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chandra bozelko

National Memo: Who Should Run America’s Federal Prison System? An Ex-Offender, by Fellow Traveler Chandra Bozelko, Jan. 16, 2022

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Award winning journalist Chandra Bozelko is a member of our White Collar Support Group that meets on Zoom on Monday evenings. I am updating my resume in case her idea develops any traction. – Jeff

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The search is on for a new director of the federal Bureau of Prisons after Michael Carvajal announced on January 5 that he’s retiring from his appointed post and will leave when the Department of Justice finds his replacement.

The Biden Administration needs to replace Carvajal with a person who knows prisons inside and out: someone who’s been incarcerated before.

When President Joe Biden announced his first round of cabinet picks just weeks after being elected in 2020, then Vice President-elect Kamala Harris said: “When Joe asked me to be his running mate, he told me about his commitment to making sure we selected a cabinet that looks like America – that reflects the very best of our nation.”

It’s not clear that the Biden administration looks like the America that so many of us occupy.

Five years ago, researchers estimated that about three percent of the country – and 15 percent of Black men in the United States — have spent time in prison. Eight percent of the country and a third of Black men had felony convictions. Dr. Sarah Shannon, a sociologist who led the study, limited the data to the year 2010. Incarceration peaked in 2008 and reached its lowest level since 1995 last summer, according to a 2021 study by the Pew Research Center. Decarceration has added many more people to these totals since that 2010 snapshot; I think it’s much higher than the “20 million” number that gets appended to discussions of hiring people with criminal records.

So this part of America looks like it’s growing — and isn’t well reflected in the employee pool that staffs the Biden administration.

Some structural barriers prevent potential applicants with criminal records from filling federal posts, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Former President Barack Obama signed an executive order to turn the practice of allowing ex-felons to work in federal government into a formal regulation. At least three people with criminal histories worked in the Obama administration, mostly toward the end of his second term.

If the White House had remained in Democratic hands in 2016, even more former incarcerees might have found their way into federal employment — but Obama’s successor erased much of that progress. The Trump campaign hired people with criminal backgrounds but not the Trump administration. Trump’s team actually wanted to expand the disqualifying criteria for federal employment to include having charges that were disposed through a pretrial diversion program. They wanted to exclude people who didn’t have a felony conviction record with an even harsher criterion: Merely a brush with the criminal legal system would have served as cause for rescinding a job offer.

Biden said he hopes he’s the polar opposite of Trump; one way to prove that would be to embrace the Beltway adage that “personnel is policy” — coined in a 2016 op-ed by Ronald Reagan’s Director of Personnel, Scott Faulkner — and rewind the reputation he’s earning for himself that he doesn’t care about doing better by the 157,596 men and women penned in the country’s 122 federal correctional facilities as of January 13.

While he promised to phase out reliance on private prison management companies early on (a vow some advocates question), Biden hasn’t made any commutations or pardons. In December, the White House ordered an “expedited clemency screening program for drug offenders with less than four years left on their sentences” but it hasn’t reorganized the Office of the Pardon Attorney. Biden lost some support in the reform community when he rebuffed a request from the National Council of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls to commute the sentences of 100 women in his first 100 days.

While Trump touts the First Step Act as the pinnacle of reform, Biden’s Department of Justice has slow-walked its implementation. People restricted to home confinement could have completed their sentences years ago if the Department of Justice had applied the law’s signature “Earned Time Credits” to their sentences when they earned them. Instead, Attorney General Merrick Garland finally ordered it done the week of January 10, 2022, taking over a year to do what could have been accomplished very quickly.

The director of the Bureau of Prisons isn’t a Cabinet member per se. The office is filled by the attorney general and doesn’t require Senate approval – an aspect of the job that may change if a House bill introduced January 13 requiring confirmation hearings and a Senate vote to install a new director is made law.

Even though the Bureau of Prisons remains the only Justice Department agency whose head doesn’t require a Senate vetting, the choice is important to the entire tenor of an administration. Carvajal’s short stint mirrors the president he served; certain prisoners hoarded large sums of money in their inmate accounts and dodged financial obligations and a certain lawlessness pervaded federal prisons, which had nothing to do with the people convicted of federal crimes. A 2021 Associated Press investigation found more than 100 correctional employees have been arrested and/or convicted of crimes since 2019. It was a lapse significant enough for Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) to call for Carvajal’s ouster in November 2021.

Naming a director who has a rap sheet would leave very few critics of Biden’s commitment to reform. Of course, this proposal will inevitably invite accusations that the Biden administration is allowing the inmates to run the asylum — as if that’s necessarily worse than who’s running it now.

But, surprisingly, it seems that even the most fervent reform advocates fall just short of saying that the new director should be a formerly incarcerated person.

The same National Council of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls that sought to free at least 100 women a year ago, released a statement on January 12 and an open letter to President Biden asking for a director who has “a deep understanding of the causes of mass incarceration and a track record of combating institutional racism in keeping with this Administration’s oft-stated — but rarely seen — commitment to racial justice… [and is] committed to decarceration of people who should not be in prison: the elderly, ill, survivors of domestic violence, and long-timers.”

The National Council did not return a request for comment on whether that “deep understanding” really means someone who lived deep inside a cell. Neither did representatives from Just Leadership USA, an organization that trains formerly incarcerated people for leadership positions. [Disclosure: I was one of JustLeadership’s “Leading with Conviction” Fellows in 2018.]

I’m not suggesting that someone slinging meth on a corner because his criminal record locks him out of legitimate employment should slide into Carvajal’s seat. More than enough former prisoners are qualified to do his former job. Among the millions of people who’ve re-entered society, there are two MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant award winners (1, 2), one of whom made Time Magazine’s 2019 Top 100 list, as well as law professors, elected officials, business pioneers, non-profit founders, authors, journalists, and artists who have accomplished more than other people who’ve never walked the line.

