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Thursday, November 30, 2006

By KASIE HUNT

WASHINGTON —  A record 7 million people _ or one in every 32 American adults _ were behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of last year, according to the Justice Department. Of those, 2.2 million were in prison or jail, an increase of 2.7 percent over the previous year, according to a report released Wednesday.

More than 4.1 million people were on probation and 784,208 were on parole at the end of 2005. Prison releases are increasing, but admissions are increasing more.

Men still far outnumber women in prisons and jails, but the female population is growing faster. Over the past year, the female population in state or federal prison increased 2.6 percent while the number of male inmates rose 1.9 percent. By year's end, 7 percent of all inmates were women. The gender figures do not include inmates in local jails.

"Today's figures fail to capture incarceration's impact on the thousands of children left behind by mothers in prison," Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based group supporting criminal justice reform, said in a statement. "Misguided policies that create harsher sentences for nonviolent drug offenses are disproportionately responsible for the increasing rates of women in prisons and jails."

From 1995 to 2003, inmates in federal prison for drug offenses have accounted for 49 percent of total prison population growth.

http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2.....on,00.html

Thursday, November 30, 2006

By KASIE HUNT

WASHINGTON —  A record 7 million people _ or one in every 32 American adults _ were behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of last year, according to the Justice Department. Of those, 2.2 million were in prison or jail, an increase of 2.7 percent over the previous year, according to a report released Wednesday.

More than 4.1 million people were on probation and 784,208 were on parole at the end of 2005. Prison releases are increasing, but admissions are increasing more.

Men still far outnumber women in prisons and jails, but the female population is growing faster. Over the past year, the female population in state or federal prison increased 2.6 percent while the number of male inmates rose 1.9 percent. By year's end, 7 percent of all inmates were women. The gender figures do not include inmates in local jails.

"Today's figures fail to capture incarceration's impact on the thousands of children left behind by mothers in prison," Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based group supporting criminal justice reform, said in a statement. "Misguided policies that create harsher sentences for nonviolent drug offenses are disproportionately responsible for the increasing rates of women in prisons and jails."

From 1995 to 2003, inmates in federal prison for drug offenses have accounted for 49 percent of total prison population growth.

Probationers include adult offenders whom courts place on community supervision generally in lieu of incarceration.

Parolees include those adults conditionally released to community supervision whether by parole board decision or by mandatory conditional release after serving a prison term. They are subject to being returned to jail or prison for rule violations or other offenses.

• At yearend 2007, over 5.1 million adult men and women were supervised in the community, either on probation or parole. More than 8 in 10 were on probation (4,293,163), while less than 2 in 10 were on parole (824,365).
• About 1 in every 45 adults in the U.S. was supervised in the community, either on probation or parole, at yearend 2007.
• The total community supervision population grew by 103,100 offenders during 2007. While the parole population (up 3.2%) increased at a faster pace than the probation population (up 1.8%) during the year, probation accounted for three-quarters (77,800) of the growth in the number of offenders under community supervision.
• At the end of 2007 —
  

  – Among offenders on probation, about half had been convicted for committing a misdemeanor (51%), 47% for a felony, and 3% for other infractions. The most common type of offense for which offenders were on probation was a drug offense (27%).

  – Nearly all offenders on parole had been sentenced to a period of incarceration of one year or more (96%). The most common type of offense for which offenders were on parole was a drug offense (37%).

  – Women comprised 23% of the nation’s probationers and 12% of the nation’s parolees.

  – Fifty-five percent of adults on probation were white, 29% were black, and 13% were Hispanic. Forty-two percent of parolees where white, 37% were black, and 19% were Hispanic.

• Entries to probation supervision (2.4 million) exceeded exits from supervision (2.3 million) during 2007.
• Similar to probation, entries to parole supervision (555,900) also exceeded exits from parole (531,400) during 2007.

• During 2007, a total of 1,180,469 parolees were at-risk of being re-incarcerated, which included those under parole supervision on January 1 or who entered parole during the year. Of these parolees, about 16% were returned to incarceration in 2007.

