6 PM UPDATE: Sara Jane Olson has just been taken back to prison. It seems that the CDCR counted on its fingers wrong and forgot that she had another two years on her sentence (even though they said she didn’t), meaning they will let her out in one.

(The CDCR has had a habit of miscalculating release dates of late.)

CONFUSED? HERE’S HOW IT WORKS: For murder you generally get life in prison, but if you’re Sara Jane Olson that’s divided by 2 because your hair is blond going tastefully gray, and you have a really, really expensive attorney, which means your sentance is now…..let’s call it half-life. Divide that half-life sentence by 2 again because you look very sad and are very, VERY regretful, and your attorney says you can’t get a fair trial because of September 11. [Nope. Not joking.] And then multiply the total by point 5 because your husband is a rich surgeon and he is very sad too, and you told the press that you only did the bank robbery, bomb, murder thingy because “It was in the air. It was impossible not to be involved.” Okay, so now the total sentence equals 12 years. Divide 12 by two because although you were in a bank robbing, murdering, kidnapping, would-be-cop exploding cult, at least your cult wasn’t all robby and murdery in a bad way, like say, a street gang; it was more hip and counter-culturally murdery, which is, when you think about it, VERY different, paradigm-ly speaking. Now were down to 6, but then add back 2 because the cops are super-pissed that a murderer and a would-be cop killer is out, which equals eight, but then subtract 1 because the CDCR looks like complete idiots for doing the math wrong, and that means Sara Jane Olson will get out next March 20.

See, once you understand it, it’s simple.

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3 PM: Sara Jane Olson, who was released from prison a few days ago after serving six years of her already low 12-year sentence, was re-arrested at noon today when she attempted to leave the state of California, which is a violation of the terms of her parole.

Ooops.

(Its a violation of nearly any felony parole, girlfriend. In fact, not leaving the state is Parole 101.)

UPDATE: It turns out she had permission from her parole officer to leave the state, although why she was given permission to do something that most parolees would never have been allowed to do so soon after their parole, if ever, is another question.


Now there is some rumbling from the California Department of Corrections about her sentence being miscalculated.

The LAPPL—LA’s police union—who had not been in a good mood about Sara Jane Olson’s release to begin with, was very much in favor of her rearrest, and sent out a new press release to that effect this afternoon. The statement from union prez Tim Sands reads in part:

“Justice is not served if convicted murderer Kathleen Ann Soliah can simply wander back to Minnesota after having served only a token sentence for murder and attempted murder. Her prison sentence is not completed until her time on parole has been served. The fact that parole might be an inconvenience to her should be weighed against the heinousness of the murder she committed and the coldblooded criminal intent she demonstrated by trying to blow up police officers and innocent bystanders. She was a flight risk 30 years ago, and she is a flight risk now.”

As it happens, I agree with the union, although for slightly different reasons than those Sands cites. Look, I personally have no interest at seeing Sara Jane or Kathleen Ann or whatever her name is…locked up for decades at taxpayer’s expense. Yet she was convicted of 2nd degree murder and two counts of attempted murder.

Now, let’s imagine for discussion’s sake that a former gang member participated in a drive-by shooting in 1994 when he was young and stupid. Let’s say that, as a result of his and his friends actions, an “innocent” person died. Maybe the victim was sixteen-year-old boy who was a good student at a local high school, or maybe the victim was a mom with kids—sorta like Myrna Opsahl, Olson’s group’s murder victim.
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Six years ago, Kathleen Soliah AKA Sara Jane Olson, a former member of Symbionese Liberation Army (the group that kidnapped Patty Hearst) pled guilty to second degree murder for her part in a bank robbery where a customer was killed by one of her cohorts. Olson also pled to “two counts of attempted explosion of a destructive device with intent to commit murder” for her failed attempt to blow up a police car. Olson as served six years of a 12 year sentence and was released from prison this week. The rationale was that her sentence could be cut in half because Olson was a model prisoner, worked while she was locked up and was a middle class mom, married to a surgeon, thus no danger to society.

(Olson was on the lam from 1975 to 1999, sentenced in 2001. The LA Times has the rest of the story in case you want to read it.)

Then in another part of town, the Long Beach prosecutor’s office announced Thursday that it intended to try two kids ages fourteen and fifteen as adults for the shooting death of another kid, a sixteen year old. Naturally gangs were involved.

If convicted, the two teenagers will get a minimum of 50 years to life in prison. But with the gang allegations that the DA’s office is already lining up, the sentences will more likely be 75 years or longer.