It won’t be some rough-riding abolitionist either who would deliver a surprise — or even illegal — exodus from federal pens; I don’t think an abolitionist would take the position. And that highlights the real risk of carving out Carvajal’s job for someone who’s been through the criminal legal system. It’s not a dearth of talent or responsibility; it just may be that none of them really wants the job of managing people confined to the same spaces they once were.

But if called, one of us should serve, even if only for a short period. To be the first person to leave one door of a prison and walk in another would too much of a revolution to ignore. And this president and his Department of Justice should kick it off by picking someone with lived experience to lead the federal government’s prison system.

Chandra Bozelko did time in a maximum-security facility in Connecticut. While inside she became the first incarcerated person with a regular byline in a publication outside of the facility. Her “Prison Diaries” column ran in The New Haven Independent, and she later established a blog under the same name that earned several professional awards. Her columns will now appear regularly in The National Memo.

 

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Award: Fellow Traveler Chandra Bozelko is 2020 Sigma Delta Chi Award Winner – Society of Professional Journalists

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Congratulations to Journalist and Fellow Traveler Chandra Bozelko on winning this prestigious award. Chandra is a member of our online White Collar Support Group that meets on Zoom on Monday evenings.

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“In online column writing, the winner is Chandra Bozelko of Gannett/ MoreContentNow for The Outlaw: Insider Takes on Criminal Justice, which, according to the judges: contained masterful writing on compelling, eye-opening subjects. She knows how to grab the reader, and how tell the stories as only she can do…”

Announcement at 34:34:

Bozelko Column: Infrastructure Plan Should Include Prisons and Jails

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Chandra Bozelko writes the award-winning blog Prison Diaries. You can follow her on Twitter at @ChandraBozelko and email her at outlawcolumn@gmail.com. She is a member of our White Collar Support Group that meets online on Zoom on Monday evenings. – Jeff

By Chandra Bozelko

Chandra Bozelko More Content Now USA TODAY NETWORK

Reprinted from The Sault News, April 12, 2021

Columns share an author’s personal perspective.

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For the second time in two months, on April 4, detainees in St. Louis’ City Justice Center escaped their cells, broke windows and tossed items into the street. It wasn’t some mastermind hacking the jail’s mainframe, or some revision of the escape at Dannemora from summer 2015.  

The locks were broken. That’s it. Everyone got out of their cells and, because there were no working locks, no one could effectively put them back in.  

St. Louis isn’t the first busted lock problem. Among the reasons why private prison management company CoreCivic decided last year not to continue its contract with a jail in Tennessee was that the doors had faulty locking mechanisms.   

In Arizona, prison locks haven’t worked, according to complaints filed in 2019.  

Last year, in Texas, at the Dolph Briscoe Unit, prisoners protested the coronavirus lockdown by letting themselves out of their cells. State Sen. John Whitmire, the Democrat who oversees the Texas Senate’s Criminal Justice Committee, told Keri Blakinger, a reporter at The Marshall Project, that replacing or fixing the locks isn’t a financial issue but rather staying ahead of inmates who are smart at circumventing them.    

Chandra Bozelko writes the award-winning blog Prison Diaries. You can follow her on Twitter at @ChandraBozelko and email her at outlawcolumn@gmail.com.

More from Chandra Bozelko:

Bozelko Column: Prisons More Secure than the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 8, 2021

Bozelko Column: 2020 Through the Lens of My Inbox, Dec. 24, 2020

Boston Globe: I Cut the Prison Phone Cord, But Not Intentionally, Nov. 17, 2020

Bozelko Column: Trump’s Not Your Man on Criminal Justice, Oct. 31, 2020

Bozelko column: CARES Act payments to prisoners problematic, Oct. 23, 2020

Bozelko column: SCOTUS nominee’s dissent on guns for felons deserves more attention, Oct. 16, 2020

CT Mirror: Blame for Coronavirus Spread in Prisons Belongs to Guards who Don’t Wear Masks, By Chandra Bozelko

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Chandra Bozelko writes the award-winning blog Prison Diaries. You can follow her on Twitter at @ChandraBozelko and email her at outlawcolumn@gmail.com. She is a member of our White Collar Support Group that meets online on Zoom on Monday evenings. – Jeff

By Chandra Bozelko

Reprinted from The Connecticut Mirror, Feb. 12, 2021

Columns share an author’s personal perspective.

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In April, former Commissioner of Department of Correction (DOC) Rollin Cook issued a department-wide memorandum requiring staff “to wear protective face-masks while on duty whenever social distancing is not possible.”

Chandra Bozelko

Corrections officers in Connecticut aren’t obeying this instruction. They’re not wearing masks, at least not properly and definitely not consistently. That’s what’s caused the precipitous rise in the number of infections and deaths of incarcerated people. As of February 5, 3,816 inmates had tested positive and 19 of them have died from COVID-19 complications; six passed away inside of a month. But none had died between May 26 and November 18, and the positivity rate during that time was around 1%. This spread is a more recent phenomenon.

There are only three ways the virus can reliably enter a correctional facility: visits, new admissions and/or staff. The realities of prison life during COVID-19 take the first two options out of contention. It’s most likely that the staff who’s spreading the disease.

Visits can’t be the cause of the spread because in-person visits that allow contact have been suspended since March; the resumption of visits in October limited them to non-contact, which means the inmate and the visitor don’t even breathe the same air.

New admissions aren’t causing the spread, either.  Incoming inmates are kept in quarantine for two weeks, more than enough time to assure that they’re not infected, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

It’s the lack of masks on the staff that’s causing the spread. That’s where the evidence points.

While it’s been hard to connect with inmates because of a lockdown imposed to slow the virus’s spread, a few prisoners have reported the non-use of masks to family and friends.

A relative of a model inmate at MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution reports that he’s witnessed prisoners asking officers to fix their masks or put them on, only to be told to mind their own business. According to this relative, repercussions are sure to follow — like mail tampering — if anyone complains about their not wearing masks.

Another woman took pictures of guards when she retrieved her cell phone from the lockers outside the visiting room at the same prison, MacDougall-Walker CI.  One officer wasn’t wearing a mask at all and another had it slung around his chin.

