Mentoring Black Men: It's More Complicated Than I Thought

I spent my late 20s and early 30s wishing I had a mentor. In one sense my father's death when I was 29 sent my personal life into a tailspin. He'd been my dominant male archetype--the person who, by virtue of his mere existence, kept me in line. He was your typical southern gentlemen. Quiet and reserved. Went about the business of providing for his family like a tactician. His departure left me hungry for an older and wiser black man to take an interest in me as a younger black man. In another sense, I needed serious career direction. I wanted to make my career as an author but I didn't know any black men who'd ever done that. What I had was this fantasy that once I published my first book a more experienced black male author would seek me out and put me under his wing. In my mind it made sense. If anybody knew how hard it was for me to a) get published and b) keep publishing then it was a black man. When that first book was published I waited eagerly, and naively, for an email. When it didn't come, I took it upon myself to write a handful of  black male authors asking for a cup of coffee or a little advice. When that didn't work I sent copies of my book with notes expressing my appreciation for their work. I never heard back from any of them. Not one.

At first I took the silence personally. I'd been raised to believe we were supposed to look out for each other, especially in fields where we were a scarce commodity. There weren't many young black writers getting published by major houses so, in my mind, I figured more seasoned black writers would take notice and make themselves available. I thought that was how it worked--each one teach one. It wasn't like I was looking for a hand out and clearly I'd demonstrated enough talent, skill and fortitude to get published in the first place. What I was looking for was a community, a tribe. I'd spent my 20s feeling like an outsider among my childhood and college friends. They'd spent the decade moving into and ahead in their careers; I'd spent mine reading books and teaching myself how to be a writer from scratch. For a while my closest relationships were with authors I'd never met but felt close to because I spent hours with their words. That was the price of the ticket, though. Growing and get better in any craft requires sacrifice. Mine was the years and years of bad writing, literally reams of terrible stories, and stacks upon stacks of books. I figured that other black writers would understand that struggle and embrace me one of the their own.

I remember on one occasion seeing one of my inspirations at a hip-hop show at SOBs. This was a guy whose books and articles I'd devoured in college. He'd wrote for all of the big mainstream magazines and newspapers. He was one of the reasons I'd allowed myself to believe that I could come to New York and be a writer one day. His writing had shown me that I could talk about the black experience as more than the struggle or the struggle to get out of the struggle. I couldn't wait to tell him how much his work meant to me. But even before I could fix my face to say hello he sized me up as a silly fan boy and walked away. I never looked at his work the same way again after that encounter. Eventually I threw out most of his books.

Once it became clear that my first book was going to be a commercial failure and that my publisher had no interest in exercising the option for my second book, I began questioning every choice that I'd made over the previous six years.  I'd spent three years writing that book. Before that I'd spent three years writing another book that had yet to see the light of day. I'd imagined book number one as a beginning to my career not the end. Yet there I was, 31, and without a future that I could see. I became depressed, angry and resentful. There I was out there on my own trying desperately to navigate a white publishing world that had already determined that I was no good. All I wanted was for someone who'd been where I was to reach out a hand. Just let me know I wasn't alone. It never happened.

Once I got past the anger, I started to gain some perspective on the matter. I'd been so focused on what these other authors had accomplished that I just assumed they felt as though they'd made it. It never occurred to me that maybe they didn't agree. After all, if the standard for making it was walking into Barnes and Noble in Union Square and seeing a book you wrote for sale, then I'd made it. Yet, I felt like an abject disgrace because the market had said so. I was so embarrassed and ashamed. I went into virtual hiding (AKA moved to Jersey City) for a couple of years. What good could I do anyone else? How could I guide someone else through a process that I'd clearly failed to master myself? What little energy I still had went into writing my next book. I was determined to prove my doubters wrong and the last thing I had time for was some upstart. That's when something else clicked. We, meaning the handful of black male writers on the market, were rivals.

