The Tea Party Movement objects to big government.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last Tuesday, Webb renewed his push.

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

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

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

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

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

ABC News has the story.

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

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

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

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

Read on.

FATHER GREG BOYLE ON TALK OF THE NATION

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

CHELSEA KING AND THE PAROLE VIOLATION

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

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

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

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

UPDATE:

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

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

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

Well, I’m glad someone has written about it.

Tim Rutten calls it government by tantrum —which try as I might not to endlessly criticize the actions of our city attorney, Carmen Trutanich—is about right when it comes to describing his latest escapade with the city’s legal system.

For those playing catch up, Trutanich is on a crusade to bring into line the scofflaw building defacers who ignore the city’s permitting process and wrap giganzoid “supergraphic” posters around multi-story structures that they personally own, in return for a handsome fees.

Good for Trutanich for holding the expensively-suited lawbreakers to answer.

To make it clear that he meant business (also a good idea; don’t put a gun on the table unless you are willing to fire it, so to speak), the city attorney chose to send a message to all the supergraphics law-ignorers by making an example of Pacific Palisades businessman Kayvan Setareh, who had evidently blithely ignored a bunch of warnings from Trutanich’s office, and wrapped an 8-story poster around a building of his located at Hollywood and Highland.

Since Setareh reportedly has other buildings and other supergraphics, this was moral equivalent of waggling his tongue at Trutanich and saying, “Naah-naah-naah-naah-naah-naah! MAKE ME, MO-FO!”

So Carmen Trutanich decided he would, indeed, make Setareh comply. All well and good. If you and I have to obey city regulations or risk icky consequences, so does the Pali-living, multiple-building-owning Setareh. Nuch, we’re behind you all the way in your quest to make the guys in pricey suits obey the law! Go get ‘em!

But here’s where the tantrum came in. Trutanich had Setareh arrested. (Fine.) And slapped him with a million dollars in bail. (Not fine.)

Rutten explains the unfineness of Nuch’s bail action perfectly. (I said something similar, although not as well articulated or in as much detail, in an email to a student who is also planning to write about the issue. It will be interesting to see what he finds out.)

The problem is that even scofflaws are entitled to due process. Trutanich found a feeble-willed judge who was willing to set the landlord’s initial bail at $1 million. By having him arrested on a Friday, the city attorney essentially gave Setareh a choice: Pay the nonrecoverable $100,000 a bail bondsman would have charged to write the bond, or spend the weekend in jail, because it takes three to four days to secure release by putting up your own real property as surety. (The bail was subsequently reduced to $100,000.)

Putting aside the question of whether there’s any ethical proportionality in demanding $1 million bail for three misdemeanor charges, are we really supposed to believe that Setareh — with all his holdings in Los Angeles — is a flight risk? Bail is not a punishment; it simply is a way of enforcing a defendant’s promise to appear in court. In this case, though, Trutanich essentially imposed a choice between jail time or a $100,000 fine on a defendant who’d never had a minute — let alone a day — in court and is entitled to the presumption of innocence.

Trutanich has explained why the guy with the misdemeanors got a higher bail than most child molesters and attempted murderers by muttering something about public safety and how when there are lots of people on Hollywood Blvd. at night, why that nasty graphic could blow off fall on people and, oh, the horror! doncha know!

Or something like that.

This was even less effective as an excuse than the weak tea offered by that other recent government bully, whom Rutten also writes about, namely Washington, Sen. Jim Bunning and his appalling use of the one-man fillbuster to, until Tuesday night, prevent passage of an extension of aid to the nation’s recently jobless.

OKAY SO HERE’S A FRIENDLY NOTE to City Attorney Trutanich, Senator Bunning and all the others who have signed on to this new “Because I can!” way of holding office:

We elected you to be our representatives, to do a job in the name of the people, not to be our hired thugs.

Got it? Thank you. I’m glad we had this little talk.

I just read the AP’s story on 30-year-old John Albert Gardner III, the 30-year-old convicted sex offender who may or may not be responsible for raping and killing 17-year-old Chelsea King.

(Devastatingly, as of this writing, Chelsea King’s body appears to have been found.)

