Madeleine Brand guest hosted for Patt Morrison on Friday afternoon and during the Talk to the Chief section of the program that features LAPD Chief Charlie Beck, Brand brought up gangs and the findings in Part 1 of WLA’s first LA Justice Report: Follow the Gang Money, by Matt Fleischer.

The Chief cheerily misinterpreted what we said, and Brand nicely but repeatedly brought Beck back to….well, facts. Something of a good tempered argument ensued, during which Chief Beck maintained that the city’s programs were successful, period, full stop. Brand finally ended the squabble by taking a question from a caller (who didn’t care a whit about gang programs and reports, but mostly wanted to know why he got pulled over and searched).

If you want to listen, it’s about half-ish way through the Ask the Chief section (and exactly halfway through the program as a whole). If you do listen, let me know what you think.

Here are the three projects by the Annnenberg journalists who each focused on some part of the question: Does gang intervention work? And if so, what works? To explore the issue, the team went to Homeboy Industries. (Yes, this was the team with which I was involved. But I did nothing but help with contacts. They determined their angles and produced their stories.)

For instance, Jill Krebs and Kirsi Crowley each looked at the early results of the 5-year long longitudinal study that Dr. Jorja Leap is conducting of the Homeboy Industries model and what it portends.

(To my knowledge the early results of Jorja Leap’s research findings have not appeared elsewhere, so Jill and Kirsi were breaking news.)

The third project, by Gabriel Cifrelli takes a far less expected view of gang recovery, as you’ll see.

The journalists’ bios are at the end of the post. You’ll note that while all three reporters have interesting backgrounds, none had experience with LA gangs, and Gabriel’s background is in art history, design and education, not journalism at all. Plus the stories had to be researched and produced very quickly—and they could not exceed 4 minutes in length. But the three reporters brought intelligence, talent and insight to the project. The results are below.

STRENGTH IN NUMBERS

by Jill Krebs

Homeboy Industries is a not-for-profit organization helping to rehabilitate gang members all over Los Angeles County.

Homeboy is participating in a five-year study which aims to accurately evaluate the program’s statistical effectiveness.

But is there really “strength in numbers?”

The preliminary results are now available for Homeboy Industries’ first evaluation.

(For Jill Krebs’ Strength In Numbers slide show click here.)

PRIEST’S UNUSUAL SUCCESS IN STOPPING GANG CRIME

by Kirsi Crowley

A gang rehabilitation program in central Los Angeles is turning two out of three gang members away from crime. Yet this successful program is under threat because of lack of funds.

Previous studies have shown that only one in three gang member from LA’s impoverished neighborhoods can turn their lives around in rehabilitation.

The extraordinary success of Homeboy Industries, run by a Jesuit priest, was revealed by a new academic study by UCLA Professor Dr. Jorja Leap.

Around 12,000 people come to Homeboy Industries every year. Father Gregory Boyle’s project offers jobs, support to end drug abuse and more.

Despite its outstanding success, the project has lost a lot of funding due to the recession and has had to lay off hundreds of people.

Although crime rate has declined in LA, gang violence remains a serious problem.

(For Kirsi Crowley’s Gangs and Crime slide show, go here.)

SERVING THE SENTENCE

by Gabriel Cifarelli

Jill Krebs, B.S. in Broadcast Journalism from Kent State University (2001). As a studio associate director, she helped launch ESPN’s West Coast SportsCenter in 2009 in the new production facility. She helps direct and produce SportsCenter, ESPNews, NASCAR Now, and Outside the Lines in addition to editing in-studio footage. Her journalism experience includes reporting for NBC, Fox Sports Net, and The Akron Beacon Journal. Krebs resides in Los Angeles, California.

