Aerial view of the Terrorism Confinement Center, the mega-prison that the Salvadoran government has built to house some 40,000 gang members, and about which very little is known because the information was classified as confidential by the Nayib Bukele administration. CREDIT: Presidency of El Salvador

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Feb 13 2023 (IPS)

The construction of a mega-prison, in which the government of El Salvador intends to imprison some 40,000 gang members, is in line with President Nayib Bukele’s tendency to hide public information on public projects, classifying them as “reserved.”

The Bukele administration thus continues to bypass accountability and transparency procedures, building a huge prison about which no one knows important details, as in the case of other government projects.

Construction work on the prison began last year, under a blanket of total secrecy.

The only information available was that the prison was being built on a 165-hectare rural piece of land, in the El Perical hamlet in Tecoluca municipality, in the central department of San Vicente. It was finished in seven months.“There is a policy, I would dare to say public, because it is a decision of the Salvadoran State to keep everything under wraps. No matter what, there is always something that they want to keep secret.” -- Wilson Sandoval

It was Bukele himself, in a televised program on Jan. 31, who formalized the start of prison operations during a tour of the facilities, accompanied by four officials.

The jail was still empty of inmates, and it was not announced when they would begin to be transferred there.

Cloak of secrecy

Despite the magnitude of the mega-project, the public does not know how much was spent on it and, above all, what criteria were taken into consideration to award the project, or which company built it, among other aspects.

Critics question Bukele about this veil of secrecy, the same one that has previously surrounded issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, or the construction of other public works.

“There is a policy, I would dare to say public, because it is a decision of the Salvadoran State to keep everything under wraps. No matter what, there is always something that they want to keep secret,” Wilson Sandoval, head of the Anticorruption Legal Advice Center of the National Foundation for Development, told IPS.

Although Salvadoran legislation allows some aspects of government programs to be classified as reserved, out of national security concerns for example, the Bukele administration keeps almost everything shrouded in secrecy.

In the case of the new prison, Sandoval said they were not demanding that sensitive or confidential information be revealed, such as the penitentiary’s internal security protocols.

He said the issue was basic aspects that should be available to the public, such as the cost of the prison and the bidding processes, since it was built with public funds.

The official secrecy surrounding the prison was announced in December 2022 and will be in force until 2024, according to the local newspaper La Prensa Gráfica.

But it is very likely that before the deadline expires, the classification will be extended, as has happened in other cases, added the expert.

The abuse of government secrecy can lead to embezzlement of funds, he said.

“I would say that more than a doubt, it is rather almost a certainty (that there may be mismanagement) because there is a basic formula in public management: discretion plus opacity will normally result in corruption,” Sandoval argued.

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele listens to an explanation from an official about how the X-ray scanners operate, located at the entrance of the mega-prison that has been built in the center of the country. Bukele made the opening of the facility official on Jan. 31, during a tour of the facilities. CREDIT: Presidency of El Salvador

The largest prison in the Americas

The government has boasted of building the prison, which it has described as the largest in the Americas, as if it were inaugurating a public university or a state-of-the-art hospital.

“It is logical to think that the government needs prisons, because otherwise it would have nowhere to put criminals in jail,” an Uber motorcycle driver, who was driving along one of the avenues in San Salvador and said his name was Carlos, told IPS.

The mega-prison, called the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (Cecot), will hold a good part of the almost 63,000 people held under the state of emergency that the government declared in late March 2022.

The state of emergency suspended several constitutional guarantees, such as extending the term from three to 15 days for filing charges before a judge.

The war on gangs led at first to massive arrests of people suspected of belonging to the gangs or “maras”, in many cases without due process.

The maras took root in El Salvador in the early 1990s, when young Salvadorans who became part of gangs in the United States were deported to this impoverished Central American nation and brought their gang affiliation with them.

The mega-prison has several security rings, the main one being a concrete perimeter wall, 11 meters high and reinforced at the top with a 15,000-volt electrified fence. It also has 19 watchtowers.

Another security ring has been set up on the outskirts of the compound, made up of 600 soldiers and 250 police officers.

Modern X-ray equipment will fully scrutinize the body of whoever enters, to keep out prohibited objects.

Standing in front of one of the X-ray screens, Bukele told one of his officials: “You can see everything here, even the lungs, the bones.”

On Feb. 3 Amnesty International tweeted against the prison saying it would mean “continuity and escalation of the abuses” committed during the massive raids, documented by local and international organizations.

