Generational Study, One Family Becomes Vice President, the Other Prison
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Kamala Harris, Mass Incarceration and Me
Many progressives mistrust her for her past as a prosecutor. As an ex-captive — and also the son of a law-breaking victim — I can tell you it'southward non that uncomplicated.
Credit... Photograph illustration by Joan Wong
Mind to This Commodity.
Reginald Dwayne Betts explores his thoughts on the criminal justice system, Kamala Harris and the hard conversations almost mass incarceration.
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Because senator Kamala Harris is a prosecutor and I am a felon, I accept been following her political rise, with the same focus that my younger son tracks Steph Curry threes. Before it was in vogue to criticize prosecutors, my friends and I were exchanging tales of existence railroaded by them. Shackled in oversized greenish jail scrubs, I listened to a prosecutor in a Fairfax County, Va., courtroom tell a gauge that in one night I'd single-handedly inverse suburban shopping forever. Everything the prosecutor said I did was true — I carried a pistol, carjacked a man, tried to rob two women. "He needs a long penitentiary sentence," the prosecutor told the guess. I faced life in prison house for carjacking the man. I pleaded guilty to that, to having a gun, to an attempted robbery. I was sixteen years old. The old heads in prison would call me lucky for walking away with only a nine-year sentence.
I'd been locked up for virtually 15 months when I entered Virginia's Southampton Correctional Center in 1998, the year I should have graduated from high schoolhouse. In that prison house, there were probably about a dozen other teenagers. Most of united states of america had lengthy sentences — 30, twoscore, fifty years — all for trigger-happy felonies. Public talk of mass incarceration has centered on the state of war on drugs, wrongful convictions and Kafkaesque sentences for nonviolent charges, while circumventing the robberies, home invasions, murders and rape cases that brought us to prison house.
The near hard word to have about criminal-justice reform has always been about violence and accountability. You could release anybody from prison who currently has a drug offense and the The states would withal outpace about every other country when information technology comes to incarceration. According to the Prison house Policy Establish, of the nearly 1.3 meg people incarcerated in state prisons, 183,000 are incarcerated for murder; 17,000 for manslaughter; 165,000 for sexual assault; 169,000 for robbery; and 136,000 for set on. That's more half of the state prison population.
When Harris decided to run for president, I thought the country might take the opportunity to grapple with the injustice of mass incarceration in a fashion that didn't lose sight of what violence, and the sorrow it creates, does to families and communities. Instead, many progressives tried to turn the bones fact of Harris'due south profession into an indictment against her. Shorthand for her career became: "She'due south a cop," meaning, her allegiance was with a system that conspires, through prison and policing, to harm Black people in America.
In the past decade or so, nosotros have certainly seen aplenty evidence of how decadent the system tin can be: Michelle Alexander'southward best-selling book, "The New Jim Crow," which argues that the state of war on drugs marked the return of America's racist system of segregation and legal discrimination; Ava DuVernay's "When They See U.s.," a series most the wrongful convictions of the Primal Park Five, and her documentary "13th," which delves into mass incarceration more broadly; and "Just Mercy," a book by Bryan Stevenson, a public interest lawyer, that has too been made into a picture show, chronicling his pursuit of justice for a man on death row, who is eventually exonerated. All of these describe the destructive strength of prosecutors, giving a lot of run to the belief that anyone who works within a system responsible for such carnage warrants public shame.
My mother had an feel that gave her a different perspective on prosecutors — though I didn't know about it until I came home from prison house on March 4, 2005, when I was 24. That day, she sat me down and said, "I need to tell yous something." Nosotros were in her sleeping accommodation in the townhouse in Suitland, Md., that had been my childhood home, where as a kid she'd telephone call me to bring her a glass of water. I expected her to tell me that despite my years in prison, everything was practiced now. But instead she told me about something that happened nearly a decade before, just weeks after my arrest. She left for work earlier the lord's day rose, as she ever did, heading to the federal agency that had employed her my entire life. She stood at a bus end 100 feet from my high school, awaiting the charabanc that would take her to the train that would take her to a terminate almost her job in the nation'south capital. But on that morn, a homo yanked her into a secluded space, placed a gun to her caput and raped her. When she could escape, she ran wildly into the vi a.m. traffic.
