Problems with Probation and Parole

In an outstanding series, "Law and Disorder," Doug Pardue and Glenn Smith of The Post and Courier examine South Carolina's broken probation and parole system. They engage, and probably enrage, readers by describing horrific crimes committed by repeat offenders. But the causes of the system's failures also should enrage. Here's an excerpt from a series of bullet points:

--The state lacks enough probation and parole agents to oversee more than 48,000 criminals. This load leaves some agents with more than 170 criminals to keep up with, more than double the recommended national average.

--Agents often don't have key resources necessary to do their jobs. In Spartanburg County, 20 agents must share just six cars to cover an 819-square-mile area with some 3,200 offenders. In Richland County, front-line agents recently had to turn in their state cell phones because there was no money to pay for them.

--Judges, faced with swollen dockets and overcrowded prisons, often allow probation violators to remain free instead of putting them behind bars. Between 2003 and 2007, fewer than half of the 64,970 criminals arrested for violating the terms of their release had their probation revoked by a judge.

About 20 states have abolished parole in one way or another, with varying success.

http://www.charleston.net/news/special_reports/parole/

Broken Trusts

In January we highlighted a Boston Globe story, "Courts Strip Elders of Their Independence," produced by eight Northeastern University students overseen by journalism professor Walter V. Robinson. Five of Robinson's students have created another excellent Globe report, "Trusts for Mentally Retarded Neglected."

The Client Trust Funds were created in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the best of intentions. At the time, the state's Department of Mental Retardation was shifting patients from state institutions to group homes, making them eligible for Medicaid.

Legislation was enacted to protect the modest assets many of them had accumulated from being used to pay for medical care. The statute created trust funds that were to be spent for their other needs. In each case, a bank trustee oversees the investments and a personal trustee, almost always a relative, is responsible for spending the funds.

The Globe conducted examinations of records in 123 trust funds that had many years of financial filings. Of the 123, there were only 15 cases in which the personal trustee regularly spent funds for the care and comfort of the mentally retarded relative. In 55 cases, there was no evidence that any funds had ever been spent.

In fact, little of the estimated $30 million in the accounts is ever spent on the patients' behalf.

Instead, the money has been siphoned off for bank management charges and legal bills. And for fees charged by the Massachusetts Probate and Family Court system, which has long neglected its obligation to ensure the funds are expended for the benefit of some of the state's most helpless citizens.

boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/08/31/trusts_for_mentally_retarded_neglected

Gutting out Gustav

Bravo to the staff of the New Orleans Times-Picayune and all the other journalists who braved Hurricane Gustav to continue reporting the news. Although the Times-Picayune couldn't turn out a paper edition because of Gustav, it kept publishing hurricane stories, photos, videos, and blogs on its nola.com Web site. In "Gustav Spares New Orleans Area, but Reveals Vulnerability," Mike Nolan describes the storm at its most ferocious:

At the height of the storm, a station in Grand Isle reported a gust of 117 mph; a Weatherbug instrument recorded a gust of 107 mph at Ft. Beauregard Marina in Ycloskey in lower St. Bernard Parish. And a Jefferson Parish School Board instrument in Marrero recorded a gust of 68 mph.

Gustav's winds demolished a church in LaPlace, stripped siding off City Hall in Westwego and dropped tree branches all over the area. But the storm but did far less damage than it portended earlier in the week.

More significantly, the storm did not drive a surge of water into vulnerable West Bank neighborhoods, which were fully exposed to coastal flooding by Gustav's driving south winds. www.nola.com/hurricane/

The Times-Picayune's Chris Kirkham meanwhile was blogging all day and night from a shrimp boat riding out the storm south of New Orleans. Here he shares what it was like on the boat:

Winds gusting up to 100 miles per hour have rousted captain Ronald "Jug" Dufrene from his slumber in the depths of the "Mister Jug," still tied firmly to the shoreline in Jean Lafitte.

