In the running of California’s prisons, one would assume that the warden is pretty much the boss of the place. Not so. For instance, the warden doesn’t have the power to select which guards should be assigned to what tasks inside the facility—even critical jobs like checking for contraband, working gang issues, or the transportation of prisoners. Nor does he (or she) decide how many guards should staff various work details, or when inmates are allowed to go to outside hospitals.

Incredibly, all those decisions—and a whole lot more—are left up to the prison guards’ union.

Last week, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger drew a line in the sand in an effort to change all that—or at least some of it.

Here’s a bit of back story: In a 2001 contract, then-Governor Gray Davis handed over much of the running over California prisons to the CCPOA—the California Correctional Peace Officers Association—AKA, the union. When Schwarzenegger first was elected to office, he swore he’d stand up to the union leadership and the millions of dollars the CCPOA pours into strategically-placed politicians’ campaign coffers. But guards’ union officials easily outplayed the governor in the game of political poker. And, when the smoke cleared in the renegotiation of the guards’ contract—Schwarzenegger had given the union virtually everything it wanted.

This contract go-round, however, the governor is determined to wrench some of the power back into the hands of state prison officials, according to today’s LA Times. How successful he’ll be remains to be seen.

I’m not particularly a fan of Arnold’s but, on criminal justice issues, philosophically at least, he’s far more sensible and rehabilitation-minded than either Gray Davis or Gray’s law-n’-order predecessor, Pete Wilson. Unfortunately, you wouldn’t know it by Arnold’s actions, which have been largely held hostage by the union.

Schwarzenegger’s inability to stand up to the CCPOA has come at a high cost. Here’s how the Times explains it:

On his watch, federal courts have appointed a receiver to oversee prison healthcare and are weighing whether to intervene again with an inmate cap — or even a possible prisoner release — to relieve pressure on the teeming lockups. Hundreds of inmates die each year, and in many cases there have been allegations of abuse or neglect.

The union is a major roadblock for Schwarzenegger and his aides as they attempt to surmount the crisis, corrections officials say.

“I need some of my management rights back,” James Tilton, secretary of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said in an interview. “I’ve said, ‘I’m responsible for running the department.’ My goals are to make sure we make decisions as necessary, and that’s what we intend to do.”

Now that his back is really against a wall with the Feds, Arnold has finally gathered the courage to issue take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum to the union.

This has meant that the already lengthy contract fight, has become a full-on knock-down-drag-out this past week. The CCOPA has already slammed back at Schwarzenegger, filing a slew of grievances against the state, a tool that the guards have used before to intimidate wardens and state officials. “Don’t get punked,” says the opening pager of the union’s website. “The state’s ‘deal’ is a screw job.”

But before you shed any crocodile tears for the poor abused union, keep in mind that Schwarzenegger’s proposed a “last, best and final offer” includes a very hefty pay raise, reports the Sacramento Bee.

It’s not as if Schwarzenegger is getting stingy: He offered the officers 5 percent annual raises for three years, plus benefit boosts that would mean a total increase of 20 percent over the life of the contract.

A fully trained beginning officer who now makes about $60,600 a year would be getting $70,221, plus enhancements for physical fitness, language fluency and working in hard-to-fill jobs. A veteran officer would top out with a base salary of more than $85,000 a year.

And that’s before you get to overtime and other bonus payments that can blow guards’ salaries up into six figures. (Thirty-four prison employees earned more than $100,000 in overtime alone last year, and hundreds more earned than $100,000 in combined salary and overtime, said Seth Unger, spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, according to the San Diego Union.)

In reaction to Arnold’s offer, CCPOA President Mike Jimenez said the state could “shove it.”

There will assuredly be more drama to come. I don’t know that I’m ready to bet the ranch on Arnold just yet. But I’m certainly rooting for him.

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Gera and Tin Tin….writing.

