“[T]his is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen … that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. … It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”
—James Baldwin,
“Letter to My Nephew”
As I struggle with months of coronavirus-imposed isolation from friends and family, I think of my colleagues who have been isolated from their families and loved ones for decades. Joe, Howard, Mike, and Raúl regularly spend twenty-three (or often twenty-four) hours a day alone, with only a steel bunk bed, sink, and toilet for furniture and in forced proximity with another adult stranger. They are among the over 200,000 Americans sentenced to spend the remainder of their lives behind bars. Despite confinement in barren cells, my colleagues have taught themselves history and foreign languages, earned college degrees, won national essay contests, written state legislation, cared for the infirm, counseled youth, cheered me when I’ve been down, and founded an organization for a more humane legal system.
Although my colleagues are extraordinary individuals, a cartoonish tale of “criminals” has allowed Americans to feel righteous about condemning these men to a lifetime of spirit-crushing incarceration that isolates them from loved ones, strips them of individuality, and cages them for days on end in cells the size of parking spots.
Many of us now take for granted that people who have been convicted of breaking a law must be sent to prison. But the idea that people who have broken a law have no place in society is a Euro-American construct with a specific political history. Seventeenth-century English philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke peddled this story when they defended the emerging liberal-capitalist state by presenting state law as the guarantor of domestic tranquility and the banishment of lawbreakers as crucial to the social order. Tellingly, while English elites and intellectuals extolled the virtues of a law-governed state, English law upheld the displacement of villagers from land sought by the wealthy, the torture of women branded as witches (many of whom were prominent occupants of the coveted land), the execution of unemployed people, the theft of land from indigenous Americans, and the kidnapping and enslavement of human beings. A seventeenth-century English folk poem noted that the law
demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who takes things that are yours and mine.
Such contradictions of the modern state are disguised, however, by our myth of “Law,” which vilifies lawbreakers and obscures the political factors that criminalize some kinds of violence and legalize others.
The story of law as “protector of the people” gained new political utility and racial undertones in the post-1960s United States. With the country gripped by uprisings against the Vietnam War and racist violence at home, politicians boosted their careers by blaming social strife on criminals against whom they promised harsh discipline.
“Law,” said former President Gerald Ford in a 1975 message to Congress, “pledges safety to every member” of society, but such safety is threatened by “street crime … that invades our neighborhoods and our homes” and “makes us fearful of strangers.” He struck a chord with middle-class White people by promising “strong measures” in “the fight against crime.” Two decades later, then-Senator Joseph Biden championed the Crime Bill with images of “predators,” who were grown from people “born out of wedlock … without structure,” who must be “cordoned … off from the rest of society … away from my mother, your husband, our families.” We must “take back the streets,” he said, “by: more cops, more prisons, more physical protection for the people.”
The tough-on-crime tale is a captivating one for privileged-class White Americans. For those of us hooked on our own and our country’s innocence, the tale conveniently buries centuries of legally sanctioned racist violence in edifying imagery of a sacrosanct Law that protects upstanding citizens from dangerous malefactors. With this framing, those of us not targeted by the police can feel righteous about supporting prison sentences that are more extreme than any in the industrialized world and treating the people sentenced as mere specimens of criminality. At a recent Illinois legislative hearing, State’s Attorney Julia Reitz mocked a proposal for sentencing review for elderly incarcerated people by invoking specters of this de-individualized criminal. “You can call them nice words like ‘folks’ and ‘elderly,’” she scoffed, but they are “criminals” who must “serve every day of their [lifelong] sentences.”
Cell phone cameras have begun to trouble this story. As incident after incident of lethal policing is caught on video, facile oppositions between “law-enforcement” and “violence” have been upended. Calls for “more cops” to “protect the people” have been matched by calls to shift resources from armed police to community-based organizations that better serve the health and flourishing of all members of our communities.
Cell phones are prohibited in prisons. But testimony can cross prison walls, and my colleagues’ testimony challenges us to consider prisons as part of the same state violence that has killed people on the streets. “Brutal policing,” explains award-winning incarcerated writer Joseph Dole, “drives wrongful convictions. It is part of a system in which prosecutors bury police lies and the courts mirror police and prosecutorial prejudices that peg some people as disposable, fit to be locked up for decades—even before their cases are heard.” As incarcerated master’s student Howard Keller puts it:
Some people die right away from violent police encounters, some die after a few minutes, as was the case of George Floyd. Countless more, however, are being choked to death by … unduly long sentences. If the police are so brazen and racist so as to shoot a black teenager 16 times on camera or choke a handcuffed black man to death on camera, then what makes people think they won’t frame an innocent person or fabricate evidence to give someone a harsher sentence? Why don’t people see that as a continuation of the same racial violence?
Four decades of “tough-on-crime” laws have institutionalized harsh sentencing, whose impending death toll dwarfs that of police brutality. In 2019, police killed 1,098 people. Currently, over 200,000 people (two-thirds of them people of color) carry sentences that require them to grow old and die in prison. The National Research Council reports that the exploding U.S. prison population of recent decades is not a result of crime increases but changes in our sentencing schemes, including a barrage of laws that increase sentences for the same crimes. As incarcerated author Raúl Dorado explains: “Even as crime rates were decreasing, [politicians] fanned the flame of fear and sold the public on [sentence increases], while simultaneously catapulting themselves into office with tough-on-crime propaganda … tax payers were stuck with the bill and people of color were crammed into cells.”
Within prisons, the tale of amoral criminal-beings sanctions abuse unfathomable against any other population. Formerly incarcerated author and activist James Kilgore describes how “racist guards use clubs and block guns and pepper spray and often live ammo to ‘keep the order.’” Like police, prison guards are trained in the language of force, which “confirms” the lack of human connection between the punishers and the punished and becomes self-justifying. Incarcerated theology student Michael Simmons says, “I now see the cuffs, the chains, the shake-downs of our cells, the long prison sentences as all part of the same state-sanctioned violence that dehumanizes us, and then uses the dehumanization to rationalize the violence against us.”
When we ignore the violence of our own society, warned James Baldwin, we must invent monsters—“beasts,” “savages,” “criminals”—whose vices supposedly rationalize the brutality unleashed against them. Our myths assure us that we are innocent and that the violence is a civilizing force, or righteous punishment, against beings different from ourselves. The imaginary walls fortify the cement ones. But Baldwin also warned that our myths make those of us who invent them into monsters, void of self-awareness and alienated from our fellow humans.
My colleagues and I founded an organization, Parole Illinois, that chips away at the walls that divide us by sharing the stories of people directly affected by extreme sentencing and educating the public about the need for people with life sentences to have fair opportunities to return home. Working with them has impressed on me the tremendous lessons that we “innocents” might learn from those incarcerated individuals who have reckoned with their own human flaws as well as our society’s worst abuses and made themselves into agents of change for a world in which no person is treated as disposable.
My incarcerated colleagues invite those of us in free society to join them in cultivating dialogue across prison walls and providing paths for people saddled with inhumane sentences to return to full lives. Such work is necessary to repair American families and communities from the violence of extreme sentencing. Perhaps it is also needed to repair our moral integrity. Baldwin told his nephew that “those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality.” Our only hope, he suggested, is to “cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.”