In 1999, Sister Suzanne Jabro took a small delegation of women to Vally State Prison at Chowchilla with the idea of starting some kind of program to help the female inmates. At any given time, Chowchilla holds around 8,000 prisoners, making it the largest woman’s incarceration facility in the world. Sister Suzanne, and her colleagues from non-profit Women and Criminal Justice (now the Center for Restorative Justice Works), had gotten permission from Chowchilla’s administrators to meet with a group of 60 women. The idea was to ask the inmates themselves what they most wanted or needed when it came to programs.

At the beginning of the meeting, the women were shy and restless and seemed not to know what to say. Finally, however, a first woman spoke.

“We never get to see our kids,” she said simply. Then another woman spoke up. “I can’t live without my kids,” she said, and she began to cry. The meeting exploded with voices. It seemed the women were not interested in amenities or privileges. Seeing their kids. That was the thing.

Within minutes, the meeting, the room was awash with outpourings of grief and longing about children. “By the end, nearly every woman in the room was sobbing,” said Sister Suzanne when we spoke this week. “Not crying. Sobbing.”

Was there any way that Jabro and her group could make seeing their kids possible? the women wanted to know.

Sister Suzanne assured the inmate women she would see what she could do. And “Get On the Bus” was born—a program that brings the children of incarcerated women to prison see their moms on Mother’s Day.

This Sunday, Get On the Bus will bring 1200 kids together with their mothers. On Father’s Day they will bring several hundred to visit their dads. Getting the right paperwork and permissions is a logistical nightmare, but every year the number of kids and the number of program sponsors expands. “Now we get calls from other states and Canada asking how they can start their own Get On The Bus,” Suzanne said.

You’d the think the need and the benefit would be obvious, and that it would have been done long ago, she said. “But it wasn’t.”

Still, as successful as the program has been, it is a small drop in a very large bucket. 200,000 California kids have one or more parents in prison. Get On the Bus serves less than 1 percent of those kids.

I first learned of the program from the California Department of Corrections, which now happily touts its partnership in the Get On the Bus efforts.

It was not always thus. The first year of the program, Sister Suzanne and company nearly didn’t get any kids in at all. “The prison officials were really against it,” she said. “They worried about security, of course. But mostly, they said, they didn’t feel that the mothers deserved to see their children.”

Sister Suzanne, who has spent much of the last 30 years working in some kind of detention ministry and/or “restorative justice,” pleaded with the prison higher ups. “I told them it wasn’t about the mothers, it was about the kids. The kids needed it.”

Finally the CDCR relented. They would try it one time. Get on the Bus was allowed to bring in nine families for a total of 17 kids, all of whom had not seen their mothers in a very, very long time.

Most of the children were living with grandmothers or other relatives who had neither the time nor money to go carting kids around to prisons for visits. Other kinds of contact was sporadic too. Collect phone calls were, of course, hideously expensive.

Out of all the studies that have been done on prison populations, comparatively few have been done on the affect of incarceration on the children of those locked up. But the research that has been done indicates a great degree of harm. Kids do less well in school, have more emotional problems, are more likely to get in trouble, teenage girls are more likely to get pregnant. Conversely, the more there is able to be positive contact with the locked-up parent, the fewer problems the kid is statistically likely to have.

Studies of prisoners have long indicated that those able to maintain close family relationships—particularly with their children— are more likely to do well outside when they are paroled. (And most of those in our prisons, state and federal both, will eventually be paroled.) “Children give men and women someone to do well for,” said Sister Suzanne. “You’d think that’d be a no-brainer. But, in terms of policy, it doesn’t seem to be.”

As I said, Sunday’s 1200 kids who will be boarding Sister Suzanne’s buses are just a fraction of the children and parents who could benefit from such visits.

But it’s a start.

And, by the way,” says Suzanne Jabro, “most of the kids we serve come from Los Angeles.”

Margaret Talbot of the New Yorker Magazine has written the story that I hoped someone would write with regard to the challenge to Proposition 8 that is being heard right now in a San Francisco courtroom (It began last week) but that, as Talbot notes, is almost certain to eventually land in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Talbot writes:

Perry v. Schwarzenegger challenges the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the California referendum that, in November, 2008, overturned a state Supreme Court decision allowing same-sex couples to marry. Its lead lawyers are unlikely allies: Theodore B. Olson, the former solicitor general under President George W. Bush, and a prominent conservative; and David Boies, the Democratic trial lawyer who was his opposing counsel in Bush v. Gore. The two are mounting an ambitious case that pointedly circumvents the incremental, narrowly crafted legal gambits and the careful state-by-state strategy that leading gay-rights organizations have championed in the fight for marriage equality. The Olson-Boies team hopes for a ruling that will transform the legal and social landscape nationwide, something on the order of Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, or Loving v. Virginia, the landmark 1967 Supreme Court ruling that invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage.

