“People who commit offenses before their capacities are fully formed deserve a second chance”
Those words come from an unlikely proponent of criminal justice reform: Republican stalwart Newt Gingrich, the former US House Speaker. He wrote them in support of California’s Senate Bill 261, which expanded the availability of parole hearings to inmates who were under the age of twenty-three at the time of their offense.
The measure drew on breakthroughs in neuroscience showing that the prefrontal cortex—home to risk assessment, impulse control, and emotional regulation—was one of the last regions of the brain to mature. Starting in 2016, the state parole board has been required to give “great weight” to a youth offender’s diminished culpability and receptiveness to rehabilitation.
The new law changed life for some sixteen thousand California inmates, including Giovanni Macedo. Sentenced to fifty-one years and four months for the crimes at the center of The Rent Collectors, he unexpectedly became eligible for a parole hearing in his fifteenth year of incarceration.
There’s no guarantee of an outcome, only of the chance to make his case: to take responsibility for who he once was and show how he has grown out of being that person. He is currently scheduled to appear before the board in 2025.
“Mr. Hangover”
California’s embrace of second chances has had champions across the political spectrum, but only one crusader could lay claim to Hollywood’s top-grossing R-rated comedy.
Before establishing himself as the leading force in California’s criminal justice reform movement, Scott Budnick was the executive producer of the raunchy, uproarious Hangover movies. Despite having ascended to the number-two spot at Green Hat Films, Budnick stepped away from a salaried position on the Warner Bros. lot and pledged his life to unlocking the redemptive potential of California’s incarcerated population. He’d already spent years as a volunteer teacher in LA’s juvenile halls, encouraging young offenders to express themselves in writing, and he’d come to see just how far a little hope could go in a hopeless environment.
To win passage of Senate Bill 261, Budnick relied heavily on stories of personal transformation from former offenders—the “real experts,” he calls them—platforming their voices at the state legislature. In reporting my 2015 story about him for California Sunday Magazine, “Outside Man,” I was reminded of the power contained in the firsthand testimonies of people who have lived it.
InsideOUT
During the first half of the aughts, I also volunteered as a writing teacher in LA’s juvenile halls and the now-shuttered California Youth Authority system through a program called InsideOUT Writers. I did it for a bunch of reasons, none greater than the admonition of a former probation officer, Jim Galipeau, who often allowed me to shadow him during my days as the LA Times gang reporter. Jim was adamant that a writer who only extracts—who parachutes into a community just long enough to emerge with a story—would always fail his credibility test. “You can’t just take,” he’d tell me. “You have to give something back.”
With his words in my head, I’d spend an hour every week in juvenile lockup, armed with pens and paper, and encourage a dozen or so students to tell their own stories: to write something true and honest about their capacity for compassion or regret or perseverance or hope. At the Heman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility, we’d gather in the chapel around a long wooden table, like at some graduate seminar, and fire up the Mr. Coffee. It was a respite from the daily mayhem, a chance for some damaged kids to let their guard down and express themselves without fear or shame.
At the end of a class, I’d collect their writing and, back home, type it up or even print it as a booklet and bring them the polished product the following week. They often couldn’t believe that those were their words—preserved now in something approximating published form. In 2005, when I wrote a magazine story about a young army recruit that earned me a fancy award nomination, my students presented me with an honor of their own: a hand-drawn picture of a journalist (that’s me in the Dodgers cap) interviewing a soldier. The giving and the getting had become hard to untangle.