Driving rains are uprooting shingles, mini-tornadoes are forming on the bayou, and Dufrene finally admits, "It's getting nasty." www.nola.com/hurricane/index.ssf/kirkhamshrimpboat/

Over at the Biloxi Sun Herald, Anita Lee and Melissa Scallan's "Hammered" is a terrific example of a roundup story that clearly presents the important facts despite difficult conditions. www.sunherald.com/pageone/story/784119.html

Any other storm coverage that you recommend? Let us know at newsgems@sbcglobal.net

Marching on Meds

"The Battle Within" by David Olinger and Erin Emery of The Denver Post reveals that the Army is deploying injured troops to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, at times overruling doctors' classifications of soldiers as "nondeployable." This helps the Army meet its personnel quotas, but it creates additional risks for injured troops and their comrades. Here's the lede.

In the weeks before Christmas last year, a brigade of battle-bruised soldiers left Colorado's Fort Carson for its third round of war in Iraq.

Sgt. Colin Barton was getting Botox shots in his forehead to kill the relentless pain from a brain injury. Army doctors said he should not wear a helmet — a safety requirement for the flight to Iraq. The Army sent him anyway.

Sgt. Joshua Rackley, recovering from his eighth knee surgery, was classified as permanently injured. The Army sent him anyway.

Master Sgt. Denny Nelson and Sgt. Joseph Smith didn't have time to recover from predeployment surgeries. Nelson hobbled with crutches; Smith wore a post-surgical boot. Sgt. Tim Graham brought a sleep-apnea machine. Sgt. 1st Class Walter Overton had a shoulder injury and couldn't lift his gear. Spec. Joseph Leon was popping morphine pills to dull the nerve damage to his groin.

The Army sent them too.

Olinger and Emery buttress these soldiers' stories with some disturbing numbers.

Defense Department records obtained by The Denver Post through a Freedom of Information Act request show that spending for some pain medication, antidepressants, sleeping pills and even an epilepsy medicine used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder and brain injuries has grown by 62 percent to 400 percent since the Iraq war began.

Those records are bolstered by military mental-health surveys indicating that nearly 20,000 soldiers — more than 12 percent of the fighting force — have taken antidepressants or prescription sleeping pills in the war zones.

http://www.denverpost.com/thebattlewithin

The Courageous Kid

It's not often that we feature stories about funerals on News Gems, but Mike White's "Funeral for a Teen Whose Bravery Touched So Many" in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette grabbed my heart. White does an amazing job of using simple words to richly describe the service for 18-year-old John Challis, whose positive attitude while battling liver cancer inspired many people.  ESPN had already done a story on how John, gravely ill from his disease, had smacked a single in his only time at the plate for his high school baseball team. But what impresses me the most about White's story is how he honestly shares his own emotions, as he does in this scene:

John's parents had asked Joe Signore, a close friend of the family, to eulogize their son, but during his speech, Mr. Signore revealed that John also had asked him, before his parents did.

But John had made Mr. Signore promise he would do one thing at the funeral. Mr. Signore asked John's younger sister, Lexie, and his mother and father to leave their first-row pew and come to the front of the church.

"Lexie, Gina, Scott. John made me promise to do this," he said. "He told me that you had gotten so many people to applaud him. Now it's your turn."

At once, everyone rose and gave the Challises a standing ovation. The applause was loud. So was the crying throughout the church. Lexie cried profusely. Tears filled my eyes, too.

White then goes on to retell how he first came to admire John while writing about him:

In almost 30 years of covering high school sports for the Post-Gazette, I have had scores of parents call in wanting coverage for their child or team or to complain about a lack of coverage. But on a night in late June, I got a parent call like no other.

"Mike, neither the doctors or me think John will make it more than another week," Scott Challis said. "We want you to be the one to write John's obituary. Will you?"

John Challis affected many from different walks of life, including me. I had never met John before I wrote a story about him for the first Sunday in May. I have interviewed thousands of high school athletes, but I have never cried interviewing one -- like I did that day with John. Our photographer, Matt Freed, also cried while making a video of the interview for the Internet. John cried, too, when he asked me if I had any kids and I told him I had three sons.

