about half of prisoners receive no personal visits from outside prison

Prisoners’ personal communication with persons outside of prison vary greatly.  About half of prisoners receive across their whole spell of incarceration no personal visits from persons living in the outside world.[1]  In Florida, prisoners who receive visits receive on average about one visit per month.  In Minnesota, prisoners who receive visits receive on average about three visits per month.  Compared to Florida prisons, Minnesota prisons are closer to the major cities where most prisoners originally lived.[2]  The lower travel costs of visiting prisoners in Minnesota is consistent with its higher visiting frequency among prisoners who receive visits.

Immediate family don’t predominate among prisoners’ visitors.  Spouses and significant others accounts for a much smaller share of visitors than do parents and friends.  Troubled personal and social relations often contribute to motivating the criminal acts that cause persons to be incarcerated.  Identifying persons who will maintain personal contact with a prisoner isn’t a simple matter of standard relational designations.  Friends account for a considerable share of personal visits to prisoners.

Despite the public importance of the criminal justice system and the extraordinarily high prevalence of incarceration in the U.S., community groups show relatively little personal engagement with prisoners.  Clergy, mentors, and other professionals account for less than 5% of visits that prisoners receive.[3]  Given high public concern about crime and the importance of prisoners’ contact with the outside world in lessening recidivism, much more civic engagement with prisoners would seem to be in the public interest.

Online video visitation can help to increase prisoners’ communication with the outside world.  Online video visitation with prisoners eliminates travel costs and lessens visit scheduling difficulties.  Online video visitation can help to increase personal contact among prisoners who have none with the outside world.  Online video visitation, by eliminating the significance of prison location, also supports more equal opportunities for prisoners to receive visits.

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Read more:

Data:

Workbook of prisoner visiting statistics for Florida and Minnesota (Excel version), extracted from Bales & Mears (2008) and Duwe & Clark (2011) .

Notes:

[1] Based on visiting data for prisoners in Minnesota and Florida.  The average spell of imprisonment in the Minnesota sample is 20 months.  The Florida data, which show that 58% of prisoners receive no visits, cover the year before release from prison.

[2] See Florida and Minnesota prisoner visiting data.  In Florida, 30% of state prisoners lived in the Miami-Dade County area, but only 5% are held there. In Minnesota, most prisons are within 100 miles of the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, where about 40% of prisoners lived. Duwe & Clark (2011) pp. 3,4.

[3] See Florida and Minnesota prisoner visiting data.

References:

Duwe, Grant, and Valerie Clark. 2011. “Blessed Be the Social Tie That Binds: The Effects of Prison Visitation on Offender Recidivism.” Criminal Justice Policy Review. Published online before print December 6, 2011, doi: 10.1177/0887403411429724

Bales, William D., and Daniel P. Mears. 2008. “Inmate Social Ties and the Transition to Society: Does Visitation Reduce Recidivism?” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency. 45 (3): 287 – 321.

misery of literary writers in the ancient Islamic world

the dream of literary writers often leads to misery

From the early Abbasid period, Arabic writers referred to the misery of literary writers.  With literary flair they used the punning phrase “hirfat al-adab.”  Hirfa meant both “profession” / “practicing a craft” and “misfortune” / “grief.” Adab meant display of verbal acuity and literary culture.  Hence “hirfat al-adab” meant both “exercising the profession of a man of letters” and “misery inherent in being a man of letters.”[1]  Intense literary status competition in the ancient Islamic world created considerable misery among literary writers.

How many are the ignorant enjoying a life of peace and joy while poverty and toil wear out the mindful.  Riches he finds among those who have no abilities, but fortune flees from those familiar with the art of the word.  (written by Nasr al-Khubzaruzzi, born in Basra, died between 929 and 942) [2]

The demand for literary talent, like that for fashionable clothes, is fickle and doesn’t readily provide material payment.[3] Well-established institutions of literary prestige limit status competition and can entrench within a society mediocre literary performances.  But seen from a different angle, those institutions give literary figures valued security of position and, in modern times, often at least a meager salary.

Writing well is hard work with relatively little reward.  That Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr have eclipsed long-form blogging isn’t surprising.