A female inmate at York Correctional Institution, the state’s only women’s prison, that went without a single infection until September 2020, says guards aren’t wearing masks and she witnessed one maskless guard ask where he could get a COVID test.

It’s not just the staff’s refusal to wear masks. Another man who spent a month at Bridgeport Correctional Center said that inmates who make their own masks are often punished for it. While a shirt or a sheet fashioned into a mask can, in theory, be considered contraband, the wisdom of punishing an attempt to protect one’s own health, and others’, is questionable.

But the most damning evidence that staff isn’t wearing masks is an official report by the Monitoring Panel — a group of five people (two chosen by the ACLU, two chosen by the DOC and a fifth chosen by the original four — established through the settlement with the state in the suit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Connecticut in April 2020, captioned McPherson v. Lamont, to protect incarcerated people from the novel coronavirus. When provided the opportunity to prove their obedience to the rules, correctional staff blew it.  The Monitoring Panel conducted two site visits where they reported that “most” of the officers and inmates observed were wearing masks when they toured.

Site visits to prisons rarely meet their expectations for oversight. When I was incarcerated at York CI, I watched last minute scrambles to throw fresh paint over dirty walls and to make the facility appear clean and in compliance when it probably wasn’t.

I would expect that all staff would have donned a mask, if only for the moments that the Monitoring Panel passed through. If they didn’t all have them on while these outsiders peered over the facility, then staff is wearing them even less frequently when overseers aren’t around.  The DOC knows this; its current Commissioner, Angel Quiros, admitted that the mask directive was only “mostly” followed.

Elana Bildner, an attorney with the ACLU of Connecticut and one of two lawyers who represented plaintiffs in the McPherson suit, says that her office receives numerous complaints that identify the date, time and place within the prison where staff members don’t have masks on.

Bildner confronted the DOC’s counsel, the Attorney General’s office, about it, only to be advised that there’s no way to review security camera footage because an agreement with the state’s unions, AFSCME Council 4’s Local 1565 and Service Employee International Union’s Connecticut State Employees Association (CSEA) Local 760, prohibits it. “They cannot be disciplined for not wearing masks based on video footage,” Bildner said she’s been told.

But that doesn’t seem to be true. Neither the collective bargaining agreements for AFSCME Local 1565 nor CSEA 760 mention the ability to review surveillance cameras. When asked for comment, David Glidden, Executive Director of CSEA/SEIU Local 2001, and Jody Barr, Executive Director, AFSCME Council 4, issued a joint statement. They couldn’t confirm that any such provision existed and also didn’t deny that staff wasn’t wearing masks, instead noting that “the unions with members at DOC have been pushing hard for appropriate PPE” and have been “outspoken and united in their advocacy for the maximum safety precautions.”

An email requesting clarification wasn’t answered by the Assistant Attorney General who acts as lead counsel for DOC in the McPherson v. Lamont litigation, Terrence O’Neill.

There’s no reason why the DOC can’t find the anti-masker employees as identified to the ACLU and order them wear masks — and do so properly. It doesn’t necessarily entail punishing them; after all, the department supposedly specializes in correction. But Commissioner Quiros admitted that he hadn’t reached the discipline level of enforcement. Maybe with 19 people dead, it’s time to start.

It’s not as if these same officers aren’t subject to rules about what they wear to work. In fact, DOC’s Administrative Directive 2.13 contains uniform and appearance requirements that are even more obtrusive.  It includes rules on how long mustaches can be. It bans female officers from painting their nails with purple, blue or gold nail polish and none of them can wear white socks. If the officers can abide by those restrictions then surely they can follow the departmental rule that would save lives.

To be fair, the original mask memo was written when health experts didn’t know as much about the spread of the virus. It directed that masks were necessary when social distance of six feet was impossible. Now we know masks are necessary regardless of the stretch of space between two people.

I predict that guards will shift blame to the poor ventilation systems in prisons. The problem with that explanation is that there’s no epidemiological evidence supporting the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 is spread through heating and cooling ducts. The much more likely source of spread is contact with an infected person who isn’t wearing a mask.

Masks’ efficacy in reducing the spread of the virus — and even the resulting death rate — has been proven over and over again. And masking advice has changed and updated itself since the initial memo from former Commissioner Cook, even advancing to a direction to wear two masks now.

Correction officers’ refusal to wear masks is poised only to get worse. As of February 1, guards are getting vaccinated and even less fearful of the virus and Governor Lamont’s isn’t honoring his promise to include all inmates in Phase 1b of vaccination, at least not as advocates envisioned. The McPherson settlement agreement that exerted some control on internal processes expired on December 31, 2020 so the Monitoring Panel that found most staff masked won’t be going back in, not without another judicial intervention.

It’s becoming clear that Commissioner Quiros must pen another memo, post haste, that explains that a mask across a guard’s face — nose and mouth — is part of their uniform, at least for the duration of the pandemic, regardless of distance from the inmates. Then he must subject them to discipline if they don’t comply. More people will die if he doesn’t.

Chandra Bozelko writes the award-winning blog Prison Diaries. You can follow her on Twitter at @ChandraBozelko and email her at outlawcolumn@gmail.com.

More from Chandra Bozelko:

Bozelko Column: Prisons More Secure than the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 8, 2021

Bozelko Column: 2020 Through the Lens of My Inbox, Dec. 24, 2020

Boston Globe: I Cut the Prison Phone Cord, But Not Intentionally, Nov. 17, 2020

Bozelko Column: Trump’s Not Your Man on Criminal Justice, Oct. 31, 2020

Bozelko column: CARES Act payments to prisoners problematic, Oct. 23, 2020

Bozelko column: SCOTUS nominee’s dissent on guns for felons deserves more attention, Oct. 16, 2020

NBC Think: One of Joe Biden’s First Steps Should be to Fix Donald Trump’s Broken Criminal Justice Reform, by Chandra Bozelko & Ryan Lo

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Chandra Bozelko writes the award-winning blog Prison Diaries. You can follow her on Twitter at @ChandraBozelko and email her at outlawcolumn@gmail.com. She is a member of our White Collar Support Group that meets online on Zoom on Monday evenings. Ryan Lo is a friend of our ministry who has been helpful in our outreach. – Jeff

After the photo ops ended, the former president’s vaunted First Step Act was barely implemented. The new administration must change that.

