Page 10
Street Roots • July 7-13, 2017
News
UNBUILD IT, from page 7
J.F.: I do. People ask me about the “Our”
in the title. “Who’s ‘Our Own?’” The reason
I was surprised in that courtroom is that in
black America there’s this sense of linked
fate. When you suffer harm on the basis of
race, I understand this as a harm that’s
affecting me. So it’s counterintuitive when a
black judge is locking this kid up and
invoking King to do it.
But the judge is from a different social
class. A black man today who drops out of
high school is 10 times more likely to go to
prison than a black man who finishes
college. The people making the laws
overwhelmingly have finished college. The
people that go to prison, overwhelmingly,
have dropped out of high school.
Another way to think about “Our” is
America locking up “Our Own.” Forty
percent of the people in prison in this
country are white. They’re overwhelmingly
poor. They disproportionately have mental
health issues that have not been treated and
continue to not be treated.
M.W.: You talk about how pretextual traffic
stops aimed a t g un violence disproportionately
affected blacks in D.C.
J.F.: Eric Holder (as chief prosecutor in
D.C.) had gone on radio in multiple
interviews and detailed the strategy. The
whole traffic stop is just a pretext. If I follow
anybody for 30 seconds, I can find a traffic
violation: going 26 miles per hour in a 25
zone, stopping too long at a stop sign,
stopping not long enough.
The theory was guns were everywhere.
The homicide rate had tripled in the ’60s,
tripled again in the late ’80s. (Holder) does
this pretext stop regime: “We’re targeting
every part of the city except for Ward 2,”
the White part of D.C. “We’re going to focus
on places that gun violence is highest.”
One of the people in the book, Sandra
Dozier, was pulled over on a pretext stop.
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percent of the prisoners in
th is eo n n try are state^ coanty
and leeaL lo c a l prosecutors
and y e w state le g is la tu re
and y o u r c ity c o u n c il b u ilt
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who^s g o in g to u n b u ild l t / ?
They didn’t find guns. They found $20 worth
of marijuana. They didn’t hold her overnight,
because she said, “I have a job at FedEx.”
The officers gave her a notice to appear a
week later. When she got there, the
prosecutors dismissed the case.
You could say that the criminal justice
system acted fairly and with mercy. She
didn’t miss work and the case was
dismissed. But if you were on probationary
status, (FedEx) treated any arrest, whether
or not there was a conviction, as a violation.
It doesn’t seem super-malicious. But there’s
this dragnet that results in black citizens
getting picked up on minor things. All the
white kids in Northwest, they got to drive
around without ever getting pulled over. Of
course they had drugs. Drug use is equally
distributed across American society.
M.W.: So a policy o f going after g u n s ...
J.F.: Leads to her losing her job. It almost
perfectly illustrates the grotesque injustice,
unintentional and unintended, of our
criminal justice policies when they’re
matched by hyperaggressive punitiveness on
the part of employers.
I got an email from a guy who applied for
benefits, and it came up that he had a
record - he says for marijuana - from 1970.
It comes up as “unspecified narcotics
offense.” That sounds terrible. It is just an
arrest. But he’s struggling to clear his
record. He’s got to get records showing that
it was marijuana and it was dismissed. The
technology is another part. Nobody knew
when they were setting these systems up
that at the press of a button any employer
could pull up your record from 47 years ago.
M.W.: So what do we do now?
J.F.: The system was built not in one fell
swoop. If all of us get somewhat more
punitive, and we all do it for 50 years, we get
mass incarceration. The solution is that
same series of micro-acts, each of us looking
at our individual spheres of control, asking
not “What can somebody else do to fix this
problem?” but “What can I do?”
There’s been a focus on electing
progressive prosecutors. In Philadelphia, a
very reform-oriented guy, a lifetime civil
rights attorney ran for prosecutor (He won).
In November, a whole slew of people ran for
prosecutor on platforms of “We’re locking
up too many people;” “the war on drugs has
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WEDNESDAYS 2-7PM
caused a lot of damage;” “my predecessor
participated in wrongful convictions and
won’t admit it.” They won - in Chicago,
Alabama, Florida, Texas, Colorado.
People say, “We had this criminal justice
reform moment, but now Trump and
Sessions arrived.” Their power is much less
than we give them credit for. Eighty-eight
percent of the prisoners in this country are
state, county and local. Local prosecutors
and your state legislature and your city
council built mass incarceration, and that’s
who’s going to unbuild it.
The other thing is, who’s the lawyer
opposing the prosecutor? Two percent of
the funding that goes to our criminal system
goes to indigent defense. People have
crushing caseloads. So the other thing we
have to do is fund indigent defense better.
There’s also what we can do as individual
citizens. Most of us are employees or
employers. What’s the policy on hiring
people with criminal records? There’s a
huge range from first question on the
application (being), “Have you ever been
arrested” — people don’t even fill out the
application once they see that - to “all
right, we’re going deep into the application
process, give you a chance, and then I’m
going to learn this additional fact, if it’s true,
and I can factor that in to everything else.”
When we started the school, we hired this
amazing guy, and on day three he said he
had been convicted of armed robbery. If he
had put that on an application, we’re tossing
it. But it was this person we had spent three
days with who was funny and inspiring and
great with kids. It was still a hard call, but
he turned out to be amazing.
People like Nixon and Reagan get a
special place in the pantheon of wrongness.
But we all participated, either actively or by
allowing it in our names and with our tax
dollars. We all have both an opportunity and
an obligation to unbuild it.
Reprinted from Street Roots’ sister paper in
Seattle, Real Change News
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