ANOTHER TRAGIC MURDER, ANOTHER 14-YEAR-OLD KID TRIED AS AN ADULT?
Los Angeles prosecutors plan to request that the 14-year-old who allegedly shot and killed his ICE agent father be tried as an adult. What is called a “fitness” hearing to determine whether the boy should be appropriately held to answer in an adult criminal justice system, will be held May 21st.
Parricide expert, Prof. Kathleen Heide, from the Dept. of Criminology at University of South Florida and Laurie Levenson, from at Loyola Law School, both weighed in on the issue on Larry Mantle’s Air Talk on KPCC.
IS LAPD CHIEF CHARLIE BECK PULLING PUNCHES ON POLICE DISCIPLINE? THE POLICE COMMISSION SAYS YES
The Los Angeles Police Commission opposed LAPD Chief Beck’s determination that Det. Arthur Gamboa operated within department regulations when he fatally shot a man in the back during a ruined drug bust. The Commission deemed Gamboa’s testimony and the evidence incongruent and added to their concern that Beck is not taking officer discipline seriously.
When the members of the Los Angeles Police Commission met behind closed doors last month to decide if a cop had been right to kill Dale Garrett, the two bullets in Garrett’s back raised serious concerns.
Det. Arthur Gamboa had insisted that Garrett left him no choice but to shoot when he pulled a knife and threatened to kill the detective during a botched drug bust. LAPD Chief Charlie Beck and the commission’s own watchdog agreed, recommending the oversight board find that Gamboa’s decision to open fire was within department rules.
But for a majority of the five-person commission, errors and inconsistencies in Gamboa’s account, along with the fact that he shot Garrett in the back, could not be ignored. In a divided vote, the commission concluded the detective was not believable. The shooting, the panel ruled, violated the LAPD’s policy on when officers are justified in using lethal force.
With that decision, the shooting became the latest in a series of incidents in which Beck and his civilian bosses disagree on whether an officer’s decision to use deadly force was appropriate. These cases have given rise to a rare vein of tension between the chief and commissioners, who otherwise have heaped praise on Beck since he took over the department 2 1/2 years ago.
TO CLOSE OR NOT TO CLOSE CALIFORNIA’S LAST PRISONS FOR KIDS.
Barry Krisberg, Director of Research and Policy at UC Berkeley’s Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute has changed his stance on the Department of Juvenile Justice in the face of realignment to the county level, which he said would be far less capable of taking care of the most serious juvenile offenders.
Moreover, while the “realignment” strategy has saved some money, asthe DJJ population has been significantly reduced, the spending per kid has remained relatively unaffected due to inflexible union contracts and other expenses that seeme immune to cost cutting, even as the inmate population fell to a tenth of it what it once was.
KALW’s Sayre Quevedo interviewed Krisberg.Here’s a clip from what Dr. Krisberg had to say:
…For the thirty years I’ve been a critic of the California Youth Authority and the conditions of confinement and the problems there. But two things have changed in this situation. One is that the population is now only 10 percent of what it used to be. Many of the youth that we were advocating to get out of DJJ, are now out and in county programs and that’s gone generally pretty well. Now we’re down to a very small core of very troubled young people and so I think that people need to pay attention to the fact that these are not the youth who have been in the system in the past.
The second issue is that in the last eight years there have been significant improvements made—not enough, not as much as I would like. But one of the problems is that at the county level they’re at ground zero. My concern is that we’ve worked hard, we’ve developed policy and procedure, we’ve improved education and medical care, we’ve cut down on the use of force and isolation but at the county level they’ve done nothing. So it’d be going back to where we were eight years ago, very harsh conditions, very harsh practices, and having to start all over again.
While WLA was dark earlier this week, a few things happened that we wanted to make sure you didn’t miss:
DEATH PENALTY REPEAL WILL BE ON NOVEMBER BALLOT IN CALIFORNIA
First of all, on Monday, the initiative known as the SAFE California Act, officially qualified for the ballot. This means that, in November, Californians will have the opportunity to vote on a measure that would ban the death penalty in the state, in favor of life without the possibility of parole.
The death penalty is alarmingly disproportionately applied to people of color, particularly African Americans.
Jeanne Woodford, who was formerly the head of the California Department of Corrections, and the former warden of San Quentin prison, is one of the ballot measure’s most vocal supporters, and was quoted in the press release announcing the measure’s official approval by California Secretary of State Debra Bowen.
“I oversaw four executions at San Quentin,” said Woodford. “I can tell you as a law enforcement officer with 34 years of experience those executions did not make any one of us safer. What they did do was consume millions of dollars in resources that would be better spent on solving crime. Now, Californians will have a real chance to improve personal safety by replacing the death penalty with life in prison without parole, and directing some of the savings to solving more rape and murder cases.”
The fact that the initiative has qualified in California is eliciting a lot of comment from outside the state.
For example, there is this from the International Business Times by Ashley Portero:
….Studies conducted in multiple states have concluded that carrying out inmate executions is ultimately more expensive than sentencing them to life without parole, further leading capital punishment opponents to question the logic of the system.
California taxpayers alone have spent more than $4 billion on the 13 inmate executions the state has performed since 1978, according to a three-year study published in the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review last year. The study estimated the costs of capital trials, enhanced security on death row and legal representation for death penalty defendants adds $184 million to California’s budget each year.
Similar studies have been conducted in at least 9 other states since 2000, all of which have concluded imposing the death penalty is exorbitantly more expensive than a life-without-parole sentence. A 2001 report from the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that capital crime trials place huge and unexpected burdens on country budgets, often leading them to counter those high costs by defunding public projects and increasing taxes….
-California had 723 death row inmates as of Jan. 2012 (the second highest, Florida, had 402).
-Over 130 people have been exonerated since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1973.
-”A 2010 poll by Lake Research Partners found that a clear majority of voters (61%) would choose a punishment other than the death penalty for murder.”
There’s more, so check it out.
