Warden Burl Cain

This article from the Wall Street Journal asks how the inauguration of America’s first black president looks to the inmates in Angola prison in Louisiana–three-quarters of whom are black.  Warden Burl Cain comes off as a criminal justice reformer in this piece and I suppose that in some respects he is.  This doesn’t alter the fact that Cain wants to keep the two remaining Angola 3 inmates locked in solitary confinement because, guilty or innocent, their organizing work with other inmates creates administrative problems.   

Positively, this article suggests that concern about our system of criminal justice is widespread and growing.

Alan Bean, Friends of Justice

What the Audacity of Hope Looks Like From Behind Bars

By GARY FIELDS

ANGOLA, La. — The horses were grazing, and the rifles were stored in their armory racks. The inmates who normally tend crops weren’t working, so the officers who watch over them in the fields didn’t need horses or guns.

Change, at least for a day, had come to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, the state’s maximum-security prison. On Tuesday, Warden Burl Cain gave the inmates the day off to watch Barack Obama take the oath of office. It was the first time in the prison’s history that inmates were free to watch a president being sworn in.

 “Most of the guys here face the reality that a president can’t change things overnight,” says Jerry Ward, 43 years old and 19 years into a life sentence for second-degree murder, convicted of shooting a man during a domestic dispute. At the same time, he says, “life here is what you make it and there are rewards for acting like men should, even here.”

Normally, most of the 5,100 men here would be somewhere on the prison’s vast farm, perhaps toiling in the broccoli or turnip fields. Angola, a prison for more than 120 years, sits on 18,000 acres wedged between the Mississippi River and the pine-covered Tunica Hills.

Tuesday, nearly all of the inmates stood glued to televisions scattered throughout the facility. About 250 of them squeezed into Angola’s main activity room broke into applause and a standing ovation as Mr. Obama became the nation’s 44th president.

More than half the men in this prison, once known as one of the most dangerous in America, are here for killing someone. Seventy percent have life sentences and the average sentence for the remainder is more than 80 years. With few paroles or pardons, almost all the prisoners will die here.

That makes President Obama’s promise of “change” and “hope” less realistic for the residents of Angola. Long sentences also complicate Mr. Cain’s job as warden. How do you entice a man to behave when he has no compelling reason to do so? For most, the threat of a negative recommendation to the parole or pardon boards is empty.

 

Ronnie Moran, 50, serving a life sentence for rape, says he appreciated being able to watch the inauguration, but doesn’t believe Mr. Obama’s election will change anything. “Until we decide to put down the guns and the drugs and stop the violence, it doesn’t matter that we have an African-American president,” he says. “You can have all the Barack Obamas in the world.”

Warden Cain nonetheless seized on the election of an African-American as president as a teachable moment for inmates. Because the prison he oversees is three-quarters black, Mr. Cain reasons, Mr. Obama’s inauguration is especially potent.

Mr. Cain says he tries to use moments like this, historic inaugurations and the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, as well as privileges for good behavior, to treat inmates like humans. “I tell them I can be as nice as you let me or as mean as you make me,” he says.

Inmates greet the 66-year-old man, with his white hair and Southern drawl, as an old friend as he walks through the main prison. He has argued for years with state officials that more inmates should get parole.

Inmates began lining up three hours before the swearing in. The all-purpose activity room is in the prison’s main camp, which houses 2,500 people. The atmosphere was almost festive, with inmates ordering food from the canteen and filling up the room, taking the front seats first.

Raymond Flank, 46 years old, convicted of second-degree murder in a robbery in New Orleans, says he felt like he was being allowed to participate in the inauguration in some small way. “Not only do we get the day off, but we get to see an example of who we can be and what we can accomplish if we try,” he says.

Mr. Flank, who is African-American, says he expects to see the results here in Camp J, the disciplinary unit where men who rebel against the system are placed with few privileges. “For years, they’ve had no image to look up to, but now they have the image of Barack Obama,” he says.

“This is my first inauguration speech, ever,” says Jim Young, a 69-year-old white inmate from Sand Point, Idaho. Mr. Young has been here since 1983 after stabbing a man to death in a barroom fight that, he says, “went too far.” He helps train boxers in the inmate program and hopes that seeing the inauguration opens the eyes of some of the younger inmates.

Imprisoned the past 26 years, Jeffrey Lewis, 48, was convicted on two counts of manslaughter and is serving a total of 80 years. He says Mr. Obama’s election and swearing in let him think “anything is possible.”

