LAWSUIT SAYS TIME IN SHUS SHOULD BE CONSIDERED TORTURE

The Center for Constitutional Rights filed a lawsuit against Gov. Brown, the head of the CDCR, Matthew Cate, and others on behalf of inmates who have been in isolation in Pelican Bay’s Secure Housing Units for between 10 to 28 years. The CCR claims that the solitary living conditions inside SHUs should be considered cruel and unusual punishment and thus, a violation of the 8th Amendment.

Here’s a clip from the Center for Constitutional Rights’ case description:

SHU prisoners spent 22 ½ to 24 hours every day in a cramped, concrete, windowless cell. They are denied telephone calls, contact visits, and vocational, recreational or educational programming. Food is often rotten and barely edible, and medical care is frequently withheld. More than 500 Pelican Bay SHU prisoners have been isolated under these devastating conditions for over 10 years, more than 200 of them for over 15 years; and 78 have been isolated in the SHU for more than 20 years. This suit asserts that prolonged confinement under these conditions has caused harmful and predictable psychological deterioration among SHU prisoners. Solitary confinement for as little as 15 days is now widely recognized to cause lasting psychological damage to human beings and is analyzed under international law as torture.

Truthout’s Tara Culp-Ressler reports on the issue. Here’s a clip:

The lawsuit is in line with United Nations experts’ recommendations for a nation-wide ban on solitary confinement. The UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Juan E. Méndez, urged the U.S. to cease the practice except in very rare cases:

Segregation, isolation, separation, cellular, lockdown, Supermax, the hole, Secure Housing Unit… whatever the name, solitary confinement should be banned by States as a punishment or extortion technique. [...] Considering the severe mental pain or suffering solitary confinement may cause, it can amount to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

WitnessLA has also previously posted about Atul Gawande’s outstanding 2009 article published by The New Yorker in which Gawande explores whether or not solitary confinement is torture.

STUDY SAYS PLEA BARGAINS A PROBLEM FOR INNOCENT DEFENDANTS

A new study illuminates the considerable problems of innocent defendants’ plea bargaining out of fear of heavier sentencing.

Sentencing Law and Policy has the abstract. Here’s a clip:

Strikingly, the authors’ study found that over half of the participants were willing to falsely admit guilt in return for a perceived benefit. This finding not only brings finality to the long-standing debate regarding the possible extent of plea bargaining’s innocence problem, but also ignites a fundamental constitutional question regarding an institution the Supreme Court reluctantly approved of in 1970 in return for an assurance it would not be used to induce innocent defendants to falsely admit guilt.

(You can also download the study here.)

Note: This also relates to our previous post on Brian Banks’ exoneration after pleading no contest to a rape charge in order to avoid a 40-to-life sentence. You can revisit it here.

SLOW DEPENDENCY COURT SYSTEM A DETRIMENT

LA County’s dependency courts often drag foster care cases out for far too long, costing families time and heartache and costing children security and stability. LA Times columnist Jim Newton has been following one such case.

LA Times’ columnist Jim Newton has been following one such case. Here’s how his most recent article on the topic opens:

In the weeks since Juvenile Court Presiding Judge Michael Nash opened this county’s dependency proceedings to the press, there have been a number of revelations about a system that, until now, has been largely shielded from scrutiny. For the first time, the public is getting a broad look at the consequences of sloppy social work, the defensiveness of lawyers used to operating in secret, the agonizing decisions of judges, even the occasional happy outcome in which a family, once torn apart, is successfully reunited.

But one overarching fact of the dependency courts, where judges supervise the lives of children in foster care, is the high and hidden cost of delay. Some cases drag on for months, even years, while children lose their chance to begin their lives in secure, safe families.

Photo: Michael Montgomery/KQED

EDITOR’S NOTE: OUR HEARTS GO OUT TO THE LAPD OFFICER WHO FOUND HIS MOTHER SHOT TO DEATH SUNDAY NIGHT

Early Monday morning there were still few details and the name of the grieving officer had not been released.

The AP has the fragments of the story that are thus far available.

A Los Angeles police officer who went to check on his mother after she didn’t return his phone calls found her shot to death on Sunday.

The officer found his elderly mother inside her South Los Angeles home around noon, department spokesman Cleon Joseph said.

He said police had no suspect information and did not know the motive for the attack.

A family friend said the officer and his mother were very close.

“He checks up on his mother every day,” Allyson Smith said.

“She was beautiful, I mean a lovely mother,” Smith said. “That’s her only son.”

KABC-TV reported that the officer is a department veteran who trains recruits at the police academy…

 
“GET ON THE BUS” TAKES KIDS TO SEE LOCKED UP DADS FOR FATHER’S DAY

LA’s Center for Restorative Justice Works is transporting over 1,000 kids to see their incarcerated dads to celebrate Father’s Day this year. The program, Get On the Bus, will facilitate the father-child reunions at six men’s institutions throughout the state over a period of fifteen days.

