Uncategorized

From President Obama’s address to America’s school children

I get it. I know what it’s like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mom who had to work and who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us the things that other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and I felt like I didn’t fit in.

So I wasn’t always as focused as I should have been on school, and I did some things I’m not proud of, and I got in more trouble than I should have. And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse.

But I was — I was lucky. I got a lot of second chances, and I had the opportunity to go to college and law school and follow my dreams…

Some of you might not have those advantages. Maybe you don’t have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job and there’s not enough money to go around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren’t right.

But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life — what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home — none of that is an excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude in school. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. There is no excuse for not trying.

Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you, because here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future….

(photo for Sara!)

So, Chris scooped me in writing about compensation for exonerees in Texas.  The story was on my radar, too, but I’ve got a somewhat different take on it.  While I agree that clearing one’s name is a vital concern for many of the falsely accused, I do actually think Texas is offering a relatively generous compensation package.  After a 45-day processing period, exonerees can expect to get $80,000 for each year spent behind bars, and lifetime annuity payments that are generally worth between $40,000 and $50,000 per year.

I’ve written about exonerees here before, and it always seemed clear to me that you couldn’t put a price on years stolen from lives by miscarriages of justice.  How would you decide what a decade of your life is worth?  What is the cost of spending your 20’s and/or your 30’s behind bars?  You would miss out on growth, maturity, exploration, and health.   One of the biggest regrets I hear from inmates (generally “rightfully” convicted and harshly sentenced) who have spent much of their young adulthood in prison is their fear that they have missed their chance to have families of their own.  How much worse must it be if you were imprisoned for a crime you did not commit?

These issues are more real and concrete to me than ever as I follow the case of my inside student, Philip Scott Cannon.  Since I first wrote about Philip’s case, his conviction has been overturned.  After serving a decade (of a life sentence without the possibility of parole) in prison, he’ll get a chance to present his case again – complete with new witnesses, a new lawyer, and better science – and perhaps he’ll get a second chance at life in the community.   If that is the case, I think $800,000 and a guaranteed $40,000-$50,000 per year would give him some peace of mind.  His children are his priority, and it would be nice if he could spend time with them without having to immediately worry about getting a job and finding a way to support himself after so many years in prison.

In a letter to the Salem Statesman-Journal, Philip wrote:

Prison sucks, but it can be a place of personal introspection, learning and self-improvement.  It has been for me.  Contrary to popular belief, the majority of men I’ve met here acknowledge their actions, and the underlying reasons for their having pleaded “not guilty” is to dispute over-blown charges and excessive  sentences.  Prison can be very violent and life altering.  Prison is what you make of it.  The true punishment of prison is the separation from your loved ones.  My youngest son was born while I awaited trial.  I only know him from the precious visits we have had over the years.  Our bond is strong, but can it be truly functional under the circumstances?

…When I do regain my freedom, I have no doubt that there will always be some degree of residual suspicion from certain people.  That will be my dark cloud.  Still, I welcome the burden.

I’ve been thinking about the value of a decade in one’s life, too, because of Tom Curtis, another of my former inside students.  Tom was released from the Oregon State Correctional Institution on Friday after serving ten years.   His case may be vaguely familiar – he was featured on “America’s Most Wanted” as a teenager.  The Oregonian explains his history like this:

Back in high school in the mid-90s, Curtis appeared to have everything going for him. He was an Eagle Scout, homecoming king, track star. He had supportive parents and a college scholarship.

Yet Curtis also led a double life as a masked gunman. He was accused in a string of armed robberies, evaded arrest and eventually landed on the television show “America’s Most Wanted.”

Police described Curtis and a handful of friends as college-bound, middle-class kids in search of excitement. They started with car prowls, then progressed to robbing neighborhood stores, mostly in Northeast Portland….

He disappeared for months, then showed up that June at a post-graduation party thrown by his high school buddies in Mazatlan, Mexico. He drank beer and hung out with his friends. No one turned Curtis in to authorities, sparking a heated debate among Portlanders about youth and the moral lessons they were learning.

I didn’t make the connection between adult Tom and the audacious and dangerous teenager in these stories until his release made headline news in Oregon.  I know him as a very bright, motivated student with a quick sense of humor that easily diffused potentially volatile exchanges in the prison classroom.  It’s got to be scary – and exciting – for him to get out of prison at the age of 29.  It will be a real challenge to put his prison experience behind him and find a way to live up to his Eagle Scout, student body president, homecoming king potential.  I hope he gets a chance to continue his education and to make a postive contribution.

How have you spent your last decade?  What might the next one be worth to you?

Yahoo news is reporting on Texas exonerees, who receive $80k for each year behind bars and a lifetime annuity. Exonerees can spend years or decades in prison before authorities are finally convinced that it would have been completely impossible for them to have committed the crimes that put them behind bars.

