WITNESS
Michele Deitch, a 2005-06 Soros Senior Justice Fellow, teaches graduate-level courses on criminal justice policy at the University of Texas's Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. Her current research focuses on the issue of independent prison oversight, and she is organizing a major international conference on this subject to be held in Texas later this spring. Michele also currently serves as Reporter to an American Bar Association Task Force that is drafting national standards on prison legal issues. Since 1993, she has also been an independent consultant to state and local policy-makers and agency officials around the country on a wide range of corrections and sentencing issues, and she also currently serves as Contributing Editor to the Correctional Law Reporter, one of the country's leading journals for correctional administrators and lawyers.
During the late 1980s, Michele was appointed by Judge William Wayne Justice as a monitor of conditions in the Texas prison system, as part of the landmark Ruiz prison reform lawsuit. She later held some key positions with the Texas Legislature, including serving as General Counsel to the Texas Senate Criminal Justice Committee and as the Policy Director of the Texas Punishment Standards Commission. She holds a J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School, an M.Sc. in psychology (with a specialization in criminology) from Oxford University, and a B.A. magna cum laude from Amherst College.
Back to Witness List
|
STATEMENT
Most corrections professionals and most advocates for prisoners would find common ground in their belief that prisons and jails should be safe and humane places that respect inmates' constitutional rights. Effective oversight allows both the public and correctional administrators to know whether that goal is being met. External scrutiny is essential any time that a closed institution is responsible for the control of individuals. Such transparency provides both a form of protection from harm and an assurance that rights will be vindicated. External oversight also benefits administrators by providing them with the objective feedback they need about their performance. At the same time, systems of internal review offer a valuable management information tool for administrators, allowing them to identify and correct operational problems at an early stage. Internal and external forms of oversight are neither in competition nor mutually exclusive-they are designed to meet entirely different needs.
As this Commission moves to write its report, I encourage Commission members to see oversight as the linchpin in any effort to ensure the safety of prisoners. Efforts must be made to keep prisons transparent and accountable. The best way to ensure that oversight is effective, however, is not to compare and contrast the value of different oversight functions, but to encourage the development of a range of different oversight mechanisms both inside and outside the correctional agency. And I especially urge that greater attention be paid to the importance of routine inspection and monitoring of correctional facilities: without such monitoring mechanisms in place, prison oversight will never be as meaningful and effective as it could be.
Excerpted from a written statement submitted to the Commission
Download the complete written statement
Note: Some witnesses submitted documents in addition to the written statement they prepared for the hearing. In most cases, those documents are not available on the Commission's web site.
|
|
