Mobile Clinic Serves California’s Growing Homeless Youth Population, KQED News
In the Golden State, the number of school-age homeless children has jumped by a third in just three short years. Unstable living environments wreak havoc on these youngsters, resulting in increased risk of chronic illness, mental health disorders and trauma. Doctors aboard the Teen Health Van provide free medical (both physical and mental), nutritional and substance abuse care to hundreds of uninsured and homeless youth.
In Snow Removal, a Model for Change, Governing
City officials in St. Paul, Minn., set out to improve how snow was removed from roadways, but in the process, found a smarter method of governing. The unique approach (which should be replicated nationwide) involved teams consisting of outside consultants, working pro bono, and members of the Department of Public Works, who could provide internal perspectives. (Normally, consultants work on their own to create recommendations.) The result of this public-private pairing? More effective snow removal, and innovative, restructuring changes that DPW employees embraced.
When Families Travel for Medical Care, Strangers Open Their Homes — and Arms, Stat News
Health insurance can help defray the costs of medical expenses, but little financial assistance is available for housing expenses incurred by patients and their families when they must receive life-saving treatments at hospitals far from their homes. Since 1983, the nonprofit Hospitality Homes has been connecting out-of-towners (most are low-income) with host families providing a free place to stay in Boston, where the average hotel room costs more than $100 each night.
Tag: California
The Surprising, Eco-Friendly Place to Store Data Servers, Safer Ways to Care for the Sick and More
Why Data Farms Are Heading Underwater, CityLab
According to an animated Walt Disney classic, everything’s better, down where it’s wetter. That’s exactly what computer giant Microsoft learned when it submerged a data farm under the sea. Cold ocean temperatures eliminates the need for massive, energy-sucking cooling systems, which land-based servers require.
Hospitals Focus on Doing No Harm, The New York Times
When one hears that an estimated 98,000 and 440,000 people die because of preventable errors at hospitals, it’s easy to think that doctors are breaking their promise to do no harm. In response, healthcare facilities nationwide are implementing new procedures — from the somewhat common sense (practicing consistent hand washing) to the more complex, like immediate monitoring for symptoms of sepsis and changing hospital culture.
Here’s How Houston Boosted Mass Transit Ridership by Improving Service Without Spending a Dime, Vox
Thanks to overcrowding, late arrivals and seemingly constant price hikes, it’s no wonder that subways and buses get a bad rap. In the highway-riddled city of Houston, transit officials found a way to boost ridership: by emphasizing frequency over geographic scope. More importantly, however, was their discovery of a mass transit strategy that can be replicated coast to coast, at no cost.
Emphasizing Learning over Memorization, This Group’s Students Achieve Life-Altering Success
Eric Eisner is that teacher you feared, the instructor who set high expectations and believed his students would push themselves to meet them. He praises success, but doesn’t shy away from criticism. Maddening as the workload could be, he was the teacher whose class you appreciated most, since the challenge gave you a better sense of your own capabilities. Tough love, some might call it. “I’m rough, I’m abrasive and blunt,” Eisner says of his teaching style. “The thing in the jungle that bites.”
Eisner has no formal background in education. He came to it, by chance, as a second career. After graduating from New York’s Columbia Law School in 1973, he crossed coasts and entered the glitzy entertainment business in Los Angeles, working his way to the top spot as president of the David Geffen Company. Big paychecks bought a home in the city’s western hills, paid for his kids’ private school tuitions and allowed him to retire in his late forties.
Looking for a way to occupy his time outside of improving his golf game, Eisner was persuaded to get involved in a nonprofit in South Los Angeles, a low-income, predominantly Hispanic area. (It took some coaxing: “I had time, but I lacked the inclination to give it,” he confesses.) Eisner recalls not knowing what he could do for the families the nonprofit helped, but he wanted to meet the children to find out what made them tick. Partially, this was self-serving — he wanted to better understand his own children, whom he was losing in “the battle to pop culture” — but he also wanted to know why kids weren’t learning in school.
The roundabout answer to those questions led to the founding of Young Eisner Scholars (YES) in 1998, a group that took the “smart kids” out of regular classes for biweekly lessons on debate and language, helped them transfer to private, high-performing high schools and mentored them through college graduation and their first jobs.
YES has mobilized $50 million in financial aid and scholarships to fund its scholars’ tuition and underwrites college tours, application fees, summer programs and medical bills beyond a family’s budget. All that capital seems to have paid off. The scholars come from neighborhoods where two-thirds of students drop out of high school, but YES’s participants have been accepted to top-tier universities and won prestigious awards like the Fulbright, QuestBridge and Gates Millennium scholarships.
Eisner admits that YES was never founded with a long-term vision in mind. Instead, the group pivoted as they learned more, reacting with the critical thinking Eisner wants to see his kids develop. The program has found success in urban Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City, and this school year, it’s testing its worth in four schools in western North Carolina. (The expansion into Appalachia drastically increased the number of white children participating in YES.)
