Teen facing lifetime imprisonment, part two
Last weekend Ted Koppel, formerly of ABC's Nightline, broadcast a program on the Discovery Channel about the overcrowded California prison system. One of koppel's ironic segments followed a parolee from his prison cell to the community where he was released to – Oroville.
What was ironic about this report is that, unless Butte county District Attorney Mike Ramsey successfully negotiates a plea from Greg Wright which means that he will spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole, after an extensive prison sentence, the 17 year old boy that allegedly raised hell at Las Plumas High School will be paroled – to Oroville.
Since it is more likely that Wright will get paroled than he will spend a life term in California prisons, unless he gets a General Education Degree in prison, he will be one of those uneducated prisoners on merry-go-round with one end in society and the other inprison. He might be one of the lucky individuals who will get a college degree in prison, but more likely he will be released with $200, a bus ticket, maybe some money earned from prison employment, no training, into one of the poorest communities in California.
Once he has been released, he will be expected to find a job, and make a go of a society that already has him branded with at least one strike. His step-father was quoted in the Enterprise-Record as saying "Well, they got him. Everybody's safe and he's safe" . The only problem is – is he?
If you substitute Greg Wright for the individual that Ted Koppel highlighted, likely he won't be. It appears his family doesn't care about him, so there won't be any support from these lost individuals. It will be next to impossible for him to find a job in Butte County without personal transportation or real training. Likely the photograph of him in a sheriff's car will follow him everywhere he goes. The result will be that he will be violated during his parole, and sent back to prison.
He could be enlisted in a gang in prison in order to survive. Next year the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has plans to integrate the prison populations which are already at over 180 percent of capacity, where ethnic background is the only way most prisoners have of staying alive and relatively undamaged. That integration will cause more stress in an already overstressed system.
Wright will wind up in that system. While there is no way to predict how he will survive in that system, it stands to reason that Greg Wright will be worse off when he is released from prison than he is now. That is all Mike Ramsey and his fellow authorities are prepared to offer us. The question thus is Robert Roberts right when he says "Well, they got him. Everybody's safe and he's safe”? The corollary question is, does anybody care?