EDITOR’S NOTE:

This story by an LA boy named Brian who struggles with schizophrenia, (his last name is withheld so it isn’t archived forever on the internet), was published by LA Youth in 2005, and is emblematic of the extremely valuable work the publication does. Below, is a clip from the introduction to the story by Brian’s editor at LA Youth, Amanda Riddle, who worked with him as part of the paper’s Foster Youth Writing and Education Project, which helps kids who are inside the foster care system and/or the juvenile probation system (or, as in Brian’s case, in a group home) sort through and express their experiences through writing.

Here’s Amanda.

Whenever I’m asked, “What’s the longest time it’s taken for a story to be written?” I don’t hesitate to answer. It was Brian’s story about living with schizophrenia. It took a year. Brian and I met once a week, except for when he was hospitalized or just not doing well. Sometimes we worked for an hour, other days because of his ADHD he could focus for only 20 minutes. His story was written paragraph by paragraph, anecdote by anecdote, testing the patience of both writer and editor. But Brian and I were both committed to publishing his story….

THE VOICES NO ONE ELSE CAN HEAR

by Brian

People with mental illness don’t always live on the streets or end up in a psych ward. They can have normal lives. I have struggled with hearing voices, but I’m getting myself through it.

Before I was 10, I lived pretty much a normal life. I had fun with my friends. I played outside in the street and slept over at their houses. Every Memorial Day, I would drive with my parents up to Santa Rosa to see some family friends, a boy and girl who were about my age. But that all stopped when I was in fifth grade.

I was in class one day and I heard stomping and clicking. I thought someone was walking down the hall and clicking his or her tongue. But when I walked outside, nobody was there.

I heard the noises on and off every day. They would last a few minutes and then come back later that day. It was like rainfall in my head. They would distract me in class and sometimes when I was watching TV or playing video games. I wouldn’t be able to sense or hear my mom or dad. It bothered me, but I thought it was normal to hear them so I didn’t tell my parents.

One day in class I asked my friend if he was hearing any noises. He said no. That made me realize that I was the only one hearing them. It was frustrating because I could not talk to anyone about them because I was scared that people would find out and tease me or call me dumb.

In seventh grade, when I got to school in the morning I would walk around by myself, instead of hanging out with my friends. I also sometimes faked being sick to skip school so I wouldn’t have to be with the other students. I started to get depressed because being the only one hearing noises made me feel alone. I would think, “Should I kill myself?” Then I would get angry for thinking those thoughts and tell myself, “Calm down, Brian.”

I felt like I needed help so I went to the counselor at my middle school. We sat there for two minutes not talking to each other. She finally said, “What are you here for?” I told her, “I feel like I don’t belong in the world.” She asked me why and I told her, “Because I feel like no one loves me or cares for me.” Again she asked why. It was hard for me to get it out, but I finally said I was hearing noises. It felt good to get it out. She said, “I need to call your parents.”

The next day my parents took me to the doctor. He asked me what was wrong and I told him that I was feeling depressed and suicidal. Because he thought I might hurt myself, he decided to put me in the hospital for 72 hours.

The hospital was not a happy place to be. It smelled like gloves and medicine, and I was away from my family and friends. I was there for four weeks. I went to school at the hospital and hung out with the other kids in the day room. The doctors would see me for only five minutes a day. They’d ask me questions about how I was doing, like “Are you hearing noises today?” and “Do you feel like you’re ready to go home?” They gave me medication and gradually increased it. The medication worked a little because the noises came every other day. After four weeks the doctors said they thought I could handle it at home. I was excited to go home, but I was still hearing noises.

My scariest experience

The noises slowly got worse and progressed to voices. They told me to kill myself or kill others. One day two weeks after I left the hospital, I had my worst experience. I was in the kitchen when I spaced out for a few minutes—I was standing there like a zombie. When I came back to, I heard the voices. (I don’t remember what they were saying.) The next thing you know, I was holding a knife to my stomach! My mom came in and saw me and tried to persuade me to put it down, but I didn’t have control over what I was doing. My parents called the police, who came and told me to put the knife down. I got scared at that point. I realized what I was doing. So I put it down and kicked it toward them. I went to the hospital after that for a week.

