Doing Time on the Outside: Incarceration and Family Life in Urban America - Hardcover

Braman, Donald

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 047211381X ISBN 13: 9780472113811

Publisher: The University of Michigan Press, 2004

Synopsis

Donald Braman shows that doing time on the inside has a ripple effect on the outside. He offers personal stories of the ordeals families face when one of their members is imprisoned, arguing that prisoners themselves must take more responsibility for their lives, as well as for their families.

About this title

About the Author

Donald Braman holds a Ph.D. in anthropology and is currently in law school at Yale. This is his first book.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Doing Time on the OUTSIDE

Incarceration and Family Life in Urban AmericaBy DONALD BRAMAN

University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 2004University of Michigan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11381-1

Contents

Introduction..................................................................1PART I. WHAT WENT WRONG?......................................................13Chapter 1. A Public Debate....................................................15Chapter 2. "It's a Mess What's Happened"......................................20Chapter 3. The Creation of the Ghetto.........................................23Chapter 4. Incarceration as a Response to Public Disorder.....................30PART II. KINSHIP..............................................................37Chapter 5. On the Ropes: Londa & Derek........................................41Chapter 6. Falling Apart: Thelma & David......................................65Chapter 7. Pulling Families Apart.............................................89PART III. EXCHANGE............................................................97Chapter 8. Arrested: Edwina & Kenny...........................................99Chapter 9. Doing Time: Lilly & Arthur.........................................113Chapter 10. Cycling through the System: Zelda & Clinton.......................135Chapter 11. Material and Social Consequences..................................154PART IV. SILENCE..............................................................165Chapter 12. Missing the Mark: Louisa & Robert.................................169Chapter 13. Problems at Home: Constance & Jonathan............................177Chapter 14. Work Worries: Tina & Dante........................................188Chapter 15. Depression and Isolation: Robin & Aaron...........................195Chapter 16. Coping: Murielle & Dale...........................................200Chapter 17. Faith and Church: Dolores & Lawrence..............................210Chapter 18. Social Silence....................................................219CONCLUSION: LOOKING AHEAD.....................................................221Postscript....................................................................225Appendix: Methodology and Data Sources........................................227Acknowledgments...............................................................231Notes.........................................................................235Index.........................................................................267

Chapter One

A Public Debate

This strange public demonstration took place early in my fieldwork and provided a striking introduction to both local city politics and the increasingly complex politics of incarceration. It was followed by five public hearings, the last two of which were open for comments from the general public. But even at the first hearing, the divergent perspectives within the community were quite clear.

The proposal that the CCA was presenting seemed, at least on the surface, to be an easy sell. Ward Eight is a community with the highest unemployment rate in the District, one where many families of prisoners lived. A large new correctional facility not only would provide hundreds of well-paying, recession-proof jobs to local residents but would keep prisoners closer to home, where family, counselors, and clergy could help with their rehabilitation. The proposed prison would be state-of-the-art, including a host of educational and job-training programs for inmates-in fact, the proposed programs were so extensive that some residents complained that they were "better than what we get out here," and CCA promptly added community scholarships and neighborhood job-training programs to the proposed package. To top it off, CCA noted, there were plenty of other communities around the country that would be happy to have the facility if the residents of Ward Eight refused it.

Marion Barry, the former mayor, who prided himself on having a broad constituency in Ward Eight, made all these points in his testimony on the first day of the hearings:

Other states are trying to get the District to send their prisoners to their states so that jobs can be maintained in those states. In fact, in Youngstown, the Congressman there wants an addition of 2,500 beds built because of the economics of 450 jobs. And Ward Eight has the highest unemployment rate of any in the city: some thirteen percent among adults, and some sixty percent among teenagers. We need these jobs in Ward Eight.

Despite the chanting and cat calls from the first meeting, a few family members returned to testify for the proposal when public comment was finally allowed six months later. One mother spoke, generalizing from her concern about her own child to that of all the "wayward children" in prison:

I am here today to pledge my strong support for the proposed correctional rehabilitation facility in Ward Eight. I was brought up to believe that we are responsible for every child, and that we are mothers and fathers to every one of them. We cannot toss our children aside when they are sick and in need of help. If we do not help them, then who will? Are we so insensitive as a society that we do not care about our children and their cries for help? Let us work together and make a productive people of our children and help those who need help the most. God said, "When you help the least of my people, you help me." Let me leave you with this final thought. What if it was your child? What type of help would you want to offer your child? I happen to know first hand. And I earnestly believe, that I would want to have available the assistance that this proposed correctional facility has to offer. What about you?

Her comments touched not only on the feelings that many families of prisoners have about the lack of rehabilitation programs in most correctional settings but also on the responsibility of the community to take care of its own.

