CDCR

For the second time in as many years, a drug commonly used in executions will become unavailable.

Word’s come out that pentobarbital, a barbituate several states use in lethal injections, will be much harder to find shortly, as the sole FDA-approved manufacturer of the drug is refusing to sell it to states that use it for executions. Pentobarbital, incidentally, became widely adopted just last year as a replacement for sodium thiopental, which was recently discontinued by its US maker.

Both sodium thiopental and pentobarbital are lethal in high doses and have been used as the sole drug in execution procedures. For states that use a three-drug procedure, they’re the first drug, an anesthetic that puts an inmate to sleep and dulls pain before being followed by a paralyzing agent, and finally a drug that stops the inmate’s heart.  Before becoming an execution drug, pentobarbital was known mostly as a drug used to euthanize pets. When it was first adopted, prisoner advocates worried that as a drug not usually used on humans, it might be ineffective–and illegal. That controversy has continued, even as numerous inmates have been put to death with the drug.

States using pentobarbital in executions include Oklahoma, Florida, Ohio, and Texas. California, meanwhile, has a stockpile of  sodium thiopental, which expires in 2014. California obtained its supply from a company in the United Kingdom. European countries have since prohibited companies from selling the drug to US states seeking to use it to carry out the death penalty.

For now, California executions are on hold, as three lawsuits challenging the legality of California’s lethal injection procedure make their ways through federal and state courts. They’re not likely to resume before voters get a chance to weigh in on the death penalty’s future in this state–a voter initiative that would put an end to the practice is working its way towards the November 2012 ballot.

Nicole Jones

By Nicole Jones

Occupy brought the movement to San Quentin State Prison on Monday afternoon. Over 600 people peacefully assembled in front of the prison’s East gate to protest prison conditions. The San Quentin rally is just one of the 15 that took place as part of National Occupy Day in Support of Prisoners.

On a stage outside of the prison gate, people spoke about the impacts of imprisonment for people behind bars and their communities. The protesters called for a number of reforms, including the end to the death penalty in California, the three strikes law, the practice of charging juveniles as adults and solitary confinement.

Tahtauerriak Sessoms, 21, spoke about her experience in solitary confinement. “I came out, I felt like an animal,” she said, “I was told I was nothing and I believed it.” She’s now a youth organizer with All of Us or None, a national organization working for the rights of prisoners and felons, and teaches youth about their rights when approached by the police or while in prison.

Organizers of Monday event are seeking change at both the state and federal levels, and are planning an “Occupy the Justice Department” action in Washington, D.C. on April 24.

nibaq

A UC-Berkeley lecturer is suing the school over getting wrapped up in a gay sex sting in a library bathroom. Police evidently stake out certain campus bathrooms known for sexual activity. The lecturer, who admittedly was there to “meet someone,” was subsequently arrested for “loitering around a toilet.” Bruce Nickerson, the attorney representing the lecturer in a class action, says UCPD’s practice of running bathroom stings is an assault on gay rights:

What happened at U.C. Berkley was as follows. The restroom in one of the major libraries gained a reputation, probably deserved, for being a place where gay persons met. The overwhelming majority of them, I believe, meet and then go elsewhere – some small, insignificant minority possibly engaging in conduct in closed bathroom stalls, which, while odious, is not illegal according to the California Supreme Court, several cases of which I argued.

And if not illegal, Nickerson says, what is UCPD doing devoting officers to library bathrooms, where they pose as men seeking sexual partners?

Because they are, I believe, prejudiced against gay persons. The best proof of that is they never, ever do that kind of a sting targeting non-monetary heterosexual sex, ever. I repeat, ever… What we need to know is that this is the last bastion of assault against gay rights. In other words, they can no longer arrest people in their bedrooms as they did in Lawrence v. Texas… But what they do is they twist the nation’s public sex and lewd conduct laws into criminalizing conduct by gays, that when straights do it, it’s ignored.