Snitching the institutional and communal consequences

The use of criminal informants in the U.S. justice system has become a flourishing socio-legal institution. Every year, tens of thousands of criminal suspects, many of them drug offenders concentrated in inner-city neighborhoods, informally negotiate away liability in exchange for promised cooperation, while law enforcement at the local, state and federal levels rely on ever greater numbers of criminal actors in making basic decisions about investigations and prosecutions. While this marriage of convenience is fraught with peril, it is nearly devoid of judicial or public scrutiny as to the propriety, fairness, or utility of the deals being struck. At the same time, it is a quintessential expression of some of the most contentious characteristics of the modern criminal system: law enforcement discretion, secrecy, and the increasing informality of the adjudication process.

The informant institution is also an under-appreciated social force in low-income, high-crime, urban communities in which a high percentage of residents - as many as fifty percent of African American males in some cities - are in contact with the criminal justice system and therefore potentially under pressure to snitch. By relying heavily on snitching, particularly in drug-related cases, law enforcement officials create large numbers of informants who remain at large in the community, engaging in criminal activities while under pressure to provide information about others. These snitches are a communal liability: they increase crime and threaten social organization, interpersonal relationships, and socio-legal norms in their home communities, even as they are tolerated or under-punished by law enforcement because they are useful.

This Article conceptualizes the informant institution as an engine of the modern criminal system, both in its operation and its expressive value. Informing shapes the practice of plea bargaining, it heavily influences prosecutorial discretion, and is a major symptom of the increasingly administrative, non-public, non-adversarial nature of the U.S. justice system. For all these reasons, the informant institution has a potentially significant normative impact on systemic legal values; the expressive value of the widespread practice of rewarding criminals even as they continue to commit crimes warrants careful scrutiny.

The Article also hypothesizes the harms imposed by the informant institution on socially disadvantaged, high-crime communities in which snitching is common. These harms may include increased crime, the erosion of trust in interpersonal, familial and community relationships and other psychological damage created by pervasive informing, the communal loss of faith in the state, and the undermining of law-abiding norms flowing from law enforcement's rewarding of and complicity in snitch wrongdoing.

Because what ails the informant institution is centrally a function of the increasingly secretive discretionary exercise of criminal law enforcement authority, the Article proposes reforms primarily of the sunshine variety. The reforms aim to reduce the secretiveness and lack of accountability surrounding the informal adjudication of informant liability, and to increase legislative control over and public awareness of this quintessentially secretive executive practice.

The history of the snitch is long and inglorious, dating to the common law. In old England, snitches were ubiquitous.Their motives, then as now, were unholy. In the 18th Century, Parliament prescribed monetary rewards—blood money—for snitches, who were turned back onto the streets where they were, in the words of one contemporary commentator,“the contempt and terror of society.”

The system produced a cycle of betrayal in which each snitch knew he might find himself soon in the dock confronted by another snitch. An example was the case of Charles Cane, who had provided evidence that sent two men to their deaths in 1755. A few months later, a snitch did unto him as he had done unto others. After Cane was hanged at Tyburn in 1756, the clergyman who ministered to him explained that Cane had expected “nothing less than hanging to be his fate at last, but not of the evil day’s coming so soon.”

If all cases ended so poetically, perhaps informantdependent prosecutions would be more humorous than objectionable. In real life, however, O. Henry endings are rare. Consider Joshua Kidden, who came to a decidedly unpoetic end—convicted and hanged in 1754 for the highway robbery of one Mary Jones. After the execution, it was discovered that Mary was a member of a conspiracy to collect blood money. A cohort planted a coin on the hapless mark, another apprehended him, and Mary identified the coin as hers.The conspirators netted £140 per case, at the expense of an untold number of innocent lives.

The snitch system probably arrived in the New World with the Pilgrims.The first documented wrongful conviction case in the United States involved a snitch.The case arose in Manchester, Vermont, in 1819. Brothers Jesse and Stephen Boorn were suspected of killing their brother-in-law, Russell Colvin. Jesse was put into a cell with a forger, Silas Merrill, who would testify that Jesse confessed. Merrill was rewarded with freedom.

The Boorn brothers were convicted and sentenced to death but saved from the gallows when Colvin turned up alive in New Jersey.