Black and White Justice (and color of all kind)

What is your personal experience with the criminal justice system?

This was the worship sharing question.  My Meeting is small and there were not a lot of us there.  Everyone sitting in the circle was white. I knew that of the people in the room that I had by far the most personal experience with the criminal justice system.

My experience has many levels and spans 4 states: as a volunteer, as a visitor, an observer of post prison inmate experience, and my own experience as an activist with arrest, detention and courts.  I started at age 20 in college going into the local prison as a volunteer...why?  Because my peer group were all being required to register for the draft for the first time in 11 years and they were taking a stand and saying no, the result of which was that some of them were going to go to prison (and did).  I wanted therefore to understand what prison is. 

Volunteering to be inside:

I was an Alternatives to Violence Project facilitator over a 10 year period of time. 

After my experience as a volunteer in the IN prisons, in Missouri I learned AVP which I did for a year before moving to WA and starting the WA state AVP.  At points I was going in once a month for 3 days straight.  I would spend beautiful summer, spring and fall days in windowless rooms.   I knew men guilty of all variety of crimes and I learned the culture of prison.   I spent hours and hours listening to men describe their experience inside, both beautiful and horrible.  I never asked anybody why they were locked up because it is considered impolite, but often they would tell me, sometimes in great detail.  I knew people doing "short" sentences of a few years, and men doing "life" anything over 13, and I still know men inside who are doing life without the possibility of parole. Vastly disproportionately the men doing life without were Black men.   I listened to men talk about how they did time, how they coped.  I listened to men describe lifestyles so hard on the outside that they said they were grateful they had come to prison because it had saved their life.   And I listened to men hate the place they lived and everyone they could never, never get away from.  I challenged myself to find that of God in each of them and I did.  I made friends and I loved men I knew inside those walls.

Long before there was a book called No New Jim Crow I understood that prisons were a way to both separate men of color from the rest of culture and also permanently bar them from equal opportunities.  It took only one look around any prison room to see that.   In the very white state of WA when the majority of prisoners are people of color the evidence of discrimination is blatantly obvious.  I listened to many men tell me about public defenders so overloaded, incompetent or indifferent that their lawyers seemed unaware of basic facts of their case or in some case even of their names.

I met guards who seemed far more cruel and heartless than the "criminals" they were watching and I also met guards well liked by the prisoners who managed to be kind to everyone.  Mainly I saw the incredible boredom of the guards and understood why the prisoners would say "they are doing time too without doing the crime."  It also became clear to me how the power tripping and cruelty were simply how some of them entertained themselves or felt important in the very small pond that was their world.  Not dissimilar to the power struggles that went on among the prisoners.

As the administrator of our program, I also spent a lot of time talking to the prison administration and dealing with rules and attempts to get reasonable accommodations for the program.  I eventually lobbied the legislature to try to change some of the most egregious things about the prison system.  I learned to not try to meet the rules of the prison with logic because they were not based upon logic but upon layers of history, egos, and power tripping - they were arbitrary and inconsistent and sanity was only to be had when you could accept that.

Visiting injustice

I eventually stopped being a volunteer and became a visitor and then endured the even more disrespectful ways the friends and family of prisoners would be treated. Metal detectors and pat searches and time wasted waiting because they had not even called the person you went to visit.  The covert message always being there must be something very wrong with you and worthy only of contempt if you cared about someone in prison.  The truth frequently being communicated that they had all the power and you had none and don't forget it.

The Post Prison “set up”

I also watched many, many men I knew come out...and 90% of the time fail.   They failed because they were set up.   The ones who had done the longest had been deprived for so long of the ability to make even the simplest of choices: what they would eat, or when they would sleep, or what products they would want to use....that having to decide all these things on the outside was overwhelming.  Street culture is so different than prison culture that they were lost.  In addition, after years of being penalized if they objected or asserted themselves, they struggled in society to have a voice, to set boundaries or to ask for things.   Those who came out without family were really sunk - released with only some clothes, no job, and money in a check form (but no id and thus no easy way to cash their check) they were easily ready to become homeless or steal something.   After years of not having consistent access to drugs and alcohol and now maximally stressed, many would very quickly be back to addictions within weeks or months.

Activism and arrest and trial

And all of the above...this does not begin to address my own receiving end of the criminal justice system.  As a political activist I have twice committed civil disobedience, so I have twice gotten arrested, been handcuffed and taken down to the station and on one occasion stayed refusing to give my name in solidarity with others in my group not giving their name.   So I have spent time both before and after sentencing in jail.   I have been to court for both arraignment, trial and sentencing.  Having spent so much time with people who desperately tried not to get arrested I am painfully aware of the privilege involved in choosing to risk arrest.  I also am supremely annoyed by activists who spend some hours or days in jail (jail being completely different from prison) and then think they know about incarceration.  I would like to say clearly that what I know about imprisonment is lightly impressed by my personal experience and heavily influenced by the sharing of literally hundreds of inmates.   And listening to something is not the same as living something.

