By Taylor Walker

THE 5-DAY NON-ARREST, NO WATER LOCK-UP

Some of you may already have seen short versions of this flabbergasting story of Daniel Chong, the 24-year-old engineering student and UC San Diego senior who said he was swept up in a Drug Enforcement Administration raid near campus and was taken to a DEA facility where, after questioning, he was told he would be released shortly. But instead Chong put in a tiny holding cell—and forgotten about for the next five days.

Jeff McDonald of UT San Diego has been doing the best job with this story. You can read McDonald’s update about the DEA’s “apology” here, and the main story here. But here are the basics of Chong’s ordeal.

At the DEA field office in Kearny Mesa, Chong said, he was handcuffed and left in a holding cell for about four hours. He was then moved to an interview room, where he was told he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and would be released shortly. One agent even promised to drive him home.

He was then returned to a holding cell to await his release. The door swung closed sometime Saturday and didn’t open again until Wednesday. Chong said he was in one of the middle cells, with no toilet, no water.

“I had to recycle my own urine,” he said. “I had to do what I had to do to survive.”

Soon, Chong said, nothing made sense. He could hear agents chatting among themselves on the other side of the heavy door, and other detainees coming and going from holding tanks nearby.

Days crawled by. No food. No water. No bathroom. He remembers biting his eyeglasses and using the broken shards to scrawl a note onto his left arm.

“Sorry Mom,” he tried to write.

The DEA acknowledged, in a statement to U-T San Diego’s The Watchdog on Monday, that agents left someone in a cell after a raid on April 21 — until they found him and had to call paramedics. San Diego Fire-Rescue Department said that medical call came on April 25.

GROWN UP FOSTER KIDS FIND KEY (LITERALLY) TO BRIGHTER FUTURE

Today, Thursday, Ashley Marquez, an 18-year-old who has recently “aged out” of foster care, will receive the keys to her first apartment, complete with rent-sharing roommate, with the help of First Place for Youth, a nonprofit that aids 16 to 24-year-old foster care kids in things like job training and placement, housing, education completion, and healthcare.

In the past, the stats on kids who age out of foster care have been heartbreakingly bad. But organizations like First Place for Youth are helping young men and women like Ashley break out of the trajectory that foster care has too often predicted.

As First Place for Youth explains the issue:

Each year in California, more than 5,000 youth age out of foster care when they turn 18 and lose access to all state-funded foster care services. Without housing, education or emotional support, 65 percent of foster youth will face imminent homelessness, 20 percent will be arrested or incarcerated, 46 percent will complete high school and only 1 percent will graduate from college.

Research has shown that providing intensive services—such as housing, education and employment support—at the critical juncture when youth are aging out, helps them avoid negative social outcomes and achieve real long-term self-sufficiency.

The kids that come through First Place For Youth seem to prove that a little help goes a long way. According to FPFY’s stats, the youth they work with are five times less likely to experience homelessness, three times less likely to give birth before the age of 21, three times less likely to be arrested, six times more likely to be enrolled in college, twice as likely to graduate from high school, twice as likely to be employed.

Congratulations to Ashley on her first place!

GEORGIA DECIDES TO USE PRISON CELLS MOSTLY FOR DANGEROUS CRIMINALS. (A NOVEL CONCEPT.)

Georgia’s governor signed a criminal justice reform bill Wednesday that will save taxpayers about $264M over the next five years. The sentencing reform will make room for an expanded rehabilitation budget and hopefully curb Georgia’s high recidivism rate (1 in 3 prisoners released are again incarcerated).

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Aaron Gould Sheinin and Bill Rankin have the story.

Here’s a clip:

…Years ago, Georgia was among the states leading the nation in tough-on-crime sentencing laws. But Georgia now joins a host of other states — including Texas, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina — that have enacted legislation to address soaring prison spending that was doing little to reform offenders. The legislation enjoyed extraordinary bipartisan support, with the final version being approved unanimously by both the House and Senate.

The sentencing reform package, which takes effect July 1, is part of a broader criminal justice initiative pushed by Deal. The Legislature also approved the governor’s recommendation to quintuple funding to $10 million for “accountability courts” that require defendants to work, seek treatment and stay sober.

“As we reserve more of our expensive [prison] bed space for truly dangerous criminals [we] free up revenue to deal with those who are not necessarily dangerous but are in many ways in trouble because of various addictions,” Deal said. “Our system is feeding on itself with our recidivism rate being as high as it is. We have the opportunity now to make a difference in the lives of future generations of Georgians.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Listen up, California lawmakers. Why are conservative states like TX and now GA taking the lead in forward thinking and intelligent incarceration policy reform, while y’all are still cowering behind the increasingly flimsy-looking Tough-On-Crime barricade? Yes, realignment was a step. But we need real top-to-bottom sentencing reform—which means, among other things, a sentencing commission that can make informed recommendations that lawmakers actually take seriously.

Really, don’t you feel a tad embarrassed letting Georgia, Texas, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina zoom past you into the future? Well, don’t you????

Okay. I’m glad we had this little chat.

Chronic truancy is a daunting problem in districts all over California, but it’s far worse in the Los Angeles Unified School District where nearly one fourth of the district’s middle-school students are chronically absent from school.

What is even more alarming is that an identical number of LA’s kindergartners— 22.7 percent—are also chronically absent from their classrooms.

(Chronic absence” is defined as missing 10 percent of the school year for excused or unexcused reasons.)

Fortunately, not every school district in the state has those miserably high truancy numbers.

In fact, earlier this week, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson announced that 11 districts have been designated as models of attendance improvement and dropout prevention by the State School Attendance Review Board. The 11 model districts, which include Alhambra, Montebello, San Bernardino and San Diego, will be given awards at a conference in April.

““There’s a very basic fact that is often overlooked: Even the best teacher can’t help students who don’t make it to school,” Torlakson said in a written statement. “These [districts] are proving that there are highly effective strategies for improving attendance and reducing the dropout rate”

After new research pointed to chronic absence as a key indicator of a kid’s academic future, reducing absenteeism became a major focus for Torlakson’s administration, which is trying to find low coast ways to motivate districts to identify students who are are missing too much school, and then intervene early.

