By Tanya Greene, Advocacy and Policy Counsel, ACLU
We as a nation need to stop throwing away our children. Kids are still maturing and developing — as I like to say, they are not done yet. As a result, society treats kids and adults differently in a wide array of contexts: kids cannot drive, sit on juries, enter contracts, join the military, smoke, drink, marry or hold political office. Yet we lock them up and literally throw away the key. Making matters worse, we condemn black youth forever at 18 times the rate of white youth and Latino youth at five times the rate of whites.
Young people need to be held accountable for their criminal actions in a way that allows them to grow and develop into successful adults. California’s Senate Bill 9 would improve the law to reflect kids’ capacity for rehabilitation, plus it protects public safety and is fiscally sound. S.B. 9 would allow youth who were sentenced to life in prison without parole for an offense committed while they were under 18 an opportunity to show remorse, rehabilitation and redemption. Under this new law, youth could petition the court for review of their sentence after serving 10 to 25 years first, with no guarantee that a lesser sentence would be imposed. There would also be no guarantee of parole, simply a hope of it where there is now none. Isn’t this the least we could do for our future generation?
Last September, the San Francisco Police Department - under the command of former chief George Gascón - submitted a proposal responding to the uptick in violence outside a handful of San Francisco nightclubs.
The proposal was supposed to be heard this week by the city's Entertainment Commission, but Mayor Ed Lee appropriately delayed the hearing for more debate.
The violence outside of nightclubs is a serious problem that must be addressed in a thoughtful way. But the SFPD's flawed proposal is a knee-jerk response that will not make us safer and will violate our privacy rights. We need to understand why a city as progressive on policy as San Francisco is being offered flawed political solutions to serious public safety challenges.
California voters overwhelmingly passed the Three Strikes initiative in 1994 based on the promise that it would take repeat violent offenders off the streets.
But now, more than fifteen years after the initiative’s passage, we have the benefit of facts to help us understand the true impact of Three Strikes.
Most Californians already know that in the wake of Three Strikes the cost of corrections has soared. Our state prison budget is now so high that California spends as much on prisons as we do on higher education.
But many Californians are surprised to learn that, under Three Strikes, Curtis Wilkerson of Los Angeles was sentenced to life for petty theft of a pair of socks; that Shane Taylor of Tulare was sentenced to life for simple possession of 0.1 gram of methamphetamine; or that Greg Taylor of Los Angeles was sentenced to life for attempting to break into a soup kitchen to get something to eat.
In fact, the majority of those put away for life under Three Strikes – over 4,000 people total – committed a minor, non-violent third strike. These non-violent third strikers will, according to the California state auditor, cost the state at least $4.8 billion over the next 25 years – almost $200 million per year.
The people named above have an advantage that the vast majority of three strikers do not -- they are all clients of the Three Strikes Project at Stanford Law School’s Mills Legal Clinic. Under the direction of Project co-founder Michael Romano, Stanford law students have helped get a dozen non-violent third strikers released from prison after having their sentences reduced.
“Our clients are, in almost every circumstance, absolutely guilty. We’re not going into court and saying that they didn’t do it. What we’re saying is that the punishment that they received for this petty crime is disproportionate.”
This disproportionate punishment is unjust, and it is bankrupting our state. We are wasting precious resources to unnecessarily incarcerate minor offenders who pose little threat to society for huge periods of time – and draining resources away from the law enforcement agencies, community organizations and schools that can truly prevent crime and keep us safe.
Simply put, it is time to reform Three Strikes – so that it is focused on the serious and violent repeat offenders we all agree society must be protected from. Because Three Strikes was passed by a voter initiative, it can only be changed by initiative. In the past, Three Strikes was viewed as untouchable. But now, with the state facing fiscal catastrophe, and Romano and his students bringing attention to the unjust extremes of the law with each new client that gets released, there is momentum for change.
Romano thinks that there is another ingredient necessary for successful reform: political leadership. He says that “with a few notable exceptions, there has been very little leadership on this issue from our elected law enforcement leaders.”
Now is the time to show the leadership what it will take to return to sensible, cost-effective and fair criminal justice polices in California.
