June 6, 2010 - News of the Day ... LA Community Policing

In late July 1997, police officers fanned out across this Phoenix suburb searching for illegal immigrants. Working side by side with Border Patrol agents, police demanded proof of citizenship from children walking home from school, grandmothers shopping at the market and employees driving to work.

At the end of what became known as the Chandler Roundup, 432 illegal immigrants had been arrested and deported. But during those five days, local police and federal officers also detained dozens of U.S. citizens and legal residents — often stopping them because they spoke Spanish or looked Mexican.

Now, as Arizona prepares to enact SB 1070, the controversial new immigration law, many of Chandler's Latino residents say they are reminded of those terrifying days — and fearful of a repeat of the past.

"SB 1070 just brought home the point: If you are Hispanic or Mexican, you are just not wanted in Arizona," said Joe Garcia, 65, a U.S. citizen who owned a video store in downtown Chandler and helped form a civil rights coalition to demand answers after the roundup.

The state attorney general later determined that authorities had engaged in racial profiling and violated the rights of residents.

The new law, which takes effect July 29, during the 13th anniversary of the sweeps, requires police to determine the immigration status of anyone they stop for another lawful reason and suspect is in the country illegally. It also makes it a state crime to lack proper immigration papers. Gov. Jan Brewer has said that racial profiling will not be tolerated under the law, which is supported by a majority of Arizona residents.

Though not well-known outside Arizona, the Chandler Roundup wasn't unique. Throughout U.S. history, raids conducted by local police and federal immigration agents have resulted in the deportation of U.S. citizens, according to Francisco Balderrama, a Chicano studies professor at Cal State Los Angeles.

In the 1930s, beginning with a dramatic raid in Los Angeles at La Placita Olvera, federal agents and police arrested more than a million people in operations around the U.S. and sent them to Mexico. By researching records at Mexican consulates, Balderrama estimates that as many as 60% of those deported were U.S. citizens. Other deportation efforts, including the infamous Operation Wetback, continued into the 1940s and 1950s.

Balderrama said that history accounts for some of the unease in the Latino community about SB 1070. "It underscores the situation that your skin color and your surname are used as ways of measuring if you are American or not," he said.

Teresa Rodriguez, 69, knows what it is like to be singled out. Although she — and her parents — were born in the United States, Rodriguez was stopped three times by Chandler police and Border Patrol agents during the roundup.

In one incident, she was speaking Spanish to a friend while walking to the store to pick up medicine for her grandson. A police officer on a bicycle came up on one side of her, an immigration officer on the other. She recalled one saying in Spanish, "You don't belong here, do you?"

When Rodriguez, who speaks English, answered in Spanish that she was a citizen and that her birth certificate was at home, they didn't believe her. She said the police officer grabbed her arm and forced her to sit on the curb until she finally convinced them that she was a citizen.

"They made me feel like I was being stepped on, like I was an animal," she said.

Garcia, a retired Mesa police lieutenant, and his wife, Rosalia, said they were still disappointed and angry about the way officers behaved during the roundup. Rosalia remembered customers fleeing into the video shop and police officers on bicycles arbitrarily stopping people. "They were literally sweeping, coming through the sidewalks" until finally, she said, the streets were empty.

"Police officers, knowing full well what probable cause they needed, just ignored the law and took the law into their own hands," Joe Garcia said.

"If you were Hispanic, you were a target," he said. "Especially if you had a dark complexion."

Arizona State University professor Mary Romero, who specializes in social justice issues and has written several articles about Chandler, said authorities even used reports with some information completed in advance: nationality, Mexican; skin color, medium; hair color, black; occupation, laborer.

Stephen Montoya, a lawyer who represented U.S. citizens and legal residents in a lawsuit against the city, said the new Arizona law paves the way for more such raids. "It knocks down the wall and legitimizes a constant, statewide roundup," he said.

Chandler authorities, who conducted the sweeps as part of a plan to revitalize the city, settled the lawsuit with 29 plaintiffs for $400,000 and pledged to not let it happen again. And in 1999, the City Council adopted a policy saying police could only ask about the immigration status of people arrested on suspicion of felonies and certain misdemeanors.

