California, Barbary Coast for Juveniles

Image from Flickr, by takomabibelot

The U.S. is the only nation in the world that sentences juveniles to life in prison without the possibility of parole. California has 309 juveniles serving such life sentences, more than any other state. Many of these youths were found guilty of crimes committed with adults, yet the adults received lighter sentences.

A new bill that would give juvenile lifers a second lease on life recently passed the California Assembly. Under the legislation, sponsored by Leland Yee, of San Francisco, juveniles sentenced to life without parole, who have served 15 or more years with good behavior and who have shown remorse, can have their sentences reduced to 25 years to life and ultimately the opportunity for parole. The bill still must pass the state senate, but passage is expected, according the Huffington Post.

Perfect Liberal Storm: Guns, Homophobia, Child Abuse and Juvenile Justice

Three years ago, at the age of 14, Brandon McInerney walked into class and shot a gay classmate, Lawrence King, with a .22-caliber handgun he had in his backpack and then calmly walked out of the room. McInerney is now being tried as an adult and faces 53 years to life, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The prosecution claims that McInerney is a neo-Nazi and is calling the murder a hate crime. However, witnesses testified that McInerney mostly hung out with the black athletes at his school, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, drawing into question the neo-Nazi claims. In fact, a black friend testified at the trial that he was unaware of any Nazi affiliations. Regardless, McInerney’s views on race are irrelevant to the case. However, it is clear that his actions were motivated by homophobia, which would certainly make it a hate crime.

The defense is saying that McInerney was provoked by King’s repeated advances, making the crime manslaughter, not murder. Yet in order to commit the crime he had to smuggle a gun into school, which would make it a preplanned and deliberate crime. Furthermore, being propositioned, even aggressively, is not a provocation that justifies violence, let alone premeditated lethal violence.

The case is being called the highest profile gay bashing since Matthew Shepard was murdered. It clearly highlights how acceptable homophobia still is in our culture and how far we are still are from having schools that are safe for all students. However, the case also brings up numerous other troubling issues, such as when, if ever, should a child be tried as an adult, or how did a 14-year-old have access to a gun in the first place? There is also the question of whether some adults fueled events leading up to the murder or if they could have done a better job in preventing the bullying and murder.

Let’s start with the obvious. Murder is wrong. Bullying is wrong. Homophobia is wrong. A well-adjusted, mature, empathetic and compassionate person, even at the age of 14, does not do such things. So what was wrong with McInerney? According to the Wikipedia account, his mom was a speed freak and his father was violent, shooting her in the arm on one occasion and attempting to strangle her on another. His father ultimately left, but he called child protective services five times out of concern for the safety of his son, accusing the mother of running a drug house.

Considering his home-life, McInerney may very well have lacked maturity, compassion and empathy. Furthermore, he may have been suffering stress, anxiety and even PTSD from the violence, aggression and lack of emotional support at home. This does not justify his crime nor take away his culpability. However, a child growing up under such conditions might very well lack the coping mechanisms necessary to deal with any anxiety producing situation, particularly unwelcome advances by another person. One might reasonably question whether trying him as an adult and imprisoning him for 53 years or longer is fair or just of even in the public interest.

While McInerney’s situation is tragic, his victim’s is even more so. King had been bullied about his sexuality since the third grade. The Wikipedia account said that the bullying intensified in 7^th grade, when he started to wear women’s clothing to school. However, there was something else tragic about King’s life that may have been independent of the bullying. He seemed to have an obsessive and dangerous need for attention. For example, he supposedly taunted other boys, saying “I know you want me,” and a Newsweek expose said that he told others in the locker room while they were dressing that he thought they were “hot.” He also apparently walked into the middle of a basketball game to ask McInerney to be his Valentine in front of his friends, which led McInerney’s friends to tease him and may have been the tipping point for McInerney.

Such provocative behavior by a middle school child of any gender or sexual orientation is often an indication that there are deeper issues. In King’s case, there were. When he was still a baby, his father abandoned him and his mother was addicted to drugs, according to the Newsweek article, leading to his adoption at the age of two. He was later prescribed medicine for ADHD and diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder, a condition in which a child fails to form relationships with caregivers. He was also in trouble numerous times for vandalism and shoplifting and there were reports that his adopted father was beating him.

While it is clear that both King and McInerney had troubled childhoods, one might also wonder about the other children at the school, many of whom knew that something terrible was in the works and did nothing to stop it. For example, McInerney tried to recruit some of his friends to help him assault King. They refused, but they also did not report his threats to the police or school officials. A friend even testified that he said he was going to bring a gun to school a day before the shooting, yet the friend said nothing to the authorities (Sacramento Bee). The Newsweek expose said that McInerney told King’s friends to say goodbye to him because they would never see him again, yet even his own friends did not report the threats.

King’s adopted father and some of the teachers at the school accused former Assistant Principal Joy Epstein, who is openly gay, of pushing her “gay agenda” by encouraging King’s flamboyant behavior. However, this is a frivolous and desperate attempt to oversimplify a tragedy and redirect blame onto an easy target and it is a distraction from the fact that many adults hold some culpability for the affair. For example, how did a 14-year-old boy have unsupervised access to a gun in the first place? According to the Wikipedia account, McInerney had used the murder weapon for target practice in the past. Did he obtain it from his father, who had once shot his mother?

