February 18, 2000
By Joe Loya
PACIFIC NEWS SERVICE
This story falls under the heading "truth is stranger than fiction." I'd been arrested and charged for some 24 bank robberies and was in court for arraignment. There, the FBI Special Agent in charge of my case vouched for me to the judge and did not object to my request to be released on bail.
In my two weeks out on bail, I robbed five more banks. When I was rearrested, that same Special Agent, an 18-year veteran of the FBI, told me he still believed I could change my life. So he charged me with just enough bank robberies to send me away for seven years rather than the 30 I could have served if he'd been less compassionate.
My future was made possible by an FBI agent whose intuition about the goodness still left in my criminal heart was absolutely correct.
On March 7, California voters will have an opportunity to decide whether or not they believe in that man's notion of redemption. Proposition 21, called the "Gang Violence and Juvenile Crime Prevention Act," wants to punish 16-year-olds with long adult sentences for committing any one of 30 named offenses. Graffiti would essentially become a felony instead of a misdemeanor, making it count toward "three-strikes."
The backers of Proposition 21 want us to believe that the initiative is intended to stop gang activity and juvenile crime. I disagree.
They tell us that juvenile crime is out of control and argue that law enforcement should be given broad room to deprive juveniles of their civil rights. To support this notion, they write,"The United States Department of Justice reported in 1996 that juvenile arrests for serious crimes grew by 46 percent from 1983 to 1992." These figures do not show the steady drop in crime rates for the past eight years.
In fact, the proposition isn't about crime statistics at all. It is really about what sort of human beings we imagine ourselves to be.
Last year I got a call from Jimmy, an old friend still in prison. He told me that Bobby, a prisoner I used to hate, was now a changed man — going to group therapy, sharing his failures with the other men, talking about feeling better, healthier.
I couldn't believe it. Bobby was an obnoxious prisoner who I despised precisely because he thought guys like me — trying to change our lives in prison — were weak-minded. He was as verbal about his disdain for me as I was expressive of my dislike of him.
When Jimmy first mentioned his name, I recalled my loathing for Bobby. My first reaction was that he must be faking — I didn't want to believe he could change, I wanted to keep him as an adversary in my imagination. I did not want to like him or otherwise accept him as my brother in the struggle to move beyond our criminal pasts.
But almost instantly I recognized that my suspicions were just like those leveled at me when I first came out of prison by people who would not believe I could change my life. I knew what it was to be doubted when I decided to work at reform.
To doubt that Bobby could change would give credence to all those who doubted my ability to reform. If I wanted to continue to believe in myself, trust that I could change my life, then I had to embrace the possibility that people I liked least, like Bobby, could change too.
Before I hung up the phone I told Jimmy I was glad for Bobby. In fact, Jimmy and I both remarked how good it was to know that there are still changes taking place in the hearts of prisoners who have failed both themselves and society.
When we give up on anyone, the child criminal or the adult offender, we are giving up on ourselves. When we give up, we admit that to violate some taboos is to go beyond the reach of redemption. Not believing that Bobby could change would have said more about a lack of faith in myself than about Bobby's reform.
Prop. 21 would deprive some juvenile offenders the sort of Easter moment that the FBI Agent left possible for me. That is why how we vote on Prop. 21 will reveal more about the hearts of California citizens than it will about the young gang member in San Jose or Los Angeles.
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