Without waving too broad a brush across the situation, black male writers are reflexively placed into a brutal competition with one another for a sliver of authorial space that has been assigned to the black intellectual voice by a predominately white owned and operated intellectual marketplace. If we're honest with ourselves, we know that race is the only subject that black writers have been able to carve out a space for themselves in which to speak with any kind of authority. This space includes subcategories such as sports, the justice system, hip hop, education and social inequality. This shouldn't sound controversial since it's fairly obvious to anyone who takes a cursory look at the contemporary landscape of intellectual production by black journalists and authors. The market cares about consumers not citizens and unless something appeals to the broadest consumer base--white America--its value is limited. In the case of black intellectuals, our value on the market is wed to race. Historically, this has translated to a black saturation cap, which, aside from being a term I just made up, is a fairly accurate descriptor of a phenomenon that cuts across industries in so far as it ensures the proper containment of black creative and intellectual production.

When it comes to literature, back when there were still book stores, black writers had a section. And in that section we had a narrow range of stories we could tell. This wasn't segregation, we were were told. This was smart business strategy. The publishing industry has historically limited print runs, publicity budgets and advances for black authors because white consumers make up the majority of the market and they don't buy black books. Under this logic, segregated marketing and sales strategies for black writers didn't just make sense--it was a blessing. Bunching the black authors together on a few shelves of the store allowed the few of us who were interested to easily find what we were looking for and perhaps stumble onto something new!  It was the industry's version of trickle down economics. A rising tide lifts all boats.

Yet those conditions bred and still breed a sense of competition among the few who "make it". If there is only room on the shelf and the talk show circuit for one black voice to offer THE BLACK PERSPECTIVE in any given industry-- ergo, the Head Negro In Charge-- then those of us who feel like we have something to say have to compete for air time. One only needs to look at the history of intellectual conflict within the race to see my point. The history of black men in America is the history of conflict.  We--meaning our views--are always framed in relation to one another. Du Bois was situated in relation to Washington. Malcolm to Martin. Jesse to Farrakhan. The list goes on and on. Most recently Michael Eric Dyson has gone after Cornel West and West has gone after Tai-Nehisi Coates. The takedown pattern is well-known, well trodden and well-designed to contain the debate and discussion on the margins of the real discussions taking place among those who really run the country. It doesn't matter that the reasoning underpinning the saturation cap--the market can only handle a certain amount of blackness at any given time--is circular, specious, unscientific and flat out racist. We absorb the dogma that there is only enough room at the top for a couple of us. We come to believe in it, live and die by it. And the market reinforces it. In my case, it wasn't that black writers were purposefully ignoring or rejecting me. By virtue of our conditional and limited power to publish, publicize and distribute, I was a threat to their existence, and if I had any sense whatsoever I'd know that they were a threat to mine. Since race was the only subject matter we were invited to participate in the public discourse concerning, every book deal for of one of us meant one fewer on the market for the rest of us.

I didn't come to this conclusion easily. I fought it for years. I saw it as a cop out, a comforting excuse for my failures. I didn't want to become (or worse be seen as) one of "those angry black people who blame everything on race." But I'm also not a fool. I've spent a lot of time in bookstores and thinking about who gets to be identified as a public intellectual in general. I know what gets published, why and for whom. I know what we're expected to produce and what the marketplace is willing to promote and consume. I'm not particularly mad at it anymore either. These days I'm more concerned with the corrosive effect this has on the writer as he matures. What happens when you're stuffed into a box? When you're not allowed to grow outside of that box? When you find yourself spinning the same yarn again and again for years because that's what pays the bills? When you know you have more to contribute but aren't offered the space to say it? Where does all of that excess energy go? How does one reconcile being a one-trick pony when it appears others are allowed to continuously reinvent themselves?

So, what does any of this have to do with my search for a mentor?

I've learned through experience that it's really hard to invest in others when we don't feel others have invested us. I also learned that's even harder to encourage someone else to achieve when we don't feel we've been able to achieve our own dreams. I can look on my bookshelf and name a dozen black male writers in the past 20 years who've never gotten their due and probably never will, who've been ignored not only by the mainstream but black readers as well. I know firsthand what that does to a person's sense of self. Left unaddressed or unresolved, the anguish calcifies into bitterness and cynicism.

