Some recent thoughts on long sentences
As a handful of you might know, our Tuesday night reentry workshop has been incorporating elements of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way into our weekly practice. Particular useful to me in this chaotic time have been "the morning pages," essentially a pact the writer makes to write everyday, no matter what. It's essentially a journal, but one element of the practice that's been enriching to my own practice is Cameron's emphasis in Week 3 of the program on using this writing time "to rest on the page." Something I sometimes lose sight of as I write more on issues outside myself - issues of communal social justice - is allowing myself to indulge in the simple artistic joy of producing words.
Ironically, I've found myself making some discoveries in my morning pages recently that I wouldn't have made without them. In the past few days, as I've talked to a lot of people on the inside and their families, participated in many Zoom hearings and focus groups, and done the work of starting up Re/Creation, I've found myself retreating into my morning pages simply to be in my own head for a bit. And in that space, I've found some answers, or at least some bigger questions, to many questions I'd barely asked yet.
With this in mind, I wanted to share a couple of excerpts from my morning pages over the past few days, both of which are giving me a framework for thinking and writing specifically on the relationship between sentencing and race. I'll present them without further comment, as seeds for further conversation.
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5/18/20
I just got off the phone with the wife of a 53-year-old man at Green Haven Correctional Facility who has asthma and has served 14 of an 18-year sentence for attempted first-degree robbery. I’m talking to a lot of guys inside right now, developing narrative profiles to submit to our governor for clemency consideration, and at one point I asked her if he has any children. One, she said, 14 years old. Doing the math, I mentioned to her that he’s the same age as his sentence. Yeah, she said, he went to prison the week his son was born. I thought to myself, My dad started a 20-year prison term the week I was born.
Only I didn’t think it to myself—I’d just said it out loud. There was a little uncomfortable silence, then she said, Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. We talked for another half hour, not as an advocate getting information from her but as two people whose families started with the incarceration of the father for a petty crime. I didn’t tell her that my dad got out after a year, but I should have, because that’s the difference between committing a petty crime in 1973 and committing a petty crime in 2006. And that’s the reason my dad still gets a little pensive, when people ask him how he got out after a year for a 20-year sentence, acknowledging the random luck he had to be born white.
5/19/20
I’m thinking on the letters OJ and the number 25.
In workshop tonight, we got to talking about the number 25, i.e., 25 to Life, the default sentence for so many black men convicted of violent (and even some non-violent) offenses from the Nineties on. I brought it up because every guy I’ve talked to this week at Green Haven, all of whom are old men who are highly susceptible to Covid-19, are in the later years of 25-to-Life sentences, and not one of them has gone up for parole, undoubtedly a result of the mandatory minimums craze.
Marvin, who is now out about nine months after serving a 25-to-Life sentence from 1994, had an interesting observation. He remembered, while awaiting trial at Rikers Island in 1994 with a broken jaw, seeing the verdict on the OJ trial on the TV and screaming in triumph, despite the pain in his jaw, along with all the young Black men in the overcrowded city jail. He then remembers going to trial and the judge admonishing him, “This ain’t no OJ trial.” He asked his lawyer if that constituted a judicial bias, but quickly discovered that this was what many judges were saying. The translations were obvious: That Black man got away with something, but you’re not. That Black man had the resources, but you don’t. We’re closing the loopholes that allowed even one Black man to escape white justice. Marvin was handed his sentence, 25 to Life, in 1995, shortly after the OJ verdict.
There are many ways of contextualizing the horrific turn we made in the Nineties toward handing out 25-to-Life sentences to Black men with impunity: mandatory minimums, the Willie Horton effect, our race-based drug war, moderate Democrats using punitive racism as a legislative team-building exercise with congressional Republicans. But Marvin pointed out a narrative that somehow unified all of these: No more OJ’s.