Say Their Names

by Curtis Bunn

  COVID-19 disproportionately impacts Black people, who are also disproportionately incarcerated. These two facts have added to the endangerment of life for the entire Black community.

  In Norway, prisons have become more rehabilitative, while U.S. prisons have maintained their punitive nature: sentencing children and mentally ill persons; handing out life without parole sentences; locking people in crowded and unhealthy prisons; removing the right to vote and adding other restrictions; and allowing the burden of mass incarceration to continue to fall disproportionately on Black people and brown people.

  In 2013, John Wetzel, Pennsylvania secretary of corrections, went with a group to tour prisons in eastern Germany. He had an unforgettable exchange, he said, with the minister of justice.

  “I asked her how Germany got where it is, and she said, ‘When you kill and lock up your own people, the notion of freedom is different.’ She was talking about the Holocaust,” Wetzel said. Instead of responding punitively to a history of violence, Germany chose to be more creative.

  In Pennsylvania, Wetzel said, the push for change that he has seen more recently came about when opioid and heroin addiction spread through white communities. He did not, however, see as much concern from the federal government or our country’s health agencies when crack addiction spread through Black communities.

  “I would argue that the use of heroin is what has reduced calls for incarceration,” Wetzel said of Pennsylvania. The governor even signed an opioid disaster declaration that allows the state to loosen regulations and work outside typical procedures to expedite aid and initiatives to fight the opioid and heroin epidemic in the state.

  “We saw individuals in every zip code being impacted by heroin, and these new people affected saw the system up close and personal and didn’t like what they saw,” said Wetzel. “You saw prosecutors say, ‘We can’t incarcerate our way out of this.’ Hell, we couldn’t incarcerate our way out of the crack epidemic,’’ said Wetzel.

  “What the Holocaust did in Germany and heroin did here in Pennsylvania is it made us and them disappear and it became we,” said Wetzel, who in 2018 reduced his state’s prison population by 1,000, the largest yearly decrease on record.

  Most justice advocates agree that decarceration in the United States is necessary, and some states have already been successful in reducing prison populations by using strategies such as offering alternatives to sentencing, better mental health treatment, parole reform, and early releases.

  But prisons and the punitive thinking behind them are embedded in this country’s history. Some reformists, including abolitionists, are not satisfied to consider only the tweaking of corrections.

  “Abolition is not a better kind of punishment,” prison abolitionist Gilmore explained in a September 2020 interview on radio station KQED in San Francisco. “What abolition is, is figuring out how to live in a world where prison is not necessary.”

  Gilmore has expressed a belief repeated by other abolitionists, which is that we can’t just address the harm caused by our current prison system but that we must “change everything.”

  Noted abolitionist Mariame Kaba has explained in her writings: “Prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition is a political vision, a structural analysis of oppression, and a practical organizing strategy. While some people might think of abolition as primarily a negative project—‘Let’s tear everything down tomorrow and hope for the best’—PIC abolition is a vision of a restructured society in a world where we have everything we need.”

  Kaba wrote: “Some people may ask: ‘Does this mean that I can never call the cops if my life is in serious danger?’ Abolition does not center that question. Instead, abolition challenges us to ask, ‘Why do we have no other well-resourced options?’ and pushes us to creatively consider how we can grow, build, and try other avenues to reduce harm.”

  And when we look at those countries cited as having the most progressive prisons—Germany and Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands—there are gnawing questions unspoken by some: “Do those countries have a significant number of Black people? Would they operate those systems the same if they did?” asks MiAngel Cody, an attorney who says she “picks locks to human cages” because she has won freedom for at least forty prisoners sentenced to life for drugs.

  Cody’s questions are legitimate. Cultures and history and how governments react to them determine the answers they give to the questions that shape a corrections system.

  Vanko agrees, but also thinks we might still learn something from the prisons she has seen. “In Norway, sentences are not politicized and people don’t worry about sentences. They don’t want them to be punitive. And Norway does have a welfare state, so even in prison you could argue that the level of living conditions are better than it is for some people who live in poverty here in this country.”

  Longtime justice advocate Dr. Divine Pryor also noted cultural differences and said the most memorable experience he had in the Netherlands occurred in Amsterdam outside the prisons he visited.

  “I went into a variety or grocery store. I was looking around, and the owner seemed irritated,” said Pryor, who is president and CEO of the People’s Police Academy, a community-based problem-solving public safety laboratory at Medgar Evers College.

  As a Black man in America, Pryor had been a victim of racism, subtle and blatant.

  “The owner was by himself. I assumed his irritation was racially motivated,” Pryor said. “I asked him with attitude if there was a problem. He said, ‘No, no. No problem at all. I was on my way out when you walked in. But don’t worry. When you get what you want, just leave the money on the counter, and lock the door.’”

