Unfair Penal System In The U.S.

Federal Prison Warden Idicted On Charges Of Lying To Investigators

2010-03-04T02:39:00.000-08:00

The warden of a federal prison in San Bernardino County was indicted
Wednesday on charges of disclosing confidential information about a
pending criminal investigation and then lying to investigators about
having done so, authorities said.

Scott A. Holencik, warden of a Federal Bureau of Prisons facility in
Adelanto, is charged in a six-count indictment, which includes two
felony counts of making false statements to investigators, according
to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angles.

Holencik, 45, is accused of lying to investigators from the Justice
Department's Office of the Inspector General last year in connection
with a probe into Internet postings that disclosed confidential
information.

If convicted of all counts, Holencik faces a maximum of 14 years in
federal prison, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.

Is This Fair? 2

2010-01-19T01:56:00.000-08:00

Did you know that peeking at someone's e-mail in Pennsylvania carries a stiffer maximum penalty than keeping a slave? Or that state law looks more harshly at someone who stole $2,000 than someone who sold a child?

These are just some of the weirder quirks in the piecemeal approach to lawmaking documented by a Pennsylvania research group for the state legislature.

University of Pennsylvania law professor, Paul Robinson, had his students determine this fall whether criminal laws were written in an orderly way. What they found was a "hodgepodge, " as State Sen. Stewart Greenleaf, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, put it. "It's more than inconsistent, " the Republican said. "It's unfair."

Students found scores of serious crimes with lesser penalties than penalties for lesser crimes. And polling of Pennsylvania residents turned up an additional 100 or so laws whose sentencing ranges were out of whack with public sentiment.

Robinson blames "aggressive politics." The more legislators feel the need to show their constituents they're responsive to the latest outrage in the media, the more punitive are the laws they write. "Usually some incident happens, it gets in the headlines, and legislators get worked up," he said. "They feel obliged to do something about it. The natural effect is to exaggerate the penalty."

Pennsylvania last gave its laws a good scrubbing in 1972, when it simplified, clarified, and organized its criminal code. Since then, the code has more than doubled in size, to 636 offenses and suboffenses. On top of that, legislators have added definitions of criminal offenses in 1,648 more sections of state law.

Researchers gauged the vastly different attitudes Pennsylvanians have about how much punishment should fit a crime by asking 131 residents from across the state to compare the seriousness of offenses.

Take slavery, for instance. Keeping an adult against his or her will, according to the law, is a first-degree misdemeanor, with a maximum penalty of five years. But Pennsylvanians found that crime as serious as a first-degree felony, which can bring a 20-year term.

In most examples, the law proved harsher than popular opinion. The law puts the maximum sentence for selling a bootlegged Beatles CD at five years. Pennsylvanians thought it was worth no more than 90 days. Reading someone else's e-mail without permission carries a seven-year
term. Again, Pennsylvanians thought 90 days was more like it.

Politicians court trouble come election time when they object to overly stiff sentences, said State Rep. Greg Vitali, a Delaware County Democrat. Vitali, who is a lawyer, said "legislators by and large tend to vote for things based on how the issue can be reduced to a sound bite and
used against them." He summoned an example from a few elections back, when he had voted
against an amendment to require a two-year sentence for former sex offenders who fail to register their address under Megan's Law. He wanted judges to have flexibility. Vitali's opponent mailed campaign fliers showing the legislator next to the man who raped and murdered Megan Kanka in 1994. (Vitali won anyway.)

The problems with the law run deeper than disorganization. Unequal justice erodes people's confidence in the system. Matt Majarian, one of Robinson's second-year students, says: "If
people have little confidence in the system, they will be less willing to serve on juries, less willing to call police, they'll be more willing to engage in vigilantism. This results in real problems
in law enforcement and criminality. "

The students presented their findings before the state Senate and House Judiciary Committees in December. They've proposed that the legislature reorganize its criminal code, evaluate the relative severity of punishments, and ensure that laws are not written too broadly.

So the next time people delete worthless data from a colleague's
computer, for instance, they're not facing up to seven years in prison.

Is this Fair?

2009-12-22T07:13:00.000-08:00

Tommy Silverstein isn't fighting to convince anyone that he's an innocent man who should be set free. He's admitted to the murder of two fellow inmates and a guard, and knows his sentence will keep him in prison until 2095 -- that is, if he lives to be well past 100.

He did the crime, and he's doing the time. All he wants is a little human contact. No, I'm not talking conjugal visits. Silverstein has spent more than the last two decades under a "no human contact" order, completely isolated from other inmates and given the silent treatment by the rare guards he does see.

That's why he's suing the Bureau of Prisons under the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of the use of cruel and unusual punishment. The United States has used solitary confinement to attempt to mentally break down prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Waterboarding might be flashier, but American POWs insist that extended isolation is just as, well, torturous.

Senator John McCain, himself a former POW subjected to torture, said in a New Yorker piece, "It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment. "

Human beings aren't made to survive without any social contact. The weight of separation destorys the mind, and I mean that literally -- studies have found that solitary confinement does the same damage to the brain as a serious head injury.

Since he's had a whole lot of alone time over the past quarter century, Silverstein began sketching as a distraction, and has captured the hearts and minds of many supporters with the anguish of his works. "At the end of the day," one of his pen pals said in a BBC article in 2001, "he is a human being. He is a victim of a system which brutalises people."

Silverstein, an Aryan Brotherhood leader who was originally locked up for armed robbery, himself argues that he wasn't a killer when he first arrived in prison, but that incarceration turned him.

That opens up the larger question of how our prison system impacts the men and women housed in its walls, a system focused on revenge rather than rehabilitation, a system that exposes non-violent offenders to extremely high rates of violence and sexual assault (perpetrated by both fellow inmates and guards).

What do you expect that to do to a person?Regardless, Silverstein' s focus is more narrow. He wants to see his fellow inmates, talk with them, walk in the prison yard with them. He is a murderer and he is a human being. We can lock him up for life and call it due punishment and protection for society.

But a life of complete solitude has another name.

And that's torture

2009-11-17T02:34:00.000-08:00

I THINK NOT!!!

Inmates are persons whom most of us would rather not think about. They have been banished from everyday sight, they exist in a 'far far away' world that most of us don't want to admit concerns us. They are members of a "correctional institution" that controls their daily existence in a way that few of us can imagine.

Prison is a complex of physical arrangements and of measures all wholly arranged by agents of government, which determine the total existence of certain human beings who have been ''found guilty'' by another governmental institution-the court of law- where the best lawyers put on their ''shows'' to manipulate a band of jury who, even though are humans with personal experiences and biases, are viewed as ''aliens from other planets'' who are, supposedly, not aware of the case and so, do not have personal opinions.

What about the judge whose favourite daughter was gang-raped years ago and the culprits could not be convicted, owing to want of evidence, who is now presiding over a rape case?

What about the Bank Security Officer who lost his job because his employers chose to ''scapegoat'' him after a robbery at the bank, who is now chairing a jury in a robbery case?

What about the Preacher whose church was burnt by arsonists who were never arrested, who is now serving on a jury in an arson trial? (I can go on and on)

The penal system says these people do nothave a personal vendetta to keep, an opportunity to punish past offenders through the present offender(s), even if they are not related?
Can such people in such system deliver ''free and fair'' judgements?

I THINK NOT!!!