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A conversation with Paul Bocanegra is awash in cognitive dissonance. How, I wonder, could the congenial middle-aged man sitting across from me at a coffee shop, apologizing profusely for being a few minutes late, be a convicted felon who spent about half his life in prison? And how does he find the strength to work to reform the system that almost destroyed him? That’s what this article is about.
In 1992, when he was 17 years old, then San Jose resident Paul Bocanegra was charged with murder and sentenced to life in prison. He was tried as an adult. The only reason Paul didn’t spend the rest of his life in prison is a California law, passed while he was incarcerated, that gave youth like Paul – minors who had received life sentences without parole – an opportunity to petition the court for a second sentencing hearing. Paul petitioned the court for a second hearing and was released in 2017. He was 42 years old and had been in prison for 25 and a half years, 12 of which he’d spent in solitary confinement.
Paul, now 50 years old, frequently refers to himself as privileged, not a word you’d normally associate with someone in Paul’s position. Paul says that he is privileged in the sense that, soon after he left prison, he moved in with his soon-to-be-wife Carolyn, a resident of Redwood City who he first connected with when an inmate in solitary introduced them, and they started corresponding. Paul says it’s only because of Carolyn that he can live in a nice house, get health insurance, and afford to continue his education. In short, he possesses a level of wealth and security that is almost unheard of among people who have spent decades in prison. Paul recognizes this, and he believes that God had a hand in it too. Given that privilege, Paul cannot fathom an existence other than working to ensure that other kids aren’t sucked into the school-to-prison pipeline that robbed him of his youth.
“When I went to prison, I was still a kid, still under the roof of my mother, my father. My mom still washed my clothes, made my bed. I went from that to death by cage. I don’t want any other kid to have to do that,” he says.
“Paul is everywhere”
Paul is the co-founder and Executive Director of Unlocked Futures, a non-profit dedicated to improving services for kids in our juvenile justice system. He also serves on the San Mateo County Juvenile Justice and Detention Prevention Commission (JJDPC), whose mission is to evaluate and coordinate local delinquency programs. But really, the most accurate description of Paul’s day to day is that he goes wherever he can use his lived experience to support kids and their families sucked into the juvenile justice system. The result, according to Unlocked Futures Board Chair Becca Kieler, is that “Paul is everywhere.”
During a typical week Paul might testify in Juvenile Court on behalf of a youth being held in Redwood City’s Youth Services Center (YSC); speak to the parents of an incarcerated youth about their parental rights; work contacts he made while in prison to ensure that a youth who is returning home from YSC isn’t harassed by neighborhood gangs; and meet with the manager of the San Mateo county jail about transgressions against yout
While the scars Paul got while in prison are still visible, his demeanor reveals little about his past. He smiles easily, is personable, and speaks eloquently about the issues that drive him. But beneath his polished exterior — and you can’t help but marvel at Paul’s polish given his past — he is a fighter. In prison, he fought, in the literal sense, to survive. Now he survives by fighting a system that punishes kids rather than heals them.
“It’s my DNA that told me that, in prison, I’d better fight or I was going to get eaten up. I’m still fighting. I don’t know how not to fight. I just know how to fight for the right reasons, which is what I do today,” he says.
When Paul is engaged in casual conversation, he keeps his anger in check. But he says he has no interest in dampening the inner fury that moves him forward. “People say I’m not angry. But why would they assume that? It’s how you display your anger that counts. My frustrations are invested in how hard I work for the youth in our community.”
Bins, cups, and pillows
As a commissioner of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention System, Paul is a vocal supporter of a resolution that would grant juvenile courts exclusive jurisdiction over cases involving youth under 18 and would keep youth under age 18 out of adult facilities.
“Let’s stop doing what we’re doing to these youngsters and get them the help that they need rather than the torture they’re going to experience in adult prisons,” Paul says. “Look at how many murders have taken place in the last two years in CDCR (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation state prisons), more than fifty, and you tell me how that’s going to benefit any of our kids.”
