VA Federal Judge: Solitary Conditions for Death Row Inmates Unconstitutional

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema has issued a decision under which holding prisoners convicted of capital murder on “death row” is unconstitutional. The decision holds that the automatic and indefinite regime, consisting of solitary confinement and harsh conditions, violates due process. More from the Associated Press:

According to court papers, a death row inmate is kept alone in his cell 24 hours a day, with the only exceptions a 10-minute break three days a week for a shower and an hour of exercise five days a week in an outdoor cell not much bigger than his indoor cell. Inmates are allowed to purchase a television set and a compact disc player for their cells, and have access to some books from the prison library.

Brinkema said that the problem is exacerbated by the extended amount of time prisoners spend on death row. A prisoner could easily spend more than a decade on death row while the appeals process plays out, and never have an opportunity to join the general population.

This is the first ruling in the country holding indefinite solitary confinement conditions unconstitutional for all inmates, not just for the mentally ill.

Gubernatorial Budget 2014-2015

The Governor’s proposed budget for 2014-2015 is out and its full text is here. Public safety is addressed on pages 65-88 and the correctional budget is addressed on pages 89-93.

The budget proposes total funding of $9.8 billion ($9.5 billion General Fund and $320 million other funds), which is 9% of the state budget – only slightly less than our expenditures on higher education.

The report reviews the history of realignment and the Plata litigation, mentioning the state prison system’s commitment to reentry as per the Blueprint titled The Future of California Corrections (here is the Blueprint, for your convenience.) The report emphasizes CDCR’s commitment to expanding the rehabilitation menu to reach 70% of all inmates.

The report goes, at length, into the changes brought about with realignment, including the following useful classification of the prison population:

Still, the state prison population is higher than projected in 2013 – about 135,000 inmates vs. the 129,000 projected. The parolee population is expected to increase in 2013-2014 and decrease in 2014-2015, as a result of realignment and the transference of post-sentence supervisees to the counties. There are also more juvenile wards than projected, as a result of an increase in first admissions and in parole violations.

The budget report explicitly refers to the legal battle waged around the 137.5% capacity cap mandated by the federal court, and assumes that the deadline for meeting the cap will be extended by two years. Remember the $315 million that Governor Brown appropriated at the very last minute of the last legislative session? If there is an extension, the budget will allocate the first $75 million of the money to recidivism reduction (state reentry, substance abuse treatment, services for the mentally ill, and a special reentry facility) and the rest to the general fund. However, should the population cap deadline not be delayed, the money will be invested in private prisons “to avoid the early release of inmates.” You can see where this is going; the money is essentially there to more-or-less extort the Three Judge Panel and circumvent its perceived intention. The message is – play nice and give us two more years, in which case we’ll invest in rehabilitation, or you’ll get private prisons galore.

More interesting stuff: A projected expansion of medical and elderly parole. The age cutoff for the latter is 60, which means 5.4 percent of male inmates and 4.4 percent of female inmates (as of June 30.) If they pushed the age cutoff back to 55, which makes criminological and gerontological sense (people age faster in prison, and people leave crime behind at an earlier age), you’d be releasing 11.2 percent of men and 10.4 percent of women. So – a step in the right direction, but plenty of room for improvement.

The report also mentions two other savings mechanisms: nonviolent third-striker releases per Prop 36 and juvenile parole per SB260. While the report doesn’t explicitly take credit for them, it is a bit surprising to read such positive reports of these from an entity that fought the spirit of these initiatives for years.

A considerable amount of the money will be spent on improving health scores in state prisons so they can be wrangled away from the Receiver. Much of the money is allocated to fund litigation, to fight the Receiver and class-action suits in court; the rest of it on improvements to pharmacies, facilities, and staff training. The report mentions the impact of Obamacare on health care for county inmates as opposed to state inmates.

