In our antitax era, many cities fish for revenue by taxing the homeless, turning the police into de facto bill collectors. Those unable to pay the fines and warrants for panhandling, loitering, or sleeping outdoors—meaning most people forced to panhandle, loiter, or sleep outdoors in the first place—can be hauled into court at any time. As Astra Taylor observes, “Municipal budgets are overly reliant on petty infraction penalties because affluent, mostly white citizens have been engaged in a ‘tax revolt’ for decades, lobbying for lower rates and special treatment.” Black Lives Matter has in part been a rebellion against this criminalization of poverty and in particular the police persecution of African Americans for minor infractions.
The situation is particularly bitter in San Francisco, now annexed as part of Silicon Valley, since the tech industry created a gigantic bubble of wealth that puts economic inequality in much sharper relief. Here is Mark Zuckerberg, the fifth-richest person in the world, in his house on the western edge of the historically Latino and working-class Mission District. Here is Division Street, on the northern edge of that neighborhood, where more than 250 housing-deprived people settled in tents early in 2016, seeking shelter from both the rain and the mayor’s sweeps of the homeless as he primped the city for Super Bowl visitors.
Of course, being homeless is itself hard work—over the thirty-six years that I’ve observed the indigent in San Francisco, they have often made me think of hunter-gatherers. These people forage for survival, eluding attack, roaming, watching, maybe making the rounds of social services and soup kitchens, trying to protect what possessions they have, starting over from nothing when medications, phones, and documents are stolen by compatriots or seized by police. The city is a wilderness to them; that they now live in tents designed for recreational camping is all the more ironic. Photographer Robert Gumpert notes that some feel they cannot leave their tents for even short lengths of time, for fear of losing their belongings. Others suffer from sleep deprivation, since they can find no safe place to rest.
Those without houses are too often regarded as problems to people rather than as people with problems. No wonder the means of addressing them is often that used to address litter, dirt, and contamination: removal. “If you’re trying to prevent the undesirables from using park bathrooms, adding porta potties seems like a pretty decent solution,” commented a Mission resident named Branden on an online neighborhood forum. “If you’re trying to keep the dirty undesirables away forever, you’ll need constant police presence with a mandate to use violence to enforce whatever law prohibits their existence.”
Bird in a Cage:
Visiting Jarvis Masters on Death Row
(2016)
There are two things I think about nearly every time I row out into San Francisco Bay. One is a passage from Shankar Vedantam’s The Hidden Brain, in which he talks about a swim he once took. A decent swimmer in his own estimate, Vedantam went out into the sea one day and felt that he had become superb and powerful; he was instantly proud of his new abilities. Far from shore, he realized he had been riding a current and was going to have to fight it all the way back to shore. “Unconscious bias influences our lives in exactly the same manner as that undercurrent,” Vedantam writes. “Those who travel with the current will always feel they are good swimmers; those who swim against the current may never realize they are better swimmers than they imagine.”
Most mornings I row out against the current, and the moment when I turn around is exhilarating. Strokes that felt choppy and ineffectual are suddenly graceful and powerful. I feel very good at what I do, even though I know that the tide is going my way.
Rowing is the closest I will ever come to flying. On calm, flat days my battered old oars make twin circles of ripples that spread out until they intersect behind the stern of the boat. I’m forever retreating from that gentle disturbance, the water smoothing itself into glass again as I go. On the calmest days, when the bay is a mirror, these oars pull me and my scull through reflected clouds in long glides, the two nine-foot oars moving together like wings in that untrammeled space.
The birds are one of the great joys, the terns and pelicans and gulls, the coots and stilts and cormorants, who dive and fly and float, living in the air and the water and the plane between them. The freedom of rowing is enlarged by the freedom of the birds. I set out from the estuary of Corte Madera Creek as it pours into San Francisco Bay. En route I pass Point San Quentin, and San Quentin Prison.
