MORE AND MORE PRISONS

...Furthermore, the Government's figures are highly questionable...

...A letter writing campaign has commenced urging you to write Warden Sowders, insisting that he stop the forced double celling, which is comparable to a policeman knocking your door down and forcing you to accept a stranger to share your bedroom...

...They had been asked to look into charges of rights violations at the prison...

...The Olympic Prison is an outrageous perversion of the Olympic spirit...

...Three years earlier, a similar Federal commission had made similar recommendations to President Johnson...

...Insunza and a colleague, lfeanyi Ifebigh, former Nigerian minister of education, were asked to look into the Olympic prison...

...It will have to come from ourselves, the real victims of this violent process...

...A former Chilean minister of justice during the brief administration of Salvador Allende, Insunza, now living in exile in East Berlin, was investigating the Olympic prison in support of a petition submitted to the S. Brian Willson, a lawyer-activist and farmer in Sinclairville, New York, has been long active in prison reform...

...The Nixon Task Force cautioned that its reform proposals had to be viewed as mere tactical maneuvers leading only to short-term solutions "unless they are executed as part of a grand strategy of social reform, with particular emphasis on reducing poverty and racial discrimination...

...The Federal prison system may be the world's largest and fastest-growing national prison system...

...Consequently crime control has become a major industry, spending nearly $25 billion a year while employing 1.3 million people in some 60,000 public agencies...

...The cell walls are solid stone and brick with an oval shaped ceiling that usually collides with the head of the man on the top bunk when he attempts to rise...

...There are no windows in any of the cells, and the cells are barely larger than an average bedroom closet...

...The Olympic Prison was born of two mutual needs: The Lake Placid Olympic Organizing Committee could obtain Federal funding for Olympic buildings only if there would be an afteruse at the conclusion of the Games...

...The Bureau of Prisons also argues that prisoners today are more violent than in the past...

...And the direct victims, of course, will not be the Olympic athletes, but the poor and predominantly non-white young men for whom the Olympic village will become a permanent home...

...William Nagel, a former prison administrator, studied prison sentencing patterns and found a significant correlation between racial composition of an area and imprisonment rates...

...The answers to these questions seem perfectly clear...

...Do people convicted of A letter from Eddyville Your support is desperately needed by writing letters to Warden Dewey Sowders at the Kentucky State Penitentiary, P.O...

...It was a match made in heaven...

...Each new Federal prison cell is calculated to cost between $40,000 and $50,000...

...The vast majority of inmates were incarcerated for drug offenses, security and exchange frauds, stolen credit cards, income tax evasion, and other white-collar type crimes...

...The building program is generally justified as a response to overcrowding in existing Federal prisons...

...These youths, the fruit of the postwar baby boom, are more prone to crime, the Government claims...

...Federal judges have responded to the punitive mood of the times...

...Representative Robert Drinan of Massachusetts is preparing a softer version which would merely call for an afteruse study without any delay of the prison use...

...The petitioners, the National Conference of Black Lawyers and the Committee for Racial Justice of the United Church of Christ, among others, had sent Insunza and seven other respected international jurists to investigate allegations of a series of human rights violations in American prisons...

...Benny Shaffner Kentucky State Penitentiary such acts really require an average of almost four years behind bars...

...A moratorium would provide time to establish goals for the incremental reduction of prisoner populations until, by 1990, perhaps, Federal prison populations could fall to 5 or 1.0 per cent of present levels...

...Data from the United States Census Bureau show that the actual serious crime rate (as contrasted with the police reported crime rate) remained fairly constant between 1970 and 1975...

...By contrast, in 1960 the average sentence was 29.6 months, and in 1950 it was only 17.5 months...

...Yet its own figures disprove that notion...

...The costs of alternative sentencing are only a fraction of that...

...Commission on Human Rights...

...The higher the rate of joblessness, the higher the rate of prison commitments...

...New capital outlays, occupational conversion, and emergency assistance will all be required...

...Several church, civic, and political To break out of the vicious cycle ...we must first have a moratorium' groups have formed Stop The Olympic Prison (STOP) to fight the prison, but so far they have found few potent allies...