I was in and out of the hospital over the next year. I would zone out for a long time listening to the voices. At first I’d think they were real, but after a few minutes I would realize they were in my head. It was scary because they were angry and would tell me to do things. My mom would say, “Brian, are you OK? Do you need to go to the hospital?” and I would say yes.

That is when I realized how serious it was. I looked at the other kids around me and I saw almost the same thing, other people with problems. Some would get angry really fast. Some would talk to themselves. There were people with drug problems getting restrained and yelling at staff. I asked a girl why she was there and she said she had schizophrenia. She said it was a disorder where you hear or see things that aren’t there and you get really depressed. I realized I might have schizophrenia. But the doctors didn’t tell me anything. They just put me on different medications but nothing was working. It felt like I was on a bus that was going somewhere, but not in the direction I wanted it to. I knew at the hospital I would be safe, but I felt like I needed more help.

The doctors recommended that I go to a group home, where I would live with adult staff members and five other boys who were in foster care or had emotional problems. I thought it would be better for me because I could get help 24/7. I could knock on the door and have a staff member to talk to.

I was 13 when I arrived at the group home. When I first got there, I didn’t like it at all. I missed my parents and there were a lot of rules, like “appearance,” which meant you had to be well groomed. If your shirt wasn’t clean or your hair wasn’t brushed, you would lose privileges, like talking on the phone.

At first I heard voices every day. It was really horrible because I was away from my parents. I would sit in my room and listen to music and rock back and forth. One time one of the staff members came up to me and asked if I was OK. She talked to me and said, “Don’t go straight to killing yourself. Think about what is around you like your parents, family and friends.” I thought about what she said for two days. Even though it was hard, I thought about all the people who loved me, like my parents and my grandpa. That helped me get through my depression. After that when I missed my parents, I would remember what she said.

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With Taylor Walker

NEW UMBRELLA PHONE TECHNOLOGY WILL BLOCK CELL PHONE CALLS FROM PRISON SAYS CDCR

On Monday, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced that it was implementing a new inmate telephone system that will both curb unauthorized cellphone use in lock-ups, and also reduce call rates for prisoners’ families. Global Tel*Link was awarded the contract to put in the the new technology, with the plan set to start taking effect by the end of the year.

Here’s a clip from the CDCR’s press announcement that explains some of the details.

Managed Access technology uses a secure cellular umbrella over a specified area blocking unauthorized cellular communication transmissions, such as e-mails, texts, phone calls, or Internet access.

In 2011, CDCR tested the Managed Access technology at two institutions. The test was conducted over an 11-day period for approximately eight hours a day. During the test, the equipment detected a total of 2,593 unique wireless devices. The equipment blocked more than 25,000 unauthorized communication attempts, such as calls, texts, emails, and efforts to log on to the Internet from a smart phone.

In 2007, CDCR staff discovered nearly 1,400 contraband cell phones. In 2008, it was 2,800; in 2009, 6,995; in 2010, approximately 10,760; in 2011, more than 15,000; and to date this year, 2,181 contraband cell phones have been discovered in prisons and Conservation Camps.

DEATH ROW INMATE IS HIS OWN BEST LAWYER

The NY Times Adam Liptak has the interesting tale of a mentally ill death row inmate who seems to be better at representing himself than either of his previous lawyers. Here’s a clip:

Albert Holland Jr., a death row inmate in Florida, has no legal training and seems to be suffering from a mental illness — “perhaps a disorder involving paranoia or delusional thoughts,” a federal judge wrote recently.

