Cross-posted from Huffington Post and DailyKos.

Education, public safety, and the economy: three vastly complex issue areas that time and again are proven to be inextricably linked.

By doing what it takes to keep kids in school in every corner of our state, we can save literally billions of dollars in public resources and greatly improve public safety.

Most of us in law enforcement have known this for many years. As San Francisco’s District Attorney, I see the direct impact of what happens when kids don’t stay in school; young lives are lost to street violence or prison at an appalling rate, our state loses more resources and our communities are less safe.

The wake-up calls keep sounding. The California Dropout Research Project at UC Santa Barbara just published a devastating report exposing the impact of high school dropouts on California’s economy. The report concludes that high school dropouts account for a disproportionate amount of juvenile crime. By contrast, graduating from high school results in a 17% reduction in violent crime and a decrease of approximately 10% in property and drug-related crimes. The juvenile crimes committed by dropouts cost California $1.1 billion per year. Add in social and medical costs, lost income taxes and associated economic losses, and the report estimates that dropouts cost the state more than $24 billion per year.

To close the horrendous budget deficit this year, California lawmakers reduced the public school system budget by $4.3 billion. Failing to educate our children and lower dropout rates is a recipe for disaster, and the price will be paid by communities and individuals victimized by crime. The direct connection between education, crime and victimization is clear. Harvard sociologist Bruce Western and Becky Pettit found that the cumulative risk of death or imprisonment by age 30-34 nearly triples for men who do not finish high school. Fourteen percent of white men and a staggering 62% of black men who don’t finish high school are dead or in prison by the age of 30-34.

What can be done? Plenty.

First, dropout prevention has to start early. The problem should be red-flagged when children first become habitual truants. Nationwide, 75% of all truant children will eventually drop out of school. In San Francisco, we found that 10% of all students are chronic truants and 40%, or more than 2,000 of those truant students, are in elementary school.

That’s right. Elementary school.

So we targeted that problem and partnered with the San Francisco Unified School District to combat school truancy.

At the time, many people asked why the city’s chief prosecutor was worried about the problem of school attendance. My answer was simple, and as our partnership now enters its fourth year, the reason remains the same: a child going without an education is a crime and it leads to more dangerous crimes. My job is to protect the public and combating truancy is a smart approach to crime prevention. We can either pay attention now, or pay the price later.

So every fall I send out letters to parents across San Francisco letting them know that truancy is against the law and that I will enforce that law. During the school year, prosecutors from my office hold mediations with parents and truant students at schools across the city to reinforce this message and urge them to get help to improve their children’s attendance. We asked business and faith leaders to engage with the city’s schools to provide mentors and resources. We opened a stay-in-school hotline and coordinated support services for families needing help. In most cases, attendance improves. But when it does not, my office prosecutes parents in a specialized Truancy Court we created that combines supervision and services for those families. To date, I have only had to prosecute 20 parents of young children for truancy.

Our groundbreaking strategy has worked. The majority of parents who have been brought to Truancy Court have dramatically improved their children’s attendance in school. But the effects of the strategy ripple far beyond these families. In the last year alone, truancy among elementary school students dropped by an average of 20%. In this new school year, my office will work closely with school district staff to expand our strategy to include high school age chronically truant students.

We have the tools that can start solving this problem. But first, we have got to commit to a bipartisan agenda that is smart on crime. The lesson for those of us in law enforcement is that we have to embrace our responsibility for crime prevention and engage in the serious business of helping to build healthier communities.

Preventing truancy does more than protect public safety. It protects precious public resources in the midst of California’s worst economic crisis in history. If ever there were a time to reassess how our state spends public resources, the time is unquestionably now.

Let’s start a serious dialogue about our collective responsibility to change the odds for children and youth. I urge you to contact your local District Attorney, school board and other elected officials about this problem. And please let me know what else I might have left out, how else we can work to solve this problem. Kids will either get an education in school or in the streets. The fabric of our community, and the future of our economy, depends on our ability to ensure that education happens in class.

Harris is the author of Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer.

In a decision that won’t necessarily score her political points, SF District Attorney Kamala Harris’s office yesterday declined to seek the death penalty for Edwin Ramos. Ramos is accused of murdering Tony Bologna and his two sons last year.

Friday in court, prosecutor Harry Dorfman made this surprise announcement.

The District Attorney has decided to seek the special circumstances penalty of life without parole; we will not seek the death penalty in this case,” he said.

Since Ramos was charged with multiple murders and two other special circumstance offenses, Harris could have asked for the death penalty. But Harris is an opponent of capital punishment and she told reporters her decision fits the crime.

