elders

May 22, 2018

Trump, Lynch, And Who We Call Animals: A Safety Alert

• BY SUSIE DAY • Did you hear Trump call undocumented immigrants animals? It’s stirring up — rightly — a lot of concern. Among humans, “animal” is the essential, go-to word to deprive people of their humanity. It’s the permission some people give themselves to ridicule, enslave, and commit genocide against other people. “Animal” is a term we read as a danger signal, even in a society such as ours, which was built on ridicule, enslavement, and genocide. And “animal” is often used by law enforcement to describe anyone accused of assaulting a police officer. Interesting, how we’ve let this one go.

Over and over, my friend Herman Bell, who spent almost 45 years in New York State maximum-security prisons, has been called an animal. Herman was convicted in 1975 of killing two New York City police officers and sentenced to 25-to-life — meaning that, after 25 years, he was eligible for parole. Thanks to his accomplishments and compassion over the years; thanks to advances in state parole regulations weighing who a person has become and not just the “nature of the original offense”; thanks to enormous love from family and friends, Herman was released in April, after his eighth appearance before the Parole Board.

But this column isn’t about Herman. It’s instead about the institutions and the people who wanted him to die slowly over more decades in prison. As an animal.

When Herman’s parole decision came down last March, Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA), declared at a press conference, “We’re gonna get you, we don’t care why you’re behind bars… We just care that you are behind bars.” The PBA also issued a “safety alert” to NYPD officers: “In the event of Bell’s release, all PBA members are urged to remain vigilant, both on- and off-duty, to ensure their own safety and to provide back-up to any other law enforcement officers in their vicinity.”

The danger to public safety posed by Herman Bell out of prison roughly approximates the danger posed by 99.6 percent of undocumented immigrants inside US borders: NONE.

The real danger — which most of us are sleeping on — is the vigilante mentality that powers our law enforcement. Since way before Stonewall, cops have rounded up queers; they can still arrest and brutalize us at street protests. But queer communities don’t necessarily see how the cops also work alongside the prison system. So here’s another safety alert; this one’s about the police.

Be on the lookout for:

Use of Scathing Pejoratives: Words like “monster,” “vermin,” “blood-thirsty,” and, of course, “animal” used by police as synonyms for actual people accused or convicted of crimes. This degree of loathing is designed to authorize the deepest kind of lynch-mob contempt. These names are, in fact, used so often to describe people of color that you wonder if they’re simply society’s latest ploy to get away with saying “n*gg*r.”

Lurid Press Coverage: This is the aorta through which “law-and-order” pejoratives and vigilantism enter the public bloodstream. Mainstream media repeat — unquestioned and un-fact-checked — whatever police officials tell them. “Cold-blooded cop-killer” headlines boost ratings. Meanwhile, the press is too busy buying tough-on-crime accounts wholesale to ask journalism-101 questions, such as why a law officer such as Pat Lynch threatening, “We’re gonna get you, we don’t care why you’re behind bars” isn’t … well … illegal?

Copying down “cop-killer” denunciations, reporters seldom bother to question if adjectives like “cold-blooded” and “monster” are close to accurate. NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill, on hearing of Herman’s parole, wrote that Herman should remain in prison because, “His mind has not changed, his heart has not opened…” Mainstream news outlets never asked how James O’Neill knew this.

It’s inconsequential that O’Neill (also Lynch, Mayor Bill de Blasio, and any other official denouncing Herman’s parole) never met Herman Bell or evinced an interest in records describing how Herman’s changed over the years. This sidelining of journalistic curiosity in favor of garish headlines is the foundation of media and police collusion. Through it, we’re bullied out of wondering if “criminals” might actually be people a little like ourselves.

Backlash Against New Parole Board Regulations: In another press conference, Patrick Lynch lamented the “coup” at the State Parole Board, where “right-minded” commissioners were ousted and replaced by those with an agenda. Already, conservative state senators, who only noticed progressive regulation changes after Herman’s parole, have passed several bills overturning these advances.

