Just A Date

I’ve been thinking about parole recently.  Funny that an idea like parole would pop into my head.  Parole, for those who don’t know, was abolished in 1995, swept away in the voter surge that propelled George Allen into the Virginia Governor’s mansion. Allen had a no lose campaign strategy. He lied to the voters and told them Richmond was too soft on lawbreakers. “Lock em up and throw away the keys,” was his mantra.

            In the surge that followed, Virginia did away with their parole system. No longer could a behaved inmate earn “30 for 30” (thirty days in plus thirty days early release). No longer could nonviolent felons given ten years come up for parole at the end of two. No, Virginia was going to get tough on crime. After January 1, 1996, if you were convicted of a felony – any felony – you served 85% minimum of your sentence.

            Allen and his political cronies painted anyone who disagreed with them as criminal coddlers. It became a period of politics by fear and smear, not a rational discussion of the actual ramifications of the abolishment of parole. In fifteen years, Virginia’s prison population ballooned from just under 10,000 to almost 40,000. With the increased population came increased spending: $25,000 per inmate. Suddenly the Department of Corrections was spending over $1 billion per year.

            And, you had to love how “fiscal conservatives” will deride Washington for runaway Federal spending yet give no thought to suckling at the Federal teat to pay for their whimsy. Allen – and his successors – paid for the construction of dozens of new dormitory-style “correctional centers” with Federal money. The Feds paid to build the prisons: the state taxpayers pay to maintain them and keep them running.

            The problem was, keeping men and women behind bars longer didn’t change the recidivism rate. People still re-offend after release in the same percentage they did in the days of parole because length of sentence has nothing to do with atonement, rehabilitation, and re-entry.

            The abolishment of parole has been a colossal failure in wasted dollars and wasted lives. If that was all this blog was about I would be through. But it’s not. There are still roughly 6,000 Virginia inmates under the “old law” (parole). Every year they come up for parole. And every year almost every one of them gets turned down. I know some of those men. They are not just inmate numbers and crime statistics but flesh and blood men. I’ve been thinking about them, and the Faustian bargain the state made when it abolished parole. They are men serving time in purgatory and I see how it warps their view of responsibility for their actions.

            Mike will be thirty-six this November. He’s been locked up for twenty-one years. Do the math. He was three months past his fifteenth birthday when he took a kitchen butcher knife and stabbed a neighbor teen to death. Mike isn’t some inner-city product of a crack-addict mom and gang-banger dad. Mike was a middle-class teen with divorced, white-collar parents.

            He was charged as an adult and faced first degree murder charges with life and no parole. He still remembers the day his mother came to see him at the jail. An entire pod had been cleared for him. Local law enforcement never had a case where a teen was facing murder one charges. His mother told him his attorneys had a deal that would avoid life. “Plead guilty to first degree murder and you’ll get fifty years. The most you’ll do is twenty-five. Behave and you’ll be out in twelve.”

            He took the deal. For the next year and a half, he sat isolated at a Virginia juvenile facility. DOC didn’t accept inmates under seventeen. Juvenile housing wasn’t built for murderers facing fifty years. Then, at seventeen they sent Mike to Southampton, a zoo of a prison where rape and stabbings were rampant.

            I don’t understand Mike. He and I work together. He is a bright guy, well read, well spoken. I don’t understand him because I can’t get my brain around his awful crime. That he underwent psychological evaluation before sentencing and was found to be “normal” causes me even more conflict. “Normal” teens don’t stab neighbors to death. But, this blog is about parole, and how we as a society decide who’s ready to leave prison and go on with their life.

            At sentencing, Mike was told by his judge behave and do the right things in prison and in twelve years you’ll make parole. Mike did that. But, Governor Allen and his successors changed the rules. When parole was abolished for crimes after January 1, 1996, guys already doing time under the old parole law faced a new board. This parole board ceased face to face meetings with inmates. This parole board reduced parole approvals to less than two percent per year. Mike has no expectation of release before 2018, his “mandatory” twenty-five year date.

            Here’s my conflict with the whole thing. How many years must a man serve for taking a life? Every year Mike goes up for parole, via video conference with a parole examiner. They see he’s charge free, see he works as a GED tutor, and see he’s enrolled in college (paying his own way. Murderers are excluded from most federal grant programs). Everything asked of him he does.