Naturally, not all see these stings as an assault on civil rights. A KALW listener who went to Berkeley, called in with his own perspective:

When I was a 19-year-old undergraduate at Berkeley, I experienced what Mr. Nickerson refers to as “cruising” at Moffitt Library. It was finals week and the library was full. I had to go Number Two real bad. I hurry to the bathroom, find the only open stall, sit down, oh, what great relief. And then, sitting on the toilet, I see to the right, there’s a large hole, about three inches in diameter in the divider between the stalls. From my angle, sitting up straight, I can see the guy in the next stall has his pants all the way down and his legs spread. Very nervously, I reach for the toilet paper to the left, keeping an eye on the hole to the right. Suddenly, this face appears and this guy is bending down, looking through the hole at me. Frightened, I instinctively yell out, “Aah” and hit the partition.  I took care of business as quickly as I could, and got out of there, but let me tell you that was a very upsetting experience.  I felt violated.

I later noticed that it was rampant throughout the UC Berkeley Library system.  Once I told a guy in the bathroom at Doe Library– it was clear he was in there for sex: you can tell when a guy leaves the urinal, goes to pretend to wash his hands at the sink, finishes at the sink, yet doesn’t leave the bathroom, oh and you noticed another guy standing in a stall looking over the door– that the bathroom was not a place for that and why not go somewhere else for that.  This guy had the audacity to tell me to leave.

So, I have no sympathy for Mr. Nickerson’s absurd contention that this is a civil rights issue, an attack on men because they are gay. What these men who are soliciting and having sex in the public bathrooms are doing is taking a public space in which people have every expectation to be able to defecate or urinate or wash their hands and faces in peace, and turning it into an unsafe space with guys lurking with the intention to have sex with somebody– could be you if they perceive that you have given them the right signal.  It is violating the rights of the others… Men who are not looking for sex can feel harassed in these cruising bathrooms.

Tough call… criminalizing consensual sex? Or protecting the rights of defecators in a public bathroom?

Rina Palta

Hunger strikers have been protesting conditions in the state's Security Housing Units, like this one at Pelican Bay State Prison.

By Nicole Jones

A spokesperson with California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has confirmed that an inmate on a hunger strike at Corcoran State Prison died on Feb. 2 after refusing food for four days.

Gomez began fasting to protest conditions in the Administration Segregation Unit at Corcoran. Over thirty inmates housed in the isolation unit at Corcoran had also been refusing food since January for the same reason. On Feb. 13, all inmates resumed eating, according to CDCR’s spokesperson Terry Thornton.

Correctional Healthcare Service spokeswoman Nancy Kincaid said nothing in the preliminary autopsy suggests starvation was the cause of death. Gomez was under medical care prior to hunger strike, suggesting he may have been in poor health which was further complicated by fasting.

Once he started missing meals, Kincaid said, the medical staff monitored him daily. The effects of starvation typically start to show in the third week of fasting, but someone who is diabetic or has other health complications is going to feel the impacts quicker, she said.

Gomez was serving a life sentence for first-degree murder. He was placed in the segregation unit to await disciplinary decisions following a January battery assault on an inmate with a deadly weapon.

Isaac Ontiveros, spokesperson for the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity coalition, said inmates in Corcoran’s segregation unit report being kept in “horrendous conditions” for months after they’ve served their assigned terms. In an open letter to CDCR’s Director Mathew Cate and Corcoran Chief Deputy Warden C. Gipson last December, strikers listed demands that included access to educational and rehabilitative programming, adequate and timely medical care, and timely hearings on their cases and petitions.

Thornton said revisions to its policies regarding security threat group management and changes to the gang validation process is nearly complete. She anticipates the revision will go out for legislators and inmate advocacy groups to review near the end of this month.