Courts and the criminal injustice system 

I have been in more courtrooms than I can now count for trials of fellow activists - some of whom were facing decade long sentences for Plowshares actions ("We shall beat our swords into plowshares" the inspiration for personal acts of disarmament against nuclear weapons in the 80's)  and more recently for trials of activists acting against our fossil fuel system.   

In these disgraceful experiences I have learned that in some ritual of authority all must rise for the judge or risk contempt charges or being barred from the room.  I have learned that the judge can limit what evidence and lines of defense people are allowed to offer to the point of preventing their defense.  I learned that jury instructions can be given in such a way that the jury is virtually told they must ignore their conscience and only interpret the law as the judge interprets the law to them - essentially saying that they must find them guilty.   I have watched juries come to quick decisions so they can home that night.  I have watched jurors be selected and dismissed on the basis of their believing anything that might bring actual justice to bare.  (ie anyone who does not believe in the death penalty is dismissed from capitol cases.)  In short I have learned that there is not much justice in our criminal "justice system."

The Color Gap

So my experience is with jails, with prisons, with courtrooms, with arrests, with police who were arresting people around me, with guards, with prison administrators, prison rules, parole boards, etc.  I want to be very, very clear.  That is a lot of experience for a white person – but it is only a glimpse of what people of color go through.  I chose my experience which is in itself an act of privilege.  I don’t have to fear that for a broken tail light I will have an interface with the criminal justice system that could become deadly.  I observed people of color being treated differently by cops and guards, but I did not have that experience.   And the only reason why my story is worth telling is for what I next have to say.

With all of the experience I have listed imagine the jolt to my system to hear my fellow Friends around the circle say, sometimes apologetically, that their only experience with the criminal justice system was with being stopped (treated respectfully and then let go) by a police officer.  These are all Friends who I love and have good, good hearts....and suddenly in one shattering moment I understood how really wide the divide actually is between white people and people of color in this country.   For all the things I have written about above...are the common experience of people of color.   It is hard because of the discriminatory arrest, prosecution and imprisonment practices in the US for there to be a person of color who does not have a family member, friend or self who has not had the experiences I describe above.   The fact that white people on the other hand can live their whole lives without having experiences with the criminal justice system and generally not know anyone either who has had a personal experience...that is a cavernous gap which separates us.

I am still trying to wrap my head around how that gap can be bridged.  It is not going to be tours of jail ...that just does not begin to be three dimensional.   Frankly, it takes time genuinely spent, and sadly I don't think most white people I know would see the benefit of spending that time.  And so, we sit in camps with life experiences so different that we don't even begin to comprehend how different the experiences actually are.

Benjamin Lay and Quaker Corporate Witness

I often hear Friends lament that we do not have a corporate witness currently, or try to figure out in consternation how to marshal other Friends to unify around one of the many critical and compelling issues of our time.  I think that Friends fail to understand the actual chapters of Quaker's historic witness.  For example, Friends proudly speak of the standard of Quakers "not owning slaves".   They sweep past the over 100 years it took our Yearly Meetings to reach consensus that Friends were not to own slavery (or that even after that some Friends did).   This ignores the great price of unpopularity and even expulsion that the early abolitionist experienced in their own Meetings.   It also ignores that this later standard was achieved by "reading Friends out of Meeting".  (Meaning that Slave owners were stripped of membership.)  Given that Friends have now rejected the idea of reading anyone out of membership, it would literally be impossible for modern Friends to achieve this level of conformity to any position we might take on any issue.

Take for example the biography of Benjamin Lay:  The Fearless Benjamin Lay by Marcus Redikar released this past month.  Redikar reports on the tactics of Benjamin, a small man known as a hunchback because of his 4 foot height and curvature of the upper back.   In 1738 he became the last of a very few Quakers expelled for their abolitionism.  In fact Redikar tells us Lay was expelled from two British Friends Meetings as well as Abington Friends meeting in the US. Below he describes the incident that led to Lay's expulsion: 

"On September 19, 1738, a man named Benjamin Lay strode into a Quaker meetinghouse in Burlington, New Jersey, for the biggest event of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. He wore a great coat, which hid a military uniform and a sword. Beneath his coat Lay carried a hollowed-out book with a secret compartment, into which he had tucked a tied-off animal bladder filled with bright red pokeberry juice. Because Quakers had no formal minister or church ceremony, people spoke as the spirit moved them. Lay, a Quaker himself, waited his turn.

