When Elizabeth Calvin decided to dedicate herself to reforming juvenile sentencing laws in California her boss asked, “Are you going to spend your life’s blood on something that will benefit so few people?”
Calvin’s response was an unequivocal, “yes.”
The reform in question was California Senate Bill 9 (Yee) which would retroactively affect 300 inmates that were under the age of 18 when they committed their crimes and sentenced to Life without the Possibility of Parole (LWOP).
For Calvin, who is the Senior Advocate in the Children’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, passing SB9 represented “part of a bigger mosaic of efforts nationwide in how we treat children and youth who are accused of crimes.” The momentum from this victory proved to be influential.
Indeed, SB 260 (Hancock) would follow the passage of SB9. This law would affect the other 6,500 inmates who also were under the age of 18 when they committed their crimes but were sentenced as adults – many to life.
Calvin was key to the passage of another bill, SB 260. Effective Jan. 1, 2014, this law establishes a unique parole process for an additional 6,500 inmates in California who were under the age of 18 at the time of their crime but sentenced as adults. Many were sentenced to life.
These bills represent the most significant change to sentencing law for youths sentenced as adults. In the prior decade, “tough on crime laws” made it possible to sentence juveniles as young as 14 as adults. “What we heard… was that these people serving life without parole are the worst of the worst, [that] they are monsters,” This sentiment represented the political and public beliefs that Calvin and her colleagues were up against. “I realized that to succeed, we needed to ensure people were not defining these men [and women],” Calvin said.
Calvin set out by leading a coalition of the University of Southern California’s School of Law Post Conviction Clinic, the Youth Law Center, Friends Committee on Legislation, Youth Justice Coalition, and Kid C.A.T.
Calvin and Kid C.A.T. members sat down in 2011 with Senator Leland Yee to discuss the goals of SB9, and in 2013 Calvin, Jennifer Newsom, and Sen. Lonnie Hancock (D. Berkeley) met to discuss the importance of SB260. Kid C.A.T members recounted their experiences as youth offenders, discussed their accountability and their work to make amends to society.
Calvin’s success is now evident in the passage of SB9, SB260 and AB 1276 (Bloom).
“This was a story of failures,” she reflects. “It is interesting to go from eight years of failure to the idea that we have won.” Still, Calvin noted that the real accomplishment is not a particular policy but in what it represents- making society to confront what it means to sentence a young person to die in prison.”
Calvin asserts that there is much more work to do. She states, “SB 9 and SB260 fall short of what we want our system to do, they do not represent an ideal of what we want to achieve.” Asked what the goal of juvenile sentencing reform law is, Calvin responded with an unequivocal, “to end the practice of trying minors under the age of 18 as adults.”
