New Outbreak at CIW: Van Houten’s Fate in Gov. Newsom’s Hands

After a spike in early June and an apparent abatement, COVID-19 is once again tearing through the California Institute for Women (CIW) in Chino. In the last 14 days, the prison tested 1,200 of its 1,413 residents (housed in a facility designed to hold 1,398 people – slightly above 100% capacity.) The testing count on the tracking tool seems to suggest testing done in batches, but we don’t know how they are managing isolation in a crowded facility–hopefully not taking a page from the book of this women’s prison in Texas.

CIW is of special interest to me, because a few days ago we learned that Leslie van Houten, who is serving her sentence there, has been yet again recommended for parole. Van Houten has been consistently recommended for parole since 2017, but governors–first Brown, now Newsom–keep reversing the recommendation for what seems to me, after having pored over 50 years’ worth of her prison record, purely political reasons. Van Houten has maintained a clean disciplinary record, participated in a variety of laudable programs, and incessantly excavated her psyche to show “insight” to the Board. She participated in the murders when she was 19 years old, manipulated and sexually exploited in a setting that, with today’s #MeToo sensibilities, might have shed a completely different light on her involvement.

I mention van Houten’s case because it is emblematic of the dilemma that Gov. Newsom faces with countless other cases. The right thing to do is to release older prisoners, who are more vulnerable to the virus; these people, who serve long sentences, are serving them for violent crimes they committed decades ago. Everything we know about life course criminology supports the prediction that they pose no risk to public safety–they themselves face a risk by remaining behind bars.

In Yesterday’s Monsters I explain how the Manson family cases came to shape California’s extreme punishment regime, and how these cases were impacted by this new regime in turn. This is the chance for a politician who has consistently ran, and prevailed, on a platform of doing the right thing in the face of baseless political pressures. There is no ambiguity about the right thing to do now. Van Houten is 70 years old, has been consistently found to pose very low risk to public safety by actuarial instruments and by everyone who has interacted with her, and there’s a pandemic going on.

Van Houten is not the only person at CIW facing these risks. Just a few days ago, advocates were overjoyed to welcome home Patricia Wright, a 69-year-old cancer patient who doctors say has mere months to live, after she served 23 years in prison. Wright’s release encouraged me, given the infuriating and heartbreaking scene just eleven years ago at Susan Atkins’ last hearing. Perhaps the pandemic is driving home, finally, the message that allowing an older person to die at home with their loved ones, or live out in peace the few years they have left, is not a weakness, nor a slight to the victims. Perhaps it is driving home the message that compassion is an essential component of our humanity. Will Gov. Newsom choose to do the right thing for van Houten and other women at CIW, from both public health and public safety perspectives, or will he succumb to unfounded public pressure, hysteria, and fear?

Release Party for Yesterday’s Monsters

Hi, Dear Readers! My new book Yesterday’s Monsters: The Manson Family Cases and the Illusion of Parole is out from UC Press and I am inviting you to celebrate!

When: Wednesday, March 11

Where: Manny’s, Valencia & 16th

What:

In 1969, the world was shocked by a series of murders committed by Charles Manson and his “family” of followers. Although the defendants were sentenced to death in 1971, their sentences were commuted to life with parole in 1972; since 1978, they have been regularly attending parole hearings. Today all of the living defendants remain behind bars.

Relying on nearly fifty years of parole hearing transcripts, as well as interviews and archival materials, Hadar Aviram invites readers into the opaque world of the California parole process—a realm of almost unfettered administrative discretion, prison programming inadequacies, high-pitched emotions, and political pressures. Yesterday’s Monsters offers a fresh longitudinal perspective on extreme punishment.

Book reading, signing, parole reform, food, drink!

RSVP HERE!

The Prefrontal Cortex Strikes Again: Bill to Raise Age for Trying Juveniles as Adults to 20

The Sac Bee reports:

A California lawmaker argues that 18- and 19-year-olds aren’t mature enough to do prison time if they break the law, and so she has submitted a bill that would treat them like juveniles.

“When teenagers make serious mistakes and commit crimes, state prison is not the answer,” said bill sponsor Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley. “Processing teenagers through the juvenile justice system will help ensure they receive the appropriate education, counseling, treatment, and rehabilitation services necessary to achieve real public safety outcomes.”

Skinner’s proposal is the last in a series of legislative and judicial changes reflecting what I referred to, in Yesterday’s Monsters, as the “rediscovery of childhood.” Since the early 2000s, our understanding of childhood and its implications as to accountability has undergone a dramatic scientific, legal, and social transformation. Recall the miscarriage of justice depicted in Ken Burns’ documentary The Central Park Five, in which five teenagers were accused, and wrongly convicted, of assaulting Trisha Meili in New York’s Central Park in 1985 and leaving her for dead. 

Current audiences bristle at the tough prosecutorial interrogation of children, but the newspaper headlines of the day (as well as rabid ads and media appearances by a younger Donald Trump) depict the youngsters as a “wolf pack” of “superpredators.” This case was no outlier: prompted by the media frenzy over the crack epidemic,  young criminal offenders, particularly African Americans, were regularly dehumanized, their age denoting danger rather than mitigation or rehabilitative potential.

However, the early 2000s, new brain imaging technologies enabled neuroscientists discover that the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for the ability to delay gratification, exercise emotional regulation, and resist pressure, continuously grows well into our mid-twenties,  which explains impatience and rash decisions by teenagers and adolescents.

These developments first permeated the legal field in Roper v. Simmons,  where the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty for minors as unconstitutional. The court found that juveniles to be immature and irresponsible, more vulnerable to peer pressure, and possessing a “more transitory, less fixed” character. These differences “render suspect any conclusion that a juvenile falls among the worst offenders”, and therefore, from a moral standpoint it would be misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor’s character deficiencies will be reformed.” 

The decision in Roper energized petitioners serving lengthy sentences for crimes committed when they were minors, and other landmark decisions followed. In Graham v. Florida,  the Supreme Court struck down life without parole for non-homicide offenses committed by juveniles, citing similar rationales, and explaining that the aims of punishment do not support such a harsh sentence for crimes other than homicide. Subsequently, in Miller v. Alabama,  the Court invalidated, for juvenile offenders, sentencing schemes under which certain murder convictions yielded mandatory life without parole sentences, finding that such schemes “preclude a sentencer from taking account of an offender’s . . . chronological age and its hallmark features—among them, immaturity, impetuosity, and failure to appreciate risks and consequences. . .  And finally, this mandatory punishment disregards the possibility of rehabilitation even when the circumstances most suggest it.”

