Take Action California

Controller John Chiang: January revenues 'disappointing'

2012-02-10T17:21:00.000-08:00

via Sacramento Bee

California revenues last month lagged 5.5 percent behind what Gov. Jerry Brown expected in his just-proposed January budget, a development that Controller John Chiang termed "disappointing."

Though the big spring revenue months and Facebook's public stock offering are still to come, the latest report may provide a cautionary signal for Democratic lawmakers who think Brown's forecast is too pessimistic.

According to Chiang's office, the state fell $528.4 million behind the governor's latest projection for January, including a $525 million (6.3 percent) shortage in income tax collections. After the first seven months of the fiscal year, the state is $694 million in general fund revenues, or 1.1 percent, behind Brown's latest plan to solve a $9.2 billion deficit through June 2013.

"January revenues were disappointing on almost every front," Chiang said in a statement.

The drop in January income taxes is due largely to lower estimated tax payments and more income tax refunds than expected in January, Chiang's report said. Withholdings were roughly on par with what Brown projected, coming in $19 million above.

Sales taxes were 5.6 percent higher than Brown expected for the month, which the report said "signals that consumers continue to spend money as the economic recovery picks up steam." Corporate tax revenues were $127.9 million shy of projections, or 48.8 percent.

When compared to the budget that Brown and lawmakers approved last year, built on outdated projections from last spring, the January revenue picture is uglier. Compared to that more optimistic budget, the state was $1.2 billion, or 11.9 percent, behind in January revenues. But Brown accounted for roughly $700 million of that in his latest deficit projection.

Chiang made a point of stating that despite the bad month, California won't run out of cash in March now that lawmakers have approved $865 million in borrowing from special state accounts earmarked for programs like transportation.

In a rare move, Brown's Department of Finance issued a two-page memo responding to the controller's revenue report to assert that December and January data don't offer much guidance.

Finance acknowledged the "recent receipts are concerning." But the department also noted, "One quarterly payment - even when there is a significant variance between actual and forecast revenue - is just one data point, insufficient information to draw conclusions or arrive at informed judgments of what is to come."

Because quarterly payments are largely to blame, Finance suggested that some shareholders delayed selling their stock in late 2011 because the market was volatile. If they sell early this year - the S&P 500 index is up 6.76 percent already this year - Finance suggests the state could see stronger quarterly payments in April and June.

The Caging of America Why do we lock up so many people?

2012-02-10T09:00:00.000-08:00

http://m.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all

by Adam Gopnik January 30, 2012

A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.

That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

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. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.

How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? There’s a fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history and sociology of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the American zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century, apportioning blame in two directions. There’s an essentially Northern explanation, focussing on the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and its “reformist” tradition; and a Southern explanation, which sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued by other means. Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern revisionist tract “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” traces two ancestral lines, “from the North, the birthplace of rehabilitative penology, to the South, the fountainhead of subjugationist discipline.” In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.

William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School who died shortly before his masterwork, “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice,” was published, last fall, is the most forceful advocate for the view that the scandal of our prisons derives from the Enlightenment-era, “procedural” nature of American justice. He runs through the immediate causes of the incarceration epidemic: the growth of post-Rockefeller drug laws, which punished minor drug offenses with major prison time; “zero tolerance” policing, which added to the group; mandatory-sentencing laws, which prevented judges from exercising judgment. But his search for the ultimate cause leads deeper, all the way to the Bill of Rights. In a society where Constitution worship is still a requisite on right and left alike, Stuntz startlingly suggests that the Bill of Rights is a terrible document with which to start a justice system—much inferior to the exactly contemporary French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which Jefferson, he points out, may have helped shape while his protégé Madison was writing ours.

The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles. The Declaration of the Rights of Man says, Be just! The Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead of announcing general principles—no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done—it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice. You can get off if the cops looked in the wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your joint, but you have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life. You may be spared the death penalty if you can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren’t guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong. Even clauses that Americans are taught to revere are, Stuntz maintains, unworthy of reverence: the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” was designed to protect cruel punishments—flogging and branding—that were not at that time unusual.

The obsession with due process and the cult of brutal prisons, the argument goes, share an essential impersonality. The more professionalized and procedural a system is, the more insulated we become from its real effects on real people. That’s why America is famous both for its process-driven judicial system (“The bastard got off on a technicality,” the cop-show detective fumes) and for the harshness and inhumanity of its prisons. Though all industrialized societies started sending more people to prison and fewer to the gallows in the eighteenth century, it was in Enlightenment-inspired America that the taste for long-term, profoundly depersonalized punishment became most aggravated. The inhumanity of American prisons was as much a theme for Dickens, visiting America in 1842, as the cynicism of American lawyers. His shock when he saw the Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia—a “model” prison, at the time the most expensive public building ever constructed in the country, where every prisoner was kept in silent, separate confinement—still resonates:

I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

Not roused up to stay—that was the point. Once the procedure ends, the penalty begins, and, as long as the cruelty is routine, our civil responsibility toward the punished is over. We lock men up and forget about their existence. For Dickens, even the corrupt but communal debtors’ prisons of old London were better than this. “Don’t take it personally!”—that remains the slogan above the gate to the American prison Inferno. Nor is this merely a historian’s vision. Conrad Black, at the high end, has a scary and persuasive picture of how his counsel, the judge, and the prosecutors all merrily congratulated each other on their combined professional excellence just before sending him off to the hoosegow for several years. If a millionaire feels that way, imagine how the ordinary culprit must feel.

In place of abstraction, Stuntz argues for the saving grace of humane discretion. Basically, he thinks, we should go into court with an understanding of what a crime is and what justice is like, and then let common sense and compassion and specific circumstance take over. There’s a lovely scene in “The Castle,” the Australian movie about a family fighting eminent-domain eviction, where its hapless lawyer, asked in court to point to the specific part of the Australian constitution that the eviction violates, says desperately, “It’s . . . just the vibe of the thing.” For Stuntz, justice ought to be just the vibe of the thing—not one procedural error caught or one fact worked around. The criminal law should once again be more like the common law, with judges and juries not merely finding fact but making law on the basis of universal principles of fairness, circumstance, and seriousness, and crafting penalties to the exigencies of the crime.

The other argument—the Southern argument—is that this story puts too bright a face on the truth. The reality of American prisons, this argument runs, has nothing to do with the knots of procedural justice or the perversions of Enlightenment-era ideals. Prisons today operate less in the rehabilitative mode of the Northern reformers “than in a retributive mode that has long been practiced and promoted in the South,” Perkinson, an American-studies professor, writes. “American prisons trace their lineage not only back to Pennsylvania penitentiaries but to Texas slave plantations.” White supremacy is the real principle, this thesis holds, and racial domination the real end. In response to the apparent triumphs of the sixties, mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow. Blacks are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites. “The system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage,” the legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes. Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of “formal control” (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for life to a system of “invisible control.” Prevented from voting, legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back through the prison system. The system, in this view, is not really broken; it is doing what it was designed to do. Alexander’s grim conclusion: “If mass incarceration is considered as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.”

Northern impersonality and Southern revenge converge on a common American theme: a growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible. No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:

Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.

Brecht could hardly have imagined such a document: a capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.

Yet a spectre haunts all these accounts, North and South, whether process gone mad or penal colony writ large. It is that the epidemic of imprisonment seems to track the dramatic decline in crime over the same period. The more bad guys there are in prison, it appears, the less crime there has been in the streets. The real background to the prison boom, which shows up only sporadically in the prison literature, is the crime wave that preceded and overlapped it.

For those too young to recall the big-city crime wave of the sixties and seventies, it may seem like mere bogeyman history. For those whose entire childhood and adolescence were set against it, it is the crucial trauma in recent American life and explains much else that happened in the same period. It was the condition of the Upper West Side of Manhattan under liberal rule, far more than what had happened to Eastern Europe under socialism, that made neo-con polemics look persuasive. There really was, as Stuntz himself says, a liberal consensus on crime (“Wherever the line is between a merciful justice system and one that abandons all serious effort at crime control, the nation had crossed it”), and it really did have bad effects.

Yet if, in 1980, someone had predicted that by 2012 New York City would have a crime rate so low that violent crime would have largely disappeared as a subject of conversation, he would have seemed not so much hopeful as crazy. Thirty years ago, crime was supposed to be a permanent feature of the city, produced by an alienated underclass of super-predators; now it isn’t. Something good happened to change it, and you might have supposed that the change would be an opportunity for celebration and optimism. Instead, we mostly content ourselves with grudging and sardonic references to the silly side of gentrification, along with a few all-purpose explanations, like broken-window policing. This is a general human truth: things that work interest us less than things that don’t.

So what is the relation between mass incarceration and the decrease in crime? Certainly, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, many experts became persuaded that there was no way to make bad people better; all you could do was warehouse them, for longer or shorter periods. The best research seemed to show, depressingly, that nothing works—that rehabilitation was a ruse. Then, in 1983, inmates at the maximum-security federal prison in Marion, Illinois, murdered two guards. Inmates had been (very occasionally) killing guards for a long time, but the timing of the murders, and the fact that they took place in a climate already prepared to believe that even ordinary humanity was wasted on the criminal classes, meant that the entire prison was put on permanent lockdown. A century and a half after absolute solitary first appeared in American prisons, it was reintroduced. Those terrible numbers began to grow.

And then, a decade later, crime started falling: across the country by a standard measure of about forty per cent; in New York City by as much as eighty per cent. By 2010, the crime rate in New York had seen its greatest decline since the Second World War; in 2002, there were fewer murders in Manhattan than there had been in any year since 1900. In social science, a cause sought is usually a muddle found; in life as we experience it, a crisis resolved is causality established. If a pill cures a headache, we do not ask too often if the headache might have gone away by itself.

All this ought to make the publication of Franklin E. Zimring’s new book, “The City That Became Safe,” a very big event. Zimring, a criminologist at Berkeley Law, has spent years crunching the numbers of what happened in New York in the context of what happened in the rest of America. One thing he teaches us is how little we know. The forty per cent drop across the continent—indeed, there was a decline throughout the Western world— took place for reasons that are as mysterious in suburban Ottawa as they are in the South Bronx. Zimring shows that the usual explanations—including demographic shifts—simply can’t account for what must be accounted for. This makes the international decline look slightly eerie: blackbirds drop from the sky, plagues slacken and end, and there seems no absolute reason that societies leap from one state to another over time. Trends and fashions and fads and pure contingencies happen in other parts of our social existence; it may be that there are fashions and cycles in criminal behavior, too, for reasons that are just as arbitrary.

But the additional forty per cent drop in crime that seems peculiar to New York finally succumbs to Zimring’s analysis. The change didn’t come from resolving the deep pathologies that the right fixated on—from jailing super predators, driving down the number of unwed mothers, altering welfare culture. Nor were there cures for the underlying causes pointed to by the left: injustice, discrimination, poverty. Nor were there any “Presto!” effects arising from secret patterns of increased abortions or the like. The city didn’t get much richer; it didn’t get much poorer. There was no significant change in the ethnic makeup or the average wealth or educational levels of New Yorkers as violent crime more or less vanished. “Broken windows” or “turnstile jumping” policing, that is, cracking down on small visible offenses in order to create an atmosphere that refused to license crime, seems to have had a negligible effect; there was, Zimring writes, a great difference between the slogans and the substance of the time. (Arrests for “visible” nonviolent crime—e.g., street prostitution and public gambling—mostly went down through the period.)

Instead, small acts of social engineering, designed simply to stop crimes from happening, helped stop crime. In the nineties, the N.Y.P.D. began to control crime not by fighting minor crimes in safe places but by putting lots of cops in places where lots of crimes happened—“hot-spot policing.” The cops also began an aggressive, controversial program of “stop and frisk”—“designed to catch the sharks, not the dolphins,” as Jack Maple, one of its originators, described it—that involved what’s called pejoratively “profiling.” This was not so much racial, since in any given neighborhood all the suspects were likely to be of the same race or color, as social, involving the thousand small clues that policemen recognized already. Minority communities, Zimring emphasizes, paid a disproportionate price in kids stopped and frisked, and detained, but they also earned a disproportionate gain in crime reduced. “The poor pay more and get more” is Zimring’s way of putting it. He believes that a “light” program of stop-and-frisk could be less alienating and just as effective, and that by bringing down urban crime stop-and-frisk had the net effect of greatly reducing the number of poor minority kids in prison for long stretches.

Zimring insists, plausibly, that he is offering a radical and optimistic rewriting of theories of what crime is and where criminals are, not least because it disconnects crime and minorities. “In 1961, twenty six percent of New York City’s population was minority African American or Hispanic. Now, half of New York’s population is—and what that does in an enormously hopeful way is to destroy the rude assumptions of supply side criminology,” he says. By “supply side criminology,” he means the conservative theory of crime that claimed that social circumstances produced a certain net amount of crime waiting to be expressed; if you stopped it here, it broke out there. The only way to stop crime was to lock up all the potential criminals. In truth, criminal activity seems like most other human choices—a question of contingent occasions and opportunity. Crime is not the consequence of a set number of criminals; criminals are the consequence of a set number of opportunities to commit crimes. Close down the open drug market in Washington Square, and it does not automatically migrate to Tompkins Square Park. It just stops, or the dealers go indoors, where dealing goes on but violent crime does not.

And, in a virtuous cycle, the decreased prevalence of crime fuels a decrease in the prevalence of crime. When your friends are no longer doing street robberies, you’re less likely to do them. Zimring said, in a recent interview, “Remember, nobody ever made a living mugging. There’s no minimum wage in violent crime.” In a sense, he argues, it’s recreational, part of a life style: “Crime is a routine behavior; it’s a thing people do when they get used to doing it.” And therein lies its essential fragility. Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.” Conservatives don’t like this view because it shows that being tough doesn’t help; liberals don’t like it because apparently being nice doesn’t help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.

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.

Social trends deeper and less visible to us may appear as future historians analyze what went on. Something other than policing may explain things—just as the coming of cheap credit cards and state lotteries probably did as much to weaken the Mafia’s Five Families in New York, who had depended on loan sharking and numbers running, as the F.B.I. could. It is at least possible, for instance, that the coming of the mobile phone helped drive drug dealing indoors, in ways that helped drive down crime. It may be that the real value of hot spot and stop-and-frisk was that it provided a single game plan that the police believed in; as military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it’s a good plan. But one thing is sure: social epidemics, of crime or of punishment, can be cured more quickly than we might hope with simpler and more superficial mechanisms than we imagine. Throwing a Band-Aid over a bad wound is actually a decent strategy, if the Band-Aid helps the wound to heal itself.

Which leads, further, to one piece of radical common sense: since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime. Neither the streets nor the society is made safer by having marijuana users or peddlers locked up, let alone with the horrific sentences now dispensed so easily. For that matter, no social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two. Would we actually have more fraud and looting of shareholder value if the perpetrators knew that they would lose their bank accounts and their reputation, and have to do community service seven days a week for five years? It seems likely that anyone for whom those sanctions aren’t sufficient is someone for whom no sanctions are ever going to be sufficient. Zimring’s research shows clearly that, if crime drops on the street, criminals coming out of prison stop committing crimes. What matters is the incidence of crime in the world, and the continuity of a culture of crime, not some “lesson learned” in prison.

At the same time, the ugly side of stop-and-frisk can be alleviated. 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, that the obvious thing to do is not to enforce the law less but to change it now. Dr. Johnson said once that manners make law, and that when manners alter, the law must, too. It’s obvious that marijuana is now an almost universally accepted drug in America: it is not only used casually (which has been true for decades) but also talked about casually on television and in the movies (which has not). One need only watch any stoner movie to see that the perceived risks of smoking dope are not that you’ll get arrested but that you’ll get in trouble with a rival frat or look like an idiot to women. The decriminalization of marijuana would help end the epidemic of imprisonment.

The rate of incarceration in most other rich, free countries, whatever the differences in their histories, is remarkably steady. In countries with Napoleonic justice or common law or some mixture of the two, in countries with adversarial systems and in those with magisterial ones, whether the country once had brutal plantation-style penal colonies, as France did, or was once itself a brutal plantation-style penal colony, like Australia, the natural rate of incarceration seems to hover right around a hundred men per hundred thousand people. (That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get lower in rich, homogeneous countries—just that it never gets much higher in countries otherwise like our own.) It seems that one man in every thousand once in a while does a truly bad thing. All other things being equal, the point of a justice system should be to identify that thousandth guy, find a way to keep him from harming other people, and give everyone else a break.

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.

