The Tea Party Movement objects to big government.

The newly-launched Coffee Party declares itself free of either party’s rigid ideologies but guided by reason. (I’ll drink coffee to that.)

But, as Doug Berman points out at Sentencing, Law & Policy, neither drink-related party seems to be interested in taking on one of the biggest government growth industries of all:

I continue to wonder if (and hope that) the new tea party movement will take on the growth of government and government inefficiencies in the operation of massive modern criminal justice systems. …And… Unfortunately, it seems that so far the so-called Coffee Party is also decaffinated when it comes to engaging with criminal justice issues, which comprise among the most consequential forms of government interaction with citizens and also is among the most massive forms of government control and expense.

Of course, the vast majority of persons who have the luxury of the extra time and energy to get involved with the new Coffee or Tea Parties are not likely to have significant experience with state or federal criminal justice systems. Still, any and all politically savvy persons must recognize that an extraordinary amount of taxpayer money is spent on modern criminal justice systems. Moreover, any new party that is concerned about government spending on programs with uncertain returns ought to be asking hard questions about the costs and benefits of mass incarceration and marijuana prohibitions and a host of other related criminal justice issues.

Meanwhile, in the Democrat-controlled congress we hear the similar sound of….nothing.

A year ago, Senator Jim Webb introduced the National Criminal Justice Commission Act, which would form a commission that would study our criminal justice system from top to bottom. But despite bipartisan support, lots of press, and lots of enthusiasm, the House of Representatives has yet to introduce a companion bill.

Last Tuesday, Webb renewed his push.

“We start with two pieces of reality,” Webb said in Washington on Tuesday. “The first is that we are a country that’s got 5 percent of the world’s population and approximately 25 percent of the world’s prison population. We are doing something different than other countries and something not necessarily correct.”

Yes. And whatever one’s political beverage, it’s time to face that fact.—and to do something about it.

Last Wednesday, Florida Congressman Alan Grayson introduced H.R. 4789—the version of the public option.

It would give any American the opportunity to buy into Medicare.

Here’s how the West Orlando News explains it:

The bill would require the Secretary of Health and Human Services to establish enrollment periods, coverage guidelines, and premiums for the program. Because premiums would be equal to cost, the program would pay for itself.

“The government spent billions of dollars creating a Medicare network of providers that is only open to one-eighth of the population. That’s like saying, ‘Only people 65 and over can use federal highways.’ It is a waste of a very valuable resource and it is not fair. This idea is simple, it makes sense, and it deserves an up-or-down vote,” Congressman Grayson said.

It is only four pages. And it has caused a lot of comment on both the left and the right. You can read the bill here.

Here’s Grayson’s own statement.

By Friday, there were 50 sponsors, 47 of them voting members.

Meanwhile, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee says that 51 senators will vote for a public option through reconciliation if the House passes it first.

In case you’d grown weary with all of the mechanizations and hadn’t noticed, I thought you’d like to know.

Rosa Maria Sanchez has been in prison for 23 years for a crime that she has always insisted that she did not commit. Even the commissioner who presided over Sanchez’ trial said her conviction had haunted him. “…it was one of the few times in my 59 years as a lawyer that I think justice was not served.”

Now because of the work of Jennifer Farrell, a second-year law student at the USC Gould School of Law, the parole board has recommended that Sanchez be released.

Governor Schwarzenegger had until today, Friday, to oppose the parole board’s recommendation. Word finally came from the governor’s office Thursday that that Arnold would not review her case. The parole board’ recommendation would be allowed to stand. After all these years of being separated from her now-grown children, Rosie Sanchez would finally be getting out.

ABC News has the story.

In 1985, Rosa Sanchez operated a store in the L.A. garment district. When a nearby rival’s shop burnt down, a man sleeping in the shop died. Sanchez was arrested and found guilty of murder. She’s been in prison for 23 years.

Jennifer Farrell, a second-year law student at the USC Gould School of Law, is working to gain Sanchez’s release.

