CO-CHAIR
Nicholas Katzenbach's career of public service includes several key posts and accomplishments. After joining the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, he was promoted to Deputy Attorney General in April 1962. In that role, and working closely with President Kennedy, he was responsible for securing the release of prisoners captured during the Bay of Pigs raid on Cuba. He also oversaw the Justice Department's efforts to desegregate the University of Mississippi in September 1962 and the University of Alabama in June 1963 and worked with Congress to ensure the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him Attorney General of the United States in 1965. He helped to draft the 1965 Voting Rights Act before resigning in 1966 after clashes with J. Edgar Hoover. President Johnson then appointed him Under Secretary of State (1966-1969) and one of a three-member commission charged with reviewing Central Intelligence Agency activities. Nicholas Katzenbach also chaired the 1967 Commission on Crime in the United States. After President Johnson decided not to run for re-election, in 1969 Nicholas Katzenbach became General Counsel of the IBM Corporation, where he remained until 1986. He is currently Non-Executive Chairman of the MCI Board of Directors.
Nicholas Katzenbach's public service began when he joined the United States Army Air Force. During the Second World War, he was captured by enemy troops and spent two years as a prisoner of war in Italy and Germany. After the war, he attended Princeton University and then Yale Law School, becoming editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. He also received a Rhodes scholarship and studied at Oxford University for two years. Early in his legal career, he was Associate Professor of Law at Yale University (1952-1956) and also Professor of Law at the University of Chicago (1956-1960).
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OPENING STATEMENT
Good morning everyone.
We're here today in Newark as part of a year-long process to examine the most serious problems in our nation's prisons and jails; and how those problems affect the estimated 13.5 million people who are incarcerated over the course of a single year, the 750,000 men and women who staff these facilities, and all of us—because what happens behind bars doesn't stay there.
What happens in prison and jail affects the very fabric of our society as millions of people return to the community, either at the end of their sentence or the end of their shift. And there's much more at stake beyond the important issue of public safety. When we fail to make peoples' living and work environments safe places where they are respected, we not only fail those individuals, we erode collective faith in the American justice system and in our core values—and we become more fractured as a society.
It's a complex web of policies, practices, and institutional struggles that determines whether those facilities are safe, humane, and effective. Sure, sometimes there are a few bad apples, but when things go terribly wrong inside a jail or prison, there's usually an underlying institutional cause.
What we're focusing on today and tomorrow are widespread, intractable institutional problems: overcrowding, the misuse of isolation, and medical and mental health care neglect that endangers individual inmates and officers and also the public health. These problems challenge and frustrate the many conscientious, hard-working corrections professionals around the country, partly because they can't prevent or fix them on their own. But deal with them, they must.
The phrase, "institutional policies and practices" sounds abstract. It's not. It's life for Pearl Beale, after her son Givon was murdered in an extremely crowded jail in Washington, DC—a jail that is still overcrowded and deemed too dangerous for New York Times reporter Judith Miller, but not for the mainly poor and African-American people confined there.
When you hear Sergeant Gary Harkins, a 25-year veteran of the Oregon Department of Corrections, describe of working in facilities so safe and humane that he can walk the halls with only a whistle or radio for protection, the term "direct supervision" no longer seems abstract.
I began my remarks by saying that we're here to examine the problems. That's true. But we're also here to figure out how to solve those problems. One of the best ways to do that is to ask leaders in the profession. Among the people testifying later today and tomorrow, are Richard Stalder, who heads the Department of Public Safety and Corrections in Louisiana and is also President of the Association of State Correctional Administrators; Jeffrey Beard, who runs the Pennsylvania Department of Correction; Reginald Wilkinson, Director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction; and Arthur Wallenstein, who oversees corrections in Montgomery County, Maryland. The Commission looks forward to your testimony; we know that we have much to learn from you.
It's fitting to hold this hearing in New Jersey—and not just because it's my home. Government officials in New Jersey grapple with all of the problems we will discuss over the next two days—and have made real progress in some areas. Not so long ago, for example, prisons in New Jersey were extremely overcrowded. But smart policy decisions by corrections leaders and state lawmakers brought the situation under control, at least in the state's prisons.
I want to thank all of you here today and people throughout the state, and particularly in the city of Newark, who have warmly welcomed the Commission. Standing out among that group is State Corrections Commissioner, Devon Brown, who has generously offered to make a few remarks. But before I yield the microphone to him, let me just say, by way of introduction, that Devon Brown has worked in this field for more than three decades and is known both for his humanity and his relentless pursuit of needed reforms. His many achievements since becoming Commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Corrections in April 2002 range from cutting staff overtime to increasing the number of inmates who receive general-equivalency diplomas to transforming one of the most problematic state prisons into a place of relative calm.
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