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele tours one of the cell blocks of the prison built in the center of El Salvador. International human rights organizations have criticized the project, with Amnesty International saying it would mean “the continuity and escalation of the abuses” committed under the state of emergency. CREDIT: Presidency of El Salvador

Machiavellian style: does the end justify the means?

The new prison is the most recent move by the Bukele government, in its fight against gangs.

That fight, at least until the state of emergency, had been thrown into doubt when an investigation by the online newspaper El Faro revealed in 2020 that the Bukele administration had negotiated with the gangs to reduce the number of homicides in the country.

Bukele began his five-year term in June 2019, at the age of 38, with an air of modernity that led him to be described as the millennial president.

But after he gained a majority in Congress two years later, he took control of the Judiciary and the Attorney General’s Office, taking steady steps towards authoritarianism.

Since the government announced the state of emergency in March 2022, human rights organizations have denounced more than 4,000 cases of arbitrary detentions and abuses by soldiers and police officers emboldened by Bukele’s hard line against the gangs.

In fact, the government itself has reported that around 3,000 detainees have already been released, as their participation in the maras was not proven.

That has been read by opponents as evidence that innocent people have indeed been arrested.

But the government gives it a positive spin, saying it shows that the cases are being investigated, and that if there is no conclusive evidence, people are released.

Carlos, the Uber driver, pointed out that since the state of emergency began, the neighborhoods of San Salvador are safer, and he himself has seen this because he can now enter areas that were previously too dangerous to visit, as they were controlled by the maras.

Like him, the majority of the population of 6.7 million inhabitants of this small Central American country approve of Bukele’s measures to dismantle the gangs, as can be seen when people are asked on the streets of towns and cities, and as all opinion polls confirm.

“Only he has put on his pants against the gang members,” Carlos said.

But the impression is that the public backs the crackdown on gangs even when human rights violations are involved.

The problem of murders and insecurity in El Salvador was so severe that most people back the measures, as long as their own family members are not arbitrarily detained and subjected to police brutality.

When the murder rate peaked in 2015, El Salvador had a rate of 103 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, making it the most violent country in the world

At the end of 2022, three and a half years into the Bukele administration, the homicide rate had plunged to 7.8 murders per 100,000 population.

But not everyone agrees with the Machiavellian principle that the end justifies the means and that gangs should be fought at any cost.

Despite agreeing, in general, with Bukele´s fight against gangs, Álvaro, who draws portraits in downtown San Salvador, told IPS that it does not seem right for abuses to be committed in the persecution of gangs.

“It is obvious, what is being done (against the gangs) is a good thing, but we must remember that there are cases, perhaps not a large percentage, of people who are innocent,” he added, sitting outside the National Theater waiting for customers.

“They are people who have been victims of an unfounded complaint. This has happened and from what I see it will continue to happen,” he said.

“The key is how to make legal and police work more efficient, without detaining everyone who is reported,” he argued.

Karam and Adam, twin Palestinian babies born after their mother underwent IFV treatment using sperm smuggled out of the Israeli prison where their father has been held for the last 11 years. Credit: Silvia Boarini/IPS

By Silvia Boarini
GAZA CITY, Jul 31 2015 (IPS)

Thirteen-year-old Hula Khadoura sits on a large sofa in her grandfather’s home in the neighbourhood of Tuffah, Gaza City, her one-year-old twin brothers Karam and Adam on her lap. “I am so happy they arrived,” she beams, holding the babies’ feeding bottles in her hands.

There is an aura of mystery and something of the miraculous around the  twins’ births – their father, Saleh Khadoura, has spent the past 11 years in an Israeli prison and has had no physical contact with Hula’s mother, Bushra, since then.

Hula hears people refer to her brothers as ‘special babies’ but does not fully grasp what the fuss is about. She is completely unaware of the unusual obstacles her father’s sperm had to overcome to reach her mother’s eggs.“After the suffering I am put through with each visit [to her husband in an Israeli prison], with the searches and the humiliation, with this pregnancy, with Karam and Adam, I wanted to show that rules can be broken” – Bushra Abu Saafi

Freedom ambassadors

Bushra Abu Saafi, is one of around 30 Palestinian women who have conceived babies since 2013 with sperm smuggled out of the Israeli prisons in which their husbands are being held. She was only the second woman in Gaza to do this. Before her, two had tried but only one succeeded.