“We have thoroughly reviewed the facts and laws in this case and arrived at a decision based on that review,” Harris said.  (KGO 9/10/09)

Harris is opposed to the death penalty. She has said in the past that she would consider each case on its own merits, but certainly her own morality must come into play.

This is a position of personal integrity. She is sticking to what she said when she defeated Terrence Hallinan way back in 2003. While the death penalty may have support in California as a whole, that is not the case in San Francisco. Surely, there will be ads, or whisper campaigns, or whatever, made about this during a campaign for Attorney General.

But you can say one thing about Kamala Harris, she has a spine.  And in this race, that gives her a leg up in my book.

Trying to appease the cowards running for higher office in the Assembly rank and file, Karen Bass has dropped the sentencing commission out of the prison reform package.

The sentencing commission was among the most controversial provisions of the Senate prison plan. But on Monday, Senate leader Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, said “a real sentencing commission, with teeth, is my top priority” for corrections legislation.

Steinberg spokeswoman Alicia Dlugosh said Monday that the Senate leader would like to see any legislation passed by the Assembly “realize the same dollar figure in savings as the Senate bill.”

The bill passed last week by the Senate, AB 14 XXX would save the state an estimated $600 million, according to an analysis of the bill. But the Assembly seemed poised to make key changes that would reduce those savings by about $220 million.

Among the other changes expected to be made by the Assembly would be the elimination of a provision that would change some crimes which can be either felonies or misdemeanors –known as “wobblers” – exclusively to misdemeanors. The Assembly bill expected to come up for a vote this week would leave the state’s wobbler law unchanged.

Assembly Democrats also balked at a provision in the Senate bill that would allow some sick and elderly inmates to finish their sentences under house arrest.

Bass said she hoped to pass the sentencing commission as stand-alone legislation later in the year.  First of all, the year ends on September 11, and second, adding the commission to a must-pass reform package was the whole point.  If lawmakers objected to it as part of a package, they’re not going to turn around and support it in isolation.

Punting on this issue will ensure that federal judges will be mandating reductions of the prison population 10 years down the road.  The only reform worth doing in the package now clarifies parole policy, devoting resources to those who need to be monitored instead of the blanket supervision that has turned our parole system into a revolving door.  But that will not be enough to turn around the prison crisis for the long-term, without finally doing something about our ever expanding sentencing law.

This also shows the complete dysfunction of the leadership.  Darrell Steinberg may not go along with the limited version, and I don’t blame him.  His chamber has now stuck their neck out three times on tough votes – Tranquillon Ridge drilling, HUTA raids and now this – that the Assembly has quashed.  I wasn’t unhappy about the first two, but if I was in the Senate, I’d be pissed about all these controversial votes I was needlessly taking.  You’d think Karen Bass would have a sense of her caucus and know that she couldn’t pass whatever she and Steinberg and the Governor hammered out in private.  Because she’s on her way out the door in 2010 she has no leverage over the caucus, because everyone’s termed out and running for something else they have no fealty to the Assembly, and because they all live perpetually in fear they won’t take a vote they know would help future generations deal with a crisis.

As I’ve said, a broken process will almost always produce a broken result.  But individual lawmakers need to be called out.  Particularly the three Assemblymembers running for Attorney General who think they’re showing off their toughness.  When all of them lose, they’ll probably attribute it to other factors.  They should be reminded of this day.

While the Senate was successful in passing meaningful, albeit not the prettiest, prison reform , the Assembly has been stumbling over the task for a few days now.  They were going to try it on Monday again.  Needless to say, it hasn’t succeeded. They’ve pushed back the vote again, indefinitely this time.

“Work is moving forward on a revised plan to increase public safety, improve the effectiveness of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and reduce state budget costs” Speaker Bass said Monday.  “There were a number of calls and meetings throughout the weekend with various stakeholders, including law enforcement.  Those conversations are continuing. When we arrive at a responsible plan that can earn the support of the majority of the Assembly and makes sense to the people of California, we will take that bill up on the Assembly floor.  We will provide advance notice when a vote on the public safety package is to be scheduled.”

If you want to take your time, and get this right, that’s a great thing.  Unfortunately, I think this delay is less about getting this right than getting it wrong.  Weak-kneed Democrats are failing California when we most need them to stand up for sound policy. Like the lawmakers in Kansas were able to do a few years back:

“But you know the old ‘trail em’, nail ’em and jail ’em stuff doesn’t work. We want people to come out and stay out and become responsible tax-paying citizens.”

She says many ex-cons have learned their lesson and don’t want to go back to prison but others have so little to lose that they lack motivation.

Now her job is to give people like Lorelei, who has spent most of her life struggling with crack addiction and drifting in and out of penal institutions, fresh incentives.