MSNBC has the press release. Here’s a clip:

Executive Director Kathy Culpepper said, “Get On The Bus exists to unite children with their parents in prison. Distance is the number one reason these children have been unable to see their parents. Most parents in California prisons are incarcerated more than 100 miles away from their children. These children miss their parents terribly and need to know that they are not abandoned. Regular visitation helps to decrease the negative impacts of parental incarceration on the children. For many of these children, this is the only time during the year that they will see their father.”

Approximately 200,000 children in California have an incarcerated parent and live with relatives or are in foster care, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

As you may remember, WitnessLA has posted about this genuinely cool program before for Mother’s Day. You can check it out here.

RACE FACTORS INTO SENTENCING JUVIES, STUDY SAYS

Stanford researchers concluded in a recent study that white Americans are more likely to support heavier sentences if they imagine the juvie defendant to be black. (Really.)

The National Journal’s Doris Nhan has the story. Here’s a clip:

The study, conducted with about 650 white Americans, looked at whether switching a juvenile defendant’s racial description to either black or white would change whether the participant was more likely to find the juvenile to be responsible and to support a harsher punishment. The researchers found that it did.

Participants who had read “black” were significantly more likely to say that the individual was responsible and thus more supportive of a life in prison without parole sentence, said Aneeta Rattan, lead author of the study and a post-doctoral research scholar at the university.

“Using this one word to cue race got people to change their attitudes and perceptions to policy regarding juveniles,” Rattan said, later adding, “We really have to ask how much bigger that effect can be in the real world.”

NEW FOSTER CARE BILL BRIDGES GAP BETWEEN FOSTER CARE AGENCIES AND EDUCATION

The Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth has presented a new piece of federal legislation that, if passed, would make it easier for schools to release critical education-related information to foster kids’ social workers. (We want to respect kids’ privacy, but foster care agencies are acting in lieu of parents, so it shouldn’t be this difficult for them to get information from schools.)

The Chronicle of Social Change’s Daniel Heimpel has the story. Here’s a clip:

For experts, advocates and administrators, the new legislation is an opportunity to change the way foster care and education work together towards the shared goal of improving educational outcomes for foster youth. Further, the A+ Act would allow for inter-agency data sharing, which experts agree would increase the chance of successful interventions to improve the dismaying educational outcomes students in foster care face.

A comprehensive fact sheet on educational outcomes for foster youth, compiled by the National Workgroup on Foster Care and Education, provides a clear picture of just how poorly these students perform compared to their peers. About half of students in foster care completed high school by age 18, compared with 70 percent of the general population, according to a review of multiple studies.  And research shows college completion rates for foster youth range anywhere from one to nine percent, far lower than the census estimate of 28 percent of people in the general population who hard earned at least a four-year degree by age 25.

“When are we going to quit talking about stats and start implementing the solutions that put our [foster] kids on par with their peers,” says Mary Cagle, the Director of Children’s Legal Services for Florida’s Department of Children and Families.

For years we have known that a high percentage of the state’s foster kids who age out of the foster care system tend to do catastrophically poorly in the first years after all support is yanked from them on their 18th birthday. With this in mind, in 2010, California passed AB12, allowing foster youth to retain support and guidance until they are 21.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that when the state legislature passed the bill, lawmakers were also trying frantically to save money, so they phased in the support so that the state wouldn’t take the $$ hit all at once. In practical terms this meant that in 2012 the state would continue to help kids until they were 19 years old. In 2013, fosters kids would get help until they were 20. Then AB12 would finally be fully operational for all foster care kids in 2014.

So while the state didn’t take as big a hit, a lot of foster kids did.

The more than 2000 youth who have fallen between the age cracks-–those who are 19 years old this year and thus lose all state support—have been dubbed the “bubble youth.”

Some California counties have voted to pick up the slack for their bubble kids. (Thankfully Los Angeles, along with San Francisco, Alameda and some others, is among the counties who are stepping in to fill the funding gap..)

Daniel Heimpel, the director of Fostering Media Connections, has written a story about one 19-year-old living in Contra Costa County who is affected by the funding bubble and who has sued to get coverage, with with an uncertain outcome.

Here’s a clip:

David walks out of the courthouse with his attorney Darren Kessler and Shawn Nunn, a private social worker with a non-profit organization called Triad Family Services that subcontracts casework with the county.

The presiding judge, Joni Hiramoto, terminated David’s case, but granted a 90-day stay so that David could file his appeal. David, who according to court documents tested positive for methamphetamine at birth and was subsequently diagnosed with Asperger’s Disorder, is concerned about the judge’s order.

At first he thinks he will have to pack up and leave his foster home that day, but Kessler re-assures him that the stay means he can remain in his Contra Costa County placement until August 3rd, nearly two months after his high school graduation.

“At the end of the day she is splitting the baby,” Kessler says of Hiromoto’s decision. “She is giving him what he needs in the meantime.”

David is relieved that he won’t have to move out before graduation. He looks forward to starting at UC Berkeley in the fall to study physics, but remains perplexed about the fate of the other kids in his situation. “It is hard, very hard, tricky,” he says.

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.