He says he will recommit to his work with the hospice where inmates who are terminally ill spend their last days. He also intends to get other inmates to reconnect with their families. “The key is to work and stay useful,” says Mr. Lewis.

Douglas Dennis, his arms scarred and his left eye blinded from long-ago knife fights with other inmates, didn’t come to the activity room. He watched from the offices of the Angolite, the prison magazine produced by inmates.

Mr. Dennis, 73, has been here since June 1957, except for a period when he was a fugitive. A drifter, born in Chicago, he was hitchhiking through Shreveport, La., when he was picked up by a patrol car. Mr. Dennis, who is white, got into a fight at the jail, killing his cellmate. He was sentenced to life and sent to Angola, where he killed another inmate. He got his second life sentence.

Mr. Dennis has little hope Mr. Obama will tackle the problems of the criminal-justice system. “He’s got his hands full: Two wars, the economy is going in the tank and the health-care costs are skyrocketing,” says Mr. Dennis. “I’d be surprised if he has time to brush his teeth in the next four years.”

Warden Cain says Mr. Obama’s election makes him optimistic. “My daddy had a phrase: ‘We’ve got to grab a root and growl,'” he says, meaning, it is time for work. He says Mr. Obama shows his inmates that the country is full of possibilities, even in a prison. “If the men here can have hope, then why can’t the rest of the country?”

Write to Gary Fields at gary.fields@wsj.com

I first heard from Cassandra Herrman and Kelly Whalen in late 2002,  a few weeks before the week-long evidentiary hearing that exposed Tulia’s famous drug string as a fraud.  Stationed in San Francisco, documentary filmmakers Herrman and Whalen were so captivated by the Tulia story that they determined to compress a complicated story into a riveting half hour production.

Here’s how Herrman and Whalen describe their unique take on Tulia:

By the time we began filming in Tulia, the drug sting and its aftermath
had captured considerable national media attention, but most of the
television coverage consisted of formulaic news magazine stories or
talk-shock programs. By presenting a different take on the story, we
wanted to reach a broad viewing audience, including those who had
been alienated by the divisive news reports. We felt it was important
to minimize “outsider” voices; we wanted to put the Tulia story back in
the voices of those people who had lived it and tell the story without
a narrator. By framing the Tulia story from the different perspectives
of those most closely involved, we ask viewers to consider the
experiences of all those involved: from law enforcement and jurors
to the defendants and their families. With our access to the array
of people featured in the film, we hope viewers will walk away with
surprising counterpoints to the broad-stroke portrayals in the popular
media.

(more…)

The major racial and ethnic communities in American life don’t talk much.  The dialogue vacuum makes it easy to assume that a generic or default American sensibility exists.  You notice the great gulf fixed between black and white America when a morally ambiguous story like Jena emerges.  Its a Rorschach test–you see what you want to see.  And white people and black people don’t see the same thing.

The Rev. Joseph Lowery’s benediction at President Obama’s inaugural ceremony offers another example of this phenomenon.

White people are outraged.  Garments are being rent in twain.  Lowery is being denounced as a racist and a race baiter.

Here’s the offending statement:

“… help us work for that day when black will not be asked to give back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right.”

White people take pride in the fact that America has elected a black president.  Doesn’t this suggest that we have quit our lowdown ways?  Aren’t we already embracing the right?  Isn’t there some kind of statute of limitations on black outrage?

The Rev. Gerald Britt helps place the issue in historical context.  As is often the case, the comments section is almost as enlightening as Rev. Britt’s post.

On the 29th of September, presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama stood before the student body of Howard University in Washington DC.  Four days earlier, I had occupied the same stage as part of a panel including several Jena 6 parents and a few other criminal justice reform advocates.  I have long been aware that then-candidate Obama talked about Jena when he was at Howard; but until today I hadn’t seen a full transcript of his remarks.

I have placed our president’s comments about Jena and criminal justice reform in bold italics below, and you might want to scroll down to that bit before reading the balance of his address.

This speech shows genuine courage.  As Obama himself acknowledges, candor on the subject of crime and justice can be bad for your political health.  The subject is so politically toxic, in fact, that candidate Obama rarely addressed the subject during the campaign and is unlikely to make it front-and-center as president.  Yet I believe these strong declarative come from the heart and reflect our new president’s genuine values and intentions. (more…)

Over at “Grits for Breakfast” Scott Henson has a thoughtful post on the relationship between crime and mental illness.  I’ll give you the opening paragraph as a teaser:

The US Supreme Court has said executing the mentally retarded is unconstitutional, but the mentally ill are still fair game. Dr. Lucy Puryear, a clinical psychiatrist from the Baylor College of Medicine offers a thoughtful discussion at Women in Crime Ink regarding the astonishing case of Andre Thomas, a schizophrenic death row inmate who plucked out his only good eye and ate it (he’d pulled the first one out while sitting in jail awaiting his capital murder trial), adding a whole new dimension to the biblical adage, “an eye for an eye.”