My mother'southward words turned me into a mumbling and incoherent mess, unable to grasp how this could accept happened to her. I knew she kept this hugger-mugger to protect me. I turned to Google and searched the discussion "rape" forth with my hometown and was wrecked by the violence against women that I found. My mother told me her rapist was a Black human. And I idea he should spend the rest of his years staring at the pockmarked walls of prison cells that I knew so well.
The prosecutor's chore, different the defence force attorney's or guess's, is to do justice. What does that mean when yous are asked by some to dole out retribution measured in years served, merely blamed by others for the impairment incarceration tin do? The outrage at this land's criminal-justice system is loud today, but information technology hasn't led us to develop ameliorate ways of against my mother's world from nearly a quarter-century ago: weekends visiting her son in a prison house in Virginia; weekdays attention the trial of the human who sexually assaulted her.
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We said bye to my grandmother in the aforementioned Baptist church that, in June 2019, Senator Kamala Harris, notwithstanding pursuing the Democratic nomination for president, went to give a major speech near why she became a prosecutor. I hadn't been within Brookland Baptist Church for a decade, and returning reminded me of Grandma Mary and the eight years of messages she mailed to me in prison. The occasion for Harris's speech was the almanac Freedom Fund dinner of the South Carolina Land Conference of the N.A.A.C.P. The evening began with the Black national canticle, "Elevator Every Voice and Sing," and at the opening chord nearly everyone in the room stood. At that place to write virtually the senator, I had been standing already and mouthed the words of the showtime poetry earlier realizing I'd never sung any further.
Each table in the feast hall was filled with folks dressed in their Sunday all-time. Servers brought plates of food and pitchers of iced tea to the tables. Nearly anybody was Black. The room was besides loud for me to practise more than crouch beside guests at their tables and scribble notes about why they attended. Speakers talked nearly the chapter's long history in the civil rights movement. 1 called for the current generation of immature rappers to tell a different story well-nigh cede. The youngest speaker of the nighttime said he simply wanted to exist safety. I didn't hear anyone mention mass incarceration. And I knew in a different decade, my grandmother might have been in that audition, taking in the same arguments about personal agency and responsibility, all the while wondering why her grandbaby was still locked abroad. If Harris couldn't persuade that audience that her experiences equally a Black woman in America justified her decision to become a prosecutor, I knew there were few people in this country who could be moved.
Describing her upbringing in a family unit of civil rights activists, Harris argued that the ongoing struggle for equality needed to include both prosecuting criminal defendants who had victimized Black people and protecting the rights of Black criminal defendants. "I was cleareyed that prosecutors were largely not people who looked like me," she said. This mattered for Harris because of the "prosecutors that refused to seat Black jurors, refused to prosecute lynchings, disproportionately condemned young Black men to death row and looked the other manner in the face of police brutality." When she became a prosecutor in 1990, she was one of only a handful of Black people in her office. When she was elected commune attorney of San Francisco in 2003, she recalled, she was one of just three Black D.A.southward nationwide. And when she was elected California attorney general in 2010, there were no other Black attorneys full general in the country. At these words, the crowd around me clapped. "I knew the unilateral power that prosecutors had with the stroke of a pen to make a decision virtually someone else's life or decease," she said.
Harris offered a pair of stories as testify of the importance of a Blackness woman'southward doing this piece of work. Once, ear hustling, she listened to colleagues discussing ways to prove criminal defendants were gang-affiliated. If a racial-profiling manual existed, their signals would certainly be included: baggy pants, the place of arrest and the rap music blaring from vehicles. She said that she'd told her colleagues: "So, you know that neighborhood you were talking about? Well, I got family members and friends who live in that neighborhood. You know the way you were talking about how folks were dressed? Well, that'due south actually stylish in my community." She continued: "You know that music yous were talking about? Well, I got a tape of that music in my auto right now."
The 2nd instance was near the mothers of murdered children. She told the audience most the women who had come to her office when she was San Francisco's D.A. — women who wanted to speak with her, and her alone, virtually their sons. "The mothers came, I believe, because they knew I would encounter them," Harris said. "And I mean literally see them. Encounter their grief. Run into their anguish." They complained to Harris that the police force were not investigating. "My son is being treated similar a statistic," they would say. Everyone in that Southern Baptist church knew that the mothers and their expressionless sons were Black. Harris outlined the archetype dilemma of Black people in this land: being simultaneously overpoliced and underprotected. Harris told the audition that all communities deserved to be condom.
