Street roots
10
LOCK AND KEY, from page 1
permanent second-class status by law. It
operates primarily through the war on
drugs, which targets people overwhelmingly
oh the basis of race for drug criihes that are
Committed with equal frequency by people
of all colors, sweeps them into the criminal
justice system by the police who conduct
stop-and-frisk operations in poor
communities of color, brands them criminals
and felons and then releases them into a
parallel social universe in which they’re
stripped of many of the basic rights won in
the Civil Rights Movement, like the right to
vote, the right to serve on juries, the right
to be free from discrimination in
employment, housing, access to education
and public benefits. So many of the old
forms of discrimination that characterized
the old Jim Crow are suddenly legal again
once you’ve been branded a criminal or a
felon.
So I refer to the system of masis
incarceration as the new Jim Crow, because
I believe it is the moral equivalent of Jim .
Crow, but also because so many of the laws,
policies and practices that were alive and
well in the Jim Crow era are back.
Feb. 18, 2011
blacks. The key is to devise a system that
recognizes this while not appearing to.” It’s
a direct quote from him about what they •
were up to and the plan worked like a
charm.
So when President Reagan declared the
“War on Drugs” in 1982, he did so at a time
when drug crime was actually on the
decline. It was a couple of years before crack
became a big issue in* the media and was
sweeping inner cities. He declared the drug
war in an attempt to make good on ,
campaign promises and they got lucky
though, because crack hit thé streets. A few
years later the Reagan administration seized
on the development by hiring staff to feed
storiès to the media about crack babies that
helped to fuel public hysteria, and that wave
-
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Our staff - 1 was directing the ACLU’s
Racial Justice project at the time - we were
screening people for drug penalties, because
we felt we couldn’t have a main plaintiff who
had a criminal history. And I said, Did you
say you had a drug felony?” And he just gets
quiet and he’s, like, “Yeah, I have a drug
felony, but I was framed. The police planted
drugs on me and beat up my friends. He
starts telling me this whole, long story about
how he was set up by the police and all this.
And I was, “I am so sorry, we cannot
represent you if you have a drug felony. The
media will be all over you.”
And he just keeps telling me about how
he was framed and telling me this story
about the officer and I just keep apologizing
and trying to shut him down and really just
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R.R.: Now with the old Jim Crow: How did
it happen? Did people come together and
decide, “We’re not going to allow them to vote,
we’re not going to allow them to come to this
restaurant. ” Did people come up with a plan or
[were there] incremental things that created the
system?
M.A.: Well, interestingly, the old Jim Crow
arose at a time when poor people of all
colors were beginning to unite in a
movement for economic justice.
R.R.: And when was this?
MA.: This was during the Populist era.
There was an agrarian depression in the late
1800s and there was also an enormous
-»^aaaount- of a bu s e .of -peo ple .working -for«»»™ - -
' railroads and other corporations. These
circumstances created an economic and
political environment for poor whites to join
together with former slaves and their
descendents for the first time in a
meaningful movement for economic justice.
Plantation owners and the corporate elite
felt incredibly threatened by this interracial
alliance of poor people and proposed Jim
Crow laws to decimate this alliance. They
started out by proposing disenfranchisement
laws that were aimed, initially, at black folks,
but the implicit threat was that white folks
too might be disenfranchised if they didn’t
get on board.
So when these laws were first proposed,
Populist leaders resisted them on the
grounds that this was ah effort to drive a
wedge between poor people of all colors.
But soon, poor whites were persuaded to
abandon their African-American allies and
politicians began competing with each other
to propose ever harsher and, in many cases,
absurd forms of discrimination against 4
African Americans. It set off a chain of
events, which led to a complete collapse of
political resistance to the emergence of Jim
Crow in tiie South.
Interestingly, a very similar political
dynamic gave rise to the war on drugs and
the “Get Tough” movement. After formal,
political civil rights had been won, Martin
Luther King and other civil rights leaders
were beginning to turn their focus to
economic rights and economic justice and
were developing the Poor People’s
Campaign, seeking to unite poor people of
all colors. Pollsters and political strategists
found that by using “Get Tough” rhetoric on
issues of crime and welfare, they could
appeal to poor and working class whites who
were feeling threatened by and anxious
about the gains of African Americans and
persuade, them to defect from the
Democratic New Deal coalition and join the
Republican party in droves. It was part of
what was known as the “Southern strategy,”
attempting to flip the South from blue to
red. In the words of H.R. Haldeman,
President Richard Nixon’s former chief of
staff, “The .whole problem is really the
" If we were to just go back to the rates of incarceration we
had in the 1970s, before the "Get Tough" movement, we'd
have to release four ont of five people who are in prison. Four
out of five. A m illion people employed by the crim inal justice
system would lose their jobs. Prisons across America would
hjave to c lo se d o w n . P r iv a t e prisoiLJCompanies would h a w to
watch their earnings vanish. 1 mean, this system isn't just
going to go away without a m ajor fight. "
of punitiveness then swept the United
States. Soon Democrats were starting to
compete to win back those white swing
voters — those Reagan Democrats — who
had defected from the Democratic Party in
droves. Bill Clinton escalated the drug war
far beyond what Reagan had done, and
championed laws banning offenders from
food stamps, from public housing, from
federal financial aid for education: All those
forms of discrimination formed the basic
architecture of this new caste system.
Within a few short decades, this vast, new
under-caste emerged that swept millions of
folks for primarily non-violent'and drug-
related offensés, the same types of crimes
that occur with roughly equal frequency in
middle class communities, on college
campuses and universities that get ignored.
Millions of folks.
R.R.: You’re breaking my heart. So when
did you realize this? Was there something that
you recognized?