*** *** ***

The new strategy seems to be working: five years ago around 203 parolees returned to Kansas prisons each month but by 2007, the number reduced by 100 per month and the number of new crimes – felony convictions that people pick up while they are on parole supervision- also nearly halved. (BBC)

Our prison crisis cannot simply be resolved with more beds, or harsher sentences.  These tactics have been tried for generations, and we are clearly losing the “War on Crime.” The more we see ourselves as fighting a war on our own people, the more we fail.  It’s a quicksand that you don’t get out of by just hitting the gas.

See, the thing about prison policy is that we have our whole system targeted at the wrong people.  Instead of simply looking to sate ourselves, we need to look to how we preserve the goals and institutions of our soceity. What works best for us moving forward?  That is what is sorely lacking in California that has been rediscovered in Kansas, even by the people who run the prisons:

Roger Werholtz, the secretary of corrections, was forced to examine how to spend criminal justice dollars more effectively. For decades, he says, policy in the US has been driven by the public’s emotional response to criminals.

“We are mad at them, frightened by them, frustrated by them, and so our typical response has been very punitive,” he says.

But Mr Werholtz argues locking people up is only a temporary solution since more than 95% of prisoners will eventually be released into the community.

“We have to think long-term and stop arguing about what criminals deserve. Instead we need to focus on what we deserve as citizens and that leads us to a very different set of interventions.”

But as we sit in limbo, waiting for the California legislators to look beyond 6 or 8 years, or whenever their next election is, we must remember that legislators are also accountable to us.  Take the current issue.  In the assembly we have three legislators who fancy themselves as excellent attorneys general of the State of California. That’s a gig that requires planning for a period beyond their own tenure.  Yet, it is widely speculated that these three Assembly members have been very reluctant to vote for a sentencing reform commission for fear of looking “soft on crime.”

The sentencing commission isn’t soft on crime, it is a policy board that will allow policy makers, not politicians, to make decisions on what is best for the state. Instead of grandstanding on penalties for each infraction, we can allow policy research and good solid ideas to take hold of California’s messed up sentencing laws.

Yet, the Democratic candidates for Attorney General must also pass through the Democratic primary, and there are alternatives for the job who have been quite up front about their position on ToughOnCrime^TM. This is about good policy, and good policy should be remembered by grassroots activists when the time comes around for donors and volunteers come primary time.

UPDATE: Whoops, I meant to include the target list for your comments. Over the flip I have now provided the list that Dave ID’d last week. If they represent you, call them early and often. If they don’t well, it can’t hurt can it? Tell them that you support a sentencing commission and the prison reform package as passed by the Senate. And if you really get going, tell them to restore rehabilitation funds.

If you’re in the districts of any of these lawmakers, contact them NOW and tell them to vote Yes on ABX3 14.

Alyson Huber (AD-10) (Calitics raised a fair bit of money for her)

Joan Buchanan (AD-15) (Does she want to win a liberal primary for Congress?)

Marty Block (AD-78)

Manuel Perez (AD-80) (Calitics raised a fair bit of money for him)

Ted Lieu (AD-53)

Pedro Nava (AD-35)

Alberto Torrico (AD-20)

Cathleen Galgiani (AD-17)

Anna Caballero (AD-28)

Kamala Harris will officially announce her campaign for attorney general, based on the assumption that Jerry Brown is not planning on running for re-election.  It is kind of amazing that we have 2 year campaigns for even the AG position. She’s always been focused on what she calls “Smart On Crime”, from her website:

I’ve spent my entire professional life in the trenches as a courtroom prosecutor. I started my career out of law school as a prosecutor in the Alameda DA’s Office and I can tell you from the frontlines, we need tough new ideas for strengthening our criminal justice system in California. I will fight for all Californians – from distressed homeowners to families whose neighborhoods are under siege. In the coming months, I will detail new ideas on how we can fight street gangs, go after subprime lenders and others responsible for the current financial crisis, and fundamentally reform our prison system. We have to shut the revolving door that simply recycles criminals in and out of our neighborhoods.

It will be nice to stop the cycle of your typical AG campaigns of how one candidate is going to throw somebody in jail longer than the other.  We need somebody with courage and a bully pulpit to speak out on reforming our criminal justice system.  It remains to be seen if Kamala Harris is that person, but at least her rhetoric is a breath of fresh air.  

She will officially launch the campaign at San Francisco City Hall this morning at 11.

So, Halloween in the Castro was pretty crazy, huh? I went home around 9 after eating at a local establishment.  Aparently, 10 people were shot shortly thereafter.  That puts a damper on your party.

Teasers: Arnold Schwarzenegger, polls, sexual harassment, Prop 90, a power struggle in the Assembly Minority,  Richard Pombo attacks small businesses, Pg&e in Davis, and more!