ADDRESSING THE ISSUE OF LOCKING KIDS UP IN SOLITARY

While severe and overused in the adult justice system, solitary confinement is most destructive for still-developing youths. There have been numerous reports on the devastating effects of locking kids up for twenty-three hours a day (and WitnessLA has linked to them often), yet California still hasn’t defined what constitutes solitary, much less regulated it.

In an LA Times editorial, our pal Rob Greene lays out in unusually clear terms the consequences of putting kids in solitary confinement and what we need to do adequately address the issue. Here’s a clip (but be sure to read the whole thing):

Juvenile justice officials should at the very least have to certify that mental health evaluations were part of the decision-making process for each juvenile, and they should document all instances of solitary lockdown, under consistent standards and definitions. SB 61 by state Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) would require such standards and documentation. It’s a bill that deserves to move forward.

The Senate has been wary, and appropriately so, of moving forward on any bill that could impose costs on counties — costs that would be passed along to the state. The budget has been cut year after year, and now, when there may be some funding available, lawmakers must decide carefully what to do with it.

In making that decision, they should keep in mind that the state’s failure to meet the mental health needs of so many Californians has led directly to the prison overcrowding crisis, and that the failure to meet the mental health needs of inmates for decades has resulted in the court order to beef up in-prison care (at enormous cost) and to release tens of thousands of prisoners. The juvenile justice system is inextricably linked to the adult system and must deal with a similar, although more vulnerable, population.

GOV. BROWN’S OFFICE BEGINS APPEAL PROCESS TO GET SUPREME COURT INTERVENTION ON PRISON POP. CAP

Monday, California officials appealed the federal court decision to uphold an order that, by the end of 2013, the CA prison population must be further reduced by 9,000 inmates.

KPCC’s Julie Small has the story. Here’s a clip:

Deborah Hoffman of California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said Monday the state has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court because the panel of federal judges “did not fully or fairly consider the evidence that with our greatly reduced prison population, prison health care now exceeds constitutional standards.”

In 2011, the legislature enacted California’s Criminal Justice Realignment law, which diverts lower level felons to the counties. Today the prisons hold 30,000 fewer inmates than they did when the federal judges ordered the state to reduce the prison population.

Monday’s filing is a notice of appeal to the district court stating California’s intention to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene. It’s the first step in an appeals process that could take years — if the nation’s highest court decides to take up the case.

BRADY V. MARYLAND…FIFTY YEARS ON

Fifty years after Brady v. Maryland—the SCOTUS ruling that dictates prosecutors must present defendants with any and all known exculpatory evidence—there is little incentive and still no real accountability in place to keep prosecutors from breaking the Brady rule.

The Atlantic’s Andrew Cohen breaks down why Brady is flawed, and what can be done to reinforce it. Here’s how it opens:

Last Thursday evening at a dinner in New Orleans, Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson came together again to bestow an award on John Thompson, the noted death row exoneree, who was being feted by the Innocence Project New Orleans after nearly two decades of false imprisonment. The names of the presenters probably don’t ring a bell to you until you put them together and separate them with a “versus,” as in Plessy v. Ferguson. The descendants of the litigants of one of the worst Supreme Court decisions ever wanted to pay homage to a litigant who had belatedly benefited from one of its best. Who says irony is dead?

The timing of the Project’s 12th anniversary “gala” was propitious. It came just four days before the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brady v. Maryland, decided on this day in 1963, in which the justices unanimously declared that prosecutors have a constitutional obligation to share with criminal defendants all “exculpatory” evidence officials may have. “Society wins not only when the guilty are convicted but when criminal trials are fair,” wrote Justice William O. Douglass, for the Warren Court, as it again sought in those progressive days to enhance individual rights at the expense of government power.

Thompson is a free man today because of the so-called “Brady” rule. But he likely would have been a free man all along — without spending 14 years on death row — had his prosecutors obeyed the law in the first place. That dichotomy is what makes Thompson such a poignant symbol of the Brady rule. He proves both that it works and that it is deeply flawed; that it saves innocent people from being railroaded by prosecutors and that countless others are wrongly convicted and imprisoned anyway. The sad truth is that 50 years after Brady, in an increasingly complex criminal justice system, too many prosecutors still hide exculpatory evidence, and too few judges do anything about it.

AND MINNESOTA MAKES TWELVE…

The Minnesota Senate voted Monday to legalize gay marriage, and Governor Mark Dayton immediately announced he would sign the bill, allowing gay couples to marry by August. Go Minnesota!

The NY Times’ Monica Davey has the story, if you missed it today.

SENATOR LELAND YEE’S BILL LIMITING USE OF SOLITARY CONFINEMENT FOR KIDS PASSES OUT OF COMMITTEE

SB 61, a bill that defines and limits the use of solitary confinement for kids locked up in state and county juvenile facilities passed out of the Senate Public Safety Committee on Wednesday. The bill, authored by Senator Leland Yee, (D-San Francisco/San Mateo) is something that youth advocates have been pushing.

A statement from Yee’s office outlined the following points:

**Nationally, over half of the youth who committed suicide while in a correctional facility were in solitary confinement and 62 percent had a history of being placed in solitary confinement.

***Research also shows that individuals who were forced into solitary confinement had much higher rates of recidivism as well as developing psychopathologies.

**“The use of solitary confinement on a child is wrong and should be used only in the most extreme situations,” said Yee, who is a child psychologist. “The studies are clear – holding juveniles in solitary increases recidivism rates, exacerbates existing mental illness, and makes youth more likely to attempt suicide. The overuse of solitary confinement with children destroys young lives.”

“Solitary confinement is an archaic way of dealing with incarcerated children” said Yee. “Clearly, solitary confinement does not benefit society in the long run and actually makes our communities more dangerous. If we embrace scientific evidence over the status quo, we can work to rebuild broken lives and keep California safer.”

Dr. Laura Abrams of UCLA testified on behalf of SB 61, saying, “The mission of the juvenile justice system is to offer youth an opportunity for rehabilitation while also promoting public safety. The use of solitary confinement is counter to these goals. Not only does solitary confinement undermine rehabilitation efforts, but also as the potential to return a young person to society with exacerbated trauma and mental illness that can manifest in violence toward self or others.”

We’re watching this bill and are heartened by this first step toward passage!

HOW SCHOOL SUSPENSIONS BACKFIRE

This run-of-the-mill yet heartbreaking story of the everyday manner in which the use of a school suspension fairls to serve either the student or the safety of the school, is all too common. It is by Sally Lee writing for the Huffington Post. Here’s a representative clip:

Working in the Bronx, as she writes in the Suspensions Stories blog, E.E.M. is a history teacher who helped develop a “Moot Court” project that has become one of the seminal academic experiences of upperclassmen at her school. Student teams research real First and Fourth Amendment Supreme Court cases and then develop arguments and present in front of guest “justices.” Each year students are highly engaged in this project, and one year four of them, a crew of friends who had known each other since childhood, were working hard to prepare for their presentation. But just weeks before the case presentations, three of the young men were involved in an altercation (involving many people from multiple schools in the building) that was the result of an out-of-school turf tension related to the two sets of housing projects near the school. The three young men were given a 60-day out-of-school suspension. The effect? The students never got to stand tall and present their cases in front of peers and impressed guests. Instead, one student transferred to a school that didn’t match his needs or interests, another moved out of state, one returned to the school with little trust for faculty, and the fourth, who wasn’t involved in the fights, grew listless after the destruction of what had been a positive and supportive team for him: his friends. What could have been for these young men had the school system intervened earlier and responded differently? For E.E.M. and her colleagues, stories like these are common, and they are heartbreaking. Educators see so much promise in their students, but what is their fate when time and again they are demoralized and alienated by schools without adequate and supportive resources?