In other words, if Ted Olson and David Boies are successful in getting the Perry case to the Supreme Court and then persuading the Supremes of the merit of the case, they will not simply overturn California’s Prop 8. That, my dears, will be the ball game.

Yet, if the challenge fails, supporters worry quite rightly that it will set back the cause of gay marriage for a very, very long time.

So, what drew conservative, Federalist Society member Ted Olson to this issue? And why has his one-time adversary David Boies joined with him? And why have they launched the case now—when many gay legal rights experts warned against a new court challenge at a time that the majority of public opinion does not yet support it?

Margaret Talbot covers all of this and more. Plus she lays out the legal thinking that has caused Olson and Boies to decide that the time was now, not later.

In addition to reading the article, do check out Terry Gross’s interview with Talbot on Wednesday’s Fresh Air.

(I recommend paying special attention to the legal concept of “strict scrutiny” that Talbot explains to Terry around or a little after the 17:50 minute mark. It is an intriguing term could be critical to the case’s failure or success. )

Even though Talbot is in D.C., she has been following various experts and advocates who are inside the courtroom tweeting and live blogging the fabulously dramatic, character-rich and anecdote-filled case, and then she has blogged her own daily analysis. (Oh, brave new interactive world.)

Much has gone into the formation of this case. And much has been arrayed against it. Margaret Talbot has done us the favor of giving us the case’s background—in the form of the legal and the human details.

Arnold Schwarzenegger seemed to grow wiser at the 11th hour and did not make good on his threat to veto hundreds of bills in an effort to bully still warring legislators to come together long enough to craft a state water policy. (It was a tactic that the governor has used throughout his tenure with little success.)

Instead, although the governor did veto 229 bills, he signed 478—among those signed were three forward looking bills that were were seen as surprising and welcome victories by gay, lesbian and transgender communities.

Summaries of the three bills are as follows:

-The Marriage Recognition and Family Protection Act clarifies that same-sex couples who married out of state before Nov. 4, 2008 are considered married in California. Same-sex couples who have married or will marry out of state after Nov. 5, 2008 will gain all the rights of marriage in California, with the sole exception of the designation of “marriage.”

-The LGBT Domestic Violence Programs Expansion Bill will leverage funding for same-sex domestic violence services, helping to sustain the critical organizations that serve the LGBT community in this area.

-The Harvey Milk Day Bill establishes in California the first day of recognition for the slain civil rights hero. Harvey Milk Day will be May 22 of each year, Harvey’s birthday.

In particular, many seemed surprised and heartened by the governor’s signature on the Harvey Milk Day Bill—a bill that he had vetoed in the past. Milk is the second Californian, after naturalist John Muir, to receive the honor.

“We are grateful to the Governor for signing these critical and groundbreaking measures into law and rising above partisan politics to improve the lives of LGBT Californians,” said Equality California Executive Director Geoff Kors. Equality California is the largest gay-rights organization in the state.

The Harvey Milk Day bill marks the first time in the nation’s history that a state will officially recognize and celebrate the contributions of an openly LGBT person with an annual “day of special significance.”

“Californians will now learn about Harvey’s amazing contributions to the advancement of civil rights for decades to come,” Kors said. “He is a role model to millions, and this legislation will help ensure his legacy lives on forever.”

Yep, this is indeed a very good thing.

MID-MORNING POST SCRIPT: I admit, and I’m not happy about this, that I didn’t truly understand of the significance of Harvey Milk until I saw the Sean Penn movie. But then, however belatedly, I really got it.

Now, as a Californian, I’m thrilled that we will be able to officially celebrate the life and work of this astonishingly brave, remarkable and prescient man who, by example as a civil rights hero, was not merely a role model for gay and lesbian kids so long desperately in need of one, but who also pointed the way to a better, braver, saner, more compassionate way of living for every single one of us.

And thank you to Arnold, for doing the right thing. Seriously.

