by David Clarke
His behavior caused the judge to lower the hammer on Mr. Prude. “The fact that one of the victims was contacted while this case was pending, whether it was by you or on your behalf, and told essentially not to testify was truly outrageous. It indicates, Mr. Prude, just how dangerous of an individual you are,” he said. “That somehow you can think that even in the face of having robbed so many people you would continue to terrorize and try and intimidate people who did nothing more than get in your way.”7
He was convicted of five counts of armed robbery and sentenced to eighty years of imprisonment followed by twenty years of probation.8
Did I care that this guy wasn’t happy? No way! But the rest of society began studying Nutraloaf and its implications for prison life. I could’ve saved them some trouble because I saw the effects firsthand, and they were glorious.
The great thing about Nutraloaf is that I served it in the disciplinary pods for every meal for days or weeks. If you’re up on a first-degree murder charge or a serious sexual assault of a child, you don’t have much to lose in jail. But once we started giving them Nutraloaf for every meal, incidences of fights, disorderly conduct, and attacks against our staff dropped tremendously. The word got around as we knew it would.
“Please, please, I won’t do that anymore,” inmates often told us. “Don’t put me in the disciplinary pod. I don’t want to eat Nutraloaf.”
Twenty-two loaf-related lawsuits had been filed over the previous two years, but all had failed.9 Regrettably, the insurance company for Aramark, the producer of the loaf, gave Prude a five-figure settlement to make the lawsuit go away. And so, in the era of lawsuits, pampered prisoners, and political correctness, I didn’t have my day in court.
In addition to the fight focused on food, I had to fight against government-funded drug rehabilitation. The district attorney in Milwaukee County, John Chisholm, decided he wanted to send fewer criminals to prison. As Professor Alfred Blumstein explained,
Criminal justice is a system, and no one person or group is in charge of it. You have legislators who decide what’s a crime and establish the range of penalties. You have judges who impose the sentences. You have police who decide whom to arrest. And you have prosecutors who have wide discretion in what cases to bring, what charges to call for, and what sentences to agree to in plea bargains.10
Since most cases don’t make it to court because they are negotiated via plea bargains, Chisholm was frequently making decisions about how long someone goes to prison. That’s when he unilaterally decided to take a different course for people he deemed a low-level threat to society. He called it “early intervention,” and it went something like this. Let’s say the hard-working police officers in Milwaukee arrested a guy on the street for drugs. Before the guy was arraigned, Chisholm would ask a number of questions.
• Have you had two or more prior adult convictions?
• Have you been arrested before you are age sixteen?
• Are you currently unemployed?
• Do you have criminal friends?11
If he got a score that indicated low risk, Chisholm would put the criminal into what is called a “diversion,” a sort of probation track that would allow him to emerge from it without a criminal record. If he got a score that was higher, Chisholm asked a more comprehensive set of questions:
• Were you ever suspended or expelled from school?
• Does your financial situation contribute to your stress?
• Tell me the best thing about your supervisor/teacher.
Depending on how the criminal scores, he might be put into “deferred prosecution,” meaning he would have a record, but his charges might be reduced or dismissed if he also went to rehab.
I felt the district attorney needed to emerge from Candy Land and live in the real world before he did more social experimentation. By offering second, third, and fourth chances to criminals, the “Milwaukee Experiment” endangered the homes, neighborhoods, and schools of the people he said he wanted to protect. Government-funded drug rehab programs demotivate people from addressing their problems. Sending them to rehab instead of prison isolated offenders from the ramification of all of their choices. I didn’t want taxpayers to pay for that. Criminals should find their own mental health solutions through the private sector, before committing crimes and putting the rest of us in danger.
Let’s face it. Communities in which most crimes occur don’t have support structures in place for social alternatives to incarceration. Consequently, it’s not wise to put them back into the community to claim more black victims. If you want to let people back on the street, you have to think about the people who are going to be dealing with them. My people. Black people. Most criminal justice reform is normalizing criminal behavior in a community that can least afford it—the ghettos. Of course, white liberals feel better about themselves when they come up with these soft-on-crime policies, no matter the real-world consequences. Then they drive into their mostly white neighborhoods and sleep soundly in their comfortable, safe beds.
You might be wondering why a prosecutor would want to reduce the number of criminals who are put into prison. Isn’t a prosecutor’s job to, you know, prosecute? What’s wrong with the “lock ’em up and throw away the key” mentality? The criminal justice system has a race problem, at least according to many politicians and social activists. And something must be done.
Here are the sad statistics. In Wisconsin, 6 percent of the general population is black; 37 percent of the prison population is black. In 2010, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee published a troubling study that showed Wisconsin with “the highest black male incarceration rate in the nation. In Milwaukee County over half of African American men in their 30s have served time in state prison.”12 The study, titled “Wisconsin’s Mass Incarceration of African American Males,” goes along with the national narrative being developed by our so-called political leaders: the criminal justice system has unfairly targeted black Americans, creating a “mass incarceration” of blacks.
