“We can keep the public safe without locking children up forever for crimes committed when they were still considered too young to have the judgment to vote or drive.”
- Elizabeth Calvin, children’s advocate, Human Rights Watch

The Fair Sentencing for Youth Act, SB 399, may or may not be passed into law this week in the California State Assembly. If passed, it would to allow courts to take a second look at cases involving juveniles sentenced to life without parole, (or hugely long sentences that amount to life), after that kid has spent 15-years behind bars. The bill guarantees nothing, but it at least opens up the possibility that an adolescent who did something terrible as a kid, might one day be given the chance to demonstrate his or her worthiness of release.

The bill was amended for what is believed to be the final time this past Friday. It has already passed through California’s Senate.

Interestingly, the best article over the weekend on the state of the bill ran in an Illinois-based publication—the Belleville News Democratic.

(The LA Times ran an op ed urging passage of the bill last week.)

Here are a few representative clips from the Bellville piece:

A 14-year-old south Modesto boy who killed a young father at a child’s birthday party will likely die in prison. Angel Cabanillas, now 19, stands to serve at least 100 years behind bars. But just 40 miles south in Merced, a boy who was 15 when he committed a fatal drive-by to impress his fellow gang members is set to be sentenced Monday to 31 years in prison. He could be out by the time he’s 42.

The disparity in their sentences reflects a divide in how judges and prosecutors handle violent crimes committed by children. The topic of whether minors can be sentenced to die in prison has recently come under scrutiny by the U.S. Supreme Court and the California Legislature, and their discussions could change the rules for cases like Cabanillas.’

In May, the Supreme Court ruled juveniles cannot be sentenced to life in prison without parole for non-homicide crimes. Denying children who commit lesser crimes the opportunity to ever get out of prison constitutes cruel and unusual punishment and runs counter to a worldwide consensus against such harsh sentences for juveniles, the court wrote. But while the decision did not specifically address what can happen to children convicted of murder, legal experts say recent court rulings regarding juvenile justice have shown a trend toward leniency.

[SNIP]

“The court has made clear that juveniles are different than adults,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine.

The California Legislature is heading in that direction, too. On Friday, it moved forward with a bill that would allow courts to take a second look at cases involving juveniles sentenced to life without parole.

It would not prohibit life without parole sentences for juveniles but lets courts review such cases 15 years after sentencing, potentially allowing some young convicts to receive a lesser sentence of 25 years to life.

The existing bill is a watered down version of Yee’s original bill, which would have prohibited life-without-parole sentences for juvenile’s altogether. But the hair of law enforcement groups across the state uniformly burst into flames over the matter of doing away totally with LWOP for kids. Thus a frantic series of amendments were added.

Still SB 399 is a place to start.

That is IF it passes.

The California District Attorney’s Association is still resolutely against it. (We are shocked, shocked.) As is the Republican Caucus. The fear-mongering against the bill has been considerable.

The last round of amendments only passed 34-30—meaning the bill likely has 34 votes locked up. It needs 41 votes to pass.

Let us hope that seven more state assembly persons find their spines and their common sense in time to pass SB 399.

Two important criminal justice rulings came down from the Supremes today. (More details on both these cases late tonight, but for now, here are the broad strokes.)

LWOP KIDS

In a 5-4 ruling with Justice Kennedy writing for the majority, the Supreme Court ruled that a sentence of life without the possibility of parole—LWOP—for a juvenile in a crime where no homicide has been committed constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, according to the 8th Amendment of the Constitution. (Justice Roberts joined in a part of the decision, making some of it 6-3.)

This is a ruling with huge implications-–and a welcome victory for those of us who believe that kids should at least have the possibility of parole.

Here’s a report on the ruling from David G. Savage at the LA Times.

FYI: California has 249 LWOP kids but only 2 are locked up for crimes that did not involve murder.

CIVIL CONFINEMENT FOR SEXUAL PREDATORS

As Doug Berman of Sentencing, Law & Policy wryly pointed out-–just to make clear that the Supreme Court is not in the least unaware of PR issues, on the same day that they leaned in a slightly liberal direction in their ruling on the LWOP issue, SCOTUS cannily scheduled another criminal justice-related hot potato case in which they came down firmly on the law-and-order, power-of-the-federal government side of things (“Not that there’s anything wrong with that.“:

In a 7-2 ruling on US v. Comstock, the court said that Congress has the authority under the Constitution to allow the continued confinement of certain kinds of convicted sex offenders after they have completed their sentences.

(Thomas and Scalia were the two dissenters.)

Here’s the relevant explanitory ‘graph from Adam Liptak’s article in the NY Times.