According to the Palestinian Prisoners’ NGO Addameer, there are currently some 5,750 Palestinian political prisoners being held in Israel. Of these, roughly 5,550 are adult males.

Women whose husbands are serving decades-long sentences do not want to see their dream of starting a family, or increasing its size, taken away by the very same authorities that took away their husbands.

Until recently, the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) was highly sceptical that sperm smuggling could be happening at all. Spokesperson Sivan Weizman told the press that tight security made it very unlikely. Recently, though, they have acknowledged that it may be an issue.

The Palestinian National Authority and Hamas, on the other hand, have never shown any doubt and have financially supported women wishing to try this very unconventional method of conceiving.

In May in Gaza, the Palestinian Ministry of Prisoners even organised a collective birthday party for the little ‘ambassadors of freedom’, as babies born this way are often called.

Families apart

“It was my husband who suggested we try ‘in vitro fertilisation’ (IVF) treatment with his smuggled sperm,” Bushra Abu Saafi told IPS from her father’s apartment, where she lives with her five children.

The majority of Palestinian households have at least one relative in an Israeli prison. For a people under occupation, political prisoners become part of the collective identity, they are adopted by Palestinians as long lost brothers, sisters, mothers or fathers and are celebrated at Prisoners’ Day marches and recurring demonstrations.

In the private sphere, the prisoners continue to be individuals and occupy prominent places in the home. Their handicrafts are displayed with pride, their photos adorn each room and the vacuum they have left is still palpable.

A flowery picture frame with a photo of her smiling husband Saleh in his twenties sits on a side table in Bushra’s living room. He was arrested at the age of 23, accused of being part of the Islamic Jihad. They had been married for five years and only two of their children have had the privilege of spending some time with him as a family.

When Saleh was imprisoned, Bushra was pregnant with Ahmed. “It hasn’t been easy these past 11 years,” she told IPS.  “We miss him terribly, my son Ahmad especially. He doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘father’. He tells me ‘when I grow up I want to be like grandad’.”

Smuggling new life out of jail

Entering a fourth pregnancy was something Bushra did not take lightly and her father worried about the extra pressure. “When Saleh proposed this to me from prison, I was sceptical,” she confessed. “My family and I worried about what people would say. Imagine, pregnant with a husband in jail!”

She need not have worried. The advice she was given, like other women undergoing IVF in this way, was to tell everyone in her family and village that her husband’s sperm had been brought out and would be used for insemination. Since then, local media stations have helped spread the story and both Palestinian society and local religious authorities have been highly supportive.

“In the end, my father saw that it was my desire to try for another baby and eventually supported my choice,” Bushra said. It took two months and many tests before she could be ready for the operation.

Although the women do not wish to discuss how the sperm is smuggled past Israeli security and out of prison, it is acknowledged that it may be slipped into the clothes of  unaware children.

While wives talk to imprisoned husbands through glass and over a phone, children are the only ones allowed physical contact at the end of a visit. The clinics performing the operation,  both in Gaza and in the West Bank, report that sperm has arrived in a variety of improvised containers, from sweet wrappers to eye drop bottles.

“The preparation, the waiting, it was all very tough,” said Bushra. “But when the news came that I was pregnant, the pressure was off and we finally celebrated.” The double surprise came later, when she was told that twins were expected.

She describes the steps leading to this pregnancy as being about resistance and overcoming challenges. “After the suffering I am put through with each visit, with the searches and the humiliation, with this pregnancy, with Karam and Adam, I wanted to show that rules can be broken.”

Fertility and non-violent resistance

According to Liv Hansson, a Danish public health specialist who has researched fertility in Palestine, the practice of sperm smuggling only makes associations between fertility and resistance easier to draw.

“In a context such as Palestine, where women are well educated and child mortality is low, a lower fertility rate would be expected according to classic demography,” Hansson told IPS. The fertility rate of 4.1 registered in Palestine between 2011 and 2013, then, must be seen in the light of Israel’s ongoing occupation.

Indeed, fertility has long been considered by Palestinians as part of resistance efforts against Israel’s military occupation. For its part, Israel views high fertility rates in the West Bank and Gaza, and in majority Palestinian areas inside Israel, as a very real threat. Talk of the ‘demographic time-bomb’ – the time when Palestinians will outnumber Jewish Israelis – is very common.