Miller did not explicitly state that it would apply retroactively, to the many inmates already serving lengthy sentences under sentencing schemes that violated Miller. One such inmate was Henry Montgomery, convicted of the murder of a police officer when he was sixteen years old; at the time Miller was decided he was already in his late fifties, still serving time in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison. Montgomery appealed his sentence,  arguing that Miller should apply retroactively.  Under constitutional doctrine, as established in Griffith v. Kentucky and in Teague v. Lane,  defendants whose cases are final face an uphill battle in reopening their cases in light of Supreme Court landmark decisions. They must convince the court of one of the following three arguments: first, that the landmark decision does not announce a “new rule,” but merely interprets prior precedent; second, that the “new rule” is substantive, rather than procedural, in nature; or third, that the “new rule” is a “watershed rule of criminal procedure,” of such seminal importance that justice requires it to be retroactively applicable.

In Montgomery, the Supreme Court was convinced of the second argument. It found that the Miller rule, according to which mandatory life without parole schemes could not apply to juveniles, was a substantive rule—a rule that “rendered life without parole an unconstitutional penalty for a class of defendants because of their status”, and therefore should apply retroactively. The Court was less decisive about the appropriate remedy, and Justice Kennedy opined that parole hearings might be a suitable forum for raising the age argument. 

 Before the Supreme Court announced its decision in Miller, a large California campaign waged by criminal justice nonprofits and human rights organizations yielded SB 9,  which required holding a judicial resentencing hearing for all juveniles serving life without parole. Subsequently, California lawmakers also adopted SB 260,  which expanded the access to resentencing hearings to juveniles serving other extreme sentences, short of life without parole. SB 260 was later amended by SB 261, further expanding the resentencing hearings to those who were under 23 years of age when committing the crime. This amendment better reflects neuroscience developments, according to which the prefrontal cortext continues to develop well into one’s early twenties. In this respect and others, California is ahead of the rest of the nation in acknowledging the contribution of youth to crime.  A subsequent bill signed into law in 2017, SB 394, set the date for the first opportunity for a hearing by a minor at 24 years of incarceration.   All of these developments, particularly in CA, explain the logic behind Skinner’s proposal.

 As an aside, because Yesterday’s Monsters is about parole hearings, I’ll say that these developments did, eventually, find their way into the parole hearing room with the parole grant recommendation for Leslie van Houten in 2016, in which the Board anchored its decision in the new understanding of youth:

Your choices that you made in your life at an early age based on the belief system that the family was over when there was a dissolution led you to a lifestyle of drugs, running away, unplanned pregnancy, the abortion, anti-establishment philosophy of the times. You exhibited these hallmarks of youth at the time of the crime as compared to adults, lack of maturity, underdeveloped sense of responsibility, leading a reckless, impulsive lifestyle. So that was 261. That was what the Supreme Court has ruled on, and that is on point with the case factors we see before the Panel here today, so the great weight played a role. Your age played a role.  


 It remains to be seen whether attention to youth significantly reforms the parole process. Recently, Beth Schwartzapfel observed that parole boards find ways to thwart the Court’s decision in Montgomery, arguing that long-term inmates who committed their crimes at a young age have not yet developed “insight.” The outcome is “a wave of lawsuits from those who claim parole officials are undermining their new constitutional obligations.” 

This is especially true in California, where political considerations might lead the Governor to reverse release recommendations, thus retaining political good will and protecting the gubernatorial office from public backlash. Notably, Governor Brown reversed the Board’s recommendation and denied Van Houten’s parole.

Nevertheless, it is telling that the Board—albeit more politically insulated than the Governor—felt comfortable recommending the release of a high-profile inmate on the basis of age, a fact widely known from the time the crime was committed but only recently considered. This development bodes well for other inmates, and specifically for members of the Manson “family,” whose young age was a deciding factor in their involvement with Manson in the first place. 

Nonexistent Reentry in CA: When People Are Duped Into Thinking It’s All Their Fault

The opening chapter of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish compares two penal scenes: the drawing and quartering of a regicide and a drab scene from a discipline-heavy juvenile facility, 80 years later. These scenes are emblematic of the change Foucault sees in punishment: from centralized to decentralized, from a “festival of punishment” to drab things behind closed doors, and most importantly–from body to soul. I read this stuff for the first time about twenty years ago, and its enchantment has worn off; I’m pretty clear on the fact that the move from corporal punishment to incarceration was overall a good one. But there are some days when the “soul” element of punishment is especially hard to stomach, especially when it consists of selling justice-involved people the lie that the only cause for their miseries lies in their own action.

I was outraged, albeit not surprised, to read this distressing exposé on Mother Jones. The gist of it is that our enthusiasm for early releases has not been matched by an enthusiasm to actually help people get on their feet after they are released. It opens with a typical–and horrendous–story:

After 15 long years behind bars, Terah Lawyer needed to show the parole board she had somewhere lined up to live. She landed a spot in a facility on Treasure Island and was so grateful to be out that at first she didn’t mind being forced to spend dozens of hours a week in treatment classes for a substance abuse problem she didn’t have, and in fact, as a drug and alcohol counselor, was certified to teach about. But quickly, the program’s strict schedule and tough restrictions, like lockdowns on holidays and limited free time, got in the way of adjusting to real life. Before she left prison, she’d worked hard to secure a job with the California Coalition of Women Prisoners, but her facility’s rules forced her to delay her start date three months, and she lost the opportunity. Most painfully, the program’s structure made it hard to visit with her parents, who lived a couple hours north in Sacramento.  

Once she was finally able to start working, she’d leave the house at 7 a.m., work a full day, and get back in time for the hour-and-a-half class at night. “I was required to still bring in 21 hours of treatment classes in order for me to get my weekend passes to go home, to go shopping, to go out with family or friends, to do things that are considered freedom,” she explains. “It was really difficult being able to hold down a full-time job, which is thankfully now giving me an income, and also meet the program’s requirements of classes that I didn’t even need in the first place.”

