This Land

by Dan Barry

  East Piper Avenue now has its sidewalk back, along with a vegetable garden, a grassy expanse where a children’s playground will be built, and, close to one of those abutting abandoned houses, a mix-and-match orchard of 18 young fruit trees.

  “This is a Golden Delicious tree,” Mr. Ryan says, reading the tags on the saplings. “This is a Warren pear. That’s a McIntosh. This is a Mongolian cherry tree….”

  In many ways, this garden on East Piper Avenue reflects all of Flint, a city working hard to re-invent itself, a city so weary of serving as the country’s default example of post-industrial decline. Nearly every day its visitors’ bureau sends out a “Changing Perceptions of Flint” email message that includes a call to defend the city’s honor:

  “If a blogger is bashing Flint and Genesee County, go post a positive message. If there is an article about the depressed economy in Flint, go post something uplifting.”

  But uplifting and depressing both describe Flint, where encouraging development grows beside wholesale abandonment. You can visit one of the first-class museums (at the moment, the Flint Institute of Arts has a music-enhanced exhibit of rock ’n’ roll posters), then drive past rows of vacant, vandalized houses that convey a Hurricane Katrina despair—though Flint’s hurricane came in the form of the automobile industry’s collapse.

  No question: Downtown Flint, about five miles from Mr. Ryan’s garden, suddenly feels vital. A large civil engineering firm has built an office there, and the headquarters of a second large firm is about to open. New dormitory rooms at the University of Michigan-Flint are full. New restaurants have popped up, including an Irish pub in a long-closed men’s clothing store. An old flophouse is now a smart apartment complex. The majestic Durant Hotel, vacant for 35 years, is being transformed into apartments for students and young professionals.

  And just last week, General Motors announced a $230 million investment in four local factories as part of its plan to build a new generation of fuel-efficient cars.

  But Dayne Walling, the recently elected mayor, says these developments, while exciting, tell but one side of the city’s story. The other side: a steep decline in the tax base, an unemployment rate hovering around 25 percent, rising health care and pension costs, drastic cutbacks in municipal services, a legacy of fiscal mismanagement—and, of course, the loss of some 70,000 jobs at General Motors, the industry that defined Flint for nearly a century.

  The job loss, compounded by the recession, has led to an astonishing plunge in the city’s population—to about 110,000, and falling, from roughly 200,000 in 1960. Thousands of abandoned houses now haunt the 34-square-mile city; one in four houses is said to be vacant.

  As a result, Flint finds itself the centerpiece of a national debate about so-called shrinking cities, in which mostly abandoned neighborhoods might become green space, and their residents would be encouraged to live closer to a downtown core.

  The matter is being pressed here by the Genesee County Land Bank, which acquires foreclosed properties and works with communities to restore or demolish them. It has been sponsoring a series of forums titled “Strengthening Our Community in the Face of Population Decline.”

  Mayor Walling, though, prefers to talk about sustainable cities, rather than shrinking cities. He imagines the Flint of 2020 as a city of 100,000, with a vibrant downtown surrounded by greener neighborhoods, in which residents have doubled their lot sizes by acquiring adjacent land where houses once stood.

  “We’re down, but we’re not out,” he says. “And that’s a classic American story.”

  Part of that classic story is up in the north end, on East Piper Avenue, where some people are trying to make use of one of the few abundant resources in Flint: land.

  Harry Ryan, 59, the child of auto workers, traveled for years as a rhythm and blues musician before returning to follow his parents into the auto plants. He got laid off, found other employment, and is now retired, with gray in his mustache and a stoop to his walk.

  In 2005 he went to the land bank—he is on its advisory board—and received permission to plant a garden on a lot it owns a few yards from the broken side window of an abandoned house. He and some neighbors cleaned brush, removed the remnant pieces of concrete of demolished houses, and planted hardy turnips and greens.

  But the garden could not contain their growing sense of pride in their community. Soon they were mowing front lawns all along East Piper Avenue—for free, and without seeking permission. “We just cut everybody’s property, even if they were sitting on the porch,” he says. “Sometimes they wouldn’t say anything, and that would get us mad.”