California voters came out in droves to support Proposition 19 this November. More than 4.1 million people voted for Prop. 19, which would have allowed adults 21 and older to possess and grow small amounts of marijuana for personal use and allow cities and counties to tax and regulate commercial sales. That's more votes than Meg Whitman or Carly Fiorina garnered. Though the measure didn't pass, the degree of support marks an undeniable leap forward in the movement to end marijuana prohibition. In the end, Prop. 19 achieved a higher percentage of "yes" votes (46%) than any state-level legalization measure on the ballot over the past decade.
This is clearly only the beginning of a new, more rational public discussion about marijuana. It's no longer a question of whether marijuana prohibition should end, but rather when and how. Post-election polling data shows that many voters who rejected Prop. 19 nonetheless believe that marijuana should be made legal. Even the leaders of the opposition to Prop. 19 publicly stated that they are not opposed to marijuana legalization, "if it's done the right way."
By Bethany Woolman, Communications Fellow, ACLU of Northern California
In California, we shackle pregnant women in prison.
And despite widespread opposition, we will continue to do so.
Last week, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill that would have ordered county jails and prisons to stop shackling pregnant women. The bill, AB1900, required new guidelines on restraining pregnant women and would have encouraged counties to adopt these policies. It had overwhelming bipartisan support and passed the legislature without a single "no" vote.
The governor, however, opted to let the dangerous practice of shackling pregnant women continue.
By Diana Tate Vermeire, Racial Justice Project Director, ACLU of Northern California
The state's criminal justice system is quickly becoming the only social service California is willing to fund. Our prison system is bursting at the seams, while school funding is drying up at the well. In the midst of a fiscal crisis -- one that only seems to be getting worse -- California continues to prioritize criminal justice spending instead of investing in the future of our state. Public education and crucial social service programs like welfare-to-work continue to experience drastic cuts, but California is loath to cut criminal justice spending.
Rather than choosing to prioritize basic necessities like a quality education, a job, and a place to live, our state's leaders are instead forcing social service agencies to close their doors, deny services, or turn certain individuals away altogether. Meanwhile, our jails and prisons remain open to anyone brought to their doors, no matter the cost. That choice-pouring scarce financial resources into the criminal justice system rather than much-needed social services-has resulted in the disproportionate incarceration of people of color, and an alarming uptick in the number of women - both women of color and white women - who are behind bars.
When I wrote regularly for Calitics, the progressive blog for California politics, I took a particular interest in the prison crisis, which has reached epidemic proportions in the Golden State. The health care system has already been taken over by a federal receiver because it violated the prisoners' Constitutional rights against cruel and unusual punishment, with at least one prisoner dying each week from medical neglect. The entire system, which fits 170,000 convicts into jails with 100,000 beds, may get taken over by the courts as well. Severe overcrowding, cutbacks to rehabilitation and treatment programs, and an insane parole policy which sends 2/3 of all recidivists back to jail for technical parole violations have contributed to the problem. As has the pervasive "tough on crime" stance from the political leadership of both parties, which has yet to be contrasted with any kind of progressive message on how to fight crime smartly and safely, at lower cost and with corresponding lower incarceration and crime rates.
Here are a few stories that all happened within the past 24 hours in California, regarding these matters: (over)
In part 1 of a New Deal for California, I discussed why any effort to rebuild the state must begin with a frontal assault on high unemployment as the only reliable means of achieving budget stability - as opposed to self-defeating quests for balance via austerity. In part 2, I studied how the quest for a more perfect democracy is inextricably linked to a renewal of democratic control over the state's own revenues.
Today, I want to discuss two areas of policy that are among the largest spending categories in the California state budget, but which also represent two faces of the state, and two approaches to developing its youth, and two sets of values - namely, education and prisons.
Arnold's recent proposal to put a floor under higher education at 10% of the state budget and a ceiling over prisons at 7% of the state budget is only the most recent example of a long trend of discussing the two in the same breath. As I discussed in the linked article, Schwarzenegger's approach is fundamentally flawed, a mirage of egalitarianism masking a reality of utter callousness. A moral society cannot pay for the future of its most talented youth through the deliberate immiseration of its least advantaged.
