Uncle

Uncle.

Chapter Nine of The Foundling Wheel, my Dickens Challenge experiment in progress is not going to be ready this week. I’ve had too much going on this week to let Tracy and Aaron and Natalie back in to show me what happens and how. The interesting thing is that I have had just as much time to squeeze in the work as I always do. The chapters have been averaging around 2,800 words – but the time isn’t the issue, it’s my inability to shift mental gears. I’ve got part of a rough draft, but not a first draft. I wrote the last chapter I posted on the flight coming back from DC a couple of weeks ago, so I may find the time to do this sooner than I think, but as of right now I’m planning to be back on schedule next week.

Tonight, Scott and I attended a fundraiser for The Pendulum Foundation and an airing of the Frontline Special, “When Kids Get Life”. On January 21^st, I started a new blog called Compassion in Juvenile Sentencing and I’ve been Googling my fingers to the bone, trying to research the issues – if you’re interested, please check it out and email me your thoughts on the blog. There are so many parts and pieces to this issue that trying to address it at all is like trying to boil the ocean.

It was a sobering, but was also a nice experience that gave me a sense of community and brought home the reality that what these families are going through, could happen to anyone. I met several of the parents and family members of people who were convicted of crimes as teenagers and sent to adult prison for life without the possibility of parole. People don’t talk about it much, but most of the parents know that not only will their children die in prison, but they will die while their children are in prison. These mothers and fathers come from all walks of life and they are a group that most people don’t think much about, but they are us. I met a retired Colorado State Representative, the columnist who write a piece in the Denver post in January about Erik Jensen, and a number of young people who heard about the event and who believe that what we’re doing with children in this country is wrong.

Tomorrow, I fly out to Washington, DC and go immediately to meet with a young man who I hope to hire to work with me on my sales team. Tuesday, I’ve got a meeting with a government agency to work out how they’ll purchase the product I sell – and I need to finalize my PowerPoint presentation and email it out to them tonight because I can’t take a laptop into their facility.

Friday we take off for four days in Estes Park with Wes and Nicole Hyde, two of our artist friends and then the following week, I’m flying down to my corporate headquarters for our annual sales meeting. Bonus: It’s in San Antonio and I also have plans to meet Patti from The Patti-O while I’m down there.

I was honored with the Excellent Blog award by Liz Fenwick and there are so many excellent blogs out there that this it’s awfully tough to choose, but I’m going to name five of them that I find excellent: Kristen Spina, Charles Gramlich, Carleen Brice, and Iyan and Egusi Soup. Each of these bloggers has posted about something recently that I especially needed to hear.

My friend Yogamum tagged me with an interesting book-related meme:

Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. (No cheating!)

I Killed Hemingway, by William MCranor Henderson. I just finished it last night and had naturally not shelved it yet. Bill Henderson has a great writing blog and is a participant in the Dickens Challenge.

Find Page 123.

Find the first 5 sentences.
The main character is having a conversation with a young woman about a friend of hers and her odd fear that extraterrestrials are eventually going to come and take her.

Post the next 3 sentences.
Okay – I’m going to cheat here and post an excerpt further down the page because the next three sentences were very short. Call me a cheater if you want.

“Smiling, Valerie sits back and pulls in her legs. All of a sudden I’m noticing a cuddly self-awareness in her movements that I wasn’t picking up on before. I think she’s about to come on to me. But what could possibly be the aphrodisiac? My ineluctable sexual modality?”

Okay, I can’t count either.

I’ll go ahead and tag five more people to do this (probably the only part of the directions I can follow). How about Larramie, Patti, Shauna, Rebecca and Karen. Let’s see if you can follow directions any better than I can.

And although I’ll be out of town for the big day, Tuesday (I believe) is a very big day for Carleen Brice with the release of Orange Mint and Honey and Therese Fowler with the release of Souvenir. Support your fellow blogger authors and tell everyone you know to buy these books!

It’s kind of weird that I’ll only be “off the grid” for a couple of days, but it’s amazing that it feels like I’m getting ready to go on a safari to some no-man’s land and I’m going to miss something terribly important! I’ve thought about our constant connectedness quite a bit and how it impacts what we write. For example, in a story told in the present day, it’s nearly impossible to write a realistic scenario where a character can’t contact someone or be contacted almost immediately. Conversely, when I joined the Air Force in 1980, went through basic training, then technical training and on to my first assignment in England, I was virtually unreachable except by letter. Even when I lived in Germany from 1985 to 1989, I didn’t have a telephone. There was no reason to take on the expense because it was too expensive to call the States or for them to call me (answering machines were also not in common use yet).

So my question is, how do modern means of communicating find their way into your writing – or not? Or, if your writing takes place in the past or in another world, how do the available means of communication factor in? Sometimes I think that the instant communication that’s so prevalent in movies and books provides an unwelcome deus ex machina that makes it harder to stress the characters out and makes things a little too convenient. What do you think?