In response to my post about Sunday’s LA Times stories telling of the two adolescents who died in the care (if you can call it that) of LA County’s Department of Children and Family Services, Richard Wexler, the
Executive Director National Coalition for Child Protection Reform wrote me an email that was both informative and disturbing.

Wexler commented in particular on the case of Miguel Padilla, the boy who was bounced around from place to place after his mother abandoned him and his father neglected him. He was raised for a while by his elderly great grand mother, who until finally he hung himself in a stand of trees outside the group home where he was placed at the end. His body was not discovered for nine days—and only then, by accident. No one had bothered to search for the kid.

Here are the questions Wexler asked:

A little boy [Miguel] is placed with his great grandmother. There is no indication that she does not love the child, but every indication that she is too old to keep up with him, supervise him properly or get him help with mental health problems.

But why does the Los Angeles Times assume, in its story Sunday about such a boy, that the only alternative is to take him away and place him with strangers?

Why didn’t anyone think to ask if DCFS should have poured help IN to that home, instead of asking only why they didn’t take the boy out?

Apparently because the Times never asked anyone who would raise that option.

When Miguel Padilla first was placed, keeping him safely with his great-grandmother would have been relatively simple: An Intensive Family Preservation Services intervention to start with, followed by linking the great grandmother to less intensive help. Even without hindsight, the odds of Miguel succeeding, not to mention surviving, would have been far greater — and, it would have cost county taxpayers far less.

Now I don’t blame the LA Times reporters for asking those questions. Looking at the surface facts of the case, I too thought Miguel Padilla’s grandmother was too old and ill equipped to care for him. Ditto Lazhanae Harris, the 13-year-old girl whose terrible story the Times also told.

But Wexler insists that this is far from true, that if the parents are not abusive, intelligent family preservation is much, much cheaper and much more likely to have a good outcome, than dumping a kid into “the system,” as those whom I know who have had personal dealings with DCFS call foster care.

To illustrate, Wexler directed me to a video of a speech by one of his colleagues, Karl Dennis, a family preservation specialist who is also the visionary founder and longtime director of Kaleidoscope, a non-profit community-based childcare agency in Chicago.

Just a bit before the video’s halfway mark, Dennis tells a compelling about a kid who, like Miguel, had no place to go because his family couldn’t or wouldn’t take him. But Dennis and his group provided the wrap-around services necessary to return the kid to his very reluctant mother (again, for less money than a slot in the foster care system—and certainly less than incarcerating him, which was clearly where the kid was headed). It worked. According to Dennis, the difficult kid finished school and got a good paying job and now has a life.

According to Wexler, with any luck at all the same might have been true for Miguel and
Lazhanae —if the emphasis at DCFS was on family preservation.

It seems, unfortunately, that it is not. So, all too often it appears that the LA County agency that is supposed to rescue children from abuse and neglect, instead has systematized it.

Surely we can do better.

A large thank you to LA Times writers Kim Christensen and Garrett Therolf for their well-reported, important and heartbreaking package of articles titled “Flawed county system lets children die invisibly.”

The first of the articles tells about a disabled and desperately neglected 17-year-old boy who hung himself from a tree outside the group home where he was placed. Then, as if to make clear the reasons behind his despair, no one at all in the group home noticed or cared enough about his absence to try to search for him.

The second article tells of a 13-year-old girl who fell down a similar chasm of neglect and dispair and ended up stabbed to death after she took to the street in search of someone who might give enough of a damn to even marginally take care of her.

Here’s how the first of the articles begins:

Miguel Padilla ran away from a licensed group home in April 2008, but he didn’t go far.

Unknown to anyone at the time, the 17-year-old amputee made his way to a stand of trees near the main driveway. Using his one arm, he climbed into the branches, tied a makeshift noose to a limb and hanged himself.

Nine days passed before a staffer found his body at the sprawling LeRoy Haynes Center in LaVerne, coroner’s records show — and then only by chance.

“To our knowledge there was no search by LeRoy’s or any other authority,” said Dave Rentz, the boy’s minister.

Miguel Padilla died much as he had lived: alone and out of sight, his suicide the final step in a failed journey through Los Angeles County’s child welfare and juvenile justice systems.

At least 268 children who had passed through the child welfare system died from January 2008 through early August 2009, according to internal county records obtained by The Times. They show that 213 were by unnatural or undetermined causes, including 76 homicides, 35 accidents and 16 suicides.

