Monday afternoon, State Senator Gloria Romero (who also happens to be the Chair of the Senate Education Committee) called for a line item breakdown of the money spent on the so-called the Taj Mahal of schools—aka the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex, which at more than a half-billion dollars ($578 million to be specific) is the most expensive public school ever constructed in US history.

Frankly, at this price tag the Taj Mahal, an elegant but unfrilled building, when you get right down to it, seems like the wrong analog. Better to liken the new school complex to the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi, or perhaps something ordered up by, say, Mad Ludwig of Bavaria.

I mean we’re talking about a school that has talking benches. Talking benches!

In Christina Hoag’s AP story on the school she pointed out that, “Some experts say it’s not all flourish and that children learn better in more pleasant surroundings.”

And who among us would want to churlishly deny our kids “pleasant surroundings”? But see, to most of us ordinary parent-like folks, “pleasant surroundings” mean maybe nice tall windows that let in lots of natural light, some great science labs, good sports fields, a nice theater, and as many green spaces as humanly possible.

“Pleasant surroundings” do not, however, require insane fripperies like talking benches, and some of the extras that are built into LAUSD’s next most expensive school, the $377 million Edward R. Roybal Learning Center (opened in 2008), which has “a dance studio with cushioned maple floors” and “a modern kitchen with a restaurant-quality pizza oven…”

(It isn’t clear whether or not RFK has a restaurant-quality pizza oven. But I’d be willing to take a gentlewoman’s bet.)

Here’s the truth: Children learn better with enough good teachers, an adequate supply of non-trashed text books, and with the presence of at least one accessible school library. Sadly, many of the other schools in the district will NOT have those “pleasant surroundings” because of recent cutbacks.

But, hell, bring on the pizza ovens.

in any case, Gloria Romero has joined Governor Schwarzenegger in asking to see the down-and-dirty figures on this puppy.

By the way, yes, we do understand that all that bond money we trustingly voted to give the district some years back had to be spent on construction, not teachers and other pedagogical type stuff, like books, libraries and art classes . Nevertheless, when we voted to, “spend on construction” we did not count on this drunken sailor routine.

After all, our city’s favorite architectural darling, the freaking Disney Concert Hall (which we adore—and didn’t have to pay for) at $274 million, cost less than half the price of the bloated RFK budget. (And it too has underground parking. But no talking benches. More’s the pity, I’m sure.)

Dear LAUSD: You know that Measure E parcel tax thingy that we didn’t pass in the June 8 election? This kind of sh*t is why.

Anyway, here is the main clip from Romero’s Monday statement:

“The latest news that the Los Angeles Unified School District is spending $578 million on the new Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools campus is baffling. LAUSD doesn’t seem to know the difference between building an excellent school and a Taj Mahal. I cannot imagine Robert F. Kennedy’s legacy being preserved in a manner that puts glitz above service to schoolchildren.

“LAUSD has laid off nearly 3,000 teachers in the past two years and slashed academic programs. The district faces a $640 million budget shortfall, with some schools persistently ranked among the nation’s lowest performing for a decade or longer. LAUSD already has two other schools ranked among the nation’s most costly: Edward R. Roybal Learning Center opened in 2008, costing taxpayers $377 million and Visual and Performing Arts High School opened in 2009 costing $232 million.

“I join the call of the Governor for school districts to release financial data to parents and the public. In these dire fiscal times, we must ensure that students are provided a quality education first and foremost and taxpayers must feel confident about how their tax dollars are spent.”

Yeah. What she said.

PS: So, after all the drama and cost, how does the thing look? According to Christopher Hawthorne, LA Times’ architecture critic, RFK is: “Confused, expensive, and a little macabre all at the same time.”

Lovely.

I’m buried in work right now reading (very good) student stories, but here are a bunch of issues that are worth our notice and/or attention.

(NOTE: For one week out of the year the mountain lupine in Topanga are in fullest bloom. This year, this is the week. I snapped the iPhone photo at the side of the road this past Saturday.)

9TH CIRCUIT JUDICIAL NOMINEE TO BE KICKED & PUMMELED QUESTIONED VIGOROUSLY AT SENATE HEARING WEDNESDAY.

James Oliphant for the LA Times has the story.