Lastly, there are some notable comments on realignment in the counties. There’s a proposal to make split sentences the default, but it still leaves a considerable amount of discretion to county judges, and would still create big disparities between county. Also, the report notes that keeping long-term inmates in county jails is not a great idea, but does not volunteer to take them back into state institutions en masse (as Manuel Perez has just suggested) because of the need to comply with the Plata/Coleman caps. The state is willing to take in offenders who are serving 10 years or more – that’s about 300 years annually – but that, of course, raises the question why people receive 10 years in prison for non-non-non offenses in the first place.

Rolling Back Realignment

Yesterday, Assemblymember V. Manuel Perez introduced AB 1449, also to be known as the Realignment Omnibus Act of 2014. The bill, if passed, would significantly regress the achievements of realignment and increase overcrowding in state prisons. Here’s what it purports to do:

(1) Under existing law, certain specified felonies are punishable by imprisonment in a county jail for 16 months, or 2 or 3 years or, where the term is specified, for the term described in the underlying offense. Notwithstanding these provisions, existing law requires that a sentence be served in state prison where the defendant has a prior or current conviction for a serious or violent felony, has a prior felony conviction in another jurisdiction that has all of the elements of a serious or violent felony, is required to register as a sex offender, or has an aggravated white collar crime enhancement imposed as part of the sentence.

This bill would additionally require a sentence to be served in the state prison when the defendant is convicted of a felony or felonies otherwise punishable in a county jail and is sentenced to an aggregate term of more than 3 years.

(2) Existing law requires that all persons released from prison after serving a prison term for a felony, be subject to postrelease community supervision provided by a county agency for a period of 3 years immediately following release, except for persons released after serving a term for a serious felony, a violent felony, an offense for which the person was sentenced pursuant to the 3 strikes law, a crime where the person is classified as a high-risk sex offender, or a crime where the person is required to undergo treatment by the State Department of State Hospitals because the person has a severe mental disorder. Existing law requires these persons to be subject to parole supervision by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation following release from state prison and the jurisdiction of the court in the county in which the parolee is released, resides, or in which an alleged violation of supervision has occurred.

This bill would also require any person who is released from prison who has a prior conviction for any of the above crimes to be subject to parole supervision by the department and the jurisdiction of the court in the county in which the parolee is released, resides, or in which an alleged violation of supervision has occurred.

(3) Existing law, the Postrelease Community Supervision Act of 2011, requires certain inmates released from state prison to be subject to 3 years of supervision by a county agency. The act provides that if the supervising county agency has determined, following application of its assessment processes, that authorized intermediate sanctions are not appropriate, the supervising county agency is required to petition the revocation hearing officer to revoke and terminate postrelease supervision of the inmate. Existing law allows the revocation hearing officer to order the person to confinement in a county jail for a period not to exceed 180 days, among other sanctions. This bill would, if the person has been found to have violated the conditions of postrelease community supervision on 2 or more prior occasions, allow the revocation hearing officer to revoke and terminate postrelease community supervision and order the person to confinement in the state prison for a period of one year.

What this means, in plain speech, is that the definition of “non-non-non” offenses, which now trigger judicial discretion to sentence a person to jail or to mandatory supervision, will dramatically change, sentencing people who received longer prison sentences to state institutions. That may not be all tragic, as many jails are very poorly equipped to handle people who are sentenced for long periods; but many of those folks shouldn’t go in for such long sentences in the first place, and this would only solidify that.

It also means that the idea behind realignment, to supervise people locally in their communities, will be rolled back, and state parole will receive some of the power it lost back from county probation departments, some of whom did a stellar job retooling supervision as an instrument of reentry and hope.

This is a very disappointing bill, and for your good deed of the day, please call your representatives in the Assembly and Senate and tell them how you feel.

Corporal Punishment for the Mentally Ill? Judge Karlton to Decide

Two shocking videos depicting prison guards at Corcoran subduing mentally-ill inmates with pepper spray and batons are the subject of federal litigation aimed at ending such brutal corporal punishment. The videos are not available for sharing online, but they have been viewed in court, and the Sacramento Bee describes their content:

In the first video, played to a hushed crowd of lawyers and reporters in Karlton’s 15th-floor courtroom in downtown Sacramento, an inmate in a mental health crisis unit at Corcoran State Prison is shown refusing to take medication from a psychologist visiting him in his cell.