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Notes:

[1] Bonebakker (2001).  Many examples have survived from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Ibn al Sa’ati (d. 1209) wrote in verse:

I loathe poetry.  Never will I aspire to it!  I even loathe transmitting it in my writings.
I avoided composing it, not because it struck me as fearsome, but because I feared the misery of letters.

Cited and trans. id p. 152, slightly adapted above.  Writing and quoting poetry was prevalent among elites in the early Islamic world.  Bonebakker’s writings, at least in English, are far from poetical.  An academic memorial of his life observed:

In spite of his distinguished career in the New World he never fully adjusted to the American way of life and he disliked academic politics and administration; not surprisingly, he and his wife returned to the Netherlands in 1994, settling in the quiet town of Zeist, not far from Leiden.

Bonebakker was born in the Netherlands and became a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles.  Van Gelder (2006) p. 6.

[2] Cited and trans. Bonebakker (2002).

[3] No evidence exists of Geoffrey Chaucer having received payment explicitly as a poet or for his poetry from King Edward III and King Richard II in late fourteenth-century England. Green (1980) p. 6. Minstrels more readily collected material rewards than did poets:

The vocation of minstrel, if it had conferred no great prestige and commanded few lavish rewards, had at least provided its practitioner with a recognized skill for which his employers were willing to offer material encouragement; the household poet, on the other hand, practiced an avocation which he shared with his superiors, and he would have been presumptuous, but also ill-advised, to seek direct recognition for it. … Account books throughout the {European} late middle ages are full of payments to minstrels (for musical not literary services, of course), but provide little evidence of direct encouragement for writers of love poetry in England

Id. p. 127.

References:

Bonebakker, Seeger A. 2001.  “The Misery of the Men of Letters: Some Quotations from their Poetry.” Quaderni di Studi Arabi,  v. 19, 147-161.

Bonebakker, Seeger A.  2002. “Supplement: Variations on the Theme of Ḥirfat al-adab .”  Quaderni di Studi Arabi, v. 20, pp. 17-38.

Gelder, Geert Jan van. 2006. “Seeger A. Bonebakker in Memoriam.” Quaderni di Studi Arabi, Nuova Serie, v. 1, pp. 5-6.

Green, Richard Firth. 1980. Poets and princepleasers: literature and the English court in the late Middle Ages. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

paternity establishment: undue influence, misrepresentation & mis-service

Men suffer from lack of good biological paternity knowledge.  That’s not a matter of biological destiny, men’s personal faults, or men’s free choices.  Legal processes of paternity establishment support false biological paternity beliefs through undue influence, misrepresentation, and mis-service.

In high-income democratic societies, paternity is commonly established in hospitals shortly after a woman gives birth.  If the woman is married, paternity of her newly born child is legally assigned to her husband.  A husband on his own initiative could seek to have a paternity test.  However, the mother might perceive her husband’s request for a paternity test as a grave insult to her.  A husband requesting a paternity test could thus seriously endanger his relationship with his wife, irrespective of the results that such a test would provide and whatever actions a husband would take given certain knowledge of paternity or non-paternity.  Not having paternity testing as a default legal rule supports relational circumstances that unduly influence husbands to remain ignorant of true paternity knowledge.[1]

If a mother is not married, paternity is commonly established through having a man sign an acknowledgement of paternity in the hospital shortly after the mother gives birth.  Paternity testing is not a default procedure in administering acknowledgement of paternity.  An unmarried man’s relationship with a girlfriend is less legally constrained than a husband’s relationship with his wife.  But that does not necessarily imply that a relationship with a wife is less personally important to a man than a relationship with a girlfriend.  Just as for married men, requiring an unmarried man to request personally a paternity test unduly influences him to remain ignorant of true paternity knowledge.

Misrepresentation in the administration of acknowledgements of paternity also contributes to men remaining ignorant about paternity.  Child-support agencies misrepresent acknowledgement of paternity as offering a man the benefits and responsibilities of fatherhood. Signing a legal acknowledgement of paternity isn’t necessary for a man to provide emotional or financial support to a child, or more generally to act as a father to the child.  Signing an acknowledgement of paternity does nearly nothing to improve men’s highly unequal opportunities to gain physical custody and to receive child-support payments.  Legal acknowledgement of paternity, which child support agencies administer and fund, primarily serves the interests of child support agencies seeking to collect money from men.[2]

Misrepresentation in the administration of acknowledgement of paternity goes deeper than misrepresentation of interests. New York State’s Acknowledgement of Paternity form, for example, informs the man and the mother:

If you have any doubts about the child’s paternity, after reading this notice and having received oral notice, do not sign an Acknowledgment of Paternity.

