Each day our courts “punish” dangerous felons by releasing them on probation. The result ? Thousands of new crimes.

To the young women he met, Michael Cartier of Boston was an attractive, fun-loving fellow. A sweet-talker, he persuaded each girlfriend he was crazy about her.

But Cartier lead a double life. He had a long criminal record of petty larcenies, break-ins and vandalism. Each time he was caught, he was merely fined or released on probation. The women he dated discovered the dark side of Cartier’s personality too late. In October, 1990, while on probation, he smashed the walls of his apartment with a sledgehammer and threw his girlfriend’s kitten out the window to its death. Punishment: another year of probation. The following spring, he beat up his girlfriend, and for this was jailed a few months, then released on probation.

He was back in court in February 1992 for harassing her- a probation violation. Rather than send him to jail, the judge ordered Cartier to attend an “Alternatives to Violence” program. Once a week, Cartier would explore his hangups at rap sessions with a probation officer and a therapist.

Meanwhile, he had begun to date Kristin Lardner, 21, a talented student at the school of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In April 1992, a day after one of his anti-violence classes, Cartier kicked her senseless on a city street.

When Cartier continued to pester her, she vowed to call police. “ I’ll do six months at the most”, Cartier mocked. “ And when I get out , you better not be around”. Lardner got an emergency restraining order and applied to file criminal complaints. But the news never reached the case officer, and Cartier remained on probation.

On May 30, Cartier confronted Lardner on a Boston sidewalk. He pulled out a gun and fired 3 times killing her. Then he took his own life.

Kristin Lardner died because a violent man who should have been behind bars was instead on probation. She is among thousands of victims of a system that has grown dangerously lax.

Can’t keep track. Probation was once a rare exception to the general rule that convicted criminals should be punished by incarceration. Not anymore. “ Probation is no longer confined to first offenders”, says Andrew Klein, chief probation officer in Quincy, Mass. For a variety of reasons- such as overcrowding, plea bargaining and faith in rehabilitation- tens of thousands of chronic, often violent felons get little or no jail time for their crimes.

In theory, probationers must obey strict rules and regularly report their activities to case officers. If they don’t they are supposed to go back to jail. In reality, there is no way probation officers can keep track of this huge criminal army in our midst. Criminals who should be locked up are not. Undetected, they violate their probation terms and commit new crimes. Even when caught, they often stay on the streets. Declares Wisconsin Circuit Court Judge Domonic S. Amato: “Probation is not a meaningful sentencing alternative for most cases. “We’re letting far too many dangerous people go free”.

The massive number of probationers makes it impossible for case officers to effectively supervise them. Probation officers in New York City carry average caseloads of 150 each; in San Diego County , 222; in Los Angeles County, about 600.

One study of three California programs found in 1990 that probationers saw their case officer san average of just 15 minutes a month. In Los Angeles, the system is so overburdened that 65,000 probationers are required only to mail their officers a monthly post card. Many of them don’t even bother.

And experiments with “intensive supervision” programs, in which probationers must take drug tests, perform community service and train for jobs, provide no evidence of rehabilitation. In fact, in some cases participants have been arrested at a higher rate than those under routine supervision.

The truth is, once a criminal is released, it is impossible to know what he is really doing. For example, when Georgia police stopped Emmanuel Hammond for speeding in February 1988, they found an illegal handgun. He was arrested. At the time, Hammond was on probation for kidnapping and armed robbery. Possession of a firearm could have sent him straight to prison, but instead he remained free pending a hearing on whether his probation should be revoked. That hearing, however, was never held.

One evening in July 1988, Julie Love, a children’s exercise instructor, was driving down an Atlanta street when her car ran out of gas. Hammond, his girlfriend and a cousin pulled over and offered Love a ride. When she refused, Hammond grabbed Love and took off. He robbed and beat her, blasted her in the head with a sawed-off shotgun and hid her body in a garbage dump.

A few months later Hammond was convicted on the earlier illegal handgun charges. He got two concurrent five-year prison terms but was back on probation after four months. According to his case officer he was a good probationer.

Eventually Hammond angered his old girlfriend, who revealed to police the details of Julie Love’s murder. He is now on death row.

