Cuz

by Danielle Allen

  173 “a lot of racism and violence”: Ibid.

  175 evidence, they say, is “overwhelming”: Shelden, Tracy, and Brown, Youth Gangs in American Society, pp. 107–110. These scholars write: “Two theories have been offered to explain why the crime rate is higher among gang members (Kaufman, 2010). One theory is called the ‘selection model.’ According to this view, those most likely to join gangs are ‘already predisposed toward delinquency and violence.’ The other perspective is known as the ‘facilitation model.’ This view argues that ‘gang members are no more disposed toward delinquency and violence than others are and would not contribute to higher crime rates if they did not join a gang. However, when they do join a gang, peer pressures promote their increased involvement in delinquency’ (Kaufman, 2010). The overwhelming evidence gives support to the latter view.” In support of this view, these scholars describe the following observed pattern: “The first arrest for gang members typically came after becoming a gang member. In fact, in each of the areas where the research was conducted, the pattern was as follows: The youths began hanging out with the gangs at around age 12 or 13, joined the gang around 6 to 12 months after (between ages 13 and 14); and incurred their first arrest at around age 14. Typically they experience their first arrest about six months after they join the gang [emphasis added].”

  176 By 1961, the number of addicts: Fortner, Black Silent Majority (Kindle location 822).

  176 unemployment for African Americans spiraled: Shelden, Tracy, and Brown, Youth Gangs in American Society, p. 11.

  177 Charles Green launched: President’s Commission on Organized Crime (Irving Kaufman, Chair), “Trafficking and Organized Crime,” in America’s Habit: Drug Abuse, Drug Trafficking, and Organized Crime (1986), chap. 3, part 1. Available at https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001087693.

  178 “a community based organization”: Shelden, Tracy, and Brown, Youth Gangs in American Society, p. 13.

  179 a world of white distributors and independent distributors: One can work out the distribution patterns for narcotics by studying the state-by-state “Drug Threat Assessment” documents that states submit to the National Drug Intelligence Center. See a 2002 example from Tennessee here: https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs1/1017/cocaine.htm#Distribution. These state-by-state reports become the basis for a synthesized national drug threat assessment report put out by the Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Agency. For the 2016 report, see https://www.dea.gov/resource-center/2016%20NDTA%20Summary.pdf.

  179 A study found that in Pasadena in 1995: Cheryl L. Maxson, “Street Gangs and Drug Sales in Two Suburban Cities,” in NIJ Research in Brief, September 1995. https://www.ncjrs.gov/txtfiles/strtgang.txt. See also Shelden, Tracy, and Brown, Youth Gangs.

  CHAPTER 27: THE LIMIT ON HELPING YOUR KIDS

  191 According to the report . . . 39.8 percent: California Attorney General’s Office, Crime and Violence Prevention Center, Gangs: A Statewide Directory of Programs: Prevention, Intervention, Suppression (Sacramento, 1994).

  CHAPTER 28: CITY OF ANGELS

  195 Operation Pipeline: The Drug Enforcement Administration addresses the history of Operation Pipeline on its website here: https://www.dea.gov/about/history/1980-1985.pdf. That history is also discussed in Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: New Press, 2010).

  195 what we have come to know as racial profiling: David Kocieniewski, “New Jersey Argues that U.S. Wrote the Book on Racial Profiling,” New York Times, November 29, 2000. See also Alexander, The New Jim Crow.

  196 From 1790 to 1950 the number of mandatory minimums: Naomi Murakawa. The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (Studies in Postwar American Political Development) (Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 116.

  196 created its first gang database: On gang databases, see Max Felker-Kantor, “Managing Marginalization from Watts to Rodney King: The Struggle over Policing and Social Control in Los Angeles, 1965–1992” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 2014), pp. 381–83. For statistics on nearly half of African American men in Los Angeles County under age twenty-five as gang members, see Nina Siegel, “Ganging Up on Civil Liberties,” Progressive 61 (October 1997): 28–31.