When I row past the prison I think about currents and I think about Jarvis Jay Masters, who’s been on my mind for a long time. We were born eight months apart, to the day, and are both children of coastal California. We’re both storytellers. But he has been in San Quentin since he was nineteen, more than a third of a century, and has swum against the current all his life. For the past twenty-five years, he’s been on death row, though the evidence is on the side of his innocence.
Until he turned twenty-three, Masters’s story could have been that of any number of poor inner-city boys: his father, missing in action; his mother, drawn into the vortex of heroin; his early neglect; and a ride through the best and then the worst of the foster care system, which dropped him straight into the juvenile prison system. At nineteen, he was sent to San Quentin for armed robbery. Four years later, on June 8, 1985, Howell Burchfield, a San Quentin prison guard and father of five, was murdered. Two members of a Black prison gang were convicted of planning and carrying out the crime. They were given life sentences. Masters was accused of conspiring in the murder and sharpening the weapon used to stab Burchfield in the heart. He received the death penalty.
In books and movies, resourceful lawyers or investigators find a subtle detail, possibly two, to undermine an otherwise credible case. But in Masters’s case there aren’t merely one or two weak links. So far as I can tell, the whole chain is rotten. Major witnesses changed their testimony, and several of the prisoners who testified against Masters recanted. Some testified that they had been offered incentives to incriminate him. One star witness was so unreliable and so widely used as an informant that dozens of cases in the state had to be thrown out because of his involvement. He has recanted his testimony about Masters. The man convicted of the stabbing said in 2004 that Masters was innocent and that all three men on trial were “under orders from [gang] commanders that, under threat of death, none of us could discuss the [gang] in any way.” In other words, Masters faced two death penalties, and one set him up for the other.
I first read about Masters in Altars in the Street, a 1997 book by Melody Ermachild Chavis, the defense investigator for his murder trial. They have remained close for thirty years. Chavis and I later became friends. “It was obvious … even way back then, between 1985 and 1990, that they had a lot of suspects and a lot of theories,” she told me. “The big mistake they made was: they destroyed the crime scene. They bagged it all up and threw it in the Marin County dump.”
She described the way prisoners and prison officials got rid of hundreds of notes that had been exchanged between prisoners, as well as a large collection of prison-made knives, which had been thrown out of the cells when the prisoners realized that they were going to be searched. According to one account in Masters’s mountain of legal documents, guards collected two different potential murder weapons, which they said they put into envelopes as evidence. Both disappeared before the trial.
Masters was a gang member at the time of the killing, but the gang’s leaders eventually gave many reasons why it was impossible that he had sharpened the missing weapon. One was that he had voted against killing Burchfield, an act of insubordination for which he had been stripped of responsibilities. Another was geography; he was on the fourth tier of a cell block, and the murder took place on the second tier. Moving a weapon back and forth would have been difficult and dangerous, and a witness testified that the weapon never left the second tier. Too, someone else admitted to making it.
Masters’s attorneys filed the opening brief of his appeal i
n 2001, after which his case progressed slowly. It was not until November 2015 that the California Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the appeal. Even by the standards of California’s glacial appeals process, this is an unusually long time.
Though only 6.5 percent of Californians are Black, African Americans make up 29 percent of the state’s incarcerated and 36 percent of those condemned to death. They are more likely than others convicted of similar crimes to receive the death penalty, and assailants of any race convicted of killing a white person are far more likely to be sentenced to death than if the victim is of another race. There are those who swim with the current and those who swim against it, and then there are those who have fire hoses turned on them.
The first time I saw Masters was at a session of a 2011 evidentiary hearing. There, in the small courtroom, stood a tall, gracious man in shackles and an orange jumpsuit. A dozen or so friends and supporters were present, most of them from the Buddhist community. Since his sentencing, Masters had become a devoted Buddhist practitioner. He told me that he meditates daily and tries to incorporate teachings about compassion into his daily life among prisoners and guards. In 1989, he took vows from Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, an exiled Tibetan lama and distinguished teacher who died in 2002. (The first vow was “From this day forward I will not hurt or harm other people even if it costs my life.”) Masters has since prevented violence and suicide, comforted the devastated, and encouraged the growth of fellow prisoners, and despite the crime he’s accused of is clearly liked and trusted by the guards. Pema Chödrön, a writer and abbess who is perhaps the best-known Buddhist in the West after the Dalai Lama, speaks of Masters with admiration, and visits him every year.
