truesee's Blog

8:19 p.m. CDT, June 11, 2011

Judges handing down extra-long sentences

Rhonda Cook

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Fulton County Judge Constance Russell stacked life sentence after life sentence after life sentence on rapist Marvin Martin three months ago, ensuring that the 33-year-old truck driver will never be free.

He will have to serve 360 years in prison before he can even be considered for parole.

Martin's is an impossible sentence. But it is indicative of the path some judges are now taking, suggesting a lack of trust that their sentences will mean anything if prison crowding continues or if the state's finances force early releases. Or if the presently conservative Pardons and Paroles Board shifts to more liberal stance on crime and punishment.

They fear a repeat of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Georgia had to open prison doors to avoid a lawsuit. Other states are already facing the same option.

“It’s a trend,” University of Georgia law professor Ron Carlson said of an apparent uptick in prison sentences that extend many times longer than a lifetime.

Evidence is anecdotal.

Former DeKalb County Deputy Derrick Yancey will be 111 before the Parole Board can consider him for clemency, assuming he lives that long. Yancey murdered his wife and a day laborer and then tried claim Marcial Cax-Puluc killed Linda Yancey and that he simply killed the worker in self defense. DeKalb Superior Court Judge Linda Harper sentenced Yancey to two consecutive life sentences plus 65 years.

Fulton County Courthouse murderer Brian Nichols most likely has the longest prison sentence in the Georgia system. For killing four people, Judge James Bodiford gave him four back-to-back sentences of life without parole, seven life sentences with parole also to be served one at a time and 485 years for all his other crimes on March 11, 2005 -- kidnapping, aggravated assault and escape.

Judges are reluctant to talk about their reasons for stacking on the time.

But prosecutors and defense attorneys say one purpose of insurmountable sentences is to reinforce to the state Board of Pardons and Paroles that these are the worst of the worst criminals and should never be free again.

“The judge is basically giving an indication as to the severity of the offense and is sending a clear message as to what he feels is appropriate,” said Bob Keller, a former Clayton County DA and now one of five Parole Board members.

“It’s all going to boil down to why did the judge think this was an appropriate sentence?” Keller said. “Is it a pile-on situation? He [the judge] didn’t just pull it out of thing air. Something prompted it.”

Nationwide, prison systems are overflowing and there is no available money to resolve those problems.

For example, on May 23, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 38,000 to 46,000 prisoners should be released from California's prisons and about 9,000 others moved to local jails to relieve dangerous overcrowding.

It's an old problem that never seems to go away and lawmakers and parole boards face fierce recriminations if they suggest an alternative that could be viewed as too easy on criminals.

The last time Georgia tried something drastic was in 1989. Threatened with a lawsuit threat that could have put Georgia's prisons under the control of federal courts, then-Gov. Joe Frank Harris created an early release program to buy time until an unprecedented building program effort could be competed. About 8,200 non-violent felons and first-time drug offenders were released early to create room for the more dangerous criminals.

The measure drew criticism from district attorneys and legislators. Twenty-two years later, judges are making sure some of those more dangerous criminals are never set free.

“There are very bad people who don’t need to be walking free among us. They’ve committed such heinous crimes they don’t need to be out,” Clayton County DA Tracy Graham Lawson said.

That is the reason, she believes, judges and prosecutors are using sentences longer than any human can serve: to inform those who hold the keys to the prison system that these criminals are off-limits.

Presently, Georgia’s system is slightly over capacity. The Department of Corrections is holding about 49,420 convicted felons while the  system has room for 46,554 men and women -- 35,527 in 30 state prisons, 5,963 inmates in two private prisons and another 5,064 in low-security county prisons.

It is unknown how many of these inmates have prison sentences that exceed life expectancy many times over. Neither the Department of Corrections nor the state Board of Pardons and Paroles tracks these inmates.

“You’re seeing much, much more of the stacking,” said attorney Sharon Hopkin, who specializes in appellate work for those already in prison.

But Carlson, the law professor, wondered if it was getting out of hand.

He referenced a case in Texas in which the judge handed down a 2,500-year sentence. An appellate court opined "these excessive sentences have made Texas sentencing the laughing stock of the nation."

There already are similar concerns being raised in Georgia.

