Incarcerating the Next Civil Rights Movement
By Adam Klasfeld
Bushwick: An Example
That our criminal justice system disproportionately imprisons people of color is no surprise, but the statistics demonstrating this are staggering. According to a Human Rights Watch report, one third of all black men in their twenties were incarcerated, serving parole, or on probation. Thirteen percent of black men in America have lost their right to vote because of the felony disenfranchisement law.
Eric Cadora, director of the Justice Mapping Center, finds that neighborhoods that produce the most prisoners also have the highest rates of poverty, unemployment, and high school dropouts.
According to his analysis of New York City published on www.justicemapping.org in 2006, one of the Brooklyn neighborhoods that best illustrates this trend is Bushwick.
Change
Diminishing privacy makes prison records more accessible and recently released prisoners harder to employ. Corrupt politicians and shallow news coverage fuel public attitudes about getting “tough on crime,” and make prison sentences longer, reform less likely, educational programs more difficult to operate, the rights of former prisoners less secure, and adaptability back into society after release increasingly bleak.
Scholar, advocate, and educator Rev. Vivian Nixon believes that the problem has gotten to the point where criminal justice has become the definitive civil rights issue of our time. After being incarcerated at the Albian Correctional Facility, she responded to injustices by studying criminal justice upon her release in 2001. She receives support from the nonprofit College and Community Fellowship, an organization which she would soon become a director.
Shortly after, she received a Soros Justice Fellowship from the Open Society Institute and was ordained a minister at the African Methodist Episcopal Church. She now returns to prisons across the country as an educator and has taught hundreds of students, many of whom have pursued higher education, from Associate’s degrees to Doctorates.
Despite her remarkable accomplishments, her provocative opinions rarely get recognized in the press, but they are not as uncommon as some might believe.
On December 2, 2007, she spoke about this new civil rights movement at a press conference at John Jay College, a respected institution for the study of criminal justice. Nobody disagreed with her conclusions during the question and answer period, but one of the other panelists, a professor from Carnegie-Melon University, argued that it would be tough to get the press and the public sympathetic.
He was right. Nobody disagreed with her alarming thesis, but none of the journalists reported her views. During our interview, Block Magazine discovered it was the first publication to request an interview.
“It’s amazing. I’ve traveled all over the country with the same message -- and the response is almost always the same,” Rev. Nixon told me in a phone interview. “They acknowledge it, but then, they move right on.”
Cadora, Nixon's colleague at the Open City Institute, and the director of the Justice Mapping Center, agrees. “The wildly disproportionate rate of incarceration in communities of color should be considered a civil rights issue.”
“Disconnected” in District 4
On the face of it, crime stats in Bushwick have been going down just as they have been throughout New York, but appearances can be deceiving. Understanding these trends requires knowing the recent history of the city’s approach to crime and how it’s measured.
Since Giuliani took office in 2002, he armed the NYPD with tools like CompStat to locate where crimes occur, and the department put more police where these computer models found hotspots. Most studies use similar methods for gathering information, and New York Magazine’s January 14, 2008 cover story “Post-Crime” published maps of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and The Bronx that followed this model.
Except for its consideration of ending the drug war, the article endorsed the most conservative ideas for combating crime. The general message can be summarized as: The results are in. Crime is dropping because America’s Mayor got tough on it, and gentrification works. Let’s fancifully imagine how we can make the stats plummet to zero.
However, various press investigations have shown anecdotal evidence that the NYPD has shuffled statistics. On November 1, 2005, The Village Voice’s Paul Moses published that the number of people taken to emergency rooms jumped in four of the last five years in direct contrast to CompStat figures. As recently as last December, ABC television found that cops in South Brooklyn were accused of hiding 11 bags of cocaine from a bust.
Even if one accepts that the statistics are valid, a different picture emerges when one looks at where people who are incarcerated come from rather than where they were caught.
In its October 2006 analysis, the Justice Mapping Center found that half of males admitted to prison live in three areas of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, even though the same areas are home to only 17% of the city’s men.
One of these areas includes a large chunk of District 4 – or Bushwick.
The same studies have found that over one tenth of 16 to 19 year olds in Bushwick are “Disconnected Youth,” defined as not having a high school diploma, not in school, and not working, making it the fifth most suffering district in all of New York.
Bushwick ranked high on the Brooklyn’s list of where residents have high rates of youth imprisonment, families on temporary assistance, and children in foster care.