Mayor Boyd Dunn, who was on the City Council at the time, said in an interview that "mistakes were made" and that officers engaged in racial profiling. But he said the department has since conducted extensive officer training and outreach to the Latino community.

Earlier this year, in anticipation of SB 1070 becoming law, the council unanimously repealed the 1999 policy and gave police more freedom to ask the immigration status of people arrested.

"We need to give our officers discretion and tools to make sure the bad guys are caught," Chandler Police Chief Sherry Kiyler said.

Dunn said the policy change, which he considered the "closing chapter" on the roundup, was necessary to bring Chandler up-to-date with other Arizona cities. Dunn said SB 1070 wouldn't result in anything like what happened 13 years ago. "We will protect not only our citizens, but their rights," he said.

Chandler, once a small agricultural town, now has a population of 250,000 and is home to several high-tech factories. The city is 21% Latino. The downtown square is surrounded by new condos, shops and restaurants, including a tea house and an upscale bridal store.

A few blocks down Arizona Avenue, however, day laborers still wait for work, as they have for years. One of the workers, Nasario Ramos, 38, said he was deported to Mexico during the roundup and sneaked back into the U.S. days later. Ramos said he worried that the calm that had prevailed in Chandler for 13 years was about to end. "It's going to be worse than '97," he said.

Illegal immigrants like Ramos continue to be a sore point for some residents of Chandler. Fred Blevins, 62, said that although he believed police went too far when they stopped U.S. citizens in 1997, something had to be done. He supports SB 1070 as a way to get more illegal immigrants out of Arizona and believes local police will do it the right way.

"Chandler learned its lesson," he said. "They got slapped."

In addition to the legal settlement after the sweeps, Chandler authorities also formed a human relations commission to promote dialogue and started several cultural events to celebrate the Latino community.

Chandler community activist Juanita Encinas said the city made efforts to build bridges with the Latino community but a level of distrust remains. "The scars will never go away," she said.

For Rodriguez, who said she received about $27,000 of the cash settlement, a reminder of the roundup is never far away. Whenever she leaves the house, she brings along her birth certificate.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-chandler-20100606,0,1885811,print.story

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2 New Jersey men held on terror charges, paper reports

A newspaper reports that two New Jersey men who allegedly intended to kill American troops have been arrested at a New York City airport before boarding flights on their way to join a jihadist group in Somalia.

The Star-Ledger of Newark reports that 20-year-old Mohamed Hamoud Alessa and 26-year-old Carlos Eduardo Almonte were arrested Saturday at John F. Kennedy International Airport before they could board separate flights to Egypt and then continue to Somalia.

The newspaper is citing officials familiar with the details of the arrests who are speaking on condition of anonymity.

The FBI and the New York Police Department confirm to The Associated Press that two men were arrested at the airport. FBI spokesman Richard Kolko says no threat was made there, but isn't elaborating on the investigation.

Officials say the men were believed to be joining with the terrorist fight against Americans in Somalia.

Sinking of ship provides welcome distraction for North Korea

The military crisis over 'puppet warmongers' gives Kim Jong Il an opportunity to distract a population suffering from a lack of food and other troubles.

Whether or not Kim Jong Il personally ordered the torpedo attack that sank a South Korean warship, the ensuing atmosphere of crisis has given the ailing dictator an opportunity to distract a population that might otherwise be complaining that they're eating weeds instead of rice.

The furor over the March 26 sinking of the Cheonan, in which 46 sailors were killed, has given Kim an opening to stage mass rallies and conduct air defense drills in a "wag the dog" strategy.

"This will distract people from their troubles," said Cho Myong-chol, a Pyongyang-born economist and son of a former North Korean minister. Cho, who now lives in Seoul, doesn't believe that Kim was intimately involved in the attack.

"It is more likely that a local naval commander did it, but there could be some short-term benefit," Cho said. "In the long run, of course, it will only make their problems worse."

In an assessment released last week based on intelligence reports, the Washington-based International Strategic Studies Assn. concluded, "Kim Jong Il was so far winning the Cheonan incident he had instigated."