Although the bills still need Assembly approval, they include regressions such as mandatory life sentences without parole for a broad range of offenses; requiring the Parole Board to accept statements from third parties — specifically, the police — which would remain confidential; and extending the waiting period between prisoners’ parole applications from two to five years.

These bills would enforce a penal structure denying mercy and equality to thousands of human beings who, for a moment, had hopes of not being seen as animals. Already, tabloids are carrying stories about why the Parole Board should not make the Herman Bell mistake and should deny parole to other “cop-killers.” Already, the PBA has bought radio ads to keep Herman’s co-defendant in prison for the rest of his life.

Assuming the Life of a Police Officer Weighs More than that of a Civilian: In a May 17 editorial titled, “Will every cop-killer in New York now go free?”, the New York Post writes, “cop-killers strike at the core of public safety. That’s why there was long a presumption against ever granting them parole.

But the PBA’S “public safety” means protection from “animals” — not protection for people like Eric Garner or Sandra Bland. It encourages a “worst-of-the-worst” category, which, once established, endangers everyone’s humanity. Recently, in The New Yorker, Masha Gessen wrote about the plight of immigrants and refugees, of Hannah Arendt’s concept of “the right to have rights.” These rights, in theory, “belong to every person by virtue of existence.”

So either we all have this right to have rights or we buy into a safety that ultimately removes our individual agency. Accepting that we don’t matter as much as the person in blue with the badge and the gun provides a cornerstone of an oncoming police state. And — remembering why Hannah Arendt wrote in the first place — that kind of thing has happened before.

This article appears at Gay City News/ http://gaycitynews.nyc/ along with others by Susie Day on parole justice and the case of Herman Bell.

August 23, 2017

A Former Parole Commissioner on Aging & Changing

by Barbara Hanson Treen (NYS Parole Commissioner for 12 years)

We’ve heard for years that all the cells in our bodies regenerate every seven to ten years. Can we assume then, that our moral and emotional compasses are also capable of transforming over time? Not according to parole commissioners who keep large numbers of aging long-termers warehoused in prison, based only on what individuals did years ago, rather than who they are now.

In New York State, people of conscience are watching to see how six recent appointees to the Board of Parole will make release decisions. Will they respect transformation? It is too late for John MacKenzie, a model prisoner who died by suicide at the age of 70 after 40 years incarcerated and ten repeated parole denials. Tragically, John Mackenzie is the human sacrifice that underscores the broken parole system.

As a NYS Parole Commissioner for 12 years some time ago, it was unusual for me to meet a parole candidate over the age of 50. Last year, of 52,344 women and men in the state’s correctional facilities, 10,140 (19%) were 50 and older, despite the decline in the overall prison population. The number of elderly incarcerated has increased 98% since 2000, at least partially reflecting the board’s unwillingness to release in spite of parole applicants having met their minimum allowable sentence. Life on the back of a sentence appears to give a pass to the Commissioners, who have been unwilling to accept transformation in human behavior and are too politically motivated to practice their job, risk assessment. Thus we have prison hospitals and infirmaries filled with long-termers languishing through the years even though their risk of reoffending is 1%. And the health care costs for the prisons have increased 20 percent from three years ago to $380 million dollars today—an increase of $64.5 million.

If the parole board doesn’t trust in people’s transformation—supported by their proof of advanced education, program involvement, clean disciplinary records and so on—perhaps they’ll believe in new evidence that is also coming of age from a field of science through brain scan research: neuroplasticity. Simply stated, it is a scientific development that shows that the brain has the ability to change and heal as it is subjected to new experiences. Much is coming to light in the medical community about this study with implications of change for ADD and Parkinson’s Disease.

But as important in our criminal justice community is the possibility that people can become entirely different in their behaviors. This change occurs in the brain on its own physically with exposure to life’s surrounding stimulus over time. I would guess that 80% of 77,000 interviews I participated in as a commissioner were with people who suffered early life traumas such as sex abuse, violence, and concussions. Our older imprisoned have gained maturity, non-violent adaptive behaviors and more often the punishing effect of their crimes on them and their families, leading them to introspection over time. They become different people by demonstrating different responses.

