CALIFORNIA INMATES
Hank Sims, Lost Coast Outpost
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) officials are searching for a minimum-security inmate who walked away from the California Correctional Center (CCC) Eel River Conservation Camp (CC #31) in Humboldt County on Jan. 17, 2017.
Inmate John Campbell, 38, was reported missing during an inmate count Tuesday, Jan. 17. He was last seen at 2:30 a.m. Tuesday in his assigned housing unit. Campbell was assigned as a kitchen worker at the camp, which houses approximately 100 minimum-custody inmates.
CALIFORNIA PRISONS
The Associated Press
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — For the first time, California's inspector general has declared that a state prison is providing above-average medical care to inmates.
A report released Friday found that the California City Correctional Facility is providing a "proficient" level of care to nearly 2,200 male inmates. That's the highest of three possible grades.
Inspectors say California City has a system to make sure inmates receive care without delays, unlike some other prisons.
CORRECTIONS RELATED
Christina Fan, abc
CHOWCHILLA, Calif. (KFSN) -- Heartbreak on Alameda Road quickly spread through the small town of Chowchilla as parents learned about a deadly shooting involving two siblings on opposite sides of the gun.
"I feel really bad for the family, for their loss and for the child, not understanding, not knowing," said Kathy Scott, neighbor.
The call for help came in around 5:00 p.m. Wednesday. Inside the bedroom, officers found a 1-year-old boy with a bullet wound to his head. His sister had accidentally shot him with a parent's gun.
Bob Egelko, The San Francisco Chronicle
Fresh out of law school at UC Berkeley, Thelton Henderson traveled south as the Justice Department’s first black Civil Rights Division lawyer, assigned to keep an eye on local law enforcement for the Kennedy administration. It was 1962, and it was hazardous duty in hostile territory.
But there were others, he soon found out, who were putting themselves in greater peril in the fight against white supremacy in the Jim Crow South.
“I would see these kids come to Birmingham with a toothbrush and toothpaste, wrapped in a face towel, ready to go to jail and take their beatings,” Henderson, 83, recalled in an interview last week after announcing his retirement as a federal judge in San Francisco. He met Martin Luther King Jr., who “knew he wasn’t going to live to old age.”
WUWM
KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:
Steven Czifra and Danny Murillo have a few things in common. They both transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, from community college. They also both served time in solitary confinement at the Pelican Bay State Prison in California. Danny says they didn't know each other on the inside, but when they saw each other for the first time at Berkeley, they could just tell.
DANNY MURILLO: You know when somebody's been through the things you've been through.
FULL VERSION
CALIFORNIA INMATES
Hank Sims, Lost Coast Outpost
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) officials are searching for a minimum-security inmate who walked away from the California Correctional Center (CCC) Eel River Conservation Camp (CC #31) in Humboldt County on Jan. 17, 2017.
Inmate John Campbell, 38, was reported missing during an inmate count Tuesday, Jan. 17. He was last seen at 2:30 a.m. Tuesday in his assigned housing unit. Campbell was assigned as a kitchen worker at the camp, which houses approximately 100 minimum-custody inmates. CDCR, CAL FIRE, law enforcement personnel, the California Highway Patrol and local law enforcement agencies have been notified and are assisting in the search for Campbell.
Campbell is a white male, 5 feet, 9 inches tall, weighing 200 pounds with brown eyes and brown hair. He was committed to CDCR on May 13, 2016, from Butte County to serve a seven-year, four month sentence for vehicle theft and evading a peace officer while driving recklessly. He was scheduled to parole in 2021.
Anyone who sees inmate Campbell should contact 911 or law enforcement authorities immediately. Anyone having information about or knowledge of the location of Campbell should contact the CCC Watch Commander at (530) 257-2181, extension 4173.
CALIFORNIA PRISONS The Associated Press
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — For the first time, California's inspector general has declared that a state prison is providing above-average medical care to inmates.
A report released Friday found that the California City Correctional Facility is providing a "proficient" level of care to nearly 2,200 male inmates. That's the highest of three possible grades.
Inspectors say California City has a system to make sure inmates receive care without delays, unlike some other prisons.
The state has leased the privately built prison 110 miles north of Los Angeles since 2013, but it is staffed with state employees. Most of the inmates are lower-security with relatively few chronic health problems.
Officials previously found that 17 state prisons are providing adequate care. Another 11 prisons still provide substandard care after 10 years of oversight to improve conditions.