My experience has been with and between black male writers, but I'm certain the same issues show up in every other profession because the same social dynamics are at play. So many black men I've known and spoken to feel cheated or shortchanged, as though things would be a lot different if they weren't black. They'd be farther along in their careers, more successful. Some of our unfulfilled aspirations are partly of our own doing--we can be prideful and cocky, cavalier and aloof. I've been all of these things at one time or another. In my case these were my only defenses against self-loathing and despair, mechanisms I adopted and adapted to cope with feeling less than a man, to deal with my relative powerlessness in a society ruled by an elite descended from those who once owned my people. That shit is deep and it affects each of us in one way or another.

Towards the end of my 30s a couple of things became apparent to me. The first was that I actually hadn't been without mentors. They were just women--and not just black women either--not men. Supervisors. Editors. Whoever it was who took time to either encourage or correct me--it was always women. They always answered my emails and returned my calls. They checked in on me. They opened doors for me. They cared. I felt a twinge of shame once this dawned on me. All of my most honest and thoughtful bosses and editors had been women yet I'd overlooked and undervalued these contributions because they didn't look the part, because the men I was looking to for guidance were too busy chasing their own unfulfilled dreams.

The second thing I realized was that I'd hit an age where younger men were seeking guidance from me. It was a little unsettling in the beginning. All of a sudden there was this new generation who'd been raised on DMX and Kanye West that didn't see me as their peer but as something else. It took them calling me their mentor for me to understand that a shift had occurred. I was no longer the young guy. I was the guy who, in their view, was making something work for himself. I certainly didn't think of myself that way. Compared to my white counterparts, I was lagging in all of the important categories that society uses to measure our progress. But this younger generation wasn't comparing me to my white counterparts. They were comparing me to so many of the men they'd grown up around.

I made a decision to be present for them in the ways others I wished others had been for me. It felt good to do it. I read their stories and listened to their albums and went to their shows and grabbed dinner or a drink with them when I could just as well go home and get my own work done. I shared   my ups and downs while encouraging them to pursue their dreams with their eyes open. I made thoughtful choices about what I would and would not participate in with them

Mentoring black male millenials in the midst of their own personal and professional journeys has also been more complicated than I thought it would be. Although we may both be operating within a history of social and  economic violence and oppression that has and continues to shape our lives, the all-important difference is that we're in different phases of dealing with that history. Their movement is Black Lives Matter; their call to action is police violence in Ferguson and elsewhere. They are angry with America and rightfully so. But I also sense that they regard my generation (Gen Xers) as sell outs, or at least collaborators with the oppressor.

An encounter I had several months back on a college campus really brought this home for me. A college student I was mentoring at the time called me out for not being more explicit in a discussion I was leading around race and policing. He accused me of soft pedaling for the white students in the room. In his view I was betraying the black students by not validating their pain and by not challenging the white students to own their privilege.

It was a hurtful moment for me. I had watched Rodney King be beaten savagely by LAPD when I was a sophomore in high school. I was in college when Amadou Diallo was shot 41 times by NYPD. I protested against the IMF and WTO in DC back in 2000. I had a cop press his pistol to my neck when I was teenager and got thrown in jail for "resisting arrest" after being beaten with batons by a team of police in my mid 20s. I'd watched close friends go in and out of prison for twenty years. I've lived long enough to understand the opening lines of Allen Ginsberg's Howl--"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness ...."

It took everything I had to restrain myself and remain in that hard place with him. I was certain that I did not need to justify myself to him or anyone else. And, yet, I did. My history wasn't sitting in front of that student. I was. And the "I" in front of him had, in his view, achieved enough stature in the world for his elite university to pay me to be there. I had to own his critique as well as the fact that everything he was experiencing was new to him even if it was old to me. That was hard because, for me, all of that stuff is still so raw and real, still informs how I live my life to this day. It was a learning moment for me to say the least. I came to understand that part of mentoring is restraint and grace under fire. Even when I think I know better or feel the need to defend myself, I sometimes have to just be quiet and present. Who other than me could understand where that student was coming from? Who other than me could that student drop all of that weight on and have it be heard for what it is--trauma? If I could not stand there and take the heat he was giving me for ten, fifteen minutes without lashing out or defending my record of solidarity with the people then how could I expect a police officer to remain calm during a street encounter? Mentoring, in that precise moment, became more than an inspirational talk. More than a white house mandate. More than a foundation initiative. More than a way for me to give back or feel good about myself on a Saturday afternoon (which it happened to be). It became part of my own ongoing work. Work that can't be captured in a handbook or PowerPoint.

