September 13, 1971 is the date the infamous New York Attica Prison Uprising ended. It began four days earlier when inmates took over the prison to demand better prison conditions. On the 13th, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller ordered authorities to retake the prison, a bloody assault ensued and in all, 43 people were killed.

At 9:46 A.M. on Monday, September 13, 1971 tear gas was dropped into the yard and State Troopers opened fire. By the time the facility was retaken, ten hostages and twenty-nine inmates had been killed. The final death toll from the riot also included the officer fatally injured at the start of the riot and four inmates killed when "inmate justice" was administered. All ten hostages died from gunfire by state troopers and guards.

The New York State Special Commission on Attica wrote, "With the exception of Indian massacres in the late 19th century, the State Police assault which ended the four-day prison uprising was the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War."

Much more is available at this PBS site.

These were the prisoner's demands:

Denver journalist and CBS legal analyst Andrew Cohen was one of a small group of journalists permitted to tour the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado yesterday. It was the first time journalists have been afforded the opportunity.

He didn't get to see the prison's most infamous prisoners like Terry Nichols or Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber" but he saw and heard enough to write an interesting article. Some highlights:

We saw cement desks and bed frames and stainless steel toilets and sinks. We saw cages—straight out of the circus—where inmates who are going along with the warden’s “program” are allowed to “recreate” outside for about 10 hours a week. We saw that the windows in the cells are only a few inches wide and all look inward toward the other windows of other cells. No one has a view of the beautiful Rocky Mountains which surround the facility in the southern portion of Colorado.

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Robert Sillen, court-appointed health-care receiver for California's plagued prisons has been making waves and progress.

So far $1.3 billion has been spent on improving health care.

He has the power to hire, fire, raise salaries, build facilities, waive laws, tap the state treasury and have jailed any bureaucrat who tries to thwart him.....

....“When people ask me how long and how much,” he said, “I have a stock answer: Long. Much.”

Not previously familiar with the criminal justice system, it sounds like Sillen has gotten a crash course.

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This is progress. I hope it catches on.

The [Bergen County] Sheriff's Department is not giving inmates fully loaded iMacs along with their jumpsuits as they come through the locking doors. They won't be working on their profiles on MySpace or bidding for rock hammers on eBay.

Rather, the department is offering stripped-down, durable mini-PCs, essentially limited to legal research, that inmates can have delivered to their cells for allotted periods. The department purchased the 80 laptops using $100,000 of its income from inmates' commissary purchases.

In other words, these computers have no internet access. The policy should be extended to federal inmates in pre-trial detention, many of whose cases are complex, involving discovery so voluminious it's only available on dvd or cd-rom.

It's important to remember that pre-trial detainees, who are often housed in county jails due to lack of available space in federal detention centers, or because there is no federal detention center in their neck of the woods, have not been convicted of any crime. They are simply being warehoused awaiting trial.

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When politicians talk about “family values,” they rarely mention the importance of family to prisoners. Most inmates will eventually be released. Some will quickly return to crime. Those who have been regularly visited by family members are less likely to recidivate. The importance of family to prisoners should come as no surprise to “family values” advocates, so why don’t they routinely speak out about news like this?

Chronic prison overcrowding has corrections officials in Hawaii and at least seven other states looking increasingly across state lines for scarce prison beds, usually in prisons run by private companies. Facing a court mandate, California last week transferred 40 inmates to Mississippi and has plans for at least 8,000 to be sent out of state. ...

About one-third of Hawaii’s 6,000 state inmates are held in private in Arizona, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Kentucky. Alabama has 1,300 prisoners in Louisiana. About 360 inmates from California, which has one of the nation’s most crowded prison systems, are in Arizona and Tennessee. ...

Paige M. Harrison, a researcher for the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, said the out-of-state inmates faced problems familiar to the large number of in-state prisoners incarcerated hundreds of miles from their homes. A study in 1997 found that more than 60 percent of state inmates were held more than 100 miles from their last place of residence.

Private prisons are a profitable business (one reason why “family values” politicians keep silent about the adverse impact they have on families), but privatization of corrections isn’t conducive to rehabilitation, particularly when the prisons are built far from the prisoner’s home.

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Here's a lesson in non-discrimination we could learn from Mexico City:

The prison system in Mexico City has begun permitting gay prisoners to have conjugal visits from their partners.

The city authorities accepted a recommendation by a human rights commission which said the visits would help to end discrimination.

