Who: You,our valued volunteer
What:Bowling to raise money for Pages to Prisoners
Where: Indiana Memorial Union Bowling Alley – The Back Alley
When: Saturday April 5, 2008 3pm POSTPONED (but start collecting right away)
Why: Unfortunately,money makes the world go round and also decides whether packages get sent,dictionaries and packing supplies get purchased, etc

Hello Pages Volunteers and Supporters,

It's time for one of our big annual fundraisers, the Bowl-A-Thon! For those of you who are not familiar with the concept from past years, it's pretty simple - volunteers and supporters get friends, coworkers, family members and anyone in their social network to sponsor them to bowl a few games with the proceeds going to Pages. People often sponsor someone per point, so the better you bowl, the more money you raise to purchase books or send packages for Pages! Of course, people can make a flat rate donation as well.

Here are 3 documents for you to use:

• a flyer to post around your neighborhood or workplace
• a donation sheet to record your sponsors/donors
• a letter that you can copy that explains the work we do and the fundraiser.

A few important things to remember:

1. All pledges above $10 are tax deductible. If the donor would their donation to be tax deductible, please write down their full name and mailing address on your pledge sheet and mark the tax letter column. Once we have your pledge sheet and money we will send a tax deduction form directly to the donor.
2. There is no minimum pledge. If people cannot donate money but still want to help out, suggest that they donate their time by volunteering, donating books, or packing supplies such as old envelopes.
3. People can donate in two ways: 1) per point. If someone pledges 10 cents a point and your final score is 76 they will owe $7.60; 2) flat rate. Anyone is welcome to give us $10 (or any amount) despite your score.

Please make sure all your pledges (money and sheet) are mailed to or dropped off at Boxcar Books, or turned in to Abbey, Anita, or Geoff

The fundraiser is coming soon, but try to get as many donations as possible. Remember, every little bit helps. If you only raise $15, that's still 5 packages out the door!

If you have any questions, write mwpp@pagestoprisoners.org or call Geoff at 812.856.1188.

Take care,
The Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project

If anyone can help find a book cart to help people incarcerated at the Tipton County Jail maintain access to even a meager offering of books, please respond to mwpp [at] pagestoprisoners.org.

For more information about the need for the cart, please read the following:

I have a question. Would you know how we could get a library cart or book shelf of some kind for the jail? It would have to be on rollers so the cart/shelf could be rolled to the different cell blocks.
 
They do have one but it is aproximately 2 ft. wide and 3 ft. tall. It has a back on it so the books won't fall out when it is being rolled.
   
I have been able to get an approval for a church to donate some books, although still not many, it is better than nothing.  However, with the cart the jail has being so small they have no room for the books. I am afraid they will quit accepting any donations and use the "space" thing as an excuse. They have done away with the "library" before, and I hate   to see that happen again.
   
I have looked online and found the library carts are way to expensive for me to buy. (I'm laid off and go to school full time now). I have called the library here in Tipton to see if they had any that they were not using, but they didn't. I have contacted a person who works P.T. at the community corrections and ask if it were possible to get some sort of grant to pay for one. She said she talked to her boss and that it wasn't.
   
I have asked a few other people to keep an eye out for something like this, but no one has been able to find anything. I thought maybe you would have an idea on maybe who I could contact to get a grant, a donation or find away to get the jail another library cart/shelf.
   
Thanks so much.
Tami Mohler

A new report released last week by the Pew Center for States reported that more than 1 in 100 american adults is incarcerated. From a New York Times article about the report:

Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing
it to almost 1.6 million. Another 723,000 people are in local jails.
The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in
every 99.1 adults is behind bars.

Incarceration rates are even
higher for some groups. One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based
on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too,
as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34.

The
report, from the Pew Center on the States, also found that only one in
355 white women between the ages of 35 and 39 are behind bars but that
one in 100 black women are.

Susan Uhran, director of the Pew Center on the States is quoted as saying, "we aren’t really getting the return in public safety from this level of incarceration."

Some interesting statistics about prison spending from the report were listed in the article:

• In 2007, states spent $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections. That is up from $10.6 billion in 1987, a 127% increase once adjusted for inflation. This accounts for about 7% of states' budgets.
• It cost an average of $23,876 dollars to imprison someone in 2005, the most recent year for which data were available.
• About one in nine state government employees works in corrections.

Paul Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah is also quoted in the article and links the higher incarceration rates to lower violent crime rates in the last 20 years. He says, "one out of every 100 adults is behind bars because one out of every 100 adults has committed a serious criminal offense.”

I find this analysis troubling because, even if there is a direct link between violent crime rates and incarceration rates, the idea that 1 out of every 100 U.S. adults has "comitted a serious criminal offense" does not ring as a shining endorsement for the success of incarceration. I find it deeply unsatisfying that we live in a culture where so many can be considered serious criminals. The pervasiveness of incarceration suggests that the cause of incarceration is not isolated acts of criminal intent, but the culture itself, in the way it chooses to criminalize certain actions and looks to incarceration as a solution instead of looking at apparent social needs that have been linked to crime.

