Charles P. Norman received the Outstanding Achievement Award in the 2009 Prison Writing Contest.
I Wore Chains to My Father's Funeral
I lay on my steel bunk in the
dark of my prison cell, staring at the ceiling, thinking about the
phone conversation I’d had with my mother a few hours before. She’d
just gotten home from University Community Hospital, where she and my
brothers held vigil over my father. She was exhausted.
“How’s Daddy doing, Mama?”
“Every day he dies a little more, son, and every day a little piece of me dies with him,” she said, voice quaking.
Tears pooled in my eyes, ran down my cheeks, and flowed into my pillow.
My mother’s words haunted me. It seemed like a claw penetrated my chest
and clasped my heart. Time passed in the dark.
The sleeping building around me was quiet. I heard leather soles slapping down the hallway, toward my cell door.
“Norman, you awake?” a young guard spoke through the window slot.
“I’m awake.” I couldn’t sleep.
“Get dressed. Lieutenant Barber wants to see you downstairs.”
“I’m dressed.” I’d never undressed.
He opened the door, and I walked quickly to the stairwell.
Lieutenant Barber met me at the foot of the stairs. He had a strained,
uncomfortable expression on his face. He didn’t want to be the bearer
of bad news. You never know how people will react in prison.
“Norman, call your brother at home.”
“Yes sir.”
I walked over to the pay phone on the wall. We could only make collect
calls. I dialed my brother’s number. The lieutenant stepped away, gave
me space, but remained within earshot. He was doing his job. I didn’t
begrudge him that. My brother, Danny, picked up on the first ring.
“Charles.” Everyone called me Charlie, but from the time he could say my name, Dan had always called me Charles.
“Dan.”
“Charles, Daddy’s dead.”
“I know.” How could I tell him I felt it?
“I just got home from the hospital.”
“Does Mama know?”
“I called her first”
“I want to go to the funeral.”
“Okay.”
“You’re going to have to call the sheriff.”
“I’ll do it first thing in the morning.”
“Don’t take no for an answer.”
“I won’t.”
“It’s going to cost some money.”
“I don’t care.”
“Are you all right?”
The line was silent for a moment. I heard a sob.
“Daddy’s dead, Charles.” His voice was anguished. I was the big brother. I had to be strong for both of us, for all of us.
“I know, Dan. It’s okay. He’s in a better place. He’s not suffering any more.”
“But dammit, why did he have to die now?” He was fifty-six years old.
How could I explain it? I didn’t understand it either. I was
thirty-six, twenty years younger.
“I don’t know, Dan.”
I heard him blow his nose. “I’m okay. Call me in the morning.”
“I will.”
I hung up the phone and turned back to the lieutenant.
“You okay, Norman?”
“Yes sir. We’ve been expecting it for awhile. He was a fighter.”
“You need to talk to someone, the chaplain will be here in the morning.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“Good man.”
Sunday morning I am standing on the front porch of the chapel with
several fellow prisoners, waiting for them to call me. Through the
double fences ringing the prison I see a Hillsborough County Sheriff’s
car turn into the parking lot from Highway 301 and approach the
sallyport entrance gate. Two uniformed deputies take out their sidearms
and other weapons, locking them in gun boxes on the wall by the
gatehouse. A squawking P.A. speaker on a light pole orders me to report
to the gatehouse immediately. A guard hands me a garment bag containing
a suit of clothes. I go into the bathroom to change.
In her grief, my mother bought pants the same size as I wore in high
school, forgetting that I had added thirty pounds in the past eighteen
years, but I made do. In the mirror I adjusted my tie and stared at the
well-dressed stranger who stared back at me. Who was that man? I folded
up my prison blues and went back out.
Two young deputies stood there holding handfuls of chains. First they
put on the handcuffs in front of me, double-locked them, then did the
same thing with the ankle chains. They threaded a chain through my belt
loops, padlocked both ends to the handcuffs, then did the same thing
with a chain connected to the leg irons. I rattled the chains. So this
was how Houdini felt.
One deputy held a file folder open, looked at it, then looked at me.
“Your name Charles P. Norman?”
“Yes, it is.”
“You born nine-four-forty-nine?”
“Right again.”
“Let’s do this.”
I shuffled my feet six inches forward at a time, the limit of the tight
chains, tiny steps, but eventually we got to the deputy car parked
inside the sallyport. I heard my name called, looked back toward the
chapel, and saw perhaps fifty prisoners on the front porch watching me.
Some waved. I couldn’t wave back, with my wrists chained at the waist.
The deputy opened the rear door, and I struggled to flop onto the seat,
scoot over, and sit up. With the security screen separating the front
and back seats, there was no leg room. I adjusted the best I could.
After they’d retrieved their nine millimeters, their ankle guns, their
Buck knives, canisters of pepper spray, police batons, and twelve gauge
shotgun from the trunk, the car backed out, and we were on our way.
My mind swirled with thoughts of my father. He and my mother were
teenagers when they married. My mother turned twenty just twelve days
before my birth. I used to tell people that I’d known my parents since
they were kids, and we’d grown up together. I was fourteen months old
when my grandmother, Memaw, gave birth to Cherry, my youngest aunt.
Memaw was just thirty-nine. Cherry and I grew up together, more like
brother and sister than nephew and aunt, and maintained that closeness
until she died.
When we were both babies, my father once held each of us in his arms
while my mother and Memaw bought groceries at the Piggly Wiggly store
in Texarkana. Approaching the checkout stand, a woman came up to my
father, admiring the babies. He must have seemed young to have two
children.
“Are those your babies?” she asked.
Looking at each of us in turn, my father answered the lady, “This is my
sister-in-law, and this is my son.” Upon re-telling the story at later
times, he said the lady walked away with a confused look on her face,
as if she was trying to figure out the relationship.
My earliest memories of my father must have been some time near three
years old, perhaps a little younger. Early Sunday mornings were a
special time. My father was home, not working, as he was the rest of
the week. By the time I woke up in the mornings during the weekdays, my
father would be long gone. But Sundays he stayed home.
It would scarcely be daylight when he’d bring in the Sunday newspaper, The Texarkana Gazette.
He’d take off the rubber band, take out the Sunday comics, spread them
open on the wood floor, lie down, prop himself up on his elbows, and
read each one aloud. I’d lie beside him in the same pose, my finger
pointing to each comic pane as he read it, and we’d both laugh at Mutt
and Jeff, Joe Palooka, Alley Oop, and Tarzan of the Apes. He’d slowly
read each comic to me, then I’d beg him to read them just once more. By
then the smells of biscuits, bacon, and eggs would be emanating from
the kitchen, and my mother would call us in for breakfast.
It was just the three of us. All was good in the world. I had no
concept of rent, grocery bills, car payments, or the impending job
market crash as the Korean War was shutting down, causing the heavily
defense-oriented industries of East Texas to lay off thousands of
workers. I had no idea how complicated life could be for a struggling
young married couple with a child, and two more on the way.
One morning I couldn’t get my father out of bed. He’d worked late
Saturday night at another job, earning extra money, and was too
exhausted to get up and go out for the Sunday paper. I couldn’t wait to
see how my friends, Alley Oop, Little Orphan Annie, Nancy, and the
others were doing, so I toddled out the front door, down the steps, out
to the road, and brought the newspaper in myself.
I finally got the rubber band off and separated the comics. I lay there
on the floor, sprawled out on my stomach, propped up on my elbows,
knees bent, feet wiggling in the air. My finger pointed at the
individual words, and I pronounced under my breath the ones I’d
memorized, watching as my father had read to me each week. It took me
awhile, but I understood, and laughed.
My father stood in the doorway between the kitchen and living room watching me while my mother cooked breakfast.
“Lucille, look here,” he said. My mother joined him in the doorway,
watching me as I slowly traced the words with my finger, moving my
lips, pronouncing them to myself, then laughing as I understood the
punchlines.
“I’d swear it looks like that boy is reading those funnies.”
“I am reading them,” I said. “You wouldn’t get up.”
He plopped down beside me and watched me move my finger from word to word.
“Show me, “ he said.
“I carefully spoke each word that I knew. I struggled with one, and he
said it for me. He shook his head, smiled, and asked my mother what she
made of that. She shook her head, too.
“I don’t know. He’s not even four years old.”
What could I say? I wanted to read, so I did.
On Sunday afternoons, my father would lie down on the wood floor and
doze off. I’d doze off with him. What he did, I did. I lay my head on
his stomach and listened to the noises inside him. The various rumbles
and squeaks sounded so strange to me.
“Daddy, what’s the sounds in your belly?”
“That’s my guts growling.”
“Why are they growling?”
“They growl when you’re hungry, calling for food, and they growl when you’re full, telling you not to eat any more.”
“Oh.” That explained it.
Life went on. I gained two little brothers, Dan and Tom. Times were
hard, though I never realized it. Friday evenings were always a thrill,
waiting for Daddy to come home from work. I had little concept of time,
but when that big red orb of the sun got down low and touched the trees
to the west, I knew Daddy would be home soon.
What was so exciting about Fridays was the surprise—wondering what kind
of car Daddy would be driving home this time. Not every week, but
fairly frequently, a strange car would slow down on the highway and
turn in at our house. The car would stop, Daddy would get out, and I’d
run to him, begging him to take me for a ride in the new car. My mother
would be standing in the doorway holding the baby, a frown on her face.
I didn’t know until years later that when he couldn’t make the weekly
payment, the used car lot would repossess the car he had, and he’d have
to go to another used car dealer to get another one on a weekly payment
plan. All I knew was that on Friday evenings, Daddy would take me for a
ride to the store for an ice cream in his new car, and he’d let me sit
in his lap and steer, or at least pretend to.
Early one Sunday morning, I went out to get the Sunday paper while my
parents slept. Across the road, a herd of deer grazed on the other side
of the barbed wire in a clearing that was part of U.S. Army reservation
land. Miles away was Lone Star Ordnance Plant, where Daddy worked, and
a bombing range, from where sounds like distant thunder often came. I
crept back inside quietly and shook my father awake.
“Daddy, there’s some deer across the road.”
He jumped up, pulled on his khaki trousers, grabbed his .22 rifle from
the closet, and looked out the front door. A dozen or more deer
nonchalantly grazed a hundred yards away. It wasn’t hunting season, he
didn’t have a hunting license, but times were hard, and he had a wife
and three boys to feed.
My father propped the rifle on the car’s fender, took careful aim, and
fired one shot. Across the road a deer jumped straight into the air. To
my young eyes it seemed like he jumped a hundred feet into the air. It
was much less than that, of course, but when the deer fell to the
ground without moving he was alone. In that second the herd had
disappeared into the woods in a flash. The only evidence they left was
a faint cloud of dust settling to the ground. I hadn’t heard a sound.
He left the deer where it lay, drove to my grandfather’s, Bebaw’s,
house, and came back with Bebaw and my Uncle David to help him. Bebaw
was the expert at skinning and cleaning a deer.
Bebaw sent David across the road and through the fence to retrieve the
deer. He was a scaredy-cat. He got the deer by the hind leg and dragged
it to the fence, looking every which way, although everything was quiet
and no cars were to be seen in either direction. David tried to slip
between the barbed wires and drag the deer under the fence at the same
time, but only succeeded in hopelessly snagging himself on the barbs.