  That first year, Mr. Ryan and Ms. Barber, who works nights at the post office, bagged up the greens and gave them away, often by just leaving a bag at the door of someone they suspected could use the food but was too proud to ask for it. But they also ate some of what they harvested; Mr. Ryan still savors that first batch of collard greens he had with some smoked turkey.

  Today, the ever-expanding garden continues to feed people. Front lawns are still mowed, though now by neighborhood children paid through a county grant. Ms. Barber still works in the garden, and Mr. Jones has expanded his sidewalk mission to the cross street of Verdun, where he has cleared a path past the shell of a house lost to arson.

  When asked why he does the work, he just says, “It needs to be done.”

  As for Mr. Ryan, he is working on a plan to build a power-generating windmill in the garden on East Piper Avenue in the great Michigan city of Flint. That’s right: a windmill.

  A Dealer Serving Life Without Having Taken One

  GREENVILLE, ILL.—DECEMBER 22, 2013

  A lifer with a pen sat in the 65-square-foot cell he shares. A calendar taunted from a bulletin board. He began to write.

  Dear President Obama.

  He acknowledged his criminal past. He expressed remorse. And he pleaded for a second chance, now that he had served 18 years of the worst sentence short of execution: life without parole, for a nonviolent first offense.

  Mr. President, he wrote, “you are my final hope.”

  Sincerely, Jesse Webster.

  Eleven hundred men reside in medium security at this remote Greenville federal prison in southern Illinois. Most come and go, sentences served. Others stay, their legal appeals exhausted, their only hope to take up a pen and enter the long-shot lottery of executive clemency with a salutation that begins: Dear President Obama.

  The prisoners are men like Mr. Webster, 46, a former cocaine dealer from the South Side of Chicago. And his old cellmate, Reynolds Wintersmith Jr., 39, a former teenage crack-cocaine dealer from Rockford, Ill., who has spent half his life in prison.

  The two friends first met at the maximum-security prison in Leavenworth, Kan. That was almost 15 years ago.

  “We were both younger then,” Mr. Webster recalled.

  Mr. Webster, bald, stocky and bespectacled, discussed his case several days ago in the spare visitors’ room at Greenville. Signs everywhere said “no” this and “no” that. Nearby stood an artificial Christmas tree used by families as a prop to feign normality in holiday photos.

  “I should have done time,” Mr. Webster said. “But a living death sentence?”

  Growing up, his family of seven barely survived on his stepfather’s job as a parking-lot attendant. Dropping out of ninth grade to make money for the household, he wound up buffing at a carwash favored by a big-tipping drug dealer. Seeing hustle in 16-year-old Jesse’s eyes, he offered the boy a job as his driver, $200 a week.

  Mr. Webster never forgot what his friends had said and how they said it: “that I had moved up in low places.”

  He became a low-key freelancer in a hooked-up world, living in a doorman building, driving a Volvo and concealing a gun he never used. “I didn’t do flash,” he said.

  In 1995, though, he learned that the law was looking for him, so he decided to turn himself in. One day a station wagon left the South Side for the North Side, jammed with his mother, brother
and others who wanted to be there in support. “We all went as a family,” his mother, Robin Noble, said.

  Soon Mr. Webster was being cuffed from behind, an indelible moment. “The look on his face,” Leon Noble, his younger brother, said. “Like he let us down.”

  Prosecutors offered leniency on the condition that Mr. Webster become a confidential informant against a powerful drug gang. He declined, which Matthew Crowl, a prosecutor in his case, described many years later as a reasonable decision, given that the gang had already killed an informant.

  Mr. Webster was convicted of participating in a drug conspiracy and filing false tax returns. His sentence of life without parole left his mother weeping and his brother’s heart dropping to the floor. For a sentence like that, the inmate said, “I thought I’d have to hurt somebody, do bodily harm.”

