My article just up in LA Progressive
 Part 2 of a two-part series. See also “Seeking Unity Across Sex, Race &  Class”


Civil  rights attorney Michelle Alexander reported in her book, The New Jim Crow, that largely as an intentional consequence of
the war on drugs, there are more African American men under correctional control now than were enslaved in 1850. People of color have been rounded up en masse for relatively minor, non-violent drug offenses. Alexander concluded all this came about in part as a strategy to deprive African Americans of rights, including the right to vote.

 William J. Stuntz, Harvard Law professor, evangelical Christian and self-identified conservative, (who sadly died much too young, before his book, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice was published in 2011) argued that black people are disproportionately imprisoned because they commit more crimes, that incarceration rates have risen in part because the system used to be too
lenient, that incarceration keeps at least the incarcerated from committing more crimes, and that police carry out drug sweeps in certain neighborhoods as a strategy to get gang members off the streets when threats against witnesses and the no-snitch culture create daunting obstacles to the arrest and prosecution of violent criminals. Though Stuntz begins his book providing rational (non-racist) reasons for racial disparity, he does conclude the effects are racialized and lead to the collapse of the rule of law.

 Given their different perspectives, it’s striking that both Alexander and Stuntz reach some of the same conclusions and identify some of the same systemic problems in the American way of criminal justice.  Even more striking to me is that when I listened to the anti-prison activists and former prisoners who spoke on Saturday, March 24 as part of the Teach-In “Sex, Race, and Class: What Are the Terms of Unity?” I heard some unity between their ideas and Stuntz’s.

He would surely have characterized them as radicals. (Selma James, the keynote speaker for the Teach-In and editor of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s latest book, said the people inside prison “have a political education we all need. A lot of the leadership of our movement is inside. We need them and we need them out.”)

 The panelists would surely have strenuously disagreed with much of Stuntz’s book, but they are living examples of the injustice he identified in the system.

 This essay will consider how the activists’ experiences align with Stuntz’s critique.

 Susan Burton went to prison six times for drug offenses during the years she was in despair and became addicted to crack cocaine after her 5-year-old son was  killed, run over by a police car. It was only after serving the sixth sentence that she was able to access drug treatment. Today, as the founder of A New Way of Life, she runs five homes that provide housing for formerly incarcerated women in Los Angeles and she also works with All of Us or None, a group advocating for the rights of former prisoners who leave State custody with a record that often deprives them of the vote and stands in the way of employment even while they are barred from receiving food stamps or living in subsidized housing, all of which too often leads to their children being permanently taken from them.

 “We have to disrupt the flow of what’s happening,” she said at the Teach-In. And her most disruptive idea is this one, aimed at throwing a monkey wrench into the process of mass incarceration: What if every person arrested refused plea bargain offers and instead demanded her or his Constitutional right to a trial? Right now, she said, when a prosecutor threatens you with a 15-year sentence but says you’ll only be locked up for two years if you waive a trial and plead guilty, of course people say, “Let me take the two because I’m scared of the 15. That’s what the system relies on.”

Michelle Alexander wrote about Burton’s idea in an op-ed in the New York Times–”Go to Trial: Crash the Justice System,” because in a system in which more than 90% of criminal cases are resolved by guilty pleas, and resources are entirely lacking for the
trials that defendants are entitled to, a complete breakdown is exactly what would happen.

  What does Stuntz say? He puts the percentage of cases resolved by guilty pleas even higher — at 95%, most by plea bargains, and cites plea bargains as part of the greatest injustice. Unlike what we see each week on CSI, “noninvestigation is the norm.” Prosecutors clear cases through pleas but no one investigates to be sure the defendant is actually guilty–not the D.A. and not
the indigent defendant’s appointed counsel who has only a brief time to represent the client. He writes, “punishment deters crimes only if crime, not innocence, receives punishment.” That is not happening.

 Like many conservatives, Stuntz is withering in his criticism of the Warren  Court’s decisions that protected the rights of criminal defendants, because this made the jobs of police and prosecutors much harder. But he also saw that by focusing on procedural safeguards–Did the defendant get a Miranda warning? Was there probable cause? Was evidence obtained through a proper search warrant?–the Court overlooked what was more important: The substance of justice. Search for the truth of either innocence or guilt. This is a critique people on the left will agree with as today we end up with Antonin Scalia asserting that as long as procedures have been followed correctly, “actual innocence” is no bar to execution.

