US: Record Numbers of Incarcerated Mothers

Tonya Drake, 35, a mother of four, had no criminal record or history of drug use when she was sentenced to 10 years in prison at the Dublin Federal Penitentiary in Northern California, for mailing a package that contained 232 grams of crack cocaine. 

Πηγή: Truthout
By Gina McGalliard
Jan 27 2012

It is well known that the United States imprisons a higher percentage of its population than any other industrialized country. And while it is true that the prison population is predominantly male, the number of female prisoners has risen more than 800 percent in the last three decades, outpacing the approximate 400 percent increase in the male prison population during the same time period.And according to the Institute on Women and Criminal Justice report "Hard Hit: The Growth in the Imprisonment of Women, 1977-2004," in 1977, the United States imprisoned ten out of every 100,000 women , while in 2004 that number had increased to 64 out of 100,000. And because women tend to be caretakers, particularly of children, the effect their incarceration often has on families can be disastrous.

The Roots of Mass Incarceration

"The rise of what we now know as mass incarceration happened on the heels of the civil rights movement and the various liberation movements in the U.S.," says Vikki Law, author of "Resistance Behind Bars: the Struggles of Incarcerated Women." Lower-income communities began to be policed more heavily as a way to prevent people from getting organized, says Law. The war on drugs had kicked into gear by 1982, which "wasn't focused across the board on everybody," says Law. "There were specific images, like the black mother on crack and crack babies."

Because women tend to be nonviolent offenders, a large factor in the increase has been the popularity of mandatory minimum drug laws, which were seen as a tough-on-crime measure during the war on drugs.

"The Rockefeller drug laws mandated that first-time offenders for drugs got mandatory sentences," says Law. "Which meant that if you were, say, in a car with your boyfriend who happened to have two to four ounces of narcotic drugs, you could be charged and sentenced to 25 years to life even if it was a first-time offense." Minority urban women were disproportionately affected by these draconian laws, as more affluent white women tended to have greater access to drug treatment centers and better legal representation.

Furthermore, because women are usually low-level players in drug deals, they often don't have information they could use to negotiate a plea deal, says Executive Director Georgia Lerner of the Women's Prison Association, an advocacy organization devoted to helping women who are or have been in prison. "It's never the queen pin, it's the king pin."

Poverty is also a factor in the rise of women being imprisoned, because people sometimes resort to criminalized means to make ends meet. "In the 1990's [there were] a lot of cuts to social welfare programs," says Law. "So you suddenly see that [what] would keep a family of three - say a single parent with two children - afloat in terms of welfare and aid to families and dependent children and food stamps and housing benefits, are suddenly getting slashed." Women in prison are also more likely not to have completed high school, which undoubtedly has an effect on their ability to provide food, rent and basic necessities for themselves and their children. Also, Law noted that many women were thrown off of the welfare rolls during the Clinton administration's welfare reform, and there was a marked correlation between women being removed from the welfare rolls and the scores of women entering prison.

"Much of what we know about women's pathways into crime has to do with earlier trauma, has to do with mental illness, addiction, relationships, so they're often involved in crime through the relationships they have with men," says Lerner. "And poverty is a big driver for plenty of women, so they're committing little crimes over and over again." For the drug addict or petty dealer who was trying to make extra money to pay rent, says Lerner, going to prison fails to address the underlying factors that led to incarceration in the first place.

The percentage of women incarcerated varies from state to state, with Oklahoma being the highest (129 out of 100,000 women) and Massachusetts and Rhode Island being the lowest (11 out of 100,000 women). Two-thirds of female inmates are convicted of nonviolent offenses and nonviolent offenders are more likely to have children. Nonviolent offenders are also the ones most likely to end up in a vicious cycle of reimprisonment.

"People who commit violent crimes are locked up longer and are less likely to reoffend," says Lerner. "People who commit nonviolent drug and property crimes tend to go in and out [of prison] over and over, because if it's addiction or economic issues driving the crime, it does not get solved, it only gets exacerbated by people being removed from the community."

