If CIA can record interrogations, so should police

Over the holiday I put my finger on what's been bugging me about the national debate over the destruction of CIA recordings of interrogation sessions: If the CIA can record interrogations, why can't local police departments? Some jurisdictions already do.

It makes sense for the CIA to record interrogations because they're looking for intelligence, so they don't want to miss something said in passing might later become important.

More routine law enforcement benefits from a similar approach, but police interrogations in the United States rely on the "Reid technique," which takes an accusatory ("admit you did it") rather than an information gathering ("tell me what happened") approach toward the suspect. Interrogators using the Reid technique desire a confession, not necessarily information, and may not to want to record other parts of a defendant's statement (like denials) that might later confuse the jury.

There's little technological barrier today to recording interrogations, only official recalcitrance that serves no discernible public policy purpose. Recording custodial interrogations would be easier than ever - my niece received for Christmas a pocket video camera with which she can record and upload video to YouTube with incredible ease. (At eleven, she and a friend plan to launch their own podcast.)

When in 2001 the Legislature passed Texas' racial profiling statute requiring squad cars doing traffic enforcement to use cameras, many officers opposed the idea. Police unions said having cameras in their squad cars amounted to "Big Brother" watching over officers' every move. Now police know from practical experience that good cops all benefit from having cameras in the cars - both by verifying their version of events when motorists contradict their account, and by giving supervisors tools to weed out officers who abuse their authority at traffic stops. Today there's very little debate about whether recording traffic stops is a good idea.

I think the same thing would happen if police began recording custodial interrogations. Not only would they accumulate more evidence by recording full interrogations at the investigations' earliest stages, the recording protects police against false accusations, protects defendants against coerced confessions, and generally makes the justice system more transparent and accountable all the way around.

More information doesn't just benefit one side of the bar or another; instead it makes errors less likely by the system as a whole, which should be in everyone's interest. If the CIA can record custodial interrogations out in the Afghani hinterlands, there's no reason the local cops can't do the same thing where you live.

Merry Christmas, Everybody

I'll be away from the blog until at least Wednesday; I hope the holiday finds you all happy and well. Thanks for visiting.

What do Cleveland, Dallas and Hearne, TX have in common?

Speaking of informants, since I've been harping on the topic this week, here's a case from out of state where a federal informant wrongfully accused innocent people of crimes in exchange for informant fees ("Informant admits to lying about drug deals," Cleveland Plain Dealer, Dec. 20). Though no officers have yet been charged, it sounds a lot from the news accounts like one or more undercover officers participated in the set up: Otherwise, you'd have to believe the undercover who purchased drugs from the informant's friends did not later recognize that a different person entirely was accused in court in every instance!

The case reminds me a great deal of the Dallas Sheetrock scandal, where a drug dealing informant packaged up minute amounts of cocaine and fake drugs to set up innocent people, as well as setting up at least one person with real drugs. These cases are always treated as isolated incidents, but soon after the Dallas scandal cropped up we saw the informant-driven debacle in Hearne, leading the Texas Legislature to require corroboration for informant testimony in undercover drug cases in 2001. (Personally I think corroboration should be required for all incentivized informant testimony, at a minimum.)

Bottom line: It happens often enough to make you wonder how many times informants set up innocent people when it's not discovered. Mendacious informants are the second leading cause of wrongful convictions behind erroneous eyewitness testimony. In the Cleveland case, the informant used his insider power to set up a woman who refused to date him as well as a competing drug dealer, among others, reports the Plain Dealer.

The Whisperers: 3/4 of Grits readers have known of drug possession crimes and didn't snitch

Here's another unscientific metric that makes me think most people have a very mixed opinion about the ethics of informants and "snitching": Perhaps unsurprisingly, more than 75% of respondents in last week's Grits readers poll said that, at some point, they have known about a drug possession crime committed by another person and failed to tell the authorities.

That's a big percentage who don't necessarily think, for whatever reason, that reporting a crime is always a good idea, that sometimes one's loyalty lies more with the "criminal" than with the state. I'm not surprised because the result confirms other recent data: A majority of Americans in a scientific poll said they wouldn't snitch on co-workers who embezzled or violated tax laws.

Via Wikipedia recently I ran across this webpage developed by a professor and students to evaluate public values concerning "snitching." Applied psychology students this year at a community college in Philadelphia have been surveying their peers using this instrument to better understand the values around snitching, and I'll be interested to see their results when they're published. The questions asked imply, as we see from these results, that people view "snitching" differently based on who is the offender, who is the victim, the nature of the offense, and whether the snitch received compensation in either treasure or reduced culpability for their own crimes.

Relatedly, driving home this morning from an early errand, I heard on NPR an interview with Professor Orlando Liges who authored a book called "The Whisperers," chronicling tales of how the use of informants in Soviet Russia influenced the culture and family life. Wrote Liges:

The Russian language has two words for a 'whisperer' — one for somebody who whispers out of fear of being overheard (shepchushchii), another for the person who informs or whispers behind people's backs to the authorities (sheptun). The distinction has its origins in the idiom of the Stalin years, when the whole of Soviet society was made up of whisperers of one sort or another.

The book appears to focus on the ways the informant culture degraded everyday human relations, and I wondered as I listened to the story how much of what the author describes would also apply to the use of informants in the American drug war, particularly in crime-ridden black neighborhoods our largest cities.

Don't get me wrong: the Stalinist purges outpaced the American drug war in brutality and especially their death count by many orders of magnitude, and I'm not comparing the two in that way. However, a study of the corrosive influence of an informant culture in any context may offer lessons for the sociological effects of tactic's use elsewhere on a wide scale. In an era when the network of law enforcement's drug informants, particularly in minority neighborhoods with high crime rates, rivals in volume that of the Stasi or the KGB under communist rule, I think an analysis of how that dynamic affects the individual family structure may illuminate dynamics that occur in more than a few American households in the here and now.

Prof. Alexandra Natapoff has estimated that one in 12 black men returning home from prison may be informants for police at any one time. In 2002, 41% of Texas' approximately 150,000 inmates were black (compared to 12% of the overall population), as were more than 24,000 of the 55,183 inmates Texas released from prison in 2001. If Natapoff's estimate is accurate, that means more than 2000 black men who left Texas prisons in 2001 became informants after they got out. And that's just for one state, in one year. Many more become informants much earlier in the process, before they're even arrested or before final conviction. While it's impossible to accurately estimate the number of police informants in the United States from publicly available data, these numbers imply that the total is not insignificant, arguably approaching a scale unseen in modern times outside of communist totalitarian states.

If you change out "fear of repression" with "fear of imprisonment for drugs," what Stalin-era families went through isn't much different than the dilemmas facing people accused of drug crimes and their families:

Millions of people lived like Antonina in a constant state of fear because their relatives had been repressed. How did they cope with that insecurity? What sort of balance could they strike between their natural feelings of injustice and alienation from the Soviet system and their need to find a place in it? What adjustments did they have to make to overcome the stigma of their 'spoilt biography' and become accepted as equal members of society?

The idea of a "spoilt" biography is especially interesting to me, as that phrase could easily be used to describe the effects of a felony record on drug offenders today. When a person's options are limited by their "spoilt biography," the petty incentives and harms that may be imposed by authorities at their whimsy can overwhelm ethical concerns for someone struggling to survive

LULAC estimated a couple of years ago that nearly one in eleven Texas adults have a felony conviction on their record, while nearly one in twenty are currently under control of the criminal justice system, either in prison, jail, on probation or parole.