            Two weeks later, a letter from the board arrives. Parole is denied it says, due to the serious nature of the crime. Mike goes into a forty-eight hour funk. I feel for him. Mike can’t do anything to overcome what he did with that knife. But at the same time, I wonder about his victim’s family. Mike’s grown up inside prison. Over half his life has been spent behind bars. He came in a teenage. When he leaves, he’ll be over forty.

            But the boy he murdered, that boy never turned sixteen or eighteen. That boy never went to his prom or college. He never had a chance to fall in love. Mike missed all those things, but he still has time. His crime took that away from his victim. And the family, each time Mike comes up for parole they are notified. They are reminded their son is no more. How many years behind bars atones for the life that was taken? How can the family be made whole?

            That is the dilemma and the ultimate failure of America’s modern day “corrections” approach. In the “old” days, you killed, you raped, you robbed one too many banks, and society terminated you. Cull the herd. You do the crime, you die. It was an Old Testament approach. That victim’s family felt some satisfaction that revenge over their loss was meted out. But, dead is dead. And executing a man for the loss of your loved one doesn’t bring either back.

            The pendulum swung the other direction. Society began to ask if execution was ever justified in an open, democratic society. Execution is finality; we are a people of second chances. Victim’s families suffered. Their loss was permanent; they were denied justice. The offender meanwhile, languished for years in self-pity. There was no reflection, no remorse, no atonement, and ultimately no reconciliation.

            That that “new” approach was such a failure should have led to something better. But it didn’t. That approach is what drives Virginia’s corrections matrix today. Here is was you have: You have men like Mike who can never overcome the “serious nature of their crime,” yet who are told each year they are “parole eligible.” No amount of remorse, no amount of rehabilitation, will change the past. So he goes to his parole “hearing” and stares at a flat screen TV. The parole examiner, sitting in her living room never looks up from her laptop. She just runs through the same questions as the year before. “That’s it. Send in the next man.” Two weeks later, the denial letter arrives.

            Because of the way the system operates Mike – and hundreds of others just like him – will go home. His mandatory date is less than five years away. Is he remorseful? I don’t know. I do know that nothing he’s experiences these last twenty plus years has directed him to be remorseful, to take responsibility for the damage he’s done. The system isn’t built for that.

            And what of his victim’s family? Has Mike’s experience in here done anything to ease their loss? Does his release in 2013 – or 2018 – do anything to justify and repay them for the violent death of their son?

            Society maintains prisons to remove those who break the social contract from its midst. But there is another purpose built around rehabilitation and restoration. Ninety percent of those who find their way into prison will one day walkout and return to the communities they left. Will they rejoin society as atoned men and women who seek to live law abiding lives? Will their victims feel that justice was served?

            The American prison model has failed because neither of the rehabilitation purposes is met. It’s not about length of sentence, or abolishing parole, or any other catch phrases politicians employ to get elected. It’s about a change of heart, a change of mindset, remorse and ultimately mercy by the victim. That isn’t happening. Offenders sit in prison and watch their lives pass away. And, there is no real effort, no meaningful effort, to use that time constructively to alter that life. Whether they leave in two years or twenty, the system fails to prepare them. Release just becomes a date. And society is no better off.

Election Day, Part 2

This may surprise you, but our college dorm is abuzz about the upcoming election.  Debates are watched, ads analyzed, and the candidates’ positions on various issues studied.  Even without the right to vote, men in this building are following the election.

I’ve paid particular attention to the Virginia race for U.S. Senate putting two former Virginia Governors – George Allen and Tim Kaine – in a bruising battle with repercussions for party control of the senate.  The campaign has been expensive, bare knuckles brawling with little regard by either man for the truth.  Both men are mere caricatures of their parties.  And, as with most political campaigns these days, truth and decency are casualties of polling success.

Both men have stretched the truth in their efforts to seek election.  But one whopper stands out.  In a series of ads George Allen continually reminds Virginians as Governor “he ended parole”.  We all expect politicians to play mental gymnastics with the truth.  Allen, however, is an Olympic gold medal winner.  The truth is, by Allen going along with and pushing the legislature toward truth in sentencing with the abolishment of parole, he did significant financial damage to Virginia that is and will continue to affect this state without massive prison and sentencing reform.

