[Pnews] Mass Incarceration in the Cornfields: Shattered Families and Racial Profiling in Small-Town America

[Prisoner News]

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/39651-mass-incarceration-in-the-cornfields-shattered-families-and-racial-profiling-in-small-town-america 



  Mass Incarceration in the Cornfields: Shattered Families and Racial
  Profiling in Small-Town America

James Kilgore - February 28, 2017

///This story is the second in a new Truthout series,/ Severed Ties: The 
Human Toll of Prisons <http://www.truth-out.org/severed-ties>/. This 
series will dive deeply into the impact of incarceration on families, 
loved ones and communities, demonstrating how the United States' 
incarceration of more than 2 million people also harms many millions 
more -- including 2.7 million children./

Annette Taylor first lost her father to the prison system at age four. 
He was gone for four years, then came home for a few months, only to 
return to the Department of Corrections for another 16 years. "My dad 
was my everything," Taylor told Truthout. Once her father was gone, 
Taylor remembers that her mother "just worked, worked, worked. She 
really wasn't around." Her mother worked two, sometimes three jobs -- 
doing laundry in hotels and laboring in factories in Champaign County, 
Illinois, where their family lived. When still a preteen, Taylor had to 
take on the role of mothering her younger siblings -- "get the dinner 
out that my mom made, make sure my little sister was doing her 
homework." By the time she was fourteen, Taylor was pregnant. "I didn't 
even tell my dad," she recalls. She was terrified he would be 
disappointed. He only learned about the child a year later.

Being a parent ultimately meant a hiatus from school for Taylor until 
she was seventeen. By that time both her sister and brother were in 
trouble, she said. This trouble compounded when her sister gave birth to 
a child while incarcerated. Taylor ended up with the responsibility of 
taking care of her sister's child as well as her own.

Looking back on those days, Taylor believes the absence of her father 
made a huge difference. If he had been around, she observed, "the 
household would have been more structured ... I don't think my brother 
and sister would have gotten into trouble."

Taylor's story is much like that of Wandjell Harvey-Robinson, who was 
also born and raised in Champaign County, Illinois. The night her mother 
was arrested, the Department of Child and Family Services immediately 
grabbed Harvey-Robinson, then a third-grader, and handed her and her 
four siblings over to foster care. Since her father was already 
incarcerated as well, there was seemingly no recourse. Fortunately for 
her, the foster home turned out to be her grandmother's house. Her other 
brother and two sisters ended up with an uncle and another grandmother.

Harvey-Robinson said that for her, the arrest caused a disconnect with 
her parents and with her siblings. She had to "schedule visitation" and 
get permission from family services to visit her sisters and brothers. 
If she wanted to go to a friend's house, family services would have to 
do criminal background checks on the friend's parents before she could 
visit. Even when her parents were released from prison, Harvey-Robinson 
and her siblings remained in foster care.

The arrest "just messed up relationships," she told Truthout, meaning 
her parents "weren't there for big accomplishments like me making honor 
roll, doing my first play and making cheerleading squad. I had to share 
all those experiences over the phone with like two minutes to even 
talk," she said, and let them know "I was doing all these great things 
while they were away." She would remain in a foster home until her 
"release" at age 18.

The stories of Taylor and Harvey-Robinson parallel those of the more 
than 2.7 million 
<http://www.lrcvt.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/fact_sheet_mc.pdf> children 
under 18 who currently have parents who are incarcerated. Yet the 
dominant narratives tend to portray the situations as if they only 
happen in big cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or DC. There 
is another side to this story: that of small towns and counties, whether 
they be in the deserts of Colorado, the mining areas of West Virginia or 
the cornfields of Champaign County, Illinois, where Taylor and 
Harvey-Robinson grew up. Mass incarceration rips apart families and 
destroys lives nearly everywhere -- and each place has its own 
particular history, an urgent story needing to be told.

*Champaign County*

Champaign County is home to 202,000 people, with 60 percent of the 
population in the two major cities of Champaign and Urbana. Located on 
what was once the Illinois Central Railroad, the town was also a stop on 
the Great Migration of African Americans who fled the South and headed 
to Chicago in the early and mid-20th century.