Justin Hicks, YES’s Appalachia program coordinator, says he spends much of his day in the car, driving 45 minutes to each school on one-lane switchbacked roads. A graduate of Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., Hicks pitched the idea for a rural version of YES during his first phone interview with Eisner. In this role for less than a year (previously, he was an intern with the organization), Hicks sees cultural differences in what these children hope to be — youth saying they want to be carpenters and farmers when they grow up, instead of lawyers or doctors — but he doesn’t see a difference in their ambition, the way they learn or their intellect. For now, the program is waiting to see if children from rural backgrounds will express interest in attending first-rate schools far from home, like their first-generation immigrant, urban counterparts.
An essential part of YES’s strategy and the way Hicks runs his classrooms is with an emphasis on language. Typically in schools, children are judged by how they perform on tests. If they score well, they’re considered to be smarter. But once Eisner started prying into how much his students actually comprehend, he realized that they were often memorizing answers that would later appear on exams, rather than learning concepts.
In hour-long sessions during the school day, YES reverses the “I, We, You” model (the teacher demonstrates, the students practice with her aid, the kids do homework alone) into something closer to the Socratic method. There’s no instruction without student participation. In math lessons, this means that there are no equations, only word problems like “If two trains, 56 miles apart, leave stations at the same time…,” although the instructors often deliberately leave out the question. When learning vocabulary, flash cards are practically banned, because Eisner says, they often define words using other terms the kids barely understand. Instead, YES sessions involve personal discussion and debate over contemporary issues.
While its students are thriving, Eisner’s answer might not be a scalable solution to our nation’s failing public schools. For one, YES requires huge sums of cash, which bars it from assisting more than a few dozen students in any given city. And troubling for some is the fact that YES plucks only the best students — the talented tenth, to use W.E.B. DuBois’s words — out of the public school system, leaving the most troubled students behind.
Eisner, for his part, would agree with DuBois about elevating the most exceptional students from low-income backgrounds is a way to bring along the rest of the class. He updates DuBois’s 1903 essay with a modern spin. “We are an advertising agency for educational aspiration. The fact that a kid goes to Harvard or Yale or Stanford or Columbia, there’s a little perfume that goes with them when they come home from school. It might reach a friend or cousin,” he says. “We succeed when these kids become glamorously successful.”
MORE: Only 1 in 5 New York City Students Graduates from College. This Nonprofit Is Going to Change That
These Teach for America Graduates Left the Classroom. But They Didn’t Forget About the Kids
Every year since 1990, in what is practically a fall tradition, idealistic college grads arrive in public school classrooms in New York City, Los Angeles and all of Teach for America’s 52 regions in between. Straight from seven to 10 weeks of summer training, these TFA corps members commit to work for two years in unfamiliar schools that desperately need strong educators. After that, they’re free to leave the classroom. While the majority of TFA’s 42,000 alumni do continue teaching, the program’s turnover rate has led some to question its success.
“My argument was: let’s take the resources you’re investing in a corps member — tens of thousands of dollars per year — and put that into professional development for training current staff on campuses,” says Robert Schwartz, a TFA alumnus and advisor at the nonprofit New Teacher Center. “You’ll see teachers that are going to stick around longer and are really invested in the community.” Schwartz’s alternative plan is voiced commonly in education circles, and it’s mild in comparison to some pointed criticism of TFA. Sarah Matsui, author of a book that gives TFA a negative assessment, argues to Jacobin that the program is mere resume fodder for Ivy League students on the way to jobs at well-heeled consulting firms like Deloitte and Boston Consulting Group. In response, TFA’s spokesperson Takirra Winfield points out to NationSwell that 84 percent of alumni continue to work in fields related to education or serving low-income communities.
But perhaps the debate over retention rates misses the point entirely. TFA’s mission statement, after all, doesn’t reference teaching at all. Instead, the organization aims to enlist, develop and mobilize “our nation’s most promising future leaders” in pursuit of a larger movement for educational equity. NationSwell explored how five TFA alums are accomplishing that outside the classroom.
Sekou Biddle, United Negro College Fund
A member of the United Negro College Fund’s leadership team, Biddle has always prized service, but as an aspiring management consultant at Morehouse College, a historically black college in Atlanta, he figured giving back was something he’d do as a brief detour on the road to business school. Thinking that TFA sounded like an impactful way to give younger students the same educational opportunities he’d been afforded, Biddle joined the corps in 1993 and stayed in the classroom for a decade.
After, Biddle “wanted to share the things [he] had learned” and transitioned to policymaking as a school board representative and city council appointee in his hometown, Washington, D.C. He says his TFA experience informed his votes and taught him empathy for teachers, who throw themselves into a “180-day marathon grind,” and parents, whom schools too often failed. He keeps in mind one phone call on which a dad told him, “This is the first time someone has ever called to say something good about my child,” Biddle recalls. “I was struck by the power of a relatively simple thing. Just a call certainly had an impact on this parent’s perception on what the relationship with a school and teacher could be.”
In his current role as UNCF’s vice president of advocacy, Biddle engages local leaders and school administrators with the same personal touch. Explaining the achievement gap, he lobbies for more academic and financial support for minority students, ultimately to increase the number of black college graduates. “I thought I was going to do [TFA] for a few years and feel I had done some good in the world, put enough in the bank and be ready to move on,” Biddle says. “I committed to doing two years, and 22 years later, I’m still at it.”