  With that, the man left. “Of course, it could never happen here [in the U.S.],” Pryor said.

  His head filled with questions about how people who trusted their fellow humans—including a Black man—that much might make different decisions regarding prisons. Although he was quick to note that he also talked with Black people in Amsterdam who made it clear “they are not treated the same as white people. They said it may not be as evident as in the U.S., but they definitely have a class system, and it is mired in race.”

  Wetzel, the Pennsylvania secretary of corrections, wants to see the United States do more on the front end to save children before they commit crimes.

  “How about fixing the freaking schools?” Wetzel asked. “Forty percent of people in Pennsylvania state prisons don’t have a high school diploma. The average reading level is eighth grade. In Philadelphia, the average is third grade. We looked at what school district the inmates in our population came from and most inmates came from the twenty lowest performing school districts.

  “Mass incarceration is how disparities in education show up,” he said. “Whatever reform we make must include creating better schools and economic opportunities for people in inner-city communities. We can and should build healthier community. There is research that shows blocks with more green grass have less violence.”

  Where life is precious, life is precious.

  Both Qadree Jacobs and Steve Blackburn spoke of being children who were overwhelmed by hopelessness before turning to crime. Inner-city children are abandoned by society to navigate violent streets, to live in dense poverty, searching for beauty in places without green parks. They arrive already traumatized at poor performing schools that are not well equipped because their neighbors cannot sustain them with significant taxes.

  A child should not have to find hope in prison. Wetzel hears plenty of stories of hopelessness from the grown men and incarcerated children in the prisons he oversees.

  “I tour SCI Pine Grove, and the story I hear there from young people is the same every time,” Wetzel said. “In Pennsylvania you can be incarcerated in a prison at age thirteen. You talk to these kids and they say, ‘I have no hope. I’ll be dead by twenty, so why should I care about living.’ It’s an explanation, not an excuse.”

  Allowing children to grow up unprotected in
unsafe neighborhoods of poverty assures they will become hopeless, said New York justice advocate Pryor.

  “The hopelessness is passed down through generations,” he said. “The children witness their parents being involved in the drug culture, which comes with domestic violence. If money is going to drugs, kids aren’t eating or wearing clothes they want to have. If there are no role models for them to see, they are ensnared by crime in that way.

  “Then I have metal detectors and police officers at the school,” continued Pryor. “I want to prepare you for when you assume the position for me when I process you into the criminal punishment system. There are schools in white communities where there have been mass murders and still, there are not metal detectors. They get therapy and bring in psychiatrists; they want to reduce the impact trauma has on the children. They don’t bring in therapists to our communities. They bring in metal detectors and more police.”

  Wetzel thinks a new constitutional amendment may be needed to address mass incarceration in this country. (Justice advocates frequently cite the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which says slavery and involuntary servitude are allowed as punishment for people who have been convicted.)

  “In Germany, they actually have in the constitution this principle of normality,” he said. “They recognize that the punishment is incarceration itself, that a person is not incarcerated for further punishment. I think you can make an argument for a constitutional amendment that requires that incarceration does not impede upon any other civil rights.”

  Wetzel believes the long-term fix is to give people, especially families headed by single parents, education, resources, and economic opportunities to “fix themselves on the front end.”

  While people deny that the prison system constructed today was built by structural racism, Wetzel said, “The result looks like what a policy built on racism would look like: No educational opportunities or economic opportunities in inner-city Black communities and the disproportionate incarceration of Black people.”

  On the other hand, author and civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander has said we must ask ourselves what a just system would look like. “Would we criminalize the simple possession of drugs for personal use? Would we do that? Or would we treat drug use and drug addiction as a public health problem rather than a crime?”

  Alexander suggests, “We need to end the war on drugs and the war mentality that we have, which means ending zero-tolerance policies. It means transforming our criminal justice system from one that is purely punitive to one that is based on principles of restorative and transformative justice, you know, systems that take seriously the interests of the victim, the offender, and the community as a whole. We need to abolish all of the laws that authorize legal discrimination against people who have criminal records, legal discrimination that denies them basic human rights—to work, to shelter, to education, to food.”

  Now is the time we must have honest conversations about the real intentions behind and the true impact of the criminal justice system, as well as the magnitude of the task of dismantling it.

  A prison sentence should not be a perpetual punishment.

  Laws are not colorblind.

  Alexander reminds us: “Colorblind rhetoric has been used to justify the most deleterious laws and programs; it has allowed us to ignore subtler forms of racism and claim we live in a country freed from the legacy of its racist past.”

  Dealing honestly with our past, we can ask new questions: Should life sentences exist? Are prisons the violent manifestation of a society that has always responded to violence with violence? Do we need prisons to have justice?