Lawyer’s experience reminded me of participant observations I did at the Peer Reentry Navigation Network (PRNN), a group of former lifers now making a life for themselves on the outside that meets monthly in San Francisco, run jointly by an activist who is formerly incarcerated and by a parole officer. The day I was there, everyone talked about housing. In Yesterday’s Monsters I described the conversation:

After a round of advice and information about housing and smartphone tutorials, Cara, a young woman, steps to the front of the room to facilitate an activity. She distributes blank pages and invites attendees to draw a picture frame on the page. She then asks us to write or draw a picture of what success means to us. We work in silence, occasionally sneaking a peek at our neighbors’ work and smiling at them. Cara then invites the audience to share. “Being able to provide for my family.” “Having a job, a stable place to live.” “Finding someone to love and someone who loves me.” One woman shares, “I want two dogs and a Mercedes.” Cara laughs. The woman jokingly adds, “What? You wanted us to define success. Well, that’s what success means to me.”

Then Cara gives us the “bad news”: If you are not actively working to direct your life toward those goals, then perhaps you don’t really want them. For example, she says, if you want to save enough money for a down payment on a house but you end up buying shoes and flashy outfits, then maybe you are not really that driven to be a homeowner. You must pursue your goals with real ferocity, she says.

For many of the people in the room, homeownership in aggressively gentrified San Francisco is a pipe dream. Since the rise of the tech industry, housing in the city has become prohibitively expensive, both for owners and for renters. Even so-called low-income housing requires a considerable income, as well as jumping through multiple bureaucratic hoops. Joe acknowledges these difficulties but encourages attendees to overcome them. “If you want to apply,” he says, “I will help you. We’ll work on your applications together.” It might take sixty applications, he says, but eventually one will succeed. 

My ambivalence grows. On one hand, I admire the spirit of enterprise, mutual aid, and community strength in the room. I recognize the importance of self-focused success and of belief in free agency. On the other, I’m sure that my fellow attendees have learned all too well in the course of their lives that, despite their best efforts, the reentry deck is heavily stacked against them. I recall Alessandro de Giorgi’s recently released subjects who attributed their immense difficulties and abject poverty to their own failings rather than to the systemic difficulties that stood in their way.

There is something maddening about people being led to be convinced that their own flaws are the only thing standing between them and their dreams, but that very message is what the so-called prison rehabilitation apparatus, and particularly the parole hearing process, tries to sell people on a regular basis. When my colleague Alessandro de Giorgi interviewed formerly incarcerated people who faced acute misery at the very bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (no home; no job; no food), he was struck by how much they attributed their poverty, squalor, and dire need to their own flaws. He explains:

Today, whatever minimal services are available to former prisoners are provided mostly through the non-profit, faith-based, semi-private sector, what Jennifer Wolch (1990, 201) has aptly defined as an emergent shadow state: a “para-state apparatus with collective service responsibilities previously shouldered by the public sector, administered outside traditional democratic politics, but yet controlled in both formal and informal ways by the state.” In this framework, highly individualistic and market-friendly solutions are systematically proposed as the only answers to a broad range of structural obstacles faced by formerly incarcerated people: At every turn in their trajectories through the carceral state, from arrest to reentry, criminalized people are taught that success or failure is entirely dependent upon their own efforts.

But here’s the really depressing bit:

Despite the weight of the structural circumstances they face, the participants to this research appear to have internalized the neoliberal narrative of personal responsibility that is constantly inculcated in prisons, rehabilitation centers, and reentry programs (see also Gowan & Whetstone 2012; Miller 2014; Werth 2012, 2016). They wholeheartedly embrace the dominant rhetoric of free choice, as well as hegemonic definitions of social deservingness and undeservingness. 

In other words, de Giorgi’s subjects themselves believe that the ills that they face when they reenter are their own fault, because they don’t deserve better, and do not seem to see any institutional problem here (when he presented this piece at our Carceral Studies Workgroup, he astutely observed that people do have racial critiques a-la-Michelle Alexander, but not an understanding of class.)

In Yesterday’s Monsters I saw this propaganda apparatus at work: people who see their crimes in a broader social context are chastised for “minimizing.” Here’s an example from the book, in which Patricia Krenwinkel, in the 1980s, tries to frame her crime in the context of the sixties:

It came up about ’65. It was the beginning of the marches. It was the beginning of the civil rights movement. It was the beginning of all the movements of the late sixties, which eventually involved entering the war. . . . I found that I couldn’t seem to find my bearings in this world at that time. . . . I couldn’t seem to find where there was any, on my own—seem to find any reinforcement for doing anything other than kind of letting myself go with the time of what at that time was tune-in and drop-out, as Timothy Leary so put it. I mean, it’s hard to say. There were so many components. I was a child of the sixties. And there definitely is something to be said about the sixties. It was an incredible time in the period of our history. It’s something that I look back on and I see, because there’s thousands of people out there that were not much different than myself.

The prosecutor, Stephen Kay, responds with an astounding lack of empathy and contextual comprehension:

I feel that it’s kind of hard for me to accept Miss Krenwinkel’s statement that she was a child of the sixties, and there were thousands of others like her out there in the sixties. I myself went to law school at Berkeley during the time of Mario Savio and could observe some of these children of the sixties. And they characterized themselves as flower children. Their slogan was “make love, not war.” They weren’t into murdering people.

Pretty much any reasonable criminologist you’ll meet will tell you that crime is a combination of personal and environmental factors (including what gets defined as crime.) How much of each gets poured into the mix varies across crimes; this is why talking about both drug use and violent assaults as “crime” can be confusing. But you’d have to be extremely naive to assume that crime doesn’t have an ontological existence (some abolitionists in the 1970s advanced this view), just as you’d have to be pretty obtuse and cruel to assume that crime is entirely a function of personal pathology. If it were, why are poor people overrepresented in the criminal justice apparatus?

A lot of the highfalutin’ critical criminology from the last few years uses the term “neoliberalism” to mean a hypercapitalist, highly privatized environment in which people are expected to take responsibility for themselves, with no welfarist contribution from the state. Kicking people out of prison to fend for themselves without any veritable programming designed to put them on their feet–and with an astonishing paucity of solid vocational training behind bars in preparation for life outside–is a manifestation of this neoliberal ideology, and what’s more–this mentality is successful and pervasive because it dupes not only the professionals who administer it, but also the people who are subjected to it. 

