California Senate Passes Family Connection Bill

More good news from California. The State Senate has just passed the Family Connection Bill (AB 1300) in a unanimous 39-to-0 vote. Here’s a summary of the bill from the good folks at Books Not Bars, who helped craft the legislation and who have done wonders to raise public awareness and help push the bill through:

The Family Connection Bill will enact several key reforms that will make it easier for youth to stay connected to their loved ones while they are in the youth prison system. The bill will:

• Make it part of the purpose of the Division of Juvenile Justice to educate the youth in its care and promote family ties;

• Require that visitation lists be transferred when the youth is transferred to a new facility;

• Require that every youth in a state Division of Juvenile Justice facility be allowed a minimum of four phone calls to family each month;

• Set up a toll-free hotline for information and updates on visitation;

• Require that young people be placed at facilities near their families when possible.

Today’s vote comes, perhaps not coincidentally, on the second anniversary of Joseph Maldonado’s suicide. Maldonado was a lanky 18-year-old who had been brought in on auto theft and sent down the line until he wound up at Chad. An Inspector General’s report published in December 2005 explains that his death (the fifth in the CYA since 2004) was preceded by an eight-week lockdown during which education, health services, visitation and exercise were cut off; it also explains that Maldonado had been denied mental health consultation four times.

As I wrote in an investigative piece for The Nation last year, Maldonado “was presented with two impossible options: He could earn programming privileges by forsaking his gang (which would likely have prompted a beating from one of the Norteño leaders in his unit) or remain in solitary confinement, a condition that was becoming increasingly untenable. Cornered, desperate, he resolved to die. On the night of August 31, 2005, the guards on duty broke procedure and waited more than half an hour after noticing Maldonado had covered his cell window before opening the door to find him hanging from a bedsheet.”

Now, exactly two years later, the State Senate is taking a big step toward preventing such tragedies in the future. “Had the Family Connection Bill been in place two years ago, Joseph Maldonado’s death might not have happened,” said Books Not Bars policy director Sumayyah Waheed. Renee Nunez, Maldonado’s sister, who was denied the right to visit her brother, believes she could have helped him cope with life inside had she been allowed to see him. Her family has filed a wrongful death suit against the CDCR and Chad officials reponsible for his death.

Post-Katrina Turnaround

NPR’s Morning Edition has been running a series this week on the second anniversary of Katrina and how different segments of New Orleans are rebuilding. This morning featured a conversation with David Bell, chief judge of the Orleans Parish Juvenile Court, and it’s worth a listen.

Before Katrina, Bell explains, kids were routinely being arrested on charges as minor as curfew violation, and they would typically spend a few days locked up in the detention center awaiting their hearing–just enough time to befriend and swap cell numbers with the more violent offenders. You can imagine what this was doing for the recidivism rate. Graduation, in this context, didn’t exactly include caps and gowns; a curfew violator might be brought in a few months later for, say, assault, followed a few months after that by aggravated battery, and so on. “When we looked at our system we realized that we were breeding criminals,” Brown says.

Much like it did in so many other sectors of the city, the hurricane created the opportunity to drastically revamp the juvenile justice system. Tapping an influx of volunteers and money from outside the city–much of it federal emergency funds due to lapse next spring–the parish cleared its backlog and closed out more than 12,000 cases, and instituted new programs and policies designed to keep all but the most serious offenders out of detention. Juvenile crime is down 84 percent.

It’s a fascinating, dramatic turnaround, and a great case study. I was particularly interested to hear what the system looked like before the storm, to learn that in the eight months preceding landfall some 5,000 juveniles were arrested. Explaining that astounding statistic, and corroborating Bell’s description of the types of kids police were hauling in, Damekia Morgan, an organizer with the grassroots Friends and Families of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, told NPR correspondent Renee Montagne that kids were routinely hauled in for “trespassing, going into a neighborhood where you’re not supposed to be, standing on a corner in a crowd, pants sagging…”

The line about the pants sagging stopped me in my tracks. How far New Orleans has come, I thought, and how far the rest of the state has yet to go. Just this morning I read in the Thursday Styles section of the New York Times about a city ordinance passed in June in Delcambre, Louisiana, declaring saggy pants illegal–illegal! Violators–and take a guess what the profile looks like–can be charged $500 or served a six-month sentence. The nearby town of Mansfield, near Shreveport, has passed a law effective September 15 that will fine pants-saggers $150 or lock them up for fifteen days. And last week, the Times reported,

Atlanta Councilman C. T. Martin sponsored an amendment to the city’s indecency laws to ban sagging, which he called an epidemic. “We are trying to craft a remedy,” said Mr. Martin, who sees the problem as “a prison mentality.”