Losing track. Instead of imprisoning probationers who commit subsequent crimes or violate probation conditions, judges sometimes ”piggyback” new probationary sentences onto previous ones. “ We have seen people with 8 probations going at the same time”, says Peter Solomon, a supervisor in Philadelphia’s probation department. “Due to overcrowded prisons, it’s tough to keep them in jail”.

In 1984, Steven Smith was put on probation in New York City after a larceny conviction. The 23-year-old drifter was arrested and convicted again in 1986 for possessing stolen property. After serving a short jail term, he was put on probation again. By May 1988, the city’s probation department, overwhelmed with a caseload of 55,000 criminals, had lost track of him.

Smith was arrested yet again, on New Year’s Day of 1989, for stealing a hypodermic needle and a clock at Bellevue Hospital. Once more, he was released, pending trial on those charges.

A week later, Dr. Kathryn Hinnant decided to go to work at Bellevue on her day off. Five months pregnant, the young pathologist planned to meet her husband at an art gallery that evening.

She never made it. The next morning, Hinnant’s husband found her body in her office. She had been beaten, strangled and raped. Police arrested Smith the following day at a homeless shelter. Convicted on four separate counts, he was finally returned to prison.

Ineffective cure. Probation began during the last century in the hope that some petty criminals would straighten out if given a second chance. Common sense limited probation to first-time, juvenile and minor offenders.

Then common sense began to evaporate. “ By the 1960s,” explains political scientist Charles Murray, author of “Beyond probation”, “ elite wisdom had shifted to a consensus that punishment was pointless, and often the best thing to do was to leave the offender on the street”. Adds Texas District Court Judge Ted Poe:” Rehabilitation became more important than retribution. And when we found we couldn’t “cure” people in prison, the idea became, “Let’s cure them on probation”. Because of this attitude, and prison overcrowding, probation populations exploded. Today, nearly two- thirds of all convicted criminals in the US end up on probation.

The cure rarely works, however. A US Justice Department study of 79,000 felony probationers across the country discovered that 43% were rearrested within 3 years. The 1990 study of the 3 California programs found that more than two-thirds of the probationers examined were either arrested or violated some technical term of their probation within one year. Princeton University professor John J. Dilulio surveyed Wisconsin inmates in 1990 and found that over 40 % admitted they had already been on probation 2 or more times.

Frank James Bertucci is a typical example of a chronic offender. Since the 1960s, he has been arrested numerous times for crimes ranging from burglary to aggravated assault. Despite this record, a Chicago judge in 1987 put him on probation after another conviction for theft. Bertucci has since been arrested four more times.

Leon L. Mckee of Milwaukee is another habitual offender. He served 2 prison terms in the 1980s for robbery and burglary. Then he was convicted in October 1990 for criminal damage to property. A judge let him out on probation. Mckee repaid the judge’s generosity two months later by holding up a convenience store. “ Give the money up,” Mckee demanded of a clerk. “Don’t do anything, or I’ll blow you off”.

A routine sentence of probation made it possible some of the most sickening crimes in modern times. In 1989, Jeffrey Dahmer was convicted of drugging molesting a 13-year-old boy. He had been previously arrested for committing lewd acts in public. Dahmer could have gone to prison for 20 years but, ignoring a prosecutor’s recommendation, a Milwaukee judge granted him five year’s probation and one year in the house of Correction “ under work release”. Undetected, Dahmer had already killed five people at the time of his trial. While on probation, he proceeded to kill 12 more.

Giving Criminals a Break. Despite such incidents many groups are pushing for less incarceration. One is the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, based in San Francisco. “We must turn away from the excessive use of prisons,” assert the NCCD”s James Austin and John Irwin. “Cherished humanitarian values are corroded by our excessive focus on vindictiveness”.

Kenneth Schoen is another leading advocate of prison “reform”. In the 1970s, as Minnesota’s Corrections Commissioner, Schoen pushed the state’s criminal-justice system toward “alternatives to incarceration”. In the years since, Minnesota has grown far more lenient toward many criminals. Probation became the recommended sentence even for some sex offenders. In 1991 the Minneapolis Star Tribune said “ Minnesota gives breaks to rapists and child molesters. Its progressive programs have won praise, but they have not made the state safer for women and children.”