Film Review: Once Upon a Time in. . . Hollywood

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

I just came out of a screening of Quentin Tarantino’s new movie Once Upon a Time in. . . Hollywood, which I somewhat dreaded watching as an expert on the cases. My own forthcoming book about the Manson family, Yesterday’s Monsters: The Manson Family Cases and the Illusion of Parole, has made me somewhat leery of Mansonsploitation, of which there is plenty as far as the eye can see. Because of the tendency to turn the tragedy of the murders (and the tragedy of five decades of incarceration that followed) into a spectacle, I decided early on I don’t want to make a cent off of the book – all royalties are going to an organization that provides parole representation for indigent lifers – and commercial enterprises centered on the story of the murders give me the creeps.

But Tarantino’s movie is not a spectacular recreation of the murders; in fact, it is a wise, almost lyrical, reflection on their cultural legacy. The main protagonists of his story, actor Rick Dalton and his stuntman Cliff Booth, live a reality adjacent to that of Polanski and Tate, Dalton’s next-door neighbors We see both men confronted with turning points in their professional lives: aging out of acting, aging out of stunts, the importance of career, what does excelling in one’s trade/art mean, big questions for thoughtful and flawed people. DiCaprio and Pitt are at the top of their game, both painting human, sympathetic, charismatic characters, and the movie is full of poignant, moving, and important glimpses into their inner worlds without becoming heavyhanded. The gentleness and nuance with which the two act their roles, and with which Tarantino paints their inner feelings, stands in contrast to the Spaghetti Western world that Tarantino has picked as a foil for the story. Truly a masterpiece.

But I watched the movie not just as a movie, but as an American phenomenon – a commentary on events that changed the course of American history, politics, and criminal justice. The movie is set around two axes of real history: the weekend in February in which Manson stops by the Polanski/Tate residence looking for Terry Melcher (the previous occupant) and the infamous weekend in August. Because we all know what happened in real life, a sense of malaise and foreboding accompanies our glimpses of Sharon Tate, wonderfully portrayed by Margot Robbie, as she lives out a hopeful, sunny existence expecting her child.

Much has been made of Robbie’s few speaking lines; I don’t see her role as diminished because she is not fully fleshed out as a character. Rather, her portrayal looks at her as the symbol she would come to embody – the quintessential California victim: a beautiful, famous, white woman about to give birth to a beautiful, famous, white child. Her joie-de-vivre around town–buying a book for her husband, watching herself on film and enjoying the joy she inspires in her fellow moviegoers, her delight in her friends–is palpable. Even Steve McQueen’s commentary about her and Sebring–their enduring friendship after their breakup–does not taint her wholesomeness. We watch and dread, because we know the only thing that can kill pure, untainted good is pure, uncompromising evil. And we brace ourselves.

In Yesterday’s Monsters I go into the way the narrative of the murders has shaped the California correctional landscape: because the crimes came to be seen as sui generis evil, they were the catalyst for the return of the death penalty; for the creation of life without parole; and for the dramatic changes in parole proceedings, including the gubernatorial veto right. In doing so, California fashioned what I call in the book the “extreme punishment trifecta” – its three most extreme punishments have come to be virtually indistinguishable from each other, creating a regime of interminable incarceration.

The reason these crimes were so instrumental as a rhetorical device in these developments is that the narrative around them was largely shaped by Vincent Bugliosi in his classic book Helter Skelter. As many of Bugliosi’s readers will attest, the book very intently and aggressively promotes a narrative of the crimes as bizarre and apocalyptic, focusing on Manson’s indoctrination of his followers into believing in a race war and helping jump-start it. While this story is not wrong, it is a truth that obscures other truths. The Manson family was a cult, though it was not understood as such until the mid-1970s, when our awareness of brainwashing and cults arose in the context of similar groups. And as a cult, it exploited–physically, psychologically, and sexually–its members, most of them adolescent girls. The crime also had the markings of an “ordinary criminals” crime, with a drug-deal-gone-wrong background (the narrative that Jeff Guinn exposes in his excellent Manson biography). For legal reasons, Bugliosi had to highlight the bizarre and obscure the ordinary. It’s quite possible that a similar crime tried today, through the prism of #metoo sensibilities, would see the girls as victims, not as perpetrators.

What is unique about Tarantino’s portrayal of the Manson family is that he manages to pack into the movie complexity and ambiguity. Manson appears in a brief scene in the middle of the movie, and is unremarkable, almost pathetic. We meet the rest of the family through the eyes of Cliff, the stuntman, who gives one of the girls a ride to Spahn Ranch. There, he encounters a scene that is at once pathetic and menacing. That not all is well at the ranch is obvious to Cliff, and he proceeds to check whether his old friend from his moviemaking days, George Spahn, is well. He is not entirely convinced that is the case, and has some disturbing run-ins with the scrawny, suspicious teenagers around him. The only violent incident happens with “Clem” (Steve Grogan), who is portrayed as small change. Tex Watson is portrayed as menacing and dangerous, but strikes out with Cliff. And throughout the whole scene, Tarantino creates a wonderful sense of duality between the young hippies’ quasi-military readiness and guardedness against the stranger and the obvious squalor in which they live. You are left with the feeling that Tarantino, as opposed to Bugliosi, knows that you are an adult, and let’s you form your own mind about these people and the danger they portend.

Even the eventual depiction of the disturbing night packs some surprises. It’s hard to fully describe them without ruining some classic Tarantino moments, which I might get to at a later time, after many more of you will have seen the film. But I will mention that, even in the most threatening and scary moments leading up to the home invasion, there are moments of “ordinary criminals”, moments of “cult”, and moments of “Helter Skelter”, though the latter are subdued and barely hinted at. Again, the viewers are treated with respect, left with autonomy to form their own impressions of the group, and free to comprehend the murders through the eyes of complex, adult fictional characters. Laudable choices all around.

