The ACLU of So Cal filed a racial profiling lawsuit against Glendale Unified School District, the Glendale Police Department, the Los Angeles Police Department, and LA County Probation on Thursday having to do with a 2010 incident in which 56 Hoover High Hchool students were rounded up and questioned for an hour.

The suit names individual officers from the GPD, the LAPD, probation, plus administrators at Hoover HS for “racial profiling and unlawful search and seizure.”

The lawsuit is based on an incident that occurred on September 24, 2010, when, according to the ACLU, school administrators, working with police and school-based probation officers, rounded up 56 Latino students during their lunch period, herded them into classrooms, interrogated them—and in a bizarre touch—”orced them to pose for mock mug shots.”

Attorneys say that the students were targeted although there was no evidence that they were violating any laws or breaking school rules.

Here’s more from the ACLU statement:

“I was shocked and scared when I saw the police, especially because I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong,” said sixteen-year-old Ashley Flores, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. “It was the first encounter I’ve had with police. I’ve never been in trouble and have nothing to do with gangs.”

The students, all Latino, were eating lunch when school administrators ordered them into two classrooms, where armed GPD and LAPD officers were waiting for them. Police told the students that they could not leave until they provided information. When some protested that they had done nothing wrong, officers ordered them to “sit down and shut up,” and threatened to go to their homes at 6 a.m. to collect the information if they did not cooperate. The officers told students that their personal information would be kept in a file to identify them if they ever got in trouble. The students were detained between 30 and 90 minutes, causing some to miss their fifth-period classes.

“The police officers, school officials, and probation officers involved in this roundup targeted these students solely because they are Latino,” said David Sapp, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California. “They acted as though being a Latino teenager is all the justification they needed to detain and threaten these students, which is a textbook case of racial profiling.”

One student who was eating lunch with the others, who is not Latino, was not detained in the classrooms.

Additionally, after the incident, Defendant Michael Rock, a captain in GPD who authorized the roundup, acknowledged that the students’ ethnicity was central in determining which students were detained, adding that GPD had planned to conduct a similar operation targeting Armenian students. [Italics mine.]

Nice.

The lawsuit sounds righteous, and there’s no excuse for racially profiling and terrorizing kids, yet it might help to have this bit of context:

According to the school website, Hoover High’s student population is around 42 percent Armenian American, and around one quarter Latino. In recent years, elements within the two ethnic groups have sometimes been violently at odds. The most tragic such event occurred in May of 2000 when 17-year-old Raul Aguirre was beaten with a crowbar then stabbed to death in front of the school just after classes ended for the day. Raul Aguirre, it seemed, was a non-troublemaker kid who had tried to intervene in a fight between the two ethnic factions, and was murdered for his trouble.

In any case, one assumes that there’s more to the story. Again, not that anything excuses the actions of the adults. However, additional information might at least, in part, explain the thinking of the cops and the Hoover High administrators.

AND IN OTHER NEWS:

CDCR SAYS CALIFORNIA’S PRISON HUNGER STRIKE HAS ENDED

The CDCR reported on Thursday that the mass hunger strike in the state’s prisons has ended. This is from their statement:

CDCR officials in Sacramento were contacted by inmates by letter on October 11. It was the first such contact by inmates or their representatives during the inmate-led action.

Officials agreed to meet with inmate representatives to discuss its ongoing review of and revisions to its Security Housing Unit (SHU) policies that began in May 2011. Similar to its discussions with inmates during a July hunger strike, all agreed the changes to policies would take several months to finalize. The department agreed to continue on its same course.

Inmates initiated a second hunger strike on September 26, and after three days, 4,252 inmates in eight state prisons had missed nine consecutive meals – the point at which CDCR considers an inmate to be on a hunger strike….

Last Friday, Ian Lovett reported for the NY Times that, unlike with the first strike in the summer, this time the hunger strikers were dug in and prepared to last as long as it took to get some of their demands met, so the change was unexpected.

Here’s a clip from last week’s story:

….since inmates resumed the strike last week in continued protest against conditions of prolonged isolation, things have gone differently: the corrections department has cracked down, trying to isolate the strike leaders, some of whom say they no longer trust the department and are hoping to push the governor to enact reforms.

“I’m ready to take this all the way,” J. Angel Martinez, one of the strike leaders at Pelican Bay State Prison, said in a message conveyed through a lawyer this week. “We are sick and tired of living like this and willing to die if that’s what it takes.”

This time, though, both sides have shown less inclination to compromise, and no negotiations between the strike leaders and the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation have taken place since the strike resumed.

An internal memo from George J. Giurbino, director of the Division of Adult Institutions for the department, outlined new, more aggressive processes for dealing with mass hunger strikes….

However, on Thursday, Lovett reported on how and why the strikers had agreed to begin eating again. Here’s a clip:

…after negotiations on Thursday between the corrections department and lawyers representing the inmates, strike leaders agreed to resume eating.

Corrections officials reiterated the reforms the department had agreed to at the end of the previous hunger strike in July, which they said would take several months to finalize, and “agreed to stay on its same course,” according to a news release from the department.

The department had already agreed to a review of its policies for placing inmates in security housing units.

But Carol Strickman, a lawyer with Legal Services for Prisoners with Children who negotiated on behalf of the inmates, said that, most importantly, the department had agreed to review the cases of all prisoners already in isolation because of “validated” gang affiliation, rather than because of their behavior while in prison.

“This is the first time the prisoners had heard that kind of review was in the works,” Ms. Strickman said. “That new information, I believe, convinced them to end the hunger strike.”