The results of Grits reader poll tells me that the drug war today creates similar dynamics where average, law abiding people find themselves confronting conflicting motives and values over whether to supply police with information. Those 75% of the 211 blog readers who answered "Yes" to this poll question are themselves the drug war's version of "The Whisperers," people torn between duty to family, friends, community and the state, all making individual choices about when to cooperate on a case by case basis.

RELATED: Grits posts on values behind anti-snitching ethos -

• "Don't Snitch, Jack"
• Survey: Most US workers don't snitch
• Antipathy for snitching part of US culture, not just hip hop
• Snitching Undermines Justice Institutions
• What Would Jesus Do about uncorroborated snitch testimony?
  
• Snitching on Good Friday: Rethinking Judas
• Stop Snitching: God Said So
• No snitching code reinforced throughout culture, not just rappers
• A prison guard's aversion to snitches
• Schneier: Faulty war on terror tactics target 'unique, unorthodox, and unexpected'
• Alberto Gonzales takes 'stop snitching' code to new heights
• Snitching and the Drug War at TPM Cafe Book Club
  

SEE ALSO: On the topic of informants who continue to commit crimes while they're "cooperating" with the police, this story from Canada seems almost iconic: A Hells Angels member collected more than $180,000 and was promised a total of $650,000 in informant fees in a contract with police. But continued to commit crimes himself over several years throughout his service as an government snitch, despite admonitions by his handlers that he was violating agency policy.

First image via Confessions of an Insomniac.

Expert: Drug dogs wrong 48% of the time

Robert Guest at I Was the State posted an interview this week with an Austin-based consultant who reviews the performance of drug sniffing dogs. In his experience, most drug dogs are only accurate 52% of the time, meaning that 48% of the time dogs wrongfully give police probable cause for a search.

Why not just flip a coin to see if there's probable cause?

The consultant, Steven Nicely, believes that dog handling officers should be required to keep logs of their dogs' success rate and that dogs should be removed from service (or their handlers switched out, when that's the problem), when success rates fall below 80%. Nicely says that "most of the trainers and handlers I have met do not want to improve their dogs," and that officers should be prosecuted for official oppression when they don't keep records on drug dog success rates or ensure that dogs meet a minimum reliability threshold.

I knew that sniffer dogs don't perform well in crowds, but Nicely's assessment makes me wonder if sniffer dogs' use can be justified at all - I'm not sure a one in five rate of wrongful searches is acceptable, but surely a 48% error rate means the dogs' "expert" assessment constitutes little better than a guess.

End of the Week Roundup

Blogging here has been a little slow this week, so let's round up a few items I haven't had time to write about in more detail:

Just one more thing before you evacuate
Several readers sent notice of what has to be the most absurd idea I've heard from emergency planners since 9/11: Criminal background checks prior to an evacuation! Texas gave AT&T the contract to perform such checks, and evacuees will wear wristbands with RFIDs so they can be tracked and their past analyzed by officials. This is a solution looking for a problem, or maybe just an excuse to hand out a fat, unnecessary contract. When has there ever been an issue with sex offenders, e.g., assaulting someone during an evacuation on a bus?! I've never heard of such a thing. According to Wired, "what’s not explained is where all the sex-offenders and parolees end up? Their own facility? I’ll bet communities are just lining up to host that type of “special needs” shelter." No kidding! Does anybody remember when Houston tried to evacuate during Hurricane Rita and we wound up with cars running out of gas en masse on the highways out of town? We have no solution to THAT problem, but somehow this foolishness is going to make things better.

Death house chaplain now an abolitionist
Rev. Carroll Pickett witnessed dozens of executions as a Texas prison chaplain, including men he believed innocent when they were killed. Now he's a death penalty abolitionist. Read why.

UT law clinic intervenes in child murderer's case
Doc Berman points to this article in the National Law Journal about a South Carolina case being appealed to the US Supreme Court by a UT Austin law school clinic on behalf of a boy who killed his grandparents when he was twelve and received a thirty year sentence.

Harris County ships more inmates to Crawfishlandia
With voters having rejected a new jail in November, Harris County plans to outsource an additional 200 county jail inmates to a private firm in Louisiana, in addition to 400 local inmates already housed there, we learn from Texas Prison Bidness.

School holidays lead to spike in graffiti
The El Paso Times documents a steep rise in graffiti around town since school let out for the holidays. I'll bet that's a pretty predictable trend that probably holds true every year.

Clemens snitch still uncorroborated
A potential corroborating source for the Mitchell report's allegation that Roger Clemens used steriods turned out to be a bust: The "Grimsley affidavit" had long been rumored to include Clemens, which has been cited by some as possible corroboration for claims by an informant that the Cy Young winner used performance enhancing drugs. I'm willing to bet the Rocket's absence in this document won't make nearly the same national press as did his inclusion in the Mitchell report, confirming a common pattern: Informants' uncorroborated accusations are nearly always given more media play than later debunking arguments or retractions, meaning for those accused, often significant damage has already been done. Did McNamee name Clemens because he, too, had heard the Grimsley rumors and thought he was handing Sen. Mitchell somebody they already knew about? There's just no way to know.

Documentary: Children in Jail

See the trailer for a forthcoming documentary film on the T. Don Hutto Immigration Detention Facility in Williamson County, titled "Children in Jail":



RELATED: Austinite Greg Moses has a piece about the Hutto facility in Counterpunch.

Third time a charm? New TYC conservator appointed

The Governor's first choices turned him down, but the Texas Youth Commission finally has a new conservator, Richard Nedelkoff, the third to hold the position since the agency was placed under conservatorship last March.

Welcome aboard, sir, y buena suerte! You've got a tough job ahead of you, and you're going to need all the luck, and help, you can get.

On the upside, it's not like you've got big shoes to fill. The Governor inexplicably declared in an AP story announcing the decision ("Former Bush aide chosen to lead TYC," Dec. 19) that:

"Impeccable leadership by conservators of TYC has helped Texas make great strides in righting a very troubled agency," said Perry. "Richard's experience and expertise in juvenile and criminal justice make him the right person to finish the job at TYC."

Uh, excuse me? "Impeccable"? Do the the Governor's PR people own a dictionary? The last two conservators took a broken agency and transformed it into a crippled one. TYC has been so mismanaged since March that the New York Times editorialized Texas should "raze" the agency and "start over"! That ignominious record, I'd suggest, cannot be wiped away with a pat on the back and a press release declaring "Heckuva job, Brownie!"

On the other hand, other experts in the juvenile justice arena suggested that Nedelkoff may be, as UNLV Professor Bill Bush declared in Grits' comments, an:

Interesting choice, and extremely well qualified for the job. Someone who knows a lot about juvenile justice and probation, knows how to handle budgets, and, it appears, an experienced fundraiser who may be able to attract some much needed federal and private funds to TYC.

The place he was working until today, Eckerd Youth Alternatives, is pretty highly respected nonprofit in Florida, which ran highly touted youth programs, and its founders were opponents of the get tough philosophy.

"I view this as a real game-changer," concluded Bush, "and it will be interesting to see what he does. At least Gov Perry has given us someone who can be taken seriously." Similarly, Dr. Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, told the Dallas News ("New conservator brings long-term outlook for Texas Youth Commission," Dec. 20) that "this is great news ... He's a tough-minded guy. He's played in a few bureaucracies."

It sounds like Nedelkoff may plan to revive the "Blue Ribbon Panel" report that the last conservator round-filed immediately upon receipt. He told the Austin Statesman ("Governor appoints juvenile justice veteran as youth agency conservator," Dec. 20) he intends:

to moderate and participate in a high-stakes political debate over whether the state's most serious youth offenders and delinquents can ever be properly dealt with in the current system of far-flung prisons.

