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Friday, September 17, 1999
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
Officials angered over seminars for inmates
Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO -- Rather than realizing that crime doesn't pay, inmates at San Francisco's jail may have learned how to get away with it.
Authorities are fuming about a series of seminars this week that they say depicted police officers as incompetent racists and showed criminals how to outsmart them.
"What a better way to reduce the city's jail population than teaching criminals how not to get caught?" San Francisco Deputy Sheriff's Association President David Hardy asked sarcastically.
Hardy asked the department to discontinue the course taught by civil rights attorney Katya Komisaruk, who was invited by the Sheriff's Department Prisoner Legal Services division.
Department officials acknowledged the classes were inappropriate and said Komisaruk would not be invited back.
The four seminars, held on Monday and Tuesday, were attended by about 120 prisoners awaiting trial for a variety of misdemeanor and felony offenses.
Some of the "criminal defense guidelines" handed out in the class included how to avoid talking to an officer without an attorney and how to keep police with search warrants away.
Hardy said the courses also included good cop-bad cop skits during which two actors portraying police officers used racial epithets and were excessively violent.
Sheriff's Department spokeswoman Eileen Hirst said state law required the Sheriff's Department to provide legal materials and information to inmates. Courses have been used to address those requirements for more than 25 years.
Komisaruk said she had taught the very same class several years ago for the department, and denied some of the critics' claims.
"I don't know what the problem is," said Komisaruk, a former anti-nuclear activist who served two years in prison for destroying government property and later went to Harvard Law School. "It's a little frustrating. It was going really well, and the prisoners seemed to like it."
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