The ultimate disposition of the Memphis Three case laid bare a prosecution team that perhaps saw its job in a way it’s not generally perceived. The perpetrators of the atrocious crime might very well still be residing in the town, but the Alford pleas have allowed authorities to pretend they’ve solved the murders.
PART 3
Failed Results
9
Walking the “Toughest Beat” in Guccis
DURING THE SAVINGS-AND-LOAN SCANDAL OF THE 1980S, A WARM-UP FOR THE banking and real estate collapse of 2008, a questioner at a congressional hearing asked scheming, silver-tongued financier Charles Keating whether the $1.5 million he’d contributed to politicians could really buy him influence. “I certainly hope so,” quipped Keating, who’d eventually do four years for crimes that included swindling thousands of retirees out of their life savings. Keating, who once called a meeting with five senators who had received his contributions (and they all showed up), was a personification of how wrong the system can get when money-hungry public servants exchange legislation for cash.1
This leads us to the California prison guards union. It would be tough to find an institution that relies more on political contributions to achieve its ends. Although its membership roll is only about one-tenth the size of the California Teachers Association, its political clout exceeds that of all other labor unions in a state that often leads the way on policy. The California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) is a uniquely powerful union that’s used to getting what it wants even though it can’t call a strike—the ultimate labor weapon—without causing immediate self-immolation. During the reign of Don Novey, who served as president of the union from 1982 to 2002, the state constructed twenty-one new prisons, spiraling the total number of adult institutions to thirty-three. As his union gained might, Novey proved to Democrats and Republicans alike that building prisons and filling them with inmates can gain votes for politicians and simultaneously help their donors. But the state’s prison network became a Frankenstein’s monster that fed off California’s absurdly harsh three-strikes law—the toughest in the nation. The union had a strong hand in creating this legal monster.
To understand how the guards’ policies affected the state as a whole, one could measure resources allocated to prisons against resources going to colleges and universities. From 1980 to 2011 the state’s higher education spending was reduced by 13 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars, whereas spending on prisons and related correctional programs—boosted by a penal code that the prison guards helped fashion—skyrocketed 436 percent.2
As part of Novey’s ongoing mission to frighten voters into submission, the union set up straw lobbying groups such as Crime Victims United of California, which was funded 100 percent by the guards. Novey also made sure everyone understood that his union’s strength and money could exact punishments as well as rewards. After District Attorney Greg Strickland dared to convene a grand jury to investigate allegations of brutal beatings by prison guards within his Kings County turf, the union opposed his reelection in 1998, spending $30,000 to proclaim that Strickland was soft on crime. He lost.3
CCPOA’s thirty-three thousand members—prison guards and parole officers—pay monthly dues of about eighty dollars each. That totals approximately $30 million a year, and perhaps a third of this money is spent on lobbying. The last labor contract Novey negotiated (which expired in 2006) earned the average union member around $70,000 a year—and with overtime more than $100,000.4 Not bad for a high school graduate with no additional education beyond sixteen weeks of training at the Correctional Officer Academy, where trainees earn $3,050 per month to learn their job. More than 120,000 people apply to the academy every year, according to the state Legislative Analyst’s Office, but it enrolls only about nine hundred. As the Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley facetiously noted, its acceptance rate of less than 1 percent makes it far more selective than Harvard, which comes in at 6.2 percent.5
After Novey’s departure, the guards continued his policy of focusing on politics and showering money on politicians. They had a testy relationship with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger but still scored plenty of successes during his tenure. In fact, in 2006, three years after Schwarzenegger started his first term as governor, Roderick Hickman resigned as head of the prison system because, he said, the guards were still calling the shots over policy decisions and undermining efforts to divert offenders into nonprison alternatives. When attempts were made to reduce the number of inmates, Hickman said, the union financed scary ads telling voters that powerful forces were plotting to put “felons out on the street.”6 The union’s leaders gleefully agree that in no other state do prison guards wield such outsized political control.
Two years before Hickman quit in disgust, polls indicated that voters overwhelmingly favored Proposition 66, a measure to reform the three-strikes law by requiring that a third charge be violent or “serious” to trigger a third-strike sentence. But the guards spent $1 million to beat back the measure, and in the last days of the November campaign, the union teamed up with Governor Schwarzenegger and former governors Jerry Brown, Pete Wilson, Gray Davis, and George Deukmejian to launch a burst of radio and TV ads warning that the measure “would release 26,000 dangerous criminals and rapists.” The claim was preposterous, but the coalition rolled right over 66.7
In 2008 came Proposition 5, the Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act, to build a firmer foundation under an underfunded drug reform initiative that had passed overwhelmingly in 2000. Proposition 5 sought to reduce prison overcrowding by letting courts provide treatment rather than prison for nonviolent drug users. A key provision would have stopped sending parolees back to prison for one failed drug test. This aimed at the cornerstone of the guards’ penal strategy, which was to level lengthy sentences against drug users. The union funneled $1.8 million into the campaign to defeat Proposition 5, more than half the funds raised for the effort.8 The guards and their allies in the prison-industrial complex, realizing they’d made a terrible mistake by not blocking the 2000 reform initiative, labeled Proposition 5 the “Drug Dealers’ Bill of Rights.” Their slick ad campaign was fronted by Martin Sheen, who had a reputation as a political liberal. Further blurring fantasy and reality, Sheen was best known to the public for portraying President Jed Bartlet on The West Wing. The actor’s smooth, baritone delivery of ad scripts outweighed stiff objections from experts. The guards once again prevailed at a cost of fifty-five dollars each—a bargain.
In 2008 Brown, whose first two terms as governor ended in 1983, was already gearing up his 2010 comeback campaign. The CCPOA contributed $2 million to his campaign.9 Union officers went through the motions of grilling Brown’s gubernatorial opponent, Republican candidate Meg Whitman, but came away revolted by her hints that someone ought to take another look at the guards’ pension deal, which awarded lifetime retirement payments at age fifty-five for up to 85 percent of salary.10
After Brown’s decisive win, the union, the largest single contributor to his campaign, won the guards their sweetest contract yet. Some of its provisions were startlingly brazen. They stipulated, for example, that ten guards at each of the fifty-four penal institutions could attend their annual union convention at taxpayers’ expense. The new deal gave members eighteen more days off over the life of the two-year contract, bringing the typical guard’s time off to more than eight weeks. Under the old contract, guards could earn up to $130 a month for remaining physically fit. Now they could earn it by simply going to the doctor for an annual physical, a unique provision that may not exist anywhere else in the western world. And buried inside the legalese was a complicated but lucrative giveaway that allowed them to save an unlimited number of vacation days and exchange them for cash at a higher pay rate upon retirement. Brown signed off on all this while the state faced a $25 billion deficit and was sending out pink slips to thousands of teachers, social workers, and health-care professionals. (Guards suffered no layoffs or days off without pay. Who would watch the inmates while they stayed home?)11