I have blogged about T.I. a couple of times in the last few weeks. The first time was to highlight a post-jail interview that he gave back in July describing the fact that prison had been a negative experience for him. I wanted to underscore the fact that prison is NOT a country club even for rich rappers contra what Lil’ Wayne has portrayed.

The next time I wrote about T.I. was to make a larger point about how his new song “Got Your Back” made me a bit queasy because of the expectations that were being conveyed to young women about staying or leaving a relationship with a partner who is incarcerated.

So I learned over the weekend that T.I. has been sentenced to 11 months in prison for violating his probation by being caught using drugs. Once again, the war on drugs has another casualty.

Below is a report about T.I.’s sentencing.

It seems like the general response to this tragedy is for people to suggest that T.I. should “not have gotten himself” into such a predicament. The sense is that he has to “pay the price” for violating probation. I have a different response which is that T.I. is a perfect candidate for being in a “community-based” setting to address his substance abuse issues. Prison disappears people and not their problems.

At his sentencing hearing T.I. whose real name is Clifford Harris Jr. asked for leniency:

“I screwed up,” said Harris, wearing a three-piece gray suit. “I screwed up bigtime, and I’m sorry. I’m truly and sincerely sorry. I don’t want and I don’t need to use drugs anymore. I want them out of my life.”

Another account reports that he said this:

“I want drugs out of my life. If I can get the treatment and counseling I need … I can beat this,” T.I. told the judge, according to U.S. attorney spokesman Patrick Crosby. “I need help. For me, my mother, my kids, I need the court to give me mercy

He did not get leniency. Instead the judge took an opportunity to lecture T.I.

But Pannell was unmoved.
“The worst thing is this case was an experiment,” Pannell said. The judge said he hoped the extraordinary sentence Harris initially received would work and could be adapted for use in other cases.

But then Pannell looked at Harris and said: “You certainly dumped a lot of smut on the whole experiment.”

Pannell had sentenced Harris to a year and a day in prison for his 2007 arrest on weapons charges. The unprecedented deal shaved almost four years off a potential sentence, provided Harris perform 1,000 hours of community service. The service, which he completed, consisted largely of visits with schoolchildren to speak out against violence, gangs and drugs.

The Defense asked that T.I. be allowed to participate instead in a community-based alternative. They were rebuffed:

Defense attorney Steve Sadow asked Pannell to sentence Harris to six months’ home confinement and allow him to be admitted into an inpatient rehabilitation program. After that, he would receive more therapy and submit to urine screens three times a week.

But Pannell said he would have imposed a longer sentence the first time if he had known Harris was going to be back in court as he was Friday.

Pannell told Harris that he will be on probation again after his release from prison and could get up to three years more time if he commits another offense. And he told the rapper that while on probation the next time, he is not to drive a car.

“He is not going to be found cruising the streets of L.A. again … while serving my sentence,” the judge said.

As I mentioned before, this situation is tragic for T.I., his wife, and their children. I think that those who are reporting on this story are missing the main point which is that prisons DO NOT WORK. This man was incarcerated. He had a substance abuse problem before he was locked up and still had it when he was released. It was not addressed.

The larger context is that this case is yet another example of the failed war on drugs. We should not be criminalizing drug users. The emphasis should be on TREATMENT for those who want it.

The final important point to make here is the one about recidivism. Particularly, T.I. like so many ex-prisoners is being put back in jail for a technical parole violation. The entire criminal legal system is ineffective, immoral, inhumane and badly in need of transformation.

What exactly do we mean when we talk about “Alternatives to Incarceration (ATI)?”

There is no agreed upon definition. I decided to do an internet search on the topic last week. What I found were people focusing on residential placements and other community-based treatment of people who are already caught up in the criminal legal system.

For these types of initiatives, this definition of ATI seems to be most applicable:

Instead of sentencing someone to jail or prison, ATIs allow a judge to sentence someone to a program where they receive treatment, education and employment training in the community, all while remaining under strict supervision. And, if people do not succeed in these programs, the court still has the option of sentencing them to incarceration.

In the past few years, some people have begun to advocate for more of these types of options and are making the case that it is more humane, cost-effective and likely to reduce recidivism by keeping people out of jails and prisons.

However my internet search also revealed a growing focus on a set of other tools meant to increase the surveillance of marginalized groups that are sometimes also characterized as ATIs:
• Boot Camps for Juveniles who get in trouble with the law;
• GPS and electronic monitoring that serve to criminalize people and behaviors that do not need to fall under the purview of state surveillance;
• Community-based Restorative Justice programs that police use as a way to hassle and dump more youth into the system for petty offenses.

Those are also being viewed and constructed by some as ATIs. This is very problematic in my view and underscores the critical importance of getting clear on what we mean when we talk about Alternatives to Incarceration.

