Good morning. My name is Father James Tramel and I am the Rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, an historic parish in San Francisco that was founded before California was a State in the Union. I am testifying today as a community religious leader; I am also testifying as a former inmate of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. In 1985, at the age of 17, I was involved in a homicide that occurred in Santa Barbara. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger consented to my parole last year after I had served nearly 21 years, more than half of my life, in prison.

During the earliest period of my legal proceedings and incarceration, law enforcement authorities questioned whether I should ever be released from prison. California Youth Authority officials determined that I was not amenable to rehabilitative change. Fortunately, in 1985, California did not allow for sentences of life without the possibility of parole for juveniles. I received a sentence of 15 years to life. Parole is an exceptionally rare occurrence for anyone serving an indeterminate sentence California. I was one of a handful of life-term inmates, out of some 30,000 serving such sentences, to be paroled.

What I would like for this committee to have is the perspective of a juvenile who went to prison with a glimmer of hope, however fleeting and distant, of the possibility of being reconciled with the community. I had that glimmer of hope because I went to prison with the hope of parole. I arrived as the youngest inmate at San Quentin prison in 1987. Hope was held out for my redemption; (Do you want to say who held out hope? At first glance it seems like those at SQ are the ones holding out hope. )I was accountable for my criminal conduct; and I devoted myself to reform rather than to recalcitrance. The pressure on a juvenile in prison to conform to the gang culture, and to the currency of violence, is immense. The dim light of hope at the end of a long tunnel of incarceration was sufficient to help me navigate the treacherous shoals of our penal system while building the character that would make me suitable for a return to the community.

During my incarceration I met many young men serving sentences of life without the possibility of parole. At a visceral level, the circumstances of their crimes made me shudder at the idea of their release from prison. There are certainly people who felt that way about me. These life without possibility of parole inmates, however, sometimes follow a different course than those serving indeterminate sentences. Without the hope of any future beyond prison they can die a moral death. They feel they have nothing to lose by degenerating into violent predators within the prison. They can be a dangerous management problem for the correctional officers and an unpredictable threat to other inmates. The basic difference in overall conduct is the presence or absence of hope.

Certainly there are adults whose conduct is so abhorrent that we will never entrust them with freedom again. But I believe that our consideration of juveniles, children by every other measure of law, should be fundamentally different not only for their sake but also for our own as a society. We, as a community, are deeply diminished when we are willing to say, by force of law, that a child is beyond hope of redemption, especially when we lose nothing by holding out such hope. No one serving an indeterminate sentence, even a juvenile sentenced to 25 years to life in prison, will ever see the streets of California again without evincing a profound and irrefutable change of character.  No change, no parole.

I am here as evidence that such profound change is possible. Last month I was in Santa Barbara again just short of the first anniversary of my parole. I had lunch with the district attorney from the Santa Barbara office that sent me to prison. In 1985, they wanted to lock me up and throw away the keys forever; In 2005, they were advocating for my parole before the Board of Parole Hearings and the Governor. Twenty or thirty years can change our perspective on the adult that a juvenile will become. I implore you to not foreclose the possibility of redemption in California’s children.