Here’s the part of the story AP that I found of note:

Gardner of Lake Elsinore pleaded guilty in May 2000 to molesting a 13-year-old female neighbor. Prosecutors said he lured the victim to his home with an offer to watch “Patch Adams,” a 1998 movie starring Robin Williams

The girl was beaten before escaping and running to a neighbor.

Gardner served five years in prison after prosecutors rejected a psychiatrist’s advice to seek stiffer punishment, court documents state.

Prosecutors said in 2000 that Gardner’s lack of a significant prior criminal record justified less than the maximum sentence. They also said they wanted to “spare the victim the trauma of testifying.”

Gardner had faced a maximum of nearly 11 years in prison under terms of his plea agreement. Prosecutors urged six years — the sentence later ordered by a judge.

In their 11-page sentencing memo, prosecutors said Gardner “never expressed one scintilla of remorse for his attack upon the victim” despite overwhelming evidence.

Psychiatrist Dr. Matthew Carroll wrote in sentencing documents, “There is no known treatment for an individual that sexually assaults girls and does not admit to it in any way.”

Let me simply those facts: Gardner lured a 13-year-old to his house, then molested her, there beat her.

And here’s how the LA Times described the attack:

In 2000, Gardner picked up an eighth-grader at a bus stop in San Diego County and assaulted her at his house, punching her several times after she tried to prevent him from pulling her pants down.

Gardner “was suffocating me. He had his hand on my mouth, and I couldn’t breathe, and I got pretty fuzzy after he hit me, and I’m not sure if I blacked out,” said the victim, according to the sentencing memorandum.

Moreover, although a psychiatrist strongly advised against it,, stating that Gardner would likely attack others when he had the chance, he was given the lowest possible term the judge and the DA could manage, six years, of which he did five.

The DA said that Gardner had “no significant prior criminal record.” (Define “significant,” would you please?) In other words, Gardner was then a 20-year-old pleasant-looking white guy, living in a nice condo with his nice, up-street mother, and so why give him the full 10-years?

After all, he just sexually assaulted and beat a little girl. And showed zero, zip remorse for it.

Yet, let a 15-year-old—non-white boy—from a poor background, with “no significant prior criminal record” climb into the backseat of the wrong car, with older guys who do a drive by, and he’s looking at 25-to life—even if no one was killed or seriously injured.

But of course, these are cases where the DA manages to attach a gang allegation—deserved or not. In those case, throwing away the key is just fine. Because somehow we view 15-year olds who get in cars with gang members as less redeemable, less important, less somehow human, than 20-year-old upper-middle-class guys who beat and molest little girls.

And while we’re on the subject of our disregard for the well-being of our law-breaking young—as long as they aren’t affluent lawbreaking young—Molly Hennessy-Fiske and Richard Winton of the LA Times, have just posted the latest chapter in their ongoing story on abusive staff within the county’s juvenile probaton facilities.

It seems that of 170 employees of the Los Angeles County Probation Department were determined to have committed misconduct —around half of those cases of excessive force or abuse involving the kids in their care— but all 170 have “so far escaped punishment because there is not enough staff to mete out discipline,” the Times reported.

Right. We’re just too busy to have discipline our staff who have been found to be abusing the probationers.

So we just leave them on the job.

You’ll be happy to know that, according to Winton and Hennessy-Fiske, the LA County Supervisors have now launched an “independent review of the agency’s discipline and internal affairs operations.”

And, why exactly, dear County Sups, did it require the Times’ revelations before it occurred to anybody over at your house to see if this $700,000 agency under your control—that, as the reporters pointed out, “has been the subject of federal investigations in recent years for failing to prevent, report and document child abuse in its juvenile facilities”—was managing to appropriately protect the 3000 kids under its care?

Nevermind. Don’t answer that. There is no good answer.

There is a very worthwhile two-part series by Kurt Streeter that is running in the LA Times Sunday and today. It is about a 70-year-old federal Judge who went out on a legal limb to snatch a 3-strikes case.

The judge in the story is Spencer Letts, a Republican whom Reagan appointed to the bench, born to a privileged family, attended Yale then Harvard Law, went to a high profile law firm before becoming the legal eagle for Teledyne where he made enough money that his family would be permanently comfortable.