The law allows the federal government to continue to detain prisoners who had engaged in sexually violent conduct, suffered from mental illness and would have difficulty controlling themselves. If the government is able to prove all of this to a judge by “clear and convincing” evidence — a heightened standard, but short of “beyond a reasonable doubt” — it may hold such prisoners until they are no longer dangerous or until a state government assumes responsibility for them.

However, there is much, much more to this case having to do with what powers the federal government is or is not allowed under the Constitution.

Back on both cases very, very late tonight.

When LA Times writer Joe Mozingo came to guest lecture at my Annenberg class last fall, he mentioned that, for months, between other assignments, he’d been working somewhat obsessively on a story about his personal heritage. Joe had taken it into his head to find out the origin of his last name, Mozingo, which his dad had always told him was Italian.

The search seemed fine as a personal journey but not terrible promising as a work of journalism.

But then Joe told us some of the rest of the story—like his discovery of the part of the family history that had long been deliberately buried, and that some branches of the family were not delighted to see uncovered.

The result is a terrific three-part series that began on Sunday, with additional parts Monday and Tuesday.

(My bet is that it will be up for prizes come next awards season.)

Here’s a clip from the beginning to give you the flavor.

I set out last year to learn our story, traveling from the Tidewater of Virginia to the hollows of Kentucky and southeastern Indiana and beyond. At times, I struggled to absorb what I was finding, and I met Mozingos who were skeptical of it, or ambivalent, or fiercely resistant.

I learned that our early ancestry reflected not so much a quirk of American history as the messy start of it, seeding a furious internal conflict that continues today.

With us, the whole battle was embodied in a family — and a name.

Read on.

NEW REPORT SAYS JAILS & PRISONS ARE AMERICA’S MAIN PSYCH HOSPITALS

The National Sheriff’s Association along with the Treatment Advocacy Center has just released a report showing that Americans with severe mental illnesses are three times more likely to be in jail or prison than in a psychiatric hospital, according to “More Mentally Ill Persons Are in Jails and Prisons Than Hospitals: A Survey of the States.”

“America’s jails and prisons have once again become our mental hospitals,” said James Pavle, executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit dedicated to removing barriers to timely and effective treatment of severe mental illnesses. “With minimal exception, incarceration has replaced hospitalization for thousands of individuals in every single state.”

The odds of a seriously mentally ill individual being imprisoned rather than hospitalized are 3.2 to 1, state data shows. The report compares statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Bureau of Justice Statistics collected during 2004 and 2005, respectively. The report also found a very strong correlation between those states that have more mentally ill persons in jails and prisons and those states that are spending less money on mental health services.

Of course we already know that LA County jail is the largest mental health facility in the U.S. But evidently the trend is not limited to our fair state.

THOUSANDS OF CHILD ABUSE REPORTS IN LA GO UNINVESTIGATED

The LA Times’ Garrett Therolf reports that DCFS-–the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services—has a backlog of more than 18,000 tips of child abuse that have not been investigated within the mandated 30 days, leaving children potentially dangerously at risk.

Read the rest here.

WHO CAUSED THE GULF OIL SPILL DISASTER?

Two segments on Sunday’s 60 Minutes were devoted to the catastrophic oil rig explosion in the gulf, that killed 11, causing the ongoing oil leak in the waters off of Louisiana. The story centers around the experiences of a crewmember on the rig Deepwater Horizon and his account of how the disaster had been building for weeks in a series of mishaps—yet that BP management adamantly declined to act.

60 Minutes also reported they have learned from a second BP insider, who said that there is a new worry about another BP facility in the Gulf, the platform “Atlantis,” which the insider is said—if certain safety fixes are not made— is a far greater threat than the Deepwater Horizon.

Watch the video.

Read the transcript.

Photo by Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times

Lower Merion School District, a suburban school district near Philadelphia, gave nearly 2,300 high school students their own laptop computers.

What a good idea! How great for the students!

Well, as it turns out, yes and no. It seems that, to make sure the computers were secure, the district installed a nifty tracking system into the laptops that, when activated, took surreptitious photos of anything or anyone within reach of the computer’s webcam.

Thus, when students reported their laptops lost or stolen (which several dozen of them did at one time or another) district officials activated the program—and the photo snapping began, with the snapees none the wiser.

In five cases, the snapping continued after the computers were retrieved. In another 15 cases, the program was activated for mysterious reasons when no computer was reported lost or stolen at all.

In total, the district snapped—and stored—58,000 images of students, one every 15 minutes when the machines were on.