Many people are also unable to afford legal help when arrested, which increases their odds of ending up behind bars. "There's a big difference between having a private attorney who can represent you and having publicly appointed counsel," says Lerner, who also noted that defendants who are able to make bail are statistically less likely to end up convicted. People of color are overrepresented in poverty-stricken communities, says Lerner, which are usually also neighborhoods where high schools tend to have high dropout rates and children are likely to enter kindergarten unprepared. In this we see how education, or lack of it, can affect a child's chances of ending up in prison as an adult: high school graduates are 70 to 75 percent less likely to end up involved in the criminal justice system.

Mothers Behind Bars

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report "Parents in Prison and Their Minor Children," the number of children under 18 with a mother in prison grew 131 percent between 1991 and 2007, when approximately 65,600 mothers were incarcerated. Mothers are more likely than fathers to be their children's primary caretaker and to be single parents, so the mother's incarceration inevitably disrupts the lives of their children, as they must then be cared for by someone else.

"A lot of women who end up in prison were already single parents at the time of their incarceration, [so] they might not have strong family ties," says Law. "A lot of women who are in prison have histories of abuse, either childhood and/or adult abuse, which means they might not have the same connections and trust in their families that men who end up in prison do. So their children are actually five times more likely to end up in foster care than [those of] men in prison."

During the Clinton administration, the Federal Adoption and Safe Families Act was put into place, which was intended to free children from foster care for adoption if the child had been in foster care for 15 of the past 22 months. Unfortunately, this had the effect of permanently separating children from incarcerated mothers, whose parental rights were mandated to be terminated irrevocably after 15 months. Even if the mother was able to show she was able to care and provide for the child upon release, says Law, there was simply no way to get her child back. Eleven percent of mothers in prison report their children being placed in foster care, while 42 percent reported the child's grandmother as being the primary caretaker during her stay in prison.

Even in the majority of cases where a family member or friend is able to care for the child (very few fathers assume full-time care while a mother is in prison), this still may involve changing schools or neighborhoods and disrupting the child's life, and the absence of the mother while in prison inevitably causes anguish.

"No matter what their mother did - they could have seen their mother selling drugs or working as a prostitute in front of them - it does not matter, children love their mothers; they are attached to their mothers; it is pretty devastating to break that bond even if logic tells us that this person could not possibly be an appropriate parent," says Lerner.

In Search of a New Life

Prisons, as opposed to being places where people can be rehabilitated in the hope of establishing law-abiding lives and becoming productive members of society, are typically warehouses to store people until their time has been served. Furthermore, in these cash-strapped times, budget cuts often mean slashing what few services exist, such as educational, drug treatment or mental health programs.

"In Colorado now, they're actually cutting their educational and vocational courses from something like a few months to eight-week sessions," says Law. "Even though studies have shown that education is the number one factor in whether or not somebody goes back to prison." And because higher numbers of men tend to be violent offenders who pose more of a risk to society, it will often be decided that resources and programs will be given to men's rather than women's prisons. Nowadays, ironically, squeezed state budgets may mean fewer people end up behind bars, as states simply can't afford to house as many people as they used to.

Other states may be rethinking their approach of using incarceration as an all-purpose solution to social ills and instead are using alternative methods to deal with problems such as drug addiction. "In New York, our incarceration has gone down significantly and a lot of that is because much of the population in the state prisons was coming from New York City and so much of the crime being sentenced to state prisons was drug related," says Lerner. New York now has several specialty narcotics prosecutors and drug courts and a large network of drug treatment and services that work to offer alternatives to incarceration, says Lerner. Judges are more willing to use these measures than incarceration because people who complete treatment are less likely to end up back in the criminal justice system.

Once released, women face many barriers to rebuilding their lives. A job can be difficult to obtain with a prison record, and even though it is technically illegal to discriminate unless the crime was directly related to the work being performed, the criminal background checks many employers routinely do often mean former inmates have trouble finding legitimate work. Other obstacles exist as well. For instance, in the state of New York, says Law, women with prison records are not qualified to live in public housing.