However, a New Deal for California will have to grapple with the reality that California will either educate or incarcerate its young, and that the power to choose lies with us.
True to the reality of a weak political media and an inattentive public, the chatter over the results of the July budget revision, despite major cuts to the social safety net, has completely subsided. No taxes got increased and nobody "important" got hurt, so it was just time to move on. Politicians just move on to the business of raising corporate money, special interests can move on to the business of writing laws that help their bottom line, and everybody in Sacramento can praise everybody else for "sacrificing" to get things done.
Only, for the people living under the consequences of these budgets, created through a choice not to properly pay for needed services, the budget battle is not forgotten. And it doesn't consist of a group of numbers in a column. It's entirely real and it hits them every single day. Here's just one example.
Six domestic violence shelters in California have been forced to close while dozens more are scaling back services after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger eliminated all state funding for the program that supports them.
Shelters in the Central Valley town of Madera, the Sierra foothill town of Grass Valley and in Ventura County in Southern California have closed. Others in the San Francisco Bay area, Los Angeles and Bakersfield are on the verge of closing.
Many centers are laying off staff and closing satellite offices that serve remote areas of the state as they cope with the budget cuts. A national domestic violence group describes California's as the deepest cuts to such programs nationwide, even as other states have reduced funding.
In Madera County, officials have turned away six domestic violence victims and eight children since the county's only shelter closed Aug. 7, said Tina Figueroa, the shelter's director. The Martha Diaz Shelter served about 100 victims a year, many of them low-income and with no place else to turn, she said.
So 100 victims of domestic violence in smallish Madera County now have truly nowhere to turn, and will either suffer under the boot of their abusive partners or, in many cases, be killed by them. The director of domestic violence policy in the LA City Attorney's office pretty clearly calls these programs "homicide prevention." It also saves money relative to what you spend prosecuting the eventual homicides. I've seen "tough on crime" conservatives over the years invoke the name of victims and stir up public support for laws in their name. They go curiously silent when hundreds of domestic violence victims are put at risk of death because they want to save rich people and corporations from having to pay for their fair share of the commons.
These closures are the direct result of line-item cuts by the Governor. So the blood is on his hands. Leland Yee has a bill that attempts to cover the domestic violence shelter budget with cash from a crime victims fund, but under 2/3 rules, it's not likely to pass this week.
Kudos to the AP for doing a story on this; but there need to be many more. There's a human face on the budget cuts that has completely been lost and forgotten. Those suffering are right to suspect that nobody in Sacramento cares about them.
In between budget posts, I've lately been in a bit of a tiff with Chris Kelly, an Attorney General candidate and former Chief Privacy Officer at Facebook, over his stale, predictable fearmongering about potential early prison releases. There are a bunch of other estimable candidates in the Attorney General's race, one who did himself a ton of good yesterday by leading the fight against the offshore drilling proposal. So maybe I shouldn't take too much time on Kelly. But there's a short-term policy fight coming up next month to determine how to implement $1.2 billion in cuts to the corrections budget, and with some good activism and common sense we can stare down the Tough on Crime crowd and post a needed victory for sensible criminal justice policies. Therefore it's worth looking at Kelly's latest post:
The prison release plan is supposed to save $1.2 billion, but that's just accounting trickery. In fact, a Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics study finds that nearly 70% of early-released inmates are rearrested within three years, 20% of them for violent crime. That will mean more than $3 billion in increased costs from crime while causing serious harm to hundreds of thousands of innocent victims.
I've spoken to police chiefs, law enforcement groups and civic associations throughout California about the issue, and they're deeply worried about the crime wave this scheme will unleash. It will be hard enough to make San Jose a safer community in tough economic times without the problems caused by early release.
