An Arizona judge has put a temporary hold on a law that bans inmates from the web.

"A federal judge has ordered the Arizona Department of Corrections to stop enforcing a policy prohibiting inmates from corresponding with, or appearing on, Web sites. U.S. District Judge Earl Carroll granted an injunction request Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union to stop enforcement of the law, which is the subject of a pending lawsuit."

``Putting free speech behind bars simply because it concerns prisoners sets a dangerous precedent,'' said Arizona ACLU attorney David Fathi. ``The court's decision makes clear that Arizona may not jail the Internet.''

"The statute, passed by the Legislature in 2000, makes it a misdemeanor for an inmate to communicate with Internet service providers, send a letter to a Web site or to a third party who then forwards it to a Web site or publishes it for the inmate. Inmates can lose privileges, good-behavior credits or face other punishment for violations, corrections officials said."

The Judge ruled that protecting the First Amendment is a compelling public interest. We haven't read the full opinion yet, but we hope the Judge pointed out that inmates don't leave all of their constitutional rights behind upon entering the prison doors.

A new report shows that nearly half of the inmates released from the Texas State prison system end up returning to prison..

"The Texas prison system incarcerates 140,000 people, second only to California, and is so big that prisoners are released every weekday. The question no one asks is: Who's coming back? But if someone did, the prisoners would answer: Not me. National studies show otherwise: Roughly half the men will be proved wrong within three years."

Texas does spend a lot of money on rehabilitation. The Bureau of Justice Statistics report that recently released convicts commit 5 percent of serious crimes.

"A system that can keep convicted criminals from re-offending would save money and better protect the public."Efforts to rehabilitate begin as soon as a criminal enters the system. The first stop for everyone is the James Byrd Diagnostic Center in Huntsville.

There, an inmate is tested on intelligence, education, emotional and mental stability and job skills. From the test results, prison officials create an individualized rehabilitation plan.

An inmate who cannot read at a seventh-grade level is enrolled in school. Those already educated can further their studies in college or vocational classes.

Everyone who is able is put to work in cafeterias, on farms and in factories making license plates, clothing, wood furniture. There are 41 prison factories. For many, it is the first steady employment of their lives.

For drug addicts, there are six- to nine-month counseling programs, and the counseling continues after release.

For the most part, inmates adhere to their rehabilitation plans because refusing affects chances. An inmate who gets an education, completes his rehabilitation plan and stays out of trouble stands a pretty good chance of earning. An inmate who does not serves more, if not all, of his sentence.

Texas incarcerates more of its population than any other other state except for Louisiana. It keeps its inmates in jail longer. It says that finding out how to make offenders stay out of prison is the million dollar question.

We don't claim to have the answer, but we agree with Marc Mauer, deputy director of the prison reform group, The Sentencing Project, who says, "The key to reducing recidivism, said is to stop locking up so many people."

"I think a main issue is we've come to rely too heavily on prison. Half the people are there for non-violent offenses, more than four-fifths are there for drug offenses," Mauer said. "There needs to be consequences for violating the law, but we need to distinguish between offenses. Prison should be used as a last resort."

"The best way to ease the transition back into society is to eliminate it altogether, Mauer said. The criminal justice system would be more effective if it allowed non-violent criminals to maintain their connections to the community and their families. Let them keep their jobs and help them overcome the addictions that inspired their crimes, Mauer said. "

"Ultimately, 95 percent of the people are coming back to the community anyway," he said." If roughly half the prisoners who go through the system come back, that also means half will not.

Wrongfully convicted former Illinois death row inmate Rolando Cruz is seeking a full pardon. The family of the victim of the crime for which he was wrongfully convicted is objecting.

"In documents filed with the board, Birkett, the DuPage County state's attorney, says recent DNA testing shows more clearly than ever that Brian Dugan, not Cruz, raped Nicarico. Dugan, 46, has confessed to the crime and has said he committed it alone. Dugan has never been charged in the child's death but is serving a life term for unrelated murders."

Why is the family of the murdered little girl objecting? They cling to their belief that Cruz was somehow involved in the little girl's death.

"Cruz and two others who had been convicted of the crime sued DuPage County and settled for a total of $3.5 million. Seven prosecutors and police officers were charged with lying and making up evidence but were acquitted. "

"Stephen Pecoraro, a jailhouse informant who testified against Cruz, told the board that a detective bullied him into lying. "I thought he was guilty. Everybody told me he was. If he was guilty, he should die that's the way I feel,'' Pecoraro said. ''I tried my damnedest to get him the death penalty because I believed the police. They lied to me."

Cruz deserves his pardon. He spent 11 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. DNA evidence proved it. The cops made up his confession.

