PRISON GUARDS GET A WARNING

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MAY 12, 2023, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “PRISON GUARDS GET A WARNING”

 

        Few labor groups have more clout in California government than the prison guards union, whose members draw an average annual salary of almost $55,000, not counting their often-copious overtime.

 

        But the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. has now been put on formal notice that its members can’t get away with simply doing whatever they want, whenever they want to inmates in the state prison system.

 

        Lawyers for convicts have long claimed that’s been the actual situation in prisons from Pelican Bay in Del Norte County on the Oregon border to Chuckwalla in eastern Riverside County, and everything in between.

 

        Now, though,the prison guards have learned their storied and frequent political contributions may buy them a lot of influence in Sacramento, but not so much in federal courts around the state.

 

        That’s one lesson of a ruling from Senior U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken, a Bill Clinton appointee based in San Francisco, in a case mostly affirmed the other day by a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that included one judge each named by ex-Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama.

 

        As a result of the new ruling, guards in at least one prison now must wear body cameras when dealing with inmates because of documented excess use of force. Some actions described included tipping over the wheelchairs of disabled prisoners, punching a hard-of-hearing inmate in the face when he asked for written communication from the guard because he couldn’t hear what the guard had said and using pepper spray on mentally ill convicts.

 

        The prison most affected by the ruling is the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in the Otay Mesa area of San Diego, about 1.5 miles north of the Mexican border. Wilken had made her order apply also to five other prisons, but the appeals court panel found alleged abuses at those facilities were not as firmly documented as those at Donovan.

 

        The Donovan facility was designed in part to prepare inmates who are undocumented immigrants for eventual release to U.S.

Citizenship and Immigration Services for deportation to their home countries. It teaches skills they can use after they are returned home. Donovan also specializes in prisoners with mental illness or high risk medical issues. Inmates there have recently included high profile criminals like Robert Kennedy assassin Sirhan Sirhan, Manson Family member Chares (Tex) Watson, the parent-killing Menendez brothers and onetime record executive Suge Knight.

 

        Donovan features a shoe factory making footwear for state prisoners around California and a bakery that supplies bread and cakes to several other prisons daily.

 

        State and union officials fought the order imposing surveillance and body cameras, new training and a new complaint process, and kept those changes away from prisons aside from Donovan. They said the claimed mistreatment of prisoner/patients was not well documented, but San Francisco attorney Gay Grunfeld and the San Quentin-based Prison Law Office collected 179 declarations from prisoners detailing alleged abuses by prison guards.

 

        The appeals court panel also said the charges upheld at Donovan were closely related to previous claims the state has mistreated disabled inmates in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

 

        Circuit Judge Michelle Friedland, an Obama appointee, called the incident where the partially deaf convict was hit in the face “a violent denial of accommodations” that might deter other inmates from seeking help required by the ADA. She said both the convicts and Judge Wilken had no need to “sit idly while (guards) violated (prisoners’) rights.”

 

        While striking down parts of the initial court order that applied to other facilities, the appeals court ruling put the  prison guards on notice that they, like police on their beats, are not immune from punishment for violating people’s rights, even people they have reason to dislike.

 

        For one thing, Friedland noted there is “plenty of evidence” of mistreatment of prisoners at other facilities, but it was “not as thoroughly corroborated” as what happened at Donovan.

 

        So prison guards around the state now know they can be observed and probably should at least pull their punches if they want to avoid the kind of discipline underway at Donovan.

 

        It also lets union leaders know the clout they enjoy in the state Capitol has some limits.

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net.

NEWSOM LOSES TRANSPARENCY, UNITY IT BROUGHT

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MAY 12, 2020, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
          “NEWSOM LOSES TRANSPARENCY, UNITY IT BROUGHT"

          Californians have shown with great clarity during the coronavirus pandemic that if they’re convinced something needs to be done, they’ll cheerfully do it even when it’s uncomfortable and terribly expensive.

          So when Gov. Gavin Newsom in a mid-March first-in-the-nation move ordered most of this huge state’s citizenry to stay home in a quasi-quarantine condition in hopes of limiting the spread of the virus, they complied, with few exceptions.

          But now, with far less ambient panic in California’s air, there are cracks in that united front. Demonstrators in places as diverse as San Diego, Newport Beach and Sacramento have turned out in respectable numbers demanding an end to the lockdown. It’s true, some of those demonstrations are orchestrated by ultra-conservative national organizations.

Many protesters ardently back President Trump, who calls for a gradual “opening up” of America. They demand restoration of all rights to freedom of movement and association, never mind social distancing. Some of the demonstrators had been seen on the state Capitol steps before, protesting last year’s new laws making it a bit tougher to get children exempted from vaccination requirements.

          The month of March saw nothing like that after Newsom issued his first order. This was partly because the governor was open about estimates of the potential extent of viral spread, contagion and fatalities.

          But Newsom, who gets high poll marks for most of his conduct this spring, now must contend with two things he helped create: One is the fact staying home meant California has seen far less contagion and death than predicted. This lessens the panic that first gave him free rein.

The other is that as the crisis persisted and one emergency executive order followed another, often in fields only peripherally related to the virus, Newsom gradually lost the aura of transparency that created the early unity.

