Horse farm and "non-violent" offenders
It all started innocently enough.
State prison officials sent six female inmates, described as non-violent, to a Howard County horse farm to clear pasture for abused animals. The inmates were all nearing thier release dates and had met all the criteria for the coveted work-release.
In the photo by The Sun's Ken Lam, Ziggy, a former Arabber horse, munches on Hay as Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services Secretary Gary Maynard, left, announces a partnership with Days End Farm Horse Rescue in which female inmates will be working on the farm doing landscaping with the eventual goal of caring for the rescued horses.
Only someone in the prison system forgot to tell the neighbors and the parents of the young volunteers that the inmates were coming, and understandable outrage followed and the program was put on indefinite hold. Then people started to wonder about the inmates themselves -- were they reall "non-violent"?
In today's crime scenes column, I try to answser that question. It's not as easy it may seem. One inmate I focused on, because she was the lead of a feature story on the program, a story that triggered the uproar, was in for second-degree assault on her boyfriend (complete story here).
Here's a bit about what I learned:
State officials describe Paula Jordan as a nonviolent inmate at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in Jessup. That made her a perfect candidate to work at a Howard County horse farm as part of a rehabilitation program.
Here is what the 41-year-old from Baltimore did to get locked up: In January 2005, she chased after her boyfriend swinging a butcher's knife, stabbed him in the leg, mopped up the blood, cleaned the blade and put it back into its holder before police arrived.
Jordan pleaded guilty to first-degree assault and was sentenced to 10 years in prison, with all but two months suspended. She violated the terms of her probation by committing another assault, and in June 2006 she was sent back to prison for six years
Classifying her as nonviolent may seem absurd to most people. But bureaucrats have indeed decided that an assault can either be violent or nonviolent, depending on the severity of the injury, and regardless of whether the term "nonviolent assault" is an oxymoron.
I did find one woman who didn't have any trouble with all this:
Cathy Batz, who lives almost adjacent to the Lisbon farm, said her 20-year-old daughter has ridden horses at Days End since she was 8 years old and was at the stables when the inmates were in the fields. "She didn't even see them," the mother said, adding that Jordan's criminal record didn't bother her a bit.Batz told me that inmates are always out picking up trash along nearby I-70. "If nobody has a problem when prisoners are picking up trash a block away from our homes and a half-mile away from a school," she said, "why do they have a problem when they work on a 58-acre farm?"
Comments
Why not send these people to inner-city neighborhoods to clean up the trash-strewn streets, sidewalks and, in some cases, lawns? Better yet, hit the alleys as well.
After all, THAT would be "giving back to the community" more than working on a horse farm.
Posted by: Gus Smegma | July 19, 2010 7:44 AM
It's not about "giving back to the community," Gus. It's about trying to put these people into situations where they can learn skills that will hopefully allow them to succeed in transitioning back into the society from which they been separated. The hypothesis is that learning work skills will help the inmates continue to rehabilitate themselves so that, again, hopefully, they will not become recidivists once they have been released.
Posted by: trebort49 | July 19, 2010 11:20 AM