A few years ago, a veteran homicide detective from the Los Angeles Police Department talked to me about the aspect of his murder investigations that he found the most haunting.
“When I began this work,” he said, “I expected to find monsters. I’d think this time, this one, there’s definitely a monster behind this crime. But, most of the time I just found messed up people.” With kids, the detective said, the chasm between his expectations and the reality of the person he confronted when the arrest was made, was particularly stark. “Like with this kid,” he said, referring to the teenage defendant in a murder trial I was writing about at the time, a murder he had solved. “I look at him, and I think, ‘He’s just a scared kid. He could be one of my cousins, one of my nephews.’ And he killed somebody else’s kid.”
In her most recent column, the LA Times’ Sandy Banks writes about the confusing reality that the homicide cop talked about, and about a couple who had every reason to dismiss teenage killers as monsters, but who found that they could not.
Here’s a clip.
The child, shot to death a year ago, was a toddler in his father’s arms. The gang member who shot him was 15. He’d fired into a pack of strangers because someone had the wrong color on. He was sentenced to 90 years in prison in a courtroom heavy with outrage and grief.
The mother of the dead toddler sobbed through her tribute: “To us, he was perfect,” she said.
The killer, Donald Ray Dokins, now 16, slumped and stared at the floor.
The judge pronounced Dokins a hateful coward, “incapable of showing remorse.” But Dokins’ weeping family and friends offered a gentler rendition of the baby-faced, bespectacled teen. “He’s little in size and little inside,” Dokins’ teacher told the court.
A frightened kid who writes poetry and gets good grades in school. A gangbanger looking for someone to kill, pedaling a bike and packing a gun.
Can two such different boys reside in one teenager’s body? Is it possible to punish one of those versions and rehabilitate the other?
No doubt it would be less confusing if we could dismiss all teenage killers as monsters-–people so totally damaged that they cannot be redeemed.
The reality, however, is far more complicated, far more human.
And far more heartbreaking.
PREPARING FOR THE CALIFORNIA PRISON HUNGER STRIKE
Two years ago this summer, in July and in Sept 2011, nearly 7000 of California inmates, spread over 9 different prisons, refused food in a hunger strike intended to protest the way that solitary confinement is being used in the state’s lockups.
Today, Monday, July 8, a new strike is set to begin.
In March, the CDCR issued a document containing revised policies regarding solitary confinement. Yet the strike leaders housed in Pelican Bay prison’s Special Housing Unit or SHU, along with human rights advocates like Amnesty International, which supports the strike, say that the revisions are not all that they claim to be, and that the CDCR officials have failed to make many of the most basic changes that the strikers called for two years ago.
Hence the new strike.
The strike’s organizers have presented 5 core demands (which you can find here)..
Some of the kinds of things they want are very simple, like, “Allow wall calendars,” and “allow watch caps,” and “allow SHU inmates adequate sunlight.” The more complex sticking points have to do with who is designated for the SHU and why, and how an inmate can earn his way out.
Reporter Michael Montgomery, who has become expert on the matter. So we are glad to note that, together with California Watch and the Center for Investigative Reporting, Montgomery and colleagues are running a week-long series on issues surrounding the strike. (We will, of course, link to the segments as they are posted.)
Amnesty International issued a statement on July 5 saying that, since the strike two years ago, conditions have not improved.
According to the California State authorities’ own figures, as of 2011 more than 500 prisoners have spent more than ten years in the isolation units at Pelican Bay State Prison and 78 have been in the SHU for 20 years or more.
INVISIBLE MEN: A BAN AGAINST PHOTOS IN SOLITARY IS LIFTED, JUST SLIGHTLY, WITH EMOTIONAL RESULTS
Reporter Michael Montgomery’s first story in this week’s hunger strike series, is an affecting tale about the long-time ban against personal photographs for those in solitary confinement, which has left many families in the dark as to what their locked up father/son/brother/husband looks like after years in the Pelican Bay SHU.
Some quite literarly have never seen an image or heard the voice of a loved one for more than 20 years—all because of a long-unquestioned policy that some prison officials are now starting to see is neither humane nor necessary.
Montgomery tells about reactions as the ban cracks open just a little bit in the course of reviewing the hunger strike demands.
Here’s a clip:
…For years, prison staff defended the ban, contending that personal photographs were circulated by prison gang leaders as calling cards, both to advise other members that they’re still in charge and to pass on orders.
But after taking a closer look at the ban during a 2011 inmate hunger strike, top Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation officials determined it was not justified. Scott Kernan, who retired as undersecretary of corrections in 2011, said the stories of calling cards were isolated examples and the photo ban and other restrictions targeted inmates who were not breaking any rules.
“I think we were wrong, and I think (that) to this day,” he said. “How right is it to have an offender who is behaving … (and) to not be able to take a photo to send to his loved ones for 20 years?”
Kernan directed prison staff to ease the restrictions for inmates who were free of any disciplinary violations.
[SNIP]
For some families, seeing an image of their incarcerated relative for the first time in years has sparked renewed hope and revived dormant family connections. For others, the photographs are a shocking reminder of the length of time some inmates have been held in isolation.
Read the rest here.
SOME CONSERVATIVE POLITICIANS WANT TO USE CRIME AS AN ELECTIONS WEDGE ISSUE, WHILE OTHERS PLAY THE LONG GAME BY PUSHING FOR NEEDED REFORM
There appears to be a new schism forming among conservative politicians on the crime and punishment issue.
On one side, there is the Texas-based conservative group called Right on Crime, that, for the past few years, has been a leader in the national movement to impose common sense on what, for 30-years, was an incarceration-mad rush to apply punishment-heavy solutions to every public safety problem.
Enter Right on Crime, which saw that locking so many people up costs a LOT of money, and inevitably produces the worst kind of big, sprawling, top-heavy government structure that conservatives had long said they wanted to avoid.
With this thought in mind, the Right on Crime people were crucial in helping pass California’s Prop. 36, last year, which reformed the state’s Three Strikes law.
Now they are helping to push through some fundamental reform in the state of Oregon.
But despite Right on Crime’s successes, according to the AP, state politicians in both Colorado and California are reportedly contemplating using the law-and-order crime hysteria that worked so well in past decades to try to win some future elections.
Here’s a clip from the AP’s story by Nicholas Riccari
…Republicans say they have no shortage of issues to run on in Colorado. But one, they say, stands out for its potency.
“Crime, justice, law and order, public safety resonate in a more personal way than a chart and graph of GDP growth,” said Ryan Call, chairman of the Colorado Republican Party.
In California, which has conducted the most ambitious criminal justice overhaul in the nation, Republicans are targeting Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative Democrats over the state’s policy that sends lower-level offenders to local jails rather than state prisons. The law went into full effect in late 2011, but already there have been several highly publicized cases of convicts released from prison committing crimes like rape and murder. The most prominent Republican to emerge as a possible challenger to Brown, former Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado, in May launched a ballot campaign to reverse the prison overhaul.
Frank Zimring, a University of California-Berkeley law professor who has written widely on crime and politics, noted that crime rates appear to have leveled out after a two-decade decline. He called the recent GOP efforts “the test run as to whether there could be a resurgence in hard-right, punitive” crime politics.
We already see signs of a trial balloon with such politics in California where candidates and would-be candidates try to blame every high profile crime on AB109.
Interestingly, however, the Right on Crime movement—which refreshingly tends to favor facts over demagoguery—shows signs of working toward more and better reform in California, not dismantling what has been accomplished in the hope of grabbing short-term political gain.