Okay, yes, yesterday was Earth Day.

But I’m sure you’ll be happy to know, that today is a National Call-In Day that is a big part of Crack the Disparity National Month of Advocacy—- a month-long coordinated push to eliminate the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine.

Unfortunately for the organizers—and those of us who believe this to be an important issue—”Crack the Disparity National Month of Advocacy” (CTDNMA???), just does not have the snappy ring of say….. well…Earth Day.

OR

Take Our Sons and Daughters to Work Day, which also occurs today.

OR

International Talk Like a Pirate Day (Okay, that has its own problems this year, I grant you—and it’s not until September anyway).

In any case, here are the instructions should you want to participate:

To participate call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard right now at 202.224.3121, and ask to speak to your representatives in the Senate and House. Urge them to support and co-sponsor H.R. 265, the Drug Sentencing Reform and Cocaine Kingpin Trafficking Act in the House and legislation in the Senate that eliminates the 100 to 1 disparity between crack and powder cocaine.

(I’m guessing that, if you call, given recent events, it’s probably best not to talk like a pirate…but if you call today, in addition to the above-mentioned days, it is National Talk Like Shakespeare Day, which opens a host of possibilities.

And then Friday, it turns out, is National Hairball Day so if you call tomorrow you could…..

….oh, never mind. Just call.)

This is a real contender for this year’s bad judgment Olympics. How do we hate what these school administrator’s did? Let us count the ways.

Here’s the story (Jason Song of the LA Times reports):

Porter Middle School administrators believed a boy was dealing pot on campus. So they allegedly sent a student to buy some.

The sting worked — to a point. The student successfully bought drugs and the administrators at the Granada Hills campus reported the incident to authorities.

But although Los Angeles Police Department officers are investigating the suspected marijuana dealer, they also are scrutinizing the three administrators who allegedly orchestrated the buy, said Michel Moore, an LAPD deputy chief, on Wednesday.

It is a felony to ask a minor to buy drugs.

The administrators have also been reassigned by the Los Angeles Unified School District to positions away from the Granada Hills campus, which was named a California Distinguished School in 2007, while the investigation is ongoing. In a letter to parents, Supt. Ramon C. Cortines said the school’s principal, an assistant principal and dean had been removed.

Thankfully, the kid whom the administrators recruited to be their narc, is not being investigated by anybody.

Read the rest.

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AND IN OTHER STUPID ADMINISTRATOR NEWS: It seems that the Corona del Mar school administrator who spiked the drama department’s idea of putting on the musical RENT has since relented.
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(Note: The kid in the photo has nothing to do with this situation. He’s just a random middleschooler.)

LAST WEEK I ASSIGNED some of my smart USC students to each write a 300-word news story explaining one of the propositions that will appear on the California ballot on Tuesday.

Below you’ll find clips from the resulting commentaries, with still more to come tomorrow.

(USC student Holly Villamagna’s assessment of Prop. 11, posted earlier, may be found here.)

ALSO TOMORROW, A FULL LIST OF ENDORSEMENTS.

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first…PROP. 6

Proposition 6 is a 30-page monster that is arguably the worst thing on the November 4 ballot—even worse, in some ways, than the loathsome Prop. 8 because the social and fiscal razor-blades it contains are so perniciously disguised.

When students, Sarah Eigner, Dina Diaz, and Chelsea Dunlap, researched the issue, they got quickly to the heart of the complicated and deceivingly written proposition (and they did it with out any nudging or cues from me).

Here’s what they wrote:

Read the rest of this entry »

Bruce Riordan is the director of anti-gang operations for City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo’s office, and a former federal prosecutor. In other words, the guy is not anybody’s bleeding heart when it comes to gangs.

Yet, he is a nuanced thinker on the subject, and together with Delgadillo, Riordan has written a thoughtful article for Wednesday’s Daily Journal, the publication that LA’s lawyers, judges and other legal types all read religiously.

Riordan sent the article over to me figuring, quite rightly, I might find it interesting. I did, indeed, and thought you’d be interested as well.

(NOTE: The Daily Journal may be accessed by (really expensive) subscription only, so I have posted slightly longer excerpts than I usually do.)

