Sprawling Los Angeles reality

In the Nov. 14 Daily Journal article, "Critics leery Gascon could import SF ideas to sprawling LA," Los Angeles County district attorney candidates discuss whether small city San Francisco ideas could work in sprawling Los Angeles County. After having worked for six years as a public defender and defense attorney in Los Angeles County many years ago, from Hollywood to San Fernando to Glendale to Pasadena to Downtown and having covered courts from Compton to Alhambra, I saw first-hand that surrendering to the sprawl did not work.

In Los Angeles I saw many dedicated professionals surrender to the reality of the caseload, to the movement of a jail that truly defines mass incarceration, and to the stress that nothing would ever change. At the same time, those with money were able to get clients sentenced to low-risk jails, admitted to Malibu treatment centers, and appear washed and dried in a new personality for sentencing before judges who reacted positively to the hygiene.

Poor people, on the other hand, were rushed through Bauchet Street arraignment courts fresh from street arrests and bearing the scars of mental illness, physical abuse, and often in the throes of drug or alcohol withdrawals. Implicit or explicit bias jumbled into a reaction that often made everyone immune to the human reality we were dealing with. When Deputy District Attorney Richard Ceballos notes that bias usually does not happen at the case filing stage but rather when court officers first see the actual defendants, he says more in that statement than he maybe he wishes to admit.

Poor people wearing the outward signs of abject poverty rarely present well to people who showered that morning. And it is this disregard of a person which conflates character with the conditions of poverty that is the source of bias from arraignment to sentencing to the prison pipeline.

I do not know if Mr. Gascon's candidacy will gain traction, but I do know that sprawling L.A. should look to any ideas (holistic defense, restorative justice, community courts, etc.) that achieve public safety, promote community reintegration, and ignite a courage to look at solutions that do not simply perpetuate existing bias and enduring human pain.

-- Jose H. Varela

Public Defender of Marin County