Obviously, Kelly hasn't talked to the California Police Chiefs Association, which endorsed the plan as a smart step to begin to move away from the failed prison policies of the last thirty years. Foremost among these new ideas is the concept of targeting resources - instead of warehousing the terminally ill or blanket strict supervision on everyone released regardless of determining possibility of recidivism, we can put resources into programs that provide opportunity for prisoners to pay their debt to society and move on. This deal doesn't do all of that, but it does, for example, put ill and infirm prisoners under home detention or in a care facility, which doesn't impact public safety and saves money. It offers incentives for prisoners to complete rehabilitation plans. It reviews the cases of illegal immigrants in jails instead of just tossing them in the lap of the ICE to deal with, which would actually be the kind of misguided policy Kelly warns against. And most important, it includes an independent sentencing commission, outside of politics, which can look at our sentencing laws and make recommendations for the legislature to adopt on an up-or-down vote.
Using the buzzword of "early release" of "dangerous prisoners" is an old Tough on Crime ploy from way back, evoking memories of the Willie Horton ad in the 1988 Presidential race. It's irresponsible and not relevant to what is being discussed. We have the perfect Tough on Crime prison policy right now - and it's not working in every respect, to the extent that federal courts have stepped in to take control of it. Overcrowded prisons cannot fulfill their core mission of rehabilitating those jailed, and that's especially true where nonviolent offenders who need medical treatment for addiction and not incarceration are concerned. Brute force has not worked in making the state safer and has certainly caused our budget to skyrocket. And the truth is that more sensible policies can save money and create better prisons at the same time.
We need real reform in prison and parole policy, through concentrated resources, community corrections, and maintaining manageable prison capacity for those who really need to be there, and what will get decided in the legislature next month represents an important step. It can be easily derailed by fearmongering from the likes of Chris Kelly, trying to win an election on the backs of the poor and disenfranchised, on whom such brute-force policies typically rain down.
Over the next month I'll be looking far more closely at this issue, as it's the first big battle in regaining control of our state. And it's a winnable fight.
Far be it from me to agree so aggressively with my friend Steve Maviglio, but he's absolutely right that Chris Kelly is making a fool out of himself by holding to outdated and dangerous Tough on Crime rhetoric in his campaign for Attorney General. Kelly, the former Facebook chief privacy officer, has created a Cause called "Protect Our Communities." As Maviglio says, George Runner couldn't have done it better himself:
Do you think the early release of 20,000 convicted felons will solve California's budget crisis? I don't.
Please stand with me: Click here to join my new "Protect California Communities" cause on Facebook and help me build grassroots opposition to this phony budget plan!
Our state is already more than $26 billion in debt and issuing hundreds of millions more in IOUs every week.
We need innovative solutions to get out of this mess. But a plan by Governor Schwarzenegger and some in the Legislature to early release nearly 20,000 felons from state prison is not one of them.
I'm all for prison reform -- but this is surrender, not reform. Even if it would save us money -- which it won't -- putting thousands of dangerous criminals back on the streets is a risk that California should never take.
Please stand with me: Click here to join my new "Protect California Communities" cause on Facebook and help me build grassroots opposition to this phony budget plan!
"Dangerous criminals" back on the streets include the terminally ill, nonviolent drug offenders and people returned to prison for the crime of technical parole violations, which eats up about 2/3 of total incarcerations in California in any given year. This is the kind of absurd rhetoric that has our prisons full to bursting, that has created 1,000 sentencing laws passed by the Legislature in the past 30 years, ALL OF THEM increasing sentences, that has turned our parole policy and prison health care systems into a national joke and a federal crime, that has cost the state billions in overtime for prison guards and overall system costs, that has scared the public into passing really dangerous, pernicious laws like three strikes, that has nearly busted our Treasury, destroyed our corrections system and eliminated any possibility for rehabilitation.
The Attorney General position can be one of leadership in producing alternatives to our prison crisis. Kelly has forfeited any ability to call himself a leader by playing to the least common denominator. He can go back now to devising schemes to strip privacy on social networking sites.
