Tag: Criminology

Imagining a New America: An Interview with Luis J. Rodriguez

Boom California on September 28, 2020

Luis J. Rodriguez is an L.A. cultural icon. A major figure in Chicanx literature, the former poet laureate of Los Angeles is perhaps best known for his 1993 book, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., which was one of the first autobiographical insider accounts of gang life in Los Angeles. Banned in cities throughout the state, it became required reading in L.A. Unified School District.

His new book is called, From Our Land to Our Land: Essays, Journeys, and Imaginings from a Native Xichanx Writer, published by Seven Stories Press. The book has received critical acclaim in the Los Angeles Times and was also featured in the LA Times Book Club in conversation with Times reporter Daniel Hernandez.

Earlier this Spring, Luis sat down with Boom’s Editor-at-Large, theologian Jason S. Sexton, in Sexton’s class at UCLA called Sociology of Crime. The wide-ranging conversation explored themes in the book and in contemporary California life related to crime, gangs, drugs, politics, and his own experience of life in Los Angeles and beyond.

Boom: This class at UCLA is called Sociology of Crime, and we’ve been exploring how “the victim” is a primary model of elevated American identity, but you’ve also got to have the reverse… a perpetrator, a criminal, somebody who’s committed the crime, created the victim… both of those swirling around. We like these hard binaries. Historians often describe crime in two ways: as ordinary crimes… and extraordinary crimes, with extraordinary crimes being those big crimes that really reshape the criminal justice system in radical ways. I want to talk about an extraordinary crime not on the books, but it’s in your “I Love LA” poem. I want to talk about “Water,” and perhaps L.A.’s original sin: water theft and water rights. I wonder if you could talk about that crime.

Luis: The way capitalism is, there are legal ways of making money, which is not that different than illegal ways. They make laws first that allow certain things to happen, but then end up doing stuff like stealing, committing theft, even murdering people. But if it’s legal, it’s ok, it’s in the bounds of whatever society says. The shadow of that is that people do this by illegal means as well. You can kill people in this country if you are legally supposed to. If you’re not, and you don’t have that given legal power to kill somebody then you’ll likely end up in prison. This is why police were given the power of life and death over certain communities. They literally had that. And now people are waking up to it with Black Lives Matter. But it used to be where police could kill people and nobody could complain, nobody could do nothing. I lost four friends, unarmed, to police violence. There was no recourse. Police had the power to do that.

Boom: And we have a history, of course, of federally sanctioned slaughtering of Native Indians.

Luis: The dominance and genocide starts off with Native peoples. Whites in power took their land, and it got legalized. You could do homesteading and you could do all kinds of things. Then they start legalizing removals and all this stuff. They also legalized slavery. The way things were done, you could legally do anything to another human being with slavery. They were constitutionally declared less than human. Then when they [slaves] escaped, you had the Fugitive Slave Act, which got the whole country involved in capturing escaped slaves. In other words, this country legalized these terrible things. It’s “okay.” But it’s not okay if it’s not a part of the legal thing. So to me, crimes in the shadow are reflective of what I would call crimes by a social system. If they allow certain people to do certain things, like steal people’s lands, steal their minerals, steal their labor, steal their water, then the shadow side is reflective of something that is allowed. When you got power, you can do this; when you don’t have power, this is what you do—commit crimes as a way to survive. I’m not justifying any of it, I think human beings shouldn’t do none of that. But the point is, that’s what we end up doing.

Boom: You identify as a Native person. Do you see Los Angeles ever making amends for that original sin, original crime?

Luis: I don’t see it happening. I was really pleased that not that long ago we changed Columbus Day in L.A. and made it Indigenous People’s Day. We were one of the first cities to do this. I just found out Chicago just did that the other day. It’s recognizing that there was a terrible theft. And you can’t honor the man that helped open that door. You can’t.

Boom: William Mulholland.

Luis: He’s one of those guys. He played a big role in the water theft. One of the things about the Owens Valley is that it used to be mostly Native peoples and it was beautiful and green. The Native peoples had a way of thinking: you only take what you need, you always give back what you take, and you never take more than you need. So, it kept green. Developers came in and said, “These people are wasting the land.” So they got rid of the first peoples. They started taking over the water. Since then the Owens Valley became horrible, dry. It’s lost most of its greenery.

Photograph by Matt Gush, used with permission

Boom: They’re still taking it from the ground. So now I want to sort of push back on this a little bit because in your L.A. poem … in the last line, that it’s a city “lined with those majestic palm trees,” which take a lot of water, [bear] no fruit, they’re not indigenous, they’re imports, they provide no shade … and you feed into the myth.

Luis: Well, I feed into it because it is a myth. I feed into it because what people think about L.A. is kind of like the transplant of the palm trees, the transplant of people. The only ones who can’t say they’re transplanted are the indigenous people who have been pushed out and are made strangers in their own land. But what happened is that we become like palm trees. … I am feeding into the myth, but the myth is that this is … not really L.A. but that’s how we’ve become. There’s a layer of L.A. that’s all made up…that people have created on top of it. But one of the things I also want to point out and contrast to this is that palm trees are very sturdy. They do take up a lot of water. Every once in a while, winds can knock them down, but hardly. The winds, rains, everything coming through here; most palm trees stay up. There’s also something there I see [in] the people of L.A. There’s resilience in the people; I think there’s something deep in everyone that comes here, and that’s what I love about L.A. Even if you come from other parts in the world, you start getting a certain depth, a creative depth, in L.A. I find fascinating.

Boom: As we’re talking about L.A., you mention in another line in that poem that this is “still a one industry town.” I wonder if we could talk about and it was mentioned recently in some of the academy award winners’ [speeches], mentioning not only the whiteness of the academy, but also the neglect, and I think the Tarantino movie, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” Brad Pitt highlights that with a lot of the stunt workers—the workers, I wonder if we could talk about the workers in that industry.

Luis: Well one of my sons, the one who went to prison, works for a Hollywood company that does sets. He’s a driver, and they bring stuff into wherever they’re filming. They’ve hired felons, and they’re doing good work; these men are working hard. And my son loves it. Somehow, he’s part of the Hollywood world. Now, he’s one of these workers that helps Hollywood get going; but nobody knows them. They’re not in front of the camera, not even behind the camera. They’re just the ones who get all the peripheral stuff needed for films to be made. So Hollywood to me is what makes L.A. the one industry town…; [but] let’s not forget this area is also the largest manufacturing center in the country. We have more manufacturing than Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh. And like those cities, we lost a lot of [good] industry in the ’80s. … In a sense people had jobs, made good money, and all this was pulled from other them. I was there when Goodyear, GM, Ford, Bethlehem… all the tire, auto, and steel plants went down, … when it all vanished. I used to work in some of these places. I worked as a welder, pipe-fitter, mechanic, in construction, and those industries were closing down, leaving. No jobs. We had one of the largest garment industries in the world, and it’s almost all gone, except for hole-in-the wall shops here and there. We were part of the rust belt and we weren’t in the rust belt. This is why by ’92 when the uprising happened, you could see how people lost their jobs, lost the ability to survive, and in turn how police got more money and became more oppressive. You can see the foundation for such an uprising because that’s the perfect storm that had developed.

Boom: Could we talk about your new book, From Our Land to Our Land, and how law, crime, and justice can better be conceived in this land.

Luis: Here’s what happened: slavery’s gone, but people are still treated badly. A lot of other things are gone, but things aren’t right. Native peoples have reservations but those are not the most beautiful places. A lot of injustice is still going on. They start building up the border, [which…] was a made-up thing.

Boom: We had a strong immigration bill in ’96 in this country, ten years after Reagan gave everyone amnesty.

Luis: What happened is they militarized the border, and an unfortunate aspect is you got Mexican tribal people and U.S. tribal people who have long ties, deep connections, family connections, that are adversely affected by this border. My mother’s family is from the Tarahumara tribe of Chihuahua, Mexico. They are known as some of the fastest runners in the world. They do marathons, and they do it with their tire-tread sandals. They don’t do it with Nike’s. The only ones they don’t beat are the Kenyans. The Tarahumaras have six canyons in southern Chihuahua. One of them is deeper than the Grand Canyon. I’ve been there, walked among them. Many live in caves. There were about 80,000 [people] living in caves when I visited. One of the few cave dweller [communities] in the world. They are Native peoples, don’t speak Spanish, they’re not Catholic, they’re Native. That tribe is related to the Pueblos, the Hopi, the Paiute, the California tribes. There’s a Uto-Azteca linguistic thing they’re all tied to. But the border comes and guess what? My mother who is Tarahumara has me born in El, Paso, [and] we live in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. She went across the international bridge, and it’s all part of the Chihuahuan desert. El Paso, parts of New Mexico, and Chihuahua, have this link to the Chihuahua desert. Those people have been there for at least 10,000 years. But now with the border, we don’t belong anymore. Now we’re aliens, strangers, “illegals.” When I was born, we went from our land to our land. 10,000 years to me means more than the last 150 years, even though my mother and my dad and my whole family were treated like foreigners.

I have an issue with this country making us immigrants. We’re not immigrants, we’re migrants, like people all around the world. And I’m not against any other migrant from around the world, I’m just saying you gotta understand our ties to Native peoples and Native lands—that it is as deep as anyone’s. If you work with Native Americans, so many of them recognize that. There are pow wows that include Mexicans from Central Mexico. There’s Native American nations that now adopt Mexicans as members of their tribes. The Navajo have a Mexican clan. In other words, some indigenous people in the US are recognizing that Mexicans are not Spanish or Europeans. They are from this land. Even if we’re mixed in with Spanish, African, Asian, and other Europeans. Everybody’s mixed up in some fashion. Native Americans have some of the most mixed people. I’ve worked with some wonderful, amazing blue-eyed Indians. I worked with some amazing African-mixed Indian people. They’re still Native. So Mexicans have that. Then of course Mexico has the largest number of actual tribal people in the whole continent. The numbers are greater than any other country. Per capita, Guatemala and Peru might have more indigenous people, but Mexico has the largest number of them.

Boom: This is fascinating, and especially significant for a key theme in this class about how crime is conceived culturally, especially when you have an imposition of laws that are meant to reflect the culture, but the question is “which culture?” When people talk about criminal justice reform, how does that even happen in relationship to who have been perceived as criminals?

Luis: The whole book is really a vision for a new country. I really want to imagine a new America. I have to. I can’t just accept everything that America’s become to this day. Now people have said, “Well why don’t you go to another country?” I’ve heard this a lot of times. I don’t have to go anywhere else—this is my land. This is my country, and I have a lot to say about it. I’m not going to go anyplace else to do that. I’m going to do it here. Because I have these indigenous ties… I’m not going anywhere, I’m staying here. Yes, I have ties to Mexico, and I’m very concerned with what happens in Mexico, but I’m really concerned with what happens in the United States. So I feel there has to be a new imagination. And the imagination has to be more encompassing. Prison is one of the worst things we’ve ever created as a country. It does not work. It does not do what it’s supposed to do; … [it] actually does the opposite. Since they started building more prisons, more crime has been the result. The gangs in L.A. in the ’60s and ’70s expanded because of prisons. There were fifteen prisons with 15,000 prisoners in the early ‘70s. Since that time, California built up to 34 prisons with upwards of [appx.] 175,000 incarcerated men and women. California gangs are spread out to other parts of the world. You got L.A. gangs all over Central America, in Mexico, and other countries. Prisons made it worse for everybody, [not] any better.

You don’t punish crime away. It doesn’t work to punish people, especially when they’re adults—kids, even worse—it doesn’t work that way. If you commit a crime, if you’re troubled, if you need a lot of help, you should have a lot of resources at your disposal. You should be given tools, knowledge, connections, whatever you need to get through it. That’s not the way it presently works, and I know because I’ve been active in this area for decades. For forty years I’ve been going to prisons—teaching, reading poetry, doing healing circles. One thing you should know about the California prison system, it’s filled with almost eighty percent people of color, and we’re not near that [number] in the state’s total population. The largest single group [in prison] is Chicano, about forty percent, which is closer to the state’s population. African Americans are the most disproportionate because they’re about thirty to thirty-five percent in prison, when their population numbers are like sixteen percent. Whites and Asians… are far less than their [statewide] populations. So something wrong is going on here. That’s what people have to look at, what is going on, and why does the prison system reflect that?

I teach at the only California state prison in Los Angeles County, in Lancaster, every Monday. I go into two high-security yards. One of them is general population. Before I got there thirteen years ago, there were riots, there were lockdowns, [and] all these terrible things. We started doing programming. I was one of the first people to come into the general population yard to do programming at Lancaster. This was in 2016. Now there’s a lot of programming. The violence has gone down. The drug use has gone down. It’s not perfect. Every once in a while, things happen, so I’m not saying that everything is great. They’re doing much better; they really are better. Even the guards have recognized it. Before, [the guards] were my biggest problem. They would say, “why do you come here, why do you bother?” Now they’re friendly to me: “I’m glad you’re here.” They help me out. It’s changed, and that to me is what’s important. Can we find, can we imagine a way to deal with human beings [that] does [not] mean locking them up, putting them away, throwing away the key, and just making them worse than when they came in?

Boom: But you also … actually took some of this vision in a political direction. Running for governor, you got a lot of votes; you would have been the first Mexican governor that we’ve ever had.

Luis: Probably not since the 1800s.

Boom: And certainly before we became an American state in 1850. I wonder if we could talk about politics, and politics not just related to California and this vision. I Iove what you’re describing and Kevin Starr would often talk similarly, and he would triangulate that he lived in San Francisco, but worked in Sacramento as State Librarian, and then taught at USC. In his books he would sign, “Kevin Starr—San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles.” People would ask him “well where do you live?” And he would say, “I live in a city called California.” It was a beautiful vision. And some of that, I think you pick up as well with different ways that we can better make life here, that’s more meaningful, related to work, related to education, resources. We’re not all at the same place socioeconomically. So how can we be more just?

Luis: I do not believe that Republicans or Democrats have much imagination. I find them to be stuck, both parties. I think all political parties in this country, and probably around the world, are in crisis. And I think all religions as well, which is not a bad thing necessarily because the essence of all of them begins to rise up while everything else falls to the side. … Everything’s in crisis for a reason. My campaign was called, “Imagine a New California.” I couldn’t do a Democratic or Republican thing. I had to imagine a whole new way to go. I’m not saying there are not good things in either party, but I have to imagine a new way that can take the best of all of them and create a new path. With no money. Governor Brown had twenty million dollars at the primary and there were fifteen candidates running at the time. I didn’t have [much] money, but I went up and down the state a dozen times, talked to a lot of people. I ended up getting fifth out of fifteen people in the primary elections, and first among all the Independents and third-party people. I also beat Governor Brown in border precincts and was second to him in San Francisco. He wasn’t the worst governor in the world, but he was, again, not very imaginative, I felt. But I’ll tell you one thing that happened, I got like 70,000 votes. You’re not going to win nothing in California with 70,000 votes, but that’s something considering that 70,000 people thought I was worth voting for. And maybe it was my name, who knows how they do it. The thing that got to me was that Brown actually picked up some of my issues after the primaries. He starts talking about poverty when he never used to. He started to talk about prison reform in a different way. And he was doing something he wasn’t doing before: he was commuting a lot of guys that had been in prison, some life without parole, but were doing very good because of programming. People were amazed that he was taking on these issues differently than he had before. I think, again maybe not, I think it had to do with what I was doing, with what I was saying.

Boom: And you do vote, you’re still involved?

Luis: I’m still involved. I still vote.

Boom: I wonder if we could take it back to talk about some laws recently passed related to criminal justice reform, which never addressed the issue of violent crime. It’s like, “you could have a commuted sentence if you didn’t do a violent crime.” But that relates to something of a preconceived understanding of, at least at some point, how a checks and balance might be provided with violent crime.

Luis: I think this looking at crime differently really started in Chicago, and then came over to New York and other cities eventually, when Jane Addams expressed the idea that you can’t just put these people away. She was putting forward, creating settlement houses primarily for the communities of white immigrants that were getting into a lot of trouble. These white immigrants—Irish, German, Italians, Eastern Europeans—were getting into a lot of trouble in their neighborhoods. They were poor, but were able to rise up because there were always Black people they can say were lower than them. The Irish were treated very badly, but they were never treated as badly as Black people. Some of them joined with the anti-Black stuff, some didn’t, but the point being: the reformers wanted to say, “Can we help these people?” The industrial world was creating crime. So they figured, “Okay these aren’t really criminals in the sense that they are just bad people; they’re bad people because the jobs aren’t there.” They gotta eat. So settlement houses, and the idea that maybe we don’t have to imprison these people as much as give them a leg up.

It was evident when there were white immigrants suffering, they were prepared to help. Now, in the twentieth century when crime involved more people of color, all of a sudden those ideas went out the door. “Let’s just put them away. They ain’t no good. They’re never going to get it. You got to put them away for a long long time.” This started to get really bad in the last 40 years, especially in the ’90s. Even Democrats fell into this. When kids were being tried as adults, they were given 135 years, they were just fourteen to sixteen years old, given a lot of years because they were already going back to the whole idea that you can’t change anything. And they weren’t justifying it by looking at the economy, they were just saying, “something’s wrong with these people, put them away.” So they were creating monsters, as I say in my book. They were monsters of our own making. We created these monsters, and now we don’t know what to do except say, “they’re monsters.”

I go to the prison now … there are guys serving their whole lives in prison who would never commit a crime again. I do thirteen-to-fifteen-week classes, so every thirteen to fifteen weeks I have a new group of guys. In the B yard, which is the general population yard, there’s about thirty guys—tattooed-faced, all buff, even though there’s no weights to work out with. They’d scare the heck out of anybody. But I do this regularly, I work with them, and some of them, over a course of time, you find out they are quite decent and complex human beings. Many of these guys are murderers, most of them have life without possibility of parole sentences. Some have been doing thirty to forty years already, some former gang members but I am working with them now, and I find a lot of decency, a lot of people that want to make some changes. Some of them are never getting out and they still want to make deep changes.

Jason S. Sexton is Visiting Research Scholar at UCLA’s California Center for Sustainable Communities, editor of Theology and California: Theological Refractions on California’s Culture (Routledge) and Editor-at Large of Boom California.

Luis J. Rodriguez is the former poet laureate of Los Angeles, and his most recent book is called, From Our Land to Our Land: Essays, Journeys, and Imaginings from a Native Xicanx Writer, published by Seven Stories Press

Copyright: © 2020 Luis J. Rodriguez and Jason S. Sexton. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Articles

From Heart Mountain, Wyoming, to the Heart of Little Tokyo

Boom California on February 18, 2019

Arnab Banerji

Located in the heart of the city’s Little Tokyo Historic District, a visit to Los Angeles’ Japanese American National Museum (JANM) is a humbling experience. JANM exists by active community collaboration.[1] The museum’s exhibits tell the story of a group of people who persevered in their hopes of making America their home even as “white” America pushed back on accommodating and accepting people of Japanese ancestry. Anchoring the museum’s display is a wooden structure. The sparse and rickety edifice is frugally-built and a less sturdy version of the log cabins that one finds in the Great Smoky Mountains in the American South. The wooden structure is one of the few surviving housing structures bought and relocated to the museum from the Heart Mountain internment camp in Wyoming. It represents one of the most dismal and yet often overlooked chapters of modern American history—the forceful removal, relocation, and imprisonment of over 120,000 Japanese Americans to inland detention facilities from the coasts during World War II.

The wooden structure with its modest interiors greets visitors as the first object of display in the museum’s second floor. Beyond the wooden structure lies an exhibit that includes everyday objects, historic photographs, and useful anecdotes that support the visitor in navigating what is bound to be a fairly new immigrant narrative for most people. The open floor plan that one traverses to explore the first couple of rooms comes to an abrupt halt as visitors make their way past the thick glass doors into the section devoted to the Japanese internment. Although, it might simply have been an architectural choice to separate this section of the exhibit. I couldn’t help but imagine a curatorial intent behind forcing visitors to push open a pair of heavy doors to enter into an area earmarked for exhibits depicting life during a state-sanctioned sequestering of fellow citizens. Like the sudden, swift blow to Japanese American aspirations of realizing their American dreams, the visitor is transported, beyond the glass doors, from the tranquility of everyday Japanese American life to the hostile badlands of middle America.

Japanese_American_National_Museum2 Wikimedia infernalfox

Japanese_American_National_Museum Wikimedia

Little Tokyo, the neighborhood that houses the museum is today a symbol of resistance and resilience. A gateway to Japanese immigrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the neighborhood was home to some 30,000 Japanese Americans before it was swept clean during Executive Order 9066 in 1941-42.[2] During the war years, the once burgeoning neighborhood became a ghost town before being populated by large groups of Hispanic and African-American laborers. These workers who had arrived in the city lured by defense manufacturing jobs were unable to find housing because of restrictive housing covenants and occupied the abandoned Little Tokyo structures.[3]

Bronzeville, as the area came to be referred to during World War II, was the site of the Zoot Suit riots between white sailors and Hispanic residents of the area.[4] After the war, Japanese residents gradually started coming back to Little Tokyo. Under the leadership of the Little Tokyo Business Association, the area was rebuilt and revitalized around 1947 and is today a thriving tourist and business destination, even if escalating costs have forced the bulk of the Japanese American residential communities to move to Torrance, Gardena, West Los Angeles, and Arcadia.[5]

The Little Tokyo neighborhood is framed by the JANM on one side and the Aratani Theatre on the other with the Little Tokyo Village plaza, with its convenience stores, confectioneries, and restaurants separating the two pivotal landmarks. The Aratani theatre managed by the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center (JACCC) has been a point of pride for the Little Tokyo district. Since opening its doors in 1983, they have hosted some of the biggest names in Japanese theatre, music, and the arts.[6]

The East West Players (EWP) is another stalwart of the neighborhood. EWP was founded in 1965 by Asian American actors. Now in its fifty-third year, the company is the longest-running professional theatre of color and is seemingly the largest producing organization of Asian American work.[7] Snehal Desai, who is the EWP’s producing artistic director, explained how the East West Players is located at an interesting intersection of the city in that it is surrounded by the Los Angeles Police Department, City Hall, the erstwhile Los Angeles Times building, and a stone’s throw from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the Music Center. This puts it squarely in the middle of the multiple loci of power—intellectual, political, and administrative—in the city. And yet the nation’s oldest and largest Asian American company holds on dearly to its diminutive appearance, housed in a former church.[8] It seems the company deliberately stays away from the glitz and glamor of the entertainment world even as it continues to produce and promote high caliber work that celebrates the diversity of the American experience.