Paul’s obsession with keeping youth out of the adult prison system is rooted not only in personal experience but also in research which consistently shows that youth tried and sentenced as adults have higher rates of returning to prison than those referred to the juvenile system. There’s a reason for that. Conditions in adult prisons force young people to interact with hardened criminals, reinforcing criminal behavior rather than correcting it. Furthermore, the adolescent brain is not fully developed, particularly the prefrontal cortex, until about age 25. As a result, adolescents have a greater capacity for change and growth than adults, making counseling, education, and community-based interventions, all of which should be available in youth facilities, essential for their recovery.
That said, our youth facilities clearly are far from where they need to be.
One of Paul’s most pressing concerns is conditions at the YSC, also referred to as Juvenile Hall. Thanks in large part to the efforts of Paul and Johanna Rasmussen, the co-founder of Unlocked Futures, kids now have bins for their clothes rather than piling them on the floor. They can drink from cups as opposed to drinking from a faucet. They have pillows rather than “bumps in their mattresses,” and the facility recently added a recreation room with ping pong and pool tables.
Still conditions at the YSC are woefully inadequate. Kids lack necessities like shoes, laptops, even toiletries. Food is often burned or cold and kids frequently complain that they don’t get enough to eat. Even though most kids have experienced severe trauma, lack of staffing means they typically see a clinician for only twenty minutes every two weeks; and sexual assault inside the facility remains a concern.
“How is it possible that one of the wealthiest counties in the state can’t find a way to provide kids even a basic level of support?” Paul muses.
A law degree in his future
In addition to his relentless advocacy, Paul has set his sights on becoming an attorney. His first step is a degree in paralegal studies from Cañada College. For Paul, attending college is yet another facet of his re-entry into a society that changed drastically during the decades he spent in prison.
“When I got out of prison I could tell you how to make a makeshift knife in thirty seconds, but I had no idea how to use a computer,” Paul says.
Paul was dropped from his first online college class because he didn’t know what a syllabus was or how to use the college’s computer system. Fortunately, he’s part of Project Change, a Cañada College program for students transitioning from the justice system. Paul mentors his fellow students — most much younger than him — in how to navigate that system while they “school him down” on the technology he needs to function in college.
Cowboy boots and a lisp
Both of Paul’s parents left school after third grade to work in the fields. His mom, the child of Mexican immigrants, picked cotton in Texas. His dad worked in the fields in Mexico, then came to the US under the Bracero program to work the fields here.
When Paul’s mom was 16, she escaped from the cotton fields and moved to California where she met Paul’s dad, 12 years her senior. They moved to a red-lined district in East San Jose and his father, who worked construction, joined the LIUNA labor union and was able to buy a house. “They used to tell us all the time, ‘Look where we come from, and we got a house’,” Paul recalls. “They felt like the American dream was within their grasp.”
Still, money was tight and his parents, focused on putting food on the table, were oblivious to the goings-on in their neighborhood: sex trafficking, child trafficking, human trafficking, gangs, drugs, prostitution. From a young age, Paul was spending time in homes where people were shooting heroin and police were knocking down doors to arrest the people inside.
As a kid, Paul was a prime target for bullying. He was small, his English was limited, he had a lisp, and his parents dressed him in cowboy boots and cowboy vests, the clothes they’d wished they’d had when they were kids. Wanting to live up to his father’s notions about manliness, Paul didn’t dare tell him about the humiliation he experienced at school.
In middle school, Paul’s frustrations reached a boiling point, and he started to fight back. “I was tired of being hit at school, tired of being hit by my dad, tired of being hit by kids in the neighborhood,” Paul recalls. “I learned that if I fought back, I’d be left alone. With that came a false sense of space, a false sense of respect, and led me to think that fighting was the way to resolve conflict, a response that I’d learned from the adults in my community.”
By the time he was in high school, Paul was part of a neighborhood gang, not an official gang per se, but the kind kids inexorably are sucked into just by hanging out with neighborhood kids.
The crime
Fast forward to 1992, Paul’s junior year in high school. It was the last day of summer school and Paul had gotten a ride home with a 17 year old friend. When they got to a bus stop, the driver picked up another friend, an adult gang member who was waiting for the bus. They’d only driven a few blocks when the passenger, spotting a rival gang member, pulled out a gun and shot and killed him. Paul, age 17, was charged under the felony murder rule which said that individuals, including minors, can be charged with first-degree murder if a death occurred during the commission of a dangerous felony even if the individual didn’t directly participate in the event. Paul was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he paid with his life.