HOPELESSNESS REIGNS AT GUANTANAMO

We don’t usually stray into issues that relate to national security, but for those of us concerned about humane and constitutional incarceration policies, this situation is of grave concern. The New York Times’ Charlie Savage has written a painful and shameful story about the dispair that has spread among the prisoners at Guantanamo, resulting in a mass hunger strike that is now threatening lives.

Here’s a clip from Savage’s excellent and disturbing story:

In the early afternoon quiet, guards in camouflage fatigues walked the two-tiered cellblocks of Camp Six, where the most cooperative of the 166 terrorism suspects held in the military prison here are housed. From a darkened control room, other guards watched banks of surveillance monitors showing prisoners in white clothing — pacing, sleeping or reading — in their cells.

But the relative calm on display to visiting reporters last week was deceiving. Days earlier, guards had raided Camp Six and locked down protesting prisoners who had blocked security cameras, forbidding them to congregate in a communal area. A hunger strike is now in its third month, with 93 prisoners considered to be participating — more than half the inmates and twice the number before the raid.

“They are not done yet, and they will not be done until there is more than one death,” said a Muslim adviser to the military, identified as “Zak” for security reasons, who fears there may be suicides. Only one thing, he predicted, will satisfy the detainees: if someone is allowed to leave.

The spark for the protest is disputed. Detainees, through their lawyers, say that when guards conducted a search of their cells on Feb. 6, they handled their Korans in a disrespectful way. Prison officials dispute that.

But both military officials and lawyers for the detainees agree about the underlying cause of the turmoil: a growing sense among many prisoners, some of whom have been held without trial for more than 11 years, that they will never go home.

AND THE REALLY, REALLY BAD JAIL OF THE MONTH AWARD GOES TO….THE BALTIMORE CITY DETENTION CENTER

Jail guards as inmates’ babymamas plus a thriving drug biz behind bars and more. Rochelle Ritchie of CBS reports this story (and so has nearly everyone else). Here’s a clip in case you missed the sad and jaw-dropping saga of one of Baltimore’s jail:

Twenty-five people, 13 of those female correction officers, are now behind bars facing federal charges of racketeering, money laundering and possession of drugs with the intent to distribute. Investigators say the women helped White and other gang members smuggle cell phones, marijuana, prescription pills and cigarettes into the Baltimore City Detention Center.

“It’s pretty much its own city. The guards aren’t running the jail; prisoners really run the jail,” said one former inmate.

The illegal operation isn’t surprising to former inmates.

“I was in there before. Everywhere you look, people lighting up marijuana joints, tobacco…we even get alcohol in there,” said a former inmate.

And here’s a clip from a story by Dan Rodricks for the Baltimore Sun:

I have lots of questions about the Black Guerrilla Family case, starting with this: Was the warden of the Baltimore City Detention Center asked to approve maternity leave for any of the female correctional officers allegedly impregnated by inmate Tavon “Bulldog” White?

I thought it was a pretty good question.

A taxpayer’s question.

According to the U.S. attorney’s office, White got four of his jailers pregnant. (Do you think these women knew what was going on before the indictment came down? Do you think they all got along and attended Lamaze class together?)

If the indictment is correct, if female prison guards fraternized with an inmate to the point of pregnancy — a couple of them had White’s name tattooed on their bodies, the feds say — then I don’t want to hear that they asked for paid maternity leave.

Don’t tell us that.

Bad enough that White pretty much ran the jail, according to the indictment.

If his baby mamas — excuse me, his alleged baby mamas — had the chutzpah to ask for paid maternity leave, that would add insult to injury….

A SHOOTING IN LANCASTER

Angel Mendez, 30, and Jennifer Garcia, 27, were assuredly not model citizens. Yet they were not suspected of any crime when a specialized Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department team reportedly blew through the door of the backyard shack where they were living.

The members of the “COPS HIT” team (the unfortunately conceived acronym for “Community-Oriented Policing Services High-Impact Team”) reportedly entered the shack without knocking, calling out, or identifying themselves. They had evidently come to the shack looking for a parolee who had gone AWOL from his court-ordered drug rehab. They’d gotten a tip that he might have gone to the Mendez/Garcia shack. Or not. It might have been somewhere else.

Within seconds two of the team unloaded a total of fifteen bullets into Angel Mendez and Jennifer Garcia.

In this week’s LA Weekly, reporter Patrick Range McDonald delves into the story of the shooting, the subsequent response of the sheriff’s department, and the civil case that has recently finished and now awaits a judicial verdict.

Here are two clips—one from near the first of the stort, the second from near the end.

Conley opened the shack door with his department-issued 9mm semiautomatic Beretta drawn. Mendez, who had on the bed a Daisy Powerline rifle-style BB gun that he used for shooting rats, sat up and moved the BB gun to the floor. Conley opened fire. A bullet ripped into Mendez’s right forearm, passed through it and struck his right leg — proof, his attorneys today say, that he was reaching down to put the BB gun on the floor when shot.

“I didn’t even know it was them,” Mendez later told Sheriff’s Homicide Sgt. Robert Gray. “They didn’t say ‘police’! They didn’t say ‘freeze’! They didn’t say ‘drop the weapon’! They said nothing, sir.”

Conley and Pederson fired at will, peppering the couple with 14 more bullets, one of which struck the seven-months-pregnant Garcia in the right upper back and shattered her collarbone. Mendez was critically injured, hit multiple times in his right leg, arm, back and side; blood poured from his wounds. Weeks later, his badly fractured right leg, whose key arteries had been sliced in half, had to be amputated.

In a disturbing videotape taken minutes after the shooting, as a paramedic worked to stop the bleeding, police can be clearly heard pressuring Mendez to say he’d pointed the BB gun at Conley. Mendez begs the people around him, “Oh, please, don’t let me die, sir!” then turns his head toward neighbor Charles Green, who is witnessing the drama, and tells Green: “I never pointed the gun at him, Charlie!”

And pages later…a second clip:

Tom Parker, the former head of L.A.’s FBI office, read the Sheriff’s and L.A. County District Attorney reports on the Mendez shooting, as well as David Drexler’s opening statement at trial. He has come to suspect that COPS HIT and TOP were engaged in the “very common” practice of “testi-lying” after a bad shoot.

Parker is a retired 24-year veteran of the FBI whose distinguished career included undercover investigations, police corruption and brutality cases and investigations of agent-involved shootings. Last year, the Legal Aid Foundation of Santa Barbara gave him a Heroes of Justice Award for his work on criminal-justice reform.

Parker says police sometimes lie about “drug houses” to justify unjustifiable searches. But he has even more fundamental doubts than that in the Angel Mendez case. He questions whether a deputy ever saw big, white Ronnie O’Dell at Albertsons or whether the purported informant even existed.

“From that point forward,” Parker says, referring to the deputies’ huddle outside Albertsons, “there’s really faulty police procedures happening here.” Nobody saw O’Dell leave Albertsons, so the deputies were not in a “hot pursuit” to Paula Hughes’ home. Nor was there any clear and immediate threat to the public.

Parker says, “Without a warrant or substantial probable cause … you don’t have a right to go into the backyard and search through buildings, never mind the shack.” He says the killing of Paula Hughes’ German shepherd was wrong. “If you’ve got no right to be on the property, you’ve got no right to shoot the dog.”

Professor O’Donnell agrees that if there’s not an emergency, “You need to have a warrant to go into someone’s house.” But he notes that due to institutional pressures, officers and their commanders often feel they can’t admit they were wrong.

O’Donnell adds, “If you can’t be truthful, then what are your reports going to say?”