"About half of the women who enter prison have not completed high school and about half have not had a legal job within the last year," says Lerner. "So when they come out of prison, they probably still have not completed a high school equivalency diploma and they haven't gained any job training or work experience in most cases." In one odd New York case, women had the option of training to be hairdressers or barbers in prison, but then the state had a regulation against obtaining a barber's license if one had a prior criminal conviction, and parole regulations prevented the women from moving to another state.

"Corrections budgets have become a huge part of state budgets," says Lerner. "[It's] crazy because corrections was created to remove people from community ... not to be a school, a doctor's office, a mental health clinic, a drug treatment provider and a job training center." Unfortunately, this is what the prison population often needs in order to become law-abiding and contributing members of society, says Lerner. "If prisons are going to do a good job of preventing people from coming back, they need to figure out how to make those things available. It's certainly not what they were created for and we're asking a lot of the system."

Ultimately, as we look at the numbers of Americans being incarcerated, we have to ask ourselves if prisons in their current state are making society safer or less so, even though many may label measures to reintegrate prisoners back into society as being "soft on crime."

"There has to be a belief that people who enter prison can come out of prison being better," says Lerner. "That's a change. It's not something we've asked people to think about."

Beyond Guantánamo, a Web of Prisons for Terrorism Inmates

The federal prison in Florence, Colo., has long held terrorists. The justice system has absorbed a surge of terrorism cases since 2001 without the international criticism that Guantánamo Bay has attracted.

Πηγή: New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

Dec 10 2011

WASHINGTON — It is the other Guantánamo, an archipelago of federal prisons that stretches across the country, hidden away on back roads. Today, it houses far more men convicted in terrorism cases than the shrunken population of the prison in Cuba that has generated so much debate.

An aggressive prosecution strategy, aimed at prevention as much as punishment, has sent away scores of people. They serve long sentences, often in restrictive, Muslim-majority units, under intensive monitoring by prison officers. Their world is spare.

Among them is Ismail Royer, serving 20 years for helping friends go to an extremist training camp in Pakistan. In a letter from the highest-security prison in the United States, Mr. Royer describes his remarkable neighbors at twice-a-week outdoor exercise sessions, each prisoner alone in his own wire cage under the Colorado sky. “That’s really the only interaction I have with other inmates,” he wrote from the federal Supermax, 100 miles south of Denver.

There is Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, Mr. Royer wrote. Terry Nichols, who conspired to blow up the Oklahoma City federal building. Ahmed Ressam, the would-be “millennium bomber,” who plotted to attack Los Angeles International Airport. And Eric Rudolph, who bombed abortion clinics and the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.

In recent weeks, Congress has reignited an old debate, with some arguing that only military justice is appropriate for terrorist suspects. But military tribunals have proved excruciatingly slow and imprisonment at Guantánamo hugely costly — $800,000 per inmate a year, compared with $25,000 in federal prison.

The criminal justice system, meanwhile, has absorbed the surge of terrorism cases since 2001 without calamity, and without the international criticism that Guantánamo has attracted for holding prisoners without trial. A decade after the Sept. 11 attacks, an examination of how the prisons have handled the challenge of extremist violence reveals some striking facts:

Big numbers. Today, 171 prisoners remain at Guantánamo. As of Oct. 1, the federal Bureau of Prisons reported that it was holding 362 people convicted in terrorism-related cases, 269 with what the bureau calls a connection to international terrorism — up from just 50 in 2000. An additional 93 inmates have a connection to domestic terrorism.

Lengthy sentences. Terrorists who plotted to massacre Americans are likely to die in prison. Faisal Shahzad, who tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square in 2010, is serving a sentence of life without parole at the Supermax, as are Zacarias Moussaoui, a Qaeda operative arrested in 2001, and Mr. Reid, the shoe bomber, among others. But many inmates whose conduct fell far short of outright terrorism are serving sentences of a decade or more, the result of a calculated prevention strategy to sideline radicals well before they could initiate deadly plots.

Special units. Since 2006, the Bureau of Prisons has moved many of those convicted in terrorism cases to two special units that severely restrict visits and phone calls. But in creating what are Muslim-dominated units, prison officials have inadvertently fostered a sense of solidarity and defiance, and set off a long-running legal dispute over limits on group prayer. Officials have warned in court filings about the danger of radicalization, but the Bureau of Prisons has nothing comparable to the deradicalization programs instituted in many countries.