CORRECTIONS RELATED
Christina Fan, abc
CHOWCHILLA, Calif. (KFSN) -- Heartbreak on Alameda Road quickly spread through the small town of Chowchilla as parents learned about a deadly shooting involving two siblings on opposite sides of the gun.
"I feel really bad for the family, for their loss and for the child, not understanding, not knowing," said Kathy Scott, neighbor.
The call for help came in around 5:00 p.m. Wednesday. Inside the bedroom, officers found a 1-year-old boy with a bullet wound to his head. His sister had accidentally shot him with a parent's gun.
Paramedics transported the toddler to Valley's Children's Hospital but he didn't make it there alive.
"Well anytime a child gets a hold of firearm, and there's some sort of a negligent discharge, it's a criminal matter," said Lt. Jeff Palmer, Chowchilla Police Department
Officers said the mother, Erica Bautisa, was home at the time. She is a 16 year veteran of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Detectives said the handgun was registered to her and was not a duty weapon, and they suspect it was stored improperly.
"Firearms are not something to be taken for granted, don't leave them loaded, and absolutely don't leave them in an area a child can get its hands on it," said Palmer.
Scott lives around the corner and while she said her heart breaks for the family the question still remains about why the gun was loaded and in reach.
"Keep it locked up, like the way they tell you when you buy it."
While this loss has parents holding onto their children tight into the evening, officers said it is more important to keep an even tighter eye on your guns.
Officers also met with the District Attorney's Office earlier on Thursday. It will be up to the DA to file any possible charges.
The police department said they do provide free gun locks.
Bob Egelko, The San Francisco Chronicle
Fresh out of law school at UC Berkeley, Thelton Henderson traveled south as the Justice Department’s first black Civil Rights Division lawyer, assigned to keep an eye on local law enforcement for the Kennedy administration. It was 1962, and it was hazardous duty in hostile territory.
But there were others, he soon found out, who were putting themselves in greater peril in the fight against white supremacy in the Jim Crow South.
“I would see these kids come to Birmingham with a toothbrush and toothpaste, wrapped in a face towel, ready to go to jail and take their beatings,” Henderson, 83, recalled in an interview last week after announcing his retirement as a federal judge in San Francisco. He met Martin Luther King Jr., who “knew he wasn’t going to live to old age.”
With his government ID, Henderson said, “I felt like a coward.”
He crossed paths with King a year later after the Justice Department had assigned the young lawyer to investigate the lethal bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala.
King needed to travel to Selma, more than 70 miles away, and had a car with a flat tire. Henderson lent him his government car, setting off an uproar from supporters of segregationist Gov. George Wallace. It cost Henderson his job — the most crushing blow of his life, he said, but still a decision he doesn’t regret.
The route to Selma “was a mean stretch of road, and with a breakdown he would have been a dead man,” Henderson explained. “I was torn between whether my job was just taking down the reports and following cases, or something bigger.”
He eventually found a job that led to expanded horizons, an appointment on the federal bench where he would oversee historic cases on prisons, police conduct and civil rights.
The appointment by President Jimmy Carter in 1980 followed many years in private law practice, in Legal Aid and at Stanford, where he recruited minority students to a virtually all-white law school.
Perhaps more than any other public figure, Henderson has brought about change in California’s huge prison system. Soon after becoming the court’s chief judge in 1990, he said, he started getting petitions on yellow paper from inmates of the supermax Pelican Bay State Prison on the North Coast, an institution he’d never heard of, complaining of mistreatment.
In a meeting arranged by Henderson, the warden told the court’s judges that Pelican Bay was a “new era prison” for the “worst of the worst,” Henderson recalled, and he described what techniques were used to keep the inmates under control. The judges reacted in shocked silence, Henderson said.
Assigned the case by random draw, Henderson issued a scathing decision in 1995 finding that inmates were being brutalized — beaten, hogtied, caged naked in cold and rainy weather. And he ordered changes and court monitoring that lasted for 16 years. The case laid the foundation for a settlement that imposed the first restrictions on California’s use of solitary confinement.
Another breakthrough came in 2006, when Henderson, in a case challenging the adequacy of health care in California prisons, ruled that the state was violating constitutional standards with medical treatment so shoddy that more than one inmate per day was dying needlessly.
He appointed a receiver to manage the health care system. Three years later, a panel that included Henderson and two other judges found that prison overcrowding was the primary cause of poor health care and ordered population reductions. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the order in 2011, and the result has been 40,000 fewer inmates in California prisons and changes in state sentencing laws to prevent the numbers from rising again.