THE CANDIDATES FOR LA’S DISTRICT ATTORNEY SPEAK ABOUT THE DEATH PENALTY AND REALIGNMENT…BADLY
The LA Times video-taped five of the candidates for DA speaking on questions that are crucial for any potential LA D.A. to be able to answer coherently. In the videos posted on Wednesday, nearly to a person, the candidates’ answers seemed to indicate a horrifying cluelessness on realignment. On the issue of the death penalty, there’s mostly a lot of pandering and very little reasoned opinion.
Not cheering.
Watch the videos here and then read the LA Times editorial that takes the candidates to task for their inexcusable lack of willingness to say anything that might be actually thought through, fact-based and responsible.
Here’s a clip:
Voters should expect the six candidates for district attorney to have mastered the facts of realignment and to be able to present well-thought-out policies for re-creating the justice system in Los Angeles County and making the reforms stick.
But today, none of the candidates seems completely prepared to grapple with what to do next. Some repeat falsehoods as if they were gospel: Los Angeles County’s jails are overcrowded (false; they are at about half capacity). California’s recidivism rate is 70% (meaningless, without distinguishing between a new criminal offense that should land an offender back behind bars and a technical parole violation, such as failing to report to an agent in time). Realignment puts parolees on our streets unsupervised (a blatant falsehood). State prisoners are being released early under realignment (false). But it’s true that if prosecutors, the courts and the sheriff are not careful, they will release people whom they should keep. And it’s true that under realignment, more jail inmates (as opposed to prison inmates) may be unsupervised upon release.
Alan Jackson has two answers to realignment: repeal it (which is not going to happen, and Jackson knows it) and allow counties to send prisoners out of state instead of seeking alternative treatment and supervision for those who can respond to it. Carmen Trutanich repeats the old saw that “we cannot start crying, ‘The sky is falling.’ ” We know that, but what would he do as D.A. to make realignment work? “This is a terrible mistake,” Jackie Lacey offers somewhat wearily. “But it’s also an opportunity.” Very well, but how will she respond to that opportunity?
JERRY BACKS CARMEN
Did we mention that Governor Jerry Brown announced on Thursday that he would be supporting City Attorney Carmen Trutanich in the upcoming Los Angeles District Attorney’s race? Okay, consider it mentioned.
THREE STRIKES INITIATIVE ALSO CLOSE TO QUALIFYING
An initiative to modify California’s Three Strikes Law is headed for the November ballot with almost twice as many signatures as necessary. SF DA George Gascon (who is also the former Assistant Chief of the LAPD), and LA DA Steve Cooley, have both publicly endorsed the measure which would eliminate the mandatory 25 to life for non-violent and less grievous third strike felonies.
…Under the proposal, only offenders convicted of a “third strike” felony that is violent or serious would face a minimum sentence of 25 to life in prison. The measure, which is modeled after proposed legislation, would also allow some offenders currently behind bars for a “third strike” that was a minor crime to seek a re-sentencing.
Voters rejected a similar measure, Proposition 66, in 2004.
San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon, who has endorsed the new measure, said in a statement that the initiative “saves California taxpayers money and restores the original intent of the law,” which was approved by voters in 1994, “by focusing on truly dangerous criminals.” A fiscal analysis estimates the measure could reduce prison costs by up to $100 million a year in the future.
CDCR CALLS EMERGENCY MEETING IN ONGOING NEGOTIATIONS WITH HUNGER STRIKER GROUP
Isaac Ontiveros reports for the San Francisco Bay View. (EDITOR’S NOTE: It’s not entirely clear if the meeting is really an “emergency meeting,” or if the “emergency” part is a bit of hyperbole from the Bay View editors.) In any case, here’s the deal:
A little over a month after the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) released its “Security Threat Group Prevention, Identification and Management Strategy,” which proposes new gang validation and Security Housing Unit (SHU) step down procedures, the department has called a meeting with members of the mediation team advocating on behalf of SHU and Administrative Segregation (Ad-Seg or ASU) prisoners around the state as well as legislative aides in Sacramento….
20 YEARS AFTER THE LA RIOTS….WHICH WAY LA? DOES A WEEKS WORTH OF PROGRAMS
Warren Olney and his producers have done an unusually good series of programs this week on different aspects of the LA Riots of 1992. You can listen here.
SUPERVISOR RIDLEY THOMAS ORGANIZES A DAY OF DIALOGUE FRIDAY
This is from the press statement:
At 9 a.m. Friday, April 27, 200 civic leaders will return to the First A.M.E., gathering at the FAME Renaissance building at 1968 West Adams Boulevard, to participate in a Day of Dialogue. In small groups, participants will discuss the causes and impacts of the 1992 upheaval, and they will assess what progress has been made and what challenges remain….
I know from talking to various community organizers that this is going to be a very large and interesting event that will be well worth your time if you can get over there.
MAYOR OF UPLAND PLEADS GUILTY TO A BRIBERY CHARGE…
The former mayor of Upland pleaded guilty today [Thursday] to a federal bribery charge, admitting that he accepted a $5,000 payment in exchange for helping a business obtain a conditional use permit from the city.
John Victor Pomierski, 58, who resigned as mayor last year after he was named in a grand jury indictment, pleaded guilty this morning before United States District Judge Virginia A. Phillips. Pomierski becomes the third defendant to be convicted in relation to a corruption investigation in the city of Upland.
As a result of today’s guilty plea to the bribery charge, Pomierski faces a statutory maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison. Judge Phillips is scheduled to sentence Pomierski on August 6.
(We don’t usually report on Upland. But we thought that a lot of you might like to know that the feds are on a roll—since they’re also very busy with ever widening investigations closer to home.)
Stevenson was the dinner speaker on the first night of the symposium I attended in New York, and the 31 experienced and sometimes jaded reporters in the room were utterly riveted
NEW UMBRELLA PHONE TECHNOLOGY WILL BLOCK CELL PHONE CALLS FROM PRISON SAYS CDCR
On Monday, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced that it was implementing a new inmate telephone system that will both curb unauthorized cellphone use in lock-ups, and also reduce call rates for prisoners’ families. Global Tel*Link was awarded the contract to put in the the new technology, with the plan set to start taking effect by the end of the year.
Managed Access technology uses a secure cellular umbrella over a specified area blocking unauthorized cellular communication transmissions, such as e-mails, texts, phone calls, or Internet access.