Gabriel Cifarelli, B.A. in Art History from California State University Northridge (2008). He has served as independent curator for the exhibition, Ulterior Design, that was on display in Terminal 1 at Los Angeles International Airport from August – December 2007. He is an Assistant Education Coordinator for the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House and Barnsdall Park. Cifarelli lives in Los Angeles, California. (Director’s Scholarship)

Kirsi Crowley, Master of Social Sciences in Journalism from University of Tampere in Finland (2005). A Finland native, she speaks Swedish, French, German, and Turkish. She has 23 years of experience writing and producing feature stories for print, radio and television. In 2008, she produced and directed an educational video series about the European Union for Tarinatalo, a television production company, in Helsinki. Also, she worked as a radio producer in the BBC World Service Finnish Section in the United Kingdom and as a freelance correspondent for the Finnish Broadcasting Company in Turkey, Pakistan, and South Africa. She has worked as a Specialist Journalist for Media House ESA, where she covered political and investigative issues and current affairs. Currently she is employed by a Finnish general interest magazine Apu. Crowley lives in Lahti, Finland.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The article below is Part One of WitnessLA’s two-part investigation into how the city of Los Angeles spends its $26 million per year in gang violence reduction dollars.

This investigation was reported and written by Matt Fleischer (and copy edited by Craig Gaines). It is the first effort to come out of the LA Justice Report, which was created through a partnership between WLA and Spot.Us.

You’ll find that both sections of this series are quite critical of multiple aspects the gang programs that have operated under the umbrella of the mayor’s office for the past two years—and with good reason. We went to great lengths to get documents and information that the mayor’s people made clear they did not want us to have. Much of what Matt found at the conclusion of his digging and reporting is, we believe, cause for concern–and rigorous rethinking.

However, just to be clear: our criticism does not suggest for a minute that the $26 million in gang dollars is not worth spending. All that money and more is needed to address the fact that hundreds of thousands of LA kids feel unsafe walking to school because of gang violence. But it is essential—particularly in these budget strapped times—that those much-needed funds are spent in ways that are measurably effective in addressing the problems for which they were allocated.

To that end, we give you Part One of Follow the Gang Money. We’ll have Part Two in a couple of weeks.

Then in September, we’ll have a wrap-up that looks at where we go from here.

FOLLOW THE GANG MONEY: PART ONE:

Are LA’s Gang Prevention Strategies Excluding the Kids Who Most Need Our Help?
by Matthew Fleischer

On a hot day in early May, nearly 200 gang-reduction experts under the umbrella of the city of Los Angeles’ Gang Reduction and Youth Development program, or GRYD, gathered in the LA City Council chambers to fight for their jobs. There were too many intervention workers, some of them former gang members with extravagant tattoos and shaved heads, to cram into the rows of seats in the City Council chambers, so they spilled into the hallways instead, greeting each other fondly and chatting nervously about their fates. With the city facing a $212 million budget shortfall, the City Council was looking to do some serious fiscal trimming, and GRYD’s $26 million in operating funds were slated for the shears.

As the council meeting came to order and the public comment period began, these men and women stepped to the microphone at the center front of the chambers and told stories of bullets whizzing, children dying and the great risks they took in their daily lives to keep their communities safe. In between their testimonies, a sprinkling of tweedy academic types from the administrative ranks of these same gang-reduction programs came forward to bolster the street workers’ pleas with facts and figures.

No money should be slashed from GRYD, each of them said, in one impassioned way or another. Despite its budget woes, this is one program cut Los Angeles cannot afford.

“We’re saving lives,” was the common refrain.

Last to speak, and most eloquent, was civil rights attorney and gang intervention expert Connie Rice, whose 2007 Advancement Project report, “A Call to Action,” was part of what triggered the formation of GRYD in the first place. More recently, Rice and her Advancement Project have been tapped to run the city’s Los Angeles Violence Intervention Training Academy (LAVITA)—which is attempting to train and professionalize gang intervention workers. “We are celebrating low crime, but in the hot zones, kids still dodge bullets,” said Rice. “These [gang workers] are the people who keep the kids safe. The GRYD office is absolutely essential. We just spent $7 million for a reptile enclosure. I’m happy for Reggie [the alligator], but we need to save our kids first.”

