Post #8

12/22/14

Life in the Bedford Hills prison seems so monotonous, it could drive one insane. While

this section talks about Elaine’s grief, the grief and sense of imprisonment her children

and mother are experiencing while she’s in prison are what are really being highlighted.

Elaine was able to tell that her children were missing her presence as they developed

into young adults. It was hard on all of them. Fortunately for Apache, who ended up

being the consistent role model for the twenty years, he found an outlet in basketball.

The drug dealers respected that and he was able to stay away from the trade. He was

also able to travel and see that there is more out there than the New York City housing

projects and the Bedford Hills prison. Jamel on the other hand has gone in the other

direction. He’s gotten himself involved in the drug trade as a twelve year old, already

carrying a gun. Jamel feels a lot of anger over the absence of his mother and then of his

brother Apache. The saddest part of it is that, Yvonne eventually stops disciplining him

for coming home after dealing, because she recognizes that he is the breadwinner of

the family at 12 years old.

Again reflecting on the field trip I attended to the prison, the separation between parents and children is a very difficult thing to deal with. I heard speakers talk about how they weren’t around to see their kids, or grandchildren born, or to attend the funeral of their mom or dad. It’s sad. It can have serious consequences on the children as we see with Jamel. I don’t think teenagers in a supportive household always recognize how important it is to have someone rooting for you, to have someone who is genuinely invested in your success. Jamel doesn’t have that now, especially with Apache gone, so all he has to look up to are the dealers around his housing complex. And what law enforcement has to realize is, by putting people like Elaine in jail for 20+ years has a poor impact on her kids, which will raise another generation of “criminals”. Hey, maybe that’s what they want because it’s a business like anything else. I just don’t understand how you can look at a twelve year old who is starting to deal drugs to support his family and not question what’s going on.

Post #7

12/22/14

“For Elaine, the nights were the hardest, when she was locked in her cell, lying on her prison cot in the dark. Sleeping alone felt strange. Growing up, she had always slept with her mother or a sister...In those early months at Bedford, she spent the last hours of every day crying into her pillow.” Also, before arriving at Bedford Hills, Elaine had never been a thief. However, once she was in prison ironically, she became a skilled thief. I see her shoplifting as warranted. The prison doesn’t provide women enough sanitary napkins. She would occasionally smoke smuggled marijuana in the prison yard with fellow inmates. She describes her high as enhancing her focus on the fence that separates her from the outside world. The faint sound of cars passing reminded her that there was lives being lived outside of the walls she’s trapped in ( her “concrete cage”). Getting high in the past had made her laugh a lot and feel cheerful but on the inside now she only felt more depressed and frustrated. When she wasn’t smoking she was still pondering what she had done that deserved a 20-to-life sentence in a maximum security prison. Her “crime” can’t even be compared to the ones committed by her fellow inmates.

I had a strong emotional response to Elaine’s early experiences in prison. Last week I went to the Norfolk County Correctional--medium security prison on a field trip. After talking with some of the inmates, I realized how rigid it is in prison. You have to wake up at a certain time everyday. If you oversleep you get a “ticket”. You are trapped in this building for an insane amount of time. As my classmates and I got up to leave the prison and the inmates got up to return to their cells or prison jobs, it hit me how fortunate I am to have the freedom to have control over my life. I’m very aware of that now. So I have empathy for Elaine during those long tearful nights. I was also angered to read that Elaine and the other inmates aren’t provided with enough sanitary resources. I mean, if you have to steal in order to keep your personal hygiene at a healthy level, than that’s not fair treatment. It’s dehumanizing in a sense. To cage people up and not provide them with vital sanitary items.

Post Based on Reading - #6

12/14/14                          Reading Post #6

In post #5 I mentioned the awful public defense lawyers Elaine was paired with, and how not being able to afford bail hurt her. Now, I want to bring up the other key downfall to Elaine’s trial. Judge Clyne was a forceful judge. He enjoyed sending people to prison. Judges need to be impartial to the case if a trial is to go properly. Clyne is described as “cleaning scum off the street like a sponge”. The idea that he sees people who are going to trial as “scum” is disgusting. People who commit a misdemeanor are just people who lost their way. There is context behind the prevalence of drug trade in Elaine’s neighborhood. Clyne is obviously ignorant to that. To quote the Race Reels video from the other night, throwing so many people in jail is like alleviating a cough of someone suffering from pneumonia. Stopping the cough momentarily doesn’t heal the infected lung. All these arrests aren’t getting to the root of the problem. If someone had improved the circumstances that Elaine was living in, she wouldn’t ever consider carrying cocaine. Later on, Judge Clyne was mocking Elaine in court, it was just ridiculously unprofessional

Between my public speaking theme of racial injustice/incarceration and my social justice class, I’ve learned how the criminal justice system really works. You would think that they are after criminals, but they’re not. They are after money just like any other business. That means the incentive of the war on drugs is, the more prisoners that the police and judges get into jail, the more money they make for “doing their job”. Drug convictions alone accounted for about 2/3 of the increase of the federal prison population and over half of the state prison population between 1985 and 2000. Drug convictions have increased more than 1000% since the drug war began. People of color are targeted in this drug war, while the use of drugs is nearly equal across the races. After serving time, the system wrecks an ex-convicts outside life. People convicted of committing a felony cannot get food stamps, are discriminated against in housing, are denied other public benefits, are denied the right to vote. Our country cripples ex-convicts economically and socially to the point where they can barely survive outside of prison. Consequently, about 70% of those released form prison return because the challenges of survival on the outside are so large. So this is the cycle.