“Oh, I have taken too little care of this!” King Lear cries out on the heath in his moment of vision. “Take physic, pomp; expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” “This” changes; in Shakespeare’s time, it was flat-out peasant poverty that starved some and drove others as mad as poor Tom. In Dickens’s and Hugo’s time, it was the industrial revolution that drove kids to mines. But every society has a poor storm that wretches suffer in, and the attitude is always the same: either that the wretches, already dehumanized by their suffering, deserve no pity or that the oppressed, overwhelmed by injustice, will have to wait for a better world. At every moment, the injustice seems inseparable from the community’s life, and in every case the arguments for keeping the system in place were that you would have to revolutionize the entire social order to change it—which then became the argument for revolutionizing the entire social order. In every case, humanity and common sense made the insoluble problem just get up and go away. Prisons are our this. We need take more care.

The politics of parole

2012-02-09T18:00:00.000-08:00

http://informant.kalwnews.org/2012/02/imprisoned-for-life-part-ii/

By Joaquin Palomino

A life sentence with the possibility of parole is one of the only sentences in California designed to encourage the convicted to reform. Lindsey Bolar, who served 23 years in prison before receiving parole, believes “lifers make up your best population in prison.” After serving between 20 and 25 years, Bolar says, “you know that the mad stupid stuff doesn’t go anymore, then all of a sudden you are trying to find a meaning for your life and you want to go home.”

The system seems to work. Only around one percent of lifers return to prison after being released, and almost never for another violent crime. Still, for the past three decades, it has been nearly impossible to be paroled. The reasons have less to do with public safety than politics. In the second segment of a three-part series, we look at the political chutes and ladders of California’s parole process. KALW’s Joaquin Palomino has the story.

Around one quarter of California prisoners are serving a life sentence with the possibility of parole. Also known as lifers, they’re a unique group of inmates. For starters, most have committed a horrendous crime – typically murder, rape, or kidnapping. They also have one of the only indeterminate sentences in California, meaning their term is open-ended and they have to work for their freedom.

J.B. Wells is one such person. “The crime I was charged with is murder in the second degree and it carries a maximum sentence of 15 to life,” says Wells. In 1983, he was sentenced to life with the chance of parole (“chance” being the key word). To be freed, he had to participate in programs, build up a resume and kick a steady drug habit. In prison, he became a published author. “I’ve been in famous plays, I played the part of Lucky in Waiting for Godot, I played the part of John Brown in John Brown’s Body, and I just had a really, really fabulous prison experience.”

It’s pretty rare to hear an inmate say he’s had a “fabulous prison experience.” Although most released lifers don’t use such animated terms to describe prison, many do say it was positive. Much of this has to do with their indeterminate sentence, a type of sentence that was once much more common in this state.

For almost the entire 20th century, California had an indeterminate sentencing system. Offenders would get very broad sentences, such as five years to life in prison. A parole board would make the final decision on whether or not an offender would be released. “[An] independent, objective set of experts would look at someone, look at their psychology and look at their behavior, look at the totality of the situation and make a reasonable decision,” explains criminal justice expert Barry Krisberg. Theoretically, those that were fit to reenter society would be released, and those that posed a threat would stay in prison. But there were flaws in the process.

In 1979, a number of factors led to the end of that system and the implementation of determinate sentencing. The driving force was fairness. Under an indeterminate sentencing system, one person might get four years in prison for dealing drugs and another could get six months for the same crime. Accusations of discrimination and favoritism are inevitable.

Determinate sentencing prevents those accusations. “Under determinate sentencing, for virtually every crime, there are three potential sentences that the judge can choose from: a high sentence, a medium sentence, and a low sentence,” says Krisberg. “Under determinate sentencing, you walked out of the courtroom knowing exactly how much time you were going to serve.”

The state needed to rewrite the penal code to reflect the sentencing overhaul and it put the legislature in charge of deciding which crimes carried which sentences. That decision came with an unintended consequence. “Suddenly, in this very political environment, with everybody watching, with the media there, you have elected officials who don’t necessarily have training or background deciding [the scale] of penalties,” says Krisberg. The shift sparked an era of tough-on-crime politics in California.

“It almost became a bidding war. ‘I want to show that I am tougher than you, so if you think a rapist should get ten years, I think he should get 20 years.’ So there has been this natural escalation upwards,” Krisberg explains.

Life with the chance of parole was one of the few sentences excluded from the overhaul. It maintained its indeterminate status, but it wasn’t excluded from the trend towards toughness.

For most of the 1990s and in the early 2000s, the chance of being paroled on a life sentence was around one percent. Last year, it peaked at 18 percent, the highest it’s been in 30 years. Again, the reason for this has to do with politics.

“California was in the grips of a moral panic about crime,” explains Krisberg. “Voters were concerned with it. People would get defeated for office because of it. We would have statewide elections that were strictly about criminal justice sentencing.”

At the onset of this panic, in 1988, a ballot measure had passed that granted the governor power to overturn parole board decisions. Governors have been taking advantage of that power ever since.

During the 12 years Pete Wilson and Grey Davis were in office, almost no life prisoners were released. Schwarzenegger was more lenient, but he still reversed about 70 percent of his parole boards decisions. According to Krisberg, Governor Brown is allowing more inmates to be paroled, but the system is still stuck.

J.B. Wells can attest to that. He was eligible for release in July of 1990, but each time he went in front of the parole board he was rejected for the same reason. “They would cite the gravity of the offense, the heinousness of the crime,” says Wells.

He was turned down ten times on those grounds. Then, in 2008, the California Supreme Court changed the rules. The Justices decided that a lifer’s original crime could not be the sole factor in a parole board’s suitability hearing. “The courts eventually said you just can’t use that over and over and over again,” Wells explains, “because that is something the prisoner can’t change.”

In a 2010 parole hearing, Wells was found suitable for release – but he still couldn’t get out right away. The tape recorder had malfunctioned during the hearing and he was told that, without a transcript, the parole hearing was null. Wells had to wait another year.

Last year, Wells was finally released, 21 years past his minimum parole date, at the age of 68 years old. “I’m just so grateful to still be alive, to have hair on my head and teeth in my mouth,” says Wells.

Having an indeterminate sentence, which aims to rehabilitate, in a prison system guided by retribution creates some pretty noticeable contradictions. Wells experienced the extremes of both. In his own words, he had a “fabulous prison experience,” accessing a number of rehabilitative services and enrolling in a multitude of arts programs. He was also an active member in a San Quentin Vietnam War veterans group. But he also spent 21 extra years in prison despite never being considered a risk to society by the parole board.

“At the end of the day, corrections was about the bumping of heads of those people that think prison should be for punishment and those people that think that prison should be for rehabilitation,” Wells says. “And I was caught between that every day.”

It’s clear which side is winning this tug of war. In past 30 years, California criminal justice has been guided almost exclusively by goals of retribution, which many believe is the root of our current prison crisis.

There are signs, though, that times could be changing. In 2006, Governor Schwarzenegger put a key word back into the title of the state department responsible for prisons, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. More recently, the implementation of prison realignment has started bringing more discretion to the sentencing process. Some lawmakers are even wondering if a return to indeterminate sentencing might be in order.

Can Facebook IPO help solve a state budget crisis?

2012-02-07T12:52:00.000-08:00

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2012/0202/Can-Facebook-IPO-help-solve-a-state-budget-crisis

Headlines across this state are trumpeting the news: The Facebook initial public offering (IPO) – a stock sale that could happen as early as May – will help close the state’s budget gap.

The Sacramento Bee says state officials are “giddy over the prospect of Facebook money helping California dig out of a $9.2 billion deficit.”

Closer examination shows that state tax revenues could benefit to the tune of about $500 million dollars, more than the $450 million in tax revenues generated when Google went public in 2004. But how much will that help the state?

To H.D. Palmer, spokesman for the state Department of Finance, “clearly, this is a big deal.”

He acknowledges the caveats: The impact depends when people sell their stock (likely spread over 18 to 24 months), and what the market conditions are at the time. And tax-privacy laws will make it hard to pinpoint exactly how much the IPO will help. But he is overjoyed.

“I have told folks that, on behalf of a grateful state, I will go to [Facebook founder] Mark Zuckerberg’s house and wash his windows and mow his lawn.”

Analysts say that the company could be valued at between $75 billion to $100 billion, depending on demand.

The main source of tax revenue would come from capital gains on the sales of the IPO stock. “Executives and investors who had a stake in Facebook before the IPO stand to report the biggest gains if and when they cash in shares,” says Stephen Liedtka, a professor of accounting at Villanova University, in an e-mail.

“Given the magnitude of the offering, it seems reasonable to predict that executives will indeed seek to cash in some of their stock over the next few years to reduce their overall risk," he adds. "This certainly could be a blessing to California.”

But political analyst Barbara O’Connor, says the money is a drop in the bucket.

“It is several hundred million. [It] will be filed in normal course of tax payments next year. Against $9.2 billion? Give me a break,” says the director emeritus of the Institute for Study of Politics and Media at California State University, Sacramento.

Republican legislators are stressing that the IPO will provide only an unexpected, one-time uptick in revenue. Currently in a battle with Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown over a temporary tax-hike initiative he is offering this fall, Senate Republican Leader Bob Huff and Assembly Republican Leader Connie Conway issued a statement.

“The great news that Facebook will go public likely means an additional one-time windfall to the state’s treasury this next fiscal year," they said. "We should use this added revenue to protect our public school students from the Governor’s trigger cuts and pay down the state’s debt service.”

But other analysts suggest that the sale could have a multiplier effect.

“There is a no question that an IPO like Facebook, and previously LinkedIn, add a real boost to the local economy the companies are located in as the employees often will benefit financially from their personal holdings in the company,” says Gordon Tucker, managing director at Protiviti, a global risk-management consulting firm that specializes in IPO preparedness. “Over time, as those employees sell stock, portions of those financial benefits get spent in the local economy on a variety of goods, like household goods, cars, etc.”

Counting on such revenues, however, can have a downside, says Michael Shires, a public policy professor at Pepperdine University.

“It is important to remember that the last dotcom bubble was the major contributor to this state's critical financial crises of the past decade,” he says. "Dependency on these speculative dollars is a dangerous bet for the state to make.”

Race and Death Penalty Juries

2012-02-07T09:34:00.000-08:00

via NY Times

North Carolina courageously passed the Racial Justice Act in 2009, making it the first state in the country to give death row inmates a chance to have their sentences changed to life without parole based on proof that race played a significant role in determining punishment.

A state court is now hearing the first challenge to a death sentence under that law. Marcus Robinson, who has been on death row since 1994, must prove that state prosecutors discriminated against blacks in selecting juries, affecting the outcomes of cases, including his. His lawyers presented a notable study by researchers at Michigan State University showing this kind of bias.

In 173 cases between 1990 and 2010, the study examined decisions involving 7,421 potential jurors (82 percent were white; 16 percent were black). In 166 cases, where there was at least one black potential juror, prosecutors dismissed more than twice as many blacks from the jury (56 percent) as others (25 percent). With black defendants, like Mr. Robinson, the disparity was even greater. Even accounting for “alternative explanations” besides race for different “strike rates” — for instance, excluding those who expressed ambivalence about the death penalty — the study found blacks were still more than twice as likely to be dismissed.

Under a 1986 Supreme Court case, it is unconstitutional for a prosecutor to strike any potential juror on the basis of race, ethnicity or gender. But the court allowed dismissals of jurors for other reasons — like their attitude toward the death penalty or even their demeanor. Prosecutors often use these reasons as pretexts to eliminate blacks from juries. North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act expressly allows consideration of a pattern across many cases. The study found a regular pattern of state prosecutors intentionally discriminating against potential jurors because of race, even though a judge had ruled that the potential jurors could be counted on to render a fair verdict and sentence in a death penalty case.

This bias is not news in North Carolina. Since colonial times into recent decades, racial prejudice has been a huge factor in the imposition of death sentences in the state. The Racial Justice Act, a response to that terrible history, uses statistical studies in regulating the death penalty, as the Supreme Court said legislatures could properly do in a 1987 case. Opponents of the law are battling to repeal it and have scheduled a hearing on it this week. The evidence of gross racial bias presented in Mr. Robinson’s case calls for commuting his sentence — but also for abolishing the death penalty in North Carolina.

We Demand the Right to Vote: The Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People’s Movement Counters Voter Suppression

2012-02-02T16:39:00.000-08:00

† Criminal InJustice is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal Injustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.

We Demand the Right to Vote: The Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People’s Movement Counters Voter Suppression

by Victoria Law

On Sunday, March 7, 1964, 600 civil rights activists attempted to march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest the police murder of fellow demonstrator 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson and to demand their rights. As the marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were brutally attacked by white state troopers, many of whom had been deputized that very morning. Seventeen marchers were hospitalized; the day became known as “Bloody Sunday.” After a federal district court issued a restraining order preventing a second march across the bridge, a third march was successfully organized and carried out. The bridge became a symbol of the Civil Rights struggle.
Nearly fifty years later, the dreams of the Civil Rights movement remain unfulfilled.

Mass incarceration has replaced Jim Crow as a means of racial and social control: In the fall of 1965, in a special message to Congress, Lyndon B. Johnson declared a War on Crime: “I hope that 1965 will be regarded as the year when this country began in earnest a thorough and effective war against crime.” In his 1973 State of the Union message, Richard Nixon vowed to continue and expand that war, linking the growing civil unrest to violent street crime. Reagan further intensified the amount of policing and prisons with his 1982 “War on Drugs” launched three years before the 1985 emergence of crack cocaine. These “wars” came at a time when economic conditions were deteriorating, particularly in communities of color; both served to lock poor people, particularly poor people of color, away before they could organize and challenge social conditions and the social order.

On February 28, 2011, more than fifty formerly incarcerated people from around the country convened in Alabama. All had worked on issues affecting incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people in their respective states. Over the course of the weekend, attendees asked themselves and each other, “How do we bring people together and align people with the work that they’re doing individually from a collective perspective?”

The Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People’s Movement emerged from this inaugural meeting. Its goal is to organize a national movement to restore formerly incarcerated people’s civil rights, halt prison expansion, demand an end to mass incarceration, eliminate prison abuses, and protect the dignity of family members and their communities. The organizers drew connections between the Civil Rights movement and their own movement for civil and human rights, illustrating the connection by walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

After returning to their home states, members of the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People’s Movement continued to build together. “We’ve held rallies and acknowledged prison actions. We’ve collectively held events on historic days. For instance, the War on Drugs was enacted on June 17, 1971. All of us held an event within our respective states around the War on Drugs. When the prisons in Georgia had their strike, we recognized that. We just recognized the fortieth anniversary of the Attica uprising. We’ve recognized the Pelican Bay hunger strike. We’ve recognized the common issues that people who have been incarcerated have stood up and fought against in building this movement. The commonalities in our collective actions have brought us together to end mass incarceration,” stated Tina Reynolds, co-chair of the NYC organization WORTH (Women on the Rise Telling HerStory), an organization of formerly and currently incarcerated women) and one of the original twenty people who began the discussion leading to the convening.

On November 2, 2011, the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People’s Movement held its second national gathering in Los Angeles. Over 270 people from twenty states converged for a one-day conference to share their experiences and vision and to strategize fighting against policies leading to racial profiling, gang labeling, inhumane sentencing, voter disenfranchisement and hiring discrimination. They learned about the issues, organizing, and, in some cases, successes in other states.

The conference included not only seasoned organizers, but also those who were new to prison justice organizing. “Pilar,” a formerly incarcerated woman, remembered that she had never before been in a public space with hundreds of people who shared her experience. Even those already organizing in their home states like Mercedes Smith, a formerly incarcerated woman and current organizer with WORTH, were impressed. “I thought it was the greatest thing I had ever heard—a movement that was made up of nothing but formerly incarcerated people. It had to be a powerful movement and I wanted to be a part of it,” she recalled. “Once I got there, it showed me how important the work is that I do and it made me eager to come home and jump back into it.”

The one-day convening was packed with trainings on juvenile justice and youth organizing, Ban the Box , voter disenfranchisement, gender issues and other issues. Attendees also adopted a national platform, addressing fourteen points related to incarceration:

I. We Demand an End to Mass Incarceration;
II. We Demand Equality and Opportunity for All People;
III. We Demand the Right to Vote;
IV. We Demand Respect and Dignity for Our Children;
V. We Demand Community Development, Not Prison Profit;
VI. End Immigration Detention and Deportation;
VII. End Racial Profiling Inside Prison and In Our Communities;
VIII. End Extortion and Slavery In Prisons;
IX. End Sexual Harassment of People In Prisons;
X. Human Contact is a Human Right;
XI. End Cruel and Unusual Punishment;
XII. We Demand Proper Medical Treatment;
XIII. End the Incarceration of Children;
XIV. Free Our Political Prisoners.

“While the platform points are broad, we believe we’ve at least touched on all of the aspects that people have experienced while doing time in prison and beyond,” Reynolds noted, adding that, although ratified by the conference attendees, the platform is still a work-in-progress. “The issues addressed in the platform are the basic foundational issues involving the inhumane and oppressive treatment within the criminal justice system. We are taking a stand and saying that we’re going to stop it, that things need to change.”

