Yesterday, I attended a celebration of Timothy Cole’s life at which the State of Texas officially acknowledged the wrong done Mr. Cole by placing a historical marker at his grave. Among the attendees were six men, all of whom had been arrested, tried and convicted of crimes they had not committed. Each of them served years, some decades, in prison before winning their release.
At the close of the luncheon event, Frederic White, the dean of Texas Wesleyan School of Law, who hosted the event, recollected a police encounter he had as a youngster zooming through town on his new bicycle. The police stopped him and accused him of having stolen it. He was carrying his bicycle registration in his pocket, and could prove the bike was in fact his, so the police allowed him to go on his way. (more…)
Adam Gopnik is an art critic, not an expert on mass incarceration. But he has read widely on the subject and this major piece in the New Yorker offers an extended commentary on ideas recently shared by Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow), Robert Perkinson (Texas Tough), William Stunz (The Collapse of American Criminal Justice), and Franklin Zimring’s book on New York City (The City That Became Safe). No book can say everything that needs to be said about the American Gulag, so a carefully-crafted piece that combines the best insights of leading authorities is extremely helpful.
Following Stuntz and Zimring, “The Caging of America” notes that major improvements can be enacted without revolutionary reforms. The crime rate of New York City has fallen by 80% (twice the national average) without significant poverty programs. People are no better off, by and large, they are just less likely to transgress.
If Gopnik had added the ground-breaking insights of David Kennedy (Don’t Shoot) to his mix, he would be less inclined to believe that crime, especially violent crime, falls of its own accord. But Kennedy, like Stuntz and Zimring, isn’t waiting for the New Jerusalem to descend from heaven anytime soon. These authors believe that utopian dreaming can be just an inimical to real reform as the tough-on-crime politics that created the problem in the first place.
Gopnik’s piece concludes like this:
“Oh, I have taken too little care of this!” King Lear cries out on the heath in his moment of vision. “Take physic, pomp; expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” “This” changes; in Shakespeare’s time, it was flat-out peasant poverty that starved some and drove others as mad as poor Tom. In Dickens’s and Hugo’s time, it was the industrial revolution that drove kids to mines. But every society has a poor storm that wretches suffer in, and the attitude is always the same: either that the wretches, already dehumanized by their suffering, deserve no pity or that the oppressed, overwhelmed by injustice, will have to wait for a better world. At every moment, the injustice seems inseparable from the community’s life, and in every case the arguments for keeping the system in place were that you would have to revolutionize the entire social order to change it—which then became the argument for revolutionizing the entire social order. In every case, humanity and common sense made the insoluble problem just get up and go away. Prisons are our this. We need take more care. (emphasis added)
Has common sense made our problems “just get up and go away?”
If the problem is violent crime, a case could be made. Even so, as Kennedy demonstrates in Don’t Shoot, violent crime rages on in cities like New Orleans and Baltimore with no solution in sight. Common sense isn’t all that common.
If the problem is mass incarceration, no big-time fix is in sight. Prison populations have leveled out, and in some places incarceration rates have actually dropped; but America still locks up over 2 million people, and it will take more than common sense to change that fact. As Michelle Alexander argues, when careers and corporate fortunes are dependent on the status quo, change requires something akin to a revolution.
Gopnik believes that a massive drop in the American crime rate means mass incarceration was a mistake. Not everyone agrees. In fact, it is frequently argued that crime rates have fallen because we have locked up so many criminals. So long as the American mainstream believes this (and it does) mass incarceration, with all its attendant woes, will flourish.
Prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock. (more…)
(This post is part of a series concerning Curtis Flowers, an innocent man convicted of a horrific crime that has divided a small Mississippi town. Information on the Flowers case can be found here.)
By Alan Bean
I had always assumed that the confederate memorial in Winona, Mississippi had been destroyed in 1978 along with the courthouse. It seemed a bit counter-intuitive, but there was no sign of Civil War nostalgia on the grounds of the new courthouse where Curtis Flowers was convicted of murder in the summer of 2010.
Curtis has been tried for the murder of four people in a Winona furniture store in July, 1996. He has been convicted four times. Two trials ended in hung juries. Three convictions were overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court, which is currently reviewing his most recent conviction.
Meanwhile, Curtis sits on Parchman prison’s death row.