“Unfortunately, her public defender did not do a good job in her initial trial. Apparently he spoke for about 30 minutes and then rested the case,” said Farrell.

Farrell said credible alibi witnesses were not called in the trial.

Read on.

FATHER GREG BOYLE ON TALK OF THE NATION

No, this is not the last of links and stories I’ll be doing on Father Greg in the next week. (Trust me I’m just warming up.) His wonderful new book, Tattoos on the Heart, came out on Tuesday—hence the flurry of TV and radio shows. But this segment on NPR’s Talk of the Nation is a particularly nice one.

CHELSEA KING AND THE PAROLE VIOLATION

As furious as I am that John Albert Gardner III, Chelsea King’s accused killer, was not given the high term for his previous sexual assault of a preteen girl, this latest bit of news—how he wasn’t sent back to prison for a parole violation—seems to have a lot of people rushing to miss the point.

Based on his lack of remorse, his psych eval, and his prior crime, this man should have been high control, and monitored aggressively.

But here’s the thing: We cannot send everyone on parole back to prison for minor violations, every time one parolee turns out to be a true monster.

Sadly, as much as I wish that had been locked up for good some time ago, we had no legal cause to do so—at least not based on what we know of his record thus far.

UPDATE:

OKAY, POSTING FOR NO EARTHLY REASON OTHER THAN…. BECAUSE IT’S COOL….

Ford has just debuted it’s new Ultimate Cop Car—A “Police Interceptor” to replace the tried and true old Crown Vic.

NOTE: I still am madly in student paper correcting and personal deadline mode, so today’s blogging is a little light. Next week will be back to full strength. (That is presuming the dog doesn’t wander off again.)

Earlier this week Tom Diaz noticed something that I had overlooked with regard to the ongoing legal proceedings in the Alex Sanchez case.

Back in January, if you will remember, after the 9th Circuit rapped Judge Manual Real on the knuckles for the way he earlier went about refusing Sanchez bail, Real granted Sanchez had one last bail hearing. The hearing, however, was a two-part series—the second part of which featured two sets of “experts,” one chosen by the prosecutor, the other by Sanchez’ attorney, Kerry Bensinger. The experts testified in a closed door session with the judge on January 13.

Then shortly after the doors opened, Judge Real announced that he was granting Alex Sanchez bail. (Here’s a link to my post on the events of that day. Then find the rest of the Alex Sanchez posts here.)

Naturally, we who were confined to the trial-watching bleachers wanted to know who was in those two groups of experts, and what exactly they said that convinced Judge Real that Alex was not a gargantuan threat to public safety.

But the court quickly sealed up both the names and the testimony. (That was after it accidentally allowed the prosecution’s list to be posted online—Ooops!—but then hurriedly resealed it.

AP reporter Christina Hoag also wanted to know what went on in the hearing so she and the AP formally requested the transcript.

On Monday February 22, Judge Real declined to release it.

Something about invading people’s privacy.

Tom Diaz has his take on it here (which you should read).

Mine is a bit different. (I know, you’re shocked, shocked.)

Here’s the thing: We know by the outcome of the hearing that someone in the room—or perhaps several someones— spoke in support Alex Sanchez. So why can’t we know who that might be and what that person or persons said that persuaded Real to be his own devil’s advocate on the issue of bail?

Is it really that politically untenable to speak out publicly in behalf of a man who has not yet been convicted of anything?

Never mind. Don’t answer that.

After a year of working, a panel of educators released a set of proposed common academic standards on Wednesday. The panel—which published its work under the banner of Common Core State Standards Initiative—formed its standards at the direction of 48 state governors and commissioners (including California’s).

The panel’s proposal has been released “for public comment”—a nice admission that we are all in this together, and that dictating from on high has not been all that successful in the past.

The idea is to replace the checkerboarded standards that are inconsistent from state to state.