Olson did whatever she did when she was in her early 20’s and got caught up with cult (sort of like a gang) that was retaliating because the the death of her friends (sort of like gangsters might).

Broadly speaking, the case of Eric Benites, 15, and Jason Trejo, 14, has some similarities. Both participated in the death of another—a sixteen year old named Florentino Rivera, whom Benites and Trejo are accused of shooting on January 6, when they fired into a group of gang members with whom Rivera was standing.

As with Olson, Benites and Trejo were retaliating for another killing: Eric Benites 13-year-old brother, Jose Cano, was stabbed to death this past summer. According to Long Beach Press-Telegram’s Tracy Manzer, an excellent reporter who’s been covering the story, Benites was incarcerated in a juvenile facility at the time of his baby brother’s murder so couldn’t go to the funeral.

So when he got out, he went crazy. He tried to get his gang, the East Side Longos, to retaliate for his brother’s death, but they didn’t—perhaps in part because those alleged murderers were locked up awaiting trial for the crime. (The story of the younger brother’s death is its own strange and tragic drama. Here’s Manzer’s account.)

Thus fifteen-year Eric Benito got his friend Jason Trejo, and the two of them allegedly got guns and, incredibly, decided to shoot at Eric’s own gang (an all but suicidal act)—which also happened to be his brother’s gang. They hit Florentino Rivera, a kid who it appears was not in a gang at all ,but had the tragically bad luck to be standing with gangsters.

Tracy Manzer was in court today when the two kids were charged. She told me afterward that Benito and Trejo were drowning in the adult sized jail sweatshirts, the sleeves pooling around their skinny arms. “Trejo doesn’t even look fourteen,” she said.

After talking to neighbors and friends of the two alleged shooters, Tracy said that both boys seemed to have less than ideal home lives. No dads on the scene, moms with a string of kids from different men. “I heard Benito’s mom would brag about how tough her sons were,” Tracy says. “The mom would say, ‘Esta cabron.’ ” He’s an S.O.B, a badass. And records show that the now dead younger kid, the 13-year-old, hadn’t been in school since he was 11.

Okay, so let’s go over our tally: We have two kids dead and three angry, damaged kids likely going away for the rest of their lives. (The sixteen year old who allegedly stabbed the 13-year old is being tried as an adult too.)

And the middle-aged, middle class white lady does six years. Sure. That works. Some lives are evidently just a little more worth saving than others.

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California is currently deciding if it will comply with a federal sex offender act that would put adolescent sex offenders as young as 14 on a national public registry, writes the very smart Hanna Ingber Win (another USC Annenberg J-School grad student).

In this week’s LA City Beat, Hanna tells of one of the kinds of kids California is likely to net if our lawmakers are damn fool enough to expand the state’s sex offender registry to include kids. Here’s the opening:

When Ricky was 16, he went to a teen club and met a girl named Amanda, who said she was the same age. They hit it off and were eventually having sex. At the time Ricky thought it was a pretty normal high school romance.

Two years later, Ricky is a registered sex offender, and his life is destroyed.

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It is bad enough that the conditions in California adult prisons are still deplorable. But the way we treat incarcerated kids in our fair state is beyond any possible excuse.

In 2004, the respected watch dog group, the nonprofit Prison Law Office, sued the state of California over the huge problems in the California Youth Authority facilities. In order to settle the case in 2005, the state agreed to “provide wards with adequate and effective care, treatment and rehabilitation services, including reducing violence and the use of force, improving medical and mental health care, reducing the use of lock-ups and providing better education programs.”

Last year, a report by the state’s inspector general indicated that, despite the promised transformations, very little had changed. According to the February 2007 report, the state’s largest juvenile prison, Herman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility in Chino, provided virtually no education services to its wards, allowed them to keep makeshift ropes in their cells and kept most of them locked up 22 hours a day.

Now one year later still, a new report indicates the system’s failures are still “pervasive, severe and chronic,” according to a story in this morning’s Los Angeles Times. In response, Prison Law Office attorneys have said enough is enough and have urged a judge to put the whole system in the hands of a federal receiver.

I hope the judge agrees.

The plea came in a filing last week from lawyers who had settled with the state after suing to transform institutions they said treated children as hardened criminals without regard for their welfare. They contend that the state’s Division of Juvenile Justice has missed dozens of court-ordered deadlines for change dating to 2005, making “a mockery of compliance” in six areas: education, safety, medical care, mental health, disabilities and sex-offender treatment.