The Court has mandated “due process” but not “equal protection.” And African Americans do not enjoy “equal protection of the law” in court or in low-income predominately black neighborhoods which he says are “under-policed” (while Susan Burton says they are “over-policed.”) But Stuntz’s point is that the police are present as a punitive force, not a protective one in African American
neighborhoods: black-on-black crime is not prevented and is rarely punished. He urges more community policing and less SWAT.

In this respect, he is in line with civil rights attorney Connie Rice who has urged that the rewards structure within the Los
Angeles police department be changed. An officer should move up in the ranks not for having the highest number of arrests but rather for bringing the incidence of crime down by being a stabilizing presence in the neighborhood.

While Stuntz has an idealized view of the police compared to the perspective of young people who are stopped and harassed daily on the way to school and to families mourning the death of an unarmed loved one shot by an officer, he stresses that the real decision making power and severity doesn’t lie with the police but with prosecutors.

Prosecutors decide whether or not to bring a case and what charges to file and what plea bargain to offer. It’s in this realm of prosecutorial discretion that African American defendants suffer most and have little recourse. As Stuntz writes: “As long as their decisions are not racially motivated” and it’s rarely possible to provide proof of someone’s intentional and knowing discriminatory
motive, “police officers and prosecutors have unreviewable discretion to decline to arrest or prosecute offenders.”

Another trick prosecutors use to obtain plea bargains is to file (or threaten to file) a range of charges for a single offense with separate sentencing for each charge. A crime that would ordinarily carry a sentence of a year or two suddenly adds up to something approaching a life sentence. Who wouldn’t take a plea? And in death penalty states, writes Stuntz, the way capital punishment is
used most is to induce people–whether guilty or not–to confess. If they accept a plea, the State will take the death penalty off the table. Stuntz likens this to extortion.
 
 At the Teach-In, we heard from 76-year-old Hank Jones, one of the San Francisco 8.  In 1971, a San Francisco police officer was killed during an assault on a police station. Members of a Black Panther Party splinter group were later arrested in New Orleans, stripped naked, beaten, blindfolded and subjected to more torture including electric probes to the genitals until they confessed to the crime and, after more torture, named names to implicate others in the Panther Party, including Jones. The case was thrown out because confessions obtained by torture were inadmissible.

Fast-forward to 2003. Following passage of the Patriot Act, Jones and others who had been named were suddenly arrested and charged again, this time under the new law with “domestic terrorism.” Not only were they being charged under a law that didn’t exist when the crime was committed in 1971, but the Bush administration, as we know only too well, had no qualms about torture and
apparently believed public and judicial opinion would now support its use.

 The San Francisco 8 benefited from the committed representation of activist attorneys. Most people targeted by prosecutors don’t fare as well.

What happened to Hank Jones is an example of another problem cited by Stuntz: criminal law being made not by judges and juries, but by legislatures that pass bills  leaving little room for discretion–or mercy–and with little regard for the possible consequences.

 The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996  mandated the deportation of legal immigrants who had committed felonies. In complete disregard of legal history and fairness, the law  was made retroactive. Immigrants who had committed offenses even decades earlier, had since lived entirely law-abiding lives, held jobs, had married and were raising children, were suddenly detained and deported leaving their families in abandonment and poverty. And of course many of them had never seen trial for their offenses but had taken plea bargains–sometimes receiving probation and no jail time, but now found those guilty pleas meant ruined lives.

Alex Sanchez, a founding member of All of Us or None, explained at the  Teach-In that most immigrants rights organizations in LA don’t assist those who’ve been labeled criminals. Homies Unidos, the organization he co-founded offers services to exactly that population: gang members, former gang members, men with tattoos who face likely torture and assassination at the hands of death
squads if they are sent back to Central America. His own work as a peace-builder and gang intervention worker brought him so many allies in the community that Sanchez, born in El Salvador and a former gang member, had enough support to help him win asylum. At the same time his work brought him enemies in law enforcement. He continues to be targeted by prosecutors and is now out on bail after his arrest on what the community–which raised bail money–sees as trumped-up charges of continued gang activity.