One of those students, Blake J. Robbins, was photographed when he was sleeping, when he was partially undressed, and at who knows what other times. (What did you do when you were a teenager and alone in your bedroom? Never mind. Don’t answer that. TMI.) Robbins never had his computer stolen or lost—-and he is suing.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Robbins found out about the web cam surveillance when the assistant school principle scolded him for “improper behavior in his home,” according to the class action lawsuit. Evidently she thought he was doing drugs on camera, when he was actually eating candy—Mike and Ikes to be exact.

(HELPFUL NOTE TO SCHOOL ADMINISTRATOR: When possibly illegally spying on someone, let’s say, for example, a minor child not your own, it is generally considered unwise to spontaneously lecture the object of your surveillance about something you saw them doing when they believed they were at home entirely alone.)

The Inquirer has much, much more here and here.

According to the AP, the FBI has opened a criminal investigation into possible wiretap violations by the district, and U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, of Pennsylvania, has introduced a bill to include webcam surveillance under the federal wiretap statute.

The photo above, one of those allegedly taken by the secret photo program, shows Robbins sleeping at home at 5 p.m. on Oct 26, 2009.

The mind simply reels at the new and appalling possibilities that this laptop spying story suggests.

PS: The comments section at Boing-Boing features an interesting conversation about the school’s policy and other schools that have tinkered with something similar.

A 12-year-old Pennsylvania boy is to be tried for the murder of his soon-to-be stepmother and her unborn child. He was 11 at the time of the shooting. The judge who ordered the adult proceedings says that the boy, Justin Brown, has no remorse thus is unlikely to be rehabilitated.

If he is found to be guilty, he will face a mandatory life sentence without parole, and will be the youngest person in the nation serving life.

Although, according to the judge’s written ruling, evidence certainly seems to point straight to the boy for the murder, Justine Brown has insisted from the beginning that he did not kill the pregnant mother of two, Kenzie Houk.

Justine’s father said that his fiance had recently been threatened by an embittered old boyfriend.

Here are clips from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

At the heart of the judge’s decision was Jordan’s refusal to take responsibility for the crime, which both Dr. Heilbrun [the defense psychiatrist] and prosecution psychiatrist John S. O’Brien II, testified is necessary for rehabilitation. The law, however, does not require a confession to move a case to juvenile court.

Dr. O’Brien said it is unlikely the boy will ever admit guilt, “thus making the prospects of rehabilitation within the confines of the juvenile court jurisdiction likely to be unsuccessful,” the judge wrote.

Here’s the judge’s opinion.

The Post-Gazette later reported that some experts were startled by the judge’s decision.

“I am shocked,” said Jeffrey Shook, a professor of social work at the University of Pittsburgh and an expert on the juvenile justice system. “We know a lot about young people and how they’re different, and to treat someone who is 11 at the time of their offense as an adult really rejects a lot of what we know about adolescent brain development.”

Laurence Steinberg, a developmental psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia and expert on adolescent behavior and brain biology, said “the idea of taking a child this age and locking them up for life is pretty repugnant. What he (allegedly) did is repugnant also. But the heinousness of the crime does not make him an adult.”

The trial will likely take place in May.

Should people who are convicted of downloading pornographic images of a child have to pay the victim? It is a new and controversial question. Some people feel the download is a victimless crime. But read on:

And The New York Times has a story about the issue on Wednesday

When Amy was a little girl, her uncle made her famous in the worst way: as a star in the netherworld of child pornography. Photographs and videos known as “the Misty series” depicting her abuse have circulated on the Internet for more than 10 years, and often turn up in the collections of those arrested for possession of illegal images.

Now, with the help of an inventive lawyer, the young woman known as Amy — her real name has been withheld in court to prevent harassment — is fighting back.

She is demanding that everyone convicted of possessing even a single Misty image pay her damages until her total claim of $3.4 million has been met.

Some experts argue that forcing payment from people who do not produce such images but only possess them goes too far.

In February, when the first judge arranged payment to Amy in a case in Connecticut, Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, called the decision “highly questionable” on his blog and said it “stretches personal accountability to the breaking point.”

Here’s the rest. Read on. Then tell me what you think.

Meanwhile, the Urban Institute released a report on Tuesday that examines the effects of immigration enforcement on children.

This is from the abstract:

This report examines the consequences of parental arrest, detention, and deportation on 190 children in 85 families in six locations, providing in-depth details on parent-child separations, economic hardships, and children’s well-being. The contentious immigration debates around the country mostly revolve around illegal immigration. Less visible have been the 5.5 million children with unauthorized parents, almost three-quarters of whom are U.S.-born citizens. Over several years, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) intensified enforcement activities through large-scale worksite arrests, home arrests, and arrests by local law enforcement. The report provides recommendations for stakeholders to mitigate the harmful effects of immigration enforcement on children.