EWP was founded in 1965 by Asian American actors. Now in its 53rd year the company is the longest-running professional theatre of color and the largest producing organization of Asian American work.

With Little Tokyo as its setting, the memories enshrined in the Japanese American National Museum as reminders, East West Players and the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center as partners, and the Aratani Theatre as its venue, Allegiance: A New Musical Inspired by a True Story made its Los Angeles premiere in March 2018. Before it arrived at Aratani, the George Takei starrer had had its world premiere at San Diego’s Old Globe and a brief Broadway run at New York City’s Longacre Theatre. The musical had been in the works since 2008 when Takei and his husband Brad initiated a conversation with its creators, Jay Kuo and Lorenzo Thione, about creating a musical that would embrace and put the experience of Takei and several thousands like him who survived the Japanese internment during the Second World War into a stage performance. The conversation started in the aftermath of two back to back chance meetings between Takei and Brad, and Kuo and Thione while attending shows in New York City. Takei was particularly moved by the song “Inutil” during a performance of In the Heights, which the four attended together. And the conversation that ensued convinced Kuo and Thione that Takei’s family experience would produce a moving show.[9]

The George Takei story itself is a celebration of the Asian-American version of the American Dream. Born Hosato Takei in 1937 in Los Angeles to an Issei (first-generation) father and a Nissei (second-generation) mother, Takei was christened “George” after the British monarch of the same name. In 1942 Takei and his family were forcefully relocated first to Santa Anita, then to Rohwer, Arkansas, and finally to the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, Northern California as part of the Japanese-American internment during the Second World War.[10] After the war and the release of the former internees, Takei and his family moved back to Los Angeles where his father took up a petty job to support his family. The world war not only claimed a part of Takei’s childhood, but it also took away an aunt and a young cousin who were found dead in a ditch in Hiroshima in the aftermath of the U.S. atomic attack on the Japanese cities.[11] Takei originated the role of Hikaru Sulu in Star Trek and went on to achieve both critical and popular fame for this iconic television role. Since Star Trek, Takei has appeared in numerous films and television shows. Starting in the late 2000s, he embraced various social media platforms and became a social media celebrity with millions of followers across Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Takei also recently launched a YouTube series called It Takeis Two with his husband Brad. Using his iconic status first as a popular and beloved television star and more recently as a social media phenomenon, Takei has been vocal about pressing social issues, most notably LGBTQ advocacy and rights. Takei says, “Raising awareness of the JA internment has been my life mission,” and with Allegiance Takei has opened up a national conversation on Japanese internment while simultaneously touching on its overall national shame as much as it is a personal history for the veteran actor.[12]

The most recent Los Angeles avatar of the play opens with a celebration in the Kimura household in Salinas, California where the family are shown to be artichoke farmers. Sammy (Ethan Le Phong), the young son of the family is portrayed to have just returned from college where he has been elected as class president. His father Tatsuo (Scott Watanabe) is quietly proud of his son, but still manages to push him to do better. This mentality rings true for most Asian parent stereotypes in that they seem impossible to satisfy. Kei (Elena Wang), Sammy’s sister and Ojii-chan (George Takei) make up the rest of the family. The celebration is short-lived as the family receives the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Sammy is eager to prove his allegiance by enlisting, but the family instead is forced to join other dazed and confused families as they make their way to Heart Mountain, Wyoming, “where their multifamily barrack is meager protection from choking dust and bitter cold.”[13]

The Japanese internment in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attacks was one of the darker episodes in the modern history of the United States. Responding to the anti-Japanese sentiment sweeping through the country after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt issued the infamous Executive Order 9066. This executive order gave sweeping authority to the Secretary of War and his military personnel to designate restricted areas and exclude certain members of the population from these prohibited military areas.[14] Under the aegis of the executive order and under the sweeping authority granted by it, the Western Defense Command announced that all people of Japanese ancestry would be relocated from the West Coast.[15] Notices began to appear in Japanese communities in April 1942 instructing families of Japanese ancestry to make preparations and report to designated areas for relocation. Defiance of the order could lead to arrest and imprisonment.

Several Japanese Americans expressed shock at the turn of events. Miné Okubo, an artist from Oakland writes, “To think this could happen in the United States. We were citizens. We did nothing. It was only because of our race. They did nothing to the Italians and the Germans. It was something that didn’t have to happen. Imagine mass evacuating little children, mothers, and old people!”[16] Evacuees were instructed to pack two suitcases and a duffle bag each and were warned that the relocation centers were pioneer communities without adequate infrastructure. 120,000 Japanese Americans, several of them American born citizens left their homes, businesses, farms, and possessions behind as they embarked on a new adventure inland, unsure about their imminent futures.

Not unlike their real-life counterparts, the play’s characters find themselves in a hostile environment and under brutal suppression once at the camp. Throughout the longer first half of the play, however, we see the internees reconciling with their fate and negotiating with the inimical situation, making it work. In the camp, Tatsuo Kimura, the proud Japanese patriarch of the Kimura household refuses to disavow his Japanese identity when he is asked to fill out an insulting questionnaire designed to test the allegiance of interred citizens. This form, reminiscent of several contemporary visa application forms where applicants are asked if they have ever endorsed terrorism or terrorist organizations, is seen as an affront by Tatsuo to the honest life that he has led while pursuing his American dream.

The play ends with an older Sam Kimura portrayed by George Takei, getting ready for yet another Pearl Harbor commemoration. A visitor, who he doesn’t know has brought a big brown envelope. In it we find a copy of Time magazine, with a young Sammy on its cover, memorabilia that Tatsuo had held on to till his last day, and a purple heart. Sam learns that the messenger is Hanako, the daughter of Kei and Suzuki, named after the slain nurse from the Heart Mountain camp—Hannah, the girl who Sammy had dared to love knowing fully well that their relationship would be considered illegal before law. Reminded of the past, and all that he had missed during the years that he stayed out of touch with his family, Sam Kimura breaks down as he welcomes his niece back into his life in a beautifully touching moment of familial reconciliation.

The cast performing “Wishes on the Wind” in the Los Angeles premiere of Allegiance starring George Takei at the Aratani Theatre, co-produced by East West Players and Japanese American Cultural & Community Center. Photo by Michael Lamont.

Director Snehal Desai says that this play has always had a Los Angeles connection, with Takei being from the city, the first reading of the play taking place in the Japanese American National Museum, and with Los Angeles being home to the nation’s largest Japanese American population. The director, who also heads the East West Players as artistic director was therefore excited to bring the musical back to its spiritual if not actual home. George Takei offered a more nuanced take on Los Angeles’ relationship to the play in an email interview. The octogenarian writes, “In many ways, the City of Los Angeles is the epicenter of the work we have done to keep alive the memory, history and education about the Japanese American internment.”[17] He points to institutions of socio-cultural significance that call the area home to further his point, “With things like the JANM and the Go For Broke Monument, not to mention the JACCC and the support of venerable institutions such as East West Players, Los Angeles has resources that no other city has to integrate our show’s message and story with the rich tapestry of the community today.”[18] But extant resources aside, the history of the neighborhood cements its ties further with the story that the play shares. Takei walked me through the history of this neighborhood highlighting pivotal existing landmarks that are reminiscent of this recent painful history: “Both the JANM’s first ‘building’ and East West Players’ original Union Church building are historic landmarks of the internment of Japanese Americans. The JANM’s first home was the former Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple, which was first built in 1927 and served as the headquarters of the Shin sect of the JA Buddhist community until the evacuation order.”[19] Takei continued, “Union Church was founded by JA Christians and was built to contrast with the traditional Buddhist ceremonial entrance of the Buddhist Temple on the east side of the same block. With the evacuation order coming down, JA Christians were gathered in front of the Christian Union Church and from there, they too were bused to Santa Anita Race Track.”[20]

And if the historical past was not reason enough for the city to have a unique stake in the Allegiance story, Takei points out that, “Allegiance still lives here in LA” with the “JACCC, the Isamu Noguchi sculpture in the plaza, the Go For Broke Memorial Monument and in a cozy side plaza beside the JACCC, the Memorial Honor Court of War Veterans are all stirring reminders of the sacrifice, anguish as well as the resilience and indeed the true patriotism expressed in so many countless ways by JAs during the war years. One cannot not be aware of our history in Little Tokyo today.”[21] Hillary Jenks has studied Little Tokyo as a lieu de mémoire.[22] The place of memory serving as places that “not only recall the past but also represent lost alternate futures, making them constant reminders of the social and political consequences of previous choices rather than depoliticized diversions.”[23] Takei’s deft recalling of the various nooks and crannies of this “ethnic” enclave in downtown Los Angeles, the presence of historically significant landmarks, and the inspiration that they lent to the creators of Allegiance to formulate and share the story signifies the importance of this neighborhood as a continued determinant of Japanese American identity even when gentrification rapidly changes the demographic makeup of the area surrounding this neighborhood. However, the changes effecting the community today won’t be the first time that this stretch between City Hall and the Los Angeles river have had to forcefully undergo a change of character to accommodate rapid social changes.

JACCC, the Isamu Noguchi sculpture in the plaza, the Go For Broke Memorial Monument and in a cozy side plaza beside the JACCC, the Memorial Honor Court of War Veterans are all stirring reminders of the sacrifice, anguish as well as the resilience and indeed the true patriotism expressed in so many countless ways by JAs during the war years. One cannot not be aware of our history in Little Tokyo today.

The forceful Japanese American relocation under Executive Order 9066 opened up a vacuum that was quickly filled by other minority communities—especially African Americans and Hispanic Americans. The Bronzeville period of this neighborhood was a result of the rapid westward migration of African American populations during the war. Segregated housing laws did not allow this new population to find reasonable accommodation resulting in the city’s newest residents squatting in houses and structures abandoned by the Japanese Americans. Takei reminds us how Little Tokyo landmarks, like the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple, were opened up to welcome the new African American Baptist congregation in order to hold Sunday services. Takei imagines that “during the war, this Buddhist Temple rocked with the foot stamping, hand clapping ‘Hallelujahs’ of Southern Baptist Sunday services” in the Providence Baptist Church.[24] The same holds true for Union Church which also “welcomed African American congregants until the return of the JAs after the war.”[25] The African American settlers in the Japanese enclave were hopeful of turning the struggling neighborhood around, but popular perception of the area as “the city’s most notorious problem neighborhood quickly overshadowed Bronzeville boosterism.”[26] The neighborhood struggled under the pressure of the sudden growth in population driven by Los Angeles’ racist and restrictive housing laws. The California Eagle aptly summarized the situation, “With 95 percent of our town locked, bolted, and barred against us the Negro is bound into a ghetto as fast as any which binds the Jewish people in Germany today.”[27]

The pressure on the already strained resources increased with the return of the Japanese American internees back to Los Angeles from their encampments. Takei recalls relocating back to Little Tokyo after he and his family were finally released from the camps. By then Bronzeville was a shadow of its confident resilient former self and was “skid row.” In Takei’s words, “It was a place for the poorest of the poor, and it was to be honest a harrowing experience—dirty, crowded, and crime-ridden.”[28] The relocation was horrific enough for Takei’s sister to wish that they were back home to the camps, which Takei suggests were “at least clean even for a prison camp.”[29] The African American residents of Bronzeville and the Japanese American stakeholders of the erstwhile Little Tokyo tried finding common ground to resist the racist segregationist policies and practices of the Los Angeles city council and the War Relocation Authority (WRA) respectively. In spite of concerted efforts from community leaders and some positive movement in reconciling the differences that separated the two communities and their efforts to achieve financial and social recognition in white America, “the events of the war had set in motion a divergence of experience between Black and Japanese American[s] that would … prove too wide to reconcile.”[30] The shrinking landscape of the symbolic Little Tokyo “became a target for Civic Center expansion in the in the 1950s.”[31] The development forcefully replacing residents with parking structures and the new police headquarters. The bureaucratic encroachment of the city into Little Tokyo was resisted by the Little Tokyo Redevelopment Authority or LTRA which was created in 1963 to prevent “external land grabbing.”[32] In the 1970s, the LTRA development plan joined forces with the Community Redevelopment Authority (CRA) and Little Tokyo subsequently began its transformation. It thus was turning into a commercial area bearing the kitschy signs of Japanese-ness that would attract a tourist population often at the expense of the ubiquitous Japanese American features that it had celebrated since it was settled in the late nineteenth century.[33]

The forceful “Japanization” of the area was also resisted by second generation Nissei Japanese Americans who spearheaded efforts to locate within the boundaries of Little Tokyo memory artifacts and promoted ethnic, historical, and cultural venues in the neighborhood. As the child of an Issei father, and a Nissei mother, George Takei seemed to have been at the hub of the Little Tokyo redevelopment. Looking back at the 1980s effort to stop “Japanization,” Takei recalls how

In the late ’80s, actress Beulah Quo and I spearheaded the fundraising drive to adaptively reuse the old Union Church as the new home of the EWP. Just before the turn of the century, in the late 90s, the EWP staged its gala opening with a new artistic director, Tim Dang, a new 250 seat theater and a spectacular production of Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures.” When EWP presents stories of the internment, it is told in a building that resonates with the heartbeat of the people who were gathered right in front of those four Ionic columns. Union Church today is a living landmark that tells the story that happened in and around its walls.[34]

Jenks’ refers to the 90s effort to resist the touristic commercialization as a “suffocating pilling-on” of cultural memorabilia. The urge to pile on memory seemed to have stemmed from the need of the community to retain Little Tokyo as a lieu de mémoire (a place of memory). A location like this is peppered with landmarks that serve to remind the community of their Japanese roots. Fundamentally, the “internment demands they remember.”[35] It is no surprise, then, that Takei celebrates the current avatar of his former neighborhood as a “vibrant JA community that welcomes all people to enjoy, discover and learn from the cuisine, the performances and our cultural heritage. It is not simply a ‘commercial’ district. It is a healthy, living and lively community with a unique cultural and historic heritage.”[36] Locating Allegiance in this part of town which is so integrally connected to the story that the play shares therefore becomes as much of a political decision as it is a logistical necessity.

Allegiance, the musical is a reclamation of a history and curating it for retelling strictly from the victim’s perspective. The creative team at the helm of the show chose to soften the critical and historical blow by not creating a scathing drama, but rather a mellifluous musical that, barring its occasional highhandedness, holds its act very firmly together. And in the process the play weaves a musical journey that is reminiscent of the classic American musical. It is interesting that both Allegiance and David Henry Hwang’s Soft Power, (which held its world premiere barely a month after Allegiance closed) both use music that is not fiercely original but somewhat of a throwback to the greatest among the showtunes. Much of mainstream criticism of these new works have therefore criticized the music for not being original. It seems a deliberate choice on the part of the creators to critique erroneous representations of Asia and Asian-ness in much of mainstream musicals. It is also a quick draw for the crowds who are then introduced to a history, this new perspective, or even a story that they would have been hitherto clueless about. However, the musical as a form still has its ways of encompassing expressions that are beyond what has been used as definitive examples. Takei explained that every evening he witnessed audiences celebrating the work of the team both during the Broadway run of the show and beyond. And this popular reception seemed to have carried more weight for him and the others in the Allegiance creative team over the not always favorable critical responses that the team garnered. Audience enthusiasm and support continue to be the mainstay for musicals like Allegiance and Soft Power, which may quite possibly only continue to be unfavorably reviewed by mainstream critics who judge these works on the same parameters as most mainstream musicals, and without the nuance of the historical lacuna that the musicals aim to address.

East West Players’ artistic director and the director for the Los Angeles edition of Allegiance, Snehal Desai, mapped out the journey that led to the musical’s eventual coming to Los Angeles during an informal afternoon chat in the EWP premises in downtown Los Angeles. After the Broadway opening, the EWP felicitated members of the Broadway company at the EWP annual gala. George Takei himself continues to serve as a co-chair with his husband Brad of the EWP council of governors and has nurtured and nourished the company for the entirety of its existence. It was therefore only natural that the EWP were involved in conversations regarding the musical’s future after the Broadway run. And after plans for a national tour were shelved EWP teamed up with JACCC and the production team to bring the musical home to Los Angeles.

Desai decided to don the director’s hat himself because he wanted someone who hadn’t seen the musical to reimagine this edition. Even though he was in close proximity to the musical when it was developing from an idea to a fully realized musical, he had neither seen nor personally heard it. The decision to direct the musical was further motivated by his keen interest in politics, which was something that Desai cultivated during his college days as a political science major while simultaneously pursuing theatre. I quizzed Desai on EWP taking up the challenge of not only producing a play that had struggled to make a mark on Broadway, but also committing to a six-week run in an eight hundred seat theatre. Desai’s nuanced response downplayed the significance of Broadway as the benchmark for great theatre. He went on to say that a few decades ago, Broadway was thought of as the place where new voices and new works were to be seen but that has stopped being the case now when Disney is at the helm of several theatres and the entertainment on offer caters to a tourist crowd who watch plays to check off a bucket list item. And therefore, EWP did not balk from the lukewarm response to Allegiance on Broadway. They went instead with the fact that the show was one of the biggest successes at the Old Globe in San Diego. And Angelenos came out in large numbers to support the play. The overwhelming support that the show enjoyed in Los Angeles potentially could have stemmed from the politics of locating the play within the lieu de mémoire of Little Tokyo and the attempt of the neighborhood to strike a balance between touristy marketing and community engagement. Desai’s refuting of Broadway as a commercial rather than a critical benchmark for contemporary American theatre certainly hints at that direction as well.

The play temporarily enters the urban space of the neighborhood to offer a performed portrayal of not only the community’s reaffirmation of its distinct ethnic identity but also its relationship and resistance to literal and figurative encroachments of bureaucratic and economic forces.

Desai recollects that the Los Angeles edition of the musical came about at what was becoming an increasingly difficult political climate with regards to immigration. The exclusionary rhetoric employed by the current presidential administration towards citizens, citizens-in-waiting, and immigrants finds echoes in this shameful episode from fairly recent American history. An episode that some Americans are painfully unaware of to this day. Takei took me back to an even earlier political moment that the veteran actor heralded his team into during the 2015 Broadway run of the show. Takei says that the show’s creators could never imagine that the play would have such contemporary relevance even though he remembers that the warning signs were already visible. And so in, “2015, as then-candidate Donald Trump questioned whether the Japanese American internment was really such a bad thing, that he would have ‘had to have been there.’ We then invited him to see the show and reserved a special seat for him every night, so that he could ‘be there’ and learn this history.”[37] The candidate never took the company up on the offer. Based on his recent experience of visiting the Texan border towns of Brownsville and McAllen, Takei reminded me of the ongoing vilification of immigrant communities and his memory of the internment, that “JAs cannot help but be reminded of our unjust incarceration and [so have] galvanized anew to fight for justice for others.”[38] In Los Angeles particularly, the location of Allegiance near the various loci of power and the Metropolitan Detention Center (albeit not an ICE facility) is a powerful statement when seen in conjunction with Jenks’ characterization of the Little Tokyo district as a lieu de mémoire. The play temporarily enters the urban space of the neighborhood to offer a performed portrayal of not only the community’s reaffirmation of its distinct ethnic identity, but also its relationship and resistance to literal and figurative encroachments of bureaucratic and economic forces.

It was difficult to find tickets to the performance. The search was so difficult that I had to wait until the closing week to finally manage to scalp a ticket. Desai confirmed that the performance played to near capacity during most of its run, reaching roughly 200,000 folks over its course. Desai also talked about the Wednesday matinees which were for high school students. The company was really excited at the immersive day that the students would be having if they came for the play including a conversation with George, a survivor from the camps, the Go For Broke Monument, which celebrates and commemorates Japanese American soldiers who fought in 442nd Regimental Combat Team. And then visit JANM for a more hands on interaction with the history that they had just seen performed. Desai was thrilled at the way the community came out to support the telling of this important story and at the ways in which various people were able to relate to it on different levels—personal and historical. The company had anticipated some of this response and therefore as Desai confirmed they did their due diligence in terms of their historical homework. It is wise, however as Desai reminded me, to remember that this was the dramatization of a historical moment—a musical based on a true story, rather than a true story as it really was.