In addition to the narrative stories, Christensen and Therolf have provided us with a list the 98 kids who have died in foster care from January to August 2009, and the reasons for their deaths.

This is necessary journalism. It is a pity that these days we don’t see more of it.

From the program for Lily Burk’s memorial service at Barnsdall Art Park last Sunday.

Comments are closed.

Embedded in the middle of the mayor’s S.O.C. speech, there was one innocent sounding paragraph that has 76 of the city’s important community agencies in a justifiable state of panic. The paragraph was this one:

We are going to better connect help to the people who need it by creating 21 Family Source Centers located in our hardest-hit neighborhoods. Where people will be able to seek assistance for themselves and their families, file for critical tax credits, access affordable medical care, and benefit from programs at every level of government – and all on a single form. Each year, this program will serve at least 50,000 people.

Here’s the problem. Those nice, spanking new (as yet to be built) “Family Source Centers” will need to be funded.

And funding, in case you haven’t noticed, is a bit tight these days. So to create his new pet one-stop shopping centers, the mayor reportedly intends to yank funding from a money cache known as the Community Development Block Grant fund.

Unfortunately, that money is funding the aforementioned 76 existing organizations and has been, in many cases, for over 20 years. In some cases 30 years. We’re talking about an impressive list of service providers that range from well-known day care centers, homeless shelters, senior care centers, pre schools, mentoring programs, after school programs, low-cost legal services, services for persons with disabilities, jobs programs……and on and on and on.

These are proven programs that are already woven into the fabric of the communities they serve. They provide services on which the poorer communities have come to depend. In other words, they cover many of the same neighborhood needs that the mayor wants to provide in his new Family Source Centers. Except that they don’t have “City of Los Angeles” over their doors, as one mayor’s office staffer helpfully pointed out when questioned about the funding switch.

Now these 76 neighborhood organizations are being told, “Bub-bye. Lovely knowing you. Must run. I’ll be taking your bank account with me.”

Put another way, the mayor seems to have decided to reinvent 21 nice new wheels all monogrammed with his name…and to do so he’s tossing out the existing working wheels, which does not sound terribly wise—and is, one would guess, a lot more expensive.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll likely write something a bit later about the fight over California AG Jerry Brown’s push yesterday to do away with the federal receiver who’s overseeing California’s broken prison health care system….

….But, in the meantime there’s the terrible Wilmington murder/suicide of the Lupoes and their five kids.

The news came out last night that Ervin and Ana Lupoe lost their jobs as medical techs at Kaiser Permanente hospital because they allegedly forged a supervisor’s signatures in order to qualify for low cost child care.

The firing, as we now know, appears to have begun a chain of events that ended in a bounced check to the IRS, a mortgage headed toward default, and finally to a boxed-in state of mind that is suspected to have led Ervin Lupoe to shoot his wife and kids and then himself.

Theirs was, from what the Kaiser Permanente folks are saying, a righteous firing. One cannot have employees forging signatures—-for any reason.

But that the Lupoes took the risk of (allegedly) committing fraud……merely to get affordable childcare for their five kids? (Who are now, not incidently, dead.)

How much sadder can the story possibly get?

I’m not sure what, if anything, all this signifies beyond the simple fact of the tragedy. But it cannot be anything good.

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PS: I am purposedly not commenting on this story. But I’ll be watching as it unfolds—as it assuredly will.

Four-year-old Roberto Lopez is the latest symbol of a dying newspaper. The little boy was shot and killed as he walked with his sister to a community center near their Angelino Heights home around 4:30 p.m. Tuesday.

Where did the Los Angeles Times play the story? Page B3 in my edition. It should, at least, have been the dominant story on the cover of the California section and knocked off a timeless feature about a fire-gutted Montecito monastery’s efforts to rebuild.

Instead, we get a short story, with no photo of the boy. No interviews with family, friends or neighbors. No neighborhood scene. Times’ editors should have followed the example of LAPD’s Assistant Chief Earl Paysinger, who told their reporter: “We’re throwing everything we have at this investigation.”

I’m so over blaming Sam Zell for every shortcoming of our once stronger daily; rarely great, just stronger. Reporters and photographers out to save their jobs from impending layoffs should have carpooled to the scene and produced an in-depth series of stories and hoisted them on their editors in time for today’s paper. Too bad a tipster couldn’t have phoned in an erroneous report of a celebrity spotted in the neighborhood. Maybe the sleepyheads on Spring Street will recover in time for Thursday’s paper. To its credit, the paper’s Web site shows some progress on the story, with video from Tribune’s KTLA. Still, it seems like their overdosing on sedatives in the Times newsroom again.