By the end of the conference, attendees set a goal of registering one million voters in 2012.
Smith, who attended a training session on voters’ rights at the conference, returned with a resolve to help formerly incarcerated and convicted people know their rights. “I’m going to put a training together for voters’ rights and get voter registration cards so that people can register to vote. We’re also going to tell people who are formerly incarcerated how to go about being able to vote.” Smith notes that, in New York State, former convictions are not barriers to voting: “As long as you’re on parole, you can’t vote, but if you have your Certificate of Relief, you can vote while you’re on parole. For women who don’t have their Certificate of Relief, I want to tell them how to get it so that they can vote. Once you’re off parole or if you have a misdemeanor, you can vote.”
The movement is also including people who are currently behind bars in their mass registration campaign: “If you’re sentenced to a year and a day and you have to go upstate on a misdemeanor charge, you’re allowed to vote. If you’re in jail and you haven’t been sentenced, you’re allowed to vote,” Reynolds explained. “Why aren’t these people given their right to vote?” So what are the next steps towards this goal?

“Our first step is to hold a training on voters’ rights,” Smith explained. “Before we go out, we need to know what we’re going out to say and do…I’m going to try to go to as many organizations and give them the training that I receive. I’m going to take voter registration cards with me and have everybody get people registered to vote. When I agreed to get people registered to vote, I took it seriously. I wouldn’t have raised my hand if I hadn’t taken it seriously. I raised my hand and I’ve been on it since I’ve come back. By the time the election comes, they’re going to be registered to vote. I’m going to tell them that you can’t just complain about who’s in office. Learn who wants to be in office, learn if that’s who you want to be in office to work with. You can’t just complain about them and not want to change things or do anything about it. Learn your rights about voting, get registered to vote!”

However, registering one million formerly incarcerated and convicted people is just the beginning: “I’m going to work on some other things, but one thing at a time,” Smith stated. “One of the things I learned at the convening was that people have worked on issues such as Ban the Box and they have been successful in their states. It makes you say, ‘If they could pass that law there, we can pass that law here.’ Before, I would say, ‘I don’t want to work on that. That’s too hard.’ Now I feel the fight is worth it. As a formerly incarcerated person, I want all of that—not only for myself, but for all my sisters and brothers that are formerly incarcerated. I want them to be able to vote, to be able to get a job, to get housing, to be treated like human beings.”

“It’s not just about them having the right to vote,” reflected Reynolds. “It’s having an opportunity to be a part of this movement because here is an opportunity for us to talk about the movement, to talk about a political analysis, to talk about education, to talk about the history of incarceration and how it’s impacted us over the last forty years with the War on Drugs. There is life after prison; there are rights that we are supposed to have. If we’re not seeking them, why aren’t we seeking them? Why aren’t we fighting for our rights as far as what is available to us?”

Victoria Law is a writer, photographer and mother. She is the author of “Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women” (PM Press 2009), the editor of the zine Tenacious: Art and Writings from Women in Prison and a co-founder of Books Through Bars – NYC. She is currently working on transforming “Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind,” a zine series on how radical movements can support the families in their midst, into a book.http://criticalmassprogress.com/2012/02/01/ci-we-demand-the-right-to-vote-the-formerly-incarcerated-and-convicted-peoples-movement-counters-voter-suppression/

Prison realignment plan presents challenges

2012-02-02T16:21:00.000-08:00

via pe.com
After four months of California’s realignment program, jail overcrowding, homelessness and inadequate mental health reporting have overburdened local agencies now responsible for prisoners shifted from state to local institutions.

County parole agents and mental health workers have had to deal with a growing number of state prison returnees who have mental health issues, which county officials say were poorly described in their state prison information packets that preceded release.

And a number of former prisoners are declaring themselves homeless, causing placement concerns and leaving county probation officers to check parks and neighborhoods that their assignees give as their living location.

Realignment was initiated Oct. 1 under state law AB 109. It moves from state to county jurisdiction those released from state prison whose most recent crimes were not classified as violent, sexual or serious.

It also declares anyone sentenced after Oct. 1 in those categories will go to county jail rather than state prison, even though sentences may be years longer than the previous county jail limit of one year.

The $6.3 billion measure was passed to meet a federal court order to reduce the state prison population by about 33,000 over the next two years.

The prison population is decreasing, but the jail systems in Riverside and San Bernardino counties have both released inmates early because of overcrowding attributed to the realignment program. Both jails are at their capacities.

Lawmakers agreed in passing realignment that local government resources, including probation, law enforcement, mental health and other service agencies, were more likely to succeed than the state parole system in restoring former inmates to the community. California has a prison recidivism rate of nearly 70 percent.

HOMELESSNESS

Released former convicts must return to the community where they committed their crimes, which may not necessarily be their home. Under the mission to end cycling back into prison, the homeless issue is a cause for concern.

“Housing is a foundation of doing well in our community,” said Maria I. Marquez, a Riverside County Mental Health Services administrator and a chairwoman of a committee looking into finding housing for the returning ex-convicts.

“People would come in, get off the bus and not have a place to go,” said Donna Dahl, one of the county Mental Health Department’s assistant directors.

Riverside County Assistant Chief Probation Officer Mark Hake said that out of the 1,757 prisoner information packets the Probation Department has received as of Tuesday, 217 have indicated they would be homeless on release.

“We get them to define an area they are hanging out at,” Hake said. “And we have them report to our offices more frequently than someone with a residence. Just because they are homeless doesn’t mean we don’t see them in the community and aren’t able to track them down.”

Hake said there are 101 current homeless cases among realignment returnees.

The unexpected numbers of homeless people in community release have county mental health and housing officials trying to find quick solutions for an issue that often takes a year or so to resolve.
Riverside County’s Mental Health Department chief Jerry Wengerd said his office can find placements for those who need mental health or substance abuse treatment, but for former inmates released without those issues, finding a dwelling is more difficult.

Marquez said two prospects are re-entry housing for those just returned and longer-term transitional housing to help them establish roots and look for work. Both are being studied for recommendation by her group. She said there is no funding for such housing.

Marquez acknowledged the challenges.

“Placement in the community is always going to be controversial,” she said. “It serves no one to house someone in a community where it is perceived people are at risk. … We have to navigate around stigma and fear.”

San Bernardino County Probation Chief Michelle Scray said some of those returning ex-prisoners who initially claim to be homeless change their information when they report.

“Some of these people thought they were going to be (nonreporting parolees)” under the system replaced by realignment, Scray said. “They are not going to give you an address if they think they don’t have to.”

MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES

Lack of diagnoses and missing medication information are among the problems in dealing with mental health issues of returning ex-prisoners, Riverside County’s Wengerd said.

“In the world outside the prison system, if there were a referral coming from someplace else, we would receive at least the information about the basic level of care, and the medication list,” Wengerd said in a phone interview. “You could tell from that what to be prepared for. But we are not even getting that from the prison system,” he said.

Prison officials have alerted local care workers about the most severe cases, said Dahl of the Riverside County Mental Health Department. She said five released ex-prisoners were immediately hospitalized on arrival. One, she said, is the subject of a conservator hearing.

A state corrections official acknowledged that mental health officials from some of California’s counties have complained about the content of the information packets, which are delivered 120 days before a state prison inmate is released to local probation agents.

“This is a new issue, because this is a new process,” said Dana Toyama of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. “We do have designated staff at each institution that disperses the mental health information to the counties, and we’ve appointed additional staff to help institutions make sure that information gets to the counties. We’ve heard from the counties, and reacted to it.”

“Things are getting somewhat better, but we have a long way to go,” Dahl said. She said her department had identified about 130 returnees as having mental health or substance abuse problems.

Realignment was instituted to reduce California’s prison population, and that is working.
At the end of September, there were 151,283 inmates in California prisons; by the end of December, there were 13,009 fewer at 138,274.
“We know there are some issues with realignment,” San Bernardino County District Attorney Mike Ramos said. “But you balance that with just opening the gates of prisons with no kind of planned oversight or supervision — that would have been the real nightmare.”

Three Strikes Legislation Passes Assembly

2012-01-31T13:30:00.001-08:00

Three Strikes Legislation
Passes Assembly

Just now, Assembly Bill 327 (Davis), the bill to put an initiative on the ballot to amend the California Three Strikes Law, passed the Assembly. The bill now moves to the Senate for a vote in the policy committee. For the full language and analysis of the bill clickhere.

Metro Board approves Project Labor Agreement for Metro Construction Projects

2012-01-30T16:35:00.000-08:00

Thursday January 26, 2012

The unanimous approval by the Metro Board of Directors sets in motion a local and national hiring requirement to provide skilled workers, a commitment to no work stoppages, and the ability to implement a targeted hiring program aimed to provide jobs to economically disadvantaged workers.

The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) Board of Directors unanimously approved, Jan. 26, a plan to help increase the number of workers from disadvantaged areas to be hired to work on the agency's transit and road projects.

The Project Labor Agreement (PLA) between Metro and the Los Angeles/Orange County Building Trades Council is believed by Metro to be the first of its kind for a transit agency in the United States. Under the PLA, 40 percent of work hours on Metro projects would be done by workers who live in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods and 10 percent of the hours going to workers struggling with poverty.

Many members of the public testified in favor of the plan, most hewing to a simple message: times are tough, they're unemployed and they need a job "not just to survive, but to live."
Los Angeles Mayor and Board Chair Antonio Villaraigosa voiced praise for the PLA, saying he believes the program will create a path for workers to the middle class.

"I am proud that the MTA Board voted unanimously to become the first transit agency in the nation to use federal and local dollars to create jobs targeted at economically disadvantaged communities and individuals," said Mayor Villaraigosa. "This landmark program is part of a strategy to deliver public transit projects while creating jobs that will lift people out of poverty and into the middle class."

Los Angeles County Supervisor and Metro Board Member Mark Ridley-Thomas said after the vote that the rest of the nation now has the chance to follow Metro and create jobs in places where they are most needed by building transportation infrastructure.

"Today's unanimous vote by the Metro Board was an historic win for workers," he said. "As a result of this groundbreaking victory, Los Angeles is now a model for the rest of the nation. We have demonstrated that job creation -- and not the creation of just any jobs, but highly skilled union jobs that lead to a middle class lifestyle for workers -- can and should be a standard component in transportation infrastructure projects."

What is the Project Labor Agreement?

The Project Labor Agreement (PLA) is an agreement negotiated with the Los Angeles/Orange County Building Trades Council and approved by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority Board of Directors that will help facilitate the timely completion of transit and highway projects in Los Angeles County. These projects are largely being funded by Measure R, a local half cent sales tax approved by LA County voters in November 2008. However, many of the projects will also be leveraged with federal monies.

Under the PLA, local construction trades unions will serve as the primary source of labor to supply thousands of skilled workers to these construction projects in an industry that has been especially hard-hit by the recession. The PLA requires that 40 percent of the work hours be performed by workers who live in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, with 10 percent of the work hours going to individuals who are struggling with poverty, chronic unemployment and other hardships. The PLA contains measures to facilitate entry into critical apprenticeship training for those targeted workers seeking employment in the construction industry. For projects that rely 100 percent on local funding, hiring can be targeted for Los Angeles County. Targeted hiring measures for any project using federal monies are national in scope.

Many public agencies across the nation have entered into project labor agreements. The Metro PLA is unique in that Metro is the first transit agency in the nation to adopt a project labor agreement for federally funded projects. The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) is in the process of reviewing the agreement. Also, the targets for hiring workers from depressed areas are higher than the targets in similar agreements involving other Los Angeles government entities.

How it works

The Los Angeles/Orange County Building Trades Council will be the primary source of all craft labor employed on the construction contracts for the various projects. In the event the unions are unable to fulfill the labor requirements of the contract within 48 hours, excluding weekends and holidays, employers may hire qualified applicants from any other available source.
Consistent with Federal and state laws governing public works compensation workers would be paid prevailing wages. A no-strike provision ensures the work is completed under tight deadlines. The PLA does not preclude non-union workers from getting these jobs, nor does it exclude non-union contractors from participating in the projects.

The Construction Careers Policy provides guidelines to Metro staff and contractors, subcontractors and employers to implement the PLA and targeted hiring measures on Metro construction projects.

Why it's important

The PLA covers all MTA transit and highway projects with a cost of over $2.5 million, which - if Metro fully implements its Long Range Transportation Plan - could amount to as much as $70 billion in construction work over the next three decades. The PLA ensures a skilled and trained workforce that is paid prevailing wages to get these projects done on time and on budget.
The construction industry throughout the nation is depressed and communities are suffering from extraordinary and harmful levels of unemployment and poverty. The PLA and Policy help remedy these problems by directing opportunities to those individuals and communities who need them most.

Who will be hired?

The PLA requires that 40 percent of construction work hours be performed by targeted workers and 10 percent of construction work hours be performed by disadvantaged workers.

Targeted workers include economically disadvantaged individuals who live in areas where the annual median income is less than $40,000 per year.

Disadvantaged workers means any individual who meets the income requirements of a targeted worker and faces at least two of the following barriers to employment: is homeless; is a custodial single parent; receives public assistance; lacks a GED or high school diploma; has a history of involvement with the criminal justice system; has experienced chronic unemployment; is emancipated from foster care; is a veteran of the Iraq or Afghanistan wars; is an apprentice with less than 15% of the hours required to graduate to journey level.

Each contractor or subcontractor may bring up to five core workers to work on a covered project.
Registered apprentices participating in joint labor/management apprenticeship programs will comprise at least 20 percent of the workforce.

Apprenticeship Participation

At least 20% of total work hours will be performed by apprentices.
The Building Trades will exert their best efforts to recruit and assist individuals in qualifying and becoming eligible for joint labor/management apprenticeship programs.
The Building Trades will work cooperatively with the U.S. Dept of Labor, the contractor's Jobs Coordinator, Work Source Centers, and other non-profit entities, to identify or establish and maintain effective programs and procedures for persons interested in entering the construction industry.
The Building Trades and the contractors will support the development and graduation of local and/or disadvantaged workers and apprentices that reside within the targeted areas.

Who will be involved in recruitment and hiring?

Contractors, sub-contractors and employers who have successfully bid on the project will engage a qualified Jobs Coordinator to assist the employers in meeting the targeted hiring requirements. The Jobs Coordinator will assist with outreach to targeted workers.
The Unions will be the primary source of all craft labor employed on the construction contract for the project. In the event the Unions are unable to fulfill the labor requirements of the contract within 48 hours during business hours, employers may hire qualified applicants from any other available source.
The Unions will recruit and identify targeted workers and workers referred by the contractor's Jobs Coordinator for entrance into the labor/management apprentice programs and assist applicants in qualifying and becoming eligible for such programs.
The employers and the Unions agree to coordinate with the Center for Military Recruitment, Assessment and Veterans Employment to reach out to veterans interested in entering into a construction career.

Jobseeker assistance:

Los Angeles /Orange County Building Trades Council is actively providing assistance to residents who are seeking employment in the construction trades. In order to meet the requirements of the PLA, contractors working on Metro construction projects will be looking for qualified workers.
http://lite.metro.net/news/simple_pr/Metro-Board-approves-PLA-for-Metro-Construction-Pr/

L.A. County supervisors approve jails funding application

2012-01-25T12:05:00.000-08:00

Los Angeles County supervisors on Tuesday approved applying for $100 million in state funding to potentially pay for jail construction.

Some county officials have advocated a $1.4-billion plan to replace the overcrowded Men's Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles and part of the Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic, although several supervisors have balked at the price tag.

Supervisors have not decided whether to approve that plan or whether to pursue less costly alternatives. But they agreed to apply for the state funding. The county could later withdraw its application.

Several dozen protesters at the meeting urged supervisors not to approve any funding for jails, saying the money could be better used elsewhere.

Bill to Amend California's Three Strikes Law Passes Appropriations Committee

2012-01-23T14:57:00.000-08:00

via The Criminal Justice Information Network
A project of the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice (CACJ) Foundation and CACJ

Bill to Amend
California's Three Strikes Law Passes Appropriations Committee

On January 19^th,AB 327 (Davis), a bill to amend California’s Three Strikes Law cleared theAssembly Appropriations Committee. AB 327 must pass the full Assembly byJanuary 31, 2012. If AB 327 passes the Assembly, the bill will move to theSenate where it will have until June 28th to pass the Senate policy committee,the Senate fiscal committee, and the Senate Floor.

The bill would put an initiative on the ballot to require that the “thirdstrike” of the California Three Strikes Law be classified as “serious” or“violent”. Assemblymember Mike Davis, whose district includes a portionof the city of Los Angeles and Inglewood, amended AB 327 to carry the currentlanguage on January 4, 2012. For the full language click here.

