FCL NEWSLETTER -- January, 2000

A Visit with Jan Marinessen

I first met Jan Marinessen in 1968 when I became the director of the American Friends Service Committee's Austin MacCormick House, an experimental private halfway house in San Francisco. Jan was one of the founders of this unusual program that was an extension of the community, rather than an extension of the prison.

Jan began his work as the Penal Affairs Secretary with the American Friends Service Committee in 1960 and for more than 30 years he has regularly visited jails and prisons and worked as a tenacious advocate for changing the system, meeting innumerable times with prisoners as well as criminal justice administrators and policy makers.

As a young boy in occupied Holland during the Second World War, Jan was detained and interrogated. His sister was imprisoned as a suspected resistance activist.

He told me years ago that after the war the criminal justice system in Holland was reconstructed by politicians and judges who had been in prison during the occupation. Their harsh incarceration experiences led them to attempt to create a system based on doing the least harm possible to persons who had broken the law. Rather than an emphasis on punishment, they stressed assistance toward a more fulfilling life and a life more fulfilling to society.

In the early sixties Jan visited San Quentin prison and discovered that there was no pre-release program. So he started a pre-release group and some of the prisoners who had served long sentences suggested that Quakers set up a residence in San Francisco. That led to establishing the Austin MacCormick Center.

In 1969 Jan was one of the founders of Connections, a organization of wives and girlfriends of prisoners. In 1972 he played an important part in the founding of the Prison Moratorium Project that later became a program of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.

In the early seventies Jan and his Prison Committee began the Mentally Ill Offender Project. Since 1959, the State of California has de-institutionalized state hospitals for the mentally ill with the promise that the money saved by shutting down the institutions would be spent on providing services in the community. Instead the money saved went back into the state's general fund and instead of de-institutionalizing, what Jan calls "trans-institutionalizing" took place.

Severely mentally ill patients went from state hospitals to the streets, then to jails and prisons. At present, 20% of the prison population and 17% of the jail population are severely mentally ill.

Jan points out that this is also true of juveniles in the justice system. There are no places to treat severely mentally ill juvenile offenders. More recently with the assistance of the American Friends Service Committee, the Friends Committee on Legislation, researchers, families and friends state legislators are raising serious questions about sending the mentally ill to jails and prisons. The FCL Education Fund is currently working on a report on mentally ill offenders that will soon be available to assist policy makers and the public to understand these issues.

Jan has been actively involved with the Friends Committee on Legislation for more than 30 years. He has served on the Northern Regional Committee, the Policy Committee, and the FCL Education Fund Board.

Having coffee with Jan in Berkeley the other day, I was reminded of how deeply he has influenced me. I am convinced by his persistent and uncompromising analysis that the criminal justice system was meant to be an oppressive system and we are foolish to tinker with it under the expectation that it can deal with all our problems like racism, violence, poverty, mental illness, and addiction. It was never meant to deal with all these problems.

We end up criminalizing the poor, the homeless and the mentally ill. We have created a strong criminal justice system so as to not have to deal with what is wrong with our society.

Instead, Jan suggests that we drastically reduce the state prison and jail populations and de-criminalize drug use. He asserts that the state would be wiser to spend its prison budget, currently more than $20,000 per year per prisoner, on making local communities more economically viable and creating programs that assist offenders toward more fulfilling lives. According to Jan, providing universal health care, building affordable housing, establishing economic justice, with meaningful jobs and education for all, and eliminating personal and institutional racism will eradicate the conditions that fill the prisons and jails.

-Peter Crysdale

Rose Bird, 63, the first woman ever to serve on the California Supreme Court, the only female chief justice and the first woman to hold a cabinet position in California state government, died in December. Appointed by Governor Jerry Brown in 1976, she lost her seat on the high court in the 1986 election after voting, on constitutional grounds, against execution in all of the 64 death penalty cases presented to her. Her defeat was an earthshaking event for justice in California. According to Bay Area lawyer Raj Chabra, "a lot of judges lost the courage to be independent" after Bird and Justices Cruz Reynoso and Joseph Grodin were voted out of office because of their records on the death penalty.

She created the court's first committee on gender discrimination, which has since been expanded to include racial and other kinds of prejudice. "Rose went to work young, was a legal secretary before she went to law school, and she identified with the powerless in our society, women, minorities," said Court of Appeal Justice J. Anthony Kline, who served with Bird in Governor Jerry Brown's administration. "There are still a lot of people who look to her as a symbol of courage and idealism in doing the right thing and what you believe in regardless of the consequences," said U.S. 9th Circuit Court Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt.

George Brown, 79, the oldest member of the U.S. House of Representatives and the longest-serving congress member in California history, died in July. Described by the Los Angeles Times as a man who will be remembered "for his quiet but dogged efforts to bring peace on Earth and to make peace with the Earth," he worked closely with FCL's Southern California office throughout his more than 40 years of public service, first as a Monterey Park city council member, then in the state assembly and finally, for 18 terms in the U.S. congress. An early opponent of the Vietnam War, he was the only member of congress to oppose the military appropriations bill in 1966 and 1967. At the height of the Cold War, Brown voted against money for civil defense, saying it "created a climate in which nuclear war becomes more credible." Proud of his support of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he displayed in his office a photo showing him beside Martin Luther King, Jr., at the law's signing by President Johnson. He was among the first legislators to promote solar power and protection of the ozone layer and he championed the Environmental Protection Act.