TOO IMPORTANT TO FAIL

The terrible fact is that a staggering 48-percent of all African American males will drop out of high school. Tavis Smiley explores what amounts to a national tragedy and looks at what to do about it.

The PBS show debuts Tuesday night in LA, but check listings for your cable provider to find out what time and which PBS station will have it.

LA TIMES SAYS STATE SHOULD BE FORCED TO DEFEND PROP 8 AGAINST CHALLENGES

The Times editorial board makes an interesting and worthwhile argument. I still don’t happen to agree with them, but their points in Monday’s editorial are good ones and essential to consider as you make up your own mind.

HOW 9/11 COMPLETELY CHANGED SURVEILLANCE IN THE U.S.

This story is from Sunday’s Wired Magazine by Ryan Singel, and is a definite must read. Here’s a clip:

Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein handed a sheaf of papers in January 2006 to lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, providing smoking-gun evidence that the National Security Agency, with the cooperation of AT&T, was illegally sucking up American citizens’ internet usage and funneling it into a database.

The documents became the heart of civil liberties lawsuits against the government and AT&T. But Congress, including then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Illinois), voted in July 2008 to override the rights of American citizens to petition for a redress of grievances.

Congress passed a law that absolved AT&T of any legal liability for cooperating with the warrantless spying. The bill, signed quickly into law by President George W. Bush, also largely legalized the government’s secret domestic-wiretapping program.

Obama pledged to revisit and roll back those increased powers if he became president. But, he did not.

Mark Klein faded into history without a single congressional committee asking him to testify. And with that, the government won the battle to turn the net into a permanent spying apparatus immune to oversight from the nation’s courts.

Klein’s story encapsulates the state of civil liberties 10 years after the shattering attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. After a decade, the country is left with a legacy of secret and unilateral executive-branch actions, a surveillance infrastructure whose scope and inner workings remain secret with little oversight, a compliant judiciary system that obsequiously bows to claims of secrecy by the executive branch, and a populace that has no idea how its government uses its power or who is watching out for abuses.

Read the rest.

TAKING ADVANTAGE OF A SECOND CHANCE – A FORMER GANG MEMBER GETS TO STAY IN THE U.S.

Hector Tobar’s LA Times story is one you shouldn’t miss. Here’s a clip from the story’s opening:

Before this week, the last time I’d seen Obed Silva was in an immigration court in downtown L.A. On that day, he rolled his wheelchair to the witness box and explained to a judge why he shouldn’t be deported.

That was in 2009. Born in Mexico but raised in Orange County, Silva is a 32-year-old former gang member paralyzed from a gunshot injury who reinvented himself as a scholar. It was the errors of his youth — as a teenager he shot and wounded a man at an O.C. party — that led to the deportation proceeding.

Professors at his alma mater, Cal State L.A., testified in immigration court on his behalf. After I told his story in this column, even a conservative talk-show host said he deserved to stay in the U.S. And in December, the government agreed to stop the deportation proceedings against him.

After nearly four years of court dates and adjournments, Silva’s final appearance before a judge lasted only a few minutes, he recalled. “Next thing I knew, the judge said, ‘You’re free to go.’”

This week Silva and I met again, at his mother’s home in Buena Park. I’d come to see what he was doing with his second chance.

He’s teaching writing at Cypress College and tackling his own painful story in a book. Much of his manuscript is about another man born in Mexico, a heavy drinker who was deported many years ago, and who isn’t missed on this side of the border:

Obed’s father, the late Juan Silva.

Juan Silva was, as Obed writes, “an alcoholic, a drug-addict and a wife beater.” Juan Silva, aged 48 at his death, was one of those fraught men who live hard and leave a lifetime of wreckage in their wake.

“I came to this country to run away from him,” Obed’s mother, Marcela Mendoza, told me. Juan Silva was, by Mendoza’s account, obsessed with the family that had escaped him. Soon after they left, he followed them northward……

THE MORAL IMPERATIVE OF PRISONS: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A RESEARCHER COMPARES U.S. PRISONS WITH LOCK-UPS ELSEWHERE IN THE WORLD? ANSWER: THE NEWS IS NOT GOOD

“The degree of civilization in a society is revealed by entering its prisons.”

– Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In the spring and summer of 2010, law professor and researcher Lucian Dervan, traveled to prisons in the United States, The Netherlands, and Israel to “compare the way each country detains its most violent and culpable residents.” The results of this research, he wrote afterward, “indicate something quite striking about what makes prisons around the world successful.” His results also indicated an alarming view of the way the United States treats its prisoners and what results from that dehumanizing treatment.

Here is a long clip from Dervan’s conclusions. (You can download the entire paper here.)

What makes one prison a violent and uncontrollable badland, while another is a calm, relatively safe, and productive facility for both staff and inmates? From my travels to three continents in search of an answer to this question, one aspect of each prison seems to contribute significantly to its success or failure. Where prisoners believed they were treated like human beings and were provided with reasonable living conditions and opportunities to utilize their time in meaningful ways, the prison environment was relatively healthy and rates of violence were low. In comparison, [in U.S. prisons] where prisoners were subjected to abhorrent living conditions and no efforts were made to treat them with a modicum of respect or provide them with even a scintilla of meaningful stimulation during the day, the prison environment was poisoned and violence ran rampant.

One final story from my travels will summarize the distinction between treating inmates like human beings and treating prisoners as mere objects for confinement.