When prisoners are looking to clear their names, they often turn to the same place: the Innocence Project. Across the country, branches of the project have helped exonerate 289 prisoners using post-conviction DNA testing. Thirteen of those cases were handled by the Northern California Innocence Project. I spoke with Linda Starr, legal director of the Northern California Innocence Project, in her office at Santa Clara University’s law school.

RINA PALTA: So, just to start out, tell me a little bit about the Innocence Project and how it started.

LINDA STARR: Well, we started in 2001 in response to word that there was going to be legislation passed that was going to permit post-conviction DNA testing. And we got involved in helping craft that legislation and then realized that there needed to be something in place to help inmates access that kind of post-conviction DNA testing. So we started as a law school clinical program here at Santa Clara University that year, 2001.

PALTA: So what are the most common issues you see in these cases? Is it usually an eyewitness who was wrong about who they saw? Or is it s procedural thing, where prosecutors disregarded evidence? What are the most common reasons you find for wrongful convictions?

STARR: Often we see a combination of factors. So we’ll see something like a witness gets it wrong. One of the reasons they get it wrong is that the police maybe fudged a line at procedure, or subtly – and maybe even accidentally – influenced how the identification was made. And then prosecutors fail to turn over some of that evidence that would have demonstrated how that eyewitness identification wasn’t done properly.

PALTA: So why does that happen? Why do police fudge line-ups or why do prosecutors put things, little inconsistencies, out of their minds? Is it just a case of being overworked, or is it, you know, this person’s been convicted of other stuff and “I’m sure we’re getting them for something that they could have done”? How does this happen?

STARR: Well, I think for police sometimes there is that, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” and “If they didn’t do this, they did something else, so let’s just get ’em” kind of mentality. But I’m going to give them a little more credit than that in some cases. I think that, many times, they think they have the right person. And they’re afraid of losing the right person, unless they somehow kind of support the identification in some way. And I think overwhelmingly there is this tendency – it’s a human tendency, it’s not just law enforcement that has it – but the human tendency of tunnel vision. They have a version of the story that makes sense to them, that demonstrates something to them, and they just fail to recognize the importance of something that’s inconsistent with that version.

PALTA: So one of the strangest phenomena in wrongful convictions to me is the false confession – people confessing to something that they haven’t done. And I was wondering if you had any insight into why that ever happens.

STARR: That is a really interesting one, and for many of us that have been involved in the criminal justice system, that was one of the hardest ones to sort of wrap our heads around. Why would somebody admit to having done something so terrible if they hadn’t done it? And there has been a fair amount of sociological research on that. And it turns out that some of what have been considered false confessions never really were confessions to begin with: they were suppositions. Say, for example, somebody has been arrested. And they are believed to have been the perpetrators of some horrible homicide. And they said, “I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it.” And then they are asked, “Do you ever drink?” “Well, yes, I drink.” “Do you ever drink to blackout?” “Yes, I have. I’ve had blackouts before.” “So isn’t it possible that you blacked out and committed this?” “Well, I guess it’s possible I did that.” Then that becomes a confession.

PALTA: So let’s talk about Maurice Caldwell specifically and his case. You guys helped him prove that he had a mistrial and he eventually did get out of prison. Has he been able to get any financial compensation for the time he spent there?

STARR: He has not yet sought any financial compensation, but I do believe he’s entitled to some. In order to be entitled to some under the statutory scheme, he’s going to have to be able to demonstrate that he’s factually innocent.

PALTA: So you say that you’ve identified the actual perpetrators of this murder that Maurice was at first convicted for. Has there been any effort on the part of law enforcement or the D.A.’s office in San Francisco to pursue who you say are the true murderers?