          Usually, when important new laws are passed in California, they follow a series of public hearings and much discussion. Not so with Newsom’s sudden edicts on everything from blocking evictions for non-payment of rent to freeing felons from jails and prisons early to prevent their becoming infected when those same felons didn’t previously worry about protecting anyone else. There were also orders to rent or buy hotels for housing thousands of the homeless and other decrees authorizing suspension by the courts of virtually all bail requirements for the duration.

        Most of these moves lacked the detailed explanation that went into the original stay-home order.

         

          Newsom has also been closed about how he’s spent much of the 7 billion state tax dollars consumed so far in the crisis, especially about his contract to buy almost $1 billion worth of personal protective equipment, including millions of face masks, from a Chinese company previously blacklisted by some federal transit agencies. It turns out no one knows when this stuff will show up, or many conditions of the huge deal. But we do know the state was gouged.

          It’s all been justified – with a warranted shot at President Trump – by the fact that the federal government has not unified national purchases or production of masks, face shields, gowns and rubber gloves, thus creating ferocious competition between states and hospital systems for vital equipment. That encouraged price gouging that’s illegal in most crises.

          There’s also the question of where Newsom and other governors get the authority to issue myriad fiats and decrees without so much as the right for anyone to petition the government for redress. The Constitution gives governors, presidents and mayors vast leeway to protect public health and safety in emergencies, as when then-Gov. Pete Wilson paid contractors large bonuses for completing bridge rebuilds ahead of schedule after the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

          But all previous emergencies were finite, with known needed corrective measures (as with evacuations in the face of wildfires) or definite time frames.

          There are no time lines here, Newsom and other governors telling their constituents they can’t know how long current orders will be enforced because as yet there is no vaccine for the coronavirus.

          The bottom line: While the governor was open about what he did, he enjoyed near-unanimous support. He needs to get back on the transparency track, or California will see more and more cracks in its harmony.

                  
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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

WHEN A FINE IS ONLY HALF A FINE

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MAY 12, 2015, 2014, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “WHEN A FINE IS ONLY HALF A FINE”

          Only minutes after an announcement that the California Public Utilities Commission would fine the state’s largest utility company $1.6 billion for violating state and federal gas pipeline safety standards, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. said it would not appeal the decision.

          But PG&E never said why it’s happy to accept the largest penalty ever assessed by regulators against an American utility company.

          Maybe it was because the fine in reality is not quite half as large as it looks, in fact mostly a cosmetic move by a regulatory commission desperate to restore its image after many months of scandal, with at least two criminal investigations in process.

          This so-called fine fits with what industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie observed early in the last century: “As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.”

    Here’s why this fine is less than half as large as it looks:

    The “penalty” is split into four parts: $400 million to be refunded to customers, $300 million going into the state’s general fund and $50 million to pay for a variety of PUC safety activities. But more than 53 percent of the money – $850 million – will be spent to repair and improve PG&E’s gas transmission system.

    Huh? How is it a fine when PG&E spends money on needed pipeline maintenance and improvements? Remember, for more than six decades, the company has collected payments monthly from each of its natural gas customers to maintain pipeline safety.

    The total comes to billions of dollars; no one knows just how many billions. Because the utilities commission did not track how this money was used until after the fatal 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion, no one knows how much was actually spent to fix or replace pipelines.

          But the PUC did find recently that PG&E used at least some maintenance money for executive salaries and bonuses. Commissioners did not respond when asked why the $850 million in pipeline repairs should be considered a penalty rather than a business expense.

          So, as Carnegie suggested long ago, watch what the PUC does, not what it says. Each one of the corrupt-seeming rulings for which it is now being investigated by the FBI and the state attorney general’s office was couched in terms at least as pious as the announced “fine” of PG&E.

          One example of the PUC misleading utility customers: The commission said last fall that it painstakingly reached a “compromise” settlement in which customers of Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric Co. will pay $3.3 billion – more than two-thirds of the cost – for retiring the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, even though the retirement was caused by Edison decisions the company knew in advance were flawed.

          But customers had been dunned monthly for the eventual retirement of SONGS since the early 1970s, and documents seized from the home of former PUC President Michael Peevey show he arranged the essence of the settlement with an Edison executive during a junket to Poland about one year before the settlement was announced last fall.

          The PG&E fine is equally misleading, even though it was accompanied by an announcement from current President Michael Picker that he’s ordering an investigation into whether PG&E “is simply too large…to succeed at safety.”

          The bottom line here is that PG&E collected many billions over many years for maintaining its pipelines, but federal investigators found after San Bruno that the company was criminally negligent in its maintenance practices – and that the PUC did not police it adequately. At least some of the money went to corporate executives and the fate of the rest is unknown.

          So PG&E now has to spend money to fix or renew its pipeline system, really an ordinary cost of doing business, one for which its customers paid long ago. How is this a fine?

          The answer is that it’s not, or the PUC would answer questions about it. Rather, this “fine” is a public relations ploy. Which emphasizes that in dealing with the PUC and PG&E, it’s wise to bear in mind what 1970s-era Manager Billy Martin said of baseball Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson and New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner: “One’s a born liar and the other’s been (indicted).”

         

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net