In the U.S. today, about 5% of children falsely identify their biological father.  Highly accurate paternity testing can now be done easily at low cost.  With such paternity testing, a man has no reasonable basis for doubt about whether a child is his biological child.  Without such paternity testing, a man necessarily has a reasonable basis for doubt about whether a child is his biological child.  That’s simply a matter of practical reason and biological and social reality.  Without paternity testing, the Acknowledgment of Paternity form cannot fairly be presented to a man to sign, because no man should sign it.

Mis-service of legal notifications of alleged paternity and resulting default judgments create many false legal attributions of paternity.  Child-support agencies receive claims of paternity from women and serve notice of those claims to men.  A default judgment of paternity, with a child support order not correctable retroactively, is established when the man does not respond to the notice.  About the year 1999, default judgements established 68% of child support orders in California and more than 50% of child support orders in six other states.  Default judgements number in the hundreds of thousands per year.[3]  Service procedures for paternity notices help to explain why a large share of fathers subject to child support orders have paternity established through default judgments:

In California, documents in civil proceedings do not have to be delivered to the person named in the proceeding, referred to as personal service. If a complaint cannot be hand delivered to the person, “substitute” service is allowed, which essentially means that any adult can be served the summons and complaint at the residence or employment of the noncustodial parent. If that fails, service by publication is allowed, which means LCSAs {local child support agencies} can publish the notice of the complaint in the newspaper.  Substitute service and service by publication make it possible that noncustodial parents are not aware of the legal proceeding being brought against them. [4]

County of Los Angeles v. Navarro (2004) provides an example of this procedure and the false paternity establishments that it creates.  Navarro was subject to a default judgement of paternity and child support:

In March 1996, the Bureau of Family Support Operations in the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office (the County) filed a complaint to establish the paternity and child support obligations of “Manuel Nava” for two boys born in December 1995 who had been receiving public assistance. The County attempted substitute service of the complaint in May 1996 by leaving a copy at appellant’s address with “Jane Doe,” listed as “sister” and “co-tenant” and serving a copy by first class mail. … Appellant did not answer the complaint and the County took his default in July 1996. The court thereafter entered judgment establishing appellant’s paternity and ordered him to pay $247 in monthly child support. [5]

Navarro denied having ever received the notice.  He never established a relation with the two boys and consistently denied being their father.  A paternity test performed about 2001 established beyond reasonable doubt that Navarro was not in fact the boys’ father.  Los Angeles County nonetheless persisted in attempting to collect from Navarro past due and ongoing child support payments.  In this case, a courageous Court of Appeal declared:

The County, a political embodiment of its citizens and inhabitants, must always act in the public interest and for the general good. It should not enforce child support judgments it knows to be unfounded. And in particular, it should not ask the courts to assist it in doing so. Despite the Legislature’s clear directive that child support agencies not pursue mistaken child support actions, the County persists in asking that we do so. We will not sully our hands by participating in an unjust, and factually unfounded, result. We say no to the County, and we reverse. [6]

The state of California quickly sought to minimize the value of this precedent.[7]  Default judgments serve state interests in generating child-support financial obligations.[8]  Quickly establishing child-support orders, even without good information about the alleged father, is a particularly potent source of financial claims.  That’s because child-support debts cannot be retroactively expunged, even with a finding that paternity was falsely established through default judgement against a man who had no relationship with the child.[9]  Child support agencies declare paternity and order child support payments with little regard for truth and justice under law.[10]

Legal notifications of alleged paternity also misrepresent knowledge.  For example, Michael Turner, who subsequently suffered repeated incarcerations for child-support debt, began his legal ordeal by receiving a paternity notification:

The Child Support Enforcement Division (Division), pursuant to S.C. Code Ann. Section 20-7-9505 et seq., notifies you that:

1. You are the natural father of and have a duty to support and provide for the medical needs of the following child(ren)

B.L.P. [Date Of Birth Omitted]

born to Rebecca L. Price and in the custody of Rebecca L. Price. [11]

Despite its affirmative statement “You are the natural father,” the Child Support Enforcement Division did not know, either through testimony that was subject to rebuttal or through reliable technological means, that Turner was the natural father of B.L.P.  The document implicitly acknowledged that reality through a complex and intimidating description of a procedure for objecting.  Turner did not object.  Thus a misrepresentation of knowledge of biological paternity produced a legal establishment of legal paternity.  That’s the typical effect of paternity notifications to which the alleged father acquiesces.

