The Beth-El Mennonite Church in Colorado Springs will host a restorative justice symposium Thursday and Friday September 24th through the 25th. This important event is sponsored by the El Paso County Bar Association, the 4th Judicial District, and the Colorado Springs School District among others. According to the Pikes Peak Restorative Justice Council, the purpose of restorative justice is “to enable victims, offenders and the community to repair harms and restore relationships.”

Many juvenile offenders, including some who are being held in prison for life, did not intend the level of harm they may have caused. Restorative justice recognizes that, regardless of intent and harm, healing the community, victims and the offender are worthy objectives. When a crime is committed, the community is harmed, victims are traumatized and offenders may simply be abandoned to a “corrections system” that fails to correct anything at all.

StopDirectFile.org sees restorative justice as an important step toward rehabilitating young offenders. According to Don Quick, District Attorney for the 17th Judicial District, “society’s number one responsibility” when a child commits homicide “is to make sure that kid doesn’t kill again.” There are many different types of homicide from manslaughter to circumstantial (felony) murder. Most often, it is not a child’s intent to commit homicide and yet children are tried as adults when a death occurs almost without question. As a society we can keep a child from killing again by putting them in cold storage for the rest of their lives. But that strictly punitive approach ignores–at enormous community expense–society’s responsibility to both the victim and the offender. Restorative Justice, on the other hand, treats both offenders and victims on a case-by-case basis.

According to one victim, restorative justice had enormously positive effects: “My family and I were able to see remorse and pain from the responsible party who killed my son [] in an alcohol and speeding related accident. Because of this, we were able to forgive him and exchange hugs and tears. We feel we now have the strength to heal and carry on [our son's] legacy along with many awesome memories.”

As stated in several previous blogs, StopDirectFile.org supports “comprehensive sentence reform that provides appropriate community protections by removing juvenile offenders from society (until they are no longer a threat); provides victims with a sense of security and justice (not revenge); and gives juvenile offenders an opportunity for rehabilitation (not cold storage).”

StopDirectFile.org feels that restorative justice is the all-important first step toward a child’s rehabilitation and we strongly endorse the Pikes Peak Restorative Justice Symposium.

For more information or to sign up for the symposium please visit the symposium page at www.pprjc.org or call (719) 640-1650. Space is limited so register today.

We’ve received several email comments about the relevance of our last post to juvenile justice reform in Colorado. Admittedly, there is no apparent connection between the last post and this one except that Sheriff Joe is at it again. According to this article, Sheriff Joe Arpaio is proposing to take over juvenile detention for all juvenile inmates in Arizona.

Arpaio is notorious for his ‘tough on crime’ approach, enslaving prisoners for less than 4%  of minimum wage at hard labor and forcing inmates to pay for their own meals with approximately 53% of their daily wage.  While Arpaio claims that his system deters future criminal behavior, StopDirectFile.org has been unable to find any evidence of a reduced recidivism rate that can be tied directly to Maricopa County jail.

StopDirectFile.org has made and supported the claim (see comments) that many American slaves made better livings than prisoners in Arpaio’s jail. If the objective of jail and prisons are rehabilitation, should we really be subjecting children to Arpaio’s slave-labor approach to justice?

Public institutions (namely, Denver Public Schools and the City of Boulder) in Colorado are protesting Arizona’s approach to immigration control through travel restrictions to Arizona. Colorado’s public institutions may soon want to add child inmate and many other human rights abuses to their list of protests against Arizona.

It took a lot to read through the following email in its entirety without vomiting pink html all over my rug. It was a test of my fortitude, so I hope you’ll do me the service of reading through to the part where Sherriff Joe is quoted as saying, “It’s 120 Degrees In Iraq And Our Soldiers Are Living In Tents Too, And They Have To Wear Full Battle Gear, But They Didn’t Commit Any Crimes, So Shut Your Mouths!”

Here’s the problem with that statement. Our soldiers in Iraq aren’t slaves. The prisoners in Maricopa County Jail are. This email is a test case in how ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric denigrates the very freedoms that our soldiers are fighting for in Iraq.  I hope you will copy and paste it into an email under a new subject line that reads “Saddam Hussein alive and well in Maricopa County, Arizona.” The email pretty much speaks for itself, but you might note that prisoners there are used primarily for slave labor. You might also ask what we’re fighting for in Iraq if this is how we treat people in America.

You remember Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona , who painted the jail cells pink and made the inmates wear pink prison garb. Well…

SHERRIFF JOE IS AT IT AGAIN!

Oh, there’s MUCH more to know about Sheriff Joe!

Maricopa County was spending approx. $18 million dollars a year on stray animals, like cats and dogs.. Sheriff Joe offered to take the department over, and the County Supervisors said okay.

The animal shelters are now all staffed and operated by prisoners. They feed and care for the strays. Every animal in his care is taken out and walked twice daily. He now has prisoners who are experts in animal nutrition and behavior. They give great classes for anyone who’d like to adopt an animal. He has literally taken stray dogs off the street, given them to the care of prisoners, and had them place in dog shows.

