Students investigate staples threat, U.S. Justice lawyers visit

MONCKS CORNER -- At the Berkeley County jail, God's Word is the only one allowed.

Three lawyers with the U.S. Justice Department arrived at the jail Monday morning to investigate a complaint that inmates have been denied reading material other than the Bible.

Sandy Senn, an attorney representing Berkeley County jail, talks about the four Charleston School of Law students and one USC student Monday who are going through more than 40,500 documents at the facility in Moncks Corner. The students are looking for proof of damage by inmates using staples brought into the jail through letters or reading material.
Photo by Sarah Bates


Inmates at the Hill-Finklea Detention Center used staples and toothbrushes to make tattoo needles.


While the attorneys toured the Hill-Finklea Detention Center, specifically seeking out non-Christian inmates with no interest in the paperback Bibles allowed inside, another group of visitors started their work in one of the jail's hallways.

County officials hired four Charleston School of Law students and a University of South Carolina student to comb through 40,500 files to show that inmates used staples to cause harm in or damage the jail.

Monday's dramatic inquiries showed the level of interest in the American

Civil Liberties Union's lawsuit against the jail, Berkeley County Sheriff Wayne DeWitt and other officials, a case that calls the Bible-only policy unconstitutional.

DeWitt noted that, unlike prisoners serving sentences, most county jail inmates only spend a day or two at the jail before trial. But he said he would work with the Justice Department.

"However, we do not have federal funding and we simply cannot and will not make our jail a Marriott," DeWitt added.

In fact, the jail continues operating well over capacity, sometimes at triple its intended population of 154. A sparkling $10 million expansion originally scheduled to come online more than a year ago still awaits state approval and necessary funding.

The ACLU's lawsuit came about after the jail turned away mail, including the Prison Legal News. Sandy Senn, an attorney representing the jail in the lawsuit, walked through the detention center Monday showing the damage that staples binding the publication can cause.

Inmates can jam staples in their toilets' flushing mechanisms and flood out their cells. They can use them to destroy $900 locks and to manipulate wiring. And they can straighten them into needles for makeshift tattoo guns.

Senn and a sheriff's sergeant showed some of those primitive instruments: A toothbrush and a pen, each with a staple sticking out of the base for tattooing, and more sophisticated version with a small ink well.

David Fathi, director of the ACLU's National Prison Project in Washington, called the staple argument "an after-the-fact rationale" and noted that the jail never mentioned staples in its original reason for rejecting Prison Legal News.

"It's unfortunate that the county is continuing to spend thousands of dollars to defend an indefensible policy," Fathi said.

He also noted that the jail still sold inmates legal pads which contained staples, even three months after the lawsuit's filing. Senn said jail officials, upon discovering the staples inside the pads, switched to a glue only brand.

A federal judge ordered that either jail officials or the ACLU review three years of inmate files to determine if staples posed problems. Senn showed the walk-in file room filled with the more than 40,500 manila folders that five students will spend the next two weeks perusing at a cost of $20 per hour.

Senn pointed out that the withheld mail, including Prison Legal News, primarily shows up at the jail unsolicited. She also said that jail officials met with local mosque leaders to ensure access to the Koran in addition to the Bible.

"We acknowledge that our written policy has been behind the times. ... But, in practice, we have been allowing a lot of religious reading materials in for a very long time," Senn said.

The case heads to court next month, when a judge will hear the ACLU's case for a temporary injunction which would require that the jail accept Prison Legal News and other publications.

SureShotBooks.com helps the relative to send books for prisoners directly online

Many new organizations have started working with the prisoners mental development and intellectual support in these recent few years. One of the pioneers in this field is definitely one of the renowned organization named SureShotBooks.

This company is associated with SureShot 2K family and started serving their consumers back in the year of 1990. This company, from the very beginning targeted a group of people for providing exclusive services.

Their subjects were, well, pretty exceptional i.e. the prisoners living in the jails. Sureshot wanted to work on the psychological developments and evaluations of the criminals taking part in correction programs in jails inside and outside the US. Another idea of this organization was to provide services to the relatives of the prisoners who want to help their relatives inside the jails by all means.