“And by early, that means kindergarten, says David Kopperud, the chairperson of the state’s School Attendance Review Board. “We thought the problem began in middle school and high school,” Kopperud told me. “But it starts way before that. It turns out that even kindergarten is important because that’s when students learn beginning reading skills.” Once kids fall behind in their first three years, he said, the slide can all too easily become cumulative until, by middle school they’re in trouble.

“Now they’re too far behind to catch up, and so the next thing is, they start to misbehave.”

School suspensions follow the misbehavior, which means more classwork in missed.

“In a lot of schools,” Kopperud said, “20 percent of their absences are due to suspensions. And we find that schools with high suspension rates, have a high drop out rate.” It’s what other experts call the push out factor. And pretty soon you have this really large population that is lost to law enforcement.”

So what to do?

“We’re learning that the best kind of drop-out intervention, is prevention,” said Kopperud. “But that means analyzing the school attendance data so that you have a good early warning system to tell you when kids are missing too much school, and then intervening aggressively.”

But aggressive and timely intervention requires the personnel to do the intervening—at a time when districts like LAUSD are in a frenzy of cutbacks.

So that’s where the awards come in..

Kopperud said that he and his board members hope that the other districts will look at the honorees and think, hey, if those guys over there can improve , we can too. “So we’re handing out certificates and plaques,” he said.

“It’s a reminder that there are places where, despite the odds, they’re beating them,” said Kopperud. “So it can be done. Even in this economy, it can be done.”

Let’s hope LAUSD takes note. So far what they’ve done districtwide is….not much. (Unless you count paying consultants fat fees to produce this and that report and analysis, without any appreciable follow-up that would change outcomes for actual kids.)

AND IN OTHER KID-RELATED NEWS…… AN OPPONENT OF OPENING OF JUVENILE DEPENDENCY COURT SLAMS LA TIMES COVERAGE OF COURT HEARINGS AS HARMING KIDS

Whittier Law School professor William Wesley Patton evidently slammed LA Times editor-at-large Jim Newton for his coverage of LA’s newly-opened child dependency court in an Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Daily Journal (which is hidden behind a hefty pay wall, or I’d link to it).

Newton, who wrote two excellent columns about his visits to court in the weeks since Judge Michael Nash ordered the opening of the long-secret proceedings to the press (here and here), decided not to simply ignore the slam, but to point out its truthiness. Here’s a clip:

The shift from holding almost all Dependency Court hearings in private to declaring a presumptive openness of those proceedings to the press is understandably upsetting to those accustomed to working in private. It is hard to have prying eyes where once there were none.

And yet, what is often lost in the resistance to change is what is most important. The interests of children are, of course, paramount in all of this, but those who side with Patton, in my view, see those interests too narrowly. Secrecy in Dependency Court has protected social workers, lawyers and even judges who perform poorly from being held to answer for their work. We would never tolerate such immunity from scrutiny in our adult and family courts, nor should we when the stakes are even higher — the preservation of an opportunity for children who have done no wrong. In the end, the victims of secrecy in Dependency Court are children whose caretakers are allowed to fail them without consequence; the beneficiaries of a more open system would be children as well.

So far, the experiment in Los Angeles Dependency Court is bearing out that argument. Perhaps that’s why Patton distorts it.

What Jim said.

COMMENTARY AFTER WATCHING SIX HOURS OF HEALTH TESTIMONY AT SCOTUS.….

Dalia Lithwick of Slate sounds stunned and depressed after Wednesday’s round of arguments….

Amid all the three-day psychodrama, it’s easy to get confused about what’s happened and what hasn’t. Court watchers seem to generally agree that the individual mandate is in real peril and will rise or fall with Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy. Court watchers also agree that 19th-century tax law—while generally adorable—will not prevent the justices from deciding the case by July. And they also agree that they may have counted five justices who appear willing to take the whole law down, along with the mandate, and the Medicaid expansion as well.

But the longer they talked, the harder it was to say. A lot of today’s discussion started to sound like justices just free-associating about things in the law they didn’t like. That doesn’t reveal all that much about the interplay between the four separate challenges—what happens when they all have to be looked at together—or anything at all about what will happen at conference or in the drafting of opinions. Could the five conservative justices strike down the entire health care law, and take us into what Kagan described this morning as a “revolution”? They could. Will they? I honestly have no idea anymore. As silent retreats go, this one was a lot less enlightening than I’d hoped.

While Adam Teicholz at the Atlantic wonders morosely…but interestingly…. if bloggers killed the health care mandate before it got to court…

Back in early 2010, before the 26 state attorneys general, before the angry protests and the breathless headlines, before the six hours of oral argument at the nation’s highest court, the legal challenge to the individual mandate was greeted with head-scratching skepticism. The constitutional argument was dismissed by many Court-watchers. A week after the first challenge was filed, one liberal scholar suggested the claims were so frivolous that the lawyers could face sanctions.

Now, however, the atmosphere has changed, “and that,” Adam Liptak, Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times, told me last week, is in part “a testament” to the persistence of a small group of conservative and libertarian attorneys. In the last few days, Politico and the New York Times have shone a light on Randy Barnett, the Georgetown Law professor who has taken on the dual role, unusual for an appellate lawyer, of spearheading advocacy both in court and in more public forums.

[BIG SNIP]

Blogs — particularly a blog of big legal ideas called Volokh Conspiracy — have been central to shifting the conversation about the mandate challenges. At Volokh, Barnett and other libertarian academics have been debating and refining their arguments against the mandate since before the ACA was signed. At the beginning, law professor Jonathan Adler fleshed out the approach that came to typify the elite conservative response for the first months of the public debate: the Founders never intended for the Constitution to permit such broad federal power, but given New Deal-era precedent, the mandate, if it became law, would pass muster. Things changed on Volokh around the time that it became clear that an insurance mandate would be part of whichever health care reform package passed into law.