And we wonder why the California Youth Authority has such a high recidivism rate. How high? you might ask. Okay, are you sitting down? The CYA recidivism rate is…..91 percent.

“Instead of rehabilitating and treating kids, they’re pushing them out the door in worse shape than when they came in,” said Don Spector, director of the Prison Law Office, when the lawsuit was first filed in 2004. “It’s like a factory for prisons.”

Looks like little has changed.

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My TV cable is down and it’s just as well. Reading about the student shootings at Northern Illinois University is bad enough. I don’t need to see the ghoulish interviews with traumatized survivors…in Hi Def.

And then, of course, there was the Oxnard student shooting.

On February 12 at around 8:30 in the morning, Oxnard 8th grader Brandon McInerney showed up at first period English at E.O. Green Junior High, pulled out a pistol, and shot 15-year old Lawrence King in the head. Classmates said the two boys had gotten into a conflict the day before. It seemed to somehow relate to the fact that King, a foster child living in a group home for abused and neglected children, had recently declared himself to be gay and had been coming to school wearing make-up, high heeled boots and jewelry.

McInerney, the shooter, may not have lived in an ideal household either. In recent years, his father had done jail time for domestic abuse and drunk driving.

And, by the way, where did the kid get that gun?

Oh, yes, and where were were the adults when King was being routinely harassed by a group of the eighth grade boys? Didn’t the school counselors know that a kid thought to be gay was five times as likely to be threatened or injured by a weapon than a straight kid? Or how about the figure that transgender people in the United States have a one in 12 chance of being murdered? One in twelve!

(A hearty thank you to all the Jerry Fallwells of the world for their years of poisonous rhetoric.)

King was declared brain dead on Wednesday. Now it seems that the Ventura prosecutor has decided to try Mcinerney as an adult for King’s murder—and not just any murder, a hate crime. The prosecutor is able to do so because Brandon McInerney turned fourteen three weeks ago and a kid has to be fourteen before you can haul him or her into adult court. In other words, if McInerny had managed to get hold of a hand gun to blow away his classmate four weeks ago, instead of this week, the case would be tried in juvenile court instead.

Adult court means that, if convicted, McInerney will get a minimum sentence of 50-to-life (25 for the murder, 25 for the gun use), likely longer, if the hate “enhancement” is added in. In California that means he’ll get out of prison…well…never.

And what exactly have will we have accomplished?

As if to answer, a day after the shooting the Illinois Coalition For Fair Sentencing of Children released a report about the fallacies of the policy of sentencing children in adult court.

In its executive summary the report mentions the fact that the United States is only one of two countries that still sends teenagers to prison for life. As of right right now, we’re incarcerating 2380 people who were sentenced as kids. The rest of the world combined has….. seven.

Bravo. Great system. Let no child be left behind.

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All day today I’ll be at the Criminal Justice Conference sponsored and organized by the USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism, where I’m a senior fellow. (They’re the folks who sponsor this blog.)

The prime mover behind the conference, which is open to anyone, is my pal Joe Domanick, and the three-day schedule will feature LAPD Chief Bill Bratton, Sheriff Lee Baca, Connie Rice, and loads of others. (You can find the full schedule here
Here’s a snippet from Joe’s introduction to the reasons he think the conference is important:

The purpose of the Justice and Journalism conference….is for L.A.’s criminal justice professionals and experts to discuss what they see taking place on the other side of the Los Angeles criminal justice conveyor belt – a belt that never stops. Over 30% of those moving into the state’s overstuffed prison system come from L.A. County. After doing their time, tens of thousands return each year to Los Angeles – the majority having received little or no educational help, mental health care, treatment for drug or alcohol abuse, or other services while in prison. When they arrive here and hit the streets, there is no serious, sustained and coordinated reentry strategy to assist them. It’s no wonder that 70% are placed back on the conveyor belt and returned to prison within three years following their release….

Come on down if you can manage it. The event is free and it will be very, very interesting, I guarantee it.

(Naturally, I’ll be blogging it.)

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(photo from Joseph Rodriguez book, Juvenile)

For the past month (with a brief break or two to obsess about wildfires, and to meet other deadlines) I’ve been thinking about what it takes to get a kid or a young adult away from gangs. I’ve been doing so in the context of writing a new introduction and epilogue for an updated version of my book about Father Greg Boyle and the gangs of the Pico Aliso housing projects. (As you may remember, that’s what got me digging through circa 1991, 1992 photos, some of which I posted here.)

