by Curtis Bunn
“If law enforcement would just see Black people the same way they see white people, that would go a long way toward ending this problem,” Dorothy Elliott said. She called on police officers to treat African Americans the same way they treated the mass murderer who fatally shot those nine Black members of a prayer group inside Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. He was arrested without incident. “Just treat us, treat Blacks, the same way they treated Dylann Roof in South Carolina,” she said.
Locking Up Black Lives
By Patrice Gaines
On the afternoon of Saturday, May 30, 2020, a Black father searched for his family among the protesters gathered at Love Park in Philadelphia’s Center City. It was five days after the killing of George Floyd, and Qadree (pronounced Kwa-dree) Jacobs was looking for his ex-wife, Shay, and their two young children. If he couldn’t find them in the crowd, how could he keep them safe?
He had sworn to care for his new family in a way he had not been able to care for his elder son.
Jacobs served fifteen years in prison for selling drugs. He marks that time by the significant events he missed in the life of his namesake, “Lil Qad.”
“I missed sixteen of his birthdays…my son losing his first tooth, having his first girlfriend. I missed the first time he dribbled a basketball and made a basket, when he rode a bike with no training wheels.”
He paused to catch his breath.
“When he learned to tie his shoe. His first grade, second grade, third grade. I missed his first birds-and-bees talk. The first time he got into a fight. I missed everything.”
Now Jacobs is forty-two. Lil Qad is twenty-three.
The first thing Jacobs did when he was released from prison was to go to his son’s house and hug him.
Jacobs admits he made poor decisions. He broke the law.
But there is also this: By the time he sold crack, he had been a child who lived with addicts, experienced hunger for weeks at a time; had been molested by a relative and held a friend as he died from bullet wounds. In his world, selling drugs, or risking death to earn a living, was an acceptable antidote to hopelessness.
On that sunny afternoon of protests, Jacobs spotted Shay cuddling their one-year-old son, Sakou, while their three-year-old, SuSu, stood nearby in her pristine white tennis shoes holding a cardboard sign that said: “I Stand for Justice.”
Jacobs bent his six-foot frame, lifted his son to his shoulders, and together the family marched down Broad Street.
They joined a crowd of hundreds that surely included many people like him, Black men and women who had spent years incarcerated, or some who still had loved ones locked in cages.
They marched to protest the killing by a Minnesota police officer of a man who had spent a quarter of his adult life incarcerated. In one conviction George Floyd served ten months behind bars for a ten-dollar drug deal, a conviction under review now because the arresting officer is suspected of fabricating evidence in other low-level drug cases. Like Jacobs, Floyd made bad choices, spending four years incarcerated on drug and robbery charges. He had difficulty finding work, partly because of his criminal record.
Research shows that Black men ages thirty-five to forty-four who have been formerly incarcerated have an unemployment rate of 35.2 percent. White men in that category have a rate of 18.4 percent.
The toll of being convicted is significant and, in addition to job discrimination, can include exclusion from voter rolls, and disqualification from food stamps, public housing, and student loans. Justice advocates have coined the phrase “death by incarceration” to emphasize the finality of life without parole sentences handed out regularly and disproportionately to Black people by U.S. judges.
Floyd had moved to Minnesota to get a fresh start.
Now the world knows his name.
Ben Crump, the attorney representing Floyd’s family, told protesters in Louisville, “There seem to be two justice systems in America. One for Black America, and one for white America.”
The difference between those two systems is horrifying. Though Black people make up just 13 percent of the population, they are 32.9 percent of the 2.2 million people incarcerated. One in five Black men is serving what are effectively life sentences. There were almost 500,000 Black lives locked away in state or federal prisons at the end of 2018.
One out of every three Black boys can expect to be incarcerated.
The criminal justice system reserves its harshest punishment for Black people. When a crack epidemic devastated some Black communities in the 1980s and ’90s, the response by the government was to proclaim “war,” deploy armored cars, and order raids on crack houses; and to create longer mandatory sentences for crack users, who were generally Black people. The government decided the penalty for possession of crack would be a hundred times greater than for possession of the same amount of powdered cocaine, the drug then favored by whites.
Instead of responding to the crack epidemic as if it were a public health crisis and increasing funds to rehabilitation clinics, the government increased funding to local police departments, turning them into paramilitary operations.
But when a new wave of opioid and heroin deaths hit white communities, the government responded in a more humane way. State governments increased money for rehabilitation, and the federal government began to investigate doctors who prescribed opioids. The white addict was often portrayed as a sympathetic victim while the Black addict was a criminal deserving punishment.
Jacobs wants to believe that the protesting in 2020 will make a difference. But he is weary. Black people are weary—and angry—about historically receiving the most brutal punishments in America.
They have been enslaved, sold back into slavery as “laborers” and leased as convicts to work themselves to death building wealth for white corporations. When Black bodies were left swinging from trees or beaten and mutilated, then tossed into rivers, those extrajudicial murders were called “law and order.” Now, when they are shot down in a city street by police, it too is called “law and order.”