He cussed, struggled, only got more tangled, and Bebaw and Daddy had to
help get him loose from the fence. Good thing no one was coming, or
he’d have been caught.
Bebaw butchered the deer in the barn, cut it up into pieces, which were
then shared with all the relatives, which were many. Everyone ate
venison steaks and venison stew. All that fresh meat was a godsend. I
felt good that I’d seen the deer, not spooked them, told Daddy, and
helped contribute in a small way to feeding our family.
When I was nine years old, we packed up, left Texas, and moved to
Florida. There was no work in Texas, and my Uncle Rufus in Dade City
told Daddy that there were plenty of jobs in Tampa for a young man
willing to work hard. That described my father.
I hated it. I didn’t want to leave Texas. How could we just leave Memaw
and Bebaw, Cherry and Alice and Pat, Junior, all my aunts and cousins,
Uncle Albert, Aunt Bonnie, Linda and Paulette? How could I live a
thousand miles away? I cried, Cherry cried, and Bebaw cried. He was so
soft-hearted, they’d say. Memaw was the strong one, always keeping it
inside. She hugged me and patted my back. She called me “Pakick,” from
my middle name, Patrick, the only person who ever called me that, her
special name for me.
“You be a good boy, my Pakick. It’ll be okay. You’ll be back to see us, and we’ll come see you in Florida some time,” she said.
“Promise, Memaw?”
“I promise.” She gave me a silver dollar from a jar she collected coins in, told me to keep it to remember her. I did.
So began my trip to Florida, Land of Sunshine, where nineteen years
later that little boy would be accused of murder and wind up in prison
serving life.
“Charlie Norman! Charlie Norman! I can’t believe it.”
I snapped out of my reverie. I was in the back seat of a sheriff’s car.
We were passing Hillsborough River State Park, where my family had held
many picnics, and I’d camped out often with my Boy Scout troop years
before. The younger deputy, the passenger, had turned in his seat and
was speaking to me.
“Excuse me. I missed that. What did you say?”
“Charlie Norman!” He was grinning broadly at me. He looked over to his partner, who was staring straight ahead at the highway.
“When I was a little kid, I used to watch Charlie Norman fight. I
couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t even in first grade yet.” He turned back
to me. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”
“No, sorry.” To my knowledge, I’d never seen him before in my life.
“You went to junior high school with my sister.” Benjamin Franklin—toughest junior high in Tampa in the 1960’s.
He told me her name. I’d known her for years. She was a nice girl, shy,
who’d gotten pregnant in tenth grade, dropped out, gotten married, had
three children, was an old woman before her time. Her younger brother
had become a major dope dealer in Tampa years later. This one must have
been the baby. Weird, I thought, one of them a drug king, another a
deputy.
He looked back to his partner. “One time I saw Charlie Norman at the
bus stop get in a fight with three boys, all older and bigger than him.
You should have seen it. Those guys were all over him, fists flying and
punching, you couldn’t even see Charlie Norman under all those guys. I
thought they were going to kill him. Everybody just watched. Nobody
helped him. Hell, I was just a little kid, but I never forgot it.” He
spoke as though I wasn’t there.
“What happened?” his partner asked.
“He wouldn’t go down. He was throwing fists, and turning and ducking
and taking punches and kicking and in about a minute one of them went
down, and then the second, then the third one just stopped and looked
at him. Charlie’s nose was bleeding and his lip was split, his shirt
was hanging half off of him. He lit into that guy, knocked him down, he
didn’t get up. The school bus came, Charlie got on, my sister and the
other kids had to step over them to get on the bus. The driver shut the
door, and they went to school. I walked home. He beat the shit out of
those boys. It was three to one.”
“That was the Wechsler brothers,” I said. “Victor was my age. He spit on my shoe and laughed.”
“I bet he never did it again, did he?”
“No.”
“You were my hero when I was a kid. I took boxing lessons when I was a
little older. I went to your karate school for awhile. I wanted to
learn how to fight like that.”
“I don’t remember you.”
“I was a kid then. I was in high school when you were on trial. I went a couple of times.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I never thought I’d meet you like this.” Me neither.
We were approaching Highway 579. My mother’s house was less than a mile
off 579 in Thonotosassa. I hadn’t seen it in years, and might not get
another chance.
“Since we go so far back and all that, why don’t we take a little
detour down 579, cut over to Grovewood, through the old neighborhood,
loop right to Main Street? Won’t take an extra two minutes.”
The silly grin on the young deputy’s face vanished. He looked to the
driver, who glanced toward him then faced front to the highway.
“We can’t make any, uh, detours. Sorry.”
They both looked nervous, uneasy. The younger deputy suddenly became
interested in the double-yellow center line whisking past us and
behind.
“Can’t or won’t?” I wasn’t going to let it go. It had been over seven
years since I’d left my family home that fateful day after visiting my
father. He’d been sick that day, too, but not nearly as sick as he
would become. Neither of them responded. If I didn’t see our home, the
yard, the huge hickory tree shading the front, the sycamore trees in
the back I’d planted sixteen years before now, I might never see them
again.
“Do you know how much my family’s paying for this taxi ride?”
The driver answered. “Six hundred and fifty-one dollars.”
“Six hundred and fifty-one dollars!” I whistled. “For a twenty-five
mile trip each way? What’s that, thirteen dollars a mile, more or
less?”
“More or less.”
“It’s hardly a mile detour—nobody’s at home, everyone’s at the funeral
home, why don’t we just tack on an extra twenty, pay for you guys’
lunch when you leave, call it even?”
Silence. Not a word. Eyes front. No more youthful reminiscences. I
watched 579 recede to the left, Spanish Main Campground bustling on a
Sunday morning.
A mile farther and I saw Fowler Avenue’s turnoff approaching on the
right, the orange grove and the little white house on the hill where
we’d lived our first ten years in Florida, when we were all so small,
it seemed.
My father was a giant in those days, a big man whose height and size
seemed unattainable, like a tree. I remembered how as a child I’d
examine his worn leather billfold that curved in the shape of his body
over the years of twelve-hour workdays stuck in his back pocket.
I especially loved looking at his driver’s license, before they had
photos, a piece of paper that described the man I knew as Daddy. Brown
eyes, black hair, weight one hundred seventy-nine pounds, five feet
eleven and three quarters inches tall Holding onto his pant leg and
looking up in the stratosphere to his face, I could never picture
myself growing to such an altitude. Imagine my surprise when one day
years later, I was walking my father to the exit door of the prison
visiting park and realized that I was taller than he, by a small
margin, bigger and stronger. He was shrinking before my eyes, and it
deeply saddened me. Could this be the same man who used to pick me up
and throw me in the air and catch me before I fell?
One of my clearest early memories of my father came from when we went
to the circus. I was three and Cherry was two. Although I grew up near
Redwater, Texas, with all its connotations of cowboys, cattle, and
horses, I rode an elephant before I rode a horse.
The circus had an elephant ride for children. A baby elephant with a
blanket on its back grasped its mother’s tail with its trunk, following
her around in a circle. Daddy lifted me onto the baby elephant’s back,
which was head-high to my father, and Bebaw held Cherry in place next
to me. I touched the stiff straw-like hairs that thinly covered the
baby elephant, marveling to be sitting up so high.
Cherry began screaming. She wasn’t having any of it. She did not want
to be sitting on a baby elephant’s back, and let the entire midway know
about it. After the second scream Bebaw handed her off to Memaw, where
she quieted down I continued the circuit, my father’s massive hand
holding and steadying me. I wasn’t the least bit frightened. I knew I
was safe.
The second thing I remember about that night at the circus was the blue
helium balloon he bought for me, wrapping the string around my wrist
several times so it wouldn’t fly off. When we got home and my mother
put me to bed, the balloon hovered against my bedroom ceiling, the
string dangling.
The next morning, I couldn’t wait to rush next door to Mrs. Clary’s
house, tell her about riding the elephant and show her my blue balloon.
I grabbed the string, tugging the balloon behind me, and rushed down
the steps outside. No sooner than I’d cleared the door a gust of wind
snatched the balloon out of my tiny grip. I stood there and watched the
balloon float higher and higher, smaller and smaller, until the blue
latex blended into the cerulean sky and disappeared. I cried for what
I’d lost.
In silence, we approached Duval Funeral Home on Florida Avenue in North
Tampa. As quiet as the two deputies had been, you’d think each of them
was alone. The parking lot overflowed with cars. Hearses lined the
drive at the front. The deputy drove us around to the back.
The last time I’d been here had been for the funeral of my tenth grade
basketball coach, who’d been stricken with stomach cancer toward the
end of the school year and was dead in four months. In the fall, just
as my junior year began, he died. It seemed like all fifteen hundred
students at King High School lined up to enter the funeral chapel, pass
by his open casket, and pay their respects. Girls wailed as they neared
him. I got closer, saw the tiny shrunken figure lying there in that big
box and wondered who it was. Coach had never been a big man, but this
couldn’t possibly be him. What happened? Someone nearby mentioned that
the stomach cancer had eaten him up, to less than half his healthy
size, and I believed it.
Now I dreaded going inside that same building and discovering what ravages death had dealt to my poor father.
The main chapel was crowded with family and friends. Relatives on both
sides had come from across Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina,
Texas, and California. Some I recognized, some I didn’t. I noticed men
who’d worked for my father, laborers, black and white, solemn, paying
their respects. I’d grown up around those men, accompanying my father
to work at Booker and Company Warehouses for years, and knew them all.
They nodded. I nodded back. I saw an open casket to my right, against
the far wall, but too many people filled the area to get a clear look.
When I entered, clanking like Shakespeare’s ghost, deputies on either
side of me, all conversation stopped. All eyes turned toward me. The
prodigal son had returned. There was no fatted calf, no celebrations.
My father was dead, and I was in chains.
My brothers, Dan and Tom, rushed through the crowd over to me. As Dan
neared me, one deputy stepped forward, held out his hand, fingers up,
in the stop gesture.
“Don’t come any closer,” the deputy said.
If he thought that an armed deputy was going to keep him away from his brother, he didn’t know Dan.
“You listen to me, you son-of-a-bitch. He’s my brother. And that’s our
daddy lying dead in that coffin. If you think you can stop me from
hugging my brother at our father’s funeral, you’d better pull that
pistol and shoot me now.”
He pushed past the deputy’s outstretched arm and embraced me, followed
by my youngest brother, Tom. They stepped aside, and my mother stood in
front of me. I hadn’t even seen her. We hugged, and I realized she’s so
small. How did she ever get so small. She had been a giant, too, in my
childhood, but now she looked so frail and light as she held my arms.
Emotions washed through me. To this day I can’t remember what either of
us said.
Faced with a losing battle and heavily outnumbered, the deputies
retreated. Family and friends, cousins, aunts and uncles I haven’t seen
since childhood crowded around and hugged me, chains and all. I
couldn’t do much myself, trussed up the way I was, but I accepted their
embraces, touches and condolences the best I could.
Rufus, my father’s last surviving brother, seven years his elder, came next. “I hate to see you like this, son.”
I saw a flare of that Norman anger, the fury that must have terrified
the English at Hastings in 1066, that Uncle Rufus turned on the
outmatched deputies.