“Former Palestinian president Yasser Arafat famously stated that ‘the wombs of Palestinian women are the greatest weapon of Palestine’,” Hansson told IPS. “Fertility is seen as something of interest not only to the family but to the community, society at large and to politicians too.”

The wait

Bushra and her five children will have to wait three more years to be reunited as a family with Saleh. Since 2012, following the release of kidnapped Israeli soldier Shalit, Israel’s Prison Service has been slowly reinstating visiting rights for family and prisoners from Gaza.

Ahmed saw his father two years ago for the first time, Hula six months ago and for the twins, the only meeting so far has been through the photograph on the side table, portraying Saleh as a young man eager to live life.

Edited by Phil Harris    

Distributing condoms in prisons and schools has set off a heated debate, rendering the fight against HIV/AIDS a challenge ahead of this year's U.N. deadline for nations to halt its spread. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/ IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Mar 28 2015 (IPS)

Tatenda Chivata, a 16-year old from Zimbabwe’s Mutoko rural district, was suspended from school for an entire three-month academic term after he was found with a used condom stashed in his schoolbag.

Regerai Chigodora, a 34-year-old prisoner at a jail in Harare, had his 36-year sentence stretched to 45 years after he was caught with used condoms in prison early this year.

With restrictions blocking the distribution of condoms in schools and prisons in Africa, health experts say the continent’s opportunity to halt the spread of HIV/AIDS in line with the U.N. Millennium Development Goals may be squandered,

“It will be hard for Africa to win the war against HIV/AIDS if certain groups of people like students and prisoners are being skipped from preventive measures,” Tamasha Nyerere, an independent HIV/AIDS counsellor based in Dar es Salaam, the Tanzanian capital, told IPS.

Human rights activists in Zimbabwe say more cases of youths like Chivata and prisoners like Chigodora may be going unreported in countries where condom use in jails and schools is anathema.With restrictions blocking the distribution of condoms in schools and prisons in Africa, health experts say the continent’s opportunity to halt the spread of HIV/AIDS in line with the U.N. Millennium Development Goals may be squandered.

“It’s indeed disturbing how hard we have worked as Africa to fight against the spread of HIV/AIDS yet we have not been so pragmatic in our bid to institute preventive measures in schools and jails, where most of our African governments have vehemently refused to allow condoms to be distributed with the common excuse that they promote homosexuality in jails and sexual immorality in schools,” Elvis Chuma, a gay activist in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare, told IPS.

Zimbabwean prisoner Chigodora agreed, telling IPS that “whether or not authorities here like it, homosexuality is rife in jails and even if we may smuggle in condoms to use secretly, if you get caught like in my case, you will be in for serious trouble.”

Schoolchildren in Africa like Zimbabwe’s Chivata have to contend with secret use of condoms in school. Their only crime is that they are underage, said Chivata.

“I’m serving a suspension from school because I was caught with a condom I used during sex with my girlfriend, but the same teachers teach us about use of protection if we get tempted to engage in sex. Now I’m wondering if I was wrong using a condom. Perhaps I could have gone undetected if I had opted to have unprotected sex,” he told IPS.

Under Zimbabwe’s Legal Age of Majority Act, any Zimbabwean under the age of 18 years is a minor, while a person between the age of 16 years and 18 years is defined as a young person under the Children’s Protection and Adoption Act.

Sodomy is also a punishable offence in Zimbabwe, which rights activists say, makes it difficult for this Southern African nation and other African nations to distribute condoms in prisons.

“African countries like Zimbabwe are being cornered by their own laws which bar them from dishing out condoms to prisoners and school children,” Tonderai Zivhu, chairperson of the Open Association of People Living with HIV/AIDS, a lobby group in Masvingo, Zimbabwe’s oldest town, told IPS.

South Africa and Namibia may be the only two out of Africa’s 54 countries that have adopted HIV/AIDS preventive measures in schools and jails.

In 2007, South Africa’s new Children’s Act came into effect, giving children 12 years and older the right to obtain contraceptives. The country’s Department of Correctional Services also provides condoms to inmates.

In Namibia, the country’s policy on HIV/AIDS states that all convicted prisoners awaiting trial and inmates are entitled to have access to the same HIV-related prevention information, education, voluntary counselling and testing, means of prevention, treatment, care and support as is available to the general population.

Other African countries, however, seem unclear about their position on condoms use in jails and schools.