M.A.: You know, even though I was a civil
rights lawyer, and I felt like I was working
for racial justice and all that, I believed many
of the myths of the drug war and our
criminal justice system. There was one
incident that kind of woke me up.
I was interviewing a bunch of young black
men as potential plaintiffs in a racial
profiling suit [the ACLÙ was} planning to
file against the Oakland Police, Department.
This one kid came in — he was probably 18
or 19 — and he had this stack of papers with
him and had documented his series of stops
and searches over a nine-month period in
his neighborhood. He had names, dates,
witnesses, names of officers, badge
numbers: just an incredible amount of detail
and documentation. The kid was bright, well-
spoken, charismatic. And I just thought, “He
is oqr dream plaintiff.” He was talking to me
and he said something that made me think,
“Wait. Are you a drug felon?”
move him along. And he becomes enraged,
just enraged. And he starts yelling at me,
“You are no better than the police. The
minute I tell yoU I’m a felon, you just stop
listening. You can’t even hear what I have to
say.” He goes, “What am I supposed to do? I
can’t get a job now, I can’t get housing, I’m
living in my grandmother’s basement, I can’t
even-get food stamps, I can’t take care of
myself as a man. What’s to become of me?
What’s to become of me?” And he is yelling
at me and he snatches all those papers o u t.
of my handand he starts ripping them up,
throwing them around the room, turns
around, takes off.
Months later, I’m doing this public access
television show in his neighborhood, trying
to organize thousands of people to go to the
state capitol to protest the governor’s racial
profiling legislation. As soon as the show is
over, he comes bursting in, carrying this
dirty potted plant, thrusting it in my arm, all
emotional. He says, “I’m here to apologize
for treating you that way. I would have
bought you some flowers, but I’m still living
in my grandmother’s house. I snatched this
plant off her front porch. I just want to give
you something to say I’m sorry.” I’m, like,
“It’s okay.” He turns around, I’m chasing
after him, he takes off in this broke down
car.
Several months after that, I’m in my
office, open up the newspaper. What’s on
the front page? Gang of officers, otherwise
known as a drug task force, planting drugs
on people, beating suspects. And who’s
identified as the ring leader? The officer he
had identified to me as having planted drugs
on him and beat his friend up* And the light
bulb went on: “Wow, he’s right about me.
I’m no better than the police?-I just started
questioning myself: “How am I as a civil
rights lawyer, just replicating all the same
forms' of discrimination I say I’m out here
fighting against?” '
That’s when I really started asking myself
some questions about my own biases and
assumptions. That was the beginning of my
journey of listening more carefully, doing a
ton of research, trying to get to the bottom
of what was really going on and what I
learned just really blew my mind. The more
I dug and the more I listened, the more that
I just came to see that those folks who are
claiming mass incarcerationis the new
slavery, the new Jim Crow, they weren’t
crazy. There was something going on here
that people like me had been willing to just
dismiss.
R.R.: Wow. How have people responded to
your book?
MA.: There’s been a wide range of
responses, for sure. But I have to say I’ve
been really pleasantly surprised. A lot of _
people who were my mentors told me don’t
write it, people aren’t going to want to hear
it, you’re going to ruin your career. You
know: Don’t go there. I just felt like this is
what I had to say. So I didn’t really know
what to expect But there’s been just a
tremendous amount of support People are
more ready to hear this message today than
they have been In the past.
That’s not to say everybody’s been happy
with it [laughs]. And interestingly, while
there have been lots of churches that have
invited me to come speak, some of my most
difficult moments have come from some
black church leaders, who have argued real
strenuouslythat these black men are just
failing our communities, they’ve got to get
their act together, you can’t be making
excuses for them. Some black ministers,
sometimes in poor communities, say, “We
brought this all on ourselves.” It’s just not
the case. So we have our work cut out for
us.
R.R.: So what do we do? It’s heartbreaking
to hear that we had this coalition of poor
people ofall races that was broken not once, m
but twice.
MA.: 1 think’ ffierem fiesuiearS w er/W e
have got to get serious about building a
movement that bridges the gaps between
poor people of all colors. There’S just no
way around i t Even if mass incarceration
fades away or recedes, something new will
come along. Forty years ago, nobody — I
mean nobody — was predicting mass
incarceratipn. Most criminologists thought
prisons, as a system of control, were going
to fade away. The overwhelming evidence
was that prisons created more crime then
they prevented or solved. So I think even if
mass incarceration begins to fade away,
nobody can predict what new systems might
emerge if we fail to deal with these racial
divisions that give rise to these systems of
control. So nothing short of a major social
movement has any hope.
If we were to just go back to the rates of
incarceration we had in the 1970s, before
the “Get Tough” movement, we’d have to
release four out of five people who are in
prison. Four out of five. A million people
emplqyed by the criminal justice system
would lose their jobs. Prisons across
America would have to close down. Private
prison companies would have to watch their
earnings vanish, I mean, this system isn’t
just going to go away without a major fight.
And so all of these policy reform groups and
civil rights organizations that are tinkering
around, arguing about whether sentences
should be 10 years or 25: We are going to
have to do more than tinker. It’s going to
take a major shift in our public
consciousness, an upheaval, even to get back
to those rates of incarceration that we had
in the 1970s that people then were
complaining about being too high.
So that’s the thing: I want this book to be
a wake-up call to folks. I had my awakening.
I want other people to wake up and say,
This enormous system, which is rooted in
our racial divisions and anxieties, is not
going away. It’s not going away unless we
get organized and develop a real critical,
political consciousness in the communities
most affected.”
Originally published in Real Change
Newspaper, Seattle, Wash.