Sending books for prisoners is a great way to help those people who are actually suffering for their committed crimes. Relatives of the prisoners wanted to work really hard so that they can contribute to the improvement of the lives of their suffering relatives.

SureShot became very interested about serving them and opened an online store where a user can place order to send books for inmates. This way, the inmates are also getting indulged into some constructive acts and they get the chance to learn new things that improve their skills in different ways.

According to the criminal psychologists, helping the prisoners in the later days of correction becomes more difficult. However, in the beginning stage, the rate and extent of prognosis is way better.

In many cases, it has been seen that a person with better improvisation facilities and approaches has come up as a better human being than he ever was. Reading books is definitely the best intellectual act of an educated person. He can not only learn new things reading the verses in a book, but also get the opportunity to evaluate and evolve his talents through different activities.

A person is always full of potentials. If you can show a person the ways effectively, you will get the best result what you haven’t even expected from him. A criminal is nowhere different in this particular issue.

No doubt he has committed a great mistake for which he has been suffering from imprisonment, but he must get the second chance to improvise himself. If you want to provide the best second chance to him, go for good books for prisoners and send them to the sufferers inside the prison.

Books for prisoners or books for inmates don’t have an exclusive genre. All these books fall under a great and noble genre of literature books popular as inspirational books among the laymen.

SureShotBooks.com is working with these books since long. They house one of the greatest collection of inspirational books on earth than can really influence a person to improvise at personal level.

This company provides the best support you could ever expect. What you need to do is go and place your order online for the prisoners you want to send the books.

Family literacy: Get involved in your kids' learning

The latest trend in educational excellence is parental engagement. Schools are struggling with how to get parents to even come through the door, much less be truly involved. It is particularly difficult for adults who didn't have good experiences when they were students or those who are unfamiliar with the U.S. education system.

But a model for true parental engagement does exist, and it's been evolving and innovating for 30 years family literacy.

It is the most important step communities and schools can take to help parents leverage their important role into meaningful change and improvement. There are some who believe striving for parental involvement is too difficult a task and that parents are not interested in being involved in their children's education. This is far from the truth.

There are thousands of family literacy sites across the country where parents come to their children's school daily or weekly.

The family literacy model has transformed lives. For the past 20 years, the National Center for Family Literacy and Toyota have worked together to create, duplicate and innovate model laboratories of learning in 50 cities across the country. Multiple generations come together to learn, and the benefit extends to the entire family and community. Such is the case in Miami and Fort Lauderdale, where three different literacy programs dating to 1992 have been implemented.

Over the past 20 years, this partnership has improved the education and economic attainment of more than 1 million U.S. families. These families face some of the biggest hurdles to improving educational outcomes. Nearly 60 percent of the parents have less than a 10th grade education.

National research verifies the success of family literacy priorities and programs:

A mother's reading skill is the greatest determinant of her children's future academic success, outweighing other factors, such as neighborhood and family income (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development).

Children who have parents who help them learn to read score 10 points higher on standardized reading tests (NCFL research).

NCFL's work with Hispanic/Latino and other immigrant families in 30 cities through the Toyota Family Literacy Program has experienced extraordinary outcomes in English language and literacy development, parent involvement and engagement, literacy behaviors at home, and school-related attitudes.

The proven track record is here. The question then becomes: How do communities and schools effectively implement family literacy?

First, public and private partnerships should be leveraged to develop approaches that work. Private resources present the best opportunities to fuel innovation. In addition, seed money from private sources encourages collaboration.

Second, existing resources must be focused on a family approach to education for Hispanic learners nationwide. Programs to help parents gain basic academic and English skills in the context of helping their children are proving to be successful with high participation among parents and promising results.

Third, strategies must be developed to increase parental leadership. Parental involvement is a key predictor of a child's success. However, parents who have less education are more likely to find schools intimidating. Taking the time for a phone call or visit can make all the difference.

Communication is the start toward comprehensive parental involvement. Ongoing communication and teamwork between teachers and parents result in students who are continuously motivated and supported in their education.