Link to New York Times article.

March 4's edition of Free Speech Radio news also included coverage of the Pew report.

Link to Free Speech Radio News report.

I've been hearing a lot of discussion about this lately and wanted to find out some details.  This is from an October 19, 2007 article in the Herald-Times titled County officials unveil plan for 'justice campus':

Here’s a look at the proposal:

The county’s criminal justice continuum would be split into two “campuses.” The first, described as a justice campus, would be located at the downtown block that’s currently home to the Justice Building and the Curry and Fiscus buildings. That campus would house courts, probation and other related activities, plus create space for future growth.

The second campus, dubbed the corrections campus, would be constructed at the former Thomson/RCA site and would house juvenile facilities offering care to youthful offenders, a new jail and sheriff’s department. In 2002, the county purchased the 85-acre site, which is located west of South Rogers Street, behind the IMI stone company and south of the old Thomson Consumer Electronics property.

A proposed timeline for the development process said it’s likely to take between two and five years and would first construct a juvenile treatment and secure detention facility on the Thomson/RCA property, then build a new jail and sheriff’s office on that property, and finally renovate the then-vacant jail and sheriff’s office at the Justice Building to create more space for courts, probation and other needed functions.

Link to article.

The Columbus Dispatch : Governor wants prisons re-evaluated:

Of the 16,994 short-term inmates admitted to Ohio's prison system in 2006, nine were released after a single day.

Another 32 stayed a week, 236 were out in 30 days, and 2,180, or 12.8 percent of all those sentenced to a year or less, were back on the street in three months.

Yet each prisoner cost the state several hundred dollars to process into the system and $69.40 for each day behind bars.

Gov. Ted Strickland, who is facing the first big financial crunch of his short time in office, shakes his head at the revolving door on Ohio prisons.

...

In an interview with The Dispatch, Strickland said he hopes to ease prison crowding and save state taxpayer dollars at the same time, perhaps by diverting short-term prisoners to community lockups (some of which are funded by the state at lower rates) or other alternatives.

...

Strickland, a former state-prison psychologist, said he has ruled out building new prisons or reopening closed ones, even though the prison population recently topped 50,000 for the first time.

In May of last year, a guard had sex with a female detainee at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center.

Federal law criminalizes sex between detained inmates and guards, regardless of whether the relations are consensual. However, the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, an agency under the Department of Homeland Security, falls within a loophole, only recently fixed through Congressional action, that prevented the prosecution of the guard.

Link to Taylor Daily Press article.

On Jan. 11, the Spitzer administration announced plans to close Camp Gabriels, two other corrections camps and a medium-security prison, all of which have been operating below capacity since 1996 because of a decline in the number of nonviolent felons, the state’s corrections commissioner, Brian Fischer, said.

While I was in san francisco, I got to go to a really amazing exbibition of prisoner writing and photos of inmates called Who We Are: A Conversation which was on display at the San Francisco Public Library.

The exhibition pamphlet describes the project like this:

Most stories about people in prison are written by journalists, screenwriters, and novelists.  Such narratives focus on the details of a crime, high-profile jury trials, or cell-block violence (as dramatized in television series like HBO's Oz) -- all of which tend to reinforce readers' preconceptions about people who commit crimes.

In many of these stories, the crime itself becomes the focal point and the action by which the perpetrator will always be defined.  The story of the crime comes to stand in for the story of the individual.

Who We Are restores the story of the individual through the presentation of first person essays, written by a diverse group of men pursuing the Association of Arts degree at San Quentin State Prison.  They've chosen to write about the life-altering events they feel define them:  ceasing to stutter; struggling against peer pressure; turning away from violence; entering college at age 35; emerging from the loss of loved ones.

"Get in control of your own narrative," says Joe Loya, author of The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell: Confessions of a Bank Robber.  By enrolling in college, writing deeply personal essays, and sharing their lives with other readers, these men have taken control of their own narratives.  Their stories help us to recognize the connections we share with human beings everywhere.

Much of the writing was so beautiful, insightful, and eye opening - not only because it addressed the lives of incarcerated people or specific hardships, but moreso because it revealed the essential qualities and experiences in life that define our humanity. 

In a more informal way, through a dialog of letters, sharing of artwork, and sending of literature, the Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project also lets incarcerated people "get in control" of their own narrative and through their words and the words they read, share a part of themselves beyond their crimes or incarceration.

Link

From a New York Times article about death penalty trends in the US:

There was a story on NPR's morning edition about people being incarcerated in prisons because they lack appropriate mental health facilities:

There is a place where seriously mentally ill people are locked away for years in prison with little treatment because there is nowhere else to put them. Is this Romania? China? Nope. It's the U.S. Virgin Islands, whose residents are supposed to be protected by the U.S. Constitution. That's exactly what happened to Jonathan Ramos. Ramos got locked up for riding off on a bicycle from the Wal-Mart in St. Thomas in 2002.