Champaign County markets its identity as home to the flagship campus of 
the University of Illinois. Enrollment for 2017 was just over 44,000. 
Known for world-class computer science and engineering schools, the 
University of Illinois has produced more than 20 Nobel laureates. The 
first graphical web browser was devised here and the National Center for 
Supercomputing Applications houses Blue Waters, a mega machine that 
measures its capacity in petabytes (that is, in millions of gigabytes).

A much less well-known and far less-publicized feature of this county is 
the racial profile of those incarcerated in the local jail. In a county 
where 13 percent of the residents are Black, at last count the jail 
population was 71 percent Black, one of the highest racial disparities 
in the country. Huffington Post journalist Jeff Kelly-Lowenstein 
reported 
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-kelly-lowenstein/in-champaign-similarity-a_b_5692130.html> in 
2014 that Champaign had even greater racial disparities in arrests than 
a well-known town just three hours away -- Ferguson, Missouri.

Ultimately, Champaign is a county of parallel universes. A world-class 
university battles for Nobel prizes and research grants, while the local 
Black population struggles with poverty and racial profiling; the 
majority-white students at the college that the Princeton Review ranked 
<http://college.usatoday.com/2015/08/03/illinois-named-top-party-school/> 
as the nation's number-one party school in 2015 freely indulge in their 
drugs of choice while the county's 26,000 Black people fight a losing 
battle against the ground troops of a war on drugs. The local SWAT team, 
which comprises both city and university police, routinely conducts 
early morning raids, often utilizingthe Mine Resistant Armor Protected 
(MRAP) 
<http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/25792-the-banality-of-police-militarization-how-champaign-urbana-acquired-its-mrap> vehicle 
recently acquired by the sheriff.

These parallel universes are neither disconnected from each other nor 
detached from the racial history of the region and the university 
itself. While the land-grant school's mission 
<https://www.uillinois.edu/> promises to "transform lives and serve 
society," that goal seems to end about two blocks past University 
Avenue, the effective border with the largely Black "North End." When 
asked about the Black community's attitude toward the University of 
Illinois, veteran local activist Martel Miller told Truthout, "We're not 
invited.... It's there, but it's not there for us. It's in reach for us, 
it's in sight for us, but it's not there for us ... no access."

*A History of Segregation*

University of Illinois urban planning lecturer Ken Salo refers to 
contemporary Champaign and Urbana as "segregated cities." The two cities 
-- as well as the university, in many ways -- remain a product of white 
supremacy. According to historian Jim Loewen, at least five cities in 
and around Champaign County have a history of segregation, with several 
being "sundown towns 
<http://sundown.tougaloo.edu/sundowntownsshow.php?state=IL>" -- places 
where Black people could not remain inside the city limits after the sun 
went down. Local public institutions also have a long history of 
complicity with segregation. In 1954, when the US Supreme Court 
effectively ended legal school segregation with /Brown v. Board of 
Education/, Champaign still had all-Black and all-white schools, despite 
Illinois laws prohibiting school segregation. In 1961, the League of 
Women Voters found 
<http://www.usd116.org/profdev/ahtc/lessons/Adrian2007/Adrian07L1/Housing102061.pdf> that 
98 percent of Champaign-Urbana landlords refused to rent to Black 
people. By the mid-60s, restaurants, bars and barber shops remained 
segregated.

Even the integration of the University of Illinois student body was 
hardly a painless process. In fall of 1968, after local protests 
following the assassination of Dr. King, the university launched Project 
500, an attempt to get 500 Black students into the freshman class. While 
the university succeeded in recruiting 565 Black and Latinx students, 
they hadn't made proper arrangements for their arrival. Some students 
were left stranded at the Chicago airport (three hours away); others 
were without financial aid or housing. As a result, the 565 staged a 
sit-in inside the campus union building during which 240 of them were 
arrested 
<https://archives.library.illinois.edu/slc/oral-history-portal/project-500/>. 
Instead of settling into the comfortable student life, many of these 
students spent the bulk of the year resolving their court cases.