Senate Republicans are preparing to mount an assault against one of President Obama’s federal appeals court choices, offering a preview of a possible Supreme Court fight this summer.

Goodwin Liu, the president’s pick for the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, is expected to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday in what promises to be a contentious hearing.

[SNIP]

The Obama White House generally has shied away from the kind of incendiary and partisan fights over appeals court judges that were a staple of the George W. Bush administration, preferring moderate nominees with extensive experience in the federal courts.

Even his Supreme Court nominee last year, Sonia Sotomayor, was widely viewed as a legal centrist with a nearly 20-year record as a judge.

But Liu, 39, is seen by opponents as a game-changer. By all accounts, he is an opinionated and intellectually fierce academic with no judicial experience. Given his relative youth, an appeals court post could serve as a launching pad to a Supreme Court nomination.

Read on.

BRUCE LISKER GETS TRIAL DATE FOR CIVIL SUIT AGAINST LAPD

Neon Tommy’s Kevin Grant has the story. (Another one of my smart students. Wooo-hooo!)

CALIFORNIA PRISONS BUDGET RESISTS THE CHOPPING BLOCK

The San Jose Mercury News had this overview of some of the reasons that chopping money out of the state’s corrections has been a troublesome matter. Here are some clips.

The billions of dollars that California pours into its troubled prisons — a number fattened by court-ordered medical spending and sky-high personnel costs — have become an increasingly attractive target for leaders desperate to trim the state’s $20 billion deficit.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in January called for a constitutional amendment that would cap prison spending and put the savings toward public universities. And since last summer, lawmakers have tried to wring more than $2 billion from the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, once budgeted for $10 billion.

But despite officials’ attempts to clamp down after watching costs double over the past decade, some corrections spending is proving impervious to the budget ax.

{SNIP]

And more than two-thirds of the department’s budget goes to thousands of correctional officers earning salaries locked in during California’s last boom. The state must employ all those officers because of tough sentencing laws that increased the inmate population more than fivefold over the past 20 years.

The challenges only add to a portrait of crisis for California’s prison system, beset by high recidivism rates and dilapidated facilities.

Paul Golaszewski of the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office, which advises the Legislature on fiscal and policy issues, says reducing the number of inmates or taking a tougher stand on corrections salaries could save millions, “but they would require difficult policy decisions.”

JEFFREY MACDONALD SEEKS NEW TRIAL IN “FATAL VISION” MURDERS

The legal team of convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald got 45-minutes in court to explain why MacDonald should get a new trial in the matter of the murders of his wife and two daughters that occurred 40 years ago. MacDonald is serving three life sentences.

ABC has the story.

It’s been 40 years since MacDonald’s wife, Colette, and their two young daughters were brutally murdered in their home in Fort Bragg, N.C., and 31 years since MacDonald, a former army surgeon, was convicted in their murders. He claimed that a group of people, high on drugs, attacked him and murdered his wife and children.

The murders came just six months after the Charles Manson killings and immediately captivated an already shocked nation, spawning the book and TV miniseries “Fatal Vision.”

MacDonald’s lawyer, Joseph Zeszotarski, argued before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., that MacDonald deserves a new trial, based primarily on statements made by people tied to the case that had not previously been heard and new DNA findings that MacDonald’s team wants submitted to the court.

“MacDonald asserts that evidence submitted shows that he is actually innocent, and shows that his trial was infected with constitutional error,” his appeal says.

Read the rest. It’s a troubling tale

To make matters more confusing, Joe McGinnis, the veteran journalist who wrote Fatal Vision, the famous book about MacDonald, the murders and the trial, is the husband of one of my close pals, and I know that, in the course of researching the book, Joe reluctantly came to believe that MacDonald likely committed the murders.

Now it looks like the prosecutor might have had his finger on the scales.

It is all very curious and, as I said, troubling. And it’ll be worth watching the outcome.

SUNDAY CLOSURES & MORE FOR LA’S LARGEST LIBRARIES?

Maeve Reston at the LA Times describes a grim picture of what the budget cuts are doing to the city’s libraries.

Like California, a number of budget-strapped states are crafting legislation that allows certain inmates to use rehabilitative programs to earn time off their prison and jail sentences.