As the story (and a 2008 Contexts feature) makes clear, Texas is the most generous state in compensating those wrongly convicted. I can’t imagine thinking that $80k/year is “generous” compensation for a year in a maximum security prison, but I suppose it beats a firm handshake and $50 gate money.

The exonerees I’ve met have all been more concerned with clearing their names than with financial compensation. Think about it: it is one thing to spend years or decades locked up for a crime you didn’t commit; it is quite another to spend years or decades with the knowledge that your friends, family, and neighbors all consider you to be a rapist or murderer.

Here’s a short and, I think, uplifting story about some of the good work coming out of prisons.  Inmates in the Oregon State Penitentiary just donated $1000 to HOME Youth and Resource Center, a day shelter and drop-in center for homeless and at-risk youth in Salem.  That’s $1000 directly from inmates’ personal funds, where an average inmate may make $50 per month working in the prison.

Nearly a year ago, my Inside-Out class at the penitentiary chose to work as a group to sponsor a hygiene drive for HOME, in hopes of helping homeless teens and ultimately keeping them out of prison.  We were all amazed at the generosity of the inmate population as they donated brand new bottles of shampoo, toothbrushes, deodorant, razors, and socks from their own scarce supply.  As I wrote about in an earlier post,  we were able to deliver more than a dozen boxes of hygiene supplies and OSU tee-shirts to the shelter.  It was a great day.

The Statesman-Journal published an editorial that described our project like this:

Inderbitzin also challenged the 31 participants to “develop a small-scale, doable prevention project that we could put into action before the quarter was over…They came through in a big way,” she said. “There are a number of aspects to their project, but their main focus was to help homeless teenagers in the Salem area.”

OSU students updated a resource guide for homeless teens. These “outside” students also collected new hygiene products from inmates, prison staff members and even the OSU football team. The “inside” students collected a dozen boxes of products from the inmates and prison staffers. The “outside” students delivered the items to a Salem outreach program lastweekend.

Reflecting on the project, one “inside” student said: “Our group took this challenge to heart, and although not every individual agreed on the focus, every individual gave it their best effort. I watched the effect it had, within our class and in the prison, and I’m not ashamed to admit I had misty eyes when I saw the amount of donated goods that poured in from the prisoners. With only 700 jobs — and most with a monthly salary of $50 — these men gave a big chunk of their pay to kids they don’t even know.”

I’m glad to see the guys in OSP kept working all year to help the homeless kids in Salem.  It’s nice to be reminded that some good really can come out of prison.

(photo is an actual picture of the HOME center, where youth proclaim in the window that “HOME Rocks”)

A recent AP article by Rachel Cohen compares the sentences of National Football League players Plaxico Burress, Donte’ Stallworth and Michael Vick.

Burress, the one-time Super Bowl star, accepted a plea bargain Thursday with a two-year prison sentence for accidentally shooting himself in the thigh at a Manhattan nightclub. The former New York Giants wide receiver pleaded guilty to one count of attempted criminal possession of a weapon… Stallworth, the Cleveland Browns receiver, served 30 days in jail for running over and killing a man while driving drunk. Vick, the former Atlanta Falcons star quarterback who recently signed with the Philadelphia Eagles, served 18 months in prison for torturing animals and running a dogfighting ring for years.

Although people tend to rank the seriousness of crimes in roughly the same order, I’d wager that there is a higher-than-usual standard deviation around citizens’ preferred sentence lengths for these three offenses. Felony DUI manslaughter has been very lightly punished in the United States relative to, say, Sweden; folks disagree on whether animal cruelty and gambling conspiracy should be felonies or misdemeanors; and, Mr. Burress actually pled out to “attempted weapons possession in the second degree.” It is hard to say whether such a crime merits two years of hard time, though I generally favor vigorous enforcement of weapons offenses.

One can’t say for sure whether star athletes tend to get lighter sentences (ala Stallworth) or heavier sentences (ala Burress), but ol’ Ray Lewis seems to be rolling along just fine. The real punishment, of course, will be meted out by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. The Commish can just toss a handful of grass into the air, check which way the wind is blowing, and determine whether Messrs. Burress, Vick, and Stallworth will be NFL princes or bounced-from-the-league paupers.

i’ve written before about my inside student, philip scott cannon, an inmate at the oregon state penitentiary serving life without parole for murdering three people.  he has spent the last ten years in prison, watching his two sons grow up in the stifling visiting room of the prison, and losing everything he owned to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for his defense.

while he has maintained his innocence and served his prison sentence, the forensic evidence used to convict cannon has been discredited and dismissed as “junk science.”  bimla boyd, the star witness who testified against cannon, has gone on to serve a prison term for committing a different murder on the same property.  and new witnesses have come forward, disputing the timeline of the boyd’s account and placing her at the scene of the murders.

