There are some good-hearted, non-professional level advocates who have been involved for a number of years, but none who understand and teach the necessity to organize a voting lobby and register the poor to vote, which of course, is the only way to be able to win initiative campaigns required to change laws. They do not teach the families how to get together and hire real attorneys to file and be able to win lawsuits.
It might take 5,000 people putting up a few dollars each to do this right, but recently a citizen's group of only 400 people in Ventura County raised $160,000 and blocked one of the much-needed mental hospitals in less than one month's time. Lawsuits are probably the only form of accountability as well as a public record of abuses, and even when they lose, the record stays in that public servant's file for at least five years. But there is no group "think", the families do what the prison guards tell them to do, even though they outnumber those who hold the jailer's keys.
The guards are master organizers and can bring the necessary crowds to create a public outcry or stand up for or against their interests within a few hours to any place in California. Their dollars and votes have put most of the lawmakers into office.
The guards and their CCPOA Union cause division and riots in the prisons and on the 500 or more inmate family lists that waste a lot of time out there passing email back and forth, which is not really an organizing action. In order to thwart real organizing efforts, the punishers give certain lifers special favors if their family members will bash those who file lawsuits, organize rallies and post at the news sites. Of course 500 small groups do not constitute a real movement, so this is how the guards have remained in power despite the murders and abuses of too many prisoners. There is one Farm Worker's Union, one union for each of 134 voting groups that have a voice in California. There are not 500 fractured email groups who rarely show up to where and when they need to be showing a crowd of outraged family members. None of this is an accident.
I had no choice but to stick it out until meaningful reform took place due to my college training and life-long commitment to the public's right to know, not to mention having a loved one inside the blood houses who is a paralegal. It was more than a little difficult to hang with it. I must have attended 30 different Plata hearings alone over the course of the last decade, often bringing as many people as I could find with me, always challenged to be able to get there myself.
Yet I read some lie about my leaving early during the closing arguments on Feb 3, when all I did was move into the main courtroom. These criticisms appear in a forum of thousands which is controlled by the guards where less than a handful of people bothered to show up after "someone" told them that one or two people in attendance could represent them all.
This non-attendance resulted in no national media coverage for the mothers of dying inmates that day, which makes the punishers overjoyed that people die in silence when so many are apathetic. Such lies are common in order to silence everyone, which empowers the abuses and deaths to continue. Other causes outside of prison reform do not have such frequent attacks on the main people doing all the work and paying for everything out of empty pockets, but it's all contrived to keep people from joining the effort.
Riots, deaths, and abuses by the guards are considered by the lawmakers to be business as usual. These events are also tolerated by the family members who are mostly in denial over what lies in store for them in their future. They somehow believe that sending an email or a letter will bring them relief, which is ridiculous logic since a campaign is much, much more than sending email and talking to friends on the internet.
There is more to say about how ignorance and apathy of the people hurt assists in the cover up taking place in the prisons, but for now I just want to focus upon an important point that wasn't discussed during the closing arguments of the Plata trial last week concerning parole. The young county attorneys, most of whom have never even been in a prison and seem to have little life experience, did their best to discourage release of inmates on the basis that they could not handle "predictable re-arrests due to overcrowding at the jail level."
With more than half the prisoners in for silly technical violations, a higher rate than that of any other state, it is clear that parole needs dramatic reform. Much of it could be eliminated as I believe these "technical violations" are a scam to keep the prisons stocked with fresh humans.
One of the most asinine laws in existence is that prisoners must parole back to the area where they were arrested, regardless of whether or not they have a job or support of family/friends there. Many prisoners want to leave the state or the country when they are paroled but this is prohibited. Why?
They are thrown back to the same influences, the same vindictive people who originally prosecuted them in many cases, with only $200 and in worse physical and mental shape than before incarceration. Allow the prisoners to be paroled out of state, or at the very least to an area where they have some support. Let them leave the country if they want, why not if that is their choice?
My impression is that a system that no reputable criminologist or sociologist thinks works to prevent crime is being perpetuated for the sole purpose of providing jobs for adults who believe punishing the sick works. It does not, and there are no statistics anywhere to support that wrong paradigm which has been a lie told since everyone thought that the world is flat.
The sentencing and parole laws must be changed, and only we, the people, can get together and do this via the initiative process or the prisons will fill right back up again. Such hoopla over these releases, while the hypocrites who profit off this misery are releasing 10,000 a month anyway of mostly people who shouldn't be in prison in the first place.
The poverty and lack of education of those most hurt makes these changes in the laws very difficult even though at least three million people are related to a state prisoner. About l.5 million more Californians have been on parole, or probation in recent years. Millions know the shambles that our system is in due to overzealous prosecutors and powerful law enforcement labor unions. We are all touched by this overcrowding crisis as disease epidemics have leaked out to schools and nursing homes, spreading throughout the world.
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