Martin Berg at the LA Daily Journal wrote a very good column about the unconscionable idiocy that is going on at the LA County Department of Probation. Since the Daily Journal is hidden behind a firewall, I’ve reprinted the whole thing below.

But first, a little back story.

Until this past February 13—three weeks ago—the LA’s Department of Probation was charging families of lawbreaking kids for their children and/or teenager’s stays in juvenile hall or probation camp—as much as $23.63 dollars for each day in juvie ($750 each month), and $11.94 for each day they spent in camp.

Cool, the hard core among you might be saying. Let’s hold parents responsible for the misdeeds of their offspring.

Yes, well. The one teensy problem about this swell notion is that the majoriy of the parents charged were poor or working class with nothing to spare, so for many, the fees were either deeply burdonsome, or not affordable at all.

Supposedly the parents who couldn’t afford what usually amounted to thousands of dollars in bills could appeal the charges. But for some reason the appeals rarely seemed to work.

As a result, working single mothers were having their wages garnished, families were losing homes or on the verge of doing so, a homeless mother got billed while in a shelter, grandparents on fixed incomes who had taken in children out of love and kindness, were being hounded for high payments.

Moreover probation was spending an astonishing amount of money hiring people to chase after slow-paying parents (and grandparents, and foster parents).

Around a year ago, the Youth Justice Coalition began hearing the fees-for-kid-lock-up horror stories and looked into the matter. What they found was worse than they had imagined. So, together with some other nonprofits like Human Rights Watch, YJC’s Kim McGill went to see Probation Chief Robert Taylor to find out if he would set things right.

Gosh! Bummer! Nothing I can do, said Taylor. ( Or words to that effect.)

(A SIDE NOTE: Since Probation Officer Mary Ridgway’s death I’ve happened to talk to a lot of POs who’ve told me they uniformly hate this parent dunning policy. Just so you know, the rank-and-file should in no way be held responsible for management’s utter stupidity.)

After failing with Taylor, YJC and company next contacted a very, very talented reporter at the LA Times named Molly Hennessy-Fiske, who started looking into the issue. A series of excellent articles resulted, which may be found here and here and here.

With the entrance of the Times on the scene, all of a sudden Chief Taylor found— Mon Dieu! Quelle surprise!—-he could do something after all—especially after the YJC also went to the County Board of Supervisors, who forced Probation’s hand.

Thus on February 13, Chief Taylor declared a moratorium on the payments until things could be sorted out.

Only one problem: a lot of people didn’t know about the moratorium because Probation didn’t bother to tell them. They just kept asking for the back money.

Which brings us to our story. Take it away, Marty.

EARTH TO L.A. COUNTY: GET A CLUE

Leave it to Los Angeles County bureaucrats to turn a well-intentioned state law holding parents financially accountable for their kids’ bad deeds into a vicious attack on beleaguered foster parents.

Vicious, and really stupid.

Vicious because county lawyers have gone after people they should have known didn’t have the ability to pay, sometimes putting liens on their homes when parents couldn’t come up with the money.

Stupid because the county lawyers throw good money after bad, in one case paying an outside law firm $13,000 to try to collect $1,000 from a grandmother who became guardian of her daughter’s four children – even after the county Board of Supervisors had declared a moratorium on the collections.

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Activists take lead roles to reopen Burke’s failed monument

I long ago gave up any hope that Yvonne Burke would be indicted for her failure to stop the dying and maiming that eventually forced King-Drew Medical Center to close in 2007. Every sitting member of the county board of supervisors, who ignored the management problems festering for a decade or more, deserve punishment, too.

To heal their souls, Burke and her accomplices should mark a calendar with the birthdays of those who needlessly died under their bungled leadership. One birthday is coming up. On Feb. 1, Edith Isabel Rodriguez may have turned 45 had the hospital staff heeded her pleas and those of her boyfriend. She writhed in pain on the floor of the ER waiting room for 45 minutes before dying of a ruptured bowel. Let the dozens of birthdays marked on the supervisors’ calendars inspire them to quickly act to reopen the hospital.