Likewise, I've finally started to find some (black male) mentors of my own. Last summer, the Executive Director of an arts nonprofit in Newark invited me to house my startup in his office space. I barely knew him at the time yet he gave me keys and some furniture, never ran my credit, didn't make me a sign a lease, didn't charge me for internet, heat, or phones. All that he asked was that I pay him a nominal rent and take care of his space. After nearly a year I told him we were moving into our own space in September. It was a bittersweet moment. There was a part of me that wanted to remain under the shelter he had provided and a part of him that wanted me to stay--he even said as much. Over the past year we'd had countless five, ten minute conversations about his work and mine. We'd bonded over the headaches that come with running a nonprofit. I'd watched him organize fundraisers and work with board members and staff. When I was going through a really tough patch last winter, he pulled me aside and gave me some advice and encouragement. Whenever donors and foundations visited him, he made sure to introduce me and slip away so that I could work my own magic. And when things started to get better for me, he was the first to offer congratulations. Not once did he ever tell me how to run my affairs or ask for credit or praise, nor did he ever haggle me when the rent was late. In the midst of our reminisce of the past year, I asked him why he had been so generous with me in the first place. Without blinking, he said that he had no choice in the matter. He felt obligated to. When we first met he knew that I had all sorts of challenges that I couldn't foresee awaiting me. He remembered starting out, how hard it was. The least he could do, he said, was help me shoulder that burden for a period. If he couldn't at least do that then what was the point?

The Movement Goes Mainstream

ROSENDALE, New York looks and feels like countless rural towns nestled inside the Hudson Valley. It boasts a picturesque landscape teeming with rivers, farmland, mountains, and hiking trails. Downtown still flaunts sturdy storefronts from the town’s run as the nation’s leading supplier of cement in 19^th and early 20^th centuries. (The Statue of Liberty and Brooklyn Bridge were both built with Rosendale Cement). Though the local cement industry collapsed after World War 1, in recent decades émigrés from New York City and nearby New Paltz have discovered its charm and cheap rents, transforming the sleepy town of 6,100 from quaint to quirky, cozy to borderline cool. What hasn’t changed, however, is the town’s racial composition. According to the 2010 census, 90% of residents identified as white while only 1.7% checked the box marked African American.  This chasm is precisely what makes the assembly inside the Creative Co-op—a 17 x 30 community space on Main Street—on a Tuesday in late April such an ideal mirror of the moment we are living through.

Forty people, most of them residents, had given up a gorgeous early spring sunset to attend a community reading series covering Michelle Alexander’s 2010 bestselling, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The co-op, which for all intents and purposes is a cabin, wasn’t big enough to hold everyone inside the circle so late arrivers squatted on the floor while others simply stacked their chairs inside the doorway.

The New Jim Crow has been widely praised across political spectrums for mainstreaming the criminal justice reform conversation. Even those who’ve yet to read it have likely heard, and perhaps regurgitated, the book’s most unsettling statistic—more black men are behind bars today than were enslaved in 1850. Alexander’s central argument in the book is that the War of Drugs has been the latest project to re-enforce a system of racialized exclusion and control. She grounds her analysis in historical and contemporary data as well as case law illustrating both the breadth and scope of the problem and how we arrived in a place where one in eight black men in their twenties are locked up on any given day and 13 percent of all black have been stripped of their voting rights. The book has ignited an awakening about the origins and purpose of racial caste in American not seen since Martin Luther King christened C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow the “historical bible of the Civil Rights Movement” in the 1960s.

“To me [Alexander] is as important in our generation as Dr. King and Malcolm and Ella Baker,” said former Obama administration official and Alexander’s longtime friend, Van Jones, in a recent interview. “She’s our Angela Davis,” Jones added, which is fitting since it was Davis who first popularized the term “mass incarceration” in her 2003 book Are Prisons Obsolete?

Yet the acclaim, accolades and awakenings were not inevitable.