In 2011, CDCR tested the Managed Access technology at two institutions. The test was conducted over an 11-day period for approximately eight hours a day. During the test, the equipment detected a total of 2,593 unique wireless devices. The equipment blocked more than 25,000 unauthorized communication attempts, such as calls, texts, emails, and efforts to log on to the Internet from a smart phone.
In 2007, CDCR staff discovered nearly 1,400 contraband cell phones. In 2008, it was 2,800; in 2009, 6,995; in 2010, approximately 10,760; in 2011, more than 15,000; and to date this year, 2,181 contraband cell phones have been discovered in prisons and Conservation Camps.
DEATH ROW INMATE IS HIS OWN BEST LAWYER
The NY Times Adam Liptak has the interesting tale of a mentally ill death row inmate who seems to be better at representing himself than either of his previous lawyers. Here’s a clip:
Albert Holland Jr., a death row inmate in Florida, has no legal training and seems to be suffering from a mental illness — “perhaps a disorder involving paranoia or delusional thoughts,” a federal judge wrote recently.
But he turns out to be a pretty good lawyer. Two years ago, in allowing Mr. Holland a fresh chance to make his case after his court-appointed lawyer blew a crucial deadline, the Supreme Court praised Mr. Holland’s legal acumen. Indeed, Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote, Mr. Holland had had a better understanding of the complicated time limits for challenging death sentences in federal court than his lawyer had.
Mr. Holland made good use of the opportunity the Supreme Court gave him. A couple of weeks ago, he won a decision granting him a new trial. In the process, he opened a window on the astoundingly spotty quality of court-appointed counsel in capital cases.
The lawyer whose work the justices had considered was the least of it; he had merely been unresponsive and incompetent. Mr. Holland’s earlier lawyers had failed him in much more colorful ways.
Consider Kenneth Delegal, who was assigned to defend Mr. Holland at a 1996 retrial on charges that he killed a Pompano Beach police officer in 1990. Mr. Delegal was removed from the case after being sent to a mental health facility. Later, the two men would see each other at the Broward County jail, where Mr. Delegal was held on drug and domestic violence charges….
NO PULITZER IN FICTION THIS YEAR, JUDGING PANEL IS NOT ONE BIT HAPPY
So the Pulitzer Prizes were announced Monday….and no fiction prize was given, a decision by the Pulitzer board that made the fiction judging panel more that a little cranky.
The way it works is that the judges pick three finalists and then the Pulitzer board picks a winner.
…On Monday, the prize committee announced that it had not chosen a winner for the fiction award for the first time since 1977. “BREAKING: Fox News Wins Pulitzer for Fiction,” the comedian Andy Borowitz quipped, as readers and pundits around the world took to Twitter to vent their outrage.
Maureen Corrigan, one of three jurors for the fiction prize, says she was just as shocked as everyone else when she learned Monday that there would be no fiction winner. “Honestly, I feel angry on behalf of three great American novels,” said Corrigan, a critic in residence at Georgetown University and a book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air.
Corrigan, along with Susan Larson, former books editor of The Times-Picayune and host of The Reading Life on WWNO-FM, and Michael Cunningham, author of the 1999 Pulitzer winner The Hours, read about 300 novels each over the course of six months. They then met and corresponded to pick three finalists: the late David Foster Wallace’s posthumous and unfinished The Pale King, which was pieced together from manuscripts by Wallace’s editor, Michael Pietsch; the young Karen Russell’s quaintly surreal debut Swamplandia!; and Denis Johnson’s stark and spare novella Train Dreams. The three were submitted to the Pulitzer Prize board, made up of 20 journalists and academics, 18 of them voting members, who must come to a majority vote on the winner. Or not, as was the case this year.
I read all three of the books that Corrigan lists as her panel’s finalists and, I can assure you that any one of the three would have made a genuinely swell winner. Had it been left up to me, I’d have likely picked the Denis Johnson book, Train Dreams, which features sentences so gorgeous they could nearly stop your heart. Still it would have been easy to make a case for either of the other two.
However, none-of-the-above is not a workable choice. Really, it’s not.
Yet the fact that both the Huffington Post and Politico, and that smart 24-year old from PA won their first awards nearly makes up for it.
Among the more notable winners were the Huffington Post’s David Wood, who grabbed the award for national reporting for his reporting on the physical and emotional challenges facing American soldiers who were severely wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. The award was HuffPo’s first-ever Pulitzer.
Politico also earned the right to call itself a Pulitzer-winning publication for the first time, thanks to Matt Wuerker’s political cartoons.
Meanwhile, 24-year-old Sara Ganim and the staff at Pennsylvania’s Patriot-News nabbed the award for local reporting for uncovering the Jerry Sandusky sex scandal at Penn State.
TO CLOSE OR NOT TO CLOSE CA’S COSTLY JUVENILE PROGRAMS?
SF Chronicle’s Marisa Lagos reports on the advantages (and disadvantages) of the state’s controversial juvenile justice programs that the governor proposes to close and the effect that closure could have on the programs’ resident youth.
Here’s a clip:
This is California’s solution to dealing with its juvenile offenders with the most serious criminal backgrounds, who need intensive treatment that county juvenile halls could not provide. The program is expensive, costing state taxpayers $179,400 a year per offender.
Now, the state is contemplating pulling the plug on O.H. Close and three other state-run facilities that serve this population, which represents less than 1 percent of the more than 225,000 youths arrested in California each year. Earlier this year, Gov. Jerry Brown proposed closing the institutions and sending these offenders back to county juvenile halls. [Editors' note: Actually it would be County probation camps. But no matter.]
The move would fall in line with Brown’s broad goal of shifting state services to the county level, in part to cut back on state spending. But staff members at O.H. Close say the closures would be devastating, and some youths here agree, saying they have received far more effective treatment than they ever got in county juvenile halls.
[SNIP]
Staff and wards at both O.H. Close and N.A. Chaderjian Youth Correctional Facility next door say closing the state facilities – which would save the state more than $100 million a year – would set California back, and experts warn it could result in far more juveniles being charged as adults and sentenced to state prison.
