by Curtis Bunn
“Cleveland told Daddy-Yo he had been taken to the Mississippi Delta, sold into slavery and held for twenty years on a plantation surrounded by two rivers and protected by armed guards, barbed wire and dogs,” Cooper wrote. “There were other plantations, all over the South, Cleveland said. Men kept under lock and key. Men were whipped for insubordination, men killed on a whim.”
Meanwhile, white men and their companies accumulated great wealth from this labor, wealth they would pass on to future generations.
This practice of convict leasing was formally outlawed by the last state (Alabama) in 1928, but it persisted in various forms until it was abolished by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941.
In 2018, construction workers uncovered a mass grave with the skeletal remains of Black prison inmates, estimated to be from fourteen to seventy years old, in Sugar Land, Texas. The area had been home to an infamous web of sugarcane plantations and prison camps. Archeology experts determined that the people had muscular builds but were malnourished with bones misshapen from backbreaking, repetitive labor.
Convict leasers could work convicts to death and ask the state for a replacement. Like slavery, it served as a stepping-stone toward mass incarceration.
“Slavery gave America a fear of Black people and a taste for violent punishment. Both still define our criminal-justice system,” civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson wrote in an essay in the New York Times Magazine.
“It’s not just that this history fostered a view of Black people as presumptively criminal. It also cultivated a tolerance for employing any level of brutality in response,” Stevenson said.
This brutality included lynching, a public act of torture used to punish Black people considered guilty of “crimes” cited by whites. In 1895, William Stephens and Jefferson Cole were lynched in Texas after they refused to abandon their land to white people. In 1916, Anthony Crawford was lynched in South Carolina for refusing to accept a low price for his cotton. In 1933, Elizabeth Lawrence was lynched near Birmingham because she chastised white children who were throwing rocks at her.
When thousands of Black people left the South for the North as part of the Great Migration, racial disparities in prisons in the North doubled.
“Never Going Home Again”
Shariff Ingram was fifteen when he was arrested and jailed and thirty-eight when he came home. He has been home three weeks. Some people think he is doing amazingly well. He has a car and a construction job and lives in a nice Philadelphia suburb with his sister, Dara.
But they don’t see the million little things he has to adjust to daily.
On his third day home, he got dressed for his family’s welcome-home party. Before leaving the house, he stopped in the downstairs bathroom. The last thing he did was wash his hands. It was about eleven a.m.
He and his sister returned home about nine-thirty that night. His sister went into the downstairs bathroom and found the water still running from the faucet.
“In prison, the water is on a timer,” explained Ingram, who made the same mistake several times.
“Now I don’t leave home without checking the faucets in the kitchen and the two bathrooms I use,” he said. “People think I’ve made an amazing adjustment, but I have to be mindful of everything. I can’t even make little mistakes other people can. My number one goal is to not go back or to put myself in any situation where something bad can happen.”
Black youth are more likely to be tried as adults than white youth. In 2018, when Black people made up 14 percent of all youth under eighteen, they represented over half the youth transferred from juvenile to adult court, nationally. The number is often much greater in some states when the discretion is left up to prosecutors. Meanwhile, criminal justice systems in some European countries rely less on the incarceration of young offenders, diverting them instead to educational and rehabilitative programs, even those guilty of serious crimes.
Ingram was sentenced to life after he killed a drug dealer who had threatened him. His life sentence was reduced after justice advocate and attorney Bryan Stevenson represented a plaintiff in a landmark case in which the Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutional to give mandatory life sentences without parole to children under eighteen.
“Bryan Stevenson is my hero,” Ingram said.
His mother is his hero also. He was diagnosed with depression while in elementary school.
“She went to everybody, every professional and agency to try to find ways to help me,” Ingram said.
He received some counseling and was in and out of mental hospitals. He was a good student through most of elementary school. Then, when he was eight years old, two young cousins who he said “were like a sister and brother to me” died in a house fire.
He remembers their father visiting him and his mother after he was released from the hospital. Ingram stared at the burn marks on his uncle’s skin as he explained how he tried to go back into the house to get his children, but it was just too hot.
“I was trying to visualize what he was saying,” said Ingram. “I thought he should have died trying to save them.”
Shortly after the tragic fire Ingram set his mother’s mattress on fire. In prison, he got access to his old mental health medical records and read that he told a doctor, “I set the fire because I thought if I died that way, I would see my cousins.”
Less than a year after the fire, his father, with whom he had a loving relationship though his parents had separated, died of cirrhosis of the liver.
Ingram continued to receive counseling and was occasionally hospitalized. But his behavioral problems continued. By age eleven, he was selling drugs and stealing. He was transferred from one school to another. He failed three grades before a teacher skipped him from sixth to ninth grade, commenting in class, “You’re the only one here with a beard.”