The standards seem, on first bounce, to be both sensible and sophisticated, pushing for a level of critical thinking and genuine knowledge in both English and Mathematics that goes beyond simple skills and memorization. (A cheering concept!)

The NY Times has more:

….adoption of the new standards would set off a vast new effort to rewrite textbooks and standardized tests.

“I’d say this is one of the most important events of the last several years in American education,” said Chester Finn, Jr., a former assistant secretary of education who has been an advocate for national standards for nearly two decades. “Now we have the possibility that, for the first time, states could come together around new standards and high school graduation requirements that are ambitious and coherent. This is a big deal.”

The proposed standards lay out a blueprint of the concepts and skills students should learn year by year as they make their way through the public schools. In English, for instance, they say that fifth graders should be able to explain major differences between drama and prose stories, and refer to elements of drama like casts of characters, dialogue, and stage directions when writing or speaking about specific works of dramatic literature, among other skills.

Read on.

The combination of the above has reduced me to a quivering puddle of exhaustion. (Particularly the lost, elderly wolf-dog—now thankfully found—who had me frantically hiking through neighbors’ backyards with a flashlight Tuesday Monday* night, then driving around the area until 4:30 in the morning. The neighbors were nice enough not to shoot at me when I was prowling on foot, which I genuinely appreciated. At daybreak Loup-Loup emerged from a hiding place a mile away, wet, disoriented and shivering. A kind person saw her, read her tag and called me. Poor dog. Poor me. All better now.)

As a consequence, I’ll post later in the day.

In the meantime listen to Father Greg on on Patt Morrison’s show.

Back soon.

*I’m clearly having trouble telling the days apart. Sad. Very sad.

On Monday, the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy released at new report that looks at the U.S. policy, now unique in all the world, of sending kids under the age of 18 to prison for life without any possibility that they might one day redeem themselves—the LWOP kids, Life Without Parole.

If you think I have continued to come back to this issue, you are right. And don’t expect it to end here. Moreover the LWOP issue is only a part of the juvenile justice issues we should be examining—an indicator. The real matter at hand is how we charge, adjudicate and sentence our nation’s young in general.

In all other areas of life, as a nation and as a culture, we wisely realize that kids are not ready to make adult decisions. We won’t let them drink, vote, have sex with adults, go to war, or enter into contracts. But we increasingly believe that, in the single realm of criminal justice, if a violent crime is involved, juveniles should be held to the same legal standard as an adult.

It doesn’t seem to matter than every single study and every shred of empirical evidence tells us that this policy is deeply flawed.

For the report click here.

And here’s a clip from the report’s abstract:

….[the authors] discuss the well-established principle that youth are different from adults, and explain how this principle is reinforced by adolescent brain development research. The authors address and dismiss arguments that harsh sentencing is necessary to protect public safety, as well as highlight troubling racial disparities and inconsistent sentencing application. In addition, they describe how such sentencing functions to undermine the United States’s moral standing, given that the United States is the only country in the world to sentence offenders under the age of eighteen to life without parole. Finally, the Issue Brief concludes with Ms. Kent and Ms. Colgan proposing an alternative to the practice of sentencing youth to life in prison without the possibility of parole

All this makes me think of Dennis Danziger’s student John Rodriguez. I don’t yet know for sure what Rodriguez did or didn’t do. I do know, from what Danziger and his wife have told me that John Rodriguez is an otherwise good kid with lots of potential. Whatever foolish and dangerous thing he did on the night in question, it resulted—thankfully—in no lasting injuries to anyone. Yet if the DA has his way, John swill pend the next 25 years behind bars.. If he did the full term, John would get out of prison when he is 43. And what kind of potential would he have then?

Last month, Newsweek’s Ellis Close wrote an excellent essay pertaining to the issue–=and in particular a report issued in New York about the abuses in that state’s juvenile justice system.