 “Mass incarceration has failed to suppress gangs,” Sanchez said. He cited gang truces that over and over again have led to a dramatic drop in gang violence. But after “the peace truce you have to bring resources. They have never brought resources into the community.”

 James, Burton, Jones, and Sanchez would certainly agree with Stuntz that the US justice system is now “the harshest in the history of democratic government.”

 How did we get here? Again, resources. Stuntz thought these were misallocated. Cities and counties pay for police and prosecution. States and the federal government pay for prisons. While more police on the street have a much more significant deterrent effect on crime than more incarceration, cash-strapped localities find it cost-effective to process cases quickly through
plea bargains and pass the prisoners along to the State. (It remains to be seen if the release of some State prisoners back to the counties as mandated now in California will have an effect on how many new cases are prosecuted, especially for minor drug offenses.)

By the end of his book, after immersing himself in study of our criminal justice system, Stuntz begins to sound like a radical himself:

 “African American imprisonment rates came to exceed the rate at which Stalin’s Soviet Union incarcerated its citizens. Residents of black neighborhoods increasingly believed, with reason, that their life choices were limited to those Pushkin identified two centuries ago: they could ally themselves with their prison-bound young men or with the system that bound them. Tyrants, traitors, prisoners–none were good options. No wonder black neighborhoods in the early twenty-first century, when imprisonment rates were
reaching their peak, spawned a “don’t snitch” movement.”


He recognized that when a community sees daily injustice and doesn’t see the rule of law equally applied, it becomes morally
and ethically easier to choose to live in a lawless way.

 If we want to bring peace to our communities, yes, we need resources. And we need to see that true justice is also a necessary resource which our neighborhoods demand and for which we still wait.


 
1 Comment
 
 
My article today in LA Progressive, the first of my reports from Bolivia. 
 
You can find it in any market or supermarket. Under the brand name Windsor, it comes in boxes that look much like  any box of Lipton tea in the US. I drank it in the morning instead of coffee. In the evening, I preferred trimate, the coca leaves mixed with chamomile and anise.

 In Bolivia, as in much of the Andes, people understand that coca leaves are not the same as cocaine. The leaves, which are rich in vitamins and minerals, are used for tea, in candies, in flour for baking cakes, as an anaesthetic, and in beverages–as they still are in Coca-Cola, following a process that removes any detectable trace of drug so that only the sugar and nutrition-free caffeine remain as stimulants.

Bolivia’s socialist president, Evo Morales, who took office in 2006, was a coca grower and led the growers’ union. He’s also Aymara, in a country where the indigenous majority has been oppressed and discriminated against for centuries.

 His election–like that of Barack Obama here–led to an often racially-based backlash revealing profound social rifts. To many people in the caste that used to run Bolivia, it’s disconcerting to see, just for one example, an indigenous woman take her place as a Cabinet minister wearing traditional garb. Morales has also lost some support among his one-time backers for promoting a new highway through the Tipnis National Park, home to three indigenous groups. But the opposition, encouraged no doubt by the US war on drugs, often uses the coca connection to demonize him. These critics don’t label the president as a socialist, or an Indian. They say, darkly, he’s a cocalero.

 Bolivia’s Constitution guarantees equal rights regardless of race, language, gender, sexual orientation, or disability. There’s been backlash here too. While I was in Cochabamba offering my arts-based literacy and social justice workshops, the city lived through a Little Rock moment. Girls enrolled for the first time in the city’s most prestigious, previously all-male, public school  and boys and their parents battled with police as they tried (in the end, unsuccessfully) to stop the girls from entering the building.

 But coca, coca, I was talking about coca.

 In the anti-Evo stronghold of Santa Cruz, coffee does seem to be the drink of choice. In the capital, La Paz, a taxi driver told me that because of Morales, the Mexican drug cartels are now slaughtering people in Bolivia–something I could not verify and does not appear to be true. What is true is that acreage under coca cultivation has expanded and the media warns of disastrous
consequences to Bolivian society if the nation were to become a cocaine producer–something that has not happened yet.