Friends of Justice is convinced that Curtis Flowers is innocent, but you would be hard pressed to find a white resident of Winona, Mississippi who agrees with us. At Flower’s 2010 trial, it became apparent, perhaps for the first time, that District Attorney Doug Evans and his investigator, John Johnson, had decided Curtis Flowers was the killer less than three hours after the murder scene was discovered. The only evidence connecting Curtis with the crime at that time was a check for three days wages found on the desk of the slain Bertha Tardy. The check was made out to Curtis Flowers. Though this hardly constituted evidence of wrongdoing, Evans and Johnson centered their investigation on Flowers from the beginning; no other suspects or alternative theories of the crime were ever considered.
The former site of the Montgomery County Jail in Winona, Mississippi
Melanie Wilmoth and I were in Winona this Monday to visit with Archie and Lola Flowers, Curtis’s parents. We were driving home from a local restaurant when I asked about the location of the old county jail and courthouse.
In June of 1963, Fannie Lou Hamer, Annell Ponder, Sue Johnson and Lawrence Guyot were savagely beaten by several local police officers and a state trooper at the county jail. A few days later, they were arraigned at the county courthouse. Their crime: demanding to be served in the white-only restaurant of Winona’s segregated bus depot two years after the federal government integrated bus depots, train stations and airports across the South.
Archie Flowers didn’t answer my question about the old courthouse, he just guided the car in the direction of downtown Winona. “The courthouse used to be right here,” Lola told me, pointing to the Montgomery County library.
There it stood, the conferate memorial that graces virtually every courthouse in the old South. This one had been erected in 1909, just 44 years after they drove old Dixie down. Southern pride still burned strong. The monument was dedicated “To the Confederacy President Jefferson Davis and the soldiers who fought for state rights.”
Even in 1909, southerners embraced the historical fiction that the War of Northern Aggression had nothing to do with the South’s “peculiar institution.”
The next morning, Melanie and I returned to the library. A Civil Rights display featuring pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. greeted us as we entered the room. I was impressed. Mississippi is one of three southern states where citizens can choose to celebrate Martin Luther King Day or Robert E. Lee Day, whichever floats your boat. A Civil Rights display was above and beyond the call of civic duty.
I moved to the desk and asked if the library had any information about the old courthouse and county jail. “I’m not sure,” the librarian told me. “If we have anything it will be in the book we’ve got on Montgomery County history.”
She plucked an imposing tome from the library shelves. It was one of those local histories that most rural counties produce every half century or so. This one had been published in 1994, three decades after Fannie Lou Hamer and friends were savagely beaten at the county jail and three years before Curtis Flowers went on trial the first time.
Like most county histories, the book began with a section on local history. Although there was an extensive section on the Native American people who occupied the county before the arrival of white settlers, there was no discussion of slavery.
The book featured articles on every white family with roots in the county and several hundred pictures, but although Montgomery County is 45% African-American, not a single black face appeared anywhere. Melanie and I weren’t the first readers to notice this. One reader had scrawled his disgust on the table of contents page. “Sorry people,” the message read, “us black folks are not listed in family histories. Apparently we don’t exist though the copyright is 1994. Go figure racist white folks. Go Obama!”
The book’s extensive section on the Civil War merely reproduced documents from the war era with not even a passing reference to slavery. The war was all about Abraham Lincoln’s desire to “destroy all the institutions of the South and withdraw from her people the constitutional guarantees for the protection to property and the right to enjoy the same.”
A visitor to Montgomery County would have no idea that black people had ever lived there or that slavery and Jim Crow segregation were integral to the county’s legacy. No wonder the note writer was confused and angry.
But that was 1994 and this is 2012. I doubt you would have seen a civil rights display in the Winona library back when Curtis Flowers was first arrested in 1997.
At first blush, historical myopia and denial have little relevance to the fairness of the Montgomery County criminal justice system. Fannie Lou Hamer, Annell Ponder, June Johnson and the other civil rights leaders arrested at Winona’s bus depot in 1963 weren’t simply denied justice; their captives took sadistic pleasure in their ability to beat and sexually humiliate the men and women in their control. Thanks to pressure from the Kennedy White House, the officers were tried in federal court, but an all white, all-male jury acquitted them after deliberating for a matter of minutes. The law of the land did not apply to black people (especially black civil rights activists) in 1963.
How much had changed when Curtis Flowers went to trial for the first time 34 years later?
A lot. When Doug Evans illegally kept black residents off the jury, the Mississippi Supreme Court reversed the verdict. When, at a subsequent trial, five black jurors were selected, all five voted to acquit Mr. Flowers while all seven white voted to acquit.
These facts suggest radical change mixed with a disturbing degree of historical continuity. Things have changed for the better; but not nearly enough. That is why the case of Curtis Flowers and hundreds of other Mississippi defendants must be viewed through the lens of the Magnolia State’s troubled racial history. Did Curtis Flowers get a fair trial in 1997, in 2010, or at any time in between? You be the judge.