It is worth looking at here. Here is how it begins:

One day, treatment of young people who run afoul of the law may be guided by logic rather than politics, prejudice, and uninformed passion. That was the implicit message of a report delivered to New York Gov. David Paterson last month, just in time for Christmas. The report, from the governor’s task force on reforming criminal justice, came on the heels of a U.S. Justice Department investigation that found New York’s juvenile penal system to be tragically mismanaged.

Youngsters in custody were routinely assaulted by staffers. Beatings were so severe that teeth were knocked out, bones were broken, and some kids were rendered unconscious. The assaults were sometimes sparked by infractions no more serious than laughing or stealing a cookie. The incarceration and the primitive methods accompanying it came at a substantial cost: $210,000 a year per child. Wouldn’t it make more sense, task-force members reasoned, to reserve incarceration for those who posed a threat to public safety? For youngsters who are not deemed dangerous, other methods seem more reasonable. “The state should treat and rehabilitate them, not hurt and harden them,” wrote the task force.

Close points out that the state of Missouri has spent years pioneering a saner, more effective system for juveniles. Would that California would do the same.

IN OTHER NEWS that is not in the least encouraging, a California man—who the psych eval shrink suggested has poor impulse control due to his bi-polar disorder—stole a $2.99 package of shredded cheese and tried to snatch a woman’s wallet, and was sentenced to 7 years 8 months in prison. The man, who has a string of burglary convictions from 30 years ago, and has spent decades behind bars, was initially set to get 25-to-life under Three Strikes, but the psych eval managed to derail that madness.

AND ABOUT THOSE REHABILITATIVE PRISON PROGRAMS that, once completed, under the new law aimed at reducing California’s prison population, will allow some California prisoners up to six-weeks of their sentences. Only one problem, those who actually work in the programs, say that those same programs are being slashed to nothing in the state’s rush to budget cut.

GAY, YOUNG & HOMELESS – Though all homelessness is troubling, the problem’s disproportionate effect on LGBT young people is especially worrisome writes Lisa Gillespie in this article on the topic.

Three last minute event notices.

Tuesday, March 9, is the release date for Greg Boyle’s new book, Tattoos on the Heart. (Much more about the book itself later in the week.)

There is a book launch party on Tuesday night at 7 p.m. at Homeboy Industries featuring a book signing and reading by Father Greg. The address is 130 W. Bruno St. (Bruno and Alameda, just north of Union Station) I’ll be there, so com’on down!

If you miss that, on Friday, 3/12, he’ll be at Vroman’s. (As for the book, you all simply have to buy it. That’s all there is to it. Not to pressure you or anything, but no excuses.)

HOWEVER TONIGHT, Monday, at 7:30, Dennis Danziger’s class of high school students are reading their work at the PowerHouse theater. 3116 2nd Street in Santa Monica, (one block N. of Rose; one block E. of Main). Details for reservations are here.

AND THEN ON WEDNESDAY NIGHT, Jesse Katz is interviewed about his book, The Opposite Field, with Greg Boyle doing the interviewing, at the downtown library’s Aloud series.

With any luck, I’ll be at all three. So if you show up, say hey.

UPDATE: The essay’s that the Venice High kids wrote and read were remarkable. I’ll put a couple of them up tomorrow.

Here’s the newest chapter in the tale of Venice High School teacher, Dennis Danziger, and his student, John Rodriguez, the high school senior whom Danziger flagged as the best writer he had ever had in any of his LAUSD classes in all his years of teaching.

Danziger ought to know the difference. In addition to being a high school instructor, Dennis is a former TV writer, a memoirist, and the author of the very funny new novel, A Short History of a Tall Jew, Plus his wife, Amy Friedman, is a writer.

But as we learned in the last two chapters, now John Rodriguez, the good writer, seemingly good, sensitive kid, has been arrested for attempted murder.

And so, the story continues:

( Read the first two chapters here.)

The Writer: Chapter 3

I remember reading a line, perhaps the opening line in a novel. It went something like this: one gets justice in the afterlife; in this life you get the law. And sadly, you only get the law you can afford.