Here is White's original story about Challis: www.post-gazette.com/pg/08125/878966-85.stm 

A big thanks to Matt Presser for suggesting these stories.

Back to Burma

Remember how Cyclone Nargis devastated much of Burma (Myanmar) in early May, killing perhaps more than one hundred thousand people? The story has disappeared from the headlines because few American journalists have ventured into the totalitarian country since the storm. George Packer is one of those who has returned. His "Drowning: Can the Burmese People Rescue Themselves?" in the August 25 issue of The New Yorker describes Burma's condition since the cyclone with brilliant detail. Here he watches the relief efforts of a brave woman, Hnin Se:

By the time we returned to the pagoda, the rain was coming down in torrents. The world beyond the village had disappeared. Hnin Se had told me that, through her relief work in the delta, she had learned how few of her countrymen knew that they had any rights, even the right to complain. The Burmese people were even further from being free than she had imagined. But at least one thing was achieved. Beyond Rangoon, the violence of the September events had been only a rumor among the vast numbers of poor people; the criminal aftermath of the cyclone was something that they saw for themselves. “When I was younger, I hoped and waited for outside help to come to our country and liberate it,” she said. “Now I realize that we have to rely on ourselves.”

A crowd of women and children had gathered outside the pagoda, clutching plastic bags. Two men in Hnin Se’s group opened the sacks of rice and poured their contents onto a sheltered walkway outside the pagoda, making a great white mound. A young monk stood with a megaphone and called out the name of each of the three hundred and eighty-five surviving families. There were far too many people to take cover beneath the shelter, and the villagers stood in the rain, shivering under umbrellas, pieces of plastic, and straw hats, waiting for their turn to step forward and receive three scoops of rice and a piece of clothing from Hnin Se.

Throughout this story, Packer does a great job of interspersing facts about Burma's history and politics with descriptions like the one about that help us see the country's despair. www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/08/25/080825fa_fact_packer

Hurricane Warning

As Hurricane Gustav strengthens and heads toward the Gulf of Mexico, "New Orleans Repeating Deadly Levee Mistakes" by AP's Cain Burdeau raises alarming issues.

Signs are emerging that history is repeating itself in the Big Easy, still healing from Katrina: People have forgotten a lesson from four decades ago and believe once again that the federal government is constructing a levee system they can prosper behind.

In a yearlong review of levee work here, The Associated Press has tracked a pattern of public misperception, political jockeying and legal fighting, along with economic and engineering miscalculations since Katrina, that threaten to make New Orleans the scene of another devastating flood.

Dozens of interviews with engineers, historians, policymakers and flood zone residents confirmed many have not learned from public policy mistakes made after Hurricane Betsy in 1965, which set the stage for Katrina; many mistakes are being repeated.

"People forget, but they cannot afford to forget," said Windell Curole, a Louisiana hurricane and levee expert. "If you believe you can't flood, that's when you increase the risk of flooding. In New Orleans, I don't think they talk about the risk."

At the bottom of the page there's a link to the Army Corps of Engineers' attractive Web site on projects to protect New Orleans from hurricanes.

http://blog.nola.com/updates/2008/08/new_orleans_repeating_deadly_l.html

Two Fighters

I like columnists who go out of their way to do their own original reporting. Few do it better than the Los Angeles Times' Steve Lopez, who has a knack for finding compelling stories in places far from the corridors of power. For this column about Olympic boxer Shawn Estrada, he visited the hospital room of Estrada's father, Juan, as his family tries valiantly to find a way for him to watch his son fight for a medal on television:

All day Friday, hospital administrators tried to wire the hospital for cable, so that if he was conscious and well enough, Juan could watch his son's fight live on CNBC just after midnight. When the cable hookup failed, Time Warner technicians spent hours setting up a wireless connection so the family could watch the fight on a laptop.

But as midnight approaches, CNBC is streaming everything online except boxing. How could this happen? After cheering him on for years, Shawn's family is going to miss the biggest fight of his life.

Juan's wife, Sandy, and daughters Emma, Sonia and Ursula begin calling relatives with Plan B. Maybe someone at home could record snippets of the fight on cellphone video and send the images along, so Juan can at least catch a glimpse of his son.

