ALREADY WELL ON ITS way to swallowing the millions now gone, the parastate, the invisible world of the gangs, had also ensnared Michael. We can be sure of this because he never revealed the name of his accomplice.
I was able to ferret out his accomplice’s first name only after Michael’s death, interviewing members of our extended family. Even to this day, I have not been able to track down his last name. In his hospital conversation with the police, Michael protected himself not one whit. Although he told the police everything else, about his friend he was silent. Since he displayed a singular lack of an instinct for self-protection, he must have held this information back for reasons other than concern for his own well-being. He must have believed that if he gave the police this information, not he himself but his family would suffer retribution. For Devonn, the protective power of the gang served its purpose, at least in the short term. This is what protection in the mid-1990s in Los Angeles had come to mean.
After Michael’s arrest, Karen was devastated. We all were. Karen wanted to get him out on bail, but he told her that, no, he didn’t want that. He thought if he were back on the streets, he would just end up in more trouble. In choosing jail instead of the streets, in rejecting his gang entanglements, Michael at fifteen, in this moment of his first arrest, chose the seeming protection of the criminal justice system over any offer of protection from a gang.
The justice system had no interest in recognizing and responding to that choice. It was the bravest decision he ever made, yet it did not serve him well. There were few rewards for virtue when it briefly flashed in his unforgiving world.
NOW, AT LAST, WE’VE found our answer. When Michael was fifteen, both fire and ice hastened his destruction. The desire for bread was fire. Two warring systems of hate—the parastate and a metastasizing penal state—made ice. The latter, all on its own, would have sufficed.
Temptations, hidden snares often take us unawares.
And our hearts are made to bleed for a thoughtless word or deed.
And we wonder why the test when we try to do our best.
But we’ll understand it by and by.
Only on his rooftop, meditating, slipping the chains of desire and evading the menacing forces of hate, could Michael, possibly, have survived.
30.
MY HEART’S LOCKET
In my heart’s locket, five gangly brown-skinned kids, cousins, will be forever at play in a pair of crepe myrtle trees bathed in beneficent June sunshine. I loved to climb trees as much as Michael. An arm here, a leg there, juts out from the trees’ floral sundress, a delicate skein of pink and purple blooms. When we found unbloomed buds on the dichondra lawn, we would gently press at their nub until the skin slit and a fragile, crinkled blossom emerged whole. Meanwhile, inside the house, through the living room picture window, the adults, beloved, are forever passing their time in glancing, distracted talk.
Coda
WHAT NEXT?
Dearly beloved, if you ask yourself why the least among us are not thriving, you can turn the question this way and that, you can push it and you can pull it, but if you are honest, you will have to recognize that there is only one answer. The least among us are not thriving because those at the top of the illegal drug economy have established a parastate and entrapped impoverished communities within it through the systematic application of violence.
From prison and in love with Bree, on Juneteenth, a holiday that marks the date in 1865 when news finally reached Texas that all slaves were free, Michael rapped:
Everyone wants to be a “g” but no one wants to be a man
How do I stand when these grown men wanna play games
I got to pray to fight from goin’ insane
Dearly beloved, if you ask yourself why the least among us are not thriving, you can turn the question this way and that, you can push it and you can pull it, but if you are fair, you will have to recognize that there is only one answer. The least among us are not thriving because national governments have sought to fight the War on Drugs by concentrating their world historic levels of firepower, punishment, and control on impoverished communities trapped by the systematic application of violence within the parastate.
Alive and well with anotha chance to get it right
Despite what the media sells, we got to fight
(Chorus: Respect it. Don’t take it for granted.
Keep it real and know that you can handle it.(4x))
It represents my liberty and my ability
To stand amongst those who for a second dare to hate me
For the color of my skin, you can’t win
That’s what they whisper, but I was raised completely different.