“He refused to take it,” the psychologist tells a waiting team of guards wearing gas masks, helmets, padded vests, gloves, protective jumpsuits and shin guards.

The inmate, locked in his cell, was playing with his feces and threatening to throw two cups of an unknown substance on anyone who entered. Almost immediately after the psychologist emerged, the team began pumping pepper spray through the food port of the metal cell door, repeatedly dousing the inmate between warnings that he better come out.

The team opened the door, dragging the inmate out and wrestling him to the floor as he alternately sobbed and screamed, “Don’t do this to me,” “help,” and “I don’t want to be executed.”

The motion focuses on Eighth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment violations, including force against inmates manifesting symptoms of mental illness, excessive use of pepper spray and of expandable batons, and requests that the Court order CDCR to revise their use-of-force policies to provide training, quality and assurance processes.

As Bakersfield Now reports, things have not been looking good for the state in court:

In its response brief, CDCR argues that it has a comprehensive use-of-force policy, revised in 2010, that takes into account mentally ill inmates and includes appropriate training and discipline provisions. The brief also argues that the high standard for intervention under the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) has not been met. The two videos, the defendants argue, do not demonstrate a “pattern or practice” of disproportionate force.

The state’s own expert witness testified that guards use pepper spray far too often and in quantities that are too great. He also said previous recommendations for changes were rejected or ignored.

The Contra Costa Times quoted Michael Stainer, Director of CDCR’s Division of Adult Institutions, who described the depicted incidents as “at best, controlled chaos.”

Judge Karlton is to issue his decision in a few days.

Solitary Confinement: What Could the Legislature Do?

Two months have passed since the joint legislative hearing held by the California Senate and Assembly Public Safety committees. At the hearing, lawmakers heard testimony from CDCR personnel, academics, and families of  SHU inmates.

At the hearing, several of the lawmakers, especially Tom Ammiano, Loni Hancock, and Nancy Skinner spoke up about their discomfort with SHU conditions. If this is truly the zeitgeist in the legislature, what can they do to modify the conditions?

It is highly unrealistic that California will do away with solitary confinement altogether. Short of extreme creativity, it’s hard to repurpose a maximum-security facility. Nor is it realistic to express political consensus that the institution is unnecessary. But there are various ways to mitigate our use of SHU units. Many of these are detailed in Confronting Confinement, a 2006 report by the U.S. Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons. In the California case, the legislature could decide to:

1. Limit long-term solitary confinement to, say, ten years.
2. Monitor the entrance to solitary confinement. One possibility would be to limit solitary to punishment for infractions, but if the legislature doesn’t want to go that far, they could focus on demanding more evidence of danger before admitting someone to solitary confinement.
3. Monitor the exit from solitary confinement. The legislature could decide to abolish the debriefing process, or it could call for modifications, such as improving the criteria for establishing gang status.
4. Limit disciplinary measures. The legislature could flat-out forbid collective punishment, especially when race based.
5. Make a decision about double-bunking. I confess this one trumps me as well. Being locked up alone in a cell versus sharing it, in very close quarters, with a roommate not of one’s choosing? This could be what Keramet Reiter once referred to as “differently horrible.”
6. Add human contact, such as work with others or joint yard time.
7. Increase contact with the outside, including letters and visits.
8. Increase access to books and educational opportunities.
9. Set up parameters for safe and effective health care.
10. Seriously examine the quality of food and consider guidelines and improvements.
11. Take on the quality of staff training.

We will have to wait and see how things shape up.

