An Open Letter to Louisiana

Louisiana has long been recognized for having the most people incarcerated per capita than any other group of people on the planet or even in the history of the world. This is a dubious distinction at best and says far more about Louisiana’s culture than it does about those it incarcerates.

Even before COVID-19 emerged, decarceration as a concept was being discussed in virtually every state in our nation. One principle reason is that incarceration is far more expensive than sending people to college and it accomplishes far, far less toward our society’s best interests. In fact, Louisiana taxpayers spend on average twice as much on keeping a prisoner imprisoned ($25,000 per year) than they do educating a K-12 student ($12,500 per year) – which interestingly enough actually ensures in the long run more people going to prison for want of the skills necessary to access other options.

Books like Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration by Emily Bazelon demonstrate what prosecutors can do – and are doing – to address their own participation in sending too many to prison for too long, often unnecessarily and even when those charged are actually innocent.

The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections admits that they hold more than 7000 geriatric prisoners, the vast majority of which pose no realistic threat to public safety, while draining the Department’s coffers. In the last legislative session, many were surprised to hear about the case of one man who is costing the Department more than a million dollars per year in medical bills and was one of the reasons this year’s budget will need to be re-visited.

And now we have COVID-19 challenging every Louisiana citizen to consider new ways to approach our lives, few of which we could even have imagined two months ago. We are being encouraged, begged, even ordered and subsidized to practice new and necessary alternatives to business as usual. Yet we are ignoring the powder keg our prisons, jails, and detention centers have now become – at least partly because of our commitment to locking our citizens up at a rate and for periods at which other Americans can only shake their heads.

We need to take this opportunity (which may last longer than we might have hoped) to make the bold moves that could release funds badly needed to fight the COVID-19 pandemic – inside and outside our prisons – by releasing every incarcerated citizen rationally possible and as immediately as can be arranged. Send home the geriatric and most physically vulnerable prisoners, those who were convicted of non-violent crimes, those who have done more than twenty years and demonstrated a commitment to rehabilitation, those who will be getting out within a year anyway. Send them home.

Many of those in Angola – as one example – have prepared themselves for just such an opportunity by taking advantage of training in employable trades and programs that address the issues that brought them to prison in the first place. Releasing them would jump-start a new, more rational and less expensive way to live in community with each other in a world that is demanding our commitment to all Louisiana citizens at this difficult time.

Angola Prisoners Refuse To Be Slaves

Ten days ago, on May 8th -- the same day a work stoppage occurred just last year -- thirty-eight men in a working cell block at Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana refused to go to the fields for their work assignment. The men were loaded on a bus immediately and sent to Camp Jaguar, where prisoners are placed in extended lockdown 23-hours per day. To make room for the ones coming in, thirty-eight men who had been housed in Camp Jaguar for punitive reasons were sent to replace the missing workers so the fieldwork could continue as planned. Apparently, this is the new Standard Operating Procedure for such occurrences.

The administration and staff at Angola are heavily populated by second and third generation prisoncrats, not a few of which represent members of extended families whose professional and economic well-being have been built on the backs of the 6,300 incarcerated citizens they presently ride herd on. A goodly number even live on the prison property itself, raising families in the shadows of the gun towers. Guards are called "freemen" (as opposed to "slaves," one must assume). And their future security seems to be assured since the numbers at Angola have risen 1200 since 2010.

Prisoners who have been at Angola for decades have told me that the administration is working hard to suppress organizing activities inside the prison, but that there is more such activity now than there ever has been and it appears to be slowly but surely building. One prisoner suggested that this could be at least partly because "these new young guys coming in have no regard for rules. They're not built for work, so you definitely can't slave 'em. They won't have it."

Asked what might help to address this issue, the prisoner suggested giving them incentives: "More money, more training, more education -- so they can help their families as well as themselves. Putting them into the fields picking cotton in the hot sun just gives them plenty of time to think about how the 13th Amendment of the Constitution actually legalizes using incarcerated citizens as slaves."

Reports from prisoners also suggest that overuse of solitary confinement, health care that amounts to torture, desperately inadequate mental health care (often exacerbated by long-term solitary confinement), and excessive force by guards has created a hostile environment that results in an increasing level of prisoner-to-prisoner violence. Mainstream media rarely are allowed to hear about it, they say. But one prisoner reported this morning that fifteen incarcerated citizens at Angola have been stabbed in the past three weeks alone. "One paranoid schizophrenic prisoner stabbed five people in one day," he said.

Hopelessness haunts the institution that uses solitary confinement at four times the national average and is well known to have kept Albert Woodfox in solitary confinement for forty-three years because of his Black Panther activism in the 1970s. Before he re-entered the free world in 2016, Woodfox forced the Louisiana DOC to sign an agreement not to use solitary confinement punitively in the future, but as he's noted since his release, an agreement and the follow-through are far from the same thing.