...Economic conversion plans for communities whose economies are now dependent upon prisons must be developed...

...Once the prison opens, will they simply be the occasion for 200 new jobs for whites from the Adirondack region...

...The key to unlocking our caged criminal injustice system will not come from prosecutors, judges, prison administrators, or others with a vested interest in enlarging the crime control industry...

...The number of employes increased by about 8 per cent during the decade...

...But the price tag for this marriage of convenience has been high...

...No less an authority than Bureau of Prisons Director Carlson has acknowledged that the growth of the Federal prison system and the influx of minority prisoners has precious little to do with any serious increase in crime...

...Not only has the number of people sentenced to Federal prisons risen, but their average stay has increased as well...

...Today, the Bureau runs almost sixty prisons, houses about 25,000 inmates, employs 10,000 people, and has an annual budget nearing $400 million...

...The excuse for inflicting this cruel and unusual punishment is that the prison is overpopulated...

...The Government contends that its projections on continued growth in the Federal prison population are based on the disproportionate number of young people in the total population...

...The Federal system holds only a small proportion of American prisoners...

...We will have no true order or real criminal justice until we seriously pursue economic, racial, and political justice for all...

...As an economic matter, altering our criminal "justice" system is highly desirable...

...The act created the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) within the Department of Justice...

...Penitentiaries, the commission said, should give way to community corrections...

...And that was no accident, for when the 1980 winter Olympics have run their course next February, the Olympic village will become a Federal youth prison...

...Moreover, according to the Congressional Budget Office, in 1977 only 11 per cent of Federal prisoners were committed for violent crimes...

...Only a concerted campaign by such organizations as the National Moratorium on Prison Construction and the Friends Committee on National Legislation has forced Congressional appropriations committees to begin scrutinizing the Bureau's policies...

...The Bureau estimates that 25 per cent of its prisoners have been committed for "serious" crimes, generally either for what are termed violent crimes or drug violations...

...Representative Robert Kastenmeier of Wisconsin, chairman of the Congressional committee with oversight responsibilities over the Bureau of Prisons, has acknowledged that the Olympic Prison is a mistake...

...Less than a year earlier, Carlson had claimed that the figure was 4.7 per cent...

...Since 1969, the Bureau's budget has grown by 43 per cent annually, the number of employes has increased 100 per cent, and an average of $50 million a year has gone into prison construction...

...the Olympic Prison has from its inception been intended as a jail, with its Olympic purpose a brief and secondary matter...

...The Rev...

...Box 128, Eddyville, Kentucky, urging him to immediately stop the forced double celling of prisoners...

...in order for one man to stand on the floor the other must remain in his bunk...

...The influx of new prisoners, and the alarming increase of minority inmates in the Federal system, should stimulate the Department of Justice to review the economic and racial biases of punishment, rather than blindly building ever more cages to house the victims of repression...

...Sadly, all that advice has been ignored...

...And 200 people from the financially pressed northern Adirondack region will get "recession-proof jobs as prison guards...

...And while it has approved the Bureau's budget demands, Congress has never systematically reviewed its programs or philosophy...

...The joy of international competition, the open sharing of different cultures and races — all will be savagely mocked by the bars and peepholes in the Olympic village...

...it also makes no long-term sense...

...The Federal prison policy is bankrupt both ethically and as a means of containing crime...

...No foul odors can escape from the cells due to the near solid doors that are made of criss-crossed iron slats...

...In 1970, the Bureau of Prisons operated about forty penal institutions, holding some 21,000 prisoners...

...But there is, in fact, a significant difference between the soccer stadium and the Olympic Prison: The stadium was built for sport and was converted only temporarily to fit the sinister needs of the Chilean military junta...

...Such an approach would also set an example for state and local systems to follow...

...It ignores, in fact, the Bureau of Prisons' own policies: New prisons, the Government has said, have to be built in or near metropolitan areas, so that prisoners can maintain contacts with the communities from which they came — and to which someday they will return...

...The cells have a makeshift double bunk in each...

