The United States imprisons more people than any other country in the world. It has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. What's gone wrong?

by Vida Adamoli

Statistics provided by the International Centre for Prison Studies at King’s College, London, show that the US puts 700,000 more citizens behind bars than China, whose population is five times larger. It also has 1,330,000 more people in prison than crime-ridden Russia. The fact that one out of every 32 US adults is either behind bars, on probation or on parole, indicates something is seriously wrong in the 'land of the free'. 

One reason for this is that trials by jury are rare. In the US criminal justice system, more than 95% of serious crime cases (murder, rape, arson etc) are settled by plea bargain. Often lawyers and family put pressure on a defendant to admit to a crime they insist they didn't commit. This is because if they protest their innocence, prosecutors will pile on further charges.

In the US the deck is stacked against the accused. A person is guilty until they can prove their innocence.

Jim McCloskey is a man dedicated to fighting for the 'voiceless, anonymous, forgotten and forsaken' innocent. He fights for those who have no one else to champion their cause.

A university graduate from Philadelphia, Jim first joined the US Navy, then became a management consultant. It was an affluent, trouble-free life.

Then 1979, at the age of 37, he woke up one day to realize he was profoundly dissatisfied. 'My life was like a rainbow,' he is quoted as saying. 'It might have looked pretty, but it was vapour. I wanted to lead what I felt to be an authentic life. I wanted to get to the real stuff of the world.'

He resigned from his job and entered a seminary. His intention was to become a Presbyterian minister. In his second year, however, while doing fieldwork as a student chaplain at Trenton State Prison, he met Jorge 'Chiefie' de los Santos. De los Santos, serving life for a murder, protested his innocence so passionately McCloskey agreed to read the trial transcript. He found that his conviction hinged largely on a confession he was alleged to have made to a fellow inmate.

McCloskey decided to track down the inmate and confront him. He did so and the man admitted to lying. There followed two years of painstaking detective work. It culminated in 1983 when Jorge de los Santos was granted his freedom. 'Chiefie would say I saved his life. But he saved mine,' stated McCloskey. 'I felt this is what God has ordained for me to do.'

McCloskey left the seminary without waiting to become officially ordained. He set up Centurion Ministries Inc, an organization dedicated to reinvestigating cases of people it believes have been wrongly convicted of serious crime.

Initially he was on his own, working out of his living room. Now Centurion Ministries Inc has five full-time and four part-time employees, 22 volunteers, and a $1 million annual budget, financed by foundations and private donors.

Although inspired by a spiritual calling, it is a strictly lay outfit. McCloskey and his colleagues don't care what religion, if any, an inmate belongs to. All that matters is that they are convinced of his or her innocence.

The work requires much patience. McCloskey - or one of his caseworkers - will correspond with an inmate for up to two years before arranging a face-to-face meeting. This enables him to check that claims of innocence remain consistent over time. And although he doesn't insist on a crime-free past, he won't take up the case of anyone with a prior history of violent or sexual crime.

Taking someone on is a big commitment, both of time and money. It normally involves years of meticulous investigation. Initially McCloskey was shocked at the way some police and prosecutors routinely lied or cut corners to make their cases stick. Now he's used to it. He says he's come to see the US criminal justice system as 'fraught with flaws and frailties'.

To date McCloskey and his team have won the freedom of 42 individuals wrongfully sentenced to death or life imprisonment.

These include Kerry Max Cook, freed after nearly 20 years on death row for a murder he didn't commit. Centurion Ministries toiled for seven gruelling years to amass the evidence that resulted in the Texas court throwing out his conviction. It ruled that the State's 'illicit manipulation of the evidence permeated the entire investigation of the murder', and that the State 'gained a conviction based on fraud and ignored its own duty to seek the truth'.

There was also Ellen Reasonover, who served 17 years of a life sentence for the murder of a gas station attendant. Centurion Ministries brought evidence that her conviction was based on a jailhouse 'testimony' given by two female drug-addicted career criminals, who were rewarded with secret deals for their lies. The judge ruled that the prosecutor hid evidence that clearly pointed to the 'testimony' being false.

And then there was Clarence Brandley. On the eve of his execution, Centurion Ministries dramatically produced an eyewitness who identified those responsible for the murder of which Brandley been accused. As a result, after 10 years on death row in Texas, he was freed.

Not every case is a triumph, however. Four of the inmates McCloskey and his group have worked for turned out to be guilty. In two of those cases, DNA testing proved the prisoners' guilt.  In the other two, the prisoners' accounts unravelled when McCloskey re-interviewed witnesses. This is demoralizing, a waste of time and precious financial resources, but the fight to reclaim the innocent never slackens.