The system, which has had the support of the Legislature for more than a decade before scandal broke in March, has been criticized as untenable by some criminal justice experts.

"It's an appropriate debate that needs to be held to discuss a variety of options," Nedelkoff said Wednesday after Gov. Rick Perry announced that he was appointing Nedelkoff to the position, effective immediately. "There is the ideal world of having as many of these kids in communities as close as possible to where their families live, and there is the reality of the current facilities."

He also sounds much less antagonistic toward the idea of rehabilitation than the current TYC crew. According to Austin's KXAN-TV:

With 28 years of criminal justice experience, Nedelkoff said his first step is to organize the agency in a way to help the kids, not just detain them.

"Making sure that a kid who leaves a TYC program or facility is better than when they walked in," Nedelkoff said.

A former director of the Governor's Criminal Justice Division under both Bush and Perry, Nedelkoff ran the Bureau of Justice Assistance under President Bush for a while, giving him a perhaps unique background to assist soliciting federal funds. Indeed, at the end of the day if everything turns out as well as it possibly could, that experience may be the most important asset Mr. Needelkoff brings to the table.

After leaving the Bush Administration, he was for a while President of the Riga Solutions Group, a management consulting firm for criminal justice and human services operations at government agencies - though I've seen the name around occasionally, I don't know anything about that firm.

In addition, though I couldn't figure out a time frame for this slot in his resume', according to a press release announcing Nedelkoff's hiring at Eckerd:

In Florida , he was the Executive Director of the Florida Network of Youth and Family Services, which is a statewide coalition of over 30 non-profit and governmental organizations that provide services to truant, runaway and troubled children in 100 sites across Florida . He was also appointed by the Florida Secretary of Juvenile Justice to manage the largest juvenile justice service district in Florida .

Since May, Nedelkoff has been "chief operating officer for Eckerd Youth Alternatives in Clearwater, Fla., a private not-for-profit organization that serves at-risk youths through residential and community-based programs in 10 states." Like Ed Owens before him, Nedelkoff considers "conservator" a part-time job; he will stay on at Florida-based Eckerd as COO and draw a paycheck while he is TYC conservator.

You have to wonder if this mess can actually be fixed on a part-time basis? Perhaps the last two, short-timers who held the conservator's slot whispered into Nedelkoff's ear, "Don't quit your day job." Certainly nobody's lasted too long in that gig so far.

One potential conflict of interest not reported in initial press accounts: Eckerd is one of the private contractors competing to take over TYC's role housing young offenders (10-13 year olds), and Nedelkoff personally was involved this summer in soliciting the Texas contract, which would have been the company's first in the state.

For that reason, I really question whether it's appropriate for Mr. Nedelkoff to stay on at Eckerd while he does this job unless the nonprofit intends to withdraw its bid to house Texas youth. If Eckerd is competing for contracts, at a minimum it creates an overwhelming appearance of conflict.

If I had to offer one piece of advice to the new conservator, it would be that the major lesson of the last two conservators is how severely they undervalued their employees. Jay Kimbrough came in and fired dozens of people who had nothing to do with the agency's scandals, then under Ed Owens TDCJ cronies filled high-paying management jobs and newly created bureaucratic positions, while front-line employees worked double shifts and suffered retaliation for complaining about unsafe work conditions. I've never seen nor heard of a government agency that's so alienated its staff, who are now leaving the agency in droves: In the last fiscal year, TYC lost half again as many old employees as it has hired new ones.

The best way to change the anti-employee culture in TYC management would be to appoint a competent, permanent commissioner as soon as possible next year. Acting executive director Dimitria Pope has been the enthusiastic instrument of misguided policies under Kimbrough and Owens, and within the agency has almost become like a brand name identified with the Governor's two failed conservator appointments. Find her a soft place to land (perhaps a job in another state with Eckerd?), then get somebody in that slot who's independent and competent with experience in juvenile justice, and you'll go a long way toward restoring confidence in the agency among its employees. From a management perspective, that must be your first concern.

RELATED RECENT GRITS POSTS:

• Every time a Christmas bell rings, an Angel gets its wings: Current TYC admin approach a "dead loser," say experts
• Governor: Please come back from the campaign trail and fix TYC!
• Looking for leadership: Meurer turns down TYC slot running agency mired in crisis
• When will the Governor replace TYC management?

Around the Blogs

I'm in Fort Worth today for a bit of museuming and a day off. Until I return, check out these blogs for good, recent posts on topics Grits regularly covers:

• Drug War Rant
• Corrections Sentencing
• Thinking Outside the Cage
• Texas Prison Bidness

Clemens informant shielded from prosecution: Do snitch agreements give incentives to lie or tell the truth?

Does a prosecutor's promise not to indict a snitch if they talk to authorities make an informant more or less likely to tell the truth?

On the one hand, the prosecution's option to indict if an informant gives false testimony supplies incentives for honesty under such circumstances. On the other hand, giving full immunity to criminal conspirators might make them feel free to just give the prosecutors whatever they want - specifically, accusations against their investigative target - in order to keep from going to prison.

Those are the questions raised in a New York Times piece today ("Trainer's steroid testing testimony followed deal with prosecutors," Dec. 18) about the informant who's accused Roger Clemens of steroid use, Brian McNamee.

It was a turning point in the exposure of the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. McNamee went on to tell his story to the former Senator George J. Mitchell and his staff. Ward said the government, in effect, told McNamee, “We are not going to charge you if you cooperate.”

The proffer agreement, to some, appears to add credibility to McNamee’s testimony against Clemens because of the punishment he would face if he lied, several former prosecutors said Monday. Clemens’s lawyer declined comment Monday, but last week said his client was outraged at the accusations against him in the Mitchell report and that McNamee’s deal with the government gave him incentive to lie. ...

A proffer is a written agreement between a person and a prosecutor allowing a person to say what they know about possible illegal activity with the assurance it will not be used against them at trial. The government is free to follow investigative leads. The proffer agreement, colloquially known as a “queen for a day” letter, may lead to a written immunity, cooperation or plea bargain agreement, or it may stop there if the government does not plan to take the case further.

Daniel C. Richman, a professor at Columbia University Law School and a former federal prosecutor, said it was extraordinary to see prosecutors compel an individual to cooperate with a private third party like Mitchell.

That last observation strikes me as odd, too: US Attorneys are usually pretty tight-fisted with their investigative information. I'm not sure I can think of a similar situation where the Justice Department used an informant proffer to gather evidence for a third party like Major League Baseball. It's one thing to use that authority to pressure witnesses and pursue prosecutions, but surely another to use it merely to embarrass major league ballplayers with uncorroborated allegations?

McNamee denied Clemens' involvement with steroids in numerous interviews with investigators, said the Mitchell report, until he finally changed his testimony in exchange for a promise not to prosecute. As I've written previously, "Was McNamee telling the truth before prosecutors threatened him with prison, or after? One just can't tell from the report." Clemens' attorney maintains that "McNamee’s deal with the government gave him incentive to lie."

In other snitching related news, the informant who accused Michael Vick in dogfighting charges received a prison sentence 1/10 as long as the former Atlanta Falcons football star - 2 months compared to Vick's 23 month sentence. Prosecutors had suggested the informant receive only probation, but a federal judge said "no," declaring “You were as much an abuser of animals as any other defendant in this case.”

