Shawn Thorpe

Michael Minor is chief deputy secretary of the Division of Juvenile Justice at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. It’s his job to help shape the future for this department that’s potentially on the budget chopping block. KALW’s Holly Kernan spoke with Minor about what the role of the Division of Juvenile Justice.

MICHAEL MINOR: The Division of Juvenile Justice currently provides services to, as you said, about a thousand young men and 31 young women who are the most troubled youth in California. They are the most serious, violent offenders and also sex offenders. So the population that we are providing services to are young men and young women who have gone through the county system, who need further services, and those services are best provided at this time by the Division of Juvenile Justice.

HOLLY KERNAN: And do you consider these young people a threat to public safety?

MINOR: I believe these young people are troubled youth who have some serious and violent crimes that need a great deal of treatment and rehabilitation services to prepare them to go back into the community so that they won’t make those same mistakes and create victims or commit additional crimes.

KERNAN: So let’s assume I’m a young man, I’m 19 years old, I’m in for felony assault…. What does my day look like?

MINOR: If they’re not a high school graduate, they should be involved in school – or either if they’re a high school graduate, they should be involved in vocational programs. As an example in the 2010-2011 academic year, we graduated over 556 young men and women. They either received the GED, or high school diploma, or a certificate of vocational or technical trade. Also we are implementing a large array of treatment groups. It may be, if you are a sex offender, you may be involved in sex behavior treatment program groups. If they identify that you have high violence, you may be included in the anger-interruption therapy group, or you may be in Counterpoint. Those are some of the groups that we offer, and then other groups are just life skills or other pro-social activities that will help build character and help the young people get ready to go back into our communities.

KERNAN: Now one highly publicized case of treatment inside of the Division of Juvenile Justice was the revelation that kids were being educated in cages because they were seen as a threat to public safety of the teachers. Is that still happening?

MINOR: No. Several years back there were some of the most violent young men who were being housed in, what was called at the time, the Special Management Program. In there were individual education booths. They were identified and they would be put in the booths and the teacher would sit outside and provide education in that manner to keep the young men from becoming violent, involved in violence. Those no longer exist; those booths no longer exist. Now what we do, we have a behavior treatment program that’s for the most difficult young people. It has a cap of 24 young people, can be in that housing, that living unit, and there’s four teachers for each of those five youths, so you’ll have five young men in a classroom and you would have one youth correctional counselor and one teacher in that classroom to deliver services in that manner, so the picture that you may have seen some years ago, where a young man, some young men were sitting in booths, no, that’s not the case any longer.

KERNAN: And you say that it’s basically the most violent and troubled offenders who are still in DJJ – everybody else is gone back to counties and back to programs, etc. So one of the other big allegations about what was formerly the CYA, the California Youth Authority, was that it was essentially a school for gladiators – that it was a place where these kids were preyed upon and that it was a very, very dangerous place to be. How have you remedied that?

MINOR: Our housing units now are occupied on a core program which is a general population living unit; the max is 38 young people. On our sex behavior treatment program there are 36. On our mental health programs, there are 24 young people; that in itself helped alleviate some of the pressure around that. And to couple with that, we’ve hired professional staff that make up the treatment teams. Those treatment teams are made up of clinical psychologists, youth correctional counselors, case work specialists or case managers, and you have the supervisors and the treatment team program managers there to help facilitate the treatment process, so everything is done now as multidisciplinary approach to providing treatments. It focuses on creating a pro-social behavior that’s therapeutic, that’s supportive, and to help young people identify what their problems are – help them look for solutions to their problems, their behavior, and I think those things have made a tremendous impact.

KERNAN: And one of the things that James Bell said in the interview that you heard that you wanted to respond to was that he didn’t think any young people needed to be in DJJ.  He thought that communities that they came from could provide those services to help kids who are struggling.