Mike Feinberg, KIPP Schools
While working in the classroom, Mike Feinberg, who co-founded KIPP, America’s largest network of charter schools (with 183 and counting), with fellow TFA alum Dave Levin, became “acutely aware that our students were not receiving an education that would set them up for success in college and life,” so late one night he and Levin laid out plans for a new educational model that refused to let children’s “demographics define their destiny.”
As a teacher, Feinberg saw firsthand student accomplishments that were a result of the belief that kids could and would learn. “If we believe there are solutions to problems, we can create a learning environment where we set high expectations for our students and they not only meet them, but surpass them.” Feinberg readily admits that growing up in poverty creates enormous challenges, but he reaffirms the principle that, if given a chance, education can level the playing field for those students. TFA “shaped my understanding of what education and social justice could accomplish,” he says.
Andrew Greenhill, City of Tucson
Now chief of staff for the mayor of Tucson, Ariz., Greenhill entered a career in government after TFA, inspired to take a broader look at how the delivery of public services can be improved. During his time as a teacher, in addition to the regular curriculum, he seemed to be teaching an impromptu course on how to make it in America. “Students looked to me for all kinds of assistance and information. Most were new arrivals in the country,” he recalls of his middle school class. Greenhill took families to free healthcare clinics, to the library to check out books, to Western Union to send money home and even to the supermarket to show them how to ring up groceries. That non-traditional teaching translated well to local government, where Greenhill has “played a role in helping to understand and support and in some cases even streamline the different programs provided by the city and local nonprofits.”
“I think the more people know about how the education system works, the better informed they will be in helping community-wide efforts, whether they’re inside the classroom, an administrator or a citizen participating in the debates that we have at the local and national level about education,” he says. As a city official, Greenhill doesn’t believe he’s given up on his old students; in fact, he’s still trying to take care of their day-to-day needs, so that classroom teachers can stick to teaching.
Tim Morehouse, Olympic fencer
A silver medal-winning fencer at the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, Tim Morehouse has a stellar pedigree to match the perceived elitism of his sport. He attended a rigorous prep school in the Bronx (where tuition today costs $40,660) and Brandeis University, a top-ranked liberal arts college in Massachusetts. It wasn’t until Morehouse signed up for TFA in 2000 that he saw how different his path could have been. Assigned to teach seventh grade at a public school six blocks from where he grew up in upper Manhattan, Morehouse realized how privileged his education had been, compared to the schooling that most children receive.
Because of his TFA experience, Morehouse returned to public schools in Washington Heights and Harlem before the 2012 London Olympic Games to coach fencing, with the hope of giving students an extracurricular to bolster their college applications and a chance at athletic scholarships. His foundation, Fencing in the Schools, last year served 15,000 students in 11 states. Like TFA, Morehouse recruited other Olympic fencers to teach kids the sport and mentor the youngsters in life skills. He says he hopes the foundation will help kids not only get to college, but also succeed there. And who knows? “Maybe they can even go to the Olympics,” he says.
Jessica Stewart, Great Oakland Public Schools
A onetime political junkie and head of the College Democrats at Auburn University in Alabama, Stewart moved to Oakland, Calif., to teach sixth-grade math in 2005 and fell head over heels for the Bay Area City. Politics took a backseat to her work in the classroom, but Stewart’s activist streak resurfaced in 2008 when the city’s superintendent threatened to close 17 schools and a budget crisis post-financial crash generated a multi-million dollar budget shortfall.
Great Oakland Public Schools, where Stewart is senior managing director, was founded in the wake of those disasters and went on to become a major voice in city politics. In 2012, the coalition endorsed three people running for seats on the school board. “To support our candidates, we had 300 volunteers do 60,000 phone calls and 12,000 door knocks,” Stewart recalls. “On any given night in October 2012, walking into the office, you’d see people sitting on the floor (because we only had five staff members at the time) talking to voters. It would be a student next to a principal next to a parent next to a teacher. It was so inspiring to see people coming together to fight for equality.” All three candidates won soundly, but Stewart isn’t resting on her laurels, explaining, “There is still so much work to be done in our education system.”
Editors’ note: This story originally stated that Teach for America was founded in 1989. We apologize for the error.
This Man’s Bold Idea: Pay Criminals to Stay Out of Trouble
To some, it’s one of the most dangerous spots in America. Others know it as “a city that pays criminals to behave.” To DeVone Boggan, Richmond, Calif., on the east side of the San Francisco Bay Area, is where a group of people are trying to build safer neighborhoods after three decades of living in what’s essentially a war zone.
Boggan is the director of Richmond’s Office of Neighborhood Safety (ONS). It’s a bureaucratic title that belies his public-private agency’s innovative work on gun violence prevention and youth outreach. Founded in 2007, when Richmond’s murder rate was nine times the national average, ONS has since helped the rate plummet to its lowest levels in four decades: 11 deaths per 100,000. (Nearby in Oakland, the 2013 rate was 23 per 100,000; in Detroit, 47.) Even more impressive is the fact that the decline in violence is happening faster in Richmond than anywhere else in the country.