More than 24,500 nonviolent offenders are serving two or three times what theywould have served if they have not been convicted under California’s ThreeStrikes Law. Many of these offenders are serving life sentences. Forexample, nonviolent crimes such as possession of a controlled substance,filling out a false DMV application, and petty theft are crimes that can putsomeone behind bars for life under the current Three Strikes Law.

AB 327 would give voters the opportunity to revisit the original goal of thislaw amidst the current fiscal and prison overcrowding crisis.

There were four organizations that testified in support of the bill at thecommittee hearing: California State Conference of the NAACP, CaliforniaAttorneys for Criminal Justice (CACJ), Californians United for a ResponsibleBudget (CURB), and Friends Committee on Legislation of California (FCLCA). Thetwo organizations that testified in opposition are: the CaliforniaDistrict Attorneys Association (CDAA) and Crime Victims United of California(CVUC).

If you have any questionsor comments, please feel free to email Nicole Hudley at nicole@hernandezlaw.org.

FEDERAL JUDGE ISSUES PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION THAT CONTINUES STOPPING STATE & FEDS FROM IMPLEMENTING 20% IHSS CUT

2012-01-20T09:01:00.000-08:00

CDCAN DISABILITY RIGHTS REPORT

CALIFORNIA DISABILITY COMMUNITY ACTION NETWORK

#010-2012 - JANUARY 19, 2012 - THURSDAY

REMEMBERING THE LIFE & WORK OF STEVE ELIAS (Nolo Press Author)AND

KPFA RADIO'S YVETTE HOCHBERG

Advocacy Without Borders: One Community - Accountability WithAction

CDCAN Reports go out to over 60,000 people with disabilities,mental health needs, seniors, people with traumatic brain and other injuries,people with MS, Alzheimer's and other disorders, veterans with disabilities andmental health needs, families, workers, community organizations, facilities andadvocacy groups including those in the Asian/Pacific Islander, Latino,African-American communities; policymakers, and others across the State.

Sign up for these free reports by going to the CDCAN website.

To reply to THIS Report write: Marty Omoto at martyomoto@rcip.com Website: www.cdcan.us Twitter: martyomoto

StateBudget Crisis - Breaking News:

FEDERALJUDGE ISSUES PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION THAT CONTINUES STOPPING STATE &FEDERAL GOVERNMENTS FROM IMPLEMENTING 20% IHSS ACROSS THE BOARD REDUCTION

SACRAMENTO, CA (CDCAN) [Last updated 01/19/2012 03:32PM] - A federal district court judge in Oakland, as expected, issued acourt order that will continue blocking the Brown Administration and thefederal government from taking any steps to implement the 20% across-the-boardreduction in service hours for hundreds of thousands of children andadults with disabilities - including people with developmental disabilities -and seniors who receive In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS). Thereduction would have also impact hundreds of thousands of IHSS workers. USDistrict Court Judge Claudia Wilken issued the court order - called a"preliminary injunction" during the hearing held today in hercourt room in Oakland. The State will likely appeal the courtorder. The order issued today by Judge Wilken remains ineffect unless a higher federal court - in this case the US 9th Circuit Court ofAppeals or the US Supreme Court decides to reverse it or if Judge Wilkendecides at a later date to modify (change) it in some way.

Judge Wilken issued on December 1st a temporaryrestraining order that blocked the reduction from taking place until a shedecideD whether or not to grant a more permanent order to stop the cutsfrom being implemented. The preliminary injunction granted by JudgeWilken - requested by those filing the lawsuit (IHSSrecipients) - means that the State federal governments wouldstill be blocked from implementing the IHSS 20% cuts. Inissuing the temporary restraining order in December, Judge Wilken had foundthat the reductions violated federal law and likely would, if implemented,cause immediate significant harm to people with disabilities and seniorsin the IHSS program who would be impacted by the cut in servicehours.

Judge Wilken heard today from attorneys representing IHSS recipients and the Brown Administration in the lawsuit "DavidOster, et al v. Lightbourne", ("Oster" is an IHSSrecipient and "Lightbourne" is Will Lightbourne, the director of theCalifornia Department of Social Services, the state agency that overseesstatewide the IHSS program). The case was previously titled "V.L. v.Wagner" ("V.L." was the initials ofan IHSS recipient and "Wagner" is the name of the previous directorof the Department of Social Services).

The lawsuit was filed by Disability Rights California (DRC),Disability Rights Legal Center, National Senior Citizens Law Center, theNational Health Law Program and San Diego attorney Charles Wolfinger on behalfof the IHSS recipients. The union plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which include fiveSEIU locals and United Domestic Workers-AFSCME, represented by law firm ofAltshuler Berzon LLP.

20% Cut Part of the 2011-2012 State Budget"Trigger Cuts"

* The 20% across-the-board cut in IHSS hours amountingto a reduction of over $100 million in State general fund spending in theremaining months of the 2011-2012 State Budget year (and continue into thefollowing budget year) was scheduled to go into effect on January 1, 2012 butnever was implemented due to the temporary restraining order that was issued inDecember. The 20% reduction did include several exemptions to thecut for certain eligible persons in the IHSS program. With thecourt order issued today - the State and federal governments are still blockedfrom taking any steps to implement the cut for now.

* The reduction was part of the $1 billion in"trigger cuts" that were part of the 2011-2012 State Budget that waspulled because the State's revenues fell significantly below what was budgetedlast June.

* Among the other state budget "triggercuts" included $100 million reduction in state general fund spending tothe developmental services budget for the 2011-2012 State budget year that endsJune 30, 2012 - with another $100 million covering the 2012-2013 StateBudget year.

* The 20% across-the-board reduction is in addition toother cuts and major changes to the IHSS program Governor Brown proposedas part of his 2012-2013 State Budget.

HELP - VERY URGENT!

PLEASE HELPCDCAN CONTINUE ITS WORK!!!

CDCAN Townhall Telemeetings, CDCANReports and Alerts and other activities cannot continue without YOUR help. Tocontinue the CDCAN website and the CDCAN Reports and Alerts sent out and readby over 55,000 people and organizations, policy makers and media across theState, and to continue and resume CDCAN Townhall Telemeetings, trainings andother events, please send your contribution/donation (please make check payableto "CDCAN" or "California Disability Community ActionNetwork" and mail to:

CDCAN - 1225 8th Street Suite 480 -Sacramento, CA 95814
Many, many thanks to all theorganizations and individuals for their continued support that make thesereports and other CDCAN efforts possible. [
Note: As of June 26th due to majorproblem with my computer and email, I have to use this old format of the CDCANReports that unfortunately does not have the list of people and organizationswho have generously contributed and supported CDCAN in the past year and inrecent weeks and months. I should have computer problem repaired sometimesoon.- Marty Omoto]

How California's lifers are dying inside

2012-01-20T08:48:00.000-08:00

via www.guardian.co.uk

In 1981, when Randall Ellis was 16 years old, he participated in a robbery in which his co-defendant shot and killed a young store clerk. Because he took part in a robbery that led to a murder, he was found guilty of the murder and was tried as an adult by the state of California, which chose to impose the maximum sentence the law would allow, of 25 years to life.

Thirty-one years later, Randall is still in prison and his chances of ever being released are slim at best.

There are around 32,000 inmates, 20% of California's total prison population, in the "lifer" category to which Randall now belongs. Approximately 8,000 of them are "three strikes" offenders. Being a lifer means you received a sentence of "15 to life" or "25 to life", so you must serve out the 15 years or the 25 years (or whatever number you were assigned) before you become eligible for parole. These lifers, known as LWPs (life with parole) do not include the much smaller category of prisoners known as LWOP (life without parole) who committed crimes so heinous they were sentenced effectively to die in prison. But it appears that the line between LWPs and LWOPs has become increasingly blurred, as so few prisoners are being granted parole in the past 20 years that "to life" is starting to seem an awful lot like "for life".

This means, of course, that the number of older and geriatric prisoners are growing. By the end of 2009, there were 11,000 prisoners over the age of 55. (Prisoners' physiological age tends to be 10-15 years more their chronological age due to the stress of incarceration, so 55 counts as elderly.) This number is expected to triple to over 30,000 within the next decade or so (pdf), which will put extraordinary pressure on a state that is already being bankrupted in part by its overcrowded prisons.

Older prisoners cost about three times as much to incarcerate as their younger counterparts, mostly due to healthcare costs. Whether the general public like it or not, the state is constitutionally obliged by the eighth amendment to provide inmates with adequate healthcare, and the cost of doing so already exceeds $2bn a year. According to Liz Gransee of the Receiver's Office (pdf), which oversees medical care in California's prisons, 90% of their healthcare costs come from the older population. Some of inmates they treat are in their eighties.

Randall turned 47 this month, and although he believes he should have been let out at least ten years ago, statistically, his chances of growing old in prison are far greater than his chance of being released.

"I've been kept here way past any reasonable period of time, considering that I was just a kid in the wrong place, with the wrong people to begin with. Over the years, the justifications have changed. They don't even consider my age, and somehow put me beyond the thinking capacity of a 16 year-old who made bad choices to somehow being beyond that."

I don't know if Randall should have been released ten years ago or not. The parole board obviously has better knowledge of whether or not he may still be a threat to society. He does raise an interesting point, however, that a person's motivations and understanding are very different at 47 than they were at 16. Statistics consistently show thatpeople tend to "age out of crime" (pdf). Nationwide, the recidivism rate for inmates aged between 16 and 29 is over 50%; for inmates 55 and older, the rate drops to 2%, rendering the chance of an elderly inmate re-offending upon release almost negligible.

But still, they remain locked up. In 2008, for instance, 7,308 lifers were eligible for parole. Only 294 were approved by the parole board, and of those, 81 were denied by then Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and more than 30 were sent back for review. In the end, fewer than 60 inmates were released. There has been a slight improvement in the number of paroles granted since Governor Brown took over, but still,more than 80% of requests are denied.

Public safety is generally cited as the reason for keeping people in prison indefinitely, and no one – least of all a politician who will be facing re-election – wants their signature on the parole form of an inmate who murders somebody's loved one upon their release. Considered in that light, granting parole is not a decision to be taken lightly.

But the fact remains that the billions of dollars spent each year keeping prisoners locked up for life are billions being diverted from the kinds of programs that might have prevented them from getting locked up in the first place.

Interested parties should write to:

Sadhbh Walshe
PO Box 1466
New York, NY 10150

Or send an email to sadhbh@ymail.com

Gov. Jerry Brown plans $1 billion in prison cuts

2012-01-19T17:29:00.000-08:00

Sacramento –

Gov. Jerry Brown wants to cut state prison spending next fiscal year for the first time in nearly a decade, a departure from the goals of recent administrations, which consistently increased corrections spending and pushed for prison expansion.

Brown’s budget would save California $1.1 billion on housing inmates and hundreds of millions more by allowing the state to halt some prison construction – savings largely due to his administration’s recent overhaul of the state’s criminal justice system.

General fund spending on prisons nearly doubled under Brown’s Republican predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, from $5.2 billion in 2004 to $9.5 billion in 2011, when Brown, a Democrat, took office. The increase in spending was largely caused by an exploding inmate population and a court order to improve medical care in prisons.

The general fund is backed by statewide taxes and pays for most of the government’s basic programs, including schools, police, welfare services and other programs. A cut in prison spending makes more dollars available for other programs.

“We’re knocking it down, and we’ll knock it down further,” Brown said Friday of the prison budget. “A lot of the problems come from the fact that they built (too many) prisons in 20 years – it was too fast, they didn’t know what they were doing, and now we have to clean up that mess. We made good progress the first year.”
$1 billion savings

Under Brown’s spending proposal, released Jan. 5, general fund spending on the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation would decline from this year’s budget of $9.8 billion to $8.7 billion, largely because the state prison population has fallen nearly 1,000 a week since Oct. 1, when the state shifted responsibility for lower level offenders to county law enforcement, a policy known as realignment.

“I don’t think there’s any question we’ve turned a corner here … just by the fact that we are significantly reducing the prison population,” said Daniel Macallair, executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, a nonprofit that conducts policy analysis on criminal justice issues.

But Republican Assemblyman Jim Nielsen, a former parole board chairman who has been a vocal critic of realignment, predicted the savings would not last, particularly without more investment in rehabilitative services for criminals. He said that counties will ultimately have to raise local taxes to fully pay for realignment, eliminating any savings for taxpayers.

“It’s frankly not a long-run savings for the state,” said Nielsen, of Gerber (Tehama County). “Corrections spending will go down a little and then creep back up.”

Just one year ago, California was grappling with a court order to reduce its prison population by 33,000 inmates and was moving forward with 13 construction projects to expand prison capacity.

Now, the prison population is at 130,000, a decrease of 11,000 in six months. State officials met the first benchmark set by the U.S. Supreme Court to reduce the prison population and say they are on track to meet the next one as well, as thousands of offenders that would have flowed into the overcrowded system are staying in county jails instead and being supervised by local probation officials rather than state parole officers.

In addition to halting construction projects, Brown next year wants to begin phasing out the state’s Division of Juvenile Justice and place the state’s most violent youth offenders in county facilities. And after years of cuts to rehabilitation programs in prisons, Brown wants lawmakers to restore about $100 million in funding for drug treatment, education and other services.

The governor’s budget proposal, like most criminal justice issues, has prompted mixed reactions.
Worries over funding

Republican critics of the governor’s realignment plan continue to warn that the change will have dire public safety consequences, while county law enforcement officers are still worried about whether realignment funding – $400 million this year and nearly $860 million next year – will be consistent or adequate to meet their expanded responsibilities.

County officials and juvenile justice experts are glad that the governor has proposed putting off severe budget cuts to the juvenile justice system this fiscal year, but they worry about the ability of counties to handle the population in the future.

Advocates who oppose prison spending are heartened by Brown’s decision to scrap several construction projects, but say the governor isn’t going far enough. Under Brown’s proposal, the state would stop the conversion of two former juvenile facilities into adult prisons, which together would have cost nearly $500 million to build. Officials expect to save about $250 million a year in debt service on bonds by canceling those projects.

“For us it’s a mixed bag,” said Emily Harris of Californians United for a Responsible Budget, a coalition made up of liberal groups that advocate for less prison spending. “They are canceling two (prison) expansion projects, and we see that as an important first step toward addressing the bloated corrections budget. … And I think it’s exciting and important that he wants to close the Division of Juvenile Justice.”

She also praised a nearly $50 million investment in grants for county probation departments that are successful in reducing recidivism among offenders.

The proposal to shutter the Division of Juvenile Justice is also significant, said experts in the field. The number of youth offenders in the state system has declined from a high of 10,000 in 1996 to its current 1,100. Now, counties handle most juvenile offenders while the state is charged with overseeing only the most violent juveniles.

Last month, Brown caused alarm among counties and juvenile justice experts when he instituted a $72 million budget cut that would have forced counties to either take back all of their youth offenders or pay the state $125,000 a year to house them.

After hearing the concern, the governor is now proposing to “delay collection” of those payments and work to phase out the Division of Juvenile Justice entirely. Under his proposal, counties would get $10 million to prepare for that change, and, starting next January, youth offenders would no longer be placed in the state system. Those currently in the system would serve out their sentences.

County officials and juvenile experts said they are not ready to support the governor’s plan without more details but are encouraged that he is willing to work with them on developing a way to handle the difficult population.

“We interpret it as a good faith effort on the part of the administration to work with us to mitigate our concerns,” said Elizabeth Howard Espinosa, who handles realignment issues for the California State Association of Counties. “What we saw in the governor’s budget is a willingness to say, look, DJJ is going to be phased out at some point, and let’s use this as an opportunity to plan and develop some programs.”
Taking steps

Macallair, the criminal justice expert, said that all of these changes would not have occurred without the U.S. Supreme Court stepping in but credited Brown for “taking the steps he needs to take.”

The governor agreed and said more work is ahead.
‘Merry-go-round’

“We wouldn’t even be here if the Supreme Court hadn’t issued a definitive order,” Brown said. “It was a big nudge. We still have district attorneys and Republican legislators that get hysterical. … But we have created some stability, we are reducing the head count, we are saving money, and I believe we can be more effective in terms of helping people re-enter society and live more productive lives, instead of being on a merry-go-round of prisons the way it’s been the last 30 years.”

E-mail Marisa Lagos at mlagos@sfchoronicle.com.