Geographer and activist Ruthie Gilmore has often said that she evaluates all of her anti-prison work based on whether what she is advocating serves to extend or shorten the reach of the prison industrial complex. I want to suggest that the same framework has to be applied to our consideration of ATIs.

Do the interventions being proposed as ATIs serve to extend or shorten the reach of the PIC?

We have to keep asking that question.

So let’s stipulate that the ATIs being proposed serve to shorten the reach of the PIC. We still have to be concerned about the case that we are making for their existence in the first place. Right now a lot of the conversation and argument revolves around the cost effectiveness of these models. These arguments resonate and have some purchase with some people at this time because of the cash crunch that state and local municipalities are facing. But what happens when the economy rebounds which we all hope to see happen soon? Do we go right back to just incapacitating large groups of marginalized people? The answer has to be yes. Yes because we are not loudly and resolutely and most importantly collectively making that case that incarceration is in and of itself WRONG, IMMORAL, COUNTERPRODUCTIVE and INHUMANE.

So as we discuss this concept of ATI, I would ask that we keep three questions at the forefront of our minds:

1. How are we defining ATIs? What do we mean when we use that term?
2. Do the interventions being proposed serve to extend or shorten the reach of the PIC?
3. How do we collectively advocate for the ultimate abolition of prisons altogether? Or Can we collectively advocate for the ultimate abolition of prisons altogether? Can ATIs be an important stepping stone to that ultimate goal?

I want to end by sharing something from an article that I read a couple of weeks ago:

The District of Columbia’s juvenile justice agency is piloting a program that puts global positioning system devices on the ankles of the young criminals it releases into the community.

The program was started under Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services interim Director Robert Hildum, and seeks to keep better track of the agency’s wards.

“Electronic monitoring is a ‘tool’ in the ‘toolbox’ for case managers,” DYRS spokesman Reggie Sanders wrote in an e-mail. “It is not a panacea, but can be helpful to improve the oversight of young people in the community.”

Sanders said the agency has contracted with Satellite Tracking of People LLC, the same company used by District’s adult probation agency. DYRS, he said, is applying for grants that would help supply the funding needed to cover the costs that could range as high as $12 per day for each device. He wouldn’t say how many monitoring bracelets have been slapped on the ankles of DYRS wards, but sources said the program is running and about 200 bracelets have been purchased.

The monitoring system allows case managers to make sure their wards are attending school and treatment programs. It can also be used to enforce house arrest. If a ward deviates from a prescribed schedule, or steps out of his home, the case manager is alerted via e-mail. It’s not the first time the District has employed electronic monitoring, youth advocates said, but this program appears to be more advanced than previous iterations.

I want to leave you to consider that story in light of the arguments that I have advanced regarding alternatives to incarceration.

This is one of my absolute favorite songs by the incomparable Lauryn Hill.

When I was a teenager growing up in New York City, I was susceptible to bouts of depression.  My mother would always respond to me as follows: “You know what the best cure for depression is? It’s to be of service to someone who has it harder than you do.”  My mom was not a psychologist but I’ve taken that advice to heart because it has served me well.

I began my community organizing work as a teenager.  I believe that this was in part an attempt to chase away the blues and also born out of a deep sense of justice.  Both things were probably there in equal measure.

Today was an opportunity for me to reaffirm the unabashed hopeful sense that I have about the future of the world.  My work is about tireless, painstaking movement-building. It’s about collaboration and tenacity and a boundless sense of hopefulness.  It’s about seeing beauty in the bricks.

For the past several weeks, I have worked to organize a youth activist panel discussion and roundtable event about the school to prison pipeline.  The event took place today and it was inspiring and edifying.  This had everything to do with the young people who spoke and performed today. Their words and actions spoke of community-building, of a deep belief in the need for restorative practices in all institutions (schools, churches, mosques, police stations, courts, etc..), and of healing and transformation.  They spoke to people’s hearts and challenged their minds.  Youth performers from Young Chicago Authors and from Kuumba Lynx added a critical artistic and truth-telling ingredient to the events of the day.

Youth and adults spoke to each other and some adults tried to practice the art of active listening and allyship.  I have been forced lately to listen to people around me (particularly people who are supposedly progressives) lament the pace of “change” in Washington and lash out at Democrats (Congress and the President).  I have not had any patience with most of these folks.  Mainly because their response to this supposed disenchantment is to “sit out” the Midterm elections.  I don’t understand that.  These are people who in my opinion have no sense of history and no comprehension of what it takes to make real, fundamental social change.  It takes constant and consistent engagement and yes, voting is one part of that civic engagement.  By sitting out of the process, you empower your opponents.  You provide them with the momentum and the clear path to roll back any movement that you have made towards an ultimate goal of social justice.