Music Review: Johnny Cash at Folsom and at San Quentin

It’s been a while since a CCC update, and this was partly because I was hard at work wrapping up my book manuscript, Cheap on Crime: How Recession-Era Politics Transform American Punishment, and sending it off to the good people at UC Press. For those wanting a wee preview, my paper with Ryan Newby Death Row Economics and my forthcoming paper The Inmate Export Business should give you a flavor of the book, though the framework will be much broader than in the papers. Until the manuscript reviews arrive, I’m working on some new and interesting projects, including one about marriage and companionship in California prisons in the post-DOMA era.

But in the meantime, I have been listening to some good music, including Johnny Cash’s two albums recorded as live performances in prison: The famous 1968 performance at Folsom, and the 1969 performance at San Quentin.

Johnny Cash needs no introduction. At the time he started considering a performance in prison, he had already had several brushes with the law himself, and his formerly glamorous career suffered serious setbacks because of his increasing dependence on drugs. Having kicked the habit at the end of 1967, Cash, whose interest in Folsom Prison was awakened long before (his Folsom Prison Blues was written back in 1953) reached out to San Quentin and Folsom through his new manager, Bob Johnston, and Folsom responded first.

Listening to the witty, subversive tracks makes one wonder how it was possible to organize a performance of this scale behind bars. The photos accompanying the CD depict Cash in front of an audience of thousands. Notably, the audience is largely white in those pre-drug-war days. Putting the show together must have been a logistic nightmare, and that CDC was willing to put up with it for subversive, anti-prison, pro-inmate, funny songs from a man whose own legal background was shady, seems incredible in 2013. The only example I can think of is Metallica’s performance at San Quentin. But Cash’s songs are risky and revolutionary. His 25 Minutes to Go is a wry, gallows-humor account of the minutes before the execution. “San Quentin, what good do you think you do? Do you think I’ll be different when you’re through?” He sings elsewhere, and even says, “San Quentin, may you born in hell; may your walls fall and I will live to tell.”

The inmates’ immense cheer is palpable.

The other tracks are also subversive and funny, and Cash’s rich voice rings jovial and powerful. The audience seems to be enjoying the performance a great deal; I bet they were expecting it for a long time. Highly, highly recommended.

Book Review: Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

For ten years, between 1993 and 2003, Adrian LeBlanc followed the lives of four young people living in the Bronx, their trials and tribulations, their families, love affairs, and friendships, their struggles and moments of happiness and despair. Random Family is a remarkable work of nonfiction, of special interest to those who see prison as part and parcel of the American social fabric.

The book follows Jessica, a beautiful and charismatic young woman who becomes a love interest of “Boy” George Rivera, a successful heroin dealer, from her early teenage years, through her tumultuous relationship with George, through the fall of his heroin empire and the eventual incarceration of both of them. Jessica, who worked in George’s heroin mill, was sentenced to ten years in prison when George was sentenced to life without parole. A life of high excitement, sex, and three children, whom Jessica was too young and distracted to mother by herself, gave way to years of incarceration, away from her children and her familial support system. Jessica navigates the complex experience of out-of-state incarceration; becomes romantically involved with a guard, bears his children, and eventually sues the prison system for sexual abuse; and finally, in her early thirties, is released from prison and starts putting her life together and mending her relationship with her teenage daughter.

The other couple at the focus of the narrative are Cesar, Jessica’s young brother, and Coco, his girlfriend and mother of two of his children. Coco’s love for Cesar endures throughout his nine years in prison for offenses related to the death of a friend, and she struggles hard to maintain her optimism through several apartment moves, immense poverty, and the need to provide for five children from four largely-absent fathers. Cesar’s time in prison, including stints in solitary, efforts to improve his education and visits from family members and the four mothers of his children, sees him grow and develop wisdom and some understanding of the bigger set of circumstances faced by his family.

An array of mothers, absent fathers, aunties and uncles, friends of the family, and kin-of-choice surround the characters in their adventures and misventures. Thirtysomething year-old grandmothers Foxy (Coco’s mother) and Lourdes (Jessica and Cesar’s mothers) confront the choices made by their children replicating the choices they made, under similar circumstances. I found Milagros–a neighborhood friend who volunteers to raise a small army of children born by her friends, and whose possibly-queer sexuality is never explored in depth–particularly engaging and intriguing.