The judge's concerns mirror my own about many informant agreements: They often formally tolerate behavior by snitches that's at least as harmful as those whom they testify against. The judge is right: This fellow is as guilty as Michael Vick, perhaps more so, and I'm sure if prosecutors had offered Vick would have been willing to testify against him! But Vick was the target: Prosecutors wanted to make an example of him, so they didn't really care if this guy was punished. That might fulfill certain public relations goals, but it's not a strategy that particularly enhances public safety.

RELATED: See an interview with Ethan Brown about his new book, "Snitch," on AllHipHop.com.

Federal crack sentencing changes won't much affect Texas; changes to state drug laws still needed

The much-ballyhooed SCOTUS decision on crack sentencing disparities will have little effect overall in Texas, reports the Houston Chronicle ("Crack ruling of little effect locally," Dec. 17) because the vast majority of drug cases come through state courts:

Since July 2006, there have been just over 1,400 drug-related convictions by federal prosecutors in South Texas, according to data from the U.S. Department of Justice.

In contrast, the Harris County District Clerk's office said nearly 35,000 convictions for drug offenses were secured in county courts from Jan. 1, 2005, through Dec. 31, 2006, the most recent data available.

That's 35,000 convictions for drug offenses over two years in one Texas county, folks, albeit the county whose size and punitive judiciary exert an exceptional and negative influence on state policy. Legislative testimony earlier this year revealed that about 85% of felony drug cases in Houston - 12,000 out of 14,000 drug indictments in 2006 - were for possessing less than a gram of a controlled substance, or less powder than is in a Sweet-N-Low packet. The recent SCOTUS ruling won't affect any of those cases.

Indeed, the flood of low-level court cases in Houston led long-time State District Judge Michael McSpadden in recent years to implore the Legislature and Governor Perry to reduce drug possession sentences for small amounts, declaring that "These minor offenses are now overwhelming every felony docket, and the courts necessarily spend less time on the more important, violent crimes."

Not only that, every one of those convicted of a felony loses access to many employment and housing options that might otherwise help them pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

Texas doesn't suffer statutory crack sentencing disparities like in the federal system, but that doesn't mean there's no problem with racial disparities in enforcing existing drug laws, most especially for black people. "Blacks make up 11 percent of the population of Texas," reported the Chronicle, "yet 46 percent of drug offenders serving time in the state's prisons are black, according to figures provided by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice."

The existence of racial disparities in Texas drug enforcement is obvious; the reasons for it, less so. We could debate here all day the reasons for racial disparities without reaching any firm conclusion. I don't know the answer to that complicated question.

But in an era when Texas prisons are completely full and severely understaffed, a bigger overall problem for law abiding citizens of all races, as Judge McSpadden indicates, is that the excessive focus of state and local policing, judicial, and incarceration resources on drug crimes reduces resources available to incarcerate more serious offenders, including violent criminals. That makes everyone less safe, including, disproportionately, black victims of violent crime.

Every time a Christmas bell rings, an Angel gets its wings: Current TYC admin approach a "dead loser," say experts

I've always been a sucker for the line in Frank Capra's Christmas classic, "It's a Wonderful Life," where at the end of the movie George's daughter looks up from under the decorated tree and exclaims to Jimmy Stewart, "Look, daddy! Teacher says, every time a bell rings, an Angel gets his wings."

So I suppose it's my affinity for that movie and the spirit of the season that made me hone in on TYC acting executive director Dimitria Pope's newest declaration about the youth under her care.

Today in the Dallas News, Emily Ramshaw identifies reform practices perhaps best modeled in Missouri ("In Missouri, 'unprisonment,'" Dec. 16), which significantly animated the recommendations of Texas' "Blue Ribbon Panel" on reforming the juvenile corrections system:

a juvenile justice model that national experts say has turned Missouri's state system from an abuse-ridden institutional nightmare to an industry gold standard for juvenile rehabilitation.

States across the country have taken note. Rarely a week goes by that Missouri officials aren't playing host to touring juvenile justice advocates or advising on proposed pilots in Louisiana, Washington, D.C., New Mexico or California.

But it is a model the Texas Youth Commission is not embracing.

For some Texas officials, it's just not the right time. For others, it's too dramatic a change and simply not punitive enough.

"The youth who are [incarcerated] in Texas, the court sent them here to restrict their behavior," said Dimitria Pope, TYC's acting executive director. "These are kids who have cut off their angel wings. This is a corrections environment."

Ms. Pope's comments to Ramshaw sum up exactly the problem that Governor Perry's "Blue Ribbon Panel" identified at TYC (see their report, pdf): The prevailing "punishment culture" dictated from the top management down instead of a focus on rehabilitation. A companion DMN article by Gregg Jones and Doug Swanson ("10 months after scandal, problems plague Texas Youth Commission," Dec. 16) quoted one of the national experts asked by Gov. Perry this spring for advice on TYC offering a much different assessment:

"The way they're going, a correctional model, is a dead loser," said Dr. Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. "That's not going to get them anyplace. It's never gotten anyone anyplace, except court."

Dr. Krisberg was a member of the TYC-appointed task force whose report the agency rejected this year. The task force advocated, among other things, a "home-like environment" for inmates.

"The question is," he said, "is Texas going to tolerate being the embarrassment of the nation on this?"

So far, Dr. Krisberg, the answer is "yes." Perhaps when Governor Perry gets back from Iowa he'll have had time to think things over and reconsider.

Naturally, Ms. Pope disagrees, reports the News: "Dimitria Pope, TYC's acting executive director, was asked to gauge the agency's current progress. 'I'm going to say excellent,' she answered," adding "I say we have turned the ship."

On that last comment, this blogger, Ms. Pope, and Mr. Krisberg all agree: Krisberg, Grits, and other critics simply wish the ship hadn't been turned toward the nearest iceberg!

Finally, an unsigned staff editorial accompanying the Dallas News article asks point blank whether the agency could be mostly sunsetted out of existence ("California is dismantling its youth [prison] system; could Texas?"). In California, the "state will pay the counties to take the youths. For some counties, though, it's a burden that they're not yet prepared to deal with." (As an aside, I suggested in "Surviving the TYC Meltdown" that counties must prepare precisely to deal with that coming future burden.) Editorialized the Dallas News, "If the plan does work, advocates may be pushing Texas to go the same way. "California and Texas face the same problems," Dr. Krisberg said. "Texas is worse: more corruption, more abuse."

The only disagreement I'd have with the Dallas News' assessment is the use of the future conditional tense, "may be": Advocates have been pushing for Texas to go the same way for many months. That's the direction the Texas Legislature was led to believe would be pursued when the Blue Ribbon Panel was appointed and Missouri's experts were paraded before Texas legislative committees to talk about best practices.

It's only since the appointment of a cadre of career bureaucrats from the adult prison system to TYC that rehabilitation has become a dirty word. For Ms. Pope and the people with whom she surrounds herself, these are all "kids who have cut off their angel wings" - her job is to lock 'em up, they can't be rehabilitated, by this logic. Public safety be damned: Forget that nearly all will re-enter society in just a few years, apparently.

Their "angel wings" have been clipped: If even God has forsaken them, why should Dimitria Pope or the state of Texas care what happens to them? (Oh, and by the way, Merry Christmas! Ho, ho, ho.)

I find I'm seldom unhappy when Governor Perry leaves the state - like most politicians he tends to do less damage when he's away from his desk - but he couldn't give TYC employees a better Christmas present than to git back home to Texas and appoint a competent, new conservator. Even I'm becoming weary of the seemingly continuous drumbeat of bad news coming out of the Texas Youth Commission, but this attitude, what the Blue Ribbon Panel called TYC's punishment culture, simply invites controversy and litigation, as Krisberg and many others have repeatedly told them.