Ingram, unable to understand the schoolwork, dropped out. He could now be considered a child on the “school-to-prison pipeline.” The pipeline, normally formed by expulsion from school for disciplinary reasons, feeds the disproportionate incarceration of Black youth. Ingram fit the profile: He was already labeled a discipline problem; he was used to institutions—in his case inpatient mental institutions—and he was now a dropout.
In another attempt to save him, his mother sent Ingram to live with his uncle Odell and his girlfriend in Richmond. But unbeknownst to his mother, Uncle Odell was a drug addict. Ingram found himself in a house without food or adult supervision.
“I used to go into the grocery store and steal bread, lunch meat, whatever I could eat,” he said.
When he told his mother two months later, she sent him to her other brother, whose name was Ray Charles, who lived in another part of Richmond. The living situation was better, but one day the police came to the house to arrest him for robbing a white woman who worked at the laundromat where Ingram washed clothes. He spent thirty days in a juvenile detention center before the case was thrown out of court after the woman admitted that all Black people looked alike to her.
Still, Ingram was selling drugs and hanging out with an older crowd of troublemakers. One night they robbed a 7-Eleven with a water pistol painted black. Ingram got caught and was sent to a juvenile facility for three and a half months. He was sentenced to two years of probation. But he violated his probation on the second day and went on the run, sleeping under people’s beds, in abandoned houses, and in stolen cars.
“We don’t understand we have other options,” he said of the youth he hung with on the streets. “We see people working out there, struggling. The drug dealers have money and clothes and girls. They drive through and the street gets quiet. It’s like LeBron James went through.”
He was on the corners selling crack when he got into a dispute with a street dealer. When he stopped acquiring his cocaine from that dealer, the dealer got angry, threatened him, and one night shot at Ingram.
On another night as Ingram stood in a phone booth, he heard loud music coming down the street and t
urned to see the dealer’s burgundy Grand Cherokee with tinted windows driving closer to him.
“He was shouting, ‘Where’s my money?!’” Ingram recalled. He saw the window going down.
Scared, he shot at the truck and ran. He was arrested two days later. Ingram said he pled guilty, explaining that he shot in self-defense. The judge sentenced him to life.
“My lawyer had all but guaranteed me I would not get life,” Ingram said. “I took a judge instead of a jury because of his advice. He felt the judge would not find me, a kid with my circumstances, guilty of a killing. But my lawyer never presented any evidence either.”
Ingram, sixteen when sentenced, was devastated. “It was an indescribable feeling, knowing I was never going home again. I felt like my life was over.”
He was assigned to an adult prison. “We [juveniles] had single cells, but whenever I went out of my cell I was with adults,” he said. “I showered with adults, ate with adults.”
Still, he was determined “to thrive, not just survive.”
He focused on educating himself, reading books—first the Bible and Quran, then novels. He chose to hang with people who had been in prison a long time and yet seemed mentally healthy and spiritually positive.
“I picked their brains. I wanted to know how they made it with dignity, sanity and morals,” he said. “I found a lot of people were closing their minds or taking medication to escape. The prison is quick to offer you psychotropic meds. There were people walking around who were out of it. When the prison offered me drugs, I refused them.”
He became a Muslim and dedicated himself to learning more about Islam. He worked out regularly, which he said helped release stress.
“I used to speak to my mom all the time,” Ingram said. His mother and his sister, Dara, visited him every week when possible. Other family and friends came, too.
“That gave me a sense of connection and motivation, knowing I had people who rooted for me and wanted me to survive,” said Ingram.
He took the GED every year for seven years until he passed it. But he was disappointed to learn there were no other classes offered to lifers.
“They think it’s a waste of time,” Ingram said.
In 2005, he began filing grievances to get into classes. In 2012, after the Supreme Court ruling opened the possibility of getting his time reduced, the prison allowed him to take classes.
Although the first Supreme Court ruling regarding juveniles was in 2012, it took years of other rulings, discoveries, and negotiations before he was freed.
Meanwhile, his mother and sister were excited about the new progressive district attorney in Philly, Larry Krasner. However, when Ingram’s case came before Krasner for resentencing, the DA offered the youth forty years. Ingram turned down the offer. Next, Krasner offered twenty-nine to life, but the judge refused it, saying, “It’s too low.”
Ingram told his lawyers to contest the judge’s decision.
“All my lawyers said, ‘You won’t get a better deal than this,’” Ingram recalled.
He went before a judge in April 2019 with character witnesses that included prison guards and administrators. The judge gave him time served.
“My lawyers cried,” he said.
But when he went to the parole board after his resentencing, they denied parole, citing incidents he had been involved in while in prison. They told him to return to the board in a year and that if he remained free of misconduct incidents he should be paroled then.
He was in the State Correctional Institution at Fayette, a remote area southeast of Pittsburgh, when George Floyd was killed. He and the other incarcerated men followed the case on television, watching the protests spread across the world.
