Duc Ta in print 11/06/2011
Add Comment Duc Ta in print 11/06/2011
Duc has an essay ("A Jackrabbit in the Prison Yard") in the new book, What's Nature Got to do with Me?: Staying Wildly Sane in a Mad World. Unfortunately, the publisher, Native West Press, isn't on the prison's list of approved vendors, so Duc cannot receive the book. I received a copy for each of us yesterday and I'm holding his for him till his release--someday. He won't get to see it with all the essays and poems and nature photographs and sketches till then. Last night I did photocopy the cover, table of contents, his essay and bio notes to send him. It made for a thick envelope. Fingers crossed that the prison authorities will let it through. (In the past I've had thick envelopes returned to me, considered prohibited material.)  Visting Duc Ta, June 18, 2011 06/19/2011
Visting Duc Ta, June 18, 2011 06/19/2011
 Duc Ta's appeals seem to be exhausted. He is simply waiting for his next visit to the parole board in 2013, hoping for a better outcome. In the meantime, he says he's at peace because even if he ends up dying in prison, he feels his life has not been wasted. He was especially happy over a letter he recently received. Years ago, when he first went to prison, a teacher in Denver who saw Juvies had the class write to him. He began exchanging letters with these teenage Colorado gangbangers and felt confused and humbled -- how could he give them advice? There was a girl who was into drugs and her brother was in prison for murder and her whole family situation was very messed up. They wrote each other frequently for a while and then he didn't hear from her. So you can imagine how thrilled he was to get a letter from her recently enclosing wedding photos. She's now an RN, just married, and wrote to thank him for all the advice and encouragement he gave her. He has reached a point of spirituality that amazes me, cleansing himself of all bitterness and anger over what he's endured. He said Leslie Neale is now making a new documentary about Forgiveness -- victims of violent crime forgiving and forging connection with the perpetrators. What a beautiful project...she is just the best! This resonated so much with conversations in Colombia (see those posts, below). I am impressed and interested in how Duc holds no rancor against the system that has treated him so irrationally and harshly. I've met other guys who actually did commit violent crimes and get out of prison and they are filled with rage over how they were treated. The brutality of prison life becomes so overwhelming that they don't even think about the acts they committed that put them there to begin with. The system must be held to account, but Duc's way offers a healthier outcome for the individual. He knows that anger will only hurt him. So here's what pisses me off this particular weekend on his (and others') behalf: He just met the Buddhist chaplain who has apparently been going to Corcoran for 12 years, during all the time that he was denied Buddhist services and had his prayer beads confiscated and had to go to a board to get them returned. The chaplain was consistently denied access to the Asian Buddhists on C yard. Apparently, she's only talked to a couple of white guys who became interested in Buddhism in prison. Duc will now try to do outreach to other Buddhists in prison and arrange for regular services. The visiting room was almost empty because all Hispanics have been on lockdown for weeks. There were some violent incidents between Norteños and Sureños and since the corrections officers can't distinguish one Latino from another, all Latinos and Mexican nationals are on lockdown. All self-help programs seem to be eliminated --budget cuts? I guess he was thinking about death because for months he experienced excruciating headaches and his requests to see a doctor were ignored. Finally they sent him for tests. For one thing, he had an infection stemming from a wisdom tooth. When they extracted the tooth and treated the infection, the headaches stopped, but they also found a spot on his brain and in his lungs as well as an enlarged heart. The spot on his lung may still be from that bout with Valley Fever and the surgery he had and the spot on his brain they want to think was from the infection that's now been treated. They are checking his heart again and he's supposed to have a telemed conference soon. But for now, he's just happy to be free of pain. He usually turns down even aspirin because once you get a reputation for seeking painkillers, the prison authorities always suspect any medical complaint from you is just a dodge to get drugs. His main complaint about being sick was that he didn't have the energy to accomplish anything. If his life is not to be wasted, he feels he has to do something constructive every day, so that his time in prison is meaningful time. Prison certainly knows how to make people waste time. Corcoran has a new system where you make appointments to visit a prisoner. If you don't get an appointment, you can show up and take your chances that they'll let you in after 11:00 am. I was lucky enough to get a 10:30 appointment so I drove three hours and saw all the cars parked along the road, people who'd waited all night to be first in line hoping to get in without an appointment. I was at the visitors room at 10:15 to find they were only getting around to processing the 9:30 appointments. I did manage to be admitted before noon which meant Duc was brought to visiting before the 12:00 count which would have held us up a long time. The visiting room closed at 2:45 so we didn't have a lot of time to talk and I was left wondering if those people who'd waited all night got to visit their loved ones at all. Facing Life 04/15/2011