The youth who spoke on today’s panel are the opposite of their spoiled adult progressive allies.  They talked about the need to see hope.  The need to never give up.  The need to build community and to engage others.  They spoke of movement-building across identities.

What a privilege for me to know such young people.  How lucky for the world that they exist.  I am humbled by their passion, commitment, and energy.  They remind me constantly about what I owe to them and by extension to myself.

I saw this post over at Diversity Inc about the role that politicians have played in the exponential growth of incarceration in America since the 1970s.  Here is the list that they offer:

This list  got me thinking about others who should be included in the Incarceration Nation Hall of Shame.   For my money,  I would have to include:

The Corrections Corporation of America — CCA is THE major player in the private prison industry worldwide.  They are politically connected and are an engine driving hyperincarceration.

The U.S. population — American citizens are a key engine in driving the PIC through our general apathy and/or our active complicity with the social oppression that is at the root this phenomenon.

Who would you add to this list?

U.S. taxpayers are spending at least $18.6 million per day to house an estimated 300,000 to 450,000 undocumented immigrants who are incarcerated and eligible for deportation from the United States, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ).

The cost per day for these prisoners is based on Justice Department incarceration cost estimates from 2001 and on the lower-end figure of 300,000 incarcerated deportable undocumented individuals, which means the actual expense today could be substantially higher than $18.6 million per day. Source: DHS FY11 Performance Report

Immigration reform can’t come soon enough! Criminalizing immigration status is inhumane and a waste of valuable resources.

I spent the better part of my day yesterday at the police station.  I got a call in the morning from a friend who is a school counselor at our local elementary school.  She needed my help.  A young man who is a student at  the school had been arrested in the night before.  His parents speak no English.  They are African refugees.  I won’t go into why this 13  year old was arrested at 10 p.m. the night before.  Because that is not the point of this post.

I went to the police station because he had been held overnight.  He is 13 years old.  His parents were called but no one in the house could understand what was going on.  They called the school counselor to let her know what was happening.

So I went to the police station yesterday morning along with the parents to find out what was happening to this young man.  As I sat there waiting to talk to the youth officer, I was struck by the other people who were also there waiting.  The officers were white and the people waiting were black and brown.  It encapsulates the tragedy of what is happening in our criminal legal system every day every place.  I started to think about how many times this scene is being played out in police stations, courtrooms, probation & parole departments in Compton, the Bronx, Englewood, Gary, Atlanta….

I watched the parents of this young man sitting stoically alongside me, their faces impassive.  I wondered what was going on in their minds as they thought about having left the Congo to be sitting in a police station in Chicago.  A foreign place even to those of us who are born and raised in the U.S.  I am a native french speaker and it is in these times that I am grateful for being multi-lingual.  I was able to communicate with the family in a language familiar to them and yet I found that my words could not convey the magnitude of the journey that their son is about to embark upon.  Words cannot do that at least the words in my toolkit cannot.

So I sat there with them.  I translated for them.  Now I have to advocate for that young man.  He needs a chance.  A second chance and a third one if need be.  In these moments, I am always reminded that the neatness of abstract theory always gives way to the messiness of real life.  So there it is.  I am trying to reconcile the two.

Below is a print created by Colin Matthes, an artist I admire.  I purchased this some time ago through the Just Seeds Artists’ Cooperative.  It seems relevant to this post.

Here is what Colin wrote about this print:

This print was inspired by visiting my cousin (who is like a brother to me) at Cook County Jail and Dixon Prison in Dixon, Illinios.

This is one of two prints about sitting in the waiting room for hours on end before finding out if I will be able to see my cousin or not. The waiting room seemed so routine, the hope, the sadness, the desperation, the determined faces, the babies crawling across the floor, the young ladies putting on makeup, and the mothers looking strong….while everyone bullshits together trying to knock down a few more minutes.

The second of the two prints is a part of the Justseeds prison portfolio project, which is currently being used to raise funds for prisoners rights and prison abolition groups.

I am forced to once again comment on the fact that rural towns in America are being sold a bill of goods with respect to the proposition that prisons will be their hope for economic recovery.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post titled “Dear Small Town America, Private Prisons Do Not Lead to Economic Recovery.” Now I find that I have to reiterate my argument.

I just read this AP article over the weekend titled “Dying Communities See Salvation in New Prisons.”

For some, like Secinore, there is hope the prison could take away some of the sting, providing jobs and business opportunities. It’s expected to employ about 330 workers, with 60 percent — about 200 — coming from New Hampshire; the rest would be brought in from other federal prisons.

Others aren’t as hopeful. Back in 2002, Berlin residents voted in favor of a proposal to bring in a federal prison. Today, strict requirements for the jobs, among them that employees be hired before age 37, have diminished some of the excitement.