Parker explains, “If you operate from the premise that [police] had no right to be there, that damages the self-protection aspect of the shooting. … Angel and Jennifer are innocent victims in this situation.”

O’Donnell says it’s also “interesting” that Mendez was not prosecuted for pointing an imitation gun. “He basically didn’t do a crime,” the professor says. “He was sitting in his home.”

The sheriff’s department’s own Internal Affairs investigation cleared the officers of any wrongdoing, as did the OIR—the Office of Independent Review—and the LA DA’s office.

There’s much more to the story so read the rest here.

SUE REAMS GETS HER SON BACK AFTER 3-STRIKES AND 17 YEARS

Anyone who has reported on 3-Strikes reform has probably met or talked to Sue Reams, one of the front line 3-Strikes reform activists. Reams started her campaign to change the law after her son went away on a life sentence.

The day before Easter of this year, she and her husband were able to bring her son home from prison.

NPR’s Ina Jaffe has the story. Here’s the audio. And her’s a clip from the text:

…Before that moment, Shane had served about 17 years of his potential life sentence. He got his third strike for being involved in the sale of a $20 rock of cocaine. He says he was a bystander. The prosecution said he was a lookout. But it was Shane’s first two strikes that caused his mother such heartache, as she said in a 2009 interview with NPR. She’d been trying to get her son off drugs, she explained. Nothing seemed to work, so she tried tough love.

“Tough love tells you that you take a stand,” she said. “So I took a stand.”

That meant when her son stole some stuff from her house — and from the neighbors — to get money for drugs, Reams insisted he turn himself in. She even drove him to the police station. She told him: “Maybe you’ll get a drug program. You need a drug program.”

Instead he got convicted of two counts of residential burglary. A few years later when he got picked up on the drug charge, those burglaries counted as his first two strikes….

THE TEEN COURT OPTION

Los Angeles has a remarkable teen court program that we’ve visited and will report on in the future, but here’s a report on a teen court in Napa, California that is doing good things.

Michael Waterson writing for the Napa Valley Register has the story. Here’s a clip:

Recognizing the power of peer pressure, Napa County’s juvenile justice system attempts to harness it for positive behavioral change through a peer court program where teens judge teens.

Peer Court came to American Canyon on Thursday. A young defendant was tried in City Hall chambers by youth lawyers who presented the case to a teenage jury and Napa County Family Court Commissioner Monique Langhorne-Johnson. The young attorneys were mentored by real lawyers from the Napa Bar Association or experienced Peer Court youths.

The young defendant, who because of his age can’t be identified, had been arrested for allegedly smoking marijuana and concentrated cannabis. A high school senior and a good student with a 3.27 grade point average, the defendant said he used marijuana more than once for joint pain in his knees and shoulder. He said a doctor told him surgery was not an option to correct his pain.

On the day he was caught smoking with a friend in a parked car, he said he had come from work where he had stood on his feet all day. Because of his arrest, he has been given a curfew by his parents, he said.

In addition to observing another Peer Court proceeding, writing an essay about it and serving on a peer jury, student prosecutors Eric McFarland and Acee Echevarria called for the defendant to put in eight hours of community service and complete a drug education class.

A 16-year-old student at American Canyon High School, McFarland said he has always loved the idea of being a lawyer. His middle name, Kazi, means “lawyer” in the Bengali dialect he said.

Echevarria, also 16 and an American Canyon student, said he is fascinated by the law, so much so he sometimes travels to Napa to sit in on random court proceedings.

“I first heard of it in class,” Echevarria said about Peer Court. “I fell in love with the program….”

Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department via LA Weekly

When it comes to overly punative school discipline policies, Meridian, Mississippi, arguably leads the pack.

But a new federal consent decree filed on Friday promises to force a change in Meridian’s severe approach to punishing students—and could, say experts, provide a blueprint for school discipline reform nationwide.

In Meridian the need for reform is particularly extreme. Here students are reportedly routinely arrested for any one of a string of minor reasons. When kids are arrested, children as young as ten are taken away by police in handcuffs, and thrown into juvenile detention centers—often without being allowed access to a lawyer.

For example, one girl with a bladder disorder was arrested after she raced frantically to the restroom without getting permission from her teacher.

Other kids were arrested and incarcerated for minor dress code violations, like the wrong color socks, or for having shirts untucked.” Tardiness and “flatulence in class” could be arrest-worthy offenses, as could using “vulgar language, or yelling at teachers.”

And in an alarmingly disproportionate number of instances, the students receiving these outsized punishments were “African-American children and children with disabilities.”

After warning Meridian to clean up its act or face legal proceedings, the civil rights section of the U.S. Department of Justice filed a legal complaint in October 2012, in which they wrote in harsh tones about Meridian administrators’ “school to prison pipeline” diciplinary policies:

Collectively, Defendants engage in a pattern or practice of unlawful conduct through which they routinely and systematically arrest and incarcerate children, including for minor school rule infractions, without even the most basic procedural safeguards, and in violation of these children’s constitutional rights.

Defendants do not afford children in the juvenile justice system even the minimum procedural safeguards required by the Constitution. As a result, (1) the City of Meridian engages in a pattern or practice of arresting children in school without probable cause; (2) Lauderdale County and the Youth Court Judges engage in a pattern or practice of authorizing the repeated incarceration of children without essentials of fairness and due process such as a timely hearing to determine whether there is probable cause to detain them, and meaningful representation by an attorney; (3) the Mississippi Division of Youth Services, Lauderdale County, and the Youth Court Judges engage in a pattern or practice of placing children on probation and incarcerating children for alleged probation violations without affording children constitutionally required protections such as reasonable opportunities to understand their probation requirements or hearings to challenge alleged probation violations that could result in incarceration; and (4) Defendants collectively engage in a pattern or practice of imposing disproportionate and severe consequences, including incarceration, for technical probation violations such as school suspensions, without any due process whatsoever.

Defendants’ concerted actions punish children in Meridian, Mississippi so arbitrarily and severely as to shock the conscience, and deprive these children of liberty and educational opportunities on an ongoing basis.

In January, the Advancement Project issued its own report titled: HANDCUFFS ON SUCCESS: The Extreme School Discipline Crisis in Mississippi Public Schools. The report made clear that the habit of criminalizing kids as young as five was not exclusive to Meridian but was happening all over the state of Mississippi.

THE FEDS LAY DOWN A LIST OF RULES WITH A CONSENT DECREE

After conducting an investigation that began in December 2011, the Feds gave local officials plenty of time to make progress toward correcting the most harmful of the issues before beginning with legal proceedings. But, instead of complying, Meridian officials reportedly tried to keep documents away from the DOJ people.

So the lawsuit was filed last October, followed five months later by the consent decree that was filed last Friday.

The following is from the DOJ press release announcing the move:

“The American dream is rooted in education. In Meridian, that dream has long been delayed by discipline practices that deny students access to education,” said Jocelyn Samuels, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. “We commend the Meridian Public School District for taking this huge step toward ensuring that its schools are safe and welcoming to all students and that education is a road to success instead of a pipeline to prison.”

A BLUEPRINT FOR REFORM BEYOND MERIDIAN?

A consent decree—like the one that the Los Angeles Police Department operated under after the Rampart scandal—is basically a plea bargain in which the agency being sued avoids court proceedings by agreeing to a set of requirements.