One would need a lot of money, six figures, a high six figure sum to effectively fight for two brothers who have both been charged with attempted murder. At least I think that’s what they were both charged with. I’m not really sure.

When I think about it, and much of the time I don’t want to think about it, I imagine that everything in John’s life right now seems to be a shade of bad. And grief. And terror.

Here is what I know of his situation. On April 5, 2009 John started the evening saying good-bye to his mom and he calls her six or seven hours later and tells her he won’t be home. For a long time.

As it happens, I know more about lock-up than you’d think. My wife, Amy, was married to a man in prison. In Canada. She had gone inside to write a series of articles about prison; she was a journalist in Kingston, Ontario at the time. Fell in love with an inmate. Doing 13-to-life. For murder. A drug deal gone bad. She encouraged me to stop fretting and to write John.

Which I did.

I asked him what I could do for him.

Write, correspond, let him know I’m there, and send him books. That’s what he wanted and it seemed easy enough. I figured I’d choose a care package of books from my shelf. Then I learned that California prisons and jails only allow books mailed directly from a book store. I was irritated. What if I wanted to order books that my book store didn’t carry? Village Books in the Palisades assured me they would send John any book I wanted. So that’s where I did my jail book shopping.

John wanted Stephen King and John Grisham. I sent him King’s Cujo and Grisham’s The Bleachers. Thick books, good page turner stuff. After they arrived he wrote, “I received your letter and the books. I’ve just finished reading Charm School, the Nelson DeMille novel. It was great. It had so much action and I was turning pages like a mad man. For awhile while I was reading I actually forgot where I was.”

I began sending him a box of paperback volumesvia Village Books every third Sunday. I wanted him to keep his mind active. Focused on writing, reading, something that was mental, positive. Something that would open up his world even while he sat in his cell.

Read the rest of this entry »

I am one of those who would have been shouting in an undignified manner at the TV tonight if Kathryn Bigelow and The Hurt Locker had not won.

For the record, I can’t tell you how bored I am with the complaints that the film doesn’t get all its details right. Art is not always about accuracy (for that we turn to documentary and nonfiction), but it is always about truth.

The Hurt Locker is only nominally about the U.S. Army EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) units—although it uses that material as a vehicle. It is about the ambiguity of war. And in depicting that moral and emotional ambiguity, it succeeds with great and lasting resonance.

Like all good art it allows the beholder to project on it what he and she will. For the antiwar liberal it is an antiwar movie. For the conservatives it is a jagged love letter to the bravery of our troops.

It is also none of the above and all of the above. For me the film successfully brought to life the words of Tim O’Brien, from his exquisite “The Things They Carried,”

True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis…..War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.

The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can’t help but gape at the awful majesty of combat. You stare out at tracer rounds unwinding through the dark like brilliant red ribbons. You crouch in ambush as a cool, impassive moon rises over the nighttime paddies. You admire the fluid symmetries of troops on the move, the great sheets of metal-fire streaming down from a gunship, the illumination rounds, the white phosphorus, the purply orange glow of napalm, the rocket’s red glare. It’s not pretty, exactly. It’s astonishing. It fills the eye. It commands you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference – a powerful, implacable beauty – and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly.

To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true.

The beautiful and important The Hurt Locker lays out an array of these contradictory truths within the convention of a compelling and deeply human narrative —and thus it escaped the confines of its story to burrow permanently inside many of us who see it.

That is why, for me, this year—despite the joys and revelations of other work like Precious and A Single Man, Kathryn Bigelow’s relatively small film is The One.

I’m just glad the Academy agreed so I was not reduced to lecturing the television.

And I’m really, really glad Jeff Bridges won too. And The Cove. And Mo’Nique. And Christoph Waltz, while we’re at it. And I thought Sandra Bullock was fabulously classy, even though I always want Merl Streep to win. If she’s not in a movie that year, I don’t care. I just think she should win anyway. (In truth, what an array of terrific women up for best actress this year!) And anytime T-Bone Burnett can win something, it is a good night.