Finally, Tarantino and the entire crew is to be congratulated for making a movie that creates a perfect sense of time and place. The songs, the design, the cars, the atomsphere, are so alive around the characters that they provide a solid presence for understanding the crimes. The chaos of the sixties, the class clashes, the unrealness of the movie industry and its dark underbelly, do not, of course, justify violence, but they place it in the context of the late sixties–a time and place so fundamental to the real and fictional events and so lacking from the parole hearings I analyze in Yesterday’s Monsters. As I explain in the book, any effort by the inmates (by now people in their sixties, seventies, and eighties, very different from the squalid teenagers in the movie) to place their actions in the context of time and place is disparaged by the parole board as an effort to “minimize” accountability and as “lack of insight” about their culpability; Tarantino’s movie is a reminder that these particular crimes could only have happened in this particular time and place. It is not an excuse; it is a deep understanding that matters for a culture still obsessed with the crimes and their aftermath.

In his book about the cultural impact of the Manson murders, Jeffrey Melnick critically analyzes the assertion that Manson “killed the Sixties”. Tarantino has brought the Sixties back to life as never before, and you will not know exactly how until you watch this gem of a movie. And after you see it, let’s talk about it.

Assessing the Dangerousness of Redball Criminals: Two Israel Examples

My forthcoming book Yesterday’s Monsters examines the parole hearings of the Manson Family, who have been consistently denied parole for decades. A key issue in the book is the notoriety of the murders and the prevalence of a narrative about them, which I call “the Helter Skelter narrative”, that portrays the crimes as bizarre, sui generis occurrences. You’ll have to read the book to see how the Board of Parole Hearings handles these cases. For now, since I’m visiting Israel for a few weeks, here are two stories of local “redball criminals” and how their requests for parole and vacation have been handled.

A few words about prison sentences for murder in Israel: Until a recent amendment, the only sentence possible for murder was life in prison. The court did not announce a minimum time like in the U.S. (such as “twenty-five to life”); it merely announced “life”. The authority to decide how long “life” lay solely in the hands of the President of Israel–a role he inherited from the British High Commissioner prior to Israeli independence. Life prisoners submitted a request to set the length of their prison sentence, and a special department at the President’s office made a recommendation. From then on the sentence would be treated as a finite sentence for release purposes, whose clock starts ticking after the inmate has served two thirds of the sentence; for example, if the President set the sentence at, say, thirty years, the prisoner would come up for parole after twenty years. There’s been a recent amendment that Americanizes the scheme of homicide offenses in Israel, but it’s not particularly relevant to this post.[1]

Another important note pertains to vacations. Under the Prison Ordinance and relevant regulations, prisoners are eligible for short vacations from prison. These depend on the prisoner’s level of dangerousness, the purpose for the vacation (an important family event, such as a funeral or an important birthday), and the time the prisoner has spent behind bars. Some of my lifer clients from the late 1990s have been receiving vacations regularly.

In 1995, as not only Israeli readers know, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was murdered by political assassin Yigal Amir. The murder shook the country to the core, and as we all know, irrevocably changed the course of history by derailing the peace process, assisting Netanyahu in ascending to the Prime Minister role, and legitimizing hate campaigns against Israeli Arab citizens, Palestinian residents, and the Israeli left-wing. But closer to the events themselves, there was still some horror and shock about the crime, which led the Knesset to legislate a special personal law, colloquially known as the “Yigal Amir Law”: a law that binds the discretion of the parole board in cases of people who murder the Prime Minister for political-ideological reasons. There’s only one such person (so far), and the law was specifically tailored to address his particular case. The President may theoretically disregard the Board’s legally-mandated “recommendation” not to release Amir, and in these times it’s not completely farfetched to imagine a President who might do so, but disincentives abound (the committee is chaired by a Justice of the Israel Supreme Court.)

Interestingly, some members of Meretz, the left-wing, civil-rights political party, abstained from the vote. They explained that creating a special, personal law for just one person was a violation of the principle of legality, no matter who the person was. Others expressed similar trepidation, but thought this was such a rare and unique case that there was no concern about a snowball effect (things have gone so seriously awry in the civil rights arena in Israel to the point that I’m no longer sure this is true.)

Another famous case involved the horrific murder of Asaf Shtierman in 1996, which remained unsolved until 2000. When a woman named Sandrine Ben-David reported severe domestic violence incidents to the police, the investigation revealed that her young husband, Rei Horev, and two young women, Sigalit Heimovitch and Lihi Gluzman, were responsible for the murder. Horev, the main instigator (for psychopathic reasons that are very hard to undestand – Shtierman was a stranger to him), received life in prison, and has been behind bars for nearly twenty years. He is, according to reports, a model prisoner with a clean disciplinary record, entrusted with responsibilities such as working on a computer. When Horev’s son with Ben-David turned 13, Horev received a short vacation from prison to attend his Bar Mitzvah (under heavy Prison Authority guard.) However, when Horev’s son enlisted in the army, Horev’s request for a vacation was denied. The judge who chaired the committee wrote a decision that reminded me a lot of the Californian equivalent Board’s vague justifications to keep the Manson Family behind bars: “According to his employers in prison, he is a responsible, essential prisoner, devoted to work, contributing, serious, and meaningful. . . he participates in educational activities and has successfully completed several therapeutic group. His psychological assessment diagnosed a significant tendency to avoid negative feelings, aggressive urges, and to see the world in an overly optimistic way. This mechanism serves him now, but might make things difficult for him when he confronts situations that evoke strong feelings. Despite a high level of insight about his past, he is lacking a deep understanding about the destructive dynamics of his past close relationships, which could be a source of difficulty in the future.”

A couple of days ago I posted about convicted rapist-murderer Shlomo Haliwa, who gets out in 2024; Horev, if he receives the customary reduction of a third of his sentence ,gets out in 2025. Who is to say which of these men is or is not dangerous? Anyone who’s heard Haliwa on tape explaining to crime documentary producers that he “likes to fuck” and that all his “relationships” were consensual with girls who “wanted them” can conclude that this is not someone who’s shown a smidgeon of insight. When he gets out, he will be 75 years old, and is still a strong, healthy man, probably as easily capable of overpowering and coercing a woman as he did in his thirties. Horev, on the other hand, has expressed remorse for his horrific crime; the extent to which he can be believed is debatable.

These cases raise the same difficulties that Yesterday’s Monsters raise about the Manson Family inmates. To what extent does the notoriety of a case impact decisions to release? And is it a legitimate consideration? Is it legitimate to factor the public’s distaste for a particular murderer in decisions to deny parole or vacations? And is there a proper measure of whether the distaste is justified? Redball crimes matter a lot in creating public policy and fueling the public’s imagination about crime, but they also feature real victims and real perpetrators who are, after all, just people.