Japanese American critics vehemently have critiqued what they have termed as outlandish portrayals of camp life and the associated violence that comes with it. They all coherently contend that the “camp was degrading. It was dehumanizing.”[39] Others have questioned how Frankie Suzuki’s resistance movement has been portrayed in the musical or how life in the camp was not as brutal as the musical would have us believe.[40] Takei offers a nuanced take on the way this painful history was recreated for the stage. He acknowledges that the company was tasked with a “difficult job of creating a story that told many facets of all of our story, with respect to all of the camps in one location. This obviously meant that in some cases what we depicted might seem harsher than what some people remember at their own camps.”[41] Based his own experience first at the Rohwer camp in Arkansas and later at the Tule Lake camp for the “‘disloyals’ in the community,” Takei recalls the harsh reality that “camp was brutal. There were beatings. There was enforced solitary confinement.”[42] Historical fact is significant. An exception can perhaps be made under exceptional circumstances like in the case of Allegiance. The musical succeeds in instigating conversations about an issue that a vast majority of the American people are either ignorant about or would rather forget. And the success of the musical in this regard makes Takei’s confident assertion, “I’m proud of the story we told, and am not bothered by those who wanted a different one,” sound like a celebration for a just cause rather than a casual disregard for history.[43]

Allegiance is a bold retelling of an episode that is often ignored in contemporary American history. And it is especially important that we revisit this historical period today when America faces several immigration challenges. Snehal Desai drew my attention to the parallels in language used to discuss and describe the Japanese in 1941-42 to the rhetoric from the top-down while discussing Muslims, Central Americans, non-white immigrants, and refugees today. The Los Angeles edition came about at what was becoming an increasingly difficult political climate especially with regard to immigration and immigrants. The exclusionary rhetoric employed by the current presidential administration towards citizens, citizens-in-waiting, and immigrants finds echoes in this shameful episode from fairly recent American history—something that a large number of Americans are painfully unaware of today. There seems to be more uncanny parallels between the time that we are living through in 2019 and the time when trucks rolled up in downtown Los Angeles more than seven decades ago to take citizens away from everything they had worked their entire lives for. The proposed amendments to the census forms, increased surveillance on non-citizens and their social media presence, and the erosion of civic discourse all seem eerily similar to the period that Allegiance puts squarely under scrutiny within its musical framework. More than anything else, this is perhaps the reason why it is such an important piece of work worthy of critical engagement. In several ways, this play is a metaphor for the city of Los Angeles—quietly significant, sprawling in its scope and possibilities, and irritatingly tedious at times. If so, then it is no wonder why it hit the mark here rather than in New York where many interpreted it simply to be this “singing history lesson” by someone who would rather be entertained while remaining oblivious to history.[44]

And on a final point about George Takei, the headliner of Allegiance and an Angeleno by birth: I would be lying if I said that I went to watch the musical drawn by its story. I went to the Aratani to see Hikari Sulu in flesh and blood. I came away inspired, intrigued, and in awe of this octogenarian who has worked tirelessly over the greater part of the last decade to share a story that is at once extremely personal and yet universal in its ramifications. And, as if to counter the observation made by Kelvin Yu character Brian in A Master of None about Takei being busy with “gay stuff,” the social media phenomenon is a gentle presence on stage, essaying Ojii-chan as an affable grandfather who never ceases to lose his sense of humor and spirit. The older Sam Kimura, similarly bears the burden of family separation, witnesses war, and yet remained resolute as a soldier.[45] Throughout the performance, Takei frequently takes himself to the background and makes room for an excellent group of young Asian-American actors to perform characters beyond caricatures and stereotypes. In the end, Allegiance celebrates inclusion like very few musicals are able to and, in the process, hopefully inaugurates a new kind of musical entertainment that is not intent on promoting superficiality when embarking on such relevant themes, but even more so informs and challenges the range of thematic possibilities.

George Takei as Sam Kimura in the original Broadway production of Allegiance. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

Notes

[1] “About JANM,” About the Museum, Japanese American National Museum, accessed on 20 July 2018, http://www.janm.org/about/.

[2] “131 Years of History,” About LTBA, accessed 15 July 2018, http://www.visitlittletokyo.com/About-LTBA.html.

[3] Ibid.

[4] See Roger Bruns, Zoot Suit Riots (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2014) for a detailed study on the infamous riots instigated by US Servicemen against Mexican-American and African-American residents of downtown Los Angeles.

[5] See Jonathan H. X. Lee, Japanese Americans: The History and Culture of a People (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2017) for a detailed study of the history of the community.

[6] Alison M. De La Cruz, “The Aratani Theatre: A Meditation on Impermanence,” Performances, March 2018, P10.

[7] “About,” East West Players, http://www.eastwestplayers.org/about-us/.

[8] Snehal Desai, Personal conversation with author, 22 June 2018.

[9] James Herbert, “’Allegiance’ pledges to make it to Broadway,” San Diego Union Tribune, 18 July 2010, http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-allegiance-pledges-to-make-it-to-broadway-2010jul18-story.html.

[10] George Takei, email interview with author, 31 January 2019.

[11] Landress Kearns, “George Takei Reminds Donald Trump Of the Past Horrors of Nuclear Weapons,” Huffington Post, 22 December 2016, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/george-takei-nuclear-weapons-trump_us_585c5511e4b0de3a08f4ccae?.

[12] George Takei, email interview with author.

[13] Daryl H. Miller, “George Takei & Co. pledge an ‘Allegiance’ to teaching WWII history,” Los Angeles Times, 1 March 2018, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-allegiance-east-west-players-theater-review-20180302-story.html.

[14] Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Transcript of Executive Order 9066: Resulting in the Relocation of Japanese (1942),” 19 February 1942, ourdocuments.gov, U.S. National Archives & Records Administration, accessed 23 July 2018, https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=74&page=transcript.

[15] Peggy Daniels Becker, Japanese American Internment during World War II (Detroit: Omnigraphics, 2013), 32.

[16] Becker, Japanese American Internment, 34.

[17] George Takei, email interview with author, 31 January 2019.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Hillary Jenks, “Urban Space, ethnic community, and national belonging: the political landscape of memory in Little Tokyo,” GeoJournal Vol. 73, no. 3 (2008): 231-244.

[23] Ibid., 235.

[24] George Takei, email interview with author corroborated by Scott Kurashige, “Bronzeville and Little Tokyo,” in The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 160.

[25] George Takei, email interview with author.

[26] Kurashige, “Bronzeville,” 160.

[27] Ibid., 161.

[28] George Takei, email interview with author.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Kurashige, “Bronzeville,”185.

[31] Hillary Jenks, “The Politics of Preservation: Power, Memory, and Identity in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo,” in Cultural Landscapes: Balancing Nature and Heritage in Preservation Practice, ed. Richard Longstreth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 39.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Ibid., 35.

[34] George Takei, email interview with author.

[35] Jenks, “Politics of Preservation,” 50.

[36] George Takei, email interview with author.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Frank Abe, “Allegiance Uplifts by Doctoring Japanese American History,” Resisters.com-John Okada/Conscience and the Constitution, 27 October 2015, http://resisters.com/2015/10/27/allegiance-preview/.

[40] Brian Niiya, “Allegiance: See the Film, but Watch for these Historical Inaccuracies,” Densho Blog, 10 February 2017, https://densho.org/allegiance-see-film-watch-historical-inaccuracies/.

[41] George Takei, email conversation with author.

[42] Ibid.

[43] Ibid.

[44] Charles Isherwood, “‘Allegiance,’ a Musical History Lesson About Interned Japanese-Americans,” New York Times, 8 November 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/09/theater/review-allegiance-a-musical-history-lesson-about-interned-japanese-americans.html.

[45] Master of None, Season 1 Episode 4, written by Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang, directed by Eric Wareheim, released on 6 November 2015, Netflix.

Arnab Banerji is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Loyola Marymount University where he teaches courses on Theatre History, Indian Performance, and Diaspora performance. His research focuses on Asian American theatre, contemporary Indian theatre, and theatre translation. His articles and reviews have appeared in Asian Theatre Journal, Theatre Journal, TDR, Theatre Symposium, South Eastern Review of Asian Studies, among others.

Copyright: © 2019 Arnab Banerji. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Articles

Greetings from Bakersfield!

Boom California on October 16, 2018

Shawn Schwaller

“Greeting from Bakersfield California” reads an early twentieth century postcard touting the various tourist attractions in the city and greater region. Bakersfield is mostly known as the home of the “Bakersfield Sound,” a style invented by country music legends such as Buck Owens and Merle Haggard in the 1950s and 1960s, and as a destination for migrants who came from places like Oklahoma during the Great Depression’s Dust Bowl. It is located in the southern part of California’s Central Valley, a multibillion-dollar agricultural region that provides a significant portion of the nation’s fruits, vegetables, and nuts. When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, Bakersfield was on the frontlines of racism and extremism, and a city located in a county where police corruption and law enforcement official-involved deaths ranked among the highest in the country.

Bakersfield, and Kern County as a whole, is the heart of California’s “Deep South” when it comes to race relations, the immigration debate, and the politics of white minoritization. Unlike the Deep South, where African Americans have faced a long legacy of white supremacy, Latinx peoples who are composed of mostly Mexican-Americans, make up over fifty percent of Kern County’s population. Importantly, the Latinx population faces the brunt of white supremacist and neo-Nazi racial violence, corruption in county law enforcement agencies, and a white working- and middle-class public who openly shared their racist view of Mexican-Americans as they boldly pledged support for Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential contest.

In the 2012 presidential election, fifty-seven percent of Kern County’s population voted for Mitt Romney. Four years later, a majority voted for Donald Trump. This is in a state where over sixty-one percent of the population voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the Latinx population in the county increased dramatically. Bakersfield, the urban center of the county, is home to approximately 360,000 residents, of which nearly half are of Latinx. Among California counties, it is home to the state’s fastest growing population and much of this growth is due to the increase in the Latinx population.

Despite the undeniable importance and visibility of the Black Lives Matter movement as the twenty-first century took off, the county with the highest number of the kinds of deaths protested by the movement is Kern County, and the victims tend to be Latinx. Between 2008 and 2014, Kern County law enforcement officials killed 3.54 residents per 100,000 on average each year, the highest number among all counties in the U.S.[1] In 2015 alone, fourteen people were killed by law enforcement officials in the county, equaling 1.5 deaths per 100,000. That’s three times the total in Los Angeles County, which ranked forty-fifth in the U.S. During the same year, New York Police Department officers policing the five boroughs—a population ten times larger than Kern County—killed only ten people.[2] While a vast majority of the victims were Latino, most of the deaths came at the hands of white males who compose approximately seventy-five percent of law enforcement officials in the county.

Although protest and candlelight vigils followed these deaths, the lack of a “Latinx Lives Matter” type of movement, or multiethnic and racial alliance against police brutality on a broader level, illustrates the vulnerable state of the population in red California’s urban center.

The high rate of law enforcement-related deaths garnered a national media spotlight and prompted attention from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). In December 2016, State Attorney General Kamala Harris and the State Department of Justice began a civil rights investigation based on “excessive use of force and other serious misconduct” committed by law enforcement officials employed in the county. The announcement regarding the investigation failed to mention that most of the victims of this possible excessive force and misconduct were Latino males. Although protest and candlelight vigils followed these deaths, the lack of a “Latinx Lives Matter” type of movement, or multiethnic and racial alliance against police brutality on a broader level, illustrates the vulnerable state of the population in red California’s urban center.

In Kern County, the Latinx population is burdened with worry about not only police brutality, but also racist violence from the general public and anti-immigrant sentiments that place the lives of undocumented peoples in danger of incarceration and deportation. The lack of attention paid to the systemic racism and law enforcement related deaths in Kern County faced by the Latinx population also stems from two other issues. One of these is the fact that race relations tends to be viewed in binary terms as a black-and-white problem. This continues to marginalize Latinx peoples from the broader narrative of race and ethnic relations throughout history, and prevents an accurate understanding of the diverse multicultural society that is twenty-first century California. The second issue is the mainstream U.S. American social and cultural notion that Latinx peoples are only recent arrivals. This misconception stretches even further to wrongfully rationalizing that Latinx peoples have no meaningful history or roots in the present-day U.S., and as such make little contributions to society. The presence of a vulnerable undocumented population, as well as flawed notions of race relations and the Latinx-American experience, fuels a collective inability to bring greater oversight to the law enforcement corruption and systemic racism in Kern County.

Within the first few hundred days of his administration in 2017, Donald Trump sent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials deep into the heart of even the smallest towns in central and northern California to round up undocumented immigrants. Passed in April 2017, Senate Bill 54 classified California as a “sanctuary state” and guaranteed that state resources would not contribute to the detainment and deportation of undocumented immigrants. Elected in 2006, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood had proposed to go against the California state government and make it a “non-sanctuary county.” However, the Latinx community has faced more dangerous and time-spanning social conditions that have threatened their lives and well-being in Kern County.

Law enforcement-involved deaths of Latinx residents of Kern County was not new in 2015. Between 2005 and 2015, most of the seventy-nine law enforcement-involved killings occurred on the southeast side of Bakersfield, which is an area where Latinx peoples are the majority. On the evening of 7 May 2013, Kern County Sheriff’s deputies approached David Silva as he slept across the street from the Kern County Medical Center waiting to get help for bouts of depression. Upon their approach, Sheriff’s officers attempted to wake him up, then proceeded to handcuff him as he woke up, fearing he was on PCP. As Silva tried to stand up, likely in somewhat of a state of shock after being abruptly awoke by Sheriff’s deputies, the officers unleashed a police dog, which bit him thirty times. Sheriff’s deputies then struck him several times with batons, hog-tied him, and placed a shield on his head. Before leaving the scene, Sheriff’s deputies confiscated phones used by witnesses to record their treatment of Silva. After vomiting throughout the evening in custody of the Sheriff’s Department, the 33-year-old father of four stopped breathing and died just after midnight the next day.[3] In May of 2016, Kern County agreed to pay $3.4 million to settle a suit brought on by Silva’s family.

Another one of the more controversial law enforcement-related killings came in November of 2014 when Bakersfield Police Department officers pursued James Villegas in a high-speed chase. After wrecking his vehicle, the 22-year-old Villegas was fired upon and killed by police officers. According to officers on the scene, he approached them in a confrontational manner and reached for his waistband after exiting the wrecked vehicle.

Witnesses of the incident involving Villegas told a different story. At least two witnesses testified that he put his hands in the air after exiting the wrecked vehicle and was waiting for the officers to approach him as they abruptly fired their weapons at him. As was the case with a majority of law enforcement-related deaths in Kern County that occurred both before and after the Villegas incident, the officers who killed him were cleared of any wrongdoing.[4] A few days after Villegas’s death, 200 community members held a candlelight vigil with signs that read such things as, “Hands Up. Don’t Shoot.” “We just want to raise awareness,” claimed David Silva’s brother Christopher at the vigil. Silva passionately continued with this strong message: “There’s something very wrong in this town.”[5]

Silva passionately continued with this strong message: “There’s something very wrong in this town.”

As if the police-related killings in early twenty-first century Kern County were not enough, the disturbing behavior exhibited by law enforcement officials sheds light on a wide range of social and cultural problems in the region’s law enforcement community. Following the death of James Villegas, veteran officer Aaron Stringer entered the coroner’s office, reached under the sheet covering his deceased body, fondled him, and tickled his toes in front of other officers. He then proceeded to twist Villegas’s neck while joking about the human body in the condition of rigor mortis, while stating, “I love playing with dead bodies.”[6]

In what was at the time not made public, the City of Bakersfield paid the Villegas family $400,000 to settle the case shortly after the incident. The Public Records Act allows city and county law enforcement agencies to keep settlements private, but if a member of the public asks for the records they must be provided. In 2017, after requesting records of settlements stemming from possible police misconduct, Bakersfield area news agencies broke a story that uncovered an expensive history of payouts. Between 2010 and 2017, the police department paid out over $5 million to settle cases involving police while the County Sheriff’s Department paid out $22 million.[7] In April of 2018, Sheriff Youngblood was caught on video stating that it was better, from a financial standpoint, to kill a suspect than “cripple” them, “because if you cripple them you have to take care of them for life, and that cost goes way up.”[8] Similar to the investigation launched by State Attorney General Kamala Harris in 2016, Youngblood’s comments were covered in the national media; but the fact that most victims were Latinx was left out. In June of 2018, Youngblood was re-elected as Kern County Sheriff by over sixty-four percent of the population. “I feel good,” stated the sheriff at his election night party held at the legendary Buck Owens Crystal Palace. “This is exactly what we thought would happen. We’re just going to go back to work and serve this community.”[9]

A few years before the Villegas incident, officer Stringer plead no contest to misdemeanor reckless driving and was able to get charges dropped on a 2010 hit-and-run and driving under the influence charge. Stringer, who retired following the Villegas incident, was not exactly a model citizen himself amongst other law enforcement officials. Unfortunately, he was not alone.

Other local law enforcement officials exhibited similar behavior that certainly does not rest within the bounds of what Donald Trump, and other presidents before him like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan referred to as “law and order.” In 2011, Bakersfield police officer Scott Drewry left the department after he was charged with a misdemeanor for throwing a rock through the window of a local business because of a civil depute the business owner had with one of his family members. In July 2012, Officer Albert Smith received a thirty-day jail sentence and three years of probation after he pled no contest to a misdemeanor charge of engaging in sex with a prostitute. Smith reportedly engaged in sex acts with at least three local prostitutes while on duty in his patrol car, as well as other undisclosed locations. The court dropped six of the seven charges he faced and Smith resigned shortly before the hearing.

“The 357 other men and women that work at the Bakersfield Police Department are here and dedicated to public safety,” claimed Chief Williamson after the Smith conviction, stating also that “they’re dedicated to serving our community” and “they are committed to going out every day, day in and day out, and putting their lives on the line to keep our citizens safe.”[10] Police and sheriff-involved deaths, incarceration rates that exhibited institutional racism, county and city law enforcement payouts, and criminal activities conducted by law enforcement figures, however, told a different story.

In 2013, former Bakersfield police detective Christopher Bowersox began a ten-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to possessing images of child victims of sexual abuse.[11] In May of 2017, Kern County Sheriff’s deputies Logan August and Derrick Penney pled guilty to conspiring to steal and distribute marijuana. August had participated in numerous drug busts with the narcotics division. After stealing, trimming, and bagging confiscated marijuana, he distributed over twenty-five pounds of the drug at a street price of $15,000. In a video issued to Kern County residents, August claimed “I am sorry” and that “I made a decision based on Satan playing games with me.”[12] August and Penny pled guilty to federal drugs charges, and received three years of probation and 250 hours of community service.

August and Penney worked with former Bakersfield police detective Patrick Mara and others to steal marijuana from Kern County Sheriff’s office storage facilities between June and October of 2014. Mara began his five-year prison sentence in October 2014 after pleading guilty to conspiracy to distribute methamphetamines. His former partner Damacio Diaz started a five-year prison sentence two years later on charges that he accepted bribes from a drug trafficker, sold methamphetamine he confiscated and stole from the department, and filed fraudulent tax returns.

In August 2016, Officer Rick Wimbish and his partner responded to a break-in at a Subway restaurant. Upon their arrival they fired on the perpetrator, twenty-nine-year-old Jason Alderman, as he crawled out of the glass front door he had smashed in. Alderman died at the scene after being struck by seven bullets. After an unsuccessful attempt by the Bakersfield Police Department to confiscate the video camera footage and hide it from the public, it was released and a wrongful death lawsuit was filed by Alderman’s family.[13] Alderman’s death was the first officer-involved shooting reviewed by the District Attorney’s office, which prompted State Attorney General Kamala Harris to launch an investigation on law enforcement officials in the county later that year. The most significant difference between Alderman and a majority of the other victims of police-involved deaths is that he was white.

Officer Wimbish, one of the figures who fired on Alderman, was the son of a former Kern County Sheriff and a twenty-five-year veteran of the Bakersfield Police Department. Prior to his encounter with Alderman, he was involved in four fatal shootings in a two-year period, firing with other officers in one instance on an unarmed confidential informant and member of his own department, Jorge Ramirez, during a planned operation. None of these shootings, however, prevented Wimbish from earning a salary and benefits package that totaled $200,000 annually as he continued to work as a police officer, while also instructing other officers and teaching local schoolchildren about the important role performed by law enforcement officials in the community.

In December 2016, Bakersfield police officers fired seven shots at Francisco Serna, an unarmed seventy-three-year-old man with dementia who was taking a walk one evening. They killed him right across the street from his home in southwest Bakersfield. Like the two residents who called 9-1-1 to reports Serna’s supposedly bizarre behavior, police officers mistook a dark colored plastic crucifix he was carrying for a revolver. Following his death, Serna’s family cited that he often took evening walks around the neighborhood to help himself go to sleep.[14] In July 2017, Police Chief Lyle Martin called Serna’s death “unfortunate” and “tragic,” while also stating that the police officer who fired the shots was working within the department’s, as well as state and federal, guidelines. At least six officers approached Serna after he was identified by the neighbors who called 9-1-1 on him, but only one responded to his actions with gunshots.

In addition to the rash of police-involved deaths faced by the Latinx community, incarceration statistics also highlight a broader racist criminal justice system in Kern County. In 2004, Kern County had the highest third strike incarceration rate in the state with 59 per 100,000 residents. Passed by California voters in 1994, Proposition 184 mandated that three nonviolent felony convictions brought a sentence of twenty-five years to life. It was the strictest “three-strike” policy in the country and contributed greatly to the over-population of California prisons, as well as the disproportionate incarceration of Black and Latinx residents. According to a 2004 Justice Policy Institute study, Kern County’s Latinx third strike incarceration rate, at 53.7 per 100,000, was the highest in the state and nearly three times the rate of Los Angeles County.[15] Overall, Latinx incarceration rates in Kern County are nearly double the state rate.

In addition to the systemic racism in the criminal justice system, in July 2017 several civil rights groups including the Dolores Huerta Foundation, reached a settlement with the Kern County High School District regarding a lawsuit which alleged that Black and Latinx students were unfairly targeted for suspension and expulsion. In 2009, the district reported 2,205 expulsions, the highest number in California. This is in a school district where the Latinx population comprised sixty-four percent of the student population.[16] These findings and the lawsuit against the school district illustrate the way in which Black and Latinx students are tracked from the schools to the prisons at a much higher rate than the white community. Between the 1990s and the 2010s, funding for prisons and jails in California rose three times faster than spending on schools, and allotment for higher education in the state remained relatively flat.[17]

Some white county and city residents, like so many other places hard hit by economic changes in the last few decades, expressed belief that a Trump presidency would revive the local economy. At the start of 2016, the unemployment rate in Kern County was over eleven percent more than double that of California as a whole. Likewise, at approximately forty-nine thousand, the median income in the county was nearly twenty thousand dollars less than the state average and one in five families in Bakersfield lived below the poverty line during the 2016 presidential race. Roadways and front yards across the county were lined with Trump’s signature “Make America Great Again” signs.

In October 2016, Joe Arpaio, the former Sheriff of Maricopa County in Arizona, headlined one of the largest pro-Trump rallies held in the county. During his speech, Arpaio joked that President Obama didn’t like him because of his incredibly vocal support of the Birther Movement. The sheriff was widely known to encourage racial profiling by law enforcement figures under him during his time in office in Arizona.