HOW REHABILITATION ALL BUT VANISHED FROM CALIFORNIA’S PRISONS
California’s prison system has drastically cut its inmate rehabilitation programs and inmates have few incentives to participate in those that remain. As a consequence, most are paroled with no new skills or education, and those with drug or mental health problems don’t have them addressed. The East Bay Express’ Joaquin Palomino examines how all of the above contributes to the states’ disastrously high recidivism rate.
Here’s a clip:
….Under the Determinate Sentencing Law that [Jerry] Brown signed [in 1977], most inmates receive a fixed sentence, and are released from prison after a specified time period. As a result, most inmates no longer need to prove to a parole board — like Bolar did — that they are ready to reenter society, and so they don’t have to work for their freedom. Because of this, participation in reform-oriented prison programs has dropped substantially. “The general prison population doesn’t do shit no more,” Bolar noted. “No jobs, no classes, no therapeutics, no nothing … and when it’s time to go home they go home.”
In addition, funding for prison rehabilitation has been systemically cut from the California Department of Corrections’ budget. In the 1990s, the legislature went so far as to officially change the penal code to say that the purpose of prison was punishment — period. “They took rehabilitation out of it entirely,” noted UC Berkeley law professor Barry Krisberg. “So for the past three decades the system has been guided entirely by retribution. The main problem with the punitive approach is that the vast majority of prisoners are released.”
And today, released inmates are much less prepared for free society. They usually commit new crimes and end up back in prison. According to the most recent state statistics, an astounding 65 percent of released inmates now return to prison. In the past 25 years, that number has fluctuated between 60 and 80 percent.
At the same time, California voters and state political leaders have made it much more difficult for lifers to win their release. During the past three decades, California governors have routinely overturned parole-board decisions, forcing prisoners to spend even more time behind bars, thereby further diminishing the role of rehabilitation.
WHEN A GEORGIA TOWN UNWISELY GAMBLED ITS FUTURE ON AN ICE PRISON
A privately run detention center in a remote Georgia town attempted to revive it’s prison population (and in turn, boost the town’s economy) with immigrant detainees, courtesy of ICE. Now that the prison is again on the brink of closure, Irwin County’s immigrant prisoners endure disturbingly inhumane conditions.
The Nation’s Hannah Rappleye and Lisa Riordan Seville have the story.
Here’s how it opens:
About a mile from the center of Ocilla, Georgia, a two-stoplight town nearly 200 miles south of Atlanta, sits a bleak boxy building surrounded by barbed-wire fencing. A hand-painted sign reads “Irwin County Detention Center.” With 1,200 beds, this private prison is the largest employer in Irwin, a county of 10,000 people. For years it did good business, bringing much-needed jobs to this impoverished part of south Georgia.
But by the middle of 2009 the prison sat nearly half empty. It needed more inmates to keep the business afloat. The facility’s private management company, and the county, began to court today’s most lucrative detention market: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, otherwise known as ICE.
ICE runs the world’s largest immigration detention system, relying heavily on local jails and private facilities in far-flung communities like Irwin County. Rather than operating them itself, the agency leases beds from local jails or contracts with private corporations, such as Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group, billion-dollar companies that spend millions on federal lobbying to ensure that the market stays strong. Private companies also inspect and monitor prospective and contracted prisons on ICE’s behalf. These entities are responsible for the health and welfare of more than 33,000 immigrant detainees each day. Immigrants who are detained before deportation can spend anywhere from a few hours to years in custody….
EDITOR’S UPDATES:
*ANNENBERG’S NEON TOMMY IS THE BEST PLACE TO GO for rounded coverage of the tragic shooting death of two USC grad students.
*NBC HAS A VIDEO OF WEDNESDAY NIGHT’S HIGH SPEED PURSUIT AND OIS SHOOT OUT DEATH OF A 19 YEAR OLD on the 101 Freeway near Canoga Avenue in Woodland Hills.
The video is harrowing to watch as the kid, after reportedly speaking to his mother and to police on the cell phone, suddenly throws a skidding U-turn with patrol cars on his tail, then gets out of his car and sprints out onto the freeway. As he runs, really, to nowhere across lanes, he turns around and twice points something at police, a move that could only have one logical ending.
The video also makes clear how important air support is for officers on the ground in highly volatile instances like this one.
UPDATE: Dennis Romero at the LA Weekly is keeping up to date on this story, which is playing out more and more tragically with additional information.
LAUSD BOARD GRITS TEETH….THEN SLASHES AND BURNS: VOTES TO CUT ALL ADULT SCHOOLS….AND A LOT MORE, HOPES THAT A PARCEL TAX & UNION CONCESSIONS WILL SAVE ALL
The Los Angeles Board of Education approved a preliminary, worst-case $6-billion budget Tuesday, a plan that would eliminate thousands of jobs, close all of the district’s adult schools and cut some after-school and arts programs.
But Supt. John Deasy presented a less severe deficit than initially expected to the board and several scenarios that would restore millions in funding and save some programs from either elimination or partial cuts before the budget is finalized. Much of that, however, is contingent on voters’ passing the governor’s tax initiative in November, which he hopes would stave off more education cuts.
“I can say that this budget, even with its clear and present dangers, remains a budget of hope,” said board member Steve Zimmer. Deasy then interjected, “I don’t want to hope, I want to plan.”
KCET’S SO CAL CONNECTED GOES INSIDE CHILDREN’S DEPENDENCY COURT, FINDS POTENTIAL DISASTERS
KCET’s So Cal Connected (which has been on a roll in the past year) brought cameras inside LA’s children’s dependency court, and saw a lot that alarmed producer Karen Foshay, and correspondent Jennifer London.
The first of the resulting episodes aired last Friday. The second will air this coming Friday, March 16.
Both episodes demonstrate why Judge Michael Nash’s controversial order to open the court to the press is so important—despite the loud protests by those who thought reporters would trample on the rights of the children whose lives were being decided at these formerly closed proceedings.
Here’s what KCET had to say about episode 2, titled Courting Disaster.