He finally rose to address this gathering of 'weighty Quakers.' Many Friends in Pennsylvania and New Jersey had grown rich on Atlantic commerce, and many bought human property. To them Lay announced in a booming voice that God Almighty respects all peoples equally, rich and poor, men and women, white and black alike. He said that slave keeping was the greatest sin in the world and asked, How can a people who profess the golden rule keep slaves? He then threw off his great coat, revealing the military garb, the book and the blade.

A murmur filled the hall as the prophet thundered his judgment: “Thus shall God shed the blood of those persons who enslave their fellow creatures.” He pulled out the sword, raised the book above his head, and plunged the sword through it. People gasped as the red liquid gushed down his arm; women swooned. To the shock of all, he spattered “blood” on the slave keepers. He prophesied a dark, violent future: Quakers who failed to heed the prophet’s call must expect physical, moral and spiritual death.

The room exploded into chaos, but Lay stood quiet and still, 'like a statue,' a witness remarked. Several Quakers quickly surrounded the armed soldier of God and carried him from the building. He did not resist. He had made his point.  This spectacular performance was one moment of guerrilla theater among many in Lay’s life."

Now if you consider this carefully my guess is these are not tactics you could see yourself doing in your Friends Meeting or for that matter any Friends Meeting.   Yet there are many recorded incidents of him doing guerrilla theater among Friends, as well as "calling out" Friends (from the bench during business meeting) in a way that could only be described honestly as self-righteous heckling.  So maybe you say: "well no wonder he was expelled - poor social skills, really very rude....other polite Friends could have gotten the same job done."   Yet both John Woolman and Lucretia Mott made themselves very unpopular among many Friends for their calls to conscience. Lucretia Mott was almost written out of her Meeting several times, probably only spared this because of the wealth and status of her husband.  George Fox for that matter in the beginning of Quakerism entered other people's churches, stood up on the benches and disrupted the service and called the minister hypocritics, among other things.  So playing nice was not in the original Quaker play book.  Speaking the truth bluntly was.  As Quakers have through education and the protection of the right to freedom of religion become more middle class have we also learned the middle class pattern of playing it safe?

I believe if we honestly appraise our history we will see that a few Friends with vision and courage put out a call to Friends to stand for social justice.  There calls were not immediately heeded or was unity quickly or easily reached.  Most spent their lifetimes both inside and outside of the Society of Friends agitating for a vision of justice that was often many decades ahead of their time and took great flack in both arenas for their "eccentric position".  They often did not see the fruits of their labor before their death.  In fact Redikar tells us Lay was living in a cave towards the end of his life in poor health and a Friend came to tell him that the Yearly Meeting had just passed a minute to discipline and disown Quaker slave owners and he jumped up saying: "I can now die in peace."

It does apparently take a certain personality type to be dedicated to the truth above popularity or even security.   That kind of personality is it seems at times flamboyant or "rude" or aggressive and self-righteous in making its point.  As Redikar says about Lay: "His confrontational methods made people talk: about him, his ideas, the nature of Quakerism and Christianity, and, most of all, slavery."   One has to think that Lay, Woolman and Mott did not have the idea that speaking to that of God in another person means to speak gently so as to not offend.  Perhaps the confrontation with oppression will always offend the ways in which oppression has dressed itself up and justified itself.  We have also been taught that minority voices in business meeting are to be listened to because they may in fact carry a piece of the truth not visible to the rest of us.  Can we believe this even when a Friend's voice makes us uncomfortable and challenges our own choices?  Are we willing to have a called Meeting for Business to respond to a crisis rather than send all our concerns off to a lengthy many month process before action can be taken?

Thus for us to wish in the present that we would all be in unity around social concerns is to ignore the actual history of how we have come to be in unity.  There were always Friends dragging the rest of us forward.  Even once we came to unity in consensus,  the work was always done by a small minority of the Meeting.   It is not insignificant that we have a value set that asks people to listen to God's voice, that teaches the rest of us to validate and support those among us who are so led.  It did make a difference that activist Friends were (usually) eventually supported by their Meetings.   But it is a great myth to say Friends acted as one body or in one mind for these great social causes.   It is true that heeding God's call we were out front ahead of much of the rest of the population.

This leads me to ask:  Who is a Friendly nuisance in your Meeting?   How well are you listening and heeding that person's words?   What truth do you care about so deeply that you would stand on a public bench making a spectacle of yourself?  What are you not willing to risk and why?  Are you willing to offend the oppressive?  Are you willing to upset and offend others by unequivocally stating a truth that challenges the very basis of who they are and how they live?

For more on Benjamin Lay see: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/quaker-comet-greatest-abolitionist-never-heard-180964401/
or: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/12/opinion/sunday/youll-never-be-as-radical-as-this-18th-century-quaker-dwarf.html

A portrait of Benjamin Lay