The criminal enterprise known as L.A. Unified, which should be overseen by a panel of federal judges, took steps to can 2,300 teachers if the nightmarish budget comes true. Where did the story run? Page B-4.

The Times should run front-page stories every day on the latest news of the budget debacle. Include email addresses, home phone numbers and home addresses of every GOP legislator who refuses to act responsibly and raise taxes. (OK, I hear you on the home addresses.) Interview the constitutents of these backward-thinking lawmakers to see if these cavemen really represent their views.

Even the governor, who continues to steal transit money, is calling for tax hikes. The same governor who would have billions more to spend today had he not slashed the car tax upon taking office in 2003.

Forgive me, L.A. Times, for suggesting you step up your game. You probably think what I’m calling for sounds like advocacy journalism and would force you to surrender your objectivity, an outdated term that only provides an excuse for your failure to inform a community about the meaning of events and issues.

Tell me, what’s your objective view of a bankrupt state that fails to meet the needs of its young and its most needy residents?

And what does your objectivity say about the sad end of 4-year-old Roberto’s life? How are we to cope when you don’t tell us more about him, our city, our struggles and our future?

While you think about it, leave a red rose on Roberto’s shrine. It’s OK to mourn while you ponder questions for Chief Bratton and the mayor.

Does Rick Warren’s homophobia mean Barack Obama should not have tapped him to give the invocation at the inauguration?

During the day, yesterday, the announcement about Warren drew comment from every direction, including from Obama himself.

The LA Times has an editorial on the topic, which was, I’m sorry to say, not one of its best, and mostly missed the point.

The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan went through his own narrative arc during thie course of the afternoon. Here’s Sullivan, several posts into the day, after the announcement was made.

Civil rights are not about left and right; they are about right and wrong. And the hurt that this choice has caused is not a function of an alienated base, it seems to me, so much as salt on the wound of Proposition 8. I understand why Obama did this. I just wonder if he understands how deeply hurtful it is to be asked to pray with someone who has compared my marriage with the sexual abuse of children, incest and polygamy. Yes, I am, in Warren’s eyes, the equivalent of a pedophile, as is my husband. This comparison is what Warren calls his commitment to “model civility. Some civility.

Several hours later, he wrote this:

My own view at the end of this deeply upsetting day is that we should all take a deep breath. That doesn’t mean forgetting this; or denying the untruths and prejudices of Rick Warren. It means focusing on getting Obama to support the substantive work of equality; and making the case ourselves.

Personally, I’m very ardently in favor of the reach-across-the-barriers concept—at least in the abstract. It is time we start healing the terrible and scarring divides in this country that the last administration used for political gain. And if Rick Warren thinks that my immortal soul is damned to hell for all eternity, what of it? He does a great deal of good, as well.

But he is also for restricting the rights of my friends and fellow citizens if they happen to be gay. And he said so in odious terms when he actively stumped for Prop 8.

So what to do?

For some further clarification, I turned to my very smart friend and former student, blogger Zach Sire, to see what he had to say.

Here’s a clip from his post (but the rest is worth reading, including his clip from—and reply to—Wonkette):

Your Barry inviting “Dr. Rick” is not a slap in the face to gays as much as it is a disingenuous olive branch to evangelicals. And they’re falling for it! You see, Obama is all about trying to please everyone with gestures and concessions. Until he actually starts enacting policies and putting forth his specific agenda, none of us should be freaking out. So, chill.

And remember, the other religious person on the bill on inauguration day (who is in fact overseeing the benediction) is Rev. Joe Lowery. Lowery founded the SCLC with Martin Luther King and, hold on to your hats, is a supporter of same sex marriage. You don’t see the religious right freaking out about this, do you? (Maybe you do, but I haven’t seen anything about it as of yet.)

So yeah. Relax. Warren is, as everyone knows, a tool. We should be proud of Obama for using him as well as he is. If this endears another couple hundred thousand evangelicals to Obama, and thus helps him out in 2012, then that’s fine by me.

Frankly, this whole issue would be a lot easier if Prop 8 had been defeated, and Californians could go back marrying the people they love, and Rick Warren could invoke to his heart’s content.

But that isn’t how it is.