To many white people, the disparity in the imprisonment of Black people just proves they are right to believe that Black people are inherently violent and criminal. Since the civil rights era, this myth has been deliberately nurtured by politicians who unabashedly use coded phrases such as “law and order” and “get tough on crime” to placate white fears and win white votes. This has not changed since a 1968 Time magazine article in which a supporter of then–presidential candidate George Wallace said: “Y’all know about law and order. It’s spelled n-i-g-g-e-r-s.”
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence mentioned “law and order” more than ninety times.
These days, as Jacobs rides in his Philadelphia Water Department truck past his old neighborhood, he sees evidence that the cycle of addiction and punishment will continue. And knows that it is the children who will suffer.
“I see people out on the streets who are on drugs, and I wonder why the government isn’t doing anything, and what is happening to their kids?” he asked, recalling his own childhood.
“Every kid in the street has PTSD,” Jacobs said. “You see people dying. You see big guns. You see drugs. No kid should have to deal with this. No kid should have to figure out a way to eat or how he will survive.”
Jacobs knows these endangered children could easily end up in prison unless this cycle is interrupted, not necessarily by removing the children but by removing the poverty, assisting the families, and strengthening the communities. He wants to believe that George Floyd’s life—not just his death—will serve as a megaphone to raise the voices of activists calling for prison reform.
If Black children’s lives matter, shouldn’t the life of a troubled, hungry child living in a poor neighborhood devoid of greenery and hope be saved and that child be educated at richly financed public schools? That, he said, would be far better than having prisons built with the anticipation that these children
will end up there.
The questions are obvious: Can America save a Black child without locking him up for fifteen years when he becomes a man—or does America even want to? How do we dismantle a system built on structural racism that disproportionately sentences and locks up Black people? What can we build that is fair and equitable and provides substantially better public safety?
We are at the tipping point. It is time to listen to the voices of advocates who speak for those Black bodies that have been silenced, locked away in cages, made invisible, rendered powerless for years.
Philadelphia: The City of Brotherly Prisons
Qadree Jacobs’s hometown of Philadelphia is known as the birthplace of the nation, but it is also home of its first penitentiary. In more recent days, some reports also call it the city with the highest incarceration rate of any large jurisdiction in this country.
Since 2015, the city has worked under a national grant to decrease the local jail population and reduce racial, ethnic, and economic disparities in the criminal justice system. Still, in November of 2020, non-Hispanic Blacks represented 42 percent of the city’s population, but they made up 73.6 percent of the people incarcerated. NAACP researchers found the poorest neighborhoods in Philadelphia had the highest rate of incarceration and the lowest performing schools. While the government uses millions from taxpayers to keep citizens imprisoned, it seems unwilling to increase funds to educate inner-city children.
Jacobs grew up in North Philadelphia, in one of the nine neighborhoods representing a quarter of the city’s population and accounting for 50 percent of all adults sent to Pennsylvania prisons from Philadelphia. Jacobs also attended some of the lowest performing schools, dropping out in tenth grade.
In 2017, Philadelphians elected a progressive district attorney, Larry Krasner, who joined the new wave of reform-minded DAs who have won offices in major cities such as Los Angeles, Detroit, and Chicago. Jacobs’s father, a recovering addict also once incarcerated, knocked on doors and did some organizing to help Krasner get elected. Since taking office, Krasner, like most of the newly elected criminal justice reformers, has earned the ire of law enforcement for his changes that thus far have included diverting nonviolent offenders from prison, eliminating cash bail on some charges, and decriminalizing weed possession.
Other DAs are watching Philadelphia, which in some ways is ground zero for the fight between the left pushing for revolutionary change in criminal justice and the right, still pushing for “law and order” that will “make America great again.”
Krasner, who as a civil rights and defense attorney sued police at least seventy-five times, was embroiled in a public debate with Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain. As U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, McSwain represented Trump’s Justice Department, which expressed disdain for the national reform movement.
Krasner and McSwain battled over how to resolve criminal cases, with McSwain using his power to supersede Krasner’s office. In one case, after the city negotiated a three-and-a-half- to ten-year sentence for a man who shot a storeowner with an AK-47, leaving him wheelchair bound, McSwain sentenced the man to fourteen years. In another case, McSwain announced federal charges against two men for gun-related crimes, saying Krasner’s office mishandled the case.
Shortly after the DA’s election, at the close of meetings between the two, Krasner told McSwain, “You are gonna lose and Trump’s gonna lose, because history is not on your side.”
The country’s first prison, established as the Jail and Penitentiary House at Walnut Street, was founded in 1790 by a group of white men in Philadelphia. Their goal was to improve conditions at the Walnut Street Jail, which locked up men and women together, did not classify people by offenses or age, and allowed the purchase of liquor. The new penitentiary offered private cells, where the founders thought prisoners could reflect in solitude on what they had done wrong.
Leslie Patrick-Stamp, a history professor at Bucknell University, examined the documents of that first penitentiary, concluding, “This evidence reveals that Black people did in fact endure disproportionate imprisonment in this country’s first state prison.”