Use of the "life without parole" option also creates hopelessness for many at Angola, since Louisiana uses that option at four times the national rate, as well, with the current tally being 5000 incarcerated citizens, many of whom would have been eligible for parole in most other Southern states. This increases their sense that there's nothing to live for and no reason to care about consequences for crimes committed inside the institution. It also increases the likelihood of suicide attempts. "One guy went out to the field this spring and tried to hang himself on the fence," reported a prisoner. "If the other guys hadn't brought him down, he would have died out there."

Decarcerate Louisiana, a movement that's been trying to organize the prisoners in Louisiana for nearly twenty years, has been severely hampered by the lack of public support for the human rights of the state's incarcerated citizens. Members say they've been inspired by the Free Alabama Movement in the past year. Still, members hit the national news a year ago when word of a work stoppage at Angola on May 8th, 2018, leaked to the outside world. And it now appears that at least some of those inside still remember, are still committed, and are waiting for the rest of us to get on board.

On This Day in History

The perception that many people in the United States have is that Africans were helpless victims of their own inability to protect themselves from their "betters" (that would be the White Europeans, of course) and that, as a result, they sort of "deserved" whatever came after that. The 30 million or so who died crossing the Atlantic from abuse, disease, starvation, suicide, or just being thrown overboard so the White slavers (all God-fearing men, needless to say) could avoid prosecution for the crime of being slavers were just collateral damage, as it were. Mutinies on slave ships with the exception of The Amistad have been largely ignored. And the African-American uprisings that have occurred in the past one hundred years have invariably been called "riots" and used to suggest that Black folks are just...well...like that ...you know?

Justice Roars!

Every now and again, I blog about a blog. And that's what I'm doing today. I had been vaguely aware of The Louisiana Justice Institute for some months, having run across some of its activists here and there in the course of doing the work I do. It's not like they're low profile folks. In fact, Institute Co-Director Tracie Washington was named this month by The Root, the daily online magazine published by the Washington Post, as one of its twenty Leading Black Women Advocating Change. And somewhere along the line, I started noticing links on my Facebook site to posts on Justice Roars, the blog of the Institute. But you know how it is, you're moving at the speed of light through your own life, trying to stay on top of the 419 plates you have spinning, and who has time to really pay attention, right?

Then, one day (this morning, obviously), you wake up knowing you don't have to leave the house before you have your coffee (for a change) and you somewhat arbitrarily read a post from one of those links and get blown the eff away. Now, I'm asking myself, how did I avoid realizing the nature of these folks' work all this time? (*shakes head ruefully*)

The Hidden History of Katrina

In the interest of priming the pump, as it were, after a few months of spending virtually all of my time elsewhere, I'm going to post some excellent and important things that other people have written. Hopefully, this will begin the process of getting me over whatever block I've been up against and bring my readers back so that I can re-establish that connection. I've missed you more than I can say.

The first piece I've chosen is by author and activist Jim Ridgeway, who is currently the Senior Washington Correspondent for Mother Jones magazine and has been around even longer than I have, which is saying something. I began communicating with Jim about a solitary confinement watch project and wound up reading the following on his blog, Unsilent Generation. He was kind enough to allow it's re-posting here. Prepare to be aghast. Once more.

The Hidden History of Katrina*
by James Ridgeway

Confronted with images of corpses floating in the blackened floodwaters or baking in the sun on abandoned highways, there aren’t too many people left who see what happened following Hurricane Katrina as a purely “natural” disaster. The dominant narratives that have emerged, in the four years since the storm, are of a gross human tragedy, compounded by social inequities and government ineptitude—a crisis subsequently exploited in every way possible for political and financial gain.

But there’s an even harsher truth, one some New Orleans residents learned in the very first days but which is only beginning to become clear to the rest of us: What took place in this devastated American city was no less than a war, in which victims whose only crimes were poverty and blackness were treated as enemies of the state.

It started immediately after the storm and flood hit, when civilian aid was scarce—but private security forces already had boots on the ground. Some, like Blackwater (which has since redubbed itself Xe), were under federal contract, while a host of others answered to wealthy residents and businessmen who had departed well before Katrina and needed help protecting their property from the suffering masses left behind. According Jeremy Scahill’s reporting in The Nation, Blackwater set up an HQ in downtown New Orleans. Armed as they would be in Iraq, with automatic rifles, guns strapped to legs, and pockets overflowing with ammo, Blackwater contractors drove around in SUVs and unmarked cars with no license plates.

