News & Commentary

Demanding to know when, why, and how police are using mobile phone location data and deploying other surveillance technologies to track the people they are responsible for protecting and serving, the ACLU of California sent requests to more than fifty law enforcement agencies across the state today.

A few days after the end of the Pelican Bay hunger strike, I was interviewed on KCRW’s “Which Way, LA?” in the same segment as spokespeople from California Prison Health Services and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The CDCR, through Undersecretary of Operations Scott Kernan, tried to defend its reckless and indiscriminate use of solitary confinement; it succeeded only in giving an exhibition in government speak.

No one is surprised to learn that California’s death penalty is a broken and dysfunctional system. After all, you don’t have to go far in California to find any government bureaucracy that’s broken or dysfunctional – it’s finding a functional government program that might take a while. The question is: How do we fix it? How do we punish the worst criminals in a way that maximizes public safety without bankrupting the budget?A new bill in the California State Assembly, SB 490, has a shockingly simple solution: give voters the facts and let the voters decide. (The shock is that it’s taken 30 years to figure that out.)

Bato Talamantez Urges Support for SHU Reform. Via San Francisco Bay View.On July 26, ACLU/SC Executive Director Hector Villagra joined "Which Way, LA?" to discuss the destructive effects of the Secure Housing Units on public safety."Imagine how bad conditions have to be there that people would risk starving themselves to death. I could cite to you any number of studies showing the negative effects of prolonged isolation but I think there's just one simple fact that will show you how desperate these inmates are. In 2005, here in California, inmates in solitary confinement were only 5% of the total prison population, but they were 70% of the suicides among the prison population. That is people who are incredibly desperate, and for whom life has become intolerable."

ACLU/SC Executive Director Hector Villagra delivered the following remarks at a press conference at the KRST Unity Center in South Los Angeles.

In a letter sent today, the ACLU of Southern California is calling on Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley to stop the criminal prosecution of a Los Angeles County jail inmate whom two sheriff’s deputies brutally attacked in the Twin Towers Correctional Facility on January 24, 2011.