MINOR: Again, DJJ has always believed in supporting the youth with support from their families. We have reached out to families as part of the treatment process. The counties have a great deal of responsibility. If these young men and women can do better in the counties, the counties can do a better job of helping them get back on their feet, I’m not opposed to that, but I do again just have to repeat that the state system, the Division of Juvenile Justice, at this time currently does have a place, and our place is to do the best job we can in rehabilitating and helping these young people.

KERNAN: And you’ve worked in corrections for 27 years; you just recently took over as Director of the Division of Juvenile Justice. How have you seen the correctional system in California, particularly with respect to young people, evolve? I mean it was just a few years ago that the CA Department of Justice put “rehabilitation” back into its actual name.

MINOR: Well, it never changed for the Division of Juvenile Justice. I mean, when it was the California Youth Authority, when I came into the organization, it was known as the national leader, and it was looked upon, looked to for creative ideas around treatment and rehabilitation. And over the years policy changes have made a difference in the way that we have done business. I mean, we went from reatment-oriented facilities to one that was more custody and controlled. And now we’re moving back, we’re shifting back to that area where we realize that locking them up and throwing away the key is not the answer – that these young people need lots of treatment, they need lots of support, in order to leave our facilities and go out and be productive citizens, and that’s what we’re focused on.

KERNAN: Governor Brown has proposed to shut down the DJJ altogether. Where do you stand on that?

MINOR: If that decision is made, then our job is to do the best plan we can to help transition young folks back to the communities. But, in the interim, I see our role as doing the best job we can to provide services for the young people we have in our care. So my focus as the director –and my constant message to the staff – is we can’t take our eyes off the ball. We have to remain committed to the job that we are tasked to do. We are public servants. We have a great task ahead of us. We have a very needy population and that’s where our focus is. If that policy decision is made, then we’ll work closely with the counties to make that transition as transparent and effective as possible.

CDCR

Sodium thiopental is one of three drugs used in California's lethal injection procedure.

The Federal District Court in Washington D.C. today ruled that execution drugs obtained by U.S. prisons from foreign suppliers are illegal and will have to be returned to the Food and Drug Administration.

A number of states purchased sodium thiopental–an anesthetic used in lethal injections–from a company in the United Kingdom amidst a U.S. shortage of the drug in 2010. California is among those states, having bought 514.5 grams, in theory, enough for 171 executions.

In February last year, a group of death row inmates in Arizona filed suit in federal court to stop the use of the foreign-made drug in executions nationwide. The major issue for the inmates is whether the drugs, which had not been approved by the FDA, would work properly if used in an execution. Sodium thiopental is traditionally the first drug in a three-drug lethal injection cocktail. An anesthetic, the drug is supposed to prevent the condemned inmate from feeling pain while dying. A second drug paralyzes the inmate, and a third stops his or her heart. A lethal dose of sodium thiopental is also sometimes used as the sole drug in an execution.

Today, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon took the inmates’ side, admonishing the FDA for allowing states to import unapproved drugs.

Two of the Arizona inmates involved in the suit have already been executed.

Federal law says that a drug may not be imported to the United States unless it’s listed with the FDA. “The FDA’s actions are clearly inconsistent with its own regulations,” Leon wrote. “The FDA appears to be simply wrapping itself in the flag of law enforcement discretion to justify its authority and masquerade an otherwise seemingly callous indifference to the health consequences of those imminently facing the executioner’s needle. How utterly disappointing!”

Leon went on to order the FDA to require states with sodium thiopental obtained from foreign sources to return the drug to the agency.

A spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation today said the department’s legal team is reviewing the ruling. Executions are on hold in the state, as several challenges to the state’s lethal injection procedure work through federal and state courts. Meanwhile, a proposed ballot initiative that would replace capital punishment with life in prison will likely go before voters in November.

States have continued to look to alternative drugs and foreign sources of sodium thiopental since Hospira, the sole FDA-approved manufacturer of sodium thiopental stopped making the drug in 2011, citing the company’s opposition to the drug’s use in executions.