[W]hen I traveled to Israel three prisoners were asked if they would volunteer to meet with me and, for their services, they were personally thanked by a prison official. During my visit to the state maximum-security prison, however, the treatment of the prisoners was quite different. At one point, a prisoner was sitting inside his cell reading a book. A
guard, who was showing me this particular wing of the facility, decided to demonstrate how he could control the lights inside this prisoner’s cell from outside. Without acknowledging the prisoner was even present, the guard then began switching the light on and off several times. When he was finished with his demonstration, still not having even acknowledged the presence of the prisoner inside the cell, he simply continued to walk down the corridor. It is striking to observe that the guards at this state facility treated prisoners with considerably less respect than the officers tasked with supervising convicted terrorists in Israel.

In conclusion, it is important to clarify why we care what type of environment exists inside a prison. It is certainly not clear that how prisoners are treated has any positive impact on recidivism rates. In fact, of the four prison systems examined in this Article, the one with the highest rate of recidivism is The Netherlands.Nevertheless, the environment inside prisons is vitally important. First, prisons in which inmates feel a sense of community appear to be less violent than those that serve as little more than warehouses for the one out of every hundred Americans currently behind bars. Second, prisons with high rates of violence are expensive facilities to administer because they require large staffs and incur incidental costs associated with medical treatment, overtime, and sick days. As such, prison systems can perform their functions in a more economically efficient manner by creating environments where prisoners are provided with incentives to cooperate and reject violence. Finally, treating prisoners as human beings and creating positive prison environments is simply the morally correct manner in which to administer a penitentiary.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky stated, “The degree of civilization in a society is revealed by entering its prisons.” Even without the significant added benefits of reducing violence and lessening the administrative costs of running our prison systems, treating prisoners with dignity is the moral duty of any government. That abiding by this duty creates a safer environment for both staff and inmates and provides for the possibility of creating better prisons with less money should merely be considered a significant and
wonderful ancillary benefit.

FATHER MYCHAL JUDGE – “WE COME TO BURY HIS HEART BUT NOT HIS LOVE, NEVER HIS LOVE”

Like most news outlets, NPR had a string of good 9/11 stories. This, about the death of NY City Fire Department chaplain, Father Mychal Judge, is a particularly sweet one.

Father Mychal Judge was a Franciscan friar and a chaplain to the New York City Fire Department. He was also a true New York character. Born in Brooklyn, Mychal Judge seemed to know everyone in the city, from the homeless to the mayor.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Father Mychal arrived at the World Trade Center shortly after the first plane hit. And as firefighters and other rescue personnel ran into the North Tower, he went with them.

Bill Cosgrove, a police lieutenant, was also there. When the South Tower collapsed, it sent debris flying into the neighboring building. When the dust cleared, Mychal Judge was dead. Soon after, Cosgrove found him. Then, Cosgrove and a group of firefighters emerged from the rubble, carrying Father Mychal’s body….

Listen to the rest here.

AND JUST IN CASE YOU MISSED IT….FOX SPORTS AND THE STUNNINGLY RACIST USE OF USC STUDENT

As you may or may not know by now, Fox Sports ran a video about the inclusion of two more college teams—Utah and Colorado— in the PAC 10, which will now be the PAC 12. In order to publicize the change on Fox’s college sports show, the show’s “reporter” Bob Oschack interviewed students at USC about their reaction to the new of the change, and asked them to “give a good old fashioned American welcome” the two new schools. Oschack, however, did not interview just any USC students. He picked only Asian students and only Asian students with strong accents. The result was racial caricature that was utterly flabbergasting in its creepiness.

The story was first reported by the Colorado Daily Camera and in short order calls and emails began to stream into the network, Fox Sports at first issued a tepid apology that was little more than an “Ooops. Our bad.” Then, a few hours later, as the fury over the vile video grew, there were evidently some hurried meetings in FoxLand because the apology from the Fox Sports head got a little bit stronger—but not much.

We sincerely apologize to President [C. L. Max] Nikias and the entire USC community for the production and posting of the video. The context was clearly inappropriate and the video was removed as soon as we became aware of it. We will review our editorial process to determine where the breakdown occurred, and we will take steps to ensure something like this never happens again.

The fury continued, thus on Wed, Fox cancelled its college sports show, The College Experiment which had produced the horrid segment, yanked videos from the network site and Hulu, and apologized all over again. (Of course Fox couldn’t stop a million video flowers from blooming on YouTube and the like. For example, here at KCET in it is posted along with a commentary by blogger/teacher Ophelia Chong, which—by the way— is very much worth reading.

Although the news on the incident died down over the weekend, all is far from forgiven. After all, said one Asian commentator, Fox is the network that called Obama’s birthday party “a “hip-hop BBQ” that “didn’t create jobs”—and other fun racist moments. In other words, they created the environment in which it was only a matter of time that the racist crap on the news segments would bleed into areas like sports coverage.

Certainly it is not workable for inmates to have unfettered access to unmonitored phone calls, and contraband cell phones have assuredly been running rife through California state prisons.

The same is also true for Federal lock-ups as this week’s WaPo story points out.

Thus it is no surprise that on Thursday, the California legislature sent a bill to the governor’s desk that will make it a crime for an inmate to possess a cell phone or for staff to sneak in a cellphone for an inmate’s use.

In the run-up to the vote there were stories in the media telling sensational tales of the activities of street gangs being directed and crimes being masterminded from behind bars using these illegal cell phones.

It is unquestionably true that some of the thousands of contraband phones are being used for criminal activities. After all, the shot callers from prison gangs were directing actions on the street just fine without cell phone access. So it stands to reason that a nice smart phone would make such activities a whole lot easier.

But in most cases, inmates are simply calling spouses, children, mothers, dads or friends—just for the human connection. And, yes, inmates also surf the web and put up Facebook pages and do heaven knows what else. But more than anything they’re looking for a cheap and accessible way to keep in touch.

