Janice Keller of Sacramento joined hundreds of people in the Caravan for Justice II at the state Capitol on April 8. This action was part of a movement to change the criminal justice system in California.

    "My son LaMont Rhinehart has been jailed for 21 months in Sacramento on a murder charge with no preliminary hearing yet and none scheduled," said Keller. "I want the DA to bring him to trial or let him go."

On January 14, 2009, emotions ran high in Oakland, California during a protest against the shooting death of Oscar Grant by a Bay Area Rapid Transit officer. (Photo: AP)

    The day before, at a Nation of Islam meeting, she learned of the Caravan for Justice II. The collective action drew people in buses and cars from the San Francisco Bay Area, the Central Valley and Sacramento region. There was a Caravan for Justice I at the state Capitol on February 11. Minister Keith Muhammad of the NOI in Oakland spoke at both rallies.

    "The law enforcement approach to urban America is not working," he said most recently. "We have come to challenge unjust laws that imprison African-American, Latino and other minority people."

    California's prison system is the largest in the US, due in no small part to the "Three Strikes" law that the legislature and voters passed 15 years ago. The law mandates judges to impose a sentence of life in prison with no possibility of parole for 25 years to a defendant convicted of a third felony charge. The impacts of this law have been mighty for racial minorities, said Minister Muhammad.

    "African-Americans make up 6.5 percent of the [state] population, but they make up nearly 30 percent of the prison population, 36 percent of second strikers, and 45 percent of third strikers," according to Scott Ehlers, Vincent Schiraldi and Eric Lotke in a 2004 Justice Policy Institute study of the Three Strikes law. "Although just over 32.6 percent of the overall population is Latino, almost 36 percent of the prison population is Latino and 32.6 percent of strikers are Latino."

    The Three Strikes law has less of an affect on whites. Ehlers, Schiraldi, and Lotke continue, "While they make up 47 percent of California's population, only 29 percent of the prison population is white, as is 26 percent of second strikers and 25.4 percent of third strikers."

    Kimberly Biggs of Sacramento is a prison-reform advocate who, with her daughter and granddaughter, attended the Caravan for Justice II. Biggs, a community organizer who helms Challenging Their Destiny, Dream Builders, has worked with Families United for Prison Reform. The group formed to promote prison reform as a means to decrease crime and violence on both sides of the wall. In September 2007, Biggs and FUPR volunteers began to gather signatures to place a measure to repeal the Three Strikes law before California voters for the November 2008 election.

    The 30,000-member California Correctional Peace Officers Association, which contributed $20,531,340.96 in state campaign donations from 2005-2008, opposed the initiative to reform the Three Strikes law. It failed to qualify for the ballot.

    Joining with Biggs at Caravan for Justice II was Rhonda Erwin of Sacramento. She held a poster with photos of and text about her son Douglas, now serving a sentence of 22 years in a state prison, "more years than he has been alive." A court convicted him in a non-murder case under the "10-20-Life" law. This law, which the state passed in 1997, mandates prison sentences to 10 years for pulling a firearm, 20 years for discharging a gun and 25 years to life for shooting a person.

    The Caravan for Justice II also focused on police mistreatment of racial minorities. Diana Marks of Hayward is the godmother of the late Oscar Grant III. She shared how on New Year's Day, Johannes Mehserle, a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer, fatally shot Grant, an African-American father employed as a butcher. Witnesses taped the shooting on cell phones. The footage spread globally on the Internet. According to Marks, people in Africa, China, France, Germany, Israel, the Philippines and across the US are reaching out to the Grant family, which has filed a lawsuit against BART. She is also leading a letter-writing campaign to make President Barack Obama more "aware of injustice in our country" involving the policing of minority communities.

    On that note, Assembly Bill 312 is before the state Legislature now. Assembly Member Tom Ammiano and state Sen. Leland Yee, San Francisco Democrats, are cosponsors of AB312. This legislation would compel the BART district to form an Office of Citizen Complaints to administer civilian grievances about the misconduct of police officers.

    "We want to make sure that this review board can render disciplinary prosecution to police," said Minister Muhammad.

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