Among the guests in the room that night whom I talked to, no 1 had an issue with her piece of work as a prosecutor. A lot of them seemed to believe that only people doing dirt had issues with prosecutors. I thought of myself and my friends who have served long terms, knowing that in a manner, Harris was talking about Blackness people's needing protection from us — from the violence nosotros perpetrated to earn those years in a series of cells.
Harris came up as a prosecutor in the 1990s, when both the political culture and popular culture were developing a story nigh crime and violence that made incarceration feel like a moral response. Back then, films past Black directors — "New Jack City," "Menace II Gild," "Boyz due north the Hood" — turned Black violence into a genre where murder and crack-dealing were as ever-present as Black fathers were absent. Those were the years when Representative Charlie Rangel, a Democrat, argued that "we should not allow people to distribute this poison without fright that they might be arrested" and "get to jail for the rest of their natural life." Those were the years when President Clinton signed legislation that concluded federal parole for people with 3 violent crime convictions and encouraged states to essentially eliminate parole; made information technology more than hard for defendants to challenge their convictions in courtroom; and made it nearly impossible to claiming prison weather condition.
Back and so, it felt like I was only ane of an entire generation of immature Black men learning the logic of count time and lockdown. With me were Anthony Winn and Terell Kelly and a dozen others, all lost to prison house during those years. Terell was sentenced to 33 years for murdering a man when he was 17 — a neighborhood beef turned deadly. Home from college for two weeks, a nineteen-year-sometime Anthony robbed four convenience stores — he'd been carrying a pistol during three. Subsequently he was sentenced by four judges, he had a total of 36 years.
Most of us came into those cells with trauma, having witnessed or experienced brutality before committing our own. Prison, a factory of violence and despair, introduced united states of america to more than of the same. And though there were organizations working to go rid of the death penalty, terminate mandatory minimums, bring back parole and even abolish prisons, in that location were few ways for us to know that they existed. We suffered. And we felt lonely. Because of this, sometimes I reduce my friends' stories to the cruelty of doing time. I forget that Terell and I walked prison yards as teenagers, discussing Malcolm X and searching for mentors in the men around the states. I forget that Anthony and I talked about the poetry of Sonia Sanchez the way others praised DMX. He taught me the meaning of the word "patina" and introduced me to the music of Nib Withers. There were Luke and Fats; and Juvie, who could give you lot the sharpest edge-up in America with just a razor and comb.
When I left prison in 2005, they all had decades left. And then I went to police schoolhouse and believed I owed information technology to them to work on their cases and help them go out. I've persuaded lawyers to represent friends pro bono. Put together parole packets — basically job applications for freedom: letters of recommendation and support from family and friends; copies of certificates attesting to vocational training; the tape of college credits. We always return to the crimes to provide explanation and context. We debate that today each i little resembles the teenager who pulled a gun. And I write a letter of the alphabet — which is less from a lawyer and more from a man remembering what it means to want to go dwelling to his mother. I write, struggling to condense decades of life in prison house into a x-page case for freedom. Then I find my way to the parole board's office in Richmond, Va., and try to persuade the members to permit my friends see a sunrise for the outset fourth dimension.
Juvie and Luke have made parole; Fats, represented by the Innocence Project at the University of Virginia School of Law, was granted a provisional pardon past Virginia'due south governor, Ralph Northam. All three are home now, released just as a pandemic would come to threaten the lives of then many others still within. Now free, they've sent me text letters with videos of themselves hugging their mothers for the starting time time in decades, casting angling lines from boats drifting along rivers they didn't expect to meet once more, enjoying a cold beer that isn't contraband.
In February, later on 25 years, Virginia passed a bill making people incarcerated for at least 20 years for crimes they committed before their 18th birthdays eligible for parole. Men who imagined they would die in prison now may see daylight. Terell will be eligible. These years later, he's the mentor nosotros searched for, helping to organize, from the inside, community events for children, and he'south spoken publicly about learning to view his crimes through the eyes of his victim's family. My homo Anthony was xix when he committed his criminal offence. In the final few years, he's organized poetry readings, book clubs and fatherhood classes. When Gregory Fairchild, a professor at the Darden Schoolhouse of Business at the University of Virginia, began an entrepreneurship program at Dillwyn Correctional Center, Anthony was among the graduates, earning all iii of the certificates that it offered. He worked to have me invited as the commencement speaker, and what I remember most is watching him share a meal with his parents for the first time since his arrest. Only he must pray that the governor grants him a conditional pardon, as he did for Fats.