STARR: Not that I know of. And that has been actually an astonishing fact for me. We have one of the actual participants – who actually confessed to having done it – described in great detail how he participated. He actually drew a diagram of the scene, and who stood where, which exactly matched the surviving victim’s description of the incident. And, interestingly enough, did not correspond with the supposed eyewitness’ identification and description of the incident. We gave all contact information and any information we had about any of these participants to law enforcement. As far as we know, not a single effort has been made to apprehend the actual perpetrators of that homicide. Including an admitted confession from a perpetrator, who after having been named as a perpetrator in this offense – law enforcement made no effort to apprehend him – he went ahead and killed another person. He is currently incarcerated in Nevada for having shot and killed a taxi driver there. I don’t understand law enforcement’s abdication of their responsibility here.

Maurice Caldwell's conviction was overturned, and after 20 years incarcerated, he walked out of custody the 28th of March 2011. Photo courtesy of: Paige Kaneb

• Maurice Caldwell's quest to prove his innocenceBy Julia LundbergDownload

It’s the early 90s. Young people are watching MTV, their parents Twin Peaks. Maurice Caldwell is 22 years old and lives in the Alemany projects in Bernal Heights, on the same streets where he grew up. He works in an industrial warehouse in Hayward and likes to hang out with his friends.

But, he admits today, he was also a troublemaker. “I wasn’t a choir boy,” says Caldwell. “I sold drugs, from time to time.” And, from time to time, he’d come in contact with police.

So when Caldwell was picked up by police and taken to the county jail on 850 Bryant Street in the morning hours one day in September 1990, he thought nothing of it. Until he learned that he was accused of murder.

On June 30, 1990, on the 900 block of Ellsworth Street in the Alemany projects, a man named Judy Acosta was murdered near a car. Police found one woman who witnessed the killing as she stood at her apartment window. When police first questioned her, she told them that the shooters “do not live around here” and she didn’t “know their names.”

Two weeks later, police returned with a picture of the woman’s neighbor, Maurice Caldwell. According to what was later presented at trial, the woman identified Caldwell as the shooter, and said she’d seen him standing under a streetlight when Acosta was shot. Whether the streetlight is even visible from the woman’s window became a big question, but not until many years later. At the trial, no one questioned her testimony, and Caldwell was disappointed with his lawyer. “I had a so-called lawyer,” Caldwell recalls. “He was totally ineffective, totally. He didn’t do anything.”

The prosecutor, Al Giannini, was an assistant district attorney in San Francisco at the time. He says it’s not surprising the witness changed her story. Nor did he hide that fact at trial. “I think it’s just a sort of apparent inconsistency that happens when people describe things, but if you talk with them a little bit, it’s clear that they mean the same thing,” says Al Giannini.

Giannini stands by the witness, Mary Cobbs, to this day. “It is my personal opinion that Mary Cobbs was an entirely credible witness. And certainly the jury accepted it and she was very compelling,” Caldwell says. “I think if you had seen her or met her, anybody would immediately dismiss the idea that she was fabricating. And it was just extraordinarily unlikely that she was mistaken because of the circumstances.”

Caldwell’s trial for first-degree murder proceeded quickly. What would usually be a year’s worth of preparation was condensed into six months. “They didn’t take the time it needed. They just wanted to get away with my character – a bad character – and that was all that was gonna lead to the conviction,” Caldwell says today.

Two weeks after the trial ended, then 23-year-old Maurice Caldwell was locked up at San Quentin state prison. “I had 27 years to life. That means, when they say ‘to life’, that could mean the entire life,” Caldwell explains.

But Caldwell wasn’t going to let his life pass by. Unlike other inmates, who hung out in the yard, made acquaintances, and started to build a life for themselves in prison, Caldwell became a self-styled student of the law. “They got bingo nights, sports, games, working programs… I didn’t want to do none of that. All I wanted to do was to deal with the law,” says Caldwell. He asked himself why he was in there. “It was many a night just wondering what was going on and then just hoping they would open the door and let me out,” he recalls.