Los Angeles County’s Dependency Court is the largest in the nation, handling 25,000 children. For the first time television cameras were granted access, revealing in graphic detail how deep budget cuts are devastating our justice system and putting our most vulnerable citizens at risk. We profile Judge Amy Pellman who is scheduled to hear 33 family cases in six hours, sometimes deciding a child’s fate in as little as three minutes. We meet parents who have completed counseling programs and are hoping the judge will grant them custody of their son. But other parents are stuck, unable to get into overcrowded programs that are required in order to get their children back.
We see how judges and attorneys often learn the facts of a case only minutes before the case is heard; how attorneys who are supposed to represent 160 children are burdened with 240 cases. More delays and backlogs are inevitable as 300 layoffs and 50 courtroom closures are scheduled to occur in L.A. County, following a statewide $650 million slash in funding.
California Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakaueye says “I think its devastating to be told to come back in four months and that we’ll hear your case on child custody. What’s a person to do in four months?”
Hell, we certainly wouldn’t want reporters looking into any of that.
And, by the way, So Cal Connected focused on exactly the sort of thing that has rarely been adequately reported. We will hear about the ghastly tragedy of a child dying at the hands of abusive parents, but we rarely hear about the everyday tragedies that occur when a system with the power to save or ruin the lives of children and families is overburdened.
CA DEPT. OF CORRECTIONS OUTLINES NEW POLICIES FOR HANDLING PRISON GANGS, AND FOR CLASSIFYING PRISONERS AS TO RISK
As the CDCR rightly states, California prisons manage “the most violent and sophisticated prison gangs in the nation.” Sadly, yes. That’s about right. And much of that management in the past has been to crack down hard, and then crack down some more.
How has this strategy worked out? Not all that well, actually—at least in the long term. Or as the CDCR put it, “Although this [suppression only] strategy reduced violence in prisons, it lacked prevention, deterrent and interdiction components.”
So what did the CDCR do? To their great credit, after 25 years of ever-more aggressive crack downs, they decided to stop and really examine the problem, and then try to institute the most effective methods to solve it, rather than the methods they’d always used.
Here is the report on the new methods that have resulted.
I’ll tell you about the report in more detail in the future, but for now, suffice it to say that it’s quite smart—and, among other things, gives gang members who are willing, a step-by-step road out that is rehabilitative rather than punitive.
It is also good news to note that, in a separate but related report, the CDCR has redone it’s risk classification system. In short, they found that they were overclassifying and/or misclassifying prisoners, which they discovered did greater damage to the prisoners and to public safety, then did underclassing them. Research showed that prisoners who were overclassified—i.e. put in more restrictive units than their behavior warranted—were more likely to act out, more likely to learn criminal behavior from the truly hard cases, and more likely to do poorly when they paroled. (Here’s the report.)
More on this too at another time. In any case, it’s really, really good to see the CDCR stepping up and doing the right thing in these crucial but difficult areas.
Go CDCR!
PS: It’s important to note that many of these reform elements were requested by the prison hunger strikers of last year, during the hunger strike that began at Pelican Bay’s SHU (Secure Housing Unit) and then spread throughout the system.
PPS: As the CDCR points out, these changes are made possible by the population relief brought by realignment, which is exactly right. Despite all the wailing, realignment is wise and necessary. Change is painful in the beginning, but under Jerry Brown’s governorship, Matt Cate and the CDCR is actually starting to slowly but steadily make genuine progress.
ANIMAL ADOPTIONS UPS—AND SO IS EUTHANASIA IN LA’S SHELTERS
Commissioners resigning, euthanasia is up, three of the five commissioners who oversee the Department of Animal Services have recently resigned thus paralyzing the department, a million dogs are running around LA unlicensed, is LA’s critter oversight a mess? Warren Olney with Which Way LA?wades into the issue.
AUTOPSY SHOWS JAIL INMATE’S DEATH LIKELY CAUSED BY DRUGS GIVEN HIM FOR MENTAL ILLNESS
NOTE: LIGHT POSTING TODAY—DUE (HAPPILY) TO HOLIDAY SLOWDOWN….BUT….
NEW JAILS/LASD STORY COMING TOMORROW
ANYBODY GOT EARLY SIGN POSTS ON CRIME AND REALIGNMENT?
KPPC’S Julie Small reports that California’s prison population has dropped by 8000, mostly in response to California’s realignment strategy that began on Oct 1 and has resulted in the transfer of thousands of prisoners from state lock-up facilities to California’s counties.
Here’s a clip from Small’s report:
The number of inmates in California prisons has dropped by 8,000 since “realignment” took effect Oct. 1. Court papers state officials filed Thursday indicate the change. Officials reported the new numbers Thursday under a federal court order to reduce crowding in the prisons.
In its monthly status report to the court, officials said the state prison population dropped by 8,218 between Oct. 5 and Dec. 7.
California prison officials say the transfer of low-level felons to county officials that began in October will allow the state to meet a court-ordered reduction a month after a Dec. 27 deadline.
The state’s prison population has declined from a record high of 173,000 in 2006 to the current population of 135,000. But many prisons remain packed with almost twice the number of inmates they were designed to hold….
University of Ohio Law prof Doug Berman, of Sentencing, Law and Policy, also noted the drop and wondered in a post, if California was experiencing a “big new crime wave in California in recent months?”
The court order resulting in these prison reductions is the one upheld by the Supreme Courtin Plata earlier this year despite strenuous objections and dire warnings of Justices Alito and Scalia and others about a likely spike in crime as a result. I am thus wondering, given that it appears that California is going to be soon complying with this court order, if there is developing evidence of a new crime wave.
The question is particularly relevant in Los Angeles where approximately 40 percent of the “realigned” prisoners have landed, and will continue to land, causing a list of city officials like DA Steve Cooley and others to predict that crime will go up.
Admittedly, it hasn’t been all that long—nevertheless, do we have any early indications, one way or the other?
(NOTE: I can tell you that, far, overall crime is down this year over 2010, but I don’t, as yet, have a month by month breakdown for these past few months.
As Berman points out, nuanced analysis of crime stats would likely tell us a lot, because not every county and/or municipality is handling realignment the same way.