As for other lessons:

Mexico City's centre-left government has taken a series of controversial decisions, including allowing same-sex civil unions and legalising abortion, despite strong opposition from conservatives and religious groups.

In Pennsylvania, a pregnant inmate is left in her Lackawanna county jail cell alone during labor while guards monitor her with a camera and refuse her assistance.

Despite her pleas for help and screams, she was forced to give birth unattended. After the baby was born, a female jailer reportedly cut the umbilical cord with her fingernails. Only then, were mother and daughter brought to the hospital.

The county has praised the prison staff's actions.

County officials are contending the staff at the prison reacted "fantastically" and told local reporters they believed the prison guards and the nurse on duty were diligent in their care.

County commissioner and chairman of the county prison board A.J. Munchak, Warden Janine Donate and Dr. Edward Zaloga, the county prison's chief medical director, all praised the staff. "As I said yesterday [Monday], medically, medical-wise and security-wise, everything was done properly," Munchak told the Scranton Times-Tribune

The mother has filed a lawsuit alleging violation of her civil rights. The baby is now in foster care.

Two federal judges Monday ordered the creation of an oversight panel to determine whether overcrowding is causing the pathetic lack of medical and mental health care to inmates.

If the panel determines they are, it would have authority to make drastic changes in the system, including ordering the early release of prisoners.

"This is an historic moment; we're hoping it means we will take a step back to constitutionally operated prisons," said inmate attorney Michael Bien, who petitioned the court for a federal takeover. "Our prisons are horrific places, they are an embarrassment to all of us. We think these very reasoned, deliberate and careful decisions by both judges represent a breath of hope that we can somehow get control of over the prisons again."

Gov. Schwarzenegger promised reform and didn't come through. He and the state legislature thought by pumping $7.4 billion into prison expansion, all would be fixed.

Now, a prison cap is possible. But it's not likely to result in mass early release of inmates.

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The Sentencing Project has released its latest report on racial disparties in prison sentences. Among the findings:

Blacks in the United States are imprisoned at more than five times the rate of whites, and Hispanics are locked up at nearly double the white rate, according to a study released Wednesday by a criminal justice policy group.

The worst of the states:

In five states - Iowa, Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Wisconsin - African Americans are incarcerated at more than ten times the rate of whites.

You can read the report here (pdf.)

Among the recommended fixes:

The New York Times today endorses "The Second Chance Act."

America has become a prison nation. More than 2 million people are behind bars. There is a better solution. Some states have already found it.

Several states have instead begun to focus on developing community-based programs that deal with low-level, nonviolent offenders without locking them up. And they have begun to look at ways to control recidivism with programs that help newly released people find jobs, housing, drug treatment and mental health care — essential services if they are to live viable lives in a society that has historically shunned them.

We need more of this and the best way to further it is to bring it to the federal level, with passage of the "The Second Chance Act."

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The 2005-2006 statistics are in. America increased its prison population by the greatest amount since 2000.

The United States, which has the most prisoners of any country in the world, last year recorded the largest increase in the number of people in prisons and jails since 2000, the Justice Department reported on Wednesday.

It said the nation's prison and jail populations increased by more than 62,000 inmates, or 2.8 percent, to about 2,245,000 inmates in the 12-month period that ended on June 30, 2006. It was the biggest jump in numbers and percentage change in six years.

Reasons for the increase:

Criminal justice experts have attributed the record U.S. prison population to tough sentencing laws, record numbers of drug offenders and high crimes rates.

The government is obliged to treat the life-threatening medical conditions of its prisoners, including illegal immigrants who are held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Yet Homeland Security "has resisted efforts by the American Bar Association to turn [detention] standards into regulations, saying that rulemaking would reduce the agency's flexibility." This is the same agency that wanted the "flexibility" to fire, demote, and transfer its employees at will, without the civil service protections that safeguard against arbitrary employment decisions.

"Flexibility" is a code word for "freedom from oversight." In the detainee context, here's what the department's trumpeted flexibility brings:

The inspector general in the Department of Homeland Security recently announced a “special review” of two deaths, including that of a Korean woman at a privately run detention center in Albuquerque. Fellow detainees told a lawyer that the woman, Young Sook Kim, had pleaded for medical care for weeks, but received scant attention until her eyes yellowed and she stopped eating. Ms. Kim died of pancreatic cancer in federal custody on Sept. 11, 2005, a day after she was taken to a hospital.

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