President Joe Biden prepares to sign a series of executive orders at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office just hours after his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021. Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

By Chandra Bozelko, vice president, National Society of Newspaper Columnists and Ryan Lo, founder, Unlabeled Digital Media

Reprinted from NBCnews.com, Jan. 21, 2021

In its outgoing announcement of then-President Donald Trump’s accomplishments, the White House listed the First Step Act as “the first landmark criminal justice reform legislation ever passed to reduce recidivism and help former inmates successfully rejoin society.”

Anyone who wants to attribute any positive accomplishments to Trump shouldn’t include the First Step Act among them. The Trump administration followed neither the letter nor the spirit of the law.

Implementation of the law is where it would have had a demonstrable effect on the people it was meant to help; it’s also the part the executive branch is wholly responsible for, and the part the Trump administration has repeatedly failed at, causing many inmates to have to resort to court intervention.

As one might expect, whatever Trump giveth with one hand, he taketh away with the other.

It’s now up to President Joe Biden to implement the First Step Act as it was written — even though Trump is claiming credit for it.

Plenty of smart people have fallen for Trump’s tale: Last September, The New York Times published a “Fact-Checked List of Trump Accomplishments” and called the law a success; fully five of the 123 listed successes dealt with the law. Heck, even we begrudgingly credited Trump with doing something moral because of his support for the bill.

The law has two main objectives; to provide reductions in some federal sentences; and to incentivize people’s participation in rehabilitative programming. Like so much that is Trump, the law is inherently transactional: In exchange for 54 days off in “earned time credits” for every year of their sentence, federal inmates must complete classes and work at their prison jobs.

But the federal government isn’t giving inmates the credits they’ve earned: The process of granting credits was supposed to start last January, but inmates are already getting stiffed.

It’s now up to President Joe Biden to implement the First Step Act as it was written.

Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen has become a case study in exactly how Trump failed to implement his own signature prison reform. Last month, he filed two petitions: one seeking his earned time credits, which would mean he could be free in May — approximately one year early; and another to make sure that the Bureau of Prisons orders the credits be issued, which will help those who remain inside get the credits they too have earned.

If he wins his second petition, Cohen will have done more to force the implementation of the First Step Act than his former client did.

Cohen is not the only person facing this broken promise. His lawyer, Danya Perry — who represented Cohen last summer when he was re-incarcerated as retaliation for publishing his memoir, “Disloyal” — also represented the first petitioner to convince a court to grant him the time credits the Bureau of Prisons owed him under the law. Perry says her office is now receiving calls from all over the country from other incarcerated people who are trying to force the bureau to acknowledge the credits they have earned so that they aren’t unlawfully imprisoned past the date the statute says they can leave.

Glen Adkins Jr., an inmate at FCI Terminal Island, is among those fighting to assure that the Bureau of Prisons obeys the law. His petition notes that Trump’s Bureau of Prisons distributed an approved programs guide in October that changed the rules of the earned time credits program to limit the number of days that a person can shave off their sentence. That guide was issued without congressional approval, and directly contradicts the plain language of the First Step Act.

So far, the executive branch’s execution of the First Step Act has been replete with bad faith.

And while the criminal justice reform law contained a clause that said that these credits didn’t have to be implemented until 2022, that itself shows that Trump didn’t intend to provide relief to inmates who take their reform seriously. Allowing Trump to delay the implementation of his signature justice reform, while still taking credit for achieving it, amounts to taking another swig of Trump lies — something we’ve sworn off. Besides, the inmates have kept their part of the First Step Act bargain. So should he.

And the earned time credits aren’t the only part of the First Step Act that has been half-heartedly administered: amid a pandemic that has taken the lives of 204 federal inmates as of January 12 — some of whom might have been home before they were infected if the law had been followed — wardens denied 98 percent of compassionate release requests from coronavirus-infected inmates as of last May, even though the First Step Act expanded the criteria under which inmates could get some relief.

Biden can and should correct all of this immediately: Article II of the Constitution says that the president “shall take care that all laws are faithfully executed.” So far, the executive branch’s execution of the First Step Act has been replete with bad faith, though the judicial branch has offered some relief. The new president can and must reverse that by directing — via an executive order, if necessary — that all inmates receive their earned credits immediately and that wardens start giving real weight to compassionate release requests while the Covid-19 pandemic continues. It’s the perfect addition to Biden’s corrective agenda on Trump mistakes.

Meanwhile, we should all recognize that what everyone hailed as a historic change by the Trump administration was really just much of the same con as ever: a deal he made for the photo op with Kim Kardashian and the ability to stick it to his detractors. Don’t continue to give him credit for championing justice reform now that he’s gone; given how he chose not to honor the promise of this law for two years, the First Step Act so far has been more stumble than stride.

NBC Think: One of Joe Biden's First Steps Should be to Fix Donald Trump's Broken Criminal Justice Reform, by Chandra Bozelko & Ryan Lo

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Chandra Bozelko writes the award-winning blog Prison Diaries. You can follow her on Twitter at @ChandraBozelko and email her at outlawcolumn@gmail.com. She is a member of our White Collar Support Group that meets online on Zoom on Monday evenings. Ryan Lo is a friend of our ministry who has been helpful in our outreach. – Jeff

After the photo ops ended, the former president’s vaunted First Step Act was barely implemented. The new administration must change that.

President Joe Biden prepares to sign a series of executive orders at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office just hours after his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021. Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

By Chandra Bozelko, vice president, National Society of Newspaper Columnists and Ryan Lo, founder, Unlabeled Digital Media

Reprinted from NBCnews.com, Jan. 21, 2021

In its outgoing announcement of then-President Donald Trump’s accomplishments, the White House listed the First Step Act as “the first landmark criminal justice reform legislation ever passed to reduce recidivism and help former inmates successfully rejoin society.”