Caldwell wrote letters to attorneys all over the country, trying to convince them of his innocence. After 17 years in prison, he finally got an answer. It was from Paige Kaneb, a laywer with the Northern California Innocence Project. She went through thousands of pages of the trial transcript, scrutinizing all the facts surrounding the one witness who testified. The witness, Kaneb says, “went from saying, ‘They don’t live around here and I don’t know their nicknames’ to ‘it’s Twan, who lives next door to me.’” Immediately, Kaneb saw a problem.

Paige Kaneb had a list of dozens of people who had lived in the area and might have seen something. She searched for them one by one and eventually found one person who had been out there that night almost 20 years earlier, and could help her find two other witnesses. “Both of them told us who the two real shooters were,” says Kaneb. “For both of them it was the first time they ever seen anyone get shot and killed so it stood out of something in their minds.”

Kaneb says that unlike the police, she was careful about jostling the witnesses’ memories. “I interviewed them separately. They hadn’t spoken to each other. None of them had spoken to Maurice or the guy who confessed, who is now in prison for another murder.”

But it was hard to get the different parts of the court system to understand the importance of seeking justice both for Caldwell and the murder victim’s family, says Kaneb. Kaneb says it was an impossible process. “I kept thinking that at some point, someone was going to care about who really did this, who really killed this guy. It was like they didn’t care at all.”

The whole process of overturning Caldwell’s conviction took more than three years, during which his mother died.

Eventually, Caldwell was released from prison. A judge found that Caldwell’s defense attorney had been incompetent and overturned his conviction. While Caldwell and Kaneb believe justice has been served, Giannini’s disappointed with the outcome. He says the reasons for Caldwell’s release have “nothing to do with guilt or innocence.”

On March 28, 2011, Caldwell walked out of custody, met up with his sister and his lawyers, and went to his favorite restaurant: McDonalds.

“I’ll always remember that day,” Caldwell says. He has a photo on his phone of a smiling just-freed face. But it was a bitter day as well. He says he would have liked to hug his mother and grandmother – and prove to them that he wasn’t guilty of murder.

Caldwell is not a rarity. He’s just one of hundreds of former inmates whose convictions have been overturned after spending years in prison. Now, Caldwell is working on his case, hoping to prove not only that he had a mistrial, but he’s factually innocent. He’s hoping to sue the state and get compensation for the time he served.

Fyrfli

• Crosscurrents: The innocence showBy Rina PaltaDownload

On Monday, we devoted an entire show to wrongful convictions–how they happen, and how they can be prevented. I’ll post each piece separately, but the audio above is the full half-hour.

Layoffs are hitting the prison system--like at Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy.

The reality of layoffs in the Calif. DOC Which haven’t really happened before, even in tough economic times.  (correctionsone.com)

DHS budget proposes discontinuing 287(g) in some jurisdictions Which could signal a philosophical change in the undocumented immigration department. (multiamerican.scpr.org)

San Quentin prison riot Sends four to hospital. (Marin Independent Journal)

Occupy arrestee was charged in 2010 protest And now more recent protests.  (San Francisco Chronicle)

Community policing coming to BART In wake of community pressure for change. (Bay Citizen)

SF key officials embroiled in byzantine legal case Involving city contracts and multiple departments. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Juvenile crime in California has been steadily declining for several decades,reaching an all-time low in 2010. What hasn’t changed much, however, is the disproportionate number of youth of color who are being incarcerated.

This is the focus of organizations like the W. Haywood Burns Institute. The San Francisco-based nonprofit has been working for years to help counties remake their juvenile justice systems so they’re equitable. It’s going to become more and more important as California begins to phase out its statewide youth prison system in favor of county alternatives.

It’s a controversial proposal from Governor Jerry Brown, and one that’s likely to be implemented by 2014. KALW News Director Holly Kernan sat down with Burns Institute Founder and Executive Director James Bell to talk about the closure of the Division of Juvenile Justice.

HOLLY KERNAN: California Youth Authority (CYA) is now the Division of Juvenile Justice (DJJ). Give us a little snap shot of who is in the DJJ and what is the day in a life like?