And as in California, in other states, the very same usual suspects are freaking out and predicting a crime wave in reaction to the various earned early release programs that are being instituted.

Refreshingly, however, at Stateline.org, the online publication affiliated with the Pew Center on the States, there is a wonderfully impartial rundown of what the states are doing in the way of incentivized early release—and the reactions against such policies.

Here’re a couple of clips:

As to whether accelerated-release programs lead to more crime by those who are released, research shows otherwise. A review by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency of at least 12 studies, for example, found unchanged or lower recidivism rates among prisoners who benefited from accelerated-release programs in states including Illinois, Wisconsin and Florida.

[BIG SNIP]

“Length of stay has nothing to do with the recidivism rate,” Todd Clear, the incoming dean of the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University in New Jersey, says. “If I let someone out (early), I’m not increasing the chances of them committing a crime. I’m just changing the date.”

Despite the studies, politicians and corrections officials are keenly aware that a single, well-publicized crime by an inmate who has been granted accelerated release can call entire programs into question, virtually overnight. In California, for instance, outrage over the state’s good-time credits has been exacerbated by the early release of a Sacramento County inmate who was arrested in connection with an attempted rape less than 24 hours after walking free.

For that reason, Clear believes, early-release initiatives are a recipe for political disaster. “The minute you let a bunch of people out early, you own everything they do,” he says

Sadly, yes. You do.

Okay, here’s this week’s segment of The Filter in which I talkin with Fred Roggin about the prison population reduction issue, which happens to be news because of two US Supreme Court decisions that occurred on Tuesday.

Here’s the deal: Governor Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown challenged in court the right of the federal panel of three judges led by Judge Thelton Henderson to force the governor and the legislature to find a method to reduce California’s over-sized prison population. The case went to a federal appeals court, and the appellate court sided with Henderson and company. Undaunted, Arnold and Jerry went on to the U.S. Supreme Court—which refused to hear the case.

That happened on Tuesday. This meant that the plan submitted by Schwarzenegger to reduce the state’s prison population by 40,000 to 57,000 over the next couple of years—a plan made because the judges in effect held a gun to the governor’s head—.was to go into effect at the end of this month.

However, to completely confuse things, the US Supremes also put a freeze on the prisoner reduction plan until they (The Supreme Court) could decide what they were going to do about the second lawsuit that Arnold and Jerry had filed about the issue. (This has to do with the three federal judges overriding state law. It’s more complicated than we need to go into right now but, in any case, the state is challenging another aspect of the prison reduction plan.)

Thus everything is a go-ahead—AND everything is frozen.

Anyway, the Supreme Court case was the jumping off point for this segment of The Filter Have a listen. Certainly the topic has more sides to it than we could go into in a three minute segment. But we got to as much as we could.

In California, there are approximately 23,000 prisoners serving life sentences who are technically eligible for parole. Of course, being eligible does not necessarily mean inmates are suitable for parole. Some need to remain permanent guests of the state for their own and everybody else’s good.

Yet, even when a prisoner does not show evidence of being a further danger, the notoriously conservative California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation parole board rarely approves an inmate for release and so California’s lifer population continues to balloon (and age).

“When California courts sentence somebody to life with parole, it turns out that’s not possible after all,” Joan Petersilia, Stanford law professor and one of the country’s experts on parole policy told the New York Times’ Solomon Moore.. “Board of parole hearings almost never grant releases, and that’s the reason that California’s lifer population has grown out of proportion to other states.”

In the rare instance that an inmate does make it through with a positive recommendation (only around 1 percent are recommended for parole out of the thousands seen each year), the board has usually done a fairly thorough job of considering the matter. And even after approval, there will be another 120 days of painstakingly rechecking and researching the inmates background, and disciplinary record. The board will also examine any information received from victims and victims’ families, plus any other public comment that might come forth, searching for the slightest reason that the person should not be let loose among the rest of us. If after all this, the parole board still thinks it’s time to hand the inmate their $200 gate money and send them on their way, one would think that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger would go along with the recommendations of his appointed board.

But he doesn’t—particularly if the inmate in question has committed murder.

In his tenure, Arnold Schwarzenegger has allowed four convicted murderers to be paroled. (Gray Davis was worse. He let 0 be paroled.)

