Locked Down, Locked Out (16 page)

Bail and Beyond

The New Orleans coalition’s focus addresses a population that often garners less publicity than people serving prison time: the nearly 750,000 people locked up in local jails, many of whom are simply waiting to be tried.
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A study of people in New York City arrested on nonfelony charges whose bail was set at $1,000 or less showed that 87 percent were in jail because they could not pay the bail amount.
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People of color are routinely assigned higher bail amounts.
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An inability to pay bail has reverberating consequences that extend far beyond the pretrial period. Those who are jailed while awaiting trial are more likely to be convicted and more likely to receive long sentences than their bailed-out counterparts, who are able to address their legal charges from within their communities. Plus, people who are jailed before trial may lose their jobs, housing, or custody of their children—and may feel forced to accept a plea bargain just to get out temporarily.
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But recently a rare path to release emerged for a nineteen-year-old young man arrested on drug charges in Massachusetts, who was assigned a very low bail but still couldn’t pay it. The Massachusetts Bail Fund, a coalition of activists and social workers who fundraise and post bail for folks whose families can’t post their own, had recently been born. The fund paid the man’s bail, and he was released to a residential drug treatment program with
which the fund connected him, Norma Wassel, the organization’s founder, tells me. Six months later, when his case reached its final hearing, the district attorney stated that through his progress in treatment, “The defendant showed me that he could stay out of trouble and get the help he needed.” Not only had this young man been spared six months of pretrial incarceration, but he’d also been granted the chance to help shape his own post-hearing future.

Groups doing other types of prisoner advocacy can cast a line out to the Massachusetts Bail Fund for help. Jason Lydon of Black and Pink says, “Working with them, we’ve been able to save people from many months in jail awaiting trial, and save some from getting sentenced to jail time at all, as they show up in court out of chains.” The fund also actively advocates for moving away from cash bail toward release and community accountability, in which services are provided by organizations based within the community instead of by state agencies—removing bricks instead of adding them.

Activism around bail, which usually happens in close collaboration with the person inside whose bail is being targeted, can serve another important decarcerative function. In lots of cases in which national campaigns have sprouted up around particular people standing trial, raising bail money is a dynamic step toward broader organizing and action. Consider Marissa Alexander, who was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for firing a warning shot to stave off an attack from her abusive husband, or Shanesha Taylor, charged with felony child abuse for leaving her kids in the car while interviewing for a job. Public campaigns to raise bail and/or legal expenses for them have exponentially raised the profiles of their cases—and raised awareness of the issues from which those cases stem: the criminalization of
black domestic violence survivors, for example, or the utter void of support provided for poor, unemployed moms of color.

Of course, campaigns to end the confinement of certain prisoners—and thus draw attention to the social forces that ground and uphold the system—don’t stop at (or necessarily start at) fundraising. The ongoing movements to free political prisoners like Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Albert Woodfox, Herman Bell, Russell “Maroon” Shoatz, Mondo we Langa, and many, many others continue to highlight the intertwined forces of racism and suppression of political resistance that power the criminal punishment machine.

The family-led fights to win clemency for prisoners such as Tyrone Brown—a seventeen-year-old incarcerated on a life sentence for smoking pot while on probation—and Richard Paey, a man who suffered from MS, sentenced to twenty-five years for using painkillers prescribed by his doctor—began to throw the drug war into a ghastly light, even for some of the most tenacious proponents of “Just Say No.” And recently, the movements to support women such as Marissa Alexander, Shanesha Taylor, CeCe McDonald (a trans woman convicted of stabbing an attacker in self-defense), and many others have become freedom campaigns in many senses of the word. They’re geared toward all-out release, but also toward a wider understanding of who is denied freedom: freedom from incarceration, freedom from gender violence, freedom from police violence, freedom from poverty, freedom from oppression.

