Barred for Life

"My views on the parole process?" Carbone's anonymity-requesting client wrote from Soledad Prison. "It's completely arbitrary. There is no case-by-case evaluation. My last hearing went nearly three hours, and they 'deliberated' less than 15 minutes."

"Dear Debra," Carbone wrote his client on Nov. 15, "I am so sorry that the governor reversed your parole grant. The impending election probably didn't help. That really stinks. I only hope you are not too depressed or saddened by the news. The 'fight' for your freedom is far from over, and I haven't given up. Neither should you. ... In support, Charles Carbone, Esq."

Carbone grew up in the Republican 'burbs north of San Diego, then moved to New York City as a teenager, following his artist mother's getting yet another in what he says was a long line of divorces.

There, at the height of the crack wars, he volunteered in a welfare hotel in Harlem, witnessing residents prostituting themselves for drugs, guns being bandied about, and violence practically as endemic as the narcotics themselves. He also joined a Board of Education-funded improv theater company, going into high schools in tough parts of town, play-acting social scenarios, and having students shout out how they'd like to see the scenes develop. "AIDS, teen pregnancies, drugs, guns, we'd be up there and five, six, seven, eight different scenes, and have the audience give us suggestions on how to fill in the scenes," the attorney recollects. "That was an education for me."

Finally, he worked for the Citywide Task Force on Housing, helping low-income Bronx residents fight eviction orders. "Right when that motherfucker Giuliani came in. It was a horrible time in New York to be homeless."

During law school at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Carbone taught writing and legal research skills to prisoners at Attica and Clinton. Afterward he worked for Ralph Nader as a researcher on white-collar crime and spent time as a special assistant to the Economic Fraud Unit of the San Diego district attorney's office, going after corporate fraudsters. Then, he got a job at the Utility Consumers' Action Network (UCAN) and successfully sued MCI WorldCom for bilking collect-call customers, many of whom were spending a fortune on calls from family members in prison. Now carrying quite a reputation with him, he moved on to Girard & Green LLP, a class action firm in San Francisco specializing in consumer rights, but his heart wasn't in it. By mutual consent, Carbone stopped working for them and took time out to regroup.

Faced with a career crossroads, with fundamental questions about who one is and what one wants out of life, some people travel, or munch comfort foods in front of the TV, or get depressed and drink too much. Carbone's solution? He took a piece of rope, strung it up between trees in a local park, and spent three months teaching himself to walk tightrope. When you fall, he recalls, "it gives you an appreciation for tightrope walkers. It's an extremely difficult thing to do." By the end of those months, he could navigate 15 feet without falling.

Now 35, Carbone knows what he's good at, and he also knows his limits. When he does something with money as a primary motive, he tends to fall off the tightrope pretty quickly. On the other hand, when he does something he cares passionately about, that 15 feet becomes a walk in the park.

Unsurprisingly, the challenges that get Carbone excited tend to be every bit as quixotic and difficult as the tightrope-walking venture. For somewhere along the line, Carbone had become more than just a legal eagle; he was now a firm believer in a cause, and the windmills he was tilting at were the institutions he saw as infringing on prisoners' rights.

A few years back, he got a job with California Prison Focus, taking part in lawsuits over prison conditions. Then, as his reputation grew and more prisoners began contacting him asking for legal advice on their parole hearings, Carbone decided to go solo. He set up shop in a shared office space on Jackson Street. The building was surrounded by plush antique stores and the office itself had exposed old brick walls and stunning views of the Transamerica Building. He moved his filing cabinets in, stacked the floor with overfill files, piled still more boxes on top of the overfill, and set to work, crafting out a specialty niche as an attorney lifers would turn to when trying to secure a parole date.

On his desk he placed his computer keyboard, monitor, basic office equipment, and a little plastic bottle of liquid oxygen. Oxygen? Yes, Carbone explains, matter-of-factly. Put two or three drops in your tea and it's guaranteed to give you an energy boost — not an insignificant detail, given he's often in his tiny black Volkswagen Rabbit stick-shift convertible eight hours or more a day, driving to one out-of-the-way prison or another.