Last year, the government of Rwanda confirmed the prevalence of homosexuality in prisons, but was non-committal on whether or not it would start distributing condoms in its correctional facilities.

This year, Zimbabwe’s Primary and Secondary Education Minister Lazarus Dokora told parliament that parents were free to pack condoms for their children in their schoolbags, but that the government would not allow them to be openly distributed at schools.

“We must say children are in school to learn and be initiated for certain life skills, and when it comes to condoms, you are the guardian of your child and you must have an intimate connection with your child so that when you pack their school luggage and prepare their books you can also pack condoms,” Dokora had said.

This laissez-faire approach has incensed certain African indigenous pro-culture activists who have been vocal in their calls against condom distribution in prisons and schools.

“Distributing condoms in prisons and in schools will render African governments accomplices to the commission of the crime of sodomy and sexual immorality among school-going children, which is against our cultural values and norms as Africans,” Bupe Mwansa, head of the Culture and Traditions Conservation Association in Zambia, an indigenous pro-culture lobby group, told IPS.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), an estimated 3.2 million children lived with HIV at the end of 2013, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, with approximately 145,000 HIV-positive children from Zimbabwe.

The Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency (ZimStat) states that Zimbabwe has a total of 18,000 prisoners, with 28 percent of these living with HIV and AIDS.

In South Africa, an estimated 41.4 percent of that country’s 166,267 prisoners are also living with HIV/AIDS, based on statistics from the Ministry of Health there, despite the country being the only African nation that does not outlaw homosexuality.

Although other African governments admit there are sexual activities going on in schools and prisons, they remain hesitant to allow condom distribution in them.

“School children engage in premarital and often unprotected sex, yes we know, and prisoners also have unprotected anal sex, but presently there is nothing we can do as government to address these challenges because our laws do not allow underage children to engage in sex while homosexual, now rife in our jails, is also unlawful,” a top Zimbabwean government official speaking on the condition of anonymity told PS.

But for human rights doctors like Nomalanga Zwane in Johannesburg, fighting HIV/AIDS in schools and jails requires drastic measures.

“If school kids are left on their own with the belief that they are not engaging in sex because they are barred by being underage, we are fighting a losing battle against HIV/AIDS because the same school pupils will spread the disease even outside school while prison inmates with no access to condoms will also one day come out of jail and further spread the disease,” Zwane told IPS.

Zimbabwe’s ex-convicts like 37-year-old Jimson Gwatidzo, now an ardent campaigner for the distribution of condoms in jails after he contracted HIV in jail, sees no credible reason why some African governments forbid condoms in prisons “in the face of rampant rape-induced HIV/AIDS infections behind prison walls.”

“It is time for governments across Africa to scrap anti-sodomy laws to allow for the distribution of condoms in prisons and be able to fight HIV/AIDS spread in jails without legal barriers,” Gwatidzo told IPS.

Edited by Lisa Vives/Phil Harris    

When Veronika Sintsova was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 2009, she spent six months in hospital before being discharged and allowed to continue treatment as an outpatient.

Today clear of the disease, the 35-year-old former drug user from Kaliningrad says the fact that she beat tuberculosis (TB) is not because of, but rather in spite of, the way many people with tuberculosis are treated in Russia.

“I think it would be fair to say that Russian authorities don’t take the problem of tuberculosis seriously,” she told IPS.

Tuberculosis is a major health threat in Russia, where it is the leading infectious disease killer.The country has the highest rates of multi-drug resistant (MDR) and extremely drug resistant (XDR) tuberculosis in Europe and the third highest in the world. And those rates are climbing.Tuberculosis exploded in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union as health care infrastructure crumbled, the country was thrown into economic crisis and crime and poverty soared, leading to overcrowded penal institutions.

It also has the 11th highest burden of all TB in the world, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), which just last week said that parts of the country were “disaster areas” for the disease.

Tuberculosis exploded in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union as health care infrastructure crumbled, the country was thrown into economic crisis and crime and poverty soared, leading to overcrowded penal institutions.

But, say NGOs in Russia and international groups working to combat the disease, the continued use of outdated and inefficient approaches to the disease are still fuelling its spread.

Long stays in health facilities filled with people with TB were a cornerstone of the Soviet health care system’s approach to the disease, and have remained, even though they were abandoned years ago in the West because they were seen as contributing to the spread of the disease.

But it is not just in health care facilities where people with TB are being failed. The disease is rife in Russian jails. Overcrowding, poor conditions and bad nutrition all contribute to high infection rates with one in seven prisoners having active TB, according to the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service.