But, Letts didn’t fit into whatever neat little boxes his background might suggest. He was his own man. And as a jurist he was reluctant to put others into neat little boxes, despite a system that seemed to conspire to do so.

Here is an excerpt about Judge Letts from Streeter’s story.

Unable to consider the context of cases, he grew indignant at being required to sentence wrongdoers to decade-long prison terms when he often felt they deserved far less. His anger intensified when he saw that almost every defendant coming into his courtroom was black, even as statistics showed that most drug users were white.

He was struck by how smart many of them seemed, how driven. Born into different circumstances — into his circumstances — some also might have become vice presidents at Teledyne, he figured.

“I began to see that it is all too easy for a judge to just put a C for convicted on a guy’s forehead and then to walk away like the guy is, and always will be, nothing,” he said. “It hit me — I am going to try my best, from then on, to extend myself, see their humanity and let them see mine.”

He fought hard against mandatory sentences, calling them discriminatory and even unconstitutional, disparaging them in opinions that circulated in legal circles and earned him the ire of federal prosecutors.

The 3-Striker in the story is Michael Banyard. Here is some of what Streeter writes:

Michael Banyard was born in Compton in 1967, the son of a truck driver and a beautician. “When I gave birth to Michael he had a 102-degree fever,” said his mother, Obie. “I remember the doctors putting him in an ice bath and I remember how terribly worried I was for my child. That was the start.”

His mother recalled that young Michael was sweet, shy and deeply affected by what happened around him. When he was 5, gang members broke into the family’s home, rampaging through everything. His mother never forgot the look on her son’s face when the break-in was discovered: fear, helplessness and anger. They were emotions he could never seem to shake.

His father left the family when Banyard was in grade school. The men he looked up to were gangsters. By 16, he was one of them, a full-fledged member of the Compton Santana Crips who sold crack on the streets. His gang name was Loco Mike.

That was one side of him. The other was the polite, razor-smart, church-going teen who would retreat to his room for hours, hounded by shame for his street life, remembering childhood days when he would fall asleep on his father’s chest.

At 17, he turned to the drug he had been selling. It wasn’t long before crack owned him. He sold his girlfriend’s jewelry to pay for a high. Then he hocked her Chrysler LeBaron to a stranger. He went to a police station and begged to be arrested because he couldn’t stop. The cops told him to go home.

In 1988, he was in a minor car wreck and stole $6 from the other driver. He was arrested and convicted. It was his first time in prison, his first felony. Under California law, his first strike.

When he got out three years later, he fared well for a while, managing his mother’s Inglewood beauty shop. But one night he got high. He fought with his girlfriend and she called the police. He pleaded no contest to assault and was placed on probation. It was his second strike.

By 1994, he had lost every vestige of control over crack. His addiction pushed him onto the forlorn patch of downtown streets that is skid row. He was arrested for a string of petty crimes, but mostly the cases were dismissed. When they weren’t, he got probation or a few weeks in jail. Then he was back on the streets.

He no longer called his family, even his mother. He smelled of urine, slept on sidewalks and underneath cars. There were times when his clothing was stolen, so he fashioned pants out of large plastic garbage bags, tied at his waist.

One day, he made his way to a freeway overpass and looked down at the cars. He was ready to jump. But at the last moment he thought of his mother and stumbled away.

On Sept. 4, 1996, a stranger approached with crack. Suddenly, cops swooped in. They would later testify that they saw drugs drop to the ground as they approached, drugs Banyard had just bought. It was less than a gram of crack, barely enough to fit under a fingernail. That didn’t matter. He was convicted and it was his third felony.

California’s three-strikes law mandated that he be sent to prison for at least 25 years. At the end of that time, his release would be subject to approval from a parole board. He could die behind bars.

:In prison, Banyard was free from drugs. His mind cleared and his anger softened. He gained a new sense of spirituality and spent almost all his time in the prison law library, preparing appeals. A state court reviewed his case and turned him down. A federal magistrate said his claims lacked merit. The attorney general said he should remain in prison.

By 2002, he was down to one last appeal -- to the U.S. District Court, where his case went to Letts. The judge was approaching 70 then, working less and reflecting on his life. He thought often of his father — a steady, stealthy drinker late in life — and of a cousin who became a fervent member of Alcoholics Anonymous. He had empathy for their struggle. He had his own dark bouts with depression and sometimes talked openly about them in court. He understood how it felt to battle despair.