Collect calls from California prisons are about the most expensive calls in the country, and the usurious rates are paid, not by the inmates but by their families. Cell phones lower those rates and make it possible for inmates to keep in touch with family more often at a less crushing cost. This is not a bad thing as study after study shows that the strength of ties with family and community essential for an inmate’s emotional health and the surest predictor of success on the outside.

With this in mind, Doug Berman at Sentencing Law and Policy has a few thoughts about how “prison-friendly cell phones” might be a better solution than merely banning the things.

Here’s a clip:

Though I fully understand the problems that contraband cell phones can pose in prisons, I do not understand why anyone would be confident that this new federal criminal law would be likely to be effective at addressing these problems (or would even ever get seriously enforced by federal prosecutors). [WLA NOTE: I think the same is likely true for California's about-to-be- law.]

As the title of my post hints, I think trying to provide inmates with controlled and closely monitored access to a prison-friendly cell phone may be a much more effective way to deal with a problem that seem likely to get even more profound if and when smart-phones and tablets and other small electronics become even cheaper and easier to pass to inmates who may just want no more than a cheap and easy way to keep up with the outside world.

Yep. In other words, if you can’t beat the technology, better to join it on your own terms.

SB9—THE JUVENILE LWOP BILL—MAY BE VOTED ON FRIDAY

It is possible that SB9 will be voted up or down on Friday in attempt to pass it after a defeat a few weeks ago. This is the bill that would give some people who were given life sentences as juveniles, a chance at a chance to eventually be paroled.

FYI: Should you be interested, those who are advocates for the bill have listed the following Assembly members to call:

Assembly Member Nora Campos (916) 319-2023
Assembly Member Wes Chesbro (916) 319-2001
Assembly Member Joan Buchanan (916) 319-2015

The best reporting thus far on the inmate hunger strike that originated in the Pelican Bay SHU—or Special Housing Unit—came from California Watch reporter Michael Montgomery, whose latest story ran on Tuesday in his series on the strike—what it meant, who is behind it, and whether it accomplished anything.

One thing you should know is that Montgomery knows this material. In past years, he has reported some deeply disturbing stories on the psychological effects wrought by these isolation units that confine inmates in windowless cells for 23 hours out of every day, separating them from nearly all human contact for years at a time.

In the course of this series, he discovered that many of the strikers’ demands already existed as recommendations that emerged from a year-long internal study commissioned by the CDCR then roundly ignore.

Here are links to Montgomery’s radio broadcasts in order— here and here and here.

His written stories on the strike may be found here and here.

Below there’s a clip to give you a feel:

State corrections officials are moving forward with a major policy initiative that could improve conditions and reduce the length of time some inmates spend in controversial isolation units. The changes are being proposed amid threats of another hunger strike by inmates who spearheaded one last month at Pelican Bay State Prison.

The policy changes, which still are being worked out, are in line with proposals highlighted in an internal study completed in 2007 by a panel of experts appointed by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, according to interviews and documents. The panel’s recommendations included:

***Moving to a conduct-based model that punishes inmates for tangible offenses, rather than for mere affiliation with a gang. This approach is widely used in other states and by the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

*** Ending the practice of indefinite detention of alleged prison gang members and associates in the Security Housing Units

***Ending the practice of automatically sending validated prison gang members and associates to the Security Housing Units

***Creating a “step-down” program inside the Security Housing Units to encourage positive behavior by offering incentives, such as special programs

***Ending the distinction between prison gangs and other threat groups to give the department more flexibility in determining inmate placement in the Security Housing Units

WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE JUSTICE GAP (YES, THERE IS A SOLUTION)

This Op Ed from the New York Times not only opines with deservedly righteous indignation, it offers a solution—or at least a good idea.

The clip below is self-explanatory:

Most low-income Americans cannot afford a lawyer to defend their legal interests, no matter how urgent the issue. Unless they are in a criminal case, most have no access to help from government-financed lawyers either.

In civil proceedings like divorces, child support cases, home foreclosures, bankruptcies and landlord-tenant disputes, the number of people representing themselves in court has soared since the economy soured. Experts estimate that four-fifths of low-income people have no access to a lawyer when they need one. Research shows that litigants representing themselves often fare less well than those with lawyers. This “justice gap” falls heavily on the poor, particularly in overburdened state courts.

There is plenty the government, the legal profession and others can do to improve this shameful state of affairs. With the economic downturn, only around two-thirds of law school graduates in 2010 got jobs for which a law degree is required, the lowest rate since 1996. That leaves the other third — close to 15,000 lawyers — who, with financial support from government and the legal profession, could be using their legal expertise to help some of those who need representation.

While the Constitution requires that defendants in criminal cases be provided a lawyer, there is no such guarantee in civil cases. The Legal Services Corporation, created by Congress, gives out federal grants that provide the bulk of support for legal aid to the poor. Over the decades, that budget has shrunk — it was $404 million in 2011, about one-third less than it was 15 years ago, adjusted for inflation. The House Appropriations Committee has proposed reducing that to $300 million for 2012. The cut would be devastating; the budget should, instead, be increased.

Half of the people who seek help from legal aid offices are already turned away…

NOTE: There will be only light blogging today because I’m spending some time with my 25-year-old son who is going to get married over Labor Day weekend (!!!)

FIRST THE LATEST NEWS ON AB 9

The AP has the story:

A controversial bill headed for a vote in California has stirred up conversation again about whether life sentences for juveniles need to be re-examined.