If that doesn't work, maybe someone can hold a cell up to a TV at home and someone can put a cellphone on speaker at the hospital, so Juan can at least hear the announcer call his son's fight.

I don't want to give it away, but the end of this column is tremendously moving. www.latimes.com/news/la-me-lopez17-2008aug17,0,617191.column?track=ntothtml

Failing the Mentally Ill

"Broken Trust" by Eileen Kelley and Dan Horn of The Cincinnati Enquirer shows how city and state inspection systems designed to protect mentally ill nursing home residents broke down at two facilities.

Cincinnati police Officer Aaron Layton was hunting for a suspect in February when he went room to room inside the Westside Health Care Center. He didn't find his suspect, but he was stunned by what he saw.

Conditions inside the nursing home so alarmed Layton that he got a search warrant and returned 16 days later with dozens of police and city and state inspectors. They described conditions worse than a crack house: Soiled mattresses. Vomit in the hall. Toilets that wouldn't flush. Sinks with no hot water. Rooms infested with roaches and flies. Pipes held together with shoestrings. Fire doors tied shut.

Investigators discovered that nurses' aides gave the mentally ill patients who lived there medicine the aides could not identify. Drugs were stored in unlabeled bottles. Even a basic first-aid kit was nowhere to be found….

An Enquirer investigation found that for at least five years, annual inspections had failed to turn up problems near the magnitude of the health and safety hazards cited by police.

Year after year since at least 2003, inspectors with the Ohio Department of Health and Cincinnati Health Department approved the facilities after management promised to fix problems. State and city inspectors seemed poised to approve the facilities again this year until Layton sounded the alarm.

The story links to city and state inspection reports.

news.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080822/NEWS01/808240301

Fun with Politics and God

As we head into the convention season, two Web sites are covering politics in fun ways. PolitiFact.com, sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly, checks the accuracy of statements made in the presidential candidates' speeches and advertisements as well as videos and e-mails circulating the Web. A "Truth-O-Meter" ranks each statement from "True" to "Pants on Fire." For example a McCain statement that Obama plans to raise taxes on electricity is rated as "barely true" because Obama once said in an interview that he would rather tax "dirty" energy sources such as coal than cleaner sources such as wind.  Edited by Times D.C. Bureau Chief Bill Adair, PolitiFact reflects the work of four other editors, 18 researchers and 27 writers. www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/

Beliefnet's "God-o-Meter" blog uses a similar concept. Edited by Beliefnet Political Editor Dan Gilgoff, it rates the emphasis that Obama and McCain are putting on religion in their campaigns. Like the "Truth-O-Meter," it's a clever way to present information that might otherwise seem dry. http://blog.beliefnet.com/godometer/

Are there any political sites or stories you recommend? If so, leave us a comment.

Empty Classrooms

In 2001-2005, Milwaukee Public Schools spent $102 million building new classrooms, science labs and libraries to revamp neighborhood schools and thus reduce the costs of busing by convincing parents to choose nearby schools. In an excellent series, "Subtraction by Addition," Dave Umhoefer and Alan J. Borsuk of the Journal Sentinel examine the results.

A massive building expansion by Milwaukee Public Schools has saddled the district with tens of millions of dollars worth of vacant or severely underused school additions, a Journal Sentinel investigation found….

The Journal Sentinel found that enrollment has dropped at nearly half the schools that added classrooms under the building program. Interest payments will push the final cost past $175 million by 2024 because most of the money was borrowed….

The Journal Sentinel visited every school that built or leased additions, conducting the first comprehensive review of the program approved by the School Board in 2000.

Reporters found that excess classrooms had been converted to storage, detention areas, recreation rooms, small-scale special education classes and teacher's lounges -- if they were used at all.

Test scores have fallen sharply at many of the schools, while busing costs have risen.

http://www.jsonline.com/index/index.aspx?id=326

Asking Tough Questions

On July 17 in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, 11-year-old Lakeisha White was struck and killed by an unmarked patrol car driven by Sheriff’s Detective Ron Killings. Local police said it appears that Lakeisha darted out in front of Killings, but on August 3 Daily News Journal columnist Jimmy Hart raised questions about the investigation.