Yesterday’s Monsters comes out early 2020 from UC Press.

————————————

[1] It is, however, relevant to some of my other work: I’ve been studying American influences on Israeli criminal justice.

Yesterday’s Monsters Coming Early 2020

I’m very excited to let you know that Yesterday’s Monsters: The Manson Family Cases and the Illusion of Parole is already in production and coming out early 2020 from the University of California Press. You are welcome to like the book’s Facebook page for news, updates, links to related media, and book release events. I very much hope that the book will open a window into the little-known world of the California parole process and look forward to the conversations that will ensue.

“I Am Speaking to You Through the Record”: Charles Manson’s Last Parole Hearings

To whet your appetite, this is an excerpt from my book in progress, Yesterday’s Monsters, under contract with the University of California Press.

On November 19, 2017, Charles Manson died in prison. His death sparked renewed interest in the killings, as well as in the peculiar legal circumstances that led to the commutation of his sentence, from the death penalty to life with parole. Little attention, however, was paid to the implication of his commuted sentence: since 1978, Manson attended 11 parole hearings, and was denied parole in each and every one of them.
My book in progress, Yesterday’s Monsters (under contract with UC Press) analyzes close to 50 years’ worth of parole hearing transcripts for Manson and his disciples. To-date, only one of them, Steve Grogan, was released. The remaining members of the Manson “family” have been repeatedly denied parole. Most remarkably, Susan Atkins, who was already seriously and terminally ill at her last hearing to the point of being nonresponsive, was not released on account of posting a risk to the community.
Yesterday’s Monsters analyzes the parole hearing and shows it to be an intricately choreographed spectacle, with a given structure, specific terms and buzzwords, and expectations as to the inmate’s performance. Time after time, most defendants in the case show up for the hearings and are denied parole. The one exception was Manson himself, who to his death played his own game with the parole board, speaking off the record, providing strange statements, and refusing to go along with the plan.
It would be easy to dismiss Manson’s behavior as a symptom of mental illness. While possible, this is only one facet of his behavior. It is especially revealing to see how the parole board attempted to deal with his last three parole hearings, to which Manson did not show up, and in which he did not cooperate with his representing attorneys.

***
1997 was the last year in which Manson attended his parole hearings. His 2002 hearing was held in the presence of his state-appointed attorney, Patrick Sparks. The Commissioner addressed Sparks as follows:
Mr. Patrick Sparks has been appointed by the State to represent Mr. Manson. Mr. Manson refused to meet with Mr. Sparks. Therefore, Mr. Sparks is at a substantial disadvantage and has indicated that he would like to be removed or dismissed from this case. Mr. Sparks, would you like to?
ATTORNEY SPARKS: That’s an accurate statement, and I’ll confirm that. That, in fact, Mr. Manson did not interview and I don’t believe that my participation at this hearing would facilitate his parole at this time.[1]
As a consequence, the Board officially removed Mr. Sparks from the case and declared a recess,[2]after which the Commissioner made a statement about the way in which the committee would have respected Manson’s rights—had he been present:
Were Mr. Manson to appear today, he would not have been required to discuss the commitment offense with the Panel. He would not have been required to speak to the Panel. Nor would he be required to actually discuss any aspects at all with the Panel. Again, he has chosen not to appear at all. And had he — Because he’s refused to attend, and had he decided not to speak to us, we would not and will not hold that against him.[3]
The panel then proceeded to read the verbatim description of Manson’s crime, as they had done at the hearings at which he was prensent. They then quoted Manson as refusing to express remorse at his 1997 appearance, which was in 1997—in contrast to his verbatim statement, in which he actually challenged the court’s findings by claiming he had not given an order to kill the victims.[4]
The board tried to make sense of Manson’s file in his absence, without much success:
In a previous report, Mr. Manson stated that in terms of parole plans, he had none. He’s had a variety of responses to that question or that issue. At one point in 1992, he stated he wasn’t interested in paroling. He would be lost in our society, and his main concern was to be released to a general population setting in order to program. There are a number of letters in the file. There are a total of 80 signatures on a petition. The signatures all appear to come from people in England. There are 15 different form letters or individual letters in the file, all of these supporting release for Mr. Manson. And the letters are signed by people who seem to be scattered all over the United States, the 15 letters.[5]
By counterbalance, the police department had provided a letter as well, which cited the original crime and the “risk to the community” posed by Manson, but did not elucidate whether said risk was current, or stemmed from anything beyond the crimes themselves:
[The Commander Officer of the Robbery/Homicide division] writes that Mr. Manson was an active participant in the mutilation and murders of several persons in the Los Angeles area. Crimes committed by Mr. Manson were of such brutality and complete lack of humanity that it is clear Mr. Manson has no concern for human life. It is the opinion of the Los Angeles Police Department that the release of Mr. Manson will create considerable risk to the community and that his release is unequivocally contrary to the interests of society.
Commissioner Mackenberg recited Manson’s unhappy and unproductive prison experience and his disciplinary violations, concluding that—
[B]y and large he has not had a very happy time of it in the last five years. If it sounds like a woeful tale, it’s not because I’m trying to simply disrespect Mr. Manson, it appears that he has serious mental health issues. That they’re causing him some very real problems.[6]
Mackenberg’s summary is as much a failure of the California prison system as it is Manson’s:
The long and short of it is, is that it’s difficult to say a whole lot about the last five years other than that he seems to go back and forth between the Protective Housing Unit, Administrative Segregation, Security Housing, back to Protective Housing Unit. So that’s kind of like a sad circle of rounds in this institution. He doesn’t seem to benefit a whole lot from treatment inasmuch as he resists it so that he often refuses apparently to see the psychologist and doesn’t want to see psychiatrists and that it’s difficult to get him to do the things that they think he should do in order to forward his programs to be able to come to the Board at some point and say really, I ought to be able to go home.
Kay, the original prosecutor, again discusses Manson’s manipulations. He also provides, again, an inaccurate characterization of Manson’s legal position:
He has never understood why he was convicted for these murders because he always thought that if he got other people to commit the murders, then they could be convicted of the murders. But if he didn’t physically do it, then he couldn’t be convicted.[7]
As mentioned before, Manson claim was not that he could not be convicted without physical participation in the crime. His factual contention was that he had not ordered the others to kill the victims. But Kay hits the nail on the head with the following observation:
He knows that he’s never going to get paroled, and he’s just not going to go along with the program.[8]
Last to speak before Manson’s expected denial of parole was Debra Tate, who evinced enough familiarity with the parole board to say:
I’m a little disappointed that Mr. Manson chose not to show up today. However, in order not to waste any time, I also believe that Mr. Manson, for obvious reasons, should be denied parole for five years. I implore you to please give him the five years so that I don’t have to come and see you folks again so soon, although I love you dearly. He is totally unsuitable for release into society in my opinion, and I implore you to please keep him in so that society can have peace for at least five more 13 years.[9]
At his subsequent parole hearing in 2007, not only did Manson not show up, but he was unrepresented before the committee, and the Comissioner stated to the record the board’s intention to “do everything we can to ensure that his rights have not been violated.” She then stated Manson’s rights for the record, but this time, she did it more theatrically, as if narrating a hypothetical play in which Manson had showed up for his hearing, which makes his absence even more glaring:
[A]t this point I would have asked him did he review his Central File, did he get a timely notice of the hearing. It appeared that he did. He declined and refused to sign whether or not he was going to review his C-File, and that was done on January the 23rd 15 , 2007. And also there were no relevant documents that he had to produce. We would always ask that at this time as well. I would also ask him if he had – let him know that he had an additional right to be heard by an impartial Panel, and again, since he’s not here, I would assume he does not object to the Panel. I would also — the nextitem that I would ask him is — and let him know that he would not be required to either discuss his offense if he desires not to do so and we cannot hold that against him, but however, we do accept the finding of the court to be true.[10]
The absurdity of this play in absentia—not only of Manson, but of a representing attorney as well—is an illustration of Kay’s insight from the 2002 hearing: The board had come prepared to play under certain rules and Manson, by virtue of his absence, forced them into a role they did not intend. To compound matters, his lack of willingness to cooperate with his psychiatrist led to a diagnosis based on partial information—antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy.[11]
The panel then mentioned a support letter:
                       