The big loser has been South Korea's conservative ruling party, which was trounced in local elections Thursday. The Grand National Party had hoped that outrage over the Cheonan would boost its popularity; instead the electorate appeared to be more concerned that President Lee Myung-bak was exploiting the incident with his hard-line stand toward North Korea. Results of an investigation of the sinking were not released until May 20, two weeks before the election.

Kang Won-taek, a professor of political science at Soongsil University, said people "thought the government was going back to the old days of using fear for authoritarianism and not democracy."

South Korea's government formally asked the U.N. Security Council on Friday to take action against North Korea. Park In-kook, the South Korean ambassador to the United Nations, said in a letter that the sinking of the warship represented a threat to peace and security on the Korean peninsula.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Saturday that planned military exercises with South Korea may be delayed until after the U.N. responds.

In Seoul, demonstrations against North Korea have drawn sparse crowds of mostly elderly war veterans, while in Pyongyang, the regime mobilized 100,000 people last weekend to demonstrate against what the official Korean Central News Agency denounced as a "smear campaign escalated by the South Korean puppet warmongers in collusion with the U.S."

"War may break out any moment," Choe Yong Rim, chief secretary of the Pyongyang City Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, was quoted as saying at the rally.

The hysteria is calculated. Pyongyang keeps vivid the memories of the 1950-53 Korean War to justify the hardships endured by the people. The famine of the mid-1990s, in which as many as 2 million people died, is known in North Korea as the "arduous march." People were told that the scarcities were caused by a U.S. blockade and the need to devote food to the military.

At the moment, there are plenty of troubles from which to divert attention. A bungled currency reform late last year all but wiped out North Korea's markets, making food scarcer than at any time since the 1990s.

Kim's poor health is too obvious to be denied. The 68-year-old leader walks haltingly, with one arm partially paralyzed as the result of a stroke in 2008. The twentysomething youngest son he has tapped as his successor has yet to establish himself.

"The dynamics of the succession, the economy, all created enough turmoil in Pyongyang of the kind that Kim Jong Il would need to create a crisis or provocation in order to rally the troops under the banner of 'us versus them,' " said Yossef Bodansky, a military analyst in Washington who wrote the report for the International Strategic Studies Assn.

He said that months before the sinking of the South Korean ship people in intelligence circles were saying "something nasty is going happen, but they thought it would be something related to their nuclear program, not a naval incident."

The more immediate motivation was probably revenge. The Cheonan, a corvette, or a small warship, went down in contested waters of the Yellow Sea where two small islands less than 10 miles off the coast of the North Korean mainland are under South Korean control.

There have been frequent naval clashes in those waters. On Nov. 10, a North Korean boat is reported to have returned home "wrapped in flames." South Korean intelligence believes 10 North Korean sailors died.

In Seoul, some analysts suggest that the Cheonan operation was directed not by Kim, but Kim Jong Un, his son and heir apparent.

"Kim Jong Un needed to establish his ability as a general very quickly by showing some sort of victory," said Chu Sung-ha, a North Korean defector and journalist.

Andrei Lankov, one of the most respected North Korea analysts, believes that the scale of the torpedo attack does not seem characteristic of Kim Jong Il, and is more likely to be the doing of North Korean admirals seeking revenge or a hot-headed young man such as Kim Jong Eun.

"In the past, the political leadership as personified by Kim Il Sung [North Korea's founder] or Kim Jong Il would have put a stop to such an operation," said Lankov. "It confirms something I've thought was happening for a while: The quality of the decision making in Pyongyang is going down dramatically."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-norkor-kim-20100606,0,7095350,print.story

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Obama's National Security Strategy

The document lays out the president's worldview. Basically, it says on foreign policy, we'll do what we can, as long as it doesn't cost too much.

When Barack Obama arrived at the White House, he quickly acted on the foreign policy promises he'd made in his presidential campaign, drawing up a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq, seeking diplomatic "engagement" with adversaries such as Iran and North Korea, and trying to "reset" the contentious U.S. relationship with Russia.

