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Will Campaign 2020 Promote Or Undermine Criminal Justice Reform?

Will Campaign 2020 Promote Or Undermine Criminal Justice Reform?

When mass incarceration in America gets political attention, it’s often so the issue can be used as a cudgel to attack opponents. Thus, the president Twitter-shames former Vice President Joe Biden for his role in promoting the 1994 crime bill even as Donald Trump’s own history of hounding the Central Park Five is highlighted in “When They See Us,” director Ava DuVernay’s Netflix miniseries on the teens accused, convicted, imprisoned, and eventually exonerated.

When Democrats and Republicans cooperated on a criminal justice reform bill late last year that made modest changes in the federal system, they congratulated themselves for getting something done in gridlocked Washington.

But it hardly solved the problem. That’s the message of Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, or EJI. “The presidential election will be important setting the tone,” he told me at a recent appearance in Charlotte. “The hard work has to happen in North Carolina, in the state legislature on issues like sentencing, on issues like prisons, on issues like excessive punishment, and that’s true for every state in the country.”

We are at a time when the idea of punishment has overwhelmed the concept of rehabilitation, Stevenson said, as the U.S. prison population has grown since the 1970s from 300,000 to 2.3 million, with 6 million on probation or parole and 70 million with an arrest history, and “no one seems bothered by it.”

According to its mission statement, EJI is “committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society.”

Stevenson spoke of the children caught in the system, of the pipeline “from the schoolhouse to the jailhouse,” and of a reaction to crime that lowered the minimum age of trying children as adults, with sentences that could mean life without possibility of parole. “They will change,” he said. “That’s what being a child means.”

Though politicians have often touted their “law and order” bona fides and have been hesitant to step away from that image with policy that could make opponents question their toughness, the December bipartisan legislation was a “First Step,” as the bill was called, to address inequities that disproportionately affect African Americans, minorities and the poor.

In his criminal justice work, Stevenson said he has seen the results tragically play out as he represents the accused in a system that treats you better “if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent” and when he brings appeals before judges “more committed to finality than they are to fairness.”

In the crowded field of 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls, many have listened to their party’s base and floated criminal justice proposals to build on last year’s bill, including Sen. Cory Booker’s “Next Step Act.” Booker tweeted about his plan’s sweeping reforms, which include eliminating the disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentences, ending the federal prohibition on marijuana, expunging records and reinvesting in the communities most harmed by the War on Drugs.

It also includes a provision to reinstate the right to vote in federal elections for formerly incarcerated individuals. “Blacks are more than four times as likely than whites to have their voting rights revoked because of a criminal conviction,” Booker noted.

That last issue made headlines when Florida Republicans, after the state’s voters overwhelmingly approved returning voting rights to former felons who served their sentences, proposed limits that would first require payments of all fees and fines, a caveat that would keep many disenfranchised, a move that some Democratic lawmakers compared to Jim Crow tactics, such as poll taxes.

Stevenson also drew a line from America’s history of white supremacy to its treatment of African Americans in the justice system, in a nation that could get comfortable with two and a half centuries of slavery and that, when it came to its Native American population, kept so many place names derived from their languages but “made the people leave.”

His Charlotte appearance was sponsored by the Levine Museum of the New South, which is exhibiting, through July 17, “The Legacy of Lynching: Confronting Racial Terror in America.” It’s a collaboration with EJI and its Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

“Slavery did not end, it just evolved,” said Stevenson, who has testified in cases that deal with, for example, racial bias in jury selection.

As Stevenson noted, important action is taking place in the states, with New Hampshire recently becoming the latest to abolish the death penalty. “While it will be important to hear how our candidates for president address these issues, it will be more important that we ask our state representatives to think about this problem of over incarceration, too many people in jails and prisons in states like North Carolina who are not a threat to public safety,” he said. “We spend a lot of money on jails and prisons that could go into education and health and human services and support for people who are vulnerable.”

And the voices of the vulnerable too often are the ones least heard in a noisy presidential political season. Yet Stevenson has hope. “Injustice prevails where hopelessness persists.”

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. Follow her on Twitter @mcurtisnc3.

IMAGE: Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative.

 

Book Review: ‘Dreamland: The True Tale Of America’s Opiate Epidemic’

Book Review: ‘Dreamland: The True Tale Of America’s Opiate Epidemic’

Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones; Bloomsbury (384 pages, $28.00)

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First declared by President Nixon, the war on drugs was always already political. Nixon aide John Erlichman later commented on its origins:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

A decade later, President Reagan announced that illicit drugs were a national security threat. “We’re making no excuses for drugs—hard, soft, or otherwise. Drugs are bad, and we’re going after them. As I’ve said before, we’ve taken down the surrender flag and run up the battle flag. And we’re going to win the war on drugs.” Announced three weeks before the 1982 midterm elections, Reagan’s initiative both intensified and militarized the drug war.