The slain girl is no longer a victim of a crime committed by Cruz. Her family in not a victim of Cruz either. We hope and urge the Pardon board and Governor Ryan to pardon Cruz.

The New Jersey State Board of Medical Examiners has revoked the license of former prison doctor John J. Napolean who was accused by inmates of sadistic behavior.

The complaints against Napoleon included charges that he doubted a prisoner's chest pains the day before the man suffered a fatal heart attack; suggested in records that an inmate was ''faking'' shortly before he died of a brain tumor; and delayed a prisoner's diagnosis of throat cancer.

An administrative law judge found Napolean had shown "contempt" for inmates in nine instances. The 13 member medical board unanimously agreed in seven of the nine cases, saying "Napoleon saw inmates as a ''sub-class'' undeserving of equal care. "

Via Politics in the Zeros we've learned that sixty inmates at California's Pelican Bay Prison are on their third week of a hunger strike.

"Lawyers for the inmates say they are protesting the Department of Corrections' practice of isolating prisoners believed to be gang members in harsh segregation units, where they are denied most privileges and are rarely let out of their windowless cells."

"Under state regulations, male convicts determined to be gang members or associates may be sent to a security housing unit at Pelican Bay or at prisons in Corcoran and Tehachapi."

"Their term of isolation in the unit is indefinite, and the only routes out are to be released on, to inform on other gang members through an elaborate debriefing process or to demonstrate no evidence of gang activity for six years."

Some inmates have been wrongly identified as gang members. Once placed in the unit as a gang member, it is very difficult to get out. Attorneys complain that under current rules, the gang member doesn't have to engage in any illegal activity but can be punished for mere association with a gang member.

"They want the state to change its policy to require that only an inmate who engages in overt gang-related misconduct be labeled a member and punished with an indefinite term in a security housing unit."

"The way it is now, you don't actually have to do anything wrong ... you just have to associate with the wrong people," said Charles Carbone, a San Francisco attorney aiding the hunger strikers."

The conditions at Pelican Bay border on the intolerable, according to one federal judge.

"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."

For more on the conditions, read Visit to Pelican Bay State Torture Chamber.

In Illinois, where the clemency hearings are underway for more than 140 death row inmates, two clemency panelists have been reassigned. Both have made comments criticizing the process and the inmates claims.

The New York Times agrees that felons who have paid their debt to society should have a right to vote.

"There are movements afoot in several states, including Virginia and Alabama, to extend the vote to former felons. Representative John Conyers Jr., a Michigan Democrat, introduced a bill this month to grant former inmates the right to vote in federal elections. And the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta has a class-action suit before it seeking to strike down Florida's laws, which deny voting rights to more than 600,000 people."

"All of these efforts are worthy of support. This nation still believes in rehabilitating criminals who have served out their sentences. Restoring their right to vote is an important part of this process."

For more on the movement to restore voting rights to those with felony convictions, see our prior posts here and here.

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Clemency hearings for 159 inmates in Illinois began today. Many view the proceedings as a trial on the death penalty itself.

"The hearings, scheduled to last the next two weeks, are the culmination of the most comprehensive review of the death penalty by any state. They come at a time when national surveys suggest public support for the ultimate punishment is diminishing, and some polls say a majority of Americans believe an innocent person has been executed in the past five years."

"The extraordinary process in Illinois has been hailed by death penalty opponents and defense lawyers. But infuriated prosecutors and grief-stricken relatives fear that outgoing Gov. George Ryan ® will exercise his right to commute unilaterally all the sentences to life without."

"Today's hearings were as much a referendum on the death penalty as they were impassioned pleas in individual cases, with national death penalty foes facing off with aggrieved survivors of victims."

The hearings were set in motion by outgoing Governor George Ryan, a Republican and a death penalty supporter. (See our posts the past few days for more of the history, here and here.)

The Washington Post article continues with:

"It was almost like flipping a coin," Ryan said in an interview. "You have to remember that out of 25 people sentenced to die in this state, 13 were exonerated and 12 were executed."

"For the next two weeks, the 14-member review panel will divide into three or four smaller panels, each of which will hear from six to eight petitions a day in government buildings in Chicago and in the state capital of Springfield. The mammoth effort has involved thousands of preparatory hours by hundreds of defense lawyers and prosecutors, expert witnesses and family members ready to testify. Ultimately, the board's recommendations to the governor will be confidential and nonbinding."

The arguments raised by defense lawyers today included "police misconduct, coerced confessions, ineffective counsel and maintaining that their clients' crimes would not have qualified for a death sentence under the new guidelines."

"Ryan brushed off the suggestion that his actions were politically motivated. Commuting all the sentences to life was just one of his options, he said, insisting that he intended to review each case within the framework of the proposed reforms."