But until last month, he hadn't laid out his broader approach to the world beyond our borders.

Now he has, in the recently released National Security Strategy, a lengthy essay required by Congress.

The short version — to save you from reading 52 pages of numbing generalities — is this: We still want to do a little bit of everything, but after almost a decade of war, we're overstretched and need to concentrate first on fixing the domestic economy. When it comes to problems overseas, we'll do what we can as long as it doesn't cost too much.

Unlike his predecessor, George W. Bush, President Obama's foreign policy isn't about pursuing one or two overriding goals — in Bush's case, defeating terrorism and spreading democracy. Instead, it's about what economists might call "sustainability," making sure we don't take on wars or other commitments that we can't afford. In an earlier generation, Walter Lippmann called this "solvency." It was essential, Lippmann believed, to bring "into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation's commitments and the nation's power."

Critics will call this retrenchment. On the right, conservatives accuse Obama of plotting to cut defense spending; on the left, human rights activists complain that he's not committing much U.S. power to promote democracy abroad. They're both right, although those defense cuts haven't exactly happened yet. The main theme of Obama's foreign policy so far has been: Never mind what we might like to do; how much do we need to do?

The National Security Strategy isn't entirely candid about this; after all, it's a public document, designed to avoid offending. Foreign policy pundits have complained that it lists every conceivable hope as a goal, including ending nuclear proliferation and bringing peace to the Middle East, along with universal access to healthcare and better education for American children. But the critics miss the point. When a national security strategy lists healthcare reform alongside "work[ing] to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon," it's arguing that international goals shouldn't override domestic goals.

And when Obama was forced to distill the message into fewer than 52 pages — in his speech at West Point last month, for example — his actual priorities were clear enough.

"Even as we fight the wars in front of us, we also have to see the horizon beyond these wars," he said, a gentle way of saying the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and the rest of the Middle East are no longer, to him, the main event.

And entanglements abroad can't come at the cost of domestic well-being. "At no time in human history has a nation of diminished economic vitality maintained its military and political primacy," he said. "Our adversaries would like to see America sap its strength by overextending its power."

That last phrase was a reference to something Osama bin Laden has said: that Al Qaeda's strategy is to entice the United States into "bleeding wars" throughout the Muslim world until the superpower is spread too thin. Obama's answer has been: We'll fight, but not that way. That's why he's trying to wage the war on terror (or rather "combat violent extremism," as he prefers) on the cheap, by increasing U.S. drone attacks against suspected terrorists in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia even as he seeks, eventually, to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan.

The Obama aide who was the principal author of the National Security Strategy, Ben Rhodes, said that one of its aims was to limit the war on terror through "a narrow definition of who we're at war with": Al Qaeda and its allies.

"There are many, many terrorist groups around the world," he said. "We're not at war with … all those terrorist groups."

In the end, what Obama laid out was more a set of premises — a worldview — than it was a strategy. And he will face at least two challenges in making it work.

One, which the deliberately bland National Security Strategy didn't solve, is explaining his approach to the American people. As a nation, we accept that there are limits to what we can and should do abroad, but we don't always like it. We still want to maintain the world's most effective armed forces, defeat terrorism, spread democracy and bring peace to the Middle East, even as we complain about government spending.

"Obama became president the moment after the collapse of a hubris bubble," said Peter Beinart, author of "The Icarus Syndrome," a brilliant new book about the pendulum swings of U.S. foreign policy between excessive ambition and excessive retrenchment. "He needs to convince Americans that we can become stronger even as we retrench militarily. That is incredibly perilous, politically."

The other challenge is the certainty of unexpected events. When Obama came to office, he knew he faced an economic crisis and two wars. But he didn't know that a BP oil well would explode, that Israel would clash with Turkey or that a Nigerian student would fly to Detroit last Christmas with a bomb in his pants — an event that, had luck not intervened, could have vaulted terrorism back to its old status as the all-consuming focus of American policy. As U.S. Marines like to note, the enemy has a vote too.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mcmanus-20100606,0,1638634,print.column

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Historically, the eldest segment of the population, those 80 and older, have had the highest rates of suicide in the United States. Starting in 2006, however, the suicide rate among men and women between the ages of 45 and 54 was the highest of any age group.

