truesee's Blog

Man arrested after officers sees marijuana on his shirt during traffic stop

 

For the Arizona Department of Corrections, crime has finally started to pay.

New legislation allows the department to impose a $25 fee on adults who wish to visit inmates at any of the 15 prison complexes that house state prisoners. The one-time “background check fee” for visitors, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, has angered prisoner advocacy groups and family members of inmates, who in many cases already shoulder the expense of traveling long distances to the remote areas where many prisons are located.

David C. Fathi, director of the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, called the fee “mind-boggling” and said that while it was ostensibly intended to help the state — the money will be used to repair and maintain the prisons — it could ultimately have a negative effect on public safety.

“We know that one of the best things you can do if you want people to go straight and lead a law-abiding life when they get out of prison is to continue family contact while they’re in prison,” he said. “Talk about penny-wise and pound-foolish.”

One woman, whose brother is a prisoner at the Eyman complex in Florence, said that most of her family lives out of state, so the fee is an additional burden on top of the travel costs.

“What will happen is that people will just stop visiting,” said the woman, adding that most prisoners “live for” visits from relatives. Because some friends of the family still do not know of her brother’s incarceration, she asked to be identified only by her first name, Shauna. She was one of several dozen family members of inmates who complained to Middle Ground Prison Reform, a group based in Tempe, about the fee.

In a lawsuit filed last month against the Corrections Department, Middle Ground said the fee was simply a pretext for raising money “for general public purposes” and as such was unconstitutional because it amounted to a special tax on a single group.

Middle Ground has also filed suit over another provision of the law, which imposes a 1 percent charge on deposits made to a prisoner’s spending account.

Donna Leone Hamm, executive director of Middle Ground, said she thought that state legislators created the background check fee “out of sheer financial desperation” at a time when the state faces huge budget shortfalls.

“This was a scheme — in my mind, a harebrained scheme — to try to come up with the money,” she said.

Wendy Baldo, chief of staff for the Arizona Senate, confirmed that the fees were intended to help make up the $1.6 billion deficit the state faced at the beginning of the year.

“We were trying to cut the budget and think of ways that could help get some services for the Department of Corrections,” Ms. Baldo said. She added that the department “needed about $150 million in building renewal and maintenance and prior to this year, it just wasn’t getting done and it wasn’t a safe environment for the people who were in prison and certainly for the people who worked there.”

Ms. Baldo said the money would not actually pay for background checks but would go into a fund for maintenance and repairs to the prisons.

Barrett Marson, a spokesman for the Corrections Department, said in an e-mail that it was the department’s policy not to comment on pending litigation.

Although there have been some calls and letters from potential visitors inquiring about the fee and how to pay it, no complaints had been reported from inmates, Mr. Marson said. The department has not determined whether the number of visitors to the prisons has changed since the charge went into effect, he added.

“Maintenance funds for our buildings are scarce in this difficult economic time,” he said. “A $25 visitation fee helps to ensure our prisons remain safe environments for staff, inmates and visitors.”

Ms. Hamm, the Middle Ground director who is also a retired lower court judge and married to a former inmate, said that an earlier proposal presented to a legislative committee would have imposed the background check fee on everyone who visited inmates, including babies and children. But in the end, the Legislature limited the fees to people over 18.

The law also allows the Corrections Department to waive all or part of the background check fee in certain circumstances — for example, when an applicant just wants permission to telephone an inmate.

Ms. Hamm said that research by her organization could not find any other example of a state prison system imposing a fee on visitors.

The Arizona Corrections Department, Ms. Hamm said, has run perfunctory checks on visitors for years. In its application form, the department requires visitors to provide their name, date of birth and a driver’s license or other photo identification number. Providing a Social Security number on the application is optional, and no fingerprints are required.

Another state agency, the Department of Public Safety, conducts free background checks for people who want to review their own records and who provide fingerprints, said Carrick Cook, a spokesman.

The Public Safety Department charges $20 for criminal background checks of people who are hired as volunteers for state agencies, and $24 for checks on paid state workers, both of which involve fingerprinting. A fingerprint clearance card, required for child care and foster care workers in Arizona, costs $65 for volunteers and $69 for paid employees.

Shauna, whose brother is at the Eyman complex, said she learned about the fee after she filed applications for her brother’s son, a Mormon missionary in Kentucky who wanted to visit his father, along with a friend and two other relatives.

She was told that the best way to pay the fee was electronically, through Western Union, but was unable to get the system to work, she said.

She was then advised to send a money order. Despite confirmation by United Parcel Service that the package had been delivered, the Corrections Department told her that the $100 payment — four $25 money orders for four visitors — had not been received, she said.

Another $100 payment was sent, and on Friday — months after she began the application process — she finally got confirmation of the payment from the department.

“I have now spent $200 of my own money to get family in,” she said, adding that it could take up to 60 days for the department to approve the applications.

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IT’S a foolish question, asking how smart a politician is.

 

It’s too vague. It ignores all the different wrinkles of intelligence and ways to measure it, along with the debatable link between brain power as it’s typically defined and skilled governance in terms of actual results. It’s a vessel for prejudices, a stand-in for grievances.

And yet it comes back around almost every election cycle, as it’s doing now.