Under the state bill, which received a key vote Wednesday to allow it to head to the Assembly floor for a vote, some juvenile offenders would get the opportunity for release.
At the heart of the bill is a question that’s been pondered by legal scholars, law enforcement and even the Supreme Court: Should juveniles who have committed crimes that led to a life prison sentence be given a second chance?

The bill, introduced by Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, would allow juveniles to ask a court to re-examine their sentences after they have served 15 years for their crime. Yee, who is also a child psychologist, argues that at certain ages, kids don’t have the full capacity to understand their crimes, and locking juveniles up without giving them a chance to show they have gained that capacity isn’t the right answer.

“The neuroscience is clear – brain maturation continues well through adolescence and thus impulse control, planning, and critical thinking skills are not yet fully developed,” Yee said in a statement. “SB 9 reflects that science and provides the opportunity for compassion and rehabilitation that we should exercise with minors.”

California law allows kids as young as 14 to be sentenced to life without parole for certain crimes.

The Patt Morrison Show had a very good segment on the issue that included as one of the guests an attorney whose wife had been horribly murdered by a teenager who lived next door, and who is against the bill.

PRISON HUNGER STRIKE ACTUALLY PRECIPITATES PROGRESS (WE HOPE)

There has been much disinformation and misinformation on this topic. But the very excellent Sam Stanton at the Sac Bee has a nice, clear well-sourced story. Here’s a clip.

Last month, inmates at Pelican Bay State Prison launched a hunger strike to draw attention to their complaints of being unfairly held in extreme isolation at the Crescent City lockup.

Within three weeks, the prison hunger strike had become one of the largest in years, spreading throughout the state corrections system to involve thousands of inmates and sparking a legislative hearing scheduled for next week.

“We had up to 6,000 (prisoners taking part), including about 300 in Mississippi in our out-of-state facility half the country away, participating in this,” said corrections spokesman Oscar Hidalgo.

When officials tried to tamp down the protest by moving 17 hunger strike leaders to the state prison in Corcoran, the inmate action spread.

“As soon as they got down to Corcoran, an additional 300 inmates at that institution went on the hunger strike,” Hidalgo said.

he effort ended July 21, after inmates inside the security housing unit at Pelican Bay were promised changes, including being given wool caps for use during winter months and being allowed to have wall calendars.

Officials with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation also said they will review policies on how the agency determines which inmates are believed to be gang leaders who are then placed in a security housing unit.

But they insist that inmates inside the SHU, including several who have identified themselves as leaders of the hunger strike, pose a serious threat to others and are there for very good reasons

Read the rest.

FINALLY, A SANE MOMENT IN THE OBAMA ADMIN’S IMMIGRATION POLICY

The LA Times’ Christopher Goffard, Paloma Esquivel and Teresa Watanabe have the story.

Here’s how it opens:

The Obama administration said it will review the cases of 300,000 illegal immigrants currently in deportation proceedings to identify “low-priority” offenders — including the elderly, crime victims and people who have lived in the U.S. since childhood — with an eye toward allowing them to stay.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced the review as the Obama administration has sought to counter criticism that it has been too harsh in its deportation policies. By launching the case-by-case review, officials said they are refocusing deportation efforts on convicted felons and other “public safety threats.”

The administration’s action was cheered bysome illegal immigrants, notably college students who have been pushing Congress to pass the Dream Act, which would allow them to stay in the country.

“It makes me happy and hopeful,” said Rigoberto Barboza, 21, an undocumented student at Mt. San Antonio College who supports a family of five with a $9-an-hour job at a fast-food restaurant. He said his mother, who brought him to the U.S. from Mexico when he was a boy, is facing deportation. “I hope they go through my mother’s case, stop her deportation and, if possible, get her a work permit.”

Like I said: sane.

But critics labeled the plan as a “blanket amnesty” for a large group of illegal immigrants.

This “clearly demonstrates the Obama administration’s defiance of both the constitutional separation of powers and the will of the American public,” said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform….

Oh, blah-blah-blah-blah.

A trio of legal and justice stories that you shouldn’t miss:

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF JERRY BROWN’S APPOINTMENT OF GOODWIN LIU TO THE CALIFORNIA SUPREME COURT

In his Sunday column, the Sac Bee’s Dan Morain has an interesting take on why Governor Jerry Brown’s recent appointment of Goodwin Liu to the California Supreme Court is important—to him and to us.

Here’s how it opens. But read the whole thing, because Morain develops his thesis in steps.

Gov. Jerry Brown is trying to make amends for missteps he made in his youth.

Brown nominated Goodwin Liu to the Supreme Court last week, hoping he has found a justice in the mold of a giant in California’s legal history, Roger Traynor.

Like Liu, Traynor was a 40-year-old UC Berkeley law professor with limited courtroom experience when Gov. Culbert Olson appointed him in 1940. Brown’s father, Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, elevated Traynor to chief justice in 1964.

For three decades, Traynor was integral to a court that expanded civil rights and pioneered what are now basic concepts of civil law. In Brown’s view, Traynor is the most distinguished justice ever to serve this state……

THE MESS WE’RE IN: FIVE STEPS IN TRANSFORMING PRISON CULTURE

Law professor Lynn S. Branham is an expert in sentencing and incarceration policy, and has written a very interesting paper for the Indian on how to—not just reform—but transform the dysfunctional prison culture that we have in most states, but most notably in California.

Here’s a clip from the abstract:

…..the more fundamental question is whether prisons can be, not just improved, but transformed. Transformation in this context means deep and sustained changes in the ethos of those who work and live in prisons. That ethos would reflect at least four precepts: (1) hope as an imperative; (2) the viability of renewal; (3) the catharsis that attends personal responsibility and accountability; and (4) the duty and call, extending to prisoners and correctional employees alike, to respect human dignity.