The main terms that the Meridian consent decree lays out are the following:

· Limits exclusionary discipline such as suspension, alternative placement and expulsion, and prohibits exclusionary discipline for minor misbehavior;
· Prohibits school officials from involving law enforcement officers to respond to behavior that can be safely and appropriately handled under school disciplinary procedures;
· Requires training for school law enforcement officers on bias-free policing, child and adolescent development and age appropriate responses, practices proven to improve school climate, mentoring and working with school administrators;
· Revises policies at the district’s alternative school to create clear entry and exit criteria and provide appropriate supports to speed students’ transitions back to their home schools;
· Requires enhanced due process protections in student discipline hearings
· Expands use of a behavior and discipline management system known as positive behavior intervention and supports (PBIS) at all schools;
· Requires teachers and administrators to use developmentally appropriate tiered prevention and intervention strategies before removing students from instruction;
· Requires monitoring of discipline data to identify and respond to racial disparities
· Requires training on all revised policies and procedures, and
· Implements measures to engage families and communities as partners in revising policies and as participants in regular school and community informational forums.

But here’s where it gets interesting.

Many youth advocates hope that the full 44-page consent decree, which expands on the points made above, can act as an instructive model that any school district can use as a blueprint for its own reforms.

“This is really an incredible document,” Miriam Krinsky, policy consultant for the California Endowment, told me on Friday. (Note: Krinsky is also the executive director for LA’s Citizens Commission on Jail Violence.) “It provides a detailed and thoughtful roadmap for elements of best practices that can be incorporated in school discipline reforms around the nation.”

A look at the still depressingly high suspension and drop out rates that plague too many American school districts makes it clear that reforms are badly needed.

“Even one court appearance during high school increases a child’s likelihood of dropping out of school,” writes the DOJ. “And court appearances are especially detrimental to children with no or minimal previous history of delinquency.”

13_03_21 Barnhardt and US v. Meridian Joint Consent Order – FILED

Photo from the Advancement Project’s report, “Handcuffs on Success”

A brand new initiative called “Mistakes Kids Make,” sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, created the video above and is busily gathering stories from adults who have made mistakes as kids but whose lives were not blown apart. To encourage others to come forward, the organizers have posted some mini-stories by famous people who did dumb, and in some cases scary and/or tragic things as kids, but who turned out okay—as most kids do, if given half a chance and some caring adult help, when needed.

(For instance you may have known the “mistake” stories listed about Laura bush and about Steve Jobs, but I didn’t.)

The site also lists a string of relevant facts:

The US locks up nearly five times the number of kids as any other nation in the world.

Only five percent of kids who get arrested, have committed a violent crime. Yet they often are given the same treatment as the youth who commit more serious crimes.

66 percent of kids who are incarcerated, never return to school

All terrific stuff. But do sites like this one actually help to motivate lawmakers to work for saner public policy? I wonder. It would be good to think so.

WHY ARE SCHOOLS SO FOND OF SUSPENSIONS AS A PUNISHMENT (EVEN THOUGH SUSPENSIONS DON’T WORK)?

Brian Palmer of Slate asked a group of experts why school suspension was so over-used.

Why is suspension such a common punishment?

Because it’s familiar, cheap, and convenient. It’s also demonstrably ineffective. Its deterrent value is low: A 2011 study showed that Texas students who were suspended or expelled at least once during middle school and high school averaged four such disciplinary actions during their academic careers. Fourteen percent of them were suspended 11 times or more. Suspensions don’t even seem to benefit the school as a whole. In recent years, while Baltimore city schools have dramatically reduced suspensions, the dropout rate has been cut nearly in half.

Still, surveys consistently show that parents support suspension, because it keeps those students perceived as bad apples away from their peers. Principals continue to rely on suspension, in part because it creates the appearance of toughness.

TV & RADIO PERSONALITY TAVIS SMILEY EXAMINES ZERO TOLERANCE IN SCHOOLS AND THE “SCHOOL TO PRISON PIPELINE” IN HIS TUESDAY, MARCH 27 TV SPECIAL, “EDUCATION UNDER ARREST.”

We mentioned this Tavis Smiley special before, but now that it’s coming up soon, it bears mentioning again.

Here’s a clip from the story about the special by the LA Sentinal’s Thandisizwe Chimurenga:

…Smiley says his decision to focus on “the connection between the juvenile justice system and the dropout rate among American teens” was a logical outgrowth of his concern about poverty.

“I’ve been talking about the issue of poverty for quite some time and this is another one of those poverty tentacles, he said. “I wrote about it in the book I did with Dr. Cornel West, The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto, but I’ve talked about it in a number of different forums over the years and I’ve done other specials about education but … ‘Education Under Arrest,’ this particular special focuses uniquely on the school to prison pipeline and how it is that we are criminalizing our children. So, my interest in it has always been there.”

According to Smiley, one out of three teens arrested in this country are arrested at school.

“The stuff that I used to get sent to the principal’s office for – foul language, getting into a fight, disruptive behavior, missing school, chewing gum in class, getting caught too many times chewing gum – kids are now being suspended for; they’re being expelled for, and they end up in front of a judge and that get’s them a criminal record. And they end up on lockdown. We’re criminalizing our kids and its’ all because of this notion of ‘zero tolerance.’ This idea of ‘zero tolerance’ does not work,” said Smiley.

HAPPY 50th BIRTHDAY GIDEON V. WAINWRIGHT – THE RIGHT TO AN ATTORNEY

We have all heard the text of the Miranda warning recited in films and on episodic TV shows at least a zillion times:

You have the right to remain silent.
Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.
You have the right to an attorney.
If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.

What most of us don’t know or don’t remember is the fact that the last line—the thing about a lawyer being provided for those who can’t afford one—is a right that is only half a century old.

Monday, March 18, marks the 50th anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Gideon v. Wainwright, which guarantees the right to counsel for criminal defendants in state courts who
cannot afford an attorney.

But, despite this remarkable Supreme Court decision that changed American legal history, and despite the hard work of many dedicated public defenders, the system, say experts, is close to broken, with overloaded public defenders often able to spend little more than 3 hours on a clients entire case.

The AP’s Mark Sherman has a story on the topic. Here’s a clip:

….So that was the promise of Gideon — that a competent lawyer for the defense would stand on an equal footing with prosecutors, and that justice would prevail, at least in theory.

A half-century later, there are parts of the country where “it is better to be rich and guilty than poor and innocent,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a former prosecutor. Leahy said court-appointed lawyers often are underpaid and can be “inexperienced, inept, uninterested or worse.”

Regardless of guilt or innocence, few of those accused of crimes are rich, while 80 percent say they are too poor to afford a lawyer.

People who work in the criminal justice system have become numb to the problems, creating a culture of low expectations, said Jonathan Rapping, a veteran public defender who has worked in Washington, D.C., Atlanta and New Orleans.

Rapping remembers walking into a courtroom in New Orleans for the first time for a client’s initial appearance before a judge. Several defendants in jump suits were shackled together in one part of the courtroom. The judge moved briskly through charges against each of the men, with a lawyer speaking up for each one.

Then he called a name and there was no lawyer present. The defendant piped up. “The guy said he hadn’t seen a lawyer since he was locked up 70 days ago. And no one in the courtroom was shocked. No one was surprised,” Rapping said.

A new award-winning documentary called “Gideon’s Army” gives a visceral feeling for the problem, and the idealism of some of the young public defenders who are trying to make a difference, despite the odds.

GIRLS & BOYS ARE DIFFERENT—SO WHY DO WE PRETEND OTHERWISE WHEN WE LOCK THEM UP?

The juvenile justice system was—and in most ways still is—-designed for boys. And that’s a problem.

Yes, boys greatly outnumber girls in the justice system but girls’ numbers have been growing. Between 1991 and 2003, girls’ detentions rose by 98 percent, compared to a 29 percent increase in boys’
detentions.