… a DNJ reporter spoke to at least two witnesses who, on the record, gave varying accounts of a bottle being disposed of by Killings.

Other media reported similar accounts. Police, however, have said they found no such evidence.

We now stand more than two weeks removed from the July 17 incident, and Lakeisha's aunt, Kim Coleman, told The DNJ this week that she still hasn't been contacted by police.

On August 6 Mark Bell of The Daily News Journal picked up the story.

Suspicion now surrounds the investigation into the death of 11-year-old Lakeisha White following the Murfreesboro police chief’s admission Tuesday that investigators "erred" by not immediately collecting a bottle of alcohol found at the scene.

Police said Tuesday that bottle belonged to Rutherford County Sheriff’s Detective Sgt. Ron Killings, the driver of the unmarked patrol car that struck and killed the Hopkinsville, Ky., girl on Bradyville Pike around 8:45 p.m. on July 17.

The Daily News Journal's editors have continued to question the handling of the case, and the Rutherford County District Attorney has requested that the Tennessee Highway Patrol take over the investigation.

dnj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080803/OPINION02/808030332

dnj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080806/NEWS01/808060330

dnj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080807/OPINION01/808070307/1014/OPINION

dnj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080818/NEWS06/80818025

More Description Stars

A big thanks to everyone who responded to Thursday's News Gems post about the best describers in American newspapers with suggestions of more great writers. (And our apologies to everyone who tried to leave a comment but couldn't; we're working on getting the comment function fixed). Here are some of the nominations we received from our readers:

Rosemary Parrillo recommends Amy Ellis Nutt, who works with her at The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J. Parrillo says "Nutt uses exceptional descriptive writing and analogies to elucidate some of the most complex issues in science today." The following passage is from the third story in a science series called "Picturing the Past":

He had looked through the photographs on the computer one by one and still remembered little. Not the walk through the winding streets of this medieval university town, or the restaurants where they'd eaten, or the wooden boats floating down the river Cam.

It had all taken place just a couple of weeks earlier, but the Alzheimer's patient had barely a shadow of a memory.

Gradually, though, some of the images stirred a feeling of remembrance, a few fragments here and there. And then one of the images stirred something else. It was a photograph taken inside King's College Chapel, showing its soaring, 80-foot-high ceiling, with the densely latticed fan vaults bathed in the warm butterscotch light of a winter afternoon.

The Alzheimer's patient remembered something, and what he remembered was a thought, as ephemeral as the sunshine momentarily caught in the ceiling's stony web.

"This should be one of the Seven Wonders of the World," he said to the doctor by his side.

A 500-year-old chapel, a photograph, a fleeting thought -- somewhere deep in the dying folds of the man's brain, bits of memory spilled out like presents from an attic closet: the walk, the restaurant, lunch with his doctor. The memory was still there. http://blog.nj.com/ledgerarchives/2007/12/snapshots_of_memory_saved_in_a.html

Tim Henderson is a fan of Nicholas Spangler at the Miami Herald. In this scene from "A Great Place for Special K Lovers to Wait," Spangler is waiting with fellow reporter Hussein Kadhim at a military base in Iraq:  

We sat on metal chairs in an air-conditioned trailer with fake wood paneling on the walls and a dozen bored soldiers around us. A security officer nixed our efforts to record this glimpse of reality on film for the folks back home: No photographs are permitted in the waiting room, he said.

Hussein immediately began to read a months-old article about self-esteem in Self magazine.

The dinginess of the place, and the drowsiness, made it feel like an out-of-the-way Trailways bus station, except that everybody was carrying an assault rifle and there were free snacks.