today, big news from the penitentiary: philip scott cannon’s conviction has been overturned.  i happened to be in the prison today to meet with students and i got to hear the news from philip in person.  he is no longer convicted, but he was still indicted on these charges and he will be transferred to the county jail to await a new trial.  i only hope the district attorney doesn’t keep him waiting in county jail – where his youngest son will not be allowed to visit him – for long.

philip’s case reminds me that justice is messy, very human, and sometimes mistaken.  i’m appalled it’s taken more than ten years for his conviction to be overturned, but relieved and glad that he’s getting a second chance to go to trial and have all of the evidence heard.  i do hope justice is ultimately served.

after a lengthy conversation with the dude handing out those nifty contexts guitar picks, i’ll break my blog silence by offering a quick update on how i spent my spring/summer non-vacation.  the basic overview is represented in the title to this post, which i realize sounds something like a bad b-movie.

prisons: i brought the inside-out program to another prison in oregon, teaching the first-ever class in the oregon state correctional institution this spring.  the class went well and the guys in OSCI are eagerly awaiting the next offering.  for the first six weeks of summer, i taught my seventh inside-out class in the oregon state penitentiary.  as part of the summer class, the students created their own blog, which they hope will build and grow as new classes are offered and new students add their own perspectives.

girls: from january through june, i taught a class once  a week for six months in our state’s juvenile correctional facility for young women.  i brought in about eight female OSU students each quarter and we held informal classes and discussions with six incarcerated young women.  one of their main goals/projects was to put on a women’s symposium for the entire institution.  my group of girls/young women planned and ran the events and workshops, raised money to bring in a pizza lunch, created a highly entertaining video of the OSU campus and experience, and brought in oregon state university’s first lady as our keynote speaker.  it was a wonderful event.  in addition, my spring-term delinquency class did a number of service-learning projects at the facility, including book clubs, art projects, and movie screening/discussions.  some of those projects, with kids in the community, were highlighted by our juvenile probation and parole department.

football: lastly, i just finished teaching a 3-week intensive social problems course to 32 freshmen football players in our BEST program, which offers a bridge to the college experience for incoming student-athletes.  while there are several summer sessions covering the majority of sports at OSU, i’ve worked exclusively with football players for the last three years and our numbers are growing like crazy.   they are  a great group of guys and i arranged field trips this year to a male juvenile correctional facility and to oregon state penitentiary, where they got an inside view of a maximum-security prison and then got the chance to meet and talk with some of my former inside-out students.  big impact.   it’s a vivid way for them to start their college careers and to step into the spotlight as athletes in the pac-10.

and now i’m ready for a vacation…hope everyone is enjoying what is left of their summer!

Newsweek follows up on an earlier story of sex offenders forced to live under a bridge in Miami’s Biscayne Bay. Local residency restrictions bar them from living within 2,500 feet of any place where children might gather, which effectively kept them from living anywhere else in the city. To comply with the conditions of their release, however, registered sex offenders must list an address where a P.O. can quickly find them, which put them on a concrete slab beneath the Julia Tuttle Causeway.

The Newsweek site offers some new video interviews with people subject to the restrictions and with experts who’ve written on the subject. I’m reposting the original CNN report below, since folks who haven’t followed the story will probably need to see it to believe it.

A bartender learns a thing or two about conflict after three or four decades on the job. The Star-Tribune offers this gem from Mikey Mussehl of Nye’s:

“When guys come in and you know they’re just looking to get in fights, I go into the kitchen and get some onion rings and fries and give ’em to the guy. As soon as they bite into their second onion ring, they’re thinking of ways to go home. That grease puts ’em right to sleep.”

Food for thought, I suppose, as President Obama sits down for his beer with Officer Crowley and Professor Gates.

gun sales continue to rise, with april marking the sixth consecutive month of big increases in use of the fbi’s national instant background check system. since some attribute rising gun sales to fears of gun control, i wanted to know how much sales have risen since president obama was elected in november.

firearms sales are seasonal, typically peaking in december and bottoming out around may. since i was interested in the post-election period, i plotted sales from november to april of each year since the nics system came online.
there were about 8.1 million background checks from november 2008 to april 2009, an increase of 29 percent over the previous period from november 2007 to april 2008. this was by far the largest increase of the past decade, though i can’t really tell whether it was due to president obama’s election, a deepening recession, or some other factor.

background checks are closely but imperfectly related to gun sales, since some checks never result in a purchase and others result in multiple purchases. nevertheless, the sheer number of nics checks is impressive, if not astounding. in a nation of 218 million adults, i count 8,097,100 background checks in the past six months alone.

how can that figure be correct? i know that not every check represents a single individual, but i’m still having trouble getting my head around the idea of 8 million in just 6 months. it would be as if every single adult resident of wyoming, vermont, north dakota, south dakota, alaska, delaware, montana, rhode island, hawaii, new hampshire, and maine all walked into bill’s gun shop to plunk down five hundred bucks for a glock 19. i wonder what the next six months will bring…