JAMES BELL: Currently, there are between 1,000 and 1,130 young people and they are supposed to be those children with serious emotional problems or such serious offenses that being brought back to the camps or ranches of the local counties is not considered to be viable option for them. And their days are 23 hours in, depending upon the facility.

KERNAN: Wait, so they are locked-up 23 hours a day?

BELL: Some portion of those young people are definitely locked-up 23 hours a day. Others are in dormitory settings. They are separated in a variety of categories, I believe enhance violence: north-south, blue-red, those kinds of categories.

KERNAN: So, the same like Saint Quentin, for example.

BELL: Absolutely. And if you go, you wouldn’t really see a huge difference in terms of what about their usefulness makes these places different. And so, the one thing you can say is, for those young people that have serious mental heath issues, they will be in a continuous program for a significant period of time. So, there is a consistency there. But that’s about all that you can say about it. And no one that believes that it should exist in its current fashion thinks that it should exist because it’s so great. They are just concerned about what the option is for bringing these young people back home. Even the proponents of DJJ are not saying that we are proponents because you are really destroying a great program. They are just saying…

KERNAN: We don’t know what else to do…

BELL: … and this way we know they are safe.

KERNAN: So, hypothetically let’s say you are in charge of the DJJ. What would you do?

BELL: I would start to realign and try to figure out a way to have same kind of programming in communities close to home.

KERNAN: And realignment is what we are doing with the adult prison system which is sending most offenders back to the local level.

BELL: You can call it devolution, you can call it “back home.” I mean, however you want to phrase it, do that! But I would do that very systematically. I would want to get demographic profile of all the young people that are there. Which counties are sending us the most young people? And what is that these young people present with that we need to deal with?

KERNAN: The DJJ has shrunk quite a lot in the last few years. From 10,000 in 1997 to about 1,000 now.

BELL: Built for 6,000, running at 10,000, so tremendously overcrowded back in those days.

KERNAN: Yes, and extremely criticized. What were the big criticisms?

BELL: The criticisms were that there was no treatment or services. It basically was…

KERNAN: School for gladiators.

BELL: Yes. The whole point of juvenile justice system is to make sure that we do some habilitation and some rehabilitation, so that you won’t go on to be an adult chronic offender. You are supposed to be there to be getting needs addressed that you have expressed as a juvenile, as a young person. Essentially, this was the place where it was guards in a pod, hundreds of young people in dorms, and if anything happens the guards would throw tear gas left, throw tear gas right, and call for backup or the SWAT team. So, you would have to declare a gang affiliation to be protected. It was just horrible!

There was no real interactive model between the young people and the people that were supposed to be serving them. So it just became custody and control. And as we know, there were beatings, there were deaths. There were absurd instances where kids with special education needs were supposed to get education but the facilities people thought they were too dangerous. So your classroom was just cage! Literally, you can imagine the absurdity that has to happen when you are non-interactive and you go to custody and control. That’s what it was.

KERNAN: Now the call is to shut down the DJJ altogether. Why is that happening now do you think?

BELL: There have been calls to shut down these facilities for many, many years. And the reasons were what we’ve just talked about: Treatment wasn’t right, it was extremely expensive for that kind of treatment. Recidivism rates were crazy – between 60-70% range. It was like, why are we doing this? But those arguments had no salience because of fear, the way politicians frame public safety… it just got no traction. Literally, the state’s fiscal crisis is the reason because folks are looking at why shouldn’t we do something differently.

Now in fairness, the populations were going down and I believe that’s because the locals were beginning to see that sending their young people away to the Youth Authority as it was then, wasn’t productive, wasn’t helpful. And so there is a movement out there in the youth justice field to look at rational policies, to become less anecdotal, more based on data and objective screens and probation violation grids and those kinds of things. That resulted in less counties sending their people anyway.