 Another truth: coca is a hardy plant and can yield four harvests a year. If non-narcotic coca products could be exported to the US, imagine what a boost it would give the small farmers and the legal economies of Andean South America.

 Banning coca. It’s as though a dry county in Texas banned potatoes because you can process them to get vodka. But when I said this to a Bolivian friend, she took offense: “Coca is not a potato. It’s medicine. And it’s sacred.”

I started drinking coca tea to prevent and alleviate high altitude sickness–el soroche–something that coca does more effectively and
without the inconvenient and at times life-threatening side effects of drugs like Diamox, prescribed in the US. Coca soothes the stomach and aids digestion. Not only did I stay healthy but I found I didn’t need coffee to start my day. I love coffee. But I’m an addict. At home in California, my head is foggy and pounding until I get my espresso fix in the morning.

 Bolivians are not ignorant of the dangers of addiction or careless about health. While we in the US use tiny print on cigarette warning labels, in Bolivia the message comes through loud and clear, taking up half the space on the pack:
 Cada seis minutos muere un fumador. (Every six minutes a smoker dies.)
 On the cartons in duty-free airport shops, purchasers are warned in large capital letters in English that smoking can cause
impotence.

 And yes, coca leaves are sacred, as I learned when we offered them up in a ritual to la Pachamama, the divinity of Mother Earth.

 Back home, my first cup of coffee in weeks upset my stomach, set my heart to pounding and my hands to shaking. I would still be drinking coca tea, if only I could.


 

 
 
 
 
         
 

 
 
2 Comments
 
Post Title. 03/11/2011
 
My latest in LA Progressive:

March 11, 2011 By Diane Lefer

He was a 16-year-old kid when he was brought to the Chicago police station on suspicion of arson murder. He was attached to a ring in the wall, beaten, had his testicles squeezed until he felt as though his head would pop right off his body. The cops told him the torture would stop as soon as he confessed to the Cook County Assistant DA. He refused. He was not allowed to talk to his mother. He was not allowed a lawyer. The torture started again. He confessed.

Mark Clements was labeled a mass murderer. He was labeled mentally retarded. He is one of hundreds of men of color tortured–some with metal rods shoved up their rectums–by Chicago police detectives under the command of Jon Burge. Though Burge has now been sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison, many of the tortured men remain locked up. Clements lost 28 years of his life until he was finally exonerated. Wednesday evening, speaking in the auditorium of the Leavey Library at the University of Southern California–obviously intelligent and in no way developmentally disabled–he said, “If I’d been two years older, they would’ve thrown me on a gurney.” What would have happened then to his accusations of torture? “A dead man can’t talk.” He recalled, “You sit in prison and you’re voiceless because you’ve been labeled as something that you’re not.”

Voiceless no more, Clements came to Los Angeles along with Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News and author of Prison Profiteers, and Cameron Sturdevant, a Bay Area activist with the Campaign to End the Death Penalty as part of that organization’s national speaking tour.

The event– Lethal Injustice: Standing Against the Death Penalty and Harsh Punishment — was moderated by local activist Danielle Heck and sponsored by the USC-campus club of the International Socialist Organization — which made it very fitting that Wright described “capital punishment” as “those without the capital get the punishment.” Or as he put it, the death penalty means “the State can kill you as long as they give you a trial. The State doesn’t say your lawyer has to be awake.”

Wednesday, March 9th was a fitting date–one celebrated by the handful of students and about 50 community members in attendance — because earlier that day, Governor Pat Quinn signed into law the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois following years of evidence of wrongful convictions. (California, by contrast, today has more people on death row than any other state and Los Angeles County under D.A. Steve Cooley is, according to Sturdevant, the “death penalty capital.”)

Wright sees a direct connection between the death penalty and extreme sentencing. “Once you have the death penalty on the table, everything else pales in comparison,” he said and so people don’t recognize the injustice of harsh sentences. “In Russia, the maximum sentence is 15 years–left over from Stalin’s time. In China, it’s 20 years maximum,” while in California people are serving life sentences for stealing pizza or videos. In the case I’ve written about before, there’s my friend Duc, serving life for a teenage incident in which not a single person was hurt or injured in any way.

