Word: prisoners
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Poor Thomas Capano. On the same day last week on which Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan, under pressure from the Pope, decided to commute the sentence of a convicted killer from death to life in prison, a jury voted to send Capano--a convicted killer in his own right--to Delaware's death...
...that seem ridiculously disproportionate to their crimes. Consider Douglas Gray, a husband, father, Vietnam veteran and owner of a roofing business who bought a pound of marijuana in an Alabama motel for $900 several years ago. The seller turned out to be a police informant, a felon fresh from prison whom cops paid $100 to do the deal. Because Gray had been arrested for several petty crimes 13 years earlier--crimes that didn't even carry a prison sentence--he fell under the state's "habitual offender" statutes. He got life without parole...
Last Thursday, when a federal judge in Mexico City sentenced Raul Salinas de Gortari to 50 years in prison for orchestrating the 1994 murder of his former brother-in-law Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, all Mexico seemed to exhale. Salinas, the older brother of former President Carlos Salinas, has been a symbol of the nation's rot. The coldness of some of his acts--ordering the killing of his own brother-in-law!--was so great that the case somehow transcended its specifics and became a referendum on Mexico's hopes and fears...
Raul's conviction was supposed to be a sign that Mexico was reforming its authoritarian democracy. But last week there was at least one reminder of how far the nation has to go. While Raul confronted his verdict in a prison cell west of Mexico City, 50 miles away, in a prison called Southside, a tightly wound, closely shorn 34-year-old ex-cowboy named Daniel Aguilar Trevino described a Mexican political system that is still dark, unforgiving and sinister. Aguilar is serving a 50-year term for pumping the fatal bullet into Ruiz Massieu's neck from point-blank...
Today Mann, 28, is an inmate serving 10 years at Alderson Federal Prison Camp, a minimum-security facility tucked away in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains in West Virginia. Her story is common among the institution's nearly 800 women prisoners. "It's fairly simple," says Richard Russell, executive assistant at Alderson. "A lot of women here got sucked in with a boyfriend involved in drugs." More than 70% of the inmates at Alderson are, like Mann, first-time offenders convicted of nonviolent, drug-related crimes serving sentences ranging, in most cases, from 12 months to 14 years...