The most recent figures released , from 2007, reveal that the 45-to-54 age group had a suicide rate of 17.6 per every 100,000 people. The second highest was the 75-to-84 age range, with a rate of 16.4, followed by those between 35 and 44, with a 16.3.

The rate for 45- to 54-year-olds in 2006 was 17.2 per 100,000 people, and in 2005 it was 16.3.

“It's such a startling rise,” said Dr. Paula Clayton, the medical director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Researchers are puzzled by the increase, but Dr. Clayton said the rise in suicide among Americans born in the 1950s and 1960s was probably a result of a combination of factors, including easier access to guns and prescription drugs and what may be a higher incidence of depression among baby boomers.

“Ninety percent of people who kill themselves have a mental disorder at the time of their death,” which can be aggravated by drug and alcohol abuse , Dr. Clayton said. Problems related to health, jobs, relationships and finances have also been shown to be important risk factors for suicide, the C.D.C. reported.

Men are more than three times as likely to commit suicide as women, and they tend to use guns. American Indians, Alaska Natives and non-Hispanic whites are also at greater risk. Veterans are also vulnerable.

About 50,000 people die each year from violence-related injuries; suicides account for more than half that number.

DIANA ORTIZ waited in a cagelike room at the Fishkill Correctional Facility that winter morning in 2005, going over it in her head again and again. She needed to find the right words, conjure the right emotions, strike the right balance between remorse for her role in the killing of an off-duty police officer and recognition of all that she had accomplished in the 22 ½ years since.

She wanted to explain how she had blossomed behind bars, earning a high school equivalency diploma and bachelor's and master's degrees in prison; how she barely recognized the wispy, naïve 18-year-old who had fallen for a man twice her age, become addicted to drugs and posed as a prostitute to set up a robbery that turned deadly.

Convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 17 years to life in prison, Ms. Ortiz had been in the same situation, prepping for a parole hearing — four times before. She knew she would have about 10 minutes to make her case to three strangers who knew little of where she had been but controlled everything about where she would go. Each previous time she had been nervous and flushed with remorse and regret. Each time, parole had been denied.

“I felt it doesn't matter what I say, it doesn't matter who I am or what I've done,” she recalled thinking. “It's never going to change; the crime will never change.”

On the other side of a heavy metal door, Robert Dennison sat with two other Parole Board members behind a long table stacked with files detailing the lives and crimes of Ms. Ortiz and some 30 other prisoners whose cases they would consider that day. As was their practice, they had begun reviewing the cases only that morning.

Mr. Dennison was appointed by Gov. George E. Pataki to the state's 19-member Parole Board in 2000 and became its chairman in 2004; it was up to him to schedule which members sat for which of the 20,000 hearings each year at prisons across the state, and to set up meetings or phone calls with crime victims and their families, who are entitled to express opinions about parole decisions.

Parole Board members, who must have a college degree and five years of experience in criminal justice, sociology, law, social work or medicine, can serve an unlimited number of six-year terms, earning $101,600 a year. By law, they must interview inmates in person and are required to consider their criminal histories, prison achievements and sense of remorse. Ultimately, though, parole decisions are subjective.

“It's a real hard issue: how much time should you do for taking a life?” Mr. Dennison said. “Many times, the parole commissioners feel differently than the judge and probably say to themselves or say to one another, ‘I don't really care what the judge gave the person, I don't feel comfortable letting this person out. And I am going to hold him for two more years.' And that can go on and on and on forever.”

More than 800,000 people are on parole, according to the Department of Justice; New York State has more than 50,000.

In 2005, 9 of the 263 so-called A-1 violent offenders — those who, like Ms. Ortiz, had been convicted of murder, attempted murder, kidnapping or arson — who went before the board were paroled, according to the State Division of Parole. That was 3 percent of the A-1 offenders who had hearings (over all, 38 percent of inmates who had hearings that year were paroled).