At the very moment he addressed the crowd in Bakersfield, Arpaio faced federal charges that he defied a judge’s order to stop targeting Latinx peoples in traffic stops and other activities conducted by the Maricopa County Sherriff’s Department. In addition to the federal lawsuit, Arpaio also refused to allow the Sheriff’s Department to recognize President Obama’s decision to grant temporary immunity to undocumented peoples who came to the U.S. as children. “They hate me, the Hispanic community, because they’re afraid they’re going to be arrested,” Arpaio boasted in a 2009 television interview, “and they’re all leaving town, so I think we’re doing something good.” [18] “As Arizona has become center stage for the debate over illegal immigration and the civil rights of Latinos,” explained Joe Hagan in an August 2012 edition of Rolling Stone, “Arpaio has sold himself as the symbol of nativist defiance, a modern-day Bull Connor bucking the federal government over immigration policy.”[19] The crowd at the Bakersfield Trump rally numbered in the thousands and was almost exclusively white. President Trump pardoned Arpaio in October of 2017 and in March of 2018, he announced he was running for Senate and vowed to revive the Birther Movement.

Despite the profound level of social divisions in the county and Trump’s highly divisive rhetoric, one Kern County native cited that he would help end social divisions. The same individual argued without providing any examples or context—and without being provoked—that “I cannot stand being called a racist, a bigot. I have nothing against anyone. Don’t tell me what I feel or what I think. I am so sick of that narrative being shoved down my throat.”[20] While many public intellectuals, writers, politicians, and voters pushed the narrative that they voted for Trump because of “economic anxiety,” the talk of ending social divisions did not include people of color in Bakersfield and the rest of the country, just as the slogan “Make American Great Again” struck a particular chord in white identity politics with its implicit embrace of the “good old days” when white male supremacy was even more entrenched in American society than it was in 2016.

Donald Trump’s racist claims that Mexican immigrants were drug dealers, criminals, and rapists during speeches, illustrate that his campaign, as well as the support he received, was based on much more than just “economic anxiety.” Kern County residents expressed sentiments which illuminated the point that their support of Trump went far beyond economic concerns to embrace racist worldviews. Residents in Oildale, a predominantly white and Republican unincorporated suburban community a few miles north of downtown Bakersfield, overwhelmingly supported Trump during his run for office. The community is over 75% white and has a long tradition of racism.

In the 1960s, when African Americans represented a larger portion of the non-white population in the Bakersfield area, white residents hung a sign on the bridge that crosses the Kern River between Bakersfield and Oildale. The sign stated the following: “Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Set on You in Oildale.”[21] In the mid-1970s, over a dozen black students enrolled at Taft Junior College were escorted out of the southwestern Kern County community by law enforcement officials after they were attacked by a white mob shouting, “Kill the Niggers!”[22] The incident eventually prompted the State Attorney General at the time to launch an investigation regarding the violation of civil rights. This was long before Kamala Harris pushed for the investigation of excessive force and misconduct among law enforcement officials in the county. In Boron, a town east of Bakersfield, three Ku Klux Klan members were arrested in 1981 for burning a cross in the front yard of a black family’s residence and in the 1990s several black motorists were attacked on the streets of Oildale by white residents.[23]

In one instance, the car windshield of a black motorist was smashed by a white woman shouting racist insults. In another, two white residents were charged with federal civil rights convictions for stabbing a black man. Black cab drivers in greater Bakersfield also avoided Oildale in the 1990s, as one reportedly entered a bar to notify a customer of his arrival only to be told, “We don’t like niggers in here.”[24] A watermelon was placed in the front yard of one black family who moved into Oildale and racist literature regularly appeared on doorsteps and in mailboxes throughout the 1990s.[25]

Members of the Chamber of Commerce actively tried to improve the image of Bakersfield in the early 1990s, and many were in denial that places like Oildale were seething with racist hatred. “There’s no more bias here than anywhere else” explained David Brandon of the Chamber of Commerce.[26] “The community is more diverse and more accepting today,” cited North High School principle Bill Bimat, who also explained that “thirty years ago a black couldn’t buy a house, couldn’t work here, and literally would’ve been run out of town.”[27] These civic and business leaders expressed a different reality than the former leader of the Bakersfield chapter of the NAACP in the early 1990s who explained that “if you’re black, you’re always looking over your shoulder,” and also that while there were some good people in Bakersfield, “there are also others who are looking for some hate. For years, it’s been blacks.”[28] While racism against African Americans was prominent in the city in the 1990s despite the level of denial expressed by some white community leaders, from the 1990s onward; the growing Latinx population became the new target.

While racism against African Americans was prominent in the city in the 1990s despite the level of denial expressed by some white community leaders, from the 1990s onward; the growing Latinx population became the new target.

The racist billboards in the 1960s, a cross burning in 1981, and the white supremacist violence of the 1990s, is only the tip of the iceberg. Racism was imported to the region in the late 1800s and early 1900s by whites who migrated to California from the lower Midwest and American South. Klan violence was common on the streets of Bakersfield in the 1920s. Similar to the American South in the early twentieth century, a plethora of local businessmen and politicians counted themselves as members of the racist terrorist organization. The mayor’s office, police departments across Kern County and the County Sheriff’s Office, local judgeships, school districts, and the county board of supervisors were controlled by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Prominent business owners also counted themselves as members of the organization.[29] The power of the Klan in early twentieth century Kern County coincided with a fairly rigid system of public Jim Crow segregation. For example, African Americans could only reside in eastern and southeastern parts of Bakersfield—neighborhoods now home to mostly Latinx peoples—and their children were forced to attend “colored schools.” Working and middle-class white suburban areas, especially those located near the oilfields, were off-limits to people of color, as were oil industry jobs. From the early twentieth century onward, oil companies tended to only hire white employees who lived in segregated all-white communities. Although the industry has gone through cycles of boom and bust, historically speaking these were the best jobs that many white working and middle residents could hope for.

While of course not every Trump supporter during the 2016 election race exhibited xenophobic, misogynistic, and racist tendencies, Oildale was one of those places where Confederate flags flew, and where white nationalist and neo Nazi gangs roamed the streets. White working and middle class residents spoke openly about their racist beliefs.

The population in Bakersfield changed a great deal between the 1960s and the early twenty-first century. Between 1970 and 2010, the Latinx population increased from ten percent to forty-five percent, at the same time as African Americans decreased from thirteen percent to eight percent. Just like the openness in regards to racist beliefs of white residents in earlier decades, some were open about their disliking of the Latinx population while Donald Trump ran for president in 2016. “I don’t like Mexicans. I don’t like them,” cited fifty-eight-year-old Oildale resident Betty Robinson in an April 2016 article in the Los Angeles Times.[30] “To me, if you can’t speak English, why be here? Go back to where you come from,” continued Robison.[31] Robinson’s ignorant comments related directly to, and mirrored in some ways, Trump’s racist comments about Mexican-Americans and spoke to notions of white supremacy in Oildale.

Over the course of just a few weeks in the spring and summer of 2009, three racially motivated incidents occurred in Hart Park, a large public park a few miles east of Oildale. In May of that year, members of the white supremacist group known as the Oildale Peckerwoods pleaded no contest to the charge of violation of civil rights and assault after they attacked a group of Mexican-Americans in the park while yelling racial epithets and white supremacist slogans. The incident resulted in two state prison sentences for assault and violation of civil rights and a misdemeanor assault charge, leaving four people injured. One required fifty stitches. A similar incident took place a few weeks later, leading to two arrests of white supremacists. “Apparently, they’ve picked that park as part of their territory,” claimed Kern County prosecuting attorney Michael Vendrasco, who continued, saying, “they’re not shy about yelling that stuff.”[32] In addition to the three attacks in the summer of 2009, five other race-related hate crimes against Mexican Americans took place in Hart Park between January and June of 2009. It is reasonable to believe that many more went unreported to law enforcement officials.

The content shared on public Facebook profiles of people who identify as Oildale Peckerwoods blatantly illustrate Vendrasco’s statement that members are not shy about sharing their racist beliefs. Specific references to Facebook content, however, were not included in this essay to respect the privacy of peoples concerned, and to prevent any ethical concerns and issues related to authenticity of sources. However, there are concrete examples of white supremacist and neo-Nazi hate in the region’s culture. One example is the acoustic pre-teen folk-pop duo known as Prussian Blue, popular in the early 2000s.

Lamb and Lynx Gaede, the twin sisters that made up Prussian Blue, were homeschooled by a mother who claimed that she was a white nationalist, and that it was her goal to share that part of her life with her daughters. Born and raised in Bakersfield, the duo took the white supremacist and neo-Nazi world by storm in the early 2000s by releasing four albums. Prussian Blue’s lyrical content praised white victory in a racial warfare, white victimhood in a new era of multicultural diversity, and the threat of black violence against white people. In their 2004 song “Aryan Man Awake,” they wax nostalgically about loss of land and wealth among whites that evokes images of the Reconstruction period in American history and the mythical threat of armed black violence ever-present in D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation. “Aryan man Awake,” sing the duo, “How much more will you take, Turn your fear to hate, Aryan man awake.”

In an early 2000s interview on ABC’s Dateline, Lamb and Lynx Gaede explained, “we must secure the existence of our people and our future for white children.” The two girls also referred to nonwhite people as “muds” and Adolf Hitler as an individual who possessed “a lot of great ideas.” The girls also shared with the ABC journalist Cynthia McFadden some of ways in which they had fun. Included in this list was a computer game entitled “Ethnic Cleansing,” a first-person shooter game where the player gets to travel around an urban environment posing as either a neo-Nazi, skinhead, or Klansman. They are then tasked with killing African, Latinx, and Jewish Americans who roam the streets making gorilla-like sounds. The game was created in 2002 by the white supremacist organization known as the National Alliance, which also signed Prussian Blue to its recording company, Resistance Records. The young twins also expressed that they enjoyed a game referred to as “dancing around the swastika,” which they demonstrated on their kitchen floor with a swastika composed of black electrical tape.

David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard who ran on the Republican ticket for president in 1992 and served as a representative in the state of Louisiana in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was one of Prussian Blue’s more prominent and vocal fans. After the group opened for him at one event, Duke said they were “examples of what we really want for our kids.” The musical duo also appeared at events with Tom Metzger, the leader of the Southern California based neo-Nazi and white supremacist organization known as White Aryan Resistance (WAR). In an early 2000s BBC documentary on neo Nazism and white supremacy in the U.S., Lamb and Lynx’s mother April said that “they’ve got to start some time,” when she was asked about why she got her children into racial politics at such a young age. The girls were eleven years old at the time of the filming. April also explained, “I think that Lamb and Lynx’s music and their appeal, especially as they just get a little bit older, they’re going to be an example, and they are going to show… how being, proud of your race is something that would be very appealing to young teenage girls. You know, I mean, what young man, red-blooded American boy, isn’t going to find two blonde twins, sixteen years old, singing about white pride, and pride in your race… very appealing.”

April’s father, Bill Gaede, also appeared in the episode of Dateline. When Prussian Blue was formed and began to perform live and release records, he owned a ramshackle ranch off State Route 180 on Elmwood Road east of Fresno. He had a reputation as someone to avoid, despite the fact that his home was about ten feet from the windy road around which he continually fed and ran pigs and cattle with no regard for the fecal matter they left behind, nor the traffic they backed up. The cattle brand for his ranch, which was adhered to the side of his full-size white Chevrolet truck, included a swastika, as did his favorite belt buckle that he wore around town regularly. Gaede was rumored to park his truck near communities of color just to intimidate residents. In 2002, after a tree burl became popular in the Latinx community because if its resemblance to the Virgin Mary, Gaede chopped the tree down and allegedly shouted “You Catholics! There’s your virgin!”[33] In 2012, he started selling his Swastika Brand Honey. He raised the pop duo’s mother in the same fashion as she raised her children, a clear case of the multigenerational nurturing of white racist hatred in California’s Central Valley.

The threat of white supremacist and neo-Nazi-inspired hatred and violence, however, goes beyond intergenerational nurturing, racist attacks at Hart Park, and Prussian Blue to simple matters of life and death. In April 2017, Justin Cole Whittington, a twenty-five-year-old member of the Oildale Peckerwood gang received a fifteen-year federal prison sentence for firing a sawed-off shotgun at a Latino man in his Oildale front yard. The incident occurred on 19 December 2012. Before firing one round at the victim and driving away, Whittington exited a vehicle near the man’s property and shouted the words “fucking nigger” and “get the fuck out of Oildale.” The pellets did not strike the victim, but he heard them pass by his head. He and his family moved out of the area shortly after the incident. Following this, Whittington fired his shotgun from his vehicle at a convenience store owned by a person of Middle Eastern descent. The perpetrator had a “P” and “W” tattooed on his shin and “23” on his stomach to signify “W” for white power.[34] Before the sentencing, Whittington was convicted of misdemeanor child abuse in 2015 after surveillance footage at a local market caught him punching out his toddler and picking him up by the neck.

Kern County’s history of racism and social injustice was around a century old when Donald Trump was elected to office in 2016. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the county was a hotbed of law enforcement-involved deaths and law enforcement corruption. It was a place where Latinx peoples were incarcerated and killed by law enforcement officials more than anywhere else. Not just in California, but in the country. White residents openly expressed their racist distaste for Latinx peoples, which at times turned violent. A new generation of white supremacists and neo-Nazi millennials embraced the uneducated and ignorant view of their parents’ and grandparents’ generation. Kern County was the southern-most county in California to pledge a majority of votes for Trump and race relations in the region harken back to the Deep South.

Notes

[1] Conor Friedersdorf, “Police Officers Killed over 610 People in 6 Years,” The Atlantic, 5 October 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/police-in-california-killed-more-than-610-people-over-6-years/407326/ (accessed 1 June 2017).

[2] Conor Friedersdorf, “The Deadliest County for Police Killings in America,” The Atlantic, 2 December 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/the-deadliest-county-for-police-killings-in-america/418359/ (accessed 1 June 2017).

[3] Richard Winton, “Kern County Pays $3.4 Million to Settle a Wrongful Death Suit Against Sheriff’s Department,” Los Angeles Times, 5 May 2016, http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-kern-county-wrongful-death-20160505-story.html (accessed 1 June 2017)

[4] Jon Swaine and Oliver Laughland, “The County: The Story of America’s Deadliest Police,” The Guardian, 1 December 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/01/the-county-kern-county-deadliest-police-killings (accessed 2 June 2017)

[5] Steve Mayer and Lauren Foreman, “Police Shooting of Unarmed Man Draws Hundreds to Site,” The Bakersfield Californian, 14 November 2014, http://www.bakersfield.com/news/police-shooting-of-unarmed-man-draws-hundreds-to-site/article_e31835d8-213a-5405-9c5f-c06bda4bdbad.html (accessed 5 June 2017).

[6] Swaine and Laughland, “The County: The Story of America’s Deadliest Police,” The Guardian, 1 December 2015.

[7] Kristin Price, “17 News Investigation: Secret Settlements,” KGET 17, 25 July 2017, http://www.kerngoldenempire.com/news/local-news/17-news-investigation-secret-settlements/772970029 (accessed, 26 July 2017).

[8] AJ Willingham, “Tape shows CA sheriff saying it’s ‘better financially’ to kill suspects than to ‘cripple’ them,” CNN, 10 April 2016, https://edition.cnn.com/2018/04/10/us/donny-youngblood-kern-county-california-trnd/index.html (accessed 25 August 2018).

[9] Joseph Luiz, “Young poised to retain Kern County sheriff seat,” Bakersfield.com, 5 June 2018, https://www.bakersfield.com/news/youngblood-poised-to-retain-kern-county-sheriff-seat/article_6071837a-693c-11e8-8851-6f98043f8dcd.html (accessed, 25 August 2018).

[10] Jason Kotowski, “Officer Arrested on Suspicion of Engaging in Sex Acts With Prostitutes,” Bakersfield Californian, 11 February 2011, http://www.bakersfield.com/news/officer-arrested-on-suspicion-of-engaging-in-sex-acts-with/article_0f5840f9-e0e0-551d-900f-ee3eebd9353c.html (accessed, 6 June 2017).

[11] Swaine and Laughland, “The County: The Story of America’s Deadliest Police,” The Guardian, 1 December 2015.

[12] Veronica Rocha, “’I am despicable’: Kern County lawman convicted in drug plot blames Satan,” 6 May 2017, http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-kern-deputy-drug-plot-satan-playing-games-20170516-story.html (accessed 25 August 2018).

[13] Friedersdorf, “The Deadliest County for Police Killings in America,” The Atlantic, 2 December 2015.

[14] Associated Press, “Deadly Shootings Prompt State Civil Rights Probe of Kern County, Bakersfield Policing” Los Angeles Times, 22 December 2016, http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-policing-review-20161222-story.html (accessed 1 June 2017).

[15] Scott Ehlers, Vincent Schiraldi, and Eric Lotke, “An Examination of the Impact of California’s Three Strikes Law on African-Americans and Latinos,” Justice Policy Institute, October 2004, http://www.justicepolicy.org/uploads/justicepolicy/documents/04-10_tac_caracialdivide_ac-rd.pdf (accessed 5 June 2017).

[16] Jane Meredith Adams, “Settlement in Kern discrimination lawsuit calls for new school discipline policies,” EdSource, 24 July 2017, https://edsource.org/2017/settlement-in-kern-discrimination-lawsuit-calls-for-new-school-discipline-policies/585212 (accessed 28 July 2017).

[17] Christopher Ingraham, “The states that spend more money on prisons than college students,” The Washington Post, 7 July 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/07/the-states-that-spend-more-money-on-prisoners-than-college-students/?utm_term=.c5ac2e0e6ef2 (accessed 28 July 2017).

[18] Joe Hagan, “The Long, Lawless Ride of Sheriff Joe Arpaio,” Rolling Stone, 2 August 2012, http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-long-lawless-ride-of-sheriff-joe-arpaio-20120802 (accessed 24 June 2017).

[19] Hagan, “The Long, Lawless Ride of Sheriff Joe Arpaio,” Rolling Stone, 2 August 2012.

[20] Brittny Mejia, “Conservative Oildale Could Be A Bellwether of How Trump’s Message Translates in California,” Los Angeles Times, April 4, 2016, http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-trump-bakersfield-20160404-story.html (accessed 5 June 2017).

[21] James Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, “Oildale,” http://sundown.tougaloo.edu/sundowntownsshow.php?id=1058 (accessed 25 July 2017)

[22] Michael Essinger, “Kern County: California’s Deep South,” 2011 essay delivered at the “Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide: Settler Colonialism/Heteropatriarchy/White Supremacy” conference at the University of California, Riverside, http://www.academia.edu/1519415/Kern_County_Californias_Deep_South (accessed 13 July 2017).

[23] Essinger, “Kern County: California’s Deep South.”

[24] Mark Evans, “Kern County Town Struggling to Overcome Its Racist Image,” Los Angeles Times, 9 August 1992, http://articles.latimes.com/1992-08-09/local/me-5918_1_kern-county (accessed 20 July 2017).

[25] Evans, “Kern County Town Struggling to Overcome Its Racist Image,” Los Angeles Times, 9 August 1992.

[26] Evans, “Kern County Town Struggling to Overcome Its Racist Image” Los Angeles Times, 9 August 1992.

[27] Evans, “Kern County Town Struggling to Overcome Its Racist Image” Los Angeles Times, 9 August 1992.

[28] Evans, “Kern County Town Struggling to Overcome Its Racist Image” Los Angeles Times, 9 August 1992.

[29] Edward Humes, Mean Justice: A Town’s Terror, A Prosecutors Power, A Betrayal of Innocence (Simon and Schuster: New York, 1999), 24.

[30] Mejia, “Conservative Oildale Could Be A Bellwether of How Trump’s Message Translates in California,” Los Angeles Times, 4 April 2016.

[31] Mejia, “Conservative Oildale Could Be A Bellwether of How Trump’s Message Translates in California,” Los Angeles Times, 4 April 2016.

[32] Steven Mayer, “Hart Park Seeing Hate Crime Spree,” Bakersfield Californian, 18 June 2009, http://www.bakersfield.com/news/hart-park-seeing-hate-crime-spree/article_417a7502-06be-5a4e-ad6b-878749facfc3.html (accessed 11 June 2017).

[33] Diana Marcum, “Man Says He Cut Virgin Mary tree,” Fresno Bee, 10 September 2002, http://www.religionnewsblog.com/758/man-says-he-cut-virgin-mary-tree (accessed 29 June 2017).

[34] Bill Morlin, “Skinhead Who Fired Shotgun in Racial Assault Gets Prison,” Southern Poverty Law Center, April 12, 2017, https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/04/12/skinhead-who-fired-shotgun-racial-assaults-gets-prison (accessed 29 June 2017).

Shawn Schwaller received his Ph.D. in history from Claremont Graduate University in 2015, and is currently a lecturer in the Department of History at California State University, Chico. His work engages California history, questions around identity politics, race and ethnic relations, and popular culture.

Copyright: © 2018 Shawn Schwaller. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Articles

African-American Muslims and the LAPD

Boom California on September 18, 2018

Nick Shindo Street

“We don’t want to walk into a kumbaya situation,” said Umar Hakim. The sixteen men and women gathered around a conference table in Inglewood simultaneously nodded in agreement. “We need training,” Hakim said, “because we already know who’s holding the power.”

One of the men at the table was Khalid Shah, a veteran activist and organizer in South L.A.’s African-American Muslim community.

“I wanted to be a police officer at one point,” Shah said as people began recounting stories about encounters with the LAPD. “Then the police killed my friend in the projects.”

He shook his head and his eyes clouded over as he relived the preventable event.

“Why?” he wondered, his pain a bridge between past and present.