But he turns out to be a pretty good lawyer. Two years ago, in allowing Mr. Holland a fresh chance to make his case after his court-appointed lawyer blew a crucial deadline, the Supreme Court praised Mr. Holland’s legal acumen. Indeed, Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote, Mr. Holland had had a better understanding of the complicated time limits for challenging death sentences in federal court than his lawyer had.

Mr. Holland made good use of the opportunity the Supreme Court gave him. A couple of weeks ago, he won a decision granting him a new trial. In the process, he opened a window on the astoundingly spotty quality of court-appointed counsel in capital cases.

The lawyer whose work the justices had considered was the least of it; he had merely been unresponsive and incompetent. Mr. Holland’s earlier lawyers had failed him in much more colorful ways.

Consider Kenneth Delegal, who was assigned to defend Mr. Holland at a 1996 retrial on charges that he killed a Pompano Beach police officer in 1990. Mr. Delegal was removed from the case after being sent to a mental health facility. Later, the two men would see each other at the Broward County jail, where Mr. Delegal was held on drug and domestic violence charges….

There’s more to this story, so read the rest.

NO PULITZER IN FICTION THIS YEAR, JUDGING PANEL IS NOT ONE BIT HAPPY

So the Pulitzer Prizes were announced Monday….and no fiction prize was given, a decision by the Pulitzer board that made the fiction judging panel more that a little cranky.

The way it works is that the judges pick three finalists and then the Pulitzer board picks a winner.

Here’s a clip from the Daily Beast’s story on the No-Winner situation.

…On Monday, the prize committee announced that it had not chosen a winner for the fiction award for the first time since 1977. “BREAKING: Fox News Wins Pulitzer for Fiction,” the comedian Andy Borowitz quipped, as readers and pundits around the world took to Twitter to vent their outrage.

Maureen Corrigan, one of three jurors for the fiction prize, says she was just as shocked as everyone else when she learned Monday that there would be no fiction winner. “Honestly, I feel angry on behalf of three great American novels,” said Corrigan, a critic in residence at Georgetown University and a book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air.

Corrigan, along with Susan Larson, former books editor of The Times-Picayune and host of The Reading Life on WWNO-FM, and Michael Cunningham, author of the 1999 Pulitzer winner The Hours, read about 300 novels each over the course of six months. They then met and corresponded to pick three finalists: the late David Foster Wallace’s posthumous and unfinished The Pale King, which was pieced together from manuscripts by Wallace’s editor, Michael Pietsch; the young Karen Russell’s quaintly surreal debut Swamplandia!; and Denis Johnson’s stark and spare novella Train Dreams. The three were submitted to the Pulitzer Prize board, made up of 20 journalists and academics, 18 of them voting members, who must come to a majority vote on the winner. Or not, as was the case this year.

I read all three of the books that Corrigan lists as her panel’s finalists and, I can assure you that any one of the three would have made a genuinely swell winner. Had it been left up to me, I’d have likely picked the Denis Johnson book, Train Dreams, which features sentences so gorgeous they could nearly stop your heart. Still it would have been easy to make a case for either of the other two.

However, none-of-the-above is not a workable choice. Really, it’s not.

Yet the fact that both the Huffington Post and Politico, and that smart 24-year old from PA won their first awards nearly makes up for it.

From Rachel Levy at Slate:

Among the more notable winners were the Huffington Post’s David Wood, who grabbed the award for national reporting for his reporting on the physical and emotional challenges facing American soldiers who were severely wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. The award was HuffPo’s first-ever Pulitzer.

Politico also earned the right to call itself a Pulitzer-winning publication for the first time, thanks to Matt Wuerker’s political cartoons.

Meanwhile, 24-year-old Sara Ganim and the staff at Pennsylvania’s Patriot-News nabbed the award for local reporting for uncovering the Jerry Sandusky sex scandal at Penn State.

It’s sometimes easy to forget all these years later, but yeah, he really was that good.