            Jones recalls the day Michelle Alexander called him about her new book. The CNN contributor and Dream Corps Unlimited founder was proud of his longtime friend, but he was also pessimistic about the book’s prospects. “I said I’ll read it and your husband will read it and that’ll be about the end of it.”

            Jones wasn’t alone. Leornard Noisette, who directs of the Open Society Foundation’s Justice Fund, awarded Alexander a Soros Fellowship in 2005 to write The New Jim Crow, yet he, too, held modest expectations: “No one inside this foundation could have imagined that the book would have this kind of impact,” he said when we met at his office.

            So how did a book that no one saw coming upend the criminal justice landscape and make it to tiny towns like Rosendale? I posed this question to everyone I spoke to. Some said it was timing—Americans were ready for the mass incarceration message. Others said Alexander was the right messenger—her mainstream pedigree as a Supreme Court clerk, law professor and civil rights attorney gave her the credibility to be heard. They were each compelling theories. But Alexander herself recently recounted a meeting with the late theologian and historian Vincent Harding early in the book’s life that is probably the most credible explanation. The venerable Harding, she said, sat her down and told her what needed to be done. 

“My job wasn’t simply to speak as a lawyer or as an advocate or as an academic railing against the system,” Alexander told a capacity crowd at the Women of Spirit Conference at Union Theological Seminary in March in reference to the exchange. “I came to see that a large part of my job, perhaps the most important part of my job, was to dig for deeper truth and to speak that truth with a lot more courage.”

Dr. Iva Carruthers was one of those Alexander reached out to on that truth digging journey.

“Michelle called me,” said Carruthers, who co-founded the Samuel Dewitt Proctor Conference (SDPC), a network of progressive faith organizations based in Chicago. “She was looking for a way to enter conversations with the black church around her work.”

Carruthers agreed to write, publish and distribute a study guide to accompany The New Jim Crow.

“We found that churches were using it in bible study, book clubs were using it, community based organizations were using it.”

Buoyed by the guide’s success, Carruthers told me that Alexander helped SDPC secure multiyear grants from the Open Society and Ford Foundations to build “a new moral consensus” in the faith community to address mass incarceration. SDPC used those funds to spread The New Jim Crow’s gospel to other faiths.

SDPC was just one example of the support Alexander provided organizations willing to build the movement around the book. In New York, the celebrated Riverside Church incubated the Campaign to End the New Jim Crow, which, in turn, motivated residents in Hudson Valley to start The End the New Jim Crow Action Network (ENJAN). Shelly Friedmann, a teacher, attended one of ENJAN’s community readings. The book’s message compelled her to ask the group if they could help her bring the book to Rosendale.   

The guests who crammed into the Creative Co-op personified the book’s broad appeal to people of conscience. They ranged from Millennial to Gen Xer to Boomer, college student to college professor. They were black, brown, and white, though mostly the latter. Women slightly outnumbered men. Three guests had served time in prison. One had taught shop at a nearby prison for 30 years. Friedmann taught chemistry at an alternative school in Woodstock. One couple operated a working farm. Another, Sally and Paul Bermanzohn, had survived the Greensboro Massacre, the famous KKK ambush in 1979 that left 5 marchers dead. Paul, a psychiatrist whose parents survived the Holocaust, suffered a bullet wound to his head that left him permanently disabled. Sally, a political science professor at Brooklyn College, wrote a book about the massacre. No one was ever convicted.

Before introducing a pair of SUNY New Paltz professors to lead the discussion, Friedmann, a bubbly twenty-something, announced that attendance had doubled since last week. It was little wonder.  On that April evening any doubts that a movement to challenge the criminal justice system had begun were being doused before our eyes. In Baltimore, Freddie Gray’s murder had instigated a turbulent uprising. In Philadelphia, activist, author and death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal’s rapidly declining health had sparked an international outcry for an investigation into prison neglect. And in New York, Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton was putting the finishing touches on a speech calling for an end to the “era of mass incarceration” that she would deliver the next morning at Columbia University.   