The community-development organization that Umar Hakim leads—Intellect, Love and Mercy (ILM) Foundation—convened the group to prepare for an upcoming public forum between African-American Muslims and the LAPD at Masjid Bilal Islamic Center in South Central. The meeting would be the first of its kind in recent memory between local law enforcement officers and the constituencies that Hakim and Shah represent.[1]

At a time when public officials often view both Muslims and African-Americans solely through the lenses of policing and security, the event at Masjid Bilal presented an opportunity for L.A.’s African-American Muslims to challenge and dispute that narrow perspective on their lives. It was also a chance for the community to exert agency over the way that law enforcement officers approach their work in neighborhoods where tensions between residents and the LAPD continue to run high and unresolved.

“I’ve heard so many stories of kids being dehumanized by police,” Khalid Shah stated, eliciting murmurs of recognition from everyone around the table. Shah added that his decades-long history of activism has paradoxically both reinforced and softened his suspicion of the LAPD.[2]

“I’ve also meet good, honest individuals who happen to be wearing the uniform,” he said. “That’s enabled me to balance things. I’ve even invited police to talk to some of the young people we work with.”

At that point Delonte Gholston stepped in to guide the conversation. Gholston and his co-facilitator, Eddie Anderson, were fresh from their work on the Trust Talks, a series of dialogues between residents of Skid Row and the LAPD. Umar Hakim had invited Gholston and Anderson to the meeting in Inglewood to help Hakim’s team prepare to steer the event at Masjid Bilal toward practical outcomes and away from both unproductive rancor and “kumbaya”—a feel-good form of dialogue that avoids hard truths and thus fails to move the conversation forward.[3]

“The name of the game is stories to solutions,” Gholston emphatically declared. “That means knowing your story, knowing what you want and knowing where you want to go with it.”

Anderson jumped in, lean and dapper in contrast to Gholston’s broad-shouldered casualness.

“If they hear our stories,” Anderson added, “they have to see our pain. Teach them how you want to be treated—show the problem and the solution in the same story.”

With that said, Delonte wrote the words “story” and “solution” at the top of two columns on a whiteboard at the head of the table.

“Now stories,” he said to the group. “What are your experiences with the police?”

“If they hear our stories,” Anderson added, “they have to see our pain. Teach them how you want to be treated—show the problem and the solution in the same story.”

Trauma weaved through the narratives that followed like an electrified wire. Abdul Ali, a barber who grew up in Watts, recalled the National Guard occupying his high school in the 1960s. Gerald Thompson, who came of age in South L.A. in the 1970s and 80s, recounted being hassled and even thrown against the side of a car by the police “just because I was hanging out.” Rashida Rogers, a sign-language interpreter, said she had intervened on several occasions when she witnessed LAPD officers “running up on” young people in her neighborhood.

Rogers said, “I have gotten out of my car and said, ‘What’s going on?’” when she observed police intimidating children who were on their way to school.

“The officer was like, ‘They were loud, they were making noise’,” Rogers said. “Holding up children from school because they were being loud! To me, they’re placing fear in them—the same oppressive mentality that they’ve always tried to instill in our young people.”

Gholston’s roster of words and phrases under the “story” heading painted a grim picture that depicted pure trauma, fear, deficient accountability, lack of trust, prejudice, and a preceding command-and-control culture. Stepping to the side of the whiteboard where he had written “solutions,” he asked, “How do we address this?”

“True community policing will only happen when police live in the community,” Eddie Anderson said. “We want officers who live within a five-mile radius of the communities where they work.”

Sadiq Davis, whose reentry story is depicted in the documentary “The Honest Struggle,” remarked, “If officers are friendly, it has a positive effect.” He added, “Some of them are just as afraid as we are.”

Others spoke about the importance of regular psychological evaluations for officers—especially those who have served overseas in the military—as well as the need for greater civilian oversight of the police department. In response to the latter point, Gholston mentioned Measure LL in Oakland, an initiative to create a civilian-run police commission and invest subpoena power in an agency responsible for investigating complaints of police misconduct. The measure won overwhelming support from voters when it appeared on local ballots in 2016, and Gholston believed it could be a model for similar initiatives in L.A.

“We also have to change our culture,” Khalid Shah interjected. “It’s cool to go to the penitentiary but not cool to become law enforcement officers. We have to become part of the effort to change that.”

Several people around the table looked dubious. Shah shrugged, conceding the complexity of the point.

“I fear the cop; I don’t respect him,” he said, playing Devil’s advocate against his own assertion. “Why would I want to become something I don’t respect?”

As the prep session wrapped up, participants took cellphone pictures of the stories and solutions that Gholston had written on the whiteboard. Umar Hakim hung back as everyone said their goodbyes.

“A lot of the men and women in the room had some deep history,” he said. “A lot of the new organizers make the elders feel like they’re obsolete. I want to build on where they left off.”

Hakim was also looking toward the upcoming meeting with the LAPD as a turning point.

“During the course of CVE”—shorthand for law enforcement initiatives that fall under the heading of countering violent extremism—“a lot of misconceptions are presented about the Muslim community, and particularly the African-American Muslim community,” Hakim said. “I have to use these relationships for more than saying you’re wrong. This is an opportunity to push back on those ideas.”

***

A couple of weeks later, on a warm Wednesday evening, the courtyard of Masjid Bilal—the seminal African-American mosque in Los Angeles[4]—was abuzz with conversation. About a hundred people were divided among ten tables. At each table there were two or three LAPD officers, a volunteer mediator from Days of Dialogue (an organization that facilitates challenging discussions between constituencies in Los Angeles) and about half a dozen members from Masjid Bilal and other predominantly African-American Muslim congregations. Participants from the prep session in Inglewood were thrown in the mix as well.

Andrea Martinez Gonzalez, a mediator from the city’s Department of Consumer and Business Affairs, ended up at a table where a woman from Sub-Saharan Africa was an unexpected ally for a young white LAPD officer who looked defensive and uncomfortable.

“The African woman created an interesting dynamic at our table,” Gonzalez said. “She was coming from a law-and-order culture that had respect for the police. She was really on the officer’s side!”

Gonzalez said that the other people at the table were polite, but kept bringing up the problems related to police violence that were plaguing their neighborhoods, as well as other communities across the country. In telling his story, the officer said people regularly shouted at him and disrespected him while he was trying to do his job—and that he was frustrated because nothing he tried seemed to diffuse those situations.

“That might change with more of these dialogues,” Gonzalez said later. “There are bad apples in every profession. But a lot of why people are angry is that these young officers are the inheritors of what went on in the old days.”[5]

She added that the officer also complained that news outlets only produce stories about what law enforcement officers do wrong. Still, she was sympathetic to the counter-narrative offered by the community members at her table.

“It’s incredible how much injustice is out there,” she said. “People feel the police are there for anything but protection.”[6]

Gonzalez said that she was optimistic about the prospects for further meetings between the groups represented that night at Masjid Bilal.

“I’m impressed from the first dialogue that this group is really trying to build a bridge to the LAPD,” she said. “The more dialogues they have, the better it is. It’s noble work.”

Officer Jim Buck, a community liaison with the LAPD’s Counter-terrorism and Special Operations Bureau who sat at a different table, echoed Gonzalez’s cautious optimism. He also knew the sources of tension in the room, along with the possibilities for progress, as well as anyone else.

“It’s been a real journey with Umar,” Buck said. “The first time I met him, he didn’t want to have much to do with me. Since then, he and I have had many conversations about policing. We’ve agreed to disagree on many issues, but I consider him a very close friend.”

A decade ago, Buck was serving as a drill instructor at the Los Angeles Police Academy when the then-Chief of Police asked him to become a liaison between the LAPD and communities like Masjid Bilal. The assignment was in some ways an odd fit—Buck described himself as a “conservative Republican.” But his gregarious personality turned out to be the most important asset in his effort to allay fears and build trust among people who were wary of his intentions as a representative of a police counter-terrorism bureau.

“When the community has issues,” Buck said, “they come to us. We’re the most visible form of government. My unit has to understand how Islam expresses itself in Los Angeles. People have invited my unit into their homes, mosques, businesses and schools.”

Referring to the event at Masjid Bilal, he said, “All of this is what we do, how we do it, why we do it. We want to create a resilient community.”

Like Gonzalez, Buck said he saw the event as the first step on a long but hopeful road.

“It gives us a positive starting point,” he said. “But the easy part is getting communities together. The challenge is moving forward.”

Rashida Rogers, the sign-language interpreter who attended the prep session in Inglewood, was mostly pleased with her experience at Masjid Bilal. From her perspective, the key benefit was the opportunity for members of the community to present their story in their own words and to lay the groundwork for future events that could move the conversation in a positive, evolutionary direction.

“It gives us a positive starting point,” he said. “But the easy part is getting communities together. The challenge is moving forward.”

“Sometimes the story gets twisted,” she said. “This was my first time speaking up and saying that the information you have about us portrayed us wrong. What I heard in response to that at my table makes me hopeful.”

She said it was the officers’ apparent willingness not just to hear, but to really accept what she was saying that left her optimistic.

“If people can change the condition of their hearts,” she concluded, “who am I to think that change can’t happen?”

A few weeks after the meeting at Masjid Bilal, Umar Hakim was savoring success.

“People feel like an opening was made,” he said. “It broke a lot of ice in our own community and showed us that we can address our problems in a diplomatic way when people are trained and given the tools to promote accountability.”

The key to that positive outcome was the storytelling strategy that the prep session participants brought to the tables where they sat during the event.

“It was good to work out the kinks in talking about your trauma behind closed doors,” Hakim said. “Then when you get to the public square, you say what you need to say. People felt like they were actually heard. That’s what I really wanted—to help my community to establish its voice.”

Hakim said he envisions future dialogues between the LAPD and the city’s Muslim communities—achieving concrete changes like the police reforms enacted through Measure LL will take sustained effort. He also wants to see meetings between community leaders and the developers who are driving gentrification in South Los Angeles, particularly around the site of Inglewood’s new football stadium.

“We’ve trained around twenty leaders at this point,” Hakim remarked, referring to community accountability programs developed through the Intellect, Love and Mercy Foundation. “I would like to get to forty, sixty, one hundred. We need a platoon of people to address development! Enhancing the community is cool, but I want to be sure our people don’t get left behind in the process of progress.”

Whether it’s confronting tensions between citizens and police or managing development in a community where residents have historically been denied agency over their lives, Hakim is optimistic that the strategy that yielded signs of progress at Masjid Bilal can be replicated as a means of tackling other challenges.

“Out of this I hope people will see that there’s more than one way to approach a problem,” he said. “You’ve got to engage it from all angles.”

Notes

[1] The Pew Research Center’s first-ever national survey of American Muslims (“Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream”), conducted in 2007, found that African-Americans account for roughly twenty percent of the total Muslim population in the U.S.

[2] Andrew J. Grandage, Britt S. Aliperti, and Brian N. Williams refer to this historical overlay of past practice that distorts police-citizen collaboration in the present as a “shadow effect.” See Grandage et al., “Leveraging the Intersection of Politics, Problem, and Policy in Organizational Change: An Historical Analysis of the Detroit, Los Angeles, and Atlanta Police Departments,” in James D. Ward, ed., Policing and Race in America: Economic, Political, and Social Dynamics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018), 57.

[3] Dialogue is generally acknowledged as the key process involved in successful conflict resolution—specifically, as a prerequisite for de-essentializing the “other” and building trust between conflicting groups. See, for example, Ivana Markova and Alex Gillespie, eds., Trust and Conflict: Representation, Culture and Dialogue (New York: Routledge, 2011) and Daniel Yankelovich, The Magic of Dialogue: Transforming Conflict into Cooperation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001).

[4] Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Jane I. Smith, eds., Muslim Communities in North America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 166.

[5] Following the Rodney King beating in 1991 and the riots that followed the acquittal of the officers involved in the incident a year later, Mayor Tom Bradley formed the Christopher Commission to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the LAPD’s operations. Among other findings, the commission determined that nearly two hundred officers were implicated in repeated instances of excessive use of force. A few years later, officers in the elite Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) program figured prominently in the Rampart Division violence and corruption scandal. After a 12-year period of reform mandated by the U.S. Department of Justice, the LAPD was finally freed from federal oversight in 2013. See Grandage et al., “Leveraging the Intersection of Politics, Problem, and Policy in Organizational Change,” 71.

[6] According to the Pew Research Center’s 2017 Demographic Portrait of Muslim Americans, “American-born black Muslims are more likely than other U.S. Muslims to say it has become harder in recent years to be Muslim in the United States. Nearly all American-born black Muslims (96%) say there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims in America, almost identical to the share who say there is a lot of discrimination against black people in the U.S. (94%).”

Nick Shindo Street is the senior writer with the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California. His reporting on religious movements, politics, sexuality, popular culture and news media has appeared in Religion & Politics, Nieman Reports, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera America, Global Post, Religion Dispatches, The Jewish Journal and Patheos.

Copyright: © 2018 Nick Shindo Street. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Articles

Black Life in Adelanto

Boom California on December 25, 2017

Image adapted from Flickr user Alex Proimos.

Jemima Pierre

My first trip to the GEO Group’s Adelanto Detention Center, the privately-run prison facility located deep inland in Southern California’s San Bernardino County, was to meet with a Haitian asylum seeker, Mr. Clement.[1] Mr. Clement had entered the U.S. from Mexico and had been in detention for nine months. Earlier that summer, he participated in a hunger strike that brought together Central American and Haitian asylum seekers demanding better treatment in Adelanto. It was through this strike that he and some of the other detained Haitian men had garnered some attention. And through a series of legal and activist connections—connections stretching from local immigration rights organizers through Florida, Haiti, and back to Los Angeles—I heard of Mr. Clement and faced, for the first time, the travesty of detention for Haitian immigrants and asylum seekers in Southern California.

Haitian immigrants and asylum seekers are a growing population within detention centers all over the U.S. Southwest. Numbers vary, but there are estimates of thousands of noncriminal Haitians incarcerated, with the largest population in Otay Mesa, Arizona. Haitian migration to these parts is relatively new, beginning with a trickle arriving early 2016 to thousands today. (Mr. Clement said that there were about thirty to fifty other Haitian men, as well as a small number of Africans, detained in his jail block. He was not sure of the numbers held in other blocks, or of how many Haitian women are being held in the women’s wing of Adelanto.) This migration is also unusual. It reflects a new pattern for Haitian migrants, who originally traveled the direct route over the Caribbean Sea to the eastern U.S., and settled in metropolitan centers such as Miami and New York, cities with large Caribbean and African immigrant populations. This new pattern of migration means a more than 7,000-mile trek over land from Brazil through South and Central America, into Mexico and, finally, crossing one of the borders into the U.S. Southwest.

Mr. Clement’s journey to the U.S. was not an easy one. But his story is similar to that of other Haitian migrants in Southern California. He left Haiti for the Dominican Republic and later traveled to Brazil. He was in Brazil for eight months, working odd jobs, barely surviving. Life in Brazil was precarious for Mr. Clement as it was for other Haitian men and women. Brazil, already known for its long history of anti-Black racism, was almost unbearable for Haitians, who are perceived as “too” Black, and often suffered racist violence.[2] Many Haitians have decided to leave Brazil, risking their lives to make the treacherous trek to the United States where they have family. Similarly, from Brazil, Mr. Clement traveled by land through Peru, Ecuador, Columbia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. The journey took more than three months, interrupted by arrests (for example, Nicaraguan officials arrested Haitians on site and jailed them for days) and a lack of funds. Occasionally, Haitian migrants would claim to be from an African country in order not to be harassed by officials in some Central American states. Mr. Clement spoke of the difficulty of the journey through Central America including having friends and fellow travelers die in the Columbian forests, drowning as they crossed rivers, or being robbed by local bandits. He said Honduras[3] provided something of a reprieve—a small community in Choluteca became one of the first groups to treat the Haitian travelers as family. Tijuana was the only other place in his travels where Mr. Clement felt he was treated with kindness.

He said Honduras provided something of a reprieve—a small community in Choluteca became one of the first groups to treat the Haitian travelers as family. Tijuana was the only other place in his travels where Mr. Clement felt he was treated with kindness.

Mr. Clement spent more than a month in Tijuana, waiting for an appointment date from the Mexican government to cross the border into the U.S.[4] When Mr. Clement finally approached the San Ysidro border crossing he was immediately arrested. He was surprised to find that his initial immigration interview was conducted by a Haitian-American border patrol officer—in Haitian Creole (kreyòl ayisyen). The officer was intimidating, Mr. Clement said. He repeatedly accused Mr. Clement of being a Haitian gang member who was running away from rivals, a claim Mr. Clement denied. After Mr. Clement was processed he was sent to a small holding cell. The cell was not meant for more than three or four people but was packed with at least thirty individuals. The holding cell had no window or bed. Most people slept sitting up while some slept on mats. The prisoners could not shower or brush their teeth. They didn’t know how long migrants were held there, but Mr. Clement believed that it was around five days. (Other Haitian migrants confirmed these facts.) After those five days, they were moved to actual jail cells in another prison—in San Diego (whose name he and the others do not know). After three days there, the migrants and asylum seekers were put in prison jumpsuits, shackled with chains at the waist, wrists, and ankles, and placed on a bus for the more than six-hour drive to the Adelanto Detention Center.

Mr. Clement and his colleagues discussed their treatment in the U.S.—from border guards to prison guards—as condescending and inhumane and they all stated that they were not expecting to be treated like criminals the moment they crossed the border. They described the humiliation of not being able to use the toilet on the long bus trip to Adelanto. Some people urinated on themselves while others asked their fellow prisoners to unzip their pants to remove their penises so they could urinate where they sat.

The men described their months-long stay at Adelanto as torture. The men recounted being kept indoors most of the time, and allowed outdoors once a week but only for a very short period. They were not allowed to sleep more than a few hours at a time. For example, when guards ordered the inmates into their small rooms at 11 p.m., they had to wake up at 1 a.m. for a “head count.” After ordering everyone back to their rooms, the guards woke them up again at 4 or 5 a.m. for breakfast. The lights in the cells were never turned off—which, according to one former Haitian detainee, affected those on the top bunks even more—and the detention center was always freezing cold. In addition, some of the Haitians complained of guards using racial slurs against them, calling them “fucking blacks” and “Haitian trash.”

At Adelanto, Haitians have had larger bond amounts (ranging anywhere from $15,000 to $50,000) placed on them to secure their release than immigrant prisoners elsewhere in the U.S. And until recently, very few Haitians have been able to bond out of Adelanto and few have won their asylum cases. A colleague who currently conducts research at Adelanto suggested that the denial rate for Haitian asylum cases there was almost 100%. At the same time, despite the denial rates, the asylum seekers are forced to serve extended periods in detention before their deportation. Mr. Clement spoke of Adelanto as “sucking us dry.”

I know that this prison is private business, and that this body [he gestures to his chest] is worth $140 per day for Adelanto. So they hold us for as long as they can. They give us high bonds that we cannot pay. They change our asylum hearing dates. They even force those who do not want asylum to claim asylum so they can keep them longer. When they cannot make more money out of us, then they deport us quickly.

Indeed, reporter Kate Morrissey argued that as of November 2016, “detaining Haitians… in immigration holding facilities is costing American taxpayers an estimated $379,380 per day.”[5] That number is greater now. Mr. Clement and some of his friends describe a number of African immigrants and asylum seekers who, having been detained for months without hope, attempted suicide.

Coast Guard Cutter Mohawk interdicts Haitian migrants

The Coast Guard Cutter Mohawk crew interdicts a group of Haitian migrants July 11, 2017, approximately 22 miles south of Great Inagua, Bahamas.

Compared to those coming from Central America and Mexico, the detention of Haitian migrants and asylum seekers in the U.S. Southwest is relatively recent.[6] When Haitian migrants first began in appear at the U.S.-Mexico border in small groups in early 2016,[7] they were allowed into the U.S. through what is called a “humanitarian parole,” given a three-year temporary pass and released to family members. However, by late September 2016, and as the numbers of immigrants and asylum seekers increased exponentially, the Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security put new arrivals in “expedited removal proceedings,” which means that they could be—and were—detained in prisons, especially if they have asylum claims.

How did so many Haitian people end up at the U.S.-Mexico border and, ultimately, at the Adelanto Detention Center and other facilities throughout the U.S. Southwest? In the increasing coverage given to this recent wave of Haitian migrants, the story seems simple: Haitians traveled to Brazil under humanitarian visas after the 2010 earthquake, and later were recruited to Brazil as a cheap labor source while the country prepared to host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics. Since then, Brazil has been beset by severe economic retrenchment, forcing many Haitians to leave for the U.S.

Yet there is much more to this. Migrants leave Haiti for economic reasons, but also because of gang-related persecution, political instability, domestic abuse, and extreme homophobia.[8] The country has also suffered from a long history of foreign military interventions, including ten interventions by the U.S. since the end of the nineteenth century. The U.S. also occupied Haiti twice in the twentieth century, the longest being the nineteen-year military occupation from 1915-1934. Most recently, Haiti has been under a militarized foreign occupation since February 2004, when the U.S., Canada, and France sponsored a coup d’état to oust its popularly elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide.[9] The coup d’état led to a short military occupation by U.S. forces, which was later sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council when they approved a “peacekeeping” mission in Haiti.[10] The military wing of the mission was headed by Brazil for more than a decade.[11] The occupation of Haiti has also added to the country’s political instability, undermining Haitian democracy and self-determination and challenging sovereignty. It has also led to massive suffering: Fall 2010, not long after the earthquake January of that year that killed hundreds of thousands of people, Nepalese troops brought cholera to Haiti. It induced an epidemic that has sickened more than a million Haitians and killed between 10,000 and 30,000.[12] Accountability has not been forthcoming. The UN has refused to admit its culpability and the Haitian people have had no avenue for redress.

When we met, Mr. Clement was preparing to present his asylum claim before a U.S. immigration court housed not far from the ICE offices within the Adelanto facility. Immigration proceedings in detention centers are considered “administrative” matters and are less formal than regular court proceedings. The usual rules of evidence do not apply and the presiding judges have substantial leeway in their interpretation of testimony and the assessment of asylum claims. Meanwhile, as U.S. immigration policy dictates, he can only receive legal representation at his own expense; Mr. Clement was forced to represent himself.

