Prison System

Here, recycling is the name of the game. Copper and aluminum obviously, but also steel, brick and even seemingly worthless nuggets of concrete from demolished buildings find their way to new and productive uses. Grasses are planted to protect critical wetlands near the Chesapeake Bay, and further toward the Appalachian Piedmont, new trees will help protect tributaries of the Potomac River. Dedicated individuals pick up trash along miles of highway and reclaim historic sites. The mission spans the generations, as well; kids tend raised beds, pick cucumbers and make friends with writhing red worms in rich black soil.

Why is a conservative foundation in Iowa seeking to roll back a civil rights law in Maryland? Three weeks ago, a federal lawsuit funded by the Legacy Foundation was filed against Maryland's proposed congressional redistricting plan. But the lawyers seem particularly concerned with condemning Maryland's "No Representation Without Population Act," a first-in-the-nation civil rights law that essentially ends the process of providing conservative communities in which prisons have been built with legislative districts larger than the number of voters who live there - at the expense of inmates' home communities.

Here's something you won't hear much about in the coming Maryland gubernatorial election: The United States has the world's highest incarceration rate and a de facto racial caste system that discriminates against hundreds of thousands of black men in the way Jim Crow laws once did. You won't hear anything close to that from Martin O'Malley, the Democrat and present governor, nor from Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., the Republican and wannabe-governor-again who,...

Here, recycling is the name of the game. Copper and aluminum obviously, but also steel, brick and even seemingly worthless nuggets of concrete from demolished buildings find their way to new and productive uses. Grasses are planted to protect critical wetlands near the Chesapeake Bay, and further toward the Appalachian Piedmont, new trees will help protect tributaries of the Potomac River. Dedicated individuals pick up trash along miles of highway and reclaim historic sites. The mission spans the generations, as well; kids tend raised beds, pick cucumbers and make friends with writhing red worms in rich black soil.

The Maryland prison system has won a $475,000 federal grant to combat drug use by inmates, sources said yesterday.President Clinton is expected to announce the grant to Maryland and similar ones to seven other states, at a White House ceremony today.The money will be used for drug-fighting efforts at the Maryland House of Correction in Jessup, a maximum-security prison with about 2,400 inmates.The grant will pay for the establishment of a prison wing devoted to drug treatment, video surveillance cameras, devices for detecting drug particles and other anti-drug efforts, sources said.

The teenager who has been at a pretrial detention center for almost a year in spite of a felony conviction and five-year sentence has been transferred to the state's prison system. Moshe Khaver was being held yesterday at the Maryland Reception, Diagnostic and Classification Center in Baltimore, where he will be assessed before moving to a prison to serve out the rest of his term. Khaver, 19, pleaded guilty last fall to first-degree assault. He admitted running over another teen, who spent five weeks in a coma and suffered permanent injuries, during a dispute about $20 in marijuana.

SAN FRANCISCO - California's enormous prison system, the largest in the Western Hemisphere with more than 162,000 inmates, could be radically altered in the wake of voters' overwhelming approval Tuesday of a measure that will sentence nonviolent drug offenders to treatment instead of prison. Nearly one in three prisoners in California is serving time for a drug-related crime, more per capita than any other state. The new law, Proposition 36, puts California at the forefront of a national movement to reform drug laws.

The United States contains just 5 percent of the world's population, yet its prisons house nearly a quarter of all the people incarcerated around the globe. We imprison our citizens at a greater rate than any other country; as a result, nearly 1 in every 100 Americans today is living behind bars. Since 1970, the U.S. prison population has increased by 700 percent, to 2.4 million people. In Maryland, the state's prison population has tripled to more than 22,000, at a cost of more than $783 million a year.

Inmates in Maryland's prison system are sometimes set free months early or, in other cases, weeks late because of errors in calculating time off for good behavior and other such credits, according to a legislative audit released yesterday. The audit of 65 inmates at two prisons who were released in 2003 showed that one-third of them got out on the incorrect date. One prisoner was released more than three months early, while another remained behind bars three weeks after he became eligible for release, according to the report.

The hand-held vacuum looks like a Dust Buster, but it collects more than just lint. Call it the drug buster.With this new drug-detection system, called the Ionscan 400, the state is searching for the most minute traces of illegal narcotics on people who visit or work at Maryland's prisons. Officials say it's more accurate than a drug-sniffing dog -- and never gets tired or needs food or exercise."The message we're sending is if you're a bad person and trying to get drugs into our prisons, we're going to catch you," said William W. Sondervan, an assistant commissioner for the state Division of Correction, during a demonstration this week at the Maryland Correctional Institution in Jessup.