In contrast, over the last four years, 14 percent of the A-1 offenders who were eligible for parole were granted it. Governor Pataki, a Republican, at one point tried to change state law so that A-1 offenders could not be paroled, and in 2006, a group of A-1 offenders filed a class-action suit claiming his administration had an unwritten policy that violated their rights by denying parole based solely on the severity of the crime.

“I never got any direct pressure from Pataki not to let certain people out,” Mr. Dennison said, “but he did make it clear in the newspapers that he didn't want violent felons released.”

NEW York passed the nation's first “good-time” law, which shaved sentences for well-behaved prisoners, in 1817. In 1876, the state began imposing sentences defined as a range, with convicts becoming eligible for parole after serving the minimum; those who were released reported monthly to citizen volunteers known as guardians, forerunners of today's parole officers.

Criminals sentenced to a range — like Ms. Ortiz's 17 years to life — still earn their first hearing after serving the minimum, while those given a fixed term — say 10 years — can be paroled after serving six-sevenths of their sentence. Those who are held (“hit” is the slang term) are entitled to another hearing after two years, but most appeal the decisions to the Division of Parole's Office of Counsel, and sometimes beyond that, in court; those who win appeals get another appearance, known as a hearing de novo.

Ms. Ortiz became eligible for parole in 2000. She was denied twice by the Parole Board, whose decisions were upheld both times by the Division of Parole's Office of Counsel. She won court appeals both times on the grounds that the board had not reasonably weighed how much she had changed versus the severity of the crime she had committed, but she was rejected in both of the de novo hearings.

“It's hard, because you always hope people will just see the true you and judge you that way,” she said. “Like they'll say ‘O.K., she did this, but that's not who she is.' And it's never like that.”

For Mr. Dennison — who was born in the Bronx and has lived in Eastchester, a Westchester County suburb, for most of his life — serving on the board was the capstone to a 37-year career in corrections.

After determining that teaching sixth grade was “too hard a job for me,” he used a master's degree in counseling to become a parole officer, and eventually rose to deputy regional director overseeing operations in Brooklyn and Queens. He said he became active in the Conservative Party in 1998 to pave the way to a seat on the Parole Board. “It's a political appointment,” he explained. “It's the only way to get on.”

Of the 16 current members (there are three vacancies), 10 were appointed by Mr. Pataki, three by former Gov. Eliot Spitzer and three by Gov. David A. Paterson (who has suggested cutting the board to 13 members, to save money). Mr. Dennison said he witnessed spirited debate and angry outbursts among the commissioners, and developed a keen understanding of the subtle — or not — messages sent from the offices of elected officials about certain kinds of cases.

“The way it works is that you are free to make whatever decision you feel is the right decision,” he explained. “However, if you were sponsored by a particular state senator and you made a decision he didn't like, it is conceivable that the next time you are up to be reappointed, he may not push your name to the governor.”

Mr. Dennison said he loved the job, taking pride in having an impact on people's lives — freeing those he deemed deserving, leaving caged those he determined were dangerous. Over the years, he said, there were simple cases and tough cases, and cases with dire consequences, like the model prisoner of 18 years who, shortly after his release, raped a teenage neighbor and set her home on fire.

“It is an easy job if you don't have courage and you don't have compassion,” he said. “Because then you really don't care. And then it is easy to make whatever decision you want without feeling guilty, without feeling, ‘Gee, maybe I made the wrong decision.' ”

IN the early-morning hours of a summer day in 1983, Ms. Ortiz, then 18, stood alone on a Coney Island street corner. A man pulled up in a car, looking for oral sex. That was the plan cooked up by her boyfriend: to get a man, any man, to pick up the pretty young thing. She made the deal for $25, and then made the biggest mistake of her life: getting into the car.

Ms. Ortiz grew up in Chicago and had come to New York as a teenager after fleeing an abusive relationship in Puerto Rico. That morning, she was following instructions that had been drilled into her head by her 36-year-old boyfriend. He had introduced her to cocaine, heroin and LSD, and had convinced her that robbery was a good way to support their habits: take the customer to a dark parking lot, wait for the boyfriend and his two buddies to creep up, get out and run.