Quiet releases. More than 300 prisoners have completed their sentences and been freed since 2001. Their convictions involved not outright violence but “material support” for a terrorist group; financial or document fraud; weapons violations; and a range of other crimes. About half are foreign citizens and were deported; the Americans have blended into communities around the country, refusing news media interviews and avoiding attention.

Rare recidivism. By contrast with the record at Guantánamo, where the Defense Department says that about 25 percent of those released are known or suspected of subsequently joining militant groups, it appears extraordinarily rare for the federal prison inmates with past terrorist ties to plot violence after their release. The government keeps a close eye on them: prison intelligence officers report regularly to the Justice Department on visitors, letters and phone calls of inmates linked to terrorism. Before the prisoners are freed, F.B.I. agents typically interview them, and probation officers track them for years.

Both the Obama administration and Republicans in Congress often cite the threat of homegrown terrorism. But the Bureau of Prisons has proven remarkably resistant to outside scrutiny of the inmates it houses, who might offer a unique window on the problem.

In 2009, a group of scholars proposed interviewing people imprisoned in terrorism cases about how they took that path. The Department of Homeland Security approved the proposal and offered financing. But the Bureau of Prisons refused to grant access, saying the project would require too much staff time.

“There’s a huge national debate about how dangerous these people are,” said Gary LaFree, director of a national terrorism study center at the University of Maryland, who was lead author of the proposal. “I just think, as a citizen, somebody ought to be studying this.”

The Bureau of Prisons would not make any officials available for an interview with The New York Times, and wardens at three prisons refused to permit a reporter to visit inmates. But e-mails and letters from inmates give a rare, if narrow, look at their hidden world.

Paying the Price

Consider the case of Randall Todd Royer, 38, a Missouri-born Muslim convert who goes by Ismail. Before 9/11, he was a young Islamic activist with the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim American Society, meeting with members of Congress and visiting the Clinton White House.

Today he is nearly eight years into a 20-year prison sentence. He pleaded guilty in 2004 to helping several American friends go to a training camp for Lashkar-e-Taiba, an extremist group fighting Indian rule in Kashmir. The organization was later designated a terrorist group by the United States — and is blamed for the Mumbai massacre in 2008 — but prosecutors maintained in 2004 that the friends intended to go on to Afghanistan and fight American troops alongside the Taliban.

Mr. Royer had fought briefly with the Bosnian Muslims against their Serbian neighbors in the mid-1990s, when NATO, too, backed the Bosnians. He trained at a Lashkar-e-Taiba camp himself. And in 2001, he was stopped by Virginia police with an AK-47 and ammunition in his car.

But he adamantly denies that he would ever scheme to kill Americans, and there is no evidence that he did so. Before sentencing, he wrote the judge a 30-page letter admitting, “I crossed the line and, in my ignorance and phenomenally poor judgment, broke the law.” In grand jury testimony, he expressed regret about not objecting during a meeting, just after the Sept. 11 attacks, in which his friends discussed joining the Taliban.

“Unfortunately, I didn’t come out and clearly say that’s not what any of us should be about,” he said.

Prosecutors call Mr. Royer “an inveterate liar“ in court papers in another case, asserting that he has given contradictory accounts of the meeting after Sept. 11. Mr. Royer says he has been truthful.

Whatever the facts, he is paying the price. His 20-year sentence was the statutory minimum under a 2004 plea deal he reluctantly took, fearing that a trial might end in a life term. His wife divorced him and remarried; he has seen his four young children only through glass since 2006, when the Bureau of Prisons moved him to a restrictive new unit in Indiana for inmates with the terrorism label. After an altercation with another inmate who he said was bullying others, he was moved in 2010 to the Supermax in Colorado.

He is barred from using e-mail and permitted only three 15-minute phone calls a month — recently increased from two, a move that Mr. Royer hopes may portend his being moved to a prison closer to his children. His letters are reflective, sometimes self-critical, frequently dropping allusions to his omnivorous reading. His flirtation with violent Islam and his incarceration, he says, have not poisoned him against his own country.