The narrative itself is as engrossing as a soap opera or a good thriller, but it is extremely valuable because of the overarching themes. The first one that struck me as immensely important is the ubiquity of sexual abuse in the lives of girls and young women. Virtually all protagonists of the book experienced sexual abuse, most of them as victims of family members and acquaintances parading through perennially unstable households. Men are held on to and fantasized upon, but cannot be fully trusted even when they are fathers, brothers and lovers. This shared experience makes the illusion of sexual freedom and agency that Jessica, Coco, and their family members seek problematic and somber.

A large number of children are born in the ten years spanned by the book, and virtually all women become mothers in their teenage years. Children are a source of pride and love, but also of anguish; their needs are impossible to address in overwhelming poverty, and they are consistently used–as symbols of love, as reminders of former love, as weapons to wield against sexual rivals, as instruments of hope for parents behind bars. The incarcerated parents–Serena, Stephanie and Brittany’s mother; Mercedes and Nautica’s father–leave gaping holes in their children’s hearts, and the letter exchanges and visits gain immense importance. The inability to count on any man–in prison or outside–for paternal stability saddles the mothers in the book with responsibilities that tax their young age and lack of experience. And the intricacies of love and family relationships are fascinating; nonmonogamies of various kinds are built and broken; protagonists alternate between tolerance, friendship, and hatred of their sexual and romantic rivals, acknowledging the fragility of the family unit; and the double standard, allowing for men’s multiple partnerships and families while begrudgingly accepting (and condemning) women’s, is present throughout the narrative.

The deep involvement in drugs, as users and sellers, permeates the lives of everyone in the book. They approach the world of narcotics as the only one available; in the words of David Simon in The House I Live In, it’s like working for the company in a company town. Incarceration is an inevitable way of life; many characters cycle in and out of prison, for crimes they committed and did not commit. They continue living, in their own experiences, and for their family outside; the weight of visits to distance prisons and expensive collect phone calls lies on the shoulders of twenty-year-old mothers and their multiple children. The struggles within prison are mirrored by the struggles of the family outside; economic difficulties, rivalries, the price of misplaced trust and generosity, all need to be handled in a reality that is oppressive outside as well as in.

We also see the protagonists constantly battling their crippling poverty and navigating the institutional world. Changes in welfare and educational policy (food stamps, HeadStart) transform the everyday lives of Coco and her family. New living situations, supervised and paternalized, require compliance to different forms of discipline. Every time a character seems to get ahead a bit, a new institutional issue pops up and needs to be urgently addressed.

One of the wonderful things about the book is that it doesn’t attempt to reduce the realities it describes to one of two frameworks: self-agency, which blames its subjects for their fate, or environmental factors, which absolve them of responsibility for their choices. LeBlanc herself, reflecting on her book ten years after its publication, speaks to some of this complexity in the context of female sexuality and its construction in the lives of her subjects:

From the distance of a decade, one thing that was operative—and it’s an ongoing interest—is the ways in which gender inequality, and the stigma of women’s sexual agency, narrows the road for female development. Teen-agers rightly fight the assumptions we place on them—many due to the fears in the adults around them, or the unlived lives of those adults, or the lies the culture tells. But, too often, consequences of attempts to explore freedom are attributed solely to sexual agency, or painted solely as victimization, and it’s much more complicated than that. Serena was keenly aware of how little all of it had to do with her, and that was something I felt was important to note.

This is something that is important to note not only with regard to the women’s sexual agency in the book. It’s true about criminal career paths, opportunities for financial development, and other issues. There are conscious choices being made by people who weigh the options in front of them to the best of their abilities. But the menu of choices is severely circumscribed by culture, class, locale, ethnicity, and gender.