This article appeared on page A – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/01/14/MNEM1MNAFQ.DTL&ao=all#ixzz1jjhAk6eh

Strengthening Our Actions and Voices Through Unity

2012-01-13T14:53:00.000-08:00

On November 2, 2011 a historical convening of the FormerlyIncarcerated and Convicted People’s Movement (FICPM), gathered to adopt anational platform. Several hundred people attended this convening in Watts,California. Prior to the November 2^nd Gathering, formerlyincarcerated and convicted people consistently sought each other out for severalyears to discuss our needs, which lead into a historical gathering and marchhosted by TOPS in Alabama and the development of a Steering Committee that workedon the platform for over nine months. It should be noted that A New Way ofLife, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children and All of Us or None performedan extraordinary job with hosting people from all over the country. There wererepresentatives from 20 states, Washington DC, England and Japan. Over 40different grassroots organizations attended this gathering. Needless to say, itis remarkable that the Steering Committee continues to meet to further developtools and a structure for this network.

Our platform is alive, and the week leading up to theNovember 2^nd Gathering was preceded by a Peace and Justice Summit inLong Beach, California, organized by A New Way of Life and All of Us or None.This event was one way of informing more than 300 formerly incarcerated andconvicted people that the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted Peoples’ Movementwas coming to Watts. It should be notedthat since our gathering, our efforts to end structure discrimination haveraised the cry to Ban the Box in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Richmond,California. By strengthening our actions and voices through unity, we willdismantle the New Jim Crow, and we aim to continue this movement by restoringour civil and human rights. We vow to educate “every wondering mind” that askthe question, “How can we dismantle the disparities in opportunities foremployment, housing, social services and end mass incarceration?” We vow tomobilize and organize a movement of the 65 million people that have been taggedas formerly incarcerated and convicted people to challenge their oppression. Our victories will continue to grow and weneed to learn better how to continue to connect our dots and our victories. Werecognize that formerly incarcerated and convicted people are pursuing justiceall over the country and we need to shine a light on our victories and ourmovement.

Once again, we elected to gather our forces in a communitychallenged by the brutal conditions of oppression, the Watts Labor CommunityAction Center (WLCAC). We agreed to engage this system through the democraticprocess and we will register a million formerly incarcerated and convictedpeople and their families. We pledged to each other that we will not onlyengage in the registration put actually push people to exercise their right tovote.

Great minds from every corner of activism, advocacy andservice provision stepped up and seriously considered movement development. Therewas one was real challenged to everyone that has ever worked on behalf offormerly incarcerated and convicted people: could they loosen the grip enough to see if these birds could really fly? Could they allow formerly incarceratedand convicted people to DECIDE on a platformabout them? This was one of the fewgatherings where formerly incarcerated and convicted people were asked to voteon a document that was written by them and designed to be the basis of amovement about their interest. We want to thank our families, friends,comrades, allies and colleagues for allowing us to join our movement and thehuman family. To those people who were not able to attend, we ask you toconsider the platform that we adopted. Our effort is dedicated to those people whoare currently incarcerated and to those people who stood up for us before weknew how to stand. Our efforts are design to enlarge the circle and ourcommunity and not shrink it, and to unify our movement and not divide it.

Three Strikes Reform Initiative for November 2012 Ballot

2012-01-12T09:51:00.000-08:00

Families to Amend California's Three Strikes - FACTS is circulating petitions to qualify a Three Strikes reform initiative for the November 2012 ballot!! Under this reform only those third strike is violent or serious will get a life sentence. If you are interested in getting involved in collecting signatures, please contact us at 213.746.4844

UCLA Law Review Symposium - Overpoliced & Underprotected: Women, Race, & Criminalization

2012-01-11T17:45:00.000-08:00

RSVP Here

Urge that the Senate Rules Committee recommend to the California Senate the confirmation of Michel Florio, Mark Ferron, Catherine Sandoval

2012-01-10T09:52:00.000-08:00

Please join us in recruitingorganizations in your regions to email 3 letters of support to the SenateRules Committee by January 11— one each to support the confirmations ofCatherine Sandoval, Michel Florio, and Mark Ferron to the California PublicUtilities Commission. The more letters received by the Senate RulesCommittee, the stronger the case to confirm the three candidates at the SenateRules Committee hearing, likely to be scheduled for January 18.

Together, the 3 Brown appointeesprovide a rare opportunity for a majority of the 5–member CPUC to be comprisedof members who take seriously the CPUC mission to provide safe and reliableutility service at fair and reasonable prices. During the past few monthsthe new Commissioners have been responsible for several decisions in which thepublic interest has prevailed over industry interests, including opening aninvestigation of the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, rejecting a PG&E customerservice charge, and compelling utilities to share with ratepayers the benefitsof federal economic stimulus funding. During the next few months, theywill decide upon LifeLine affordability and expansion to wireless, profit ratesguaranteed to utilities, and PG&E fines for the San Bruno explosion.

Commissioner Sandoval is a lawprofessor specializing in telecommunications policy at Santa Clara University,and has served as a senior manager at the FCC. She was born in East LA,becoming the first Latina in the U.S. to be awarded a Rhodes Scholarshipand the first person of Latino descent to be appointed to the CPUC.

Commissioner Florio developed hisreputation as California's foremost consumer advocate during the 33 years(1978–2011) he worked as the senior energy attorney at TURN. He wasraised in the Midwest, became the first in his family to attend college and lawschool, and is possibly the most experienced person ever appointed to the CPUC.

Commissioner Ferron has over twodecades of banking and business experience from a European perspective thatembraces the value of regulation as a balance to industry dominance. Heworked his way through school growing up in the Midwest by working infactories, and brings to the CPUC an expertise in financial markets with asense of humanity.

Here are 3 sample letters of support for each of the 3 CPUC appointees up forconfirmation. Please feel free to modify anything that you desire.

Letter 1

January11, 2012

Honorable Darrell Steinberg

Chair, Senate Committee on Rules

California State Senate

State Capitol, Room 205

Sacramento, CA 95816

Dear President pro Tempore Steinberg,

I am pleased, onbehalf of _____________________________, to submit this letter of enthusiasticsupport for the confirmation of Michel Florio as Commissioner of the CaliforniaPublic Utilities Commission. __________________ is a______________________ organization that ________________________________.

Commissioner Florio offers a unique depth of experience and expertisethat qualifies him to serve as an effective CPUC Commissioner. His 33–year tenure from 1978 to 2011 as TURNSenior Energy Attorney provides him with an exceptional appreciation of howenergy policies impact both the utility industry and everyday consumers. His expertise on the challenges ofmaintaining a sustainable system of energy procurement, transmission, anddistribution was honed when he served as a member of the Board of Governors ofthe California ISO from 1997 to 2005. His reputation as a problem solver has been earned from years ofbringing together consumers, utilities, and energy generators to seek commonsolutions that resulted in SB 695 reforms as well as broad–based settlements inkey energy policy procurement issues.

Commissioner Florio brings a sensibility to the CPUC rooted in communityand accomplishment. He was raised in theMidwest as the son of a machine repairman who worked in a rock quarry. He was the first in his family to not onlyreceive a law degree, but to attend college at all. It seems only fitting that he was appointedby Governor Brown as one of the most experienced regulatory experts to serve asCPUC Commissioner in its 100–year history.

The most important reason that we support the confirmation ofCommissioner Florio is because he has demonstrated his leadership commitment tothe CPUC mission of providing safe and reliable utility service at fair andreasonable prices. While he has had torecuse himself from recent key votes pertaining to PG&E rate cases becauseof his previous participation as a consumer attorney in those cases, recentexamples of his willingness to exercise independence from the CPUC leadershipinclude:

1) Commissioner Floriojoined Commissioners Sandovaland Ferron in voting for an investigation of the impact on Californiaratepayers of the proposed AT&T/T–Mobile merger, and voted againstPresident Peevey’s alternate proposal, which would not have analyzed theCalifornia-specific impacts of the merger.

2) Commissioner Floriohas taken the lead in expanding CPUC oversight of gas safety, requiringPG&E to conduct extensive pipeline inspections and document retrieval, andreversing the policy of not fining utilities for safety violations—resulting ina $36 million fine of PG&E for the deadly Rancho Cordova explosion.

We strongly urge that the Senate RulesCommittee recommend to the California Senate the confirmation of Michel Florio as CPUC Commissioner becauseof his leadership experience, accomplishments, and willingness to defend thepublic interest to deliver the cleanest energy and best phone service at thelowest prices to consumers.

Sincerely,

(Your name)

----------------

Letter 2

January11, 2012

Honorable Darrell Steinberg

Chair, Senate Committee on Rules

California State Senate

State Capitol, Room 205

Sacramento, CA 95816

Dear President pro Tempore Steinberg,

I am pleased, onbehalf of _____________________________, to submit this letter of enthusiasticsupport for the confirmation of Catherine Sandoval as Commissioner of theCalifornia Public Utilities Commission. __________________ is a______________________ organization that ________________________________.

Commissioner Sandoval offers a wide range of leadership experience andexpertise that qualify her to serve as an effective CPUC Commissioner. Her positions as a professor specializing intelecommunications law at Santa Clara University since 1994, and a senior managerat the FCC from 1994 to 1999, provide her with a research–based expertise intelecom policy issues. Her expertise inenergy policy issues was developed when she served as Undersecretary of theCalifornia Business, Transportation and Housing Agency from 2001 to 2004 andadvised the Agency Secretary on energy matters when she served on theCalifornia ISO Board of Governors.

Commissioner Sandoval brings a sensibility to the CPUC rooted incommunity and accomplishment. She wasraised in East Los Angeles in a bilingual Spanish and English environment, andbecame the first person in her family to graduate from a four–yearcollege. She is the first Latina in theUnited States to be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at OxfordUniversity. It seems only fitting thatshe was appointed by Governor Brown as the first person of Latino descent toserve as a Commissioner on the CPUC in its 100–year history.

The most important reason that we support the confirmation ofCommissioner Sandoval is because she has demonstrated her leadership commitmentto the CPUC mission of providing safe and reliable utility service at fair andreasonable prices by casting votes different from that of the CPUCleadership. For instance:

1) CommissionerSandoval joined Commissioners Simon and Ferron in voting for a CPUC Judge’sProposed Decision to deny a new PG&E $3 monthly customer service charge,saving most customers $1 billion over the next 3 years, compelling PresidentPeevey to join the majority and withdraw his Alternate Decision to grant thecustomer service charge.

2) CommissionerSandoval joined Commissioners Florio and Ferron in voting for a thoroughinvestigation of the impact on California ratepayers of the proposedAT&T/T–Mobile merger, and against President Peevey’s alternate proposal inwhich an expedited and more superficial investigation would have beenconducted.

We strongly urge that the Senate RulesCommittee recommend to the California Senate the confirmation of Catherine Sandoval to Commissioner of theCalifornia Public Utilities Commission because of her leadership experience,accomplishments, and willingness to defend the public interest to deliver thecleanest energy and best phone service at the lowest prices to consumers.

Sincerely,

(your name)

----------------

Letter 3

January11, 2012

Honorable Darrell Steinberg

Chair, Senate Committee on Rules

California State Senate

State Capitol, Room 205

Sacramento, CA 95816

Dear President pro Tempore Steinberg,

I am pleased, onbehalf of _____________________________, to submit this letter of enthusiasticsupport for the confirmation of Mark Ferron as Commissioner of the CaliforniaPublic Utilities Commission. __________________ is a______________________ organization that ________________________________.

Commissioner Ferron offers a wide range of leadership experience andexpertise that qualify him to serve as an effective CPUC Commissioner. His 24 years of service as an internationalbanker provides him with the experience necessary to evaluate the costs andrisks associate with running a business that delivers safe and reliable utilityservice. For the past two years, he hassupported the role of nonprofits in advancing positive policy reforms throughhis involvement with Silicon Valley Social Ventures, a collaboration of 100families who pool their resources to promote effective organizations. His twodecades living in Europe has given him an appreciation of the positive effectsof government regulation to provide a balance to unfettered markets.

Commissioner Ferron grew up in a small Midwestern town,worked his way through school by cleaning up in a metals-working factory,working grave-yard shifts at a 24/7 plastics factory and tutoring kids inMath. He comes from a family of 5 kids, and now has 5 children of his own. One of his chief motivations for getting involved in the work of the PUC is totry to hand over a decent environment for children who will live with the worldwe have created. It seems only fitting that Governor Brown has appointed him as afinancial markets expert with a sense of humanity to serve as CPUCCommissioner.

The most important reason that we support the confirmation ofCommissioner Ferron is because he has demonstrated his leadership commitment tothe CPUC mission of providing safe and reliable utility service at fair andreasonable prices by his willingness to exercise independence from the CPUCleadership. Two recent examples include:

1) Commissioner Ferronjoined Commissioners Sandoval and Simon in voting for a CPUC Judge’s ProposedDecision to deny a new PG&E $3 monthly customer service charge, saving mostcustomers $1 billion over the next 3 years, compelling President Peevey to jointhe majority and withdraw his Alternate Decision to grant the customer servicecharge.

2) Commissioner Ferronjoined Commissioners Sandoval and Florio in voting for a thorough investigationof the impact on California ratepayers of the proposed AT&T/T–Mobilemerger, and and against President Peevey’s alternate proposal in which anexpedited and more superficial investigation would have been conducted.

We strongly urge that the Senate RulesCommittee recommend to the California Senate the confirmation of Mark Ferron as CPUC Commissioner of theCalifornia Public Utilities Commission because of his leadership experience,accomplishments, and willingness to defend the public interest to deliver thecleanest energy and best phone service at the lowest prices to consumers.

Sincerely,

(Your name)

Wells Fargo, king of private prisons, shut down for the day; seven arrested

2012-01-09T15:44:00.000-08:00

Via SF Bay View

by Adrienne Lauby

Santa Rosa, Calif. – On Dia de Reyes, the Day the Three Kings, a false king was exposed. Wells Fargo is the king of private prison finance, a king who shows no remorse as it forecloses on the houses and homes of its victims. But, on Friday afternoon, Jan. 6, two branches of Wells Fargo in Santa Rosa were closed for the day and seven people were arrested after they did civil disobedience inside the banks.

The protest, a collaboration between the immigrant rights community and the Occupy movement, drew 400-500 people for a march and rally. Their target, Wells Fargo, is the trustee of a fund that is heavily invested in two private prison corporations, Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group. These corporations own a majority of the detention centers that house undocumented immigrants across the U.S.

These same corporations helped draft the model for the Arizona anti-immigrant law, SB 1070, insuring a steady stream of immigrant prisoners for their private detention prisons. Because they contract with the U.S. government at a cost to taxpayers of $5.5 million a day, they profit from the misery of the immigrants and their community.

Okili Nguebari, originally from Congo, Africa, spoke at the rally about his experience in a private immigration prison. Three years ago he was picked up in front of his home by Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) and held for three months in an immigration detention facility owned by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) in Eloy, Arizona.

In addition, the protestors challenged Wells Fargo’s practices around foreclosures and short sales of houses in Sonoma County. In only four years, foreclosures in the county have skyrocketed from 71 to 4,469 homes – nearly 4,450 families this year have lost their houses and all of their equity because banks and financiers manipulated the market.

Protestors unfurled a banner in the lobby of the main branch of Wells Fargo reading, “Homes Not Jails.” Then they read statements about the bank’s financing of private prisons and stories of people affected by deportations until they were arrested. Wells Fargo personnel detained at least two of the protestors in a citizen’s arrest.

“It was empowering to stand there and speak the truth,” Carolyn Epple said about her act of civil disobedience.

The protestors called on all Sonoma County residents to demand that Wells Fargo immediately divest from investments in immigrant prisons and declare a moratorium on foreclosures in Sonoma County. They also asked people to move their money from Wells Fargo into a local bank or credit union.

Jesus Guzman of the DREAM Alliance at Santa Rosa Junior College called the protest a “defining moment” for both the Occupy and Immigrant Rights movements.

“It’s about time,” he said and, judging by the cheers, the crowd agreed.

The coalition included the Graton Day Labor Center, the DREAM Alliance of Sonoma County, MEChA of Santa Rosa Junior College, the Committee for Immigrant Rights of Sonoma County, as well as Occupy groups from around the county. An Occupy Petaluma contingent rode bicycles to the rally.

The energetic and colorful march included a contingent wearing bright orange jumpsuits representing immigration detainees and the Hubbub Club Marching Band. A troupe of Aztec dancers led the march.

Adrienne Lauby is a Bay Area-based writer and a programmer at KPFA Radio 94.1FM. She can be reached atadrienne@sonic.net.

Editor’s note: Private prisons that Wells Fargo invests in also house thousands of California prisoners moved out of state prisons in response to a federal court order to reduce overcrowding.

BUDGET: Brown wants cuts, higher taxes

2012-01-06T08:49:00.000-08:00

via Press Enterprise

BY JIM MILLER

SACRAMENTO BUREAU

jmiller@pe.com

SACRAMENTO — Programs for the poor and sick take the brunt of $4.2billion in spending cuts proposed Thursday by Gov. Jerry Brown in a budget that hinges on voters approving higher taxes this fall.