(I want to welcome SF's District Attorney Kamala Harris. - promoted by Brian Leubitz)
States across our country are facing budget deficits. California is projected to begin next fiscal year with a deficit of nearly 25 billion dollars, equaling one fourth of the state's entire general fund. Over 10 billion of that general fund supports corrections and law enforcement. In this fiscal crisis, there is no denying the facts: tough budget times are here for public safety agencies. As the District Attorney for the City and County of San Francisco, I am personally familiar with the difficult circumstances we face. Without a significant shift in local and state practices, we can predict that shrinking law enforcement and corrections funding will result in higher crime rates, less support for victims, and fewer offenders being held accountable. If ever there was a time to think outside the box and break with the failed approaches of the past, the time is now. We need to do something different.
In San Francisco, I have developed a smart on crime approach: we must be tough on serious and violent offenders while we get just as tough on the root causes of crime. In my office, we have raised felony conviction rates and sent more violent offenders to state prison, at the same time we have launched innovative, cost effective approaches to reduce recidivism, truancy, and childhood trauma. With a genuine investment in breaking cycles of crime, we can improve public safety at the same time that we save precious public resources.
Once again, a judge has invalidated parts of a "tough on crime" ballot initiative. Earlier it was Jessica's Law, Prop. 83, which was ruled partially unconstitutional. Now Prop. 9, passed last year, has been found to have illegal provisions.
A key part of a victims' rights measure voters approved in November was blocked Thursday by a federal judge, who ruled that the state cannot restrict parole violators' right to state-provided legal counsel when considering whether to send them back to prison.
Senior Judge Lawrence K. Karlton of the U.S. District Court in Sacramento ruled against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the state in issuing an injunction against part of Proposition 9, the measure known as the Victims' Bill of Rights Act of 2008: Marsy's Law.
The initiative dictates that the state provide legal counsel to parole violators only under certain circumstances, including when the case is unusually complex or when the parolee is indigent or has issues of mental competency.
The SacBee has more. I don't know how this could ever have even reached the ballot in the first place. And this is part of our insane parole policy, which even before this law was failing the state. 67% of all inmates sent to prison in 2007 were parole violators, often for technical violations. As I wrote then:
It is a financial and moral disaster that we are throwing men and women back in jail for parole violations at such an accelerated rate, far beyond any other state in the country. This is clearly a factor of the state's parole policy, which is too constrictive and too quick to return people to prison. It surely leads to the high recidivism rate for those who commit crimes multiple times - if they feel they can't escape the system once they're in it, they simply have no incentive to rehabilitate themselves [...]
We are diseased by the prison-industrial complex. Prison construction is good for the CCPOA and supposedly good for the economy but it's based on a flawed notion that all construction spending is valuable. In fact, prison construction, especially of the type so needless that bringing parole policy in line with the other 49 states in the union would practically eliminate the overcrowding crisis and rendering the need for more beds moot, crowds out other, more valuable building projects that have a tangible value to people's lives. We are violating the human rights of inmates and the Constitutional provision against cruel and unusual punishment, as well as stifling innovative public investment, because the parole officers have a powerful lobby and the Tough on Crime dementia has infested the minds of practically every legislator in the state for 30 years.
At the national level, we are finally seeing the seeds of a robust prison reform movement. Jim Webb and Arlen Specter have submitted a bill to completely overhaul the criminal justice system. The bill would commission a panel to review incarceration rates, sentencing policies, gang violence, prison administration and reintegration of offenders. This sounds like a small step, but considering that absolutely nothing has been done to stop the train of "tough on crime" insanity from rolling down the track in decades, it's significant. A copy of the legislation is here. Sen. Webb remarked:
"America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace," said Senator Webb. "With five percent of the world's population, our country houses twenty-five percent of the world's prison population. Incarcerated drug offenders have soared 1200% since 1980. And four times as many mentally ill people are in prisons than in mental health hospitals. We should be devoting precious law enforcement capabilities toward making our communities safer. Our neighborhoods are at risk from gang violence, including transnational gang violence [...]
"We are not protecting our citizens from the increasing danger of criminals who perpetrate violence and intimidation as a way of life, and we are locking up too many people who do not belong in jail," concluded Webb. "I believe that American ingenuity can discover better ways to deal with the problems of drugs and nonviolent criminal behavior while still minimizing violent crime and large-scale gang activity.
The bill has 14 co-sponsors, neither or whom are named Boxer or Feinstein. Tell them they should know better, with the prison crisis consuming more and more of the state budget and destroying the lives of nonviolent offenders.