In the article, the men talk about the fact that Mexico is experiencing a huge and very violent rise in gang activity. As a consequence, they write, the Mexican government is being sorely tempted to react to their new gang crisis with methods that are heavy-handed in the extreme. They point out that the purely hard-core/shock-and-awe approach to gangs is precisely the strategy that has repeatedly been shown not to work.

(Think Daryl Gates’ Big Blue Hammer.)

When it comes to gangs , the use of a bludgeon alone—i.e. enforcement without prevention and intervention—inevitably produces of host of unintended consequences—many of which could easily blow back toward us, and not in a good way, say Riordan and Delgadillo.

Now here are those excerpts:

The images are all too familiar: random kidnappings, police officers assassinated by criminal gangs, journalists killed in cold blood as retribution for their latest investigations, and, even judicial officers murdered for their roles in the criminal justice system. All this amid cries of foul play from victims alleging both criminal and official misconduct.

These are not scenes from the Iraq War or from Colombia’s showdown with the Pablo Escobar syndicate in the late 1980s. They are drawn directly from today’s headlines in Mexico, and from the border cities of Juarez, Nogales and Tijuana, the latter a mere three-hour drive from downtown Los Angeles. Indeed, this past weekend, the Los Angeles Times reported that children in Tijuana are suffering from a form of post-traumatic stress disorder due to the alarming levels of violence there.

While the U.S. media has covered the violence, the Mexican government’s response, both legal and extralegal, has largely been overlooked. But Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon has openly declared “war” on drug gangs, and the mayor of Nogales, in Sonora, has called for the use of “heavy-handed” tactics akin to the surge in Iraq.

Make no mistake: Mexico is now undergoing a fundamental legal, as well as political, crisis; and the fabric of its legal system is being tested. As a result, current events in Mexico should be cause for close attention in our local legal community and perhaps even closer scrutiny.

[SNIP]

Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday, the Washington Post Magazine ran an excellent cover story about one man out of the thousands upon thousands of low-level offenders who have served or are serving very long sentences for dealing crack cocaine. Here’s how the story begins:

ON HIS 18TH DAY OF FREEDOM, Michael Short awakened before dawn. In prison, corrections officers had paced the halls at night, jingling keys and shining flashlights. Now Mike slept fitfully, even in a king-size bed.

It was a damp, gray Tuesday late in February. He slipped on a pinstriped shirt that hid his tattoos, slid his feet into shiny new loafers and rubbed coconut oil into his hair, cut razor-straight at the temples and flecked with gray. He was 36, with a basketball player’s long-legged gait and the lined brow of a man well acquainted with consequences. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, he nervously knotted a silver-and-white tie that his girlfriend had bought him at Macy’s.

….Over breakfast, he practiced the testimony he was scheduled to deliver that afternoon before a congressional subcommittee:

My name is Michael Short. I am here because in 1992 I was sentenced for selling crack cocaine. Before that, I had never spent a day in prison. I came from a good family. I had no criminal history. I was not a violent offender. But I was sentenced to serve nearly 20 years. I was 21 years old.

The writer, Vanessa Gezari, has done a masterly job of using a compelling human story about one person’s experience to illuminate the whole issue of drug sentencing reform—including how we came to have penalties for crack cocaine offenses that are so much more severe than for any other controlled substance.

I think you’ll find it to be a really interesting and worthwhile read, at the end of which you’ll know a lot about an important issue that is deeply intertwined with the future of American incarceration policy.

BUT THERE’S MORE….

On Monday at noon, journalist Gezari participated in an online Q & A with readers. The transcript of the discussion may be found here.

In 2001 Education Week told this story about the Bush Administration’s decision to be hard core in its enforcement of one part of the Higher Education Act.

When police found a small amount of marijuana residue in her car the day before her 19th birthday, Marisa Garcia was handed a ticket and sent on her way. After she was convicted of drug possession and paid a $415 fine, Ms. Garcia thought the incident could be put behind her.

But the California State University-Fullerton student later discovered that her minor scrape with the law had cost her much more: Ms. Garcia ended up losing her eligibility for federal student financial aid because of a change three years ago in the Higher Education Act.

“It was the first time I had ever been in trouble with the law,” said Ms. Garcia, who worked extra hours in a flower shop and turned to her family to help pay her tuition and expenses. “When I found out that if I was a murderer or child molester I would still be eligible, I really got mad.”

Hard to blame her. With cases like Garcia’s in mind, college students, financial-aid associations, and civil rights groups have been working since then to challenge or overturn the provision—with no luck. (335 organizations from American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers to the United Church of Christ favor overturning it.)