For example, Margo Johnson, 48, has served 24 years of a life sentence for a 1984 murder. The NY Times reports that Johnson has been recommended for release four times by the state parole board, but the governor “rejected the board’s recommendation each time.”

It was therefore heartening to find that talented independent radio journalist Nancy Mullane has Soros Foundation grant to produce a two-hour, four part radio documentary on this issue called “Life After Murder.” It will debut in April of this year.

In the meantime, one story out of Mullen’s project had its debut on This American Life this past week.

It’s about a man named Don Cronk who shot and killed a man in a home burglary gone hideously wrong. He was righteously convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 25 years-to-life in prison with the possibility of parole. More than a quarter of a century later, he was facing his seventh parole hearing. Mullane tells the story.

(Note: The show has a prologue and two acts. The Mullane/Cronk parole story is Act 1.)

It is a compelling and very human tale about the issue of murder and parole. So listen.

PS: Carol J Williams of the LA Times reports on the history of California governors and their parole boards as well as an ongoing legal challenge on the issue.

PPS: Act two of This American Life has exactly zero to do with corrections or parole or Arnold Schwarzenegger but is a long personal essay by short story writer Wells Tower, and it is—wonderful.

NOTE: On an unrelated note, in Tuesday’s LA Times, Senator Ted Kaufman called for a broad, blogger-included federal shield law for journalists. Thank you, Senator Kaufman.

SHOULD WE RISK MAKING CALIFORNIA’S PRISONS BIG BIZ?

(Short answer: No.)

In his State of the State speech on Wednesday (Schwarzenegger’s last) the governor was impassioned about wishing to spend more on higher education that we do on prisons, which is very laudable.

However, there is one surefire way to cut the corrections budget in order to free up money for our CSUs and UCs: When we send people to prison, we need to do what is necessary to insure that, when they get out, they don’t come back again. We’ve got a 70 plus percent recidivism rate in the state. Imagine if we could cut that by a third; what a fiscal difference that would make!

We also need sentencing reform. (Just yesterday, one of my lawyer friends told me about the case she’d witnessed earlier in the week in which two women who were sentenced to 32 months in prison for stealing what was, at the most, $25 worth of pillowcases from Walmart. Lock them up, sure. But for more than 2 years? Not smart. )

But is the governor proposing any such reforms? Nope.

He’s got another way to reverse the corrections v. college budget problem. He wants to privatize the California prison system.

This is…how to put it?… a truly hideous idea. Think a profit-driven Blackwater running the state’s lock ups. (Do we really want to actively incentivize NOT rehabilitating prisoners?)

Here and here you’ll find some of what happened when federal immigration facilities got privatized.

State Assemblyman Ted Lieu has it right:

Religious institutions across the board condemn private prisons as both inhumane and ineffective. The Presbyterian Church USA stated that “Since the goal of for-profit private prisons is earning a profit for their shareholders, there is a basic and fundamental conflict with the concept of rehabilitation as the ultimate goal of the prison system . . . for-profit private prisons should be abolished.” Catholic Bishops in a resolution stated that “We bishops question whether private, for-profit corporations can effectively run prisons. The profit motive may lead to reduced efforts to change behavior, treat substance abuse, and offer skills necessary for reintegration into the community.

Private prisons are also dangerous, both to prisoners and to the public. In 2003 a report by Grassroots Leadership detailed a range of failures by CCA, [Corrections Corp of America] a for-profit private prison company, including: failure to provide adequate medical care to prisoners; failure to control violence in its prisons; and escapes.

Legislators are, thankfully, skeptical. (And the union—the CCPOA—is aghast. For once I agree with them)

HOW FAR DO HABEAS RIGHTS EXTEND?

Last year three detainees being held in the U.S. prison at Bagram Air Base 40 miles north of Kabul, Afghanistan, challenged whether the Habeas rights accorded prisoners in Guantanamo should extend to other prisons where the U.S. is holding captives. In response, Judge John Bates of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in favor of the detainees whose circumstances, he said, justified access to U.S. courts to challenge their ongoing detention. The Justice Department appealed the ruling, and the appellate case came to court this week.

Thus on Thursday, three judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struggled to parse out what was really meant by the Boumediene decision, which in 2008 granted Habeas rights to those held Guantanamo.