We do have a support letter and it’s dated – it was received in the institution on January 24th 26 , 2007, but it’s undated and it’s from a Carol Gallego. . .  She indicated she was only 13 years old when the inmate came to prison and she’s never met the man, but all she’s ever heard about and learned from is by books and news media, and then she wrote some things that she said that bothers her about the – his incarceration, and she indicated that she thinks it’s time to set this innocent man free. “Please consider initiating a further investigation” and I won’t go into all of the details of what was said about and the five items that she brought up in this support letter for the inmate.[12]
The prosecutor, Sequeira, provided a standard narrative closely following the demonic Bugliosi story, very similarly to Kay before him. Notably, and by contrast to the police and the prosecution. Debra Tate actually provided an argument for current risk posed by the inmate:
I would like it to go on the record that I disagree with some of the things read in the Central File. I believe that Mr. Manson has one very prolific talent and that talent is to pick sociopaths. That is the same reason in which he should never be granted any kind of a release. There are still people that are influenced by him. They grow in numbers every day via the Internet, and in regards to that, anyone of these people being released poses a great public safety issue.[13]
The board’s frustration with having had to play Manson’s game was evident in their decision as well:
We’d like to also go on record to state that we feel that Mr. Manson should be attending these hearings, these suitability hearings, in order for the Panel to be able to discuss and clarify any discrepancies that may be in his record, that he constantly said that this or that is not here, and we could also question him on some of the various conflicting versions that he’s given as relationship to the crimes.[14]
Manson’s last parole hearing, which he also did not attend, was held in 2012. However, this time Manson was represented by a new attorney, Dejon Lewis, who by contrast to Sparks tried to provide representation for the client who did not cooperate with him[15], by making both legal and factual points. Notably, Commissioner Peck, perhaps frustrated with Manson’s absence, chose to address him in the second person throughout the hearing, as if to force engagement on him:
And Mr. Manson, I’m speaking to you through the record now. We have reviewed your Central File. We’ve reviewed your prior transcripts, and nothing that happens here today is going to change the court findings. We’re not here to retry your case. We’re going to accept as true the findings of the court. We’re here for the sole purpose of determining your suitability for parole.[16]
As the hearing began, Lewis presented a legal objection to the timing of the parole hearings. As mentioned above, Marsy’s Law, an ostensibly pro-victim legislative initiative, increased the time between parole hearings to an initial 15 years, and it was applied to cases of people serving current prison terms, even if they had originally been incarcerated long before its enactment. Lewis made the argument that the law should not apply retroactively, and Peck summarily dismissed his argument.[17]
Peck proceeded to quote Manson’s interview with the prison psychiatrist:
“I am special. I am not like the average inmate. I have put five people in the grave. I have been in prison most of my life. I am a very dangerous man.” Further in the psychological assessment, he stated, “I don’t care about the Board’s opinion. I don’t care about your opinion.”[18]
As Peck reviewed the psyhicatrist’s diagnosis, he read this observation:
Clinically, while limited, this indicates some degree of improved insight into his violent and anti-social behavior considering his previous pattern of denial of wrongdoing.[19]
Once more, a solitary support letter was presented on Manson’s behalf, which Peck leaned toward dismissing as vague:
There is a letter by an individual named John E. Ashcraft that says he’s Mr. Manson’s best friend and there’s — I really don’t know if this is even a legitimate letter or not a legitimate letter. But it basically says that he says that Mr. Manson told him that he, that once he did not want to get out on parole, but now he wants to. And if he can, then he wants to live — then Mr. Ashcraft is offering residence in Fullerton. But so that, frankly, is the only support letter that I have, unless you have, do you have any other support letters?[20]
But Lewis refused to go along with this dismissal and actually argued to the point:
I will say, though, Mr. Manson is 77 years old. He doesn’t need to have a job at this time. He can draw Social Security at this point if he was to get a parole date, and him living with Mr. Ashcraft would cover those parole plans, I think. I’m not going to say they’re viable, because we haven’t or the Board hasn’t backed that letter up by, you know, investigating Mr. Ashcraft and what not, but it seems to me if he is genuine in offering him a place to live that that would be an adequate parole plan for a gentleman who is 77 years old.[21]
As in previous hearings, the police department sent a letter opposing the release, and the prosecutor, Sequeira, expressed similar sentiments, echoing, as before, Bugliosi’s demonic narrative. Quoting Manson’s words to his psychiatrist, Sequeira essentially asked the board to give Manson what he asked for:
In his own words, Manson is telling this Board and essentially the public as well, that he is dangerous and he is completely  unsuitable for parole.[22]
It is here that Lewis embarks on the thankless job of doing the most with what he has, which was nearly nothing. He recounted Manson’s absolute lack of collaboration with prison authorities and failure to achieve any educational or vocational milestones.
My client has not accomplished any of these milestones. Why is the question? Why? Yesterday, while watching CNN, I listened to Mark Geragos, Henry Byers and Alan Dershowitz just destroy the two former attorneys for George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin case for commenting on Mr. Zimmerman’s mental state. They were of the opinion that this was unprofessional behavior for attorneys to do so. Well, my client has been tried and convicted and has served over 30 years in prison, and I think that’s the difference between the two cases from what I’m about to say. Mr. Manson has not even remotely accomplished any minimal milestones that the Board would like to see an inmate who they are considering parole to do. I cannot purport to you that Mr. Manson has a mental disorder causing his utter failure in the rehabilitation process. I’m not a mental health professional, and I have never met him, and several psychologists say that he has no Axis I severe mental disorder. But one thing is clear to me is that corrections or rehabilitation has not taken place here for Mr. Manson. It is my belief that Mr. Manson could benefit from hospitalization, given his age and his need for more geriatric care as he increases in age. He would also receive excellent psycho-social support in that type of environment. Mr. Manson needs hospitalization, not further incarceration in a state prison of this type.[23]
This was a remarkably generous and therapeutic observation on Lewis’ part, but it received little attention or sympathy from the board.  Peck read the decision to deny parole, again by addressing Manson in the second person through the record. He mentioned that “you chose not to be with us today”, and continued:
We have not yet, in any of our documents, seen any indication of remorse. We have no indication that you have any kind of insight into the causative factors of the life crime. You have absolutely no parole plans. You had a significant drug problem while you were in society, and this drug problem is still unresolved. You’ve been involved in absolutely no rehabilitative programs or self-help to address your substance abuse history. I think the statement that you made to the psychologist or the psychiatrist in the Comprehensive Risk Assessment told us a lot of what we needed to know, and I want to make sure I get this right so I’m just going to read what it, what you told Dr. Reed, and you said, “I am special. I am not like the average inmate. I have put five people in the grave. I’ve been in prison most of my life. I am a very dangerous man.” And this Panel agrees with that statement.[24]
What can we learn from these last three hearings? They reveal some of the embarrassment and absurdity of an institutional engagement with someone who flat-out rejects the rules of engagement. We see different approaches: a withdrawal of one of the attorneys versus a noble effort on the part of another attorney to make legal and factual arguments on behalf of his noncooperative client. We see pro-forma, shortened discussions, versus theatrical efforts to involve, as it were, the absent inmate in his own parole proceeding. For the most part, these hearings stand in stark contrast to the vast majority of inmates—not only the remaining inmates in this case—who make a valiant effort to play the game. It would be easy (and perhaps correct) to conclude that the board made the right call, that Manson was unsuitable for parole, and that the system “won.” But in denying him parole, the board merely came to the predetermined conclusion that Manson set up for it—remaining in control of others till the end of his life.