One congressional floor speech seemed to mark a tonal turning point for Volokh, the moment its writers realized their power to shape debate…..

AND IN GOOD LASD NEWS…..A DRAMATIC AIR-5 RESCUE SAVES WOMAN’S LIFE AFTER CRASH

Amid the Aero Bureau controversies, it’s important to remember the great work LASD pilots do day in and day out, both in patrol and rescue. Here’s a KTLA report of the most recent dramatic example of Air-5’s rescue work. (Scroll down for the video.)

LAUSD BOARD GRITS TEETH….THEN SLASHES AND BURNS: VOTES TO CUT ALL ADULT SCHOOLS….AND A LOT MORE, HOPES THAT A PARCEL TAX & UNION CONCESSIONS WILL SAVE ALL

The LA Times Stephen Ceasar reports:

The Los Angeles Board of Education approved a preliminary, worst-case $6-billion budget Tuesday, a plan that would eliminate thousands of jobs, close all of the district’s adult schools and cut some after-school and arts programs.

But Supt. John Deasy presented a less severe deficit than initially expected to the board and several scenarios that would restore millions in funding and save some programs from either elimination or partial cuts before the budget is finalized. Much of that, however, is contingent on voters’ passing the governor’s tax initiative in November, which he hopes would stave off more education cuts.

“I can say that this budget, even with its clear and present dangers, remains a budget of hope,” said board member Steve Zimmer. Deasy then interjected, “I don’t want to hope, I want to plan.”

The very excellent Tami Abdollah of KPCC has LOTS more.

KCET’S SO CAL CONNECTED GOES INSIDE CHILDREN’S DEPENDENCY COURT, FINDS POTENTIAL DISASTERS

KCET’s So Cal Connected (which has been on a roll in the past year) brought cameras inside LA’s children’s dependency court, and saw a lot that alarmed producer Karen Foshay, and correspondent Jennifer London.

The first of the resulting episodes aired last Friday. The second will air this coming Friday, March 16.

Both episodes demonstrate why Judge Michael Nash’s controversial order to open the court to the press is so important—despite the loud protests by those who thought reporters would trample on the rights of the children whose lives were being decided at these formerly closed proceedings.

Here’s what KCET had to say about episode 2, titled Courting Disaster.

Los Angeles County’s Dependency Court is the largest in the nation, handling 25,000 children. For the first time television cameras were granted access, revealing in graphic detail how deep budget cuts are devastating our justice system and putting our most vulnerable citizens at risk. We profile Judge Amy Pellman who is scheduled to hear 33 family cases in six hours, sometimes deciding a child’s fate in as little as three minutes. We meet parents who have completed counseling programs and are hoping the judge will grant them custody of their son. But other parents are stuck, unable to get into overcrowded programs that are required in order to get their children back.

We see how judges and attorneys often learn the facts of a case only minutes before the case is heard; how attorneys who are supposed to represent 160 children are burdened with 240 cases. More delays and backlogs are inevitable as 300 layoffs and 50 courtroom closures are scheduled to occur in L.A. County, following a statewide $650 million slash in funding.

California Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakaueye says “I think its devastating to be told to come back in four months and that we’ll hear your case on child custody. What’s a person to do in four months?”

Hell, we certainly wouldn’t want reporters looking into any of that.

And, by the way, So Cal Connected focused on exactly the sort of thing that has rarely been adequately reported. We will hear about the ghastly tragedy of a child dying at the hands of abusive parents, but we rarely hear about the everyday tragedies that occur when a system with the power to save or ruin the lives of children and families is overburdened.

CA DEPT. OF CORRECTIONS OUTLINES NEW POLICIES FOR HANDLING PRISON GANGS, AND FOR CLASSIFYING PRISONERS AS TO RISK

As the CDCR rightly states, California prisons manage “the most violent and sophisticated prison gangs in the nation.” Sadly, yes. That’s about right. And much of that management in the past has been to crack down hard, and then crack down some more.

How has this strategy worked out? Not all that well, actually—at least in the long term. Or as the CDCR put it, “Although this [suppression only] strategy reduced violence in prisons, it lacked prevention, deterrent and interdiction components.”

So what did the CDCR do? To their great credit, after 25 years of ever-more aggressive crack downs, they decided to stop and really examine the problem, and then try to institute the most effective methods to solve it, rather than the methods they’d always used.

Here is the report on the new methods that have resulted.

I’ll tell you about the report in more detail in the future, but for now, suffice it to say that it’s quite smart—and, among other things, gives gang members who are willing, a step-by-step road out that is rehabilitative rather than punitive.

It is also good news to note that, in a separate but related report, the CDCR has redone it’s risk classification system. In short, they found that they were overclassifying and/or misclassifying prisoners, which they discovered did greater damage to the prisoners and to public safety, then did underclassing them. Research showed that prisoners who were overclassified—i.e. put in more restrictive units than their behavior warranted—were more likely to act out, more likely to learn criminal behavior from the truly hard cases, and more likely to do poorly when they paroled. (Here’s the report.)

More on this too at another time. In any case, it’s really, really good to see the CDCR stepping up and doing the right thing in these crucial but difficult areas.

Go CDCR!

PS: It’s important to note that many of these reform elements were requested by the prison hunger strikers of last year, during the hunger strike that began at Pelican Bay’s SHU (Secure Housing Unit) and then spread throughout the system.

PPS: As the CDCR points out, these changes are made possible by the population relief brought by realignment, which is exactly right. Despite all the wailing, realignment is wise and necessary. Change is painful in the beginning, but under Jerry Brown’s governorship, Matt Cate and the CDCR is actually starting to slowly but steadily make genuine progress.

ANIMAL ADOPTIONS UPS—AND SO IS EUTHANASIA IN LA’S SHELTERS

Commissioners resigning, euthanasia is up, three of the five commissioners who oversee the Department of Animal Services have recently resigned thus paralyzing the department, a million dogs are running around LA unlicensed, is LA’s critter oversight a mess? Warren Olney with Which Way LA? wades into the issue.