“You asked what I think of the U.S.; that is an extraordinarily complex question,” Mr. Royer wrote in one letter consisting of 27 pages of neat handwriting. “I can say I was born in Missouri, I love that land and its people, I love the Mississippi, I love my family and my cousins, I love my Germanic ethnic heritage and people, I love the English language, I love the American people — my people.

“He said he believed some American foreign policy positions had been “needlessly antagonistic” but added, “Nothing the U.S. did justified the 9/11 attacks.”

Mr. Royer rejected the notion that the United States was at war with Islam. “Conflict between the U.S. and Muslims is neither inevitable nor beneficial or in anyone’s interest,” he wrote. “Actually, I suppose it is in the interest of fanatics on both sides, but their interests run counter to everyone else’s.” He added an erudite footnote: “ ‘Les extrémités se touchent’ (the extremes meet) — Blaise Pascal.”

He expressed frustration that the Bureau of Prisons appears to view him as an extremist, despite what he describes as his campaign against extremism in discussions with other inmates and prison sermons at Friday Prayer, “which they surely have recordings of.”

“I have gotten into vehement debates, not to mention civil conversations, with other inmates from the day I was arrested until today, about the dangers and evils of extremism and terrorism,” Mr. Royer wrote in a yearlong correspondence with a reporter. “Can they not figure out who I am?”

A Scorched-Earth Approach

In 2004, prosecutors believed they knew who Mr. Royer was: one of a group of young Virginians under the influence of a radical cleric, Ali al-Timimi, whose members played paintball to practice for jihad and were on a path toward extremist violence. After Sept. 11, federal prosecutors took a scorched-earth approach to any crime with even a hint of a terrorism connection, and judges and juries went along.

In the Virginia jihad case, for instance, prosecutors used the Neutrality Act, a little-used law dating to 1794 that prohibits Americans from fighting against a nation at peace with the United States. Prosecutors combined that law with weapons statutes that impose a mandatory minimum sentence in a strategy to get the longest prison terms, with breaks for some defendants who cooperated, said Paul J. McNulty, then the United States attorney overseeing the case.

“We were doing all we could to prevent the next attack,” Mr. McNulty said.

“It was a deterrence strategy and a show of strength,” said Karen J. Greenberg, a law professor at Fordham University who has overseen the most thorough independent analysis of terrorism prosecutions. “The attitude of the government was: Every step you take toward terrorism, no matter how small, will be punished severely.”

About 40 percent of terrorism cases since the Sept. 11 attacks have relied on informants, by the count of the Center on Law and Security at New York University, which Ms. Greenberg headed until earlier this year. In such cases, the F.B.I. has trolled for radicals and then tested whether they were willing to plot mayhem — again, a pre-emptive strategy intended to ferret out potential terrorists. But in some cases prosecutors have been accused of overreaching.

Yassin M. Aref, for instance, was a Kurdish immigrant from Iraq and the imam of an Albany mosque when he agreed to serve as witness to a loan between an acquaintance and another man, actually an informant posing as a supporter of a Pakistani terrorist group, Jaish-e-Muhammad. The ostensible purpose of the loan was to buy a missile to kill the Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations. Mr. Aref’s involvement was peripheral — but he was convicted of conspiring to aid a terrorist group and got a 15-year sentence.

That was a typical punishment, according to the Center on Law and Security, which has studied the issue. Of 204 people charged with what it calls serious jihadist crimes since the Sept. 11 attacks, 87 percent were convicted and got an average sentence of 14 years, according to a September report from the center.

Federal officials say the government’s zero-tolerance approach to any conduct touching on terrorism is an important reason there has been no repeat of Sept. 11. Lengthy sentences for marginal offenders have been criticized by some rights advocates as deeply unfair — but they have sent an unmistakable message to young men drawn to the rhetoric of violent jihad.

The strategy has also sent scores of Muslim men to federal prisons.