Although some of the city council members fully intended to snip GRYD’s funds, Rice made her pitch with the knowledge that the program enjoys the unequivocal backing of LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Ever since his school reform efforts sputtered and stalled, Villaraigosa has taken to GRYD as his new flagship policy effort. He routinely touts it as “among the most innovative in the U.S.,” and has the habit of making lofty claims about GRYD’s impact: “The program has reclaimed our city for our citizens.”

Within days of the City Council hearing, the mayor, Connie Rice and the rest of the GRYD network got their way: GRYD would receive full funding for another year, which in 2009-10 amounted to $26 million, $18.5 million of which came directly from LA’s general fund. In the following weeks, virtually every other program in the city would be cut amid LA’s budget crunch—the library system, city attorney’s office and even the LAPD’s counterterrorism task force among them. GRYD was among the few allowed to remain intact.

It was a major political victory for Villaraigosa and Gang Reduction and Youth Development.

The mayor reacted to the news with a celebratory tweet: “Our GRYD programs WORK—gang crime is way down and more kids have a way out of the gang life.”

A two-month investigation by the LA Justice Report, however, has revealed that the mayor and the City Council’s confidence in GRYD’s central programs isn’t grounded in quantifiable facts. In truth, no one knows if, how well or how poorly GRYD is working—not the mayor, not the police, not GRYD itself.

Power and accountability have been consolidated in the mayor’s office, but there is still no way of determining whether the program is effective. And there are many indications that methodological errors have been made that have cost—and continue to cost—the city millions of dollars.

A recent audit by LA City Controller Wendy Greuel stated that, after nearly two years, GRYD, much like LA Bridges, still has no adequate evaluation of its effectiveness, or lack thereof—despite the city’s spending $525,000 (with another $375,000 soon to be paid out) for an assessment report from the Urban Institute (UI).

“We had years of a feel-good program under LA Bridges,” Greuel says. “Now we’ve spent more than $500,000 on a tool to see what’s working, but we still don’t have that yet.

“Transparency is the biggest problem we face.”

But while Greuel placed most of the blame on the irritatingly secretive assessment conducted by the UI, the Justice Report found the real failings to be not with the UI researchers’ evaluation of the GRYD programs, but with the programs themselves. Though it took weeks and multiple California Public Records Act requests, we acquired a copy of the UI’s 60-page evaluation and found it most revealing. After speaking with the UI head evaluator and two independent evaluation experts, we have learned that UI had a perfectly acceptable methodology in place. GRYD, however, has been hampered by serious bureaucratic blunders, prime among them poorly negotiated contracts that resulted in the loss of a year of data.

But beyond pure evaluation and data-collection screw-ups—of which there have been plenty—the Justice Report discovered gang prevention programs that may be systematically excluding many of the kids that most need their help and intervention programs that are based on a model that has little or no proven success. Further, the programs may fail to emphasize the most basic services that have been shown to help the men and women in LA’s most violent, troubled neighborhoods leave gang life behind.

As with many city and county problems, the situation is complex, so bear with us. Policy analysis can be wonky at times. But this is no academic exercise. LA is the gang capital of America, and the stakes of the gang-reduction debate are measured in blood.

On Tuesday, City Controller Wendy Greuel released her audit of the effectiveness of the city’s Gang Reduction and Youth Development programs—aka GRYD. (The report follows-up on former Controller Laura Chick’s 2008 report.)

Overall Ms. Greuel said that the programs had made a lot of progress and, in effect, laid down a promising foundation on which future progress may be built.

Her main criticism was that the city had spent $525,000 on an evaluation of the programs (with the cost of the ongoing eval rising as I type), but had gotten no real evaluation for that half million bucks plus.

As you will see when we begin our Follow-the-Gang-Money stories, we agree completely with Controller Gruel about the not getting much for the evaluation $$$.

But we have found that the problem goes a bit deeper. We have read the Urban Institute’s 60-page evaluation report very carefully.