More recently, as the number of juvenile arrests has dropped in the U.S., the drop is far bigger for boys than for girls. (In 2010, boys’ arrests had decreased by 26.5 percent since 2001, while girls’ arrests had decreased by only 15.5 percent.)

Girls come into detention facilities for different reasons and with different needs from those of their male counterparts, and yet they are often treated with a cookie cutter sameness.

For instance, 19 percent of boys in juvenile detention facilities had tried to commit suicide, while 44 percent of girls had.

In terms of physical abuse, the split was 22 percent boys, 42 percent girls.

And 8 percent of boys admitted to being sexually abused; 35 percent of girls had been sexually abused.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to differences—and the needs they suggest.

The Sunday LA Times has a story by Anna Gorman on the subject. And it is an important topic that we’ll continue to return to over the next year.

Here’s a clip from Gorman’s report:

Latrice lifts the sleeve of her gray sweatshirt to reveal small, dark lines — scars from slicing her forearm over and over to drown out pain from years of sexual abuse. She says she was an alcoholic, dropped out of school in the eighth grade and got pregnant at 16.

Now 18, she is in Los Angeles County’s juvenile justice system because she violated probation. Latrice says she has been locked up more than 20 times in four years. Petite and talkative, she has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and takes antidepressants.

Her health issues — and those of about 9,400 girls in juvenile detention centers around the nation — are serious and complex. Many of the girls don’t have regular doctors, so their physical and emotional problems often go undiagnosed and untreated. That continues when they enter a system that was designed for boys and has been slow to adapt to girls.

“Their health needs are different; they are more severe and more complicated than boys’,” said Catherine Gallagher, a George Mason University professor and an expert in juvenile justice. “They come in underserved…. They remain underserved.”

More than one-third of girls in custody nationwide have a history of sexual abuse, compared with 8% of boys. Girls also have had more physical abuse, suicide attempts and drug-related problems, according to the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Few juvenile justice centers have shown they meet minimum healthcare standards, and girls are less likely than boys to get the care they need.

Both the Atlantic Monthly and NPR did good stories —both by reporter Jenny Gold—on the needs of girls that are worth reading and/or listening.

Here, also is one of the studies from the Department of Justice with some of the facts and figures.

SHERIFF LEE BACA AGAIN PROPOSES NEARLY $1 NEW BILLION JAIL

Christina Villacorte of the Daily News has the story:

With the inmate population steadily increasing, Sheriff Lee Baca will ask the Board of Supervisors Tuesday to study replacing the dilapidated and violence-plagued Men’s Central Jail with a $932.8-million high-tech facility, and consider relying more on electronic monitoring devices and other alternatives to incarceration.

The proposal at this stage is to hire a contractor to prepare a conceptual design and environmental impact review.

In a letter to the board, Baca and county chief executive officer William Fujioka said it was “critical” to begin the process of replacing the aging MCJ with a more efficient facility that would hold high-security and medical inmates.

The proposed new jail would be built on the site of the half-century-old MCJ in downtown Los Angeles. It is envisioned to house up to 3,500 high-security and medical inmates in two towers.

Baca and County CEO are also scheduled to ask for $22 million in order to restore adequate patrols in the county’s unincorporated areas. (So what happened to that independent audit that was going to be done on the department’s budget to find out where the money was going. Here’s that story—also from Villacorte at the DN.

DO GOOD, AVOID EVIL

On Wednesday afternoon, the Chief of LA County Probation, Jerry Powers, sent out a short and pithy “Honesty Directive” to all of the department’s 6100 employees. It said, in essence that lying and stealing would not be tolerated.

Now, under ordinary circumstances, one would assume such strictures would be implicit. But inside the nation’s largest probation department matters are still not ordinary. Thus Powers found that, for a certain percentage of his staff, it was better to state this sort of thing outright.

Since he took over as head of the troubled department in December 2011, in addition to grappling with the new responsibilities brought on by AB 109, Powers has been focusing his reform efforts on some of the basics. He’s hired some fresh, new people at the top of his command staff, and has been cooperating with other law enforcement agencies to arrest law-breaking employees—totaling around 50 staff arrests, at last count. Most recently, Powers has gotten permission from the Board of Supervisors to hire some more Internal Affairs investigators and lawyers, to make sure that allegations of staff misconduct are investigated quickly and efficiently. (In past years, cases were allowed to languish uninvestigated, in frightening numbers.)

And now there’s the directive.

Here are its high points

“The mission of the Probation Department can only be carried out with the expectation of honesty from all employees at all levels….”

All dishonest acts committed during the course of employment will be considered a violation of this policy.

The following are some examples of some situations where, if an employee is dishonest, discipline may be warranted. (This list is not intended to be exhaustive.)

*Falsification of time records
*Written, oral, or electronic communications
*Responses to questions during investigations and or inquiries. Deliberate omission of relevant information will also be considered to be dishonesty
*Leave requests (abusing leave policies to obtain time off while not ill or injured)
*Pilfering department property for personal use (regardless of the value)
*Using departmental funds or equipment, such as vehicles, for unauthorized personal use.

The directive makes clear that failure to follow the aforementioned rules will result in discipline, including possibly termination.

And, just so there’s no misunderstanding, employees are going to be required to sign the thing in order to acknowledge that they’ve read it.

HONESTY, PART DEUX

This isn’t Powers’ first go round with the honesty issue.

In late November of last year, Powers sent out a message to all department members, this one in video form, explaining that the directive was coming and why:

“There appears to be a small fraction of our workforce that doesn’t feel that honesty is an essential trait of being a peace officer or working for a law enforcement agency,” Powers said in the video. “We’ve had too many instances where staff have filed fraudulent reports. They’ve been dishonest in reporting whether it’s use of force, time card fraud, workman’s comp issues. Please understand that honesty is at the core of what we do. If we’re not seen as an honest agency, if we’re not seen as an honest officer we can’t do the job that we’re required to do to keep these communities safe and the citizens safe.

THE RETURN OF THE LEMONS

After the directive was released on Wednesday, I spoke to Powers and asked him why such an obvious sounding set of instructions was needed. He laughed momentarily at the question—then turned serious.

“We found we hadn’t communicated very precisely on some of these issues.”

For instance, Powers said, it wasn’t clearly understood that, when someone made a verbal or written report on misbehavior by another employee, that one was obligated to be rigorously truthful. Staff tended to cover for one another.

“So what would happen,” he said, “is that we’d terminate an employee for wrongdoing, and our terminations would be overturned by the civil service commission because of inaccuracies on the part of the witnesses.”

So he was putting everyone on notice that, in the future, lying about one’s actions—or about the actions of a fellow employee—would not be tolerated.

Powers paused. “See, I don’t want to terminate a bad employee and then have to take them back because I haven’t communicated to everyone what our expectations are.”

He gave an example.

“A kid in our of our facilities will say, ‘A staff member beat me up.’ But then four staff members, three of them witnesses, will tell investigators that nothing happened, or that the kid was resistant and force was needed. But then when each of the four staffers are isolated, typically one will crack and say, ‘Here’s really what happened.’” And suddenly it becomes evident that the kid was telling the truth.

“But then the civil services panel will say, ‘Well, since the witnesses changed their stories, we don’t know which time they were telling the truth.’

“I understand we need that process when we’re talking about taking someone’s career away,” Powers said. “But honesty should be foremost in your activities. I want us to be seen as leaders in the field. But for that to happen, we need to be a more professional organization.”

UNION BLUES

The main union representing probation officers, AFSCME Local 685, was reportedly part of the process of hammering out the exact wording of the directive and, according to probation department spokesperson, Carol Lin, the union signed off on it.