And you could really see a north-south split. Southern California being the one that are most sending, and northern California sending least.

KERNAN: Sending fewer people to CYA?

BELL: Yes, sending fewer people to CYA. And so…

KERNAN: So that sort of gave it a sense that we don’t need this.

BELL: That’s right. The CYA was also unaffordable in its current construction. So once it’s like, we cannot afford these recidivism rates and this expense at the state level where the county is bearing very little to no expense – we cannot afford this.

KERNAN: So is there a danger here? A lot of people are advocates of shutting down the Division of Juvenile Justice. Is there a danger that young kids are going to be sent to adult prison?

BELL: There’s always danger. There’s always unintended consequences. I think it’s important for those questions to be in the forefront and for people to keep an eye on what’s happening. This is not an all win-win situation. We all know that oftentimes, justice policy is determined by local department heads. So, whether you, for example, sent young people to the adult system with Proposition 21 or any of those things is a decision made by the head prosecutor in those counties.

I believe that if we do bring them home, it is incumbent for people to say: We are watching you, prosecutor, to see if you are going to now send our young people into the adult system, and what is the rationale for doing that. Because, public safety is not a rationale when you have expense and a recidivism rate like we have in California. It’s not working.

So this whole notion of “tough on crime” – it’s up to the local people in that community to raise this issue of, why are we sending them to the adult court? What are we getting for that? Are we just getting retribution and a pound of flesh? Is that what you’re saying as the DA? Well, we live in the communities these people are coming from, and we’re not saying that’s what we want. So advocacy will always be required. We must always be vigilant all of the time when it comes to social justice.

KERNAN: So, according to the Violence Policy Center, Alameda County has one of the highest youth homicide rates in the state second only to Monterey County. What are you seeing being done in places like Oakland to deal with kids killing other kids?

BELL: My sense is that in terms of Oakland, I feel that they are hamstrung. There’s a new police chief… This has been a neighborhood that has had youth homicide at an alarming rate for a long while.

KERNAN: You’re talking about east Oakland?

BELL: I’m talking about the City of Oakland. My sense is that they are at a quandary about what to do. I don’t think there are any magic bullets or answers, but one thing I do know is that you have to engage the young people that are participating in these acts themselves in their communities in beginning to solve these problems. Unfortunately, Oakland has not been able to get past suppression in order to get to intervention and engagement. Because the urge for suppression from the citizens is powerful.

KERNAN: So what do you mean when you say that?

BELL: I mean that the theme is suppress. We have the 100 blocks that Mayor Quan has talked about, and there’s this notion of, we can’t intervene until we get it under control. Meaning suppress the crime, do what it takes for suppression.

KERNAN: When you talk to people living in those neighborhoods that is sometimes what they are saying too…

BELL: Who wants to be in an unsafe neighborhood? It’s absolutely true. But, what I’m saying is that the two have to live together. You can’t suppress, you can’t arrest, you can’t “public service announcement” your way out of these kinds of issues that have violence at these rates. You have to intervene and engage people who are a part of this issue.

KERNAN: Isn’t that what Measure Y has done with the cease fire project and with putting outreach workers on the street at midnight? Isn’t that what they’re trying to do?

BELL: That’s a start. Absolutely. But clearly, it needs much more scale.

KERNAN: What do you think does work in terms of violence prevention? And can you point to some concrete examples.

BELL: I think it’s very hard. But, when it’s framed as “violence prevention” as opposed to “neighborhood well-being,” then I think we have set ourselves up to fail because violence is a by-product of hurt people hurting people. So what we need to do is in a real way invest in those communities. And, actually, those are the communities that are first cut and so you can’t prevent violence in the context of a larger deprivation of neighborhoods and societies, which they can see. And so to me, you have to engage that. So that’s right, take those eight blocks, take those 10 blocks, and get people what they need in terms of services. That, I believe, is the best violence prevention. Hard to do, it takes courage, and it takes investment.