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 19th and early 20th 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.
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