King’s family sued the school, accusing them of contributing to his death by allowing him to wear makeup and girls’ clothing to school. However, the school could not legally stop him from wearing girls’ clothing. Furthermore, dress codes should not be based on other peoples’ bigotry or fears of how bigots might react. Rather, schools and society at large must ensure the safety of everyone, even if they behave in ways that make some people uncomfortable. It is here where the school seems to have failed. Considering the history of bullying and King’s provocative and outrageous behavior, it would seem unlikely that teachers and administrators were unaware of the threats to King or the conflict with McInerney. Indeed, there had been a confrontation between the two the day prior to the shooting and many teachers were aware of it, but apparently they did not see the potential for it to escalate into something much worse.

Cruel and Unusual: California’s Educational/Justice System

Overcrowded California Prison

California already has an adult illiteracy rate of 23%, a figure that is likely to grow as adult-education classes are slashed in the desperate scramble to close California’s remaining $15.4 billion budget gap. This will exacerbate a trend that began in 2009, when the state relaxed restrictions on how school boards spend state money. According to the Bay Citizen, 75% of California’s school districts have already made cuts to adult education since the spending restrictions were lifted.

California’s high illiteracy rate reflects, in part, its high incarceration rate. It is estimated that more than 60% of adult prisoners, and over 80% of juvenile convicts, are functionally illiterate. Considering that those who receive reading support classes have a 16% recidivism rate, compared with 70% for those who do not receive any reading support (see the Educational Cyber Playground website), it would make fiscal sense to redirect funding from incarceration to education, particularly adult education. Boosting funding for k-12 literacy programs might also help reduce the number of first-time offenders.

Theoretically, this could happen as a result of the recent Supreme Court ruling requiring the state to reduce its prison population by 33,000 inmates. At a cost of nearly $20,000 per prisoner per year (see Legislative Analyst’s Office report), simply releasing or paroling 33,000 prisoners could save the state as much as $660 million per year, plenty to bolster the adult education program and maybe even provide a little extra for K-12 education.

Of course this is pie in the sky. While the right wing has fanned the flames of hysteria with paranoid fantasies of murderers and rapists being dumped into family-friendly communities, all early-release prisoners must be signed-off by the governor, who is not dumb enough to release any convicted rapists, molesters or murderers, as it would likely come back and bite him in the ass. Indeed, few prisoners are likely to be released at all. The state has at least two years to reduce its current population of 143,435 inmates down to 109,805 (still far above its 80,000 inmate capacity), and the possibility of petitioning for further extensions. Most of the reductions will occur through transfers to county jails, thus deferring costs to the counties, or to out of state for-profit facilities. More reductions will likely occur by transferring juveniles in adult lockup to the California Youth Authority, or to county youth facilities, pushing many nonviolent youth offenders back into the public school system and increasing its financial needs.

In spite of logic or common sense, Samuel Alito, in his dissenting opinion, said the decision was “gambling with the safety of Californians,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported, while Republican assembly leader Connie Conway (Tulare), said Californians “could be at serious risk of violent crime.” Antonin Scalia, in his dissenting opinion, said “terrible things are sure to happen” (San Francisco Bay Citizen).

The only terrible thing that is going to happen is that California is going to continue to lock up its residents at one of the highest rates in the U.S. (458 per 100,000), which has the highest incarceration rate in the world (502 per 100,000), at an enormous financial and human cost to taxpayers, families and communities. Considering that most inmates are in for nonviolent offenses, particularly drug offenses that can more cheaply and humanely be addressed through drug rehab programs and education, and considering the desperate fiscal state of the state, there is really no justification continuing to lock up so many people.

One also might consider who is the bigger threat to Californians: 33,000 nonviolent offenders allowed back on the streets or 600,000 millionaires and numerous corporations that refuse to pay their share of the taxes? Alito and Scalia could be lumped into the latter group, not only for their wealth, but for their utter disregard for the safety of the prisoners themselves. Indeed, the main reason for the Supreme Court ruling was that conditions for inmates are so horrific that incarceration in California is considered cruel and unusual punishment. Suicidal prisoners are held in phone booth-size holding pens without toilets, while mentally ill prisoners sometimes must wait up to a year for treatment. A single prison doctor may have a caseload of 700 inmates. Medical care is so deplorable that it, alone, is responsible for a death per week (Los Angeles Times).

Youth Crime Down—California to Close Its Juvenile Prisons

Image by Still Burning

In a seemingly intelligent and compassionate move, the California Assembly Budget Committee voted to support Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposal to eliminate the state’s youth prison system. This would save the state $242 million over the next three years. The problem is that youth incarceration would be passed on to California’s 58 counties, all of which are struggling with their own budget crises. Brown promised to compensate counties with revenues from the June 6 ballot initiative to extend taxes, which is essentially saying he’ll pay them back after he returns from Vegas.

Brown wants to divest the state of all interests in running its youth prisons because they have been operating under a court order to improve their facilities, an order that has mostly ignored due to lack of funding. The system is in shambles and most agree that it is beyond repair. It is also a hugely unnecessary system, as juvenile crime has dropped dramatically in recent years. The DJJ population has declined from 10,000 to 1,300 since 1996.

In states across the country, juvenile crime has been dropping, despite the fact that youth homelessness, hunger and child abuse have been rising. In 2004, youths committed just 4.8% of all murders, the lowest number recorded up until then. Crime by 12-20-year olds fell by 66% in the 1990s, to its lowest point in 30 years. These trends have largely continued over the past decade.

Remarkably, as adult crime rises for people in the 35-45 year old range, and as adults continue to gut social services, education, and programs that serve children, juvenile crime continues to decline. Yet we continue to hear paranoid rants about out of control kids running amok in the streets and the need for more repressive measures to control youth. Oakland, for example, is attempting to implement a sweeping gang injunction that strips away civil rights for large numbers of youth based on Oakland Police profiling without regard for evidence.