I’m on this mission, keepin’ this vision
Establish by those before, who now, no longer living
But the spirit of freedom is far from dead
Incarcerated but they can’t trap what’s inside of my head
Dearly beloved, if you ask yourself why the least among us are not thriving, you can turn the question this way and that, but if you are self-aware, you will have to recognize that there is only one answer. The least among us are not thriving because so very many of us desire illegal drugs and turn a blind eye to the costs involved in supplying our desire. We are like nineteenth-century Englishmen and -women who sweetened their tea with sugar made by slaves.
So I smash debilitating curses
Debilitating my foes wit prayer and that’s for certain
I’m searchin’ even though I’m lock down
Remaining focus and gettin’ ready for when I touch down
Dearly beloved, remember that there are three categories of direct victim of the international drug economy: ONE, addicts; TWO, victims of violence; THREE, those entrapped in the parastate. In terms of sheer numbers, the third category may be the largest. There are many millions gone.
They can’t hold us, we under a creed
I serve Christ, and like Him for my people I’ll bleed
Imagine if Malcolm or Martin would have gave up
But in adversity they stayed down and was trued up
Dearly beloved, we’re today
Gathered in the memory of those who were brutally slayed
I pray that we can find peace
Cause even in Penitentiaries we still can remain free
But there must be recognition that Prison isn’t living.
Consider the numbers of Americans now imprisoned. One out of every one hundred adult Americans is in prison. This makes more than 2 million people currently incarcerated. The world has never seen a penal system like this before.
Been down since 15, now I’m 23
Wit 3 to go I’m ready to accept responsibility
Consider America’s preeminence in imprisoning people. Twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners are in American prisons even though only about 5 percent of the world’s population lives between our shining shores. The world has never seen anything like this.
This my first and last time, prison will never be a pastime
A free man so you can never take mine
Consider, once more, how the War on Drugs bloats and disables the judicial system. It’s so important as to be worth repeating. Fourteen percent of Americans now imprisoned have been sentenced for nonviolent drug offenses. In recent years, as many as 32 percent of defendant filings in federal courts, in a given year, are for drug-related cases. This is the biggest category of filings. And then there are all the violent offenses that flow from the intertwining double helix of drugs and gangs. Imagine how well our courts might work if this burden were removed.
The same goes for you, cause only you can stop you
You can make or break you, so to thyself remain true
Consider how the War on Drugs increases violence. The illegal drug economy overburdens our judicial system, increases prosecutorial workloads, and drives down homicide clearance rates, leading to a phase shift in levels of violence in urban areas. Then, as viole
nce in urban contexts increases, impoverished communities are ever more entrapped in the protection rackets run by the gangs claiming to protect their turf and the international traffickers who employ them. Imagine what liberation might look like.
I celebrate my folks died so I can be free
Love and peace to any struggling incarcerated minority
When in the course of human events, misguided laws have resulted in the entrapment of a population in the jaws of ever-more-powerful pirates, it becomes necessary to overthrow the parastate, in the worst-case scenario, which we now face, by legalizing it. Legalizing marijuana alone will not be enough to dismantle the parastate. We have to set our faces squarely to the future and learn how to decriminalize harder drugs as well.
I bleed tears directly from my veins
I cry for joy cause a future awaits w/o pain
This has been done before. In 2001, Portugal eliminated criminal penalties for low-level possession and consumption of all illicit drugs and reclassified these activities as administrative violations. Instead of being arrested, people found in possession of personal-use amounts are ordered to appear before a “dissuasion commission”; the result is treatment, a fine, or other administrative sanctions. In contrast, drug trafficking remains criminal. Yet decriminalization of personal-use possession has brought drug dependency out of the shadows. In Portugal, the number of people seeking treatment increased by 60 percent between 1998 and 2011, and adolescent drug use has decreased since the law’s passage. At the same time, the percentage of people in Portugal’s prisons for drug violations fell from 44 percent in 1999 to 24 percent in 2013. And the overall quantity of illicit drugs seized actually increased, possibly because public safety resources could be directed to targets higher up the supply chain.
