Los Angeles County is no stranger to misguided appointments, but every so often one comes along so stunning in its recklessness that it forces even the most hardened political observers to stop and reassess what is happening inside the Hall of Administration. Janice Hahn’s elevation of Dolores Canales to the Probation Oversight Commission is one of those moments, a decision so wildly incompatible with the responsibilities of the position that it raises deeper questions about Hahn’s judgment, her alliances, and the political machine she may be serving.
Canales is not a mystery. She spent twenty years in prison, including long stretches inside the SHU, the Security Housing Unit, the most restrictive, violent, psychologically punishing isolation block in California’s prison system. The SHU is where the state puts its most dangerous inmates: gang shot-callers, extortionists, high-level influencers, enforcers and those who command prison politics. Time in SHU is not incidental. It signals proximity to the power structures within California’s prison-based criminal networks.
Yet Hahn placed Canales, a former SHU inmate, into an oversight role supervising the largest probation department in the United States, a department responsible for violent offenders, high-risk youth, gang-entrenched minors, and probation officers regularly targeted by cartel and gang influence.
The conflicts deepen when you examine Canales’ personal world. Her husband, Jack Morris, spent forty years inside California prisons, most of it in Pelican Bay’s SHU, the epicenter of the Mexican Mafia, Aryan Brotherhood, Nuestra Familia, and other violent prison-gang operations. Morris was convicted of second-degree murder in 1978 and spent decades in precisely the environment known for producing prison shot-callers who continue to issue orders, extort operations, and direct violence from behind bars. He was released only in 2017. In 2022, he and Canales married, the union celebrated by the same decarceration activists now poised to benefit from her placement inside county oversight.
The county’s sanitized biography of Canales omits all of this. It does not mention twenty years of incarceration. It does not mention SHU confinement. It does not mention her husband’s four decades in Pelican Bay’s isolation units. It does not mention her son Johnny Martinez, the man federal prosecutors identify as a Mexican Mafia shot-caller who ordered murders from inside prison and whose criminal empire stretched across Orange County. And yet Hahn saw fit to place Canales inside the very oversight structure that monitors a department historically infiltrated by gang influence.
It is impossible to believe Hahn didn’t know. Canales is not obscure. She is a Soros Justice Fellow and one of the most visible activists behind the Pelican Bay hunger strikes aimed at dismantling the SHU system. Hahn has been politically aligned with the decarceration movement for years. This appointment was not an accident. It was a placement.
The danger becomes stark when viewed alongside the reality of what SHU-connected gang figures can do from behind bars, and no case illustrates this more brutally than that of Canales’ own son, Johnny “Crow” Martinez.
Martinez is not a street-level offender. According to the Los Angeles Times and federal prosecutors, he is a member of the Mexican Mafia who ordered murders, extortions, beatings, and assassination attempts from inside prison. Even more disturbing, he did so while receiving letters of support from pillars of the progressive establishment: ACLU officials, law professors, pastors, a high school principal, even commissioners of the Los Angeles County Probation Department. They urged a judge to grant him bail.
This is not a typo. Members of the very agency tasked with juvenile justice oversight supported bail for an accused Mexican Mafia leader.
Martinez became eligible for bail after his 1995 murder conviction was overturned under new California law, but he didn’t walk free; he was indicted for federal racketeering instead. Prosecutors allege he commanded illegal profits from gangs, drug dealers, and jail inmates throughout Orange County. His former right-hand man testified that Martinez collected a percentage from any criminal racket running in the region. And investigators discovered that, despite being incarcerated, Martinez somehow made 3,500 communications, calls, messages, and orders, from inside prison using smuggled phones and clandestine networks.
Letters submitted on his behalf portrayed him as a “champion for civil rights” and a “warmhearted, ethical individual.” But prosecutors played the other side of the wiretaps: Martinez threatening to have people shot in the head for interrupting him, boasting about murders he’d committed, warning an associate that “I already put four people six feet under” and threatening to make them “the fifth.” On another call, Martinez said that if one of his “brothers” in the Mexican Mafia asked him to act, he would do it even if his own mother were on her deathbed.
And that mother is Dolores Canales, now a commissioner appointed by Janice Hahn to oversee Los Angeles County Probation.
Even more astonishing, Canales herself wrote to the judge advocating for her son’s release, portraying him as a principled man driven not by gang loyalty but justice. Her fellow commissioner, Sean Garcia-Leys, also supported bail for Martinez, praising him as the architect of a countywide gang truce. Garcia-Leys later said he was acting in his capacity as a nonprofit attorney, not a county commissioner, but the contradiction is glaring.
These are the people Hahn has appointed to oversee the department responsible for supervising youth targeted for gang recruitment, monitoring minors linked to the Mexican Mafia, and safeguarding probation officers vulnerable to cartel pressure.
And this is why the appointment is not just misguided – it is structurally dangerous.
Los Angeles County’s probation system has long been a battleground for gang influence. Juvenile halls have suffered infiltration. Staff have been compromised. Gangs have used probation facilities to pass messages, identify informants, and recruit minors. The department has struggled under repeated scandals involving contraband, abuse, internal corruption, and violent outbreaks. To place a former SHU inmate whose husband and son have deep, documented ties to prison-gang structures into a position of civilian oversight is not reform. It is not representation. It is a breach of public trust.
Janice Hahn either knew exactly what she was doing or is dangerously unfit to oversee the largest county in the United States. There is no third option.
The county does not accidentally install activists with extreme incarceration proximity into key oversight roles. It does so deliberately, strategically, and with the expectation that the public will not object, or will not understand what the appointment truly means.
But now they do.
No responsible jurisdiction would place a twenty-year SHU inmate, married to a Pelican Bay SHU lifer, and mother to an alleged Mexican Mafia shot-caller into authority over its probation system. That Los Angeles County has done so is not a coincidence.
It is a warning, and a blueprint of exactly how deeply compromised the system has become.
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