Fourth, family literacy should be incorporated into existing services. Educational efforts should embrace an intergenerational approach by connecting family literacy to all child-serving agencies, such as school districts, Head Start programs and faith-based program initiatives.

By taking these steps, parents will become more active in their children's education, and a successful 21st-century community and work force will result.

Sharon Darling is president and founder of the National Center for Family Literacy.

By Sharon Darling

American Civil Liberties Union says jail in South Carolina is banning books 'for no good reason'

Prisoners at a jail in South Carolina are being denied any reading material other than the Bible, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging the "unconstitutional" policy at Berkeley County detention centre in Moncks Corner on behalf of monthly journal Prison Legal News last autumn. Last week a request by the US Department of Justice to stand alongside Prison Legal News as a plaintiff in the lawsuit was granted by a federal judge, and the ACLU has now asked a federal judge to block enforcement of a policy which it claims sees the jail's officials "unconstitutionally refusing to allow prisoners to receive any materials that contain staples or pictures of any level of nudity, including beachwear or underwear", effectively banning most books, magazines and newspapers.

Last year's lawsuit quotes an email from a member of staff at the prison to Prison Legal News, which said that "our inmates are only allowed to receive soft back bibles in the mail directly from the publisher. They are not allowed to have magazines, newspapers, or any other type of books". It charges that, since 2008, copies of Prison Legal News and books – including Protecting Your Health and Safety, which explains legal rights to inmates – sent to prisoners at the jail have been returned to sender. There is no library at the Berkeley County detention centre, the ACLU says, so that "prisoners who are incarcerated for extended periods of time have been deprived of access to magazines, newspapers and books – other than the Bible – for months or even years on end".

Officials at the jail responded to the ACLU lawsuit by saying that they only banned material containing staples and nudity. But the new ACLU motion to block this policy points out that legal pads containing staples were being sold at the jail. It claims that the no staples or nudity policy was "adopted post hoc and in response to this Case", and that it "eliminate[s] access to reading material almost as completely as the 'Bible only' rule".

"This is nothing more than an excuse by jail officials to ban books and magazines for no good reason," said David Shapiro, staff attorney with the ACLU national prison project. "There is no justification for denying detainees access to periodicals and in the process cutting them off from the outside world."

"Jail officials are looking for any excuse they can come up with to obscure the fact that they are unconstitutionally censoring materials sent to detainees," added Victoria Middleton, executive director of the ACLU of South Carolina. "And in so doing they are failing to serve the detainees and the taxpayers of South Carolina. Helping prisoners rehabilitate themselves and maintain a connection to the outside world by reading books and magazines is a key part of what should be our larger and fiscally prudent objective of reducing the number of people we lock up by lowering recidivism rates."

New Site Helps Inmates Blog from Behind Bars

Although inmates are denied Internet access in jail, they can still blog albeit in a different form. Their sketches, poems and musings circulate online after being posted by those outside of prison. There are dozens of these blogs, but inmates need tech-savvy friends or family to maintain them.

For those without such connections, Between the Bars offers an alternative. Charlie DeTar and Benjamin Mako Hill, fellows at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media, conceived of a blogging platform for prisoners in 2008 after America reached an infamous milestone: one out of 100 U.S. adults were in jail.

To post on the blog, inmates send handwritten letters to Between the Bars, whose team then scans them and uploads them as PDFs. The group decided that scanning the letters, rather than transcribing them, would be the most efficient way to get them online.

They later realized that displaying the originals could also foster deeper personal connections. “You get a much clearer sense of somebody’s identity when you’re reading their real handwriting instead of standard computer font,” DeTar told TechNewsDaily.

A human connection

Once the letters are online, anyone can comment on them or create a transcript. To keep in communication, the bloggers receive paper copies of their posts, along with any comments they received. Currently, the team at Between the Bars is focused on generating more commenting activity.

“People are writing because they want to get a human connection, they want to talk to someone, so any comment they can get on a blog post is really helpful and really meaningful,” DeTar said.

The topics and tone of the letters vary widely. One recent letter, written by inmate William Medina, reads, “I am composing this communiqué from another world. A cold, distant, isolated planet. A sphere that consumes personalities and human identities.”