It’s not just journalists and academics who have been inspired by Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness.” Having worked as an assistant public defender, I find the book speaks a truth that I have already witnessed. My former boss, Dawn Deaner, the elected Public Defender for Nashville and Davidson County, studied the data and found that although African-Americans constitute 20% of the population in Davidson County, Tennessee, 60% of the people in Davidson County jails are black. Even more shocking, 80% of the children held in jail waiting to be tried as adults are African-American.
I echo Ms. Deaner’s words in an editorial published in The Tennessean today, “Everyone who cares about equality and fairness in our criminal justice system owes it to themselves to read her book, and to make their own evaluation of how and why 1 in 3 young African-American men is currently in prison or jail, or on probation or parole.”
Dawn Deaner
Disproportional incarceration emerges as a civil-rights issue
Dawn Deaner
As Nashville’s public defender, I applaud Jim Todd’s Jan. 18 article about the unfair sentences meted out under Tennessee’s Drug Free School Zone Act (DFSZA), and his call for a legislative remedy to that problem.
I write, however, to shine a light on another disparity created by the Act that goes beyond the sentences imposed, and represents a much more serious inequity permeating our American criminal justice system — the mass incarceration and criminalization of minority individuals.
In 2010, 73 percent of adults charged in Nashville with violating the Drug Free School Zone Act were African-American, even though African-Americans represented only 20 percent of Nashville’s adult population that year, according to U.S. Census data. These disproportionate numbers are even more troubling when you realize they are not limited to DFSZA arrests. On an average day in 2010, the Davidson County Jail held an adult inmate population that was 61 percent African-American, 6 percent Hispanic, and 33 percent Caucasian — a mixture wildly different than our city’s adult population that year (roughly 20 percent African-American, 6 percent Hispanic and 70 percent Caucasian). The numbers are even more disparate for our children. In December 2011, 80 percent of juveniles held in Nashville’s jail pending trial as adults were African-American.
Beyond statistics, a trip to the A.A. Birch Criminal Court Building reveals the same reality — the faces of our city’s criminal defendants are predominantly faces of color, regardless of whether they are charged with minor offenses or serious felonies. Unfortunately, Nashville is not alone in this racial disparity, as civil-rights advocate Michelle Alexander points out in her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. In the book, Alexander explains how — primarily as a result of American’s “war on drugs” — minorities have come to be overrepresented in the criminal justice system, even though they are not committing a higher share of crime. She goes on to make a case for how a wide variety of American laws, institutions and practices — ranging from racial profiling to biased sentencing policies, political disenfranchisement and legalized discrimination — trap African-Americans in a virtual (and often literal) cage.
In a recent episode of Fresh Air on NPR, Dave Davies interviews attorney and author Michelle Alexander. In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Alexander argues that, as a result of the war on drugs, the U.S. has created a system of mass incarceration which disproportionately targets people of color.
“The war on drugs,” Alexander states, “was part of a grand Republican Party strategy, known as the Southern Strategy, of using racially coded get-tough appeals on issues of crime and welfare to appeal to poor and working-class whites, particularly in the South, who were resentful of, anxious about, threatened by many of the gains of African-Americans in the civil rights movement.”
The “wave of punitiveness” and get-tough policies that followed the declaration of the war on drugs had an incredible impact on communities of color. Although African-Americans make up about 13% of the general population, they make up nearly 40% of the prison population. “In major American cities today,” Alexander points out, “more than half of working-age African-American men either are under are correctional control or are branded felons.” (more…)
Below is a New York Times editorial summarizing a recent study conducted by Stanford law professor John Donohue. Donohue’s research focuses on the relationship between the heinousness of a crime and the likelihood that an individual accused of a crime will be sentenced to death. The results of his research, which shed light on the arbitrary and discriminatory nature of capital punishment in the U.S., indicate that “inmates on death row are indistinguishable from equally violent offenders who escape [the death] penalty.” MW
The Supreme Court has not banned capital punishment, as it should, but it has long held that the death penalty is unconstitutional if randomly imposed on a handful of people. An important new study based on capital cases in Connecticut provides powerful evidence that death sentences are haphazardly meted out, with virtually no connection to the heinousness of the crime.
A number of studies in the last three decades have shown that black defendants are more likely to be sentenced to death if their victim is white rather than black. But defenders of capital punishment often respond to those studies by arguing that the “worst of the worst” are sentenced to death because their crimes are the most egregious.