Is parenting easier in this environment? No one’s done that study, but a reduction in secrecy must surely be a boon, and having fewer children in jail cells, fewer prison visits to make, must lift morale.
All night my mother be praying on bended knees
Symbolizing Harriet crawling till her knees bleed
I plea to my b’s & c’s quit busting on each other
Vision the pain that those who died sustained
Imagine being split open and at your feet rests your brain
Am I crazy? No I speak reality.
From day to day livin’ was a fight for liberty.
So I thank Christ cause somebody prayed for me
And you too, cause you’re right here listening to me.
Does legalizing marijuana everywhere and decriminalizing hard drugs sound like turning the world upside down? Here’s what’s been turned upside down. This girl who always tried to be squeaky clean—because she thought it was the only way to be safe—has turned into a proponent of legalizing drugs, including even decriminalizing heroin. Even though she’s seen relatives ruined not just by incarceration but by addiction, too. I have become a legalizer. How about you?
Each one of us has the job of, somehow, absorbing the damage done to us as children and transmuting it into wisdom so that we do not pass it on. The terrible thing is that we have to achieve that transmutation before we have any wisdom, because the time to achieve this is between the ages of eleven and sixteen, when, like Michael, we choose our life course. It is not that by then we will know, or need to know, precisely what we will do in life but that by then we will have chosen how we are putting the basic building blocks together. What kinds of people will we want to live with? Can we delay gratification? Are our purposes pure? Will we live inside or outside of the law? Before we choose our building blocks, before we are fourteen or sixteen, perhaps, we need to transmute the damage done to us into wisdom. How many of us can do this? The more the damage that has been inflicted on a kid, the harder the job of transmutation, but even when there’s not so much damage, I think none of us manages to transmute all of it, whatever the quantity it may be our particular burden to transmute. The question is mainly whether we’ve been given a light load or a heavy one. And if our burden is heavy, there is one more question. Can we transmute enough of the damage to survive? This is possible only if we ready ourselves to damage others less than we ourselves were damaged. This is the paradox: to save ourselves we have to prepare to save others by seeking to understand what went wrong with us.
Now I lay me down to sleep
And every morning I wake-up I think about this Juneteenth.
As a society, our challenge is the same. Can we damage the generations to come less than we ourselves were damaged? From the ground we stand on, we must understand the harm that has been done and ascertain how we can rebuild the foundation while we stand on it, so that we do not pass on the harm. The failed War on Drugs is something rotten. Its effects are by no means limited to those who sell or use.
Forgive us our trespasses
As we forgive those who trespass against us.
NOTES
Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device's search function to locate particular terms in the text.
PART 1: RELEASE AND RESURRECTION
1 Limits are: from Charles Olson, “Letter Five,” Maximus (Oakland: University of California Press, 1985).
CHAPTER 3: THE INVESTIGATION, JULY 2009
10 Headline No. 1, from KTLA: “a body riddled with bullets,” KTLA News website, July 18, 2009, 9:39 PM PDT.
11 Los Angeles Police Department blog: “Man Found Dead in Car,” July 20, 2009, available at http://lapdblog.typepad.com/lapd_blog/2009/07/page/3/.
CHAPTER 8: FUNERAL, JULY 27, 2009
33 The great grounding: Frank Bidart, “You Cannot Rest,” in Watching the Spring Festival (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009).
CHAPTER 11: THE END, AUGUST 2008–JULY 2009
50 “I hate and I love”: “Catullus 85,” trans. F. W. Cornish. Catullus and Tibullus, Catullus. Tibullus. Pervigilium Veneris, trans. F. W. Cornish, J. P. Postgate, J. W. Mackail, rev. G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library 6 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1913).
52 The theologian Augustine captured her experience: Augustine, City of God, Book 19, chap. 8.
56 “arrow flew, as if of itself”: From Frank Bidart, “Fourth Hour of the Night.” Preceding lines are “How each child finds that it must deal with/the intolerable//becomes its fate.”
