JOHN & CAROLYN

 

 

JUDICIAL JACKASSES

 

VS.

 

JOHN & CAROLYN

 

 

PUNISHMENT FOR THE SAKE OF PUNISHMENT

 

 

Carolyn and John met in rather unusual circumstances.  They are both highly educated teachers; both deserving of a life far better than their situation dictated.  They were teachers in the same facility.  Upon meeting they were almost instantly mutually attracted to one another.  Over a period of time that attraction secretly grew to mental affection and a desire to better their lives together in the future. 

 

What John and Carolyn had together was a forbidden love.  Not sexual, not even physical.  Strictly mentally with stolen conversations only of their dreams of a future.   This ‘future’ was to begin May 28, 2008 with the anticipated release of John from James Hamilton Correction Center in Hodgen, Oklahoma.  A minimum security prison.

 

Serving an extremely long sentence [30 years] for a  non-violent paper crime in which no one was injured, threatened, cheated or lost any property or money. 

 

A thirty year sentence is somewhat of an extreme sentence for such a crime for which John had been convicted:  “Possession of forged instruments of debt.”     A group of honorable individuals petitioned honorable officials to look into the sentence that is six times longer than those levied on some drug traffickers and some other crimes of violence such as physical assault.  John is one of the most docile non-violent human beings one would ever meet.  In other civilized countries the punishment would range from a fine to as much as 3 years in prison.

 

All arrangements had been made; John was scheduled to be transported to Duncan where his ten-fold excessively long sentence was to be modified to “time served.”   John had received the information from his attorney via a phone call late afternoon May 24, 2008 confirming the ‘official’ scheduled date of the decision to modify John’s sentence and order his release to freedom. 

 

John & Carolyn’s dreams of a future would begin to materialize in a matter of days.  Four days, to be exact.  John was ecstatic.   Bursting inside.  He called this writer.  He called as many of his friends as he could.  His actions, though not seen by this writer, remind me of a little kid on a road trip getting a full bladder and no place to stop to pee.  In that scenario, of course, when a child has to pee he has to pee. It being Saturday, John could hold his information until Monday morning when Carolyn came back to work her teaching job.  But knowing she too, was anxious for the news and would likewise be ecstatic, his bursting emotions temporarily reigned control over his usual stoic patience: 

 

John called an authorized # from a prison phone to let Carolyn know the good news.

 

An “incident” report was filed by officer/phone monitor Ms. Hethering, Monday morning, just three days before John was to be released a free man to fulfill his . . . and Carolyn’s . . . dreams of a future together far better than the existence indigenous to prisons they were both forced to endure.  “On the above date [5/24/08] … monitored a call from John …. I believe the voice I heard was a female staff member, … Both parties expressed love for each other.  I believe it could be [Carolyn] in the Educational Department.”   

 

John was immediately arrested and thrown in a solitary “Segregated Housing Unit” and stripped of all of his privileges and rights.

 

Carolyn was fired. 

 

“JUST” punishment for the most normal act of two adults dreaming of better lives?   How can the Department of Corrections correct that?

 

I called Chuck Kirkpatrick, John DuBiel’s Case Manager to ask about the ‘street’ charge John was facing.  Mr. Kirkpatrick stated he did not know if there was more than one that was to be filed.  John was being held “Pending Investigation” and that John was not allowed phone calls but was allowed to send and receive correspondence. 

 

Unbeknownst to me at that time, to expedite matters John had already pled guilty to Unauthorized Use of a Telephone and for his punishment was thus considered a “Security Risk” pending an ordered transfer to another yard [prison] of higher security.  

 

I received two mails back from the prison I had addressed to John.

 

One was marked “Unauthorized Legal Mail” and it contained the completed chapter of a book written by me; two jokes from the internet (with the URL deleted) and two news articles from the Associated Press.  Also was a personal letter of my rambling about some of my foster kids.

 

No “legal” mail of any kind.

 

The other I had mailed earlier consisted of my “rough draft” of the chapter from my [“G” rated] book AND a photo taken 44 years ago of my daughter, 4 at the time, holding a rather large [but harmless] snake and on that page was written the question, “Have I ever told you about the “Deadly Water Moccasin incident?” or words to that effect and nothing else.

 

This one was returned as “Unauthorized Correspondence.”

 

As I find it difficult to comprehend John committing any kind of criminal act I had contacted the Le Flore County Court House to learn that no charges have been filed against John DuBiel.  A minor infringement of Prison policy, perhaps, but no criminal act. 

 

I also wrote the Warden, Mr. Bruce Howard concerning the mail issue.  I received the nastiest letter I have ever received from ANY official implying the most derogatory of accusations suggesting I have a mentality lower than any type of human I have ever knowingly met that has violated any or all of the verboten moral codes of Leviticus!  By association the “Birds of a feather” factor ‘taints’ John as well. 