Another judge will be needed to replace Henderson on the prison panel and, in another major case, as overseer of the Oakland Police Department.
The case involved a 2000 lawsuit by 119 people who accused a group of veteran officers, nicknamed the Riders, of beatings and evidence-planting, and it exposed disproportionate arrests of racial minorities in the city. Henderson presided over a $10.5 million settlement in 2003 and has been overseeing the department’s slow, painful compliance with the terms of the agreement ever since. He’s appointed a series of monitors to enforce the settlement and keep him informed.
“I see light at the end of the tunnel,” Henderson said of Oakland’s efforts to improve police practices. He said he hasn’t met the city’s incoming police chief, Anne Kirkpatrick, formerly a top police official in Chicago, but “she talks the way I’d like to hear a chief talk. Police should be accountable.”
He said some of the cases he’s proudest of involved civil rights challenges by individuals, like the woman who sued State Farm Insurance Co. in the early 1980s, when the company had virtually no female insurance agents. In a 1985 ruling, Henderson found intentional sex discrimination, and in 1992, State Farm agreed to pay $157 million to 814 California women who had been turned down for jobs. The company also agreed to hire at least 50 percent female agents in the state over the next 10 years.
In 1987 Henderson ruled that the Defense Department had discriminated in its decades-old practice of denying security clearances to gay or lesbian applicants. It was only a year after the Supreme Court had upheld a Georgia criminal law against gay sex, and Henderson said last week he wasn’t surprised when an appeals court overturned his ruling in 1990.
But as public attitudes on gay rights evolved over the years, so did government policies and court rulings. President Bill Clinton outlawed antigay discrimination on security clearances in 1995, and the Supreme Court reversed its ruling on gay sex in 2003, 12 years before legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide.
“Time has proven me right,” Henderson said.
Racial issues took a different course.
When California voters banned affirmative action in 1996 based on race or gender in public education, employment or contracting, Henderson blocked enforcement of the measure, which appeared on the ballot as Proposition 209. He said it was likely to be ruled unconstitutional. He noted that the state still allowed preferred treatment in university admissions for veterans and the disabled, for example, while banning it for minorities and women.
But a federal appeals court overruled Henderson in a scornfully worded decision. The Supreme Court denied review of the case and in 2014 upheld a similar law approved by voters in Michigan. Prop. 209 remains in effect.
Some congressional Republicans called for Henderson’s impeachment after his ruling. Death threats arrived in the mail, and U.S. marshals were assigned to guard his home.
“I can take the taunts,” the judge said. “The death threats were a little scary.”
But Henderson has endured. He served as the district’s chief judge from 1990 to 1997, then transferred to senior status in 1998, with a reduced caseload, creating a vacancy for Clinton to fill. But he has kept a substantial calendar and presided over the recent criminal trial of Pacific Gas and Electric Co., convicted by a jury of violating pipeline-safety laws. The case stemmed from the deadly gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno in September 2010.
Henderson said he is retiring in August because of a progressive muscle disease that first afflicted him 30 years ago. The disease has forced him into a wheelchair and limited his movements and energy level. The normally amiable and soft-spoken judge said he’s also found himself getting “grumpier on the bench.”
“I don’t like the judge I’ve sometimes become,” he said. “I love the job, but it’s time to go.”
Henderson said he plans to take car and train trips with his wife, Maria Alaniz, when she retires as a San Jose State sociology professor next year.
Reflecting on what shaped his outlook, he recalled his childhood in South Central Los Angeles, where two of his uncles were in and out of jail and his mother regularly put up her house as security to bail them out.
“On sentencing days, I see families” of defendants waiting to be sentenced, he said, “and I think of my family, wondering what’s going to happen to my uncles. It’s humbling.”
WUWM
KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:
Steven Czifra and Danny Murillo have a few things in common. They both transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, from community college. They also both served time in solitary confinement at the Pelican Bay State Prison in California. Danny says they didn't know each other on the inside, but when they saw each other for the first time at Berkeley, they could just tell.
DANNY MURILLO: You know when somebody's been through the things you've been through.
MCEVERS: The two eventually became friends and started a project called the Underground Scholars Initiative. It's a group of formerly incarcerated people who've gone on to college and to try to help others do the same.
MURILLO: I went to Berkeley two weeks before. And my mindset was that I'm going to go two weeks before and get to know the campus, where my classes are at most importantly. I don't want to be late for the class. I went to my department, ethnic studies - talked to my adviser, asking her that I'm interested in doing work on school-to-prison pipeline. And she referred me...