AUTOPSY SHOWS JAIL INMATE’S DEATH LIKELY CAUSED BY DRUGS GIVEN HIM FOR MENTAL ILLNESS

LAT’S Robert Faturechi and Jack Leonard report.

CALIF. PRISON INMATE FINDS HE HAS TALENT FOR SCHOLARSHIP IN HIEROGLYPHICS

Read this very cool Column One story in the LA Times by Thomas H. Maugh II.

Photo by KPCC’s new education reporter Tami Abdollah

Those wishing to slam shut the Children’s dependency court where foster care and family reunification cases are heard, were dealt a setback on Wednesday when two petitions were denied that sought to overturn a new order by Los Angeles County Children’s Court Presiding Judge Michael Nash allowing reporters to observe hearings unless it can be determined that the journalist’s presence will do harm to the child or children in the individual case.

Children’s Court Hearings—the hearings pertaining to matters such as whether or not a child should be taken away from parents or returned to them, and the like—have traditionally been closed tightly against any kind of outside monitoring until Judge Nash issued his order earlier this month.

In a two-line ruling the 3-judge panel at the 2nd District of the California Court of Appeals said that the petition was denied “for lack of standing.”

In other words, come back and see us if and when you can show how a kid has been hurt by the presence of a reporter.

[Garrett Therolf of the LA Times has more on the decision.]

There has been much controversy ever since Judge Nash issued his order allowing some metaphorical sunshine into the court in the form of press coverage, thus disrupting the fiercely protected secrecy that has characterized the Department of Children and Family Services cases.

Advocates for social workers and court attorneys have predicted that kids coming out of abusive situations would be harmed by a stranger sitting in a court room where their cases are discussed.

However, as anyone who has ever sat through a number of those hearings knows, the courtroom is already loaded with strangers. In fact, the minute a child hits the foster care system, his or her life is shoved about by a list of strangers. To suggest that a reporter will add some kind of uniquely harmful foreign element to the mix is grossly exaggerated at best and, and in most cases, simply counterfactual.

Also there is the mistaken assumption that hoards of reporters will want to cover foster care hearings. Save for a few dedicated and hardy souls, or barring some unusual high-profile case, the media hoards will be elsewhere, trust me. It’s anything but exciting and easy to cover a DCFS case. There’s a lot of hurry-up-and-wait. Plus the hearings on a single case can be spread out over weeks or months.

Yet those reporters who do make the time and effort have the opportunity, not only to shine a light on the parts of the system that are still so horribly broken, they also might possibly with their presence—and reporting—make a crucial difference in a case that might have otherwise gone in a sad or tragic direction.

Kevin Uhrich, editor of the Pasadena Weekly writes about that issue in a column on the hullabaloo surrounding Judge Nash’s order to open the courts.

First he mentions a wonderful series on foster care kids that reporter Joe Piasecki did for the paper. And then:

…More recently, the paper covered the case of a mentally infirm mother, whose two children — one an adorable infant, the other a slightly older toddler, both seemingly happy — were taken from her in late 2010 and were almost immediately prepped for adoption by the LA County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS).

Much as Joe did with his wards of the court, all ostensibly “protected” by law from exposure in the press, we covered this case through the mother’s eyes — mainly because no one at DCFS would talk to us. We tried to make contact, but no one returned our calls. Neither did attorneys for the county nor the mother’s attorneys, so fearful were they of being sanctioned by the court for speaking with the press.

To write this story, we were forced to rely on the mother, who came to us with her problems and was more than happy to share stories and corresponding documents related to her quixotic quest to get her kids back. Her few advocates believed, as did we, that at the very least something was troubling about the ease with which anonymous and unaccountable county social workers simply took children away from their biological mothers and fathers, a rather common occurrence in LA County, or so we learned through our reporting.

Granted, the mother had many personal issues to work out, and perhaps she wasn’t fit. But why then did the court refuse the many requests of her socially well-established parents living in another state to care for those babies? These grandparents were certainly financially stable enough folks of good Midwestern stock, and they were willing to raise these children as their own. But they were repeatedly rebuffed by the court, according to them, and the records we were able to obtain.

So were we just “butting in,” invading people’s privacy in search of sensational copy with which to titillate and amuse our readers? The answer, of course, is no. We were equal parts shocked and outraged at what we learned throughout the course of reporting this story. We also were, and still remain, genuinely concerned about these people, as any right-thinking person with a shred of basic morality would be.

More importantly, though, did any of our coverage matter in the final disposition of this tragic case, which ultimately saw the infant go to the grandparents and the older child turned over to adoptive parents?

I can’t say for sure, mainly because the judge never explained her reasoning to us or to the anxious grandparents, who ripped through their life savings traveling back and forth from their home to California to attend court hearings and pay for lawyers. But I do know that this judge’s final decision to split up the children might not have happened at all had the paper failed to notify the grandparents about what was happening to their kin in court. Nor would anyone have known that the judge in the end inexplicably decided against the recommendation of DCFS workers to turn both youngsters over to their grandparents….

On the other side of the coin, there is last year’s horrific case of Vyctorya Sandoval-– a pretty toddler who was inexplicably returned to her erratic mother against the panicked advice from the girl’s grandmother, family friends and a foster care official, and, as a consequence, soon wound up dead, with bruises, a fractured rib, thirsty and starving.

After the story broke in the LA Times, I was contacted by someone very close to the family who gave me additional details on all the warnings there had been, a plethora of red flags, plus the pleading letters to the court from those who were worried that the mother would hurt the little girl, and finally the nightmarish court hearing, the result of which seemed to run counter to all reason. Had a journalist been in the hearing room would the circumstances have played out just as tragically? Maybe. Maybe not.

I’d like to think not.

There is a strong movement afoot to slam closed the door that Judge Michael Nash unlocked last week with his order to open LA’s Child Dependency Courts to the press.

Two LA Times reporters and one LA Times columnist actually observed hearings last week. (I linked to the resulting article by reporters, Garrett Therolf and John Hoeffel here and columnist Jim Newton has a wonderful essay, just published this morning.) Somehow it seems no children were hopelessly traumatized by having another stranger or two sit quietly in the room. (Life for children in the midst of dependency hearings is already, sadly, loaded with strangers.)

