SAN FRANCISCO UNIFIED STUDENTS WITH INCARCERATED PARENTS MAY SOON GET MEANINGFUL SUPPORT IN THEIR SCHOOLS
Two San Francisco education officials want to create a comprehensive support system for young students with parents in jail or prison.
As many as one in ten California kids have a parent in jail or prison, or on probation or parole.
The resolution, proposed by SF Board of Education Vice President Matt Haney and Commissioner Shamann Walton, would help kids communicate with their locked-up parents, would create curriculum to teach the impact of incarceration, and would create a liaison between the schools and the parental education program in the San Francisco Jail.
ThinkProgress’ Carimah Townes has more on the resolution. Here’s a clip:
“Parental incarceration is one the most severe forms of trauma a child can go through, with major social, emotional and academic consequences,” Haney told the publication. “Our schools can better understand the experiences of students with incarcerated parents, and work harder, smarter and more compassionately to meet their needs.”
Having an incarcerated parent exacerbates childhood poverty, because those parents are no longer making a steady income to support their kids. A report from the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Forward Together, and Research Action design found that, prior to incarceration, former inmates contributed half of their family’s income. When they were locked up, prisoners’ families were responsible for paying the costs of confinement. Altogether, these children are forced to deal with financial instability and are less likely to have their basic survival needs met.
Living with a parent behind bars takes an emotional toll as well. Depression, anxiety, loneliness, aggression, and disobedience are common side effects exhibited by children in that position. They feel ashamed and stigmatized in social settings, and performance in school declines.
SAN FRANCISCO JUVIE PROBATION CONSIDERS ALTERNATIVES TO ISOLATING KIDS, WORKS TOWARD MERIT-BASED SYSTEM
On Wednesday, the San Francisco Juvenile Probation Department discussed changing policies regarding how long kids can be placed in isolation. Juvenile Probation Chief Allen Nance asked staff members to figure out alternative ways to deal with youth who are acting out or who are posing a danger to themselves or others, rather than using “room confinement,” which many advocates say is just another way to describe solitary confinement. The probation department is also considering creating a rewards-based system for good behavior, and is in the middle of building a rec center in the juvenile hall for kids to play things like pool, ping-pong, and foosball.
SF Examiner’s Michael Barba has more on the issue. Here’s a clip:
“Long gone are the days of 24- or 36-hour room confinement for a kid,” Nance said. “Even though” the department does use room confinement, “they are not isolated in some dank, dark, dungeon space.”
While some have criticized juvenile detention centers across the nation for using solitary confinement, while referring to it with euphemisms like “room confinement,” Nance said the department will always have a need to confine youths to rooms for the safety of the offender and others at juvenile hall.
Nance said the anticipated policy revisions will ensure the department can “do that in a way that is thoughtful and strategic,” as well as limited.
“It’s important for the public to know that San Francisco Juvenile Probation understands that we have to encourage and support our young people,” he said. “It’s not our job to punish kids for the things that they’ve done but it is our job to impact their behavior so that they don’t engage in it in the future.”
Fred Nelson, a counselor and probation officer at the Juvenile Justice Center, said the department does not use solitary confinement and has guidelines as to when, and for how long, a youth offender can be held in room confinement for.
“Some folks never receive room confinement because they never violate,” Nelson said. But when they are placed in isolation, “It can go anywhere from one hour to four hours.”
Any time spent in room confinement beyond that has to be approved by supervisors before a Disciplinary Review Board and written into an incident report explaining the incident, he said.
MOST VICTIM SERVICES LEAVE OUT YOUNG BLACK VICTIMS OF CRIME AND THEIR FAMILY MEMBERS
Not only are young black males locked up far more often than the rest of the population, they also comprise the majority of crime victims.
Part of the problem is that nearly all victim services developed over the last 30 years have been dependent on criminal prosecution and are funded by fees charged to offenders. And many young victims of color don’t even report violent or property crimes to the police.
A more recent victim services movement has focused in on the communities that are home to high levels of victimization and trauma.
Al Jazeera America’s Mark Obbie explains the history of victim services and tells the story of David Guizar, whose brother’s unsolved murder led David into the victims advocacy movement. Here’s a clip:
While traditional victims’ advocates have aligned themselves with law enforcement, maintaining that justice should come in the form of harsh punishment of offenders, this new movement has more in common with criminal justice reformers seeking alternatives to tough sentencing policies. Grounded in research that establishes clear links between early exposure to violence and self-destructive patterns, the new victims’ advocates want to spend less on prisons and more on crime prevention, trauma care and other forms of counseling. That shift, they say, can save today’s victim from becoming tomorrow’s criminal and prisoner — and can rescue communities of color from the twin ravages of high crime and rates of imprisonment.