"We need to take a strong look at these sentences that, for the purposes of public relations, have been piled on,” Carlson said. “What is being done here, if it continues, will look ludicrous to the public. ... The trend toward enhanced punishments needs to be weighed against several factors, including costs of confinement as well as the need to shape a sentence which meets confinement objectives without overkill.”

Gov. Nathan Deal created a 13-member commission to recommend sentencing changes because, he said, there are "too many people behind bars." The Special Council on Criminal Justice Reform had its first meeting on Tuesday and heard many of the same warnings on over-crowding sounded repeatedly over the past two decades.

The special council's recommendations are due to the governor by Nov. 1.

At the same time, the State Bar of Georgia has a Criminal Justice Reform Committee working in tandem with the governor’s group.

Both panels include judges and prosecutors but their conclusions may still be difficult for some segments of the criminal justice system to accept.

“You want to control it for the rest of the time and judges are that way,” said Rick Malone, who was a South Georgia prosecutor for two decades and is now executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia. “It’s a statement as to whether or not this person should ever get out. You hear horror stories about sending them home to die and six years later, he’s still out there and he commits another crime.”

 

Federal data shows troubling unemployment, underemployment trends

 

1:46 AM  6/10/11

Less than half of African-American men now have full-time jobs, and less than half of all white men will have full-time jobs in 2018, according to post-2000 trends hidden in federal population and workforce data.

There are roughly 14 million people formally labeled as unemployed, but “there’s probably 22 million to 23 million people who are unemployed, mal-employed or underemployed,” said Andrew Sum, an economics professor at Northeastern University in Boston.

The hidden data shows that “we’ve got an overwhelming job gap that effects men more than women, less-educated men more then better-educated men, and the group aged 25 to 29 the most,” he said.

One startling result, he said, is that only 43 percent of African-American men aged 18 to 29 have a full-time job.

This trend is obvious to T. Willard Fair, head of the Urban League of Greater Miami. He recently advertised two janitorial jobs via the unemployment office in his local town Liberty City. The city is 85 percent African-American, yet “only 2 of the 33 applicants were African-American,” he said. “The remainder were Hispanics or Haitians.

“People want to work, and if they can find jobs, they would take those jobs … [but] blacks are no longer even applying for those kinds of jobs, or have concluded they’re not going to get those jobs,” he said.

There’s recently been a run of bad news about unemployment trends. That’s damaged the White House’s poll ratings, but the federal government’s unemployment estimate — now 9.1 percent — counts only a portion of the nation’s non-working population. That’s because the 9.1 percent counts only people who have sought work in the last four weeks, and have failed to find employment of 35 hours or more per week.

The count obscures the fact that many people have unwillingly ended their participation in the workforce.

The “employment population ratio” is a standard economic term that describes the percentage of work-ready people people who do have jobs. It ignores people who can’t work because they are in prison, nursing homes or full-time education.

In practice, the ratio of working people can’t go much higher than 85 percent because some of the people who can work chose to retire, or to consume savings or to rely on government payments.

In 2000, the employment-population ratio for male, black university graduates reached a high of 81 percent, or 87 percent if the calculation included graduates working in part-time jobs. That full-employment came at the tail end of the dot.com bubble — which burst in 2001 — and before the midpoint of an immigration wave.

At least 15 million legal and illegal immigrants, mostly young and unskilled, entered the country between 1994 and 2007.

Since 2000, for most groups, for most of the time, the employment population ratio has continuously fallen to levels far below 80 percent, even before the current recession, according to the government data that was analyzed and sent to TheDC by Northeastern’s Sum.

The full-time employment population ratio for white men fell from 62 percent in 2000 to 55 percent by 2010. That’s a drop of 7 percent in 10 years, or 0.7 percent a year. If that drop continues at the same rate, less than half of whites will be working by 2018.

If part-time workers are included, the ratio started at 74 percent in 2000 and fell to 67 percent in 2010.

Among all African-American men aged more than 16, the full-time ratio fell from 56.9 percent in 2000 to 46.4 percent in 2010. The inclusion of part-time work bumps the ratio upwards, but the ratio still fell from 67 percent to 58 percent in 2010.

Full-time employment ratio

People with extra education qualifications are more likely to be working than those with few skills or qualifications. For example, the full-time employment-population ratio for whites without high-school qualifications fell from a 2000 high of 35 percent to a 2010 low of only 27 percent. With part-time work included, the 2010 ratio for white dropouts was 39 percent.