Decarceration Nation

Lillie Branch-Kennedy of Richmond, Virginia, didn’t encounter the matrix of the criminal punishment system by choice. “I wish from the bottom of my heart that I never had to learn firsthand
about America’s world record for mass incarceration, and about Virginia’s criminal system that targets and ensnares young black men,” says Lillie, who founded the Resource Information Help for the Disadvantaged (RIHD), an advocacy group for Virginia prisoners and their families. Sixty-one percent of state prisoners are black; for every white person incarcerated in Virginia, six black people are behind bars.
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That number includes Lillie’s son Donald.

In 2001, Donald—who was attending Virginia State on a scholarship but had recently begun “running with the wrong crowd”—was arrested as an accessory to a robbery. For a crime that would ordinarily carry a sentence of 3 to 8 years, Donald was sentenced to 127.

As the summer before his junior year of college wound to an end, instead of returning to school, Donald was bussed off to prison: Wallens Ridge, a supermax in the Appalachian mountains, a steep eight-hour drive from Lillie’s home. With her son caged in twenty-three-hour-a-day lockdown and her life pinned to the commute to see him, Lillie couldn’t ignore the system. So she decided to take it on.

In addition to coordinating transportation for prisoners’ family members (providing monthly van trips to four Virginia state prisons), Lillie steered RIHD toward decarceration advocacy, traveling the state to rally family members against various manifestations of the prison-industrial complex, from “ban the box” campaigns (eliminating criminal background questions from initial employment forms) to ending mandatory-minimum sentencing to bringing back parole, which has been abolished in Virginia since 1995. Lillie’s not timid about her commitment to broad-scale decarceration; she rejects a recent Virginia bill aimed at reinstating parole for people convicted of nonviolent crimes
only, which entrenches a sort of “good prisoner vs. bad prisoner” mentality. “It’s unfair and discriminatory,” she says.

Lillie knows that no single group can triumph over the prison nation—and RIHD isn’t going it alone. It’s part of a growing coalition of local campaigns called Nation Inside, which is sweeping the country by way of ground-level activism, Facebook, Twitter, email, blogs, “storybanks,” petitions, and a multifaceted website where new efforts are continually sprouting up.

It all started around the time Donald was incarcerated in 2001. Many of the prisoners at Wallens Ridge were listening to a hip-hop show called “Holler to the Hood,” launched by artist-activists Nick Szuberla and Amelia Kirby to serve the populations of central Appalachia’s prisons. “It was meant to culturally acknowledge the fact that there were folks being shipped into the region,” Nick tells me. Indeed, many people in these Appalachia coalfield prisons hailed from far-flung states—New Mexico, Connecticut, Wyoming. Many were people of color from urban areas, plunked down in a white, rural landscape. Soon, Nick says, prisoners began writing into the show, describing abuse by guards, the brutal conditions of their confinement, and their isolation from loved ones far away. Not long after, prisoners’ families began calling in, using the program to speak directly to their loved ones. Lillie Branch-Kennedy was one of those callers.

“From there,” Nick says, “people like Lillie started to use the show as an organizing tool. Family members laid the foundation for an organizing effort that went beyond the station.” Ironically, because the Appalachian prisons drew their populations from such disparate parts of the country, the radio show’s potential as a tool for activism was hugely amplified: Families in Virginia were linking up with families in Connecticut, New Mexico, and Washington, D.C., sowing seeds for a national network. Like Lillie,
family members in other states were launching campaigns from the ground up, working with the support of their network to confront the urgent issues they witnessed—and felt—firsthand. They began to meet each year in person: a coalition of about forty people, geographically scattered but bound by shared pain and conviction. In late 2011, the coalition gave itself its name, Nation Inside—it refers to the “nation inside of our nation,” a prison population the size of some countries—and committed to building an online platform that would draw together grassroots, local campaigns like theirs: communities challenging the systems that fuel incarceration.