“What’s wrong with you bastards?” he growled at them. Eyes wide, they each took half a step back.
“What do you think you’re doing, bringing this boy in here like this,
chained up like a beast? Don’t you have any respect? Why couldn’t you
take all this . . . crap . . . off him before you brought him in here
to his mama? You aren’t afraid of him, are you, big, bad deputies,
armed to the teeth?”
His face had turned so red, I thought he was going to have a stroke.
“It’s okay, Rufus,” I said. “At least I got to come.” Rufus was always
the joker of the family, and at gatherings, he’d keep everyone in
stitches with his jokes. I thought I’d take a cue from him and try to
defuse the situation. “Besides, when we leave here, they’re going to
stop on the Hillsborough River bridge, toss me in the water, and if I
can get loose, I’m free to go.”
Everyone laughed. The deputies looked decidedly uneasy.
Then I noticed my father’s two surviving sisters, Frankie Lee, the
oldest, and Eloise, the youngest, across the room together looking
intently at me. They were crying. I stood where I was as they slowly
approached. I hadn’t seen them in twenty years, since a family
gathering when I was a teenager.
With the exception of Uncle Rufus, I’d never felt particularly close to
or identified with the Norman side of my family. Part of it was that
I’d rarely been around most of them but for a day here or a funeral
there throughout my youth, and that most of them lived elsewhere. Also,
the Normans seemed more emotionally detached, sterner, not like my
mother’s family, the Walkers, who were emotional and demonstrative with
their love in most cases. I was Memaw’s and Bebaw’s first grandson, had
always been special to them, but to the Normans, I was just another
cousin. But now, the way Frankie Lee and Eloise were looking at me, I
sensed something had changed. They came up to me and Aunt Frankie Lee
touched my cheek, tears flowing.
“Charlie, honey,” she said, “When I saw you walk in, my heart stopped for a second.”
“Why?”
“You’re the spitting image of our father when he was a young man. Your
grandfather. He’s been gone so long. You look just like him, so
handsome. It breaks my heart.” Her words deeply touched me.
She fingered the chains around my wrists. I wanted to hold her, but I
couldn’t. I cried instead. Eloise and Frankie Lee hugged me together.
“You do, Charlie,” Eloise said, smiling. “You look just like Daddy. I
was just a little girl when he died. I wish I could take you home with
me.”
“I do, too.”
My brothers took my arms, and we walked slowly to my father, feet shuffling. Everyone moved back and made room.
It wasn’t him, not the man I knew. I could see little resemblance to my
father. He was gone. What was left was little more than artifice.
Cigarettes killed my father. Slowly. Forty-four years, from the age of
twelve until his last breath at fifty-six, my father smoked cigarettes.
He couldn’t quit, no matter how he tried.
When I was four years old, my mother pregnant with Dan, it was freezing
cold in the Texas winter. The only heat in our little house came from
the kitchen stove, which my mother wouldn’t turn on till five AM, when
she got up to cook breakfast before my father went to work.
I was sleeping soundly under quilts Memaw had made when my father’s coughing woke me. It went on and on.
I climbed out of bed and my bare feet touched the cold wooden floor. I
raced to my parents’ bedroom and climbed into bed with them, where it
was warm. My father continued hacking.
“Daddy, why are you coughing so much?” I asked. “Are you sick?”
“It’s these damned cigarettes, son. Don’t ever smoke them.” He was just twenty-four at the time.
Thinking back over all those years, I realize that long ago admonition
was one of the few pieces of advice my father gave me that I obeyed. I
never smoked a cigarette in my life. I never wanted to cough like that.
For that I am grateful. I am three years older now than my father was
when he died, and my lungs are clear and strong. On the prison tennis
court, I wear out players half my age with shots from side-to-side that
leave them bent over and gasping. Even at thirty, cigarettes have taken
a toll on them, and I gladly collect it.
I begged him to quit for years, as did my mother, but nothing could
overcome nicotine’s siren song of death. We feared lung cancer, but
emphysema got him first, with complications from lupus. He was in and
out of the hospital for a couple of years, but the last time inexorably
approached.
His kidneys began shutting down, and they put him on dialysis. That
worked for awhile, but other systems began failing. The toxins built
up, and his extremities, his hands and feet, began darkening,
gangrenous. The poisons climbed higher. My father was in terrible pain,
but he fought to live.
He and his doctor were friends. He came to talk to him about his
choices. My father couldn’t talk with the respirator helping him to
breathe, but he had his mind, and he could nod his head.
“Gene, we’ve been friends for a long time, and I’m not going to
sugar-coat it. You don’t like b.s. It’s not good. Your kidneys are
failing. I can save you, but it will be drastic. You’re getting
gangrene. If I amputate your arms and legs, you will live. I don’t know
how long, but it could be awhile. But I know you. I know what kind of
man you are, and I don’t think you want to live like that, helpless.”
My father shook his head no.
“You say the word, I’ll do the surgery now. If you say no, I won’t Do you want me to do the surgery?”
My father shook his head no.
The doctor patted his shoulder. “Then this is goodbye, old friend.”
He left. My brothers stood next to my father’s bed. He had been so
strong, the toughest man I ever knew. Next to him I was a weakling. He
had held out for longer than anyone expected, for whatever reason, but
when the doctor gave him his options, it was like my father decided it
was time to go. He looked at my brothers, closed his eyes, exhaled, and
he was gone. An hour later I was calling my brother, Dan, collect from
a prison pay phone in the dark.
There is much I want to say about my relationship with my father, but
even all these years later, I realize that the emotions pierce me too
deeply. As I write this, tears drop onto the paper and dimple the
sheet. Perhaps the cathartic experience of reliving those years as I
write them will strengthen me to where I will write again, about things
too close to my heart, and get them out in the open, where they belong.
But that will be another day.
When the deputies brought me back to Zephyrhills prison and left with
all their chains and cuffs, a prisoner friend held out my blues for me
to change into. He knew my family well, and offered me his condolences
the best he knew how. He had a difficult time sharing his feelings. I
knew he wanted to say something, so I stood there, unspeaking, waiting
him out.
“Charlie, when I first knew you, and met your family, several years ago, I knew you and your dad had unfinished business.”
“Yeah?”
“I had unfinished business with my father, too, so I recognized it in the both of you.”
“Okay.”
“I admire what you did,” he said. “Over the past few years you spent a
lot of time talking with your daddy, healing wounds, I don’t know what
they were, but you took it upon yourself to do it, and you and he
reconciled whatever it was.”
“We did”
“I could tell. Even when he was here last time, real sick, I could see
that you loved your father, and he loved you. You settled your
differences, and that was a good thing.”
“It was”
“It gave both of you a peace you didn’t have before.”
“I appreciate you saying that, Mario.”
“You see, the reason I’m saying this, is that I didn’t get that chance
with my father. There were hard feelings between us. He said things, I
said things I’ve always regretted. I wanted to make it up to him, like
you did, but he died before I got the chance.”
“I’m sorry.”
That big strong man with the bulging muscles broke down, leaned his
head on my shoulder and cried like the little boy who still lingered
inside. His tears soaked into my suit coat. Unchained now, I patted his
shoulder and sobbed with him. It was the least I could do. Even tough
guys must sometimes cry.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Monday, January 18, 2010
Schwarzenegger’s deficient thinking
California’s budget crisis is destroying its state government. Schwarzenegger’s latest plans will only make things worse
California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Photograph: Rich Pedroncelli/AP A couple of months ago I interviewed an economist in Sacramento who has long studied California state finances. I asked him what the lowest general fund budget was that he could envision in California as state revenues shrivelled. He answered: $85bn a year. The state simply couldn’t function with a smaller budget than that.
Last week, Governor Schwarzenegger declared another fiscal emergency, and proposed an $82 billion budget – three billion dollars below the barebones survival estimate of my economist friend.
Amidst all of the doom-and-gloom cuts, and the accompanying rage as the state that until recently epitomised possibility in America continues to implode, one policy change stood out, offering a glimmer of better priorities in the years ahead. Schwarzenegger called for a state constitutional amendment to ensure that the state never spent less than 10% of its general fund on higher education and never spent more than seven percent on prisons.
For years, criminal justice reformers and an increasing number of journalists have argued that California’s reflexive tough-on-crime policies were bankrupting the state. California has gone from having a prison population of fewer than 30,000 in the late 1970s to a prison population of about 170,000 today. It has passed laws such as “three strikes and you’re out” that have resulted in tens of thousands of men and women serving decades behind bars for relatively low-level third offenses. It has the country’s most dysfunctional parole system. It has a medical and mental health system for its prisons that is so awful the federal courts have declared them to be unconstitutional. It has a trade union for guards that, until a new leadership revamped it a couple years back, bludgeoned much of the political establishment to support prison-boom policies that served mainly to provide jobs and overtime pay to the guards rather than to promote public safety. And, despite a $10bn annual budget, the department of corrections and rehabilitation is so strapped for resources that it frequently has to triple bunk prisoners and, over the past year, has dismantled many of its drug rehab and vocational training programs.
At the same time as the state has gone on an incarceration tear, its support for higher education has shrunk, making a mockery of the half-century old Master Plan for Higher Education designed to guarantee access to the University of California system for the top 12.5% of graduating high school seniors, to make the second-tier state university system widely accessible, and to offer entry into community colleges to all remaining high school graduates.
When the incarceration binge began, California spent about $5 on higher education for every $1 on prisons. A few years back, that number approached parity. These days, shamefully, California spends more on prisons and corrections than on its state universities. In the last round of budget cuts, the University of California system lost nearly $1bn. Student fees have, as a result, been raised 32%, thousands of support staff have been laid off and professors across the system have been put on unpaid leave. The country’s most prestigious public university system now faces the humiliating reality of seeing universities across the country set aside special funds with which to poach disgruntled, underpaid, UC academics.
Given these realities, Schwarzenegger’s proposal is a hugely welcome priority shift. Yet, as the New York Times editorialised, the small print within this proposal is more a mark of cowardice than courage. How will Schwarzenegger rein in prison spending? Not by cutting the numbers of people entering prison. Not by using what little political capital he has left to urge reform of three strikes, not by investing in a community infrastructure of job training programs, drug rehab centres, mental health clinics or any of the other structures that could reduce criminality in the first place. Nor by pushing for system-wide reform of a parole system that functions mainly as a revolving door between prison, the free-world, and prison again.
Instead, Schwarzenegger has proposed widespread privatisation of the prison system – on the dubious grounds that private prisons can operate at lower costs than do state-run prisons – and huge reductions in the amount of money spent on medical and mental health services for prisoners.
On the first point: in states where private prisons have proven cheaper to maintain, that’s largely because they pay staff poorly, cut corners on training, and create job training, education, and drug rehab programs for prisoners that look alright on paper but have almost no credibility on the ground. It’s also because they cherry-pick which inmates to accept, leaving the state with the most dangerous, hardest-to-control inmates. That’s why few private prison companies are willing, or able, to run Supermax facilities – and why states such as Arizona, that have proposed wholesale privatisation in recent months, are running into heavy criticism from criminal justice experts who fear the consequences of handing the most dangerous prisons and prisoners over to cost-cutting privateers.