  196 no fewer than 1,400 African American youth: Donna Murch, “Crack in Los Angeles: Crisis, Militarization, and Black Response to the Late Twentieth-Century War on Drugs,” Journal of American History, June 2015, p. 162–73.

  196 “the casual drug user”: Ronald J. Ostrow, “Casual Drug Users Should Be Shot, Gates Says,” Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1990, p. A19. For Daryl F. Gates’s argument for greater incarceration rates, see Felker-Kantor, “Managing Marginalization from Watts to Rodney King,” 409–10.

  196 The African American prison population in California: Murch, “Crack in Los Angeles,” pp. 162–73.

  198 far more powerful system: I wrote to a Stanford psychologist who works on the impact of a pressing sense of mortality on one’s decision-making to ask her if she knew of any work on juvenile offenders and inmates and the effects of long sentences on their psyches. She wrote this back to me: “Dear Danielle, Nice to e-meet you. About 20 years ago my group began to explore relationships between time horizons and gang membership. The idea was prompted by reports that young men living in high crime neighborhoods did not expect to survive their 20s. I reasoned that gangs may represent highly selective and strong social bonds and reflect preferences similar to those of elderly people for smaller and emotionally meaningful social relationships. We collected some survey data from a high school in a high crime neighborhood and findings supported the hypothesis about shortened time horizons in youth: Those who were in gangs or considering joining gangs had time horizons comparable to the elderly. Those who were the same age but not in or interested in gangs had much longer time horizons. “I visited a youth incarceration ‘camp’ and spent a day talking with middle and high school aged boys who were in gangs. By the end of the day, I had given up the idea of studying the question. I learned from these boys that they had essentially no choice but to join a gang. Some told me that they didn’t ‘join’ at all; they were simply default members by virtue of their addresses.

  “If I’d had an idea of a way my research could have helped them, I would have pursued it. But because my question was theoretical and I saw no way it would be useful–given how overdetermined their situations seemed to be–I felt that it would be exploitative to pursue the research so I let it go. We never published these data.

  “Your email prompted this memory. I don’t know of any other research on the topic, published or unpublished.”

  199 32 percent of defendant filings: See Federal Judicial Caseload Statistics for 2013, available at http://www.uscourts.gov/statistics-reports/federal-judicial-caseload-statistics-2013.

  199 According to Vernon Geberth: Interviewed by Martin Kaste for “Open Cases: Why One-Third of Murders in America Go Unresolved,” National Public Radio: Morning Edition, March 30, 2015. Available at http://www.npr.org/2015/03/30/395069137/open-cases-why-one-third-of-murders-in-america-go-unresolved.

  199 the average clearance rate for homicide: Ibid. See also Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America (New York: Spiegel & Grau), 2015.

  199 In contrast, in Detroit in the years: Martin Kaste, “Open Cases: Why One-Third of Murders in America Go Unresolved,” National Public Radio, Morning Edition, March 30, 2015.

  199 In Chicago in 2009: Mark Konkol and Frank Main, “59 Hours,” Chicago Sun-Times, July 5, 2010.

  199 hide the low rate of cases ending in arrest and prosecution: Mike Reicher, “LAPD Closed Homicide Cases Without Bringing Killers to Justice, Analysis Shows,” Los Angeles Daily News, January 24, 2015.

  200 Two economists, Brendan O’Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi: Brendan O’Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi, “Homicide in Black and White,” in Journal of Urban Economics 68, no. 3 (November 2010): 215–30.

  202 an estimated $100 billion on illegal narcotics: Danielle Allen, “How the War on Drugs Cr
eates Violence,” Washington Post, October 16, 2015, citing Office of National Drug Control Policy, “What America’s Users Spend on Illegal Drugs: 2000–2010,” 2014. Available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/ondcp/policy-and-research/wausid_results_report.pdf.

  202 the police had 47 percent of African American men: Murch, “Crack in Los Angeles.”

  CODA: WHAT NEXT?

  218 One out of every one hundred adult Americans: Committee on Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration, Committee on Law and Justice, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, National Research Council, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences, ed. Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western, and Steve Redburn (Washington D.C.: National Academies Press, 2014), p. 2.

