Jeff Sessions Is All Wrong on Halfway Houses

By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News

25 October 17

he Justice Department and its Bureau of Prisons (BOP) late last week quietly began to close halfway houses, those for-profit entities where nearly all federal prisoners go before they are permitted to go home near the formal end of their sentences. The move, which has gone largely unnoticed, means several things in the near term: fewer federal prisoners will get access to classes and programs to help them reintegrate into society, prison sentences effectively will be longer, and federal prisons will remain grossly overcrowded. An even more important point is that the Obama administration’s efforts to reform the criminal justice system are now dead under Donald Trump.

The move comes in the wake of Attorney General Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions III’s insistence that mandatory minimum sentences be lengthened and his appointment of Army General Mark Inch, the former head of U.S. military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the notorious Abu Ghraib, as the new director of the BOP.

Most Americans really don’t have a clear idea of what a halfway house is. I’ll give you a personal example. When I was released from prison in early 2015, I was assigned to report to the Hope Village halfway house in Washington, DC. Hope Village is notorious for its well-documented failures. Many of us called it “Hopeless Village” or “Abandon All Hope Village.” But the truth is that, even with its problems, it taught many soon-to-be-released prisoners valuable skills as they sought to reenter society, including how to write a resume, how to balance a checkbook, and how to get through a job interview. There were classes on parenting, suicide prevention, and domestic violence prevention. I didn’t need any those classes, but many prisoners do.

Even more crucially, all federal prisoners are eligible to spend between one and 12 months in a halfway house. Those who need more of a helping hand to become productive citizens get more time. (I got one day. Thanks a lot.) All prisoners must finish a dozen “life skills” classes, get a job, and undergo drug testing. Once they prove to their case managers that they can keep a job and follow the rules, they are sent home to be with their family, and the remainder of their sentence is converted to home confinement, with provisions to leave home to go to work, to the doctor, and to “family events” on the weekends.

The Justice Department claims that the halfway house closures will affect only underutilized facilities in small towns. That’s nonsense. The BOP already has closed the only halfway houses in cities like Dayton, Ohio, and Columbia, Missouri, cities where the venues were full of recently released prisoners.

Protestations that halfway houses are too much of a drain on the federal budget are also patently false. As I mentioned, halfway houses are for-profit entities. Again, let’s look at Hope Village as an example. Even though I never spent a single night there, I had to “rent” a bed. My rent was 25 percent of my gross pay, and I had to pay it every Friday. Hope Village makes a profit by renting the bed out to four, five, or even ten men at the same time, all but one of whom are already home. It also uses the money to fund the reentry programs I mentioned above. There is no aid coming from the Justice Department. So closing halfway houses doesn’t save the American taxpayer a single dollar. It’s just a way to keep more people locked up for longer periods of time.

If Sessions were serious about saving taxpayer money, he would instead close the BOP’s minimum-security work camps. The camps are sometimes called “Club Fed,” although I can attest that there is nothing about prison at any level that resembles a country club. With that said, camp prisoners are classified by the Justice Department as “out custody” prisoners. That means that they are free to come and go as they please so long as they do not abscond, there are no bars on the windows, the facility doors remain unlocked, and most prisoners work in town or for private contractors. If you get sick, it’s no problem. Another prisoner will drive you to the doctor’s office, drop you off, and pick you up when you’re done. It’s the honor system. Most of the prisoners there are crooked lawyers, bankers, and politicians, or drug offenders who have worked their way down from higher-custody prisons through good behavior.

My question, then, is that if your crime is so minor and you are at such a low risk of running away or of committing another crime, why are you in prison in the first place? Minimum-security camps should be closed immediately and all of the prisoners there should be sent either to halfway houses or to home confinement. It would save the government millions of dollars annually, it would reunite families, and it would put prisoners back to work when they otherwise would be drains on the federal system.