Yet despite such terrible circumstances, Mr. Clement is one of the fortunate ones. With the help of a bond fund[13] established for the Adelanto hunger strikers by a local organization, volunteers were able to bond him out of the detention center just before his deportation hearing. A regular immigration judge on the outside—rather than within Adelanto—will now hear his asylum case, and Mr. Clement will now have a more normal set of legal set of proceedings. At the same time, he is stuck within the U.S. criminal justice system. He was bonded out on a $17,000 bond with two ankle bracelets (shackles produced by a subsidiary of the GEO Group)—one for ICE, and one for the bond company. The bond company that collateralized his release requires former detainees to pay a $480 “activation fee” for the ankle monitor, and $420 per month service fee for as long as it takes for his case to be resolved. Yet, as an asylum seeker awaiting trial, Mr. Clement is not allowed to seek employment to cover this non-refundable fee, the ankle monitor fee, or his day-to-day living expenses.

Mr. Clement may be out of detention, but he is certainly not free.

Notes

With gratitude to Peter James Hudson for his brilliant and generous feedback.

[1] All names of asylum seekers are pseudonyms.

[2] “Haitian Immigrants Victims of Xenophobic Attacks in Brazil,” TeleSur, 9 August 2015, https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Haitian-Immigrants-Victims-of-Xenophobic-Attacks-in-Brazil-20150809-0002.html; “‘It’s not because I’m black, is it?’—As Haitian immigrants head to the south of Brazil, racist tendencies arise as descendants of European immigrants turn their noses up,” Black Women of Brazil, 29 May 2015, https://blackwomenofbrazil.co/2015/05/29/its-not-because-im-black-is-it-as-haitian-immigrants-head-to-the-south-of-brazil-racist-tendencies-arise-as-descendants-of-european-immigrants-turn-their-noses-up/.

[3] Although, with pressure from the United States, Honduras has begun arresting Haitian migrants traveling through the country (http://www.hougansydney.com/whats-happening-in-haiti/more-than-100-haitian-migrants-arrested-in-honduras).

[4] It turns out that the Mexican government does not allow all who want to cross the border to the U.S. Instead, it passes out appointment dates to cross. Most of these dates require the Haitian (and other migrants) to spend at least two weeks in Baja California.

[5] Kate Morrissey, “ Detaining Haitians awaiting deportation to hurricane-ravaged homeland is not inexpensive,” San Diego Union Tribune, 11 November 2016, http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/immigration/sd-me-haitian-cost-20161111-story.html.

[6] Of course, the U.S. has a long history of detaining Haitian asylum seekers and migrants. Two of the more notorious detention centers are Krome Detention Center (http://thepublicarchive.com/?p=3362) and the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay (http://gitmomemory.org/timeline/haitians-and-gtmo/) before it gained more notoriety as a maximum-security prison for purported suspects of the U.S. “War on Terror.” Both of these detention centers have reputations for the cruel treatment of Haitian immigrants.

[7] Daniel González, “Migrants amassed at U.S.-Mexico border unsure what’s next,” azcentral,13 December 2016, http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/border-issues/2016/12/13/thousands-haitian-migrants-amassed-us-mexico-border-unsure-whats-next/94688238/.

[8] There are also new impediments to social life, including the recent Haitian government’s new anti-LGBT posture (http://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-21838-haiti-politics-what-say-the-law-on-reputation-and-good-life-and-morals.html).

[9] Jemima Pierre, “Haiti: The Second Occupation,” The Black Scholar, 14 August 2015, http://www.theblackscholar.org/haiti-the-second-occupation/; Anthony Fenton and Dru Oja Jay, “Ottawa’s “Secret Memo”: Canada’s Role in Haiti’s February 2004 Coup d’Etat,” Global Research, 26 February 2013, https://www.globalresearch.ca/declassifying-canada-in-haiti-canadian-officials-planned-military-intervention-weeks-before-haitian-coup/2225; “When Canada plotted to overthrow Haiti’s government,” 24 January 2014, https://yvesengler.com/tag/ottawa-initiative/.

[10] According to Dady Chery, Haiti’s UN mission is the only UN Chapter 7 force in a country that is not at war. Chapter 7 of the UN Charter gives the UN Security Council the power to “determine the existence of any threat to the peace” and take military and nonmilitary action to “restore international peace and security.” Participating countries have boasted about Haiti being a place where they could test their police methods and military equipment for urban warfare on an unsuspecting population” (“10 Reasons Why UN Occupation of Haiti Must End,” Haïti Liberté, 19 April 2017, https://haitiliberte.com/10-reasons-why-un-occupation-of-haiti-must-end/).

[11] Jemima Pierre, “Brazil’s Haitian Training Ground,” Black Agenda Report, 4 May 2011, https://blackagendareport.com/content/brazil’s-haitian-training-ground.

[12] Gina Athena Ulysse, “30 Thousand Haitian Lives Lost to U.N. Cholera,” HuffPost, 6 June 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gina-athena-ulysse/30-thousand-haitian-lives_b_10299692.html.

[13] https://cluela.nationbuilder.com/Adelanto.

Jemima Pierre is Associate Professor jointly appointed in the Departments of African American Studies and of Anthropology at UCLA. She is the author of The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (Chicago). Her research focuses on race, political economy, transnationalism, and the politics of knowledge production.

Copyright: © 2017 Jemima Pierre. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Articles Poetry

An Agent Suspects of Her

Boom California on December 20, 2017

Omar Pimienta

an agent suspects of her
suspects of him    suspects of me
suspects himself and above all suspects the baby

his work      to suspect   suspicious

everything about you is suspect: your glasses are suspicious
                     your books are suspicious
                     your car is suspicious
       the cloudy day is suspicious
       the picture on your ID is suspicious
       your last name is suspicious
       your ears are particularly suspicious
       your fingerprints
       above all are very suspicious

she carries a newborn
he looks at the IDs
there’s no picture that’s true to a baby
there’s no ID that can assure
that you are you at 10 days after arriving to the party

every father or mother suspects
during the first 10 days
where that baby came from

suspicion is part of the cog
that churns when the world moves

a suspicious customs officer
suspects     asks her to pull out her breast
she suspects         he suspects her breasts
asks her to breast-feed
if that child is hers there will be milk


if not the suspicion will be certain

she does it
he asks her to do it again
during the first attempt the amount of milk
was suspiciously small

she does it again
he allows her to cross
and the line of suspects moves on.

Translated by by Jose Antonio Villarán.

Omar Pimienta is a Tijuana-based artist and writer, and Ph.D. candidate at in Literature at UC San Diego. His work examines questions of identity, migration, citizenship, emergency poetics, landscape, and memory, and his work is currently on display as part of the unDocumenta exhibition at the Oceanside Museum of Art. He has published four books of poetry in México and Spain, and his newest book, The Album of Fences, with translations by Jose Antonio Villarán, is forthcoming with Cardboard House Press.

Copyright: © 2017 Omar Pimienta. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Articles

Presumed Innocent

Boom California on October 14, 2017

Peter Colby

[O]nce those convictions were erased, the presumption of their innocence was restored.

– Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Maurice Atwone Caldwell was released from a California prison over six years ago, but he doesn’t feel free. Hobbled by back pain and suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from years in prison, he spends many days in his suburban Sacramento apartment. He feels most relaxed sitting alone in his favored spot on the couch: “I’m secluded here. In prison, you are secluded. You go to your cell, you are separated from everybody. When you have people around you, you’ve got to have a sense of trust. I don’t have no sense of trust.” Looking back on his life, Caldwell doesn’t see much reason to have a sense of trust.

In the summer of 1990, twenty-two-year-old Caldwell was living in San Francisco’s Alemany housing projects. “Little Twone,” as the 5’4 Caldwell was known on the streets, was in a situation shared by many young people today—a few years out of school, working at whatever jobs were available, hanging out with friends and trying to get established in the adult world. In that era of rampant crime and crack cocaine, any young black man with only a high school education would struggle. But Caldwell faced extra challenges.

“To me, my case was personal. My case falls back to my last name—my father.” Donald Ray Caldwell was convicted of killing a San Francisco police officer during a robbery and served nineteen years before being released in 1988. As Maurice sees it, the San Francisco police resented the fact that the elder Caldwell was alive and walking the streets, and they were more than willing to settle the score at Maurice’s expense. In 1989 and 1990, Maurice was arrested more than a dozen times; in every case the charges were eventually dropped.

A botched drug sale in the early hours of 30 June 1990 changed Caldwell’s life. Around 2 a.m., after an evening of drinking, four men drove up Alemany Blvd. looking to buy crack cocaine. They found a dealer, but as the buy was being completed something went wrong and shots were fired from a handgun and a shotgun. The four friends scattered, but one man, Judy Acosta, died from gunshot wounds. Caldwell, who was in bed with his girlfriend in a nearby apartment, heard the shots and ran outside to find out what was happening, but only saw an acquaintance walking away carrying something that looked like a shotgun.

The initial police investigation didn’t turn up much since in the midst of an epidemic of drugs and violence, Alemany residents generally deemed the police more likely to harass a witness than arrest a killer. But several weeks after the murder, neighbor Mary Cobbs identified Caldwell as one of the shooters. He was arrested 21 September 1990. Caldwell’s family scraped together money to hire a lawyer who had never tried a capital case before, but assured Caldwell that “this case is a slam dunk.”

The initial police investigation didn’t turn up much since in the midst of an epidemic of drugs and violence, Alemany residents generally deemed the police more likely to harass a witness than arrest a killer.

The prosecution’s case against Caldwell did have problems. None of the survivors of the shooting were able to positively identify him, and several witnesses testified that Caldwell was indoors when the shooting occurred. The police failed to follow accepted procedures while taking Cobbs’s statements, which cast doubt on the reliability of her identification of Caldwell. However, at trial Cobbs was steadfast in her assertion that she saw Caldwell at the scene of the crime with a shotgun. The jury found Caldwell guilty, and he was sentenced to a term of twenty-seven years-to-life in prison. Cobbs, who claimed Caldwell threatened to kill her if she testified, was proclaimed a hero and awarded the Medal of Merit by the City of San Francisco.[1]

Throughout his twenty years in prison, Caldwell strenuously asserted his innocence. He wrote letters to anyone he could find who might help him. Finally, in 2009 the Northern California Innocence Project (NCIP) took up his cause. The NCIP followed leads that Caldwell had given the police and his attorney, but which neither Caldwell’s attorney (who was later disbarred) nor the police ever pursued. Marritte Funches, serving time in a Nevada prison, admitted he shot Acosta and swore that Caldwell was not involved. Investigators demonstrated that Mary Cobbs could not have seen the incident from her window, and talked with acquaintances who testified that Cobbs lied about Caldwell.

The NCIP filed a petition for habeas corpus in state court claiming that Caldwell’s conviction was based on perjured testimony, that he received ineffective representation by counsel and that he was actually innocent of the crime for which he was convicted. The court ordered him released, finding that his attorney’s inadequate defense constituted a violation of Caldwell’s constitutional rights. Still asserting Caldwell’s guilt, the San Francisco District Attorney entertained retrying the case and offered Caldwell a plea bargain: he could acknowledge guilt and would be released from prison on the basis of the time already served. When Caldwell refused the deal, the District Attorney dropped the charges. On 28 March 2011, Maurice Caldwell was released from prison. He had served over twenty years, just about one year longer than his father.

Caldwell’s release confronted him with new challenges—making a living and a building a life. The family members who stood by him through his ordeal had all died while he was incarcerated. The world had changed while his life was on hold. Caldwell had never owned a cellphone or an iPod, and he barely remembered how to buy a ticket for a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train. The kitchen work he had done while in prison left him with a bad back but no marketable skills.

In some ways, Caldwell was worse off than an inmate who served out an entire sentence. While few would argue that post-release services in California are adequate, at a minimum the system provides the supervision of a parole officer and some limited resources to assist the former inmate’s reentry into society. Since the court found that Caldwell should never have been in the corrections system in the first place, he was not eligible for those services. A 2008 report on wrongful convictions by the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice recommended that services to assist reintegration into society be offered to the wrongfully incarcerated.[2] Shortly afterward, the legislature overwhelmingly voted to make this change, but the bill was vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger. It has never been revived.

Still, Caldwell persevered. He moved in with his sister and her partner, and found work as a laborer at a recycling plant until increasing back pain forced him to leave the job. He moved to Sacramento with his girlfriend and continued to work until disabled by carpal tunnel syndrome. Also, like many who have spent long years in California prisons, Caldwell has suffered (and suffers) from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which contributes to his current disability.

Paige Kaneb (NCIP), sister Debbie Caldwell, grandniece Tayonna, Maurice, Linda Starr (NCIP), fellow exoneree Rick Walker.

Today, Caldwell’s greatest satisfaction comes from working with the NCIP, speaking about his personal experiences. “I’m not one of those persons who get out of prison and stand in front of the camera and say ‘I’m not mad at the system.’ I am mad at the system. And for that, I am doing something about it.” Speaking is therapy for Caldwell. But even more, it is his way of setting up his three children for a better life than he had. “The character I’ve got right now, when my kids grow up, ain’t nobody going to be able to say, ‘your father was a bad person.’ They’ll be able to look and see me speaking, helping people…. I am not doing what my father did to his kids.” But his speaking engagements do little to pay the bills, and Caldwell has few opportunities to earn other income. Having lost literally the best years of his life, Caldwell needs compensation.

There are limited routes for an exonerated inmate like Caldwell to receive compensation. The best hope is a claim for violation of civil rights under federal law by showing that the conviction was secured through illegal actions by police or prosecutors. Though notoriously hard to win, such claims offer the prospect of punitive damages and are the basis for most of the multimillion-dollar verdicts and settlements, as in the infamous Central Park Jogger case. That $41 million settlement paid five individuals approximated $1 million per year served.[3] Caldwell filed a civil rights case in federal court, but the lawsuit was dismissed without a trial (an appeal is currently pending). Claims can be made under state law as well, but these too are only rarely successful.

The other option is a claim under a statute providing compensation for wrongful incarceration. Until relatively recently, few such laws existed. Although California’s statute was enacted in 1941,[4] most states’ laws came in more recently. As of 2000, only fourteen states (along with the District of Columbia and the federal government) had such statutes, and many of those provided negligible amounts.[5] The California statute capped payments at a flat $5,000 until 1969, when the limit was raised to $10,000.[6] A key reason for this was that until the widespread use of DNA evidence, wrongful convictions were deemed rare.

Since the early 1990s, studies (many supported by the New York-based Innocence Project and its affiliates around the country) have documented hundreds of erroneous convictions. In response, many states have made efforts to reduce errors, for example by establishing strict guidelines for obtaining and using eyewitness identifications like that of Mary Cobbs, which are known to be a prime source of wrongful convictions.[7] Many have also passed laws providing compensation for those wrongfully convicted. Currently, thirty-two states have statutes providing compensation for wrongful incarceration. Ironically Texas, which executes far more individuals than any other state, also offers the most generous payments for wrongful incarceration.[8]

Over the years, California’s legislature has modified procedures and increased the amount of compensation available. Payout is now set at $140 per day served (about $50,000 per year), with claims being reviewed by the California Victim Compensation Board and submitted to the legislature for final approval and award. As with statutes in other states, compensation is available only to individuals who are innocent, not to those released as a result of mistakes or governmental misconduct in the course of the prosecution.

The most recent changes in the California requirements for recovery came in 2013 in response to analysis showing that most claims were being denied.[9] The changes in the law seem to have made a difference. Since 2014, seventeen out of twenty-seven claims have been granted.[10] Still, meritorious claims are being denied; at least four of those denied since 2014 were contrary to the recommendation of the staff-hearing officer who heard them. One involved Luis Galicia, who was convicted in 2009 of lewd acts with a child under fourteen years of age.

In 2011, Galicia filed a petition for habeas corpus in state court. By then it had come to light that Dr. Mary Spencer, whose examination of the minor was critical to the prosecution’s case, had given false testimony in a 1991 case (as it turned out, she gave inaccurate information in at least ten other cases, too). Three other doctors reviewed the medical reports and found no basis to conclude any molestation had occurred. The District Attorney chose not to oppose Galicia’s petition and the court ordered his release, but did so without making a finding of innocence.

Galicia filed a claim with the Victim Compensation Board. The Attorney General’s office, who represents the state before the Board, opposed the claim asserting that Galicia was guilty of the crime. After a daylong hearing, the hearing officer concluded that Galicia had proved his claim of innocence and recommended it be paid.

The Board, reluctant to accept the recommendation, asked Galicia’s attorney and the Attorney General’s office to present their arguments to the full Board. No witnesses testified, but a representative of the Crime Victim Action Alliance was allowed to speak and urge the Board to deny Galicia’s claim. The Board rejected Galicia’s claim 3-0. The chair “found that the evidence presented was very complicated, and had difficulty drawing any conclusions.” She said she wanted to support the hearing officer’s recommendation, but “couldn’t find the evidence” that would allow her to accept that recommendation.[11]

California State Capitol via Flickr user Ken Lund.

There are obvious institutional reasons that the Board may be hostile to claims of wrongful incarceration. The Board’s mission and primary business focus is on victims of violent crime, not victims of erroneous prosecution. The stated mission of the Board is straightforward: “The Victim Compensation and Government Claims Board provides financial assistance to victims of crime.”[12] In that capacity, the Board processes tens of thousands of claims per year, and over the last few years has averaged payouts totaling over $50 million annually. In contrast, the program for compensating those wrongfully incarcerated, discussed in the Board’s Annual Report in the section, “Additional Board Functions,” paid out about $14.5 million total from 2001 through 2017.[13]

The composition of the Board as set out in its enabling statute does little to adjust the balance. Two members are specified in the statute. One is the Secretary of the California Government Operations Agency, which is charged with improving government administration and fostering efficiency. The other is the State Controller, who is responsible for the state’s financial resources. As the Controller is required to sit on seventy boards and commissions, they typically designate a staff member for this role. In any case, given the nature of their jobs, neither of these delegated officials is likely to have any expertise in criminal law or procedure.

The third member is chosen by and serves at the pleasure of the Governor with no specified qualifications. Michael Ramos, the District Attorney for San Bernardino County, was appointed in 2004 by Governor Schwarzenegger and has served since. According to an ACLU study, San Bernardino County has the second highest rate of killings by police officers in California.[14] Beyond how this context may inform Ramos’s approach, district attorneys are unlikely to provide sympathetic perspectives for a body reviewing claims against the state being made by those once convicted of a felony.

Ramos’s service on the Board reflects his perspective as a prosecutor. In voting to overturn the hearing officer’s recommendation to approve the claim of Timothy Atkins, he made what has become a typical comment: “I still feel the same way regarding the statements and then one thing that actually stood out for me and when I have these difficult—very difficult decisions—I always lean toward the victims. We have a victim that has been murdered.”[15] It is difficult to see how the plight of victims factors into assessing the evidence of the claimant’s guilt. Indeed, a wrongfully convicted person is also a victim. But, as the longest serving member of the Board and the only one with criminal law experience, Ramos’s pronouncements carry a lot of weight. And the Board generally operates by consensus. Since 2010 there have only been three split votes, and in all three Ramos voted to deny the claim.[16]

California State Senator Bill Monning has recognized the flaws in the system: “Unfortunately, the current compensation review process forces exonerees, who have very few resources, to defend their claim before the Victim’s Compensation Board, whose members are not experienced in the legal nuances of wrongful conviction cases.”[17] In March 2017, Senator Monning introduced SB 321, which would require appointment of a special master, qualified by “education, training, and work experience,” to oversee all claims for wrongful incarceration. However, at least for this session, the bill will not be enacted.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle for a claimant is the burden of proof—under the California law, they have the burden to prove that they are innocent of the crime of which they were convicted.[18] In addition, the Board has issued regulations to clarify how claims should be reviewed. Those regulations specify that the claimant must prove innocence “by a preponderance of the evidence,” which means the Board must find it is more likely than not that the claimant is innocent. This is the standard used throughout the United States for civil claims, and contrasts the heavier burden on the prosecution in a criminal case—proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

However, the Board added a hurdle for claims of wrongful incarceration. The claimant’s testimony can be considered, as well as the fact that they were released and not tried again, or were acquitted on retrial. However, none of that can be the basis of an award without “substantial independent corroborating evidence.”[19] Even after their conviction has been reversed, the claimant’s own testimony cannot be sufficient to support a finding of innocence.

Though the claimant’s burden of proof is deemed met if a court has already made a finding of innocence, there may be no such finding even when the facts indicate it. Most individuals who are exonerated after serving time in jail are released through habeas corpus proceedings in state or federal court. The U.S. Supreme Court has made clear that in the federal courts, the subject of a habeas corpus review “is not the petitioners’ innocence or guilt but solely the question of whether their constitutional rights have been preserved.”[20] Under California law, new evidence pointing to innocence can be ground for reversing a conviction, but it is only one of numerous bases that can be presented.[21] Many state law proceedings, too, are based on claims that the defendant’s constitutional rights were violated.[22] In those cases, discussion of innocence can be beside the point.

In Caldwell’s case, although the Innocence Project lawyers argued that he was innocent, the habeas court vacated the conviction based on lack of effective representation at trial as required by the Sixth Amendment. The court made no finding as to guilt or innocence in his decision, and when Caldwell went back to court to request a finding of innocence to bolster his claim, the court declined. The San Francisco District Attorney who never pursued charges against Marritte Funches, who confessed to shooting Judy Acosta, or against Henry Martin, who was identified by Funches as the shotgun shooter, continued to insist that Caldwell was guilty. Caldwell had no choice but to try to convince the Board of his innocence.

Maurice Caldwell.