SodiumThiopentalOrder

By Nicole Jones

Last week, three UC Berkeley students an alumnus were issued orders to stay away from the UC Berkeley campus when not attending class. The orders come after thousands participated in an Occupy Cal protest last year, resulting in dozens of arrests.

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Paul Seeman issued stay away orders for 8 of the 13 protesters arrested on the November 9 protest. Most of 13 were charged with resisting arrest and obstructing a public place and a few were charged with battery on an officer.

Concerns have been raised about the fairness of these orders, especially for the students. Stay-away orders are usually issued from places where property damage has occurred or violence has erupted.

According to the Daily Cal, ACLU-Northern California attorney Linda Lye called the stay-away orders “unjustified at the outset” and  “dramatically over-broad.”

Jeff Wozniak, a lawyer for one of the students, said the stay-away orders mean that the charged students are not allowed within 100 yards of any campus property, except when going to class or a job on campus. It’s not clear if these students are barred from the recreation center or other UC buildings.

“All of UC property is a stay away order,” Wozniak said, “but the order didn’t define what all UC property is.”

UCPD spokesperson Lt. Eric Tejada told the Daily Cal that if the protesters are found violating a stay-away order, the police department will determine whether to arrest them.

One of the charged students, Amanda Armstrong and her lawyer Wozniak plan to fight the orders in court. In a video recorded on November 9, she and other students are shown blocking police from entering an area outside Sproul Plaza where tents had been set up. The police responded with force and arrests followed shortly after.

Armstrong said the stay-away orders have had a chilling effect and harm her ability to work as a steward for the union for academic workers, a recognized union that bargains with university on behalf of student workers.

“The stay-away order has already significantly affected my daily life,” Armstrong said, “Instead of spending most of my time on campus, working with classmates in the library, going to events, and having meals at nearby cafes, I’ve been spending a lot more time alone at home.”

Campus spokesperson Janet Gilmore said the campus administration did not have anything to with issuing the stay-away orders. She told the Daily Cal, she hopes “an arrangement can be worked out in which members of the university community who agree to comply with law and policy can have their full access to the campus restored.”

Wozniak said the arraignment comes at a crucial time when higher education in California continues to be faced with sweeping budget cuts. Last week, the California State University system freezed Spring 2013 enrollment while approving pay raises for a number of administrators.

The incident began when an unidentified victim was robbed at gunpoint by two suspects near a taco truck at Oaks Avenue and Orange Grove Boulevard, the lieutenant said.

Pasadena police officers responding to the scene spotted McDade, who was running north on Fair Oaks, Ibarra said. The officers, who were not identified, tried to detain him.

“The suspect put his hands in his waistband at some point,” Sanchez said. “Both officers fired striking the suspect.”

No weapon was found at the shooting scene Sunday, though police continued combing the area, Ibarra said.

McDade was taken to a local hospital where he died, according to police and coroner’s officials. A second suspect, identified as a 17-year-old Pasadena boy, was arrested nearby without incident.

The teen was booked on suspicion of murder under the legal theory that he committed a felony that resulted in the death of a co-suspect, Ibarra said.

California’s felony murder rule allows a suspect to be charged with murder if a death happens during the commission of a felony–whether or not the person charged anticipated or directly caused the death. Apparently, it’s been invoked before in the case of officer-involved shootings. For example, in 1984 in the case of People v. Caldwell at the California Supreme Court, justices determined that two men involved in a police shootout could be charged with felony murder after one of their accomplices was killed in the shootout.

Trayvon Martin

Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman on February 26, 2012–exactly one month ago. Yet outrage over the tragedy is just hitting its peak in the news cycle. Why didn’t the media, public officials, and the FBI care about this issue sooner?

CNN took up that question over the weekend. According to CNN’s Howard Kurtz, “it took a few days for the major Florida papers to cover that news. And it wasn’t until 10 days later that the killings drew a bit of national media attention from the A.P. and Reuters, The Huffington Post, and CBS This Morning. Then a bit more coverage, BET, HLN, CNN, Good Morning America. And then nearly three weeks had passed before the first article in New York Times.”