James A. Browning, Jr, 68, a retired Sacramento attorney and stalwart FCL supporter, died in November. Browning served from 1984 - 1997 on the staff of the state Board of Prison Terms, whose chairman, Jim Nielsen, described Browning as "one of the last Kennedy liberals who was loved and respected by Reagan Republicans." Browning worked from 1975 - 1984 in the state senate, where he drafted legislation to reform the judiciary and restructure state trial courts, and as a private attorney in Ventura County, where he headed the legal aid association and, as a volunteer, helped prepare a lawsuit that preserved one of the largest perennial streams in Southern California. FCL's staff long benefited from his advice and experience and enjoyed his enthusiastic presence at nearly every FCL annual dinner in the past 20 years.

John Kelley, 82, former clerk of FCL's Northern California policy committee and retired chair of the UC Berkeley mathematics department, died in November. In 1950, he was one of 29 tenured Berkeley professors fired for refusing to sign a loyalty oath, although he returned three years later after the oath was declared unconstitutional. In the 1960s, he opposed the Vietnam War and supported the Free Speech Movement. He was a long-time attender at the Berkeley Friends Meeting and frequently opened his home in the Berkeley Hills for FCL activities.

Elaine Wood "Woody" Schwartz, 75, former member of FCL's Executive Committee and long-time Sonoma County activist, died in July. She called herself "a radical pacifist who lived a life of joyful resistance." As a teenager, she protested the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and in the 1960s she started an American Friends Service Committee Hawaiian chapter in her Honolulu laundry room. In California, she served on the board of the Sonoma County Center for Peace and Justice and became known as the "Bread Lady" because of her years of service in Catholic Worker food distribution to homeless camps. She held one-woman demonstrations against civil defense measures ("Peace is the only shelter," she contended) and was arrested for blocking nuclear weapons shipments. "Her issues were justice and peace," said Dr. Arnold Schwartz, her husband of 53 years, "Justice first."

While the legislature and the governor took final action on many bills presented to them in 1999, some pieces of legislation were held for consideration in 2000.

Here's a look at some of the two-year social and economic justice items that the legislature is likely to examine beginning in January. Please note that those still in their house of origin must pass out of that house no later than January 31.

AB 43 (Antonio Villaraigosa, D., Los Angeles), AB 93 (Gil Cedillo, D, Los Angeles), AB 1015 (Martin Gallegos, D, Baldwin Park) Together these three bills create a coordinated and comprehensive health care package by integrating and expanding eligibility for Medi-Cal, Healthy Families, and Access for Infants and Mothers programs for families with incomes up to 300% of federal poverty standards. FCL SUPPORTS. Senate Insurance Committee.

AB 869 (Fred Keeley, D., Santa Cruz) Encourages California insurance companies - the second largest source for private long- term investment capital - to invest in low-income urban and rural communities. FCL SUPPORTS. Assembly Floor.

AB 1190 (Hilda Solis, D., El Monte) Ensures that redevelopment agencies don't divert their low and moderate income housing funds to other purposes. FCL SUPPORTS. Assembly Housing and Community Development Committee.

AB 52 (Gil Cedillo, D., Los Angeles) Preserves immigrant access to selected state health care programs. FCL SUPPORTS. Senate Floor.

AB 1463 (Gil Cedillo, D., Los Angeles) Eases application process for immigrant driver's licenses and identification cards. FCL SUPPORTS. Senate Transportation.

SB 92 (Tom Hayden, D., Los Angeles) Ensures Healthy Families program eligibility for legal immigrant children. FCL SUPPORTS. Assembly Appropriations.

SB 996/SB 1023 (Patrick Johnston, D., Stockton) Allows employees to receive workers' compensation and state disability benefits without regard to immigration status. FCL SUPPORTS. Assembly Appropriations.

SB 65 (Kevin Murray, D., Los Angeles) Appropriates $20 million for CalWORKS transportation services improvement grants to assist welfare recipients. FCL SUPPORTS. Senate Appropriations.

-Ken Larsen

Department of Corrections

The November/December FCL Newsletter incorrectly reported two votes on AB 1440 in the Assembly, Steve Baldwin voted "no," not "yes"; in the Senate, Ray Haynes did not vote, rather than voting "no." Thanks to reader Peter Sussman for calling these errors to our attention.

While the California State Legislature may have been in recess since September, things have been anything but quiet in Sacramento. Fall is the season when the first draft of the state budget is worked out and agendas are created for the upcoming legislative session.

When lawmakers return on January 3, FCL will be working with other peace and justice advocates to persuade our elected officials to get moving on a number of pressing needs. Here's a brief outline of some of the issues we'll be working on.

California Agenda for Working Families (developed by Children Now)
* Expand High-Quality Child Care
* Expand High-Quality After-School Care
* Improve Health Insurance Programs to Cover All Children
* Increase Affordable Housing Supply
* Enact a State Earned Income Tax Credit

End Hunger in California Agenda (developed by California Food Policy Advocates)
* Make Food Stamps Work for Working Families
* Continue Food Assistance for Legal Immigrants
* Increase Low-Income Children's Access to School Breakfast
* Document Hunger In California

Safe, Just, and Affordable Housing Agenda (developed by California Housing Law Project)
* Put $750 - 980 Million Housing Bond on the November Ballot
* Increase State Housing Budget to $50 -100 Million
* Increase State Low-Income Housing Credit to $50 Million
* Prevent Landlord, Redevelopment and Permit Abuses
* Provide Farmworker Housing Development Incentives

An Increase in the Minimum Wage in Keeping with the State's Booming Economy (developed by California Labor Federation)
* Assist the 3.5 million California workers at or near minimum wage
* Return real buying power of minimum wage to 1968 levels, the year before the wages of the bottom quarter of workers began to see a 20-year decline of nearly 40%
* Move the working poor out of poverty

Those are just a few of the items we'll be pursuing. Watch these pages for further developments.

Ken Larsen