SCOTUSBlog has one good analysis of the parsing that is taking place.

Then the story in Friday’s WaPo describes the decided uneasiness with which the three judges are grappling with the lower court’s decision.

And if you still want more, the Blog of the Legal Times has a nicely pithy take on Thursday’s arguments.

TWO MORE JUVENILE LIFERS

On Wednesday, two young men, Steven Menendez, 17, and Jose Garcia, 19, were given sentences of 50 to life for the 2007 murder of 16-year-old Danny Saavedra, who was playing basketball when he was shot. Menendez and Garcia were 14 and 16 years old when they got into a car with a 26-year-old gang member who did the shooting. Menendez and Garcia have always contended they had no idea that the gangster was up to until the firing began, that he told them the group would “go look for girls.”

The Youth Justice Coalition and some other juvenile advocacy groups have been following Menendez and Garcia’s case very closely, and were very disheartened by the sentencing.

The mother of the murdered boy feels justice was served.

The LA Times Molly Hennessy-Fisk has written a short but well-balanced story that points beyond itself to the question of whether we are really better off for handing out such long sentences to juveniles offenders such as Menendez and Garcia.

“HE’S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU”

And in what is far and away my favorite legal decision of the week, on Thursday a panel for the 2nd Circuit opined about what constitutes a “significant romantic relationship.” The case had to do with a condition of parole for a middle-aged guy with no previous record of domestic violence, sexual offenses, or anything related, who had been labeled a sex offender when in the course of an unrelated arrest for some financial shenanigans, cops found among the guy’s porn collection, three DVDs of child porn. (Okay, so, yeah, that does certainly legally qualify him as a sex offender.)

The problem came when, as a condition of his parole, the guy, whose name is Lamont Reeves, was required if he entered into a “significant romantic relationship,” to notify the object of his affections about the nature of his offense.

Mr. Reeves appealed that portion of his parole conditions. The 2nd Circuit judges sided with Reeves, and mentioned both Jane Austin’s Mansfield Park and the film, “He’s Just Not That Into You,” among other works to make their collective point. To wit:

We easily conclude that people of common intelligence (or, for that matter, of high intelligence) would find it impossible to agree on the proper application of a release condition triggered by entry into a “significant romantic relationship.” What makes a relationship “romantic,” let alone “significant” in its romantic depth, can be the subject of endless debate that varies across generations, regions, and genders. For some, it would involve the exchange of gifts such as flowers or chocolates; for others, it would depend on acts of physical intimacy; and for still others, all of these elements could be present yet the relationship, without a promise of exclusivity, would not be “significant.” The history of romance is replete with precisely these blurred lines and misunderstandings. See, e.g., Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, The Marriage of Figaro (1786); Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Thomas Egerton, 1814); When Harry Met Sally (Columbia Pictures 1989); He’s Just Not That Into You (Flower Films 2009).

Well said, 2nd Circuit! (The full opinion may be found here.)

(Thanks to the always wonderful Howard Bashman at How Appealing for the legal and literary discovery.)

On Monday, California lawmakers saw their pay cut by 18 percent. Instead of earning $116,208 a year, they will drop to $95,291.

It was a move that our dear legislators did everything they could to keep from occurring, including pleading with State Attorney General Jerry Brown to declare the cut illegal. (He wisely and correctly declined to do so.)

This brings us to this past Tuesday when the LAUSD board threatened cuts closer to home. The board told the LA’s public school teachers that either 5000 more jobs would be slashed from the district payrolls in the next two years, OR the teachers could take a more than 11 percent drop in pay.

It hardly needs to be said that, if LA’s teachers take the proposed wage hit, they will NOT be grossing $95 grand as their remaining take home.

On the Huffington Post, impassioned Venice High English teacher Dennis Danziger takes a look at the brand new unholy choice of LAUSD cuts from a perspective other than purely fiscal: He sees the cuts as a civil rights issue.

Here, in part, is what he writes:

I stood in a crowd of four or five hundred red-shirted fellow teachers outside Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters near downtown LA late this afternoon. Inside the LAUSD Board was debating, and would later vote on a budget plan which called for a 12% teacher pay cut; plus they’d consider tossing in a few furlough dates just for good measure. All totaled, the package, if approved, would amount to just under a 15% pay cut.