This article rests on the proposition that such “culture busting” in prisons is possible and describes five key steps that need to be taken by each state and the federal government to effectuate the envisioned transformation in their prisons.

US IMMIGRATION LAW GOVERNING ASYLUM CUTS AGAINST THOSE THREATENED BY MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS

US asylum law was written during the cold war and was aimed mainly at people who were being persecuted by their government. However, now we have a whole new class of asylum seekers at our borders, mainly those fleeing the violence of the Mexican drug cartels.

This story in the El Paso Times explains the problem. Here’s a clip:

….To obtain political asylum, a person must prove that there’s a well-founded fear of persecution on account of the person’s race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.

An individual must also show that he is being persecuted by his government or that authorities in his country are unable or unwilling to protect the applicant from persecution by another group.

Former immigration attorney Edgar Holguin said the problem for many political asylum cases from Mexico is that current asylum law — contained in the Refugee Act of 1980 — was drafted to offer protection in a Cold War setting.

“What I tell my clients is that asylum law was designed to help people fleeing from the other side of the Iron Curtain,” he said. “It worked really well for people who were openly practicing Christian faith in a communist country. But in Mexico’s case, it’s difficult to pigeon someone into it. The law was written for a different era and different circumstances.”

San Francisco immigration Judge Dana Leigh Marks, head of the national immigration judges’ union, said that the law predates some of today’s problems, such as gangs in Guate mala and cartels in Mexico, so there are fewer precedents on how the law should be applied.

“These are newly emerging situations, so case precedents do not squarely address them,” she said.

While the law can be stretched to accommodate cases from foreigners seeking relief from gang or drug violence, such arguments often don’t fit traditional interpretations of the law, immigration experts said…..

(Thanks to my pal and immigration policy guru Dan Kowalski for the heads up on this story.)

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The hunger strike that began on July 1 at the Pelican Bay SHU eventually spread to somewhere between 1700 to 6600 prisoners in 13 of the state’s prisons, according to the SF Chron.

Now that the strike has ended, it is unclear what it has accomplished since, as the LA Times pointed out in an editorial last week, the CDCR won’t let reporters into the SHU to talk to any of the prisoners.

However one measurable effect the strike has had is to stimulate articles about solitary and whether we ought to be engaging in the practice.

The very best of the Op Eds on the topic is an excellent editorial from the NY Times. Here is a big clip:

Solitary confinement has been transmuted from an occasional tool of discipline into a widespread form of preventive detention. The Supreme Court, over the last two decades, has whittled steadily away at the rights of inmates, surrendering to prison administrators virtually all control over what is done to those held in “administrative segregation.” Since it is not defined as punishment for a crime, it does not fall under “cruel and unusual punishment,” the reasoning goes.

As early as 1995, a federal judge, Thelton E. Henderson, conceded that so-called “supermax” confinement “may well hover on the edge of what is humanly tolerable,” though he ruled that it remained acceptable for most inmates. But a psychiatrist and Harvard professor, Stuart Grassian, had found that the environment was “strikingly toxic,” resulting in hallucinations, paranoia and delusions. In a “60 Minutes” interview, he went so far as to call it “far more egregious” than the death penalty.

Officials at Pelican Bay, in Northern California, claim that those incarcerated in the Security Housing Unit are “the worst of the worst.” Yet often it is the most vulnerable, especially the mentally ill, not the most violent, who end up in indefinite isolation. Placement is haphazard and arbitrary; it focuses on those perceived as troublemakers or simply disliked by correctional officers and, most of all, alleged gang members. Often, the decisions are not based on evidence.

Also notable are the letters to the editor that came a few days later. I’ve included a fragment of one of them:

Re “Barbarous Confinement,” by Colin Dayan (Op-Ed, July 18):

Mr. Dayan vividly captures the cruelty of long-term solitary or “supermax” confinement, which has increasingly become business as usual in American prisons. Supermax units like the one at Pelican Bay State Prison in California cost two to three times as much to build and operate as conventional prisons, and prisoners released directly to the community from solitary are more likely to commit more crimes than comparable prisoners released from general prison populations.

Fortunately, some states are beginning to change course. In Maine, the new commissioner of corrections has cut the population of the state’s supermax unit by more than half. Mississippi depopulated its supermax unit and eventually closed it entirely, leading to a dramatic drop in prison violence and a savings of $8 million a year….

Interesting that conservative states like Mississippi are reforming their SHUs, while liberal California cling to the concept.

FRANK SOTOMEYOR WRITES ABOUT THE DEATH OF PRIZE WINNING JOURNALIST GEORGE RAMOS

The essay appears in LA Observed.

NOTE: I had a late event on Sunday night, hence the short post. More later today.

“IT’S ONCE AGAIN IT’S THE ALLEGED RAPE VICTIM WHO IS ON TRIAL, SAYS LAT’S SANDY BANKS

As the cable channels blared out the details of Dominique Strauss-Kahn being released from home confinement largely because his alleged victim turns out to have a less than squeaky clean life, the LA Times’ Sandy Banks found she has something to say about what the reversal means. Here’s a clip:

And Dominique Strauss-Kahn — a potential French presidential candidate — was a wealthy bully with a history of sexual faux pas, accused of attacking her while she cleaned his suite in a luxury hotel. In May, he was charged with attempted rape and sexual assault, and held on $6-million bond.

Then suddenly, on Friday, Strauss-Khan was set free. His accuser, it appears, is a liar and cheat.