When the Administration announced an end to medical marijuana raids by the DEA, they abruptly took back the statement a few hours later. There was a bit of confusion about the new policy. Eric Holder put an end to that.
Attorney General Eric Holder signaled a change on medical marijuana policy Wednesday, saying federal agents will target marijuana distributors only when they violate both federal and state law.
That would be a departure from the policy of the Bush administration, which targeted medical marijuana dispensaries in California even if they complied with that state's law.
"The policy is to go after those people who violate both federal and state law," Holder said in a question-and-answer session with reporters at the Justice Department.
Good. There is little justification to waste Justice Department resources harassing Californians and Americans in 12 other states engaging in perfectly legal activity. Holder must follow the law but he also has discretion in setting priorities, and it's good to see him recognize that arresting local businessmen and their patients makes no sense. There remain questions about outstanding medical marijuana federal court cases with over two dozen dispensaries, and hopefully the solution will be to drop the charges.
In a related story, Maxine Waters wants to end mandatory minimum sentencing for federal drug offenses, and the bill has 15 co-sponsors. The Bureau of Prisons budget has increased 25-fold since mandatory minimums were introduced. Small drug cases belong in state courts, where offenders could be given treatment instead of jail. Furthermore, these kind of drug cases disproportionately impact minority communities.
H.R. 1466, the Major Drug Trafficking Prosecution Act of 2009, seeks to repeal mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders and to give courts the ability to determine sentences based on all the facts, not just drug weight. It would also refocus federal resources on major drug traffickers instead of low-level offenders. There is currently no companion bill in the Senate.
This is a major, if tentative, victory for criminal justice reform advocates.
California's three-strikes sentencing law suffered a blow Tuesday when a federal appeals court struck down as unconstitutional a 28-years-to-life sentence for a sex offender who failed to register with local police at the correct time of year.
The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case of Cecilio Gonzalez back to federal district court in Los Angeles for resentencing after finding his 2001 penalty constituted cruel and unusual punishment, which is prohibited by the 8th Amendment.
Gonzalez's harsh sentence was grossly disproportionate to his "entirely passive, harmless and technical violation of the registration law," the appeals court said.
This case represented the unintended consequence of three-strikes carried out to its most ridiculous extreme. 28 to life for registering, but not at the right time of year? Nuts. This isn't a crime in 11 states, and the maximum sentence allowed by customary law in California is three years.
In case the "tough on crime" absolutists start shieking about "activist liberal judges" overturning the will of the people, consider who wrote this opinion: Jay Bybee. Nominated by George W. Bush Jay Bybee. Writer of the fucking torture memo Jay Bybee. Even a guy who justified the torture of prisoners considers this cruel and unusual punishment. There is no indication whether or not Jerry Brown would carry this to an appeal, but considering the opinion of this very conservative jurist, I would imagine the US Supreme Court would at least potentially rule the same way, although they struck down a similar challenge to three strikes in 2003 on a 5-4 vote. Put it this way, I don't see Bybee as more conservative than Anthony Kennedy.
This does not invalidate three strikes entirely, but it certainly gives a ray of hope to those locked up for a minor third crime to challenge their sentencing. And it provides a framework to show how unjust and counter-productive these stringent mandatory sentences are. Three strikes is more of a symptom than the entire problem - the legislature has approved over 1,000 higher sentences in the past 30 years. But this is an important start, to end the tyranny of "tough on crime" absolutism that has contributed to busting the state budget and making this the worst state in the union when it comes to the corrections system.
Today, in recognition of International Human Rights Day, the American Civil Liberties Union released a comprehensive analysis of the pervasive systemic and structural racism in America. The report, Race & Ethnicity in America: Turning a Blind Eye to Injustice, is a response to the U.S. report to the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) released earlier this year. The U.S. report was a whitewash, sweeping under the rug the dramatic effects of widespread racial and ethnic discrimination in this country.