There goes cable TV. Christmas gifts to everyone on my list. The photographer at my daughter’s upcoming wedding. Hand sanitizer. July, August and September rent. Abbot Kinney pizza. The 3,000 mile oil change. Bully sticks for my dogs Leo and Soni. And the land line.

[SNIP]

More disappointing than imagining my shrinking paycheck was the Board’s lone alternative to the proposed pay cuts. In lieu of a pay cut we teachers could vote to have 5,000 LAUSD employees, including 1,400 of our fellow teachers, canned. Kind of a Sophie’s Choice move by the Board. Your money or your colleagues’ jobs. You choose.

This year the LAUSD booted 2,000 teachers off its payroll, and the English classes I teach at Venice HS jumped from 27 students per class in 2008 to 37 students per class this year. Another round of teacher cuts and my classes will be so packed they’ll be in violation of city fire codes. Oh well.

We few hundred protesters milled around in the cold shouting the same old lame union chants: “Enough is enough. Enough is enough.” And the old reliable United Teachers of Los Angeles chant, “U-T-L-A! U-T-L-A!”

Someone with a microphone shouted, “Louder, so they can hear you upstairs!”

Maybe if the 48,000 UTLA members who stayed away from our demonstration had showed up, the people upstairs would have heard our voices. Would have thought twice before threatening our livelihoods, trashing our profession, before threatening to turn a second-rate school district into little more than storage units, holding facilities for the poor. Because that’s what the LAUSD is fast becoming.

Check out the LAUSD website and you’ll learn that over 90% of its students are non-white and the vast majority of them are poor.

So I don’t take the Board’s proposed pay cuts, furloughs and layoffs personally. It’s not that the Board hates teachers. Heck, I figure they could care less about us one way or the other.

This is a civil rights issue. What the Board is doing, if they impose these cuts, is making sure that LA’s poor and working class children don’t stand much of a chance when it comes time to compete for college slots. When it comes time for these kids to enter the workforce.

What the Board will insure if they pass these cuts is that the status quo will prevail. They’ll make sure the tech schools and the military fill their quotas. Make sure there’s another generation of cheap labor. Bus boys, car wash attendants, people who can answer phones, vacuum office floors, deliver pizzas, rake leaves, change diapers, stock shelves and check the oil…..

Read the rest here.

ARNOLD STEPS IN TO SAVE STATE PARKS—BUT MAYBE NOT FOR THE REASON HE SAYS

This past Friday, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger jumped into the budgetary breach with a plan to miraculously rescue 100 state parks from closing (the same 100 he had personally and unilaterally elected to close, but okay. A niggling point).

The story is that the governor brought out his budget crunchers and told them to go forth and find enough savings elsewhere to be able to keep the parks open with minor cutbacks and partial closures to a few parks. Not a perfect solution but much better than shuttering 100 of California’s precious public wildland spaces. That, Arnold! Such a problem solver!

But what, one wonders caused this sudden change of heart?

Could it maybe have been the looming threat of nasty lawsuits and the possible loss of millions of dollars in federal grants?

Yep. Looks like it. In another one of his excellent essays on state and national parks, civil rights lawyer and City Project head, Robert Garcia, pointed out rather presciently, just before Arnold had his come-to-Jesus cost cutting session, that it had been recently been brought to Schwarzenegger’s attention that closing the parks would cost a hell of a lot more—in legal bills and funding losses—than keeping them open.

Here’s a clip:

[The National Park Service] told the governor in June that state park closures would violate the contracts the state signed to receive $286 million in federal funds for 67 parks under the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and could jeopardize hundreds of millions more in future funds. The land for another six state parks could also revert to the federal government. (Read the NY Times article.)

Months after the plan to close state parks was announced, the department’s lawyers finally got around to analyzing the law earlier this month in a memo that was promptly leaked and posted on the Internet. (Read the Mercury News Article on the memo.)

The memo outlines about eight reasons why closing state parks would raise serious problems under contract, property and environmental laws…..

[Here's the rest of Garcia's essay. And here's the memo.]

PS: Try to catch Ken Burns series on the National Parks before it’s over. It’s fantastically good.