In fact, those were just the latest headlines in what can only be described as a national rethinking of crime and punishment. In March, President Obama commuted the sentences of 22 offenders (In June he commuted another 46). In the last two years, his Attorney General and the FBI Director—the two highest law enforcement posts in all the land—had delivered historic speeches acknowledging systemic bias in the justice system. Last spring the National Academy of Sciences had released a Department of Justice-funded report dispelling the myth that stiff prison sentences correlated to crime reduction and calling for sweeping reforms to the prison system. California voters had reduced several felonies to misdemeanors. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia had decriminalized marijuana. States across the country were restoring sentencing discretion to judges, abolishing capital punishment and investing in alternatives to incarceration. The ACLU had launched an 8-year, $50 million grant to cut imprisonment in half, an idea originally proposed by Van Jones’ #cut50 initiative. Jones, meanwhile, had convened a “bipartisan summit on justice reform” in March that featured the liberal ACLU and conservative Koch Industries, both of whom had just invested seed capital in a brand new organization called the Coalition for Public Safety, the aim of which is to make the system “smarter, fairer and more cost effective.” 

Yet, none of the political and legal activity, check writing, lofty speechifying and hashtagging will matter if people in towns like Rosendale aren’t part of the discussion. These are the places where “colorblindness” thrives in plain sight. Residents lean left and vote blue. They consider themselves post-racial and progressive. Yet their interactions with black and brown communities that feed the prison system are minimal. 

The New Paltz professors started off with curve ball. Is ending “mass incarceration” the right goal for the movement or is ending “mass criminalization” the real objective, they ask? Stop and Frisk presents a prime example of the latter. Under its reign in New York City, several hundred thousand black and brown young men were detained because of their identity. Most were never sent to jail but no one would dispute that they’d been harmed in a way most Americans will never experience. More recently, the Justice Department’s report on Ferguson revealed that officers saw African-American residents as “sources of revenue,” handing out a variety of pricey tickets for petty civil infractions then issuing even costlier arrest warrants when the offenders could not afford to pay.

The question spurred a polite classroom discussion about the merits of one term over the other. No fire, no fury. Only the shop instructor dared to expose his actual worldview and experience. Everyone else intellectualized the discussion, offering their thoughts rather than their hearts. And when the conversation threatened to expire of natural causes, the professors filled the awkward silence with long-winded monologues that sucked the air out of the room.

Suddenly, an expansive figure next to me wearing eyeglasses the size of a compact discs and a deflated Yankees cap lifted his leathery, arthritic fingers to indicate his wish to be heard. Up to now, the figure had remained quiet, content it appeared based on my vantage point to his left, to play the role of silent sage.

 “When we’re trying to build this mass movement,” he starts, his voice a syncopated throwback to the black power era, “we first have to use what the people have.” When he paused no one rushed to fill the silence. “And that language that we have is everybody’s locked up. That’s mass incarceration,” he added to emphasize the gravity of the moment—that this was not the time for thought experiments. The movement has begun and wasn’t looking for this audience to redefine it.

Sixty-eight year-old Odell Winfield has seen the dawn, climax and denouement of the drug war in America. By 21, the Hempstead, Long Island native, had a wife, four kids and a job loading trucks at a warehouse that he knew, even then, was never going to lift them out of the dilapidated complex they were living in. So he organized his crew into a tenant’s association, taught himself landlord-tenant law, and took his landlord to court. Rather than repair the building, the landlord decided to sell. But all that the tenants got for their efforts was a new deadbeat slumlord. Still, that first taste of grassroots organizing lit a fuse. They all became active in the community.

They also became involved in the heroin trade. The narcotic was just beginning to flood the streets when Winfield and his friends were frequenting New York City. Dealers were making beaucoup money, easy money. They decided to build their own heroin empire on Long Island.

“The same people that I struggled with, I hustled with,” he sighed when we spoke three days after the meeting. “We just never sat down and talked about how we also were a part of genocide by selling drugs to our community. We never really talked about that. It was money and we took care of our families.” 

The police busted down Winfield’s door in 1972 and sent him to Nassau County Jail. He was convicted in the county court of multiple possession and distribution charges and sentenced to 55 years at Comstock Correctional Facility in Saratoga.

“I walked out in the big yard and thought every black male I knew had got arrested,” he recalled. “And that was only one prison. In every prison up there, the majority of the inmates were black. This is the real beginning of mass incarceration.” 