The repeat parole hearings of candidates echo the retelling of the crimes that brought them to these places, crimes that are most often horrendous. And while the penalties for these crimes can never satisfy the need to restore a victim or render survivors of crime whole, the court-sanctioned sentence is our accepted legal calibration for punishment.

Can continuing denials amounting to 30 or 33 years beyond a sentence change the crime? Can 10, 13, 17 times before the board expressing redemption and remorse make a person any more prepared to face the community? No, it makes them older and sicker and some don’t even recall why they are there.

These aged are mostly invisible people. On paper, we don’t see their limps, their dementia, their physical impairments, their addled senses, their diminished capacities. They bring with them all the hope it takes to describe their transformation and regret to the parole board, although it will probably result in the same denial based on the “nature of the crime.” And the category of those aging, the women and men aged 50 and older, grows.

Perhaps the Parole Board can examine the possibility of the growth of their own hearts and brains among their new colleagues.

May 3, 2017

VIDEO: RAPP Members Testify at NYS Parole Board Business Meeting; Albany, April 24, 2017

On Monday, April 24, RAPP members and other advocates challenged the New York State Parole Board to release greater numbers of people who have served long sentences.

January 3, 2017

New York Times editorial: “Why Keep the Old and Sick Behind Bars?”

By the New York Times Editorial Board, January 3, 2017

Anyone who visits a prison these days might be shocked to see what looks more like a nursing home with bars and metal detectors. Prisoners put away years ago under the wave of draconian sentencing are now turning gray and frail, suffering from heart disease and hypertension and feeling the effects of Alzheimer’s and other age-related illnesses.

Corrections officials once thought they had time to prepare for this, but something unexpected happened. Federal data shows that prison inmates age more rapidly than people on the outside — because of stress, poor diet and lack of medical care — so much so that their infirmities qualify them as “elderly” at the age of 50.

This problem is overwhelming the state and federal prison systems’ ability to manage it. And unless prisons adopt a common-sense approach of releasing older inmates who present no danger to the public, this costly group could soon account for a full third of the population behind bars.

Granting early release to sick, elderly inmates with families who want to care for them would be the humane thing to do. But it also makes good policy sense, given that they are far less likely than the young to commit new crimes. For example, a 2012 study by the American Civil Liberties Union documented that criminal activity drops sharply as people age. In New York, the study found, just 4 percent of prisoners 65 or older return to prison with a new conviction within three years of release; only 7 percent of those who are 50 to 64 do so. In contrast, 16 percent of those 49 or younger return.

A 2015 report on the federal prison system published by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General offers a sense of what managing aging inmates will cost if compassionate-release programs aren’t expanded. Older prisoners are already more expensive than younger ones; treating the sick is more costly in prisons. The costs will grow as prisons are forced to hire more and more people to help elderly inmates feed, bathe and dress themselves or to escort them on trips to see medical specialists. Some elderly inmates will also require costly infrastructure improvements, like elevators and wheelchair-accessible cells, bathrooms and passageways.

The inspector general’s report also found that the re-arrest rate for older inmates was relatively low compared with the rate for young inmates and said that many older inmates were good candidates for early release. But federal policies “limit the number of aging inmates who can be considered for early release and, as a result, few are actually released early,” the report explained. This problem is echoed at the state level, where eligibility for compassionate release is so strictly defined that parole boards almost never consider granting it.

Prisons, of course, cannot release people based solely on age. But the states and federal government can expand medical parole programs under which far too few terminally ill and physically disabled people are now released. In addition, parole boards across the country can screen older inmates for release using widely accepted measures to determine whether or not the inmate poses a risk. The best answer for the future is for state legislatures to keep moving away from the disproportionately harsh sentencing laws that brought us to this point in the first place.