On the second point, the state’s record on providing mental health and medical services to inmates is already so bad that federal judges have handed control of those services over to a federally-appointed Special Master. Last year, a panel of judges found that prison overcrowding was contributing to unconstitutionally poor levels of medical care and it ordered California to find a way to reduce the prison population by almost 50,000.
So far, the state has shown a remarkable unwillingness to be bound by these federal rulings. Slashing the budgets for medical and mental health services will be a further slap in the face to the federal judiciary – and could, ultimately, result in a wholesale federalisation of the California prison system.
Like so much else about the last Schwarzenegger budget, this is a game of illusions. Schwarzenegger was right that California’s higher education versus prison priorities are entirely backwards at the moment. But he was absolutely wrong in his proposed solutions. Put simply, there’s no way to preserve California’s higher education institutions in an austerity era unless Californians are willing to fundamentally re-evaluate 30 years of ill-conceived, tough-on-crime politics. And that doesn’t mean cutting services for prisoners and paying those who guard them less; it means putting fewer people in prison in the first place, in some cases putting them in for fewer years, and finding more sensible ways to keep them on the straight-and-narrow than the threat of automatic revocation of parole once they return to their communities after their sentences are served.
Schwarzenegger’s belated realization that California’s fiscal priorities are messed up was welcome. I hope he’s now intellectually honest enough to take the debate where it needs to go. California is at a turning point. If it turns in the wrong direction on this crucial issue, the troubles of the state’s higher education institutions will only get worse and its prisons will only continue to be a national scandal.
California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Photograph: Rich Pedroncelli/AP Last week, Governor Schwarzenegger declared another fiscal emergency, and proposed an $82 billion budget – three billion dollars below the barebones survival estimate of my economist friend.
Amidst all of the doom-and-gloom cuts, and the accompanying rage as the state that until recently epitomised possibility in America continues to implode, one policy change stood out, offering a glimmer of better priorities in the years ahead. Schwarzenegger called for a state constitutional amendment to ensure that the state never spent less than 10% of its general fund on higher education and never spent more than seven percent on prisons.
For years, criminal justice reformers and an increasing number of journalists have argued that California’s reflexive tough-on-crime policies were bankrupting the state. California has gone from having a prison population of fewer than 30,000 in the late 1970s to a prison population of about 170,000 today. It has passed laws such as “three strikes and you’re out” that have resulted in tens of thousands of men and women serving decades behind bars for relatively low-level third offenses. It has the country’s most dysfunctional parole system. It has a medical and mental health system for its prisons that is so awful the federal courts have declared them to be unconstitutional. It has a trade union for guards that, until a new leadership revamped it a couple years back, bludgeoned much of the political establishment to support prison-boom policies that served mainly to provide jobs and overtime pay to the guards rather than to promote public safety. And, despite a $10bn annual budget, the department of corrections and rehabilitation is so strapped for resources that it frequently has to triple bunk prisoners and, over the past year, has dismantled many of its drug rehab and vocational training programs.
At the same time as the state has gone on an incarceration tear, its support for higher education has shrunk, making a mockery of the half-century old Master Plan for Higher Education designed to guarantee access to the University of California system for the top 12.5% of graduating high school seniors, to make the second-tier state university system widely accessible, and to offer entry into community colleges to all remaining high school graduates.
When the incarceration binge began, California spent about $5 on higher education for every $1 on prisons. A few years back, that number approached parity. These days, shamefully, California spends more on prisons and corrections than on its state universities. In the last round of budget cuts, the University of California system lost nearly $1bn. Student fees have, as a result, been raised 32%, thousands of support staff have been laid off and professors across the system have been put on unpaid leave. The country’s most prestigious public university system now faces the humiliating reality of seeing universities across the country set aside special funds with which to poach disgruntled, underpaid, UC academics.
Given these realities, Schwarzenegger’s proposal is a hugely welcome priority shift. Yet, as the New York Times editorialised, the small print within this proposal is more a mark of cowardice than courage. How will Schwarzenegger rein in prison spending? Not by cutting the numbers of people entering prison. Not by using what little political capital he has left to urge reform of three strikes, not by investing in a community infrastructure of job training programs, drug rehab centres, mental health clinics or any of the other structures that could reduce criminality in the first place. Nor by pushing for system-wide reform of a parole system that functions mainly as a revolving door between prison, the free-world, and prison again.
Instead, Schwarzenegger has proposed widespread privatisation of the prison system – on the dubious grounds that private prisons can operate at lower costs than do state-run prisons – and huge reductions in the amount of money spent on medical and mental health services for prisoners.
On the first point: in states where private prisons have proven cheaper to maintain, that’s largely because they pay staff poorly, cut corners on training, and create job training, education, and drug rehab programs for prisoners that look alright on paper but have almost no credibility on the ground. It’s also because they cherry-pick which inmates to accept, leaving the state with the most dangerous, hardest-to-control inmates. That’s why few private prison companies are willing, or able, to run Supermax facilities – and why states such as Arizona, that have proposed wholesale privatisation in recent months, are running into heavy criticism from criminal justice experts who fear the consequences of handing the most dangerous prisons and prisoners over to cost-cutting privateers.
On the second point, the state’s record on providing mental health and medical services to inmates is already so bad that federal judges have handed control of those services over to a federally-appointed Special Master. Last year, a panel of judges found that prison overcrowding was contributing to unconstitutionally poor levels of medical care and it ordered California to find a way to reduce the prison population by almost 50,000.
So far, the state has shown a remarkable unwillingness to be bound by these federal rulings. Slashing the budgets for medical and mental health services will be a further slap in the face to the federal judiciary – and could, ultimately, result in a wholesale federalisation of the California prison system.
Like so much else about the last Schwarzenegger budget, this is a game of illusions. Schwarzenegger was right that California’s higher education versus prison priorities are entirely backwards at the moment. But he was absolutely wrong in his proposed solutions. Put simply, there’s no way to preserve California’s higher education institutions in an austerity era unless Californians are willing to fundamentally re-evaluate 30 years of ill-conceived, tough-on-crime politics. And that doesn’t mean cutting services for prisoners and paying those who guard them less; it means putting fewer people in prison in the first place, in some cases putting them in for fewer years, and finding more sensible ways to keep them on the straight-and-narrow than the threat of automatic revocation of parole once they return to their communities after their sentences are served.
Schwarzenegger’s belated realization that California’s fiscal priorities are messed up was welcome. I hope he’s now intellectually honest enough to take the debate where it needs to go. California is at a turning point. If it turns in the wrong direction on this crucial issue, the troubles of the state’s higher education institutions will only get worse and its prisons will only continue to be a national scandal.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Chino prison warden replies to allegations of inmate mistreatment
Photo by Michal Czerwonka/Getty Images
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) tours the California Institution for Men prison with Warden Aref Fakhoury (L) on August 19, 2009 in Chino, California. After touring the prison where a riot took place on August 8th, Schwarzenegger said that the prison system is collapsing and needs to be reformed.
Steven Cuevas | KPCC
Lt. Mark Hargrove slowly steers an SUV across Reception Center West at the California Institution for Men. Reception Center West features an open field lined with eight wooden barracks.Chino warden responds
Warden Fakhoury and California Governor Schwarzenegger discuss their immediate response to the August 2009 Chino Prison riots and the long-term issues that contributed to the disturbance 10 days after the violence erupted.
On Aug. 8, fires were lit in two of the dorms. None of the buildings have ceiling sprinklers. Inmates kicked out barred windows and a security door to get out of one burning dorm. More than 200 inmates housed at Reception Center West were hurt.
Governor: Prisons ‘collapsing under own weight’
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger visited a week later.”California’s entire prison system is collapsing under its own weight,” he said. “Our prisons are overcrowded and endangering the staff and the inmates. California is quite literally losing control of our prisons.”Those conditions may have spurred what happened in the days after the riot. Several former and current inmates say the prison kept dozens of men in outdoor enclosures all day and all night for several days as authorities tried to regain control of West yard.
Sterling Werner and his fiancée.
Held outside for more than 24 hours?
Acting Warden Aref Fakhoury admitted that inmates were held outside in an exercise recreation area, possibly for over 24 hours.“There’s a big possibility that, yes, that they were,” said Fakhoury during an interview in his office at CIM.“Well, after the riot we did have inmates out in open area. It’s an exercise recreation area at the Center facility. So inmates were being held in that area until they were placed somewhere else.”
Many inmates held outside say they were stripped to their underwear and not given food for a day after the riot. Others claim they’re skin blistered in the August heat. A prison doctor confirmed that his staff treated several inmates for sunburn. But Warden Fakhoury says inmates were protected from the elements.
“I saw it with my own eyes that they had bedrolls and they had blankets,” Fakhoury said. “And they were clothed with the jumpsuits or boxers and T-shirts.”
High risks of outdoor detention
Holding prisoners outdoors for several days or even just a few hours poses risks. Last May, a female inmate at Perryville Prison in Arizona died after she was forced to spend four hours in an outdoor holding cell without shade. Arizona has stopped using most outdoor cells. Several states ban them outright.Terry Thornton, a spokeswoman from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation says keeping inmates outside for more than four hours at a time requires prior approval from department higher-ups.“There should never have been an inmate living in that environment for longer than eight hours,” said Charles Carbone, a San Francisco attorney who specializes in prison law. He says what allegedly occurred in Chino after the riot amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.
“They may be there in prison for a variety of reasons, some may be minor some may be serious,” Carbone said. “But surely none of them signed up to be placed in a cage for days on end. And the social cost of violating a prisoner’s constitutional rights is great.”
Lengthy outdoor detention is ‘emergency measure’
A California Institution for Men spokesman says inmates were held outdoors for long stretches as an emergency measure after rioters wiped out roughly one-quarter of the prison’s bunk space. But some inmates say not only does the practice of holding prisoners outdoors for extended periods continue, it started months before the riot.”When I first got there they put us out on the yard and we set out on the yard all day,” said Steven Morrissette.The 24 year old ex-inmate from Hesperia was sent to CIM in March on a parole violation. He got out in August. Morrissette says prison staff had no bunk space for him and many other inmates when they arrived. He says the first week of his incarceration was spent alternating between indoor temporary holding cells and outdoor exercise cages. Neither is designed for long term inmate housing.
“They fed us out there. The only time we went indoors is if you had a medical slip to go see the doctor or nurse.”
And, says Morrissette, to sleep on the floor of indoor holding tanks with nine or ten other inmates.
Source: SCPR.org
Monday, January 11, 2010
Chino prison inmates complain of being incarcerated outdoors
AP Photo/Reed Saxon
Lavatory and dormitory facilities lay in ruins during a tour of the California Institution for Men in Chino, Calif., Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2009. Blood-soaked mattresses, singed bedding and abandoned backboards and medical supplies littered the campus of the Chino prison, a testament to the violence of the riot that shut down part of the institution and injured nearly 200 inmates.
Rumors of violence swirled for days before the riot exploded inside the Chino prison’s Reception Center West.
Guards had taken to serving meals to small groups of inmates, rather than entire dorms.Listen to the letters:
“The tension, you can feel,” said former inmate Sterling Werner, who talked about the riot while he smoked hand-rolled cigarettes on the balcony of his Anaheim apartment recently. “And when officers are doing controlled feeding one building at a time two days prior to the riot, you know. Something is wrong.”