Over the course of the five hearings, however, it became clear that the opposition to the prison was overwhelming. The current mayor, Anthony Williams, the city council, and the local area neighborhood commissions all voiced strong opposition to the project, as did the major and minor newspapers and nearly all the citizens' organizations in the District. If the proposed prison would provide Ward Eight with valuable economic opportunity and an increased chance of rehabilitation for local residents involved in the criminal justice system, why were so many in Ward Eight opposed to it?

Opponents cited a variety of complaints, but a central theme that ran through the most poignant and persuasive arguments was that the prison was, for this community in particular, an indignity. As the Reverend Dennis Wiley argued at the final hearing, "Even the thought of placing such a complex in our community is but another indication of the low regard in which the citizens of this Ward are held."

Building this facility in Ward Eight is not only unwise, it is wrong. In fact, Ward Eight ought to be the last place that anyone would think of building a prison. Why? Because the people of Ward Eight and especially the young people have for too long been stereotyped as residents of the most dysfunctional, pathological, and undesirable section of the city. Already this Ward has more than its share of programs, projects, institutions and facilities that no other Ward wants. Already the negative image that is constantly projected onto this Ward has taken its toll in broken dreams, lowered self-esteem, frustrated ambitions, misdirected lives, and untimely deaths. The burden, the shame, the indignity and the despair of trying to be somebody when everybody keeps telling you that you're nobody is often more than the human spirit can overcome. What I am saying is that the people of Ward Eight need hope. And at this critical juncture on the eve of the twenty-first century, any major facility that is built in that Ward ought to be a symbol of that hope. And I am sorry, no matter how you try to package it, no matter how you try to camouflage it, no matter how you try to fix it up and make it look attractive, a prison is not a symbol of hope.

This concern was echoed in the testimony of David Pair, a member of a local youth advocacy organization, who suggested that those families of inmates who were supporting the proposed prison, far from advancing the welfare of their loved ones, were inadvertently supporting their demise and that of others in the community.

There are many people who support locating a prison in Southeast because it helps keep families closer. However, this statement seems to say that people who reside in Ward Eight are the only perpetrators of crimes that occur in the District.... I can say that most of the young people, males anyway, will instill in their mind that yes, yes they've built a prison over here because of that. And all this, I feel as though it will be a bullet shot into minds of the young black males.

Residents were not simply concerned with the potentially demoralizing effect of a prison on those who lived in Southeast D.C. As the Reverend Wiley's and Mr. Pair's arguments made clear, Ward Eight residents were also keenly aware of the perceptions of outsiders. This sensitivity to how the prison would color the perceptions of those who lived elsewhere was apparent when Damion Cain, a youth living in Southeast, argued that the construction of a prison in Ward Eight would "perpetuate [the] negative images that those outside of Southeast, D.C. have branded in their minds." The prison, he argued, would simply reinforce the preconceptions that people outside of Southeast had about the community:

Because I usually go to Northeast and Northwest and [when someone asks] "Where are you from?" And I'm like, "Oh, Southeast, D.C." [They respond:] "Oh yeah, that's where the thugs at." "That's where the drugs at." "That's where everything at." You know, "It's hot around there." And stuff like that. That's what I hear. I hear it everywhere.... How do I feel about the prison? Well, I feel that it shouldn't be there. It's a negative image because Southeast, D.C. is already labeled as a prison, by the crime and all the drugs and the trades going on in Southeast. They are just looking at the surface of our community and not looking in the heart of the community to see what's good.

The material implications of these negative perceptions were brought home by one longtime community activist, Robin Ijames. Voicing strong opposition, Ijames described how, after "the former Administration overlooked our distressed community for the designated Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities' benefits," residents of Ward Eight started their own "first-time home-buyers project" and a "first-time entrepreneurs project" but struggled to find investors "due to the fact that it's a redlined area." By denying mortgages and insurance to poor and minority residents in "risky" neighborhoods, financial institutions that practice redlining severely restrict the ability of businesses and homeowners to invest in local properties, making the rehabilitation of inner-city neighborhoods difficult. "I didn't even know what redlining was until I moved to Ward Eight,"* Ijames continued, "but, investors and lenders are very leery of Southwest and Southeast deals." Trying to "rise above the poverty and violence that has entrapped our community for many years" would be all the more difficult with a prison coloring the way outsiders looked at the community as well. Ward Eight didn't need a new prison, Ijames argued, because the distressed community was already "a prison without walls."

This is true literally as well as figuratively. A majority of the men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five in Ward Eight are under some type of correctional supervision, most on probation or parole. Indeed, a large majority of the men in Ward Eight will spend time behind bars if current conditions persist. The different meanings of the proposed prison to different people at the hearing give us some sense of how moral and practical concerns can be turned against one another as disadvantaged communities struggle with the terms of their own estrangement.

The struggle of two women in the corridor of the District's municipal building is symbolic of the struggle of the people in the District and across the nation as they grapple with poverty, crime, incarceration, and competing understandings of what has gone wrong and who is to blame.