But as she was running down 24th Street, the plan and her life crumbled. The robbers and the victim fought; the would-be customer was shot. Worse, as she would discover in the next day's tabloids, he was an off-duty police officer, and he died after a few days. A frightened Ms. Ortiz, who had no criminal record, turned herself in.

Convicted of felony murder at trial, she spent 18 years at Bedford Hills — the state's only maximum-security prison for women. Eventually, her fears of rape and abusive guards faded, and she began taking classes, earning college degrees. She worked as a bookkeeper and with a church ministry, helping other inmates to reconnect with their children and learn to read.

After 15 years, Ms. Ortiz began counting down to her first chance at freedom. “You start going through it in your mind,” she said. Other inmates told her what to expect at the parole hearing: “This is what the room looks like; this is where you're going to sit.”

She was cautiously optimistic. “I was 18 years old, first-time offense, drug use — now I have a master's degree,” Ms. Ortiz recalled thinking. “And my role, my role in the crime: I wasn't the actual shooter. I wasn't actually there when it happened. So this is what I kept telling myself: ‘This is going to happen.' ”

In a letter outlining its decision, the board said that “your serious record of violent crime” and other factors “demonstrate that you pose a serious threat to community safety and welfare.”

After three more denials, Ms. Ortiz grew weary of the emotional roller coaster, unsure what more she could do. “I want to say all of these great things that I'm doing, this great person that I am, but how do you balance that with a life was taken?” she said. “Someone did die because of my act, because of what I did. And so I think that was the hardest part. You really want them to see who you are, who you've become, who you're going to be. That these are my hopes, these are my aspirations, this is what I want to do with my life.”

HAVING left the board in 2007, Mr. Dennison, now 63, spoke plainly about Ms. Ortiz's case in a recent interview. “He was an off-duty police officer,” he said of the victim, “and, basically, people didn't want to let her out because of that.”

Since retiring from the board, Mr. Dennison has worked with parolees to adjust to post-prison life and lobbied in Albany for changes in lifetime-parole rules. “I have been back to several prisons to explain to people how they can better prepare for the Parole Board,” he said, “how they can enhance their chance of being released.”

Ms. Ortiz, prisoner No. 85G0315, had no such counseling, though she had assembled hundreds of letters of support, including ones from several public officials, before her fifth parole hearing. (The victim's widow said she had also written letters opposing Ms. Ortiz's parole.)

Ms. Ortiz's was the first name called that cold morning at Fishkill, and she took her place in an armless chair, dressed in prison greens, her long brown hair in a ponytail; she was 40. A stenographer, a parole adviser who helped her get her paperwork together before the hearing, a parole supervisor and a secretary sat along the periphery of the room. But like in a movie, she said, everything but the long table and the three strangers behind it melted into a smear of white light.

“So you've been in jail longer than you were alive when you committed the crime?” Mr. Dennison asked.

“Do you tell your story to the women at Beacon?” he continued. “Do you tell them what a terrible thing getting involved with drugs can do, not just to your life but to the victims?”

“I use my life as an example,” she added, “so that they know this can happen, it can easily happen to anyone if they continue living their lives, using drugs, not thinking about how their choices are going to affect other people.”

It was the longest of all her hearings, about 12 minutes. She was excused from the room, then called back in and questioned for five more minutes, then sent out a second time, then called in a third.

She returned to Beacon Correctional Facility, where she had spent the past couple of years, and was summoned by the parole adviser that afternoon. The inmates gathered on either side of the hallway and in stairwells, rooting for her. She was their friend and mentor, and in that moment, she carried all of their hopes for freedom.

“You're going home,” Ms. Ortiz remembered the adviser saying. “I waited so long for that.”

When she emerged from the office with a smile, the prison halls erupted in cheers and hugs, smiles and tears.

In a little coffee shop in Harlem not long ago, Ms. Ortiz's eyes were wet again after she spilled her soul. Now she, like Mr. Dennison, is helping other recently released inmates adapt, working with Exodus Transitional Community, a nonprofit group where 85 percent of the staff has served time. She completed her parole last year.