  “I believe that what people choose when they have only one option is no predicator of what they will choose when they have others,” said Danielle Sered, a renowned justice advocate who created a New York–based program called Common Justice.

  “At the heart of our work is a restorative justice–based alternative to prison for serious and violent felonies like assault, robbery, and attempted murder,” Sered said. “We know part of our role in our movement is to prove it is possible to address violence without prison—that it is possible for people to make things right, and for people to produce the safety that prison never can and never will.”

  Sered said she has found that when survivors are given the chance to choose whether they want the person who harmed them incarcerated or in a restorative justice process, 90 percent of the survivors choose the restorative process. This is in direct opposition to what the public has been told for years: that victims want the people who hurt them to be caged and treated harshly. With restorative justice, people are empowered because, unlike in the traditional punitive corrections process, it offers those directly impacted by acts of violence an opportunity to design what repair will look like.

  “One thing we learn from survivors is that options are transformative, that we cannot predict in the absence of options what people will do in the presence of options,” Sered said. “As we expand the options, more and more people will see in what we do a thing worth their life force to fight for. As a country, we have failed to provide victims of violence with real options other than incarceration to hold the person who harmed them accountable.”

  Our current way of responding to violence is with violence, she said. “For that reason and countless others, we believe deeply that people who cause harm do not belong in cages. But we also believe pain requires repair. And so, we do accountability—which is different from punishment. Punishment is passive. Accountability is active.”

  Sered, who is white, believes that to have real change, in these historic days following massive protests, “white people will have to become ready to lay down the current, old world that is made of death but, for us, also made of privilege and power and can at times feel like protection. We have to own all the parts of it that destroy and all the parts that benefit us and be ready to move to something new, something not yet fully known.”

  She believes the process to address harm should be the same for this country as it is for individuals who have caused violence: “Acknowledge our actions, acknowledge their impact. Express genuine remorse, repair the harm to the degree possible—ideally in ways defined by those harmed, and become a nation who will never do it again.”

  The criminal justice system in this country labels people as criminals and felons to devalue their worth; sends them away so they are invisible. But parents, sons, daughters, spouses, and loved ones know without Ruth Wilson Gilmore telling them: Where life is precious, life is precious.

  There are a growing number of justice advocates who, like Marc Mauer, for years did not consider abolition as a possibility, but now find the word on their lips.

  “I’m evolving toward the idea of abolitionist,” said Mauer, senior advisor and former executive director of the Sentencing Project. “I see abolition as a goal that should be right up there with ending racism. It may not happen in my lifetime, but why would we not want to live in a society that thinks it does not have to put people in cages to maintain order.

  “We have the possibility—between Black Lives Matter and the COVID-19 crisis—a moment when we could see significant change in how we structure our lives in our communities,” Mauer said. “I don’t know how optimistic I am that it’ll happen. But it’s clear we can’t go back to doing things as we did before. The question is: How much of a shift are we willing to engage in?”

  The videotape of George Floyd’s killing and the callous disregard of the fellow officers who did nothing to stop it exemplified the disrespect U.S. law enforcement has for Black lives. Mixed in among the protesters were people who had already experienced the brutality of the arm of law enforcement known as the criminal justice system. In the crowd were formerly incarcerated people, as well as grieving relatives with children in cages in faraway towns. They demonstrated while worrying about loved ones who were locked up in a space that made it difficult to social distance during the pandemic.

&
nbsp; At the current rate of incarceration, it will be difficult in the near future to be Black in America and not know another Black person who has been caged or whose life is controlled by the government’s probation policy. Black people do not have to read the research data or statistics on collateral damage. They have lived it, witnessed it.

  And the protests that rocked America in 2020 didn’t give an exasperated Qadree Jacobs any new sense of hope.

  “The marching, the rioting, the protesting is not new,” he said on his way to work at the Philadelphia water company. “It is not going to change anything anytime soon.”

  His frustration was drawn from an ancient well. Author James Baldwin, who died in 1987, expressed it this way near the end of his life: “What is it you want me to reconcile myself to?…You always told me it takes time. It has taken my father’s time, my mother’s time, my uncle’s time, my brothers’ and my sisters’ time, my nieces’, and my nephews’ time. How much time do you want for your ‘progress’?”

  Church in the Age of the BLM Movement

  By Nick Charles

  In the beginning, there was the church, and while their masters’ God promised enslaved Africans a measure of salvation even as they endured the whip and the lash, the Black church, as it evolved, vowed it could also deliver African Americans comfort beyond religion, including liberation and freedom.

  The mission expanded over time as the Black church went from sole institution of refuge and power for African Americans to a vessel and vehicle for aspirations beyond slavery, beyond the epidemic of lynching, beyond the destruction of communities such as Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Black Wall Street in 1921, beyond Jim and Jane Crow and de jure segregation.