Nothing this agency does seems to work. Just yesterday the Dallas News reported that "TYC's drug treatment program produces graduates who are more likely to re-offend after release than addicted inmates who did not participate." Nearly every day some new disgrace seems to crop up damning the current administration and pointing toward some looming, radical transformation, for good or ill, in TYC's near future.

Since her appointment, Ms. Pope has blamed underlings, the prior administration, private contractors, "corrupt" and "illiterate" employees, "white women," and now the youth themselves for TYC's mismanagement. Perhaps over the holidays the acting executive director will find an opportunity to locate a mirror when she's looking for someone to blame.

Or at least carve out a couple of hours to watch "It's a Wonderful Life."

This week's reader poll: Would you snitch?

Having discussed "snitching" in several recent posts, this week's reader poll asks, simply, "In your personal experience, have you ever had knowledge of a drug possession crime by another person and failed to report it to authorities?" In other words, have you ever known someone else had drugs in their possession and failed to report the crime?

For those who answer "Yes," let me know in the comments what you believe is the relation between your motives for failing to report that person and the "stop snitching" meme which has received so much attention in the last couple of years.

Governor: Please come back from the campaign trail and fix TYC!

An Open Letter to Texas Governor Rick Perry:

Dear Governor,

I read that you are in Iowa speaking to crowds of 20-30 on behalf of Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign bid. Perhaps you simply, strongly support him, or perhaps you hope to become his vice presidential nominee, as some have claimed. I won't presume to judge your motives.

But sir, we need you to get back home and fix the mess your appointees have made at the Texas Youth Commission. You need to find a new conservator, PRONTO!, and give them the authority to hire and fire agency leadership as they please, including getting rid of the current managers who've alienated staff and proven they're not up for the job.

If the new conservator is not empowered to replace the Executive Director, the General Counsel, or "Bronco" Billy Humphrey whose defiance needlessly dragged TYC into litigation over its pepper spray and use of force policy, then honestly you can't expect any self-respecting person to take that position.

In the past Ms. Pope has wrongly blamed TYC's problems on the influence of juvenile corrections experts, as though some rogue superintendent allegedly sodomizing youth out in West Texas or a guard allegedly coercing sex with girls in Brownwood stems from the application of juvenile justice best practices! Now, in the Dallas News, she blames TYC's failure to provide adequate treatment services on the influence of "white women" with Ph.D's.

Mr. Perry, exactly where would the Republican Party be without white women? Are you sure you want your state agency heads running around making such foolish statements while you're off chasing voters in packs of ten through the Iowa cornfields? Sir, please come home and find somebody ASAP to turn this sinking ship back toward harbor: It may already have wandered too far out to sea!

There are readers on Grits for Breakfast, many of them Youth Commission employees, who think all this is happening because you want it to, because acting executive director Dimitria Pope and the crew of TDCJ transplants she has brought in are intentionally running the agency into the ground so that you can farm the contracts out instead to private prison firms or other contractors that may contribute to your campaign.

My observation has been different: Even at the height of the media storm this spring - when it was first revealed youth had been sexually molested by staff at multiple units, and physically abused at all of them - you never appeared engaged, simply handing the problem over to your "fixer," Jay Kimbrough, whose unhappy legacy still hovers over the agency, and appointing a "Blue Ribbon Panel" whose recommendations your appointees ignored. I don't honestly think you've paid a lick of attention to TYC. But it's time for you to start. Jay Kimbrough has moved on, this time without "fixing" things, and the folks he's left in charge have no experience in juvenile corrections and just can't do the job, however good their intentions.

Thanks both to past, bipartisan neglect and because the gravity of its problems were understated by the new administration during the legislative session, the agency is not sufficiently funded to fulfill its mission given the number of kids who are housed there. That's the main reason for poor treatment results at TYC, not the influence of white women!

Current pay is not sufficient to hire staff in the remote locales where units are located, even if morale at the agency could be transformed under new leadership. In the last fiscal year, TYC lost half again as many guards as it hired, and youth recently had to be moved from a remote West Texas unit because understaffing became so severe.

It may be possible still to avoid a complete collapse at the agency, whose misdeeds are already drawing withering editorials from the New York Times, during the height of the general election season next year.

It would be much better to get home now and find somebody to fix this problem before it gets out of hand. It could even require a special session, before it's all said and done, as much as I hate to say it. TYC can't remain a backburner issue for you any longer, Governor Perry, and what's happening at that agency is a lot more important to Texans than whatever you had to say to twenty people at an Iowa house party.

You may be a lame duck, Governor, but at least until Mr. Giuliani offers you the Veep gig, you've got a few more years left on your contract still, and it's not time yet to start phoning it in. Please get back home and fix this train wreck at the Texas Youth Commission, or get on the phone and find somebody who will.

Sincerely,
Scott Henson
Grits for Breakfast

Snitching and the Drug War at the TPM Cafe Book Club

Over at the TPM Cafe Book Club this week they're debating the book "Snitch," and unsurprisingly the topic quickly turned to the use of snitches in the drug war. I'm going to try to review "Snitch" next week, but the discussion so far over at TPM itself is remarkable. Ethan Brown's book focuses primarily on snitching in the federal system, which has its own specific rules and vernacular. Writes Brown in his introductory TPM post:

Street hustlers and criminal defense attorneys call this process “The 5K Game.” Indeed, one criminal defense attorney dubbed a cooperator in a recent drug conspiracy case that a “graduate of 5K University.” Why? Because the cooperator cooperated in a federal drug case in Pennsylvania the early 1990s, received a huge sentencing reduction as a result and then hit the streets and committed murders for hire in New York during the late 1990s and beyond. When he became ensnared in a murder and drug conspiracy case in 2007, he entered into a cooperation deal yet again. This cooperator’s tale elicits yet another fatal flaw of the cooperator institution: cooperators are often much, much more dangerous than the defendants they have cooperated against. Unsurprisingly, residents in inner city neighborhoods where such dangerous cooperators roam free are not happy with the effects that the “5K Game” is having on their communities. Indeed, I believe this anger with the unregulated cooperator institution is at the very root of the much publicized, yet little understood “Stop Snitching” phenomenon. While antipathy towards informants and cooperators has existed for decades—former FBI director William Webster famously remarked that “there is a tradition against snitching in this country”—the evils of the “5K Game” and mandatory minimums for drug related offenses have caused an explosion in anti-law enforcement sentiment in recent years, particularly among minority populations who are most affected by such policies. As criminologist David Kennedy told The Atlantic Monthly in April of 2007, “this [mistrust of law enforcement] is the reward we have reaped for 20 years of profligate drug enforcement in these communities.”

Based on these comments and his reading of the book, drug policy prof and blogger Mark Kleiman views criticism of snitching, perhaps rightly, as a frontal attack on the drug war. As a drug war supporter, at the end of the day (he actually argues it was a public policy mistake to end alcohol prohibition), Kleiman thus encourages us to "Keep on Snitchin'." John McWhorter replied that the book made him think the entire war on drugs needed to be scrapped, causing Brown and Kleiman to digress over whether drug prohibition should be scrapped or retained.

Though Doc Berman and Alexandra Natapoff brought the discussion back down to earth by insisting that snitching plays out in many different contexts, it's entirely understandable that the debate over coercing criminals to testify in exchange for leniency would center at least in part on the drug war.