  The federal judge, James B. Zagel, explained to the court that he was adhering to the mandatorily harsh sentencing guidelines of the day. “To put it in simple terms,” the judge said before imposing sentence, “it’s too high.”

  If it were 1986 or today, Mr. Webster would probably be sentenced to serve about 25 years. But he was sentenced in 1996, during a period when sentencing guidelines gave federal judges virtually no discretion in assessing punishment.

  “That was at the peak of mandatory sentencing,” said Vanita Gupta, the deputy legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union.

  The A.C.L.U.—which highlighted the cases of Mr. Webster and Mr. Wintersmith, among dozens of others, in a recent report on lifers—estimates that more than 2,000 federal inmates are serving life without parole for nonviolent offenses.

  What’s more, in a sample study of 169 federal inmates incarcerated for nonviolent crimes, the organization found dozens who were first-time offenders, as well as many others who had only misdemeanors and juvenile infractions in their past.

  And this was just in the federal prison system.

  “We kind of lost our moral center and any sense of proportionality in our sentencing” during the so-called war on drugs, Ms. Gupta said. “The result was the throwing away of certain people’s lives, predominantly black and brown people’s lives.”

  Mr. Webster spent 16 years in federal maximum-security prisons, including Leavenworth, willing himself past the temptations, the lockdowns, the nearly hopeless reality. He received only three infractions—all minor, with the last one in 1997—and earned the trusted position of captain’s orderly.

  In July 2011, finally, he won a transfer to relative tranquility, here in Greenville. “Took me 17 years to get here,” he said.

  Up at 6:30. Bowl of oatmeal. Stretch. Clean cell. Work as a unit orderly. Run three miles. Push-ups and pull-ups. Shower. Lunch. Volunteer as a tutor to other inmates. Stand for count. Dinner. Work on job skills and résumé writing. Shower. Read the Bible. And call Mom, whose picture he keeps tucked into his bottom bunk’s ceiling.

  Family members say Mr. Webster lifts spirits on the outside when he calls from the inside, urging improvement, strength. Mr. Noble, for example, considers his older brother to be his role model.

  All the while, Mr. Webster knows that the associates who testified against him have been free for years; that his mother is ill; that his daughter, Jasmine, who was 4 when he went away, has given him a grandson he has seen only once. That barring the secular equivalent of divine intervention, he will die in prison khaki.

  A few months ago, Mr. Webster’s lawyer, Jessica Ring Amunson, sent a thick packet of documents to the Office of the Pardon Attorney of the Justice Department. This office assists the president in exercising his power of executive clemency, including pardons and the commutations of sentences.

  In these papers were Mr. Webster’s life, the bad and the good. The particulars of his case, his achievements as an inmate, and many, many letters requesting a commutation of Mr. Webster’s sentence, all effectively beginning with: Dear Mr. President.

  They even included appeals for clemency from the prosecutors and the judge in his case.

  “A commutation of sentence which would result in his service of 20 or so years in prison is enough punishment for his crimes,” Judge Zagel wrote.

  The packet also included Mr. Webster’s letter, which had undergone several drafts as he sought concision in conveying to the president the essence of who Jesse Webster was, and is. “I didn’t want a lot of mumbo jumbo,” he says. “I know he’s a busy man.”

  The odds never favored Mr. Webster, though, at least not this round. Nearly 2,800 other requests for commutation of sentence were pending—including one from his friend Mr. Wintersmith—and before last week, Mr. Obama had commuted the sentence of just one inmate.

  Turkeys at Thanksgiving had a better chance at mercy.

  “But you’ve got to keep up the hope,” Mr. Webster said, shrugging, before leaving the visitors’ room.

  On Thursday, President Obama increased his number of commutations by eight (while also pardoning 13 others). He described his action as “an important step toward restoring fundamental ideals of justice and fairness,” and called on Congress to come up with further sentencing reforms.

  That morning, some inmates were gathered in the Greenville prison gymnasium, including Mr. Webster and Mr. Wintersmith. A voice came over the intercom, summoning Mr. Wintersmith to the associate warden’s office.