The Connecticut study, conducted by John Donohue, a Stanford law professor, completely dispels this erroneous reasoning. It analyzed all murder cases in Connecticut over a 34-year period and found that inmates on death row are indistinguishable from equally violent offenders who escape that penalty. It shows that the process in Connecticut — similar to those in other death-penalty states — is utterly arbitrary and discriminatory.
From 1973, when Connecticut passed a death penalty law, to 2007, 4,686 murders were committed in the state. Of those, 205 were death-eligible cases (capital murders that include the killing of a police officer, murder for hire, murder-rape and murder committed during a kidnapping) that resulted in some kind of conviction, either through a plea bargain or conviction at trial. The arbitrariness started at the charging level: nearly a third of these death-eligible cases were not charged as capital offenses as they could have been, but as lesser crimes. Sixty-six defendants were convicted of capital murder, 29 went to a hearing for a death sentence, nine death sentences were sustained and one person was executed.
Why was this small group of defendants singled out for death? Did their crimes make them more deserving of execution than all the others? (more…)
No one can account for the dramatic drop in violent crime. According to the Washington Post, in 2011 the DC homicide rate reached its lowest point since 1963. But just across the county line, the homicide rate is experiencing an upswing. When violent crime drops there is always a reason. When gang-related violence plunged in Fort Worth, TX, a big part of the reason was the Rev. W.G. Daniels.
Daniels died this week. Marty Sabota’s obituary shows that Daniels grasped many of the principles criminologist David Kennedy outlines in his excellent book Don’t Shoot:
America has four inextricably linked problems that converge in its most troubled communities. There’s the violence that terrorizes many of its, especially, black and minority communities. There’s the chaos that comes with, especially, public drug markets. There’s the devastation being wrought on, especially, troubled black and minority communities by our criminal justice in response to the first two problems. And there’ the worsening racial divide that’s causing.
In Fort Worth, Pastor W.G. Daniels stopped the violence by forging a creative dialogue between law enforcement and the communities most affected by violent crime. A former police officer who understood the law enforcement mindset, Daniels made the perfect peacemaker. He knew why his neighbors didn’t want to talk to the police, but he also understood why law enforcement will always concentrate on high crime communities. Daniels didn’t want the police to ignore the hot neighborhoods; he just wanted them to show more respect and professionalism.
Getting gang members, community members and the police on the same page isn’t easy, but it can be done. As Daniels once told the Star-Telegram:
You had gangs like the Crips and the Bloods fighting against each other, but after we conducted a survey, we found that there just needed to be somebody to bring a truce to stop the madness and no better people to do it than pastors who meet every Sunday. We needed to send a message that it would not be tolerated, and by the help of God and Christ we were able to bring about peace.
When people are talking to one another behavior changes. Open air drug markets move underground, police officers feel more appreciated and behave with a higher level of professionalism, residents of high crime neighborhoods gain a new sense of confidence and self-respect. Criminologist David Kennedy and pastor W.G. Daniels heal communities because they understand the spiritual nature of the war they are fighting. (more…)
In a three-month period shortly after World War II, 751 home fires killed fo urteen people in the city of Chicago. The deadliest of these fires broke out in filthy, overcrowded tenement buildings in the city’s black district. Joe Allen’s People Wasn’t Made to Burntells the story of a fire on 1733 West Washburne Street that claimed the lives of four children and eventually placed the victim’s father on trial for murder.
Like scores of other Mississippi sharecroppers, James and Annie Hickman had migrated north in search of a better life. In segregated Chicago, housing options were strictly limited for Black families like the Hickmans. They were “forced to live in ‘kitchenettes’: dilapidated one-room apartments that in many cases had no heat, electricity, or running water.” The kitchenette the Hickman family moved into was owned by Mary Porter Adams, a Black woman desperate to maximize her monthly profit, and managed by David Coleman, a white man determined to spend as little as possible on maintenance and repair work.
James Hickman paid Coleman a $100 deposit and moved into a 25 by 15 foot attic apartment on the understanding that more suitable accommodations on the second floor would soon be available. “The Hickmans had to go down to the floor below them to get water from a neighbor to cook and clean with” Joe Allen tells us. “They cooked on a Kenmore two-burner stove a few footsteps from their beds. At a local store James bought two lamps to light the room, both fueled by kerosene.”
