To get a client released from custody, I needed to get her accepted into an approved rehab facility. She could only get into the approved rehab facilities by doing an intake appointment. The facilities only set intake appointments for people who are out of custody.

Initially, I would encounter similar situations and become angry. I assumed they were caused by incompetence and thought the people in charge would fix it if they knew what they’d done. Although my anger began to diminish as I encountered those situations over and over again, it flared back up when I finally realized that the people in charge often not only knew what they’d done, but did it for a reason.

These days, when I see a Catch-22, I assume some bureaucrat planned it. I’m right more than frequently than you might think. I regularly see just how far the government will go to create an unfair situation that ensures a certain result without actually having to demand that result. Government incompetence, though pervasive, isn’t universal. Sometimes, things that appear to be incompetence are actually cleverness, albeit evil bureaucratic cleverness.

It would’ve been too easy for the government to just say that it didn’t want my client released. We all know that’s what it wants, but people might get upset if it came out and said it. It figured out a creative way around that problem.

Creating a Catch-22 may seem needlessly complex, but it usually gets the desired result. At the very least, it ties up a defense lawyer for a little while, and it doesn’t make it look like the big bad government is refusing to release people who need to be released. It’s a win-win-win situation for everyone except the real human being involuntarily caught up in the system.

I almost feel as if I should be impressed by the irritating creativity the government musters from time to time.

There’s been a big issue at one particular jail about attorneys wanting to do visits in the actual pods where the inmates are housed. For some reason, jail staff hate it. They would rather have the lawyers visit their clients in little visitation rooms where an officer has to open a trap every time the lawyer needs to hand the client something. I have no clue why.

Because the lawyer and client are separated by thick glass and visibility can be limited in those rooms, lawyers were getting inside-the-pod visits when they had to show the clients videos. Unfortunately, someone at the jail decided to put a stop to that.

A relatively new sign in the jail now explains that, to facilitate lawyers being able to show videos to their clients in the regular visitation rooms, the rooms are being “retrofitted with a shelving system.” I, for one, was quite impressed. Until I saw the retrofitted shelving system, that is.

The updated rooms now each have a plastic milk crate turned upside down with a piece of plywood bolted on top. They didn’t even go to the trouble of painting any of it, and it doesn’t look like they did a very careful job of affixing the plywood. Hardly the kind of thing they had to “retrofit,” and certainly not something anyone in their right mind would call “shelving system.”

I’d accuse them of sesquipedalianism, but that somehow seems a bit hypocritical.

There must be something wrong with me, as I found the poster amusing. It took me a second to put my finger on just why that was. Maybe CCA intended to have zero tolerance when it comes to employees who facilitate suicide among inmates, but if it’s like any other big, oppressive company or government entity, the burden of any zero tolerance policy is going to fall squarely on the shoulders of people the policy is intended to help.

It really is a perfect example of zero tolerance thinking in action. Only when government is involved, directly or indirectly, would anyone think that taking caged, hopeless, mentally ill people and making their lives suck just a little bit more using stupid policies and intolerance is a good way to cut down on the suicide rate.

The topic of the study seemed so familiar, yet the numbers were so much more stunning than I ever could have imagined. I scoured blogs to see if someone else had posted about it, yet I found only one article. Let me know if I’ve missed others.

The statistics are incredible: we now incarcerate 240% more people than we did in 1980; in 2008, one out of every 48 working-age men was in prison or jail; non-violent offenders make up over 60% of the prison and jail population; drug offenders now account for about one-fourth of all offenders behind bars.

Those are just some of the numbers that appear in the summary. If you want a real shock, have a look at the graph comparing us to other countries on page three, or the graph showing changes in our incarceration rate over time on page six. The study is such an incredible argument against strict prison sentences that it’s almost hard to believe the numbers are real.

I believe the numbers because I participate in the system that throws such an absurd number of people in cages. I see prosecutors make decade-or-more prison offers to nonviolent offenders. I see judges sentence people who lose at trial to sentences that far surpass the life expectancy of any human. Away from work, every time I’m exposed to the news, I hear people arguing that we need to create new crimes or impose harsher sentences.

Why do we think imprisonment works? The numbers certainly don’t say it does. My experience certainly doesn’t say it does.

Prison changes people, but not for the better. I have clients who got hooked on meth in prison. I have clients who entered prison as small-time criminals and left with the network necessary to become big-time criminals.

Many of my repeat-offender clients have decades of booking photos in their files. I see them getting more tattooed, more muscular, and angrier with each photo. I’ve flipped through far too many series of photos that start with a scared, confused kid and end with a photo of the kind of person most people think should belong in prison. We force people to turn into what we thought they were at the beginning, before we knew what they might have had the potential to become.

Does anyone truly believe that prison rehabilitates? The public discourse certainly isn’t about getting prisoners the educational and vocational training they need to reintegrate into society; it’s about shaming them Sheriff-Joe-style, making their lives miserable for the duration of their stay. When they’re finally released from the hell we created for them, we throw them back in after doing what we taught them to do.  We shake our fingers at them for not playing nice.

People often throw around a quote from Albert Einstein about how insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. It’s a good quote, and it’s especially apt here. Reading the study, I feel like we have to wake up sooner or later. How can we argue with those numbers? When will the insanity stop?