How did Boggan do it? His agency contacts a select group of young men that are most likely to be involved in shootings — the ones who’ve brushed off help and stubbornly refused to change. With directed help, ONS gives the boys a profitable alternative to crime, starting with a monthly paycheck up to $1,000 for staying out of trouble.
“I found myself in a room with a myriad of law enforcement agencies and what I continued to hear was that they believed that 28 people were responsible for 70 percent of the gunfire in our city in the year 2009, and I said these 28 people are all were gonna focus on,” Boggan explains. “Before we could hit the ground running, we lost three of those young men to gun violence, so we invited the 25 living to City hall and 21 of them dared to show up. That tells you they’re hungry for something real.”
If you want to “reduce firearm-related homicides,” Boggan says, you can’t simply flood the streets with police, install surveillance cameras or scare people into being good. “You’ve got to understand the nature of [violence] and you’ve got to understand the drivers of it,” he explains. Being a young man in poor circumstances is a situation that Boggan recognizes well. Growing up in Michigan, he was busted for selling drugs.
“The context that has led me to where I’ve landed professionally has a lot to do with having access to positive adult healthy men. My parents divorced when I was nine years old. That meant my father was out of a home,” Boggan says. “It was during that period that my first mentor showed up at a time when I really needed some adult guidance. Having access to adult male figures is vital. In Richmond, it’s vital to survive.”
Almost always seen in a fedora, Boggan picked a team of Neighborhood Change Agents who could make inroads with potential murders. Boggan’s joked before, “It’s the only agency where you’re required to have a criminal background check to be an employee,” but he says that a more important qualification is hiring “people who cared about these young men.”
“Our job is to be on the streets talking to folks, interaction, building relationships,” says Joe McCoy, a Neighborhood Change Agent. “The car is our office; the street corner is our conference room.”
The reach of ONS expanded in 2009 with the creation of the Operation Peacemaker Fellowship. It identified at-risk individuals, ages 13 to 25, and incentivizes them to turn their lives around by paying stipends ranging from $300 to $1,000. Though the reduction in murders speaks to the efficacy of the program, it’s not without controversy.
“I think the biggest question that comes up is, Why would we spend these kinds of resources on people who should be in jail?” Boggan says. “Our philosophy and approach is were not going to arrest our way out of gun violence. The way were going to get ourselves removed from gun violence is developing and shaping these young men in a different way. We see these young men as vital and viable partners and we have to understand the power that these young men bring to the table,” he adds. “Gun violence isn’t being reduced because of the police alone. The primary reason is because these young men are making better decisions.”
What Are the Latest Farming Innovations in America? This Group Is Touring the Heartland to Find Out
“American farmers are a dying breed,” a Newsweek cover story tolled last spring. The splashy headline was eye-grabbing, but the narrative of aging farmers and agricultural decline is closer to myth than fact. More and more young people are joining the time-tested profession, bringing new technology, ideas and environmental consciousness to farming.
Just who are these millennials heading into the fields, and why are they doing it? It’s a question Young Invincibles, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit focused on youth engagement, along with Global Prairie, a digital media and marketing firm in Kansas City, will be asking on a nationwide listening tour, FarmNext: Giving Voice to the Next Generation of Food Producers. The group will host its first meeting at University of California, Davis today, followed by stops at Kansas State University, Virginia Tech and Iowa State University. It all culminates in a summit at the nation’s capital this fall.
NationSwell will be following the conference as it hops around the country, bringing you stories about young farmers’ perseverance and innovation in the face of challenges. We’ll focus on how we can incentivize young people to do the crucial work that stocks our markets with food; how drones, mapping and the latest inventions are changing the business of agriculture; and how America as a whole can bridge the divide between rural and urban communities.
“I think we’ve seen the millennial generation as a generation that has been let down by traditional institutions, whether that’s the real estate market, Wall Street, government,” Tom Allison, Young Invincible’s policy and research manager, tells NationSwell. For young people, “there’s a cultural search for something authentic, and you can’t get more authentic than reconnecting with the land, growing your own food and becoming part of the ecological system in a way that maybe has been lost in previous generations.”
These 80 million teens and twentysomethings — idealistic, socially, tech-savvy and penniless, if you believe what the media says — compose a growing share of the country’s workforce. Agriculture’s no different. While some indicators, like the average age of the “principal operator,” may appear to show farmers are getting older, those aren’t exactly accurate. “A lot of times a family might designate the oldest person in the family, out of respect and tradition, even if Grandpa isn’t necessarily doing as much work or making the business and ecological decisions of the farm,” notes Allison, whose family operates a small vineyard in Virginia.
Most other numbers reveal a millennial-driven business. The median age for non-management farmhands is 37.4 and for miscellaneous agricultural workers it’s 34.1 — both far younger than the median age for all occupations: 42.3. Another way of measuring the age of the workforce, the share of jobs held by millennials (16 to 34 years old), reveals that in fields like agriculture and food science, 41 percent of jobs are held by young adults.