One woman already up for the fight to reopen the South L.A. hospital is Sylvia Drew Ivie, the daughter of Charles Drew, the physician for whom the hospital was named. A graduate of Howard University School of Law, Drew Ivie is the chief of staff for County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, who replaced the disgraced Burke.

A profile of Drew Ivie, written by a former colleague of mine, Evan George, appears in today’s Daily Journal, a legal newspaper in Los Angeles. (Evan covers healthcare and law better than anyone in town. And yes, his is the first piece written about Drew Ivie by any major media in Los Angeles.)

Drew Ivie worked in the Carter Administration’s U.S. Office for Civil Rights and served briefly as a deputy L.A. city attorney in the 1970s and was most recently the executive director To Help Everyone Clinic in South L.A. She cut back on her time there to lead the community’s losing struggle to keep the hospital open.

Here are a few excerpts from Evan’s story. (Sorry, no link. The paper’s online and print editions are paid-subscription only.)

Her work with the clinic tapered off by 2005, when the largest cloud hanging over South Los Angeles became its once celebrated hospital and the Charles Drew University Medical Center that trained its doctors. As losing federal funding over safety concerns grew likely, Drew Ivie served as project director of the Steering Committee on the Future of the King/Drew Medical Center. The group advised supervisors on how to clean up the hospital’s act.
When the supervisors pulled the plug on the hospital, Drew Ivie said, she was stunned. “We really didn’t think that would be permitted to happen by all of the people who understood how important it was to the community,” she said. She said she blamed failed governance and poor communication between the medical staff and county leaders.
Now, her boss is the one county official most bent on reopening the decrepit facility within two years.
Many in county government have interpreted Drew Ivie’s appointment as a shake-up to try to overcome crippling bureaucratic failures. Last week, Ridley-Thomas also announced his pick of attorney Yolanda Vera as his health deputy. Vera, a longtime health care advocate who helped sue the county over hospital bed cuts years ago, said she has worked closely with Drew Ivie in the past.

Earlier in the story, Evan describes the depth of her motivations:

She also comes to the fight saddled with heavy emotional ties to the issue.
A daughter of the physician for whom the teaching hospital was partially named, she made saving the sinking institution a personal battle and a family obligation. That the hospital finally shuttered within weeks of her losing her own husband to a brain tumor made the tragedy that much more crippling. Friends say the loss brought Drew Ivie to a low point in her life that left her treading water. They also said they had no doubt she eventually would charge back into the fray.
“Sylvia is somebody, unlike some politicians, who actually understands her mistakes and learns from them,” said Stan Price, a former director of the National Health Law Program who has worked with her for decades. “She knows what went wrong and why she wasn’t successful.”

Let’s hope all of the county supervisors are listening to Sylvia Drew Ivie and Yolanda Vera as they reflect on the many darkened days on their birthday calendars.

There was a time when it seemed that So Cal’s best bet for a forward thinking and comprehensive gang program would be LA County, which planned to completely revamp its existing $105 million gang program—while the City Council and the mayor’s office seemed to do little more than shoot at each other rather than coming up with a coherent strategy to calm the violence in the streets.

But now the city seems to be moving (at least vaguely), even if slowly, in a single direction. Yet the county has done……Zero. Zip. Nada.

Bill Fujioka, the county’s chief executive, and a smart guy whom we generally like, is more than a year late in unveiling even a presentation of a plan—so that the Board of Supervisors might begin to haggle over it.

More on this in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, the LA Times’ Molly Hennessy-Fisk has a fairly thorough listing of some of the vexing issues at play here. (By the way, Hennessy-Fisk was only given the LA County beat this past September, and she has already produced some very nicely reported articles, this one included.)

Hard to say for sure. But it’s beginning to look more and more like the latter.