However, when asked for a comment on the matter on Wednesday by KPCC’s Rina Palta, the union issued the following statement:

“The Department’s Honesty Directive is, almost entirely, a reiteration of existing policies and is more likely to generate employee complaints about management actions than net any new employee discipline,” the union said. “It is another example of current management that is overly focused on the small number of employees with conduct issues, while ignoring the overwhelming number of rank and file Probation Officers who work hard every day to provide vital probationary services and protect the public’s interests essentially without management’s assistance.”

One can certainly understand that the decent people in the department who are simply trying to do their jobs are tired of hearing about those who aren’t.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happens when a ghastly amount of misconduct has, for years, been allowed to flourish inside a large public agency, as has been the case with LA County Probation. It’s rough on the good people.

(For a few of the most recent accounts of flourishing wrongdoing, check reports here and here and here.)

Thus it would seem, simply from a practical perspective, that the union’s anger would be better served aimed at the probation employees who are still engaged in lying, stealing, kid-slugging, and so on, rather than at the guy who’s trying to put a stop to it.

HOUSECLEANING AND HIRING

Powers reiterated that, in order to build a good department, there will need to be some painful housecleaning—which will also include tightening up the hiring standards, including thorough background checks, when taking on new employees.

“There are tons of people in LA County with Master’s degrees who really want these jobs, because they genuinely want to do this work.” When probation next hires, they can cherry pick, he said.

“Look,” Powers said finally, “If everybody’s just honest and takes care of business, then we can have a great department. This is all just part of the process.”

Here’s a copy of the Honesty Directive if you want to read the text for yourself.

EDITOR’S NOTE: THERE’S NOT REALLY ANY NEWSWORTHY REASON FOR POSTING THE VIDEO ABOVE OF SHERIFF LEE BACA ON BLACK BELT TV. WE JUST KINDA LIKED IT.)

THE CONSERVATIVE CASE AGAINST MORE PRISONS

The latest issue of The American Conservative has an interesting article by Vikrant Reddy and Marc Levin about how it is conservatives who are leading the charge against lowering America’s prison populations.

Leading the charge might be an overstatement. But conservative groups are having an important and measurable effect on policy, where all but the most liberal of democrats are lagging behind.

The reform of 3-Strikes in California simply would not have passed had it not been for the help of some of the conservatives from the Right on Crime movement.

Plus Right on Crime and related conservative groups like Prison Fellowship Ministries are pushing for reforms of disastrous zero tolerance policies in schools, and in the realm of juvenile justice.

In any case, here are a couple of clips from TAC’s story.

Since the 1980s, the United States has built prisons at a furious pace, and America now has the highest incarceration rate in the developed world. 716 out of every 100,000 Americans are behind bars. By comparison, in England and Wales, only 149 out of every 100,000 people are incarcerated. In Australia—famously founded as a prison colony—the number is 130. In Canada, the number is 114.

Prisons, of course, are necessary. In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne observed that “The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil… as the site of a prison.” As long as there are people, there will be conflict and crime, and there will be prisons. Prisons, however, are not a source of pride. An unusually high number of prison cells signals a society with too much crime, too much punishment, or both.

There are other ways to hold offenders—particularly nonviolent ones—accountable. These alternatives when properly implemented can lead to greater public safety and increase the likelihood that victims of crime will receive restitution. The alternatives are also less costly. Prisons are expensive (in some states, the cost of incarcerating an inmate for one year approaches $60,000), and just as policymakers should scrutinize government expenditures on social programs and demand accountability, they should do the same when it comes to prison spending. None of this means making excuses for criminal behavior; it simply means “thinking outside the cell” when it comes to punishment and accountability.

[SNIP]

Between 1992 and 2011, the U.S. prison population increased by nearly 73 percent. To the extent that the recent rise in incarceration incapacitated violent offenders, it was valuable. For nonviolent offenders who are not career criminals, however, incarceration can be counterproductive. As is sometimes said, prisons are graduate schools for crime. This is more than apparent in numerous states where recidivism rates exceed 60 percent.

Unnecessary incarceration of nonviolent, low-level offenders also destroys families. Mitch Pearlstein at Minnesota’s Center of the American Experiment has pointed out that incarcerated men “are less attractive marriage partners, not just because they may be incarcerated, but because rap sheets are not conducive to good-paying, family-supporting jobs.” It is common sense that neighborhoods suffering from high incarceration rates also suffer a plague of single-parent homes and troubled children.

This, in turn, leads to dysfunctional communities that are mistrustful of law enforcement. Most American children are taught that they may always ask the police for help. In some American neighborhoods, however, children are taught never to engage with the police.

For this—high recidivism rates, ravaged families, and maladjusted neighborhoods—Americans pay dearly. In 2011, Americans spent over $63 billion on corrections, a 300 percent increase since 1980. Prisons are the second-fastest growing component of state budgets, trailing only Medicaid….

Read more here.

YES, THERE HAVE BEEN SOME ANECDOTAL PROBLEMS WITH REALIGNMENT, BUT THE PROBLEMS WE’D HAVE HAD WITHOUT COULD HAVE BEEN FAR WORSE

I realize we’re starting to get boring on this topic. But a refreshingly sane editorial in the Ventura County Star, gave us an opportunity to harp on this issue that has been dreadfully reported by many journalists around the state (with some notable exceptions, like the LA Times, which has been great).

Here’s a clip from the VC Star Op Ed by Thomas Elias:

As crime statistics for 2012 gradually filter in from around the state, gripes about the 15-month-old prison realignment program have begun rising in newspaper headlines and talk show airwaves.

There are two major complaints: One is that crime rose as realignment cut the inmate populace by more than 24,000.

The other is that some criminals are being released earlier than before the program began in October 2011, in part because local jails in a few counties are overcrowded.

A typical gripe comes from Tyler Izen, president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the state’s largest police union. “Our members are terribly concerned that we are allowing people out of prisons who are likely to recommit crimes and victimize the people of our city,” he said in a telephone interview.

He claimed probation departments have lost track of some former prisoners, but could offer no specific examples. “All I have is anecdotal information,” he conceded.

It turns out that only one of those big gripes has any proven merit…

Read the rest here.

SOME FINE-TUNING OF REALIGNMENT LIKELY TO COME BEFORE THE STATE LEGISLATURE

California legislators are introducing a cluster of bills, each of which would fine tune some part of the realignment structure put into place by California’s massive AB109.

The Capital View reports:

Democratic Assembly members Susan Talamantes Eggman, of Stockton, and Ken Cooley, of Rancho Cordova, introduced Assembly Bill 601 to allow parole violators to be returned to state prison for up to one year.

AB 2, authored by Assemblyman Mike Morrell, R-Rancho Cucamonga, would return sex offenders who violate their parole back to prison “to serve any sentence ordered for that violation.”

Sen. Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, earlier proposed Senate Bill 57, which would make removal of a GPS monitoring device an additional crime requiring a prison sentence of 16 months, two years or three years

WitnessLA agrees that some fine tuning and closing of certain loopholes is needed, but the devil will be in the details. What we do not want to see is an emotional rush to return to the bad old days that produced overcrowded prisons with little or no positive effect on public safety.

PREDICTIVE POLICING: THE PROS AND CONS OF USING ALGORITHMS TO DRIVE PROACTIVE COP WORK

The LAPD has been running a pilot program of a strategy called predictive policing that uses a combination of updated crime statistics, technology and algorithms to predict areas ripe for crime so that police can be ready and move in to prevent crime and/or make arrests in the moment rather than trying to solve the crimes afterward.

The program, known as PredPro, has reportedly been used so successfully in the LAPD;s Foothill Division that now other places like Santa Cruz and, more recently Seattle have signed up as a way to police smarter in an era of budget cutting.