The best statistics I've ever seen on the aggregate use of snitching in drug law enforcement came from Texas drug task forces like the one in Tulia funded by the federal Byrne grant program. After management of Texas' task forces were taken over by the Texas Department of Public Safety, those units' aggregate reporting constituted the closest thing to hard numbers I've ever seen regarding (state) drug cases involving informant testimony. E.g., in this public policy report (pdf) published by ACLU of Texas in December 2002, I was able to calculate that "collectively requested $1,941,286 in funds for CIs in their 2002 grant applications." That's a lot of scratch paid to informants in a single year!

What's more, if you think none of the informants that money paid for accused innocent people, I'd encourage you to ask Regina Kelly, or at least listen to her interview with Radley Balko, about what happened to her and more than a dozen others at the hands of an addicted, mentally ill informant in Hearne, Texas. (Long-time readers may recall that posts from this blog got momentarily caught up in that court case.) The FBI in some instances will knowingly tolerate "serious violent felonies" by informants in order to retain a snitch's cover.

Not only do informants have incentives to lie, but task forces and other drug enforcers frequently have their own incentives to maximize their cases made thanks to asset forfeiture and don't always have many good reasons to closely examine snitch testimony favorable to their case. (I've been told that this is more frequently a problem with young prosecutors - long-timers tend to have been burned pretty often and may be less likely to rely solely on a snitch, the logic goes.)

Thankfully, Texas' Byrne task force system was abolished by Gov. Perry after a serious of remarkable and unfortunate scandals, and those funds have largely been shifted to give fat grants to border sheriffs to patrol the Rio Grande. However, Byrne task forces in other states still provide perhaps the best snapshot of informant use in drug cases. A quick Google search turned up this recent report on Byrne grant funded drug task forces in Massachussetts, which largely jibes with the numbers we saw in Texas (see p. 7):

During FFY 2005 and FFY 2006, the task forces reported 5,373 drug transactions. For the task forces that reported information on the types of drug transactions, purchases made by confidential informants were the most frequently reported type of drug transaction (45%), followed by purchases made by undercover officers (32%).

These 5,373 drug transactions a two-year period resulted in more than 3,000 arrests and more then 10,000 drug charges, according to the report - 95% of them state-level offenses. Applying the percentage of informant-related transactions to arrests, around 1,500 defendants were arrested in Massachussetts by drug task force officers during those two years based on informant testimony.

Most of these informants were themselves in a position where they could have been arrested for their own crimes, but were granted leniency if they would go scout out other people for drug task force officers to arrest. A smaller number (who often begin "working off" cases then continue snitching for pay), become professional paid snitches like Alex White in Atlanta, who considered working as a police informant his "job."

If lying snitches were the only problem, there might be little overall reason for concern. Substantive corroboration requirements and vigorous cross-examination might prevent most such injustices (though right now that doesn't always happen). But forcing witness "cooperation" as it's practiced today by threatening long prison sentences has larger corrosive effects on the justice system to which Doc Berman's appropriately returned the discussion - the degradation of civil rights and liberties for everyone, not just those caught up in drug cases:

Through many provisions of the Bill of Rights -- particularly the right to a jury trial and the rights of confrontation and counsel -- the Framers sought to limit the ability of govertments to convict and punish persons based on suspect accusations. But, as Ethan shows with many anecdotes, persons facing certain and severe sentencing consequences quickly realize that flinging allegations may be their only sentencing life preserver, and some of these allegations are sure to stick.

Relatedly, and integral to this story as well, is the weakening of the privilege against self-incrimination. By threatening even more severe and certain punishment after a trial conviction, the feds now can tell suspects that only through self-incrimination and cooperation is there any real hope of a mitigated sentencing term. In this context there is a particularly disturbing irony: those who are most guilty and would least benefit from traditional trial protections are necessarily going to admit guilt and point fingers in the hope of reducing their sentencing exposure; in turn, those who believe in their innocence end up subject to the full brunt of the certain and severe sentencing realities if convicted after a traditional trial.

Hear, hear. Go get 'em, Doc! And those aren't the only serious problems. Regular readers know I've long thought this dark underbelly of the justice system deserves more discussion. Those interested in more on the subject should definitely mosey on over to TPM Cafe's Book Club, and I'm looking forward to reading and reviewing "Snitch" myself in the near future.

Baseball's 'Mitchell Report' relies on uncorroborated, coerced informant testimony to accuse "Rocket" Roger Clemens

The nation may soon get an up-close and personal look at the pressure the criminal justice system places on witnesses/informants whose testimony is coerced through threat of prosecution thanks to the steroid investigation in Major League Baseball.

Texas baseball great and seven-time Cy Young award winner Roger Clemens was the biggest star and most often mentioned player named besides home-run king Barry Bonds in the "Mitchell Report." Clemens' lawyer said the pitcher's name was included based on uncorroborated testimony from a "troubled" informant, who himself faced federal charges and was seeking leniency from federal prosecutors. The informant apparently is "Brian McNamee, a former undercover police officer who worked with Clemens while he was the Toronto Blue Jays strength and conditioning coach and later with the Yankees. McNamee allegedly injected "the Rocket" with steroids he said Clemens obtained from some unknown source in 1998.

Having just looked through the massive 400+ page Mitchell Report (pdf) looking to ascertain McNamee's role, it really does seem as though his testimony is the only accusing voice against Roger Clemens. Unlike several other players named, the report provided no canceled checks or other documents linking Clemens. McNamee previously denied to the press and, at first, to investigators, that Clemens used steroids, then changed his story after he was repeatedly threatened with prison.

I saw no corroboration for McNamee's claims accusing Clemens in the report, just his testimony. Is that enough to destroy the pitcher's reputation, to taint a lifetime of athletic achievement? Can he now be dismissed as "just another cheat"? The allegations could be true, but repeatedly threatening a witness if he doesn't give investigators names makes me think his uncorroborated testimony shouldn't be enough to draw a firm conclusion. Certainly the witness has never faced cross-examination related to these claims.

Was McNamee telling the truth before prosecutors threatened him with prison, or after? One just can't tell from the report.

I've written before that under Mosaic Law, no one could be accused without testimony from two or three witnesses. By that standard, the allegations against Clemens would not withstand scrutiny, and I'll be quite surprised if it's enough to convince an MLB arbitrator that Clemens is definitively guilty.

It will likely be enough, though, to convict Clemens in the court of public opinion. As with Barry Bonds, for the Rocket this bell cannot be unrung - the public will forever associate the best major league pitcher I've ever seen with steroid use, whether or not he is really guilty.

Perhaps the Clemens case will spur a wider discussion about snitching and whether pressure on witnesses may coerce false testimony.

Meanwhile, I continue to wait for the day when we'll see a "Mitchell Report" aimed at steroid use among law enforcement. Why is it, I wonder, that a bunch of millionaire ballplayers merit this kind of massive, expensive investigation, but similar resources aren't aimed at preventing abuse and corruption among those charged with enforcing public safety?

Related Grits posts:

• Barry Bonds perjury indictment is pure USDOJ media ploy
• Why test Texas high school athletes for steroids but not police officers?

Related from the blogosphere at:

• Cafe Hayek
• Signal to Noise
• Talk Left
  
• Mack Avenue Tigers
• Below the Beltway
• Biased Look at the New York Yankees
• You Been Blinded
• Mets Today
• Off the Kuff
  

At one-year anniversary, Kaufman County public defender says focus on mentally ill

Via Robert Guest at I Was The State, I was pleased to discover an article from the Terrell Tribune ("Just a year old, Kaufman County PD's office serves as a model for others around state," Dec. 13) reflecting on the one-year anniversary of the Kaufman County public defender office. Guest points to a common theme in MSM reporting about public defender offices:

The news article seems to focus on the cost savings to the county. Much is made over the fact that the average cost per case is down 50% over 2005-2006. Is that a good thing? I know the county wants to save money but the government created the need for indigent defense. Instead of looking for the cheapest defense maybe we should rethink our incarceration epidemic.