Now in New York City, Schoen directs the Justice Program at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, which crusades for fewer and shorter prison terms. “Governors and legislators have to change all those mindless get-tough crime laws and mandatory minimum sentencing statutes that they passed in recent years,” he declares. With assets of over $ 430 million, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation has helped fund other alternative-to-incarceration projects in Michigan, South Carolina, Colorado, Alabama and Delaware.

When Oregon faced a shortage of prison space in the 1980s, the Oregon Prison Overcrowding Project ( OPOP), funded in part by the foundation, blamed the problem not on criminals but on “an inclination to respond to crime as stringently as possible”. According to its report, hundreds of prison inmates could be granted probation at little increased risk to the public.

The OPOP urged the state legislature to begin a complete review of the criminal code. Following the lead of Minnesota, Oregon has now cemented into law some of the most permissive sentencing guidelines in the country. Judges are expected to grant probation for property crimes under $5000 and thefts under $ 50,000, even if the offender has as many as three previous felony convictions. Probation is also the sentence for child abandonment or for peddling child pornography. The results of these guidelines are often ludicrous,” says Joshua Marquis, chief deputy district attorney in Deschutes County. “Serious criminals are laughing up their sleeves.”

Leonard Hasbrook is one. He had gone to prison for burglary and drug possession before the new sentencing guidelines took effect. Then he burglarized an office and robbed a safe containing thousands of dollars in silver coins. Sentence: two years of probation and 60 days in jail.

Russian Roulette. Reform of the nation’s probation systems will not be easy, but these common-sense measures would make our streets safer:

1. Expand prison capacity. In the 1960s , imprisonment rates fell sharply, and crime rates exploded. By contrast, prison populations expanded dramatically during the 1980s, and crime rates leveled off. Not all of the decrease in crime can be ascribed to increased used of imprisonment,” says Professor Dululio. “But the data leave no doubt that the increased use of prisons has averted millions of serious crimes.”

2. Although prisons are expensive, their costs have to be put into perspective. For an additional five dollars per US resident, we could expand our prison capacity and take thousands of additional criminals off our streets. And studies confirm that the cost of new prisons is more than offset by the savings from the crimes that are prevented.

3.End probation for chronic and violent offenders. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” This adage sums up all that needs to be said about the system’s blind faith in rehabilitation. Probation for some first-time or petty offenders is reasonable. What we have now is not.

4.Punish violators. Once probationers learn they can commit infractions with impunity, there is little incentive for them to stay out of trouble. Ken Babick of Multnomah County, Oregon, speaks for many other probation officers when he says, “We need to use ‘jail therapy’- a swift, immediate sanction that will put a probation violator in jail.”

Releasing dangerous felons back onto the streets is playing Russian roulette with innocent lives. No one understands this better than the victims- or their survivors.

Kristin Lardner’s family remains stunned at their loss. For months, her father, George Lardner, Jr., has been trying to make sense of a system that allowed his daughter to be murdered by a man who should have been locked up. He has reached only one conclusion: ”They say that winking at a wrong causes trouble. Well, that’s probation- a wink at evil.”

SENTENCED TO LIFE

Communists and “patriots” in the Duma are clamoring for the death penalty to be restored, which they hope will intimidate terrorists and killers. Meanwhile, the punishment meted out to former death-row intimates, who had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment, is more terrible than execution, and not one of them is a terrorist or hired killer.

At night, when the entire Vologda region is plunged into darkness, one of the islands in the middle of Lake Novoye commonly known as Ognenny, or Fiery, is ablaze with light. True, the source of this light is not fire, but electricity: powerful searchlights illuminate the white walls of a 15^th-century monastery topped with barbed wire, armed guards peeping from under the roofs of monastery towers.

In the daytime the island looks indistinguishable from scores of other inhabited islands in the area. Nearby, children play, jumping from a planked footway into the water, and elderly people sit in front of their log cabins. It is just that the number of servicemen in camouflage fatigues seems disproportionately large on the island, which is not really surprising: Ognenny is home to institution OE-265/5- the country’s first and largest penal colony for prisoners serving a life sentence, that is, people once sentenced to death who then had capital punishment commuted to life imprisonment on the island by presidential decree.