Anyone who wants to attribute any positive accomplishments to Trump shouldn’t include the First Step Act among them. The Trump administration followed neither the letter nor the spirit of the law.

Implementation of the law is where it would have had a demonstrable effect on the people it was meant to help; it’s also the part the executive branch is wholly responsible for, and the part the Trump administration has repeatedly failed at, causing many inmates to have to resort to court intervention.

As one might expect, whatever Trump giveth with one hand, he taketh away with the other.

It’s now up to President Joe Biden to implement the First Step Act as it was written — even though Trump is claiming credit for it.

Plenty of smart people have fallen for Trump’s tale: Last September, The New York Times published a “Fact-Checked List of Trump Accomplishments” and called the law a success; fully five of the 123 listed successes dealt with the law. Heck, even we begrudgingly credited Trump with doing something moral because of his support for the bill.

The law has two main objectives; to provide reductions in some federal sentences; and to incentivize people’s participation in rehabilitative programming. Like so much that is Trump, the law is inherently transactional: In exchange for 54 days off in “earned time credits” for every year of their sentence, federal inmates must complete classes and work at their prison jobs.

But the federal government isn’t giving inmates the credits they’ve earned: The process of granting credits was supposed to start last January, but inmates are already getting stiffed.

It’s now up to President Joe Biden to implement the First Step Act as it was written.

Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen has become a case study in exactly how Trump failed to implement his own signature prison reform. Last month, he filed two petitions: one seeking his earned time credits, which would mean he could be free in May — approximately one year early; and another to make sure that the Bureau of Prisons orders the credits be issued, which will help those who remain inside get the credits they too have earned.

If he wins his second petition, Cohen will have done more to force the implementation of the First Step Act than his former client did.

Cohen is not the only person facing this broken promise. His lawyer, Danya Perry — who represented Cohen last summer when he was re-incarcerated as retaliation for publishing his memoir, “Disloyal” — also represented the first petitioner to convince a court to grant him the time credits the Bureau of Prisons owed him under the law. Perry says her office is now receiving calls from all over the country from other incarcerated people who are trying to force the bureau to acknowledge the credits they have earned so that they aren’t unlawfully imprisoned past the date the statute says they can leave.

Glen Adkins Jr., an inmate at FCI Terminal Island, is among those fighting to assure that the Bureau of Prisons obeys the law. His petition notes that Trump’s Bureau of Prisons distributed an approved programs guide in October that changed the rules of the earned time credits program to limit the number of days that a person can shave off their sentence. That guide was issued without congressional approval, and directly contradicts the plain language of the First Step Act.

So far, the executive branch’s execution of the First Step Act has been replete with bad faith.

And while the criminal justice reform law contained a clause that said that these credits didn’t have to be implemented until 2022, that itself shows that Trump didn’t intend to provide relief to inmates who take their reform seriously. Allowing Trump to delay the implementation of his signature justice reform, while still taking credit for achieving it, amounts to taking another swig of Trump lies — something we’ve sworn off. Besides, the inmates have kept their part of the First Step Act bargain. So should he.

And the earned time credits aren’t the only part of the First Step Act that has been half-heartedly administered: amid a pandemic that has taken the lives of 204 federal inmates as of January 12 — some of whom might have been home before they were infected if the law had been followed — wardens denied 98 percent of compassionate release requests from coronavirus-infected inmates as of last May, even though the First Step Act expanded the criteria under which inmates could get some relief.

Biden can and should correct all of this immediately: Article II of the Constitution says that the president “shall take care that all laws are faithfully executed.” So far, the executive branch’s execution of the First Step Act has been replete with bad faith, though the judicial branch has offered some relief. The new president can and must reverse that by directing — via an executive order, if necessary — that all inmates receive their earned credits immediately and that wardens start giving real weight to compassionate release requests while the Covid-19 pandemic continues. It’s the perfect addition to Biden’s corrective agenda on Trump mistakes.

Meanwhile, we should all recognize that what everyone hailed as a historic change by the Trump administration was really just much of the same con as ever: a deal he made for the photo op with Kim Kardashian and the ability to stick it to his detractors. Don’t continue to give him credit for championing justice reform now that he’s gone; given how he chose not to honor the promise of this law for two years, the First Step Act so far has been more stumble than stride.

Bozelko Column: Trump Threw Away his Legacy on Human Trafficking

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Chandra Bozelko writes the award-winning blog Prison Diaries. You can follow her on Twitter at @ChandraBozelko and email her at outlawcolumn@gmail.com. She is a member of our White Collar Support Group that meets online on Zoom on Monday evenings. – Jeff

By Chandra Bozelko

Reprinted from The Holland Sentinel, Jan. 15, 202`1

Columns share an author’s personal perspective.

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On Jan. 12, the federal government carried out the first execution of a woman since 1953.

The woman is Lisa Montgomery, who in 2008 was convicted of killing Bobbie Jo Stinnett, a pregnant woman, and removing Stinnett’s baby and treating her as her own. It looked like the execution might have been scheduled for Jan. 20 or later, but the Supreme Court of the United States reversed each of three stays – court orders halting the execution – to allow the government to take her life.

Montgomery’s last hope was President Donald Trump. But he didn’t grant her clemency or a reprieve, thereby throwing away his legacy of protecting victims of sex trafficking.

The Department of Homeland Security defines human trafficking as “the use of force, fraud or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act.” The mention of human trafficking conjures images of women from foreign countries being smuggled out. But it’s a domestic problem; about 83% of sex trafficking victims are United States citizens, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. About half are children, according to the federal Office for Victims of Crime.

Montgomery was one of them. As her clemency petition detailed, at age 11, she was prostituted by her own mother in order to “earn her keep.” Her lawyers report that “the roofer, the plumber, the propane man, and who knows how many others, each took their turn” raping Montgomery and paying her mother for the opportunity.