THE SUPREMES CONSIDER THE CONSTITUTIONALITY OF LWOP KIDS WHO DID NOT COMMIT MURDER

In Monday’s LA Times, David Savage gave a preview of the case that the Supreme Court will consider in November to determine whether or not life without parole for minors who didn’t kill constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

At issue is whether it is cruel and unusual punishment to imprison a minor until he or she dies when the crime does not involve murder.

According to Amnesty International, “The United States is the only country in the world that does not comply with the norm against imposing life-without-parole sentences on juveniles.”

Nearly all of the estimated 2,500 U.S. prisoners serving life terms for juvenile crimes, the group said, were guilty either of murder or of participating in a crime that led to a homicide. But 109 inmates are serving life sentences for other crimes committed when they were younger than 18.

[SNIP]

The question will be an early test of whether Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a former prosecutor, will align herself with the court’s tough-on-crime conservatives or join with its liberals to strike down prison policies perceived as going too far.

Here, by the way, is a past look at California’s LWOP kids.

UC PRESIDENT MARK YUDOF TO ALL UNDERLINGS: YOU’RE DEAD TO ME

Okay, he didn’t say those words exactly, but in last week’s NY Times interview, University of California president Yudof said some things that were a bit flip sounding given how drastic the cuts have been at the state’s UCs.

For instance there was this:

….Being president of the University of California is like being manager of a cemetery: there are many people under you, but no one is listening. I listen to them.

(“…like being a manager of a cemetery?” Okay, so faculty and staff are either dead to him—or the undead. Hard to tell.)

And, regarding his salary (Yudof makes $540,000 plus $228,000 a year toward his pension plan, plus an annual $120,000 housing allowance, totaling: $888,000 a year), when asked what he thought about the suggestion that no administrator at a state university needs to earn more than the president of the United States, ($400,000), Yudof said:

Will you throw in Air Force One and the White House?

Yudof may or may not be good for the UCs (there are a lot of people lately weighing in on the NOT side of things)—but, given the hits the university system, its employees and its students are taking, a little diplomacy would go along way, dude.
.

THINKING OF STAFON JOHNSON

This isn’t a social justice issue, but many people—myself included— are sending positive thoughts the direction of USC running back, Stafon Johnson, who went though 6 hours of surgery Monday after a weight room accident in which a weight bar fell on his throat.

Today, Thursday, September 24, is the first day of classes for nearly all University of California students. (UC Berkeley for some reason started earlier.)

It is also the day of a system-wide strike in which a great many faculty, students and UC staff plan to walk out in order to protest a bunch of the policies and cuts of that have been instituted by the University of California President Mark Yudof and the UC Board of Regents in the wake of California’s ghastly budget cuts, which snipped 4 percent out of the the University of California’s budget. (To kick things off, UC Davis held a “naked” protest yesterday, pictured above.)

In order to balance the budget, 100,000 full-time UC employees got a 4-10 percent cut in pay, plus mandatory furloughs.

This has meant fewer classes offered to students and pared down educational services while at the same time students are being hit by a 9.3 percent increase in tuition—with more tuition hikes slated.

Plus there is the little matter of some upper echelon UC employees getting raises rather than cuts.

Bottom line: although everyone understands that cuts were necessary, students, staff and faculty are pretty unhappy at the way those cuts have been done.

The Bay Guardian and the SF Chron have additional details. (For the striker’s POV there this much forwarded open letter from UC Berkeley professor, Catherine Cole.)

I teach at one of the UCs. To be specific, I drive to UC Irvine to teach a journalism workshop that meets once a week for three hours. My first class of the Fall quarter is not until Friday so thankfully I am not faced with the unholy choice of either not supporting my striking colleagues (not good) or yanking away from my 20 students of one tenth of their ever-more-costly instructional time. (Really not good. Ten weeks isn’t long enough as it is.)

The novelist Susan Straight was not as fortunate with her schedule. Susan is a longtime faculty member at UC Riverside. Unlike me, her first class is September 24, the day of the strike. In Wednesday’s LA Times she wrote about how she intends to resolve the dilemma. And because Susan is wonderful Susan, she also wrote about writing and teaching in general and about life.