According to Ed Week, even Republican Congressman Mark Souder, the guy who introduced the 1998 legislation, has indicated that the law was never intended to “reach back” and affect students with past drug convictions. It was meant, said Souder’s office, to derail applications if kids were convicted of drug crimes while they were applying for aid. (An explanation that has its own illogic, but whatever.)

Yesterday one of the constitutional challenges to the law finally had its day in court, but the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected it. A new Ed Week blog post has the details (and here’s the ruling itself).

Constitutionality aside, why in the world would we want to punish a kid for some past transgression—particularly a kid who is trying to go to college?

Remember that the average high school graduation rate in America’s largest cities is at 50 percent, with cities like Baltimore, Cleveland and Detroit graduating even fewer. It would seem that if a kid does graduate and wants to go to college, we should be moving heaven and earth to help.

But instead we’ve got this idiotic provision that since 2001 has reportedly denied aid to approximately 200,000 students.

These are the days when I start to think some of our lawmakers really don’t like our nation’s children very well.

PS: And how has the media covered the story? Other than Ed Week and the wonkiest law blogs—I’ve found nothing. (Obviously, there are more important topics to explore.)

Another of the talented LA Weekly writers who’ve migrated elsewhere in the past year is Jeffrey Anderson. Jeff is an emblematic example of that much too rare breed, the crusading reporter. He has great street instincts, lives to afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted and rarely meets a wrong he doesn’t long to right. (While at the Weekly, he wrote about, among other topics, political corruption in Bell Gardens and Cudahy.)

Now Jeff lives in Baltimore and works for the town’s LA Weekly equivalent, the City Paper.

Earlier this year, I posted links to Jeff’s three-part series that connected dots in the LA-Baltimore drug connection,

Now, Jeff and his colleagues have been working on an investigative series that feels like it’s pulled straight from The Wire. This look at Baltimore’s shadow world involves the nexus of drug trafficking, respectable business and local politics.

Jeff sent me a link to the latest in the series yesterday. It’s an intriguing tale that makes for great reading and likely has many more chapters yet to come. But it’s scary stuff for any reporter to dig into, especially when one is working for the alternative weekly, not the town’s Tribune-owned, lawyer-heavy paper of record.

Here are the links to the pieces of the story thus far so you can follow along, and cheer Jeff on as he continues to dig.

1. Flight Connections

2. One Angry Man

And from yesterday...

3. Grave Accusations.…. in which a now dead prosecutor calls a local business man a “violent drug dealer.” (This last one’s by Jeff’s colleague, Van Smith.)

Photo above of murdered Baltimore-based Federal Prosecutor Jonathan Luna

On Wednesday, the LA City Council passed a resolution that asks Federal law enforcement to mind its own damn business when it comes to medical marijuana.

More accurately, the resolution supports the state in its push to get the Feds to back off. Last August, the Council tried on its own when it passed the an ordinance to regulate and oversee the medical marijuana trade in LA, and politely asked the DEA to stop launching 100-agent raids on lawful clinics. But the DEA blithely ignored the request and kept on raiding the marijuana clinics anyway. “We’re just enforcing the law,” DEA spokeswoman Sara Pullen told me when I reported on the issue last summer for both WLA and the LA Weekly.. (I believe I mentioned to Pullen that I could personally point out a couple of meth-dealer locations, the raiding of which might be a better use of her agency’s time, but she declined to take me up on the offer.)

With Wednesday’s resolution, sponsored by Dennis Zine, Janice Hahn, and Bill Rosendahl, (the lone No vote from Greig Smith) the Council is trying a new strategy by calling for support of California State Senate Joint Resolution 20. The state resolution asks the President and Congress to enact legislation to require the DEA and all Federal agencies and departments to “respect the compassionate use laws of states”. SJR 20 also requests Federal law enforcement to enforce Federal medical marijuana laws in a manner consistent with the laws of the State of California.

California Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act, was passed 12 years ago, yet still the DEA continues to raid clinics, and arrest patients, although the charges rarely stick.