Yet, many believe that Nash’s order will not stand for long—not because his order was wrong, but simply because those who want to yank that door closed again may have the power to manage it.

Here’s part of what Sunday’s LA Times’ well-written editorial said about the matter, now that they’d had reporters visit.

There were furious objections to the presence of these observers, a reminder that the idea of openness is profoundly unsettling in a courthouse accustomed to doing its work in private. But privacy has bred arrogance and resistance to notions that otherwise suit society well: that the public has a right to observe its institutions at work, and that public servants should not be allowed to hide behind secrecy to disguise inefficiency, incompetence or worse.

Secrecy is absolutely the issue—and not in a good way. A child’s privacy must always be protected, but it does not take re-closing the courts to do that. What must no longer be kept secret is the process by while decisions are made for children’s lives.

Another Sunday editorial, this one by Steven Greenhut from the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, writing for the North County Times, laid things out even more plainly.

Here are some clips:

….These courts and the entire children and family services systems are plagued by controversy and allegations of mismanagement and corruption. In few areas of American life do government officials have so much unchecked power, yet are allowed to operate in nearly complete secrecy. Maybe there’s a connection there.

No reforms or inquiries ever fix the situation, which is no surprise because the public doesn’t get to look at the inner workings of these agencies or delve into the details of specific cases. Los Angeles County has been a particular mess, where more than 70 children have died under the supervision of county social workers since 2008, and many of those deaths have been blamed by county leaders on mismanagement.

[SNIP]

It’s so frustrating how every serious policy issue in this state is driven by what’s best for government employees, not the public. In support of the Feuer bill [which tried to institute a pilot program to open some courts], the San Jose Mercury News opined: “Three years ago, Mercury News reporter Karen de Sá documented the troubled state of this system. Her yearlong investigation found that overwhelmed, undertrained lawyers weren’t properly representing their clients, that older children were too often excluded from proceedings affecting their lives, and that parents’ and children’s rights were routinely at risk.”

That’s exactly right. And, according to the Times report, Nash argued: “There is a lot that is not good (in the dependency courts), and that’s an understatement. Too many families do not get reunified … too many children and families languish in the system for far too long. Someone might want to know why this is the case.”

Yet Nash’s thinking is treated as something that’s almost radical. The simple and humane reform he imposed in his courtroom is being challenged in court by the same self-interested parties that have stopped reform in the Capitol. Openness is the rule in 17 states, so this isn’t some uncharted territory.

This is a very delicate matter to navigate well. And the court has to have broad discretion to protect kids. But the secrecy has to stop.

We’ll be tracking this issue closely.

NOTE: Here’s a clip from the LA Times’ Jim Newton’s column on his experience in court last week, which was published after I posted. By the way, to fend off challenges by DCFS lawyers Newton brought his own lawyer. (Smart move.)

Read the rest of this entry »

LA Times reporters Garrett Therolf and John Hoeffel experience their first visit inside LA County’s main children’s court, a territory previously forbidden to reporters—until, after much deliberation and controversy, Children’s Court Presiding Judge Michael Nash ordered the courtsto be open to the media, except in cases when a judge finds that it would be harmful to the child involved. Nash’s judicial order that is still being fought by advocacy groups.

Here’s how Therolf and Hoeffel’s report opens:

Just days into an unprecedented effort to open Los Angeles County children’s courts to the press, Judge D. Zeke Zeidler weighed the case of a young boy whose abuse injuries raised concerns that he might never be able to run again and have confined him to a medical facility for many months.

In a hearing Tuesday at Edelman Children’s Court in Monterey Park — the sort of proceeding almost never viewed by the media or outsiders prior to an order handed down last week — the boy’s lawyer reported that since being taken from his parents, the youngster has made remarkable progress. He’d earned a reputation for being a “miracle child” who would someday “play like other kids,” the lawyer told the court.

Zeidler then turned his attention to the boy’s social worker, who was ordered last April to search simultaneously for a relative and a potential adoptive parent to provide a permanent home. When the case worker described her limited efforts to comply with the order, the jurist delivered a stern rebuke.

“You as the government have chosen to become vested with this child” by removing him from his home, Zeidler said. “But the court does not find that the department has provided sufficient services.”

The exchange offered a highly unusual — and controversial — view into courtrooms filled with stuffed animals, coloring books and posters for children’s movies. Children’s court is an insular judicial world that has been criticized by parents for too often trampling their rights and by children’s advocates for inadequately protecting young people at risk from potentially harmful living situations.

It seems that although things went smoothly in Judge Zeigler’s courtroom, in the courtrooms of some of the other judge’s in the building, various forms of freakouts ensued the moment that the reporters tried to enter. Interestingly, some of the lawyers doing the most freaking out, had not bothered to ask their clients if they minded having reporters in the court or not.

I happen to know that, prior to Judge Nash’s recent ruling, Judge Zeigler once had at least one other reporter in his courtroom: ME.

This occurred in 2004, when the parents I was following for a year long series called An American Family (published in the LA Weekly) wound up in children’s court when their kids were taken away by DCFS after the police raided their house in search of drugs. Both parents requested that I be present in the court, and their attorneys went along with it. After much discussion, Judge Zeigler consented. I was allowed in as “friend” and observer, but was not allowed to write anything that I witnessed directly. (I was, however, able to write about what the parents told me later after they were no longer in court—a technical loophole that I navigated very, very carefully. The resulting chapters in the series may be found here and here.)

I recall Judge Zeigler as being an unusually smart and fair-minded jurist.

Reading Therolf and Hoeffel’s account of Zeigler’s calm handling of the matter of their presence, I wondered if he remembered those hearings and me all these years later— how once before he let a reporter into his court, but that no children were harmed as a consequence. And the sky didn’t fall.

In any case, be sure to read the whole LA Times story, as it’s an informative tale well told.

A lot of necessary budget cutting is going on in the state right now. Many of the cuts are difficult. But in a few cases, the cuts are poorly thought out—- penny wise and pound foolish (as my mother would have put it).