I tell myself that my friends are unique, that I wouldn't fight and so difficult for simply anybody. Merely maybe there is piffling particularly singled-out about any of the states — beyond that we'd served enough fourth dimension in prison. There was a skinny low-cal-skinned 15-year-old kid who came into prison during the years that nosotros were there. The rumor was that he'd broken into the firm of an older woman and sexually assaulted her. We all knew he had iii life sentences. Someone stole his shoes. People threatened him. He'd had to break a man's jaw with a lock in a sock to prove he'd fight if pushed. As a teenager, he was experiencing the worst of prison. And I know that had he been my cellmate, had I known him the mode I know my friends, if he reached out to me today, I'd probably be arguing that he should be costless.
But I know that on the other end of our prison sentences was always someone weeping. During the eye of Harris's presidential campaign, a friend referred me to a adult female with a story about Senator Harris that she felt I needed to hear. Years ago, this woman's sister had been missing for days, and the police had done little. Happenstance gave this woman an audience with then-Attorney General Harris. A coordinated multicity search followed. The sister had been murdered; her body was found in a ravine. The woman told me that "Kamala understands the politics of victimization every bit well as anyone who has been in the arrangement, which is that this kind of case — a fifty-yr-old Black woman gone missing or found expressionless — ordinarily does not become whatsoever resources put toward it." They defenseless the man who murdered her sis, and he was sentenced to 131 years. I call up about the human who assaulted my mother, a series rapist, considering his case makes me struggle with questions of violence and vengeance and justice. And I stop thinking nigh it. I am inconsistent. I want my friends out, but I know there is no one who can convince me that this man shouldn't spend the rest of his life in prison house.
My mother purchased her first single-family unit abode just before I was released from prison. One version of this story is that she purchased the house so that I wouldn't spend a single night more than than necessary in the childhood home I walked away from in handcuffs. A truer account is that by leaving Suitland, my mother meant to burn down the place from retentivity.
I imagined that I had singularly introduced my mother to the pain of the courts. I was wrong. The first fourth dimension she missed work to attend courtroom proceedings was to witness the prosecution of a child the same age as I was when I robbed a man. He was probably from Suitland, and he'd attempted to rob my mother at gunpoint. The second time, my mother attended a series of court dates involving me, dressed in her best work clothes to remind the prosecutor and judge and those in the courtroom that the child facing a life sentence had a mother who loved him. The third time, my mother took off days from work to go to court alone and witness the trial of the human who raped her and two other women. A prosecutor's subpoena forced her to testify, and her solace came from knowing that prison would prevent him from attacking others.
After my female parent told me what had happened to her, we didn't mention it to each other once again for more than a decade. But then in 2018, she and I were interviewed on the podcast "Death, Sex & Money." The host asked my mother about going to court for her son's trial when he was facing life. "I was raped by gunpoint," my mother said. "It happened simply before he was sentenced. Then when I was going to court for Dwayne, I was also going for a court trial for myself." I hadn't forgotten what happened, but having my mother say it aloud to a stranger fabricated it far more than devastating.
On the last twenty-four hour period of the trial of the homo who raped her, my mother told me, the judge accepted his guilty plea. She remembers only that he didn't get enough time. She says her nose began to drain. When I asked her what she would have wanted to happen to her attacker, she replied, "That I'd taken the deputy'due south gun and shot him."
Harris has studied offense-scene and autopsy photos of the dead. She has confronted men in court who have sexually assaulted their children, sexually assaulted the elderly, scalped their lovers. In her 2009 book, "Smart on Criminal offense," Harris praised the piece of work of Sunny Schwartz — creator of the Resolve to Stop the Violence Project, the get-go restorative-justice program in the country to offer services to offenders and victims, which began at a jail in San Francisco. It aims to aid inmates who accept committed violent crimes past giving them tools to de-escalate confrontations. Harris wrote a nib with a state senator to ensure that children who witness violence can receive mental health handling. And she argued that safety is a civil right, and that a 60-yr sentence for a series of eating place armed robberies, where some victims were bound or locked in freezers, "should tell anyone because viciously preying on citizens and businesses that they will be caught, convicted and sent to prison — for a very long time."