“When asked what authority they were operating under,” Scahill reported, “one guy said, ‘We’re on contract with the Department of Homeland Security.’ Then, pointing to one of his comrades, he said, ‘He was even deputized by the governor of the state of Louisiana. We can make arrests and use lethal force if we deem it necessary.’ The man then held up the gold Louisiana law enforcement badge he wore around his neck.”

The Blackwater operators described their mission in New Orleans as “securing neighborhoods,” as if they were talking about Sadr City. When National Guard troops descended on the city, the Army Times described their role as fighting “the insurgency in the city.” Brigadier Gen. Gary Jones, who commanded the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force, told the paper, “This place is going to look like Little Somalia. We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.”

Ten days after the storm, the New York Times reported that although the city was calm with no signs of looting (though it acknowledged this had taken place previously), “New Orleans has turned into an armed camp, patrolled by thousands of local, state, and federal law enforcement officers, as well as National Guard troops and active-duty soldiers.” The local police superintendent ordered all weapons, including legally registered firearms, confiscated from civilians. But as the Times noted, that order didn’t “apply to hundreds of security guards hired by businesses and some wealthy individuals to protect property…[who] openly carry M-16’s and other assault rifles.” Scahill spoke to Michael Montgomery, the chief of security for one wealthy businessman who said his men came under fire from “black gangbangers” near the Ninth Ward. Armed with AR-15s and Glocks, Montgomery and his men “unleashed a barrage of bullets in the general direction of the alleged shooters on the overpass. ‘After that, all I heard was moaning and screaming, and the shooting stopped. That was it. Enough said.’”

Malik Rahim, a Vietnam veteran and longtime community activist, was one of the organizers of the Common Ground Collective, which quickly began dispensing basic aid and medical care in the first days after the hurricane. But far from aiding the relief workers, Rahim told me this week, the police and troops who began patrolling the streets treated them as criminals or “insurgents.” African American men caught outside also ran the risk of crossing paths with roving vigilante patrols who shot at will, he says. In this dangerous environment, Common Ground began to rely on white volunteers to move through a city that had simply become too perilous for blacks.

In July, the local television station WDSU released a home video, taken shortly after the storm hit, of a local man, Paul Gleason, who bragged to two police officers about shooting looters in the Algiers section of New Orleans.

“Did you have any problems with looters,” asked an officer.

“Not anymore,” said Gleason.

“Not anymore?”

“They’re all dead,” said Gleason.

The officer asked, “What happened?”

“We shot them,” said Gleason.

“How many did you shoot?

“Thirty-eight.”

“Thirty-eight people? What did you do with the bodies?”

“We gave them to the Coast Guard,” said Gleason.

Gleason told his story with a cup of red wine in one hand and riding a tractor from Blaine Kern’s Mardi Gras World.

Although the government’s aid efforts were in chaos, those involved in the self-generated community rescue and relief efforts were often seen as a threat. Even so, Common Ground, founded in the days after Katrina hit, eventually managed to serve more than half a million people, operating feeding stations, opening free health and legal clinics, and later rebuilding homes and planting trees. But they “never got a dime” from the federal government, says Rahim. The FBI did, however, recruit one of Common Ground’s founders, Brandon Darby, as an informant, later using him to infiltrate groups planning actions at the 2008 Republican National Convention.

And while the government couldn’t seem to keep people from dying on rooftops or abandoned highways, it wasted no time building a temporary jail in New Orleans.

Burl Cain, the warden of the notorious Angola Prison, a former slave plantation that’s now home to 5,000 inmates, was rushed down to the city to oversee “Camp Greyhound” in the city’s bus terminal. According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the jail “was constructed by inmates from Angola and Dixon state prisons and was outfitted with everything a stranded law enforcer could want, including top-of-the-line recreational vehicles to live in and electrical power, courtesy of a yellow Amtrak locomotive. There are computers to check suspects’ backgrounds and a mug shot station—complete with heights marked in black on the wall that serves as the backdrop.”

In the virtual martial law imposed in New Orleans after Katrina, the war on the poor sometimes even spilled over into the war on terror. In his latest book Zeitoun, published in July, Dave Eggers tells the story of a local Syrian immigrant who stayed in New Orleans to protect his properties and ended up organizing makeshift relief efforts and rescuing people in a canoe. He continued right up until he was arrested by a group of unidentified, heavily armed men in uniform, thrown into Camp Greyhound, and questioned as a suspected terrorist. In an interview with Salon, Eggers said:

Zeitoun was among thousands of people who were doing “Katrina time” after the storm. There was a complete suspension of all legal processes and there were no hearings, no courts for months and months and not enough folks in the judicial system really seemed all that concerned about it. Some human-rights activists and some attorneys, but otherwise it seemed to be the cost of doing business. It really could have only happened at that time; 2005 was just the exact meeting place of the Bush-era philosophy towards law enforcement and incarceration, their philosophy toward habeas corpus and their neglect and indifference to the plight of New Orleanians.