She lied on her taxes and asylum application — claiming a child she didn’t have and a gang rape in Guinea that never happened. Her bank records and a taped phone conversation with her jailed fiance suggest she consorts with criminals linked to drug-dealing operations.

Does that prove that she wasn’t attacked and forced into sex by Strauss-Khan? No. But it does mean that his high-priced lawyers would tear her apart on the witness stand…..

2 VIEWS OF 3 STRIKES AND ITS PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Tracey Kaplan of the San Jose Mercury News and Andy Furillo of the Sacramento Bee each have stories that have bearing on the future of the Free Strikes law. (Both Kaplan and Furillo are a part of the Three-strikes Fellowship that I covered here.)

Kaplan writes about 3-striker Kelly Turner whose future could have an impact—for good or ill— on the 3-strikes initiative that is expected to be on the ballot in fall 2012.

Here’s how it opens:

The luckiest woman in California may not be the Alameda secretary who recently won $93 million in the lottery, or the Marin woman who survived a Maui shark attack.

By some accounts, she’s Kelly Turner, a 42-year-old former thief once doomed by the state’s “three strikes” law to spend 25 years to life in state prison for writing a bad check for $146.16. Retired Santa Clara County Judge LaDoris Cordell, now San Jose’s independent police auditor, got the courts to release her after Turner spent 13 years locked up. She’s believed to be the only female “third-striker” to get out early.

“She’s turned her life around,” Cordell said.

But if Turner so much as steals a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, it’s not just her new life in a Central Valley town that could unravel. Also at risk could be an effort by a group of Stanford law professors to put an initiative on the ballot to temper the “three strikes” law, the strictest such sentencing law in the nation.

That’s because Turner’s behavior — and the conduct of all third-strikers, including the few who have been freed early and the thousands still inside — will take center stage if the measure qualifies and goes to voters next year, political experts say.

“The only thing voters will see when they get behind the curtain are their faces,” said Democratic political consultant Bob Mulholland, referring to the third-strikers. “Voters will vote with their gut or heart, not their thought process…..”

Furillo of the Sac Bee shows how the use and enforcement of Three-strikes has changed since its passage in 1994.

Furillo’s story explores the evolution of prosecutors’ attitudes toward the law and, in particular, highlights the manner in which LA District Attorney Steve Cooley led the way among prosecutors to a more proportionate application of Three Strikes.

Here are some clips;

Fifteen years after passage of the state’s landmark “three strikes” sentencing law, prosecutors in Sacramento and throughout California have become far more selective in applying the full force of the statute, reducing the number of lifetime prison terms being sought for third strikers to a relative trickle.

While it used to obtain the maximum sentences anywhere from 50 to nearly 100 times a year, the Sacramento District Attorney’s Office now asks for life terms for third strikers fewer than 20 times a year, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The office obtained 16 such sentences in 2010 compared with a high of 94 in 1996.

The trend bears out from Del Norte to Imperial counties. District attorneys across the state used to collectively pack off criminals on maximum three-strikes terms by the hundreds – more than 1,700 in 1996 alone. In the past three years, the numbers have dropped to well short of 200 annually. California prisons housed 8,727 three-strike lifers as of Dec. 31.

[SNIP]

Prosecutors have always had discretion under the law to reduce potential life terms to lesser sentences, but many didn’t exercise it. Los Angeles County prosecutors, in particular, refrained from “striking strikes,” or dismissing prior serious or violent convictions for the purpose of lowering prison terms.

The approach changed when Steve Cooley was elected L.A. County district attorney in 2000. Elected largely on a platform of refining the law’s application, Cooley took the lead in putting a new policy in place. He reserved the heavier sentences for defendants with serious or violent third strikes, but built in exceptions to target offenders with horrific pasts even if their latest charge wasn’t so serious.

Cooley said over-application of the law by some California prosecutors – hitting people for third strikes for minor felonies such as drug possession and pizza theft – prompted a public backlash. A 2004 statewide ballot measure that would have dumped three strikes altogether came within three percentage points of winning.***

“If you have a good law, and you abuse it, you will predictably lose it,” Cooley said at a recent symposium on the three-strikes law in Los Angeles. “If somebody has a rock (of cocaine) in his sock, you give him 25 to life? Give me a break.”

***NOTE: Furillo has this one fact wrong. The 2004 ballot measure, Prop. 66, would not have done away with Three-Strikes altogether, but would have modified the law. People like Cooley, who is not at all averse to some modifications, felt Prop. 66 went too far.

HAMLET IN PRISON

Even non-Shakespeare fans know that a large part of the play of Hamlet features the play’s leading guy musing about whether or not he should kill Claudius. Okay, then, what if the play was performed by actors who actually had killed a person or persons?

The radio show This American life attempts to answer the question.

Reporter Jack Hitt spent 6 mos reporting on the casting, rehearsal and performance of Hamlet by maximum security prison inmates for TAL.

Jack Hitt begins his story about a group of prisoners at the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center who are rehearsing and staging a production of Hamlet. The man who plays Hamlet gets in character by recalling times he’s wanted to hurt people, like the crime that sent him to prison, in which he shot two people and left them for dead. Big Hutch, who plays Horatio, explains how it would work if you set Hamlet in a prison, and why it would actually improve a flaw in the plot.

I love this show. Listen when you possibly can.

ON THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S DEATH LA TIMES DAVID ULIN ASKED HIMSELF WHY “PAPA” MATTERED

As LA Times book critic Ulin goes about answering the question, he writes a terrific essay. A must read for anyone with a love of literature and writing. It helped me sort out my own hot/cold feelings for Papa and his writing.