Another letter, written by inmate Timothy Muise, is typical in that it tells a story and begins: “Many years ago I was a sternman on my brother’s lobsterboat the Genesis III.”

Some prisoners choose not to write anything at all, and opt instead to submit sketches.


Blogging with purpose

The creators of Between the Bars said they have three main goals for the project. The first is helping inmates maintain their weaker, more casual connections.

“The more mundane connections that we tend to take for granted are actually the types of connections that help us to get by in life transitions,” DeTar said. “If we have to find a new job, generally your mother is not going to be able to find you a job. A friend of a friend might. That’s really the level of connection that we’re trying to support.”

As a space for self-expression, Between the Bars also encourages inmates to retain their individual identities. Since many prisons have a policy of referring to their populations as "offenders," this practice tends to reinforce a criminal self, while weakening the personal one, DeTar said.

In fact, sociological evidence shows that those who maintain self-perceptions separate from the system fare better when they are released. Thus, the act of blogging may help lower recidivism rates.

One letter at a time

DeTar and Hill also hope Between the Bars will help change general attitude toward those in jail.

By spreading “human stories from prison,” those on the outside can learn to sympathize with an otherwise stigmatized and underrepresented group. Empathy and awareness may prompt changes in behavior, such as the refusal of employers to hire those with criminal backgrounds.

“Yes, these people committed a crime, yes they made a mistake, but they’re still people,” said DeTar.

“They’re going to be doing much better in society if we can communicate with them, if we can help them socialize more and not just ignore them.”

By Paulina Reso, TechNewsDaily

Prisoners sign up for law degrees

Ana Ruiz, a former offender, is in her final year of a law degree.


Like many students, Malcolm Sang, who is working towards a law degree, spends hours poring over his books. But when it comes to some aspects of his studies, the reality of what he's working on is very close to home – because he is in jail, serving a life sentence for murder.

And if his subject is unlikely, his educational past is, too: because when Sang was convicted, a decade ago, he hadn't a single GCSE to his name. "Malcolm was kicked out of school at 13," explains Jude, his mother (as he's a prisoner, Sang isn't allowed to give interviews, but he has given her permission to tell his story). "It wasn't until he found himself inside that he went back to studying. He passed GCSEs in English and maths and then got an A in A-level English."

Sang's decision to pursue a distance-learning degree in law at Nottingham Trent University was partly motivated by his disillusionment with the law. He believes he should have been convicted not of murder, but of manslaughter, as his co-defendant was.

Now 30, Sang is an inmate at Verne prison in Portland, Dorset – but when he started his degree, he was in another prison and staff there tried to dissuade him from enrolling. "They said law wasn't a suitable subject for a prisoner to study. But there's no reason why not, and he was determined to do it," says his mother.

Sang's funding came from the young people's charity The Longford Trust, named after the Labour peer and prison reformer, which since 2004 has offered scholarships to current and former convicts who want to study for a degree. But what the trust has come to realise, explains its director, Peter Stanford, is that prisoners like Sang aren't alone: law is a subject that prisoners often feel particularly drawn towards; so much so, that the Longford Trust decided to establish a new batch of awards aimed at enabling prisoners to study law. The Patrick Pakenham awards are named after Lord Longford's son, a barrister who died in 2005, and they offer practical, emotional and psychological support to students during their time at university.

"In many ways it's entirely understandable why prisoners who get involved in education should feel drawn to law as a subject," says Stanford. "They're far more likely to want to study law than they are to be drawn to, say, English or classics or history – these subjects aren't going to have the same relevance for them that they do for young people coming out of school, who have maybe had more advantages in life than many of those who end up in jail."

Another law student who has had personal experience of being on the wrong side of the law is Ana Ruiz, who was convicted of drug dealing eight years ago. "Being sent to prison is a crushing blow to anyone's self-esteem – you think you're worthless, you feel excluded," she says. "Starting to study makes all the difference, because you realise you can achieve something."

Ruiz, who is 33, is in her final year of a law degree that she started in 2007, having been released from prison the previous year. She hopes to become a solicitor, specialising in environmental law. "I feel very strongly about these cases, and I'd love to make working on them my future."