A team of state prisoners is headed to the Cecil County town of Port Deposit to help clean up the mud and mess left behind from last week's flood, a state lawmaker said Tuesday. During a meeting about prisons in Baltimore, State Sen. Nancy Jacobs, a Republican who represents Harford and Cecil counties, said she asked Gary Maynard, the state's secretary of Public Safety & Correctional Services, for help with cleaning up the mess made by the flooding Susquehanna River. Maynard agreed, Jacobs said, and will be sending out a 7-man crew of "fully supervised" inmates within the next 24 to 48 hours.

The United States contains just 5 percent of the world's population, yet its prisons house nearly a quarter of all the people incarcerated around the globe. We imprison our citizens at a greater rate than any other country; as a result, nearly 1 in every 100 Americans today is living behind bars. Since 1970, the U.S. prison population has increased by 700 percent, to 2.4 million people. In Maryland, the state's prison population has tripled to more than 22,000, at a cost of more than $783 million a year.

In the coming weeks, Maryland's Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services will seek the technology industry's solutions to the very real threat that illegal cell phones pose to the state's prison system. However, from my understanding, Secretary Gary D. Maynard will focus exclusively on a single technology solution — cell phone blocking — rather than leaving the door open to all the possible technologies. Inmates' cell phone access is not a new problem to Maryland, but in the past few years, the problem has exploded.

Dan Rodricks remains stubbornly obtuse about the disproportionate number of black men who are in prison or on probation or parole. Professor Michelle Alexander affords him an occasion to renew his ignorance ("Jim Crow alive and well in prison system," April 8). Mr. Rodricks observes that "in the mid-1970s, the U.S. prison population was about 300,000. Today it is roughly 2.4 million. ... During the time of this explosion in prison populations, drug arrests climbed while property crime and violent crime dropped."

Here's something you won't hear much about in the coming Maryland gubernatorial election: The United States has the world's highest incarceration rate and a de facto racial caste system that discriminates against hundreds of thousands of black men in the way Jim Crow laws once did. You won't hear anything close to that from Martin O'Malley, the Democrat and present governor, nor from Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., the Republican and wannabe-governor-again who,...

It sounds like a classic case of the tail wagging the dog. An inmate at a prison in Western Maryland files a piddling lawsuit on the Eastern Shore that requires his presence in court. When corrections officials attempt to transport him there so he can testify, he outwits them during a stopover in Baltimore and makes good his escape. This would be the stuff of a Hollywood movie -- or an urban legend -- except that it really happened. Raymond Taylor was serving three life terms at a maximum security facility in Cumberland for a triple shooting when he escaped from a downtown prison in Baltimore last Friday while en route to the Eastern Shore.

Friday marks 75 years since repeal of the Volstead Act, which made the manufacture, distribution and consumption of alcoholic beverages illegal in the United States. As the anniversary of the end of Prohibition approaches, modern advocates of a similar repeal are calling again for the decriminalization of heroin, cocaine and marijuana - and this time they've come packing a money argument by a Harvard economist. I like money arguments. They are usually a lot more effective than emotional ones or those that exploit stubborn prejudices with the intent of maintaining the status quo. As the American economy recedes, state and local tax revenues fall and government budgets are cut, the money argument for changing the way we do things - from enforcing the laws to educating children - makes the most sense and has the strongest appeal.

Two years ago, state Corrections Secretary Gary D. Maynard gave prison and local police officials a simple task: draw up lists of the most violent gang members being held in state custody. With the House of Correction set to be shuttered, the worst of the worst would be transported to out-of-state facilities. The agencies submitted a total of 220 names, but to Maynard's surprise, only eight appeared on more than one list. The prisons didn't know who the police thought were most dangerous, and the police departments weren't sharing the information with each other, either.

The state Board of Public Works has approved a $500,000 settlement for the family of an inmate killed in 2004 while officers attempted to subdue him using pepper spray at a Western Maryland prison. The family of Ifeanyi A. Iko had been seeking $28 million in a federal wrongful death lawsuit, which will now be dismissed. The settlement - thought to be one of the largest Maryland awards in a prisoner death or injury case - was approved at Wednesday's board meeting. Gary Adler, the Iko family's attorney, said the settlement also includes a condition that the prison system revisit policies related to Iko's death.