And, yes, surely the controller is right: It is beyond maddening to find that, nearly 2-years in, we have no practical assessment of the city’s gang programs—particularly after all the promises made that, once the gang money was moved under the mayor’s umbrella, Priority One would be the twinned values of transparency and accountability.

However after a very thorough examination, we have found that the larger problem is not with the Urban Institute evaluators, who seem quite competent and professional. It is with the programs. The Urban Institute delivered a 60-page, $525 million NON-evaluation because—-there is not a whole lot to evaluate.

Details to come soon.

So stay tuned.

(NOTE: I’m still ensconced in a cabin on river in West Glacier, Montana, with a (gasp) dial up connection to the Web. This means the 24-hour-news cycle has slowed down to something like 72 hours. But, Matt Fleischer and I are on top of this gang money issue—among others. And there will be a lot of new stuff when I return—and likely sooner.)

Here’s the LA Times’ report on the Report.

NOTE # 2: The photo isn’t of the river in back of our house, but of nearby Lake McDonald.

Thanks to 88 fantastic people, the first LA Justice Report story is fully funded.

(Woooo-hooo!)

This is a very, very good thing—particularly because reporter Matt Fleischer has been hard at work on the story for over a month.

The LA Justice Report, as you may or may not remember, is a partnership between WitnessLA and Spot.Us. It uses the Spot.Us wonderfully cool “crowd-funding” model to support social justice-oriented investigative journalism in LA.

The partnership’s first project is called Follow the Gang money, and it will look at how the city of Los Angeles is spending it’s $26 million of gang violence reduction money, which is dedicated to gang prevention and intervention. That $26 million is one of the very few city budgets that was not cut this past budget slashing season.

Matt has done incredible reporting, in several cases employing the excellent tool known as the Public Records Act to get the information that the mayor’s office and others were a bit…um…slow…to fork over.

Now, we have the answers.

Matt’s resulting story series will be published here in the 3rd week of August—(In other words, a few days after WLA and I are back from vacation).

What Matt has learned will, I promise, surprise, interest and likely infuriate you.

But here’s the thing: Los Angeles is our city, and we have the right to know how our money is spent on such essential issues. If the information is withheld, we have the duty to acquire it.

So we have done just that.

Thank you to all of you who have thus far been a part of our collective endeavor.

And for those of you who have not donated or acquired credits to donate: don’t worry, there will be other opportunities ahead. Trust me.

In the meantime, stay tuned. An important LA story awaits you.

Really, all we’re asking for is a little of the much promised transparency and accountability.

It’s a season of ongoing budgetary nightmares. LA’s libraries are losing one-third of their staff. Even the city’s firefighters are taking budget hits. However one of the few programs or agencies in all of Los Angeles that has not seen its funding slashed is the city’s $26 million plus Gang Reduction and Youth Development program—or GRYD.

This is not to suggest that the city doesn’t need every penny of that GRYD money. Even after LA’s drop in crime, Los Angeles is still the gang capital the nation. Gang violence takes lives, wrecks futures, fills prisons and causes staggering levels of measurable PTSD in school-age kids who live in gang-intense neighborhoods.

In truth, $26 million is not all that much considering the gravity and complexity of the problem.

Yet the very scarcity of funds is a big part of the reason why the community at large deserves to know exactly what we’re getting for our prevention/intervention millions now that we are two years into the mayor’s GRYD strategies—which is precisely why WitnessLA and Spot.Us have hired Matt Fleischer to find out under the banner of the LA Justice Report.

Matt’s been digging up a lot very intriguing information already. (The fruits of his labors will appear later this summer.)

But, as he digs and explores, it has been a bit vexing to find that the least cooperative people have been those in the mayor’s GRYD office.

Take for example the issue of the evaluation:

As part of its mandate, GRYD has contracted with the Urban Institute to conduct an evaluation of the various GRYD programs’ for performance and efficacy—for a fee of $900,000. The gang programs were officially moved to the mayor’s office in July of ‘08 and here we are in late June of 2010. Yet, thus far we can find no one outside of GRYD who has seen any part of any kind of an evaluation.