Once again the United States of America has managed a peaceful transfer of power without the shedding of a single drop of blood. 

George Washington feared it could never happen.  But it can, and it does.

When Barack Obama stepped to the microphone he wasn’t smiling.  Neither was the sea of humanity arrayed before him.  As he spoke, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was in free fall on more bad news from the banking industry and the nation was bogged down in two unwinnable wars.  What could a new president say that hadn’t been said before?

With the dexterity of a skilled seamstress, Obama wove the themes of responsibility and inclusion into a single strand.

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

American immaturity, the president seemed to suggest, was rooted in an ancient tendency of distinguishing between “us,” (the “real Americans”) and “them,” (the folks who don’t qualify for full citizenship). 

The us-them distinction expounded formally in the dreadful DredScott decision.  For the purposes of political calculus, evern African American resident of the United States was equal to three-fifths of a person.  In the wake of the civil rights movement the full citizenship of non-whites was recognized, but there has always been an unspoken assumption that, while all are equal, some (to quote George Orwell) are more equal than others.

Instead of arguing for the full inclusion of non-white Americans, President Obama introduced an alternative assumption: all the folks who have crowded the American stage from the earliest days of our history have been full-fledged American making equally important contributions to our greatness as a nation. (more…)

This CNN report provides important background to Mychal Bell’s recent troubles including a brief interview in which Mychal discusses his dance with disaster.

Things were just as bad at the civil rights division of the Department of Justice as many of us feared.  According to a recent article in the Washington Post, “a former Justice Department official entrusted with enforcing civil rights laws refused to hire lawyers whom he labeled as “commies” and transferred another attorney for allegedly writing in “ebonics” and benefiting from “an affirmative action thing,” according to an investigation released yesterday by internal watchdogs.”

According to a report from the department’s inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility, Bradley J. Schlozman, injected partisan politics into the hiring process.  “Over three years in which he controlled employment decisions, Schlozman favored young conservatives for entry-level jobs, transferred those he called “right-thinking Americans” into top assignments and instructed colleagues that “adherents of Mao’s little red book need not apply,” according to e-mails cited in the report. Authorities analyzed 112 career hires during Schlozman’s tenure and determined that “virtually all” of the lawyers whose political affiliations were known at the time had ties to Republicans or conservative legal groups.”

Schlozman has been accused of lying under oath in his testimony to Congress.  According to the Boston Globe, Eric Holder, the Attorney General designate, has promised to investigate Schlozman if he is confirmed.

This is just one instance in which the fox was been invited to guard the Department Of Justice hen house during the Bush Administration.  The DOJ is supposed to represent the interests of all Americans, not just those of a favored minority.  When hiring policy at the Civil Rights Division is being set by a guy who doesn’t believe in civil rights we’ve got a problem.

While the Obama administration shows little appetite for a thoroughgoing investigation of Bush administration abuses, Paul Krugman at the NYT wants the offenders held accountable.   After cataloguing the manifold sins of ommission and comission (including hiring practices at the DOJ) Krugman has some strong advice for the 44th President:

While it’s probably in his short-term political interests to forgive and forget, next week he’s going to swear to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That’s not a conditional oath to be honored only when it’s convenient.

And to protect and defend the Constitution, a president must do more than obey the Constitution himself; he must hold those who violate the Constitution accountable. So Mr. Obama should reconsider his apparent decision to let the previous administration get away with crime. Consequences aside, that’s not a decision he has the right to make.

I listened to this thoughful NPR opinion piece this morning as I lifted weights in my garage.  I was impressed. 

William Lawrence teaches American Church History (my own specialty) at Perkins School of Theology, a Methodist seminary affiliated with Southern Methodist University in Dallas. 

Presidents have preacher problems, Lawrence says, because most Americans don’t know very much about religion–their own or anybody else’s.  That’s why so many Southern Baptists feared the election of a Roman Catholic named John Kennedy and why non-evangelicals broke into a sweat when a born-again Baptist named Jimmy Carter took the oath of office.  The text of Dr. Lawrence’s remarks is printed on the KERA website. (more…)