"For example, he noted he would pay particular attention to cases in which a jailhouse informant was the sole witness against an inmate, since the review panel suggested limited use of such witness in capital cases. "The system is in terrible shape," Ryan said. "But that doesn't mean I'm saying we're going let all the prisoners go."

The Illiniois Legislature has failed to implement any of the 85 suggested reforms.

Update: Steve Mills of the Chicago Tribune has another good article on the hearings, see Life or Death Debate Rages At Hearings.

Columbia Law Professor Vivian Berger provides some excellent commentary in the National Law Journal on inherent racism in the application of the felony disenfranchisement laws--laws that prohibit felons from voting--long after they have paid their debt to society.

"These laws have a disproportionate impact on minorities -- 1.4 million black men cannot vote. That is a rate of 13 percent -- seven times the national average. A majority of the disenfranchised live in the South: Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia all bar former prisoners from voting. Some of these states adopted disenfranchisement provisions during Reconstruction in order to evade the 15th Amendment's ban on withholding suffrage from freedmen. (Disenfranchising crimes were carefully selected to disqualify large numbers of blacks.) In Florida and Alabama, the racial effect is greatest; blacks comprise almost 50 percent of the disenfranchised."

"Given the disparate targeting and treatment of blacks by the criminal justice system, felony disenfranchisement adds a second level of insult and injury to minority ex-offenders. It harms individuals and also limits group political power. "

"Recently, several states have repealed or curtailed disenfranchisement provisions, and three bills are pending in Congress that would abolish these voting restrictions in federal elections. Americans should pressure their representatives to pass such laws without delay. "

The Sentencing Project has a lot more information on these laws and the growing movement to end them, as we've written here.

An experimental court for mentally ill defendants opens today in Brooklyn.

Operating as a pilot project since March, the Brooklyn Mental Health Court primarily handles mentally ill non-violent offenders, using treatment instead of jail as sentences. Many of the defendants have "persistent mental diseases like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. "

The Court's goal is to keep these offenders from "passing through the system repeatedly or from committing a more violent offense."

Judge Jonathan Lippman, the chief administrative judge of New York State courts, has said that up to one-fourth of all defendants in Brooklyn suffer from "a serious psychiatric disorder."

Here's how the Court works:

"The district attorney's office must approve switching a case to the special court, and then the defendant must undergo detailed psychological assessment and agree to plead guilty to the crime that is charged."

"In lieu of incarceration, such a plaintiff would receive time in a mental health center and would have to agree to frequent appearances in front of the judge or court managers. If the offender fails to meet his obligations, the court could sanction and even eventually incarcerate him."

The Court is similar to drug and domestic violence courts, and is supported by both prosecutors and defense counsel. Judge Matthew J. D'Emic is the presiding judge.

This is an excellent program. The criminal justice system is simply not equipped to deal with the vast number of mentally ill defendants. There are not enough treatment options in prison. When all we do is warehouse the mentally ill during incarceration, they leave prison even less capable of functioning on the outside than they were when they went in. Prison becomes a revolving door and violent tendencies emerge and escalate. By connecting the defendants to treatment programs on the outside instead of locking them up, we may be able to break the cycle and restore some semblance of normalcy and productiveness to their lives--which should in turn make our communities safer for everyone.

Last week we wrote about Aileen Wuornos, age 44. She is one of the nation's first known female serial killers. Wuornos was convicted of fatally shooting six middle-aged men along Florida highways in 1989 and 1990. Her story has been portrayed in two movies, three books and an opera. She is now on death row in Florida, and until today was scheduled to be executed on October 9.

Florida Governor Jeb Bush granted Wuormos a stay of execution Monday due to issues surrounding her mental competency.

Wuernos wants to die. In April she received permission from the Court to drop her appeals and fire her lawyers. Bush granted a similar stay for Rigoberto Sanchez-Velasco, who was scheduled to die Wednesday.

Three psychiatrists will examine both inmates. Under Florida law, an inmate cannot be executed unless they understand both that execution results in death and why they have been sentenced to death. If they are judged mentally competent, the executions will be re-scheduled.

Governor Bush has said that he believed Ms. Wuornos was competent when he signed her death warrant less than a month ago. We commend him for taking this action so that experts can make that determination.

Update: Ms. Wuornos has been found competent and her execution is back on.

Money is available through a class action settlement to inmates who were booked in the Los Angeles County Jail between April 23, 1996 and December 31, 2001, and were held past the date they were entitled to be released.

The website has claim forms and all necessary information.

There is $27 million available for disbursement. The deadline to apply for the money is Sept. 20 and apparently many of those entitled to partake don't know it. So help spread the word.