The process of doing a second (in 2004), and now a third version (2008) of a book that was originally published in 1994 has led me, sheerly by accident, into what has now become a back door longitudinal study of around three dozen homeboys and homegirls over a period that, to date, spans nearly seventeen years.

In future weeks and months, I’ll post about some of the patterns I’ve observed in the course of the latest incarnation of this project. But, in the meantime, it was heartening to find in Sunday’s New York Times a short, but very smart editorial about an approach that many of us have long seen as a big part of the answer to the question of what is wrong with America’s juvenile justice system, and what might be changed in order to set things right. Specifically they wrote about a juvenile corrections system that is known in criminal justice circles as the “Missouri model.”

The Times has done a good job of distilling what is working in Missouri, so let me first just quote from them directly.

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The California fires are now estimated to cost in the billions, George Bush’s administration continues to poke sticks at Iran (then claims it’s a only negotiating ploy)….but there is one genuinely good piece of news today:

The Georgia Supreme Court ruled earlier today that Genarlow Wilson’s ten year sentence for having oral sex with another teenager (he was 17, she was 15), is indeed cruel and unusual, and the court ordered him released.

This afternoon, his mom drove over to the prison with a nice bunch of new clothes for her about to be released kid. Now he’s OUT! And, as you can see from the ABC photo above, his mom looks mighty happy about it!

(Earlier WLA stories on the subject here, here, here, here and here.)

Good going Georgia Supremes! (At least, the four of you that voted in favor of release.)

Here are some clips from the NY Times story.

In a 4-to-3 ruling, the court’s majority said the sentence was “grossly disproportionate” to the crime, which the justices said “did not rise to the level of culpability of adults who prey on children.”

…Writing for the majority in Friday’s 48-page opinion, Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears noted that changes to the law made after Mr. Wilson’s conviction “represent a seismic shift in the legislature’s view of the gravity of oral sex between two willing teenage participants.

“The severe felony punishment and sex offender registration imposed on Wilson make no measurable contribution to acceptable goals of punishment,” she wrote.

Very nicely said, Justice Ward.

NOTE: Chapeau Tip to commenter Woody for snapping me out of my deadline-ridden, post-fire haze long enough to notice this news.

(photo from ABC)

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This week TIME Magazine has an article worth reading about all that is rotten in Florida’s prisons and boot camps. It’ opens with the story of the death of Martin Lee Anderson.

Last year, like many people, I watched the video of Anderson, a skinny 14-year-old, as he was hit, kneed and ultimately smothered to death by seven grown men, as a nurse looked on dispassionately, her expression no more alarmed than if the guards were simply subduing a rabid dog.

And like many, I was shocked and outraged when the horror of Anderson’s unnecessary death was compounded by the jury verdict last week in which the guards who beat him, and the boot camp nurse who stood by and watched, were acquitted of all wrongdoing by an all white jury.

The jury deliberated only 90 minutes. Within that same 90 minutes, the jurors also rejected the possibility convict the batterers and the of lesser charges of child neglect and culpable negligence.

Now it seems that the feds are actively contemplating the notion of bringing civil rights changes against the eight who were not held to answer in criminal court.

According to TIME, however, the Andersen case is not an isolated incident, but a pattern that the Florida’s Corrections honchos have tragically failed to correct:

While no one is asking Florida to coddle its prisoners, adult or juvenile, many fear it has yet to break its dark habit of coddling abusive guards and other officials watching over those prisoner.

The state is facing lawsuits alleging that its prisons subject too many inmates, including the mentally ill, to a prisoner “warehousing” culture of unlawfully extreme isolation and deprivation, usually with little or no rehabilitation efforts to prevent recidivism. Other suits decry what one calls excessive as well as “malicious and sadistic” use of pepper spray and other chemicals to keep mentally ill prisoners under control. In many cases the sprays have burned off inmates’ skin, according to the suit. “Florida prisons still need to end this kind of outrageous conduct,” says Randall Berg, executive director of the Florida Justice Institute in Miami, which is participating in a suit filed against the state’s current Corrections head, James McDonough, along with other department officials.