CHILDREN NOW, a national nonprofit that monitors the wellbeing of American children, has just issued its yearly scorecard for California, with measurements that are separated by county.

So how does LA County score in relationship to the rest of the state?

We are home to 2.8 children under the age of 18. And when the scores are converted to grades, overall LA County gets a C -.

Among a number of decidedly uncheering scores, one of the most disheartening numbers was the percentage of high school students who had not been victimized and who felt physically safe at their school’s school: a mere 23 percent.

In other words, less than one fourth of LA County’s adolescents feel that school is a safe place.

Among the other scores, there is the fact that only 62 percent of LA’s kids “feel connected “to some adult or other. The same percentage, 62 percent, report very good to excellent health. (Meaning a more than a third of LA County kids do not report good health.)

There’s more at both a state and local level. So take a look.

ALL THS SCORING of the existing health and well-being of the state’s kids cannot help but bring to mind the suggested budget cuts that will affect the future health and educational scores of California’s children and young adults.

For instance, there is the following:

At present there are more than 900,000 California kids enrolled the state’s Healthy Families program. These are kids who would not have health insurance otherwise. But, because of the state’s budget woes, at a time when parents are losing their jobs and health benefits, the state, for the first time ever, is considering freezing enrollment and starting a waiting list.

That’s, of course, along with such other fun cuts like the planned amputations for K-12 education totaling $2.5 billion, and those that are causing the Cal State Universities to announce a likely enrollment cut-back of 10,000 students for next year, and the cuts that are making it necessary for the UC’s to raise their tuition (another) ten percent (triggering protests yesterday), and the positively draconian $332 million budget slashing that has been proposed for the lowest rung of the state’s higher education ladder, California’s community colleges.

One wonders what those cuts will do to the physical and educational health of California’s young.

From now through Monday, I’ll be running informational posts —written by me and others—on most of the various propositions.

(For instance, some of my very smart USC students have written some nice and pithy analyses, which I’ll be putting online, and there will be more voices)

Then on Monday, I’ll post a list of endorsements.

(Since the LA Weekly has stopped doing endorsements, some readers have suggested that another voice or three would be helpful. And I agreed.)

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FIRST…..PROPOSITION A:

KPPC’s Frank Stolz did an excellent short and informative, rundown on Prop. A.

In case you don’t remember, Proposition A is the City of LA parcel tax to fund gang-prevention programs. It will raise $30 million every year through a $3 per month parcel tax dedicated solely to gang prevention, intervention and after-school programs, plus vocational, job training and apprenticeship programs. Supporting it are LAPD Chief Bill Bratton, Sheriff Lee Baca, the police union, Steve Cooley, Connie Rice, Antonio Villaraigosa, former mayor, Dick Riordan, the teachers’ union, the LA firefighters….and on and on.

HERE’S what Frank Stolze says:

Southern California remains the gang capital of the world. Law enforcement officials estimate more than 100,000 mostly young adults claim membership in hundreds of gangs. Police have had some success in reducing gang violence. But they say they can’t keep up with the constant flow of kids joining gangs. In the city of Los Angeles next week, voters will consider a new tax to pay for more gang prevention and intervention programs. KPCC’s Frank Stoltze reports.

Frank Stoltze: Being asked to join a gang is almost a rite of passage in many Southern California neighborhoods. James Vasquez recalls hanging out with friends after school one day when he was 12.

James Vasquez: A big group of guys just came out of nowhere and said, “where are you from?” And we said, “we’re not from anywhere.” And they’re like, “you want to join our gang,” and I said “no thank you.” My other friend said “sure, why not.” I know, it’s weird how one friend said yeah, and I said no.

Stoltze: Not long after that, Vasquez’ teachers helped enroll him in a gang prevention program called “Bridges.” Outside a Tommy’s Burger in his Hollywood neighborhood, Vasquez says his parents weren’t really around at the time.