Those figures are expected to grow. While the number of students majoring in agricultural studies remains low overall — 1.8 percent — its growth is skyrocketing, with a 39 percent increase over the past five years.
“There’s attributes that make us uniquely adapted to the agricultural industry,” Allison says. “We have collaborative approaches to work. Even though it is one person toiling in the soil, it really takes a whole network across the industry: the folks selling the equipment through the food chain pipeline to the buyer. Young people are also so adapted to technology. Agriculture relies more and more on predictive analytics to inform decisions on what to grow and when, GPS or drones to identify problems in the field that are too big or too small for one person or a crew to identify and big applications for food chemistry.”
Farming is not as easy or romantic as it sounds, as Allison can attest. It’s “not exactly Norman Rockwell,” he says. There’s days in late spring when you light a fire at the end of your row of vines to ward away a frost, tend it all night, then have one flock of birds eat your entire crop the next afternoon. There’s days in late summer when the salty sweat burns your eyes under 100-degree heat. But even for all the hardship, the rewards of harvesting something from the soil are attracting a new group.
“The numbers are there,” Allison adds. “Young people are getting into farming, both because they care about it and because there’s a lot of opportunities there.” Which is good news for the rest of us, since our dinner depends on it.
A Big-Hearted Man and His Calling to Build Tiny Houses for Oakland’s Homeless
“Homeless people,” says Gregory Kloehn, an artist, plumber and construction contractor based in Oakland, Calif., “they’re not really seen… I don’t want to say as human but almost. I mean, they’re definitely [viewed] lower than second class citizens.”
To Kloehn, it’s odd that our society finds it acceptable to ignore the plight of those living on the street.
Several years ago, when Kloehn got an iPhone, he began taking pictures of the structures erected by the homeless of West Oakland, compiling the photos in the book “Homeless Architecture.” Through this work, he came to know his homeless neighbors as the unique people that they are.
But Kloehn’s fascination didn’t stop there. Inspired by the ingenuity of his homeless neighbors, he put his construction and artistic skills towards making homes with the materials they were sourcing, mostly illegally dumped items found on the streets of West Oakland. Mostly famously, he created a house out of a dumpster that garnered a lot of media attention.
“I really just ripped a page out of the homeless peoples’ book, their own game plan,” says Kloehn.
The first home — complete with wheels for mobility and a lock for safety — and a bottle of celebratory Champagne was given to a homeless couple Kloehn had come to know while taking photos. As he saw them wheel it down the street and live in it, he came to understood the value that a safe, dry place has to people who have fallen on hard times.
To date, Kloehn has built 35 miniature homes for the homeless in Oakland and San Francisco. All construction materials (except for the wheels and a few other odds and ends), are sourced from garbage. He also runs workshops and give lectures, teaching other artists and handypeople the tricks of the trade. Following his lead, other builders have made homes for their neighbors in Los Angeles, Tucson, Arizona, and even abroad.
“It’s really put me in tune with the homeless,” says Kloehn. “Now, I see them as people. I know their name, I know their story, I know where they come from, I feel comfortable going up, chatting with them, just hanging out as a person.”
California Jailed a Man for Life for Stealing Beer Mugs. Meet the Woman Who Fought for His Freedom
Susan Champion found her first client in 2009. She was an enthusiastic student at Stanford Law School, and he was serving a life sentence in a California state prison. The crime that put him away for life? Three relatively minor thefts.
High on meth, he used a key hidden under a mat to sneak into his mother’s house and steal her VCR player, wanting to sell it for more drugs. Strike one.
He did his time. Got sober. But soon after he got out of the pen, he relapsed. On the waiting list for a bed at a rehab facility, he was homeless, sleeping outside in the bushes. One day, the police picked him up at a bus stop and found items in his backpack that had been reported missing in a daytime break-in. Strike two.
After being released from prison a second time, he committed a third burglary, stealing beer steins from someone’s commercial storage unit and trying to sell them at a flea market. Strike three.
Under California’s Three Strikes sentencing law, “persistent offenders” at the time had to be incarcerated for 25 years to life if a third felony was preceded by two crimes that were “serious or violent,” even if the last felony didn’t meet those criteria. Because of the stringent rule, this man was sentenced to life in prison without parole, simply for swiping a few mugs.
Champion submitted a habeas corpus petition (a motion asking the courts to review his detention) on her client’s behalf to determine if life for stealing beer glasses counted as cruel and unusual punishment. She won the case, convincing the judge that his sentence had been disproportional to the crime. Since then, she’s stayed on at Stanford to help many more like him through the law school’s Three Strikes Project.
The Three Strikes Project is currently the only legal organization in California working to reverse excessive sentences for minor crimes. Michael Romano, a law school professor and the program’s director, realized the need for services like it while clerking for the Ninth Circuit Court: Since there’s no right to legal counsel for habeas corpus petitions, convicts were sending in handwritten documents to his court, pleading with justices to take another look at their case. Since the project was institutionalized as one of Stanford’s 11 legal clinics in 2006, more than 1,000 inmates have sent letters to the school asking for pro bono assistance. The clinic currently represents 25 individuals and has already freed or reduced prison sentences for dozens more. So far, Champion, Romano and their students haven’t lost a case. Each time, they’ve convinced a judge to immediately release the prisoner or commute the lengthy sentence.