Approximately 100 prisoners in the Secure Housing Unit—the SHU-–of Pelican Bay Prison will begin an indefinite hunger strike on Friday July 1st in the hope of drawing attention to a list of five “core demands.”

The demands are:

1. Individual accountability. No more “‘group punishment’ as a means to address individual inmates rule violations.”

2. Stop the practice of debriefing. Inmates in the SHU because of perceived gang membership, who claim they have left the gang behind, can only prove their non-involvement by ratting out other inmates, a practice that has led to many false accusations, and marks the inmate for deadly retaliation when they are released.
3. Use long term solitary confinement only as a last resort.

4. Provide adequate food and stop using food as punishment.

5. Expand and Provide Constructive Programming and Privileges for Indefinite SHU Status Inmates.

The strikers also have written up a formal complaint listing what they contend are ongoing human rights violations.

The Pelican Bay inmates are being joined by inmates in the SHU at Corcoran. Protests to support the inmates are being held in a string of cities including San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Toronto and Montreal, with activist groups in each city joining in support.

THE NATURE OF THE SHU

Built in 1989, Pelican Bay State Prison has one of the largest and oldest isolation units in the country.

Each prisoner spends 22 1/2 hours of their day entirely alone in a small cement prison cell. The other 1 1/2 hours is spent in a bare cement “yard”—really just a slightly larger box-like cell, except with a metal grate for a ceiling that is open to the air. They are allowed no balls in the so-called yard, nothing is allowed but the inmate and the walls. Even SHU inmates’ interaction with the guards is conducted only through a narrow slot in the cell door.

in the last few years, there has been growing group of experts who suggest that solitary confinement, of the kind that goes on at Pelican Bay and three other California SHU units, is a form of torture, that isolation drives people mad.

(This 2006 NPR story has more.)

PREPARED TO STRIKE INDEFINITELY

Todd Asker, one of the strike’s organizers presently residing in the Pelican Bay SHU, wrote the following to San Francisco-based activist group, California Prison Focus, about the strike.

This peaceful H.S. protest is not “led” by any individual or group; it was deemed necessary only after more than a year of discussion and thought amongst many PBSP-SHU prisoners, from all races. And it was never taken lightly by anyone—actually the opposite is the case, because no one wants to put their health/life on the line, and all understand that there’s a good chance some will die before this is over…. However, many of us are also lifers with 20 to 45 year in, and we recognize the illegal policies and practices (summarized in the Formal Complaint) continue unabated in spite of thousands of prisoner grievances and hundreds of court challenges. Thus we are left with no other option than an indefinite H.S.—the goal being to expose the illegal policies and practices at issue (and the related failure on the part of law makers and the courts) and to force positive changes.

We have nothing to lose.

Terry Thorton, spokesman for the California Department of Corrections, told California Watch that, if the strike does indeed materialize, the department would monitor the prisoners’ health, but that was about it. “If an inmate decides he’s not going to eat, we can’t force him to eat.”

And the state did not plan to actually negotiate with the strikers, she said.

“It’s appropriate for the CDCR to review the demands, but they’re not going to concede under these types of tactics.”

On Tuesday, the governor and the California Department of Corrections announced their collective plan to reduce the state’s prison population— and it comes down to one single word: REALIGNMENT.

The plan was, as most of you know, put forth in answer to last month’s Supreme Court ruling mandating that California lower its inmate numbers by 33,000.

Corrections Secretary Matthew Cate Matt Cate called realignment the “cornerstone” of the state’s proposed methods to solve a chronic and severe overcrowding problem that, according to the Supremes, produced “serious constitutional violations” and endangered both inmates and guards.

Realignment is just that—a realigning of which prisoners go to state prison, and which instead remain with the various counties.

Here’s how the CDCR explains it:

Under Realignment, the state will continue to incarcerate offenders who commit serious, violent, or sexual crimes and counties will supervise, rehabilitate and manage low-level offenders using a variety of tools. It is anticipated that realignment will reduce the prison population by tens of thousands of low-level offenders over the next three years.

A bill to authorize realignment was passed in Aprilbut has languished since then for lack of funding.

As the AP reports:

The shift cannot take effect unless local governments get the money to provide jail cells and rehabilitation services, and funding for that remains stalled in the Legislature. Republican lawmakers have blocked Brown’s proposal for an extension of temporary tax increases that are set to expire by the end of this month.

Renewing the recent increases in the vehicle, sales and personal income taxes is essential to funding Brown’s plan to shift low-level offenders to county jurisdiction.

Whether realignment gets funded or not, one thing that Cate made extremely clear was that, whatever California’s response to the ruling, it “does not include the early release of inmates.”

OPERATION “BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY’ GANG CRACK DOWN

On Tuesday morning, a large federal law enforcement action targeted the Varrio Azusa 13 street gang. The action— literarily titled “Operation Bright Lights Big City”—marks “only the second time in history that federal civil rights laws have been used against members of a criminal street gang, ” said a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s office.

LA Weekly’s Dennis Romero has more:

The indictment alleges the gang was run on the principle that members “will harass and use violence to drive African-Americans out of the City of Azusa and .. use violence in order to prevent African-Americans from moving into the city.”

How did they allegedly try to make their brown gang Utopia a reality? Graffiti, beatings, and robberies, prosecutors say. A black high school student was even beaten on his way home from school in last spring — just because he’s African American.

The U.S. Attorney in L.A., Andre Birotte Jr:

The Azusa 13 gang waged a campaign of hate during a two-decade crime spree in which African-Americans were harassed and attacked. We hope that this federal case will signal the end of this racist behavior and will help vindicate all of the victims who have suffered over the years.

NOTE: LIGHT BLOGGING TODAY.