According to Kurtz’s guests, there were various factors that led to the delay: the fact that the homicide happened in a small city in Florida, instead of a major news hub like New York City; the sparsity of in-depth news coverage of killings, especially of young Black men; and the fact that the local police, at least at first, backed up Zimmerman’s claims of self defense.

When family members started speaking to the press, giving an alternative perspective on what happened, things started to blow up and the story became huge. The story’s spread to a national outrage was no doubt assisted by social media and inflamed by some national figures’ callous responses to the tragedy.

What’s important to watch now is where these conversations go. One of the most interesting takes on the incident I’ve read is at Women in Crime Ink, a blog run by female law enforcement. There, criminal profiler Pat Brown offers an interesting take on Zimmerman’s psyche:

From what I have read, he is a wannabe cop, the neighborhood ninja, the overzealous protector of the community. My guess is he might qualify for a personality disorder and be more into his role as superhero than he is into being concerned about the welfare of the local citizens or being a racist of any sort… I think George Zimmerman was “gunning” to be a hero and Trayvon ended up being the unsuspecting victim of Zimmerman’s overactive zealous power trip.

Brown’s conclusion is that this one man’s racist attitudes, whether Black men should wear hoodies, and the whole massive conversation about race that the tragedy provoked is beside a bigger point. A better conversation may be about why the community–and particularly the police and district attorney–tolerated such vigilantism.

Sheriff Mirkarimi’ s actions undermine the integrity of the Office of Sheriff. He misused the power and status accompanying his public office. He committed unlawful acts of violence and falsely imprisoned his wife -ultimately resulting in his own imprisonment. This misconduct is fundamentally incompatible with holding the Office of Sheriff, the chief elected law enforcement officer in the City and County of San Francisco and constitutes official misconduct under Section 15.105 of the Charter.

Interestingly, the charges of domestic violence and child endangerment–for which Mirkarimi was not convicted–are mentioned as reasons for his removal alongside his guilty plea to false imprisonment.

Sheriff Suspension Charges

CDCR

An ACLU report released today asks whether prison realignment is fixing the overcrowded prison system--or simply pushing California's reliance on incarceration to the local level.

The ACLU of California released a report today, “California at a Crossroads,” detailing 53 California counties’ realignment plans. Prison realignment began in October of 2011 as a way to quickly reduce California’s prison population–and get the state into compliance with a federal court order to relieve the state’s overcrowded prisons. Reform advocates had hoped that counties, which are slated to take over some 33,000 offenders from the state over the next couple of years, would use their realignment dollars in innovative rehabilitation programs. Instead, the ACLU report says, many counties are choosing to add more jail beds to incarcerate those who would have previously gone to state prison.

California recently approved $1.2 billion to help counties build jails, with the largest allocations going to Los Angeles, Riverside, and Orange counties.

At the time, Bill Sessa, a public information officer for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said some of the counties applying for jail money are overcrowded and in need of additional capacity. One county, he said, currently houses jail inmates in dorms, and isn’t equipped to house felons for the longer sentences they receive.

Sessa said that while realignment is designed to spur an increased focus on rehabilitation, “no matter how much rehabilitation you incorporate into the system, you still need capacity. And there are counties that have undersized jails.”

In their report, the ACLU agreed that many county jails are overcrowded. But they pointed to the fact that about 71 percent of California’s jail population is composed of those awaiting trial–meaning people who have been charged with a crime, but either cannot afford bail, or are being held by the jail as a risk to public safety if released.

Find the full report here.

Usually in this space, we talk a lot about what’s wrong in the criminal justice system. So in this three-part series, we’re looking outside of the Bay Area for examples of what works. On Monday, we spoke with UC-Berkeley Professor Franklin Zimring about New York City’s massive crime decline over the last two decades. And yesterday, we looked at a method police are using to predict crime before it happens. Today, we’re in Santa Cruz, examining why the county has become a national model for keeping kids of out jail. 