“You know, total chaos. We’re talking about window panes coming off and being thrown. Pieces of glass being used like Ninja stars. Kicking, fighting, punching. So much blood. So many people just trying to get out of the way.”It took authorities until sunrise to contain the violence. More than 200 inmates at the California Institution for Men were injured. Two housing blocks were demolished, making the prison’s bad overcrowding problem even worse. Each dormitory was at double capacity. About 1,300 inmates were left without bunk space. Hundreds of prisoners were immediately moved to other institutions across the state.
In an interview in his office at the California Institution for Men, Acting Warden Aref Farkhoury defended his staff’s response to the riot.
“Both custodial and medically, response at CIM level was outstanding,” he said. “If it wasn’t for the training that we have provided our staff and all the tools we have available to them, this would have taken longer and we would have had a lot more seriously hurt people, and possibly death.”
‘They housed 10 of us per cage’
But dozens more inmates claim they were handcuffed with plastic zip-ties, separated by race and marched into outdoor recreation cages. The inmates say they remained in these cages all day and night, for up to four full days. Werner says most inmates were stripped to underwear, socks and shoes.”They housed 10 of us per cage,” he said. “We tried to cooperate. OK, we know it’s probably going to be maybe a few hours. Well, it extended to days and nights. Freezing cold. The only warmth I was able to get was from leaning my body against another inmate. They are only supposed to be used about two hours at most while the ad-seg people have rec time. They’re animal cages.”Each enclosure is about 20-feet long and 10-feet wide, with a toilet and a sink. Werner says nobody fed the inmates for a day after the riot. They were given no soap, no blankets – and no complaint forms.
Guards non-commital about inmate treatment
When KPCC asked about the allegations over a month ago, a prison official denied them.But on a visit to the prison, two guards in the Chino prison’s administration segregation unit said that inmates were held outdoors for hours after the riot.“As far as what I remember being in here, we would bring them out here during the day so we can do our daily process to try and get some of these guys out and try and give them medical,” said Lt. Eddie Hernandez. “And then at night, probably be around 9 at night when we would bring them inside.”
Lt. Gerard de los Santos said that initially, the inmates might have been held outside for up to two days in order to “let the dust settle and find out where we were gonna house inmates.”
“They were out here initially because we had no place else to put ‘em at,” De Los Santos said. “But we gave them blankets and everything else, jumpsuits so they can stay warm. They were not here with just boxers on and nothing else.”
Letters tell of post-riot treatment
After the riot, Chino’s daytime temperature soared into the upper 90s. The holding cages provided little shade. Some inmates were sunburned after hours in the outdoor rec cages.Werner says the skin on his back blistered and peeled. The prison’s chief physician confirmed his staff treated sunburned inmates after the riot.“They stripped us down to our boxers and had us there for about three days,” said Charlie Padilla, reading a letter from a relative incarcerated at Chino at the time of the riot.
Sitting in her Los Angeles County home, Padilla reads the letter – one of dozens of letters sent to her by inmates at the Chino prison. Last month, she launched a Web site: www.intheriot.com. Padilla began corresponding with inmates after hearing her relative’s story.
“The sun burnt us during the day, at night it was real cold,” Padilla read. “I remember watching that movie ‘March of the Penguins.’ We all stood real close together like the penguins did. We looked dumb. But it worked.
“I have no idea what they’re going to do with us but I don’t see freedom getting any closer.”
Padilla said many prisoners talked about the riot as a “nightmare.”
That’s all anybody talked about,” she said. “He didn’t give me a lot of detail about blood and what he saw. I’ve gotten that from other people.
Five years ago, a group of Chino guards complained that some inmates were held in small holding tanks for days at a time. They called it “cruel and dangerous.”
Inmate complaints after the riot reflect a similar practice.
Source: SCPR.org
Saturday, January 09, 2010
Governor's budget plan includes deep cuts for prisons, health and welfare programs, state workers' pay
SACRAMENTO - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger released an $82.9 billion spending proposal Friday that calls for another round of deep cuts in health and welfare programs, reduces funding for the state's prison system and trims state workers' pay.
The governor's plan would reduce money for public transit. And it depends heavily on the state receiving $6.9 billion from the federal government to close a nearly $20 billion gap between spending and revenue.
There would be another $4.6 billion in cuts and shifts if the state fails to get the federal money, including the outright elimination of services for in-home care patients and people moving from welfare to work, plus $2.4 billion in additional measures to raise money.
The $8.5 billion in proposed reductions in Friday's plan largely spare public schools and universities following several years of deep cuts and fee hikes.
"For our economy, recovery is on the horizon. I wish I could say that about our budget, but I can't," Schwarzenegger said at a Friday news conference.
Schwarzenegger's proposal follows about $60 billion in cuts, tax hikes and other budget fixes last year as the recession caused a steep drop in revenue.
Schwarzenegger blamed much of the state government's worsening finances on a tax system that produces large swings in revenue, an expensive prison system and a U.S. government that, aside from last year's billions in stimulus aid, is treating the state unfairly.
The Legislature's majority Democrats sharply criticized the governor's proposal. They seized on what they claim is the administration's mismanagement of federal stimulus money following news this week that a state agency had a huge backlog of applications.
"They need to look inside and figure out how to manage the state first," said state Sen. Denise Moreno Ducheny, D-San Diego, the vice-chairman of the Senate budget panel.
Republican lawmakers generally liked the plan.
"I think it's time to get serious about right-sizing government," said Sen. Bob Dutton, R-Rancho Cucamonga, the Senate's budget vice-chairman.
The new fiscal year begins July 1. Friday, Schwarzenegger ordered the Legislature into a special session to pass $8.9 billion in solutions in the coming weeks so savings take effect sooner.
INLAND IMPACT
Schwarzenegger's proposal does not include $10 million for a medical school at UC Riverside. The University of California has asked for the money since last year to continue planning the school. Planning costs would total an estimated $50 million.
The governor again called for a statewide surcharge on residential and commercial property insurance policies to help pay for fighting fires in the San Bernardino Mountains and elsewhere.
Since last summer, state employees have had been forced to take three unpaid days off a month, including about 7,700 full-time state workers in Riverside County and 10,800 in San Bernardino County. The furloughs have reduced workers' pay by 14 percent.
Employees unions have challenged the furloughs in court, with the cases destined for the California Supreme Court. Under Friday's plan, the furloughs would end June 30, to be replaced by 5 percent pay cuts and a 5 percent increase in the amount employees must contribute to their retirement plans.
Local officials in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, meanwhile, were alarmed to learn that the governor's budget plan calls for returning thousands of low-level prison inmates to jails in their home counties.
Riverside County Board of Supervisors Chairman Marion Ashley said many county jails already are crowded. The prison proposals could hurt public safety, he said.
Cindy Beavers, a spokeswoman for San Bernardino County Sheriff Rod Hoops, said the county cannot house any more inmates without more money to build larger jails.
Advocates for the poor and disabled, meanwhile, attacked the governor's plan to slash funding for the state program that provides in-home medical assistance to seniors and the disabled, part of $4.05 billion in proposed cuts to health and welfare programs.
Responding to the governor's demand for more federal money, Democrats criticized his linking additional cuts to the in-home care program and other services if the money doesn't come through.
"The governor is free to threaten people, if that's what he wants to do," said U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. Her office released figures contending that the state receives much more from Washington than the governor claimed.
Gas shakeup
Friday's plan would eliminate the 6-percent sales tax on gasoline purchases. Instead, the state would increase the excise tax on gasoline from 18 cents a gallon to almost 29 cents a gallon. The swap would save consumers about five cents a gallon, according to administration officials.
But the shift would hurt public transit agencies, which have successfully sued to block past attempts by the state to take their share of gas sales-tax revenue. Excise-tax revenue is off-limits to transit agencies.
Omnitrans CEO Durand Rall said the San Bernardino County bus system could lose between $3 million and $7 million if the proposal went through, leading to fare hikes and service cuts.
Schwarzenegger also proposed raising money for state courts by installing speed sensors on existing red light cameras. The cameras, already unpopular with critics who say local officials use them to raise money, would be outfitted with detection equipment to catch drivers speeding through intersections. The governor said the speed cameras would raise $296.9 million for state courts.
The governor's plan would reduce money for public transit. And it depends heavily on the state receiving $6.9 billion from the federal government to close a nearly $20 billion gap between spending and revenue.
There would be another $4.6 billion in cuts and shifts if the state fails to get the federal money, including the outright elimination of services for in-home care patients and people moving from welfare to work, plus $2.4 billion in additional measures to raise money.
The $8.5 billion in proposed reductions in Friday's plan largely spare public schools and universities following several years of deep cuts and fee hikes.
"For our economy, recovery is on the horizon. I wish I could say that about our budget, but I can't," Schwarzenegger said at a Friday news conference.
Schwarzenegger's proposal follows about $60 billion in cuts, tax hikes and other budget fixes last year as the recession caused a steep drop in revenue.
Schwarzenegger blamed much of the state government's worsening finances on a tax system that produces large swings in revenue, an expensive prison system and a U.S. government that, aside from last year's billions in stimulus aid, is treating the state unfairly.
The Legislature's majority Democrats sharply criticized the governor's proposal. They seized on what they claim is the administration's mismanagement of federal stimulus money following news this week that a state agency had a huge backlog of applications.
"They need to look inside and figure out how to manage the state first," said state Sen. Denise Moreno Ducheny, D-San Diego, the vice-chairman of the Senate budget panel.
Republican lawmakers generally liked the plan.
"I think it's time to get serious about right-sizing government," said Sen. Bob Dutton, R-Rancho Cucamonga, the Senate's budget vice-chairman.
The new fiscal year begins July 1. Friday, Schwarzenegger ordered the Legislature into a special session to pass $8.9 billion in solutions in the coming weeks so savings take effect sooner.
INLAND IMPACT
Schwarzenegger's proposal does not include $10 million for a medical school at UC Riverside. The University of California has asked for the money since last year to continue planning the school. Planning costs would total an estimated $50 million.
The governor again called for a statewide surcharge on residential and commercial property insurance policies to help pay for fighting fires in the San Bernardino Mountains and elsewhere.
Since last summer, state employees have had been forced to take three unpaid days off a month, including about 7,700 full-time state workers in Riverside County and 10,800 in San Bernardino County. The furloughs have reduced workers' pay by 14 percent.
Employees unions have challenged the furloughs in court, with the cases destined for the California Supreme Court. Under Friday's plan, the furloughs would end June 30, to be replaced by 5 percent pay cuts and a 5 percent increase in the amount employees must contribute to their retirement plans.
Local officials in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, meanwhile, were alarmed to learn that the governor's budget plan calls for returning thousands of low-level prison inmates to jails in their home counties.
Riverside County Board of Supervisors Chairman Marion Ashley said many county jails already are crowded. The prison proposals could hurt public safety, he said.
Cindy Beavers, a spokeswoman for San Bernardino County Sheriff Rod Hoops, said the county cannot house any more inmates without more money to build larger jails.
Advocates for the poor and disabled, meanwhile, attacked the governor's plan to slash funding for the state program that provides in-home medical assistance to seniors and the disabled, part of $4.05 billion in proposed cuts to health and welfare programs.
Responding to the governor's demand for more federal money, Democrats criticized his linking additional cuts to the in-home care program and other services if the money doesn't come through.