Good point. We certainly don't see enough news coverage about that! Besides, providing counsel to defendants isn't nearly as costly to taxpayers as housing them in jails and prisons after they've been convicted.

Perhaps an even more important upside from the public defender office in Kaufman County from a public safety perspective may be the creation of a de facto advocate for mentally ill defendants who use up tremendous extra resources, using the local jail as a substitute for community based mental health treatment. (Regular readers know that Texas jails and prisons warehouse tens of thousands of mentally ill inmates.) Buried in the Tribune article public defender Andrew Jordan exudes:

“I am really excited to be working right now with the district attorney, the sheriff and the judges to create a special program for mentally ill clients,” Jordan said. “Sadly, over the last several years the Legislature has continued to under fund programs that care for people with recognized mental illnesses.”

According to Jordan, the result has been that the county jail has become the de facto care facility for citizens who, through no fault of their own, can't interact in society.

“In addition to being expensive and presenting a liability issue for Kaufman County, it's simply inhumane,” Jordan said. “Many of these individuals also qualify for my office's services so that area of the law is of particular importance to me. Hopefully in another year I can report that we have found a way to balance public safety against the absolute need to take a more compassionate approach to the mentally ill who enter our criminal justice system.”

Writes Guest, a former East Texas prosecutor, "That is absolutely true. The mentally ill are constantly arrested and shuffled through the criminal justice system." I'm not sure that Kaufman County would be directly addressing mental health issues among indigent defendants if they hadn't created a public defender office. A system of appointed private attorneys simply doesn't empower the kind of big-picture advocacy role that an institutional public defender can play on issues like criminalizing the mentally ill.

I'm all for defense lawyers making a living, but I'm increasingly convinced that many defendants receive poor representation for the price that counties are willing to pay per head, and that public defender offices provide more consistent quality of counsel, provide an important institutional counterweight to the elected DA, and obviously cost less overall to operate than paying private lawyers case by case.

"Meth Free Texas" backs drug treatment

I ran across a pro-drug treatment website from the Texas Panhandle titled Meth Free Texas, whose founder Charlene Cheek had a column earlier this year (9/26) in the Amarillo Globe News titled "Drug addiction a matter for medicine, not the courts." The Globe News piece uniquely frames the problem of criminalizing drug addiction as something out of science fiction:

In his novel about the imaginary land called Erewhon, Samuel Butler deals with the criminal code of the Erewhonians, which makes it a crime to have tuberculosis.

The very notion of punishing someone for a disease seems preposterous, yet we do it a thousand times a day, every day, in courtrooms across our nation.

A hard hitting analogy, huh? Cheek quotes a judge from Butler's novel offering justifications for criminalizing tuberculosis that can be heard in courtrooms and DA's press conferences every day across the country where drug prohibition is enforced:

"It is all very well to say that you came of unhealthy parents, and had a severe accident in your childhood which permanently undermined your constitution; excuses such as these are the ordinary refuge of the criminal; but they cannot for one moment be listened to by the ear of justice."

Meth Free Texas advocates for expanding drug treatment alternatives, particularly in the Texas Panhandle. On the MFT website, Cheek laments:

The sad truth is, there are no "Treament" facilities in the Texas Panhandle. Why is that? It certainly is not because we do not have a need.

In Lubbock, Texas, Managed Care is our nearest state funded facility. Even then, there is a very long waiting list and a limited number of "beds" available. Anyone that has tried to find help for a loved one, understands this frustration. Unless you have the monetary resources and are willing to spend some "big bucks" for treatment...indigent treatment is almost non-existent

Good work, Charlene, and good luck! Finding this site reminds me I need to check up to see how new treatment dollars allocated to the TX Department of Criminal Justice this year have been spent so far, and where.

Informant in Kathryn Johnston case sues Atlanta police; 'Snitch' discussed all week at TPM Cafe Book Club

A couple of national items on the subject of informants caught my eye today:

TPM Cafe Book Club Discussing 'Snitch'
First, via the ACLU informant blog:

Check out the play Ethan Brown’s new book Snitch is getting this week at the TPM Cafe Book Club. His book will be the featured subject, with special guests contributing to the conversation, throughout the week. Each post has a string of comments and the conversation is hot!

Besides Brown himself, contributors to the discussion so far include Grits favorite, Loyola (CA) law professor Alexandra Natapoff and Doc Berman from the Sentencing Law & Policy blog.

I got to chat a bit with Ethan in New Orleans last week and have just begun to crack open his book myself, but definitely check out these writers and Ethan's commentary on TPM in the meantime.

GA man says snitching was his job, sues over blown cover, lost wages
Second, in a bizarre turn of events, the informant in Atlanta who police tried to get to perjure himself to cover up police misconduct in the death of Kathryn Johnston has sued the agency because the event ended his ability to get informant work, which was apparently a significant part of his income. Steve Rose in the Atlanta Constitution Journal blog, View from a Cop, writes:

Alex White, professional snitch, is suing Atlanta Police.

First, let’s get this out of the way: Should he have told on those narcotics cops? Damn right! No doubt. They got what they deserved. There’s plenty of dope out there without having to fabricate facts and doing what they did. Kathryn Johnston should not have been shot and killed that night. Alex White should have told the truth and Alex White did what he should have done. Whether or not he did it because it was the right thing to do or doing to cover his fanny is a matter of discussion I’m sure. Maybe it was the lesser of two evils.

Alex White’s “credibility” as a confidential informant has been damaged due to the fact that his face was on television. Now he can’t get a job as a confidential informant. That’s horrible. Is there some sort of pie chart or graph showing the dramatic decline of confidential informants? Those guys need a union.

I have no idea what are the merits of Mr. White's lawsuit, and from the description in this police officer's blog post it sounds a little squirrelly. But one suspects the court pleadings will provide interesting reading, giving a lot more first-hand, nitty gritty detail than we usually get to see about how police handle snitches.

It's a safe bet that a guy who made most of his income as a police informant to the point where he sued over lost wages has a lot of stories to tell.

RELATED: See also Radley Balko's coverage of the Kathryn Johnston case.

As Bexar prepares to pilot needle exchange, Vancouver CA models the future of harm reduction

One of the more interesting presentations I saw last week in New Orleans at the Drug Policy Alliance conference centered on implementing ground-level harm reduction strategies, a topic that interests me especially as Bexar County prepares to launch Texas' first legal needle exchange operation in San Antonio. (Last I heard, Bexar officials hoped their county's needle exchange pilot program will begin early next year.)

Vancouver launched its needle exchange programs, said the city's Drug Policy Coordinator Donald MacPherson, because of a spike in overdose deaths in the late 1990s topping 200 per year at its height. Like similar programs elsewhere, Vancouver saw a decline in both overdoses and HIV transmissions among injection drug users after implementing needle exchange, and more addicts referred to treatment.

Observing these successes, MacPherson said, the city took the idea one step further, creating a "supervised injection site" where addicts can use illegal drugs in a clean environment under nurses' supervision. The facility teaches addicts how to protect themselves from disease transmission and encourages them to enter drug treatment. According to this brochure from the Vancouver program, called "insite," more than 7,000 people have used the facility to inject drugs since its inception.

people using insite are more likely to enter withdrawal management (detox) programs, and people using insite who also talk with addiction counselors are even more likely to enter detox. In fact, one in five regular visitors to insite began a detox program, showing that insite is a proven entry-point for the Downtown Eastside’s highest risk injection drug users. Detox programs are an important marker of addiction treatment system use, as most addiction treatment programs first require people to complete a detox program.