Men, with good evolutionary and practical reasons, are keenly interested in who their biological children are.  Modern paternity testing technology can easily remove reasonable doubt about paternity and eliminate false legal attributions of paternity.  Paternity establishment practices unjustly keep men ignorant about true biological paternity.

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Notes:

[1] Being in a hospital with a mother at the time she gives birth is a emotionally potent time for securing a legal affirmation of paternity:

The man’s presence in the hospital to be with “his” baby is called the “magic moment” and the child support bureaucracy openly exploits it as the best opportunity to get a paternity acknowledgment with no questions asked.

Henry (2006) p. 59.

[2] Federal incentives to state child support agencies strength those interests.  Henry (2006) pp. 53-5.  The New York State Division of Child Enforcement trains hospital personnel in administering acknowledgement of paternity.  The Division of Child Enforcement also produces an emotionally manipulative public information brochure on paternity establishment through voluntary acknowledgement of paternity.  The brochure features images of cute babies and a father hugging his young daughter.  The brochure highlights this statement:

Every child has two parents and needs emotional and financial support from both parents — even if they never married or currently live apart.

Most fathers provide emotional and financial support to their children without being compelled to do so under law.  Legal paternity is clearly not necessary for a father to provide emotional and financial support to a child.  Moreover, public policy does not favor two-parent families over single-parent families. Public policy does, however, favor extracting money by force of law, mainly from men, under the guise of “child support.” In California family law, the local child support agency pays hospitals $10 for each acknowledgement of paternity filed with the child support agency.  See California Family Code, Section 7571(c).

[3] In California in March, 2000, 71% of child support obligors with arrears had at least one child support order established by default judgment.  About the year 2000, default judgments accounted for above 50% of child-support orders in seven states, including the states of Washington and Arizona.  Sorensen et al. (2003) Report 5-10; Henry (2006) p. 53; Legler (2003) p. 15.  Oklahoma child support agency records in 2007 suggest that 25% of paternities with child support orders are established through default judgements.  Wade (2008).  In fiscal year 2009, child-support agencies established 1.8 million paternities of children of unmarried mothers.  See U.S. Office of Child Support Enforcement, FY 2009 Annual Report to Congress, Tables 71 and 72.

[4] Sorensen et al. (2003) Report 5-10.

[5] County of Los Angeles v. Navarro, 14 Cal. Rptr. 3d 905 – Cal: Court of Appeal, 2nd Appellate Dist., 8th Div. 2004, at 906.

[6] Id at 907.  The details of the case stated above are from the court’s opinion.

[7] The Los Angeles County child-support agency petitioned the California Supreme Court to depublish the Navarro ruling so that it could not be used as precedent.  See “Court asked to ‘depublish’ child-support ruling,” Washington Times, Aug. 18, 2004.  The California Supreme Court denied that request.  Shortly thereafter the County of Fresno, California, represented by the extraordinarily formidable legal team of Bill Lockyer, {California} Attorney General, Thomas R. Yanger, {California} Assistant Attorney General, Margarita Altamirano and James Ching, Deputy Attorneys General, won a court ruling against Celestino Sanchez, Jr., who was acting as his own lawyer.  The appeals court, which state official probably carefully selected, went out of its way to disparage the Navarro ruling:

In light of this comprehensive statutory scheme for setting aside a judgment of paternity when otherwise established procedural rules would not permit relief, it must be concluded that section 7645, et seq., vitiates County of Los Angeles v. Navarro. The amorphous equitable considerations and general policies relied on in Navarro must give way to the later enacted detailed procedure.

County of Fresno v. Sanchez, 37 Cal. Rptr. 3d 192 – Cal: Court of Appeal, 5th Appellate Dist. 2005, at 195.