Meet Rick Perry. At Texas A&M University, his grades were so poor he was on academic probation. He flunked advanced organic chemistry, which, in his defense, sounds eminently flunkable. He got a C in animal breeding, which doesn’t. For a “principles of economics” course, he attained a glittering D, as The Huffington Post detailed. You won’t be hearing him mention that much amid all his talk about Texas jobs creation.

His academic background, coupled with his rejection of climate change and fondness for gauzy generalities, prompted a story in Politico last week with this subtle headline: “Is Rick Perry Dumb?”

Based on grades alone, it seems so. But by that yardstick, even a politician as outwardly cerebral as Al Gore has some explaining to do. Gore got his very own college D — in a course about man’s place in nature, no less. Granted, this was at Harvard. But still.

Perry can’t dazzle in policy discussions. That’s also clear. The farther he ventures from Texas, the smaller he shrinks. When the radio talk show host Laura Ingraham recently tried to get him to say something specific — anything specific — about how America should deal with China, he clung so tightly to banalities that she was forced twice to plead: “What does that mean?”

But he’s savvy enough to have assembled a political team and adopted a political strategy that have him leading the (flawed) Republican field in a raft of recent polls. There’s something to that. Something more than excellent hair.

I’m less troubled by how thickheaded Perry may be than by how wrongheaded we already know he is on issues like evolution, which he says is just a theory, and homosexuality, which he has likened to alcoholism.

President Obama has those issues right. And can talk authoritatively about them and most others. A former editor of the Harvard Law Review, he has that kind of mind, that kind of fluency. In this one poised man, erudition and eloquence join hands.

But they don’t save him. Last week, he set himself up once again to look like the nation’s deferrer in chief by proposing a date for his jobs speech that had the possibility of provoking Republican opposition and did precisely that, at which point he retreated. Is this the Mother-May-I presidency? With John Boehner in the role of paddle-wielding matriarch?

That many Republicans will viciously seize any opportunity to defy and undercut Obama is a lesson he should have learned by now. Regardless of who was being unreasonable, it was he who actually ended up sending an e-mail to supporters with the one-word subject line “frustrated.” The president of the United States is supposed to salve our frustrations, not meekly bemoan his own.

Shouldn’t he or someone in his inner circle have foreseen the potential for events unfolding in such a humiliating fashion and made sure to avoid it? Apparently no one did, and that suggests a deficit of smarts by almost any definition of that ludicrously imprecise term.

Worse yet, this was only the latest in a long series of questionable calculations. Was it smart/prudent/pick-your-adjective to lavish all that precious post-election political capital on health care reform rather than economic revitalization and jobs creation, especially if it winds up being the first in a chain of dominoes that leads to defeat in 2012 and the repeal of that precise legislation?

Was it smart/prudent/pick-your-adjective not to head off a debt-ceiling showdown by settling the matter during last year’s lame-duck session of Congress, before Republicans took the reins in the House? And, during the showdown, didn’t Obama and his advisers misjudge both the zeal of some House Republicans and the magnitude of his own powers of persuasion?

Time and again, Obama hasn’t been a prescient or brutal enough tactician and hasn’t adjusted his high-minded ways to the low-minded sport of Congressional politics. That’s a failure of some kind, and intelligence may be one word for it.

“Is Obama Smart?” the Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens asked in early August. That was the headline, and it’s at least as good a question, in terms of the president’s political efficacy of late, as the one Politico posed about Perry.

THAT Perry’s headline contained the harsher adjective — “dumb” — is typical, say many Republicans, who complain that journalists tend to equate the anti-intellectualism and populist affects of many of their party’s candidates with outright stupidity. They cite Ronald Reagan as an example of someone first dismissed as a dunce and understood only later to be wise in some basic, consequential ways.

And they say that Democrats get a greater pass on gaffes than Republicans do. There’s merit to the argument. The recent verbal hiccup with which Joe Biden seemed to endorse China’s one-child policy lengthened a formidable list of Bidenisms, including his statement in 2007 that Obama, as a presidential contender, was “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.” But Biden’s intelligence is seldom questioned, not the way it would be if he had a Tea Party affiliation and Southern drawl.

Then there’s the whole matter of whether we’re well served by a brainy president. In an excellent piece in Slate in 1999, Jacob Weisberg explored a growing body of thought that a president’s supposed brilliance (or lack thereof) has no bearing on success in office. By this theory, relatively ordinary smarts yielded extraordinary accomplishment (Reagan, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman) while extreme intelligence led to defeat (Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Herbert Hoover).

Weisberg rightly noted the huge flaws with this analysis, including the small sample size and the subjectivity involved in judging achievement. Here’s another: what makes Carter more brilliant than Roosevelt — or, for that matter, Reagan?

That assessment reflects a narrow, traditional understanding of smarts as a sort of academic aptitude, a facility with facts and language. But a whole genre of best-selling books over the last decade and a half insist — correctly, I think — that there are various ways to be clever: “Emotional Intelligence,” “The Wisdom of Crowds,” a knack for gut responses formed in the span of a “Blink.” None require exemplary SAT scores.

Instead of talking about how smart politicians are or aren’t, we should have an infinitely more useful, meaningful conversation about whether we share and respect their values and whether they have shown themselves to be effective. Someone who rates high on both counts is someone to rally unreservedly around.

Right now, neither Perry nor Obama fits that double bill.