone think this is justified? Why aren't these people being pardoned? Not only is it morally reprehensible it has to cost states a lot of tax dollars housing these inmates for the rest of their lives for these petty offenses.

Lance Tapely continues reporting of Maine's supermax brutal state prison

Last week, the intrepid Lance Tapely continued his reporting about the dismal conditions continuing at Maine State Prison, despite some promising reforms:

Maine corrections commissioner Joseph Ponte has reduced the typical number of prisoners in isolation from close to 100 to 40 or so in a 900-man prison. Of the supermax’s four cellblocks or “pods,” two, of Administrative Segregation, have 50 cells each, and one is now empty. The Mental Health Unit, where solitary confinement has never been total, has two pods of 16 cells each, one for “acute” prisoners, one for “stabilization.” Together they held 17 men the day I was there. 

Stays in the supermax also are much shorter now, and there’s a lot less prisoner “cutting up” and fewer brutal cell “extractions” by guards to tie prisoners into the restraint chair. For his reforms, Ponte has deservedly received national attention, helping fuel a still-weak movement to limit solitary confinement. 

But the Maine supermax is still there, and it’s still grim. While 40 prisoners may not sound like many, it’s the total, according to one report, that England and Wales, with 56 million inhabitants, keep in isolation — isolation less severe than in American supermaxes. 

And the supermax is part of a prison from which I receive constant reports of guard cruelty, inadequate medical care, understaffing, deliberate mixing of predators and the vulnerable, and — currently — turmoil because scores more men are being forced to double-bunk. Corrections says the double-bunking is being done for proper “classification” of prisoners. Critics suspect it’s being done to save money.

As Solitary Watch notes, it's important to remember that many prisoners are still languishing in unnecessary solitary confinement despite some recent an incomplete reforms.

Niagra Falls business man's attorney seeks to have him freed from solitary confinement

From the Buffalo News:

County Judge Sara Sheldon Farkas scheduled the hearing after defense attorney E. Earl Key insisted that placing DePetris in a regular cell would not necessarily mean lifting the judge’s order cutting off his communications privileges. 

Key said that his client lacks access to the jail’s law library and its Internet connection to the Lexis legal database. “It’s harming his defense,” Key said. 

Farkas wasn’t keen on the idea because DePetris is accused of using the phones to try to set up a contract with a hit man to kill Sandro Viola, DePetris’ brother-in-law and owner of another Niagara Falls company. 

“How am I going to put him back in the general (jail) population when the last time he was there, he allegedly committed a crime?” Farkas asked.

This is perhaps one of the rare instances when confinement seems justifiable.