“I was thinking how sad our society is that we are going through this in 2020,” he said. “I would hear guards talking about it and making excuses for the killing.”
He grew up in prison overhearing white guards supporting the killing of Black people they viewed as criminals. He heard them more recently dismiss Black Lives Matter as “ridiculous” people who hate police.
“I used to hear them speaking, saying things like, ‘He shouldn’t have resisted. Black Lives Matter just uses these situations. What about all the killings going on in Black communities?’”
On the news, he saw one Black person after another get gunned down by police officers.
“I remember after one incident where a Black guy was killed, I heard a guard say, ‘I would have let off all my clips in his ass.’”
Meanwhile, Ingram had to steel his feelings, suppress any reaction. Occasionally, he failed and got into an altercation with a guard.
“I was watching George Floyds being murdered in prisons all my life,” said Ingram. “Now society was talking about the same thing I was seeing every day. People in prison were being beaten and killed by guards and nothing happened. A lot of the incidents stemmed from racism, and these guards were white people who hated us for no reason.”
He called Fayette “one of the most oppressive” prisons he had been in.
“Most of the guards are white,” said Ingram. “But to say most guards are white in some prisons is an understatement.”
He rarely saw a Black guard while he was there, and the ones he saw seldom lasted, he said. “If you see a few Black guards you know they are likely forced to be oppressive, too.”
Ingram was suspicious of the Black prison staff he met. For two years at Fayette, he avoided therapy even though the psychiatrist was a Black woman.
“After a while I realized she was one of the ones that would stand up for us and go at those white guards,” he said.
One day the psychiatrist told him Fayette was a very depressing place and she didn’t know how much longer she could work there. Then she told him something he’ll never forget.
“She said, ‘I can never take my grandchildren to the zoo anymore.’”
Ingram asked her to explain.
“Because this place reminds me of a zoo. They have you in cages—and the animals in the zoo are treated better,” she said.
Ingram was released on September 24, 2020. A guard led him to the prison lobby, which he had never seen before. He stood, staring outside, until a prison employee told him he could open the door.
“I can go out?” he asked in disbelief. “It was weird. I was free and asking permission to walk outside.”
His mom, now retired from the tax abatement office for the City of Philadelphia, was waiting, along with Dara, a cousin, and his mother’s boyfriend.
He stepped out the door, and his mother ran to him. As he walked to the vehicle, he paused to stare at the building holding solitary confinement—“the hole.”
“I was thinking how I never thought I’d be on this side of the gate,” he said.
He voted for the first time in 2020. He reluctantly voted for Joe Biden, determined to vote out Donald Trump.
An estimated 5.17 million people are unable to vote and disenfranchised because of a felony conviction. Because Black people suffer from mass incarceration disproportionately, they are underrepresented in the electorate.
Pennsylvania is a state where voting rights are automatically restored to people convicted of felonies. In some states people lose these rights for a period of time, and in some others they must re-register.
Because Ingram was a juvenile when he went to prison, he registered for the first time.
“Thinking back, I believe the system failed me,” Ingram offered. “I was always being arrested between twelve and fourteen years old, but there was no form of treatment available for me in the juvenile system. They locked me up—and let me out. That’s all they did.
“The core of how we look at crime is wrong. We must look at the real causes and the real solutions. Imprisonment is not a solution,” he said. “Those of us who come out and are better, it is not because of the system but because we beat the odds on our own.
“Look at it from the perspective of trauma. You have to treat hop
elessness, poverty, despair, lack of options. These are the things that would make a major difference, rather than incarceration. When you have people growing up in poverty without hope, they don’t care about incarceration or about being killed—or killing.
“We are victims before we become victimizers,” said Ingram, who recalled being robbed of his beloved red Freestyle bike at gunpoint at age eleven. “People don’t understand what life is like for a child like me.
“We don’t call the police. We learn how to adapt and survive.”
When White People Get Scared, Black People Get Locked Up
The hard-fought civil rights movement opened new routes to success for Black people, and thousands of families moved from the cities to buy homes in the green suburbs. Meanwhile, the government shifted monies from education and social services to law enforcement, basically to “protect” white people who feared Black people, who had been abandoned in inner-city communities and left behind in poverty.
It was President Richard Nixon who coined the phrase “war on drugs” during a speech in 1971. He also increased the size of federal drug control agencies and pushed through “tougher” measures, such as mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants.
Around the same time politicians began making their “law and order” speeches, and the prison population boomed. In 1970, the state and federal prison population was 196,441. In the 1980s and ’90s, Democratic and Republican politicians battled verbally and then with legislation to prove which party should hold the title of “toughest on crime.” By 1985, the state and federal prison population increased to 481,616, with a disproportionate number being young Black people.
The Ronald Reagan administration launched a media campaign to publicize the crack epidemic that had hit poor inner-city communities. The media coverage won the administration support for the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which included new mandatory minimum sentences and far more severe punishment for distribution of crack.
