LETTER TO A FRIEND WHO UNCONDITIONALLY SUPPORTS SAFE CA INITIATIVE, WHO THINKS THAT WE ALL SHOULD, AND WHO IS TROUBLED BY OUR QUESTIONS

I hear you about the central importance of getting rid of the death penalty. Also hear you about the fact that life without possibility of parole is already the alternative to death penalty in California and that the initiative doesn't change that. And hear you, too, that the point is just to focus on voting for this initiative and not let "the perfect be the enemy of the good."

Most people I know certainly agree with you on the first point (getting rid of the death penalty) and understand about lwop. It's on the third point that we have some questions.

First of all: Why is it a problem to raise concerns among apparent allies?

Second: As work toward the vote develops, it's clear that people behind the initiative simply assumed people like me (people who care so deeply about prison issues) would support the initiative no matter what. Such an assumption is not wise or politically expedient. So far every piece but one that I've read written by someone on Death Row, and every report I've heard about attitudes on the Row, shows dramatic opposition to the initiative. Largely this is due to the analysis of those in line to be executed regarding the legal consequences to them should the initiative pass. But also - apparently - no one behind SAFE CA ever contacted them (which I can't even fathom). Similarly, everyone I talk with who's been part of the on-the-ground anti-death penalty movement feels enormously disrespected and discounted by not being included or informed, but instead being asked to just accept an approach very different from one they've worked toward for years. Everything I've heard about how the SAFE CA folks have gone about things is an example of how NOT to build a movement.

Third: The above raises questions about whether SAFE CA folks even want to be part of building a movement. What are their motivations? A common theme I hear from people on the Row is a whole lot of distrust of the people behind the initiative. Because of not being contacted, as I say above, and also because there is no love from these men toward Jeanne Woodford, whom they see as the enemy. This sentiment is expressed clearly by Kevin Cooper and by Correll Thomas. These men see Woodford as someone who advocates for prisons and not the people locked up in them.

As I first read some of this writing, I felt the men's reaction was perhaps too strong, too personal, too antagonistic. But now I'm hearing things like this: This past week, at a Sonoma County ACLU event, Woodford apparently said that people on death row have it too easy - single cells and visits seven days/week (they do have single cells, but not seven days/week of visiting) - and that they should be put on Level IV mainlines where prison life is so much harder. Or look at what the ACLU has on its own website. Recognizing that lwop has the legal power it does in California is one thing; lauding it as a sentence is quite another. After such a post and position, there's no way the ACLU could come back next year and join the effort to get rid of lwop.

These concerns may seem to you like letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, but they don't seem that way to me. I understand that the death penalty is the most important issue to you. As a citizen who knows that the death penalty makes me a murderer, I get that point. However for many of us the "most important issue" is larger than even the death penalty. Speaking in shorthand, that "most important issue" is something like what the phrase "school to prison pipeline" conveys. Yes, of course, one can't put "let's abolish our whole thinking about prison and the economic and social factors that surround it" on the ballot. But there's a way to put forward a single issue - abolishing the death penalty - that opens doors to the next effort and there's a way that closes down and even works against further efforts. From all I'm seeing, from what's reported to me by many others, the SAFE CA folks are doing the latter. As you surely know, many in the faith community and left political community - people and organizations who strongly supported the initiative at the beginning - are raising questions now, feeling concern. We may all still vote for the initiative, and I can't imagine anyone will vote against it, but so many people are furious and frustrated and we didn't need to be. This could have all been done differently giving us both a good chance to end the death penalty and to continue the long-term fight for equity and justice.

Sincerely, Judith

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,

First By Heart readings, too! At U Mich on Sunday, at Women's Huron on Monday afternoon, and at Parnall on Monday evening.

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.

Those with term-to-life sentences have to go before the Board of Prison Terms periodically and make a case for why they should be given a release date. There's lots to share about this process, but for now here's a very interesting article about one man -- Lonnie Morris, whom Spoon, Coties, Elmo, and I all knew at San Quentin 25 years ago -- and his experience with the Board.

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

Hartman has done twenty-nine years in five California prisons. The years Hartman writes of are the years in which I’ve known the California Department of Corrections (“Rehabilitation” has recently been added to the department’s title, but as nearly all programming is about to be cut beginning next year, there’s no rehabilitation happening other than what the men and women inside create for themselves).

I know what I know due to the various poetry workshops I’ve taught inside, as well as to researching and writing a manual for artists working in prison for the state’s Arts in Corrections program. Through teaching, interviewing staff, or sitting in visiting rooms, I’ve been in at least half of California’s thirty-three prisons. I’ve learned most from close friendships with former students – including a recent collaboration with Spoon Jackson on our book: By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives. Spoon, Coties, Elmo, Smokey and the others are all lifers and each has served Hartman’s twenty-nine years and more.

Hartman tells not only his personal story, but also the broader story of what’s happened in California prisons in the past three decades. Both narratives are compelling, well written, factual (and accurate to what I know and hear), and incredibly important. I’ve appreciated all three books out this fall, but in many ways, Hartman’s got to me most. Due to his own skill, I’m sure, but also because so much that he writes mirrors the experiences and expressions of the men inside whom I know best.

Hartman’s personal story is one that moves from adolescent evil to adult consciousness. The book’s publisher – writer and editor James Atlas – comments on the book’s first line, which he feels is impossible to forget: “When I was nineteen, I killed a man in a drunken, drugged-up, fistfight.” Hartman immediately lets the reader know: “Anyone who knew me could have seen it coming.” He’d been in trouble for years and had spent a long time in the juvenile justice system. He was state raised (thus “Mother California”) and ended up with a life without possibility of parole sentence.

Hartman shares some of the familial reasons that logically led to his becoming such an angry young man, but there’s no blame or self-pity in his writing. Mostly his narration is objective, almost that of a journalist, not denying emotion but maintaining steady sight, and at just the right distance to allow intimate vision and wider understanding. In this way we watch the young race-identified white man do all kinds of bad in his first years in prison. And we watch, too, his increasing consciousness and self-directed change.

Since “increasing consciousness and self-directed change” is the path I’ve watched my former students walk, I am deeply curious about what encourages such opening. In Hartman’s case, writing played a part, but mostly it was love – first from (and to) his wife (who saw and reflected the good that was in him) and eventually from (and to) his beloved daughter. Although our era keeps moving away from this knowledge, everyone I know who works with young people or people in prison knows this exact truth: deep growth comes through love and bright reflection, not through punishment and negativity.

Eventually Hartman works with others to establish what’s called the Honor Program at Lancaster (California State Prison – Los Angeles County). I know a group of prisoners at New Folsom (California State Prison – Sacramento) who are also old lifers, also sick of their part in perpetuating race hatred in prison, also sick of negativity instead of steady encouragement toward greater humanity. This group, too, brings men together to do deep work on their own spirits. I’ve learned so much about real – self-directed and group-supported – change from these men. I wish the wider voting public understood that this kind of work – prisoner-led – is going on all over the country. I welcome Hartman’s report.

As Spoon and I prepare for the April 2010 release of our book, I am so glad for these three other books. “Each man does his own time,” as the saying goes, and Betts, Masters, Hartman, and Spoon Jackson prove that point. Each man “came awake” inside, but each journey was unique and not programmable.