"The governor is free to threaten people, if that's what he wants to do," said U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. Her office released figures contending that the state receives much more from Washington than the governor claimed.
Gas shakeup
Friday's plan would eliminate the 6-percent sales tax on gasoline purchases. Instead, the state would increase the excise tax on gasoline from 18 cents a gallon to almost 29 cents a gallon. The swap would save consumers about five cents a gallon, according to administration officials.
But the shift would hurt public transit agencies, which have successfully sued to block past attempts by the state to take their share of gas sales-tax revenue. Excise-tax revenue is off-limits to transit agencies.
Omnitrans CEO Durand Rall said the San Bernardino County bus system could lose between $3 million and $7 million if the proposal went through, leading to fare hikes and service cuts.
Schwarzenegger also proposed raising money for state courts by installing speed sensors on existing red light cameras. The cameras, already unpopular with critics who say local officials use them to raise money, would be outfitted with detection equipment to catch drivers speeding through intersections. The governor said the speed cameras would raise $296.9 million for state courts.
Thursday, January 07, 2010
Criminal turned criminologist John Irwin dies
Thursday, January 7, 2010
He chose rebirth - with a passion.
Over the next half century, Mr. Irwin became one of the nation's foremost advocates for compassionate reform of the prison system, the author of six heralded books dissecting criminal justice, and a tenured sociology professor at San Francisco State University.
When he died at 80 at his San Francisco home of liver and kidney failure Sunday, he had one final book nearly ready for print, an autobiography he called "Rogue."
The term, in its kindest but most activist meaning, fit him perfectly, his family, friends and colleagues said.
"John was fearless about being honest about the realities of crime and justice," said Naneen Karraker, a national advocate for prison reform.. "He had the courage to see things differently from the common way.
"He was an uncommon man."
Founded movements
In 1967, after he began teaching at S.F. State, Mr. Irwin founded Project Rebound, a program on the campus that helps those coming out of prison go to college. Over the ensuing decades, he co-founded the now-defunct Prisoners Union, which organized inmates to push for their civil rights, as well as the Convict Criminology movement, in which convicts who became professors critically examine the criminal justice system.He was also on the board of directors of the Sentencing Project, the national organization that advocates prison reform and alternatives to incarceration.
"John always challenged us to think in bold ways about what kind of justice system, and society, we hoped to achieve," Sentencing Project Executive Director Marc Mauer wrote in a tribute on the organization' s Web site this week. "And he did so with humor, grace and intelligence. "
Mr. Irwin was born and raised in Los Angeles, where his father, Roy Irwin, sold insurance and ran a candy store, and his mother, Eloise Irwin, was a homemaker. As a teenager he became fascinated with what he called "the life" of being an outlaw, said his wife, Martha Rosenbaum - and that led to his life-altering ensnarement with the criminal justice system.
He robbed a gas station, and while serving time he began to realize that education and going straight was a better alternative, she said.
"Prison really turned John around," Rosenbaum said. "He took care of his health, he went to school, and eventually he made it on the outside by transitioning from criminal to criminologist. "
Pushed rehabilitation
Disturbed at what he saw as an unfair system of sentencing the poor to long prison terms rather than finding more rehabilitative alternatives, Mr. Irwin decided to devote his life's work to bettering the lot of convicts.After being paroled, he earned a bachelor's degree in sociology at UCLA in 1962. He was hired five years later at S.F. State and taught there until retiring in 1994. He earned his doctorate at UC Berkeley in 1969.
Mr. Irwin's first book, an examination of career criminal behavior called "The Felon," became an instant classic in the field of criminology when published in 1970. The others that followed, including "Prisons in Turmoil" and "The Warehouse Prison," became touchstones of the prison reform movement. His last published book, last year's "Lifers," examined the struggle for redemption by convicts serving life terms..
'A remarkable man'
In between his more serious pursuits, Mr. Irwin found time to surf, ski, make furniture, root on the Giants and 49ers, and father three daughters and a son. He met his wife of 38 years when she was one of his graduate students."He was smart, had a sense of humor, had wisdom, and he was good-looking, " said Rosenbaum, director emerita of the San Francisco office of the Drug Policy Alliance. "My husband was a remarkable man."
Mr. Irwin is survived by his wife; daughters Jeanette Irwin of Washington, D.C., Katie Irwin of Honolulu and Anne Irwin of San Francisco; and son Johnny Irwin of San Francisco.
A service for family and friends will be held at 4 p.m. Friday at the Golden Gate Club, 135 Fisher Loop at the Presidio in San Francisco.
In lieu of flowers, donations in Mr.. Irwin's name can be made to the J.K. Irwin Foundation, which funds prison and drug reform, at 2233 Lombard St., San Francisco, CA 94123.
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
Positive Point: Jurisprudence and California corrections
Richard Mazzucchi
Folks of all sorts are intermingled, some not yet charged or awaiting trial who may be guilty or innocent, others serving sentences for nonviolent drug or property crimes, along with some guilty of violent assaults and murder. Only one demographic group is not often found there the wealthy.
This is a dangerous and dysfunctional situation that puts the safety and rehabilitation of the inmates at risk, and makes one question the fairness and effectiveness of our judicial and corrections systems.
Some of the inmates will be found innocent of any misdoing but are exposed to hardened criminals with treacherous habits. It is not surprising that one inmate was nearly beaten to death in his cell by other inmates given the mix of personalities and the limited number of correction officers available to control them.
All this is due to unrealistic burdens California legislators have placed upon the police, prosecuting attorneys, judges, corrections officers and wardens of our jails and prisons.
No one wants to be seen as soft on crime, so ever stiffer and longer sentences are being prescribed, such as the three strikes law and other mandatory minimum sentences that overload our prisons and put immense pressures on correctional officers and prison support staff.
Prisons should be for those that are dangers to society, not non-violent drug offenders or those only guilty of property crimes.
For some jail or prison has become a home of last resort, given the lack of mental health services, half-way houses and diversion programs to offer a way out. Once a person is a convicted felon, which is not hard to do these days if one uses drugs or hangs around with the wrong types of people, it can be very difficult to regain employment and the trust of the community to excel leaving limited opportunities to overcome the allure of drugs to ease the pain and sense of loss, recover from underlying depression or other mental illnesses or otherwise avoid lives of crime.
So the cycle continues for many, and often spirals to greater levels of addiction, mental illness and criminality until they become institutionalized and a permanent burden on society.
What can we do about these unfortunate souls and realities? It would seem we have little alternative but to more carefully triage people that we introduce to our jails and prisons differentiating as well as possible among those that are violent threats to others that must be incarcerated, those that are guilty of property crimes or fraud that must be taught a lesson by facing consequences that may include extended time behind bars, and those that are in need of rehabilitation, counseling, training and other assistance to get back and stay on track.
By so classifying, housing and treating defendants and criminals we might avoid the exposure of these different breeds of cat to one another, and provide treatment and training programs targeted to minimize stereotyping and maximizing the chances of reentry into the general population as functional adults.
This may seem a simplistic solution to a complex problem but there are simply too many people being housed at great expense in our over-burdened prison system, and we have neither the revenues to support them, nor the will to do so.
I think we must strive to divert people from crime by using more carrots and fewer sticks, with progressive counseling, mental health services and training programs that help novice criminals improve their lot, rather than condemn them to lives in captivity. At least such investments can facilitate real change and individual progress, rather than continue apparently futile efforts to intimidate criminals into compliance.
It may sound trite and seem inappropriate, but a pinch of sugar may accomplish more than tons of salt when addressing the frailties and foibles of the human condition.
If you agree with any of what I have to say please tell your elected officials, so they might better defend not always being hard on crime and brave using more effective approaches to address the problem where warranted.
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Richard Mazzucchi is a retired research engineer specializing in energy efficiency and renewable energy. He has travelled extensively and now makes his home in Los Molinos, where he is striving to manifest a sustainable and spiritual lifestyle. He can be reached at living-green@att.net.
Monday, January 04, 2010
California prison guards union ends consulting contract with ex-president Novey
Sacramento Bee Staff PhotoThe union that represents 30,000 correctional officers in California has ended its consulting contract with Don Novey, the one-time president of the organization credited with building its political muscle.
In an e-mail obtained by The Bee, Novey lashed out at Mike Jimenez, current president of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, for terminating his three-year deal. Jimenez was Novey's second-in-command until taking the reins in 2002.
"Jimenez, it's fine to go after me, but your Stalin like attacks on the membership and inability to focus on the concerns of the troops disappoints me," Novey wrote. "Jimenez, you unfortunately will have to deal with me in the future and my respect for the line troops will continue."
Novey, 62, retired from the CCPOA presidency in 2002 after more than 20 years in command. During that time, union membership exploded as California built dozens of new prisons. Novey, a former amateur boxer and U.S. Army intelligence officer, ratcheted up the group's political presence by using the millions its members provided to sponsor tough-on-crime ballot measures, elect legislators and back union-friendly gubernatorial candidates.
Continue Reading....
Friday, January 01, 2010
Elderly felons need a prison break
RICH PEDRONCELLI / Associated Press
Debbie Coluter, a certified nurses assistant, assists an elderly inmate, with Alzheimer's disease, to his cell at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville.
After holding nearly steady for decades, our prison population began to climb as criminal justice policy took a sharply punitive turn, with the massive criminalization of drug use, “three strikes” laws and other harsh sentencing practices. More people were going to prison and staying there longer. By 2005, the prison population was six times what it had been in 1975.
One little-known side effect of this population explosion has been a sharp increase in the number of elderly people behind bars.
According to the Justice Department, in 1980 the United States had about 9,500 prisoners age 55 and older; by 2008, the number had increased tenfold, to 94,800. That same year, the number of prisoners 50 and older was just shy of 200,000 — about the size of the entire U.S. prison population in the early 1970s.
People age 50 or 55 may seem a bit young to be classified as elderly. Because their lives have often been characterized by poverty, trauma and limited access to medical care and rehabilitative services, most prisoners are physiologically older than their chronological age would suggest, and more likely to have disabling medical conditions than the general population.
One study cited by Ronald H. Aday in his 1994 article in Federal Probation concluded that the average prisoner over 50 has a physiological age 11.5 years older than his chronological age.
With 1 in 11 U.S. prisoners serving a life sentence — in some states, the figure is 1 in 6 — it’s no surprise that the number of elderly prisoners is skyrocketing.
In 2007, The New York Times profiled Charles Friedgood, 89, a New York state prisoner who had served more than 30 years of a life sentence for second-degree murder. Although he had terminal cancer and had undergone several operations, including a colostomy, he had been denied parole five times before being released in 2007. Friedgood at least had the opportunity to apply for parole; in some states, parole has been abolished and a life sentence means exactly that.
Being in prison is hard on anyone, but elderly people face special dangers, particularly if they are ill or disabled. Some have complex medical and mental health needs that prisons are ill-equipped to handle. Many prisons are not accessible to persons with mobility impairments; for them, bathing, using the toilet or even getting in and out of their cells can be a difficult, dangerous challenge. And older prisoners are more likely to be robbed, assaulted or otherwise victimized.