When I was incarcerated, I saw how much sexual abuse of young girls contributes to mental illness that rips away moral inhibitions as an adult. This isn’t an abuse excuse; it’s statistical analysis. Experiencing child abuse doubles the probability that an adult will break the law, says the National Bureau of Economic Research, and sexual abuse amplifies this risk the most.

Indeed 16 women who committed crimes like Montgomery’s had similar abuse histories, yet they were either spared the death penalty by a jury or had their death sentences commuted because of that mistreatment.

Montgomery’s crime is severe and she took responsibility for it. She knew she deserved accountability. But imposing the ultimate punishment on her ignores the fact that the road to Stinnett’s death was paved with molestation by adults who never faced consequences for it – even after Montgomery reported it to a family member who was a police officer.

Addressing sexual trafficking of children is a blueprint for crime reduction, and very few presidents have tackled human trafficking the way Trump has. In September the Department of Justice released $100 million in grants; $35 million will cover survivors’ short-term housing costs. On Dec. 31, he named January 2021 “National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month.” For the first time, a White House staffer will work exclusively on combatting human sex trafficking, a change that future presidents will likely maintain – at least they should.

The awareness of human trafficking has increased exponentially, arguably because of what the 45th president of the United States did to combat it. The National Human Trafficking Hotline referred 499 cases to law enforcement in 2010 but 3,599 in 2019.

The Jan. 6 riots at the nation’s Capitol and his historic second impeachment have imperiled what Trump can bequeath to history; anything good he might have done will be ignored as people interpret his works. The president could have associated his tenure with protecting people by forbearing the ultimate punishment on a trafficking survivor like Lisa Montgomery. But he didn’t.

Interestingly enough, on Oct. 16, 2020 – the same day the Department of Justice announced the scheduling of Montgomery’s execution – Trump told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie that he agrees with being “very strong against pedophilia.” If that were the case, then he would have hated what was done to Montgomery as a child, at least enough to prevent her unnatural death. But he didn’t.

Executing Montgomery implicitly endorsed the illegal and wretched trade of her tiny body that Trump allegedly worked so hard to stop. The president vowed to “tenaciously pursue the promise of freedom for all victims of this terrible crime.” But he didn’t.

While freedom for Montgomery wasn’t a possibility, administering capital punishment granted a win to the people who sexually abused her. That’s not what Trump’s tenure was ever supposed to be about. But in the end, it was and it will remain that way.

When he leaves office Jan. 20, remember this: President Donald J. Trump turned his back on trafficking victims and protected pedophiles and sexual abusers. It was fully within his authority – and consistent with his other acts – to spare Lisa Mongtomery. He didn’t, instead opting for a shameful legacy.

Chandra Bozelko writes the award-winning blog Prison Diaries. You can follow her on Twitter at @ChandraBozelko and email her at outlawcolumn@gmail.com.

More from Chandra Bozelko:

Bozelko Column: Prisons More Secure than the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 8, 2021

Bozelko Column: 2020 Through the Lens of My Inbox, Dec. 24, 2020

Boston Globe: I Cut the Prison Phone Cord, But Not Intentionally, Nov. 17, 2020

Bozelko Column: Trump’s Not Your Man on Criminal Justice, Oct. 31, 2020

Bozelko column: CARES Act payments to prisoners problematic, Oct. 23, 2020

Bozelko column: SCOTUS nominee’s dissent on guns for felons deserves more attention, Oct. 16, 2020

Boston Globe: I Cut the Prison Phone Cord, but Not Intentionally, by Chandra Bozelko

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Chandra Bozelko writes the award-winning blog Prison Diaries. You can follow her on Twitter at @ChandraBozelko and email her at outlawcolumn@gmail.com. She is a member of our White Collar Support Group that meets online on Zoom on Monday evenings.

By Chandra Bozelko

Reprinted from The Boston Globe, Connections Magazine, Nov. 17, 2020

For the first year I was home from prison, I rerouted any money that came my way directly into an account for prepaid calls with Securus, the correctional phone service behemoth. Because prison rules only allow outgoing calls, I would cheerfully accept and underwrite calls from my friends and former cell- mates still inside, and listen to what was happening in the place where I’d lived for more than six years—gossip from the old neighborhood. Police had arrested one of the guards for sexual assault. Then another. Then a third. Recidivists swung in and out. Tuesday evenings were locked down for staff training, which both ends of the call knew was likely not happening.

“What’s up with you?” each caller inevitably asked. I had little to relay and, without a job or social networks—all of that had evaporated 10 years before—I was almost in the same position as they were. So I would share small details: “I got a $12 bob” — all I could afford and a significant fall from my pre-prison life, which included $500 highlights in Manhattan. “No, I didn’t get a job yet.” “Of course I’m not dating anyone — did you hear what I just said about the cut-rate bob?”

In post-prison reentry to society, your future just shows up. It doesn’t appear when you need it to and it doesn’t match your plans because even though you’d been warned, you had no idea how hard it was going to be. With a criminal record, stop signs and land mines litter your life; you’ll be blocked or blown up almost every time you at- tempt something new. But you’ll continue on, as I did. Eventually, I got busier, found a job, started freelancing, and my appeals demanded more of my attention. I’ve never felt fully resettled, though. Each detour and disappointment re-minds me of where I once was.

As time went on, my phone account deposits got smaller and less frequent. Even though I had more money, I couldn’t justify the cost of the calls in light of competing, immediate expenses—like getting new shoes to replace the ones whose soles had cracked from age and neglect as my feet walked the line far away.

Drifting from the prepaid calls didn’t result from forgetting about the women of York Correctional Institution. Quite the contrary: Their stories and needs fuel my work. I fought to cap the price of prison calls so that their families and I would pay less to connect with them. I think about each one every day, but I doubt they know that because I haven’t talked to many of them in years.

Until the pandemic, I didn’t realize that the cost of the calls was just an excuse. Now, each inmate in Connecticut receives two free calls per week because wardens canceled in-person visits to prevent COVID-19 from spreading. Inmates could call me even with my zero Securus balance, but they haven’t. Maybe my number isn’t on their lists of approved contacts anymore.