The handwringing perhaps started when CNN’s Christiane Amanpour asked Bill Clinton about his 1994 omnibus crime bill made famous for its federal “three strikes” provision. Under his plan, if a person was convicted of a violent felony after two or more previous convictions (including drug charges), he’d receive a mandatory life sentence.
“The problem is the way it was written and implemented is we cast too wide a net and we had too many people in prison,” Clinton responded. “We wound up … putting so many people in prison that there wasn’t enough money left to educate them, train them for new jobs and increase the chances when they came out so they could live productive lives.”13
Mrs. Bill Clinton later echoed her husband’s culpability: “I … have a very comprehensive approach towards fixing the criminal justice system,” she said. “Going after systemic racism that stalks the justice system … and ending the incarceration of low level offenders.”14
(Side note: Some have observed that I always refer to Hillary Clinton as “Mrs. Bill Clinton,” so allow me to explain. This woman is married to Bill Clinton in an attachment of convenience. Politically, she has been the benefactor of his name as First Lady of Arkansas, as First Lady of the United States, and as a carpetbagging senator of New York. Her husband carried her politically; she launched her political career using his name for political advantage. Good for her. It worked. But for the name of Bill Clinton, she would’ve achieved nothing politically. She knows it. That’s why she protected his reputation when scores of women claimed Bill assaulted them. She knew how valuable that name would be to her down the road, so she didn’t hesitate in trashing their reputations and—consequently—their lives. In her failed 2016 campaign for president, she used his name and even said he’d be in charge of fixing the economy. Now I will make her own that name because she is not a self-made woman. End of rant.)
But the epidemic of the lamented “mass incarceration of African Americans” extends beyond Mr. and Mrs. B
ill Clinton. President Barack Obama, who has repeatedly said drug laws disproportionately punish black people, visited El Reno Federal Correctional Institution outside Oklahoma City, where he talked to six inmates who had been put in prison for drug offenses.
Just let that sink in. A sitting president went to a prison to lift the spirits of the inmates, to talk to people who have been engaged in criminal activity and have put the lives of law-abiding Americans at risk. I’m old enough to remember when presidents were against crime.
After his visit, a reporter asked him a softball question: What struck him the most by his visit?
“When they describe their youth and their childhood, these are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different than the mistakes I made and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made,” he said. “The difference is they did not have the kinds of support structures, the second chances, the resources that would allow them to survive those mistakes.”
It’s almost as though you could be walking down the street smoking pot and end up in the pen, according to Obama, who said, “Over the last few decades, we’ve also locked up more and more nonviolent drug offenders than ever before, for longer than ever before. And that is the real reason our prison population is so high.”15 He went on to say that a disproportionate percentage of minorities were being imprisoned because of the War on Drugs and our nation’s “long history of inequity in the criminal-justice system.”
But this isn’t just Democrat talking points; Republicans are into this game as well.
In March 2015, the Koch brothers teamed up with George Soros to sponsor the Bipartisan Summit on Criminal Justice Reform, hosted by conservative Newt Gingrich and liberal Van Jones. The gist of the conference attended by people of both parties was that our nation was locking up too many black people.
Perhaps Michelle Alexander, writing in The New Jim Crow, put the sharpest point on it: “Mass incarceration—not attacks on affirmative action or lax civil rights enforcement—is the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement.”16
You got that? Again and again, you will hear that America is putting too many nonviolent blacks into prison, mostly because of insignificant drug issues. But this lie is getting people killed.
The anti-incarceration talking points are based on two major myths:
Myth #1: Recreational drug use has landed so many otherwise law-abiding citizens behind bars. The Manhattan Institute did an eye-opening study on this very issue and discovered that “less than 1 percent of federal prisoners have been convicted of drug possession, and most of those convictions were bargained down from serious trafficking charges.”17 Also, it’s not easy to land in prison in this nation:
Most convicted felons never reach prison, and those who do are typically repeat offenders guilty of the most serious violent and property crimes. The system sends very few people to prison for simple drug possession. Drug-related convictions do not disproportionately harm the black community. To the contrary, if all drug offenders were released tomorrow, there would be no change in the black share of prisoners. We do know, however, that putting the most dangerous criminals behind bars reduces victimization for crime-plagued communities. As the incarceration rate for violent felons has increased, crime rates have plunged, saving countless lives and improving public safety, especially in minority neighborhoods.18
The Manhattan Institute also found that 47 percent of Americans serving time behind bars are there because of violent crimes. Only 20 percent are there for drug-related crimes. You can’t blame the drug laws on the high number of blacks in prison.