Another $5.4 billion in reductions would be imposed if voters reject Brown’s planned November ballot measure to temporarily increase the sales tax and raise income taxes on the wealthy. School funding would be slashed by more than $4.8billion, equivalent to cutting the school year by three weeks.

“This is not nice stuff, but that’s what it takes to balance the budget, and that’s assuming we get our tax revenues,” Brown told reporters at the Capitol, calling on lawmakers to act on some of the cuts by March.
2012-13 state budget
The $94.3 billion general fund plan closes an estimated $9.2 billion shortfall through June 2013. That is significantly less than a nearly $13billion gap projected in November by the Legislature’s nonpartisan fiscal analyst. Brown said his plan will help end the chronic shortfalls once and for all.

“We've cut the structural deficit substantially, and we now have the possibility of eliminating over the next couple of years the deficits that have plagued California,” Brown said. He spoke at a hastily called news conference after aides mistakenly posted the budget on the Internet, five days before its scheduled release.

Brown’s proposal changes the state’s welfare-to-work program known as CalWORKS. People who do not meet federal requirements of looking for work could be dropped from the program after two years, down from four. The plan reduces child aid for people in CalWORKS from $463 to $392 monthly.

In addition, the number of state child care slots for low-income working families would be reduced from 363,400 to 292,900. In-home assistance for the infirm and elderly also would be cut.
“How can the governor be cutting time limits and assistance for poor families to go to work when we have 11 percent unemployment and people cannot find jobs?” said Mike Herald of the Western Center on Law and Poverty.

Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, said his house will wait before considering the cuts sought by Brown. The state’s revenue picture seems to be improving, he said.
“If that trend continues even slightly, we may avoid the need to make the kinds of cuts the governor now suggests,” Steinberg said.

INLAND IMPACT

Inland welfare officials reacted warily to the governor’s proposal.

“The initial concept is good, but it is a question of how are they achieving the savings of $1 billion?” said Susan Loew, director of public social services for Riverside County. “And how will that impact the customers we are serving today?”

Between 11,000 and 12,000 families are enrolled in CalWORKS in Riverside County.
“The way the grants have been cut continuously over the last few years, many families are struggling,” she said. “This is the safety net. There is nothing below this.”

San Bernardino County served 51,163 people in the CalWORKS program in June, according to the county’s annual social services report.

That number has increased because of the economic recession, officials said. Further funding challenges will only decrease services as more people seek help, said Kevin Mahany, director of advocacy services at St. Mary Medical Center in Apple Valley.

“What we are seeing is people who are for the very first time having to go to the food bank or the homeless shelter or the welfare office,” Mahany said.

In Riverside County, about 18,000 people participate in the In-Home Supportive Services program. About 13,000 of those would be affected by the governor’s plan to reduce services for recipients who live with someone else. In San Bernardino County, the corresponding numbers are 20,500 and 14,300, respectively, according to the California Association of Public Authorities.

SCHOOLS EYE BALLOT

Brown has proposed a November ballot initiative that would raise the income tax on those making $250,000 or more a year and increase the state sales tax by a half cent. The higher taxes would raise about $7 billion a year and expire in 2017.

Inland school officials welcomed the prospect of more K-12 revenue after several years of reduced or frozen funding.

Yet districts would have to tear up their budgets midyear if Brown’s tax measure fails at the ballot box.

“Local school districts must again build and adopt their budgets based on uncertain state revenue estimates — and again without the legal ability to reduce their costs midyear if needed,” said Riverside County Superintendent of Schools Kenneth M. Young. “This is a very poor way of dealing with the state’s continuing budget crisis.”

Mike Fine, deputy superintendent for business services in Riverside Unified School District, said shortening the year would require additional legislation as well as negotiations with teachers and school employees unions.

“I believe the governor’s trying to do the right thing,” Fine said.

But schools’ options are limited, he said. “Our class sizes are already at the maximum. Our staff has been cut to the bone.”

Murrieta Valley Unified School District Superintendent Stan Scheer said the district already faces an $11 million shortfall in 2012-13. “We don’t have any wiggle room if this thing doesn’t pass,” he said of the governor’s tax measure.

Similarly, the San Bernardino County superintendent of schools office is advising districts to have a backup plan in case voters reject the tax increases.

“There’s no way districts can make that kind of cuts once the school year is under way,” said Ted Alejandre, assistant superintendent in the county office. “The advice we’re giving districts is to have contingency plans in place.”

Assemblyman Kevin Jeffries, R-Lake Elsinore, said he liked parts of the governor’s plan. But he criticized what he called the governor’s “tax and hammer” approach.

“He is effectively saying to the taxpayers that we are going to continue spending more than we take in — so you either give me more of your money or I’m going to cut what you cherish most,” Jeffries said.

Contributing to this report: Staff writers Dug Begley, dbegley@pe.com; Dayna Straehley, dstraehley@pe.com; and Michelle L. Klampe, mklampe@pe.com. Also contributing: The Associated Press.

Important Message On Behalf of All of Us or None

2012-01-05T12:00:00.000-08:00

Greetings Everyone,

Dorsey Nunn (co-founder of All of Us or None) has requestedthat to all those concern with the contents of his email, please make the phone calls as requested. Thanks for your time and consideration.

DearFamily, Friends, Allies, Associates and Comrades,

Thisnot the end or the beginning of the year request for money but a request foryour assistance in pursuing justice. I am asking that you make two telephonecalls and to forward this email to your list that could help to save numerouslives. During the course of my vacation and the last several days of the year Iwas contacted by a number of family members whose loved ones are incarceratedin Tutwiler, Mississippi. They informed me that there has been a race riot inthis southern prison (Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility) where someCalifornia prisoners are housed. Days ago the Tallahatchie County Jailexploded in violence. This is one of those private prisons where the primarypurpose is to save this state money and to secure a profit for a private prisoncorporation. Prisoners’ safety and rehabilitation comes second to pursuit ofthe all mighty dollar. I have been informed that it took over two hours toregain control of the environment and to end the misplace violence but thefrustration remain extremely high during this current lock down.

Acouple of family members have informed me that there were not enough guards toquell the violence. I couldn’t bring myself to argue that what gave rise to theproblem was too many prisoners, mass incarceration and control being exercisedthrough divide and conquer. Somehow when you are talking to concerned familymembers it is difficult to always make the correct political argument. However,I think it is extremely important that we pay attention to the unique set ofcircumstances that could confront members of our community who are incarceratedhundreds and thousands of miles from home; especially when the basis of theirincarceration is to generate jobs and money for other people.

Istarted to write this email on New Year Eve but didn’t want to end the yearthinking about another year where I have not figured out how to stop the beast(torturous mass incarceration). As the year ended I narrowed my New Year to asimple wish. I wished that I lived in a world where society thought everyonewas entitled to public safety, even those under the absolute control of thestate and private corporations.

Iam writing to ask you to call the heads of this corporate prison (BobbyPhillips or Kenneth Little) and let them know that every human being hasthe right to safety. You can contact them at (662) 345-6567.

Iam also asking you to call Matthew Cates, the head of the CaliforniaDepartment of Correction and Rehabilitation and let him know that he is stillresponsible for the California prisoners housed outside of the state. Ask himwhat he has in place to insure the safety of prisoners being housed out ofstate. You can contact him at (916) 323-6001.

InHot Pursuit of Justice,

DorseyE. Nunn

How much does it cost to incarcerate an inmate?

2012-01-04T15:16:00.000-08:00

via http://www.lao.ca.gov/laoapp/laomenus/sections/crim_justice/6_cj_inmatecost.aspx?catid=3

California’s Annual Costs to Incarcerate an
Inmate in Prison

2008-09

Type of Expenditure
Per Inmate Costs

Security
$19,663

Inmate Health Care
$12,442

Medical care
$8,768

Psychiatric services
1,928

Pharmaceuticals
998

Dental care
748

Operations
$7,214

Facility operations (maintenance, utilities, etc.)
$4,503

Classification services
1,773

Maintenance of inmate records
660

Reception, testing, assignment
261

Transportation
18

Administration
$3,493

Inmate Support
$2,562

Food
$1,475

Inmate activities
439

Inmate employment and canteen
407

Clothing
171

Religious activities
70

Rehabilitation Programs
$1,612

Academic education
$944

Vocational training
354

Substance abuse programs
313

Miscellaneous
$116

Total
$47,102

It costs an average of about $47,000 per year to incarcerate an inmate in prison in California.
Over two-thirds of these costs are for security and inmate health care.
Since 2000-01, the average annual cost has increased by about $19,500. This includes an increase of $8,300 for inmate health care and $7,100 for security.

Cities, lawmakers seek redevelopment compromise

2011-12-30T10:25:00.000-08:00

via http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_19637721

By JUDY LIN Associated Press

Posted: 12/29/2011 01:17:17 AM PST

Updated: 12/29/2011 09:25:22 PM PST

SACRAMENTO, Calif.—The California Supreme Court on Thursday gave Gov. Jerry Brown and state lawmakers the right to eliminate community redevelopment agencies in a crucial victory on the state budget. But the fate of the more than 400 redevelopment agencies remains unclear as cities—and even many lawmakers—vowed to seek a legislative compromise next year that would ensure the agencies' survival.

Brown has little incentive to go along.

The court affirmed the state's authority to dissolve the agencies, calling it "a proper exercise of the legislative power vested in the Legislature by the state constitution." Doing so means more of the property taxes generated within redevelopment zones will go toward schools, law enforcement and other local services, freeing up as much as $1.7 billion in the state general fund during the current fiscal year. The money now is returned to the agencies to spend on future redevelopment projects.

Lawmakers and the mayors of several large cities said Thursday they were inclined to work out a compromise after the justices issued their split decision. While they affirmed the Legislature's authority to dissolve redevelopment agencies, the justices in a unanimous decision invalidated companion legislation passed last summer that was intended to keep the agencies operating by forcing them to direct a certain amount of property tax revenue to schools and other services.

The justices said that law ranafoul of voter-approved Proposition 22, which prohibits the state from raiding local tax money.
"I intend to work closely with leaders in Sacramento and across California to develop a responsible path forward that invests in our schools, our safety and puts the 14 million unemployed Californians back to work," Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said in a statement. "This includes new legislation to provide economic tools to communities most in need."

Redevelopment agencies were authorized by the Legislature shortly after World War II as a way to restore blighted neighborhoods and are largely controlled by cities and counties to promote construction projects. They have been credited with revitalizing blighted districts such as the Gaslamp Quarter in San Diego, downtown San Jose and Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco.

Critics, including Brown, say some have become little more than slush funds for private developers. They want property taxes generated by new developments to be diverted from the agencies to local services that now must be funded by the state.

Redevelopment money in the past has been used to finance big box retailers, sports complexes and other projects that critics say run counter to the agencies' original mission.

"Today's ruling by the California Supreme Court validates a key component of the state budget and guarantees more than a billion dollars of ongoing funding for schools and public safety," the governor said in a statement.

The ruling was highly anticipated because it was a key component of balancing this year's state budget. The state is heading into the new year with a $13 billion deficit over the next 18 months, and a ruling against the state would have widened the shortfall.

The governor proposed dissolving redevelopment agencies in January, then transferring their property tax revenue of about $5 billion a year to the cities and counties that controlled the agencies. They would then use the money to repay redevelopment debt and distribute money to cities, counties, special districts and schools, saving the state about $1.7 billion this year.

State lawmakers inserted a compromise in last summer's budget that allowed the agencies to keep operating if they made additional payments of about $400 million annually to schools and other local services starting next year. The court invalidated that piece of legislation, calling it "flawed."

The court opinion was written by Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar and signed by five other justices. The seventh, Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, agreed but wrote a separate opinion saying she would have upheld the compromise law that would have permitted agencies to continue if they shared revenue.

The decision means schools can expect more than $1 billion each year in additional property tax revenues, but a firm figure won't be released until Brown presents his spending plan next month, said Brown's finance department spokesman, H.D. Palmer.

Local government officials say it does not make sense for the state to eliminate redevelopment agencies, which contribute $2 billion a year in economic activity. They say because the Legislature did not intent to eliminate local economic development efforts, agencies should be reshaped.

"We do know that the governor will be a tough nut on this, but at the end of the day, his primary challenge is to help balance the state budget," said Jim Kennedy, interim executive director of the California Redevelopment Association, which filed the lawsuit along with the League of California Cities.

San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders called it a "sad day" while San Jose City Attorney Richard Doyle called the ruling a disappointment but not a total surprise, given the judges' reactions during arguments in November.

Associated Press writer Juliet Williams contributed to this report.

Stop LA Jail Expansion, Save LA County

2011-12-29T09:31:00.000-08:00

This piece was originally posted on Ella’s Voice, the blog of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.

by Emily Harris on Dec 19, 2011

In a few weeks, the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors will vote on whether or not to approve Sheriff Baca’s latest plan to rob LA: a new jail that will cost $2.66 billion dollars($1.4 billion to build and $1.26 billion in interest to bankers). Los Angeles County is one of 25 counties that have been invited by the Corrections Standards Authority (CSA) to submit applications for AB 900 Phase II funding for construction or expansion of county jails.

“What is California doing?” asks Susan Burton, Executive Director of A New Way of Life Reentry Project in Los Angeles. “Don’t we know by now it is bad for all Californians if we build more cages anywhere? This is a terrible investment of our resources, and we must stop it!”

Los Angeles County was ranked highest in priority to receive jail expansion money because it is the county that committed the largest percentage of prisoners to state custody in 2010. “With violent crime at an all time low, Los Angeles locks up more people then any place in the world, especially brown and Black youth, yet we have no money for jobs, youth centers, schools, libraries, and parks,” says Brandy Brown with the Youth Justice Coalition in Los Angeles.

With the resources Sheriff Baca already has, he has created an international disgrace in LA County jails, where the torture of inadequate medical and mental healthcare and pervasive brutal beatings are routine. It’s time to stop using LA jails as mental health hospitals and homeless shelters. The only sustainable solution to overcrowding is to send less people to jail.

Let’s send the Supervisors a simple and clear message: Vote No on Jail Expansion in LA.

Sign the petition urging LA Supervisors to vote NO on the jail expansion!

LA does not have $2.66 billion dollars to waste on harmful jails. 14.5% of LA residents are unemployed; 40% live without health insurance; and at least 51,000 people are homeless.

What could LA do with $2.66 Billion?

$55 million: hire 500 registered nurses

$50 million: hire 400 people in the Dept. of Mental Health

$55 million: hire 375 people for prevention and early intervention services

$366.4 million: Stop Medi-Cal, Mental Health Services, CalWORKs, In-Home Support Services cuts at the state level from hitting LA residents

$816 million:End homelessness in LA (rent 40,000 2 bedroom apartments for a year at $1700/month)

$1.3 billion: close LAUSD 2011-2013 anticipated budget gaps, save further cuts

Emily Harris is the Statewide Coordinator for Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) a statewide alliance of over 40 organizations working to curb prison spending by reducing the number of people in prison and the number of prisons in California. To help us organize and plug into the work in Los Angeles contact Emily Harris!

Half of America In Poverty? The Facts Say It's True

2011-12-27T17:21:00.000-08:00

via Commondreams.org

Published on Tuesday, December 27, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

Half of America In Poverty? The Facts Say It's True
by Paul Buchheit

Recent reports suggest that almost 50% of Americans are in poverty or at a "low income" level. The claim is based on a new supplemental measure by the Census Bureau that includes health care, transportation, and other essential living expenses in the poverty calculation.

The concept of "low income" is controversial. It has been defined as earnings between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level, a claim which, if true, would place every American family making $50,000 or less at a near-poverty level.

Conservative organizations believe the whole 'poverty' issue is overblown. The Cato Institute blames LBJ and Obama for reversing a declining poverty rate. Forbes blames the calculations. The Heritage Foundation argues, "The average poor person, as defined by the government, has a living standard far higher than the public imagines...In the kitchen, the household had a refrigerator, an oven and stove, and a microwave." The case for a growing "consumption equality" is alternately defended and denied.

With emotions running high on both sides, we need to take a balanced look at the available data to determine how well the highest-earning family of the poorest 50% -- a family with a $50,000 income -- can survive. (The maximum individual income for the poorest 50% is about $30,000.)

Start with taxes. It is frequently noted by conservatives that the richest 1% pay most of the federal income taxes, and indeed they paid about 37 percent in 2009, more than the poorest 90% of Americans. But only the richest 5% of Americans have experienced income growth since 1980. And during that time, their tax rate has dropped from 34% to 23%. As for the 3 percent rate paid by the poorest 50%, the Tax Policy Center sums it up nicely: "The basic structure of the income tax simply exempts subsistence levels of income from tax."