Maria Aristodemou, a senior law lecturer at Birkbeck College, where Ruiz is studying, says students who have direct experience of being caught up in the criminal justice system often have fascinating insights to share in seminars and tutorials. "At many universities, though not at Birkbeck, many students have come straight from school and have no experience like this – so someone who can talk from personal experience can be really interesting for them," she says.

"But there is a downside, too, which is that people who've been in this situation can sometimes be quite opinionated and stubborn – they're entrenched in their own experience, and they're unable to see the wider picture. You start to feel that what they're unpacking in a seminar would be better unpacked on an analyst's couch, and it can be hugely time-consuming for everyone else.

"But certainly in the long term, those who stay the course and maybe go on to work in the legal system will be able to relate to defendants in a way that many lawyers maybe can't, and that has to be valuable."

One anxiety for people like Ruiz and Sang – who would also like to work as a solicitor eventually – is that they may never be able to make the leap from one side of the courtroom to the other, despite having studied hard for their degrees. That's because they fear that the Solicitors' Regulation Authority (SRA), part of the Law Society, won't sanction their applications to work as solicitors. "I understand their worries, because certainly on past experience the Law Society has been reluctant to admit people who've been convicted of crimes to the solicitors' course," says Stanford.

According to Diane Lawson of the SRA, every application for admission to the solicitors' course is evaluated on merit – but there are concerns. "The overriding consideration is public protection," she says. "The type and number of convictions are taken into consideration, and applicants have to provide evidence of rehabilitation.

"It's quite understandable that someone who'd been exposed to the legal system may have a great interest in pursuing legal studies. However, the SRA has an obligation to build public confidence in our legal system and has to ensure that all entrants to the profession meet the requirements for competence and conduct."

But some prisoner law students have already put their learning to practical use. "Gary", who can't be named for legal reasons, served three years of a six-year sentence for rape. Like Sang, he became interested in studying law partly because he felt he'd been the victim of injustice. "When I was convicted, I was disqualified from seeing any children including my own – but when I read up on what the law actually said, I discovered it shouldn't have happened in my case.

"I lodged an appeal and represented myself – and I got the disqualification overturned. I was very nervous, but I knew I could do it. The judges took 10 minutes to reach their decision, and winning really spurred me on to study law. It made me realise how brilliant it is to be able to argue a case in a court of law – it made me determined that this was what I'd like to do."

And when he got back to prison, there was a long queue of fellow inmates all waiting to see him. "They wanted me to work on their appeals for them. My nickname became "the QC"; even some of the prison guards came to see me, to ask advice about their divorce cases.

"You need a lot of books to study law, and when I was inside, it was difficult to get them. Eventually, I decided to write to every judge, barrister and solicitor I could find, asking them to donate books they didn't need any more. Lots of them did – in the end, I had 40 or 50 books, so many that I had to be moved to a bigger cell!"

Gary is now out of prison and continuing the law degree. Like Sang and Ruiz, he hopes to practise as a solicitor. "I'd like to work in criminal and family law," he says. "I don't feel the lawyers I encountered served me as well as they should have done. I want to be a better lawyer for some other defendant in the future."

Smugglers find creative ways to move contraband

The package surprised even veteran law enforcement officials used to seeing all kinds of contraband smuggled into prisons: It was a child's coloring book, dedicated "to daddy" and mailed to a New Jersey inmate, with crayon-colored scribbling made from a paste containing drugs.
The discovery of the book last month prompted the Cape May County sheriff to warn others in law enforcement that smuggling techniques were reaching new levels.

In Pennsylvania last month, prosecutors disrupted a prescription drug smuggling ring that was mailing narcotics into prisons concealed under postage stamps.
And in Clifton, N.J., police once uncovered a drug-smuggling operation under the guise of an importer bringing fresh flowers from South America in cardboard boxes that, when shredded and mixed with a solution, dissolved into liquid heroin.

Experts say even as surveillance equipment, airport scanning technology and cargo X-rays modernize, drug-smuggling techniques are keeping pace.

"It's a question of building a better mousetrap," said Deirdre Fedkenheuer, a spokeswoman for the New Jersey Corrections Department. "Somebody's going to always try and think of a new way."