This book, in its remarkable objectivity, in the narrator’s removal of herself from the narrative, in its perceptive insights into the lives of the people that inhabit its pages, is a must-read for anyone, regardless of political beliefs or interest in the prison system.

Criminal Justice Bills Vetoed by Gov. Brown in 2013

Image courtesy the Los Angeles Times.

Our first post in this series reviewed the bills signed into law by Gov. Brown in 2013. This edition examines some of the bills vetoed by the Governor, complete with veto memos and some thoughts about the future of the ideas behind the bills.

We all heard, of course, with great disappointment about the vetoing of SB 649, which would have reclassified simple drug possession offenses as “wobblers”, thus allowing their prosecution as either felonies or misdemeanors. The passage of the bill would have put California on par with several other states. Not all, however, is lost. Gov. Brown’s veto message indicated that, while he wasn’t comfortable with this change, he might be open to other drug law reform (a good example is his signing of AB 721, which effectively decriminalizes drug transportation for personal use.)

There were other disappointments, and they were for the most part along the lines of failed attempts to create broad health-care and rehabilitation reforms or to curb police power. Examples of the former are AB 994, which proposed creating a postplea misdemeanor diversion program in each county; AB 1263, addressing Medi-Cal for low-income people, which would have had important implications for formerly incarcerated folks and their families, as it would establish CommuniCal, which would dispense information to folks with low proficiency in English; and AB 999, which would require CDCR to develop a 5-year plan to extend the availability of condoms in all CA prisons. An example of the latter is the veto on SB 467, which would prohibit a governmental entity from obtaining information from an electronic communication service provider without a warrant, and require that the subscriber/customer receive a copy of the warrant.

Some of these vetoes are deeply disappointing, but it is important to observe that they addressed extensive medical reforms, which the Governor may believe he is solving with his proposition to spend an enormous sum of money on privatizing prisons and thus reducing overcrowding.

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Criminal Justice Bills Signed Into Law by Gov. Brown, 2013 Season

Image courtesy NBC San Diego.

A month ago we provided a brief overview of the criminal justice bills on Gov. Brown’s desk. With the end of the legislative session, we have some important updates on some of these bills. This is the first of two posts, reporting on bills signed into law; the second post reviews vetoed bills.

We’ve all heard the news about the passage of AB 4, otherwise known as the TRUST Act. Federal law authorizes federal immigration officers to advise state and local law enforcement agents that a given person under custody has to be held for deportation. Under the new bill, CA law enforcement officials are not allowed to detain someone based on an ICE hold after the person is eligible for release from custody, unless certain conditions apply, such as a conviction for specified crimes.

Regular readers may recall our failed attempt to restore voting rights to non-serious, non-sexual, non-violent offenders in jail or on community supervision. AB 149 requires each county probation department to maintain a link to the Secretary of State’s voting rights guide, explaining clearly people’s rights to vote, which is particularly important in the case of probationers, who are eligible to vote in California and may not know that.

And we all remember the happy announcement that AB 218, otherwise known as Ban the Box, passed and was signed into law. The bill prohibits state or local agencies from asking an applicant to disclose information regarding a criminal conviction until the agency has determined the applicant meets the minimum qualifications for the position. From the reentry perspective, it is a laudable initiative that gives formerly incarcerated people a fair shot at being considered for a position on their merits and qualifications. Fewer people are aware of SB 530, which prohibit employers from asking about convictions that have been judicially dismissed or ordered sealed, except in special circumstances.

There were a multitude of gun bills on the Governor’s desk, and the end result on those was fairly mixed. The higher-profile bills were vetoed, such as SB 374, which would have banned semi-automatic rifles with detachable magazines and require registration of even low-capacity rifles, and SB 567, which would have defined some rifles and shotguns as assault weapons. However, AB 231, which makes it a misdemeanor to store loaded weapons where children might have access to them, passed, and so did bills creating prohibitions for businesses from applying for assault weapons permits and two bills restricting firearms for mentally ill patients.