My friend Jorja Leap has written a wonderful new book called Jumped In: What Gangs Taught Me About Violence, Drugs, Love and Redemption, about her last ten years spent in some of LA’s most violence haunted neighborhoods, in order to study the causes and possible solutions to the gang violence that still claims the lives of nearly 5000 kids and young adults in America.

Jorja is a nationally recognized expert in gangs, violence, and crisis intervention, she is the senior policy adviser on Gangs and Youth Violence for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, and has served in similar post for the mayor, for the National Institute of Justice, and more. Jorja brought her crisis intervention skills to post war Bosnia and Kosavo, and is on the faculty at UCLA.

She’s also in the middle of a five year study of the homeboys and homegirls at Homeboy Industries, and has another project at Jordan Downs in partnership with Mike Cummings, a gargantuan former gang member who goes by (and lives up to) the name of Big Mike. Once a fearsome and notorious gangster who helped found the Grape Street Crips, Mike now facilitates groups of men to discover in themselves a passion for fatherhood, with Jorja documenting it all.

In other words, she knows her stuff.

The book draws from all that expertise, of course, but the heart of it is something much closer to the ground, much more intimate, much more heartbreaking, tragic, joy-producing and transformative.

It is also a personal tale of finding her own deepest self in the course of delving into the lives of others. (Did I mention that right in the middle of her research Jorja, the tough girl who was never going to have kids, inconveniently fell in love with and married a widower LAPD Commander with a young daughter? For quite some time, both cop husband-to-be and gangster research subjects were horrified by the proximity of each other.)

But rather than give you any more generalizations, I’ve posted some (very rough) iPhone shot video clips of Jorja speaking at Skylight Books* on Tuesday night.

In the clip above, Jorja fields questions about any fears she had doing the research, and what cultural barriers she encountered.

In the clip below, former gang member Wilfredo Lopez, who came with Jorja to the Skylight event, gives his own perspective on some of the issues the book covers.

In the clip above, Jorja is asked what most surprised her in the course of researching the book. “I know just what surprised me,” she says without missing a beat. “Lesbians.”

In this clip, Jorja address a question about how one “pierces the veil of secrecy” surrounding gangs.

Here she talks about the difference between LA street gangs and organized crime.

*NOTE: Apologies to the wonderful and unmistakable Skylight Books for, in my fatigued haze, originally writing their name as the also wonderful City Lights bookstore in San Francisco.

[MORE BELOW THE JUMP]

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He was a master of absurdist comedy with a heart the size of Wyoming.

A co-founder of the Firesign Theater and one of the smartest men I have ever known or ever will know, Peter Bergman, was a magician in every important sense of that word.

Goodnight, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Not insane!

Here and here and here and here are links to some of the better early obits.

LA author, blogger, provocateur Andrew Breitbart died Thursday morning. He was 43.

He was what Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan called a worthy opponent, the media landscape will be less interesting in his absence.

Kevin Roderick at LA Observed has a good gathering of tributes and obits—from both sides of the fence.

The photo of Breitbart is taken from the cover of his book, Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World!.

The finalists for the LA Times Book Awards were announced on Tuesday. (The full list is here.)

This year, I was one of the three judges for the Mystery Thriller category, along with Dick Lochte and Michele Slung. (for the last two years, I’ve judged Current Interest in nonfiction, so this year it was fun to leap into genre fiction.) Frankly, our main challenge was selecting between a lot of worthy books. Once we narrowed the choices down to ten—twice the number of finalists the contest permitted—it was hard to want to lose any of them off our list.

Yet, when the winnowing was completed, we were quite pleased with our final selections:

“Started Early, Took My Dog” by Kate Atkinson (Reagan Arthur Books/Hachette Book Group)

“Plugged” by Eoin Colfer (Overlook Press)

“11/22/63” by Stephen King (Scribner)

“Snowdrops: A Novel” by A.D. Miller (Doubleday)

“The End of Wasp Season” by Denise Mina (Reagan Arthur Books/Hachette Book Group)

By the way, since I’m a reading fool, I’ve read quite a number of the finalists in the other categories, thus I can assure you that there are some terrific books in there. (The Art of Fielding, The Cat’s Table, Leaving the Atocha Station, Thinking Fast and Slow, The Malcom X biography….and lots more.)