An intriguing article in the Gardian by columnist/author Evgany Morzov cautions that, while the program seems very promising now, targeting crime before it happens can be a mighty slippery slope.

Here’s a clip from the close of his story:

The promise of predictive policing might be real, but so are its dangers. The solutionist impulse needs to be restrained. Police need to subject their algorithms to external scrutiny and address their biases. Social networking sites need to establish clear standards for how much predictive self-policing they’ll actually do and how far they will go in profiling their users and sharing this data with police. While Facebook might be more effective than police in predicting crime, it cannot be allowed to take on these policing functions without also adhering to the same rules and regulations that spell out what police can and cannot do in a democracy. We cannot circumvent legal procedures and subvert democratic norms in the name of efficiency alone.

And, of course, it bears remembering that it was those Masters of the Algorithmic Universe—the Wall Street genius “quants”—who, to a great degree brought us the 2008. So, yeah, full speed ahead, but with ethics intact, and a good hold on common sense and caution.

FOUR—NOT FIVE—SUPERVISORS WRITE A LETTER

Okay, when we last left the cheery topic of LA County Probation, the county’s probation-chief-eating union heads, and the agency’s head guy, Chief Jerry Powers, were engaging in a spitting match via the medium of dueling letters to the board of supervisors, all of which we covered here.

Now WitnessLA has acquired a brand new letter that the Supes have written back to the unions telling them, in essence, to get a grip and cooperate with Chief Powers.

However, while four of the Supervisors signed the letter, Mark Ridley-Scott did not. But we’ll get to that part of the story in a minute.

(Here’s a copy of the letter: Letter from Supervisors to Unions )

AGAIN, THE BACK STORY

To refresh your memories about the cause of the spitting match: Powers was complaining to the board at a Supes’ meeting last month, that—due to restrictions imposed by existing contracts with the four probation workers’ unions—-he couldn’t hire the needed number of probation officers to fill 248 still-open slots that must be filled to handle the additional parolees who, because to the provisions of AB109—AKA realignment—are daily landing on the County’s probation case loads for supervision, rather than in the care of state parole.

In response to Powers’ public complaints, the unions wrote a rather nasty letter to the Supes in which they expressed their “collective outrage,” and accused Powers of causing “a public safety crisis” to “circumvent our union contracts.’ Powers complaints were nonsense, the union people said (although their language was not anywhere near as friendly as mine). There were plenty of trained and experienced probation employees ready and willing to be promoted into those AB109 positions.

There is reportedly only one problem with that POV: with a few exceptions, most of those who would be appropriate—from a civil service perspective—for those promotions, are working in the county’s deeply troubled juvenile probation camps, which are understaffed to begin with, and assuredly cannot afford to lose any trained and competent personnel.

THE NOT-SO-FAR-AWAY BAD OLD DAYS

It’s important to recall that LA County’s probation camps are a bare three years away from the scandal-a-week days when they had personnel written about in the LA Times for goading kids into engaging in “gladiator fights’— a sort of LA County juvenile probation Fight Club. AND during that same 2010 period another 18 staffers were charged, according to the Office of Independent Review’s Michael Gennaco, with crimes including cruelty to a child, sex with a minor, prostitution, assault with a deadly weapon, resisting an officer and battery. (Sadly, I have only named a few of the that year’s horrors.)

While the camps and the halls have improved at least marginally since then, according to the report by federal monitors last fall, there is a depressingly long way to go. To be specific, the feds report that the camps still have staff that can’t manage to stop slamming kids against walls, making young probationers assume stress positions as punishment, can’t keep kids reasonably safe from aggressively pounding each other, and can’t keep adequate track of what kid is being given what medication and has received what mental health services.

In our own digging around, we’ve heard even worse reports of staff misconduct.

Yet, as we said, it’s better than it was. Thus the camps cannot afford to have any of their frail progress threatened.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Please allow me to make it clear—as always—that there are many wonderful, dedicated, honorable, talented people who work for LA County probation, people who give way more than they are asked to do on a daily basis. Some are people I know personally. But it is not their good work that is at issue here.)

THE STAFFING ISSUE

Of course, the staffing issue wouldn’t be a problem if Powers could replace some of those staffers promoted out of the youth camps and into the AB109 positions with nice bright-eyed and bushy-tailed applicants with master’s degrees and an affinity for kids—even law-breaking kids. That’s what Santa Clara County Probation does to staff their much lauded juvenile facility, the James Ranch (where kids are helped, rather than slammed against walls). But, according to union rules, the positions must only be filled from within, usually by the next people in the food chain, who are, by definition, less experienced and less trained, and who may or may not have a talent for working with youth.

To add to it all, as we mentioned before, the camps are already understaffed—a problem caused, in part, by the fact that an insane number of those working for probation are not actually….you know….working. According to last year’s report on the agency by the Office of Independent review, 400 of the agency’s 5,630 employees are on some type of medical leave, “Another 353 employees are … on modified duty.” I’ll do the math for you. That means more than 13 percent of Probation’s workforce are not, at least at the count last year, on the job full time—or at all.

THE BOARD WADES IN

To get past this depressing, multi-directional logjam, Powers would like to have the option of hiring some people for the AB 109 positions from the outside—like say laid off parole officers. The unions replied that hell will freeze over first, or words to that affect. Powers then responded by writing his own outraged letter to the Supervisors.

Union supporters further reacted by, behind closed, accusing Powers of being a union busting carpetbagger who’s made no effort to get along with the collective bargaining units, has no commitment to LA, and only took the job to up his retirement rate.

At the same time, Powers supporters called the union leaders power-hungry thugs who make running a functional department all but impossible.

And so, finally, the board waded into this melee with its letter, which was at least some kind of positive move.

“The Board wanted and needed to make it clear that if the union had a beef it was with the Board and not with Jerry Powers,” Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky wrote to me in an email. “We brought Jerry in to turn this very troubled department around, and he is doing exactly what the Board has asked him to do. The Board majority is committed to fixing the Department from within through assertive and urgent reform, but to be successful, the department head must have the authority to make the necessary changes.”

Well, yes. It stands to reason that someone has to hold the tiller of the ship; otherwise it will simply continue to run aground.

As we’ve observed earlier, Powers— while frankly less visionary in his outlook than we would like) —seems, at least, determined to clean up the place and make it behave with a modicum of professionalism. For instance, last year Powers got rid of some of the worst of the agency’s supply of bad apples, resulting in the arrest of around 40 department employees this year—which was more than either of the two previous administrations managed to do. (Yes, you read right: 40 employees arrested.)

SO WHY NOT SIGN THE LETTER?

Since the board’s letter to the union heads seemed like a positive move in the face of a bad situation, I asked Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas why he’d chosen not to sign it.

I knew that Ridley-Thomas is considered, by his critics, to be perhaps too beholden to the unions, which contributed heavily to his election campaign, and thus be reluctant to criticize them. On the other hand, no other supervisor’s office has been more active in pushing for intelligent reform in the county’s juvenile probation facilities. Moreover, he has repeatedly called for the Department of Justice to come in and slap probation with a federal consent decree, which would, by definition, trump a host of union rules and objections.

“I’m concerned that a battle between labor and management portents a set of problems I hope we can avoid,” he said when I broached the question. “I think a more constructive role for the board is to challenge both the Chief Probation Officer and the bargaining units to work out a way to work together for the good of the youngsters in those camps and halls. To pick one side over the other does not facilitate consensus.”

Ridley-Thomas also said that he believes a first step would be to look for a clear statement of mission, and a set of “deliverables” from Powers—specifically having to do with a plan to reduce recidivism among the AB109 adult probationers, and to articulate “a mission that is fundamentally tied to rehabilitation” regarding the juvenile facilities.