The best part? His budget for the entire department is now under $3 million. Teresa and I adopted a Weimaraner from a Maricopa County shelter two years ago. He was neutered, and current on all shots, in great health, and even had a microchip inserted the day we got him. Cost us $78.

The prisoners get the benefit of about $0.28 an hour for working, but most would work for free, just to be out of their cells for the day. Most of his budget is for utilities, building maintenance, etc. He pays the prisoners out of the fees collected for adopted animals.

I have long wondered when the rest of the country would take a look at the way he runs the jail system, and copy some of his ideas. He has a huge farm, donated to the county years ago, where inmates can work, and they grow most of their own fresh vegetables and food, doing all the work and harvesting by hand..

He has a pretty good sized hog farm, which provides meat, and fertilizer. It fertilizes the Christmas tree nursery, where prisoners work, and you can buy a living Christmas tree for $6 – $8 for the Holidays, and plant it later. We have six trees in our yard from the Prison.

Yup, he was reelected last year with 83% of the vote.
Now he’s in trouble with the ACLU again. He painted all his buses and vehicles with a mural, that has a special hotline phone number painted on it, where you can call and report suspected illegal aliens. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement wasn’t doing enough in his eyes, so he had 40 deputies trained specifically for enforcing immigration laws, started up his hotline, and bought 4 new buses just for hauling folks back to the border. He’s kind of a ‘Git-R Dun’ kind of S heriff.

TO THOSE OF YOU NOT FAMILIAR WITH JOE ARPAIO

HE IS THE MARICOPA ARIZONA COUNTY SHERIFF

AND HE KEEPS GETTING ELECTED OVER AND OVER
THIS IS ONE OF THE REASONS WHY:

Sheriff Joe Arpaio (In Arizona ) who created the ‘ Tent City Jail’:
He has jail meals down to 40 cents a serving and charges the inmates for them.

He stopped smoking and porno magazines in the jails. Took away their weights Cut off all but ‘G’ movies.

He started chain gangs so the inmates could do free work on county and city projects.

Then He Started Chain Gangs For Women So He Wouldn’t Get Sued For Discrimination.

He took away cable TV Until he found out there was A Federal Court Order that Required Cable TV For Jails So He Hooked Up The Cable TV Again . Only Let In The Disney Channel And The Weather Channel.

When asked why the weather channel He Replied, So They Will Know How Hot It’s Gonna Be While They Are Working ON My Chain Gangs.

He Cut Off Coffee Since It Has Zero Nutritional Value.

When the inmates complained, he told them, ‘This Isn’t The Ritz/Carlton…… If You Don’t Like It, Don’t Come Back.’

More On The Arizona Sheriff:

With Temperatures Being Even Hotter Than Usual In Phoenix (116 Degrees Just Set A New Record), the Associated Press Reports:
About 2,000 Inmates Living In A Barbed-Wire-Surrounded Tent Encampment At The Maricopa County Jail Have Been Given Permission To Strip Down To Their Government-Issued Pink Boxer Shorts.

On Wednesday, hundreds of men wearing boxers were either curled up on their bunk beds or chatted in the tents, which reached 138 Degrees Inside The Week Before.

Many Were Also Swathed In Wet, Pink Towels As Sweat Collected On Their Chests And Dripped Down To Their PINK SOCKS.

‘It Feels Like We Are In A Furnace,’ Said James Zanzot, An Inmate Who Has Lived In The TENTS for 1 year. ‘It’s Inhumane.’

Joe Arpaio, the tough-guy sheriff who created the tent city and long ago started making his prisoners wear pink, and eat bologna sandwiches, is not one bit sympathetic.. He said Wednesday that he told all of the inmates: ‘It’s 120 Degrees In Iraq And Our Soldiers Are Living In Tents Too, And They Have To Wear Full Battle Gear,
But They Didn’t Commit Any Crimes,So Shut Your Mouths!’

Way To Go, Sheriff!

Maybe if all prisons were like this one there would be a lot less crime and/or repeat offenders. Criminals should be punished for their crimes – not live in luxury until it’s time for their parole, only to go out and commit another crime so they can get back in to live on taxpayers money and enjoy things taxpayers can’t afford to have for themselves.

On May 25, Governor Bill Ritter quietly signed into law House Bill 1413. In contrast to the fanfare around other criminal rehabilitation bills and the governor’s energy package there has been little to no mention from the Governor’s office of reforms to Colorado’s direct file system. While the bill is a small step, it brings Colorado closer to policy standards in other states for treating juveniles as adults. This badly needed reform will ultimately reduce juvenile recidivism (the number of children returning to prison) and lower the long-term cost to Colorado’s taxpayers.

More than a dozen studies show that adolescent brain development inhibits a child’s ability to make deliberative decisions. Children, therefore, cannot be held fully culpable for their crimes. And yet, even under the new act, children can be direct filed as adults (with no hearing before a judge) at ages as young as 14.

A report by the Sentencing Project published in the year 2000 states, in summary, that:

The move to send more children into the adult criminal justice system is a radical rethinking of the traditional view that delinquent children need help to turn their lives around and belong in a system that focuses primarily on rehabilitation rather than punishment. Remarkably, the nationwide transformation to this more punitive approach is taking place despite the continuing, multiyear, decline in juvenile crime.