Myth #2: Racism is the driving force behind harsher sentencing, putting too many nonviolent blacks behind bars. During his time in office, President Obama could not stop talking about racist policing. When he went before the NAACP in Philadelphia, he said that
there are costs that can’t be measured in dollars and cents. Because the statistics on who gets incarcerated show that by a wide margin, it disproportionately impacts communities of color. African Americans and Latinos make up 30 percent of our population; they make up 60 percent of our inmates. About one in every 35 African American men, one in every 88 Latino men is serving time right now. Among white men, that number is one in 214. The bottom line is that in too many places, black boys and black men, Latino boys and Latino men experience being treated differently under the law.19
After that last line, the members of the audience responded with thunderous applause. Remember when Obama’s election was supposed to usher in an era of racial healing? Me neither.
But author and researcher Heather MacDonald demolished this myth when she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2015. She explained that this was perhaps one of the most dangerous inaccuracies:
For decades, criminologists have tried to find evidence proving that the overrepresentation of blacks in prison is due to systemic racial inequity. That effort has always come up short. In fact, racial differences in offending account for the disproportionate representation of blacks in prison. A 1994 Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country’s 75 largest urban areas found that blacks actually had a lower chance of prosecution following a felony than whites. Following conviction, blacks were more likely to be sentenced to prison, however, due to their more extensive criminal histories and the gravity of their current offense.20
I can tell you this from personal experience. If you go to a neighborhood riddled with crime, the people who live there don’t want drug dealers and users to be put back on their streets. Who would? Residents of these neighborhoods want tougher sentencing, not more lenient sentencing. Only in the twisted logic of liberal class and race guilt would putting druggies back on the street seem like a good idea.
So why are there so many black people in prison?
No matter how complicated social activists try to make it out to be, no matter how much they try to blame society, cops, or whatever else, there are so many black people in prison because so many black people commit crimes.
Discipline, Order, Training, and Structure (DOTS)
I was in Target one day, and a black woman stopped me and said, “You’re Sheriff Clarke.” I get stopped frequently at stores, but I was not expecting what came next. She continued, “My son has been in and out of the House of Corrections ever since you took that over.” I’m sure my back stiffened. The media didn’t like my approach to prisoner comfort, and I’d gotten sick of all the criticism people hurled my way. “But he’s out, and he told me he doesn’t want to go back there.”
“‘Mom, Sheriff Clarke ain’t playing no games,’ he told me. ‘He’s running the jail the way it should be.’”
I breathed a sigh of relief. I expected her to lay into me and say I’ve been too hard on her son.
“Well, I try to instill a sense of discipline,” I began, but just as I started talking, a young man walked up to us.
“Here comes my son now!” the mother exclaimed.
Uh-oh, I thought.
“Everything okay, Mom?” he asked. She’d been in the store longer than expected, so he’d come in to check on her. Even though she’d characterized him as appreciative of my reforms, you never know what you’re going to get. However, I found him to be respectful and courteous to me.
Previously, inmates weren’t really bothered about going to jail. They didn’t like it, but they thought of it as a minor inconvenience. But my reforms made jail a very unpleasant place, just as it should be.
I don’t know if that guy is going to walk the straight and narrow. But I had figured out a way to give people like him more of a chance. I had noticed that too many inmates leave jail, go home as the same dysfunctional people they were when they went in, and return to the same house and the same goofs for friends. As I mentioned before, inmates don’t need another job program. They need a discipline program.
An employer needs someone who is reliable, trustworthy, prompt, respectful, and productive. But many of these in
dividuals don’t exhibit these qualities. Instead of teaching them some sort of low-paying skills, I decided to teach them something that could really help them: life skills.
In 2010, I created the Discipline, Order, Training, and Structure (DOTS) program to give offenders the tools necessary to make a cognitive decision to change their behavior so we don’t see them back at the jail. We based this on a Michigan Department of Corrections’ program, and I thought I’d finally found something that would get broad-based community and political support. After all, who’s against teaching inmates life skills?
People from Michigan came to Milwaukee County and worked with a group I’d put together to run this program. My employees went to Michigan to see firsthand how this program runs. Instead of hiring people to run this program, I assigned the task to staff who were already with us so we didn’t spend additional funds. The program would cost the taxpayers precisely $0 since I had already cut programs that didn’t work in order to make room in my budget for this one.
I invited the reporter who covers county government to my office and laid out the whole program for him. I knew I’d be able to get public and political support with this innovative program that I hoped would help people get on track.
We began with one dormitory of sixty inmates who’d be given a few perks. They’d have access to a better quality of food with a bit more say-so in the menu. They wouldn’t get filet mignon or lobster, but we would bring in hamburger meat on Wednesday night, opening up the kitchen and letting them cook the meat themselves. Also, they got to watch movies and cable television, which was a huge benefit for them. Men who were willing to go through my program would have more control over their lives, but they would have to have to earn it. Special privileges such as access to television or visitation could be revoked for infractions.
“This is strictly voluntary,” we said, to the inmates before explaining what it would entail. The participants would get up at 5:00 a.m., take an early morning run, and then do fitness training, before focusing on their work detail, education, and job-training classes. There would also be a time of team competition so that they learned how to push one another to achieve group success. Lights out for this program was 9:30 p.m.