When James Hickman asked Coleman when the second-floor apartment would be ready, the manager initially put him off. Hickman kept pressing the issue. Finally, Coleman told Hickman he wasn’t going to rent him the better apartment and wouldn’t return the deposit money. Moreover, Coleman said “he had a man on the East Side ready to burn the place up” if Hickman took him to court. (more…)
Although New York City is 29 percent Latino and 25 percent Black, Al Baker reports that a shocking 85 percent of individuals stopped by New York City police are Latino or Black. In 2008, the New York Police Department’s “stop-and-frisk” tactics and the racial disparities associated with them, prompted the Center for Constitutional Rights to file a suit alleging the use of racial profiling by city police. Recently, lawyers representing the city attempted to dismiss the case. Yesterday, however, Judge Shira Scheindlin rejected the lawyers’ efforts, ruling that there was enough substantial evidence to carry on with a trial.
Once upon a time, it was generally understood that the police could not stop and search someone without a warrant unless there was probable cause to believe that the individual was engaged in criminal activity. That was a basic Fourth Amendment principle. In Terry v. Ohio, decided in 1968, the Supreme Court modified that understanding, but only modestly, by ruling that if and when a police officer observes unusual conduct by someone the officer reasonably believes to be dangerous and engaged in criminal activity, the officer “is entitled for the protection of himself and others in the area” to conduct a limited search to “discover weapons that might be used against the officer.” Known as the stop-and-frisk rule, the Terry decision stands for the proposition that, so long as a police officer has “reasonable articulable suspicion” that someone is engaged in criminal activity and dangerous, it is constitutionally permissible to stop, question, and frisk him or her — even in the absence of probable cause.
…In the years since Terry, stops, interrogations, and searches of ordinary people driving down the street, walking home from the bus stop, or riding the train, have become commonplace — at least for people of color.
As Alexander points out, the Supreme Court’s decision in Terry v. Ohio set a legal precedent, making it permissible for police to search individuals without probable cause. (more…)
Once upon a time, the red-red state of Texas was Dixiecrat Blue. That changed at the federal level a long time ago, but as late as 2004, the State House was still controlled by Democrats. Recent elections have changed that in a big way–Republicans are now firmly in control of the Texas Legislature. Texas has always been a politically conservative state; it just took a few decades for the Southern strategy to kick in.
One quick glance at the Texas Legislature’s “face-book” and the racial implications of this political re-orientation is immediately obvious: most Democrats are black and brown and the delegation boasts a large number of women; flip over to the Republican delegation and you see lots of white males, a few white females and the occasional conservative Latino who was elected with Anglo votes.
Meanwhile, the complexion of the Texas electorate has been rapidly changing. The state population has been exploding in recent years and almost all the growth has come from the Latino segment of the population. Thanks to this growth, Texas was recently awarded four additional congressional seats. Here’s the problem; the Republican dominated Legislature is responsible for drawing up a new electoral map, but the folks responsible for creating four new seats rarely pull the red lever in the voting booth.
As this article in the National Journal indicates, the GOP initially looked to Rep. Lamar Smith for guidance. Smith suggested that they create two strong Republican districts (to ensure continued GOP hegemony) while cobbling together two heavily Latino districts a to avoid questions about fairness and possible legal challenges.
Led by Joe Barton and Rick Perry, Texas Republicans decided to ignore Smith’s advice and play for all the marbles. They controlled the Legislature, so they ought to be able to reconfigure the electoral lines in their favor. This kind of thinking produced a “Perrymandered” map designed to give the Republicans four new seats while doing absolutely nothing to increase Latino political influence. In fact, the new map was designed to frustrate Hispanic voters. The snub was obvious and intentional.
Texas Democrats have only themselves to blame for these developments. The party’s best bet (morally and politically) is to embrace ethnic diversity and market itself as “the party that looks like Texas.” Unfortunately, many older Democrats are still mired in the bad old days when Jim Crow values dominated Texas politics. What’s the use of fielding an inclusive mix of black, brown and white candidates, they reason, if conservative white voters rally around The Party of White? The idea that white voters might reconsider their biased ways if presented with a compelling new vision is beyond the comprehension for most Anglo Democrats in Texas.
Latino Texans are frustrated. For decades they have been exploited by Democrats and ignored by Republicans. Texas Latinos have a hard time getting excited about the Democratic Party (why should they), but they do want their growing numbers to translate into real political influence (why shouldn’t they). (more…)
By Lisa D’Souza
By Alan Bean
Below is a New York Times editorial summarizing a recent study conducted by Stanford law professor John Donohue. Donohue’s research focuses on the relationship between the heinousness of a crime and the likelihood that an individual accused of a crime will be sentenced to death. The results of his research, which shed light on the arbitrary and discriminatory nature of capital punishment in the U.S., indicate that “inmates on death row are indistinguishable from equally violent offenders who escape [the death] penalty.” MW
By Alan Bean
By Alan Bean
Friends of Justice 