As recently as last month, I talked to a med marijuana patient who, in the course of a routine traffic stop, was asked by two LA sheriff’s deputies if he had any drugs or alcohol in his car. The man had just come from purchasing his month’s supply and answered honestly. Yes, he said, he did have a small amount of marijuana, but he had a prescription for the stuff and handed the officers both his just-purchased weed and his official state card. (Yeah, the guy was a real patient with a real medical condition, not a scammer just wanting to smoke out) The cops confiscated the weed and wrote up a misdemeanor citation meaning the guy had to take off work and show up in court. The judge promptly dropped the case as soon as the proper paperwork was produced. “Oh, yeah we get these all the time,” the bailiff told the man, explaining that the judge usually dropped the charges forthwith if the prescription was legit.

Meanwhile we have overcrowded courtrooms and a state, county and city budget crisis. So does this seem like a good use of your tax dollars?
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Television has never seen a better dramatic series than “The Wire.” Period. The Sopranos gave us one of TV’s greatest characters. But if the Sopranos was grand drama, The Wire gave us great literature. I’m convinced that if Charles Dickens was alive today, he’d have been writing for the The Wire.

And he’d have been in good company. In addition to their own considerable gifts for storytelling, producers David Simon and Ed Burns were smart enough to hire a string of the best crime novelists in America to write for the show, and it showed. Richard Price and George Pelecanos are uniquely talented with inner city argot. Dennis Lehane (author of “Mystic River”) has been moving for years toward a form that combines the traditional detective novel with a kind of tragic sensibility.

Most Hollywood-produced cop shows, no matter how large their stable of “consultants,” usually end up with dialog that sounds like….well…..Hollywood. In contrast, The Wire” was consistently able to capture, not only the sound of street language, but its poetry.

Yet, the great dialog wasn’t the reason we watched. (And are still watching. I’ve just started over with Season One)

We tuned in because David Simon and company gave us weekly commentary on modern urban life with a nuanced authenticity rarely seen elsewhere—all packaged in form that was wildly engaging. And Simon did it using a nearly symphonic pattern of narrative layers and interweaves. We saw the wasteful futility of the war on drugs interwoven with the impossible pressures placed on the cops who are asked to somehow eradicate the drug mess…Into those themes was threaded the hypocrisy and compromise that informs American politics….the absurd and tragic state of the nation’s inner city schools….and finally, the profit-driven shredding of the soul of our country’s newspapers.

Stunning. And all presented through the relentlessly human medium of the show’s remarkable cast of indelible characters.

To me it was season four, about the Baltimore school system and the catastrophic affects of No Child Left Behind, that was the best—and the most emotionally devastating.

But this season was brilliant too.

As a new round of buyouts is announced at the LA Times and the ongoing turf battles at City Hall over gang policy manage to fail all concerned….it’s been somehow steadying to know that we’re not unique with our messes. The Wire got there first.

But what about you? Are you a Wire fan? If so, why does it matter to you?

I’ve got a crazy day, but here are a few short takes to chew on:

*The ACLU just released this video on the Crack/Powder sentencing issue:

*The Nebraska supreme court is hearing a case this week about whether a State Trooper should be allowed to keep his job despite membership in the Klu Klux Klan. Here’s the Omaha Herald story.

*You think good teachers should be paid a six figure salary? This proposed Washington Heights charter school plans to do just that. (Chapeau tip to Eduwonk.)

*And, according to the Washington Post, this Boston area charter high school guru has a radical idea about how to cure the drop out rate—with a sort of drop out savings account. (Just read it.)

AND LAST….AND PROBABLY BEST:

*A new, worthwhile-sounding documentary: Troop 1500: Girl Scouts Beyond Bars Here’s some of the info:

Their mothers may be convicted thieves, murderers and drug dealers, but the girls of Troop 1500 want to be doctors, social workers and marine biologists. With meetings once a month at Hilltop Prison in Gatesville, Texas, this innovative Girl Scout program brings daughters together with their inmate mothers, offering them a chance to rebuild their broken relationships….

An estimated 1.5 million children have incarcerated parents and 90 percent of female inmates are single parents. Their daughters are six times more likely to land in the juvenile justice system. TROOP 1500 poignantly reveals how an inspired yet controversial effort by the more than 90-year old Girl Scouts organization is working to help these at-risk young girls deal with their unique circumstances and break the cycle of crime within families.

Troop 1500 is part of a group of films about women, criminal justice and prison—all of which can be purchased by those looking for a night at the movies that features more in the way of content than say, Jumper.