Requiring the claimant to prove innocence is inconsistent with a fundamental principle of our criminal justice system: a person charged with a crime is presumed innocent until proven guilty. As the United States Supreme Court put it in 1895: “The principle that there is a presumption of innocence in favor of the accused is the undoubted law, axiomatic and elementary, and its enforcement lies at the foundation of the administration of our criminal law.”[23]

The U.S. Supreme Court recently addressed this issue in a case stemming from Colorado’s Exoneration Act. In addition to providing compensation for wrongful incarceration, the Colorado statute governed recovery of court costs, fees, and restitution paid by those wrongfully convicted and placed the burden of proof on the claimants. Two individuals whose convictions had been overturned sued the state to recover amounts they had paid as a result of their convictions, claiming that the state requirements violated their constitutional right to due process by unduly burdening their ability to recover.

Applying a well-established test, the Court (in an opinion by Justice Ginsburg) weighed the interests of the claimants, the risk that the procedures applied will result in erroneous denial of their claims, and the countervailing interests of the state. The Court opened its analysis by noting that the claimants must be treated as innocent: “Once [their] convictions were erased, the presumption of their innocence was restored.”[24] Since the payments at issue were based solely on the findings of guilt, the state no longer had a basis for retaining the funds.

Colorado argued that if it is proper to require exonerees to prove innocence in order to receive compensation for their time in prison, placing the same burden on recovery of fees and costs must be valid as well. The Court rejected this argument on the grounds that the claimants were not seeking compensation: “Just as the restoration of liberty on reversal of a conviction is not compensation, neither is the return of money taken by the State on account of the conviction.”[25] But the Court offered no explanation why this distinction should matter. In a separate opinion, Justice Alito questioned the distinction by asking rhetorically, under Ginsburg’s logic, “why shouldn’t the defendant be compensated for all the adverse economic consequences of the wrongful conviction?”[26]

Every Supreme Court justice takes as a given the validity of the Exoneration Act as to claims for compensation for time in prison. None of the thirty-two states allowing compensation for wrongful incarceration (nor the federal law) require the state to prove guilt to prevent an exoneree from being compensated. Indeed, most compensation statutes are much more restrictive than Colorado’s (or California’s), for example, limiting claims to cases involving a gubernatorial pardon or DNA evidence.[27] Still, the Court’s decision raises the question whether these limits are truly defensible as a matter of either constitutional law or policy.

The first consideration in the Supreme Court’s analysis is the interest of the claimant. The claimant has been deprived of their freedom, their relations with family and friends and their livelihood for the duration of imprisonment. If the wrongful incarceration drags on for many years, as in Caldwell’s case, the effects are magnified. Over time, relationships fade away. Family and friends die or move away, skills atrophy and the very ability to be gainfully employed may be lost. Monetary compensation cannot restore the years or repair the damage, but it may be the only means for the exoneree to support himself or herself. The claimant’s interest in the outcome is very high—likely far greater than the Colorado claimants’ desire to recover the relatively small fees and costs at issue there.

It is no surprise that under California’s rules, many claims for compensation fail. In short, the risk of erroneous deprivation of the claimants’ interests is severe.

The second consideration the Court discussed is the risk that procedures used will result in erroneous deprivation of the interest at issue. The prevalence of exonerations across the country shows that even under criminal procedures that (theoretically, at least) provide all constitutional rights to the defendant, including the requirement that guilt be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, innocent people are still convicted. The risk of error is exponentially greater in claims for compensation under statutes like California’s.

Luis Galicia’s case illustrates the significance of which party bears the burden of proof. While the officer who heard the testimony found Galicia’s showing sufficient, the reviewing Board ”had difficulty drawing any conclusions” about the evidence.”[28] It was easy and natural to conclude that Galicia failed to make his case. Shifting the burden to the state would require the Board to rule for the claimant where evidence is inconclusive.

The nature of wrongful incarceration claims exacerbates the impact of placing the burden of proof on the claimant. The state does not provide representation for exonerees in their claims before the Board. As Senator Monning observes, most exonerees have few resources at their disposal before their convictions[29] and even fewer when they are finally released. Exonerees like Caldwell, who served many years, have claims large enough to support contingent fee arrangements. The rest have few options for obtaining counsel. And in any contested case—like Caldwell’s—claimants face the full resources of the state Attorney General’s office.

Claimants are by definition facing a trial transcript that was sufficient to convince a jury of their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In some cases before the Board, evidence relied on by the prosecution in the criminal case may be excluded or may have been repudiated. Witnesses may be unavailable—in Caldwell’s case, the key prosecution witness, Mary Cobbs, died while Caldwell was in prison—and memories also fade. All these circumstances will tend to weaken the prosecution’s case, but none will prove the claimant innocent. The same effects hinder the claimant’s efforts to prove innocence. It is no surprise that under California’s rules, many claims for compensation fail. In short, the risk of erroneous deprivation of the claimants’ interests is severe.

The final consideration under the Supreme Court’s analysis is the government’s interest. In entertaining claims for wrongful compensation, the state’s only interest is financial. Compare this to a typical criminal trial where if a finding of “not guilty” is erroneous, a criminal escapes punishment. Yet, by applying the rigorous requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, we signal that we are willing to accept this risk in order to minimize the risk of a greater harm: convicting an innocent person. If a claim for compensation for wrongful incarceration is granted in error, the calculus is different. The guilty party already either has or has not been punished, no matter the result of the proceeding. The only “harm” to be suffered by the state is payment of compensation to a guilty party.

Maurice and his grandniece Tayonna.

It could be argued that an erroneous payment is not even harmful. The claimant, by definition, served time in prison without a valid conviction being made. Though no U.S. jurisdiction has done so, a government could decide, as a matter of policy, to compensate all those wrongfully incarcerated whether guilty or not.[30] Such a policy might even save money. Providing compensation to all who were wrongfully incarcerated, regardless of whether the evidence shows they were innocent, might reduce the likelihood that those released will commit additional crimes.[31]

In any case, the amounts at issue are vanishingly small compared to the cost of the prison system. The current California budget includes $11.4 billion for the correction system.[32] To call the expenditures on exonerees a drop in the bucket would exaggerate their importance. A 2015 study by Berkeley Law provides a more useful comparison. The study looked at the state’s expenditures on the 692 individuals who were exonerated from 1989 through 2012 and found that incarcerating the exonerees cost the state $148 million (and this figure did not even include the cost of prosecuting the cases).[33] Paying claims made to the Victim Compensation Board cost just $5 million—less than 4% of the costs already incurred by the state for those individuals.

If the State of California can devote so many resources to the task of sending citizens to prison and keeping them there for years, surely it can afford to compensate more of those who should never have been there in the first place.

Still, the Supreme Court made clear in the Colorado case it is not ready to require states to accept the burden of proof. In fact, the Colorado statute requires claimants to prove their innocence by clear and convincing evidence, a much higher standard than California imposes. Yet the same analysis used by the Court in finding the Colorado law unconstitutional as it applied to recovering fees and costs could be applied to the burden California places on people like Caldwell that seek compensation for the years they lost to a mistake by the state.

Of course, the legislature does not need to be constrained by the Supreme Court’s rigorous application of balancing tests and its adherence to precedent. The legislature can review the system and conclude, as it did in 2013, that the procedures in place are simply not fair. The legislature can decree that the current law places too great a burden on those whom the criminal justice system already failed once. Shifting the burden of proof would make a tremendous difference.[34]

In the meantime, the cases drag on. Maurice Caldwell filed his claim for compensation in March 2013. The matter was heard before an officer of the Board on 9 May and 31 May 2017. On 1 September, the hearing officer issued his Proposed Decision: a denial.

The Proposed Decision is baffling. The officer acknowledges that at least seven witnesses supported Caldwell’s version of the events, while “only one strong witness” implicates him—the deceased Mary Cobbs. He brushes aside testimony from the NCIP attorney that Cobbs could not have seen the shooters from her apartment, as well as all the evidence that the police improperly influenced Cobbs—not only moving her out of the projects but also by paying for a trip to Disneyland. As for Caldwell’s witnesses, Marritte Funches confessed to shooting Judy Acosta, a conclusion supported by every witness, and swore that Caldwell was not involved. The hearing officer blithely concludes that since the district attorney never pursued charges against Funches, those statements must not be credible.

What does the hearing officer believe occurred on that night in 1990? He accepts the testimony that Caldwell was in a bedroom with his girlfriend at the time of the shooting, but notes that Caldwell ran outside and “it is unknown what occurred.” To find Caldwell guilty of Acosta’s murder, one would have to believe that Caldwell heard shots, dressed, left the apartment, picked up a shotgun, and ran out to the street, arriving in time to shoot a man fleeing from someone else’s drug deal gone bad.

But in this proceeding, the hearing officer had no need to determine whether Caldwell was guilty. Caldwell was already denied the presumption of innocence, so the hearing officer can rest his decision solely on the burden of proof. He concludes that none of the witnesses on either side “can comfortably be found reliable which is detrimental to Caldwell’s case since he has the burden of proof.” In summary: “None of these pieces of evidence show guilt but they raise further hurdles for Caldwell to show his innocence…. Caldwell has failed to meet his burden of proof.”[35]

So long as the State of California imposes the burden of proof on those seeking compensation, the Victim Compensation Board will repeat that refrain. Individuals who served time in prison for months or years for crimes they did not commit, whether due to police misconduct, abuse of prosecutorial discretion, or simply witnesses who hope to gain an advantage by providing false testimony, will continue to be relegated to the fringe of society.

As for Caldwell, he will pursue the fading glimmers of hope: contesting the Proposed Decision before the Board and litigating his appeals. Any changes in procedure will be too late to make a difference for his life or to help him set a better course for his three children.

Maurice and his family: Amaya Haynes, baby Iyanna Caldwell, Maurice, little Maurice Caldwell, and girlfriend Pamela Haynes.

Notes

[1] Ken Garcia, “Mary Cobb, Genuine Hero, Leaves Legacy of Truth, Grit,” San Francisco Chronicle, 20 January 1998, http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Mary-Cobb-Genuine-Hero-Leaves-Legacy-of-Truth-3015468.php.

[2] “California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice Final Report,” 30 June 1998, 18.

[3] Benjamin Weiser, “Settlement Is Approved in Central Park Jogger Case, but New York Deflects Blame,” The New York Times, 5 September 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/06/nyregion/41-million-settlement-for-5-convicted-in-jogger-case-is-approved.html.

[4] California Penal Code §§ 4900-4906.

[5] Table showing compensation statutes of the states prepared by The Innocence Project, https://www.innocenceproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Adeles_Compensation-Chart_Version-2017.pdf.

[6] The corresponding federal law limited payouts to $5,000 until 2003, when the Innocence Protection Act raised the limits to $50,000 per year, and $100,000 per year on death row. California Commission, pp. 103-04.

[7] “California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice Final Report,” 24-32.

[8] See https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/number-executions-state-and-region-1976.

[9] Data provided by the California Victim Compensation Board, 1 August 2017 (hereafter, “CVCB Data”). For reflection on this legislation nearer the time, see http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-exoneree-national-20141220-story.html and https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2014/may/19/california-improves-compensation-process-wrongfully-convicted-prisoners/.

[10] “CVCB Data.”

[11] In the Matter of the Application of: Luis Galicia, Board Decision of 18 February 2016, 3. See https://www.victims.ca.gov/docs/pc4900/PC-4900-Denied-Galicia.pdf.

[12] California Victim Compensation Board, “Strategic Plan 2016-2018,” 1, victims.ca.gov/docs/reports/StrategicPlan2016.pdf.

[13] “CVCB Data.”

[14] Conor Friedersdorf, “Police in California Killed More Than 610 People Over 6 Years,” The Atlantic, 5 October 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/police-in-california-killed-more-than-610-people-over-6-years/407326/.

[15] In the Matter of the Claim of Timothy Atkins, Amended Proposed Decision, 16 January 2015, Exhibit B (transcript of the Board meeting), 14. Similarly, in a recent case where the underlying conviction was for arson, Ramos identified the fact that a mother and her two babies died in the fire as “the circumstances I took into consideration” in overruling the hearing officer’s recommendation that the claim be paid. In the Matter of the Application of: George Souliotes, Board Decision of 18 May 2017, 6.

[16] “CVCB Data.”

[17] Provided by the Office of Senator William Monning, 29 August 2017, used by permission.

[18] California Penal Code § 4903(a).

[19] Cal. Admin. Code tit. 2, §§ 644(c) (burden of proof); 641(a) (requirement of corroborating evidence).

[20] Moore v. Dempsey, 261 U.S. 86, 87-88 (1923); Herrera v. Collins, 506 U.S. 390, 400 (1993). The federal statute governing habeas corpus, 28 U.S.C. § 2254(a), specifies that a federal court may consider a habeas petition “only on the ground that [the petitioner] is in custody in violation of the Constitution or laws or treaties of the United States.”

[21] See California Penal Code § 1473.

[22] In re Winchester, 53 Cal. 2d 528, 531 (1960): “Habeas corpus has become a proper remedy in this state to collaterally attack a judgment of conviction which has been obtained in violation of fundamental constitutional rights.”

[23] Coffin v. United States, 156 U.S. 432, 453 (1895). See In re Winship, 397 U.S. 358, 361 (1970).

[24] Nelson v. Colorado, 137 S. Ct. 1249, 1255 (2017), applying analysis from Mathews v. Eldridge, 424 U.S. 319 (1976).

[25] 137 S. Ct. at 1257.

[26] 137 S. Ct. at 1260-61.

[27] Maine requires a pardon by the governor, Maine Rev. Statutes § 8241; Missouri requires proof of innocence through DNA testing, Missouri Rev. Statutes § 650.058.

[28] In the Matter of the Application of: Luis Galicia, Board Decision of 18 February 2016, 3.

[29] A report by the Prison Policy Initiative found that the United States prison population had a pre-incarceration income 41% less than the average American. Bernadette Rabuy and Daniel Kopf, “Prisons of Poverty: Uncovering the Pre-Incarceration Incomes of the Imprisoned,” 5 July 2015, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/income.html.

[30] The Ohio legislature is currently considering changes to its compensation statute that would allow exonerees to recover if their civil rights were violated, even if they are not able to prove innocence. Josh Sweigart, “Provision on Wrongful Imprisonment Axed, But May Get Second Life,” Dayton Daily News, 29 June 2017, http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/state–regional-govt–politics/provision-wrongful-imprisonment-axed-but-may-get-second-life/CMBTbW7aN3xbZca84knn0L/.

[31] The state could provide some or all of the compensation in the form of payments over time, which could be terminated if the claimant were to be convicted of a new crime. Texas has this provision. See Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code, ch. 103.

[32] Associated Press, “At $75,560, Housing a Prisoner in California Now Costs More Than a Year at Harvard,” Los Angeles Times, 4 June 2017, http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-prison-costs-20170604-htmlstory.html.

[33] “Criminal Injustice,” The Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy, Berkeley School of Law (2015), https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55f70367e4b0974cf2b82009/t/56a95c112399a3a5c87c1a7b/1453939730318/WI_Criminal_InJustice_booklet_FINAL2.pdf.

[34] An argument to shift the burden of proof was made several years ago in a law review article. Daniel S. Kahn, “Presumed Guilty until Proven Innocent: The Burden of Proof in Wrongful Conviction Claims under State Compensation Statutes,” U. Mich. J. L. Reform 44 (2010): 123-68.

[35] In the Matter of the Claim of Maurice Caldwell, Proposed Decision, 14 August 2017, 24.

Peter Colby writes on social and political issues, drawing on his varied career experiences, and his work has been published in Anthropology Now. He has worked in land conservation for the last fifteen years and previously practiced litigation, real estate, and environmental law. Peter graduated from the University of Virginia and obtained his law degree from Berkeley Law, University of California.

Copyright: © 2017 Peter Colby. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Articles

The Other LAPD

Boom California on October 11, 2016

by Catherine Gudis

Homeless and formerly incarcerated people making art in LA’s Skid Row

From Boom Summer 2016, Vol 6, No 2

Based in Los Angeles’s Skid Row and comprised largely of the area’s formerly homeless, the Los Angeles Poverty Department creates performances from the writings, stories, and experiences of its participants. The mission of LAPD (yes, their acronym is purposeful) is to illuminate the social forces that shape the lives and communities of people living in poverty. For thirty years, LAPD’s creative body of work has included theatrical productions, street parades, a museum and archive, and educational programing, all aimed at the problem of “poverty,” a word that too often elides what is actually a constellation of some of the most intractable social problems of this era: institutionalized racism, the criminal justice system, the failed drug wars, crises in mental healthcare, and the forces of capital, which separate people from basic rights of citizenship. Yet what LAPD achieves is ultimately at human scale. The group brings back into view those who are most often forgotten (the disenfranchised, the impoverished, the mentally ill); the players make you feel what you might never otherwise know, even if you’ve lived it (audiences are often Skid Row residents); and the performances create ruptures in master narratives in order to supersede the social divisions between us, to allow understanding and even regeneration. In the words of its founder and director, John Malpede, LAPD allows “ripples of thought” to permeate the hard edifice of capital.¹

State of Incarceration is an LAPD production that taps the inside knowledge of core company members, including Kevin Michael Key, Riccarlo Porter, Anthony Taylor, and Ronnie Walker, and roomfuls of other participants, some from parolee reentry programs in the area. Virtually all Skid Row citizens can claim firsthand knowledge of the criminal justice system. It’s hard to escape the system once you’ve hit Skid Row, given its long history of aggressive policing, criminalization of poverty that renders illegal the daily actions of homeless people—actions such as sleeping on sidewalks and carting one’s belongings—and ticketing for minor infractions, such as jaywalking, with $100 fines or more that go to warrant and then arrest when unpaid.²One of every five people released from incarceration back into Los Angeles go directly to the streets, many taking their “gate money” (money given upon release from incarceration and reentry into society) to Skid Row when they leave state prison or county jail.³

With no paucity of experience to work with, LAPD’s process is as important as the performances themselves, particularly in aiding street-level truth and reconciliation. In workshops, the group collects data about our carceral state, recounts and improvises counter-narratives, derives new insights, and perhaps even founds a new and more egalitarian way of understanding how to comprehend the complex social reality of disenfranchisement. In its process and performance,State of Incarceration offers an affective historical accounting and cataloging of the pieces of personal experience that are rarely part of the publicly accessible record, but which comprise the experiences of significant populations and are essential to any collective reckoning with mass incarceration and the cycles of poverty and violence at its base. The performance creates a space for formerly imprisoned people to share experiences as well as strategies of survival, and it “creates a moment of exchange and reflection on how they and we, the people of California, can recover from living in a state of incarceration.”⁴

When performed, State of Incarceration (2010–present) lines cellblock bunk beds wall-to-wall for audience members to sit on, mimicking California’s overcrowded jails and prisons. It begins with the “History of Incarceration” song, a spiritual performed by the entire cast, whose combined voices forge a sense of the communal, across historical time and space, as the song connects the prison-bus journey to slave routes and chains. “This history is like used-up water to me; it flows in my veins, in my blood, in my community,” they sing. Similarly poetic are monologues expressive of interior lives born out of the memories of LAPD performers, two of whom landed back in prison between productions of State of Incarceration (one for stealing toothpaste).⁵Doing jumping jacks in one’s cell becomes liberation (“rhythm moves my spirit. . . lost in freedom”). A prisoner intones his upcoming fate—”thirty days in the hole” (solitary confinement) with “four walls, no TV, no books, only me,” and repeats a chant that includes, “I walk. I sit. I look. I think. I cry. . . time rises and falls like the ocean. . . I exist.”

At the performance’s end, the players ritualistically clean “one wall at a time,” “one brick at a time,” “washing down for the addicted, weak, and sick,” enacting a baptism of forgiveness and release. Finally, they prepare for communion, using “the spread,” another prison ritual. Ramen, Cheetos, and plenty of garlic are base for the communal meal, added bit by bit to a giant garbage bag opened on the floor. Audience members are invited to share the “spread,” as actors put plates of food into our hands. Thus, we too take communion, joined together with both those acting as prisoners and guards, and perhaps together we feel some of the responsibility of living in a state that is supported so fundamentally by the policing and incarceration of our most vulnerable members.

Taken in its entirety, State of Incarceration is a litany of the rituals of incarceration, from the ride on the bus—termed the Slave Ship in the performance—to the state prison, to therapy and passing the time, to release and the Kafkaesque struggle to remain out of the control of the criminal justice system. What follows is a short excerpt that illuminates a few of the struggles the newly released face.

Excerpts from State of Incarceration by the Los Angeles Poverty Department.

Performance directed by John Malpede and Henriëtte Brouwers.

RONNIE: Relapse + JIMMIE: Johnny Mack (two texts inter-cut)

RONNIE: I am being released from prison soon. I have no money and nowhere to go, and on my release my addiction will start fighting for control of my thoughts.

JIMMIE: I committed a crime that, you know, I’m not proud of. I got out of the penitentiary and the government don’t have too many places where a fellow like me can get a job.

RONNIE: All of my good ideas will go straight out of the window if my addiction wins over my thinking. However I have too much pride to leave jail and go straight to a program. How could I even think of embarrassing myself like that?

JIMMIE: They tell you to be honest on an application. I can guarantee you that the moment I walk out of that door, they throw my application in the garbage.

But on the other hand I don’t have a problem with getting high in jail—only when I’m on the streets. But I need money and clothes and the only way to get that is to sell dope.

JIMMIE: Years ago, when you got out of prison you could get on welfare. Nowadays, you can’t go on welfare, unless for three months, or sometimes you even can’t get on welfare. So, you are out on the street, in a shelter, or you are back to what you were doing. You know what I’m saying? No way out of it.

RONNIE: Nobody is going to hire me because of my record. So I am going to have to find a way to stay out of jail, take care of myself and stay off drugs.

JIMMIE: Because like I was saying, the government does not have a lot of places where a guy like me could go. It is totally up to you to get out of the situation.

RONNIE: And the reality is: I hit downtown at 6 PM, and by 9 PM I was high with my girlfriend.

My First Job

DEBORAH: The first chance I had to get a job, I had to go down to the office and get a print out of my record. I had to do it that day—or no job. I had one dollar to my name. When I got there, they told me the record was free.

WORKER: If it don’t take longer than 10 minutes to print out, it’s free. After that it cost $5 a minute.