  219 Twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners: Ibid.

  220 In 2001, Portugal eliminated criminal penalties: Drug Policy Alliance, “Drug Decriminalization in Portugal: A Health- Centered Approach,” February 2015. Available at https://www.drugpolicy.org/sites/default/files/DPA_Fact Sheet_Portugal_Decriminalization_Feb2015.pdf.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  I am grateful to my family, especially my aunt Karen; cousins Nicholas, Roslyn, and Pili; my father and mother, William Allen and Susan Allen; and my former husband and stepson Robert von Hallberg and Isaac von Hallberg for taking the time to share their memories with me, even over the course of repeated interviews and follow-up conversations. In order to reconstruct events, I depended not merely on their memories and my own, but also on articles about Michael’s attempted carjacking in the Daily Breeze (Torrance, Calif.) and court records for Michael’s case and Bree’s later homicide and manslaughter case. Whereas most California court documents are available to the general public through the court archives, juvenile records are not. Despite the fact that he was treated as an adult, Michael’s case was filed as a “Youth Authority” or juvenile case. Consequently, I have not been able to secure the whole of his record and was able to secure those parts that I did acquire access to only via formal public records requests. I am unlikely to have succeeded in that effort without the valuable legal advice of Joshua Milon. It is worth noting that, in California, the court files of juvenile defendants who reached the age of eighteen but are now deceased are orphan files. No one has a legal right to them. The defendant, who is deceased, cannot access them, of course. Neither, though, can their parents if the deceased passed the age of eighteen before passing away. Such was the situation with Michael’s file. It was difficult, in the first instance, to find it, because it had been misfiled. Once I found the file, it was held up to me, through a glass partition, in its full thickness of several inches. The clerk then informed me that she would have to review it and remove anything marked confidential. After twenty minutes, she returned to me with a file with very little left in it. This is what led me down the path of making public record requests. I am extremely grateful for the material that I was able to secure, but I did not secure the whole of Michael’s file. There are other mysteries in it that I may never be able to untangle, for instance a letter that Michael wrote in 2001 from prison to the judge who sentenced him.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First and foremost, I must thank my friend and colleague, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., without whose invitation to give Harvard’s DuBois Lectures, this book would never have been written. The purpose of those lectures is to contribute to our better understanding of African American life, history, and culture. As, over years, I contemplated giving those lectures, I could think of no topic more important than the ravages of mass incarceration. Yet that topic, that material was too hard, too personal. Without a firm date, a room booked and an audience expected, I’m not sure I would ever have been able to finish this.

  Second, I thank my friend, Quiara Alegria Hudes, whose own public statement about a cousin, a chapter in my book Education and Equality, gave me the courage to start.

  To my family, of course, I owe everything. My parents and brother, my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. My former husband and stepsons. My husband and children. All have in one way or another helped author this book.

  My daughter, Nora, came across me one evening at work with photos of Michael spread out.

  Who is that, she wanted to know?

  “It’s Michael.”

  “Who is Michael?” she said.

  Well, Nora, this is Michael.

  If the material was hard for me, it was excruciating for my aunt Karen and cousins Nicholas and Roslyn, who endured repeated interviews and my insistent, continuous probing. Each of us had been seeking understanding, and peace, through a solitary journey. Never had we tried to assemble our story together. While the process has been painful, I believe we have all achieved greater clarity. By and by, we have come to understand, at least in part, and this can put some of our incessant mourning to rest, I hope.

  My agent, Tina Bennett, my editor, Bob Weil, and miracle-working assistant Emily Bromley are stalwart friends, advocates, and teachers. They believe in me, and we should all be so lucky to have their sort of fierce support.

  Many, many more assisted, too, of course. My friends and colleagues at Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, in the Government Department and Graduate School of Education, in the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, in the Department of African and African American Studies. My students across campus, of course. And all of the extraordinary scholars and writers—people like Bruce Western, Elizabeth Hinton, Glenn Loury, Rajiv Sethi, Tommie Shelby, Brandon Terry, Michael Fortner, Michelle Alexander, Jill Leovy—and so many others who have at last opened up the story of mass incarceration so that we may all consider our circumstances with clear eyes.

