A Grave Wrong Called ‘Justice’: The Betrayal of the California Dream

 

 

I am a proud Californian.

We are a people of movement, glorified for our ambitions and our ambitious belief in education. 

And yet, the public temples of education that dot the California landscape – the universities once celebrated by their letters or location alone, like UCLA, San Diego, Santa Cruz, Berkeley or Irvine – no longer cast their lights around the world, but stand, instead, in the harsh glare of a different spotlight.

It is the klieg light of interrogation, and the megawatt rays of the guard tower. It is the displacement of first-class institutions of higher learning, the professoriate expelled by massive cutbacks and departments closed by lack of funding; a dream postponed, if not permanently denied . . . while we build more and more prisons.

We call these “campuses” Folsom, San Quentin, Mule Creek, High Desert and Pelican Bay: The graduate schools, so to speak, for offenders raised by, in the words of one inmate’s memoir, “Mother California”; the iron bars that juvenile offenders mistake for a crib and lifetime inmates know is the only home they will ever have.

These facts are a depressing snapshot of our civilization.

This penal colony, which has an institution for every age and every type of criminal, contains a series of “youth farms,” where cruelty is routine and savagery is standard.

It is a perverse universe, where guards pit inmates against one another in gladiatorial games of extreme violence, as onlookers place their bets and warning shots fired from a high-velocity rifle inaugurate and conclude each contest.

These farms, even the name is a racist throwback to the plantations African-Americans once maintained in the Deep South, are the community colleges of California’s new version of state-funded education.

The characters that emerge from this darkness, illiterate and contemptuous of any visible sign of humanity, will never be free, no matter how brief their layover between reentry into society and their return to prison may be.

As a former Juvenile Probation Commissioner for the City and County of San Francisco, I know what doom looks like. It is the despair of circumstance, where opportunity is scarce and a two-parent family is rarer still.

I know where those emotionally confined children live in Northern California, and I know where they gather in Southern California.

Having volunteered at Camp David Gonzales (a probation facility for Los Angeles County), options are few and outcomes are predictable: Existence, instead of living; and indifference, instead of compassion.

We, the citizens and taxpayers of California, are responsible for this moral crime.

In our relentless demand for order, we ignore the insatiable need for justice. The two are not the same because what is legal is not always right, and what is right is not always legal.

Our duty is to recognize this distinction, separating the cheated (of a sane and safe neighborhood) from the evil.

The latter – the murderers, molesters and rapists – are not our brothers in spirit, nor icons for mercy.

They are evil not in some abstract biblical way, inexplicable and beyond our understanding, but very much of this world.

They are not victims, but remorseless victimizers, who prey upon the old and infirm, the innocence of children and the vulnerability of defenseless women.

Prison is where these brutes should be. It is where they must be.

But we must ourselves avoid brutality.

Remember: Prison should be – it already is – punitive. It does not need to be a sterile version of hell, or an unrelenting box of psychological terror.

Our responsibility is to save the troubled and the wayward boys (and girls, too) among us before they become members of a gang and the foster children of Mother California.

We owe them salvation, not damnation.

 

 

 

Elizabeth Rice Grossman