So take a look. Lots of stuff to put on your reading list.

The LA Times Book Awards will be presented on Friday night, April 20, and the LA Times Festival of Books follows on Saturday and Sunday, April 21 and 22, at USC.

Mark it on your calendar now. I’ll be on a panel, so I’ll see you there!

SHOOTOUT…AMONG FEDERAL AGENTS IN LONG BEACH?

At first I thought I read the LA Times headline wrong. I’d noticed hours earlier Thursday night on my breaking news twitter feed that there’d just been a shootout in Long Beach with two possibly dead. Then the news changed to this:

A confrontation between federal law enforcement agents erupted in gunfire Thursday evening in Long Beach, leaving one dead and another seriously injured, authorities said.

The incident was sparked by an unspecified dispute between Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the Glenn M. Anderson Federal Building near the city’s oceanfront, according to law enforcement authorities.

The agency said in a statement Thursday night that one of its agents died at the scene and the other was in stable condition after the shooting. But the statement did not provide details about the incident.

Multiple law enforcement authorities told The Times the shooting involved a dispute between an agent and his supervisor.

The agent opened fire repeatedly on the male supervisor shortly before 6 p.m. in the building, according to the sources, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

With the supervisor wounded, a third agent intervened and opened fire on the gunman, who was pronounced dead at the scene, according to law enforcement authorities. The male agent who killed the gunman was uninjured….

(NOTE: A scary and tragic story like this is exactly why, by the way, to most civilians, the idea of one law enforcement officer pointing a gun at the head of another law enforcement officer and mouthing threats, when it is widely acknowledged that the men are not friends but antagonists, does not seem like something that should be be flicked away as a “joke”—as was recently reported here and here.)

AND THEN THERE WAS THIS HORRIFIC STORY…

KIDNAPPED WOMAN DIES IN CRASH DURING POLICE PURSUIT

As the LA Times reported:

The victim of a reported kidnapping died Thursday after her alleged abductor crashed the sport utility vehicle he was driving head-on into another vehicle in Westlake as he was trying to flee police, authorities said.

Police were alerted to the kidnapping shortly after 8 a.m. when witnesses reported a woman inside a GMC Yukon frantically waving for help near the intersection of 6th Street and Westlake Avenue, said Cmdr. Andy Smith of the Los Angeles Police Department….blockquote>

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AND THIS…

SHERIFF’S DEPUTY ARRESTED FOR LEWD ACTS AGAINST A CHILD….

The Times story opens as follows:

A veteran Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputy has been arrested on suspicion of committing lewd acts with a child, police said Thursday night.

Oscar Rodriguez, who was assigned to the Marina del Rey station, allegedly committed the unspecified acts against the child while he was off duty, the Los Angeles Police Department said….

LA Times reporters Andrew Blankstein and Robert J. Lopez, among others, had a very busy night, Thursday night.

Or as Blankstein (@anblanx) tweeted around midnight:

This was the kind of news day in Los Angeles where every big story was so two hours ago #nightblog #sleepneeded

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OH, AND I NEARLY FORGOT THIS…

(NOTE TO SELF: when straying with the Cessna into the President of the United States’ temporary no-fly zone, best to leave the giant bags of reefer at home.)

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NOW IN THE NON-BREAKING NEWS, SLIGHTLY MORE WONKY REALM….

A NEW REPORT ON THE IRRATIONALITY OF “DIRECT FILING” PATTERNS ON JUVENILES IN VARIOUS CALIFORNIA COUNTIES

The power to direct file power, as it is called, was created in 2000 through Proposition 21, and allows prosecutors to circumvent the neutral decision-making authority of the juvenile court and unilaterally transfer certain kid offenders directly into adult jurisdiction. Now, prosecutors are threatening to direct file more if the state’s youth correctional facilities (DJF) are closed as the Governor proposes to do with his new budget.

