The Supreme Court has ruled in Johnson v. California, that California must discontinue its policy of segregating prisoners by race for 60 days upon arrival unless it can show it passes a strict scrutiny test and there is a compelling reason for it.

State prisons cannot temporarily segregate inmates by race except under the most extraordinary circumstances, the Supreme Court said today, all but ending a long-standing California policy aimed at reducing gang-related violence. As a result, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals must now scrutinize the 25-year-old policy for hard evidence that it is necessary and works — a burden that will be hard to meet.

In order to justify the policy, there has to be a "compelling reason." Many inmates, including some of my clients across the racial spectrum, probably would tell you that staying alive is a pretty compelling reason.

We've gotten accustomed to legislators introducing bills that increase the number and length of mandatory sentences, eliminate well- established defendants' rights and establish procedures designed to ensure convictions. This year, California takes it one step further with a bill to eliminate conjugal visits.

Here's a letter to the editor that defense attorney Jeff Friedman of Santa Ana, CA wrote that probably won't get published:

Meet Ricky Lee Claycomb, age 37. He was serving a jail sentence in Colorado for robbery when Ohio authorities extradited him to Ohio to stand trial for a 1994 rape in which his DNA had turned up as a match. Mr. Claycomb went to trial in Ohio and was acquitted. The jury accepted his defense that he had had consensual sex with the accuser the day before the assault. Ohio jailers told him to leave. He told them he had to go back to finish serving his sentence in Colorado, and they told him to find his own way back.

So Mr. Claycomb called his mother in Colorado.

"He told them at the jail that he was supposed to be taken back to Colorado," said Mr. Claycomb's mother, Jill Claycomb. "He said they told him he was done in Canton and it was his problem to get back."

She sent him money for a bus ticket. After the two-day trip to Colorado, Mr. Claycomb visited her long enough to have oatmeal and peaches for breakfast and pizza for lunch, and then his brother drove him to the Fremont Correctional Facility in Canon City, Colo., late Thursday.

In 1994, as part of its get-tough-on-crime mania, Congress abolished Pell grants for prisoners, effectively ending chances for inmates to get a college education while behind bars. Professor Ian Buruma, writing in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, taught college courses at a maximum security prison in New York, and explains, in a very moving article, that educational courses can reduce recidivism and benefit all of us.

A new study by the Sentencing Project shows that 1.5 million felons who have completed their criminal sentences have been denied the right to vote. The laws vary from state to state. 34 states allow convicted felons to vote. 14 provide some sort of prohibition - with 8 providing a total ban. From the report overview:

An estimated 4.7 million Americans are not eligible to vote as a result of felony disenfranchisement laws that apply in 48 states and the District of Columbia. Election laws are determined by each state, and so disenfranchisement laws vary significantly across the country. Persons who are excluded from voting include people currently serving a felony sentence in prison or on probation or parole, as well as persons in 14 states which disenfranchise convicted persons even after completion of sentence.

28 year old Daniel Provencio had five months to go on his sentence to Wasco State Prison for violating parole on a repeat DUI offense. During an uprising, of which his role, if any, is not known, he was shot in the head with a foam projectile from a guard's gun. He was declared brain-dead and put on life support. Consistent with prison policy, he has been guarded 24 hours a day by guards at the hospital.

His family, hoping for a miracle, won't allow him to be taken off life support. Tired of paying the bills, the California Department of Prisons has granted him early release.

Pelican Bay prison in California has been on lockdown since Feb. 4 due to an alleged inmate plot by to kill guards.

Pelican Bay is a nightmare of a prison. Inmate conditions are deplorable.

"The 1,154 unit inmates spend about 23 hours a day in 8-by-10-foot cells, released only to exercise daily and to shower three times a week. Contact with other inmates and guards is almost nonexistent. The doors are opened by remote control and meals are pushed through slots in the wall."

The overly influential prison guard's union plays a big role in the prison's crisis, like when it sanctioned whistle-blowing guards for reporting assaults on inmates.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger continues to win our praise by giving felons a second chance.

Through a series of recent steps, the governor who personified toughness on the movie screen has emphasized education, job training, drug treatment and counseling for inmates to improve the odds that they would get out and go straight.

He also has freed 83 murderers who had done their time and won the endorsement of the parole board.

by TChris

Could it be that sound public policy (and a bit of press) can convince a politician to rethink a state's approach to sentencing? Is it finally safe for public servants to acknowledge that lengthy prison sentences often waste the public's money without making the public safer?

TalkLeft called attention to a Wisconsin newspaper's critical reporting of the state's harsh sentencing laws and swollen prison population, as well as a recent editorial that chided state politicians for ignoring repeated cries for reform. Gov. Jim Doyle, never known to be soft-on-crime during his years as Wisconsin's Attorney General, has apparently seen the light.

Hoping to slow, if not reverse, the escalation of the state's prison population, Gov. Jim Doyle will propose in his next two-year budget to dramatically expand drug and alcohol treatment for criminal offenders and provide more services - and alternative punishments - for offenders outside of prison.

The state's Republican legislature may want to perpetuate the expensive status quo (the many small communities that depend upon prisons for jobs tend to send Republicans to Madison), but some members may start to feel heat from budget-minded constituents who think the Governor's modest proposal for sentencing alternatives is worth a try. Has the public grown so weary of tough-on-crime rhetoric that real changes can be made in a government's approach to crime and punishment?

Journalist Silja J.A. Talvi went undercover at the American Correctional Association’s 2005 Winter Conference in Phoenix last month. The organization of wardens was originally designed to promote " rehabilitation, religious redemption and humane treatment of prisoners." But that was back in 1870. Today, Talvi writes, its focus has shifted to profiting from inmates.

Scores of individuals from prison acquisition and purchasing departments, consulting agencies, and the ranks of high-level prison administrators had come to the conference for networking, recruiting and, above all, business.

And they weren't disappointed.

With all the attention that has been focused on abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at Guantanamo, are we forgetting to look at our own prison system? In this week's news:

• The ACLU has filed a federal lawsuit challenging conditions at Indiana's secured housing unit.

Conditions within the Secured Housing Unit of western Indiana's Wabash Valley Correctional Facility have caused prisoners to hallucinate, rip chunks of flesh from their bodies, rub human excrement on themselves and attempt suicide, the ACLU charged.

Only in America. Prison Nation. In Maryland, a 20 year old prisoner was killed on the prison bus on the way back to the jail from the courthouse. The murdered inmate had testified at another prisoner's sentencing hearing earlier in the day.

A state prison inmate was killed early Wednesday while riding on a bus with about 35 other inmates, authorities said. Phillip E. Parker Jr., 20, was slain by one or more of the other prisoners, state corrections officials said, but they would not divulge how he was killed or any possible motive.Parker was being returned to the maximum-security Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center in downtown Baltimore after testifying in Hagerstown Tuesday at the sentencing of a fellow inmate.

Officals said the inmates were handcuffed and in leg irons, and that there were five guards on the bus. And still, one inmate gets killed right under their noses? Friday's Baltimore Sun reports Mr. Parker was strangled in his seat by another inmate who was later found to have blood on his wrists.