Champion became a lawyer late in life — at age 40 — to fight systemic injustice, like the Three Strikes Law’s misguided “one-size-fits-all” approach or jailing of the mentally ill. After working for years in a hospital that catered to the formerly incarcerated, non-English speakers, mentally ill and others “dealing with incredibly challenging circumstances,” Champion planned to study the intersection of mental health and criminal justice. But after her first year of law school was spent in required classes that focused on contracts and civil procedure, “stuff that doesn’t seem relevant to anything, let alone social justice issues,” Champion wondered if she’d made the right choice.
A job at the San Francisco district attorney’s office while still in school led her to focus directly on sentencing. In preliminary hearings — an early part of a case during which the judge decides if there’s enough evidence for a trial — Champion “saw a parade of poor black people. They were the only people coming in and out. It was just so stark and heartbreaking to see that’s what we’re doing with people who could be leading productive lives.” When California’s Three Strikes law appeared on the ballot, it promised “to keep murderers, rapists and child molesters behind bars, where they belong,” but those were not the people that Champion saw filling the courtroom.
In the early 1990s, the bill that initially proposed Three Strikes languished in Sacramento — until a horrific murder spurred a frantic campaign to crack down on crime. In October 1993, Polly Klaas, a 12-year-old with dimpled cheeks and a fondness for floral-print dresses, was abducted from her home in Petaluma, a small farm town in Sonoma County. Richard Allen Davis, a career criminal whose rap sheet included kidnapping and assault, broke into the three-bedroom home during a slumber party, bound and gagged two other girls and kidnapped Klaas while her mother slept nearby. Two months later, police found Klaas’s body on a trash pile adjacent to a freeway off-ramp, badly decomposed. Before Davis was convicted, legislators passed a slew of tough reforms, including Three Strikes. The measure was approved by a ballot initiative, winning approval from 72 percent of voters.
Since then, California’s Three Strikes Law — the first and harshest mandatory sentencing guideline of its kind — has been responsible for sending 46,000 inmates to prison for 25 years to life within the first decade since it passed in 1994, a government analysis found. Together, these “strikers” made up roughly one-quarter of California’s already overcrowded prison population.
Twenty years later, the need for change was also voiced through popular approval. In collaboration with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Romano and Champion helped draft the text of a statewide ballot measure (Proposition 36) to modify the law. The Three Strikes Reform Act captured more than two-thirds of the vote. Surprisingly, voters weren’t persuaded by arguments about the cost of prison as much as the law’s inherent unfairness, Champion says, referencing internal polls. As written, the original law could assign the same harsh penalty to the psychotic kidnapper whose crimes escalated to murders as the guy who faltered by stealing golf clubs, a disparity that seemed particularly unfair to voters, especially when it meant the difference between life in notorious San Quentin versus a few months at the local jail. “They thought an injustice had been done. What they thought they’d voted for in 1994 was not what they’d seen result. In fact, quite a few of our clients’ families voted for Three Strikes and would tell me after they never would have voted for it if they knew it would put someone like their loved one away when they might have just had a drug problem.”
Adding to the law’s insults was the fact that within California’s penal code, certain crimes are classified as “wobblers” meaning that people who commit them can either be charged with a misdemeanor or a felony, depending on the district attorney’s judgment. Because the third of the three strikes could have been applied to any felony — not merely a serious or violent one — a prosecutor could jail someone for life for a crime that might have been charged as a misdemeanor elsewhere in the state. With the passage of Prop 36, judges regained discretion over sentencing, so that the punishment would fit the crime, not public hysteria or prosecutors’ ambitions. It’s part of the reason why after the reform passed, hundreds of prisoners from “tough-on-crime” strongholds like Orange, San Bernardino and Kern Counties were eligible to have their cases reviewed, while only three from liberal San Francisco qualified.
The spike in crime that opponents of Prop 36 predicted never came to pass. Of 2,000 former lifers released under the reform, only 4.7 percent have re-offended (over an 18-month period, on average) — far below California’s usual recidivism rate of 45.2 percent over a one-year period and 56.9 percent over two years. Additionally, the change in the law made 3,000 second-strikers who’d been incarcerated for a third non-violent, non-serious offense eligible to appeal their sentence to a judge. There are still 700 cases pending (mostly in Los Angeles), Champion says, but those who have been released have largely kept out of trouble. Only one in 20 reoffended, and those were largely for theft or drug charges.
“I hope the enduring lesson is that people are not hopeless recidivists,” Romano tells the New York Times. “Those who remain dangerous should be kept behind bars. But there are many people in prison who are no threat to public safety.”
Champion will tell you her clients are no angels. Unlike the famed Innocence Project, which uses DNA testing to exonerate the wrongfully convicted, Champion says her colleague “Mike [Romano] calls us the Guilty Project. It’s true, we never claim that our clients are innocent, that’s never the basis of our argument,” she says. The prisoners broke the law — three times, at least — but her work is proving that slamming the convicts behind bars isn’t the solution.
