Many Californians are elated that we might get an initiative on the ballot to abolish the death penalty and that a majority of voters might be convinced (by the initiative’s economic and crime-fighting language) to stop state killing. Count me among those who agree that ending the death penalty in California is a most worthy goal. I’m concerned, though, that those fighting hard for the SAFE California Act seem comfortable with an initiative that advocates for life without possibility of parole as a reasonable sentence.

You can read the whole initiative here, and here is the summary that initiative supporters have signed on for:

The SAFE California Act will replace California’s death penalty with a sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole as the maximum punishment for murder. This means convicted killers will remain behind bars forever – with no risk of executing an innocent person.

I understand: LWOP is already the alternate sentence to death penalty and emphasizing “behind bars forever” is the only way enough voters might finally be willing to abolish state murder in California. I understand: the initiative’s crime-fighting language and proposed policies are strategic compromises.

However “behind bars forever” is also a death penalty; people serving an LWOP sentence will only leave prison when they’re dead. As Spoon Jackson, serving a life without sentence, writes about the initiative: “You offer one poison for another and think you have done a good deed. It is like instead of being bitten by a western diamondback rattlesnake, we let you be bitten by an eastern diamond back rattlesnake.”

Many initiative advocates know this and recognize that one can never really be sure, when someone first enters prison, who he or she will become 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years later. “All rehabilitation is self-rehabilitation,” Spoon Jackson writes. And the (most often) young person convicted of murder may well grow into a “self-rehabilitated” wise elder (whether due to that proverbial light bulb going off, to classes and programs offered at the prison, to love and support from people on the outside, to god’s intervention, to wanting to do better for his or her own child, or to just getting older and quieting down).

I urge supporters of the SAFE California Act to read the whole initiative and to hold in one hand the chance to end the physical death penalty and in the other hand the initiative’s entrenchment of LWOP.

And as we hold those two possibilities in our hands, here are some points to ponder:

1. We know there have been people on Death Row who later were found innocent. The inevitability of the state murdering some innocent man or women is, of course, a reason to abolish the death penalty. However, if this initiative passes, future men and women – given LWOP, but innocent of the crime for which they were convicted – will be in prison their whole lives without resources (that those given death penalty currently have) for investigating a petition for writ of habeas corpus.

2. Innocent or not, some people once on death row and released after Furman are now out of prison. LWOP wasn’t a sentence in California when the US Supreme Court abolished the death penalty in 1972, so those taken off the row at that time were given term-to-life sentences. Even in our current harsh prison climate, some who were originally given the death penalty, proved to the Board and the Governor that they were no longer risks to the community and have been released.

3. People in California serving LWOP currently have to be housed at Level IV prisons. These are the prisons least likely to have anything going on other than long lockdowns. Warehousing rarely provides conditions in which a human being can “self-rehabilitate.”

4. Since LWOP was a sentence first given in California in the mid-1970s, we’re only beginning to see the full consequence of health consequences and costs as these men and women get older. The SacBee reported (on 2/1/12) that in 1990, California state prisoners age 55 or older were 2.1 percent of the prison population. In 2009, they were 7.1 percent. And by 2019, the state expects older prisoners to be 15 percent of the prison population. As the Bee puts it: “Dealing with geriatric populations behind bars is costly, especially since prisoners are not eligible for federal health insurance programs for the elderly – Medicare and Medicaid. The state picks up the tab.” I know well a half-dozen men inside who are now over 50. One has had surgery for prostate cancer, one has had two knee surgeries, one is frequently monitored for diabetes, another deals with heart disease.

Kenneth E. Hartman – the founder and Executive Director of The Other Death Penalty Project – speaks to the dilemma this way : “I support the initiative to do away with lethal injection executions. Nevertheless, it’s important for Californians to remember that there are close to 4,000 other prisoners in this state sentenced to death by imprisonment, to the slow, torturous, ‘other death penalty’ of life without the possibility of parole. Everyone sentenced to prison should have the chance to prove his or her rehabilitation and be released at some point. Anything less and we have a system of revenge, not justice.”

Personally, I can’t imagine voting against abolishing the death penalty, and I also can’t imagine voting for an initiative that pretends LWOP is a solution.

A few other resources to read and consider:

“Don’t Throw Away the Key: Why Life Without Parole Is Cruel and Unusual” Luis J. Rodriguez, The Progressive (there’s a link from The Other Death Penalty website above).

Pros and Cons of Life Without Parole by Catherine  Appleton and Bent Grover

“Anti-Death Penalty Budgeting Bungle,” Joe Mathews, NBC,

I write to ask you to work as hard as you can to stand up to these forces. Please vote for what supports the education, work place, health care, and creative and information needs of the vast majority of us and against what undermines those needs.