CHAPTER 12: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
62 To quote Atul Gawande: Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014).
62 time without “milestones”: William Muth and Ginger Walker, “Looking Up: The Temporal Horizons of a Father in Prison,” in Fathering 11, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 292–305.
63 “gaping abyss”: Fabrice Guilbaud, “Working in Prison: Time as Experienced by Inmate-Workers,” in Revue française de sociologie: English issue. Vol. 51 (2010): 41–68.
CHAPTER 13: WHERE WAS OUR FAMILY? WHERE WERE THE LAWYERS?
74 carjackings had nearly doubled: “Governor Signs Death Penalty in Carjack Killings,” Daily Breeze (Torrance, CA), September 27, 1995.
79 “God causes all things to work”: Romans 8:28.
CHAPTER 15: NORCO
96 you might want to send him: 2008 Blog Post at Prisontalk.com. Available at http://www.prisontalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=350459.
CHAPTER 17: VISITING 1.0
109 I always dress up like: 2005 Blog Posts at Prisontalk.com. Available at http://www.prisontalk.com/forums/archive/index.php/t=408777.html.
110 I must say I agree with Hisprettygirl: Ibid.
CHAPTER 20: THE BIGGEST WILDFIRE IN CALIFORNIA HISTORY
142 The more formal 99-page: Jack Blackwell and Andrea Tuttle, “California Fire Siege 2003: The Story,” U.S. Forest Service and California Department of Forestry, n.d.
CHAPTER 21: FIRE AND ICE
151 The economists Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz: In The Race Between Education and Technology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).
151 Some
say the world: Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice,” in Harper’s Magazine (1920).
CHAPTER 22: THE SINGLE MOTHER AND THE GREAT WHITE WHALE
154 The number of black nurses: In Michael Javen Fortner, Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment (Kindle locations 737-738) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). Kindle ed.
CHAPTER 24: “SIS, RUN!”
161 no looting, arson, or damage during the Watts riots: Jon Schleuss, “Inside the Watts Curfew Zone,” Los Angeles Times, August 11, 2015, http://graphics.latimes.com/watts-riots-1965-map/.
161 modern peak in ridership: Wendell Cox, “Transit in Los Angeles,” NewGeography Blog, April 7, 2010, http://www.newgeography.com/content/001495-transit-los-angeles.
169 from 9 percent to 25 percent: Cheryl L. Maxson, “Street Gangs and Drug Sales in Two Suburban Cities,” NIJ Research in Brief, September 1995, https://www.ncjrs.gov/txtfiles/strtgang.txt.
169 “the [annual] number of gang related homicides”: Randall G. Shelden, Sharon K. Tracy, and William B. Brown, Youth Gangs in American Society (Cengage, 2013), p. 115.
169 “either jacked for money or you sold dope”: Sanyika Shakur (aka Kody Scott), Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2004), p. 251.
169 “working was considered weak”: Ibid.
CHAPTER 25: GANGBANGING—A DEFINITION
172 white-on-black race riots flared: Robert A. Gibson, “The Negro Holocaust: Lynching and Race Riots in the United States, 1880–1950,” Yale-New Haven Teacher Institute, Curriculum Unit 79.02.04. Available at http://teachersinstitute.yale.edu/curriculum/units/1979/2/79.02.04.x.html#c.
173 Further domino effect riots against Latinos: See Himilce Novas, Everything You Need to Know About Latino History (New York: Plume, 2008), p. 98.
173 “The leaders of the [Catholic] Church”: From an oral history posted by a blogger, under the alias “Lonewolf.” “White Fence,” on the Brown Kingdom blog, December 11, 2015, http://13radicalriders14.blogspot.com/2015/12/white-fence.html. The blog is not, in other words, a verified source of precisely how gangs developed, but it does capture people’s perceptions of how they developed.
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