Civil Rights

The second time was the charm as a little over a year after legislation sponsored by Sacramento Assemblymember Roger Dickinson died in committee, Governor Jerry Brown signed AB 218 into law.

The bill prohibits requesting criminal background information on the initial employment application for local and state government employees, with the goal of reducing unnecessary barriers to employment for the one in four adult Californians who have an arrest or conviction record. California joins nine states and over 50 cities and counties across the United States that have adopted similar legislation.

By Val Dolcini

Comprehensive Immigration Reform: Pro-Growth and Pro-Agriculture- Earlier this year, the U.S. Senate passed a commonsense immigration reform measure in a strongly bipartisan fashion. This was an important step in the right direction – especially for producers, farm workers and rural communities.

The historic legislation passed by the Senate provides a pathway to earned citizenship for the 11 million people who are in our country today without authorization. They will have to go to the back of the line, pay fines and settle taxes they owe our nation.

One of the big questions for President Barack Obama’s speech would be for him to figure out how to thread the needle – to exalt the progress of the last fifty years while not becoming complacent about the challenges that remain.

How would he honor the spirit of those who fought for civil rights, and yet understand that, while we have come far, we have not come nearly far enough?

This week we commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington which is best known perhaps for the speech delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr., a speech ironically that his advisers did not want him to give.  Sadly, 50 years later only one of the speakers from the original march remains alive – John Lewis, now a Congressman, who was just 23 years old at the time of the speech.

It likely goes without saying that 50 years ago, the speakers who addressed the huge throngs could not envision a world in which the African-American Attorney General would be speaking to a crowd 50 years later, and that the African-American President would have a special address from the Lincoln Memorial on the exact date of the anniversary.

For the first time this week, the door is open for the possibility of meaningful prison reform.  Earlier this week, Eric Holder, the much-criticized US Attorney General, speaking at the American Bar Association, said the words that many have been waiting to hear since the Obama Administration began in 2009: “Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law-enforcement reason.”

His speech and modest policy change marks only the beginning.  As the Economist wrote this week, “America has the world’s largest prison population. China, which has more than four times as many people and nobody’s idea of a lenient judiciary, comes a distant second. One in 107 American adults was behind bars in 2011 – the highest rate in the world – and one in every 34 was under ‘correctional supervision’ (either locked up or on probation or parole). A black man in America is 3.6 times more likely to be incarcerated than a black man in 1993 in South Africa, just before apartheid ended.”

Ten years ago last month I suffered a very serious blood clot.  It got lodged in my heart as a pulmonary embolism and part of it broke off and ended up in my right shoulder.  It was the most painful experience of my life and it took nearly a week for the doctors to figure out what was wrong with a 30-year-old who was otherwise in good health.

The pain was such that they were providing me with morphine combined with Percocet to combat it.  As the pain lessened, I became increasingly aware of being doped up and eventually preferred a little pain to feeling “out of it.”