Some states have so many elderly prisoners that they have built special facilities to house them. Several years ago, I visited the Ahtanum View Corrections Center, Washington state’s prison for the elderly. Everywhere I looked were aged, frail, disabled people, some of whom could barely move without assistance. The prison’s Web page helpfully points out that a volunteer clergy team is available to assist prisoners with “end-of-life issues.”
The main justification for incarceration is to protect public safety. But it’s hard to see the public safety rationale for keeping so many elderly people in prison.
It’s even harder to understand the economic justification.
Incarceration is expensive — about $24,000 per year for the average prisoner, according to a 2008 Pew Center on the States report. Keeping someone over 55 locked up costs about three times as much. Given that criminal behavior drops off dramatically with advancing age, this is a major investment for very little return.
One little-known side effect of this population explosion has been a sharp increase in the number of elderly people behind bars.
According to the Justice Department, in 1980 the United States had about 9,500 prisoners age 55 and older; by 2008, the number had increased tenfold, to 94,800. That same year, the number of prisoners 50 and older was just shy of 200,000 — about the size of the entire U.S. prison population in the early 1970s.
People age 50 or 55 may seem a bit young to be classified as elderly. Because their lives have often been characterized by poverty, trauma and limited access to medical care and rehabilitative services, most prisoners are physiologically older than their chronological age would suggest, and more likely to have disabling medical conditions than the general population.
One study cited by Ronald H. Aday in his 1994 article in Federal Probation concluded that the average prisoner over 50 has a physiological age 11.5 years older than his chronological age.
With 1 in 11 U.S. prisoners serving a life sentence — in some states, the figure is 1 in 6 — it’s no surprise that the number of elderly prisoners is skyrocketing.
In 2007, The New York Times profiled Charles Friedgood, 89, a New York state prisoner who had served more than 30 years of a life sentence for second-degree murder. Although he had terminal cancer and had undergone several operations, including a colostomy, he had been denied parole five times before being released in 2007. Friedgood at least had the opportunity to apply for parole; in some states, parole has been abolished and a life sentence means exactly that.
Being in prison is hard on anyone, but elderly people face special dangers, particularly if they are ill or disabled. Some have complex medical and mental health needs that prisons are ill-equipped to handle. Many prisons are not accessible to persons with mobility impairments; for them, bathing, using the toilet or even getting in and out of their cells can be a difficult, dangerous challenge. And older prisoners are more likely to be robbed, assaulted or otherwise victimized.
Some states have so many elderly prisoners that they have built special facilities to house them. Several years ago, I visited the Ahtanum View Corrections Center, Washington state’s prison for the elderly. Everywhere I looked were aged, frail, disabled people, some of whom could barely move without assistance. The prison’s Web page helpfully points out that a volunteer clergy team is available to assist prisoners with “end-of-life issues.”
The main justification for incarceration is to protect public safety. But it’s hard to see the public safety rationale for keeping so many elderly people in prison.
It’s even harder to understand the economic justification.
Incarceration is expensive — about $24,000 per year for the average prisoner, according to a 2008 Pew Center on the States report. Keeping someone over 55 locked up costs about three times as much. Given that criminal behavior drops off dramatically with advancing age, this is a major investment for very little return.
California laws strengthened wall of silence around officers
The Orange County Register
California laws enacted more than 30 years ago to protect honest peace officers from over-zealous internal investigations have become a safety net for bad cops.
The mandates – the most stringent in the nation -- have given troubled officers special privileges that make it harder to get rid of them and nearly impossible for the public to learn whether they've been adequately disciplined.
Laws that began as an effort to protect police and the integrity of their work expanded over time, giving more and more cover to officer misconduct. Attempts to scale back those laws have met with opposition from California's highly organized police unions, who argue it could affect officer safety.
"California is the most restrictive state in the nation, when it comes to police secrecy," said Jim Chanin, a former ACLU attorney in San Francisco. "It's California's dirty little secret."
Consider the effects:
•Former Orange County Assistant Sheriff George Jaramillo went to jail on state corruption charges and is serving another 27 months in federal prison for tax evasion. But Jaramillo sued the county in 2005 for firing him without going through the extensive process mandated by California's Peace Officers' Bill of Rights. A Superior Court judge agreed and Jaramillo stood to collect $362,707 before a federal judge ordered that the money be turned over as restitution.
•In 2006 Berkeley police officers refused – citing state protections - to cooperate with a civilian probe into the theft of heroin, methamphetamines and other drugs from 286 envelopes in the evidence locker. Without police participation, the probe was unable to determine the extent of the security breach. The missing evidence was ultimately blamed on a drug-addicted, 20-year narcotics sergeant, Cary Kent, who was convicted and given home detention for a year.
•A prison guard in Central California was kept on the job after being accused in 2005 of sexual relations with inmates and using his/her position as a union steward to blackmail an administrator. The guard was dismissed by the Department of Corrections, but rehired during a closed-door hearing before the state personnel board. State law prevents the corrections department from releasing the guard's name, exact place of employment or details of the alleged misdeeds.
•A suspected drunken driver alleged that a Los Angeles deputy checked her into a motel rather than arrest her. The deputy later returned when he was off duty and made "inappropriate advances." The department attempted to fire the deputy, but was overturned by the county personnel board, in a confidential hearing without public input. State law prevents the sheriff's department or its auditors from releasing the deputy's name, when the incident occurred or any other details.
"Now it's really hard to get rid of undesirables," said Jim Keysor, the former San Fernando Valley assemblyman who introduced the "Peace Officers' Bill of Rights" legislation in 1976. "They use the 'bill of rights' to protect themselves, and the bosses are really stuck."
Keysor added that the law "escalated into a far bigger thing than I imagined."
EFFORT TO REDUCE FRIVOLOUS LAWSUITS
Keysor and his colleagues say they initially wanted to protect street officers from being used as scapegoats by unscrupulous supervisors. They also wanted to prevent criminal defendants from using the arresting officers' personnel records to make frivolous counter-complaints.
Instead they created a series of statutes that over time, with the help of powerful law enforcement unions and sympathetic courts, planted a steel wall between officers and the public's right to know.
The first law, the "Peace Officers' Bill of Rights," was the brainchild of the Assembly's Criminal Justice Committee in the mid-seventies. At the time, stories circulated about police brass leaning on officers, their wives and their families, to get confessions.
"At the time, you could be forced to take a polygraph examination, forced to do anything (or lose your job)," said Ron Cottingham, president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California.
In essence, the law prevents police supervisors from firing officers without an extensive rebuttal process. The law also dictates how the officer can be treated during interrogations. For instance, the officer cannot be subjected to foul language, or lied to, and must be paid overtime if the interrogation is not conducted during regular work hours.
(In contrast, civilians suspected of crimes can be verbally berated and even lied to by police questioners—all legal under the law.)
The bill was backed at the time by the American Civil Liberties Union and signed into law by then-governor Jerry Brown, a Democrat whose support helped him to gain political favor among rank and file officers.
Used in tandem with the bill is a 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision – Garrity vs. the State of New Jersey. This case, involving patrolmen accused of fixing traffic tickets, holds that officers can be forced to answer questions from their employers, under threat of firing. But those answers cannot subsequently be used against them in criminal court.
Another protection is California Penal Code sections 832.7 and 832.8, which prohibit police disciplinary files from being publicly released without court approval. Passed in 1978, these sections were written by the office of then Attorney General Evelle Younger and carried by Assemblyman Dennis Carpenter, a former FBI agent from Newport Beach. Younger and Carpenter are now deceased. Both had publicly expressed concern that criminal defendants were using the disciplinary records of arresting officers to fight criminal convictions. The new law would prevent defendants from "fishing" through the records, authorities said at the time.
For decades, California police departments and media agencies have wrestled in court over police disciplinary files and other law enforcement records. For the most part, the wall surrounding the officers just got thicker and taller with every court decision.
The California laws protecting police officers contrast strongly with laws in Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, Florida and other "right to work" states where unions have less sway over government.
Public employee and police unions in those states are mainly fraternal organizations with little weight in blocking the flow of public information, officials say.
"The police associations are pretty much neutered. They can scream or cry pretty much all they want, but it doesn't help," said Frank V. Rotondo, executive director of the Georgia Association of Chiefs of Police. "It's very tough watching Peace Officers' Bill of Rights or unions (in other states) protect ineffective law enforcement officers."
California, one of the most unionized of all states, has some of the most powerful police associations in the country. Public safety unions and lobbying groups here doled out more than $33.5 million in political contributions during the last nine years, including $5.5 million to the Democratic Party and $1.95 million to the Republican Party.
PUBLIC'S RIGHT TO KNOW COMES SECOND
California's protections were made virtually impenetrable in 2006 when the California Supreme Court ruled in Copley Press vs. Superior Court that civilian police commissions could not publicly disclose their findings on police misconduct. Some commissions could no longer gain access to personnel files. The unions and lobbyists for the police said these protections were necessary for officer safety.
An attempt by state Senator Gloria Romero (D-East Los Angeles) in June of 2007 to enact new legislation overriding the court ruling drew police from across the state to a packed Capitol hearing room, where they testified that vigilantes would attack their families if their misdeeds were made public.
Police officers and their lobbyists jammed the seats, lined the aisles and stood outside in the hallway, all with the same message: Cops will die if this bill is approved. No real-life examples were provided to back up their assertions.
"It was like a Who's Who of police lobbyists, a full complement of firepower," said Jim Ewert, an attorney for the California Newspaper Publishers' Association, which backed Romero's bill.
The Assembly committee let the bill die without a vote. Another attempt to revive the bill, in 2008, failed before the same committee.
Public records show the committee members received $227,990 from public safety lobbyists during the two-year session that included the two votes on the bill. Orange County public safety groups contributed $17,000 over that period, with $5,900 coming from the Santa Ana Police Officers PAC and $4,500 from the Orange County Professional Firefighters Association.
The argument that the lives of police officers depends on secrecy is not a new one. It has been used to quash public information requests across the United States. But seldom, if ever, can police offer any evidence to back up the argument.
Police groups in Florida and Georgia, where more police information is accessible, could not point to a single case where releasing disciplinary files led to the death or injury of the named officer or his family.
But police in those states also believe that releasing records endangers cops.
"Every year we are bombarded with calls from our officers who've discovered that folks have discovered their (personal) information," said Matt Puckett, deputy executive director of the Florida Police Benevolent Association.
Police departments in California can withhold the names of officers involved in shootings if they believe that disclosure would put the officers in danger – which they almost always believe. But experts say retaliation against named officers is extremely rare.
"I know thousands of police officers involved in shootings who've been named and there never has been a problem," said David Kling, a former LAPD officer and an expert in lethal force at the University of Missouri. "I don't think the standard pattern of withholding names is a good thing to do."
Cottingham, from PORAC, countered that naming officers may taint them in the public eye, which hurts law enforcement because victims can't chose which officers will respond to 911 calls.
"You can pick your doctor or lawyer, but you can't pick the officer who shows up on your doorstep," Cottingham said. "You've tainted this individual because of your need to fill (news) pages. It's hard to go through an entire career without making a mistake."
But some law enforcement professionals say a change is needed.
"The pendulum has swung too far the other way. It has blocked the ability of the public to know when officers commit misconduct," said Mike Gennaco, a former federal prosecutor who now heads the Los Angeles Office of Independent Review, which monitors complaints against the LA sheriff's department.
