Armando Osuna is a perfect example of how the modified Three Strikes Law is working.
He’s a free man today, but he admits that as a 20-year-old, he was a “knuckle head” who sold drugs in his community. He swears he never used the drugs he sold, but after his girlfriend broke up with him, he was heartbroken. He then turned to heroin.
At 37 he was arrested for possession of heroin for what he says was only a dime bag. He said it was just enough for the district attorney to test.
He could not make the million-dollar bail placed on him, so for the next year and a half he waited in the county jail for his trial. It took two days for the jury to find him guilty. He was then sentenced under California’s Three Strikes Law and sent to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to serve 25 years to life. Osuna said he could not believe he could receive such a long sentence for such a little amount of drugs.
He says he’s not without fault, but feels that this law “was designed to punish the poor.”
His two priors were for robbery and burglary. He said he did the crimes to support his drug habit.
Osuna started his time at the California Men’s Colony, where he spent five months in The Hole. From there he was transferred to Salinas Valley State Prison where he spent the next five years in a lock-down environment. He says they accidentally sent him to Solano State Prison, where he sat in limbo for three months until they realized that he was supposed to be in Soledad, where he spent the next five years.
Ten years after his incarceration, Osuna received notice that his father, who had so much hope to see him released, had passed away. Osuna cherished his visits with his father. After his father’s death, he picked up three write-ups for mutual combat. “I was always in survival mode,” he said.
Things really took a turn for the better at his next stop, San Quentin. He says all he wanted to do was educate himself. He still had hope he would some day be released and when that happened, he wanted to be prepared to set a good example for his peers.
He was an active participant in the at-risk kids program, SQUIRES, because he wanted to show the youngsters that they had a choice to go in the right direction instead of the direction he went.
After spending 14 years in prison, Osuna says he was given hope when California voters passed Proposition 36 to amend the Three Strike Law.
Osuna was surprised when his daughter contacted a private attorney to assist with his release after the passage of Proposition 36. He proudly says he has six grandkids who were born since his incarceration, that he doesn’t know them and he wants to spend time with them.
“Everyday will be precious with them now. It won’t be the 15-minute phone calls, but the human touch that has been missing,” he said.
Osuna had a drug problem like many other men in state prisons. For the last 14 years, taxpayers spent approximately $450,000 to keep him incarcerated; instead they could have spent about $20,000 to send him to two years of drug treatment. With the saved money, nine school teachers could have been hired.
With the passage of Proposition 36, some “three strikers” like Armando Osuna can finally stop spending time in prison for non-violent crimes. Osuna was finally released in April.
He says, “There is still a lot of work to be done to get many of the other three strikers out who are just taking up space and wasting millions of dollars that could be spent on drug treatment.”
About 25 percent of all people serving time in U.S. prisons and jails have drug convictions, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