Patrick-Stamp noted that prior to the opening of Walnut Street Jail and Penitentiary House, the Pennsylvania legislature passed in 1780 the “Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery,” which began the process to end slavery in the Commonwealth. The last slaves in Pennsylvania weren’t freed until 1847—sixty-seven years later.
The legislation, theoretically, eliminated racially specific courts and penal practices and imposed a uniform penal code for people of all races.
Nevertheless, Patrick-Stamp found that the 3,053 Black people sentenced to the state penitentiary between May 1790 and June 1791 made up 14.9 percent of the prison’s population. Black people made up 2.3 percent of Pennsylvania’s population at the time.
“Urban Black people were overrepresented in the penitentiary with 85 percent of the total Black prison population sentenced from Philadelphia courts, while they constituted only 35.3 percent of the commonwealth’s Black population,” wrote Patrick-Stamp.
In rural Pennsylvania different means were used to control Black people, such as curfews and threats of exile and of unemployment. Just like today, Black women were incarcerated at a much higher rate (per capita) than white women, though there were more Black men in total incarcerated. White men believed Black women were immoral and lacked dutifulness to family.
When a series of fires engulfed York, Pennsylvania, in 1803, only Black people were found guilty of arson. The state’s attorney general proclaimed arson “the crime of slaves and children.”
Most Black people sentenced to the Walnut Street prison came from the South, likely to escape slavery. While the prison’s records were incomplete, Patrick-Stamp occasionally came across some specifics: Ester Green, condemned to Walnut Street in 1796, born on the Maryland plantation of Robert Hoops, jailed for stealing goods and chattel worth $72.50; Samuel Jackson, laborer, convicted of larceny in 1814; Teeny Deal, “a Negress,” born in Philadelphia and sentenced for larceny. Upon her release from prison, Deal was “pardoned and discharged by the Governor, upon condition of leaving the state forthwith not to return.”
The largest group of incarcerated Black men were common laborers, such as chimney sweeps. The second-largest group provided personal services and included waiters, house servants, and barbers. The smallest group had worked in skilled occupations, such as cabinetmakers, shoemakers, and painters.
The largest group among Black women were domestics and servants.
These were poor people. The Prison Sentence Dockets showed that 83.8 percent of the 3,053 Black people committed to the penitentiary between 1794 and 1835 were jailed for larceny or for stealing tools, food, clothing, and other goods.
Speaking at a national conference of the American Correctional Association in 2005, Patrick-Stamp said: “Such numbers only confirm a long-standing belief held by many African Americans that they always have been disproportionately represented in this country’s prisons. Most Black people know intuitively and experientially that racial discrimination in the criminal justice system always has existed in the U.S.”
While the North often gets a pass because of the abolition movement, Patrick-Stamp said imprisonment by the state began in the North and that all the states, except New Jersey, founded their prisons after abolishing slavery.
In other words, after slavery, prison became the new method of controlling Black bodies.
“What need was there for imprisoning the black populace when there was slavery, an institution which performed functions quite similar to the prison?” Patrick-Stamp asked.
Before it closed in 1835, the Walnut Street Penitentiary became known for being the first to use inmates for labor. Western State Penitentiary opened in 1826, and a few years later, Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia opened, featuring cells equipped with feed doors to minimize contact with other humans.
Easter
n State Penitentiary, now a museum, describes its first prisoner this way: “Charles Williams, Prisoner Number One. Burglar. Light Black Skin…Sentenced to two years confinement with labor.”
Nearly two centuries later, Black people still fill Pennsylvania prisons, and Black Philadelphians still represent a disproportionate number of those caged in the state’s prisons.
The Road to Prison is Paved with Hopelessness
Brenda Jacobs was walking across the street of her North Philadelphia neighborhood, munching on fried fish, cradling her six-month-old son, Qadree, in her arms.
Her cousin waited on her front porch. Suddenly, Brenda fell. Her cousin ran to catch the baby.
Brenda Jacobs was dead at twenty-eight. She choked on a fish bone.
Years later, Qadree Jacobs would blame himself for her death after drunk relatives told him repeatedly that his mother was headed across the street to show him off. Then when he was nineteen, Jacobs finally asked his mom’s cousin what happened that day, and she told him his mother was coming over to finish a conversation she didn’t want anyone to hear: She was going to take her kids and move away from Jacobs’s father, a heroin addict, fleeing from him and a house crowded with alcoholic relatives. If Brenda Jacobs had lived, perhaps her son’s life would have been completely different, devoid of poverty, neglect, sexual abuse—and prison.
For a while, the family remained in the house Brenda had owned, a total of thirteen people in a one-bathroom house. When Jacobs was five, his father stopped using drugs and came home and told his sons, “Pack up your things. We got a house.”
They put their belongings in a grocery cart and walked to another house nearby. For the first week or so the new house didn’t have electricity or water, but the boys were happy because the crowd was gone, and their father wasn’t using drugs.