They might feel betrayed, which would be reasonable. They may have forgotten about me, which I would deserve. But they know, and I know, the real reason why we don’t talk anymore. My life is kinetic; theirs, still. Prison is the last place many of them will ever live. As frustrated as I may feel about my progress, I’m moving and I can’t bring them with me, at least not in a meaningful way. The dynamic created by my freedom and their confinement is unworkable over the phone. I know that maybe just by listening to them I’d be helping; presence means a lot.

But as long as I can’t free them or save them, each call feels like I’m brunching with champagne across the table from someone connected to an IV glucose drip. The powerlessness to share the freedom I have gnaws at me. Perhaps cutting the cord was not only inevitable, but in all of our best interests.

Chandra Bozelko writes the award-winning blog Prison Diaries. You can follow her on Twitter at @ChandraBozelko and email her at outlawcolumn@gmail.com.

More from Chandra Bozelko:

Bozelko Column: Trump’s Not Your Man on Criminal Justice, Oct. 31, 2020

Bozelko column: CARES Act payments to prisoners problematic, Oct. 23, 2020

Bozelko column: SCOTUS nominee’s dissent on guns for felons deserves more attention, Oct. 16, 2020

Bozelko Column: Trump’s Not Your Man on Criminal Justice

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Chandra Bozelko writes the award-winning blog Prison Diaries. You can follow her on Twitter at @ChandraBozelko and email her at outlawcolumn@gmail.com. She is a member of our White Collar Support Group that meets online on Zoom on Monday evenings.

By Chandra Bozelko

 

Columns share an author’s personal perspective.
*****

Ever since the conventions, when each party’s presidential candidate was finally confirmed, I figured criminal justice reform policy would come in a very competitive third behind coronavirus and the economy when it came to debate topics. But Proud Boys and COVID-19 infections got in the way and we weren’t talking about policy until the last presidential debate. And even then, there wasn’t much.

Criminal justice plans – and records – finally appeared and, instead of cementing President Donald Trump as a champion of smart decarceration, they proved that his heart and his head were never really in the reform game.

I expected the president to ham up the FIRST STEP Act on the campaign trail. After all, criminal justice is exactly where former Vice President Joe Biden is vulnerable.

Anyone who’s served time in the last 20 years lived the effects of Biden’s work in the Senate during the 1980s and 1990s. That’s when the 1994 Crime Bill – sometimes known by its full name, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 – passed, along with other laws that Biden had a hand in crafting, like the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, of which Biden was one of the first co-sponsors.

I’m one of those people. What affected me were the so-called “Truth in Sentencing” requirements for getting that funding under the Crime Bill. My state, Connecticut, repealed all “good time statutes” – traditionally referred to as “time off for good behavior” – laws in 1995, a year after the Crime Bill passed. Before that, inmates earned 10 days off for every month served. If that law had been in effect when I was in prison, I would have come home one year earlier than I did.

I was lucky in that, in 2011, the Connecticut General Assembly enacted a revised form of good time called Risk Reduction Earned Credits, so I earned about one year off my sentence.

But if the various laws Biden touted decades ago hadn’t been in place, it would have been two years off. In fact, without the 1994 Crime Bill and its local legislative progeny, I would have served only about 10%, or about 8 months, of my seven-plus year sentence before I was eligible for parole. I can see why people in my place might have a grudge against Biden.

Federal inmates got some similar relief from the law Trump put into place. As of May 2020, 5,168 of them had come home under the FIRST STEP Act, for a variety of reasons. The FIRST STEP Act gave Trump some decarceration bona fides that I thought he would gleefully rub in Biden’s face during the first debate.

But he didn’t. “You did a crime bill, 1994, when you call them super predators, African-Americans, super predators, and they’ve never forgotten it … and I’m letting people out of jail now …” is how Trump started, but he lost focus and veered into the subject of cops and how they like him.

The last debate served another opportunity but he blew it. For one, he didn’t even identify the FIRST STEP Act or what it did. He just repeated “criminal justice reform” four times over. He never mentioned that thousands of federal prisoners are home, that recidivism hasn’t seemed to be a problem, that at least by the letter of the law, women are supposed to get the sanitary supplies they request, although reports that guards still deny women tampons and pads persist.

He must equate the FIRST STEP Act – which he can’t name – with the Emancipation Proclamation; that’s the only explanation for the comparison to Abraham Lincoln. I’ve always resisted the idea that we seek reform of the criminal legal system for the exclusive benefit of Black people.

Not only is it not accurate – nearly half of U.S. adults have an immediate family member who was or is incarcerated; that’s 113 million people, more than twice the size of the Black population in this country – it doesn’t debunk what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls “the enduring myth of Black criminality,” namely the idea that Black people are more prone to lawbreaking than white people. It’s simply not true, even if 91% of the FIRST STEP beneficiaries have been Black. The reason is that the laws from the ’80s and ’90s were implemented in racially disparate ways.

What Trump wouldn’t say, because it doesn’t help him, is that his administration hasn’t really gotten into the FIRST STEP spirit; far more people can find freedom if his administration stops fighting them. Federal prosecutors have sought to resentence people who were released under the reform law, the Department of Justice rigged the risk assessment tool that qualifies inmates for the low-security status that allows them to earn prison credits, and the Bureau of Prisons has been stingy in granting compassionate release requests, especially at a time when they deserve expedited attention because of COVID-19. Even with this federal statute, Trump’s time in office has been less than Lincoln-esque.

Biden’s apologized for his laws’ unintended consequences. That, combined with his original platform, which was quite progressive and included providing for the health of incarcerated women – a plank that only Biden and former Mayor Michael Bloomberg included – is enough for me. I’m not sure why the Biden-Sanders United Task Force sapped it of all its flavor to create the Democratic Party’s final policy statement.