It was against this backdrop that he took Banyard’s case.

Read the rest of Sunday’s story here.

And then go on to Part Two here.

If you think this story has a nice, tidy, upbeat ending, it doesn’t. But it ends with hope….a strong dose of humanness, and a sense of kinship found.

Photo by Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times

Barack Obama pledged to close Guantanamo within a year of his inauguration. But Gitmo is still open and too many of the dark and toxic stories that characterized Gitmo under Bush are still in evidence.

Here are two of them.

THE UIGHURS

Seven Chinese ethnic-minority Uighurs being held on Guantanamo contend that they are being held illegally by the U.S, government. Their case has come to Supreme court.

In yesterday’s Slate, Rebecca Crootof and Oona A. Hathaway have an analysis. Here’s a clip

The Uighurs’ story is by now depressingly familiar. Having fled first to Afghanistan to avoid persecution in China and then to Pakistan to avoid U.S. bombing in the wake of 9/11, the Uighurs were turned over to the U.S. military by local inhabitants in exchange for $5,000 per person. The United States suspected them of being enemy combatants (wrongly, our government now admits) and sent them to Guantanamo Bay, where they have been imprisoned for the past seven years.

After the Uighurs’ detention was challenged in court, the U.S. government determined that there was no legal reason to continue to hold them. But repatriation to China was not an option. The United States concluded that the Uighurs might well face persecution and perhaps even torture as suspected members of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, which China regards as a terrorist organization.

Switzerland has finally agreed to take the Uighurs, thus suggesting they should be released. So why hasn’t it happened? Perhaps the Surpemes will answer that question.

THE GUANTANAMO 3: WAS IT A TRIPLE SUICIDE??

While the Uighurs’ limbo is deeply disturbing, the story of the three prisoners whom, we are told, committed a coordinated suicide on the same night chills in a whole different way.

A law professor with his students, plus a reporter from Harper’s magazine named Scott Horton, all got drawn into investigating the issue.

The stories below tell what these investigations found. .

First, the journey taken by the law professor and his students as told this week on Dick Gordon’s The Story.

Here’s a clip of the text. (And there are links to the investigation.) But listening to this story is the thing.

When three prisoners at Guantanamo Bay died on the same night in June 2006, the official report said they had committed coordinated suicides by hanging themselves in their cells. Years later, a Seton Hall University professor named Mark Denbeaux asked a group of his law students take another look based on newly-released documents from multiple investigations. Adam Deutsch and Kelli Stout were part of that group. They were shocked to learn the three men had been dead at least two hours before they were found, when they were supposedly under constant supervision. And that was just the beginning.

And now there ’s Scott Horton’s investigation that will appear in the March issue of Harper’s Magazine.

The opening makes a sobering accusation:

When President Barack Obama took office last year, he promised to “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great.” Toward that end, the president issued an executive order declaring that the extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo Naval Base “shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order.” Obama has failed to fulfill his promise. Some prisoners there are being charged with crimes, others released, but the date for closing the camp seems to recede steadily into the future. Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama’s young administration with crimes that occurred during the George W. Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.

Late on the evening of June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners…..

Although a number of others have criticized Horton’s story, While others have criticized the story’s critics.

For me, it was Horton’s work in combination with that of the law prof and his students that made this a case that demands investigation.

Listen and …..read. See what you think.

The state of Texas may be one of the toughest when it comes to capital punishment, but it been positively enlightened of late when it comes to Criminal Justice reform—at least in comparison to California. And it’s getting results.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation has just published a look at the matter in this January 2010 report titled, Texas Criminal Justice Reform:Lower Crime, Lower Cost

It opens like this:

In recent years, Texas has strengthened alternatives to incarceration for adults and juveniles, achieving significant reductions in crime while avoiding more than $2 billion in taxpayer costs that would have been incurred had Texas simply constructed more than 17,000 prison beds that a 2007 projection indicated would be needed. Similarly, juvenile crime has markedly declined at the same time Texas has reduced the number of youths in state institutions by 52.9 percent. By building on these successes in a challenging budget environment, policymakers can continue delivering improved results for public safety and taxpayers.