Prison mentality, indeed. Problem, clearly. Remedy? Try again. Somehow I don’t think criminalizing an entire demographic of fashion-conscious hip-hop fans (read: young African-American males) is the smartest way to tackle social ills in Atlanta, or Delcambre, or Mansfield, or anyplace else. Certainly won’t help alleviate that dreadful “prison mentality.”

I wonder, by the way, if the mayor of New Haven, Connecticut, has considered passing a law that would target anyone caught wearing the collar up on his Lacoste polo shirt. Seems like a fair way to battle the city’s cocaine habit.

Foster Spared

Update: Governor Perry has spared Kenneth Foster’s life.

Texas-Style Justice

Kenneth Foster may very well die today for a crime he didn’t commit. The 30-year-old prison poet was 19 and behind the wheel the night of August 14, 1996, driving three members of his gang around San Antonio on a crime spree that led to four armed robberies and the murder of Michael LaHood Jr., a 25-year-old law student. Mauricio Brown, who shot LaHood, was executed in July 2006, and the other two accomplices are serving life sentences. Foster is on death row, awaiting a lethal injection.

The decision in this case relies on Texas’s dubious “law of parties,” which holds that Foster was guilty of the murder Brown committed in part because he kept the car running and thus, the argument goes, was able to “anticipate” what Brown was about to do. The logic here is patently absurd: How does leaving the key in the ignition equate to foreknowledge of Brown’s crime? Would Foster have turned the car off for a mere mugging? More simply–and assuming Foster did, in fact, know that Brown intended to kill LaHood–why is driving the getaway car a crime punishable by death? Even more simply, why should any crime, no matter how heinous, merit the death penalty? Why are Americans clinging to such a flawed, atavistic notion of justice? If this case doesn’t make one question the basis for capital punishment, I don’t know what would.

Texas, however, can’t seem to get enough of it this week. Unless Governor Rick Perry issues a reprieve in a matter of hours, Foster will be the third inmate executed in the State of Texas in as many days; that will make him the twenty-fourth this year, and the 403^rd since capital punishment was reinstated in Texas in 1982. Foster is preceded by DaRoyce Mosley, convicted for a murder he committed at 19 and executed on Tuesday, and John Joe Amador, who was killed Wednesday for allegedly murdering a cabdriver at the age of 18.

Texas law classifies 10- to 17-year-olds as juveniles; all three of these men were legally (but barely) adults at the time the crimes were committed. But it’s worth noting that Amador had served three years in California’s Youth Authority, following a conviction as an accomplice to his stepfather’s fatal stabbing. The CYA, a notorious failure when it comes to rehabilitating young offenders, locked him up for a couple of years and then saw fit to let him off on parole. I would also add that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and the US Supreme Court rejected a petition to stay Amador’s execution on the grounds that his trial lawyers failed to introduce evidence about his abusive childhood. And I think it’s worth mentioning that the woman who was sitting in the front seat of the cab that night admitted under oath that she had drunk perhaps fifteen beers and a wine cooler earlier in the evening. She was able to identify Amador as the killer only after repeated interviews and a hypnosis session.

Good News in California

Last week the California State Legislature passed Bill SB81, which calls for halving the number of wards held in the state’s prisons. Governor Schwarzenegger is widely expected to sign it when it crosses his desk. If and when he does, the occasion will mark a watershed for juvenile justice reform in California, the state with arguably the nation’s worst, most punitive system for handling young offenders. A shrinking California Division of Juvenile Justice is very good news those who believe, as I do, that the DJJ is broken beyond repair and that the best way to reform it is to shut it down and start over from scratch.

In the short term, of course, counties will be hit rather hard; as the population shrinks at the state level (it’s currently at about 2,600, down from an outrageous peak of 10,000), the number of wards held at local juvenile halls and outdoor camps will grow. This presents a serious challenge, as some counties are already operating at or beyond capacity, and many lack adequate resources for the wards they’re currently serving. Absorbing more teens–particularly those who have been hardened by the adultlike conditions at the DJJ prisons–will create more problems.

Thankfully, and wisely, along with this influx of offenders will come an influx of cash. Schwarzenegger agreed after some arm-twisting to set aside an average of roughly $130,000 per youth transferred to the county level. He also allocated $100 million for new facilities and rehab programs, and has given county officials wide latitude on how to spend the money. I also noticed that the state budget, which Schwarzenegger signed last Friday, includes $24 million for similar purposes.

Short-term challenges notwithstanding, the long-term goal is a good one. The basic premise of this bill is to reserve the state system for only the most violent offenders, and to keep it small enough so that they can be properly educated, treated and rehabilitated. The rest should be kept out of prison, close to home, and handled in a safe, sensible, supportive environment that aims to return them to their communities with a lesson learned as soon as possible.