  Also, this story could never have been written without able and generous legal work by Joshua Milon, without the courteous and sympathetic assistance of staff in the Los Angeles courts archives and records offices, without the smiling help of staff in several branches of the Los Angeles County library system, and without the patient responsiveness of Irene Wakabayashi, in the District Attorney’s Office, who fielded my multiple public records requests.

  I am also grateful to all the people at Norton and Liveright who have helped make this book possible, especially Peter Miller, Cordelia Calvert, and Marie Pantojan.

  Finally, I want to say thank you to the many people who came up to me after I relayed Michael’s story for the first time, in those DuBois Lectures, and said, I, too, love someone who is in prison or I, too, have lost someone to the ravages of the world of drugs. So many people shared their own painful stories with me. You, too, are in my heart’s locket.

  CREDITS

  Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device's search function to locate particular terms in the text.

  TEXT

  10 Headline No. 1, from KTLA: “A body riddled with bullets,” KTLA News website, July 18, 2009, 9:39 PM PDT. Reprinted courtesy of KTLA.

  33 Excerpt from “You Cannot Rest,” from Watching the Spring Festival by Frank Bidart. Copyright © 2008 by Frank Bidart. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  56 “arrow flew, as if of itself”: From Frank Bidart, “The Fourth Hour of the Night,” from Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965–2016 by Frank Bidart. Copyright © 2017 by Frank Bidart. Reprintd by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  57 Expert quoted by the Los Angeles Times, Sept. 6, 1995, “New Wave of Mayhem; Juveniles Are Increasingly Committing Violent Crimes—and Experts Don’t Know Why or How Best to Stop Them.” Reprinted with permission of quoted expert.

  174 Excerpt from “Jet Song,” from West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim. © Copyright 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959 by Amberson Holdings LLC and Stephen Sondheim. Copyright renewed. Leonard Bernstein Music Publishing Company LLC, publisher. Boosey & Hawkes, agent for rental. International copyright secured.

  IMAGES

  14 Photo of Michae
l from Danielle’s wedding. Photo by Laura Slatkin.

  23 The author and her cousin, Michael, at her wedding. Photo by Sharon Renee Hartley.

  28 The entrance to Los Angeles Valley Community College. Photo courtesy of Isaac Van Hallberg.

  48 Michael Allen, in Central Juvenile, with mother, Karen Allen, autumn 1995. Photo by California Youth Authority.

  48 Michael Allen in California Rehabilitation Center–Norco, date uncertain. Photo by California Youth Authority.

  48 Michael Allen in California Rehabilitation Center–Norco, date uncertain. Photo by California Youth Authority.

  48 Michael and Karen Allen, Visiting Day in California Rehabilitation Center–Norco, 2004. Photo by California Youth Authority.

  49 Michael Allen, during second phase in prison, 2007–2008. Photo by California Youth Authority.

  84 Michael in Centinela, on prayer rug. California Youth Authority.

  86 Map of places where Michael was incarcerated. Map created by Anna Oler.

  87 “Norco, CA State Prison,” 2015, photo by Stephen Tourlentes, courtesy of Carroll and Sons Gallery, Boston, MA.

  96 “Chino, CA State Prison, 2015,” photo by Stephen Tourlentes, courtesy of Carroll and Sons Gallery, Boston, MA.

  100 Elizabeth Eckford turning away from hostile crowds outside of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, Sept. 4, 1957. Bettmann/Getty Images.

  108 Aerial photo of California Rehabilitation Center–Norco. Courtesy of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

  126 Fire burns above the city of San Diego. Photo included in U.S. and California governmental report, “The Story: California Fire Siege 2003.” Courtesy of CAL FIRE Archives.

  136 Fire burns along a hill line endangering homes. Courtesy of CAL FIRE Archives.