Shuffling Crime through Gentrification
The Justice Mapping study uses 2003 data from state and city prisons. Cadora says that his organization just received the 2006 figures. Still, despite Bushwick’s rapid development since then, crime rates are less likely to go down than to get shuffled.
“We have noticed in past comparisons that even when the total imprisonment rates stay the same, over the years they are shifted according to patterns of development and gentrification,” he explained.
However, the public still largely believes that large scale development effectively combats crime.
“The reason that it’s so easy to gentrify communities and nobody rises up against it the way they used to is because crime is the excuse to do it,” says Rev. Nixon. “You’re justifying your treatment of people based on the ‘fact’ that they’re ‘bad’ people. So large groups of people are saying, ‘This is all right because it has nothing to do with the fact that they’re black or that they’re Latino, it’s because they’re ‘bad’ people and they’re hurting us because they’re making our communities less safe.’”
Throughout the 1950s and 60s, the American Civil Rights Movement fought for equality in voting, housing, education, employment, and individual freedom. Today, “bad” people are fighting for the same rights in prisons across America, but nobody is listening.
Excerpts From the Interview with Rev. Vivian Nixon:
How long have you been making these arguments?
I actually had to give the credit to some of my colleagues. I started making these arguments about 4 or 5 years ago when I began working with some colleagues at the Legal Action Center. He’s now at the Fortune Society. His name is Glen Martin. He’s the associate vice president of policy and advocacy at the Fortune Society, and Alan Rosenthal for the Center for Community Alternatives in Rochester, who pulled together a group of people to have a dialogue about this. Then, the Soros Foundation – George Soros’ Open Society Institute – also pulled together a group of Soros Justice Fellows to try to take a look at criminal justice form the perspective of race. We all together started to rethink and reframe the issue. We didn’t use the exact language about framing it as a civil rights issue until later on when smaller pockets of us started to meet and talk about it. It was with other colleagues. It wasn’t just me.
Besides your study of these issues and the policy, what has been your journey in exploring it? Have you gone to the prison systems and spoken to people who are incarcerated?
I was at Bay View Prison on Friday night. First of all, I spent 3 and a half years in prison fifteen years ago, which is a fact that I don’t mention all the time because it seems like it was a lifetime ago. When I go to prisons, my main goal is to inspire people to change their lives in multiple ways. Of course, the first way a person can change their lives is to identify what happened to end them up in prison, which is sometimes the result of personal decisions but many times the result of some injustice. Most times it’s a combination of both things, but I try to get people to understand that it is rarely a singular thing that happened to you. It’s a combination of things. When you get out of prison, your responsibility is to open up your mind and see yourself differently in the world – and I think that happens through education. But my type of education is not the type promoted in most correctional settings, which is strictly educating people to become part of the labor market. Although I believe that labor market education is a good thing, and in American society, it’s necessary, I think that you best educate your citizens when you educate them to be good citizens. Their participation in the labor market should be secondary to that.
You mentioned James Baldwin. I think a lot of people believe in America’s heroes in theory, and then you mention what the heroes were actually saying. Then, they turn their ears off.
America does not know its history – black and white. Black conservatives, as well, because they do exist, glamorize the pie in the sky, dreamy, lofty speeches of Martin Luther King, but if they really read his more radical work, they would understand what he was really saying. We have come nowhere near accomplishing the type of equality that he was demanding.
How does gentrification tie in to civil rights and criminal justice?
To me, it’s so simple because I see everything from this perspective that criminal justice is the new race problem. It’s the new civil rights problem. The reason that it’s so easy to gentrify communities now and nobody rises up against it the way they used to, is because crime is the excuse to do it. We’re cleaning up the neighborhood! We’re getting rid of the crime! We’re making you safer! Not we’re taking away your opportunity, taking away your housing, leaving you out. We’re making the neighborhood better.
Why did you go to prison?
I went to prison for a series of paper crimes, forgeries, falsification of business documents. It was all about money to support a habit. I did three and a half years. It was a one-time experience, and that was in 1997.
Author Bio: Adam Klasfeld is a contributor for Art Science Research Laboratory’s media ethics project StinkyJournalism.org, and his reporting also has been published in Block Magazine, The L Magazine, Brooklyn Paper, and City Limits. He is also a playwright, director, and producer.