It's been more than a decade since sending food to prisoners was prohibited, but today, drugs, weapons and cell phones still find their way behind bars, according to Fedkenheuer. New Jersey's prison system has added dogs trained not only to sniff drugs, but to detect the odor of cell phones as well, which are banned.

It's not only prison smuggling that gets creative, according to U.S. Customs officials. Smugglers try all sorts of techniques to bring contraband into the country by air, sea and land.

Smuggling drugs into the U.S. has been going on as long as there's been a market for illegal substances, according to John Saleh, a Customs and Border Protection officer based in New York.

"The drug industry, drug trafficking, is a billion-dollar or trillion-dollar business," Saleh said. "It's a business that makes money, so they're very cunning in their ways of masking something, or smuggling something in so they can make a profit."

In the past two months alone, inventory confiscated at New York-area airports and ports included opium concealed in porcelain cat figurines, cocaine in bags of freeze-dried coffee, drugs built into the railings of a suitcase, sewn into pants, molded into sneakers, concealed in clothing hangers or packed into the console of a Nintendo Wii video game system.

"You name it, we've probably seen it," Saleh said. Drugs have been hidden in electrical cords, in a computer mouse, a child's Mr. Potato Head doll, baby diapers, drug-soaked clothing, toothpaste, cosmetics, fruit that is expertly sliced, gutted, filled with drugs and resealed to look untouched, or in live animals _ such as puppies _ and of course, in people.

Even for customs officials like Saleh, who think they've seen it all, every once in a while, a smuggler surfaces whose level of craftsmanship has to be admired.

Saleh said one of the most shocking finds was a cache of cocaine that had been sculpted into the size and shape of individual black-eyed peas, each one painstakingly hand-painting with tiny black markings to blend in with a bag of real beans.

Customs enforcement agents use a multi-layered approach, according to Saleh, to detect smugglers or illicit goods; a mix of technology, intelligence techniques and officers on the ground.

Kevin Donohue, a deputy chief officer with U.S. Customs at Newark Liberty Airport, says that in addition to drug and agricultural product-sniffing dogs, scanning technology and luggage searches, the most effective way to catch smugglers is by being able to read people and detect scenarios that may seem slightly off.

A young woman with small feet, carrying size 14 sneakers in her luggage.

A beat-up, older-model suitcase with shiny new screws in its base. Travelers who watch the carousel a bit too anxiously for their bag. A person carrying a huge tub of peanut butter from a country that doesn't produce it.

A hard-shell suitcase coming from a country where nearly everyone carries soft-sided luggage. They are all real scenarios in which drugs or illegal contraband have been found at the airport, Donohue said.
"You pretty much become an expert in the suitcase," Donohue said. "Rivets, bolts, the way it's made, the weight of every kind of suitcase."

Airports tend to have smaller-scale drug smuggling, although Donohue said there are agents on his force who are also trained airplane mechanics and search aircraft for hollow contraband cavities.

That leaves traffickers hoping to move larger quantities to find other methods.
In 2010, a truckload of white sea bass headed into San Diego from Tijuana, Mexico, was found to contain 708 pounds of marijuana wrapped in 29 packages and stowed beneath the fish and a layer of ice.

In Dallas, a man pulled over for a traffic violation was found to be transporting a casket carrying 100 pounds of marijuana instead of a body.

A corrections officer in Arkansas was arrested in 2008 for making frequent takeout food deliveries to the county jail and was caught sneaking syringes inside tacos and marijuana under chili.

Smugglers also use a wide variety of methods to get drugs across borders.
Soldiers in Colombia seized a fully submersible drug-smuggling submarine in February, capable of reaching the coast of Mexico.

Last July, another fully submersible "narcosub" was seized just across the border by authorities in neighboring Ecuador.

And this past January, U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials discovered drug traffickers in Mexico using an ancient technology _ a giant catapult _ to hurl marijuana across the U.S. border into Arizona.

Those on the front lines of stopping contraband, like Customs officials, are rarely ever surprised.

"There really are no new ways," Saleh said. "If you can imagine it, they've probably done it."