Vasquez: If I wasn’t in this program, I would have been doing drugs. I would have been gang banging with my friends, you know.

Stoltze: Why do you say that? Why do you think you would have ended up there?

Vasquez: ‘Cause I wouldn’t have anywhere to go.

There’s much more after the jump (and there’s an audio version if you’d prefer):

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Two good LA stories were produced for USC’s TV station ATVN by two of my smart Annenberg students–one present, the other former. Since I only teach print journalism and these are broadcast stories, I can’t claim even the tiniest bt of influence on either. But, I thought you might enjoy seeing what some smart kids at Annenberg TV News are producing.

One story is about Tuesday’s controversial decision to allow a bunch of new oil drilling in a neigborhood in Baldwin Hills, but also to apply additional evironmental regulations

Here’s a clip from the LA Times version of the story.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to regulate controversial new drilling at an oil field in southwest Los Angeles, a decision that came after a contentious three-hour public hearing and despite the protests of nearby residents.

The unanimous vote effectively clears the way for Plains Exploration & Production Co., or PXP, to drill 24 wells this year, starting in a month. The plan allows for 600 new wells over the next 30 years in the Baldwin Hills area.

Now here’s what USC’s Mat Mendez had to say:

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The second story is about a hunger strike called “Fast for Our Future” taking place at La Placita in downtown Los Angeles. It will last until the presidential election, it’s purpose is to draw attention to immigrants rights, but also as part of a GOTV push for LA’s Latinos.

Here’s what USC’s Marin Austin did on the story.

UPDATE: CBS KCAL News has reported that the engineer was likely texting a teenager, but Metrolink would not confirm and the National Transportation and Safety Board said they were reluctant (understandably) to deal in rumors.

However, I have additional material that suggests he KCAL story may very well be accurate.

Yesterday, a source with family who works inside Metrolink also gave me this same information independently, saying that Metrolink has the information about the engineer’s text messaging having occurred just before the crash, but that they are not releasing it.

Here’s what Fox News had on the story:

Nick Williams, a teenage train enthusiast, told CBS2 in Los Angeles he exchanged three text messages with engineer Robert Sanchez Friday afternoon. Williams, who considered Sanchez a “mentor,” received the last text at 4:22 p.m., one minute before the train wreck, according to the ocregister.com report. Williams’ claims have not been confirmed.

UPDATE 2 – 1:15 pm Sunday: It is now my understanding from my source that Metrolink does indeed have the phone records confirming that the engineer was texting right before he blew the light, yet I have not been able to further confirm this.

Just a few minutes ago, I talked to Metrolink spokesman, Terry Williams, and he declined to comment on the text message story. I asked him if Metrolink had indeed recovered the engineer’s phone, he said he honestly didn’t know.

The NTSFB has yet to return my calls.

UPDATE 3: Monday, NTSFB says that no phone has been recovered as yet, so my tip sounds wrong.

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SATURDAY MORNING: Twenty-five dead…and counting. Obviously, I’m not bringing you news. Just posting to acknowledge that we know….and care.

Demonstrating their concern in a concrete way, today, a flood of Los Angeles residents showed up at the UCLA Blood & Platelet Center in order to donate blood, according to the LA Times.

Metrolink is providing updates here.

(Photo by Francine Orr, Los Angeles Times.)

While bad news is never difficult to find, I can tell you exactly where to go tonight for a dose of good news: For those of you within the reach of LA’s Fox 11 news station, fire up your TiVos and set them to record a half hour news special called A League of Our Own at 10:30 p.m.

The show profiles an innovative program designed by the Los Angeles Urban league that aims to fundamentally transform the 70-block neighborhood surrounding Crenshaw High School.

The idea behind the Urban League’s “place-based initiative” is that you can’t solve the gang problem in a neighborhood without coming up against the school problem. And when you take on the school problem, pretty soon you see that school attendance and performance is deeply intertwined with the public safety problem. And once you start with public safety, you see it’s part and parcel of the public health problem—physical and emotional. And you certainly can’t solve public health without looking at housing and employment, and….