I worry because I see no end in sight. We will not change because we don’t have to change. I expect that we will sooner collapse than rethink our failed policies. As a country, we must be insane. That’s what worries me the most.

About a year ago, a defense attorney named Jason Keller got busted smuggling heroin to inmates. The Maricopa County criminal defense bar was abuzz with talk of his supposed meth addiction and involvement with the Mexican Mafia. At the time, he represented a client named Jesse Alejandro in a murder conspiracy case. His client became his co-defendant.

A few weeks ago, another defense attorney, David DeCosta, got busted for doing more or less the same thing. Apparently, he was trying to sneak drugs to a client in court. The Maricopa County criminal defense bar has been abuzz with talk of him getting blow jobs from that client’s girlfriend. The client? Believe it or not, Jesse Alejandro.

I was pretty surprised to hear that another local criminal defense attorney decided to sacrifice his career and reputation doing something monumentally idiotic, but I was stunned to find out the same client linked them together. What is this guy doing to his defense lawyers? Is it his personality? Are his girlfriend’s “skills” really that amazing? All joking aside, I wonder how one person can get two established defense lawyers to give up everything committing a crime that’s virtually guaranteed to get noticed.

I’ve spoken with a number of defense attorneys about this, and we’ve all wondered the same thing: what happens in a client meeting with Jesse Alejandro?

Imagine you’re a defense attorney who just got appointed to a new case. You go through the security theater of one of the Maricopa County’s many jails to meet with your new client, then grab a seat in an interview room. The client approaches, sits down, and slides a photo of someone you love across the table. He tells you where the person lives and works. He knows the person’s social security number and date of birth. He tells you he’s going to have that person killed if you don’t do him a favor.

Anyone can say they’d do the right thing and report it to authorities right away, but things like that are always easier said than done. What would you do in that situation? What would the state of your personal and professional life have to be to make you give in? Can you really say you’d never do what he asked?

My guess is that Jesse Alejandro just happened to get appointed two lawyers who were desperate enough to break the law to get something he could provide them. In one case, it was drugs. In the other, it was oral sex. Lawyers are people too, and they probably had personal things going on that placed them in a vulnerable position. I’m guessing my hypothetical is far-fetched, to say the least.

I’m sure I’ll never know how much of a role Jesse Alejandro actually played in what happened with Jason Keller and David DeCosta, but I’m awfully curious.

*** I wrote this post after reading about the case in the news and hearing courthouse gossip about what happened to David DeCosta. The police reports reveal a very different set of facts, which I discuss here. ***

It got me thinking. Do people in Mexico fear our jails like a lot of Americans fear Mexican jails? I have no experience with Mexican jail, but I have to say the thought crosses my mind every time I’m in Mexico that I could accidentally end up incarcerated south of the border, where terrible things might ensue. I think my fear comes from urban myths and the general misunderstanding of Mexico that I share with most of my fellow Americans.

It makes me wonder if he knows something I don’t. Maybe our jails are worse than Mexican jails. Maybe Mexicans get treated very harshly in Maricopa County.

They will not schedule visits from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. or 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Most of the superior court judges have 8:30 a.m. or 9:00 a.m. morning dockets and 1:30 p.m. afternoon dockets, so it is often impossible to make it from your hearings to jail before visitation ends at 10:30 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. If you want to do a visit at 12:30 p.m., there’s only a short window of time to visit before you will have to leave for afternoon hearings. If you want to do a visit at 6:00 p.m., there’s only a short window of time to visit before everything closes at 7:30 p.m. Are they trying to only allow visitation when attorneys are in court?

On top of that, the visits themselves are normally a pain because of other jail policies. First, you have to set up your visit at least 24 hours in advance. Some guards take that literally and won’t let you schedule a 10:00 a.m. visit at 11:00 a.m. on the morning before. Second, there are only three places for contact visits in the entire jail. Believe it or not, in a jail housing roughly fifteen-hundred inmates, only three in-person attorney visits can be conducted simultaneously.

Two of the places for contact visitation aren’t much better than video visitation. You sit on one side of glass, and the client sits on the other. There are about a half dozen visitation booths in each unit, but only one in each unit is actually set up for visitation. In those two booths, the phones don’t work very well, so it’s often easier to just yell through the glass. There is a little slit just big enough to fit through a few pieces of paper, so you have to ask the detention officer to give your client a pen to sign things. The officer usually tries to hover over your client until he gets his pen back.

The other contact visitation option gets you in the same room as the client, but you have to get a supervisor’s approval and it takes about twice as long as any other kind of visit (though the jail consistently takes its time doing visits regardless of the type). Some of the time, ICE is conducting unscheduled interviews in the room and you have to wait. I’m guessing that, unlike attorneys, ICE doesn’t have to call 24 hours in advance to set up a visit.

Little policies like that create big, needless problems for the criminal defense bar, and I’m sure I’m overlooking plenty of other stuff here. Some defense attorneys expressed hope that the new sheriff would make visitation easier. Based on what I’ve seen so far, I think they shouldn’t hold their breath.

When I later met with my client, he was irritated by the court’s ruling, but not for the reasons I expected. His question was, “if they’re so worried about the victim, why did they make him my cellmate?” My eyes grew big, and at first, I didn’t believe him. Later on, I found out that, sure enough, the victim had indeed been picked up by the county sheriff, booked, and placed in a cell with my client. It’s a good thing that client was such an easy-going guy.