 

I exposed this issue to Justin Jones, Director of D.O.C. including copies of all correspondence to show Mr. Howard’s ‘innuendos’ totally without merit.   I also faxed copies to John’s attorney that he may be advised. 

 

To date, seven weeks later, John is still in SHU, mail extremely restricted as even the slightest communication pertaining to any legal matter is censored, selected news media pertaining to public issues is censored, and John has still NOT been allowed to talk with his attorney. 

 

And John has been denied at least one correspondence labeled “Unauthorized Legal Mail” as it contained a few paragraphs copied from a document not pertaining to either John or I but my observations of the grammar of the document and how it could have been improved. 

 

Time in SHU for “investigation” is rarely in excess of 29 days.  Time in SHU beyond 29 days is commonly reserved for aggressive violent and dangerous offenders.  The “investigation” was culminated with John’s guilty plea to the unauthorized use of a telephone, his only ‘crime.’  No one was harmed or injured in any way.  Except by the Warden who fired  one of the best teachers James Hamilton has ever had for her ‘crime’ of answering a telephone and carrying on a short but pleasant normal conversation!

 

Makes me afraid to pick up my telephone when it rings.  I might be charged with a crime and fired!  Oh, I can’t be fired.  I’m retired. 

 

John does not acknowledge all of my mail.  Of course, I am sure he gets it, of that I have been assured and it would appear that I do not receive all of his mail to me.  Probably gets lost in the mail.  That happens a lot.

 

John certainly is not being punished by keeping him in segregation because I ‘blew the whistle’ to Director of D.O.C. Justin Jones.  It would certainly be ludicrous of me to suspect that John is being tormented in SHU because there are no beds available in any of the other 31 prisons in Oklahoma with its proud record of having the forth highest per capita of prisoners in the country.  Highest women prison population per capita in the world!  Surely I can’t suspect John is being punished by cutting off his funds by my being told not to send him any money when he is broke.

 

We need to punish these violent offenders like John to protect society.  They should not be released lest they become productive citizens contributing to the betterment of the welfare of all citizens.  John would undoubtedly earn an income that would make my military disability retirement seem at the poverty level by comparison.

 

I am not a bleeding heart.  Most inmates should remain inmates.  We have inmates who are not able to rehabilitate.   A word that has no meaning to those who have only a desire to punish.  Some, it is futile to try.  But John has been rehabilitated years ago.  Continued cruel punishment makes no more sense than beating a dead horse.  There is no benefit in any desire to punish.  Particularly this docile prisoner. 

 

One harmless phone call.  Childish exuberating news he can’t wait to tell to those he loves.  Especially the one he hopes to spend the rest of his life with.  We need to destroy that hope because we have the power to do so and keep him in prison.  Who gives a damn about a convict, anyway.

 

Me, for one.  Also any other who sees that this man simply ‘tripped’ and needs a helping hand up.  Mr. Howard would cut those helping hands off.  Help this man, in his 60s, get relief from this excessively cruel punishment for being a bit over excited at his scheduled release.  He is an asset where he remains only to those who hold the key to his cage.  He is their income.  What better inmate to keep caged than one who is in his 60s, docile and non-violent?

 

To all else in society he is a liability when he would have become an asset last May had ‘Security’ and Mr. Howard not made a mountain out of an ant hill as an excuse to punish.  A productive member of society anyone would be proud to have as a friend.

 

This author and friend of John & Carolyn will help all he can to right this violation of the foundation of every civilized religion in the world from ancient Taoism to modern Christianity. 

 

Is our John Dubiel, 238816 an isolated case?

 

From a struggling organization whose goal is the rehabilitation and reintegrating of errants back into society as productive members,

                

[Citizens United {for the} Rehabilitation {of} Errants]:

 

U.S. prison population dwarfs that of other nations

Wednesday, April 23, 2008 12:36 PM

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/23/america/23prison.php

 

U.S. prison population dwarfs that of other nations

By Adam Liptak

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes ? from writing bad checks to using drugs ? that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China's extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)

San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner.

The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England's rate is 151; Germany's is 88; and Japan's is 63.

The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

There is little question that the high incarceration rate here has helped drive down crime, though there is debate about how much.

Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America's extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges ? many of whom are elected, another American anomaly ? yield to populist demands for tough justice.

Whatever the reason, the gap between American justice and that of the rest of the world is enormous and growing.

It used to be that Europeans came to the United States to study its prison systems. They came away impressed.

"In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States," Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in "Democracy in America."

No more.

"Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror," James Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. "Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons."

Prison sentences here have become "vastly harsher than in any other country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared," Michael Tonry, a leading authority on crime policy, wrote in "The Handbook of Crime and Punishment."

Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States "a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach."

The spike in American incarceration rates is quite recent. From 1925 to 1975, the rate remained stable, around 110 people in prison per 100,000 people. It shot up with the movement to get tough on crime in the late 1970s. (These numbers exclude people held in jails, as comprehensive information on prisoners held in state and local jails was not collected until relatively recently.)