You get the picture. Neighborhoods are interwoven ecologies. Yank on one dangling thread and others immediately start to unravel.

With this in mind, the LA Urban League has budgeted $25 million over five years to take on the whole thing, and they’ve drafted everyone they can find in the city into partnership with them.

A few months back, I blogged briefly about the initiative, which is called Neighborhoods@Work. The LA Times ran an editorial, and our own Alan Mittelstaedt did an excellent interview with Urban League Prez, Blair Taylor, about the project for CityBeat (back in the days when CityBeat was still smart enough to employ, you know….journalists).

This afternoon, I had a long conversation with the Urban League’s Vice President, Chris Studwick-Turner, who told me that, from day one, the League has made sure to measure outcomes in five separate focus areas: education, health, safety, employment and housing. That way they can see what’s working and what isn’t, and correct their collective aims accordingly.

There has already been progress. Crime has dropped in the area and Crenshaw High, while not yet skyrocketing in terms of achievement, is starting to do quantitatively better after circling the drain a few years ago, with more progress anticipated These and other indicators are promising beginnings. Obviously, if this holistic strategy can be shown to create real change, the League will have pioneered a replicable model to be duplicated in other neighborhoods—neighborhood after neighborhood.

Anyway, grab your TV remotes and record that 10:30 Fox 11 broadcast. (And for those of you elsewhere in the country, it is my understanding that Fox News will run a shortened version at 10 p.m. Sunday night.)

A whole neighborhood, all-hands-on-deck approach is exactly what has been needed in LA’s violence-haunted communities for a long time. It ain’t easy, and it’s labor intensive.

But it also just might rescue the futures of 70 blocks worth of LA’s kids. And that, my dears, is very good news, indeed.

UPDATE: In an admiring rip-off of the the Will-i-am “Yes We Can Song” video, the urban league has a YouTube video out there called “We Can Do This.” and it’s quite terrific.

Let us get one thing straight at the outset of this conversation: Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor is not the only hospital in Los Angeles County capable of hideous and life-altering screw-ups. Last year a nurse at Cedars Sinai gave Dennis Quaid’s infant twins the wrong medication and nearly killed them. My son and I had an experience at Northridge Medical Center that, for the first time in my life, caused me to really, really want to sue the bejesus out of someone. (It is only because my son sustained no lasting physical harm—no thanks to Northridge—that I did not.)

I’m sure many of you have your own stories.

Yet although MLK-Harbor is a hospital that did much good for a great many people, there was a pattern of mistakes, incompetence and failure that, once discovered, could have and should been fixed. But it wasn’t. After repeated warnings, little changed. Then when the scandals and the horror stories kept coming (my own reporting detailed one of them), the fundamental problems were left intact.

And, although detailed and specific promises were made—and made again—the promised layoffs and the retraining of staff simply never happened.

When finally MLK-Harbor’s ER was forced to shut its doors last August, I badgered County Health officials about some of these issues. The response was not….how to put it?….very satisfying. Here’s the relevant clip from the LA Weekly article I wrote back then.

After years of multipage reports issuing dire warnings — not to mention the board’s expenditure of $18 million in taxpayer funds on consultants — and after scores of broken promises, perhaps residents of Los Angeles County deserve to know why, as of last Friday, MLK still had nurses on its staff who could not mix medicine.

“We were told that Harbor-UCLA would take over management of Martin Luther King,” said state Assembly Member Laura Richardson when it was her turn to address the county supervisors. “And that never happened. Well, why didn’t it happen?”

On Tuesday, the Weekly asked county health department spokesman Mike Wilson those same questions. Why were the majority of MLK staff — who were supposed to receive rigorous off-site retraining — never retrained? Why were a significant percentage of MLK staff — who were supposed to be laid off or transferred — never laid off or transferred? And why, after officials announced that the respected Harbor-UCLA Medical Center was taking the reins of MLK — and even changed the hospital’s tainted name from King-Drew Medical Center to Martin Luther King Jr.–Harbor Hospital — did that transfer of power fail to occur? Who stopped it?