Read more here.

WHEN DOES RESTRAINING AND SECLUDING KIDS TURNS ABUSIVE AND DANGEROUS

On Wednesday, December 9, Representatives George Miller (D-CA) and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) plan to introduce a bill that prevents the misuse of restraint and seclusion on school kids. (Miller is the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. McMorris Rodgers is a member of the Committee.)

One would imagine that such a bill as this one would not be necessary in this day and age. But one would be wrong.

It seems that, unlike with hospitals, and like facilities that receive federal funding, there are currently no federal policies that provide guidelines as to how restraint and seclusion can be used in schools, and the state laws are ridiculously uneven.

As a consequence, there have been reports of horrific cases of adults sitting on kids who are face down until they have stopped breathing, adults placing mentally disabled kids in closets for extended periods of time, in certain cases with fatal results, and on and on.

(The video above shows the Congressional testimony of a mother named Toni Price about once such incident. Price’s account is dignified, clear and heartbreaking.)

A look at the report on the matter from the US General Accounting Office is quite sobering.

Anyway, this is a bipartisan bill. Take a look.

The video above is of one mother’s testimony at a Congressional hearing on the issue this past spring.

ROBBER APOLOGIZES TO VICTIM

Evidently on Sunday night, a gun-wielding robber who jacked $70 from a Christmas tree salesman apologized to his victim saying, “Times are tough,” according to the LA Times.

I know several young able bodied men who are about to apply for General Relief because, despite daily searches for any kind of work they can find nothing, and they need some way to put food in the house but do not want to turn to the same desperate strategy as the gunman.

I got a call from one of them last night. He does not want a government hand out, he said. “But what can I do?” he asked me. I had no answer.

CAN A CAMPUS CHRISTIAN GROUP BAN GAYS AS VOTING MEMBERS?

On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to take a case which pits issues of religious freedom against a college’s policy of nondiscrimination. Moreover, the case has views of two circuit courts at odds with each other, one of them California’s beloved and sometimes notorious 9th Circuit.

The Christian Science Monitor has a very thorough write up. Here’s a clip:

The Christian Legal Society (CLS) at the Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco was stripped of its registered student organization status at the college because it refused to allow gay and lesbian students to become voting members or officers of the group.

Under the Hastings nondiscrimination policy, student organizations must allow fellow students to join and potentially seek leadership positions in any organization without regard to their status or beliefs….

Starting in the 2004-2005 academic year, the CLS required prospective members to sign a statement of Christian faith. The statement includes a pledge that the undersigned student trusts in “Jesus Christ as my savior.”

Prospective members must express belief in several religious tenets, including “one God, eternally existent in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” The statement includes a pledge of belief in the virgin birth, eternal life, Jesus’ resurrection, a divinely created heaven and earth, and that the Bible is the inspired word of God.

In addition, the national Christian Legal Society developed a policy position stating its view of biblical principles of sexual morality. The position, adopted by the Hastings chapter, said that “unrepentant participation in or advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle” was inconsistent with the group’s statement of faith and would disqualify an individual from membership.

Great case! Morally complex and legally ambiguous. Go Supremes!

JUSTICE BREYER: “GET ME THE REWRITE GUY!”

And Speaking of the Supreme Court…based on another case that went before the court on Monday, it looks quite possible that the nation’s Miranda warning may get rewritten. The case—Florida v. Powell—concerns one Kevin Dwayne Powell who did not understand, even after the warning was given, that he could have an attorney with him during questioning—as that fact is not really spelled out.

(Although if Mr. Powell had watched a little more episodic television, surely he would have known his rights a bit better.)

As the AP explains the rest.

STILL MISSING DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

This isn’t really a social justice issue at all, it’s a literary issue. But if you care about such things, the new posthumous piece of fiction by David Foster Wallace in the upcoming issue of the New Yorker, is a reminder why so many of us are, more than a year later, so devastated that Wallace could seem to find no way out of his personal psychic pain other than to silence it in the most permanent of manners.

Still and all, no matter how bittersweet, another encounter with DFW’s huge and humane talent is utterly thrilling.

The New Yorker published short story is an excerpt from The Pale King, the unfinished novel he was working on before he committed suicide in September 2008.

Every year around 5,000 kids are emancipated from California’s foster care system. Sixty-five percent of those kids who “age out” of foster care do so with nowhere to live, and 51 percent are unemployed.

When combined with whatever abuse and/or neglect brought a kid into the system, the effects of this sudden removal of all support are stark. One in four foster kids who mature in the system will be incarcerated within two years of leaving. One in five will become homeless before they turn 20-years old.