According to Sturdevant, thanks to the Three Strikes law, California prisons now house 40,000 people serving indeterminate sentences that can keep them inside for the rest of their lives. (I do give Cooley credit for saying Three Strikes needs to be reformed.)

Decrying the “two-tiered system of justice,” Wright pointed out that while former Alabama governor Don Siegelman has spent millions to defend himself against corruption charges, while he was in office, he put a $400 cap on compensation for court-appointed attorneys representing indigent defendants facing the death penalty. Is it any wonder poor people are inadequately represented in court while being overrepresented in prison and on death row?

Our prison system, said Wright, “is a tool of class war.” He thinks some people do belong in prison: “They’re sitting in government offices and they’re sitting in corporate suites.” As for the death penalty, its purpose in his opinion is ideological. He reminded the audience that Bradley Manning now faces a possible death sentence while not a single soldier who committed any of the war crimes revealed by the documents Manning leaked has been charged with a crime.

Sturdevant spoke of his failed efforts to stop the 1996 execution of William Bonin, the notorious “Freeway Killer” who was convicted of the rapes and murders of 14 young men and boys. The crimes were horrific, but Bonin had been victimized by sexual abuse as a child. He was hospitalized in a mental hospital after two tours of active duty in Vietnam but under the Reagan administration policy of deinstitutionalization, Bonin ended up, still mentally ill, on the street. “The State of California was there to kill him,” Sturdevant concluded, “but not to provide any help.”

Indeed, our prisons have become the very expensive and inhuman substitute for affordable housing, adequate public education, living-wage employment, mental health services, and welfare. And, said Clements, “We’re sitting here listening to a government that lies to us saying ‘We ain’t got no money.’”

Wright cited estimates that from 40-80% of inmates are illiterate or functionally illiterate, but educational programs have been cut. Most of these prisoners will be released at some point and what sort of livelihood are they likely to find? Clements was taking college courses while in prison until, under the Clinton administration, the grants that made this possible were eliminated nationwide. Today, said Wright, Texas is the only state with funding so that prisoners can obtain higher education. Here in California, I’ll never forget the struggle Duc went through in prison as state authorities again and again blocked his attempts to finish high school.

“We’ve had a criminal justice solution to social ills,” according to Wright who said that Mario Cuomo, the former New York governor and Democratic icon, took federal funds intended for low-income housing and used the money to build 50,000 prison cells instead.

The speakers stressed that public safety is better served by education, treatment, and rehabilitation rather than prolonged incarceration and State-sanctioned murder.

“We better wake up because we have failed,” said Clements. “Where is the love?” He–whose own youth was spent in a cage–today works with youth, the kids who are labeled “out of control” and he warns we have to listen to young people. “A lot of their anger is directed because they have no one to talk to. You got to pat them along to pull them out of the mud.”

“We welcome the hard questions,” said Sturdevant when an audience member raised the question of victims’ families and said if he’d lost a family member to murder, he wouldn’t want to see the killer walking down the street.

“I’m sorry if my presence here offends you,” said Wright who served 17 years for murder. “Unlike Mark,” he acknowledged, “I did it.”

But if Paul Wright is a danger today, I believe the only threat he poses is to the continuing injustice of the system.



Add Comment
 
 

My article in today's LA Progressive:

To LA’s New Probation Chief: Condolences on Your Appointment

Civil rights lawyer  Connie Rice welcomed new Probation Department chief Donald Blevins to LA Monday night by offering him thanks–and condolences. After all, why would anyone take on the challenge of cleaning up a department long known for abusing rather than helping the kids in its custody, losing track of money and ID badges, punishing whistleblowers and protecting wrongdoers?

At a meeting with the Empowerment Congress at the Exposition office of County Supervisor  Mark Ridley-Thomas whose Second District includes much of LA south of the 10 including Watts, Compton, Inglewood, and Culver City as well as some points north including parts of Hollywood, Wilshire Center, and Koreatown, Chief Blevins asked for the community’s help not just in turning the department around but in actively working on behalf of youth. He was greeted enthusiastically by members of the Probation Department who have waited a long time to see leadership that would put kids first.

The new chief who was sworn in three months ago began his 34-year career in San Diego and most recently served as Chief in Alameda County which is smaller than LA but with similar demographics and problems.