So my personal essay about the juvenile in/justice system ran over 12,000 words. OK, that's long. I'm sorry, but there's a lot to say. Didn't think anyone would publish it, but here it is, out today thanks to Connotation Press. http://connotationpress.com/creative-nonfiction/839-diane-lefer-creative-nonfiction Three Strikes and the Prison Industrial Complex “We’re fasting for freedom,” proclaimed Geri Silva, “because we’re starving for justice.” Silva, founder of FACTS, David Chavez of And while the notion of Three Strikes sounds as though it will be applied to violent criminals who are habitual offenders, committing crime after crime, mothers and wives of incarcerated men stepped forward to tell about the common practice by which district attorneys charge more than one strike for a single incident. Amy York, social worker and sentencing advocate, spoke on behalf of incarcerated youth, many of them first-time offenders sentenced to life in prison for gun crimes in which no one died and in which they did not pull the trigger. “They have no adult rights,” she pointed out. “They are not considered adults for any purpose other than sentencing.” She told of Steven Menendez, arrested at age 14. “He’ll turn 18 on Sunday. He has grown up in the youth facility, a model prisoner.” He should be going to college, she said. Instead, he’ll now be transferred to an adult prison to serve life behind bars. “It breaks my heart that he’s not being given a second chance.” California taxpayers, we learned, pay $7,500 for a young person in school. We pay about $50,000 a year for each prisoner. While, as representatives of CURB — Now fathers tell her they know better than to spend any time around their daughters’ friends. In a society where we know children need male role models and father figures, she fears we are encouraging dads to remain aloof and uninvolved. ”I wasn’t an activist before this,” she explains. “We were just a middle class family raising kids in Temecula Valley. Now I’ve met people all around the country who are going through the same thing. As long as any child can say ‘I’ve been touched,’ this could happen to anyone. But you have no idea until it happens to you. It’s like being hit by a truck.” In prison her husband met another teacher whose conviction was overturned when it became clear that the little girl who’d agreed with prosecutors that he’d touched her vagina had believed “vagina” was a fancy grownup word for “elbow.” By then, the man had served five years in prison and his family was destitute. They lost their home and he is still fighting to regain his teaching credential. As for Larry Vanderberg, even if you choose to believe he is guilty as charged, that his hand slid between the little girl’s legs as he lifted her into the air, does it make sense that convicted rapists serve eight years and go home when Vanderberg got a life sentence? Teri Vanderberg’s father has cashed in the equity in his house and her church is holding fundraisers to help pay legal bills for her husband’s appeal. In the meantime, in prison he was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer. In spite of his wife’s constant, unwavering advocacy, Larry Vanderberg still waits for medically necessary follow-up care while his youngest daughter–now a teenager–writes to him, talks to him on the phone, and makes public statements on his behalf but because he’s not allowed any contact with minors, she is barred by the State from visiting him. “The people who run the State are far removed from the pain and suffering,” said Silva. “The only pain they have is when they get annoyed because here we are again.” And Molly Bell, describing herself as “straight out of Compton,” explained why she was present and fasting even though “it’s not my husband. It’s not my son. But somebody has to stand in the gap for those who cannot stand here." Duc TA denied parole 04/08/2010
The commissioners denied him last night and told him to come back for another hearing in three years. Where is the sense of justice? What sort of human being hands down decisions like this? How do they sleep at night? How do they look at themselves in the mirror in the morning? Where is their sense of guilt? Where is their remorse? I didn't want to have anything to do with prisons. Or with juveniles. I got beaten up as a kid. "Bad boys" (and girls) tormented me. As far as I was concerned, the bullies should have all been locked up for good. Then a friend introduced me to Duc Ta. You may already know about Duc as he was featured in Juvies, Leslie Neale’s eye-opening documentary about the juvenile in/justice system that tries minors as adults. (Check it out at www.juvies.net) In 1999, when he was sixteen, Duc drove the wrong kids home from school--gang members who lived in his neighborhood. They asked him to stop for a friend of theirs, a boy he didn't know. This kid fired a gun out the window. No one was hit. No one injured. Duc was arrested, tried as an adult, represented by an indifferent public defender, and sentenced 35 years-life. I thought an “enhancement” made something more attractive, but in Duc’s case it meant the mandatory imposition of additional years for his presumed gang membership. Though he’d grown up in poverty and in a gang-infested neighborhood, Duc had always resisted and refused to join any gang. He got another “enhancement” – more years because of the presence of the gun. What I later learned when I got to know him better, the court heard he used to ditch school but didn’t hear he spent that time not getting in trouble in the streets but rather wandering the galleries at LACMA and the Norton Simon. The court heard from a “gang expert” who knew him, but didn’t hear she had met him not as a banger but as a child who’d suffered severe abuse from his father. The first time I went to Corcoran State Prison to see him, I got up before dawn for the 180-mile drive up 99, the gulag highway, where almost every town has a prison. So I drove three