Now a new study just released by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice reveals that a small number of California counties are responsible for the vast majority of adult court transfers and that the practice of funneling large numbers of kids into the adult system is unrelated to population or crime rates. ..

More on the report on next week.

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AND FINALLY…

….ANTHONY SHAHID IN JAN 26, 2012 MOTHER JONES INTERVIEW…

“….it’s important as a reporter, a writer, a journalist, to try to restore humanity.”

Rest in peace. We are heartbroken.

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Photo by Bob Chamberlain for the Los Angeles Times

At 8:24 p.m. Thursday night, after hearing about the death of two-time Pulitzer winning New York times reporter, Anthony Shadid, famed journalism/digital media professor Jay Rosen tweeted the heart of the matter:

“Typically, great journalists are great stylists or great reporters. How many are great at both and at courage? Almost none. @anthonyshadid.”

Here are the basics of what happened, from the NY Times.

Anthony Shadid, a gifted foreign correspondent whose graceful dispatches for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The Associated Press covered nearly two decades of Middle East conflict and turmoil, died, apparently of an asthma attack, on Thursday while on a reporting assignment in Syria. Tyler Hicks, a Times photographer who was with Mr. Shadid, carried his body across the border to Turkey.

Mr. Shadid, 43, had been reporting inside Syria for a week, gathering information on the Free Syrian Army and other armed elements of the resistance to the government of President Bashar al-Assad, whose military forces have been engaged in a harsh repression of the political opposition in a conflict that is now nearly a year old.

The Syrian government, which tightly controls foreign journalists’ activities in the country, had not been informed of his assignment by The Times.

The exact circumstances of Mr. Shadid’s death and his precise location inside Syria when it happened were not immediately clear.

But Mr. Hicks said that Mr. Shadid, who had asthma and had carried medication with him, began to show symptoms as both of them were preparing to leave Syria on Thursday, and the symptoms escalated into what became a fatal attack. Mr. Hicks telephoned his editors at The Times, and a few hours later he was able to take Mr. Shadid’s body into Turkey.

Jill Abramson, the executive editor, informed the newspaper’s staff Thursday evening in an e-mail. “Anthony died as he lived — determined to bear witness to the transformation sweeping the Middle East and to testify to the suffering of people caught between government oppression and opposition forces,” she wrote.

Listen to the interview with Shadid on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. It took place around seven weeks ago, this past December.

In the world of journalism, the loss of Anthony Shadid is a very big one.

Most Americans honestly don’t want to spend much time, energy or emotion thinking about people in jail or prison—unless, by chance they have a family member who is locked up.

We harp on the issue here at WitnessLA since criminal justice is, after all, central to the mission of the site. But if the topic comes up in a social setting, I see eyes starting to glaze over, even among friends who try to be interested.

That’s why the article by Adam Gopnick in the current New Yorker, The Caging of America, is so heartening.

Gopnick is a critic and commentator with no particular expertise in criminal justice matters. But he’s also a very smart guy and clear headed thinker. Somehow the topic grabbed his interest, and he dove deeply.

The result is part think piece, part book review. (He examines the new book by Berkeley criminologist, Frank Zimring, The City that Became Safe: New York’s Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control.)

In any case, it shouldn’t be missed.

I won’t try to summarize Gopnick’s work here. The essay is carefully crafted, thought by thought, and should be read in it’s totality. But some clips will give you an idea of what he’s on about.

To wit:

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.

Conservatives and other law and order types insist that the nationwide 40 percent drop in crime we’ve seen in the past few years can be laid at the feet of all this incarcerating. But, as Gopnick, channeling Zimring, points out, that assumption falls apart when one looks at New York’s crime stats, which happen to be another 40 percent lower still than the rest of the nation—the lowest since 1900—while its incarceration rate, rather than rising, has also dropped precipitously.