And GRYD ain’t sharing.

In fact, every time Matt asked for any information whatsoever regarding the UI evaluation city officials switched on their vague-afiers.

It was in draft form, they said, so they couldn’t give him that.

Now, granted, the evaluation is a 3-5 year project, which means that every interim report is, by definition, a “draft” until 2013 or 14 or whatever, when there will be a final report. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t reports at the one year mark. Surely GRYD wants to know—and would want us to know—that they are on the right track with their $26 million worth of gang violence prevention and intervention strategies. Matt said that a draft of the evaluation would fine. Anything would be better than nothing. At this, the GRYD people remembered urgent business elsewhere and stopped replying to his requests altogether.

Just out of curiosity, I called a contact who is an insider at the LA City Council. I reasoned that since the council is responsible for approving all GRYD’s city funds, surely a well-placed person in the council offices could get some kind of interim evaluation at this point. Nope, they’d asked for it, he said. And so far, nada.

“The council gets quarterly reports,” he said, “but they don’t say much.

He reminded me that one of the selling points for moving LA’s gang dollars away from the city council and putting the money all under the single roof of the mayor’s office was to insure that the program would be more accountable and transparent than the city’s previous gang violence reduction programs had been. (cough) LA Bridges (cough, cough).

“Well, the mayor is two years into having all the money, and we’ve not seen a lot of either transparency and accountability,” he said grumpily. “They aren’t very good at collaborating either. As a result, if you as a taxpayer ask me what you’re really getting for your money, I can’t really tell you.”

Okay, we aim to change that. That’s what Matt’s reporting for WLA and Spot.Us is all about.

IMPORTANT NOTE: You can do another round of free “donations” to Matt’s investigation for WLA the LA Justice Report by doing the following:

* going to Spot.Us
*Login/Register on Spot.Us (upper left hand side.)
* hit the EARN CREDITS button
*answer three anonymous questions about how reporters and techs might better collaborate.
*scroll down and choose the LA Justice Report when you’re prompted to select how to use your credits.
*hit the APPLY CREDITS
*Then confirm it at the prompt.

That’s it. You pay nothing, and our reporting fund gets ten bucks!

In 2007, the Los Angeles Urban League began a project that, in theory anyway, is exactly what LA needs.

The Urban League’s idea is to fundamentally transform the 70-block neighborhood surrounding the campus of Crenshaw High School.

The center of the transformation is to be the high school itself. But there is much more to the concept. One could say that the larger purpose is to recalibrate the educational outcomes for Crenshaw’s students by remaking the ecology of the community itself.

The notion that a host of social ills—failing schools, gang violence, public health challenges, unemployment, lack of low-cost housing, prison reentry—should best be viewed and solved, not separately, but as pieces of an interdependent system, is a concept that has been gaining currency over the last decade.

However, the ecological theory of community problem solving is one thing; putting it successfully into action is quite another.

Geoffrey Canada’s now famous 100 block Harlem’s Children’s Zone is the best known example of the concept in action.

The Urban League is trying it’s own version—the hope being that, if their model is successful, it can be replicated around the city, and beyond.

Three years into the project, the staff of Annenberg’s Neon Tommy has done a multi-faceted interim assessment of progress made. The Neon Tommy reporters ask what has been achieved? What remains to be done? Overall, how well is the project working?

Neon Tommy gives the Urban League’s Neighborhoods@Work endeavor mixed reviews. But the news is not altogether unpromising.

To give you a small taste of some of the anecdotal stories in the package, here is an excerpt from an article by NT’s Olga Khazan, who examines how Crenshaw students and teachers manage to achieve despite high levels of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder among both the student and the faculty population.

(Olga’s video above features Raheem Giddens from Crenshaw High.)