The nation's relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of people in American prisons.

"The assault rate in New York and London is not that much different," said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group. "But if you look at the murder rate, particularly with firearms, it's much higher."

Despite the recent decline in the murder rate in the United States, it is still about four times that of many nations in Western Europe.

But that is only a partial explanation. The United States, in fact, has relatively low rates of nonviolent crime. It has lower burglary and robbery rates than Australia, Canada and England.

People who commit nonviolent crimes in the rest of the world are less likely to receive prison time and certainly less likely to receive long sentences. The United States is, for instance, the only advanced country that incarcerates people for minor property crimes like passing bad checks, Whitman wrote.

Efforts to combat illegal drugs play a major role in explaining long prison sentences in the United States as well. In 1980, there were about 40,000 people in American jails and prisons for drug crimes. These days, there are almost 500,000.

Those figures have drawn contempt from European critics. "The U.S. pursues the war on drugs with an ignorant fanaticism," said Stern of King's College.

Many American prosecutors, on the other hand, say that locking up people involved in the drug trade is imperative, as it helps thwart demand for illegal drugs and drives down other kinds of crime. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, for instance, has fought hard to prevent the early release of people in federal prison on crack cocaine offenses, saying that many of them "are among the most serious and violent offenders."

Still, it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes American prison policy. Indeed, the mere number of sentences imposed here would not place the United States at the top of the incarceration lists. If lists were compiled based on annual admissions to prison per capita, several European countries would outpace the United States. But American prison stays are much longer, so the total incarceration rate is higher.

Burglars in the United States serve an average of 16 months in prison, according to Mauer, compared with 5 months in Canada and 7 months in England.

Many specialists dismissed race as an important distinguishing factor in the American prison rate. It is true that blacks are much more likely to be imprisoned than other groups in the United States, but that is not a particularly distinctive phenomenon. Minorities in Canada, Britain and Australia are also disproportionately represented in those nation's prisons, and the ratios are similar to or larger than those in the United States.

Some scholars have found that English-speaking nations have higher prison rates.

"Although it is not at all clear what it is about Anglo-Saxon culture that makes predominantly English-speaking countries especially punitive, they are," Tonry wrote last year in "Crime, Punishment and Politics in Comparative Perspective."

"It could be related to economies that are more capitalistic and political cultures that are less social democratic than those of most European countries," Tonry wrote. "Or it could have something to do with the Protestant religions with strong Calvinist overtones that were long influential."

The American character ? self-reliant, independent, judgmental ? also plays a role.

"America is a comparatively tough place, which puts a strong emphasis on individual responsibility," Whitman of Yale wrote. "That attitude has shown up in the American criminal justice of the last 30 years."

French-speaking countries, by contrast, have "comparatively mild penal policies," Tonry wrote.

Of course, sentencing policies within the United States are not monolithic, and national comparisons can be misleading.

"Minnesota looks more like Sweden than like Texas," said Mauer of the Sentencing Project. (Sweden imprisons about 80 people per 100,000 of population; Minnesota, about 300; and Texas, almost 1,000. Maine has the lowest incarceration rate in the United States, at 273; and Louisiana the highest, at 1,138.)

Whatever the reasons, there is little dispute that America's exceptional incarceration rate has had an impact on crime.

"As one might expect, a good case can be made that fewer Americans are now being victimized" thanks to the tougher crime policies, Paul Cassell, an authority on sentencing and a former federal judge, wrote in The Stanford Law Review.

From 1981 to 1996, according to Justice Department statistics, the risk of punishment rose in the United States and fell in England. The crime rates predictably moved in the opposite directions, falling in the United States and rising in England.

"These figures," Cassell wrote, "should give one pause before too quickly concluding that European sentences are appropriate."

Other commentators were more definitive. "The simple truth is that imprisonment works," wrote Kent Scheidegger and Michael Rushford of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in The Stanford Law and Policy Review. "Locking up criminals for longer periods reduces the level of crime. The benefits of doing so far offset the costs."

There is a counterexample, however, to the north. "Rises and falls in Canada's crime rate have closely paralleled America's for 40 years," Tonry wrote last year. "But its imprisonment rate has remained stable."

Several specialists here and abroad pointed to a surprising explanation for the high incarceration rate in the United States: democracy.

Most state court judges and prosecutors in the United States are elected and are therefore sensitive to a public that is, according to opinion polls, generally in favor of tough crime policies. In the rest of the world, criminal justice professionals tend to be civil servants who are insulated from popular demands for tough sentencing.

Whitman, who has studied Tocqueville's work on American penitentiaries, was asked what accounted for America's booming prison population.

 

An observation from our caged John Dubiel:

“I’m thinking ------

                                        The way they treat people for innocent feelings – cutting normal communications and disrupting making future plans – Is it any wonder they breed contempt for the powers that be, and have such a high recidivism rate?  I think not.”

                                            -JVD