The cut to Foster Youth Services is one of those cuts.

Foster Youth Services is a unique state program that helps !4,000 California kids in foster care stay in school and navigate their lives—help that is very much needed..

If you are not familiar with the stats, foster care kids, particularly the kids who age out of foster care, do not, as a group, have great outcomes—in school, in employment, in finding a stable place to live, at staying out of poverty.

More than one third of the nation’s runaway kids were in foster care during the year they ran away.

A third of those who age out of foster care wind upon the street, homeless.

Over 75 percent of foster youth students’ work is below grade level, 50 percent are held back at least one year in school. 75 percent of those who age out of foster care, fail to graduate high school.

However, if foster care kids are given tutoring, encouragement, and mentoring during their school years, their prospects change dramatically.

Created in 1981 as a pilot program, Foster Youth Services was so incredibly successful in keeping foster kids in school and helping them navigate their lives that, in 1998, it was expanded statewide to help foster kids from ages to 4 to 21, plus adolescents in juvenile detention facilities.

Suddenly kids began doing better.

Now, however, Foster Youth Services is scheduled to use its funding. It’s not that it’s being cut directly. It is that the funds especially designated for the program are no longer designated. This leaves the onus of providing funds for FYS will fall on the individual school districts—-WHICH ARE BUSY CUTTING EVERYTHING.

Thus it is the equivalent of defunding the program. And it is not in the state’s best interest to have this Foster Youth Services dumped.

This blog post by Amy Lemley has more.

A GAY CALIFORNIA VET AND HER SPOUSE IS DENIED BENEFITS

The AP has the story:

A gay Army veteran and her wife sued the federal government on Wednesday after they were denied military benefits granted to straight spouses.

The lawsuit announced in Washington involves a 12-year veteran of the Army, Tracey Cooper-Harris. After leaving the Army she married Maggie Cooper-Harris in California in 2008. Two years later, Tracey Cooper-Harris was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and she has received disability benefits through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs as a result. But her application for additional money and benefits that married veterans are entitled to was denied.

THURS. THE 9TH CIRCUIT WILL RELEASE A PROP 8 RULING (NAMELY THE RULING ABOUT WHETHER OR NOT THE VIDEO RECORDING OF THE FEDERAL TRIAL WILL BE RELEASED)

Lyle Denniston of ScotusBlog thinks today’s ruling may be a precursor for the next ruling-–which will be about whether or not the Prop 8 supporters who challenged the lower court ruling have the “standing” to have brought the challenge.

Heres a clip from the ScotusBlog story:

The first ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court on California’s controversial ban on same-sex marriage — but not an ultimate ruling on the ban’s constitutionality — will be released Thursday morning, the Circuit Court announced Wednesday. Coming out at 1 p.m. Washington time (10 a.m. in San Francisco), this will be a decision on whether the courts will release, for public broadcast and public viewing in general, the videotapes made of the historic federal trial on the ban known as “Proposition 8.”

The ballot measure approved by California voters in November 2008 barred gay marriages in California, but the state Supreme Court later ruled that — while Proposition 8 did not violate the state constitution — marriages already performed among same-sex couples remained legal. The ban itself, however, was then challenged in a federal court case that unfolded in a three-week trial two years ago. A video recording was made of the entire trial and, although some limited excerpts of it have been played before selected audiences, the full tape remains under seal in federal court.

Juvenile Court Presiding Judge Michael Nash did a brave and important thing on Friday—and then again on Monday. On Friday he issued a draft order to open the Juvenile dependency courts to the press, allowing fresh air into a system in Los Angeles County that has long been disastrously closed. Then on Monday, he had a hearing on the matter and announced that he planned to make the order permanent.

In case you’ve forgotten, Juvenile dependency courts are the places that hear child abuse and neglect cases.

Nash was originally going to open the courts to the public as well as the press, but he ran into a lot of resistance.

So, according to Friday’s draft order, the courts will remain closed to the public unless a certain set of criteria are met in individual cases. However, the new default position will be that press will be allowed in— unless anyone can show clear cause that having reporters in a hearing will harm a child.

As the order itself states:

Members of the press shall be allowed access to Juvenile Dependency Court hearings unless there is a reasonable likelihood that such access will be harmful to the child‟s or children‟s best interests.

Richard Wexler of the NCCPR—the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform— expressed the view of the many child welfare experts who have been advocating for LA’s court to get some fresh air. Here’s a clip from Wexler’s blog post on the topic:

If Judge Nash proceeds with this order as written, it will be a significant step forward in holding the county Department of Children and Family Services and the courts themselves accountable for what the system does to children and families in Los Angeles. As we explain in our Due Process Agenda, none of the many other state and local systems that have opened these courts has closed them again because all the fears of opponents proved groundless…

Not everyone agrees. Former foster child, Marcy Valenzuela wrote an Op Ed for the LA Times last fall explaining why she felt the courts should stay closed.

Juvenile dependency courts exist to protect children and youths who have been neglected and abused, so it’s shocking that the presiding judge who oversees the Los Angeles County Superior Court’s juvenile division is pushing a plan that puts foster children and youths at risk of further harm.

If Judge Michael Nash’s order stands, vulnerable children, youths and their families, who are already dealing with painful consequences of neglect and abuse, would face the additional burden of proving why the most intimate details of their lives should be kept private.

The primary movers against letting light into the courts, are not child advocates, but the unions for the grown-ups, those who represent the social workers, et al. They have fought hard to keep the hearings secret.

However, Nash is clear on the issue.

There is a lot that is not good [in the dependency courts], and that’s an understatement,” the LA Times reported that Nash said earlier this year at a Sacramento hearing on the issue. “Too many families do not get reunified…. Too many children and families languish in the system for far too long. Someone might want to know why this is the case.”

Exactly.

According to advocates who were present at Monday’s meeting, Nash said he would issue a final order very soon.