During a mid-morning break between classes at Crenshaw High School, a senior named Patricia was showing Sybel Stanley pictures of a prom dress on her phone. Earlier in the week, another girl at the school had told her friends that the dress in question, clearly a store-bought number, had been special-made for her by a designer. Patricia was speaking in the outraged tone of a sassy high schooler-cum-prosecutor, and Stanley, whether in earnest or in a convincing show of support, was shocked as well.

“Well, would you look at that,” Stanley said. Sybel Stanley is a parent-resource coordinator at Crenshaw, which essentially means she makes sure students are doing well enough at home to do well enough at school. Her round frame barely breaks 5 feet, and she has a gap-toothed grin that she’s quick to flash anyone who needs it.

“She’s gonna show up at the prom, and someone else is gonna have her same dress on!” Patricia said. Patricia’s bobbed black hair is straightened and pulled back in a pink headband that matches her shirt. Everything about her appearance is carefully coordinated, from her purse to her phone cover.

“I mean, it’s a dress. Why would you lie about that?” she concluded emphatically. After all, nothing is sacred in high school if not prom.

“Well, you know how tight money is for everyone these days,” Stanley said.

Suddenly Patricia remembered something on a more serious note.

“Oh Granny, you don’t even know,” Patricia said. “My momma broke down this morning.”

Patricia, like many of her Crenshaw peers, was accepted to college. But her mom, like many Crenshaw moms, was having trouble paying her initial deposit. That morning Patricia was faced with the reality of the financial pressures when she saw her mother crying….

Read on.

Then read wonderful articles by Neon Tommy editor,Callie Schweitzer, and Andrew Khouri and Shirin Parsavand and Catherine Cloutier and LeTania Kirkland.

It’s all very good stuff. Enjoy!

And a big thank you to Neon Tommy for doing an important series of stories that most other major LA news outlets have somehow managed to ignore.

As most of you know, WitnessLA has embarked on a partnership with Spot.Us.com called the LA Justice Report. The partnership was formed to do some much needed investigative reporting into social justice issues affecting Los Angeles.

Each of the reports will be “community funded”—in other words, paid for by small donations from regular people.

However, for the next few days, you can support the joint WitnessLA and Spot.Us investigation into how the City of LA is spending its $25 million in gang prevention and intervention money. And you can help with that support at exactly zero cost to….well…you.

But we get five bucks for each one of you who takes 2 minutes to participate in answering four short questions anonymously for Spot.Us.

This is the second such chance at these “sponsored credits” that Spot.Us has offered through a system they are calling “community centered advertising.” (Poynter reports on the concept here.)

Here’s the deal:

In less than 2 minutes and 4 clicks you can get a free $5 credit that you can apply to the LA Justice Report. (Just follow the instructions in the box below).

We think our first project—which has working title of FOLLOW THE GANG MONEY—is particularly important to complete ASAP.

Just to remind you, Los Angeles is spending $25 million to lower gang violence (several million more if you count the city’s federal funds). But no one seems to be able to give a straight answer when asked what the city is actually getting for that money. What services are provided for all that cash? How many people are helped? Exactly how are they helped? Is that help doing any good?

(By the way, out of that $25 million—precisely zero dollars goes to Homeboy Industries, even though everyone at city hall knows that Homeboy is fighting for its life.)

Neither the LA Times or the Daily News has looked into the question of how the city uses its gang money. But LA Justice Report investigative reporter, Matt Fleischer is already hard at work on the project.

However we need your support.

Okay here are the instructions:

1. Go to Spot.Us and hit “register,” which you’ll find in the top left hand corner. (If you’ve previously registered, skip this step.)

2. After registering, click the large green button that says “Earn Credits”

3. Answer the quick questionnaire. (It’s four questions and painless. I just now did it.)

4. Your account now has $5 in credits and you’ll automatically be directed to a page that lists current Spot.Us projects. Click “Apply Credits” to The LA Justice Report.

And—like magic—we get $5 closer to our fundraising goal.