In prison every prisoner is assigned a role. Some are prostitutes. Others are extorted. Paul’s role was to fight, often in gladiator fights — brawls organized and sanctioned by guards in which members of rival gangs battle till near-death.
“Just like in the underserved community where adults turn us into child soldiers, it’s the same exact thing in prison. The prison gangs make you fight for your life,” Paul says.
Because of his perceived associations with prison gangs and his willingness to engage in physical combat — even though many of those fights were sanctioned by prison guards — Paul was sent to solitary confinement where he stayed for 12 years. Exactly 22.5 hours of his day were spent in an 8′ by 10′ concrete, windowless cell containing a concrete ledge with a foam pad for a bed, a stainless-steel sink/toilet combo, and an immovable concrete desk and stool. The lights never went out. He spent 90 minutes a day in a 300–square-foot exercise yard.
While in solitary, Paul lost his mother, a pain, Paul says, that “still shocks my conscience.”
Surviving in solitary
Paul survived solitary by relying on an inner strength he didn’t know he had. “When you torture a youth, everything is taken from you, and so you have to go inside,” Paul says. He discovered he was a natural artist and spent hours a day immersed in his artwork. He meditated, standing on his head for an hour at a stretch. And he got an education.
While he was in solitary, the prison started offering a pilot program so inmates could get their GED. Initially Paul wasn’t interested. He was incarcerated for life. Why bother with an education?
It was a prison elder, David, who’d been incarcerated since the 70s and who Paul describes as a stone-cold killer, who forced Paul to rethink his decision. David knew that Paul, with many years of prison ahead of him, would be more useful to the prison’s gang leaders if he could think critically. Paul says David also recognized the value of education.
Paul spent hours a day studying. If he didn’t understand something, he’d read it over and over again, or he’d talk about it with David in the prison yard. Of all the books he read, it was psychology texts that opened Paul’s mind, helping him understand his parents’ child-rearing practices as well as the impact of the brutality he’d experienced as a kid. While in solitary, he earned an associate degree in business management. He also learned enough from fellow inmates, jailhouse lawyers, to write appeals to the 9th Appellate District Court and the United States Supreme Court. He didn’t win his appeals, but what he learned contributed to his interest in studying law.
What hope looks like
Paul’s life changed dramatically when, after 12 years in solitary, he received a letter from Elizabeth Calvin, an attorney in the Civil Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, that said she’d been searching for minors who were condemned to life in prison through the felony murder rule, so that their cases could be retried if legislation was approved that would make that practice unconstitutional.
Initially Paul was unable to process the news. “When I read the letter, I didn’t understand what it meant. I couldn’t bring myself to trust anybody around me. I had been brutalized by the guards. I had been committed to a cage for a crime I hadn’t committed. Then something in my head lit up and said, ‘This is what hope is.’ I hadn’t felt that in my entire life’s experience, but I knew I was feeling something different.”
Human Rights Watch notified Paul of the bill’s movement through the California legislature. The first version of the bill failed, it was amended and failed again. Meanwhile, every month or so, Carolyn started visiting Paul at the Pelican Bay State Prison, 320 miles from where she lived. (Prisoners typically are assigned to prisons far away from family.) Their only means of communication was through a bullet-proof glass partition. Carolyn, who up to that point had been apolitical, spent hours organizing family and friends to lobby for passage of the legislation.
Finally, on the third try in 2012, four years after he’d gotten the initial letter from Human Rights Watch, Paul received news of Senate Bill 9 (SB9)‘s passage in a letter sent to Carolyn’s home. In 2016, Paul was re-sentenced from life to 25 years. He was released from prison soon after. Almost a decade after leaving prison, Paul continues to experience PTSD, not only related to his prison experience but also the trauma he suffered as a youth.
With the support of several community members, Paul is currently appealing his case in hopes that it can be expunged from his record.
Paul says, “The dark parts of my life are behind me. But they never will leave me. And they never will stop compelling me to work for the justice our youth deserve.”