Christian is 15 years old. And like many teenagers, he’s made some mistakes. “Kinda stupid stuff,” he says. “Like vandalism. Not necessarily graffiti or anything. But yeah. Vandalism.”

And he got caught.

“It’s funny, one little incident can change everybody’s opinion of you,” Christian says. “Like, everybody. At school, like the teachers, from the students, to your family and stuff. But I try not to look at it as a negative or anything.”

Christian was put on juvenile probation, which is pretty standard for kids who break the law. What’s weird about his case is that when he violated that probation, Christian didn’t really get punished. In a different county in California, like Los Angeles or neighboring Monterey, he might have been locked up or at least taken back to court. But in Santa Cruz, he wasn’t. Instead, Christian was sent to the Evening Center in Watsonville.

Staying at a typical juvenile hall means sleeping there, eating there, going to classes with other locked-up kids. At the Evening Center, kids check in every afternoon from 4pm to 8pm – the toughest hours of the day for a kid trying to stay out of trouble. At the end of the day, though, they go home to their families.

Probation, by its nature, is a balance of punishment and help, law enforcement, and social services.

“We lean more towards the social service side, so that’s what our department’s value is,” says Yolanda Perez-Logan, the director of the Evening Center. Locking kids up might be the easier way to do things, Perez-Logan says, but it’s not the best way. Studies show that incarceration, even for one night, is linked to higher recidivism in children.“So teaching them to stay there and be connected to the community and engaged is the best thing we can do. And I don’t want to sound Santa Cruz-y but I guess I will be – you get into this job to help people,” she says.

What’s really interesting about Santa Cruz’s juvenile probation system is that it wasn’t always so “Santa Cruz-y.” Change started with the Latino community taking an interest in juvenile hall. Let’s go back to the late 1980s and early ‘90s in Santa Cruz County, when things looked a lot different around here. In a seven-year period, felony arrests of Latino youth rose 85 percent.

“There wasn’t enough beds to hold the juvenile population,” says Watsonville Mayor Daniel Dodge. “The facility was over capacity at that time. And the majority of kids being detained were kids of color,” says Raquel Mariscal of the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

At the same time juvenile hall was filling up, the state was offering grants for renovating juvenile facilities.

“But there was a condition. Monies would be provided for renovations if facilities would add beds.” recalls Mariscal. “So it was a confluence of, they want to apply for these monies, and the old adage of “if you build it, they will come.” And the Latino community was convinced that if these extra beds were added, that it was going to be brown kids that would be housed at the facility.”

On one hand, a county is battling a crime wave. On the other hand, the community is concerned that people of color are entering the justice system at high rates. What do you do?

The county had a large Latino population back in the 80s and 90s, but there weren’t any Latino elected officials in the county. Then came the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989.

After the earthquake, Latino immigrants became much more involved in local politics.

“That all started from that focal point where the ground shook and the buildings fell down,” says Dodge. “It was more the symbolic, it was more like a whole way of life fell and a new way of life was allowed to blossom.”

Dodge, an organizer at the time, took on the issue of Latino kids in lock-up.

And, says Mariscal, “ultimately, there was a compromise made – that yes, we will support the application for this grant, but you, probation department, have to agree to intentionally address the over-representation of Latinos in the detention facility.”

The probation department did address the over-representation of minorities, but it never built that new facility. The county didn’t need it.

The county’s juvenile hall sits in Felton, in the Santa Cruz hills, about 20 miles and a two-hour bus ride from Watsonville. Fernando Giraldo is the director of juvenile probation for the county. He says the population in the hall is about half what it was 10 years ago – and that’s a good thing.

“There’s plenty of evidence that shows that the experience of detention is a higher risk factor for future recidivism, more so than gang involvement or being arrested with a loaded firearm,” Giraldo says.

So the department’s policy is to keep kids out of the hall when at all possible. How to actually do that is a practice they’ve developed over time. The key, Giraldo says, was self-examination. And that’s because probation officers have a lot of discretion.