September 29, 2015

Gov. Cuomo: Get It Together & Do the Right Thing

Saturday night, September 26, 2015 was not the first time Release Aging People in Prison/RAPP – along with about 100 or so other New Yorkers committed to ending mass incarceration and prison injustice – held up lighted candles outside Governor Cuomo’s home in Mt. Kisco. “Candles for Clemency” started last year, when we first stood outside the governor’s home, urging him to grow a heart and a spine and begin taking steps to reduce New York’s huge prison population.

The target issue of the Candles for Clemency vigils has been the governor’s executive power to release people from prison when other channels are not available. RAPP has been crucial to expanding these efforts, because we emphasize that, beyond clemency, the governor could also instruct his parole commissioners to release applicants when they clearly pose no danger to public safety.

Last year, Governor Cuomo did not appear at or respond to Candles for Clemency. This year the governor sent his counsel, Alphonso David, to address the crowd. And on the governor’s behalf, David insulted us all. He threw the burden for the governor’s lack of compassion (zero commutations in his five years in office) back on incarcerated people and their families. The obstacle, David said, has been the lack of “viable candidates” for commutation, a dearth of robust applications submitted to the governor. Individual candle-holders began to challenge David’s statements, calling them fabrications. After all, many people at the vigil had friends or family members who have in fact submitted files and papers requesting commutation—and who have waited in vain for a response.

But we don’t need to cite those files to expose the fabrications mouthed by David for his boss. All we need to do is look at the records of parole board releases—and denials.

There are more than 9,500 elders (people 50 and older) in the prisons of New York, and 2/3 of them have parole-eligible sentences. Put those numbers together with the regulations governing parole—the use of evidence-based methods for determining whether a person of, say, 62 years of age poses any risk of committing a crime of the nature he or she may have committed many decades earlier—plus the statistics showing that older people who have served long sentences pose the very lowest risk of recidivism, and you get a recipe for simultaneously promoting public safety and human rights. Yet Governor Cuomo and his administrators continue to deny some 75% of parole applicants over and over. That is a main reason why the population of people aged 50 and older in New York State prisons has risen by 81% since about 2000.

With a series of quick strokes of his pen (to sign clemency petitions) or just one phone call (instructing his parole board to do the right thing), the governor could put New York in the lead in ending the internationally embarrassing racist policies and practices that have filled prisons with people of color, damaging their families and destabilizing their communities. He could take the courageous—but totally sensible—step of releasing many elders, instead of turning prisons into nursing facilities. He could immediately save the millions of dollars being wasted on security and incarceration and funnel those funds into community health and welfare.

In other words, Governor Cuomo could be a leader. But first he desperately needs some heart. Instead of asking the community to nominate individual cases for clemency consideration, he, like the lion from the Wizard of Oz, should have asked us to help him find some courage. When he does that, we will know he truly cares about communities and justice.

Follow RAPP on Twitter @RAPPCampaign

October 2, 2014

If California Can Do It, Why Can’t We?

Pay attention, New York! California has been changing its parole policies in ways favorable to basic human rights and economic good sense. In the last three years, the state has released nearly 1,400 lifers on parole with the approval of Governor Jerry Brown, and, as of this June, has announced it will begin the early release of elderly and unwell prisoners who meet new criteria.

People older than sixty who have spent at least twenty-five years in prison will be eligible for release—excluding only people sentenced to death or to life without parole. And those with health conditions requiring skilled nursing care will be in a position to be moved to health care or nursing facilities.

Back in 2008, the California Supreme Court ordered officials to look beyond the severity of parole applicants’ crimes. Instead, officials were directed to give serious consideration to people’s records while incarcerated and their volunteer work behind bars. Now that federal courts have ordered California to reduce its disturbingly high levels of crowding in prisons, the parole board is in a better position than ever to serve the needs of public safety and conserve community resources by releasing elders.

It would make sense for New York State to be taking similar steps, right? After all, the population of incarcerated people over age 50 increased 81% between 2000 and 2013, and elders now comprise fully 17% of the prison population.