[8] A default judgement establishes paternity simply through an unmarried mother’s declaration to a child support agency that some man is the child’s father.  If a mother has slept with multiple men within the biological window of conception plausibly resulting in a birth, a mother may not have a reasonable basis for knowing who the child’s father is.  Child support agencies do not diligently evaluate whether a claimed father is plausibly the biological father.  Thus a man who never met a mother and lives far from her can receive an official notification that he is the father of her child.  See Welch (2004).

[9] County of Los Angeles v. James (2007), 152 Cal.App.4th 253 , 60 Cal.Rptr. 3d 880.  See also Wade (2008).

[10] Henry (2006) forcefully argues for legal reform.  Child-support agencies sponsor much research on child support.  But they don’t sponsor research like id.

[11] Turner v. Rogers, Brief of Respondent, App. 1a-6a. South Carolina Department of Social Services, Child Support Enforcement Division, Notice of Financial Responsibility and Paternity Determination, issued to Michael Turner.

References:

Henry, Ronald K. 2006. “The Innocent Third Party: Victims of Paternity Fraud.” Family Law Quarterly. 40 (1): 51.

Legler, Paul. 2003. “Low-Income Fathers and Child Support: Starting Off on the Right Track,” Final Report Prepared for Annie E. Casey Foundation, Baltimore, Maryland, Jan. 30, 2003, Policy Studies Inc.

Sorensen, Elaine, Heather Koball, Kate Pomper, and Chava Zibman. 2003. “Examining Child Support Arrears in California: The Collectibility Study,” March 2003. Urban Institute, Prepared for the California Dept. of Child Support Services.

Wade, Jarrel. 2008.  “Child support law leaves man a default dad.”  Tulsa World.  Tulsa, OK, published 10/13/2008.

Welch, Matt. 2004.  “Injustice by Default.” Reason.  Feb. 2004.

visiting prisoners reduces recidivism

Setting prisoners free is historically associated with jubilation.  In practice today, many prisoners are released to the street outside the prison at midnight.  A released prisoners has only the clothes and possessions that were on his person at the time of his incarceration.  He typically has lost his job and lost his apartment.  His driver’s license and credit cards have expired.  He may have no money other than a small amount, e.g. $20, given to him at release.  Freedom is a worthy cause for shouts of joy.  But released prisoners often encounter harrowing struggles just for the basic needs of life that they received within prison.

Relationships that prisoners maintain with persons outside prison help prisoners to secure their basic needs outside prison and to re-integrate into free, law-abiding society.  That’s not just common sense.  An high-quality quantitative analysis of 16,420 prisoners released from Minnesota prisons between 2003 and 2007 indicates that prisoners who received visits from outsiders had a lower probability of being re-imprisoned (recidivism):

Any visit reduced the risk of recidivism by 13% for felony reconvictions and 25% for technical violation revocations, which reflects the fact that visitation generally had a greater impact on revocations. The findings further showed that more frequent and recent visits were associated with a decreased risk of recidivism. [*]

Increasing opportunities for visiting prisoners is relatively inexpensive compared to the cost of imprisonment.  Hence increasing communication between prisoners and the outside world is not merely just and merciful, but also cost-effective.

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[*] Duwe and Clark (2011) p. 19.  Randomized experiments with prisoner communication liberalization would help control for unobserved prisoner social characteristics in estimating the marginal effects of visitation.  Duwe (2012) illustrates use of randomized experiments.  More generally, Duwe and Clark (2011) has the typical weaknesses of most current empirical social-science scholarship published in scholarly journals .  It reports results of a statistical model (Cox proportional hazard model), but doesn’t report tests of the statistical validity of that model.  It doesn’t provide the underlying dataset online for replication and validation of the reported results and for further analysis.  It provides only a standard table of descriptive statistics and doesn’t advance broad understanding of the data.  With widely available scholarship no longer constrained to 20-30 pages of paper, social science can become much more scientifically credible and intellectually interesting.

References:

Duwe, Grant, and Valerie Clark. 2011. “Blessed Be the Social Tie That Binds: The Effects of Prison Visitation on Offender Recidivism.” Criminal Justice Policy Review. Published online before print December 6, 2011, doi: 10.1177/0887403411429724

Duwe, Grant.  2012.  “Evaluating the Minnesota Comprehensive Offender Reentry Plan (MCORP): Results from a Randomized Experiment.” Justice Quarterly, 29:3, 347-383