At the movement’s core is the belief that criminals and their most frequent victims belong to the same community, one that has long been told what brand of criminal justice is good for it. Now members of this community are announcing that they want a say in those policies.
The modern victim advocacy movement started four decades ago as a demand for a voice in a criminal justice system perceived as too lenient toward criminals and too callous toward victims. Emboldened by a 1982 report commissioned by the Reagan administration, advocates in the 1980s and ’90s won constitutional amendments in more than 30 states that established bills of rights for victims, including the right to speak out at sentencing, in plea bargain negotiations and at parole hearings. The 1984 federal Victims of Crime Act and state laws enacted nationwide around that time established a system to provide victims with mental health counseling and compensate them for financial losses — all paid by local victim-aid agencies with money from fines and fees levied on offenders.
Important as those advances were, they still failed to help a majority of victims. An annual survey conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics consistently finds that barely one-tenth of violent crime victims receive the services designed to support them, in large part because fewer than half the victims of violence and property crime bother to report these offenses to police. In effect, tying victim services to crime prosecution has ended up excluding most of the people these services were meant to help.
As victims’ rights were gaining momentum, a parallel movement was taking place in the criminal justice system in response to high crime rates.
In his 2007 book, “Governing Through Crime,” University of California at Berkeley law professor Jonathan Simon described his state as the cradle of the victim-focused severity revolution in criminal law, which rejected prisoner rehabilitation and judicial discretion in favor of lengthened mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes laws. Even after the crime wave began to recede in the 1990s, a number of legislative innovations were named for victims — usually white — whose experiences exposed perceived gaps in the justice system, among them, Megan’s Law establishing sex-offender registries, Amelia’s Law toughening parole systems and, most recently, the proposed Kate’s Law to strengthen deportation policy.
In contrast to the image put forth by the victims memorialized in those laws and bills, a more complete picture of crime victims in the U.S. looks less white and more socioeconomically marginalized. Young black men are much more likely to be victims of violence than other groups. They end up imprisoned far more compared with the general population. And research into the interactions between trauma and crime suggest that’s not a coincidence. A Justice Department–funded study concluded that the “toxic combination” of exposure to domestic abuse and street violence makes children up to 10 times as likely as other children to suffer from post-traumatic disorders into adulthood — including turning to drugs and crime “to counteract feelings of despair and powerlessness.” In a recent study of how poverty and exposure to violence play into the making of future criminals, researcher Bruce Western found that among a cohort of former prisoners in the Boston area, nearly half witnessed a homicide as children and about half were victims of violence at the hands of their parents.
This vicious feedback loop of victimization, untreated trauma, crime and punishment, along with racial disparities in incarceration rates, sparked the new victims’ movement — one made up of advocates who see, as Cornell law professor Joseph Margulies put it recently, that “the men and women living in the communities ostensibly served by saturation enforcement strategies are often the people who object to them most vehemently.” Criminal justice policy, he continued, “has been designed and imposed by those least affected by crime, by distant politicians and pundits who do not so much experience disorder as imagine it.”
FORMER CENTRAL CALIFORNIA DEPUTY SENTENCED TO PRISON FOR ON-DUTY SEX CRIMES
A judge has sentenced former Tulare County sheriff’s deputy William Nulick to five years in prison for committing sexual crimes against four women. Two of the women said Nulick took them into a remote area to have them perform sexual favors in exchange for Nulick not writing them tickets. The other two women accused Nulick of touching them inappropriately during pat-downs.
The Associated Press’ Scott Smith has the story. Here’s a clip:
In an investigation last year, The Associated Press uncovered about 1,000 officers nationwide in six years who lost their license to work in law enforcement because of rape, sexual crimes and misconduct.
The number is likely an undercount because states such as California and New York have no administrative process known as decertification, and not all states take such actions or provide records.
Prosecutors had initially charged Nulick with 18 criminal counts after the women said he assaulted them in 2013. He faced a possible life prison sentence and resigned shortly after being arrested.
Nulick accepted a negotiated settlement with prosecutors in November, pleading no contest to two felony counts of oral copulation under the color of authority and two misdemeanor counts of sexual battery.