More relevant to the poverty issue is that federal income tax is only a small part of the tax expense for lower-income families. According to a study by The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the poorest 50% paid about 10 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes (the richest 1% paid 5 percent). Congressional Budget Office (CBO) figures reveal that the bottom 50% pays about 9 percent of their incomes toward social security (the top 1% pays just under 2 percent). CBO also shows that the bottom 50% is paying about 2 percent of their incomes on excise taxes, a negligible expense for the people at the top. Another year of Bush tax cuts will chop another 1-2 percent off the taxes of the very rich.

So total taxes for the poorest 50% are 24 percent of their incomes (3% + 10% + 9% + 2%), as compared to 29 percent for the richest 1% (23% + 5% + 2% - 1%).

Other significant expenses for low-income people, based on the most conservative estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, the National Center for Children in Poverty, the Carsey Institute, and the Economic Policy Institute, include food (10%), housing (27%), transportation (6%), health care (5%), child care (8%), and household expenditures (5%). Expenses for insurance and savings and entertainment, although important to most households, are not being included here.

Energy costs hit low-income families especially hard, taking about 20% of their incomes. At the $50,000 income level the burden is closer to 12%, as generally agreed upon by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the American Gas Association.

Total expenses for the richest family in the bottom half of America?
24% taxes
27% housing
34% food, health care, child care, transportation, household needs
12% energy

That's 97% of their income. The richest family among 70,000,000 households is left with just $1,500 for a car, appliances, a TV, a cell phone, a loan repayment, an occasional night out. It comes to $30 a week, barely enough to take the family out for a pizza.

Critics bemoan the amounts of aid being lavished on lower-income Americans, making dubious claims about $16,800 in government funds going to every poor family and families with $90,000 incomes being classified as "near poor."

The fact is that only 4,375,000 families (out of 70,000,000 in the bottom half) received Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in 2010, for a total expense of about $36 billion. Current federal budgets include about $350 billion for food, housing, and traditional 'welfare' programs for needy children, elderly care, and energy assistance. This averages out to about $400 per month per family.

Another fact is that earnings have remained flat for most people while productivity has grown 80% since 1980. If a $50,000 family had received a fair share from their contribution to America's growth, they'd be making $90,000, and they wouldn't need a dime from government.

Conservatives complain about the TVs and refrigerators owned by low-income people. But it's the height of insensitivity to admonish people who are trying to survive in a perversely unequal society.

Jakada Imani on the Ella Baker Center, his port commission bid, and fighting for Oakland

2011-12-23T11:16:00.000-08:00

Via Oakland North

By: Amna Hassan

December 20, 2011 – 11:01 am

When Jakada Imani stepped up to the speakers’ podium in the Oakland City Council chambers on October 4, he didn’t look a bit perturbed. Dressed immaculately in a dark suit, he bore an expression that did not betray emotion.

That night, 18 speakers preceded him at the podium. Two expressed support for him as a new commissioner for the Port of Oakland. The other 16 were indignant that Margaret Gordon was not being reappointed to the same position by Oakland Mayor Jean Quan to serve a second four-year term. Imani had been nominated by Quan, but the council still needed to confirm the appointment with a vote before he could be sworn in, turning the meeting into a debate over which candidate was right for the job.

“Tonight I want to share with you, even in this most awkward moment for me, uh…” Imani said into the microphone, stretching his arms and pausing.

Imani is the executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland and a longtime community activist. He knew his appointment to the seven-member board that manages the port was a delicate affair. Gordon is a longtime health and environmental activist, and during her only term on the job, she spearheaded projects aimed at reducing diesel pollution and improving air quality, among others. That work had strengthened her position in many minds, including some present at the meeting, as “the true voice of West Oakland.”

“You know, Margaret Gordon’s a giant and there’s no denying it. You see it when you meet her,” Imani continued. “What makes me still willing to do this and be in this uncomfortable moment is because I came from fighting. I came through fighting.”

Imani has had to battle his entire life. As a child, he said, he was diagnosed with dyslexia, lived in a home with parents addicted to drugs, and was homeless for a brief period of time. He fought the odds to become a well-respected community leader, and strived to find ways to protect the rights of the disenfranchised. He said that was why he wanted to be a port commissioner – to fight for the people of West Oakland.

The chamber was teeming with people for the meeting on that early October evening — the council was also discussing the implementation of two controversial new gang injunctions, and a large crowd had shown up to voice their opinions. The rows of red velvet chairs were all occupied, and people lined up against the walls, with a few police officers positioned against the back wall in an effort to keep it clear.

As he finished his speech, he urged everyone to come together on principles that would allow everyone to win. “We need to come together,” he said. “And that’s what I want to stand with this people, this city, and this state for.”

But despite the fire and zeal with which Imani has fought for causes he believes in, he knew when it was time to stop and unite.

“Everybody in Oakland’s been fighting,” Imani said. “We’re fighting tonight and we’re going to be fighting later on tonight, and we’ve got nowhere by fighting. Nowhere!”

A little more than a month later, he took his name out of the running for the port commissioner position.

Imani grew up in what he calls a “nice little neighborhood” in East Oakland called Maxwell Park. “It was super, for a small kid,” he said.

In the fourth grade, doctors discovered he had dyslexia, a condition that he describes as “seeing some letters backwards.” Because he was tracked into special education classes, his mother was able to advocate for him to go to schools that lay outside his school district — Thornhill Elementary in Montclair, Maxwell Park. Montera Middle School. He went to Skyline High for a while, and graduated from Oakland High.

School was always a struggle for Imani. “Education wasn’t my thing,” he said, as he sat in a conference room at the Ella Baker Center, which is located on the eighth floor of an office building on Broadway.

“I graduated high school because my counselor took me around to all of my teachers who were failing me and explained to them that if they didn’t give me a passing grade, I would be back and she would put me in their class,” he said with a smile.

He stumbled into community work at the age of 17. While he barely scraped by in school, it was his “probing sensibility” and “racial consciousness” he said that changed his life. Some of that was from his mother, who had gone to school with Bobby Hutton, a member of the Black Panthers party who was later killed, and who had also grown up knowing Huey P. Newton. She instilled an awareness of racial issues in her boys, a trait that one of Imani’s teachers saw when she passed him a flyer for a youth leadership discussion for kids of various ages to come together to discuss issues they were dealing with.

“I saw young people really talking about race and class and liberation and oppression and sexual orientation for the first time, and I was completely blown away,” Imani said of the first leadership discussion he attended.

His life at home was difficult. His parents had started using drugs, he said, and their addiction was spiraling out of control. “Crack in particular,” Imani said. “That changed a lot of things for us. We lost our house for a while. For a while, we were homeless.”

He moved out of the house at the age of 18 when he found a job as a workshop leader focused on peer-to-peer education, teaching others about ways in which they could get involved in helping their communities, at a variety of venues in the Bay Area.“Basically hustling here and there, getting little one-off contracts and consulting gigs,” he said. He worked part-time until he found a more permanent job in San Francisco, doing youth leadership and development for The Kellog Koshland Youth leadership Program at Community Educational Services.

While working in San Francisco, Imani heard Oakland City Councilmember Nancy Nadel’s office was seeking someone with a background in organizing, and he applied for the job of constituent liaison in 1998.

Imani said he learned a lot about District 3 and how local government works during his time with Nadel’s office. He also learned about the health issues that people of West Oakland were dealing with on a regular basis because they live adjacent to a large and busy port complex. “I learned about pollution and brown fields and all the stuff that people in West Oakland were dealing with in terms of health issues,” he said.

Imani was living at the time near the post office in West Oakland, in a house that was just off the Highway 880 corridor, near the port. He remembers being confused by the excessive amounts of dust that would find its way in through the cracks in the doors and windows.

“Then I came to know that it was particulate matter,” he said, a mixture of acids, organic chemicals, metals and dust particles that polluted the area. “At the time, I was allowing one kid to breathe that in everyday.” Today, two of his four daughters have asthma, which he said he thinks may have been a result of exposure to toxins in West Oakland’s air.

As Nadel’s constituent liaison, he also had to respond to residents’ complaints about potholes and stop signs — a job which he said he respects but was never meant to do. Plus, he said, when he took the job, he really wanted to focus on work in West Oakland, and assumed Nadel would want him to do the same. “But that’s not the entire district, right?” said Imani with a chuckle. “It’s Jack London Square, and the lake and the downtown area.”

Much of his work became “liaison work,” he said; he coordinated between different departments and answered community requests instead of doing the kind of grass roots organizing he preferred. “That’s not what I was in it for at all,” Imani said. “So that led to me saying I’m going come to the Ella Baker Center.

“And that was 11 years ago,” he continued. “I became a youth organizer, worked my way up to being director of programs, later ran a campaign, because I wanted to be in the trenches, and four years ago became the executive director.”

In his early years at the Ella Baker Center, Imani campaigned against Proposition 21, legislation that allowed teenagers as young as 14 years old to be tried and charged as adults. While the proposition passed in 2000, Imani said he learned a lot from the experience and it affected his work at the Ella Baker Center. He then began to focus his work on reducing the number of juvenile prisons, and the number of inmates in California through a campaign he spearheaded called “Books not Bars.”

Books not Bars aims to transform the criminal justice system, by organizing families of incarcerated youth throughout the state to get involved in the rehabilitation of their children, and by advocating for the education of these children.

In 2006, Imani arranged for the group to take a guided tour and hold a press conference at a large juvenile correctional facility in Chino called H.G. Stark. Imani was part of the advance team sent to scout the area and meet with prison staff.

By the time he had flown to Los Angeles, and then driven to Paso Robles, the team had acquired the approval of numerous levels of prison bureaucracy. It had taken months of tedious requests and follow-ups to get various officials to sign off on the visit, and Imani’s team had to plow through bundles of red tape before they got everyone on board.

So when Imani drove into the sprawling facility, he did not foresee any more problems. He was wrong. “I got there and the shift sergeant is like, ‘No! You can’t go on tour. No, you can’t see this. No, you can’t do that. No, no, no, no.’”

Furious at being turned away, Imani strode back to his car, got inside, and began calling everyone he knew who could possibly help. “It made my blood boil,” he said. “I’m just fuming. I’m going, ‘They don’t understand that these are somebody’s kids, somebody’s son, brother, niece, nephew.’”

It was a Saturday morning, and Imani was trying to reach people who were not in their offices, but he still continued to dial every number he could come up with. Finally, he was able to reach various jail officials on the phone, and the jail’s superintendent showed up soon after and gave the group the OK to proceed as planned.

While he was waiting outside the prison, one of the guards, an older Latino man with a weathered face, drove out of the compound and sat next to Imani. Imani reckoned the man was in his late 50s or early 60s. Imani listened with increasing curiosity as the guard began to talk about the 30 years he had spent in the prison. Here was a man who had a son and daughter in college, who was getting close to retirement himself, Imani thought.

“He was talking about how when he first got here, they would take the kids on field trips, and now he’s standing there in a full military jumpsuit, with a giant bottle of mace on his hip, a panic button, a tazer, handcuffs, and a baton, right?” Imani said. “And you could just hear it in his voice that that’s not why he came here.”

For Imani, that was when a pivotal shift occurred. “That was the moment when I realized, that these guards too are somebody’s fathers, they’re somebody’s sons, they’re somebody’s children,” he said. “And as much as I want to fight for our children to get a fair shake, that I had not been present to fight for them to get a fair shake. While some of them have committed horrible atrocities, the same goes for some of our children in these facilities too.”

One of the ways that changed him, and the Ella Baker Center, was that they began to fight for the “jailed and the jailer.” He was able to connect with people on both sides of the fence.

“He is an incredible bridge-builder,” Esperanza Tervalon-Daumont, the Executive Director of Oakland Rising, an organization that works on social justice issues, with which Imani was also involved.

Daumont, who was recommended for the job at Oakland Rising by Imani more than three years ago, said this trait was what made Imani a strong leader. “He has a really bold vision,” she said.

Imani said that interaction with the jail guard made him remember a saying from Gandhi — that justice was wide and deep. “And I think that changed me as an activist, it made me a lot less angry, and I think it made me a lot more wise,” he said.”

On November 15, the final day of the mail ballot-only special election, the council was to have another meeting and vote on Imani’s appointment again.

In the preceding month, Imani’s appointment had become increasingly complicated. On Oct 18, the council approved him as the next port commissioner, only to have that decision overturned soon after by the city attorney. The reason: the president of the council, Larry Reid (District 7) had encouraged audience members to give up their chance to speak on the issue and allow the council to vote, which the city attorney then said made the vote invalid. And then the recasting of the vote was delayed more than once for different reasons.

But before the council could vote again – hours before the Nov. 15 meeting took place — Imani sent out a press release stating that he had withdrawn his nomination.

For many people who do not know Imani personally, the withdrawal came as a shock, and seemed to be related to other defections from Quan’s administration – City Attorney John Russo, Police Chief Anthony Batts, Deputy Mayor Sharon Cornu, and unofficial legal advisor Dan Siegel all who quit between June and November of this year.

But Imani made it clear that his decision had nothing to do with any falling out with Quan, who at the time was facing a lot of criticism for the city’s handling of the Occupy Oakland encampment that had been set up in front of city hall.

For Imani, this was not a fight worth fighting anymore.

“I’ve been engaged in the nomination process since September, and it became clear to me over time, that the opportunity had little to do with me and Margaret,” he said. “It had to do with the mayor and her opposition,” he continued, hinting that some councilmembers had opposed his nomination.

With the port commissioner nomination debacle behind him, Imani said he will now focus his energies on the Ella Baker Center and Oakland Rising and continue to do the work he has enjoyed doing for so long. “I know this is a critical juncture in our state and our country, so I’m going to focus most of my energies at the Ella Baker Center,” he said.

Imani did not apply for the job so he could put another title under his belt, according to his friends, and he thought the debate over the next port commissioner was detracting from the real issues in West Oakland that needed solving. “He’s not in the work that he’s in for public recognition,” said Eric Gurna, the godfather to Imani’s eldest daughter, and one of his closest friends. Gurna met Imani almost 27 years ago in a seventh grade classroom at Montera Middle School, when their teacher seated the class in alphabetical order.

Gurna remembers Imani as someone who was always willing to engage in a political discussion, and the two friends often would stay up nights talking about politics. But he knew that this was not a debate Imani wanted to be a part of – he preferred doing what he did best, fighting for the disenfranchised at his current job.

“He is not interested in the conversation being on him,” Gurna said. “He’s more focused on standing with the people of Oakland.”

“This is Where I’m Going To Be When I Die,” Say Prisoners Sentenced For Juvenile Crimes

2011-12-21T10:07:00.000-08:00

By William Fisher
The Public Record
Dec 3rd, 2011

Amnesty International is calling on the US justice system to stop sentencing young men and women to “life in prison without the possibility of release” for crimes they committed when were under 18 years old. More than 2,500 prisoners are currently serving such sentences in US prisons today.

In a new report, “‘This is where I’m going to be when I die’: Children facing life imprisonment without the possibility of release in the United States,” Amnesty charges that children as young as 11 at the time of the crime have faced life imprisonment without parole in the United States – the only country in the world to impose this sentence on children.

The report says, “Sentencing children to die in prison flouts a principle of international human rights law recognized and respected across the world, except by the USA. No other country is currently known to impose life imprisonment” without the possibility of parole for crimes, however serious, committed when they were children.

“In the United States, people under 18 cannot vote, buy alcohol or lottery tickets or consent to most forms of medical treatment, but they can be sentenced to die in prison for their actions. This needs to change,” says Natacha Mension, U. S. campaigner at Amnesty International (AI).

In the United States, life without parole can be imposed on juvenile offenders as a mandatory punishment – without consideration of mitigating factors such as history of abuse or trauma, degree of involvement in the crime, mental health status, or amenability to rehabilitation.

“We are not excusing crimes committed by children or minimizing their consequences, but the simple reality is that these sentences ignore the special potential for rehabilitation and change that young offenders have,” said Mension.

In May 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court said life without parole is “an especially harsh punishment for a juvenile,” as the young offender will serve, on average, more years and a greater percentage of his life in prison than an older offender. “A 16-year-old and a 75-year-old each sentenced to life without parole receive the same punishment in name only,” the Court said.

Eighteen months after prohibiting this sentence for non-homicide crimes committed by under-18-year-olds, on November 8, 2011, the Supreme Court agreed to consider this issue in relation to crimes involving murder. It will not issue a decision until the second quarter of 2012 at the earliest.
The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which entered into force more than two decades ago, expressly prohibits the imposition of life imprisonment without the possibility of release for offenses, however serious, committed by people under 18 years old. All countries except the United States and Somalia have ratified the Convention.

“It is long past time for the United States to ratify the Convention without reservations or other limiting conditions and to fully implement its prohibition on the use of life imprisonment without release against children, including in relation to the cases of those already sentenced,” said Mension.