Listening to My Inner Voice

When I met Scott nearly four years ago I was going through some major life changes. I’d just gotten divorced and I’d been working in my current job for nearly four years. The job had initially given me a lot of satisfaction and went a long way toward allowing me to overcome my long time negativity of my self worth. I hadn’t gone to college and I’d spent a long time in an environment where our relative worth was identified by how many stripes we had and the fact that we had stripes and not bars, oak leaf clusters or eagles on our shoulders.

Then I had an opportunity to work as a sales person in the telecommunications industry and it was exactly the kind of job I needed. How good you are is measured in very simple terms. Are you selling, or not? Within a very short period of time, I was the top sales person in my company and I was making more money than I ever dreamed possible. People treated me differently than they ever had before, although I was exactly the same person I’d ever been.

At first I was like a kid in a candy store. I bought a bigger house, I bought expensive clothes, and I treated myself to obscenely priced, self-indulgent day spa treatments and began collecting expensive wine. But the thrill was short lived and I soon realized that the only thing the job and the additional money had done for me was remove those negative feelings of self-worth – which was a good thing, but it certainly wasn’t making me happy or satisfied.

I began thinking of the job as a means to an end. It became a near term way to save for the time when I didn’t need to make a certain level of income. I began thinking in terms of what would come next. I wanted to do something that would make me feel like I was contributing, making a difference or doing some good in the world. I thought maybe I could take my newfound sales and marketing experience and get into fund-raising for a non-profit. I researched it and found that although there are literally thousands of good causes, none of them sparked my passion.

More time went by and I continued to save and bank my commission checks, saving for the time when I could walk away or cut down my hours and do – what?

And I started to write again. I thought, maybe fiction writing is a way to make a difference, if not directly then indirectly. About a year or so later, I popped up here. Life was great and I was following my heart, but there was still a nagging desire to do something that might make a difference to real people.

In December, I posted about the Frontline special, “When Kids Get Life”. I had watched the special, which focused on five inmates in my home State of Colorado who had committed crimes as juveniles, were tried as adults and had received mandatory sentences of Life Without the Possibility of Parole (LWOP). I was stunned to learn that our country, which currently has over 2,200 juvenile LWOPs incarcerated and Israel, who has 8-12 are the only two countries in the world who sentence juveniles to die in prison. Over 60% of the juveniles currently serving LWOP in Colorado were convicted of felony murder, which means that someone died or was killed while another crime was being committed, but the convicted offender didn’t actually kill the person. Some of the juveniles committed horrible, brutal, heinous crimes. Some of the juveniles made bad decisions that resulted in a death. Some of them killed their parents after years of systematic abuse; some of them are developmentally disabled or mentally ill.

Regardless of the circumstances of the crime, the thought that children as young as fourteen or fifteen would be locked up with adult violent offenders, without therapy or any form of rehabilitation was incomprehensible to me.

In 2006, the State of Colorado changed the laws and decided that LWOP for juveniles was inappropriate. The mandatory sentence for murder and felony murder was reduced to forty years and then the possibility of parole. Forty years is still an enormously harsh sentence, particularly when you consider non-mandatory sentences served for murder, rape, child molestation and other violent crimes, which often allow offenders to be released in less than ten years. Unfortunately, the change was not made retroactive, so we still have 48 people serving LWOP under the earlier mandatory sentencing.

I contacted The Pendulum Foundation after seeing the show and eventually met with Pendulum’s Executive Director, Mary Ellen Johnson. Mary Ellen is a remarkable woman, who became involved with Pendulum fifteen years ago. She has appeared on television programs in several countries, testified before law makers, participated in panel discussions and wrote a book about one of the juveniles, Jacob Ind. The Murder of Jacob was published a number of years ago, but is still available on Amazon.

The more I learned, the more I wanted to help. I could not imagine a system that would dictate that our society would not even open up the possibility that juvenile offenders could be treated, rehabilitated and someday, after taking responsibility for their crimes, at least have the possibility of freedom. I told Mary Ellen to consider me a volunteer for anything she thought I could do – forwarding information out on upcoming events, researching issues – whatever would be useful. Mary Ellen recently contacted me after sharing the December blog post with Curt and Pat Jensen, the founders of Pendulum and asked if I’d be willing to volunteer as their publicist. I don’t know anything about being a publicist, but I’m willing to learn. Mary Ellen and the Jensens know that I work full time and have a limited amount of time to dedicate, but they need all the help in promoting awareness that they can get.

Last night I created a new blog, called Compassion in Juvenile Sentencing. I’ve learned through this blog that the blogosphere can be a powerful medium for establishing dialogue. I have no illusions that trying to raise awareness and garner support for shorter sentences for juvenile offenders will be popular and I fully expect, if I’m lucky enough to draw any traffic that I’ll experience hostility in the blogosphere for the very first time.

But for starters, I feel like it’s what I’m supposed to do. I’ve added a link to the new blog on my sidebar and since I know that many of you have experience working in PR and even working in the legal and juvenile justice systems, I’m asking for your help. Please comment or email me with any ideas or advice you have for me. If this issue resonates with you at all, please help me to spread the word. The Pendulum site has a call to action that lists things that you can do.