Among blacks who also left high school without qualifications, the full-time ratio fell from 30 percent to a mere 21 percent. That means only one-in-five male African-American high-school dropouts has a full-time job. If part-time work is included, the ratio for male African-American dropouts began at 40 percent in 2000, and fell to 31 percent by 2010.

In contrast, 76 percent of male African-American university graduates had a full-time job in 2002, and 64.5 percent still had a full-time job in 2010.

Ratios are also lower among younger workers.

For all men age 25 to 29, the ratio fell from 89 percent in 2000 to 78 percent in 2010. That’s an 11 point drop, and almost twice as much as the 6-point drop among similar-aged women, whose ratio fell from 74 percent to 68 percent over the same period. The ratio among all black males aged 25 to 29, fell from 77.3 percent to 63 percent in 2010. For black males aged 20 to 24, the ratio fell from 65 percent to 54 percent.

That steep decline among younger people is especially painful, said Sum, because it takes many years for unemployed youths to catch up to the experience and wages of steadily employed peers. In turn, that earning shortfall makes it less likely they will marry the women they make pregnant, and less likely they’ll serve as beneficial fathers to their children, and more likely their children will fall even further behind, he said.

The employment ratio among whites is usually higher than the ratio among blacks, but both are trending downwards. The ratio among the Hispanic population usually fall somewhere between Caucasian and African-American ratios.

But the Hispanic numbers conceals an significant split. The workforce ratio of U.S.-born Hispanics is lower than that of immigrant Hispanics, according to government data shown by Steve Camarota, a researcher at the Center for Immigration Studies.

For example, in late 2010, almost 40 percent of U.S.-born Hispanic high-school dropouts grads unemployed, but also 30 percent of immigrant Hispanic dropouts were unemployed. Among 18-29 year-old high school grads, the unemployment rate for U.S.-born Hispanics was 35 percent. Among similar Hispanic immigrants, the unemployment rate was 27 percent.

Employment and high education

South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, the most influential African-American legislator in Congress, has been an outspoken advocates for programs designed to boost employment among African-Americans and other workers. He’s now trying to pass language that would require every federal agency direct 10 percent of their budgets to counties that have 20 percent of their populations living below the poverty line for 30 years.

“If targeted investments are made in these communities, we will begin to see a turn-around in the unemployment rate of all minority groups,” Clyburn said in a statement to TheDC.

He’s also pushing a “Rural Energy Savings Program Act” that will offer rural residents loans of up to $7,500 for home modifications that conserve energy. The bill would “create high-skill, high-wage manufacturing and construction jobs and deliver meaningful energy savings for consumers that will put money directly into their wallets,” he said in the statement.

When asked about the impact of 15 million immigrants on the workforce, Clyburn spokesman responded that “the Congressman doesn’t believe immigration plays a role in this systemic problem."

But immigration is central to the problem, said Sum and Camarota.

Those 15 million immigrants, said Sum, arrived during a period when the U.S. produced only 15 million additional jobs.

Immigrants, especially Hispanic immigrants, can win new jobs quickly because they’re more motivated than U.S.-born workers and because they’re often directly recruited for new jobs by informal transnational networks, said Camarota. They’re also freer to move to any part of the country where new jobs are appearing, unlike citizens, who tend to stay in the communities they know, even when there are few jobs.

In Congress, the Reclaim Americans Jobs Caucus was formed in 2010 by Republican Reps. Lamar Smith, Gary Miller and Sue Myrick to boost enforcement of immigration rules. “Seven million illegal immigrants have jobs in our economy … [that] should go to U.S. citizens and legal immigrant workers,” said a caucus statement.

Clyburn and other African-American legislators in the Congressional Black Caucus are avoiding the immigration issue because they’ve made a strategic alliance with Hispanic activists and legislators, said Carol Swain, a professor at Vanderbilt University’s law school.

“They don’t want to talk about the issue … [and] every single CBC member wants to change the subject,” said Swain, whose new book, “Be The People; A Call to Reclaim America’s Faith and Promise” will be published June 14.

The book has chapters on immigration and on how African-American political activists “have deceived large number of African-Americans to support policies that are against their interests,” she said.

Down on the streets, Fair said, African-Americans are strongly opposed to immigration.

“Out of earshot of others, when you can scratch that itch,” he said, “The conversation is hostile … [and] they blame their leadership for not doing anything about it.”

Elise Young contributed to this report.