Politicians and the public acknowledge mass incarceration is a problem, but the lengthy prison sentences of men and women incarcerated during the 1990s have largely not been revisited. While the show of any prosecutor doing work on this front end is slim, every bit a politician arguing for basic systemic reforms, Harris has noted the need to "unravel the decades-long endeavor to make sentencing guidelines excessively harsh, to the point of existence inhumane"; criticized the bail system; and chosen for an end to private prisons and criticized the companies that charge absurd rates for phone calls and electronic-monitoring services.
In June, months into the Covid-19 pandemic, and earlier she was tapped as the vice-presidential nominee, I had the opportunity to interview Harris by phone. A police officer'due south knee on the neck of George Floyd, choking the life out of him as he chosen for help, had been captured on video. Each dark, thousands around the globe protested. During our conversation, Harris told me that every bit the but Black woman in the United States Senate "in the midst of the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery," endless people had asked for stories nearly her experiences with racism. Harris said that she was non about to showtime telling them "about my world for a number of reasons, including you should know about the issue that affects this country equally part of the greatest stain on this country." Exhausted, she no longer answered the questions. I imagined she believes, equally Toni Morrison once said, that "the very serious function of racism" is "lark. It keeps you from doing your work."
But these days, fifty-fifty in the conversations that I hear my children having, race suffuses so much. I tell Harris that my 12-year-old son, Micah, told his classmates and teachers: "As you all know, my dad went to jail. Shouldn't the police who killed Floyd go to jail?" My son wanted to know why prison seemed to be reserved for Blackness people and wondered whose violence demanded a prison cell.
"In the criminal-justice system," Harris replied, "the irony, and, frankly, the hypocrisy is that whenever nosotros use the words 'accountability' and 'consequence,' it'due south always about the private who was arrested." Again, she began to make a case that would be familiar to any progressive about the need to make the organisation accountable. And while I establish myself agreeing, I began to fear that the point was but to find ways to treat officers in the same barbarous manner that nosotros care for anybody else. I thought about the men I'd represented in parole hearings — and the friends I'd exist representing soon. And wondered out loud to Harris: How do we get to their liberty?
"Nosotros need to reimagine what public safety looks like," the senator told me, noting that she would talk nearly a public health model. "Are we looking at the fact that if yous focus on problems like instruction and preventive things, then yous don't accept a arrangement that'due south reactive?" The list of those things becomes long: affordable housing, chore-skills development, teaching funding, homeownership. She remembered how during the early 2000s, when she was the San Francisco district chaser and started Dorsum on Track (a re-entry program that sought to reduce future incarceration by building the skills of the men facing drug charges), many people were critical. " 'Y'all're a D.A. You're supposed to exist putting people in jail, not letting them out,'" she said people told her.
Information technology always returns to this for me — who should be in prison, and for how long? I know that American prisons exercise trivial to address violence. If annihilation, they exacerbate information technology. If my friends walk out of prison changed from the boys who walked in, it will be because they've fought with the system — with themselves and sometimes with the men effectually them — to exist dissimilar. Most violent crimes get unsolved, and the pain they cause is nearly always unresolved. And those who are convicted — many, maybe all — exercise far too much time in prison.
And yet, I imagine what I would do if the Maryland Parole Commission contacted my mother, informing her that the man who assaulted her is eligible for parole. I'grand certain I'd write a letter explaining how one morning my mother didn't go to piece of work because she was in a infirmary; tell the board that the retentivity of a gun pointed at her head has never left; explain how when I came dwelling house, my female parent told me the story. Some violence changes everything.
The thing that makes you lot suited for a conversation in America might be the very thing that precludes you from having it. Terell, Anthony, Fats, Luke and Juvie have taught me that the best indicator of whether I believe they should exist free is our friendship. Learning that a Black homo in the city I called home raped my female parent taught me that the pain and anger for a family unit member can be unfathomable. It makes me wonder if parole agencies should contact me at all — if they should e'er contact victims and their families.
Perchance if Harris becomes the vice president we can have a national conversation about our contradictory impulses effectually crime and punishment. For three decades, every bit a line prosecutor, a commune attorney, an attorney full general and now a senator, her work has allowed her to witness many of them. Prosecutors brand a convenient target. But if the organization is cleaved, it is considering our flaws more than than our virtues breathing it. Confronting why so many of u.s. believe prisons must exist may force us to admit that we accept no adequate response to some violence. Still, I hope that Harris reminds the country that merely acknowledging the problem of mass incarceration does not address it — any more than than keeping my friends in prison is a solution to the violence and trauma that landed them there.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/magazine/kamala-harris-crime-prison.html
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