“I still have those dreams of not being able to leave prison, like I'm still in there trying to get out,” Ms. Ortiz said. “I'm no longer part of the system, but I keep having them. Why am I still struggling to get out?”

Matthew McConaughey: 'I Want to Do Some Good'

Three years ago, actor Matthew McConaughey wanted to, as he puts it, "do some good with the goods that I had been given." So he started the J.K. Livin Foundation (it stands for "just keep livin'"), an after-school program that encourages inner-city high school students to improve their physical and mental health through exercises and teamwork. The program now reaches more than 6,000 students in California and Texas.

"I get excited because I love kids," McConaughey says. "I wanted to work with 15- to 18-year-olds so they could learn better life choices early."

First Team

Second Team

Third Team

Honorable Mention

Stop Texting Behind the Wheel

by Rebecca Webber

06/06/2010

Last spring, Meghan Obendorfer, then 18, of Downingtown, Pa., was texting back and forth with a friend when she lost control of her car and slammed into an empty school bus. Her passenger, Nikki Pomon, 17, was killed instantly, and so was Pomon's full-term baby, due to be delivered the next day.

Distracted drivers—people texting, talking on the phone, fiddling with the GPS, even eating—k illed 5870 people in 2008 and injured an additional 515,000. Texting was a factor in more than 200,000 crashes that year.

“It's an epidemic,” says Raymond LaHood, the U.S. secretary of transportation. “Almost everyone has a cellphone or a BlackBerry and has used it while driving—and it's not safe. You simply cannot drive and text safely.”

Despite the horror stories and statistics, many of us can't seem to resist the ring, blink, or chime of a new text. “We think it could be something important, so that impels us to answer or retrieve our messages,” says James E. Katz, a communication professor at Rutgers University. The temptation is especially hard for teens to resist. “They want to be in frequent contact,” Katz says, adding that they might even find the riskiness of texting exciting rather than scary. Of course, driver-safety advocates say, no message is worth dying for. “I know you think it's so important to take that call from your daughter's school or text a reminder to your husband,” says Jennifer Smith, co-founder of FocusDriven, a safety-advocacy group formed by people who've lost loved ones to distracted drivers. “But it's not worth a life.”

So what can be done?

Get the message out

Last fall, the Department of Transportation launched a campaign to raise awareness of the dangers of driving while distracted and to increase the penalties. The department created a website, Distraction.gov, ran public-service announcements, and worked with Oprah Winfrey on her “ No Phone Zone” campaign, which the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and other groups support.

Increase penalties

Texting while driving is illegal in 25 states, often resulting in a fine of about $100. Some states go further: Wisconsin adds four points to the offender's driving record (12 points in a year lead to license suspension). In Utah, drivers caught texting face three months in jail and a fine of up to $750—and if they hurt or kill someone, they could be looking at 15 years and a $10,000 fine.

At the national level, bills pending in the House and the Senate would reduce federal highway funds to states that fail to ban texting behind the wheel.

Fight back with technology

“Technology got us into this mess, and it's going to get us out,” says Smith of FocusDriven. New smartphone applications like iZUP, tXtBlocker, CellSafety, and ZoomSafer use a handset's GPS to sense when the car is in motion, then block its ability to send and receive texts (some have opt-out mechanisms if you're just a passenger). Other programs, such as Cellcontrol, work on regular cellphones but require an additional transmitter. These cost between $25 and $100 for set-up and a year of service.

Of course, there's always the old-fashioned fix—and it's free. “When you get in a car, buckle up and put your cellphone in the glove compartment,” says Secretary LaHood. “Whatever message is coming across that device will surely wait until you get to your destination, and you will get there more safely.”

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First Team

ECONOMICS

EDUCATION

HEALTH

ENVIRONMENT

COMMUNITY

Second Team

ECONOMICS

ENVIRONMENT

EDUCATION

COMMUNITY

HEALTH

Third Team

ECONOMICS

ENVIRONMENT

EDUCATION

COMMUNITY

HEALTH

Honorable Mention

Stop Texting Behind the Wheel