By chance, as I was cruising the TIME website, I noticed that they had an earlier interview with my pal, Joan Petersilia, about how to fix some of the problems in California’s disastrously overcrowded prisons. Joan, who is as smart as they come on such things, quickly listed a trio of fixes that she thought were the most important to look at first:

We need three things: sentencing reform, better prison rehabilitation programming, and parole reform. Part of our problem is structural. Under our current sentencing law, we can send people back to prison for technical parole infractions. [Some other states only order jail time or community punishments for technical parole violations.] So, parole violators just keep churning in and out of our prison system, serving very short terms. We should change that practice and handle very low-risk, non-serious, non-violent parole violators in the community. California could reduce its prison population by adopting this practice. It’s low-hanging fruit in terms of addressing overcrowding. Additionally, we need more crime-prevention programs and better funding for probation to reduce the number of people coming into prison in the first place.

All three suggestions, while obviously not fleshed out, are dead on—and all reasonably doable (beginning with parole reform)…if Arnold and the state legislature could stop playing politics long enough to put some genuine reforms in motion (which ain’t too likely).

As for Florida…. Well, hopefully the U.S. Attorney’s office that promised to review the case against Martin Lee Anderson’s cavalier and lethal batterers will spend more than 90 minutes on the matter.

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The United States is unique in all the world in its attitude toward punishing its young. Right now there are more than 2225 kids, age 17 or younger, who are serving life sentences in American prisons without the possibility of parole, according to a new study released today by the Equal Justice Initiative. Of those 2225 plus, the EJI researchers located at least 73 who were 13 or 14 at the time of their sentencing.

In December of last year, the United Nations voted on a resolution to ban the imposition of life sentences on children and young teenagers. The vote was 173 to 1. The U.S. cast the solitary NO vote.

Up until two years ago, we were also the sole country in the world that handed out death sentences to juveniles. (The Supreme Court finally put a stop to that practice in 2005, with the case known as Roper v. Simmons.)

Using the Equal Justice initiative report as a jumping off point, today’s New York Times has an interesting and nuanced take on the question of whether juveniles who have committed serious crimes should be given the opportunity to one day be released:

Corrections professionals and criminologists here and abroad tend to agree that violent crime is usually a young person’s activity, suggesting that eventual parole could be considered in most cases. But the American legal system is more responsive to popular concerns about crime and attitudes about punishment, while justice systems abroad tend to be administered by career civil servants rather than elected legislators, prosecutors and judges.

In its sentencing of juveniles, as in many other areas, the legal system in the United States goes it alone. American law is, by international standards, a series of innovations and exceptions. From the central role played by juries in civil cases to the election of judges to punitive damages to the disproportionate number of people in prison, the United States is an island in the sea of international law.

One of the most alarming elements of the EJI report is the section on the histories of the kids who have received life sentences, most of whom have been victims of abuse and/or neglect, often to a staggering degree.

Children sentenced to die in prison have in common the disturbing failure of police, family courts, child protection agencies, foster systems, and health care providers to treat and protect them. Their crimes occur in the midst of crisis, often resulting from desperate, misguided attempts to protect themselves.

And then the report goes on to list some harrowing examples.

Ashley Jones was repeatedly threatened at gunpoint by her parents, sexually assaulted by her stepfather, forced into crack houses by an addicted mother, physically abused by family members, and abducted by a gang shortly before her crime.

Severe neglect is also common among children in this group. Joseph Jones grew up in Newark public housing, where his crack-addicted parents left him to cook, clean, and take care of his six younger siblings. At 13, Joseph’s parents took him to North Carolina and abandoned him with relatives.

Quantel Lotts saw his uncle gunned down in his front yard in a poor St. Louis neighborhood, where his mother used and sold crack cocaine out of their house. Quantel was removed from his mother’s custody at age eight; he smelled of urine, his teeth were rotting, and his legs, arms, and head bore scars from being punched and beaten with curtain rods and broom handles.

EJI’s lawyers have taken around a dozen of these lifer kids as clients and are challenging their sentences. Among the worst of their horror stories is that of Anthony Nunez, a kid who was sentenced to life in prison for a crime committed by adults in which no one was hurt.

When the juvenile justice system was invented over 100 years ago, it was based on the idea that children and adolescents were developmentally different than adults, that they were still forming psychologically and, as such, were less mindful of the consequences of their actions, and more malleable to transformation and reform. It was, therefore, the duty of the court to look at each young man or woman who came before it and to ask the question: is this kid redeemable?

A growing number of organizations think we should start asking that question again about our nation’s lifer kids.

The rest of the world’s nations agree. Unfortunately, at this point anyway, American public policy does not.

(photo by Jessica McGowan/The Birmingham News)

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