I sincerely hope that there is an on-going effort to track the public safety impact of the prison population reductions in California, especially because it seems that different localities are responding to the influx of former prisoners in different ways. The process of prison realignment is thus creating a kind of post-prison community reentry natural experiment, and I would expect spikes in crime to vary in different localities based on both the nature of the offenders returning to the community and also how the communities are responding to the return of these offenders.
Only a few months into the realignment plan, it is surely to early to have clear or conclusive evidence on the public safety consequences of Plata and its aftermath. Still I am very eager to hear any early reports, especially from anyone actively working on these issues, about what we might know on this front so far.
Yep. Me too.
60 MINUTES OCCUPIES THE BANKS AND THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT
In the past months, CBS’s 60 Minutes has done a couple of excellent, aggressive and utterly enraging reports by Scott Pelley on the banking business, the mortgage crisis, and the like—asking repeatedly why the Justice Department hasn’t filed charges one any of these folks.
The Occupy movement could do worse than to study these segments for talking points.
TEXAS MAN CONVICTED OF MURDERING WIFE, FREED AFTER 25 YEARS – PROSECUTORS WITHHELD CRUCIAL EVIDENCE
The LA Times Molly Hennessy-Fiske and David G. Savage have the story. Here’s how it opens:
The case of a grocery store clerk wrongly convicted of murdering his wife has rocked the legal system across Texas, and not just because an innocent man served 25 years of a life sentence.
Supporters of Michael Morton, who was set free in October, say he might never been convicted if a prominent prosecutor had shared significant evidence with the defense at the time of the trial.
“Mr. Morton was the victim of serious prosecutorial misconduct that … completely ripped apart his family,” said Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project in New York, which represented Morton in his appeal.
On Monday, Morton and his lawyers plan to ask District Judge Sid Harle to take action against the lead prosecutor in the case, Ken Anderson, now a county judge.
The case highlights what critics say has become a recurring problem in Texas and across the nation: prosecutors concealing evidence that could undercut their cases.
The ACLU of So Cal filed a racial profiling lawsuit against Glendale Unified School District, the Glendale Police Department, the Los Angeles Police Department, and LA County Probation on Thursday having to do with a 2010 incident in which 56 Hoover High Hchool students were rounded up and questioned for an hour.
The suit names individual officers from the GPD, the LAPD, probation, plus administrators at Hoover HS for “racial profiling and unlawful search and seizure.”
The lawsuit is based on an incident that occurred on September 24, 2010, when, according to the ACLU, school administrators, working with police and school-based probation officers, rounded up 56 Latino students during their lunch period, herded them into classrooms, interrogated them—and in a bizarre touch—”orced them to pose for mock mug shots.”
Attorneys say that the students were targeted although there was no evidence that they were violating any laws or breaking school rules.
Here’s more from the ACLU statement:
“I was shocked and scared when I saw the police, especially because I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong,” said sixteen-year-old Ashley Flores, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. “It was the first encounter I’ve had with police. I’ve never been in trouble and have nothing to do with gangs.”
The students, all Latino, were eating lunch when school administrators ordered them into two classrooms, where armed GPD and LAPD officers were waiting for them. Police told the students that they could not leave until they provided information. When some protested that they had done nothing wrong, officers ordered them to “sit down and shut up,” and threatened to go to their homes at 6 a.m. to collect the information if they did not cooperate. The officers told students that their personal information would be kept in a file to identify them if they ever got in trouble. The students were detained between 30 and 90 minutes, causing some to miss their fifth-period classes.
“The police officers, school officials, and probation officers involved in this roundup targeted these students solely because they are Latino,” said David Sapp, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California. “They acted as though being a Latino teenager is all the justification they needed to detain and threaten these students, which is a textbook case of racial profiling.”
One student who was eating lunch with the others, who is not Latino, was not detained in the classrooms.
Additionally, after the incident, Defendant Michael Rock, a captain in GPD who authorized the roundup, acknowledged that the students’ ethnicity was central in determining which students were detained, adding that GPD had planned to conduct a similar operation targeting Armenian students. [Italics mine.]
Nice.
The lawsuit sounds righteous, and there’s no excuse for racially profiling and terrorizing kids, yet it might help to have this bit of context:
According to the school website, Hoover High’s student population is around 42 percent Armenian American, and around one quarter Latino. In recent years, elements within the two ethnic groups have sometimes been violently at odds. The most tragic such event occurred in May of 2000 when 17-year-old Raul Aguirre was beaten with a crowbar then stabbed to death in front of the school just after classes ended for the day. Raul Aguirre, it seemed, was a non-troublemaker kid who had tried to intervene in a fight between the two ethnic factions, and was murdered for his trouble.
In any case, one assumes that there’s more to the story. Again, not that anything excuses the actions of the adults. However, additional information might at least, in part, explain the thinking of the cops and the Hoover High administrators.
AND IN OTHER NEWS:
CDCR SAYS CALIFORNIA’S PRISON HUNGER STRIKE HAS ENDED
The CDCR reported on Thursday that the mass hunger strike in the state’s prisons has ended. This is from their statement:
CDCR officials in Sacramento were contacted by inmates by letter on October 11. It was the first such contact by inmates or their representatives during the inmate-led action.
Officials agreed to meet with inmate representatives to discuss its ongoing review of and revisions to its Security Housing Unit (SHU) policies that began in May 2011. Similar to its discussions with inmates during a July hunger strike, all agreed the changes to policies would take several months to finalize. The department agreed to continue on its same course.
Inmates initiated a second hunger strike on September 26, and after three days, 4,252 inmates in eight state prisons had missed nine consecutive meals – the point at which CDCR considers an inmate to be on a hunger strike….
Last Friday, Ian Lovett reported for the NY Times that, unlike with the first strike in the summer, this time the hunger strikers were dug in and prepared to last as long as it took to get some of their demands met, so the change was unexpected.
Here’s a clip from last week’s story:
….since inmates resumed the strike last week in continued protest against conditions of prolonged isolation, things have gone differently: the corrections department has cracked down, trying to isolate the strike leaders, some of whom say they no longer trust the department and are hoping to push the governor to enact reforms.