They may not be saints, but they’re not monsters either.
The Common Sense Move That Reduced California’s Teen Pregnancy Rate by 60 Percent
In 1991, within the course of a single year, close to 16 out of every 100 teenage girls in California became pregnant — a rate that ranked among the worst in the country (the national average was 6.18 births for every 100 teens) and far exceeded those of other developed countries, sometimes by double digits.
Staggering as those statistics were, there’s been an equally stunning development in the 20 years since. By 2011, the teen pregnancy rate nationwide dropped 37 percent, and by more than half in the Golden State, a decline that’s “one of the nation’s great but unheralded success stories of the past two plus decades,” says Bill Albert, chief program officer for The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.
Despite the drastic drop in teen pregnancies, the fact remains uncelebrated — perhaps because no one can pinpoint exactly how it happened. Researchers haven’t yet explained how so many states’ divergent (and sometimes contradictory) strategies could consistently result in such steep declines.
The simple explanation? A “magic combination of less sex and more contraception,” as Albert puts it. But that only begs the question, What changed about the way teens have sex?
Studies point to a number of cultural factors. Some claim that mandatory sex education in schools after the AIDS crisis increased use of contraception. Others cite welfare reform and the strong economy. One hypothesis holds that MTV’s reality shows “16 and Pregnant” and “Teen Mom” discouraged sex with their gritty looks at the challenges of childbearing at a young age. Another theory says kids saw their parents marrying and having children later in life, so they likewise didn’t experiment until they were older and perhaps more mature.
A hard look at California’s programs, however, may reveal the best practices and a model to adopt nationwide. After all, the state is leading the way in reducing all three key areas — teen pregnancy, births and abortions. It’s “the undisputed heavyweight champion of prevention,” Albert remarks.
The Golden State, as a whole, saw teen birth rates drop by 60 percent from their peak in 1991. That number reflects improvement across all races; Hispanic teens still have the highest rate (4.27 births per 100 female teens), but it’s down 42 percent in the past 10 years.
Many public health officials point to the state’s sex education as an essential element in their multi-pronged approach. State law passed in 2003 requires the education to be “comprehensive, medically accurate and age- and culturally-appropriate.” Within the context of preventing HIV/AIDS, California teaches abstinence, but otherwise says abstinence-only education is “not permitted” in public schools. (It’s the only state in the union that didn’t accept lucrative federal dollars tied to “abstinence-only-until-marriage” programs included in a 1996 welfare reform package, after the state found its own pilot ineffective compared to one that included information on contraceptives.)
From there, the state’s approach focuses on access to healthcare, pioneering an innovative funding model that allows teen patients at hospitals or community clinics to qualify as their own household, making them eligible to receive public assistance for their medical expenses.
Additionally, California takes a more personalized approach to the social issues that surround — and lead to — teen pregnancy by helping local school districts and community healthcare providers tailor their programs to specific geographic areas. There’s vast differences, for example, in urban, affluent San Francisco and the rural farmlands of the San Joaquin Valley, where teen pregnancy rates still double those of the Bay Area.
“The problem isn’t the across-the-board teen birth rate in California, it’s the inequities that are revealed when you look at the rate,” Alison Chopel, senior program manager of the California Adolescent Health Collaborative and champion of the effort, says. “Why are black girls and Latina girls having babies younger than white girls? It’s because of the opportunity landscape that’s available to them.”
For Chopel, the need to customize the programs is very personal. As a teenager, she saw herself becoming another statistic. Raised in a poor household, she struggled with schoolwork, took drugs to cope, failed her classes and barely graduated from high school. College didn’t seem to be in her future, especially not after she had a baby boy. “I didn’t mean to get pregnant,” she says, “but I meant to have him.”
With the help of a Pell Grant, she graduated from college and went on to graduate school to study public health. She came to recognize the wide scope of factors contributing to unintended pregnancies: family structure, education, poverty, access to healthcare, race and culture.
Recently, public health advocates have questioned whether a baby is really the cause of the negative life outcomes — dropping out of school, living in poverty, depending on food stamps — for teen moms or whether they would have been just as likely to end up there because of their upbringing. (Chopel points to new research showing that young mothers from impoverished backgrounds may actually perform better than their peers because they receive family support and are motivated to succeed for their child’s sake.) Poverty, in other words, isn’t a symptom of unwanted teen pregnancies. If anything, it’s the cause.
California’s “innovative” strategies and community-based partnerships worked: they’re “helping young women and men make responsible choices,” says Dr. Ron Chapman, director of the state’s public health department, so the state is focused on continuing to make prevention programs available. “In all communities,” Chapman adds emphatically.
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Would You Be Willing to Give Up Everything to Help the Environment? This Man Has
Walter Fuller says each morning at his beachfront home is “heaven.” A painted sunrise spotlights the blue-white waves. A symphony of birds alight and sing. It’s a beauty that’s made Ormond Beach, a two-mile stretch in Ventura County a destination for surfers and fishermen from all over Southern California.
“Every morning, I’m waking up to a different sunrise,” Fuller says, of his routine. “Sometimes it’s cold, sometime’s its raining. But I’m right out in nature, and for me, it’s good.”
