Aaron

Aaron just got released from prison, and you can hear the release in his voice.  Enthused about life and his newfound liberation, I could not help but be lifted by his contagious spirit.  Aaron is the man who I mentioned in the Little Easter 4 post.  Aaron and his mother came to meet me, and I left our meeting feeling more blessed than they could ever imagine.

I had a chance to talk with Aaron today and hear more of his story.

Aaron’s father went to prison when Aaron was six years old, on drug and assault convictions.  So Aaron was left without a father, and his mother struggled to provide for Aaron and his four sisters.  She remarried, but the step-father was an alcoholic.  Aaron felt that he never had a positive role model in his life and that his mother took out her angry resentment on him that she felt toward the men who let her down in her life.  Adrift, angry, abandoned, Aaron was on his own for clothes, food, other necessities, but says that he loved school, tried to never miss a day, and graduated from high school with straight As.  Aaron found solace in some friends who accepted him for who he was, yet led him into habits of drinking, smoking weed, and sometimes shoplifting.  Aaron remembers times when he shoplifted food to get the first meal he had eaten in days, and recalls how he walked several miles to his high school graduation because his step-father was too drunk to drive him.

One night when Aaron was 19, Aaron and his friends attempted to shoplift some things from a convenience store.  The clerk tried to stop them by hitting Aaron in the nose with a telephone.  Aaron fought back by taking off his belt and swinging it at the clerk.  Aaron was caught, tried, convicted, and sentenced to 30 years in prison for aggravated robbery.  Yes, the belt was the “weapon” that aggravated his sentence.  Mistake, of course.  Wrongful act, certainly.  Survival, likely.  Excessive punishment, undoubtedly.  Lost soul wandering aimlessly in the wrong places, finding suffering upon suffering, yes indeed.

But Aaron did enough of his time in an entirely satisfactory manner and was released on parole after 14 years in the penitentiary.  After three and a half successful years on parole, a serious and extenuating family circumstance in which Aaron chose to sacrifice himself to help someone he cared about get out of a bad situation, Aaron’s parole was violated and he found himself back in prison for another five and a half years.  Aaron had simply left the state to rescue his ailing step-father from an abusive situation, failed to report only one time because of this situation, and found himself back behind bars.  A prisoner of parole.  Aaron is now on parole for eight more years, with a  GPS tracker, only allowing him to be out of his house from 8 am to 5 pm, required to find a job, and never leave the state of Texas.  He is having tremendous difficulty getting an ID or driver’s license, which adds another enormous obstacle in obtaining the necessary employment required by parole.

But Aaron has not let these harsh realities deter him from his dreams.  He loves to read, he tells me.  In prison, he treasured the opportunity to read as much as he possibly could.  He chose to keep gaining knowledge, asserting its power and the freedom it provided him.  His focus and passion has been and continues to be criminal law.  He has written briefs, motions, read all the codes, and advised many along his path.  He just this afternoon told  me with great joy that he was enrolled to start in a community college program where he will earn a paralegal studies degree.  Aaron wants to work in the law, serving young people much like himself, seeking love and justice with them in a world that is all too often unrelenting in the suffering it brings.

Aaron, thank you for showing us what it means to live free, even when shackled by chains most of us can never imagine.  We cannot wait to see what God has in store for you.

Day 27

School to Prison Pipeline

     Students across the United States are being suspended, expelled, or even arrested for minor offenses that once were handled with a visit to the principal’s office, detention, or writing on the blackboard.  And yes, you guessed it — students of color are disproportionately targeted and affected by the policies that create what is known as the school to prison pipeline.

     A study released just a few weeks ago by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights reveals troubling racial disparities in America’s public schools.  “This critical report shows that racial disparities in school discipline policies are not only well-documented among older students, but actually begin during preschool,” said Attorney General Eric Holder. “Every data point represents a life impacted and a future potentially diverted or derailed. This Administration is moving aggressively to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline in order to ensure that all of our young people have equal educational opportunities.”

     “The data released today reveals particular concern around discipline for our nation’s young men and boys of color, who are disproportionately affected by suspensions and zero-tolerance policies in schools. Suspended students are less likely to graduate on time and more likely to be suspended again. They are also more likely to repeat a grade, drop out, and become involved in the juvenile justice system.”