In the early 1990s the Federal government approached the states with a too good to be true deal.  Enact “truth in sentencing” laws which require convicted felons to serve 85% of the sentence imposed and Federal grants will cover the cost of prison expansion.  “Free Federal money” most states thought and across the nation legislatures fell in lock step.  In Virginia, George Allen seized on the opportunity.  “Tough on crime, No parole” became rallying cries for his campaign.  His slogans carried the day and soon Virginia’s General Assembly voted to abolish parole.

And soon after his term was underway, Governor Allen engaged his Department of Corrections chief to begin ramping up prison construction.  Like drunken revelers on a pub crawl, the legislators lined up, all eager to prove they too were tough on crime.  In less than ten years new prisons opened in a dozen communities around the Commonwealth, many of them in rural pockets where employment opportunities lagged.

Virginia went from a state with around 9,000 inmates to over four times that many, reaching almost 40,000 in 2009.  DOC became the state’s largest department employing over 13,000.  And the cost?  Soon Virginia was spending over $1 billion dollars annually to operate its prison system.  One out of every 8 general fund dollars was going to prisons.

The Federal grant money stopped, but Virginia’s costs didn’t.  Politicians were afraid to admit they’d made a mistake.  George Allen?  He kept smiling and distorting his record.  Fact is, locking more people up for longer sentences has nothing to do with the crime rate.  Fact also is, Virginia’s released inmates reoffended at the same rate at before.

But change did come.  For one thing, the economy began to tank.  Virginia couldn’t afford everything the politicians promised.  While millions were being directed to DOC, real spending on Virginia’s colleges actually decreased.  Transportation projects were put on hold.  “Creative accounting” on the state retirement system let people believe the Commonwealth had a balanced budget.

First Tim Kaine, then Bob McDonnell, realized Virginia couldn’t sustain its gulag prison system. They began to shut them down devastating rural Virginia counties who had come to rely on the prison gravy train for economic sustenance.

And the inmates?  There were crowded into fewer prisons with fewer officers making the facilities less safe and less rehabilitative.  Inmates began suing and Virginia’s costs continued to climb (over $1.2 billion this year alone).  And George Allen continued to tout his record as Governor. 

Prison reform – sentencing reform – will occur.  The states realize it. You can’t keep locking people up.  There are cheaper, more effective alternatives.

I can’t vote – I’m an incarcerated felon.  But if I could, I’d vote for the candidate who is honest with me about the real cost of Virginia’s love affair with prisons.  They cost too much financially and in the lives they destroy.  George Allen isn’t that politician.

Budget Bunko

On December 19, Governor McDonnell released his proposed biennial budget for fiscal years 2013 and 2014.  Like any great wordsmith, an initial reading of the Governor’s remarks can make you think all’s well in the Old Dominion.  A careful reading tells you otherwise.  Governor McDonnell’s budget is – like most political rhetoric these days – long on platitudes and self-promotion and short on concrete proposals with realistic economic projections.  Unfortunately, the Governor continues the process his predecessors did.  He’ll tell Virginians what they want to hear, not the truth.

Before turning specifically to DOC’s budget and the continuing lack of will on the part of this state’s elected officials to address the crime that is this state’s criminal justice system, I give you one example of Governor McDonnell’s bunko budget.

Governor McDonnell lists, as core principle number four of his budget proposal, that “we must solve specific problems, like a near broken pension system…”  He then notes “we will make the tough decisions and set priorities in state spending”.  Why, you may ask, have the state retirement system funding ratios decreased so dramatically?  Great question and the Governor knows the answer.  He deferred contributions to the fund to report fiscal year-end surpluses.  Now, the Governor announces, “we will pay back, in full, deferred compensation to VRS…”

Like Lloyd and Harry in “Dumb and Dumber”, Governor McDonnell put a paper “IOU” in the VRS suitcase.  And his “payback plan”?  Pay it back over ten years and make state employees contribute 5% of their salary to the retirement plan (which, ironically, is the amount of raise state employees were given last year).

No, the Governor’s budget is heavy on smoke and mirrors.  People don’t have to make tough decisions when they aren’t given the facts.  And Bob McDonnell, like George Allen, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, want Virginians to think all is well when in fact, it isn’t.