Chapter Two

"It's a Mess What's Happened"

Londa lives in the center of Washington, D.C., in a twenty-year-old housing project. The project is one of the more modern in the District, spreading inhabitants out in a series of squat cement row houses. Her street is a small loop off of a main thoroughfare, and there is no traffic except for the cars of those living in or visiting the project. Kids and the occasional grown man ride bikes of varying quality up and down the street, some aimlessly riding, others watching for police. In the middle of the workday, the school day, the block is still populated by a scattering of people young and old. A run-down Dodge Neon is parked on the street with two halfway inflated balloons floating inside, one with a picture of a teddy bear, the other with "LOVE" written in large print. And, although it hides behind the doors of this project most of the time, there is a lot of love here.

Many of the residents are unemployed, but around five o'clock, when the working parents and their kids have come home, the street activity picks up. Parents, kids, and the occasional dog are in and out of the tiny cement tenements, playing and calling after each other. It is the typical puzzle of the inner-city project, with some folks working hard at being "decent" and others unable or unwilling. Many of the younger kids alternately play at being "thugged out" and "respectable" to different people, caught between trying to impress their friends and please their mothers. It's the usual mix of loud and quiet, smart and foolish.

It's a mix that is better than most, in part because Londa's project is within walking distance of downtown. That means jobs are available and more of the residents can find work than those living in other, more remote projects. And, rather than being a high-rise warehouse of dark and dangerous interiors, it is spread out, making the common spaces visible to all. The proximity to downtown and the visibility mean less violence than the more notorious projects of the District. But it is also clear that a fair amount of the activity during the day here is, as it is around the corner and for several blocks, drug related.

In the last year, there were sixty-four arrests for drug possession and distribution within a two-block radius of Londa's residence. Over 120 men living within the same two-block radius were admitted to the D.C. correctional system during that time, about one-quarter of them on drug possession or distribution charges. Many others, like Londa's husband, Derek, were incarcerated on other charges related to drug addiction.

When we first meet, Londa has trouble opening the door because her leg is in a cast and her crutches get in the way. She's a solid woman, light skinned, with wide eyes and wrinkles just starting to form in the center of her forehead. When she's in pain they become deep furrows. Once inside her house, surrounded by the debris of family life-toys, a few empty kid-sized boxes of juice, dishes on the table from a lunch just finished, bottles and baby blankets strewn over the couch-she is apologetic for the mess. "But," she tells me, "I've got three kids, a broken leg, and a husband who's locked up." She has been fighting her husband's crack addiction and struggling to keep her family together for fifteen years. Gesturing out the window, she tells me, "I don't want to end up like everyone else. I guess I'm halfway there. But my kids need a father. I look around here and none of these kids have fathers. It's a mess what's happened."

What, exactly, has happened? Not just to Londa's family, but to the millions of families and thousands of communities like hers across America?

Chapter Three

The Creation of the Ghetto

In 1870, as freedmen were participating in their first local elections in the nation's capital, Frederick Douglass, like many blacks in the District, was celebrating newfound suffrage: "The ideas of progress, of self-dependence, and self-government," he wrote, "have taken root and are flourishing among our people. Each feels that he is a part of, and has an interest in, the welfare of the city, the District, and the nation." Freed slaves were flocking to the city, which offered voting rights to blacks far earlier than most states. The Civil War had been won, and many thought that full citizenship was at hand. More so perhaps than even at the height of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, blacks in the District during this period had a sense of possibility and prospective inclusion.

Unsurprisingly, as blacks flocked into the District, they moved, for the most part, into what were already largely black neighborhoods. Migrant groups typically follow the powerful pull of kinship, and black migrants were no exception. But if blacks migrated to predominantly black neighborhoods by choice, they were kept there by social and political forces that emerged quickly in the aftermath of the Civil War. By 1874, representative local government had been undone in the District, and all officials were appointed by the federal government. The Supreme Court not only upheld segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson but overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

The end of democratic rule in the District, the intransigence of the Supreme Court, and the social practices of whites in the District created a web of restrictions that effectively barred blacks from predominantly white neighborhoods. Once in the District, those who attempted to leave the confines of the black neighborhoods were blocked by zoning and exclusionary laws that were considered constitutional until 1917 and then by racially restrictive covenants until 1948.5 Frustratingly, even after the abolition of formal segregation and the striking of private racial covenants, landlords, white landowners, banks, and real estate agents simply refused to rent, lend, sell, or show properties to blacks looking to leave black neighborhoods.

At midcentury, the neighborhoods of Southwest, Foggy Bottom, and what would eventually be called Shaw had become crowded with black families, small towns within a city. While still a minority in the District-blacks represented about one-third of the population in 1950-the black population had been growing more quickly than the white population. Over thirty thousand blacks in the District lived in "the Alleys," as the teeming and poorly constructed neighborhoods south and west of the Capitol were known.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Doing Time on the OUTSIDEby DONALD BRAMAN Copyright © 2004 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: The University of Michigan Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 047211381X
• ISBN 13: 9780472113811
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 280