When we began talking on the phone, in late 2015, Masters told me how much prisoners crave connection with the outside world. Buddhism allowed him to join a community of ethical and idealistic people with practical ideas about how to respond to suffering and rage. It took him outward and inward. “Meditation has become something I cannot do without. I see and hear more clearly, feel more relaxed and calm, and I actually find my experiences slowing down,” he wrote in 1997. “I’m more appreciative of each day as I observe how things constantly change and dissolve. I’ve realized that everything is in a continual process of coming and going. I don’t hold happiness or anger for a long time. It just comes and goes.”
He’s also connected to the outside world through his writing. He’s the author of two published books and many magazine essays. He told me that his essays “go out on their own wings and some of them fly back to me.” It’s not the first time he’s used flight as a metaphor for his own reach; the title of his memoir comes from an incident when he stopped another prisoner from nailing a seagull with a basketball in the prison yard. Asked why, he said off the top of his head, “That bird has my wings,” and so the gripping, moving narrative of his early years is titled That Bird Has My Wings.
“You know, it’s really hard to get in,” I told Masters, about my attempts to figure out how to move through the prison system and arrive at our visit. “It was easy for me,” he replied, and we laughed. From the time I first wrote him, it took me approximately two months of bureaucratic wrangling to be able to visit him. Finally, on a cold Sunday in January, I showed up at the visitors’ entrance wearing clothing in the permitted colors and carrying what few articles I was allowed: a key, a state-issued ID, some coins and bills for the vending machines, and a few pages of fact-checker’s questions and quotes to verify, sealed inside a clear Ziploc bag. After half an hour in a waiting room inhabited largely by women of color, I showed my ID, was checked against the system’s file on me, and passed through an x-ray machine. On the other side, I stepped out to face a shabby jumble of sinister architectural styles. I was suddenly left alone to find my way to the visiting rooms a couple hundred yards away.
There were more doors to go through, operated by a young woman in the guard booth, who let me in and took my license and pass. I entered a room in which everything except the vending machines was painted a pale buttery yellow. There were fifteen cages in which prisoners were locked with their visitors, a U-shaped arrangement with guards on the inside (where prisoners entered) and outside (where the visitors entered). Each cage was about four by seven feet, not much smaller than the cells the prisoners live in, and was furnished with two plastic chairs and a tiny table.
A guard wearing a heavy belt with keys dangling on steel chains locked me in the cage closest to the door through which the prisoners entered and exited. Masters arrived with his hands cuffed behind him. He offered them up through a slot in the cage so the guard could unlock him, a gesture both had apparently engaged in so many times that it appeared utterly routine. Thus began my first face-to-face meeting with Masters. Soon afterward a stocky white man with gray hair passed by on his way out of the visiting room, and he and Masters shouted something at each other. It was a little unclear to me whether this was animosity or friendship, but Masters said it was the latter. The two men had known each other since being in foster care together. It was as though they’d been groomed for death row since they were little boys.
Another prisoner on his way back to his cell stopped to say that his daughter was on break from college and coming to see him. After their conversation and his departure, with the guard watching over him, Masters told me that he’d become a confidant, someone who, because of his writings and the way he conducted himself, was trusted with personal information that prisoners might not ordinarily share. He reminded me that he’s been in prison since before some of the younger inmates and guards were born.
“I have been so blessed because I was thinking about all that could have gone wrong, that could’ve affected me,” he told me. “All the things that didn’t go wrong. I have seen a lot of tragedy, and all of those things could’ve been me. I’ve seen the violent heart, and I count my blessings that I haven’t had that kind of hatred. Being on death row, I have a front row seat on what suffering is. I’m not damaged, not had this place tear me up like I’ve seen a hundred times. I’m probably crazy for not being crazy. I count my blessings every day.”