Now to DOC.  Senator Jim Webb has championed the cause of criminal justice reform.   He described the criminal justice system as “being in a profound, deeply corrosive crisis that we have largely been ignoring at our peril”.  As commentator Mansfield Frazier noted, “We choose to ignore the crisis in criminal justice chiefly because of the embarrassment factor”.
Something is terribly wrong with Virginia’s prison system.  In 1994, then candidate George Allen lied to the voters of the Commonwealth.  He told them – as a means of getting elected Governor – that Virginia could abolish parole, “lock em up and throw away the key” and solve the crime problem.  Virginia went from a system where 9,600 individuals were incarcerated to almost 40,000 in 15 years.

For fiscal year 2012, DOC’s budget was set at $1,107,000,000 of which $925 million came from the general fund.  McDonnell’s 2013 proposed budget calls for $1,133,000,000 in DOC spending.  How then, I wonder, does the Governor say with a straight face that things are being done in a fiscally responsible way?

DOC’s mission statement states the department:

“Enhances public safety by providing effective programs, re-entry services, and supervision of sentenced offenders in a humane, cost-efficient manner, consistent with sound correctional principles and constitutional standards.”
Liar, liar, pants on fire!  DOC does none of those things.  Programs are sacrificed.  Offenders are not kept in humane conditions, nor is the system cost efficient.  The major portion of the budget – your tax dollars – is used to maintain a staff of 13,000 to watch over 40,000 offenders, the majority of whom are low-custody.  The “George Allen” model followed by Governor McDonnell has done nothing but increase expenditures on a deplorable inhumane system which has created close to 400,000 convicted felons in the Commonwealth.  That’s 5% of the state’s population.

It is time for real change in Virginia’s criminal justice system.  It is time for alternatives to prison, enhanced sentence good-time earning and real programs to stop recidivism.
As ProPublica (an independent, non-profit organization that produces investigative journalism in the public interest - www.propublica.org) so eloquently noted, “the problem with fixing the system lies, in large part, in a lack of political will and the fact most Americans think a broken criminal justice system doesn’t affect them or their lives since they have no intention of breaking the law.  But that’s where they’re wrong.  A criminal justice system fixated on [treating every crime harshly] fails to focus on much larger crimes that impact all of our lives in profound ways.”

It’s time for Bob McDonnell and Virginia General Assembly to get real.  Quit playing word games.  Do something!

Closing Time

A major DOC announcement hit the airwaves on the noon news today:  “Virginia DOC has announced the closing of its Mecklenburg Prison and Receiving Unit”.  The closing stung another rural Southside Virginia county already weighed down by an unemployment rate above the state average and prospects of real business and industry moving there hovering between slim and none.

Mecklenburg Prison, a facility opened in the late 1970’s with much political fanfare (the then Governor attended its opening) announcing it to be “the most secure prison in America.”  Less than four years later, the notorious Briley brothers – cold blooded rapist/killers from Richmond – and four others executed a daring escape and ran up and down the east coast causing terror and fear each day of their escape.  That escape, from a prison Virginia’s political class sold as being secure, represents the utter failure of the Commonwealth’s corrections’ philosophy.  The end of its dismal life is not as a secure facility for Virginia’s most incorrigible offenders.  No, it is as a dumping ground – a “receiving center”, is emblematic of all that is wrong with Virginia’s bloated, unsustainable corrections apparatus.

I write this blog with some ambivalence.  After all, three hundred Southside Virginia residents arrived at work today and learned – less than two weeks before Christmas – that they will have no jobs.  I feel for those men and women – and their families, even as I wonder how they morally justify working in a place that treats fellow people – many of whom are not a threat to the community – in such vile, degrading ways.

Almost every politician since George Allen (up to our current Governor and members of the Virginia General Assembly) has lied to and betrayed the voters of the Commonwealth.  They’ve told voters they were safer with extraordinary harsh sentencing and abysmal prison conditions.  They’ve told voters the Commonwealth could afford one out of every eight dollars going to corrections – over $1 billion annually – all the while they lined their own pockets and the pockets of selected crony prison enterprises.

They told rural Virginia communities that a prison in their neighborhood would generate jobs and growth.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Prisons do not generate jobs nor do they create or foster an atmosphere for new businesses.  Study after study has concluded prisons have the opposite effect.  Companies don’t move to towns with prisons.

Still, the lies go on.  Where is the courageous politician who will stand up and say “Virginia needs sentence reform?  We have close to 30,000 nonviolent, low custody offenders in prison and we need to let them out.”  Where is the courageous politician who will propose real work training, education and treatment programs for the incarcerated?