1. Yep, Guggenheim knows how to make a movie;
2. The children who provide the basic story line of the movie are wonderful, as are their parents;
3. The movie is already getting such a conversation going and that’s a good thing. And also a dangerous thing because Guggenheim misrepresents so much;
4. He does say that only 20% of charter schools get better results than public schools (“better results” means test scores), but that line is in passing while the story arc of the movie (as Gail Collins put it in her piece in NY Times) makes charter schools seem like the answer to the problem;
5. The movie basically says money isn’t the problem, but doesn’t mention the huge amount of money the charter schools he features have been given (by Gates, Broad, etc etc);
6. The movie talks a lot about the negative consequences of public schools as large bureaucracies beholden -- as institutions in a democracy are -- to diverse participants, but doesn’t raise any negative consequences of the “corporate” approach of many charter schools and being beholden to funder, etc;
7. Doesn’t show kids whose parents can’t or don’t advocate for them, immigrant parents who don't speak English, parents working three jobs, etc. Uses language of equity, but doesn’t exhibit awareness of what equity means in any real, on-the-ground sense;
8. Nothing at all about the value of public institutions in a democracy, or about why due process might be important and why we might not want teachers' jobs not to be at whim of each random supervisor or group of politicians or parents or anyone with a particular axe to grind. Nothing about what negative consequences of attaching teacher pay to student test scores might be;
9. A teacher in one of the charter schools featured wrote a wonderful blog about, right, this is WHY we’re so good. Nothing in the movie remotely about “what it takes”;
10. Geoffrey Canada and Harlem Children’s Zone are featured prominently, but there’s very little description of the entire program, only the school. The entire program of course began by saturating one square block with every single service residents needed, then moving out and out and out until a larger part of the community was covered. Mentioned but in such a way as if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t get it that even their middle school is one education venue in a whole line, beginning with Baby College for pregnant women and their partners. What HCZ is doing is way beyond the school. As many are saying about this:  "Well, at least we now know what real change costs!"
11. Every time Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, is on screen she's accompanied by devil dramatic music playing. The music alone makes her come across as a monster;
12. Unions are definitely the Bad Guy in the movie, but there's no mention for example, that in the states where students have highest test scores, the teachers' unions are strong, as they are in the countries lauded as successful (Finland, Japan);
13. Basically no teachers speak in the movie, give their sense of the problems and what they’ve seen work in their classrooms, schools, and communities;
14. Michelle Rhee is presented as a hero and there’s nothing in the movie about her actions that led to Fenty being voted out (which of course happened after the movie). Nothing about how, as DC has gentrified, the children taking tests there are not the same children who took them a few years ago;
15. We talked of those we know teaching in charter schools who tell us about the high percentage of children "counseled out." The movie said nothing about this;
16. The movie states that things have gotten worse in schools in the past decade, but doesn't make the connection that these are the years No Child Left Behind -- and emphasis on test scores -- has reigned;
    
17. The movie uses words like “working” or “success” without definition. Seems like the measure is improved test scores. There were many things our group discussed about this — including:

• The audience reacts so warmly to the children whose stories are being told because these children are bright, curious, articulate, adorable, etc NOT because they answer questions right or do anything related to testing. We love them because of their natures and how they express themselves.
• When asked why they want to get into the “better” school they’re entering the lotteries for, these children speak of having a better life, getting out of their neighborhoods. Their comments recognize that the problems are shared ones — economic, social — and because those problems aren’t being addressed, they want a way out.
• One of the boys, when asked how he feels about the boarding school charter school his grandma is trying to get him into, says his feelings are “bittersweet.” He wants to have the best chance for himself, but he doesn’t want to leave his family and friends.
• In her op/ed piece linked to above, Gail Collins writes that her own narrow wrath arose at the lottery system shown — how it’s made a piece of performance art and how children are made to feel that this one moment will make or break them. Of course the quality of school one attends is major, but our little group talked about how we want children to feel confident in making the best of even bad outcomes.
• We spoke about the movie’s assumptions (as Obama and Duncan also say) that the point of education is future jobs so that the USA can remain #1. We wondered if we really want our children to give up childhood (play, individual exploration, unstructured time to be curious, etc) for capitalist intentions.
  

How something – ironic, painful, what-do-you-expect? – that Tattoos on the Heart came into the world at about the same moment that Homeboy Industries (one of the book’s primary subject) ran into huge financial difficulties. You can read more about Homeboy Industries (and make a donation) here.

Father Greg loves the community he lives in (the neighborhood around Dolores Mission Church in East Los Angeles) and he shares his love for each person he tells us about, even those who frustrate him no end. He writes: “You stand with the least likely to succeed until success is succeeded by something more valuable: kinship. You stand with the belligerent, the surly, and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.”

“Evidence-based outcomes” is the name of the game these days – in Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan’s, Race to the Top and in the way most funders of programs working with youth or in prison demand evaluation. WritersCorps teachers know well how I roll my eyes or rant at all this. So it does my heart special good to read Father Greg’s chapter titled “Success.” He writes: “If our primary concern is results, we will choose to work only with those who give us good ones.”  Instead (as Father Greg quotes Mark Torres S.J.) “We see in the homies what they don’t see in themselves, until they do.”

DARKENED ROOM

I sit in a darkened room
to hide
from nothing in particular.

I sit in a darkened room
to think
about nothing in particular.

I knock one devil on his ass,
ten more appear.

The angels, they want to stay
in the heavens, safe among the stars,
the lights of dusty immortality.

The devils swoop like hawks,
they swarm around the head
like summer flies.

I sit in bare-footed silence
chiseled in-between the two,
trying to keep symmetry.

Thursday April 8, 2010 7 PM Diesel, a Bookstore 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, CA

Sunday April 11, 2010 4 PM Booksmith 1644 Haight Street, San Francisco, CA

Wednesday April 14, 2010  7:30 PM Tattered Cover Book Store 1628 16th Street, Denver, CO

Wednesday August 4, 2010 6 PM Sacramento Poetry Center @ Central Library 828 I Street, Sacramento, CA