DEBORAH: I didn’t say anything, just nodded. I didn’t care. I wasn’t gonna let anything stop me from getting that job. I wasn’t gonna put the brakes on myself.

WORKER: I asked you, do you want to have me print it? After 10 minutes it cost $5 a minute. You understand?

DEBORAH: If it came out too long, then I’d deal with that, somehow. But I wasn’t gonna give up, get hopeless. Walk away. No way.

WORKER: “Yes? You want me to print it?” That girl didn’t have a dollar to her name.

DEBORAH: I stood there while it was printing and every guilty thought came back into my head. How I was guilty of this, and that and some more this and that. How they were gonna find things out. How I’d messed up, messed up, couldn’t help but mess up. How they hated me, knew I was stupid, knew I would mess up and always keep messing up. The longer I waited the more hopeless my situation was.

WORKER: The whole time it was printing she stood there scared to death I was gonna ask her to pay something she couldn’t.

DEBORAH: What was I waitin for? You know they’re not gonna give it to me. I’m not gonna get the paper. What is wrong with me thinking I was gonna get that job? Get real. What the hell you waiting around for? Just to be humiliated. You like that. Being humiliated. You like that. That’s what feels good to you. Feels right. You like it, otherwise you’d get the hell out of here right now. You wouldn’t have come here in the first place.

WORKER: I came back with the print out. It came out to eleven minutes. “All right Miss Anderson, here you are.” Eleven minutes, but I just gave it to her and didn’t say anything. Didn’t ask her to pay.

DEBORAH: While I was waiting for those papers, it all came back to me. I was nearly overwhelmed by the stigma, the stamp of being a criminal—a convict. I was overwhelmed by the fear.

Notes

Photographs from a performance of State of Incarceration courtesy of the Los Angeles Poverty Department.

1. Malpede uses this phrase in connection with a discussion of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 poverty tour through Eastern Kentucky. Lynda Frye Burnham, “When Kennedy Came to Kentucky,”American Theatre (July/August 2004), 33.

2. “Homelessness is not a Criminal Activity,” public education statement developed by the Los Angeles Community Action Network, November 2003, accessed 13 October 2009,www.cangress.org ; John Thomason, “Can a ‘Homeless Bill of Rights’ End the Criminalization of LA’s Most Vulnerable Residents,” The Nation, 13 October 2014, accessed 1 December 2014,http://www.thenation.com/article/can-homeless-bill-rights-end-criminalization-las-most-vulnerable-residents/.

3. Robert Greene, “From Jail to Skid Row, Where ‘All Healing Needs Are Met,’” Los Angeles Times, 4 February 2016, accessed 1 June 2016, http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-starks-los-angeles-homeless-20160203-story.html ; Abby Newell and Cindy Chang, “Ex-Inmates Want L.A. County to Stop Dumping Mentally Ill Inmates in Skid Row,” Los Angeles Times, 28 September 2015, accessed 1 June 2016, http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-jail-skid-row-releases-20150928-story.html .

4. “Radar L.A.: State of Incarceration,” LA Stage Times, 10 June 2011, accessed 1 June 2016,http://thisstage.la/2011/06/radar-l-a-state-of-incarceration/. Also see “State of Incarceration” project descriptions at Los Angeles Poverty Department’s website, accessed 1 June 2016,http://lapovertydept.org/projects/state-of-incarceration/.

5. Conversation with LAPD members Walter Fears and Henriëtte Brouwers, 2 February 2014.

Articles

Proposition 47

Boom California on October 11, 2016

by Marisa Arrona

Reimagining justice, opportunity, and healing

From Boom Summer 2016, Vol 6, No 2

Rochelle Solombrino was sixteen when she got her first DUI, the same age as her first suicide attempt. A year later, she nearly died from alcohol poisoning. When she was twenty-four, she almost died of a heroin overdose.

“I was on a suicide mission,” Solombrino, now forty-nine, says ruefully. “It wasn’t normal to think like that, but, back then, it was hard to understand what ‘normal’ was.”

She had her first drink at age six and was encouraged by an uncle to start smoking marijuana at a young age. Her stepfather sexually molested her.

She also knew she was gay, but because her family was conservative, and included an uncle who was a conservative pastor, she was scared to be true to herself. Alcohol and drugs were the only things she knew would numb her pain. By fourteen, she had tried not only marijuana but also PCP, LSD, and cocaine.

It should be little surprise, then, that Solombrino’s story includes a period of incarceration. After being arrested a number of times for nonviolent crimes such as petty theft, drug possession, and disorderly conduct driven by her addictions, she was sentenced to eighteen months in state prison. Solombrino became a victim of California’s misguided prioritization of incarceration over crime prevention programs like drug treatment.

“It never made any sense to me that people like myself who were convicted of nonviolent crimes were serving time in the same place as people serving twenty-five-to-life sentences for violent crimes,” she says.

Solombrino’s story is not unique.

Over a three-decade period from 1981 to 2011, the money California spent on prisons and on incarcerating people increased by more than 1,500 percent. During this time, the state also reduced the number of behavioral health treatment beds by nearly half. Meanwhile the recidivism rate skyrocketed to nearly 70 percent, meaning two out of three people released from prison committed new crimes landing them back in prison within three years.

CHANGE YOUR RECORD CHANGE YOUR LIFE SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 27, 2015 HELD AT EXPOSiTION PARK 2015 Photo by Valerie Goodloe

At a fair in South Los Angeles, people get help applying to have their records changed.

Much of our criminal justice system has proceeded aggressively with the idea that locking up criminals for as long as possible is the most effective way of dealing with crime. But it has become increasingly clear over the years that this approach has failed.

No matter how tough we made the punishments, too many people have cycled in and out of our justice system, But we know now there are much better ways to improve public safety than locking up people like Solombrino in our jails and prisons where they not only don’t receive rehabilitation services but then, upon release, are prevented from successfully reentering society because of their criminal records. After decades of soaring prison costs and recidivism rates, it is imperative that California does whatever it takes to improve our approach to safety and justice.

We have learned a lot over the years about how to deter crime and change criminal behavior. While prison is the proper punishment for the most violent criminals, it often does more harm than good for people convicted of nonviolent offenses, increasing the chance they will keep committing crimes, perpetuating the cycle.

Many California voters believe this, which is why 60 percent of them in November 2014 approved Proposition 47, a measure that changed simple drug possession and five petty-theft crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. Polling done a year after the law went into effect shows that support for Prop. 47 has grown to 67 percent.¹

In strong complementary ways, the law helped continue to address the severe overcrowding in the state prison system that the Supreme Court ruled in June 2011 was unconstitutional, and which led to a court-ordered population cap. In the eighteen months since the law went into effect, the population of the state’s overcrowded prison system has been reduced by more than 5,000 people.²Similarly, California’s overcrowded county jails have also seen their populations reduced as a result of Prop. 47: a recent report by the Public Policy Institute of California found that in the first year after Prop. 47 was approved, jail populations decreased by about 9 percent.

The initiative has also saved the state and counties tens of millions of dollars—money mandated by the law’s language to be reallocated to community-based crime-prevention programs like drug and mental health treatment that help break the cycles of crime, risk prevention, education programs for at-risk schoolchildren, and trauma recovery services to help victims of crime. Now that Governor Jerry Brown’s Department of Finance has calculated the savings generated by Prop. 47 during the first full fiscal year the law has been on the books, the money will be put into the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Fund and dispersed early next year to local jurisdictions by the Board of State and Community Corrections as part of a grant process.

To be sure, Prop. 47 did not decriminalize misdemeanors, nor did it take away law enforcement’s ability to hold defendants accountable. Law enforcement and the legal system can still arrest, detain, and jail for up to a year someone convicted of a misdemeanor—including the six crimes impacted by Prop. 47. If someone is convicted of multiple misdemeanors, that person can be sentenced to multiple years in jail.

Significantly, the law is also retroactive, meaning that anyone in California with a felony conviction on his or her criminal record for one of the six low-level crimes impacted by Prop. 47 can apply to the courts to have that felony reduced to a misdemeanor. It’s the largest opportunity in the history of the United States for people to change past felony convictions on their records—indeed, as many as one million Californians may be eligible.

In California today, nearly 5,000 restrictions are placed on people with felonies on their criminal records, and more than half of those restrictions are employment-related. Someone with a felony conviction on his or her record, no matter how old it is, cannot obtain a cosmetology license or receive college grants, for example. As a result, many people find it hard or impossible to secure and maintain employment, housing, financial aid to go back to school, and other factors that are key to achieving economic security and family stability.

Solombrino knows this well. Upon being released from prison, she was enrolled in a twelve-step program at Fred Brown Recovery Services in San Pedro, which helped significantly as she found her feet back in society. After successfully completing the program, she started working for Fred Brown, first as a sober-living manager at one of its residential homes and then as an office manager. Today she is the operations coordinator for the entire organization.

Having experienced sober living for seven years now, Solombrino is saving to buy her first home. Four years ago, she achieved a major milestone: getting her driver’s license back. She bought herself a used Jeep—her dream car.

But her criminal history became an issue last year when Fred Brown applied for a county contract. To qualify, no one on the organization’s staff could have a felony conviction on their record. Suddenly, despite all the work she’d done to turn herself around and get her life back on the right track, Solombrino was in danger of having all of it taken away.

But then, at a job fair, she met Prop. 47 advocates who told her about the chance she had to reduce her old felony convictions to misdemeanors. She confirmed that she was eligible and immediately filed an application for relief under Prop. 47. Hers was one of nearly 250,000 applications that have been filed to date.

“I was feeling completely defeated before Prop. 47,” Solombrino says. “Even though I’d done all of this positive stuff in my life, the county could’ve taken away my job even though I’d already paid my debt to society.”

The experience was reminiscent of one from years earlier, when Solombrino applied for Section 8 housing but was denied because of her criminal history.

“That was another defeat,” Solombrino says. “That was just another reason to get drunk.”

Increasingly, policymakers are recognizing the futility of sitting around and waiting for crime to happen and then going after the people who commit those crimes. They’re beginning to invest more into programs that seek to prevent crime from happening in the first place.

In Los Angeles County, for example, the Board of Supervisors has created a task force comprised of officials from the Probation and Sheriff’s departments, as well as other key county representatives. They were tasked with developing a plan for reaching out to as many people as possible in Los Angeles who are eligible to change an old felony on their record to a misdemeanor. County leaders are also working to create jobs and provide services to people once they have received Prop. 47 relief. They’re keeping tabs on the amount of money Prop. 47 saves the county, and they are engaging community members to help decide how that savings will be reinvested.

But in Los Angeles and jurisdictions across the state, more needs to be done.

Rochelle Solombrino

Proposition 47 requires new approaches, and everyone in the justice system needs to be committed to adapting to the change in state law.

Local justice agencies should be expanding best practices in diversion, targeted deterrence, supervised probation, treatment, collaborative courts and neighborhood problem solving, and other strategies that can help protect public safety without wasting costly state prison beds.

Prop. 47 is a historic opportunity to get smart about our justice resources. Adapting to reform is what Californians voted for, what they expect, and what needs to happen now. The old way of doing things busted our budgets and didn’t do anything to improve the health and safety of our communities. Returning to the ways of the past will only waste resources and fail to stop the cycle of crime. We can do better than we’ve done in the past, and Prop. 47 is beginning to show the way.

“I can positively say that although I began my road of recovery from active addiction the day I entered treatment at Fred Brown Recovery Services, it wasn’t until I embarked on Prop. 47 that I started to truly believe I wasn’t a bad person trying to get good, but a good person trying to get well,” Solombrino says. “I began to feel real hope that I could clear the wreckage of my past, redeem myself, and restore my future.”

Notes

1. The California Endowment, Californians Back Prop. 47; Want Investments in Prevention,November 2015 (available at www.calendow.org/survey-californians-back-prop-47-want-investments-in-prevention/).

2. State of California, Office of Governor Edmund G. Brown, California State Budget 2016–2017(available at www.ebudget.ca.gov/FullBudgetSummary.pdf ), 44.

Articles

The Road to Private Prison Divestment

Boom California on October 11, 2016

by Anthony Williams

Inside the University of California student campaign

From Boom Summer 2016, Vol 6, No 2

My first encounter with the Afrikan Black Coalition—the largest California-wide Black youth organization, with chapters on fifteen University of California and California State University campuses—was at its January 2015 annual conference at the University of California, Irvine. I was one of forty delegates from the University of California, Berkeley, and joined more than 600 Black students from California’s public universities attending the conference. The Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend event was full of introductions, workshops, caucuses, dancing, and food. It was one of the first times in my twenty-six years of life that I had been surrounded by that many Black people, and I did not know what to do with myself. Blackness is not monolithic: in skin tone, physical build, personality, and presentation, our diversity was wonderfully evident at the conference.

Each year the conference is held on a different campus; but given the demographics of the University of California system, such a large gathering of Black students always attracts undue attention. Merely existing as a Black person can be an isolating experience, particularly when UC campuses maintain a less than 4 percent Black student body¹. While we enjoyed each other’s company, we also felt under perpetual surveillance by non-Black students, campus visitors, and campus police. While grabbing In-N-Out during dinner, we were stared at; while walking the campus UC Irvine, students pointed out an increased police presence; at the hotel we felt like unwelcomed guests. This constant policing of Blackness was a reminder that our work to improve the deplorable admission and retention rates of Black students is far from complete. At UC Berkeley, my alma mater, I was one of 911 Black undergraduate students enrolled in Fall 2015 out of a total of 27,496,²making up 3.3% of the total student population. To combat this isolation, the Afrikan Black Coalition (ABC) connects the work Black students do on campuses to the wider struggle that people of African descent experience throughout the world, not just in North America. I felt compelled to do more for fellow Black folks as I entered my final year of undergraduate education at Cal, and joined the Afrikan Black Coalition as a writer that summer.

Members of the Afrikan Black Coalition in February 2016. Photograph by Charlene Macharia.

The year 2015 marked one year since the murder of Michael Brown, Jr. in Ferguson, five years since the “accidental” murder of Aiyana Stanley-Jones in Detroit, and six years since the murder of Oscar Grant in Oakland. The budding #BlackLivesMatter campaign brought to public prominence—for the first time for many Americans—the link between mass incarceration and the brutal overpolicing of Black communities across the United States. That same year, the Afrikan Black Coalition—led by ABC Political Director Yoel Haile, a University of California, Santa Barbara, alumnus and University of California, Berkeley, Goldman School of Public Policy master’s of public policy graduate—launched a campaign to educate staff and students on the mass incarceration of Black people. As an organization fighting for Black liberation, we want to abolish the prison industrial complex. We want political prisoners released; we want private prisons gone; and, ultimately, we want to live in a world without prisons. ABC seeks the abolition of all forms of slavery in their entirety, and we believe that begins by recognizing that prisons are a form of legal slavery.

United States history proves helpful for animating this argument for prison abolition. The Thirteenth Amendment was ratified 6 December 1865 and is often celebrated as the end of American slavery. Yet the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution reads:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

The caveat, “except as punishment for a crime,” suggests that the Amendment never intended slavery to end necessarily, but rather for it to merely mutate into something more easily countenanced—or ignored—by the public. In his study of the California prison industrial complex, calling this “the sedimentations of slavery,” Brady Heiner identifies California’s situation, with convict labor producing significant profit for prisons, as a functional substitute for the plantation.³Bryan Stevenson has made this argument on a more popular level, highlighting that American slavery has evolved, with the racializing of criminality effectively becoming an extension of chattel slavery, chain gangs, and the convict leasing system that was meant to maintain cheap labor by treating Black people as less than human.

Incarceration, like enslavement, is a temporary condition that is often extended and exacerbated by housing discrimination, occupational discrimination, social stigma, and disenfranchisement after release. Private prisons and those who invest in them seek to profit from this grotesque state of affairs. They represent only a small portion of mass incarceration in the United States, but they are the portion that is the most symptomatic of the American justice system. University of Wisconsin School of Business Professor Anita Mukherjee reviewed data from private prisons in Mississippi—where California has sent inmates to ease overcrowding in its own state prisons—and found that, though they are advertised as money-saving ventures for the states that house them, “prisoners in private facilities had an increase in their sentence of 4 to 7 percent, which equaled 60 to 90 days for the average prisoner.”⁴At $50 per bed occupied, sixty days adds around $3,000 per prisoner without any guarantee of fair treatment. It’s a system that must be fed constantly not just with taxpayers’ money, but with taxpayers’ bodies.

For these reasons, the Afrikan Black Coalition hopes to see a world without private prisons—and eventually all prisons—so we started where we had presence and, as students, leverage: the University of California. Based on research by Enlace, the Afrikan Black Coalition began an investigation into the connection between the University of California and private prisons.⁵We focused on three of the largest private prison corporations: Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), Geo Group, and G4S. Through conversations with the University of California’s Chief Investment Officer, Jadgeep Bachher, Afrikan Black Coalition members began a campaign of phone calls and emails to put pressure on the university to determine exactly how much the UC invested in the three corporations. Initially, we were stonewalled; so, we filed a public records act request to obtain the necessary information, but Bachher provided the information before we received the records in response to our official request.

Anthony Williams. Photograph by Jasmine Curtis.

As a coalition of nine UC campuses, we released a statement in November 2015 that exposed for the first time that the University of California was supporting the three largest private prison operators with $25 million in investments using student and taxpayer money. During that same month, all nine UC chapters of Afrikan Black Coalition voted unanimously to demand an end to these investments immediately. This vote was in support of an internal document, the Prison Divestment Resolution, which spelled out eight demands. The primary demand was simple: divest the $25 million sum in CCA, the Geo Group, and G4S.

After two meetings with high-ranking UC officials, Yoel Haile, Terron Wilkerson (UCSB alumnus), and I had our first meeting with the Chief Investment Officer, Jagdeep Bachher in December. We made the moral and ethical case for the UC to stop investing in private prisons based on evidence compiled by researchers across the country, including the Responsible Endowments Coalition. I shared the experiences of my older cousin, who is in his mid-thirties and has spent half of his life in prison. He made mistakes—and it is important that he be accountable for his actions—but it’s also important to recognize the way the system of mass incarceration disenfranchises him outside of prison, even after he has served his time and experienced the abuse he faced inside of prison.

In arguing that divesting from private prisons was an imperative, not an option, we were pleasantly surprised when Bachher told us that he agreed and wanted to partner with us to reach our goal. In the days that followed, we met repeatedly with University of California representatives but received no guarantee of divestment. As we waited for the CIO to follow through, we published the campaign demands on the ABC blog. As the director of communications for the campaign, I sent hundreds of emails and made dozens of phone calls to drum up press coverage on the university’s investment into private prisons to make sure that public pressure would keep the CIO and the UC true to their word. Finally, in our second and final meeting with Bachher, he informed us that the University of California would sell the shares by 31 December 2015. There could be no greater holiday gift for ABC and me than a fulfilled promise from Bachher, who had kept his word. On 17 December, we issued a press release about the unanimous vote for prison divestment. The day after that, our most triumphant win yet—prison divestment—occurred. It was an important victory for our campaign and for a simple moral truth: no one should profit from the suffering of others—but it was only a first step.

Photograph by Jasmine Curtis.

The Afrikan Black Coalition is still campaigning. We spoke at the February 2016 UC Regents Committee on Investments meeting and the March 2016 UC Regents meeting about the university divesting its shares of Wells Fargo. The University of California has publicly stated that they do not intend to sell their shares in Wells Fargo.⁶Wells Fargo, however, is a major lender for private prison corporations and has a history of discriminatory lending lawsuits.⁷Although Jagdeep Baccher issued an April 2016 memorandum informing UC foundations that they sold their holdings in private prisons, the Afrikan Black Coalition is still awaiting quarterly investment reports from him, as we have requested. The sum that was invested in private prisons has not been reinvested in education and companies that are owned or controlled by the formerly incarcerated, also as we requested. Finally, the Afrikan Black Coalition still seeks for the UC regents to create a Socially Responsible Investment Committee, with representatives of the Afrikan Black Coalition and UC Students Association, that actively researches whether future corporations the UC invests in are held to ethical standards.

Yet even with these unresolved concerns, I often think back to a particular moment in our first meeting with Chief Investment Officer Jagdeep Baccher. I was skeptical when he offered to partner with us. Although the University of California has not officially declared divestment from private prisons “as a matter of policy,” and $25 million of an almost $100 billion UC investment profile is small in relative terms, it is still a major organizational win. And for a student like me—Black, queer, with formerly incarcerated family members—the support from fellow Black students, staff, and a high-ranking UC official felt enormous. When I stepped onto UC Irvine’s campus over a year ago for my first conference, I had no idea that my efforts could have such an impact. We made it clear that to invest in private prisons is to invest in the enslavement and dehumanization of Black, brown, and migrant lives. Our Black existence is not disposable, our university degrees do not make us any better than incarcerated individuals, and we are making it plain that all Black Lives Matter.

Photograph by Jasmine Curtis.

Notes

1.
http://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/chapters/chapter-7.html .

2.
http://opa.berkeley.edu/uc-berkeley-fall-enrollment-data .

3. Brady Heiner, “Excavating the Sedimentations of Slavery: The Unfinished Project of American Abolition,” Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration, Geoffrey Adelsberg, Lisa Guenther, and Scott Zeman, eds. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 13–42.

4.
http://news.wisc.edu/study-finds-private-prisons-keep-inmates-longer-without-reducing-future-crime/.

5. Enlace is an organization that calls itself “a strategic alliance of low-wage worker centers, unions, and community organizations in Mexico and in the U.S.” They were vital to the success of our campaign, and they also supported activists and students at Columbia University who successfully campaigned for their school to divest from private prisons. They were the first private university to do so.

6.
https://theaggie.org/2016/01/29/afrikan-black-coalition-calls-for-uc-to-divest-from-wells-fargo/.

7. “Banking on Immigrant Detention: Wells Fargo’s Ties to the Private Prison Industry,”http://public-accountability.org/2012/09/banking-on-immigrant-detention/.

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Proposition 47

Notes

The Road to Private Prison Divestment

by Anthony Williams

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