Southside Virginia’s prison communities will continue to suffer high unemployment and high dropout and poverty rates until courageous politicians admit we need less incarcerated persons and more money going to rural areas for education and business development. 

My friend DC was one of the initial 19 “incorrigible inmates” who populated Mecklenburg.  That he wasn’t part of the Briley escape was due to his awareness that they’d all eventually be caught.  He saw stabbings, beatings, rapes, and murders during his time there.  At one point he testified on behalf of the inmates during a 1983 prisoner civil rights case before Senior Federal Judge Robert Merhige, Jr. in Richmond.  His recitation of beatings and abuse at the hands of officers so impressed the Judge that he immediately ordered the U.S. Attorney to investigate.  “If you see a corrections officer lay a hand on any prisoner you get word to me”, the Judge told DC from the bench.

Mecklenburg is closing.  There are almost twenty other prisons holding low custody inmates that can also be closed.  All it takes is some honesty and courage from Virginia’s politicians.

In the 1970’s the late, great Johnny Cash performed inside California’s notorious San Quentin Prison.  Cash himself was a convicted felon and did prison time.  He knew the inhumanity of the prison system.  That night, he sang a song he wrote about San Quentin.  The inmates – black, white, Hispanic – erupted in cheers.  He sang “San Quentin, may you rot and burn in hell…”

Everytime the news announces a Virginia prison closing I think of Mr. Cash.  Its closing time for Mecklenburg.  May it rot and burn in hell.

The "At Risk" Grant

Within the next few weeks, I’ll move from my current building to another one on the compound. My new “home” will look exactly like my current home. There will be the same number of bunks (96), same number of showers, sinks and commodes; same dimension building. The difference will be the guys residing there.



I’m one of seven “dorm mentors” for a college/technical training dorm. All seven mentors have Bachelor’s degrees at a minimum. Two of us have law degrees; one has his masters in chemistry. Approximately half the men are enrolled under a federal grant as students pursuing an Associate’s degree through the local community college. There are five terms during the year, three or four classes per term. Instructors come in from the “outside world” to teach their classes. It normally takes an inmate three full years to earn his degree.


The other forty inmates are enrolled in a new initiative aimed at “high risk” offenders. These are men who have had repeated run-ins with law enforcement – usually involving drug dealing and using. They scored “high” on a profile test indicating there is a significant likelihood these guys will get out (all are within two years of release) and return to the same criminal behavior that led to their imprisonment because (1) the deck is heavily stacked against felons, and (2) these guys have limited, marketable skills.


The program – funded by a $750,000 grant and operated by the community college – combines a college general studies curriculum with intense IT training. Four days and evenings a week (Monday through Thursday, 12:30 – 3:30 and 6:30 – 9:00) these guys will be in class.


When they are released there will be resources available to assist them with job placement, dealing with probation issues, and staying clear of the environments and impulses that put them in here.


It’s a laudable, worthy goal and I was excited when the principal asked me to be a mentor.


This program should be the standard for prison rehabilitation for almost every inmate. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t even be considered had the economy not sunk into this long, painful recession. For too long, the public has been told a huge lie by politicians: “You can lock people up for long periods of time without repercussions”.


That lie has led to Virginia’s explosion in its inmate population and the geometric growth in cost and manpower to operate its prison system. $1 billion plus annually. Think about that. $1 billion to operate a system that holds slightly less than 40,000 offenders. And that $1 billion doesn’t include the cost to operate DCE (the Department of Corrections Education, the largest school district in the Commonwealth). It doesn’t include the millions of dollars spent each year by the Attorney General’s office defending (and losing a fair number this year) lawsuits brought by and on behalf of the incarcerated. It does not include the millions spent on welfare, mental health services, community outreach projects; to monitor and maintain broken men and women released from the meat grinder known as corrections who have received little in the way of actual rehabilitation and training while locked up.


While people are busy thanking George Allen for abolishing parole as Governor (a decision I too applauded at the time), someone should ask him if it was worth the cost, in dollars and lives damaged. If he was honest, he’d have to answer no.


This new program is a good first step. But, it is merely a band aid on a severed artery. The entire system is broken. Every man and woman that comes under the control of the Department of Corrections is at risk. Prison reform must become a reality. The cost to do otherwise is astronomical.