A little more than a year ago I visited the Alameda County Juvenile Hall in the Bay Area and was impressed by the clean, new, modern facility with classrooms, a health clinic, and mental health services, all built on his watch. Make no mistake, however: lockup is lockup. The only windows in the cells look out on the control desk and when you walk by it hurts to see in each square pane the little faces of kids as eager to be let out as puppies in the pound.

But as Chief Blevins explained on Monday night, in Alameda he worked to change the culture of the officers. They’d been trained with the “care, custody, control mantra,” he said. He wanted them to see themselves as counselors and role models instead. What I saw on the unit for teenage girls was a counselor who chatted easily with the kids, sharing girltalk. Instead of a uniform, another wore a T-shirt featuring a smiling Obama family. Still, the counselors were not pushovers: I saw them turn on a dime from warm and friendly to instantly stern as soon as, in their parlance, “the tone was getting too high.”

In the Bay Area, I saw failures, but also saw the system sometimes works. A young man who since his release found a corporate job and a wife told me, “Juvie was one of the happiest times in my teenage life. When I was on the street, I was so busy hustling, getting into trouble and fights, trying to make a name for myself I never had time to sit down and play checkers or play chess. I’m sorry to say that’s where I had a real childhood–in Juvie.”

What will Chief Blevins do in LA?

He is proud that Central Juvenile Hall now offers parenting classes to the mothers and fathers before their kids go home. The number of kids held in custody is at a 30-year low as the department is doing a better job of assessing which kids will do best if kept out of juvenile hall and instead receive supportive services in the community. Options such as electronic monitoring are also keeping young people out of lockup. “I need programs in the community the kids come from,” he said, “so they don’t have to take a bus crosstown.”

We heard from a 17-year-old whose probation officer gave him one week to enroll in school after his release if he didn’t wanted to go back to Juvie, but he couldn’t find a school that would take him. Blevins said he understood “the school district doesn’t always want our kids back. What they hope is that a kid will go away and just not come back.” In cases like this, he says his staff will help. “We pay taxes for our schools and they have an obligation to teach.”

In Alameda County, Blevins explained, before a kid is released, the parents come in and receive orientation. The kid has a classroom waiting in the community. If kids take psychotropic medications, the meds go home with them and appointments are scheduled in the community before they even leave Juvenile Hall. Sounds reasonable. But in LA? “We’re not doing that here yet,” he said. If he has his way, we will.

He acknowledged that DMC (Disproportionate Minority Contact) remains a problem, but Probation alone can’t resolve the disparate treatment accorded to youth of color. There are other “decision points. We don’t control who law enforcement brings. Or that some kids get released to their parents at the police station and others get taken to juvenile hall,” but he pledged cultural sensitivity on the part of his department and that a kid who has committed a minor offense won’t be locked up for giving attitude to the officer and that all mitigating factors will be considered.

“Locking kids up doesn’t change behavior. If you don’t provide treatment, it doesn’t work.” What he believes does work is cognitive-based therapy and evidence-based practices that have shown results rather than once-touted ideas such as boot camp that became popular with law enforcement and the public while having the wrong effects. “Boot camp stresses physical fitness and the military culture,” he explained, training that meshes perfectly with gang culture. Kids left boot camp well equipped to lead a gang.

A young member of the Youth Justice Coalition asked if the Chief would support State Senator  Leland Yee‘s bill,  SB 399, which would give a small number of prisoners serving life without parole for crimes committed as juveniles at least a chance at eventual release. “I’m a father, so I have mixed feelings,” Blevins admitted, saying he understood why a parent would want to lock away for good anyone who hurt his child. But he said he also understood that when you make a mistake at fifteen, you might be very different at 35. He concluded he is now leaning towards supporting the bill.

Another YJC member asked if the chief would support their 1% campaign to divert that much of the county’s criminal justice funding to intervention and youth development programs. Alone among criminal justice professionals I’ve heard answer that question so far, Blevins said, “That sounds like a good idea.” Still, he feared with his $36.8 million budget “how we fund it is a bit of a challenge.” But he added, “We have some grants,” and he agreed, “If you have a good strong prevention network keeping kids out of the probation system, that’s a good model.” He admitted when it comes to prevention there’s currently a gap and that should be remedied.