“Both sides have to get back to a mission that they can agree upon before we can move forward. And they both have a obligation to find a way to work together. To me, nothing else is acceptable.”

SO WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE US?

We at WitnessLA are definitely for some kind of aspirational goal setting at LA County Probation. Otherwise it seems like we’re left solely with a law enforcement agency, and not a particularly interesting law enforcement agency, but one whose highest calling is to prevent further crimes and/or misbehavior—by either its probationers or, frankly, its staff.

So where are we, exactly? Will the supes letter promote forward movement by giving Chief Powers the backing he needs to lead the department out of its newest morass, as Zev Yaroslavsky hopes? Or will it simply further the fight, as Ridley-Thomas fears?

And how do we get Powers and company to come up with some kind of achievable 10-point plan—or whatever—that places rehabilitation, and lowering recidivism rates at the top of the list of goals. You know, where are our “deliverables?”

THESE AND OTHER QUESTIONS REMAIN

So stay tuned.

AND IN OTHER NEWS….LASD UNDERSHERIFF PAUL TANAKA SAYS THE ENTIRELY WEIRD STORY OF CAMBODIA-SHIPPED BULLET-PROOF VESTS IS MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

Sandy Mazza at the Daily News has the story. Here’s a clip:

A Los Angeles County supervisor is seeking a “rigorous” re-examination of a decade-old issue in which the city of Gardena acted as an intermediary for the Sheriff’s Department to sell ballistic vests to Cambodia.

The sale was scrutinized at least twice in the past 10 years because it was so unusual but, despite appearing convoluted, nothing illegal or improper was found.

This week, after recent news reports again questioned the transaction, Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas called for another audit of the purchase.

Former Sheriff’s Department Assistant Sheriff Larry Waldie negotiated the sale, according to Undersheriff Paul Tanaka, who is the current mayor of Gardena.

At the time, Cambodia was rebuilding its country and police force following Khmer Rouge communist party rule, Tanaka said. The Cambodian foreign consulate asked Waldie if it could purchase 473 ballistic vests that the department would not use because they were either expired or used, he said.

Tanaka was in his second year as a Gardena city councilman and was also the sheriff’s chief of administrative services. Waldie asked for his help because he didn’t believe Los Angeles County could sell directly to a foreign country, he said.

FORMER STATE SENATOR GLORIA ROMERO SAYS OPEN UP POLICE DISCIPLINE RECORDS

Romero’s Op-Ed ran in the OC Register. Here’s how it opens.

Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck channeled a significant public policy implication from Christopher Dorner’s murderous rampage when he announced he would reopen the investigation into Dorner’s 2009 firing from LAPD. Beck’s words were haunting: “I hear the ghosts of the past of the Los Angeles Police Department. I hear that people think that maybe there is something to what he says, and I want to put that to rest.”

To do that will mean that the Legislature must revisit the damaging 2006 California Supreme Court decision in Copley Press Inc. v. Superior Court of San Diego. On a technicality, the court all but cemented secretive police operations. Ultimately, information on misconduct under color of authority – and any resulting discipline – must be a matter of public record.

I know this issue firsthand. In 2007 I introduced Senate Bill 1019, written to rectify the harm of the Copley decision and restore public access to information, which had been California’s practice for decades.

The Copley Press, then the publisher of the San Diego Union-Tribune, sued over the decision of the San Diego County Civil Service Commission to close the hearing of a county sheriff’s deputy appealing a termination notice. The commission also refused to explain why the deputy was fired.

After the Copley decision, police discipline records throughout California that had previously been open to the public, including LAPD boards of rights hearings, were sealed. Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office bowed to the political pressure of the police lobby and mandated full closure of hearings. Los Angeles was left with, for all intents and purposes, a police force that dealt with its own members in secret.

FROM JUVENILE PRISON TO JUVENILE JUSTICE LAWYER

This story by Meredith May in the San Francisco Chronicle is a redemptive delight.

A group of incarcerated teenage boys at the O.H. Close Youth Correctional Facility in Stockton slouch in plastic orange chairs, arms crossed, scowling at their tie-clad visitor, whose lecture will eat into their TV time.

Francis “Frankie” Guzman, a 32-year-old lawyer and recipient of a prestigious Soros Justice Fellowship to advocate for juvenile justice, gets right to the point.

“How many of you read ‘Lord of the Flies’? It’s like that in here, right? But which one of you is leading? Do you really want to follow that guy?”

Guzman speaks like he knows what he’s talking about, and the boys, ages 14 to 17, take notice. There’s a perceptible shift as they sit up a little straighter.

Guzman knows exactly what it’s like to wear khaki pants every day and sleep in a cell. When he was 15, he and a friend stole a car and robbed a liquor store at gunpoint in Southern California, resulting in six years behind bars inside the California Youth Authority.

It was the culmination of a childhood defined by tragedy in East Oxnard, an enclave of farmworkers and day laborers where gangs, family and community had blended together over the generations, blurring the lines between loyalty to the street and to the self.

“Kids don’t make smart decisions,” Guzman said. “But ultimately, you are not the worst thing you have done. The weakest thing I did made me the strongest person I am today.”

Read on!

AN INSANE INCIDENT WITH A TEN-YEAR OLD AND A SQUIRT GUN

Donna St. George at the Washington Post has the story of the 10-year-old arrested for his toy gun on the school bus.

MIDDLE SCHOOL BOOBIES BRACELET CASE GETS A SECOND HEARING BY COURT OF APPEALS

We are very pleased to note that the Boobies Bracelet case gets another hearing Wednesday! This time by the entire 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals.

Maybe the court, like me, simply is amused by writing it: (Boobies Bracelet, Boobies Bracelet, Boobies Bracelet. Ahem, sorry.) Nah. More likely, the court is concerned with the First Amendement issues the case represents.

Anyway, rather than having me explain the case, read the story for yourself here at The Daily Call with a story by Peter Hall.

EDITOR’S NOTE: WitnessLA is taking Monday off. We’ll be back to our regular reporting tomorrow.

In the meantime, we want to strongly recommend to you a completely extraordinary 2-part story produced by the public radio show, This American Life.

This 2-part series takes a look at the violence affecting Harper High School in Chicago where, during the last school year, 29 current and recent Harper students were shot. Twenty-one of those kids were wounded. Eight of them eight died.

“Watching this,” said the program’s host, Ira Glass, “it’s hard not to think that if you grafted these facts on to another high school, in a wealthier place, maybe a suburb…In other places that would be national news, right? We would all know the name of that school.”

But most of us have never heard of Harper.. Nor do we hear much about a similar kind of everyday violence that goes on in certain neighborhoods in Los Angeles. When we do hear about a shooting, it’s often labeled “gang-related,” the unstated implication being that the victim must have somehow deserved it, that what goes around comes around—unless, of course, the victim is specifically designated “innocent.”

This story of Harper High School drills down past those careless assumptions.

“For everything we’ve all heard about children and gun violence,” says Glass, “there are basic things we don’t hear so much about. Like what it’s like to live in neighborhoods that have to cope with so much bloodshed. This is a school that knows this problem in a way that most of us around the country don’t.”

The administrators at Harper (who seem, by the way, like unusually caring and level-headed educators) gave TAL’s three reporters remarkable access for a full semester, five months. When violence struck—as it does with some regularity—the reporters recorded the staff as they jumped into action. They recorded private and painfully difficult meetings with families and students.

The result is one of the most affecting and accurate pieces of journalism I’ve run across in a very long time.

I’ll have more to say after Part 2. But for now, just listen.

Back tomorrow with our regularly scheduled programming.