Post Based on Reading - #5

12/14/14                          Reading Post #5 

The whole process of Elaine going through court was incredibly unfair. New York University Professor James B. Jacobs states that, "Your ability to remain free depends on the size of your wallet, which just inherently discriminated against the poor". The system bail is catered to the wealthy. Let me rephrase that, the system of bail mostly benefits white Americans. If Elaine had the $250,000 she could have avoided jail time. In general, do you think you can really put a money value to all crimes? That seems a bit shallow to me. It’s all a money game.  As a result of Elaine not being able to afford a good lawyer, she was represented by a public defense lawyer who felt no need to defend her. Once again we return to the money. If you can afford to pay a lawyer, you will be better off in trial, especially if you are not white. Elaine and Nathan (her boyfriend) were given no legal advice. If Elaine had pleaded guilty (even though that’s a frustration on it’s own because she isn’t guilty) she could have done much less time, like 15 years less. It’s just ridiculous.

What’s scary to me is that Elaine is just one story. I’m sure there are lots of black and hispanic parents who have gotten screwed over in court or by the police, with kids at home that they are trying to provide for. As the book seemed to allude to, Americans in similar living conditions to Elaine don’t have $250,000 hanging around to give to the court. The idea of bail being a fair system is our country has been nagging at me, so I decided to look into a couple of articles about it. A member of the Human Rights Watch, Jamie Fellner states, "The idea that somebody goes and sits in Rikers Island [jail] and endures all of the hardship of that simply because they don't have $500 or $1,000 is truly offensive and serves no public purpose". After reading this section of Life on the Outside and the articles about bail, I’ve decided that my opinion on it is similar to Fellner’s. It’s a blatant contradiction to the idea that “all men are created equal” in the eyes of the law.

Posts Based on Reading - Post #4

12/7/14                          Reading Blog Post #4

A little farther into Life on the Outside we learn about how and why Elaine ended up in prison. In order to provide for her family Elaine worked any job she could. She often found herself renting a chair at a local Barber and Beauty Shop without a license in hairdressing. However, she was still struggling to earn the money she needed to comfortably provide for her children and with Thanksgiving around the corner she needed extra money to prepare an expensive family dinner. A frequent visitor of the barbershop named Charlie knew that Elaine was desperate to make some extra cash, so he approached her with a hustle he was running. He offered Elaine $2,500 to deliver a package of cocaine to Albany from New York City. Well, Charlie turned out to actually be an informant for the police named George Deets. Elaine and her boyfriend Nathan were arrested under New York’s Rockefeller drug laws. Deets was able to shorten his sentence for cocaine use and dealing by being an informant for the police. He would deliberately go into the city and bring people to Albany to be framed.

The way Elaine was set up is bothersome to me. It’s a corrupt system when George Deets can get his sentence reduced by throwing others under the bus. Law Enforcement has a job, that job is to investigate and come to answers based on their evidence. An informant like Deets has been far more involved in the drug trade than Elaine, but he can just get off on a secretive deal made with the police? Furthermore, Elaine had completely good intentions. She was a hard worker who just wanted to provide for her family. That angers me. Our politicians have a real disconnect with the East Harlem and South Bronx neighborhoods amongst others, as to why the prevalence of drugs is so great. Obviously getting into the drug trade isn’t ideal, but for many it’s either that or not making ends meet, or not being able to provide for their loved ones. I mean put yourself in Elaine’s shoes. Meanwhile, our politicians are worried about the spread of crime rate that frankly doesn’t reach their neighborhoods in the Upper East Side. Maybe they should be more focused on the rehabilitation than the incarceration of drug addicts who later have no options. I look forward to seeing how Elaine is able to turn her life around after prison.

Posts Based on Reading - Post #3

12/7/14                      Reading Blog Post #3

I switched my book from the first two blogposts. I am now reading Life on the Outside by Jennifer Gonnerman. In this book Gonnerman narrates the story of Elaine Bartlett who was imprisoned for sixteen years for a first offense cocaine bust. On the first page of the prologue, a Bartlett family tree is shown. Yvonne Bartlett was the mother of Elaine and her six siblings. Elaine is the mother of four, Apache, Jamel, Satara, and Danae. Drug use, HIV contraction, and incarceration is rampant down the family tree. The rest of the prologue describes the chilly January day in 2000 when Elaine was released from the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. She warmly embraced her son Apache . Apache who was only ten when Elaine was arrested, is now twenty six and was the one who filled Elaine’s role in raising his younger siblings. Gonnerman states that the reality is, American has turned into a nation of ex-convicts, thirteen million to approximate. That would be 7% of American adults. That’s more people than those who make up the population of Sweden or Bolivia. United States prisons release over 600,000 people every year. That’s more people than the population of Boston, Seattle, or Washington DC. It’s very troubling and ex-cons often find that they hit a dead end in the outside world.

When I looked at the Bartlett family tree, in addition to the frequent incarceration, drug use, etc I noticed a lack of male role models. As a result, Apache gets stuck with the responsibility of caring for his siblings at a young age. It’s impressive to me that he was able to take on that load for his mother, while also redirecting the family trend. I really admire that. The emotional strength that must have required is tremendous. The number of ex-convicts/people released from prison each year is jaw dropping. Even worse 40% of those released will return (240,000 a year) and 16% suffer from severe mental illness. Those released are provided with little support. Typically ex-prisoners have no money, few job skills, little education, a history of addiction and are expected to rebuild their lives. Our Criminal Justice system is often one large circle of imprisonment, release, and then re-entry