My own concern was even if he does the miraculous and turns LA County Probation into a model department, that won’t help the kids in Juvenile Hall who are never going home given that the D.A. files cases involving juveniles directly into adult court and seeks extreme sentences: 25-to-life, 35-to-life, 80-to-life even in cases in which no one is hurt or in which no one is killed.

I asked if he’d had any meetings with the District Attorney’s Office to share his own philosophy. “I’m willing to have this conversation with the District Attorney,” Blevins said but his further answer cast the problem in a whole new light. “The D.A.s have lost faith in the juvenile justice system.”

Given the problems in the Probation Department, that made sense. Can we be surprised that prosecutors want to send kids to adult prison if the alternative is a few years in a youth facility with inadequate education, no job training, no therapy, and possible abuse followed by release? Blevins thinks the D.A.’s practices may change “if I can build the faith that if a kid is in our system he’ll be handled appropriately.”He did add, “But in those really egregious cases I think we all agree that the kid has to be sent away for a while.”

OK, I guess, though people may not agree on whether “a while” should mean a life sentence. Or what constitutes “egregious.” (I just learned of a boy from Sacramento who was sent to Juvie for stealing hubcaps. Someone thought that was egregious: the kid just turned 18 and was transferred to adult prison to serve a 5-year sentence for his crime.)

There was also disagreement as to whether the Department of Justice should intervene. Connie Rice and many community members say yes. Blevins objects that DOJ already looked into the abuses in the juvenile camps and nothing there changed. Now he believes he can turn things around faster and more efficiently. “By the time the federal government gets here and figures out what needs to be done, we’ll be well down the road.”

I think he means it. And another glutton for punishment, the Interim Chief  Cal Remington (who I wrote about on March 19) will stay on to help for the next several months. So, we’ll see.

What I can’t get out of my head is the story Connie Rice told at the start of the meeting about a boy in a juvenile camp who, while in county custody, was jumped in by a neighborhood gang. When he got out, no one warned his parents. No one checked on him. “We let this kid leave camp and the gang greets him. That was his re-entry.” The gang wanted him to complete his initiation. He refused. They asked again. He said no. After he said no the third time, they sent him a message, “putting a bullet in his baby brother’s head.”

A Re-entry Summit scheduled for Friday in Carson will bring together community organizations, probation staff, youth, and stakeholders to brainstorm on better ways of bringing kids home.

In the meantime, Donald Blevins has a mountain to move.

“Let me throw the first stones at my own glass house,” Rice said Monday night, arguing that we have all of us failed the kids. “We have high school diplomas awarded to kids who can’t read. We need real rehabilitation. Real education. We have got to make these kids our kids.”

“Hold me accountable,” said the Chief.
Add Comment
 
 
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?
Add Comment
 
 
Deborah Osborne is the president of Police Futurists International and a crime analyst with the Buffalo PD. I was amazed to see her blog where she writes:
In the book Words Overflown by Stars, creative writing teacher Diane Lefer uses terms in her essay "Breaking the 'Rules' of Story Structure" that could be applied to crime and intelligence analysis. 
If you want to read her analysis of how my ideas apply to policing and intelligence, check it out: Analyst's Corner for March 8th.

So here I am addressing criminal justice issues while someone who is truly an expert in the field is looking to my work as a teacher of creative writing for fresh approaches. Weird! And kind of wonderful to think my essay came into the hands of someone with these credentials: Debbie received a BA in Psychology and an MA in Social Policy with a criminal justice emphasis from Empire State College, SUNY. Her book Out of Bounds: Innovation and Change in Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysis was based on a study conducted during her remote fellowship with the Center for Strategic Intelligence Research, Joint Military Intelligence College (now the National Defense Intelligence College). She is a member of the Global Task Force for the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN), the International Association for Intelligence Education (IAFIE), the International Association of Crime Analysts (IACA), and the International Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysts (IALEIA). She is also on the Counterterrorism Advisory Board of the Lifeboat Foundation and an Associate of the Proteus Management Group.

I will definitely read up on the Police Futurists. I'll bet I can learn from them.
Add Comment