AB 494 increases CDCR’s accountability for literacy programs for inmates. Current law requires CDCR to implement literacy programs that would bring inmates, upon parole, to a 9thgrade reading level. ABA 494 requires CDCR to implement literacy programs that allow inmates who already have that level of literacy to acquire a GED certificate or its equivalent, as well as offer college programs through voluntary education programs. It also lists priorities. AB 624 is also a source of similar good news for inmate advocates. The bill allows sheriffs and other county directors of corrections to increase the number of programs that provide inmates with good credits toward release. Along the same lines, AB 1019 requires that the Superintendent of Education set goals for technical education programs in prison.

In helping folks reintegrate into their communities, record-cleaning and expungement issues are incredibly important. Now that AB 651 has been signed into law, defendants who did jail time for felonies may apply for expungement (withdraw their plea of guilty) after one or two years following the completion of the sentence, if they have an otherwise clean record; this makes their situation vis-a-vis expungements similar to that of defendants on probation. Defendants who completed prefiling diversion programs may also petition to seal the arrest records, under newly enacted SB 513. There are special rules about expungement of juvenile records, and AB 1006 creates an obligation to notify juvenile defendants of their rights to petition for sealing and destruction of the records.

There are other bills specifically geared toward juvenile defendants. SB 569 requires recording all interrogations of juveniles accused of murder (why only juveniles? why only murder? I suppose someone thought an incremental approach would be best.) And, of course, there’s SB 260, which, as we pointed out in the past, extends SB 9 to allow resentencing petitions for juveniles sentences to lengthy periods of time.

And more good news on the health care front: AB 720 requires the board of supervisors in each county to designate an entity to assist certain jail inmates to apply for a health insurance affordability program, and will prohibit county jail inmates who are currently enrolled in the Medi-Cal from being terminated from the program due to their detention, unless required by federal law or they become otherwise ineligible.

While SB 649, intended to reclassify simple drug possession as a “wobbler” (in order to allow it to be prosecuted as a misdemeanor) was vetoed (and more on that on the next post), there are some developments. AB 721 redefines drug transportation as transportation for sale purposes, effectively decriminalizing transportation for personal use.

There are also some expansions to police authority and some new criminal offenses, but at least from my perspective they seem fairly reasonable–a far cry from the super-punitive voter initiatives of elections past. SB 255 prohibits “revenge porn”, that is, distributing someone’s nude photo to cause them distress. [EDITED TO ADD: Notably, the law does not cover “sexting” situations, that is, redistribution of photos the victim took him/herself.] SB 717 allows issuing a search warrant to authorized a blood draw from a pesron in a “reasonable, medically approved manner, for DUI suspects who refuse to comply with police request for a blood draw. There’s also SB 57, which prohibits registered sex offenders from tampering with their GPS devices, which I suppose is good news for folks who think these devices are good tools for recidivism prevention (I have doubts.)

SB 458 tempers the legal requirements for including people’s name in gang databases. Under the new law, a person, or his/her parent/guardian in case of a minor, now gets notified that there’s an intention to include him/her in the gang member registry, and the person may contest, with written materials, said designation. Local law enforcement has to prove verification of the designation, with written materials, within 60 days.

And finally, SB 618 extends the ability to receive compensation for wrongful conviction to felons serving jail time. Also, the bill extends the time to apply for compensation to two years, requiring the Attorney General to respond within 60 days, and also removes the burden on the exoneree or pardoned person to prove that they did not intentionally contribute to bringing about the arrest or conviction.

Some important themes emerge. First, note the emphasis on reentry and reintegration in the job market, which is a healthy recession-era policy to allow formerly incarcerated folks at least a fighting chance finding employment and rebuilding their lives. We’re also seeing particular care with regard to juvenile offenders, especially those charged with or convicted of serious offenses. There isn’t a lot of hyperpunitive legislation, and the few new offenses seem tempered and reasonable. The next post deals with the vetoed bills.

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