Only around three percent of those who age out in foster care will ever go to college.

At yesterday’s County Sups meeting, Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina honored 80 foster care kids who are part of a pilot program that has taken a small but promising step in reversing those troubling statistics.

Launched in spring 2008, the program known as the First District Education Pilot Program is designed to improve graduation and college entry rates among LA County’s foster children.

Molina, who is one of the program’s strong supporters, announced that of the first graduating class from the program, 80 percent will be attending two or four year colleges in the fall.

“I’m proud of the work we’ve done,” Molina said. “But I’m particularly proud of the students because many of them had just sort of given up. Many of them thought this is just the way the system works. But I think they, too, were inspired and motivated by the caregivers, by the social workers, by the counselors, and all the people that were involved.”

One of the graduating seniors named Jeanette Rios talked about how she was way behind in school and didn’t think it was possible to graduate with her class. Now she has discovered a love of creative writing and is off to college to major in English, after having gotten some work experience interning at Wells Fargo bank. “The most important thing I learned,” she said, “is that I can reach everything I believe in.”

Molina said she hopes to see the program expanded countywide and eventually statewide.

We hope that eventually this is a program that is going to be available to every single foster care child that is with us because they deserve it,” Molina said. “As you can see, these are bright, talented, wonderful young people. And we need to do all we can to give them that boost that they need toward their independence, to really create an emancipation that will truly make them the future leaders we want to see.”

May it be so.

Molina said recently that whatever money troubles the city, county and state are having, there are some programs we must not cut because the long term cost of slashing them will be far more than what we would save in the short term. Let us hope that this pilot program is one of those must-save budget items.

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AND WHILE WE’RE ON THE SUBJECT OF EVER-WORSENING BUDGET-CUTS AND EDUCATION, the California State University Chancellor announced yesterday that the Cal States will have a new 15-20 percent tuition hike, which comes on the heels of the existing 10 percent hike approved in May. The LA Times’ Gale Holland has the rest of the story.

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Gloria Molina photo from the LA Times

In a brand new study published in the July issue of Pediatrics, University of Minnesota pediatrics expert, Dr. Iris Wagman Borowsky, found that almost 15 percent of American teens believe they will die before age 35.

Dr. Borowsky also found that the adolescents who were the least hopeful that they would survive past 35, were the most likely to engage in risky behavior.

Those of us who have worked around at-risk kids have long noted that a hopeless kid is the one who is most likely to act out in dangerous ways. But seeing quantified the sheer numbers of American teenagers who believe that they will die young cannot help but shock us.

Dr. Borowsky arrived at her conclusions after she and her team analyzed reams of data collected by the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, in which the attitudes and behaviors of 20,594 adolescents in 7th through 12th grade, were tracked over a three year period.

One of the reasons the study is important is that it topples a common fallacy that most kids engage in risk-taking behavior because of their naive belief that nothing bad will happen. The reality, Borowsky found, is actually quite the opposite—and far more complex.

“While conventional wisdom says that teens engage in risky behaviors because they feel invulnerable to harm [italics are mine], this study suggests that in some cases, teens take risks because they overestimate their vulnerability, specifically their risk of dying,” Borowsky said. “These youth may take risks because they feel hopeless and figure that not much is at stake.”

Nearly 25 percent of youth living in households that receive public assistance and more than 29 percent of American-Indian, 26 percent of African-American, 21 percent of Hispanic, and 15 percent of Asian youth reported believing they would die young—compared to just 10 percent of their Caucasian peers.

“Our findings reinforce the importance of instilling a sense of hope and optimism in youth,” Borowsky said. “Strong connections with parents, families, and schools, as well as positive media messages, are likely important factors in developing an optimistic outlook for young people.”

No kidding.

Borowsky noted specifically that the kids who believed they would die young were more prone to drug use or to acquire STDs.

Yet, this same model applies when we look at the likelihood of joining or staying in gangs.

In and around the gang world, the least hopeful kids are always the most deeply involved and the most dangerous—either to themselves or others.

“Hey, you gotta die sometime.…..” I’ve heard kids say right before they go do something life-theateningly stupid. These were the same kids who told me how they had already planned what they were going to wear to their own funerals.

It is for the above reasons that programs like “Scared Straight” and the ever more draconian juvenile laws that are aimed at getting young gang members or gang wannabes to “think twice”—are so entirely ineffective.

These strategies work wonderfully for the kids who don’t need them—the hopeful kids.

But if we want to help the kids who are the most at risk (and it seems according to Borokwsky and company, there are a great many of them) we need to find much more effective methods for infusing them with hope.