When Kids Get Life

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On November 21st I watched an episode of Frontline, called When Kids Get Life. I was completely unprepared to learn that in our country, there are over 2,200 juveniles who are in adult prisons serving life sentences without the possibility of parole.

In the rest of the world, there are a total of twelve juvenile offenders serving life without the chance of parole. Let me say that again. In the rest of the world there are only twelve.

In my home state of Colorado, there are currently 46 offenders who were convicted as juveniles and who are serving LWOP. When Kids Get Life profiles five of them.

I feel compassion for the victims and for the families of the victims. I cannot imagine what it would be like to lose a loved one to a violent crime. I lived in the communities where two of the crimes occurred and well remember the shocking stories unfolding. But I don’t believe that the desires of the victims can weigh as heavily on how we choose to mete out justice in our society as it does.

Some people should never leave prison because they will always pose a threat to the rest of us. Some of these juveniles should probably never leave prison. But the concept that we, as a civilized society would decide that children are irredeemable, should have no chance at rehabilitation or redemption is appalling to me. The idea that a person who is too young to drive a car, join the military or buy a beer, can be tried and sentenced to stay in prison until they die a natural death, kill themselves or someone kills them is inconceivable.

I contacted Mary Ellen Johnson, the National Director of The Pendulum Foundation to see what I could do. An incredible woman, Mary Ellen has been fighting for changes in our juvenile justice system for fifteen years. She’s appeared on Frontline and on television programs broadcast in other countries. She’s been interviewed many times and has dedicated herself to trying to help a small group of people the rest of us would rather not think about. She’s been harassed and threatened for what she does.

Mary Ellen became involved in the case of Jacob Ind in 1992. Jacob Ind murdered his mother and stepfather in the mountain town of Woodland Park. I lived in neighboring Colorado Springs at the time and I followed the case in the news daily. During the trial, it was revealed that both Jacob and his older brother had been subjected to years of violent abuse and to sexual molestation. Jacob Ind was fifteen and he was tried as an adult and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Over the years, I’ve see his case in the news now and then. When I saw Frontline, I was nearly sick. Jacob Ind is now thirty years old and bears little resemblance to the skinny teenager we all saw on the televised trial. He has now spent as much time behind bars as he did in our world.

Nathan Ybanez and Erik Jensen, fifteen and sixteen at the time of their arrests were also profiled on Frontline. Nathan murdered his mother and his friend Erik helped him to clean up the crime scene afterwards. Nathan had been beaten and sexually molested by his parents for years. He’d run away repeatedly, but was always returned to his abusers. Erik and another friend's parents called the county social services to report the abuse and they were told that social services would take down a report, but the reality was that he was a boy over the age of 13 and with the caseload they had, nothing could be done. Nathan and Erik are both serving life without the possibility of parole.

I hesitate to shine a light on the stories of the abuse victims who killed their parents because in some ways, it feels like I’m trying to excuse their crimes or imply that the sentence of life without the possibility of parole should be used in some cases and not others. I do feel that abuse victims should be subject to special consideration, but I also don’t believe any juvenile should get this sentence, no matter what the circumstances of the crime.

No child should be sentenced to die in prison without any hope of redemption.

The Rocky Mountain News published thirty days of journal entries from Nathan Ybanez a couple of years ago. For me, they were a unique and heartbreaking view into what happens to children who go to prison. Rolling Stone did a piece on Nathan in November of 2006.

A fellow blogger coined the term obligation overload some months ago during a discussion about all of the social causes that need our attention: the environment, abused animals, children, disaster victims, incurable diseases, the homeless – the list goes on and on. I’ve always believed that we need to help other people and despite rumor to the contrary, there are a lot of good people who are making change and doing good things.

In 2006, in large part due to the work of Pendulum, Colorado passed a law changing the mandatory sentence for juveniles from life without parole to 40 years before the possibility of parole. Previously, offenders as young as 12 were eligible for life without parole. The law was not made retroactive, however, so it does not affect the sentences of Colorado's 46 juvenile LWOPs. A map showing the number of juveniles serving LWOP by state is here. We have nearly 50 in our state but several other states house more than 300.

There aren’t many people who are trying to help convicted murderers. Maybe that’s why I feel like I need to. I can’t seem to get it out of my head that no other country in the world does to its child offenders what we do here. There’s a call to action on the Pendulum site that lists some things that people can do to help.

Talking about it is something we can do here. I believe that through raising awareness and through expressing opinions to our state lawmakers, we can make slow change. I’ve written to all of my state representatives and state senators and I’ve been surprised and encouraged at the number of responses I’ve received.

Please watch the episode of Frontline, visit the Pendulum website and some of the other links and think about what you can do to help. If you have suggestions and ideas about what can be done to raise awareness or to accelerate changing the laws, even if you don't have the time to work them yourself, please comment or send me an email.

If you don't agree that juveniles should be given the opportunity at a second chance, tell me why. If you support change, tell me that too. Let’s talk about this.