Prisoners wrote the press releases, drew the artwork, and collaborated in laying the plans that launched the coalition, which now unites more than 125,000 people and thirty groups, from a New York campaign working for the release of aging prisoners to a group fighting to stop the construction of a jail in Illinois’ Champaign County to an Oregon-based campaign calling for divestment from private prison companies.

Charting these kinds of networks, crossing neighborhood lines and state lines and the walls of prison, is not just preparation for decarceration; it is part of the work of decarceration itself. Making connections means refusing to isolate, to ignore, to hide, to replicate the patterns of the prison. It means refusing to be canceled.

Beware the Women’s Villages

Over the past several years, the raised voices of anti-prison activists and scholars, coupled with the tightening of state budgets, have resulted in a shocking shift: Prison populations have slowly begun to decrease nationwide. Mainstream media outlets now regularly condemn the drug war and excoriate vile prison condi
tions. Laurie Jo Reynolds from the Tamms campaign tells me, “Six years ago, you’d say ‘solitary confinement,’ and nobody knew what it was! Now my accountant is making small talk about solitary.” But, she notes, that doesn’t mean most people are making larger talk about the place of prison in our politics, economy, and culture.

As Mariame Kaba from Project NIA notes in a piece called “Prison Reform Is in Vogue ... and Other Strange Things”: “Absent the large-scale, cross-sectional movement-building needed in order to uproot the oppressions that both give rise to the PIC and hold it in place, I’m afraid that this latest round of proposed prison reforms will only be another version of tinkering towards imperfection.”
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That tinkering is happening from a variety of directions—including from within the criminal punishment system itself. Look at a prison website these days and you may not realize it’s a prison. Boasting of dog-training programs, culinary arts classes, cosmetology, “cake decorating” seminars, and an array of “volunteering opportunities,” many never use the word “prison” in their publicity materials, opting instead for the innocuous term “facility.” Isaac Ontiveros points out, “Massive numbers of dollars still go toward building new cages to target poor black and brown people, but they take up the language of reform, saying things like, ‘We’re going to provide “women’s villages” with services for underserved women of color’—this kinder, gentler rhetoric.”

Diana Zuñiga, the statewide field organizer of the forty-organization-strong decarceration coalition Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), talks of how policies that expand the prison nation creep in under the guise of confronting mass incarceration. In California, the state is carrying out a process of “realignment,” shifting large numbers of incarcerated people
from prisons to county jails. The strategy, championed as a route to reducing the state’s skyrocketing prison budget and ending the “revolving door” of recidivism,
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has actually resulted in most counties moving toward jail expansion.
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Diana is often alarmed to hear CURB’s calls for shrinking the prison system echoed by officials calling for “mental health jails” and “social service jails.” She says, “We have seen our language be coopted so that law enforcement can appear to be doing the ‘right thing.’”

Diana is pointing to an even more insidious recent trend in addition to the production of “alternative” forms of confinement: A wide range of influential political groups, switching from a push for “tough on crime” legislation to a “right on crime” message, are advocating that money saved from reducing prison populations be spent on heightened policing and surveillance. The Texas-based conservative group Right on Crime touts “reforms” like increasing monitoring and records-keeping on formerly incarcerated people, scaling up the use of private security companies, and zeroing in on “crime hotspots” in cities: poor neighborhoods of color.
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I broach the subject with Jazz from the Campaign to End the New Jim Crow, who’s also the organizer behind Cop Watch, a group that videotapes police searching, harassing, and beating people. He’s also been a leader in the struggle to end New York’s “stop and frisk” policy. Jazz points to the way that “targeted” policing tends to play out in reality: violence directed at neighborhoods of color, especially black neighborhoods. “Turning our communities into open-air prisons is not the solution to violence,” he says.

Where
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we turn to deal with violence, harm, and conflict in a landscape that’s not fashioned around incarceration? Since right now, prison is society’s go-to “solution,” thinking beyond
the prison means not only uprooting it, but also offering new answers to harm. Layne from Decarcerate PA articulates it like this: “Abolition is a complicated goal which involves tearing down one world and building another.”