"When (cops) commit a violation, why shouldn't they be in the public light?"
MISCONDUCT BURIED
The death of an inmate at Orange County's Theo Lacy jail in October 2006 illustrates how strongly the police protections contrast with the public's right to know.
In a quick investigation, the sheriff's department had arrested a handful of inmates for beating John Derek Chamberlain to death and cleared their deputies of wrongdoing. No other information was released on the names or involvement of jail deputies.
It wasn't until The Orange County Register obtained confidential documents, in March 2007, that the public learned that deputies were accused by inmates of orchestrating the beating. One deputy admitted he was watching "COPS" on television while Chamberlain was stomped to death some 68 feet away. The Register also revealed that deputies changed the jail logs after the beating to show that Chamberlain did not want to move to a safer cell.
After the district attorney empaneled a grand jury, the public also learned that that guards routinely slept on duty and recruited jailhouse bullies as enforcers. Allegations that deputies helped set up the attack were never proven.
Nine sheriff's employees, including two assistant sheriffs, left their jobs in the fallout.
Under state law, the department can't say whether any were fired – and if so what the nature of their misconduct was.
California laws enacted more than 30 years ago to protect honest peace officers from over-zealous internal investigations have become a safety net for bad cops.
The mandates – the most stringent in the nation -- have given troubled officers special privileges that make it harder to get rid of them and nearly impossible for the public to learn whether they've been adequately disciplined.
Sheriff Deputy Jason Chapluk was accused of not adequately watching his post in the death of John Derek Chamberlain. Image taken from video.
Register File Video screen grab
About this series
California's decades-long obsession with public safety has tied the hands of budget-makers who want to spend more on education and social services – and has given power, influence and wealth to the state’s law enforcement community.
This is the final of four parts examining the consequences of our state's tough-on-crime mindset.
In Part One, we showed how concerns over public safety have given power and wealth to the state's law enforcement community.
In Part Two, we examined flaws in California’s prison system. Although it is the most expensive in the nation, it is plagued by outdated sentencing policies, severe overcrowding and a high recidivism rate. Efforts to reform the system are attacked as “soft on crime.”
Last week, in Part Three, we looked at liberal pensions for public safety officers, a benefit that was handed out without regard to the consequences and subsequently became a financial disaster for many municipalities.
In this final installment, we examine how laws intended to protect good police officers from overzealous supervisors turned into a safety net for bad cops.
To read all four parts, and to see slideshows depicting the conditions in state prisons, go to ocregister.com/investigations.
"California is the most restrictive state in the nation, when it comes to police secrecy," said Jim Chanin, a former ACLU attorney in San Francisco. "It's California's dirty little secret."
Consider the effects:
•Former Orange County Assistant Sheriff George Jaramillo went to jail on state corruption charges and is serving another 27 months in federal prison for tax evasion. But Jaramillo sued the county in 2005 for firing him without going through the extensive process mandated by California's Peace Officers' Bill of Rights. A Superior Court judge agreed and Jaramillo stood to collect $362,707 before a federal judge ordered that the money be turned over as restitution.
•In 2006 Berkeley police officers refused – citing state protections - to cooperate with a civilian probe into the theft of heroin, methamphetamines and other drugs from 286 envelopes in the evidence locker. Without police participation, the probe was unable to determine the extent of the security breach. The missing evidence was ultimately blamed on a drug-addicted, 20-year narcotics sergeant, Cary Kent, who was convicted and given home detention for a year.
•A prison guard in Central California was kept on the job after being accused in 2005 of sexual relations with inmates and using his/her position as a union steward to blackmail an administrator. The guard was dismissed by the Department of Corrections, but rehired during a closed-door hearing before the state personnel board. State law prevents the corrections department from releasing the guard's name, exact place of employment or details of the alleged misdeeds.
•A suspected drunken driver alleged that a Los Angeles deputy checked her into a motel rather than arrest her. The deputy later returned when he was off duty and made "inappropriate advances." The department attempted to fire the deputy, but was overturned by the county personnel board, in a confidential hearing without public input. State law prevents the sheriff's department or its auditors from releasing the deputy's name, when the incident occurred or any other details.
"Now it's really hard to get rid of undesirables," said Jim Keysor, the former San Fernando Valley assemblyman who introduced the "Peace Officers' Bill of Rights" legislation in 1976. "They use the 'bill of rights' to protect themselves, and the bosses are really stuck."
Keysor added that the law "escalated into a far bigger thing than I imagined."
EFFORT TO REDUCE FRIVOLOUS LAWSUITS
Keysor and his colleagues say they initially wanted to protect street officers from being used as scapegoats by unscrupulous supervisors. They also wanted to prevent criminal defendants from using the arresting officers' personnel records to make frivolous counter-complaints.
Instead they created a series of statutes that over time, with the help of powerful law enforcement unions and sympathetic courts, planted a steel wall between officers and the public's right to know.
The first law, the "Peace Officers' Bill of Rights," was the brainchild of the Assembly's Criminal Justice Committee in the mid-seventies. At the time, stories circulated about police brass leaning on officers, their wives and their families, to get confessions.
"At the time, you could be forced to take a polygraph examination, forced to do anything (or lose your job)," said Ron Cottingham, president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California.
In essence, the law prevents police supervisors from firing officers without an extensive rebuttal process. The law also dictates how the officer can be treated during interrogations. For instance, the officer cannot be subjected to foul language, or lied to, and must be paid overtime if the interrogation is not conducted during regular work hours.
(In contrast, civilians suspected of crimes can be verbally berated and even lied to by police questioners—all legal under the law.)
The bill was backed at the time by the American Civil Liberties Union and signed into law by then-governor Jerry Brown, a Democrat whose support helped him to gain political favor among rank and file officers.
Used in tandem with the bill is a 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision – Garrity vs. the State of New Jersey. This case, involving patrolmen accused of fixing traffic tickets, holds that officers can be forced to answer questions from their employers, under threat of firing. But those answers cannot subsequently be used against them in criminal court.
Another protection is California Penal Code sections 832.7 and 832.8, which prohibit police disciplinary files from being publicly released without court approval. Passed in 1978, these sections were written by the office of then Attorney General Evelle Younger and carried by Assemblyman Dennis Carpenter, a former FBI agent from Newport Beach. Younger and Carpenter are now deceased. Both had publicly expressed concern that criminal defendants were using the disciplinary records of arresting officers to fight criminal convictions. The new law would prevent defendants from "fishing" through the records, authorities said at the time.
For decades, California police departments and media agencies have wrestled in court over police disciplinary files and other law enforcement records. For the most part, the wall surrounding the officers just got thicker and taller with every court decision.
The California laws protecting police officers contrast strongly with laws in Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, Florida and other "right to work" states where unions have less sway over government.
Public employee and police unions in those states are mainly fraternal organizations with little weight in blocking the flow of public information, officials say.
"The police associations are pretty much neutered. They can scream or cry pretty much all they want, but it doesn't help," said Frank V. Rotondo, executive director of the Georgia Association of Chiefs of Police. "It's very tough watching Peace Officers' Bill of Rights or unions (in other states) protect ineffective law enforcement officers."
California, one of the most unionized of all states, has some of the most powerful police associations in the country. Public safety unions and lobbying groups here doled out more than $33.5 million in political contributions during the last nine years, including $5.5 million to the Democratic Party and $1.95 million to the Republican Party.
PUBLIC'S RIGHT TO KNOW COMES SECOND
California's protections were made virtually impenetrable in 2006 when the California Supreme Court ruled in Copley Press vs. Superior Court that civilian police commissions could not publicly disclose their findings on police misconduct. Some commissions could no longer gain access to personnel files. The unions and lobbyists for the police said these protections were necessary for officer safety.
An attempt by state Senator Gloria Romero (D-East Los Angeles) in June of 2007 to enact new legislation overriding the court ruling drew police from across the state to a packed Capitol hearing room, where they testified that vigilantes would attack their families if their misdeeds were made public.
Police officers and their lobbyists jammed the seats, lined the aisles and stood outside in the hallway, all with the same message: Cops will die if this bill is approved. No real-life examples were provided to back up their assertions.
"It was like a Who's Who of police lobbyists, a full complement of firepower," said Jim Ewert, an attorney for the California Newspaper Publishers' Association, which backed Romero's bill.
The Assembly committee let the bill die without a vote. Another attempt to revive the bill, in 2008, failed before the same committee.
Public records show the committee members received $227,990 from public safety lobbyists during the two-year session that included the two votes on the bill. Orange County public safety groups contributed $17,000 over that period, with $5,900 coming from the Santa Ana Police Officers PAC and $4,500 from the Orange County Professional Firefighters Association.
The argument that the lives of police officers depends on secrecy is not a new one. It has been used to quash public information requests across the United States. But seldom, if ever, can police offer any evidence to back up the argument.
Police groups in Florida and Georgia, where more police information is accessible, could not point to a single case where releasing disciplinary files led to the death or injury of the named officer or his family.
But police in those states also believe that releasing records endangers cops.
"Every year we are bombarded with calls from our officers who've discovered that folks have discovered their (personal) information," said Matt Puckett, deputy executive director of the Florida Police Benevolent Association.
Police departments in California can withhold the names of officers involved in shootings if they believe that disclosure would put the officers in danger – which they almost always believe. But experts say retaliation against named officers is extremely rare.
"I know thousands of police officers involved in shootings who've been named and there never has been a problem," said David Kling, a former LAPD officer and an expert in lethal force at the University of Missouri. "I don't think the standard pattern of withholding names is a good thing to do."
Cottingham, from PORAC, countered that naming officers may taint them in the public eye, which hurts law enforcement because victims can't chose which officers will respond to 911 calls.
"You can pick your doctor or lawyer, but you can't pick the officer who shows up on your doorstep," Cottingham said. "You've tainted this individual because of your need to fill (news) pages. It's hard to go through an entire career without making a mistake."
But some law enforcement professionals say a change is needed.
"The pendulum has swung too far the other way. It has blocked the ability of the public to know when officers commit misconduct," said Mike Gennaco, a former federal prosecutor who now heads the Los Angeles Office of Independent Review, which monitors complaints against the LA sheriff's department.
"When (cops) commit a violation, why shouldn't they be in the public light?"
MISCONDUCT BURIED
The death of an inmate at Orange County's Theo Lacy jail in October 2006 illustrates how strongly the police protections contrast with the public's right to know.
In a quick investigation, the sheriff's department had arrested a handful of inmates for beating John Derek Chamberlain to death and cleared their deputies of wrongdoing. No other information was released on the names or involvement of jail deputies.
It wasn't until The Orange County Register obtained confidential documents, in March 2007, that the public learned that deputies were accused by inmates of orchestrating the beating. One deputy admitted he was watching "COPS" on television while Chamberlain was stomped to death some 68 feet away. The Register also revealed that deputies changed the jail logs after the beating to show that Chamberlain did not want to move to a safer cell.
After the district attorney empaneled a grand jury, the public also learned that that guards routinely slept on duty and recruited jailhouse bullies as enforcers. Allegations that deputies helped set up the attack were never proven.
Nine sheriff's employees, including two assistant sheriffs, left their jobs in the fallout.
Under state law, the department can't say whether any were fired – and if so what the nature of their misconduct was.
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