When I started rowing, I thought it would be a meditative practice of sorts, because so much concentration goes into the single gesture that moves you across the water. That repetitive movement requires the orchestration of the whole body, and it contains a host of subtleties in timing and positioning and force. You could spend a lifetime learning to do it right, but even as you’re learning you can go miles across the water. Gradually the gestures became second nature, and I could think about other things. Though I don’t get lost in thought much. It’s too beautiful.
Buddhism calls for the liberation of all beings, and it’s a useful set of tools for thinking about prisons and what we do with our freedoms. We are all rowing past one another, and it behooves us to know how the tides move and who’s being floated along and who’s being dragged down and who might not even be allowed in the water.
I bought Masters some things from the vending machines just outside the cages, which I could access and he couldn’t. He asked whether I was going to eat, and I said maybe I’d get a taco after. He said, “That’s freedom.” He was right. Freedom to eat tacos on my own schedule, to pursue the maximum freedom of rowing, to enter the labyrinth of San Quentin and leave a couple of hours later, to listen to stories and to tell them, to try to figure out which stories might free us.
It was stories written down by Melody Ermachild Chavis, by the Zen priest who’s now Jarvis’s spiritual guide, Alan Senauke, and by Jarvis Masters himself that made me care about him and think about him and talk to him and visit him. And it was these stories that made me hope to see him leave that cage on his own wings. Meanwhile, there is a way Jarvis is already free; as a storyteller he’s escaped the narratives about himself he’s been given, and he’s made his own version of what a life means.
“Whatever the outcome, I want to be in a position to deal with that,” he told me. “There are a lot
of people who say, ‘Jarvis, you gonna win this case.’ It’s the same way the other way,” meaning people who say he won’t win. “I’m scared both ways; I’m scared to think this way and scared that way. Do I lose sleep? Of course, I lose sleep. I do have some faith in this system, I just have to. The possibility of them coming to the right decision is there. I do have faith in the outcome of this system. History doesn’t give you a lot of good reasons for it. That’s just my bottom line.”
• • •
Coda: Case Dismissed (2016, 2018)
Masters’s lawyers filed their opening appeal brief in his case in 2001. On February 22, 2016, the long-awaited California Supreme Court ruling was handed down. It upheld his death penalty conviction and reaffirmed the legitimacy of his trial. That trial included what seem to be arbitrary or biased decisions about who would be regarded as a reliable witness and what evidence was admitted or not admitted.
The appeals process only allows challenges to the content of a trial itself. Now that the appeal has failed—after fifteen years of Masters’s life were spent in a small cage under a death sentence—his lawyers have petitioned for a rehearing and will continue with a habeas corpus petition. The latter allows new information to be introduced—including the fact that many witnesses recanted—and presents a stronger case overall. Still, whether Masters will ever be exonerated and go free is impossible to guess.
What we do know is that the odds are against him.
They have been against him much of his life. A good deal of space in the seventy-three-page Supreme Court decision is devoted to reciting bad things Masters is said to have done as a minor. One detail the court saw fit to bring up is this: “In 1974, when Masters was 12 years old, he took some change from another boy’s pocket, but ultimately gave the money back after the boy pleaded with Masters not to take it. Masters later told police that he had merely borrowed a dime from the boy but returned it when the boy said he wanted it back.” The court included this laughably minor exchange as evidence of his immorality, but it tells a story other than what the judges intended, about a child who was already being treated as a criminal, already stuck inside the legal system. (Masters was a foster child from an early age and, after he ran away from a brutal home, an inmate in the juvenile justice system.) Most of us committed petty crimes when we were children; most of us were not interrogated by the police or had it go on our record to be brought up against us forty-two years later.
Call Them by Their True Names Page 11