...This massive growth in the prison system is in direct contradiction to the recommendations of no fewer than three studies conducted by the Federal Government itself In 1970, the Task Force on Prisoner Rehabilitation, in a report requested the year before by President Nixon, suggested that the nation had enough prisons...

...According to the National Moratorium on Prison Construction, a project of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, municipal, county, state, and Federal jails and prisons house a total of 550,000 people — almost twice as many as a few years ago...

...the prison is a symbol of all that's wrong in the . . . system' The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 launched an all-out "war on crime," first by President Johnson and then by the Nixon Administration...

...A subsequent national commission, the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, in 1973 recommended a ten-year moratorium on prison construction...

...Without the 500 young prisoners anticipated at the Olympic Prison, the Winter Olympics might well not take place in Lake Placid at all...

...The gains from a true reconciliation model (restitution to the victims and rebuilding the lives of the convicted) are almost incalculable...

...But since the Census Bureau forecasts a sharp decline in the proportion of youths in the population during the next ten years, the construction of vast new costly permanent prisons to handle what the Government implicitly concedes is a short-term problem is economically absurd...

...That is why stopping the prison is so important, not only because of the fundamental inhumanity of its conception, but also because the prison is a symbol of all that's wrong in the Federal penal system...

...Tensions are mounting because of the forced double celling in the same close quarters for eleven to thirteen hours daily...

...This matter is currently being reviewed in Geneva, Switzerland, following hearings held in late August by the U.N...

...The Government got its youth prison...

...But in 1955, the percentage of serious offenders was 58 per cent, according to Bureau records, and in 1945, the figure was 40 per cent...

...During 1975 hearings before the House Judiciary subcommittee in charge of overseeing the Bureau, only one of nine witnesses from outside the Justice Department unequivocally supported the Government's prison building program...

...Warden Sowders, for political and financial reasons, will not transfer prisoners to other less crowded institutions, and the State Parole Board for the same reasons will not parole a reasonable number of prisoners...

...The dangerous and chilling situation is reaching explosive proportions...

...Were black and Hispanic young men from the cities being used as pawns to justify building an Olympic village at government expense...

...Enough prisons, local jails, and juvenile facilities now exist to accommodate society's most heinous and dangerous offenders...

...What was needed, the Task Force said, were noninstitutional, community-based rehabilitation programs for Federal prisoners...

...The prison, isolated in the mountains more than 300 miles from the large East Coast cities from which its population will come, defies the spirit of the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners...

...The Federal prisons also reflect the racism that still dominates American political and economic life...

...The forced double-celling of stranger on stranger has produced rapes, suicides, severe beatings, and the compelling of some of the weaker inmates to take refuge in protective custody cells...

...The United States Olympic Committee has sought to prevent STOP from distributing anti-Olympic prison posters and brochures, claiming such literature interferes with the good name and promotion of the 1980 winter Olympics...

...He found no significant correlation between racial composition and the crime rate...

...Cellhouse 2 contains cells that are only thirty-seven square feet and are likewise double-celled without ventilation...

...To break out of the vicious cycle of more prisoners sentenced to longer terms requiring more and more prisons, we must first have a moratorium on building new prisons...

...The Olympic Prison is a vivid symbol not only of American insensitivity to the spirit of the Olympics, but of our inability to create an intelligent, humane system of criminal justice...

...The prison, by design, distorts the noble intentions of sport and the quadrennial Olympics...

...Testifying before Congress in 1976, Norman Carlson, director of the Bureau of Prisons, said the Federal prison system was overcrowded by some 19.4 per cent...

...Federal sentencing patterns show that minorities receive significantly longer prison terms than whites, even if they have no previous prison record...

...Throwing people in prison and vastly increasing the number of prisons is not an appropriate cure for unemployment...

...The cells are only forty-eight square feet, without any ventilation, that were built approximately 100 years ago and now do not meet even minimal Federal standards to house just one person...

...When one uses the open commode the other is no more than a couple of feet away...

...The buildings that spread out over the eighty-two-acre site near the little village of Ray Brook, New York, seven miles west of Lake Placid, had bars over all the windows...