Special Units

After news reports in 2006 that three men imprisoned in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing had sent letters to a Spanish terrorist cell, the Bureau of Prisons created two special wards, called Communication Management Units, or C.M.U.’s. The units, which opened at federal prisons in Terre Haute, Ind., in 2006 and Marion, Ill., in 2008, have set off litigation and controversy, chiefly because critics say they impose especially restrictive rules on Muslim inmates, who are in the majority.

“The C.M.U.’s? You mean the Muslim Management Units?” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The units currently hold about 80 inmates. The rules for visitors — who are allowed no physical contact with inmates — and the strict monitoring of mail, e-mail and phone calls are intended both to prevent inmates from radicalizing others and to rule out plotting from behind bars.

A Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman, Traci L. Billingsley, said in an e-mail that the units were not created for any religious group but were “necessary to ensure the safety, security and orderly operation of correctional facilities, and protection of the public.”

An unintended consequence of creating the C.M.U.’s is a continuing conflict between Muslim inmates and guards, mainly over the inmates’ demand for collective prayer beyond the authorized hourlong group prayer on Fridays. The clash is described in hundreds of pages of court filings in a lawsuit. In one affidavit, a prison official in Terre Haute describes “signs of radicalization” in the unit, saying one inmate’s language showed “defiance to authority, and a sense of being incarcerated because of Islam.”

One 2010 written protest obtained by The New York Times, listing grievances ranging from the no-contact visiting rules to guards “mocking, disrespecting and disrupting” Friday Prayer, was signed by 17 Muslim prisoners in the Terre Haute Communication Management Unit. They included members of the so-called Virginia jihad case of which Mr. Royer was part; the Lackawanna Six, Buffalo-area Yemeni Americans who traveled to a Qaeda camp in Afghanistan; Kevin James, who formed a radical Muslim group in prison and plotted to attack military facilities in Los Angeles; and John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban.

An affidavit signed by Mr. Lindh, who is serving 20 years after admitting to fighting for the Taliban, complained that a correctional officer greeted male Muslim inmates with “Good morning, ladies.” (“No ladies were in the area,” Mr. Lindh writes.) Prison officials say in court papers that Mr. Lindh has repeatedly challenged guards and violated rules.

Unlike those at the Supermax, inmates in the segregated units have access to e-mail, and some were willing to answer questions. Mr. Lindh, whose father, Frank Lindh, said his son believed the news media falsely labeled him a terrorist, was not. In reply to a reporter’s letter requesting an interview, he sent only a photocopy of the sole of a tennis shoe. Since shoe bottoms are considered offensive in many cultures, his answer appeared to be an emphatic no.

There is some evidence that the Bureau of Prisons has assigned Muslims with no clear terrorist connection to the C.M.U.’s. Avon Twitty, a Muslim who spent 27 years in prison for a 1982 street murder, was sent to the Terre Haute unit in 2007. When he challenged the assignment, he was told in writing that he was a “member of an international terrorist organization,” though no organization was named and there appears to be no public evidence for the assertion.

Mr. Twitty, working for a home improvement company and teaching at a Washington mosque since his release in January, said he believed the real reason was to quash his complaints about what he believed were miscalculations of time off for good behavior for numerous inmates. “They had to shut me up,” he said.

Another former inmate at the Marion C.M.U., Andy Stepanian, an animal rights activist, said a guard once told him he was “a balancer” — a non-Muslim placed in the unit to rebut claims of religious bias. Mr. Stepanian said the creation of the predominantly Muslim units could backfire, adding to the feeling that Islam is under attack.

“I think it’s a fair assessment that these men will leave with a more intensified belief that the U.S. is at war with Islam,” said Mr. Stepanian, 33, who now works for a Princeton publisher. “The place reeked of it,” he said, describing clashes over restrictions on prayer and some guards’ hostility to Islam.

Yet Mr. Stepanian also said he found the “family atmosphere” and camaraderie of inmates at the unit a welcome change from the threatening tone of his previous medium-security prison, where he said prisoners without a gang to protect them were “food for the sharks.” When he arrived at the C.M.U., he said, he found on his bed a pair of shower slippers and a bag of non-animal-based food that Muslim inmates had collected after hearing a vegan was joining the unit.