But New York hasn’t heeded the call of common sense and humane practices. Instead, the parole board has continued to deny release to elders, citing over and over, for example, the nature of the original offense committed 43 years ago by a man who is now 64 years old—and whose prison record is pristine, family connections solid, and state-administered risk assessment score as good as it gets.

When more than 300 individuals and groups submitted statements to the board recommending that they begin assessing parole applicants based on the risk they pose to public safety rather than on the nature of the crime for which they were convicted, the board said, “No.”

That sums up New York’s intransigence compared to California’s forward-looking approach. Sad.

We urge New York State to begin showing greater leniency to the sick, the elderly, and those who have demonstrated their readiness to re-enter society. We urge Governor Cuomo to follow Governor Brown’s lead, and to assert leadership in this crisis. Although overall numbers of people imprisoned in New York State have been declining in the last ten years, the population of those over fifty is skyrocketing. So, too, are financial costs to taxpayers and personal costs to imprisoned people and their families.

Surely there is no need to wait for an even more serious overcrowding crisis in order to take sensible and humane action. If California can release more people without compromising public safety, why can’t New York?

[To see the comments community groups made about the parole board regulations, go to the Correctional Association of NY web site here]

ACT NOW! Sign our petition to release aging people in prison. Follow us on Twitter @RAPPCampaign

January 23, 2014

Parole Board Ignores Community, Refuses to See the Light

Undoing months of organizing efforts took less than three minutes for New York State’s Parole Board. At their April 21, 2014 meeting, the Board dismissed more than 300 public comments urging the use of objective and consistent criteria in release decisions.

After the board posted their draft regulations governing parole criteria in December 2013, a large number of formerly and currently incarcerated people wrote letters commenting on the regs, as did families, lawmakers, civil rights organizations, and other concerned groups and individuals. The overwhelming majority of comments asserted that the Board’s draft regulations were inadequate to address the core problem: parole decisions currently function more as second (or multiple) trials than as assessments of an individual’s readiness for release. Because the board bases its decisions largely on the “nature of the original offense” committed by an applicant, the community argued for the regulations to be amended to shift the focus to risk-assessment and rehabilitation. This would allow the board to release people—especially elders—who pose no risk to public safety and for whom longer incarceration serves no rational purpose and simply wastes community resources. We also insisted that the Board provide specific guidelines as to why an applicant was denied and what they could to do improve their chances of parole.

The Parole Board’s response to countless pages of passionate and analytical comments? Dead silence—and then a show of hands unanimously affirming their own regulations and procedures.

Recently, the case of Stokes v. Stanfordchallenged these insubstantial regulations. The Appeals Court ordered a new parole hearing for petitioner Robert Stokes, ruling that the Board failed to show evidence that they had considered anything but the nature of the crime in their decision to deny parole. The case exposes what we already know to be true: there is an alarming disconnect between Parole Commissioners’ decisions and the evidence presented to them of individuals’ low-risk status and readiness for release. Stokes may represent a legal victory, but until the Board is put in check with clear regulations, it will continue to use the vague language of its regulations to deny release in most cases and continue a culture of permanent punishment.

The Parole Board may be relying on silence to maintain the status quo, but we will only raise our voices louder to show that we want change! The community will make our voices heard – by people on the streets, in the subways, at community board meetings, on campuses, and across the world on the internet. We hope you will join us in our efforts to build a mass movement so big that Parole Commissioners will have no choice but to listen and respond.

Join us: Sign the petition to release our elders. Attend our monthly coalition meetings. Together we can end perpetual punishment, build respect for human rights, and heal our communities.

Trump, Lynch, And Who We Call Animals: A Safety Alert

A Former Parole Commissioner on Aging & Changing

VIDEO: RAPP Members Testify at NYS Parole Board Business Meeting; Albany, April 24, 2017

New York Times editorial: “Why Keep the Old and Sick Behind Bars?”

Gov. Cuomo: Get It Together & Do the Right Thing

If California Can Do It, Why Can’t We?

Parole Board Ignores Community, Refuses to See the Light

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