Through all the time that the federal and local governments, in concert with wealthy New Orleanians, were pitching their battle, there was virtually no one fighting on the other side. Reviewing the “available evidence” a month after Katrina, the New York Times concluded that “the most alarming stories that coursed through the city appear to be little more than figments of frightened imaginations.” The reports of residents firing at National Guard helicopters, of tourists being robbed and raped on Bourbon Street, and of murderous rampages in the Superdome—all turned out to be false.

But the truth of what happened in New Orleans—vigilantism and racially tinged violence, a military response that supplanted a humanitarian one—is equally sinister.
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*For links, see the original posting at Unsilent Generation.

On Emancipating Minds -- Our Own and Other's

I don't want to give anybody the wrong idea. I've assured my students here in Louisiana that institutionalized oppression in the form of racism is, unfortunately, alive and well throughout the U.S. culture. The default position in this country, I tell them, is White Supremacy. From coast to coast. Even for those -- Black or White -- who have money. (Can you imagine a major White actor being sentenced to three years in prison for being convicted of the misdemeanor crime of not filing his taxes -- like Wesley Snipes just was?) Even for those -- Black or White -- who have advanced degrees from college. (African-American men are four times more likely to be unemployed than European-American men at every educational level.) It's not just in "The South," I promise you.

However, many people in Louisiana don't try to hide it as readily or as well as they do elsewhere. They aren't more racist, you understand. They're just less apologetic about it. They see it as natural. Even reasonable. And African-Americans here have been down so long, they think they prefer segregation to having White folks all up in they business. I don't blame 'em. Sometimes I don't want White folks up in my business either and I'm White (as far as I know).

That's what has bothered me most about Louisiana so far. There's much I love about it. People are often gracious. Almost anybody will feed you. Virtually everybody will invite you to church. Laughter is common. Music is lively. The food is famous. And people kiss you on both cheeks. No place is perfect, after all. But the n-word, as I mentioned the other day, is so common that I've been left off guest lists to avoid a possible scene. (Note: I'm the one left off the guest list.) Once, when I engaged a Black man in a conversation about a business matter, his White employer marched up, joined the conversation, and then summarily dismissed the African-American with a curt "Don't you have something to do?" despite the fact that we were standing in the space where he did his work. On another occasion, I was blessed with a whole collection of racist materials (including an Imperial Klans of America patch and a copy of The Turner Diaries) that a casual acquaintance had skanked from a former cop. At least half of the people of color I've talked to here have warned me in no uncertain terms to be VERY careful who I offend (as if I have any control over what goes on in other people's heads, past just shutting up entirely -- the tack most folks like me apparently are expected to take). And my least favorite moment so far occurred when I was at one point (and I swear it) called "Boss Lady."

I even had an African-American student write me an infuriated note after the grades went in because the F he received (that's going to destroy his chances to keep his athletic scholarship) was MY fault. That poor child was so ill prepared for the idea that he would actually have to do the work in the course that he was incredulous at my behavior in holding him responsible. I tried to work with him all semester, giving him all kinds of encouragement, setting him up with a study group, outlining exactly what would be necessary for him to do to make sure he passed the course, and I could tell he wasn't making the needed effort, but I couldn't figure out why. In the end, he simply didn't believe I was serious. Now where do you suppose he learned that? Black students here are by and large relegated to schools that make little if any attempt to teach even the most basic skills, are trained to believe that their only hope is in sports, and ultimately become convinced that they are incapable of even adequate academic performance, in any case. And that just eats my lunch. Yes, I know it goes on everywhere (which makes it okay how?), but I've never seen the level of self-doubt that I see in people of color here. I'm told it's worse in Mississippi, but I can't speak to that, not having lived there.

This sad reality recently caused me to realize that I now see my primary mission in education NOT as trying to raise European-American consciousness related to "race" (which I used to think), but rather to reach young African-Americans and unmask the lies they have been told as truth about themselves. I mean, I always saw this as important, too, but I used to reverse these two commitments. No longer.

Bob Marley wrote: "Emancipate your mind from mental slavery. Only we ourselves can free our minds." And he was charging all of us with this responsibility. It's no mean trick to shake off the dead hand of history (as Walter Mosley called it here) when the whole society with all its authority, culture, and media machine is ever wrapping chains around anything that moves. But some of us have not only the responsibility to emancipate our own minds, but to feed others that they, too, might free themselves. Of those with much, it is said, much will be required. What is much? It's all relative, now isn't it?


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The poster above can be found at Northland Poster Collective.