“I’m ready to take this all the way,” J. Angel Martinez, one of the strike leaders at Pelican Bay State Prison, said in a message conveyed through a lawyer this week. “We are sick and tired of living like this and willing to die if that’s what it takes.”
This time, though, both sides have shown less inclination to compromise, and no negotiations between the strike leaders and the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation have taken place since the strike resumed.
An internal memo from George J. Giurbino, director of the Division of Adult Institutions for the department, outlined new, more aggressive processes for dealing with mass hunger strikes….
However, on Thursday, Lovett reported on how and why the strikers had agreed to begin eating again. Here’s a clip:
…after negotiations on Thursday between the corrections department and lawyers representing the inmates, strike leaders agreed to resume eating.
Corrections officials reiterated the reforms the department had agreed to at the end of the previous hunger strike in July, which they said would take several months to finalize, and “agreed to stay on its same course,” according to a news release from the department.
The department had already agreed to a review of its policies for placing inmates in security housing units.
But Carol Strickman, a lawyer with Legal Services for Prisoners with Children who negotiated on behalf of the inmates, said that, most importantly, the department had agreed to review the cases of all prisoners already in isolation because of “validated” gang affiliation, rather than because of their behavior while in prison.
“This is the first time the prisoners had heard that kind of review was in the works,” Ms. Strickman said. “That new information, I believe, convinced them to end the hunger strike.”
In the last few weeks, the LA Times’ Robert Faturechi has been doing some fine and very welcome reporting on the issue of deputy abuse of inmates in the Los Angeles County Jails—which is important.
In Friday’s paper Faturechi tells of a young Sheriff’s deputy who says he was forced by his supervisor to beat a mentally disabled inmate in the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown L.A.
Here’s how the story opens:
A Los Angeles County sheriff’s rookie who graduated at the top of his recruit class resigned after only a few weeks on the job, alleging that a supervisor made him beat up a mentally ill jail inmate, according to interviews and law enforcement records.
The deputy, Joshua Sather, said that shortly before the inmate’s beating his supervisor said, “We’re gonna go in and teach this guy a lesson,” according to the records. The attack, Sather said, was then covered up.
Law enforcement records reveal that the incident caused tensions in the Sheriff’s Department. Sather’s uncle, a veteran sheriff’s detective, angrily confronted the supervisor about making his nephew “beat up ‘dings,’ ” slang for the mentally disabled. He then allegedly threatened to “put a bullet” in the supervisor’s head.
Sather’s case was pieced together by The Times from department sources as well as district attorney’s documents in which Sather’s uncle revealed his nephew’s allegations to investigators.
Sheriff’s officials launched an investigation and determined that an uncooperative inmate had been subdued by force, but concluded that no misconduct had occurred. They also asked the district attorney to review the uncle’s alleged threat, but prosecutors declined to file charges.
Sather’s allegation is among several first-hand accounts of unwarranted deputy violence against inmates in the nation’s largest jail system. Last week, two chaplains and a movie producer released sworn statements that they witnessed deputies abusing inmates. But Sather’s allegations are unusual because they come from within the department’s own ranks, from the point of view of a deputy.
AND WHILE WE’RE PRAISING THE LA TIMES, GEORGE SKELTON HAS A GOOD ESSAY ON ALL THE COMPLAINING OVER REALIGNMENT.
The boring, bureaucratic word “realignment” masks the truly dramatic change in locking up California criminals that Gov. Jerry Brown just pulled off.
“A lot of people say, ‘Hey, what’s new in Sacramento?’” Brown told a news conference last week. “Well, this is new. It’s bold. It’s difficult. And it will continuously change as we learn from experience.
But we can’t sit still and let the courts release 30,000 serious prisoners. We have to do something.”
In truth, the change was inevitable.
Either the state began to dump thousands of its lower-risk prisoners onto local custody or it would have been forced by federal courts to dump them on the streets.
“We’ve either got to reduce the prison population or release 10,000 inmates by Christmas Eve,” says Matthew Cate, secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. “That’s [equal to] two prisons.”
Complainers — such as Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa — are being disingenuous, at best.
Villaraigosa called a news conference Monday to denounce the state for not providing “a single dollar to help with the burden” of incarcerating and monitoring more criminals. “That is not alignment. That is political malpractice.”
Not quite. The state is sending financial help to the counties, including $124 million to Los Angeles County. It’s up to the cities to request a share. The mayor has privately told people that he won’t “go begging” to county supervisors for money, according to one state official who requested anonymity because he was reporting a private conversation.
My favorite hyperbole, however, comes from Republican State Sen. Sharon Runner of the Antelope Valley: “Now is the time for Californians to get a dog, buy a gun and install an alarm system. The state of California is no longer going to protect you.”
Let’s be honest: The politicians and the voters simply could not continue their decades-long insistence on increasing criminal sentences and enlarging the prison population without raising the money to pay for more cells and guards.
PROBATION CHIEF DON BLEVINS SAYS DEPARTURE IS VOLUNTARY
Chief Blevins told KPCC’s Larry Mantle on Thursday’s Air Talk show that he is leaving Probation to…spend more time with his family.
Among other things, Blevins said that he expects Probation to meet—or to nearly meet—all of the 41 reforms in the County’s juvenile camps required by the Department of Justice by October 31, whereas sources who work in an around the camps say this is simply not true, that the County won’t come close.
We’ll know which point of view was more factual very soon.
Zev Yaroslavsky said bluntly and quite rightly that kids in the Probation camps are simply not being given the mental health care or the education that they need.
Yaroslavsky also mentioned that probation needs a large cultural change “so that people [in probation] are expected to work for the hours that they are paid.
Doesn’t seem like too much to ask.
SCREENING FOR REALIGNMENT PAROLEES MAY NOT BE ALL THAT ACCURATE SAYS ZEV’S BLOG
Zev’s blog reports that cases are coming through where the so-called Non, Non, Nons—people who have committed non serious, non violent, non sexual crimes—have larger crimes in their background, or inmates who should not be in the category are being accidentally sent through for county supervision when in reality they should be high control parolees.
The blog reports that the Probation Department is doing it’s own screening.