In the immortal words of Flavor Flav, all I can say is brothers and sisters don’t believe the hype. Folks in urban centers and small towns across the U.S. need to mobilize a social movement for economic justice. That is the answer. Not more prisons. How can we get poor people in Appalachia to understand that their liberation is inextricably linked to that of the young black man in North Lawndale and the migrant farmworker in California? The attempt to sell prisons as an engine for economic development is destructive and will not lead to SALVATION for these small towns.

The article suggests that the research is limited and unclear about the economic impact of prisons on localities. It points out however that whatever research is out there points to modest or negative results.

Although rural communities have successfully lobbied for — and built — prisons for years, not many studies have been done on their economic impact. Some studies indicate slight economic gains for some prison towns, according to a Congressional Research Service report in April. Others that have become prison anchors might have not grown as fast as those without prisons.

UPDATE: I received an e-mail from my friend Julia about this post. She made several important and relevant points so I want to share some of those here :

First off, I absolutely agree with the post and am grateful to see you writing about the issue of prisons in small rural towns and the connections to our urban centers. In Letcher Co., KY, where I was living before I came back to Chicago, there are plans to build another federal prison (FCI Letcher) and there’s a lot of uncertainty about what’s actually happening, what stage they’re in, etc. And there’s a lot of community support for the prison. As the coal industry leaves more and more people unemployed and young people have no option, prisons are seen as the only economically viable option. Lies about their benefits are not only promoted by the BOP and DOC, but through the schools (taking classes of middle school students to tour the prisons so they can see what a great job they could possibly have), and local talk. With such a large percentage of people with drug addictions (Oxycontin especially) in eastern KY, there’s even more people ineligible to be employed in the facilities, but that’s not the part of the equation they talk about in the info sessions. So people support it. They see it as the next way out.

But, there’s also a fairly vocal number of people against the construction of another prison in the region. They’ve witnessed the destruction in McCreary Co, where the prison was built on the top of a formerly strip mined mountain and the ground was unstable and the prison started to sink. They’ve seen that local people didn’t actually get jobs and that it didn’t promote the economic well-being of the town. They’ve seen the same thing in Martin County. And across the border in VA they’ve seen it in Big Stone Gap and Pound.

This post is prompted by an article that I read in the Guardian yesterday underscoring the fact that “More Black People are Jailed in England and Wales Proportionally than in the U.S.” You read that correctly this is NOT a mistake.

From the article:

The proportion of black people in prison in England and Wales is higher than in the United States, a landmark report released today by the Equality and Human Rights Commission reveals.

The commission’s first triennial report into the subject, How Fair is Britain, shows that the proportion of people of African-Caribbean and African descent incarcerated here is almost seven times greater to their share of the population. In the United States, the proportion of black prisoners to population is about four times greater.

So the jailing and imprisonment of Black people is apparently a worldwide phenomenon. No refuge is available to those of us who are considering moving overseas I guess. Let’s be clear that the article is highlighting a study that found that the PROPORTION of blacks imprisoned in England & Wales is higher than in the U.S. not the NUMBER of blacks imprisoned. This is important to keep in mind. This ties into the next issue that I want to raise.

In an August 2010 post, I highlighted the crisis in the U.S. regarding the imprisonment of young black men. I relayed the troubling figure that 68% of African American men born since 1975 who have dropped out of school have a prison record. I had found that statistics in materials distributed at a Disproportionate Minority Contact conference that I attended. The peril of quoting statistics where sources are not provided is that they can be misleading or completely erroneous.

Mark Parker gets at this issue in a recent article that he published called “The Simple Truth about Statistics.” From his article:

By their very nature, statistics can only be misused when the audience doesn’t bother checking them. Statistics are just a numerical summary of evidence that has been collected. They give people the starting point to delve directly into that evidence and see if the arguments hold together.

When misused, statistics are less Disraeli’s “damned lies” and more another leader’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”. It is by not presenting all of the information and selectively choosing definitions that statistics can appear to lie. But such claims will not stand up under cross-examination.

Just recently, I learned that the source for this statistic was actually the work of researchers Western and Pettit. So I am providing a more complete and accurate explanation of the original figure that I quoted.

In 1980, one in 10 black high-school dropouts were incarcerated. By 2008, that number was 37 percent. Western and Pettit calculated that if current incarceration trends hold, fully 68 percent of African-American male high school dropouts born from 1975 to 1979 (at the start of the upward trend in incarceration rates) will spend time living in prison at some point in their lives, as the chart below shows. (Source: Toxic Persons by Sasha Abramsky)

I have an out of print book that I love called “Black Is.” I feel that it is worth sharing two quotes from the book here:

Black is when they say “…one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all…” and you wonder what nation they’re talking about.

Black is being accused of causing trouble but always winding up as the casualties.

Some things to keep in mind…

There are no words to describe this. Just listen…