The mainstream narrative about how the United States grew the world’s largest prison population—2.2 million—typically goes something like this: Starting in the early 1980s under President Reagan, the federal government launched the war on drugs, passing one stiff crime bill after another, each peeling away long established safeguards for defendants and prisoners, adding more criminal offenses with longer sentences and establishing lopsided drug policies, most notably the 100:1 crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparity that would devastate black and brown communities. Even as critics pointed to deindustrialization, globalization and urban disinvestment as the ultimate causes of soaring crime rates, lawmakers felt pressured to push for harsher penalties to pacify voters throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. Amid this pressure cooker environment, Bill Clinton signed the 1994 crime bill. Widely considered the most ruthless set of criminal laws in modern history, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 introduced a federal three-strikes provision, expanded the number of death penalty offenses, allowed thirteen year-olds to be tried as adults, and increased and militarized police forces, all while defunding prevention programs. The rest is history.

This narrative frames mass incarceration as the unintended outcome of an anxious nation’s appeal for law and order during a period of crisis. Framing it this way sets the stage for Hillary Clinton to call the criminal justice system “out of balance” then propose “smart” solutions like body cameras for cops and alternatives to prison for “low level” offenders to restore the balance, as she did in her much-celebrated speech at Columbia University.

Winfield was the first person I met who challenged this narrative. But as I started to ask around, I discovered that he wasn’t alone.

“If you read the literature of the sixties and of black radicals, the Black Power movement, and the movements of Native Americans and Chicanos, turned into a movement to free political prisoners,” said Johanna Fernandez, a Baruch College history professor whose book on the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican nationalist group,  is under contract with Princeton University Press. To be sure, Alexander draws the connection between the urban rebellions of the 1960s and mainstream America’s rising concerns about crime. Fernandez just takes it one step further. In her analysis, the tactic of mass incarceration was first deployed to discredit and delete civil rights and black power movement activists under the FBI’s well-documented Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). “That strategy was a very conscious attempt to criminalize black radicals and imprison them,” explained an impassioned Fernandez. That strategy then was deployed against the mass of black people in the nineteen seventies and eighties at the height of deindustrialization.”

In keeping with this alternate history, at Comstock Winfield met Black Panthers, Young Lords, and white inmates who’d taken part in the Attica uprising two years earlier. Together they decided to form an organization. They called the People’s Party.

“We sat down and hammered out a platform,” Winfield said. “I still live by that platform.

Their objective was to secure services like access to education that the prisoners at Attica had given their lives for. Winfield was elected Education Minister. He started a library, sent away for books to stock it with, distributed literature to cells and organized study groups. When Skidmore College began offering a degree-granting program in the prison, he jumped on the opportunity. Along the way, he accumulated enough “good conduct time” to qualify for early release. By the time he walked out of Comstock in 1976 he only needed another year and a half to complete his bachelor’s.

Rather than return to Hempstead, Winfield moved to Albany where he enrolled at Siena College, rented an apartment in town, and even bought a used a car to get around courtesy of federal Pell Grant program. In the meantime, he reconnected with his four kids and started repairing those relationships. As soon as he finished his degree, he landed a position at Regent’s College (now Excelsior College) setting up external degree programs for adults, including those in prison. He would remain with Regent’s for the next two decades.

Yet, that was just part of Odell Winfield’s journey to redemption. He started a re-entry program that he quickly evolved into a halfway house. He returned to prisons as a volunteer advisor throughout. He founded an African roots library in Poughkeepsie. He joined every social movement from anti-apartheid to Occupy. And, in 2012, he founded the End the New Jim Crow Action Network (ENJAN) to push for reforms such as Ban the Box, which, notably, became law in Ulster County last December.

“Everything I did,” the grandfather of 19 offered when I asked what had motivated him, “was all about the give back.”

There is more to the story. As it happened, Winfield was arrested one year before New York passed the infamous Rockefeller drug laws—a series of draconian penal codes triggering lengthy mandatory sentences for drug offenses. He readily acknowledges that he was “one of those arrested that pushed the efforts of the legislature to pass the laws.” Had he been arrested under the law, he could still be serving his sentence. Likewise, if he had come out of prison twenty years later than he did, he would have been banned from receiving federal aid for college, visiting his family in public housing, receiving welfare or getting food stamps.  