The way prisoners with TB are treated typifies the general approach to the disease by authorities. Sintsova said that although she was treated well by doctors, it was during a sixth month spell in prison for a drug offence that she had what she says was “the worst experience” of all the time she had the disease because fellow inmates and wardens took no pity on her when she left her cell.

“They would shout out ‘tuberculosis sufferer on a walk’ as I went along. That really hurt me. It was probably the worst thing I experienced in all the time I had tuberculosis,” she told IPS.

And this abuse is typical, she said, of the way many people with the disease are viewed in Russia. TB is common among those at the margins of society – drug users, alcoholics, people with HIV and those in dire poverty. “In our society, a drug user is not a person and their death from tuberculosis is seen as something they deserve,” Sintsova, who herself has HIV, told IPS.

Third sector groups working with TB sufferers say approaches towards such people need to be changed. Anya Sarang, president of the Andrei Rylkov Foundation for Health and Social Justice, has previously told local media that the “unjustified imprisonment of Russian people, especially drug users, leads to prison overcrowding” which in turn fuels continued TB infection.

Others point to the need to provide integrated care for people with co-infections, such as HIV and hepatitis C. Oksana Ponomarenko, Russia country director for the U.S. organisation Partners in Health (PIH) which works with TB patients in Russia, said on the group’s website: “The biggest problem lies in the fact that each health system in Russia is vertical and operates separately –TB, drug addiction services, HIV care, psychiatric services, among other health programs.

“At federal level and in individual regions these programs are not connected. Often, clinicians in one programme will not have complete information on other nearby services and programmes.”

PIH and other local organisations have started programmes to try and provide integrated treatment to people with TB in some cities, including a mobile clinic.

Some success has been reported in a scheme in the city of Tomsk where prisoners with TB are all housed in one facility. If released before their treatment has finished, they are placed straight into hospital to prevent infecting others when they return to wider society.

PIH says that its methods have been adopted as official state policy on TB and legislation was recently brought in to emphasise the importance of ambulatory, rather than institutional, care in TB treatment. The government has also increased spending on TB in recent years, modernised diagnostic equipment and overhauled research institutes specialising in TB.

But what worries many working with TB patients is the Kremlin’s approach to some of the biggest international funders of TB projects. It recently decided to reject money from the Global Fund for Aids/TB and Malaria, justifying the move by saying that Russia is now a donor to the Global Fund and that it would be wrong for it to continue to take money from it.

Some see the move as entirely political and part of attempts by the Kremlin to crack down on foreign NGOs operating in Russia. Another major funder of groups working on TB programmes, USAID, was expelled from the country in 2012 and forced to stop operating, on the grounds that it was interfering in Russian politics.

Some projects, including a few run by PIH, have already been affected.

Mandatory minimum sentencing has contributed to the acute spike in the prison population in recent decades. Credit: Bigstock

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Feb 12 2014 (IPS)

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and several key Republican and Democrat senators agree on the need for criminal justice reform, and some are now even seeking to restore voting rights to former felons.

“There is no rational reason to take away someone’s voting rights for life just because they committed a crime, especially after they completed their sentencing,” Holder said Tuesday at a symposium here. “There’s evidence to suggest that former prisoners whose voting rights are restored are significantly less likely to return to the criminal justice system.”“In my state, one in three young black men are unable to vote because of a felony conviction – and they never get it back.” -- Kentucky Senator Rand Paul

The attorney general referenced statistics indicating that a third of former criminals who regained their right to vote did not commit repeat offences. Holder also traced the existence of laws barring felons from voting back to the period following the U.S. Civil War, when southern states aggressively sought to keep African Americans from voting.

“Many southern states enacted disenfranchisement schemes to specifically target African Americans,” Holder said. “In 1890, 90 percent of the prison population was black and those swept up in the system could not vote.”

Holder and others say the effects of these policies persist today, as the U.S. system continues to disproportionately affect African Americans.

“In the criminal justice system, minorities, particularly African Americans, are very much overrepresented,” Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based criminal justice advocacy group, told IPS. “So incarceration translates to high rates of disenfranchisement.”

Mauer argues that the implication goes well beyond those in prison. Disenfranchisement, he says, dilutes the electoral power of minority communities, who remain disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system.