Abandon all hope. Quite. It is unlikely that any of these men will ever be let out. Formally, they still can hope to be free. To this end they have to spend here 25 years, working conscientiously, and then, if a convict has had a clean record for the past 10 years, he may be released. For this to happen, however, approval has to be obtained from a number of officials, including psychologists who monitor the convicts’ mental state and behavior. But it is highly improbable that any of these inmates will ever get such approval- either now or in 25 years. Not because psychologists, like so many people in our society, detest lifers, convinced that no punishment is too severe for them. It is simply that after 25 years of such life none of these wretches will probably be fit to lead a normal life at liberty.

“ As long as I’m alive, I will not have any of them discharged, given the condition they are in now,” said a psychologist who requested anonymity. “If released, these men will never be able to adapt to freedom. They will be left with no option but to reoffend and return here, to a familiar environment”.

Three days- and never again. The life of every new arrival begins with a kind of initiation rite: as soon as he is out of the paddy wagon, the new prisoner has to crawl to the island on his knees along a planked footway, to the barking of leashed police dogs. The ceremony is supposed to produce a psychological effect: the man has to realize once and for all where he has got to and what will happen to him should he try to escape. Given that visits by relatives- the traditional “carrot” for prisoners- are banned here, the prison administration can only resort to the “stick”: dogs, solitary confinement and clubs.

Visiting ended in 1997, following the adoption of a new Criminal Code. Prior to that, lifers could see their relations for 3 days once a year, on a par with ordinary convicts. In 1997 the lawmakers chose to deprive them even of that small joy: let them suffer for 10 years. After 10 years, provided they have a good record, lifers are granted standard security status and allowed visitors.

“Before, the prospect of seeing a family member was an incentive for an inmate,” says Vasily Smirnov, who has been working at the colony for 6 years. “In order to see their mother or girlfriend, every prisoner took care to keep out of trouble and tried to work hard. No longer.”

Lawmakers imagine they have given convicts a new incentive: if you behave for 10 years, you will get a chance to see your nearest and dearest. But 10 years is an eternity. During this time parents can die and even the most faithful of wives may not hold out for so long. I found myself agreeing with the prison psychologist: “Those who established these rules haven’t the slightest inkling of what it’s like to live in such a colony”.

Some might say that these people richly deserve it. But do we always have the right to pass such hasty judgment? Among the island colony’s 150 inmates, there is not a single hired killer. Persistent offenders who killed to rob, make up not more than 10%. Most of the men here are “domestic criminals” who killed a relative or a friend in a violent quarrel, out of jealousy or simply because they were blind drunk. True, there are some notable exceptions.

Alexander Biryukov killed an officer when doing a stint of compulsory service in the army. He says he could no longer endure molestation by his homosexual superior. That failed to impress the court, however: Murder of an army officer is punishable by death. Then, under presidential decree, he had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment and was moved to this colony.

“We knew that Alexander was not a criminal. After years of working here we have learned to understand who is who,” colony officials told me. So, when 2 years ago, his mother came to see Alexander for the last time, colony chief Alexei Rozov allowed Alexander Gutman, a St. Petersburg-based journalist, to film the meeting. The documentary was appropriately named “Three Days – and Never Again”: a 10-year separation could easily prove fatal for Biryukov’s elderly mother. When the film was shown in the colony, all women officers sobbed. As a result, a presidential decree commuted Biryukov’s life sentence to a 15-year term.

“ They’re all cutthroats!” God alone knows what goes on in the minds and souls of these people. They have no one to confide in except a fellow inmate or prison guards. Under such conditions, even the simple job of making mittens in a workshop comes as a blessing: at least they can exchange a few words with a new person. But on the whole repentance or impertinence is the convict’s own business: no one else cares about that. However, a local priest does come over sometimes. Recently, an envoy from the Patriarchate paid a visit but left minutes after he started hearing confessions, yelling: “ they’re all cutthroats to a man!” True, journalists, mostly foreign, have been showing interest of late.

Predisposition to Crime. We walk along the corridors of a maximum security wing for lifers. Heavy metal doors with peepholes for the guards. Each door has a card with the convict’s name, photo and a brief description of the crime with an entry headed “Inclined to ...”: “attack guards”, “run away”, and even “take hostages”. But most often it reads “ inclined to commit suicide”.