It’s time to begin an honest conversation about the fact that racial bias remains perhaps the most significant barrier to opportunity for people of color, particularly African Americans and Latinos. The ACLU report finds that discrimination in America permeates education, employment, the treatment of migrants and immigrants, law enforcement, and access to justice for juveniles and adults.
The results for California are particularly disturbing. The report documents the persistence of racial inequity and institutionalized discrimination in California’s educational and criminal justice systems, and in the treatment of immigrants. Among the examples cited in the report:
•Compared to schools attended mostly by white students, schools with a high concentration of African-American and Latino students are 74% more likely to lack textbooks for students to use for homework; 73% more likely to have evidence of cockroaches, rats or mice; and three times more likely to report that teacher turnover is a serious problem.
•In California, African Americans are given third-strike, 25-to-life prison sentences at a rate nearly 13 times the rate of whites. African Americans are 6.5% of the population, but they make up 45% of third strikers.
•Children of color are 20 times more likely to be sentenced to life without parole than white children in California, the worst racial disparities in the country. The California Supreme Court is currently considering the case of a 14 year old boy who is the youngest person in the United States to be sentenced to life without parole for a crime involving no physical injury to the victim.
Other reports echo these findings. Just last week, the Justice Policy Institute released a study of racial disparities in prison sentences for drug offenses in the 198 most populated counties in the nation. Four California counties made it into the top ten for sending the most African Americans to prison for drug offenses: Alameda, Kern, San Francisco, and San Mateo Counties. According to the report, Alameda and San Mateo Counties each send 35 times more African Americans than whites to prison for drug offenses, even though research shows almost no racial difference in drug use or sales.
The conclusion is inescapable: One of the most diverse states in the country, California has a two-tiered, separate and unequal educational and criminal justice system. In those institutions where we need justice the most, systemic racial bias is among the worst in the nation.
While the evidence of systemic human rights violations continues to pile up, California lawmakers continue to turn a blind eye. Despite overwhelming public support for limiting the three strikes law to violent felonies, the legislature has failed to act. As a result, judges continue to send people to prison for life for petty theft and other non-violent offenses. And despite overwhelming public support for alternatives to juvenile incarceration and judicial condemnation of the youth prisons, our state government has failed to shut them down.
The three simple criminal justice reforms that did pass the legislature this year—all intended to prevent wrongful convictions and ensure that only the guilty go to prison—were vetoed by the Governor, despite widespread support in newspaper editorials. The California criminal justice system sends more people to prison, in raw numbers and per capita, than almost any other criminal justice system in the world—and the overwhelming majority of these people are African American and Latino.
California officials should be leading the conversation about how we can all work together to steer the state in a more promising direction. To turn this equation around, we need to have the courage to begin a more constructive—and productive—conversation about the relationship between race, justice and opportunity in this state.
Health care reform may have stalled in California, but Governor Schwarzenegger still has a chance to make the state a leader in fixing a national problem: wrongful convictions. Three major criminal justice reform bills are now on the Governor's desk. The measures are designed to safeguard against wrongful convictions by making practical changes to eyewitness identification procedures, reforming the process by which confessions are attained, and regulating the use of jailhouse snitch testimony.
With more than 200 exonerations to date in California it is critical that measures are enacted before more mistakes are made. The governor has the ability to not only protect the innocent but enhance public safety and the integrity of California's law enforcement by signing these important bills into law, and setting a standard for the nation.
Three bills in the California Legislature would help prevent the most common causes of wrongful conviction:
Senate Bill 511 (Alquist) will require the electronic recording of police interrogation in cases involving homicides and other violent felonies.
Senate Bill 756 (Ridley-Thomas) will require the appointment of a task force to draft guidelines for the conduct of police line-ups and photo arrays to increase the accuracy of eyewitness identifications.
Senate Bill 609 (Romero) will require the corroboration of testimony by jailhouse informants.
The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice—a group of law enforcement officers, prosecutors and defense attorneys—has recommended all three reforms, http://ccfaj.org/legislation-2007.html.
These reforms will help protect the innocent and make sure the guilty are convicted.
Today, in recognition of International Human Rights Day, the American Civil Liberties Union released a comprehensive analysis of the pervasive systemic and structural racism in America. The report,