hours-grateful that I own a car–hoping I would not arrive to find everyone on lockdown and visiting privileges canceled. The guard at the gate told me I was in the wrong place. “You want the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility.” Strange. Duc doesn’t drink or uses drugs but it turned out the “Substance Abuse Treatment Facility” is actually a “level 4-180 yard,”-maximum-security prison for California’s most violent felons. That made even less sense than Duc being in for substance abuse. The inmates there are “cell-fed,” because it’s too dangerous to let them in the same room for meals. To prevent prisoners from signaling one another, all the windows have been painted black and not a single ray of natural light enters. I asked, “What are you doing here?” It turns out Duc actually requested a transfer to Corcoran in order to get out of Tehachapi, also maximum security, because of the pervasive racism. As one of the few Asians, he was a constant target of racial violence from inmates while guards harassed him for having white visitors. He spent a year in the Security Housing Unit for his “own protection,” where he was kept in solitary confinement and protected–from books. During those twelve months, Leslie Neale helped keep Duc’s mind and soul alive by photocopying whole novels and mailing them to him, pages at a time, in envelopes thin enough that they wouldn’t be confiscated. She sent origami paper and he folded more cranes than I can count. During his years in prison, Duc has been beaten and stabbed and has witnessed countless acts of brutality, but he says, “If I survived the SHU, I can survive anything.” Though the California Department of Corrections is now the CDCR, with the “R” standing for “rehabilitation,” there are no programs to assist prisoners like Duc with higher education. For years, the authorities even blocked his attempts to take the high school equivalency exam. Friends on the outside raised money to pay his tuition for a college correspondence course-an opportunity most prisoners don’t have. Now, the Guvernotor has canceled even those prison programs that are run by volunteers and cost the state nothing. Here’s another “R” word: “restitution.” At Corcoran, I found Duc was working double shifts at his prison job, at 18 cents an hour to raise the $4,000 he owes. I used to think “restitution” meant compensation paid to a victim. There was no victim in the incident which led to Duc’s arrest but the State automatically takes 55% of his earnings to pay back the cost of prosecuting him. Since Duc was featured in Juvies, people have rallied round him. Mark Geragos took his case pro bono and got the “enhancements” thrown out. More than two years ago, Duc’s sentence was reduced and he was ordered to be transferred out of maximum security, but two years later, he was still there. As the sentence remains indeterminate, the State can still keep him for life. Statistics show that youths who are tried as adults tend to get harsher sentences than real adults for comparable crimes. Duc has already served more time than some adults who’ve actually killed people. Of course, his friends all waited and hoped he’d make parole. A small problem arose: Duc was told he had to complete an anger management class before going before the Parole Board-a date that keeps getting postponed–but at Corcoran, only inmates on psychiatric meds are allowed into the class. Duc’s supporters finally managed to get him transferred out of max so that he could fulfill the anger management requirement. He was moved to Pleasant Valley State Prison, famous because the disease Valley Fever is endemic in the institution. Almost all inmates contract it after which they either develop immunity or suffer permanent organ damage. Asians are particularly susceptible. Duc contracted it, sure enough, and spent three months shackled to a hospital bed undergoing a toxic regimen of drugs that left his immune system permanently compromised. And because he was in the hospital, his scheduled parole hearing was canceled. Duc finally went before the parole board in October 2009, represented by Keith Wattley, the best there is. He had letters of support from family and community members. He had firm job offers. He had a place to stay. The board commissioners sent him back to prison and told him he couldn't be considered again for parole for another three years. It occurred to me that Duc has done too good a job counseling other inmates. I know of at least two instances when prison violence was averted because Duc stepped in to talk someone (or more than one guy) down and keep the situation from exploding. I guess the State can't afford to lose him. The good news is that yesterday I got word that Keith convinced someone in the system that so many legal errors were made by the commissioners in his case, Duc is being granted a new hearing soon. That doesn't mean he'll be released, but at least he's got another chance. And it makes me think about what happens to all the people who don't have the best parole lawyer in the business. It's because of Duc that I decided to take a closer look at what's happening to young people in LA who are being stigmatized, pathologized, and criminalized. More on that later.  Hector Aristizabal and I visiting Duc in prison. Don't you love the panoramic backdrop the prison uses when you get a photo? We can all pretend we're on vacation, going on a picnic. Right. Hector and I write about Duc and about other kids in Juvie in our book, The Blessing Next to the Wound, along with Hector's story of surviving torture and civil war in Colombia. (The book is not available yet but you can find advance word at the Lantern Books website as well as the sites of various booksellers who decided to post it in advance.) |   Author, Playwright, Troublemaker
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