AND LEST WE STRAY TOO FAR FROM THE LASD & JAILS…THE LA TIMES EDITORIAL SAYS: YES, LA COUNTY’S JAILS ARE BROKEN, BUT EVERYBODY NEEDS TO THINK BEFORE PRESCRIBING A $1.4 BILLION DOLLAR ONE-DIMENSIONAL, BUILD-A-JAIL FIX

Or words to that effect. Mainly, Monday’s very well written editorial echos what we said last week before and after the board of supervisors meeting, regarding the need to look at the whole picture before rushing off and throwing a billion and a half dollars at jail building.

And by “the whole picture, this includes the suggestions contained in the very lengthy and very smart Vera Institute report on the county’s jail over crowding issue and what to do about it ( a report that was, by the way, ordered and paid for by the county). And it also means waiting to look at the upcoming report on the same issue from jails and prison expert Jim Austin, due in late February.

Anyway, a big thank you to the Times editorial board, who said all of the above more elegantly than we did.

THEN WHILE WE’RE ON THE SUBJECT OF WISE GOVERNANCE….WHAT’S UP WITH GOV. JERRY TRYING TO DO AWAY WITH THE HAYDEN BILL, WHICH HAS PROTECTED CALIFORNIA’S PETS FROM NEEDLESS EUTHANASIA SINCE 1998?

Former California senator Tom Hayden (and current critter owner) explains everything. (See above video.)

Yes, yes, we’ve heard that the legislative analyst says that doing away with this bill will save the state money. Okay, sure. And having no shelters at all will save the state even more money. BUT THAT DOESN’T MAKE IT A GOOD IDEA.

Raise fees. Whatever. But do not even think of trying to vaporize the law that prevents precipitous critter euthanasia—which could, in turn, mean that if by some chance our four-footed family members get lost, get out of the house for an unscheduled walkabout, or get separated from us by some unforeseen force majeure, they could be killed dead before we’ve had the chance to track them down.

No. Not a workable solution, Jerry.

Seriously—Ask yourself, WWSD? What would Sutter do?

Okay, see? I rest my case.

Last year, California legislature passed AB 12, the bill that gives another three years of aid to the young men and women who “mature out” of foster care.

The measure hopes to fix one of the largest problems in California’s foster care system—namely the fact that foster care kids are cut off from nearly all help or support the minute they turn 18. This occurs with very little preparation or help in getting an apartment, a car, a job, health care….and all the other elements of adult life. They are given a few referrals and a bag holding their possessions. That’s it.

As a consequence, sixty-five percent of those who “age out” 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 abandonment are stark. One in four former foster kids who matured in the system will be incarcerated within two years of leaving foster care. One in five will become homeless before they turn 20-years old.

Although the bill was passed more than a year ago, AB 12 is not set to kick in until January 1, 2012.

NEW STUDY SHOWS HUMUNGOUS PROBLEMS THAT AB 12 WILL (HOPEFULLY) HELP TO CURE

A unique study focusing on LA County’s Foster Care youth was released last week. Its brand new set of disturbing findings put a spotlight on the fact that the extra three years of help that AB 12 is scheduled to provide is desperately needed—like yesterday.

The research, which was funded by the Conrad Hilton foundation and conducted by University of Pennsylvania professor Dennis Culhane, with help from the LA County CEO’s Office, looked at how well or poorly kids did 3-7 years after exiting foster care and/or LA’s juvenile probation system.

The results were predictably disturbing.

Yet the numbers were by far the grimmest for kids who had been in the possession for both county agencies—the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) and LA County’s extremely troubled juvenile probation.

The young adults in this double duty group are known as the “crossover” youth.

Among the study’s key findings:

One-third of former foster youth and one-half of crossover youth experienced a period of extreme poverty during their young adult years. For example, a youth exiting the foster care system had cumulative earnings of just under $30,000 over the first four years. The amount of income earned by crossover youth is far more dismal — less than $14,000 over four years.

Of those leaving foster care, 68 percent accessed public welfare benefits during the first four years after leaving the system—costing the County of Los Angeles an average of $12,532.

As for the crossover kids, a staggering 82 percent applied for and collected some kind of public assistance benefits during the first four years after exiting the system—bringing their average total cost to LA County to $35,171 over four years.

The rates of using public welfare declined for both groups in years 5 to 8 but the numbers are still substantial —41 percent for foster youth and 54 percent for crossover youth.

(By the way, this study is the first ever to look at outcomes for crossover youth, those who are involved in both foster care and juvenile justice systems. This is a population of kids that deserves MUCH more focus in the future. )

A HOPEFUL GLIMMER

Both the researchers and foster care advocates were interested to note that almost half of the former foster youth and crossover youth enrolled in community colleges, despite the fact that they were poor, often jobless, in some cases homeless, and often prone to depression and other emotional conditions.

A dispiriting two percent actually received an Associate Degree, but the researchers felt that the willingness to try was significant.

“This study provides compelling evidence that these young adults, especially the crossover youth, should be targeted with housing support, education, employment services and mentoring, if the county and the state are to avoid a lifetime of public dependence by this highly vulnerable population,” said Dr. Culhane. “The good news is that this is a population that can be easily targeted with assistance and that current costs to the county could be potentially offset by reduced incarceration and public assistance costs.”

In other words, when—through AB 12 and related programs—we spend a little bit of extra money and effort on kids transitioning out of foster care, juvenile probation, and those double whammy crossover kids, a lot of money will be saved over these kids’ lifetimes in the way of public assistance and criminal justice costs.

More importantly, the bleak trajectories of these young men and women’s lives can be redirected toward hope and accomplishment.

“..I understood the incredible challenges foster kids faced as they prepared to enter a world that they were not ready for,” said U.S. Representative Karen Bass in a statement released last week. Bass, who was one of the original sponsors for AB 12, said she hopes it will become a model for the county.

And just one more thing to put all this in perspective: A 2007 report indicated that, nationwide, kids who grow up with their own parents typically don’t become self-sufficient until age 26 — and their parents on average contribute $44,000 after they turn 18 in rent, utilities, food, medical care, college tuition, transportation and other necessities to help them get there.