“Let’s say two teens, a Latino and an Anglo come into custody at 10 o’clock at night for an offense that, through our objective risk instrument, we determine they are releasable,” Giraldo says. And say there’s no one on duty who speaks Spanish, and the Latino kid’s parents are working in the field, so they’re hard to reach.

“Easy to find the parent who speaks English, call the parent and say, ‘Come pick your kid up,’” Giraldo says. “If you don’t have the capacity – bilingual bicultural staff – and that staff may say, ‘I have to wait until tomorrow afternoon when our next Spanish-speaking person comes in.’ And so we hold that youth in custody.”

To avoid this scenario, the county instituted a strict policy for who stays in custody and who doesn’t. It also hired more Spanish-speaking staff and started a number of new programs that serve as alternatives to locking kids up.

“We get kids coming in here to Santa Cruz and they’ve had experiences in other counties and they’re shocked,” Giraldo says. “Like, ‘Oh, you’re not going to do that to me? You’re not going to lock me up?’ No, no.”

Now, crime is down across the county. And Santa Cruz has become an emblem, a model site for how to safely reduce reliance on incarceration.

But will other California counties follow?

“They are alone in their exceptionalism,” says James Bell of the Haywood Burns Institute in San Francisco. “People go and visit and say, ‘Yeah, that’s nice but we’re not going to do that.’”

Bell helped Santa Cruz and 45 other jurisdictions throughout the country change their approach to juvenile justice. But Santa Cruz, he says, is just different.

“Santa Cruz has a fundamental cultural belief that a child sitting in detention is a child that’s wasting their lives and that their job is to get them out of their system as quickly as possible. Most people think – even though their systems are horrible – most people think us having our grip on you is making your life better,” he says.

Bell says other places in the state, with large, difficult juvenile halls will look to Santa Cruz and say that their own kids are different, tougher, less likely to change. But Bell says he sees a similar issue in all of the overcrowded juvenile halls he’s visited – they’re filling their beds with non-serious, non-violent offenders:

“I defy anybody to take a population snapshot and tell me that probation violations, bench warrants, placement failures, administrative things will not be at least 40-45 percent, if not 50 percent of that population. I defy anybody. Murderers, robbers, rapists, those things that we feel are really bad kids that we want to be protected from, will probably be 15-20 percent of that population.

Bell says nothing will change in these jurisdictions until the people demand it, just as in Santa Cruz.”

Kids still commit crime in Santa Cruz County. There’s still a gang problem. But the probation department is willing to bet that the less these kids interact with the judicial system, the more likely they are to turn their lives around.

Like Alejandro, a teenage boy in the department’s youth soccer league.  “I started hanging out with the wrong people, the wrong crowd,” he says. “I don’t know, I started getting into gangs and it became part of me, you know.”

Alejandro was a Norteño gang member. Now he’s a member of the probation department’s unofficial soccer team, run by Officer Gina Castañeda. Castañeda says these kids are at formative ages – they’re looking for an identity.

“The kids identify themselves as soccer players and stop identifying themselves as probationers or gang members,” she says.

The team has kids from rival gangs, who wouldn’t get along on the street.

“They walked in with their Dickies, Ben Davids, their Nike Cortez, their crease down shirts, their black belts hanging down,” she says. “And then they put on their soccer shirts, and you couldn’t tell the difference.”

Castañeda says, like being a good parent, being a good probation department takes a lot of confidence, self-criticism, and a willingness to listen. That’s something places like Orange and Ventura counties will have to consider. They, like many other places, are looking to Santa Cruz for a new approach to steering kids away from a lifetime of crime.

In the early 1990s, New York was considered a dangerous place. The crack epidemic was still in full swing, and the city was at the peak of a national crime wave. Twenty years later, everything’s changed. New York’s crime rate has dropped dramatically and so has the state’s rate of locking people up in prison. How did this transformation occur? I sat down with Berkeley Law Professor, Franklin Zimring, to talk about his new book, The City That Became Safe: New York’s Lessons for Urban Crime and its Control. Audio of the interview is above.