“I don’t know,” an exhausted-sounding Wilson said finally. “[health department’s director, Dr. Bruce] Chernof made all those requests.”

Yet someone chose not to put Chernof’s vital “requests” into practice. It was clear this week that county officials, and some of the most powerful politicians in California, had no idea who prevented the ordered changes, or why.

Now, just short of a year since the ER was forced to shut down, in two separate articles the Los Angeles Times reports that hospital and County health officials still have not managed to break through what has been a pernicious cycle of enabling and codependence (to use the recovery clichés) to remove the hospital’s problem employees. Here’s a clip from the second of two Times’ stories:

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When activists complained to the Los Angeles County Supervisors that the collect calls that inmates are allowed to make from the county’s various jail facilities were too expensive, the Sups agreed on Wednesday to take the incredibly lucrative contract to provide phone service for the enormous LA jail system and open it up for competitive bidding.

This meant that the Sups would not extend Global Tel*Link’s contract — which expires in 2010 — to provide the service through 2013. The Board of Sups made the decision at the recommendation of county CEO William Fujioka, a man who generally has his head screwed on straight.

It is unclear, however, if the competitive bidding will actually lower the price of the calls for inmates and their families.

So how lucrative is the jails phone contract? Let’s just say that, when GTL was trying to talk the Sups into extending the contract, it offered the county $3.5 million as a kick back to sweeten the deal.

We are now living in a world where few of us pay by the minute for phone calls and, even if you don’t use Skype, calling China or Estonia costs far less than you once used to pay to call your mother in Portland. But calling collect from jail costs $3.54 for the first minute, !0 cents for each minute thereafter. Or at least that’s what it used to cost in 2004 when ATT had the contract. Now it’s even higher under under GTL.

Oh, and—just so we’re clear— the phone company isn’t the only one making big profits on the calls. The county also takes a healthy cut on every call too.

Sheriff Baca, who is usually far more sensible about such things, bridled when the subject of expensive jail calls came up.

`The key to all of this is that if you don’t like what’s going on in the world of being in jail, don’t commit the crime to go there,” he said.

Yes, dear Sheriff, but not everybody in jail has committed a crime. A large percentage of the inmates are simply waiting for trial, meaning they are supposedly innocent until proven guilty and all that good stuff.

Furthermore, the people paying for these expensive calls aren’t the inmates. They are the families of the inmates, the wives, husbands, parents, children—who have not committed any crimes.

I wrote about this issue extensively in 2001, for the LA Weekly and found that, in the city’s very poorest quarters, communities like the housing projects of East Los Angeles and South LA, one meets a disproportionate number of parents with sons or daughters who are incarcerated. As one community activist told me, “I know more mothers than I can count who are accepting those high-priced calls.”

But the cost of calls add up, so when lower income mothers can no longer afford the price of the calls they often have no choice but to put a block on their phone.”

“I constantly have mothers say to me, ‘I couldn’t bear to hear his voice and not accept the call,’” county jail chaplain Father George Horan told me back in 2001. “So they put a collect-call block on the phone because they don’t know what else to do. They can’t afford the calls. And they can’t stand not to talk to their sons.”

One more thing: according to studies on recidivism dating from 1954 to the present the amount of contact an inmate has with his or her family and community is among the top predictors determining a parolee’s success. Inmates who remain in contact with family and loved ones are less likely to pose a threat to prison staff or to re-offend once they’re released.

The jail and prison collect call system in California is a problem that has long needed reform. But frankly, no one involved in these mega-bucks contracts wants to give up the profit. In 2001, over the three year life of the LA County jail phone contract, the county made $70 million in collect call fees.

Seven years later, we can assume that the county’s take is much, much higher.