REPROOF Issue 2009 – 2 © Jason Pecci
While everyone’s noses were to the grindstone the country was sold…as were the grindstones

Self Serving Prison Industry

With the new found freedom to be broke Americans, or their representatives and journalists, are finding fault with prison budgets and over- incarceration. Federal senator Jim Webb D-NC, (famous for putting G. Bush into a public bitch fit upon responding to his fatuous inquiry into Sen. Webb’s son’s service in Iraq) has commissioned a study into why one in thirty-one U.S. citizens is incarcerated or under some correctional supervision.

The answer, until about 2006, was; why not? Money was free and government jobs as guards, prosecutors, investigators, cops, parole/probation officers, administrators, paper pushers, process servers, evidence processors. Service providers, office suppliers, product pimps, food vendors. Restraint designers, weapons chemist, social engineers… gave broader ownership of and employment by the government to those participants. Thus the prison/industrial complex has arisen to take ownership of larger branches of public treasure. The problem, which Sen. Webb’s study will easily show, is that the public is over-invested in a failed scheme.

This is enormously aggravated by the intervention of the private incarceration industry’s intervention into representative politics to ensure judicial systems; state, federal and foreign, provide an ever increasing corpus of billable bodies.

Root cause analysis will show failure of representation as the primary culprit for this runaway train of conviction and sentencing that has finally arisen as a financial problem. Legislators are swamped with input that is not readily parsed to match with their constituent’s needs. In fact the majority of input is solicitation obfuscated to hide the petitioner’s ulterior motive and disguised as a public need. Add a dash of contrived urgency and you most often receive a law that is diametrically opposed to the public’s need.

Thirty plus years of this malfeasance by lobbyists (the “special interests” one hears about in campaign speeches) has built a tangle of laws – the mechanism behind over-incarceration – that may never be comprehensively penetrated by any study.

The lobbyists may have to less aggressively advance their positions for more fuel for the industry, but will never concede their cause (exorbitant fees buy extensive thoughtless allegiance)

This phenomena is only reversed when these hucksters become a victim of their own clients - tobacco lobbyists dying of cigarette induced cancer; prosecutors, lobbyists, police and politicians prosecuted by the system they over- built – which tells you, the taxpayer, all the truth you must know. When these people assume the role of defendant they are appalled at the extent of victimization the current criminal justice system can, and usually does, perpetrate upon them.

The parts of the problem that have to be corrected are: charging, investigation, legal representation, sentencing, imprisonment; from booking to discharge of sentence the system is wholly obtuse.

Charging: A district attorney’s performance metric is conviction rate and allegiance is to law school loans and peer organization accolades, neither serving public interest in the highly discretionary act of applying criminal statute to criminal complaints.
**Solution: Applications for public service as attorneys are accepted with no specificity and the most qualified are offered positions as either prosecutor, public defender or other (tax, water, property, civil, planning…) exclusively.

Representation: Public defenders office diminished ineffectiveness since established under Gideon v. Wainright (1963).
**Solution: Restore capability of the office to provide effective representation by hiring via the solution under ‘Charging’ above. See. Am. Bar Assoc.’s study, “Gideons’s Failed Promise,” for exhaustive analysis.

Investigation: Defense relies on the highly selective investigation of the state, State labs are notoriously biased.
**Solution: Defense pressed by procedure to produce point by point response to inculpatory evidence with countervailing evidence or mitigation factors. That is, provide expected adversarial testing like a fighter in the proper weight class; access to unbiased lab testing.

Sentencing: Pre-sentencing investigation report generated by probation dept. (or other prosecutorial affiliate). Judge defers to the prosecutor for appearance of serving the public’s best interest; mandatory minimums.
**Solution: PSI report must require response from an unbiased source capable of evaluating matters of fact and law in the context of sentencing – regional law school perhaps. Balance ratio of prosecutors to defense attorneys appointed as judges. Repeal the mandatory minimums that restrict discretion.

Imprisonment: More inmate intake that output. Lack of rehabilitative incarceration.
** Solution: Develop and utilize a parole and earned time system that encourages an inmate to earn progressively earlier release from day one. Dedicate rehabilitative program resources to the remaining, non-parole eligible inmates. (Colorado maintains approx. 8000 parole eligible inmates in a population of approx. 22,000 with no explanation as to their unworthiness).

All this deconstruction and reconstitution can only be accomplished by the public reasserting their interest in a justice system that provides proportional and prudent justice and an optimally socialized inmate upon timely release. Your right to petition your government for due services is the only way to combat self-serving industry manipulators and rebuild a public serving court and prison system.

Does your state have “voter initiative?” -- The right of citizens outside the legislature to originate legislation.
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Fear of Due Process and Journalism
Roxanna Saberi has been convicted of spying in an Iranian court and sentenced to eight years, after a one day trial in which no defense was allowed. She was originally charged with practicing journalism without a license (there is contrary reporting that she told her father she was detained for buying alcohol). Reproof is given to understand that the trial judge decided to elevate this charge to espionage. It is unclear what compelled this caprice. It is not unheard of for a judge to evaluate evidence before him and make a procedural decision that alters the legal process of a case. Here the judge appears to have spontaneously decided there were grounds for something bigger than communicating with BBC and NPR and levied the immense accusation of spying. Given no evidence nor any input from the prosecution to support the higher charge he has capriciously assumed these prerequisites and adopted the additional role of prosecutor… Ms. Saberi was thus subjected to a court of one; a combined judge and prosecutor.

This judge further dispensed with trifles of investigation, presentation of evidence, and the adversarial testing of evidence for and against, expected of any minimally functional judicial system. Proper investigation would have been moot as Ms. Saberi’s attorney was prohibited from speaking, thereby excluding even the appearance of adversarial testing that U. S. courts strive for.

Ms. Saberi is on hunger strike, in protest of her due process deprivations, while awaiting appeal. This deprivation is so blatant and politically charged that the usually obtuse president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Iran’s chief judge have expressed the need for swift and fair appeal. The political gravitas is likely the motivator for these sentiments.

Similar abuses are reported to occur in the U.S. only when courts are in session.
Book Review
The Story of American Freedom; Eric Forner-Clinton,
Professor of History, Columbia discusses the changes and nuances of “America’s animating impulse; freedom,” in penetrating detail.
Bush v. Gore was premised upon what Constitutional amendment?

REPROOF IS:
Jason Pecci
#111132
BCCF / 8P
11560 Rd. FF 75
Las Animas, CO 81054
© Jason Pecci / 2009-2 Copy and Distribute Freely
Note from MEP / I entered this Reproof late and am happy to say Ms. Saberi is home safe!