MCEVERS: School-to-prison pipeline, yeah.
MURILLO: The school - yeah, she - on this phenomena that was being called - this new phenomena, supposedly, but it's been going on for years.
STEVEN CZIFRA: Incarceration comes out of sets of conditions that people grow up in and that certain people don't have those conditions and never experienced incarceration. And certain people do have those conditions, and that's unfair. That's not cool. And we're here. And if we're going to be here and it's going to mean anything, then it has to involve giving back.
MURILLO: And that's how I got involved in the conversation.
MCEVERS: And so you guys came up with the idea for the group. And what was the thinking behind it? You know, you're both there. You're both doing your thing. But you thought, let's make this into something that we can replicate with other people. Was that the idea, Steven?
CZIFRA: Well, there were - in the first meetings, there were probably - you know, in the first half a dozen meetings, there were between 12 and 20 people. And we started meeting weekly right away. Most of the people were not formally incarcerated, and pretty much everybody had a different idea about what we were doing. And so we were like, we're here.
And it's quite miraculous on some levels, and on some levels, it makes sense that we're here. But we want to make this opportunity available to other people because how I got to UC, Berkeley - there was no pipeline. There was no pathway. There was no path. That was - there was no discernible path. I got there, so obviously there is a pathway. And that pathway is actually available to every - any California resident.
MCEVERS: Right.
CZIFRA: But they're not - they're opaque...
MCEVERS: Right.
CZIFRA: ...Unless you fit a certain demographic. And I'm not going to go into all that.
MCEVERS: Yeah, sure.
CZIFRA: But we just want to - we want to pipeline that more.
MCEVERS: Right.
CZIFRA: We want to institutionalize that, shore up those pathways that we've taken and expose them for other people.
MCEVERS: Right. So basically Underground Scholars is a way to show people that pathway. Like, here's what you need to do. Get into this program. Write your application this way. Do these extracurricular activities. You know, know that this funding is available. Know that kind of stuff. Is that how it works?
MURILLO: Yeah, pretty much. And...
MCEVERS: Yeah.
MURILLO: But not just folks that are already in the community college, but we're already talking...
MCEVERS: Yeah.
MURILLO: ...To people in prison.
MCEVERS: Right.
CZIFRA: Equally importantly and - or if not more importantly, our presence, especially our public presence at UC, Berkeley, offers identification for people who haven't imagined themselves in places like UC, Berkeley, or other - Stanford, you name it. They see themselves in - as academics, as scholars.
MCEVERS: Yeah. You know, you guys have done this pretty amazing thing, right? I mean this has, like, affected a lot of people's lives. And if we're talking about dozens of people going to these meetings, it's a pretty - yeah, it's a pretty amazing thing. But you both kind of don't like the whole, like, redemption narrative thing, right? You don't love that version of the story. Is that - am I getting that right?
CZIFRA: I - yeah, I can speak to that.
MCEVERS: Yeah (laughter).
CZIFRA: So yeah, the redemption narrative is just about the worst possible thing you can do to this work. And when it happens, it's just - it just makes me want to scream or sometimes cry because people want to make it out like I'm special or we're special.
And I'm so extraordinarily average, and I got so lucky. And that's how I ended up where I ended up. It had nothing to do with people like, oh, no, take credit. Bull - I can't take credit for almost anything. When I was in community college, I mostly hustled.
MCEVERS: (Laughter).
CZIFRA: Right or wrong, I just - there was a system in place. And I knew systems, and I worked the system. And I went to UC, Berkeley, on some level.
MCEVERS: Yeah because what - I mean I think if you take it a step further - right? - is this notion that, like, within an incarcerated population, maybe there's a couple exceptional people who deserve to bubble up to the top. And I think what you guys are saying is, like, open up the pipeline. Make it known, you know, how the system works, and anybody and everybody could do exactly what you've done.
CZIFRA: Literally - I had this big movie idea about what prison was going to be like. And I got on the yard, and I saw all these just really scary looking people covered in tattoos. And within a couple of days, I realized that they're mostly just - they're almost - to a man, they were just people.
MCEVERS: That's Steven Czifra. He and Danny Murillo helped found to the Underground Scholars Initiative which has helped dozens of former prisoners get their undergrad and graduate degrees. Murillo and Czifra have both graduated from Berkeley but still work with Underground Scholars there. And they're expanding the program to other UC campuses.
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