Fuller, now 60, doesn’t wake in a palatial villa by the seaside or even a cozy bungalow. From 2008 until last June, he lived in a steel shipping container, a unit crammed with field guides and notebooks that doubled as his office. If the beach looks heavenly today, it’s because Fuller has been its guardian angel for nearly two decades. After first seeing the beach in 1996, he couldn’t keep away. Each day, he works to transform it from an industrialized, crime-ridden dump into one of the last preserved wetlands on the Southern California coast.
“I knew [Fuller] was a completely volunteer person out here trying to protect the wetlands,” says Carmen Ramirez, the vice mayor of Oxnard, the nearby city of 200,000 wedged between two naval facilities. “We didn’t have … .enough protection for it, and he would come out here and talk to people and try to engage them about bird-watching, about not doing negative things on the beach that would hurt the environment,” she says. “More and more, he’s become a legend. We count on him.”
Born outside Phoenix and raised at his grandparent’s home in Ojai, Calif., Fuller says he’s always had an affinity for nature — in particular, for birds. His first pet was a parakeet named Whitey, who’d bop his head in time with Johnny Cash records. Other caged birds — a cockatoo, parrot and myna — remained fixtures at home until a high school science teacher assigned Fuller a report on eagles. He bought a pair of binoculars in 1972 and was instantly hooked; watching birds in the wild became his new obsession.
Today, if you ask Fuller what is favorite bird is, he’ll claim it’s the bald eagle, which he spotted at Ormond last year after a lifetime of waiting. Then he’ll rattle off a list of a couple more — the great blue heron, white crown sparrows, mallards, pretty much all of the egret family — before he gleefully admits, “Actually, I love all the birds.”
His passion for the flocks has been one of his most valuable contributions to Ormond Beach, a much needed bird habitat. The beach is home to the threatened western snowy plover, a nearly inconspicuous bird that pecks food from the shoreline and whose nests are often damaged by humans. It’s also a key stop along the Pacific Flyway, a north-south route that migratory birds follow in pursuit of food, breeding grounds or warmer climates. More than 200 species have been documented at the site, including the endangered California least tern.
Due to development along the coast, “these species now have been so confined, and there’s a limited numbers of places where they can breed,” David Pereksta, a local ornithologist who works for the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, explains. Fuller’s presence helps “reinforce what the regulations are and keep an eye on these places,” he adds. “It’s not just putting up some signs and fences. It really needs a strong human presence to engage the public,” Pereksta says. “Without this active management, these birds are just not going to survive.”
Though Ormond now looks pristine, it’s hemmed in by the scars of industrialization. The Halaco scrap metal recycling plant was originally built on the city dump near the beach in the mid-1960s, but after the plant shuttered, the area was deemed a hazardous waste cleanup site by the federal government. Behind the dunes, the GenOn power plant’s tall smokestacks puff fumes into the sky. Nearby, there’s also a deepwater port to the north and a naval base to south at Point Mugu. Ironically, the factories and plants may have actually saved the beach over the long-term because they discouraged developers from putting up condos, boardwalks and marinas on the coastline.
“My vision for Ormond Beach is that it will be restored for the youngsters, that it will be turned over to them someday,” Fuller says. “I want to see my age group put it back together to what it used to be hundreds of years ago, so kids don’t have to go look up birds in a book that used to be out here and have gone extinct. You think of years past, the ivory-billed woodpecker, the passenger pigeon. They’ve all gone extinct because we didn’t take care of them. We didn’t watch them.”
Fuller began tending the beach back in the mid-1990s. He stumbled upon it while searching for a lunch spot before his afternoon maintenance work at Point Mugu began. At the time, the beach was a mess. People got wasted on booze and drugs, fired off guns and dumped trash and old furniture in the canal. Vandals canvased the parking lot for valuables. “You wouldn’t be safe walking your dog out here,” Fuller recalls. “You couldn’t walk down the pathway without worrying about stepping on glass.”
He soon spent nearly all his free time at the beach, watching the plovers scurrying in the surf or other rare birds in the dunes and informing visitors how to behave in the fragile ecosystem. Dogs off-leash or kids with pellet guns, for example, often spelled ruin for a nest.
When Fuller’s mother died, he started spending nights in his Ford Explorer parked at the beach. He took up an informal role as gatekeeper and caretaker. It was, after all, his home. Almost always dressed in a short-sleeved khaki shirt, Fuller kept one eye trained on the birds and another on the parked cars in the lot. Gradually, the beach’s clientele changed. Families and tourists showed up to see the sights, and new birds dropped in on the cleaner sands. Fuller takes notes on everything that arrives at the beach and guesses he now has at least 3,000 pages of observations. “It’s kind of about my life,” he says.
When the City of Oxnard found out about Fuller’s work, they gave him a cargo container to use as an office. Six years later, when they discovered it was also serving as Fuller’s home, they approved funds for a residential trailer. Their resolution also came with an official title and three-year contract to be “Steward of Ormond Beach.”
“This is all still in a wild state out here. Nothing has really touched it,” he says. “This is a jewel.”