So, yeah, three extra years of a extra help for our County’s kids whom we’ve taken into our collective care is the only sane or wise thing to do.

MEANWHILE….ELSEWHERE IN FOSTER CARE NEWS: WHILE SACRAMENTO DITHERS OVER WHETHER TO OPEN LA COUNTY’S DEPENDENCY COURTS TO MEDIA SCRUTINY, PRESIDING JUDGE MICHAEL NASH SAYS HE WILL DO IT ANYWAY.

Both the LA Times Garett Therolf and the LA Weekly have the story, but Jill Stewart writing for the Weekly, is in a particularly satisfying state of fury about the delays in opening the courts.

By the way, Jill’s anger has mostly to do with abusive parents who get their kids back and do terrible harm to them, whereas I’ve mostly seen the other side, where kids are terribly traumatized when taken from parents unnecessarily.

As Therolf writes of Judge Nash:

“There is a lot that is not good [in the dependency courts], and that’s an understatement,” Nash said earlier this year at a hearing in Sacramento on legislation that would have opened dependency courts. “Too many families do not get reunified … too many children and families languish in the system for far too long. Someone might want to know why this is the case.”

We need sunshine for both sides of this kid-wrecking coin.

AND, FINALLY….MORE ON JAILS:

For those of you following the jails scandal saga (and if you aren’t, why in the world aren’t you?) be sure to read Sunday’s LA Times’ story by Jack Leonard and Robert Faturechi about how jail duty was used to punish certain problem deputies.

NOTE: WE’LL HAVE MORE ON THE JAILS AND THE LASD THIS WEEK

A SECOND SMART LA TIMES EDITORIAL ABOUT THE LA COUNTY FOSTER CARE SYSTEM AND THE POLITICAL WINDS THAT DRIVE IT

In the second LA Times editorial this week about DCFS and the LA County Board of Supervisors who are micromanaging it, the Times notes that the Sups have fired one head of DCFS this year and run through two other interim directors, Now they have hired yet one more interim director, County Welfare Chief, Philip Browning

Let us hope that Browning can figure out what is going so wrong in DCFS’s culture that that allows the bad decisions that have led to kids’ deaths, and what is beginning to go right in the department, that needs more nurturing.

And keep those clear-eyed editorials coming.

SENTENCING THE JUDGE IN THE PENNSYLVANIA KIDS FOR CASH CASE

The PA judge who took high ticket bribes in return for sending kids to certain juvenile incarceration facilities, whether thee deserved be locked up or not, is finally about to be sentenced. Michael Rubinkam of the AP has the story. Here’s how it opens.

As a juvenile court judge, Mark Ciavarella Jr. routinely deprived kids of some of their most basic constitutional rights. Their right to a lawyer. Their right to understand the charges against them. Their right to a fair, impartial hearing.

Ciavarella enjoyed all of those protections while defending himself against federal charges that he took millions of dollars in kickbacks while sending youth offenders to privately owned detention centers. Not that it changed the outcome.

Convicted in one of the biggest courtroom scandals in U.S. history, the disgraced former judge could face more than a decade in prison when he is sentenced in Scranton on Thursday.

“I hope he gets sent away so he can see what he put others through, see what he made kids go through,” said Brian Larkin, 19, who once appeared in Ciavarella’s courtroom.

The denouement of the “kids for cash” case comes more than two-and-a-half years after Ciavarella and a second Luzerne County judge, Michael Conahan, were charged with orchestrating a scheme to enrich themselves by stocking for-profit detention centers with young offenders. Conahan pleaded guilty and awaits sentencing….

FLA TOUGHENS LAWS AGAINST FELONS—AND HARMS PUBLIC SAFETY RATHER THAN THAN HELPING IT

Steve Bousquet at the St. Petersburg Times reports on a new study in Florida. The study found found felons who successfully get their rights back tend to stay out of prison. But such pesky facts have not fazed FLA legislators who have recently made it harder for a felon to regain these rights.

Here’s a clip from the story:

….a new report by the Florida Parole Commission shows that a released felon in Florida whose civil rights are restored is much less likely to commit a new crime than others in the overall population of released prisoners.

The report, quietly delivered to officials a few weeks ago, has not been discussed publicly.

The agency studied 31,000 cases over a two-year period in 2009 and 2010 and found that about 11 percent of people whose civil rights were restored ended up back in custody.

The overall re-offense rate in the state is three times higher — 33 percent — according to the Department of Corrections.

“This report shows clemency is working very well, as 89 percent of convicted felons granted a second chance have not re-offended,” said Reggie Garcia, a Tallahassee lawyer who has helped felons navigate the complicated clemency process for the past 17 years….

The NY Times’ Adam Lipdak writes about a man named Edmond Demiraj who risked his own and his family’s lives to inform on an Albanian mobster in return for legal immigration status for his wife and children. But the feds went back on the deal.

Here’s a clip from the story’s center:

…Mr. Bedini was allowed to post bail and promptly fled to Albania. With their witness no longer of value to them, federal authorities deported Mr. Demiraj, also to Albania.

Mr. Bedini was waiting. He kidnapped, beat and shot Mr. Demiraj, the bullet just missing his kidneys.

Mr. Bedini also went after members of Mr. Demiraj’s family, kidnapping two of his nieces and forcing them into prostitution in Italy. “This was payback to your Uncle Edmond for when I was in the United States,” he said as he beat the women, who were 19 and 21.

This lurid narrative is set out in a recent federal appeals court decision and related court documents. The ruling, issued in January, contained good news: Mr. Demiraj survived the shooting, and his nieces escaped thanks to, as a dissenting judge put it, “sheer luck and a kind taxi driver.”

Mr. Demiraj and his nieces are now lawfully in the United States. He owns a small painting company near Houston. But the decision in January also brought bad news for Mr. Demiraj. It ordered the deportation of his wife, Rodina, and teenage son, Rediol, who have both lived in the United States since they entered the country unlawfully in 2000. (The two youngest Demiraj children were born in the United States.)

The idea that members of his family will be forced to return to Albania terrifies Mr. Demiraj….