Should Washington Abolish the Death Penalty? My Experience at CRC

Today I would like to discuss something that I feel is important. I would like to discuss crime and punishment.

Senator Debbie Regala, Democrat-Tacoma, is sponsoring a bill that will abolish the death penalty in Washington State. Ms. Regala and her supporters claim that abolishing the death penalty will save the state millions of tax dollars -- millions of tax dollars that can be spent on other things. I have mixed feelings about the death penalty.

When I was a girl, my parents were devout Republicans. My father firmly believed that it was acceptable for the state to execute convicted murderers. He said that, when a person intentionally kills another, the killer forfeits his own life. As a teenager and as a young adult, I agreed with my father about the death penalty.

My feelings about executing criminals began to change when I worked at the California Rehabilitation Center in the early 1990's. CRC is a minimum security prison in Norco, California. California's courts often sentenced drugs addicts to civil commitment at CRC. This prison was also known as "Hotel California" because Don Henley of the Eagles was incarcerated there for nine months in 1969 for heroin addiction. Henley wrote many of the songs on the Eagles' "Hotel California" album while he was confined at CRC. The artwork on the album cover is a sketch of CRC as Henley remembered the prison.

I worked as a radiology technologist in the prison infirmary. I supervised two inmate radiology techs who were allowed to position other inmates for xray procedures, but were not allowed to operate the xray equipment. Both of these inmate radiology techs were convicted murderers who had studied radiology technology in prison. One was Afro-American. The other was Basque. Both of them had committed a gang-related murder when they were about 18 and had been in prison for about 20 years. Inappropriate behavior of any kind would have added a few more years to their sentences. Neither was willing to do anything that might jeopardize his chance to be released.

Both of these men were polite and courteous to me, but I forged a friendship with the Afro-American. He was from south central Los Angeles. He said his mother was only thirteen years old when he was born. He never really had a parent because his mother was a child herself. He had been in prison for years, but he was well-educated because he liked to read. He read at least two books per week. He especially liked to read books about Malcolm X and black history. Instead of arming himself with guns, he armed himself with knowledge.

Sometimes he would leave hand-written notes about his life on my desk. I encouraged him to write because I felt that he might be able to discourage minors from joining gangs and making the same mistakes he had made. In one note, he said that when he was a little boy, a neighbor had taken him to a Christian church and had him baptized. This was done without his mother's knowledge or permission. When his mother found out, she was livid. She hadn't wanted him to be baptized because she did not believe in God. From this experience, the little boy learned to hate God. I felt that it also placed him on a path going the wrong direction.

Working with two convicted murderers changed my opinion about the death penalty to a point. I didn't see them as "killers" or as "hardened criminals." I saw them as human beings who had made terrible mistakes. They were no longer teenage gangbangers who wanted to control and dominate their neighborhoods. They were mature men. I felt they could become productive members of our society.

At the same time, the prison's staff warned me that the men I supervised were inmates who were thoroughly "institutionalized." We could not predict how they would behave outside of prison. The staff said prisons have "revolving doors." After their release, many inmates resume their old tricks and are sent back to prison. For example, some drug addicts civilly committed to CRC couldn't make it out of the prison's parking lot before the guards caught them with needles in their arms again.