  Mr. Webster instantly knew what had happened, and what had not. He later said he was overjoyed for his friend, and hopeful that the president would remember the many, many others, and “spread his grace on us.”

  EPILOGUE

  In March 2016, Jesse Webster heard his name announced over the prison intercom, ordering him to report immediately to the assistant warden’s office. The last time he had been summoned was to inform him that he had been given the privilege of choosing the Christmas specialties to be sold in the commissary. He went with barbecue potato chips and some smoked cheeses.

  This time, though, he was told that his lawyer, Jessica Ring Amunson, was holding the line on the office telephone. She had some news. Mr. Webster, it turned out, was one of 61 federal inmates, all serving time for drug-related crimes, whose sentences had just been commuted by President Obama.

  All he could think to say was: “Wow.”

  Mr. Webster works now as a homeless prevention specialist for Catholic Charities in his hometown, Chicago. He is also taking classes in communication at the City Colleges of Chicago. And, he said, he travels in his free time to schools and churches to “tell my story about my choices and consequences.”

  That is the name of his company: Choices and Consequences.

  On a Trip to Fenway, Only the Game Was Meaningless

  BOSTON, MASS.—OCTOBER 4, 2015

  My good friend of 30 years has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Not much that he can do about this, beyond hoping for some major medical breakthrough, and nothing, really, that I can do. So let’s go to a ballgame.

  I meet my friend, Bill Malinowski, at his home in Rhode Island. He will drive his Acura wagon the hour to Fenway Park for a night game of no importance. I will drive back, because having A.L.S. is exhausting. These days, he’s usually asleep by 9.

  The diagnosis this spring only confirmed what he suspected. A superior athlete—marathoner, swimmer, biker—who chronicled his every mile in the chase after fitness, he knew his body. Now the body he so carefully nurtured had betrayed him in some cosmic bait-and-switch.

  Cry. Curse the fates. Monitor the research. Keep working out as best he can for as long as he can. Keep his head clear as best he can for as long as he can. At least there’s baseball tonight.

  Bill walks to his car as if the pebbles and tree roots conspire to trip him. Gingerly he steps, wearing red linen shorts and a black brace on a weakening left leg that once helped to power him through 15 marathons, three triathlons and scores of road races.

  Let’s go.

  “Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis” usually precedes “also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.” It helps the l
ess clinically minded to summon to memory Gehrig’s iconic farewell speech in 1939, his head bowed, half-smiling to himself at the dark joke played on the durable Iron Horse. Dead within two years, at 37, the Yankees great had called himself the luckiest man in the world.

  Bill loathes the Yankees.

  The word “loathes” does not quite convey the depths of his tribal hatred. A Red Sox guy to the marrow, he roots against the Yankees with a negative-force vigor that has sustained him through this trying summer. His wife, Mary Murphy, says he sometimes wakes at night to check the Yankees score. A Yankees loss eases the approaching morning.

  We head north on Interstate 95, two old friends, both 57 years old. With coffee hot in the cup holders, Springsteen low on satellite radio and not a cloud in the early-autumn, late-afternoon sky, we talk about everything and nothing, as we have so many times before. Only now even talk about nothing takes work, this disease named after a Yankee thinning his voice, requiring exertion for every word he utters.

  “It’s challenging to talk,” he says, and I can hear it.

  This is why we text now more than talk on the phone, our virtual conversations a mash-up of medical reports and baseball.

  May 4: “Doc says I have ALS.”

  May 20: “Great joy! The Skanks have lost 8 of 11 & the Sox are pitching well.”

  June 2: “I despise A-Fraud. The ultimate jerk.”

  June 18: “I despise the Yankees, the most hated team in pro sports.”

  June 28: “Just got a leg brace on Thursday @ Mass General. It helps stabilize my walking.”

  July 27: “Just took the Detroit series!”

  Sept. 8: “I can go with you to a night game… Just scheduled an appointment at Johns Hopkins…”