     “The current explosion of school arrests is not caused by an increase in school violence.  On the contrary, research shows that, between 1992 and 2002, school violence actually dropped by about half.”  *see School to Prison Pipeline

• 40% of students expelled from U.S. schools each year are black.

• 70% of students involved in “in-school” arrests or referred to law enforcement are black or Latino.

• Black students are 3.5 times more likely to be suspended than whites.

• Black and Latino students are twice as likely to not graduate high school as whites.

• 68% of all males in state and federal prisons do not have a high school diploma.

*see School to Prison Pipeline fact sheet  This website also shares statistics about the “foster care to prison” pipeline that also disproportionately impacts youth of color.

• A 2007 study by the Advancement Project and the Power U Center for Social Change says that for every 100 students who were suspended, 15 were Black, 7.9 were American Indian, 6.8 were Latino and 4.8 were white.
• The same study reports that the U.S. spends almost $70 billion annually on incarceration, probation and parole. This number lends itself to a 127% funding increase for incarceration between 1987-2007. Compare that to a 21% increase in funding for higher education in the same 20-year span.

I could go on and on about this devastating phenomenon.  Instead, I will just point you to some more resources.  And hope that you continue to see how far and wide and deep the implications of our cultural and societal irrational penchant for punishment go.

• The School-to-Prison Pipeline:  A Nationwide Problem for Equal Rights  — “Advocates point to data showing that excessive disciplinary policies disproportionately target black, low-income, and disabled students.”
• Texas Appleseed School to Prison Pipeline Project — Texas Appleseed researches and reports on the impact of school discipline policies; ticketing, arrest and use of force in public schools; court involvement in student discipline; and the effectiveness of alternative education programs to help close pathways to dropout and incarceration.  Go here for their excellent reports and other publications.
• It even starts in preschool!  Read more about this deeply disturbing reality in these articles:  Salon ;  The Nation ; TIME
• Police see black children as less innocent and less young than white children — Salon ; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Do we really truly believe that our children, ALL our children, are our nation’s future?  If so, why don’t we act like it?

Clinton

Clinton Drake’s story is from The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander, pp. 159-160.

Drake, a fifty-five-year-old African American man in Montgomery, Alabama, was arrested in 1988 for possession of marijuana.  Five years later, he was arrested again, this time for having about $10 worth of the drug on him.  Facing between ten and twenty years in prison as a repeat offender, Drake, a Vietnam veteran and, at the time, a cook on a local air force base, took his public defender’s advice and accepted a plea bargain.  Under the plea agreement, he would “only” have to spend five years behind bars.  Five years for five joints.

Once released, Drake found he was forbidden by law from voting until he paid his $900 in court costs — an impossible task, given that he was unemployed and the low-wage jobs he might conceivably find would never allow him to accumulate hundreds of dollars in savings.  For all practical purposes, he would never be able to vote again.  Shortly before the 2004 presidential election, he said in despair:

I put my life on the line for this country.  To me, not voting is not right; it led to a lot of frustration, a lot of anger.  My son’s in Iraq.  In the army just like I was.  My oldest son, he fought in the first Persian Gulf conflict.  He was in the Marines.  This is my baby son over there right now.  But I’m not able to vote.  They say I owe $900 in fines.  To me, that’s a poll tax.  You’ve got to pay to vote.  It’s “restitution”, they say.  I came off parole on October 13, 1999, but I’m still not allowed to vote.  Last time I voted was in ’88.  Bush versus Dukakis.  Bush won.  I voted for Dukakis.  If it was up to me, I’d vote his son out this time too.  I know a lot of friends got the same cases I got, not able to vote.  A lot of guys doing the same things like I was doing.  Just marijuana.  They treat marijuana in Alabama like you committed treason or something.  I was on the 1965 voting rights march from Selma.  I was fifteen years old.  At eighteen, I was in Vietnam fighting for my country.  And now?  Unemployed and they won’t allow me to vote.

* Quoted from Sasha Abramsky, Conned: How Millions Went to Prison, Lost the Vote, And Helped Send George W. Bush to the White House, p. 224.