This isn’t a very complicated issue. There’s a clear-cut right way and a clear-cut wrong way to reform the system. Unfortunately, Jeff Sessions is wrong. He’s clearly and obviously wrong. His wrongness is more than just stubbornness or ideology. His wrongness is breaking up families and contributing mightily to criminal recidivism. If somebody is getting out of prison, which nearly every federal prisoner eventually will, and he has no education, no job training, and no life skills, he’s going to do the only thing he knows how to do. He’s going to commit crimes again. The next time it’ll be on Jeff Sessions.

John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act - a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Here's What Happened Among Republicans a Few Hours After Jeff Flake's Speech

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

25 October 17

Specifically, among those seeking reelection.

ou would have thought that Senator Jeff Flake would have basked a little longer in the applause he got for scarpering out of the Senate before he got around to the business of emptying his words of any significant meaning they ever had. Instead, Flake—along with fellow brave truth-tellers Bob Corker, Ben Sasse and, significantly, John McCain—joined with every other Republican (including Mike Pence, The Great Tiebreaker) to arrange for the screwing of countless Americans and their families.

In the dead of Tuesday night, with the applause still ringing in his ears, Flake voted to strip the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau of a rule that allowed Americans to file class-action suits against banks rather than being forced into an arbitration process that generally is as rigged as a North Korean election. From The Los Angeles Times:

The rule was unveiled in July by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and praised by Democrats and consumer advocates as giving average people more power to fight industry abuses, such as Wells Fargo & Co.’s creation of millions of unauthorized accounts. But banking lobbyists argued that the rule would unleash a flood of class-action lawsuits, and that the cost of fighting those suits would be passed on to consumers. Republicans quickly moved to repeal the regulation.

You have to love their timing, too. This move comes hard on the heels of the Equifax calamity, and just as the Congress is shilling for a massive upward shift in the country’s wealth that is disguised as a “middle-class tax cut.” Further, it proves that our political system learned absolutely nothing from what happened in 2008, when the masters of the universe nearly blew up the entire world economy.

Set to take effect in March, the rule would not have banned clauses in checking account, credit card and other banking agreements that say disputes between companies and customers must be dealt with privately or in small claims court. Instead, there would have been a ban on provisions that block consumers from banding together to bring class-action cases. The CFPB argued that such cases help hold banks accountable. The determinations of an arbitrator are binding and consumer advocates say most decisions favor the company. The private proceedings also allow banks to deal with individual problems quietly rather than address widespread abuses. George Slover, senior policy counsel for Consumers Union, said the vote “means that big financial companies can lock the courthouse doors and prevent consumers who’ve been mistreated from joining together to seek the relief they deserve under the law.”

You know who’s going to get hosed now, Senator McCain? All those veterans and military families that you’re always so tender about. You know who’s going to take it in the ear, Senators Corker, Flake, and Sasse? All those middle-class people in all those little towns that you spend most of your time praising as the reservoir of Real American Values. None of those people mattered a damn to you Tuesday night, and it wasn’t the president* that forced you to make this vote. You did it with cold deliberation and calculated forethought.

And it’s not as though we don’t already know how stacked a deck the mandatory arbitration process is.

For years, Wells Fargo used arbitration clauses to block lawsuits from customers who alleged that unauthorized accounts had been opened in their names. Ultimately, the bank estimated that as many as 3.5 million such accounts were opened.

Just gaze in awe. Wells Fargo opened three-and-a-half million unauthorized accounts in the names of actual customers. To hell with a class action suit, these people should have been keelhauled under the Staten Island Ferry for a year. Now, though, Wells Fargo and the other banks, and their armies of lobbyists, have choked off the most effective way through which the people so swindled could get some form of justice.

Three-and-a-half million phony accounts. More than twice as many phony accounts as there are actual people living in the borough of Manhattan, wherein Wall Street lies. A little more than three times as many actual people as live in Boston, where Wells Fargo has its headquarters. And the U.S. Senate, an otherwise torpid beast unable to get anything done, bestirs itself to make sure that these swindlers never are called to a proper account. The vice president stays up past his usual bedtime just to make sure. Tell me again who the real owners of the country are.