Not all drugs were bad, of course. The Reagan administration lavished benefits on Big Pharma, and Congress passed laws that extended patent protections and monopoly rights for brand-name drugs. But even with illegal narcotics, the Reagan administration applied a double standard. As we know from the Kerry Committee report of 1989, CIA officials knew that Nicaraguan drug dealers were selling powder and crack cocaine in Los Angeles during the 1980s. Nobody lifted a finger to stop it. They also knew that the profits supported the Nicaraguan contras, whom the Reagan administration actively (and illegally) aided in their efforts to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government.

As the drug war dragged on, it netted users who didn’t fit Erlichman’s description. A decade ago, we learned that Rush Limbaugh abused Oxycontin, a prescription painkiller also known as hillbilly heroin. He was arrested but served no jail time; Palm Beach prosecutors dropped the charge after Limbaugh agreed to continue his treatment. “I actually thank God for my addiction to pain pills,” he told Fox News in 2009, “because I learned more about myself in rehab than I would have ever learned otherwise.” In particular, he realized he had been trying too hard to be liked in his personal life. But after seven weeks of treatment, he emerged with “zero feelings of inadequacy.” Limbaugh’s skirmish in the drug war turned out to be a voyage of personal growth and self-discovery.

While the Limbaugh story played out, many American cities were experiencing large increases in the use of black tar heroin imported from Mexico. These weren’t cities previously associated with that drug; rather, they were places like Salt Lake City, Boise, Charlotte, Portland, and Columbus. For years, local law enforcement noticed unarmed dealers making home deliveries in small quantities. Even when they made arrests, the cases were minor and often led to deportation. And because police officers rarely communicated with their counterparts in other mid-size cities, they failed to see the larger pattern.

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As Sam Quinones shows in Dreamland, the Oxycontin and heroin stories were closely linked. A Los Angeles Times reporter, Quinones learned that black tar heroin wasn’t produced or distributed by violent Mexican cartels; rather, he traced it to the tiny state of Nayarit and its ranchero culture. The opium was grown locally, and tight-knit families sent wave after wave of polite farm boys to deliver balloons of heroin to white suburbanites in the United States. The service was excellent, and users learned that they could maintain a daily heroin habit for the price of a six-pack of premium beer.

The Xalisco Boys, as law enforcement called the Nayarit operators, spread quickly across the American west. They thrived, it seemed, in every city serviced by US Air out of Phoenix. In reading about them, I was reminded of an ironic passage from T.C. Boyle’s 1995 novel, The Tortilla Curtain. In describing coyotes, a nature writer also commented on the influx of Mexican immigrants:

The coyote is not to blame—he is only trying to survive, to make a living, to take advantage of opportunities available to him … The coyotes keep coming, breeding up to fill in the gaps, moving in where life is easy. They are cunning, versatile, hungry and unstoppable.

Eventually the Xalisco Boys moved east across the Mississippi River. By that time, Big Pharma had aggressively marketed OxyContin for chronic pain relief. Its campaign hinged on industrious self-delusion. Distorting a stray remark in a prestigious medical journal, one pharmaceutical firm persuaded American doctors that Oxycontin and other opiates weren’t addictive. That claim contradicted everything those doctors learned in medical school, but many went along with the program. Between 1997 and 2002, OxyContin prescriptions soared from 670,000 to 6.2 million. One 2004 survey indicated that 2.4 million Americans used a prescription pain reliever non-medically for the first time within the previous year; that was more than the estimated number of Americans who tried marijuana for the first time. Once patients were well and truly hooked on opiates, many switched to black tar heroin, which was cheap and easy to acquire. In effect, American pharmaceutical firms opened up new markets for the Xalisco Boys, who delivered heroin like pizza to America’s suburbs.

Dreamland is a tale of two artificial and highly permeable membranes. One separates legal and illegal drugs, the other Mexico and the United States. Quinones is perfectly positioned to tell that double story. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, he became a crime reporter in Stockton, a mid-size city in the Central Valley that was struggling with gangs and a crack cocaine epidemic. (After Stockton became Ground Zero for the subprime mortgage crisis, Forbes magazine described it as “one of America’s most miserable cities.”) In 1994, Quinones traveled to Mexico, where he planned to study Spanish for three months. He stayed for a decade working as a freelance reporter. What Quinones learned there informed his first two books about immigration, the border, ranchero culture, and the drug trade. He eventually returned to California and worked for the Los Angeles Times until last year.

Quinones brings all of his considerable talent and experience to bear on this sprawling story. Few American journalists can match his narrative skills or crime chops, which he combines with an ever rarer understanding of Mexican culture. His description of Nayarit is especially evocative; you can see practically hear the bandas playing at the feria, taste the cerveza, and feel the crisp new Levis the drug operatives brought home by the dozens.

Toward the end of Dreamland, Quinones shows how some American communities began enforcing their drug laws differently when they realized that their white, middle-class neighbors and family members were the perps. It was a reminder, if any were needed, that the war on drugs has always been a civil war. When will we bind up the nation’s wounds and care for those who have borne the battle?