One fact stands out. While the rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. “New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,” Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison. The logic is self-evident if we just transfer it to the realm of white-collar crime: we easily accept that there is no net sum of white-collar crime waiting to happen, no inscrutable generation of super-predators produced by Dewar’s-guzzling dads and scaly M.B.A. profs; if you stop an embezzlement scheme here on Third Avenue, another doesn’t naturally start in the next office building. White-collar crime happens through an intersection of pathology and opportunity; getting the S.E.C. busy ending the opportunity is a good way to limit the range of the pathology.

And still we go on locking people up at a ferocious clip—even though, in terms of our incarceration rates, we increasingly stand alone in the world.

To catch sharks and not dolphins, Zimring’s work suggests, we need to adjust the size of the holes in the nets—to make crimes that are the occasion for stop-and-frisks real crimes, not crimes like marijuana possession. When the New York City police stopped and frisked kids, the main goal was not to jail them for having pot but to get their fingerprints, so that they could be identified if they committed a more serious crime. But all over America the opposite happens: marijuana possession becomes the serious crime. The cost is so enormous, though, in lives ruined and money spent….

So how do we go about ending this plague of imprisoning? Gopnick suggests that we must start thinking and acting sanely—in a thousand small ways.

Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime….

Anyway, read the thing. It’s worth it.

HOUSE PANEL QUESTIONS US ATTORNEY GENERAL ABOUT PARDONS OFFICE AFTER PROPUBLICA INVESTIGATION ON RACIAL DISPARITIES IN PRESIDENTIAL PARDONS

In December of this past year, in an investigation co-published by the Washington Post, ProPublica reporters Dafna Linzer and Jennifer LaFleur found that, in the past ten years of presidential pardons, white criminals seeking pardons were nearly four times as likely to succeed as minorities pardon seekers. Black pardon seekers had the lowest chance of all.

Here’s a clip:

Current and former officials at the White House and Justice Department said they were surprised and dismayed by the racial disparities, which persist even when factors such as the type of crime and sentence are considered.

“I’m just astounded by those numbers,” said Roger Adams, who served as head of the Justice Department’s pardons office from 1998 to 2008. He said he could think of nothing in the office’s practices that would have skewed the recommendations. “I can recall several African Americans getting pardons.’’

The review of applications for pardons is conducted almost entirely in secret, with the government releasing scant information about those it rejects.

The facts uncovered by the reporters’ investigation caused the House Judiciary Committee to pose a series of probing questions to Attorney General Eric Holder about what he was doing to look into this issue.

A WOMAN RELIVES THE TRAUMA OF FORCED STERILIZATION AND THE NIGHTMARE OF EUGENICS

This LA Times Column One story story by David Zucchino is dizzyingly painful to read, but also essential.

Here’s how it opens:

Elaine Riddick was a confused and frightened 14-year-old. She was poor and black, the daughter of alcoholic parents in a segregated North Carolina town. And she was pregnant after being raped by a man from her neighborhood.

Riddick’s miserable circumstances attracted the attention of social workers, who referred her case to the state’s Eugenics Board. In an office building in Raleigh, five men met to consider her fate — among them the state health director and a lawyer from the attorney general’s office.

Board members concluded that the girl was “feebleminded” and doomed to “promiscuity.” They recommended sterilization. Riddick’s illiterate grandmother, Maggie Woodard, known as “Miss Peaches,” marked an “X” on a consent form.

Hours after Riddick gave birth to a son in Edenton, N.C., on March 5, 1968, a doctor sliced through her fallopian tubes and cauterized them.

“They butchered me like a hog,” recalls Riddick, now a poised and determined woman of 57.

Between the years of 1929 and 1974, reports Zuccinno, close to 7,600 people were sterilized under orders from North Carolina’s Eugenics Board. Nearly 85% were women or girls, some as young as 10…

Read on.

Photo by Steve Liss for the New Yorker