As the number of juvenile cases heard in criminal court increases, more people involved in the system are recognizing that adult courts are inappropriate and unjust settings for children whose developmental immaturity puts them at a disadvantage at every stage in the system. There is mounting evidence of the long-term and damaging consequences suffered by children who are imprisoned in adult prisons and jails. Furthermore, the imposition of adult punishments, far from deterring crime, actually increases the likelihood that a young person will commit further criminal offenses.

The transfer of increasing numbers of children from juvenile to criminal courts is continuing in the face of mounting evidence of the harm it does both to the children and to public safety – once again “tough on crime” politics undermines good public policy.

Thankfully, the trends identified in the report seem to be reversing. The passage of House Bill 1413 is proof positive that good public policy will no longer be held hostage by “tough on crime” politics. Colorado’s district attorneys would do well to recognize that fact by giving their power to file adult charges back to impartial judges.

A recent Los Angeles Times Editorial slams juvenile life without parole as “contrary to the interests of our state (California).” Perhaps the most notable feature of the editorial is that its three authors are all former employees of the criminal justice system. The authors include Miriam Aroni Krinsky, a former Department of Justice Attornery; Ernie Pierce, a former police officer with the San Diego Police Department; and Jeanne Woodford, former warden of San Quentin State Prison and director of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

The article is a strong endorsement of California’s SB 399, which would allow those who merit a second chance to be considered for parole after serving at least 25 years in prison.

Colorado has nearly 50 prisoners sentenced while juveniles to life without parole. While Colorado has ended life without parole for juveniles, it still allows juveniles to be sentenced to 40 years without parole and subjects them to consecutive sentencing. As the article notes, children are different from adults. Many of those children convicted as adults and currently serving life without parole have near perfect records in prison. Isn’t it time Colorado gave them a second chance?

A recent Denver Post article profiles 18th Judicial District DA, Carol Chambers. That profile is truly a study in what happens when a District Attorney allows politics to trump their ethical obligation to “pursue justice.”

According to the article:

In the end, Chambers sees the criticism as a reflection of the politics in the district she represents.

“It’s part of being a prosecutor in a conservative jurisdiction,” she said, “I think where we are, perhaps, a bit tougher on crime than other jurisdictions are.”

So let’s get clear about one thing: Politics aren’t justice. Many Colorado district attorneys, Chambers included, would tell you that they are one in the same; that as elected officials they are not politically motivated, but their decisions reflect both their ethical obligations and the will of the community.

Here are some examples from the article of how politics might have been allowed to cloud the “pursuit of justice” in the 18th Judicial District:

[Chambers] continues to pursue charges against a hearing-impaired, developmentally disabled man accused of breaking into an 8-year-old’s bedroom and groping her — despite a DNA test that found genetic material from an unknown male, not the suspect, on the girl’s underwear.

Chambers said she continues to evaluate the case, which she acknowledges concerns her. In the end, she said, her office’s ethical burden will determine what she does…

That the case already hasn’t been dismissed bewilders Iris Eytan, the man’s attorney…

And then there’s the case of a mentally ill young man who faces an assault charge after he sprinted out of a hospital room and crashed into a doctor, breaking his leg. The man’s family argues that he needs mental- health help, not jail…

These examples deal primarily with adults. So what of juveniles in the 18th Judicial District? Again, according to the article:

Originally conceived as a kind of juvenile probation, her office’s diversion program has been led by Chambers in surprising new directions.

…

It’s also a program that aims to go beyond a teenager’s (emphasis added) crime to look at the factors that contributed to it. The office has arranged for family counseling. It has set out to find someone to donate braces, or acne treatment, to help a kid in trouble be more ready to face life.

…

All of it, Chambers said, falls into her philosophy (emphasis added): Tough on crime on one end of the system; progressive about finding treatment and rehabilitation in hopes of preventing future criminal behavior on the other.

But this “philosophy” is in sharp contrast to her treatment of “teenagers” just over the age of majority. According to one comment at www.DenverPost.com:

How about “DA Chambers insisted on 10 years in prison.” Even the Judge was baffled. [The defendant] had just turned 18 when it happened, no prior history, he was not carrying a real gun, and he did not harm the person…The original court appointed DA left and was not present on the final day (he had expressed his concerns at the prior court date and that he did not feel the offer was fair).” Does that sound like a fair, or smart, prosecutor?

So much for judicial discretion in the prosecutor’s office. The litany goes on and on, leaving StopDirectFile.org to ask again and again: Does justice by politicking truly reflect justice or is it just politics as usual? Things like juvenile diversion programs sound great until you consider that they’re just an end run of the existing juvenile justice system.

Prosecutors are elected officials with political biases. Judges are paid to be impartial arbitrators. Decisions about how to treat young people should be left up to an impartial judge, not a politically motivated DA like Carol Chambers. If district attorneys truly wanted to “pursue justice, not conviction” they would give up their power to adjudicate juveniles and give it back to judges.