...There is no question about it...

...This punishment binge, and the consequent obsession with building new facilities, has its roots in the law-and-order backlash of the late 1960s...

...Its annual budget was $70 million and it employed 5,000 people...

...Much, if not all, of this background was unknown to Sergio Insunza and Ifeanyi Ifebigh when they toured the Olympic Prison last summer...

...Congress was not even consulted during the development of the master plan...

...William Sloane Coffin, who calls the Olympic Prison America's Gulag Archipelago, has been prodding the committee...

...In our rush to punish, we are building prisons at a rapid pace: The Olympic Prison is one of an estimated 1,000 that will be completed in the next five years or so, adding another 300,000 prisoners to our caged population at a cost that could exceed $25 billion...

...RE PRISONS The Olympic village is just part of the building boom S.BRIAn wiuson The Olympic village Sergio In-sunza toured early last August looked more like a prison than a home away from home for 1,000 to 2,000 athletes...

...The Fels Center of Government at the University of Pennsylvania conducted independent research which confirmed Nagel's findings...

...The annual cost of housing a Federal offender in a newly constructed prison is now $17,305 a year...

...In the decade from 1959 to 1969, the Bureau's budget increased at an annual rate of about 5.5 per cent...

...Between 1970 and 1975, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency reports, the average Federal prison sentence increased from 41.1 months to 45.5 months...

...The Olympic Committee got its village, with the Bureau of Prisons picking up all of the $22 million price tag...

...In fact, we will all be victims of this crass erosion of principles of cooperation, excellence, and justice...

...Much of the discrepancy stemmed from changes in the official definition of prison "capacity...

...The Bureau of Prisons has been blithely following its own master plan, drafted in 1970, which calls for building some forty new Federal penal institutions by 1980...

...Carlson, in a 1974 interview in Corrections Digest, said, "In all the studies that have been done trying to predict the numbers of people who will go to prison, the only variable to show a positive correlation is unemployment...

...Solid doors with little peepholes and firm, heavy locks, and a double cyclone fence surrounding the entire area reinforced the penitential motif...

...Warden Sowders is forcing prisoners to live together in cells designed for one man...

...Some Federal institutions no doubt might be considered overcrowded, but that problem stems from dependence upon a foolish policy of overcommitment and from ever stiffer sentencing...

...If you will not write, then any contributions in the form of postage stamps will be deeply appreciated to carry on my letter writing campaign to gain support from legislators, clergy, lawyers, and everyone that I can think of and can reach by letters...

...Congress has been reluctant to take up the issue...

...That is why Sergio Insunza was examining the almost completed buildings...

...But he claims it's too late to do anything about it now...

...Our streets may be no safer, but many additional thousands have found "safe" jobs...

...And while other Western nations are decreasing their prison populations, the United States is ignoring available alternatives, while significantly expanding its prison population...

...the Federal Bureau of Prisons, a part of the United States Department of Justice, in a mad rush to build ever more penitentiaries, was looking for a site for a medium-security jail housing 500 young men, mostly from racial minorities, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five...

...Indeed, the Bureau has been expanding at an astonishing rate...

...The problem of overcrowded prisons, like the problem of crime itself, can not be solved by building ever more prisons...

...While touring the facility, Insunza wondered aloud if the Olympic prison was in fact any different from the use that had been made of the soccer stadium in Santiago during the coup that toppled Allende...

...In the past decade, the minority population in the Federal system has jumped from 27 per cent to 40 per cent...

...In the past eleven years, the LEAA has disbursed billions of dollars to beef up Federal, state, and local crime control bureaucracies...

...United Nations Commission on Human Rights...

...The stadium, like the Olympic village, was converted into a prison where thousands of Allende supporters were kept for weeks at a time, often before being shipped to notorious prison camps...

...The United States now has the highest rate of imprisonment of any industrialized nation, with the possible exception of South Africa and the Soviet Union...

...But STOP is persevering...

...Representative Robert Garcia of New York City has been preparing legislation to delay the prison's opening and to find another use for the facility after the Olympics, but now he is apparently backing away from this tactic...