Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
The new director of the Iowa Department of Corrections, John Baldwin, 57, appointed by Gov. Chet Culver in April, is a veteran administrator in the Iowa prison system with service going back to 1977.
Following a recent Board of Corrections meeting in Anamosa, Iowa Independent conducted a one-on-one interview with Baldwin in which the Fort Dodge native discussed a number of prison issues from mental health concerns to a rising female inmate population to what he says is an exaggerated public perception of the rape problem in Iowa’s 9,000-inmate prison system.
Iowa Independent: You’ve been on the job for a few months. Overall, how do you think things are going?
Baldwin: I think things are going very well. The staff has responded to some of the issues I’ve raised. We continue to have good relationships with our staff.
We did get a full salary adjustment this year and that is always positive. We’re just very pleased with how things are going.
Iowa Independent: Many of your inmates are mentally ill. There is much discussion about how to handle this, whether it’s appropriate in the prison system or whether it should be somewhere else. What are your thoughts on that?
Baldwin: Right now, we have almost 3,500 people who have some type of mental illness. That shouldn’t be equated with “they can’t serve their sentence.” Clearly, they were found guilty, they were found competent. A lot of our people, if they take their medication, can function in a prison setting, they can function out in the community.
What we’re trying to focus on, though, is making sure this department tries to work very hard to make the state expand some of its resources to treat them appropriately at whatever level they can best function at.
We just want to start the conversation of how we should best treat them in prison and then that will spinoff other conversations.
Iowa Indepedent: In looking at your prison count, Mitchellville, the women’s prison, seems to be your most overcrowded. There seem to be more women in prison than every before. Why is that? Are Iowa women just becoming more violent? Are they getting tied up with bad relationships with men who are criminals? Why is that?
Baldwin: They are not becoming more violent. They are in for drug charges at a much higher rate than they used to be. That is the leading cause of female incarceration. We hit 790 females incarcerated in Iowa about four weeks ago, which was a record. It’s dropped a bit since then but we are looking at expanding Mitchellville to accommodate the growing numbers of them.
We would build more minimum security at Mitchellville and not so much medium, and that’s going to be part of this master plan that’s starting after July 1 when the funding becomes available.
Iowa Independent: So much of the public views incarceration in the “busting rocks” terms, in being harsh on offenders — out of sight, out of mind. Just lock ‘em up and we never want to see them again. But the reality is most of these offenders do return to society. How do you get people to look at the system in more realistic or cost effective ways, not as TV-variety punitive?
Baldwin: Almost 95 percent of the people in the prison system in Iowa will return to the communities. I think it’s an education component. We’ll make a very large effort to get out and talk to various groups, and talk to the press and talk to civic groups. These people do return. It’s our responsibility to teach them a job skill and educate them while they’re here and that includes both treatment in the institution and in community based correction, education and job skills so when they return to the community they’ll be employable, they’ll have life skills.
Iowa Independent: One thing that always comes up in the public when I talk to people about prison, is the issue of rape. There are always these snide comments, little jokes about watching your back. I guess the question would be if I were convicted of something and on my way to Anamosa, I would pretty much just assume that as a 180 pound guy who was, say, convicted of a white-collar crime as I’m not a violent person, I would assume that if I came here, I would probably get raped.
Baldwin: No. There a Prison Rape Elimination Act. It’s a federal law that all states are going to be compelled to comply with. It started out because some states had a very bad problem with the prison rape issue. It’s never been a huge problem in Iowa.
Iowa Independent: Is there percentage or a range?
Baldwin: We probably deal with allegations, maybe 20 to 22 a year. It’s minimal.
Iowa Independent: So is this one of the huge myths about prison?
Baldwin: Well over half of those are not substantiated. No one’s going to say it hasn’t happened. And it will happen. The numbers in Iowa would not support what you might think if you would watch TV and some of these programs.
Iowa Independent: Yeah, everybody thinks it’s almost a given, that if you are a certain body size and from a certain socio-economic class that that’s going to be your fate — getting raped by another inmate.
Baldwin: Right. Our reports would not indicate that and the offenders have a toll-free line they can call and report this to a non-DOC person.
Iowa Independent: With so many people in the corrections system having substance abuse problems do you think it makes sense from a corrections standpoint to decriminalize drug use?
Baldwin: We just don’t get into that conversation at all. We enforce what the laws are.
Iowa Independent: In the immigration debate a lot of the people on the far right are throwing around allegations that the Hispanic community is awfully violent and troubling, and yet the prisons I’ve been into in Iowa, I don’t see too many Latino inmates.
Baldwin: I cannot tell you what percentage of our prison population is Latino. It is not very hi
gh.
Iowa Independent: What’s the best prison movie ever made? What’s the one that gets it right the most? Is it “Shawshank Redemption” — although that’s probably a bad one for an administrator.
Baldwin: (Laughing) I don’t know. I don’t watch too many movies. I’ll have to think about that one.
Iowa Independent: Last question. You’ve worked in prisons for some time. How are inmates today different than maybe they were in the 1970s.
Baldwin: They are actually older. When I started the average age was 27, and now it’s almost 33 years old. The main difference is there is a higher percentage of mentally ill. Meth has certainly re-arranged some of the health issues. Now we see a lot of people presenting to us medically 10 and 12 years older than they are chronologically and that’s probably been the biggest change for us as far as what the offenders look like. A lot of them that deal with some of the high-end drugs are medically way older than they actually are.
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