[1] Manson 2002, 1.
[2] Manson 2002, 2.
[3] Manson 2002, 7.
[4] Manson 2002, 14-15.
[5] Manson 2002, 19.
[6] Manson 2002, 20.
[7] Manson 2002, 30.
[8] Manson 2002, 30.
[9] Manson 2002, 36.
[10] Manson 2007, 6.
[11] Manson 2007, 17-18.
[12] Manson 2007, 20-21.
[13] Manson 2007, 29.
[14] Manson 2007, 34-35.
[15] Lewis explains that Manson had refused to come out of the cell and discuss the case with him at his visit, 30 days prior to the hearing. Manson 2012, 8-9.
[16] Manson 2012, 7.
[17] Manson 2012, 11.
[18] Manson 2012, 17.
[19] Manson 2012, 18,
[20] Manson 2012, 21.
[21] Manson 2012, 21-22.
[22] Manson 2012, 34.
[23] Manson 2012, 35-36.
[24] Manson 2012, 42.

Aquarius, Episode 12 – Spoiler Alerts

These are Hodiak, Shafe, and Walt (Hodiak’s son) sharing a beer in friendship, and toating to America, even though their fragmented and flawed understandings of what America has become pull them apart.

Hodiak, the WW2 cynic veteran, is just trying to do his job. Shafe, an early Vietnam veteran, is “not there yet” with respect to the anti-war movement. An Walt, about to be court-martialed for revealing what he knew, is embracing the movement and feels disenchanted with his country.

Disenchantment abounds in Episode 12. The murderers of the gay victims and the judge’s wife are caught and killed–one by the cops and one by his brother’s hand–and the cover-up of the deaths is truly masterful–the Thin Blue Line strikes again.

Oh, and apparently Mary gives birth to a dead son, and somehow Sadie procures a live one for her to replace him, partly to curry favors with Charlie – another incident that has no bearing on the real chronicles of the Manson family. I liked the aesthetics of juxtaposing the christening with Hodiak’s award of the Medal of Valor, but I’m not sure what was implied. Nor did I particularly appreciate the Ken Karn backstory which, again, tries to make something that in reality was plenty horrible without embellishment into something else.

This concludes our series on Aquarius, and we return to our regular blogging program.

Aquarius, Episode 11: Spoiler Alerts

Plot-thick and sixties-thin, this episode sees Hodiak fighting for the life of his whistle-blower son by bargaining with Ken Karn. We also are exposed to more information on Manson’s deeds and to more animosity between the girls.

Shafe’s remorse about his homophobic reaction to Chris, the murder victim, becomes front and center as he fights to reopen the case with the help of the disgruntled bar owner. And Emma finds herself further alienated from her mother and in prison, with nowhere else to go but back to the Family.