Last year, my novelist friend, Leslie Schwartz, and I managed to rope ourselves into heading up an unusual endeavor called the Homeboy Stories Project. It wasn’t a totally fly-by-night idea. The project was sponsored of PEN USA (where I’m on the board of directors, and she’s the president) and Homeboy Industries, and was funded primarily by a grant from the California Council for the Humanities as part of their “California Stories Initiative.”

Our intention was to gather together some young, at-risk gang wannabes plus some older former gang members—drawing primarily from the group that worked with and/or hung around at Homeboy Industries. It was our hope to teach them that their voices were worth something. We figured we’d do this by introducing them to the art of creative writing during a 14-week class, in the course of which we would also help the youngsters collect the veteranos’ “oral histories” on digital recorders. Our plan was to then transform all of the above into a snazzy printed anthology that would be presented in several public readings/receptions, with the homeboys and homegirls doing the reading. One event would be on the east side of town. The other on the west side.

Well, we have the anthology, and I can honestly say it’s a wonderful document. The east side reading is this coming Saturday night, July 14, 6:30 pm at Utah Street Elementary School. The second reading is next Wednesday, July 18, 6:30 pm at Crossroads High School. [details below the jump]

But, other than those three facts, very little else went as planned.

For one thing, class attendance was sometimes disrupted by the fact that several of our writers got beat up, arrested and, in one case, shot.

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As commenter, Richard Locicero brought up in the last thread, the notion of execution—lethal injection or no lethal injection—becomes even dicier when viewed in the light of the growing number of exonerations.

Because of my gang reporting, I know of a smattering of cases in which people are serving time for crimes they didn’t commit. (And, of course, I also know of a number of other situations where people didn’t get caught for crimes they did commit.)

There is, however, one instance in particular that continues to haunt me.

I’ll get to that in a minute, but first some more recent news:

On Monday of this week, the 200th person exonerated through the use of DNA evidence was officially cleared . His name is Jerry Miller and he spent 25 years in prison for a Chicago rape, which he didn’t commit.

Here’s what the AP said about the case:

The details of the latest exoneration are typically nightmarish: Jerry Miller served 25 years for a rape conviction and had already been paroled when DNA tests showed he could not have been the man who attacked a woman in a Chicago parking garage.

Yet more alarming even than the individual stories, is the fact that the number of newly discovered wrongful convictions in the United States is growing at an increasingly rapid clip.

What’s also troubling is how common these exonerations have become since the first reversal in 1989. It took 13 years to reach the first 100 DNA exonerations, but just five to double that number. For prosecutors and judges, as well as defense attorneys, the exonerations raise a larger question: How many others, innocent of their crimes, are behind bars?

Advocates for extensive changes in the way cases are investigated and prosecuted see the 200 as the tip of a huge iceberg and use the word “epidemic.”

Prosecutors bristle at the characterization. They agree that a single person wrongly convicted is an injustice that can’t be tolerated, but see the problems as few, far between and fixable.

Well, maybe. While “epidemic” is a bit extreme, there is a growing uneasiness among many working in and around the criminal justice world who suspect that, as forensic technology becomes more sophisticated, and more and more states begin forming “innocence commissions” to examine claims of wrongful convictions, it’s likely that exoneration numbers are going to increase substantially

In California alone, more than 200 people have been cleared of major crimes—rape, murder and the like—using DNA but also other methods—as it many cases there is no DNA evidence.

The truth is, it doesn’t take a major crime for a false conviction to have a near-ruinous effect on someone’s life.

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In this section, we plan to run a series of multi-part narratives, tales told chapter by chapter over weeks or months (and, in certain cases, as they actually unfold in real time). The idea is to better humanize the complexities of certain social issues by viewing them through the lens of those whose lives those issues most affect. For instance, we’ll look at the issue of homelessness through the point of view of an unusual street worker, an impassioned police officer, an activist service provider, an artist, and a man who is trying, thus far without success, to get off Skid Row and into a place of his own.

But, even before we get to the series on homelessness, we’ll be introducing another terrific and sometimes painful story about public education in urban America. It’s called The Principal.

Part One will appear later this week.

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