Before you get to thinking how good American fighting men and women have it in Iraq, realize that there was only one variety of snack: Special K cereal in one-portion plastic cups. There was an infinite supply of these, along with napkins and tiny plastic spoons, but no milk. www.miamiherald.com/news/world/story/635768.html

The Los Angeles Times' Joe Mozingo also received a nomination. At the start of "In His Old South Los Angeles Neighborhood, Big Mike's the Man," Mozingo introduces us to Michael Cummings, a former gangbanger who is now a Pentecostal minister, tow-truck driver and peacemaker: 

Big Mike hitches up in front of Jordan High School in Watts like a bull snuffling for trouble.

He scans the stoops down Juniper Street. He peers in the windows of passing cars. And he keeps a firm eye on the three chain-link gates of the Jordan Downs housing project down the block. ...

Cummings is a tow-truck driver, Pentecostal pastor and former Grape Street Crip. He is as imposing as a defensive tackle and wields absolute respect in the neighborhood where he grew up. Parents adore him. Gangbangers listen to him.

No one messes with Big Mike. www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-bigmike28-2008jun28,0,6347758.story

Tony C. Yang nominates the work of his former mentor at the Chicago Tribune, James Janega, who has a knack for reporting from places few people go. In this passage from "Underwater, a Disturbing New World," Janega describes the bottom of Lake Michigan, where invasive species are taking over: 

The changes are easy to see. From 20 deep feet of water out to 40 feet or more, mussels cover the lake floor in a crunching layer as brittle as breakfast cereal. On their shells fronds of algae wave in the water, forming a carpet the lush green of a tropical forest. Darting sand-colored gobies complete the picture.

The Tribune makes readers pay for stories after 30 days, but when this one's no longer available you can do a search of Janega's name for more good work. www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/green/chi-great-lakes-invasives_30jul30,0,5835308.story

Do you know of other masters of description out there? Send your nominations to newsgems@sbcglobal.net.

Mortgage Fraud

On August 12 we featured a Miami Herald investigation into Medicare fraud in South Florida. Today we'd like to highlight another Miami Herald series, "Borrowers Betrayed," on how Florida became the national leader in mortgage fraud.

The series, written by Jack Dolan, Rob Barry and Matthew Haggman, reveals that from 2000 to 2007 Florida allowed more than 10,000 people with criminal histories to work in the mortgage business. As mortgage fraud soared, the state let crooked brokers stay in business. Here's an example.

When state regulators showed up at Samantha Johnson's mortgage company, she had already stolen her first house.

She had forged documents to fleece lenders. She had skimmed money off a customer's loan. She had lied to conceal 19 questionable mortgages.

Florida regulators caught all of that, but they didn't revoke her license or call for a criminal investigation.

Instead, they fined her $4,300 -- less than the commission on a single mortgage -- and made her promise to stop breaking the law.

Case closed.

Back on the prowl, Johnson went on to steal $2.5 million in loans and nine more homes -- including one from a recently widowed, disabled Vietnam veteran and another from a blind, 79-year old woman with Alzheimer's disease….

Though agents for Florida's Office of Financial Regulation had the power to stop Johnson anytime, they didn't revoke her license until after a judge had thrown her in jail.

http://www.miamiherald.com/static/multimedia/news/mortgage/

The Battle for Georgia

"Georgia Soldiers, Civilians Break Down on Road to Battle," by Megan K. Stack of the Los Angeles Times, is a gritty report that brings us face to face with Georgian troops as they are overwhelmed by Russian air assaults. Stack wastes few words as she uses a camera-over-the-shoulder approach to bring the conflict into focus.

The Georgian soldier sprawled facedown in the ditch, so still that he looked dead at first glance. Skinny arms folded over his head, mouth in the dirt, combat boots braced against the earth. He was cowering at the side of the road in South Ossetia, frozen in place.

Russian jets, wheeling overhead, had just bombed the road, a hot explosion that sent chunks of dirt and broken pavement showering down. The soldier picked up his head. He looked young and underfed, fevered eyes gleaming in a pinched face.

"Please, no run," he said miserably in bad English. He nodded toward the ground at his side and raised his eyes heavenward. "It's Russian MIG."

latimes.com/news/nationworld/columnone/la-fg-road12-2008aug12,0,3055036.story