He was wary. “I thought they were trying to indoctrinate me,” he said. “They never tried.” The consensus of the inmates, he said, “was that 9/11 was not Islam.” “These guys were not lunatics,” he said. “They wanted to be back with their families.”

Reflection

It may be too early to judge recidivism for those imprisoned in terrorism cases after Sept. 11; those who are already out are mostly defendants whose crimes were less serious or who cooperated with the authorities. Justice Department officials and outside experts could identify only a handful of cases in which released inmates had been rearrested, a rate of relapse far below that for most federal inmates or for Guantánamo releases.

For example, Mohammed Mansour Jabarah, a Kuwaiti Canadian who plotted with Al Qaeda to attack American embassies in Singapore and Manila, pleaded guilty in 2002 and began to work as an F.B.I. informant. But F.B.I. agents soon discovered he was secretly plotting to kill them — and he was sentenced to life in prison.

Nearly all of these ex-convicts, however, lie low and steer clear of militancy, often under the watchful eye of family, mosque and community, lawyers and advocates say. A dozen former inmates declined to be interviewed, saying that to be associated publicly with a terrorism case could derail new jobs and lives. As for Mr. Royer, he is approaching only the midpoint of his 20-year sentence.

Did he get what he deserved? Chris Heffelfinger, a terrorism analyst and author of “Radical Islam in America,” did a detailed study of the Virginia jihad case, and concluded that Mr. Royer’s sentence was perhaps double what his crime merited. But he said the prosecution was warranted and probably prevented at least some of the men Mr. Royer assisted from joining the Taliban.

“I think a strong law enforcement response to cases like this is appropriate nine times out of 10,” Mr. Heffelfinger said. Mr. Royer himself, in his long presentencing letter to Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, said he understood why he had been arrested. “I realize that the government has a legitimate interest in protecting the public from terrorism,” he wrote, “and that in this post-9/11 environment, it must take all reasonable precautions.”

Today, Mr. Royer’s only battle is to serve out his sentence in a less restrictive prison nearer his children. In what he called in a letter “a heroic sacrifice,” his parents, Ray and Nancy Royer, moved from Missouri to Virginia to be close to their son’s children, now aged 8 to 12.

“I found it necessary to be a surrogate father,” said Ray Royer, 70, a commercial photographer by trade, in an interview at the retirement community outside Washington where he and his wife now live. When his son, who still goes by Randy in the family, converted to Islam at the age of 18, his parents did not object. Later, when he headed to Bosnia, they chalked it up to his active social conscience. “Religion is a personal thing,” the elder Mr. Royer said. “He’d never been in trouble.”

Ray Royer was at his son’s Virginia apartment in 2003 when the F.B.I. knocked at 5 a.m., put him in handcuffs and took him away. Now, years later, he alternates between defending his son and expressing dismay at what Randy got himself into.

“He did help his buddies get to L.E.T.,” or Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani militant group later designated as a terrorist organization. “He admitted to it. He should pay the price.” Still, he added, “maybe he deserved five years or so. Not 20.”

Ray Royer sat at his home computer one recent evening, looking through a folder called “Randy Pics” — photographs tracing his son’s life from childhood, to fatherhood, to prison.

“He loved his family,” the father said of his son. “Why would he put this cause ahead of his family? I still don’t really know what happened. I’m still trying to figure it out.”

Alleged CIA prisons in Europe to be discussed Council of Europe session

Πηγή: News PL
Oct 3 2011


On Saturday, the Council of Europe's Commissioner for Human Rights, Thomas Hammarberg told Poland’s TVP public broadcaster that,” It is clear that Poland hosted secret CIA prisons between December 2002 and September 2003. We know who was held there and what interrogation methods were used. They can be described as torture.”

Poland's president during the period under investigation, Aleksander Kwasniewski has repeatedly denied the existence of any such CIA prison.

Meanwhile, the assembly will consider a further report that reaffirms that torture is an inadmissible violation of human rights.

The report nevertheless argues that some other human rights may be suspended in the so-called “war on terrorism.”