“I cannot take any more. It’s better to die”, convict Knyazev says, wearily surveying his cell. Several months ago Knyazev appealed to the president to have his death sentence carried out. This is uncommon: usually in their letters to all judicial authorities, including the European Court of Human Rights, convicts plead for mercy. They normally talk about their wish to die only with journalists to arouse compassion. And here, suddenly, a petition for death...

“You see, I grew up in an orphanage and never had anything I could call my own,” Knyazev explains. “Here, too, everything in this cell- the bed, the stool, the clothes- belong to the state. I have only my life to dispose of but they do not let me dispose even of my life”.

Knyazev has a point: at Institution OE-265/5suicide constitutes a serious violation of standing regulations; a suicide attempt is fraught with a spell in the cooler. However, most inmates display a striking ability to hold on. Some even try to escape. The easiest way of doing that is through a special hospital in the town of Belozersk where lifers are taken for surgery. During a course of treatment, one Neudachin sentenced for killing a taxy driver was preparing to take his doctors hostage. Luckily, the guards soon caught on. As a result, Neudachin was put on trial again, getting another 7 years in addition to his life sentence.

A Living Robot Factory. Although Neudachin’s is a special case( it is virtually impossible to escape from the island- what with an alarm system, barbed wire, 10 police dogs and the water around), prison officers are always ready for an emergency. The most difficult part is that eventually you start looking on the convicts not as criminals but as ordinary people – your acquaintances,” Smirnov says. “ But they can go off the rails at any moment.”

All precautions provided for under standing regulations are taken without fail: inmates may only leave their cells handcuffed; when going to a bath-house or to work, there must be 2 guards per inmate or 3 guards for 2 inmates. Yet even the most ingenious security system cannot make up for the fact that lifers are entirely unprepared to lead a normal life. And although the Criminal Code proclaims correction and social rehabilitation of convicts as the chief aim of our penitentiary system, in reality the Code doesn’t give them a chance. In the US the psychopath who attacked and wounded Ronald Reagan in 1983 now spends most of his time at large, gradually adapting to society from which he was shut off for nearly 20 years. But inmates at Institution OE-265/5 are slowly turning into robots who can only carry out orders and respond to nightsticks and the barking of dogs.

The colony administration is not to blame. Quite the contrary, Col. Rozov , who has been with the Interior Ministry for 30 years, tries, at his own risk, to bring at least a modicum of humanity into the convicts’ life. Inmate Ganin has become a painter: his paintings- mainly landscapes with churches on a river bank- grace the walls of every building in the colony. Former death-row inmates periodically take part in amateur shows: Mikhail Bukharov, 28, writes fairly good poetry and plays the guitar. On August, 23, the colony had “open house” with relatives coming to visit inmates in the general security section. Yet nothing the prison officials do can make up for the inherent inhumanity of the system.

Why a Pigeon Was Killed. Today the colony is expanding: a new section for lifers is being built while the existing facilities are being enlarged. This is only natural: now that capital punishment has been all but abolished life sentence is increasingly common. Laws are becoming more humane. True, everyone knows that inmates at Institution OE-265/5 had their death sentences commuted to life not only out of altruism but, above all, because Russia had joined the Council of Europe. At the same time government officials and lawmakers in Moscow sought to make the convicts’ life as unbearable as possible. Duma Speaker Gennady Seleznyov made no secret of his intention to institute penal servitude in Russia so that convicts would “every minute pray to God for death”. The prison rules for lifers, whereby they are to get less than one gram of tea leaves a day, seem to have been written by Seleznev’s peers. True, this rule is not observed at Institution OE 265/5: there inmates get 30 rubles’ worth of food a day- not a bad diet by Vologda standards with unemployment life and wages niggardly. It is another matter that an extra slice of bread cannot replace an effective system of measures to adapt the “living robots” to normal life.

On the day we arrived at the colony there was an emergency: it came to light that 2 lifers had tamed a pigeon and taught it to carry notes to their buddies in the next wing. Colony officers had to kill the pigeon- in line with standing regulations.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 2009