Let’s hope so. The realignment strategy is a necessary change, but to avoid problems there has to be quality control in the screening process. Otherwise we got trouble.
Last week WitnessLA reported (based on the word of multiple inside sources) that Probation Chief Donald Blevins had been informed the week before that his tenure in LA County Probation was over; he was being given the boot.
When other news outlets, like KPCC, called Probation to confirm our report they were told no such firing had take place. (Never mind that we know that Blevins’ employment situation was as we reported it.)
Now on Tuesday morning, the Supervisors will meet in a closed door session, the purpose being, according to their agenda, for: Interview and consideration of candidate for appointment to the position of Chief Probation Officer.
Last week Spokesperson Kerry Webb did confirm another pesky rumor—namely that last week Blevins left for a vacation that “had been planned months in advance ” reported the LA Times.
There was some muttering in and around some of the supervisors’ offices about the wisdom of the Probation Chief planning a vacation that kicked in just days before Los Angeles was to get an influx of parolees from the state to be overseen by LA County Probation.
But whatever. The beat goes on. More soon.
SINCE WE’RE ON THE TOPIC OF REALIGNMENT, MORE CITY OFFICIALS ARE PREDICTING DOOM AND GLOOM
The LA Times’ Joel Rubin and Andrew Blankstein report that the LAPD will be additionally burdened by the realignment parolees and that the mayor and others have expressed concern while a Governor’s aide calls all this public worrying political posturing.
Who is correct remains to be seen, although I do notice that, according to the article, the City of LA is predicting a much larger number of parolees to come to LA before the end of the year than the actual CDCR numbers reflect. Not sure what’s up with that.
THOUSANDS OF CALIFORNIA INMATES RENEW HUNGER STRIKE, AND THE CDCR INVESTIGATES TWO STRIKE ATTORNEYS
I’m playing catch up on this story, but the very knowledgeable Michael Montgomery from California Watch is doing great coverage. Here’s an excerpt from his latest.
Just days after thousands of California inmates renewed a hunger strike, two Bay Area attorneys closely involved in mediation efforts got a surprise: They were under investigation by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for allegations of misconduct and unspecified security threats.
The attorneys – Marilyn McMahon, executive director of California Prison Focus, and Carol Strickman of Legal Services for Prisoners With Children – have been banned from state institutions until the investigation is resolved, according to temporary exclusion orders signed by Corrections Undersecretary Scott Kernan on Sept. 29.
The investigation will determine whether the attorneys “violated the laws and policies governing the safe operations of institutions within the CDCR,” the order states.
The document does not provide details about the allegations.
SANDY BANKS ON SHERIFF LEE BACA AND THE JAILS ABUSE SCANDAL
Yesterday, I missed linking to Sandy Banks’ excellent and very welcome column about Sheriff Baca and the growing jails abuse scandal. If you’ve already seen it, great. If not, it’s a BIGTIME must read. Banks lays it all out for the Sheriff, with no punches pulled. For his sake as well as ours, I hope he is listening.
WHERE TO WATCH TUESDAY’S IPHONE 5 APPLESTRAVAGANZA
YES, it is presumed that the iPhone 5 is launching Tuesday at 10 am Pacific (not just the undramatic iPhone 4s).
And NO this is not a social justice issue.
It’s an Apple cult issue.
So if you too are a cult member, here’s where you can find out where to follow real-time commentary and/or live streaming.
The hunger strike that began on July 1 at the Pelican Bay SHU eventually spread to somewhere between 1700 to 6600 prisoners in 13 of the state’s prisons, according to the SF Chron.
Now that the strike has ended, it is unclear what it has accomplished since, as the LA Times pointed out in an editorial last week, the CDCR won’t let reporters into the SHU to talk to any of the prisoners.
However one measurable effect the strike has had is to stimulate articles about solitary and whether we ought to be engaging in the practice.
The very best of the Op Eds on the topic is an excellent editorial from the NY Times. Here is a big clip:
Solitary confinement has been transmuted from an occasional tool of discipline into a widespread form of preventive detention. The Supreme Court, over the last two decades, has whittled steadily away at the rights of inmates, surrendering to prison administrators virtually all control over what is done to those held in “administrative segregation.” Since it is not defined as punishment for a crime, it does not fall under “cruel and unusual punishment,” the reasoning goes.
As early as 1995, a federal judge, Thelton E. Henderson, conceded that so-called “supermax” confinement “may well hover on the edge of what is humanly tolerable,” though he ruled that it remained acceptable for most inmates. But a psychiatrist and Harvard professor, Stuart Grassian, had found that the environment was “strikingly toxic,” resulting in hallucinations, paranoia and delusions. In a “60 Minutes” interview, he went so far as to call it “far more egregious” than the death penalty.
Officials at Pelican Bay, in Northern California, claim that those incarcerated in the Security Housing Unit are “the worst of the worst.” Yet often it is the most vulnerable, especially the mentally ill, not the most violent, who end up in indefinite isolation. Placement is haphazard and arbitrary; it focuses on those perceived as troublemakers or simply disliked by correctional officers and, most of all, alleged gang members. Often, the decisions are not based on evidence.
Also notable are the letters to the editor that came a few days later. I’ve included a fragment of one of them:
Re “Barbarous Confinement,” by Colin Dayan (Op-Ed, July 18):
Mr. Dayan vividly captures the cruelty of long-term solitary or “supermax” confinement, which has increasingly become business as usual in American prisons. Supermax units like the one at Pelican Bay State Prison in California cost two to three times as much to build and operate as conventional prisons, and prisoners released directly to the community from solitary are more likely to commit more crimes than comparable prisoners released from general prison populations.
Fortunately, some states are beginning to change course. In Maine, the new commissioner of corrections has cut the population of the state’s supermax unit by more than half. Mississippi depopulated its supermax unit and eventually closed it entirely, leading to a dramatic drop in prison violence and a savings of $8 million a year….
Interesting that conservative states like Mississippi are reforming their SHUs, while liberal California cling to the concept.
FRANK SOTOMEYOR WRITES ABOUT THE DEATH OF PRIZE WINNING JOURNALIST GEORGE RAMOS
May 8th, 2012 by 
Celeste Fremon
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