Also on Tuesday, Senator Rand Paul, a Republican, agreed with Holder’s assessments on criminal disenfranchisement. He said he is seeking to restore the right to vote for former felons in his home state of Kentucky.

“In my state, one in three young black men are unable to vote because of a felony conviction – and they never get it back,” Paul said. “I’m also in favour of giving back people the right to vote in my state.”

In 1974, a case before the U.S. Supreme Court challenged the constitutionality of disenfranchising former felons. But while many legal scholars disagreed with the ruling, the justices upheld the right of states to enact criminal disenfranchisement laws.

“There have been a number of state-level challenges in recent years to various aspects of the law,” the Sentencing Project’s Mauer said. “But at the moment, most of the reform will have to take place on a state-by-state basis.”

For-profit probation

While many highlight the importance of restoring voting rights to former felons, the main thrust of a fast-growing bipartisan push for criminal justice reform is geared at reducing the overcrowded U.S. federal prison population, which has undergone an 800-percent increase since 1980, exacting a huge toll on taxpayers.

On Tuesday, Republican Senators Paul and Mike Lee, alongside Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, voiced their support for the Smarter Sentencing Act of 2013. The bill, which recently passed the Senate Judiciary Committee and is currently awaiting a vote, would lower “mandatory minimum” sentences for drug offences.

Mandatory minimum sentencing stipulates an obligatory period of jail time for which an offender must serve, but the bill would give judges more flexibility when sentencing drug offenders, who make up the vast majority of federal cases. Current mandatory minimums stand at five, 10 and 20 years for first, second and third offences, while the bill would reduce these to two, five and 10 years, respectively.

As mandatory minimums have contributed to the acute spike in the prison population in recent decades, the prison system has been forced to try to mitigate the mounting costs. In part, the situation has led to the growth of the for-profit prison industry, which has been criticised for externalising the cost onto offenders themselves.

Last week, Human Rights Watch, a watchdog group here, released a report entitled Profiting from Probation, detailing how for-profit companies have put detainees on probation back into jail for their inability to pay their probation fines.

In one instance in the report, Sentinel Offender Services, a private company hired by the federal government to administer probations, charged a Georgia man, Thomas Barrett, 360 dollars a month in monitoring fees on top of his 200-dollar fine for stealing a two-dollar can of beer. As Barrett was unemployed, he was unable to pay the fees that Sentinel Offender Services imposed, prompting the company to revoke his probation – and landing him in jail.

In 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that courts could not revoke an offender’s probation for failure to pay fines, unless the failure was wilful. Nonetheless, the Human Rights Watch report notes that probation companies and some courts simply assume that any outstanding payment was wilfully ignored.

Senator Paul, a fiscal conservative, referenced the Barrett case at Tuesday’s symposium and condemned for-profit probation monitoring.

“The prison is not the free market, where you have to have everything done privately,” Paul told IPS. “If you can do some stuff to save money, I’m for that, but you have to recognise a lot of people that are arrested are very poor.”

Paul indicated that while for-profit probation monitoring occurs largely at the state level, he is open to addressing the issue in the federal prison system, as well.

Because many people released on probation are also unemployed as a result of non-violent drug-related felonies, critics worry that for-profit probation can put people back into the prison system.

Paul described how his neighbour’s brother was unable to find a job where he could utilise his business degree due to a conviction in college for selling marijuana. Instead, today he works as a painter.

While the senator praised states that have opted to expunge the records of released felons, he instead favours demoting certain non-violent drug-related felonies to misdemeanours.

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, locking up about 750 people per 100,000 residents. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jun 14 2013 (IPS)

A Congressional task force started work Friday to review the massive U.S. federal penal code and cull statutes deemed to be overlapping, ineffective or otherwise unnecessary.

The bipartisan House Committee on the Judiciary Over-Criminalisation Task Force will also come up with recommendations for broader reforms of the criminal justice system, the first time such reforms have been discussed in two decades.

In recent years, some efforts to look at ways to tame the penal code and rein in the country’s record-high prison population have been scuppered by political wrangling.

Nonetheless, the task for has received broad support from across the political spectrum, uniting conservatives afraid of government overreach and liberals concerned with the criminalisation of minor offenses and “prison state” tactics.

“The Judiciary Committee is one of the most partisan committees in the Congress, so conservatives and progressives agreeing that it is timely and important to take a look at the criminal justice system – this is a tremendous opportunity,” Jennifer Bellamy, legislative counsel with the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), an advocacy group, told IPS.