NOTE: If the software tries to talk you into giving an extra $20, just hit “remove.” (Unless, of course, you want to give us the $20.)

Okay, I’m done hectoring. Please just do it.

Even before the economic downturn, 60 percent of all employers surveyed on the topic said that they wouldn’t hire someone with a criminal record. Now with a glut of educated and skilled people out of work, employers can afford to be even more selective. So those with even very minor criminal convictions are often completely out of luck.

There is one way to get rid of certain kinds convictions on one’s record, however. It’s called expungement.

Sandra Hernandez has a story in the Daily Journal about the expungement issue. She writes that joblessness and job insecurty—the worry about being laid off—has meant an increase in the number of people seeking expungements. But for lower income people looking there are few places to get the necessary legal help at a price they can afford,

My friend Elie Miller, a former alternate public defender who is now the staff attorney for Homeboy industries, is one of the few lawyers in LA who does expungement work at no cost—-and she is overloaded with people who need her help in navigating the legal system. (And her services are among those that are vanishing from Homeboy if they don’t find the money they need.)

Elie features prominently in Hernandez’ article, as you’ll see below. Since the Daily Journal is hidden behind a paywall, Sandra has kindly allowed me to post the full article here at WLA.

It provides an interesting look at a problem that many otherwise hard-working Californians have to deal with—even more so as high unemployment rates continue.

PETITIONS FOR EXPUNGEMENT SOAR IN DOWN ECONOMY

By Sandra Hernandez
Daily Journal Staff Writer

LOS ANGELES – Dolly Robles has spent much of the last two years struggling to find work.

Her past, including convictions for misdemeanor assault in 2003 and felony burglary in 2004, has made her unemployable.

Desperate, Robles – a mother of three who grew up in Los Angeles’ foster care system - went to court last year and asked a judge to expunge her criminal record.

“I realized that if I didn’t do something different, they were going to take my kids and put them in the system,” said Robles, 26, who lives in the San Bernardino County town of Upland. “I said ‘Heck no, I don’t want that for my little babies.’”

With the state unemployment rate hovering at 12.6 percent, Robles is among a growing number of Californians who are asking judges to dismiss past convictions.

The Los Angeles criminal court saw a 53 percent jump in such petitions filed in April, compared to the same period the previous year, according to court officials.

“I think employers in a tough job market can be more selective about who they hire so people are doing what they need to do,” said Superior Court Judge Peter P. Espinoza, who presides over Los Angeles County’s criminal courts.

In California, anyone who was convicted of a crime but served no prison time and has remained out of trouble can expunge his or her record for a $125 fee.

Attorneys said it’s not just the unemployed who are asking for a second chance – but also those trying to hold on to jobs.

“I recently had a woman come see me who had worked for the city for 15 years and had a misdemeanor conviction for disturbing the peace,” said Elie Miller, an attorney with Homeboy Industries, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that is helping Robles clean up her record.

“This woman was terrified that as layoffs come up this would put her at greater risk of losing her job, but she didn’t know what to do,” Miller said.

The petitions could continue to grow: studies suggest one in 10 California residents has a criminal conviction.

The uptick, however, comes at a time when courts are becoming less and less equipped to handle them.

Read the rest of this entry »

A very cool reading and party starring a group of talented Homeboy poets and featuring a short talk from Father Greg Boyle.

I’m going. You should too if you’d like to experience a moving, intriguing and one-of-a-kind literary event.

If you show up, please find me and say “hi,” (or whatever else you’re moved to say).

WHEN: Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Time: 7 pm
Where: Homeboy Industries
130 West Bruno Street
Los Angeles, California 90012

WHAT: This reading is free and open to the public. However, please help us in our current time of need. You give us $5 bucks we give you five chances to win our amazing raffle including signed copies of Tattoos on the Heart, G-Dog and The Homeboys, Homeboy Review’s debut issue, a Homeboy T-shirt, coffee mug and lunch for two at the Homegirl Café.