“It’s very important that people have an understanding of the bipartisan way we got into this mess,” Van Jones tells me when we speak in early May. “There is this mythology that Republicans passed a bunch of horrible laws and Democrats were trying to prevent what happened from happening. That’s completely ahistorical.”

When we spoke in May, Jones was still riding the wave of his bipartisan summit on criminal justice reform in Washington, D.C. He praised Republican Governor Deal in Georgia and even Rick Perry Texas for their criminal justice reforms. But he was also disappointed with what he saw as the left’s distrust of the right’s motives.  It’s no secret that Newt Gingrich isn’t interested in shrinking the prison population because it discriminates against black people. He wants to scale back the $80 billion industry because it will put money back into the pockets of private citizens. This continues to be the barrier for many of the left who see mass incarceration as a racial justice issue. But in Jones’ view, this shouldn’t be the case.

“I can guarantee nobody is sitting in a prison cell saying I want to come home but I hope no Republicans help. Nobody is sitting at home missing their mom and dad saying I wish they would come but I sure hope that the Koch brothers don’t help. That’s just stupid!”  

 Jones’ new alliance with right wing policy and lawmakers is particularly surprising in light of his past entanglements with the party. Just six years ago, conservative lawmakers pushed him out of his green jobs post in the Obama administration when his signature showed up on a 9/11 Truther petition. Yet, if anything, he seemed to have absorbed that setback and returned with a more pragmatic understanding of the way movements begin, build and evolve to complement his boundless optimism. For him, that fiscal conservatives, libertarians and even socially conservative evangelicals were “moving our way” on criminal justice reform was what mattered most in this moment.

 “Where we’re starting on criminal justice is not going to be where we end up,” he assured me, pointing to the early days of the civil rights movement when Montgomery bus boycotters were only seeking a more humane form of desegregation. “My concern is that we have people so concerned with the last domino that we won’t knock down the first.”

At this moment in time, that “first domino” is undoubtedly non-violent, drug offenders.  Practically every piece of legislation that has legalized, decriminalized or reduced punishment at the state or federal level in recent years has centered on this population of offenders. All 68 of the sentences that President Obama commuted in 2015 stemmed from drug offenses. Drug offenders have even had their federal financial aid, welfare and food stamps rights restored.

That domino didn’t fall overnight, though. Advocates, scholars and researchers spent two decades discrediting the War on Drugs with data and studies both here and abroad that proved it was issue better suited to a public health response.

“Those kind of safer, unemotional, objective arguments are an easier way for us to attach ourselves to the problem and start to come to terms with it and start to work together to find solutions.”

Allison Holcomb is the Director of the ACLU’s new $50 million Campaign to End Mass Incarceration. In 2012, she led the ACLU’s successful effort to legalize marijuana in the state of Washington. The state now estimates sales of the drug will generate nearly $2 billion over the first four years of legalization.

Holcomb’s new role is national and carries an ambitious mandate from the Open Society Foundation to instigate reforms in states across the country that cut the prison population in half by 2020. The strategy and specific targets are still being defined, but she’s optimistic about what they can accomplish given the ACLU’s 50 state reach and track record.

“I think we can definitely move to a place of agreeing that people that don’t pose a threat of physical injury to others don’t need to be locked in cages,” she said, echoing the aspirations of many I’d spoken to as well as Hillary Clinton. However, in the next breath she conceded that the “tougher question is dealing with those offenders who have caused physical harm.”

Indeed, that reform conversation is still in its infancy. Even though recent studies in New York and California as well as one by the Bureau of Justice Statistics have found that murderers have the lowest recidivism rates of all offenders, the political will to explore what, in fact, is violent and whether our punishments match the crime just isn’t there. For now, the strategy to end mass incarceration is a cautious one, despite the reckless ramp up that bloated the system in the first place

Neverthless, if the intention is to end mass incarceration, then sooner than later we’re going to have to wrestle with those “tougher” questions. After all, if we could release every drug offender in America today and still house 1.7 million prisoners—more than any other country in the world, still.