This notion may seem radical from where Texas sits now, but from all appearances the idea (which was imported from Switzerland) works surprisingly well at reducing both drug use and the harms associated with it. "It hasn’t been difficult to convince injection drug users that insite offers a safe, clean place to inject drugs," reports the insite brochure. Overall program results were analyzed in a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, reported CBC News, finding that

the three-year-old Supervised Injection Site in the Downtown Eastside has been a great success.

The injection site, which drew about 5,000 users in its first year of operation, is a place where people can safely go to inject illegal drugs while being supervised by nurses.

"By all criteria, the Vancouver facility has both saved lives and contributed toward the decreased use of illicit drugs and the reduced spread of HIV infection and other blood-borne infections," Mark Wainberg, the director of the McGill University AIDS Centre in Montreal, wrote in a commentary published alongside the study.

The study — conducted by Dr. Evan Wood, a professor of epidemiology at the University of British Columbia, and his colleagues — found that drug users who visited the site at least once a week were more willing to enter detoxification programs.

These data make me optimistic about San Antonio's legislatively approved pilot program to exchange clean needles, which I see as an important first step toward implementing policies to reduce drug demand and the harms associated with addiction. Prison, by contrast, does neither of those things.

Vancouver's experience shows that not only do harm reduction principles work but they can be expanded beyond just needle swapping, and indeed may be the best available method for convincing serious addicts to seek treatment.

Vancouver's model demonstrates that its possible to scale up harm reduction strategies to demonstrably reduce deaths and addiction in a major city. Indeed, the idea of a safe injection site strikes me as the epitome of the harm reduction model - a much more civilized, humane, and rights respecting mentality than Texas' current "trail 'em, nail 'em, and jail 'em" approach. Every major Texas city has thousands of addicts who inject illegal drugs, and if all society offers them is prison, they're more likely to remain in the shadows.

In closing, I found these data interesting about the Vancouver supervised injection site, and was especially encouraged to see that 453 overdoses at the site occurred during a two year stretch with no fatalities. By contrast, that many overdoses out on the street or in some run-down shooting gallery would be much more likely to result in morbid outcomes. Here are some other statistics worthy of note for those interested the Vancouver supervised injection site:

Other research results show*:

• 7,278 unique individuals registered at Insite
• Women made up 26 per cent of clients
• Aboriginal people made up 18 per cent of clients
• Heroin was used in 41 per cent of injections
• Cocaine was used in 27 per cent of injections
• Morphine was used in 12 per cent of injections
• 453 overdoses resulted in no fatalities
• 4,084 referrals were made with 40 per cent of them made to addiction counselling
• Referral to withdrawal management: 368
• Referral to methadone maintenance: 2 per week
• Daily average visits: 607
• Average number of visits per month, per person: 11
• Busiest day: May 25, 2005 (933 visits in 18 hours)
• Number of nursing care interventions: 6,227
• Number of nursing interventions for abscess care: 2,055

*All totals or averages are for the two-year period from April 1, 2004 to March 31, 2006.

Perry TBCJ Appointee: My main qualification is that I know nothing about the subject

Gov. Perry just named three new members to the Texas Board of Criminal Justice, the governing board for the state prison system. Reports the Houston Chronicle:

A trial lawyer, a businessman and a social worker were appointed by Gov. Rick Perry on Monday to the nine-person Texas Board of Criminal Justice, which oversees the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

The appointees are: R. Terrell McCombs of San Antonio, who is vice president of McCombs Enterprises and a nephew of auto magnate B.J. "Red" McCombs; Eric Gambrell of Highland Park, who is a trial partner with the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer and Feld; and Janice Harris Lord of Arlington, who is a social worker and national consultant on crime victim issues.

McCombs touted his lack of criminal justice experience as a plus.

"I'm open-minded and business-minded. My hope is to make (the prison agency) run more efficiently."

Janice Harris Lord worked for many years for Mothers Against Drunk Driving (that should make Robert Guest happy) and told the Fort Worth Star Telegram she sees her role on the board as "to present the victims' perspective in criminal justice issues."

One wonders what experience Gambrell, a trial lawyer from Highland Park (an exclusive, wealthy enclave entirely surrounded by the City of Dallas) brings to the table? According to his biography at Akin Gump, he "represents businesses and high-net-worth individuals in aggressively prosecuting their claims and defending their interests." Not a lot of those in TDCJ.

Similarly, I couldn't help but be reminded of Perry's ill-suited appointments to run the Texas Youth Commission when I read that GOP superdonor "Red" McCombs' nephew was one of the picks, telling the Chronicle that the fact that he had no experience at all in corrections was his biggest asset. As at TYC, apparently the Governor sees having zero experience in the area for which they're responsible as a key requirement for his criminal justice appointees. Perhaps that's because people with any experience in the field tend to disagree with his policies.

TDCJ's problems don't stem from a lack of business-like efficiency. They arise from understaffing, low pay, poor working conditions, poor inmate health care, failure to fund programming to reduce recidivism, and a variety of other troubles that need leadership from professionals who know what they're doing.

These appointments suit the Governor's political interests much more than they do the agency's management and oversight needs in the face of looming challenges.

New TYC treatment program unveiled; completion by youth now optional

Thanks to Scott Medlock for pointing out to me that the Youth Commission came out with its new treatment program, CoNEXTions, while I was out of town last week on December 7. (Note to TYC PR department: Pearl Harbor Day? If I were y'all, I'd avoid for the time being all future symbolic references to sinking ships.)

The new TYC treatment program sounds a lot like the old "Resocialization" program, but with key differences designed to rush kids out the door on the back end much quicker than under the old guidelines:

CoNEXTions measures a youth’s progress in treatment in five stages: Orientation, Skills Development, Transition, Maintenance, and Community Reintegration. Once a youth completes a stage in his or her treatment, he or she cannot be demoted to a lower stage. Additionally, youth do not have to complete all five stages to be eligible for release from a TYC facility when they have met their minimum length of stay. Progression through and completion of the program can be accomplished as a condition of parole.

In the CoNEXTions model, reward and privileges are key motivating tools to encourage youth to progress in their rehabilitation. While all youth receive basic privileges as outlined in TYC policies, there are four additional privilege levels. As youth advance in their treatment, additional privileges are earned. Youth may earn or lose privilege levels based upon individual behavior but any lose of privilege will not affect a youth’s minimum length of stay in TYC.

So bottom line, kids no longer must complete this treatment program before they go home, and while privileges may be taken away, failure to participate fully in treatment will no longer be used to extend a youth's length of stay (a change already codified this summer in TYC's formal rules).

That's probably just fine for most youth, but for some of the more troubled kids at TYC the failure to more fully prepare them before re-entry to the free world could invite trouble, just like the failure to provide adequate sex offender and chemical dependency treatment may lead to youth re-entering society without resolving their core problems.

I can't find any additional info about the program on the agency website, but the press release declares that "CoNEXTions is expected to be implemented system wide in early 2008."

BoR: Help find good candidates for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals

With filing deadline approaching, Burnt Orange Report promotes a plea from Scott Cobb to help locate good candidates to run against incumbents on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

Cobb points out that, "Candidates for the court are required to submit 50 signatures from each of Texas' 14 appellate districts, so even after a candidate is found, the blogging community should be ready to help the candidates get those signatures." Good point! I think the blogosphere could easily assist with accomplishing this task before the filing deadline. The question is, will there be horses in the race to support?