But Biden was hardly bested by Trump’s platform; it contains nothing about changes for the future. Just a bulleted mention of ending “cashless” bail, which can only mean extending the life of the current money bail system that persists in so many states and municipalities that strips people who haven’t been convicted of their freedom – where the Black men he’s allegedly helped so much are 50% more likely to be detained than their white counterparts.

Judging just by the numbers, far more people are free from incarceration because of Trump than Biden. For that reason, Trump walked into the last debate as the “reform candidate.”

But he didn’t walk out one. He showed he can’t even talk a good game, much less play one. If you’re voting on criminal justice Nov. 3, Trump’s not your man.

Disclosure: Author was an Alternate At Large Delegate for the Biden-Harris ticket at the 2020 Democratic National Convention.
Chandra Bozelko writes the award-winning blog Prison Diaries. You can follow her on Twitter at @ChandraBozelko and email her at outlawcolumn@gmail.com.

More from Chandra Bozelko:

Bozelko column: CARES Act payments to prisoners problematic, Oct. 23, 2020

Bozelko column: SCOTUS nominee’s dissent on guns for felons deserves more attention, Oct. 16, 2020


 

Bozelko Column: Prison Prep for Emergencies Lacking

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Chandra Bozelko writes the award-winning blog Prison Diaries. You can follow her on Twitter at @ChandraBozelko and email her at outlawcolumn@gmail.com. She is a member of our White Collar Support Group that meets online on Zoom on Monday evenings.

By Chandra Bozelko

Originally posted on The Pueblo Chieftain on Sep 18, 2020 at 7:24 AM

Columns share an author’s personal perspective.
*****

As fires threatened Coffee Creek State Prison in Oregon Sept. 10, guards evacuated it. When women arrived at a new facility, no clean clothes awaited them and there were no mattresses. In the 8 ½-hour bus trip, they were forced to soil themselves and throw used tampons out the window, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported.

More than 700 inmates moved out of a federal prison in Beaumont, Texas, in late August before Hurricane Laura hit. And more were taken out of Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, jail before Hurricane Sally pounded the Gulf Coast.

These evacuations and transfers haven’t been totally calamitous but they came close. Violence in prisons is more likely during transport, says one study from City University of New York’s Graduate Center, probably because there are few firm plans for unexpected transfers of large groups; the Coffee Creek staff operated from an earthquake plan in place even though the chance of a major earthquake affecting Oregon is slim, according to experts.

The backup generator blew during Hurricane Sandy when I was at York Correctional Institution in Connecticut. Because all the locks were electric, none of the cells were bolted. I’m still not sure that any locked door stood in my way, but plenty of skittish guards did. An unlockable prison frightened them.

It’s why every single prison and jail must have an emergency preparedness plan for every conceivable natural disaster and breakdown of protocols, like the busted generator, on file with the governor’s office in the state where they’re located.

Only about 29% of facilities have a dedicated disaster department and plan, according to a 2013 student dissertation on disaster practices in prisons – the only comprehensive document on such preparedness in existence.

The only person or agency to bother to collect this information was a candidate for a doctoral degree in Law and Policy at Northeastern University. The Federal Emergency Management Agency doesn’t have a depository of information, nor does the Department of Justice. If Dr. Melissa Savilonis Surette hadn’t undertaken this inquiry, no one would know how little prepared prisons are.

Not only did Surette fill this informational hole, she exposed that the people who run these places don’t care enough to answer questions about it. When she sent surveys to various wardens, the response rate was low.

The lack of a plan can be deadly. More than 6,500 inmates were in Orleans Parish Prison during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and they weren’t evacuated until flooding in the first-floor cells was chest-high, according to Human Rights Watch. No one compiled records of inmate deaths from that storm, but 517 inmates were never accounted for.

In 2018 Hurricane Florence struck South Carolina and two detainees drowned while they were being taken from a locked psychiatric facility; the deputies transporting them ignored warnings to take another route, according to a federal lawsuit. Manslaughter charges remain pending against them.

We think the least dangerous prison is the one that’s tightly sealed, but that’s not always the case. Essential to any prison’s safety is its ability to release people without incident; some situations make confinement the less-safe option.

This became exceedingly clear during the COVID-19 epidemic, when the density of prisons made transmission more likely behind bars and made it less likely to be contained. Thousands of inmates were let go, mostly because no correctional facility has an Influenza Specialty Care Unit to isolate people with communicable diseases. While we labeled this response “early release” because it was selective, it was really an evacuation.

But don’t assume that an evacuation is an evacuation, and as long as people get out it’s a success. That’s only partly true. Transporting inmates to a field in an earthquake would be wise – most earthquake deaths are due to falling structures or debris. But that same field in a fire would be catastrophic; fire can burn through grass at 14 miles per hour. That means a football field would be burned in less than 17 seconds. Even the routes to take in flight are important, as the deaths of the two women in South Carolina prove. Emptying out a prison in a natural disaster is no time to improvise.

What underpins this complete neglect of disaster preparedness, of course, is the idea that inmate lives are expendable; preparedness is a safeguard on their lives. The good citizen who believes that inmate deaths justify forgoing an evacuation plan forgets that the likelihood an inmate will die is lower than the chance he’ll escape. A man broke out of a Texas jail Sept. 4 because of damage from Hurricane Laura – and none died. Inmates sprung themselves from a British Virgin Islands prison during Hurricane Irma in 2017 leaving 100 empty beds – but zero packed body bags.

In the choice between a dead prisoner or one who’s roaming the streets, paranoid and desperate because he’s the subject of a fervent hunt, I say choose a vetted emergency plan instead – before either of those events happens.

A global pandemic comes around every century or so; I understand why a facility wouldn’t have had a plan for COVID-19 on file. But hurricanes, many of them, whirl in annually and threaten life and property. We expect fires on the West Coast every year; the combination of wind events and dry conditions practically guarantee them, because human folly – gender reveal parties with fireworks near dry brush and people hammering metal to create sparks – is so reliable.

Disasters are routine for prisons, inside and out. Yet 71% of prisons and jails haven’t formulated any disaster preparedness scheme to respond to them. That must end. No prison or jail should be allowed to operate without one. 

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