Yooooo-hooooo, California legislature…….? A-a-a-aaare you listening….?

My friend Joe Domanick is part of a new online criminal justice journal called The Crime Report.” It should be an every day destination for anyone who is interested in the many-faceted world of criminal justice.

This week Joe has a two-part story about the drop in crime in America-–and about what has, and what has not, caused it.

In Part I he looks at the role of smart policing and at the change in gang culture in California, including the tighter grip that the prison gangs have on the gangs in the street.

In Part II he talks to an A-list lineup of experts who nearly to a person agree that the one strategy that cannot be credited with the crime drop, is the ramping up of incarceration.

Here’s how the story begins:

During the 1990s, the favorite solution to reducing crime was incarceration. That is, mass incarceration: mandatory minimums and 25-to-life three-strikes sentences for stealing a slice of pizza. The consequence today is more than two million people behind bars, the world’s largest per capita incarceration rate. No one among the experts I spoke with, however, suggested that as a factor in 2009’s crime drop.

Quite the opposite.

“The dramatic increases in incarceration did contribute to the crime decline in the 1990s,” says Richard Rosenfeld, of the University of St. Louis-Missouri. “The bulk of the evidence shows that. But from 2000-2009, the rate of incarceration slowed. In New York, for example, it’s flat or in decline. So the current decline can’t be ascribed to incarceration.”

John Jay Professor David Kennedy agrees. Recent incarceration rates have been marginal,” he says, while decreases in crime have been dramatic; so any new increases “are likely to be grabbing low level [criminals]. Anything going on is taking place at the margins in terms of incarceration, and is not very powerful.”

Carnegie Mellon University Prof. Al Blumstein also dismiss incarceration as a factor. “We’re close to equilibrium in terms of changes in incarceration,” he says. On the average, the inflow is roughly equal to the outflow. We’re way down to less than one percent increase [in imprisonment], whereas for most of the ’80 and ‘90s the rate was going up by 6 to 8 percent a year.“

Meanwhile, Todd Clear, a noted criminologist from John Jay College, points to mass incarceration’s corollary: lengthy prison sentences. “The length of stay in prison in England and hasn’t changed that much and England’s violent crime rate has gone down very similarly to that of U.S; same with Canada,” he says. “The increasing length of prison stay in the US has been a pattern for about 20 years, so I’m not persuaded that that’s a big cause of the current decline.”

Read on.

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.

THE CALIFORNIA SURPREMES UPHOLD JESSICA’S LAW

On Monday, the California Supreme Court largely upheld Jessica’s Law dictating where sex offenders are allowed to live—even though, by most accounts, it wreaks havoc with the parolee’s ability find a place to live and to stabilize his life and does little to protect public safety.

Stories on the very disappointing ruling may be found that the Sacramento Bee,the San Jose Murcury News and the LA Times, among others.

REFORMING THE DREADED NCLB

President Obama’s proposed budget includes some serious—and much needed—overhauling of the controversial No Child Left Behind act.

On Monday, KPCC’s Patt Morrison had an informative discussion on what the changes would mean should they take place.

A HIGH SCHOOL FREE OF TAUNTS AND RIDICULE

It shouldn’t be that much to ask. The LA Times has the story about the new school. Here’s how it opens:

Aiden Aizumi almost didn’t graduate from high school.

Aizumi, now 21, is one of many gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender young people who say they have suffered through school, enduring homophobic taunts and name-calling.

He completed his final semester of high school from home.

His mother, Marsha Aizumi, didn’t want others to endure the same treatment, so she approached educators about a new school geared for such students.

The school, which serves grades seven through 12, is a collaboration between Opportunities for Learning, a charter school with 34 locations across Los Angeles and Orange counties, and Lifeworks, a mentoring program for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth sponsored by the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center….

By the way, the kind of taunting that kids want attend this school to escape is yet one more reason why Prop 8 is so vile: By its existence it says to such kids that there is something wrong with them, that they are not normal, that their desire to one day marry the person they love is not only not allowable, it an active threat to the well being of others.

Being a teenager is hard enough without this kind of abuse.