“This is also the first time that we’ve had this type of re-examination since the 1980s, so it’s a pretty huge undertaking.”

In introductory remarks on Friday, task force members noted that recent decades have seen Congress massively expand the number of federal offences.

“Federal offences increased by about 30 percent between 1980 and 2004, so that we’ve averaged almost one new crime a week over the past few decades,” Representative Bobby Scott said Friday.

“In the 4,500 provisions of the federal criminal code, there are an estimated 300,000 or more federal regulations that can be enforced with criminal penalties. But far too many of these criminal offenscs and regulations lack the adequate criminal intent…requirement to protect the innocent.”

The lack of adequate “intent” requirements for many statutes is blamed for allowing for the criminalisation of innocent people or those who unknowingly break certain laws. Other laws are seen as overly broad, particularly given the relatively recent rise in crimes that carry mandatory minimum punishments."An individual's fate often hinges on not the actual offence but the authority that prosecutes them."
-- Bobby Scott

“The bottom line is that an individual’s fate often hinges on not the actual offence but the authority that prosecutes them…including car-jacking and drug offenses,” Scott continued. “An unforeseen consequence of this over-criminalisation and over-federalisation has been over-incarceration, with an explosion in the U.S. prison population.”

The number of federal prisoners in the United States has increased by almost 800 percent over the past three decades, to almost 220,000 today. According to a February report by the Congressional Research Service, the Congress’s main research wing, that build-up is “historically unprecedented”.

It also means that the United States today has both the largest number of people in prison and the highest rate of incarceration of any country – locking up some 750 people per 100,000 residents, seven times the international average, and inordinately affecting minorities.

Not only have those numbers created a massive budgetary drain, but scholars have suggested that this level of incarceration is dangerous for society at large. According to landmark research by the Pew Centre on the States, a research group, any incarceration rate over 500 per 100,000 actually produces more crime by affecting families and vesting people with criminal records.

Meanwhile, states are locking up African-Americans at an average rate of 2,200 per 100,000. According to a major report on racism that the U.S. State Department sent to the United Nations on Thursday, African-American men remain 6.4 times more likely to be incarcerated than white men.

State models

A significant amount of the work – and potential – for the new task force will simply be in disentangling federal from state statutes. On a broader level, advocates are hoping that the process will result in an effort to redefine the role of the federal government in prosecuting criminal activity.

“The states have historically had responsibility for prosecutions, and it’s only fairly recently that the federal government has become increasingly involved,” the ACLU’s Bellamy said.

“It’s quite difficult politically for policymakers to step back and admit that an issue is already being adequately handled at the state level. But this process is now an opportunity to do that.”

States in recent years have become cauldrons of innovative – and bipartisan – thinking on criminal justice-related reforms. Motivated to a great extent by the fiscal challenges that have cropped up since the economic downturn, state governments have been increasingly tackling policies that have led to high levels of incarceration.

Juvenile detention and drugs sentencing have constituted two particular focuses, and the latter could now form a central part of the task force conversation. Federal drug policy is widely acknowledged as a leading driver for the current high incarceration rates, accounting for roughly half of the federal prisons population.

The last Congressional attempt to address over-criminalisation, in 2011, failed because conservatives worried that it could lead to lighter punishments for marijuana-related offences. Yet some advocates suggest drugs law could today provide fruitful middle ground.

“In recent years, we have seen the left and right coming together to critique excessive federal intervention in the drug war and the often wasteful and unnecessary incarceration,” Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“So there should be a lot of potential for common ground around drug policy and mandatory sentencing. Either way, it is a very intriguing development that we have bipartisan interest around these issues, though it remains to be seen what set of issues receives priority.”

The task force is expected to hold open meetings for the next six months, aimed at coming up with a final set of reforms recommendations that would then move through Congress as a normal law.

For the moment, however, some critics note that Congressional lawmaking is proceeding as normal.

“Less than 24 hours before this morning’s… hearing, the House Judiciary Committee heard testimony on a new immigration bill that expands the federal criminal code, creates a crime without including an intent requirement, and establishes new and expands existing mandatory minimum sentencing provisions,” Julie Stewart, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, an advocacy group, said Friday.

“If House Judiciary Committee leaders think we have too many federal crime laws, and that these laws are vague and duplicative, then they should stop passing them. They really don’t need expert witnesses to find the cause of over-criminalisation. They need a mirror.”