You’ll be missing out if you don’t read the whole thing, but here’s a clip from the middle of the essay:

….Over the years, some people have said to me that it’s frivolous to teach writing — compared with a practical skill like auto mechanics or biology or engineering. But I say that each of my students who learned to tell a story, who taught someone else how to tell a story, who read a story and thought about it and kept it inside until its meaning was clear, learned something vital. The world runs on stories. It is how we humans survive.

What I tried to give them, and what I hope to give my students this fall, is the power that comes with the freedom to write about themselves, to tell their own stories and the stories of their communities, populated by people they know, real or imagined.

My students are like me: Often the first in their families to attend college. I say to them, you have stories no one else has, and you write about places no one else does, and you give voice to people no one else knows. Don’t let anyone tell you that a Huntington Beach surfer’s story doesn’t deserve to be told (that student went on to teach English in Japan). Don’t ever let anyone tell you a migrant farmworker picking grapes in Coachella doesn’t deserve poetry (that student teaches at the New School in New York City).

What to do tomorrow, then?

I agree passionately with the demands behind the strike. My sister-in-law is a custodian at UC Riverside, a single mother of three. Close friends work as clerical staff or in food service. Anyone who makes less than $40,000 a year should be insulated from the cuts. The faculty, the students and all of us who “own” UC should know precisely how it is spending its money. The faculty should not be powerless, and the latest tuition increases — 50% by the time this academic year is over — only make it all worse.

And yet, what is the right thing to do?

Read her solution here.

Photo by Renée C. Byer for the Sacramento Bee rbyer@sacbee.com

According to a new study released Thursday by the California Dropout Research Project, dropouts cost the state of California $1.1 billion annually in juvenile crime costs alone. The study also concludes that cutting the dropout rate would prevent thousands of juvenile crimes in California.

Los Angeles County has a dropout rate of 21 percent—higher than the state average of 18.9 percent, according to data from the California Department of Education. And in 2007, there were more than 60,000 juvenile arrests in Los Angeles County.

In today’s economy when our undereducated young are the most likely to be unemployed, the drop out/crime connection cannot help but worsen.

As Thursday’s LA Times notes:

The California Dropout Research Project at UC Santa Barbara found that cutting the dropout rate in half would prevent 30,000 juvenile crimes and save $550 million every year.

“This study demonstrates the immediate impact dropouts have on both public safety and the economy,” said project Director Russell W. Rumberger. “If California could reduce the dropout rate, it could subsequently reduce the juvenile crime rate and its staggering impact on the state budget.”

With these numbers in mind, State Senator Gloria Romero cosponsored a bill—SB 651—which provides what is basically a diagnostic tool that makes smarter use of existing student data in order to “shine a spotlight on dropout prevention, promote public accountability, and encourage timely interventions for students showing early warning signs of dropping out.”

SB 651 would also make it harder for schools to mask their dropout rates (and raise their by shoving low-performing or at risk kids into continuations schools, then failing to track them, as many school districts presently do.

While it is not a complete solution, the bill is a great jump start. And what is even better, it costs exactly zero in its first year. For every year thereafter, it costs $150,000.

(In other words, it will set back the state approximately the amount that Arnold Schwarzenegger allocates for his annual cigar budget.)

A string of local law enforcement leaders who were shown the research—including Sheriff Lee Baca and a list of So Cal police chief’s—have signed on to the campaign under the banner of a group called Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, California to persuade the governor to sign AB 651, which flew easily through the California state legislature with strong bipartisan support.

Unfortunately, those I spoke with in Sacramento report that Mr. Schwarzenegger is still in the throes of a girlie-man hissy fit (although I don’t believe they used those precise words). It seems that state lawmakers didn’t pass some of the recent bills he wanted passed. So he has vowed (again) to veto any and all legislation that lands on his desk—even if it’s legislation he likes.

This means SB 651 is right now in limbo.

Let’s hope the governor stops his tantrum soon.

(Honestly, is this really the only negotiating tool the man has in his repertoire? So, far, by my count the threatening-and-fit-throwing ploy has worked exactly zero times.)

In a conference call on Tuesday, Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer spoke in strong terms about the pressing need for the bill’s passage. “So often we look at the numbers,” said Dyer, “we don’t look at what drives those numbers. Kids are allowed to drop out of the educational system and be forgotten about. We need to do more. Unfortunately we start remembering them when they commit crimes in our communities.

“We need to do more than count our children as casualties,” Dyer said.