But the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which the USA did ratify in 1992, acknowledges the need for special treatment of children in the criminal justice system and emphasizes the importance of procedures that take account of their age and facilitate their rehabilitation.

The report says this international prohibition “does not stem from any inclination to excuse crimes committed by children or to minimize the consequences of such crimes for the victims and their families. It stems, rather, from recognition that children, who are still developing, are not fully mature, and hence not fully responsible for their actions.”

These “offenders have a special potential for rehabilitation and change. It is not that young people should not be held accountable for their actions. It is that this accountability must be achieved in ways that reflect the offender’s young age and his or her is utterly incompatible with basic principles of juvenile justice.”

Amnesty International’s 34-page report illustrates the issue through the stories of Christi Cheramie, Jacqueline Montanez and David Young.

On November 30, Christi Cheramie, who is serving life without parole in Louisiana, will submit an application for executive clemency with the state Board of Pardons. Christi was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of release in 1994, when she was 16 years old for the killing of her 18-year-old fiancé’s great aunt.

She pleaded guilty just before her trial in adult court began, fearing she could be sentenced to death if the trial went ahead. Her guilty plea prevents her from directly appealing her conviction or sentence.

A psychiatrist who saw Christi prior to her trial said that she was a “depressed, dependent, and insecure” 16-year-old who “seems to have been fearful of crossing” her fiancé, who she maintains committed the crime. Christi’s childhood was marked by sexual abuse. At the age of 13, she was hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic after trying to commit suicide on at least two occasions.

After spending half of her life in prison, Christi believes she has changed in many ways. She has obtained a high school equivalency diploma, a degree in agricultural studies, and teaches a number of classes at the prison. A warden has stated that she is “worthy of a second chance.”

A clemency campaign is also pending for a second person whose case is profiled in AI’s report. Jacqueline Montanez is the only woman in Illinois serving a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for a crime committed as a child. A victim of child abuse, Jacqueline began abusing drugs and alcohol at the age of nine. Jacqueline’s abuser was her step-father, a gang leader, who also involved her in the drug trade as a very young child and groomed her to be his “little soldier.” After running away from home and joining a rival gang, she and two older women shot and killed two adult male members of her step-father’s gang.

Because she was 15 at the time of the crime and charged with first degree murder, she was automatically tried in adult criminal court. This denied the court system the opportunity of conducting a transfer hearing to determine whether her case ought to have been tried in juvenile court where factors such as her young age, home environment or amenability to rehabilitation would have been considered. Jacqueline was also automatically sentenced to life without parole due to her conviction; the sentencing court had no discretion to consider her history, her age, the circumstances of the offense or her potential for rehabilitation.

Now 35 years old, she expresses deep remorse for her actions and believes that she has grown into a very different person. She has obtained a high school equivalency diploma and has become a certified trainer of service dogs for disabled people. She grieves for her victims and the pain that their families have suffered.

In Illinois, 80 percent of children in prison for life without parole received mandatory sentences; about 82 percent are prisoners of color. That number is even higher in Cook County, where the Montanez case originated. These findings were published by the Illinois Coalition on the Fair Sentencing of Children in its 2008 report, “Categorically Less Culpable, Children Sentenced to Life Without Parole in Illinois.”

Jacqueline’s petition for executive clemency will be submitted to the Illinois governor and the Prisoner Review Board in January 2012.

David Young is one of two teenagers arrested and charged for the murder of Charles Welch in 1997. He was automatically charged in adult criminal court as required by North Carolina law for any criminal offense committed by anyone age 16 or older. Young’s co-defendant, who shot the victim, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 19 to 23 years in prison. David was convicted of first-degree felony murder and was sentenced to life without parole.

Young grew up in a hostile community environment where his parents abused drugs and his stepfather physically abused him and his mother. Now 32 years old, Young obtained his high school equivalency diploma and is in solitary confinement after being stabbed by two prisoners.

William Fisher has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt’s agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the international affairs area in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He began his working life as a reporter and bureau chief for the Daytona Beach News-Journal and the Associated Press in Florida. He now reports on a wide-range of issues for a number of online journals.

California prison population drops by 8,000 since realignment

2011-12-21T10:00:00.000-08:00

via KPCC

Dec. 16, 2011 | By Julie Small | KPCC

The number of inmates in California prisons has dropped by 8,000 since “realignment” took effect Oct. 1. Court papers state officials filed Thursday indicate the change. Officials reported the new numbers Thursday under a federal court order to reduce crowding in the prisons.

In its monthly status report to the court, officials said the state prison population dropped by 8,218 between Oct. 5 and Dec. 7.

California prison officials say the transfer of low-level felons to county officials that began in October will allow the state to meet a court-ordered reduction a month after a Dec. 27 deadline.

The state’s prison population has declined from a record high of 173,000 in 2006 to the current population of 135,000. But many prisons remain packed with almost twice the number of inmates they were designed to hold.

About two years ago, attorneys at the Prison Law Office convinced a panel of three federal judges that crowded conditions prevented inmates from getting basic medical care. The judges ordered California to reduce the state inmate population within two years.

In March this year the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that order.

The court order and state budget deficits convinced state lawmakers to enact Gov. Jerry Brown's historic "realignment" plan that shifts responsibility for non-serious, non-violent, non-sex offenders to counties. The Legislature also diverted some sales tax and vehicle licensing revenues in the next fiscal year to help local government pay for the new responsibility. The law took effect Oct. 1.

Michelle Alexander on The New Jim Crow and the school-to-prison pipeline

2011-12-21T09:38:00.000-08:00

December 20, 2011 by rethinkingschoolsblog

by Jody Sokolower

Last spring I went to hear Michelle Alexander, the dynamic author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. She spoke to an overflow audience at a primarily African American church.

We were transfixed as she described how difficult it had been for her, as a civil rights attorney, to face the current realities of what is happening with prisons in this country and its impact on people of color. It was the stories of one formerly incarcerated person after another that finally broke through her long-held beliefs about the justice system. She went on to explain her thought-provoking and disturbing thesis: Mass incarceration, justified and organized around the war on drugs, has become the new face of racial discrimination in the United States.

At that point, we were in the midst of planning the winter issue of Rethinking Schools—available the first week in January—which focuses on the school-to-prison pipeline. I realized how important Michelle’s perspective is in understanding how the criminalization of youth fits into the larger social picture. So we asked her to provide a context for our readers by sharing her thoughts about the implications of her work when applied to education and the lives of children and youth. She agreed. Here is the interview:

RS: What is the impact of mass incarceration on African American children and youth?

MA: There is an extraordinary impact. For African American children, in particular, the odds are extremely high that they will have a parent or loved one, a relative, who has either spent time behind bars or who has acquired a criminal record and thus is part of the under-caste—the group of people who can be legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives. For many African American children, their fathers, and increasingly their mothers, are behind bars. It is very difficult for them to visit. Many people are held hundreds or even thousands of miles away from home. There is a tremendous amount of shame with having a parent or other family member incarcerated. There can be fear of having it revealed to others at school.

But also, for these children, their life chances are greatly diminished. They are more likely to be raised in severe poverty; their parents are unlikely to be able to find work or housing and are often ineligible even for food stamps.

For children, the era of mass incarceration has meant a tremendous amount of family separation, broken homes, poverty, and a far, far greater level of hopelessness as they see so many of their loved ones cycling in and out of prison. Children who have incarcerated parents are far more likely themselves to be incarcerated.

When young black men reach a certain age—whether or not there is incarceration in their families—they themselves are the target of police stops, interrogations, frisks, often for no reason other than their race. And, of course, this level of harassment sends a message to them, often at an early age: No matter who you are or what you do, you’re going to find yourself behind bars one way or the other. This reinforces the sense that prison is part of their destiny, rather than a choice one makes.

A Birdcage as a Metaphor

Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

RS: At one point in The New Jim Crow, you refer to the metaphor of a birdcage as a way to describe structural racism and apply that to mass incarceration. How does what is happening to African American youth in our schools fit into that picture?

MA: The idea of the metaphor is there can be many bars, wires that keep a person trapped. All of them don’t have to have been created for the purpose of harming or caging the bird, but they still serve that function. Certainly youth of color, particularly those in ghetto communities, find themselves born into the cage. They are born into a community in which the rules, laws, policies, structures of their lives virtually guarantee that they will remain trapped for life. It begins at a very early age when their parents themselves are either behind bars or locked in a permanent second-class status and cannot afford them the opportunities they otherwise could. For example, those with felony convictions are denied access to public housing, hundreds of professions that require certification, financial support for education, and often the right to vote. Thousands of people are unable even to get food stamps because they were once caught with drugs.

The cage itself is manifested by the ghetto, which is racially segregated, isolated, cut off from social and economic opportunities. The cage is the unequal educational opportunities these children are provided at a very early age coupled with the constant police surveillance they’re likely to encounter, making it very likely that they’re going to serve time and be caught for committing the various types of minor crimes—particularly drug crimes—that occur with roughly equal frequency in middle-class white communities but go largely ignored.

So, for many, whether they go to prison or not is far less about the choices they make and far more about what kind of cage they’re born into. Middle-class white children, children of privilege, are afforded the opportunity to make a lot of mistakes and still go on to college, still dream big dreams. But for kids who are born in the ghetto in the era of mass incarceration, the system is designed in such a way that it traps them, often for life.

RS: How do you define and analyze the school-to-prison pipeline?

MA: It’s really part of the large cage or caste that I was describing earlier. The school-to-prison pipeline is another metaphor—a good one for explaining how children are funneled directly from schools into prison. Instead of schools being a pipeline to opportunity, schools are feeding our prisons.

It’s important for us to understand how school discipline policies have been influenced by the war on drugs and the “get tough” movement. Many people imagine that zero tolerance rhetoric emerged within the school environment, but it’s not true. In fact, the Advancement Project published a report showing that one of the earliest examples of zero tolerance language in school discipline manuals was a cut-and-paste job from a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration manual. The wave of punitiveness that washed over the United States with the rise of the drug war and the get tough movement really flooded our schools. Schools, caught up in this maelstrom, began viewing children as criminals or suspects, rather than as young people with an enormous amount of potential struggling in their own ways and their own difficult context to make it and hopefully thrive. We began viewing the youth in schools as potential violators rather than as children needing our guidance.

The Mythology of Colorblindness

RS: In your book, you explain that the policies of mass incarceration are technically “colorblind” but lead to starkly racialized results. How do you see this specifically affecting children and young people of color?

MA: The mythology around colorblindness leads people to imagine that if poor kids of color are failing or getting locked up in large numbers, it must be something wrong with them. It leads young kids of color to look around and say: “There must be something wrong with me, there must be something wrong with us. Is there something inherent, something different about me, about us as a people, that leads us to fail so often, that leads us to live in these miserable conditions, that leads us to go in and out of prison?”

The mythology of colorblindness takes the race question off the table. It makes it difficult for people to even formulate the question: Could this be about something more than individual choices? Maybe there is something going on that’s linked to the history of race in our country and the way race is reproducing itself in modern times.

I think this mythology—that of course we’re all beyond race, of course our police officers aren’t racist, of course our politicians don’t mean any harm to people of color—this idea that we’re beyond all that (so it must be something else) makes it difficult for young people as well as the grown-ups to be able to see clearly and honestly the truth of what’s going on. It makes it difficult to see that the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement manifested itself in the form of mass incarceration, in the form of defunding and devaluing schools serving kids of color and all the rest. We have avoided in recent years talking openly and honestly about race out of fear that it will alienate and polarize. In my own view, it’s our refusal to deal openly and honestly with race that leads us to keep repeating these cycles of exclusion and division, and rebirthing a caste-like system that we claim we’ve left behind.

RS: We are in the midst of a huge attack on public education—privatization through charters and vouchers; increased standardization, regimentation, and testing; and the destruction of teachers’ unions. Much of it is justified by what appears to be anti-racist rhetoric: Schools aren’t meeting the needs of inner-city children, so their parents need choices. How do you see this?

MA: People who focus solely on what do we do given the current context are avoiding the big why. Why is it that these schools aren’t meeting these kids’ needs? Why is it that such a large percentage of the African American population today is trapped in these ghettos? What is the bigger picture?

The bigger picture is that over the last 30 years, we have spent $1 trillion waging a drug war that has failed in any meaningful way to reduce drug addiction or abuse, and yet has siphoned an enormous amount of resources away from other public services, especially education. We are in a social and political context in which the norm is to punish poor folks of color rather than to educate and empower them with economic opportunity. It is that political context that leads some people to ask: Don’t children need to be able to escape poorly performing schools? Of course, no one should be trapped in bad schools or bad neighborhoods. No one. But I think we need to be asking a larger question: How do we change the norm, the larger context that people seem to accept as a given? Are we so thoroughly resigned to what “is” that we cannot even begin a serious conversation about how to create what ought to be?

The education justice movement and the prison justice movement have been operating separately in many places as though they’re in silos. But the reality is we’re not going to provide meaningful education opportunities to poor kids, kids of color, until and unless we recognize that we’re wasting trillions of dollars on a failed criminal justice system. Kids are growing up in communities in which they see their loved ones cycling in and out of prison and in which they are sent the message in countless ways that they, too, are going to prison one way or another. We cannot build healthy, functioning schools within a context where there is no funding available because it’s going to building prisons and police forces.

RS: And fighting wars?

MA: Yes, and fighting wars. And where there is so much hopelessness because of the prevalence of mass incarceration.

At the same time, we’re foolish if we think we’re going to end mass incarceration unless we are willing to deal with the reality that huge percentages of poor people are going to remain jobless, locked out of the mainstream economy, unless and until they have a quality education that prepares them well for the new economy. There has got to be much more collaboration between the two movements and a greater appreciation for the work of the advocates in each community. It’s got to be a movement that’s about education, not incarceration—about jobs, not jails. A movement that integrates the work in these various camps from, in my view, a human rights perspective.
Fighting Back

RS: What is the role of teachers in responding to this crisis? What should we be doing in our classrooms? What should we be doing as education activists?

MA: That is a wonderful question and one I’m wrestling with myself now. I am in the process of working with others trying to develop curriculum and materials that will make it easier to talk to young people about these issues in ways that won’t lead to paralysis, fear, or resignation, but instead will enlighten and inspire action and critical thinking in the future. It’s very difficult but it must be done.

We have to be willing to take some risks. In my experience, there is a lot of hesitancy to approach these issues in the classroom out of fear that students will become emotional or angry, or that the information will reinforce their sense of futility about their own lives and experience. It’s important to teach them about the reality of the system, that it is in fact the case that they are being targeted unfairly, that the rules have been set up in a way that authorize unfair treatment of them, and how difficult it is to challenge these laws in the courts. We need to teach them how our politics have changed in recent years, how there has been, in fact, a backlash. But we need to couple that information with stories of how people in the past have challenged these kinds of injustices, and the role that youth have played historically in those struggles.

I think it’s important to encourage young people to tell their own stories and to speak openly about their own experiences with the criminal justice system and the experiences of their family. We need to ensure that the classroom environment is a supportive one so that the shame and stigma can be dispelled. Then teachers can use those stories of what students have witnessed and experienced as the opportunity to begin asking questions: How did we get here? Why is this happening? How are things different in other communities? How is this linked to what has gone on in prior periods of our nation’s history? And what, then, can we do about it?

Just providing information about how bad things are, or the statistics and data on incarceration by themselves, does lead to more depression and resignation and is not empowering. The information has to be presented in a way that’s linked to the piece about encouraging students to think critically and creatively about how they might respond to injustice, and how young people have responded to injustice in the past.

RS: What specifically?

MA: There’s a range of possibilities. I was inspired by what students have done in some schools organizing walkouts protesting the lack of funding and that sort of thing. There are opportunities for students to engage in those types of protests—taking to the streets—but there is also writing poetry, writing music, beginning to express themselves, holding forums, educating each other, the whole range. For example, for a period of time the Ella Baker Center in Oakland, Calif., was focused on youth engagement and advocacy to challenge mass incarceration. They launched a number of youth campaigns to close youth incarceration facilities in northern California. They demonstrated that it is really possible to blend hip-hop culture with very creative and specific advocacy and to develop young leaders. Young people today are very creative in using social media and there is a wide range of ways that they can get involved.

The most important thing at this stage is inspiring an awakening. There is a tremendous amount of confusion and denial that exists about mass incarceration today, and that is the biggest barrier to movement building. As long as we remain in denial about this system, movement building will be impossible. Exposing youth in classrooms to the truth about this system and developing their critical capacities will, I believe, open the door to meaningful engagement and collective, inspired action.
http://rethinkingschoolsblog.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/michelle-alexander-on-the-new-jim-crow-and-the-school-to-prison-pipeline/

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