The sit-in at the University of Illinois was a reflection of the 
intensity of social movements of the time, especially Black Power. When 
the militancy of the '60s faded away, pressure to recruit students of 
color dissipated, and the student population drifted back toward its 
pre-1968 demographics. But while campus politics were calming, things 
were heating up on the streets of Champaign-Urbana. The war on drugs had 
come to town.

*"Fishing With a Brick": The Rise of Mass Incarceration in the '80s and 
'90s*

Champaign native Donte Lotts lost his father to the prison system for 32 
years when he was just four years old. He grew up in the 1980s, when 
mass incarceration and the war on drugs were kicking into high gear. 
"Single parent families were the norm in those days," Lotts told 
Truthout. "Out of the 10 men in my family, eight were incarcerated."

Lotts said the closest thing he had to a family photo was a picture of 
him visiting his father and uncle in Menard prison, a four-hour drive 
from home. He recalls that the only time the whole family got together 
was the annual picnic inside Menard. "We were allowed to bring in food," 
he said. "My aunt used to bake cakes.... They even had relay races."

But over the years the regimes in prison tightened. Opportunities to 
engage in activities together, like the picnic, vanished as security 
began to trump keeping families connected. Communication was limited to 
letters and infrequent, over-priced phone calls.

Lotts told Truthout how his North End neighborhood changed under the 
weight of mass incarceration: "Incarceration stretched the resources of 
families. With breadwinners gone, some people even became homeless." 
Lotts turned to the neighborhood Boys & Girls Club for support. There he 
said he found some male role models that were missing from his family life.

In local schools, the disciplinary regimen began to change during the 
1980s as well. Instead of relying on the principal and families, schools 
began referring cases to the juvenile justice system. As early as 1984, 
school reports for disorderly conduct or disobedience were filled out in 
triplicate, with one copy going to the juvenile court. These were the 
early days of the school-to-prison pipeline.

By the time Deloris Henry became a school administrator in Champaign's 
Unit 4 District in the late 1990s, she told Truthout that a 
"law-and-order attitude" pervaded the district, with Black children 
being disproportionately singled out for suspensions and expulsion. 
According to Henry, who is African American, even young children were 
not exempt. If a third-grader got into a schoolyard fight, a note about 
the incident might be sent to local police, particularly if the child 
was Black. The police department was starting "rap sheets" for children 
before they turned 10. This advent of a local brand of zero-tolerance 
discipline did nothing to improve education, especially for Black 
students. By the late 1990s, Black parents were so distraught at the 
poor performance rates of their children that they filed a successful 
civil suit with the federal government. The lawsuit pointed to the low 
rate of Black students in honors and advanced placement classes, as well 
as their over-representation in special education and remedial programs. 
The importance of such statistics was not lost on Henry. As she reminded 
Truthout, "there is a strong correlation between core academic 
performance and incarceration." The result of parents' petitioning was a 
consent decree that put Champaign Unit 4 Schools under the federal eye 
from 2002-2009. This decree yielded a plan of action that helped reduce 
achievement gaps between white students and students of color. 
Evaluators of the decree also noted that white enrollments dropped 
during this period, largely due to white families relocating to 
neighboring towns with fewer people of color -- the "white flight" syndrome.

At the same time as the consent decree papers were moving through the 
courts, in the streets of the North End, the war on drugs and mass 
incarceration was moving into high gear. According to Miller, SWAT teams 
emerged during this period, as well as undercover police who drove 
around in "old Chevies with primer on them" trying to blend in. The war 
on drugs, he said, was like "fishing with a brick ... you might hit 
something but mostly you are stirring up the water."

The national fear campaign focusing 
<http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/03/very-brief-history-super-predators> on 
the supposed impending rise of "youth superpredators" did, however, 
resonate with local authorities. In 1996 they built a 40-bed juvenile 
detention center, a facility that has remained less than half full for 
most of its life. In 1998 the county passed a public safety sales tax 
dedicating revenue to law-enforcement construction. This tax helped 
support the building of a second county jail. By 2002, county jail 
capacity had increased from 45 in 1980 to 313, and it was overflowing. 
Mass incarceration had taken root in this sleepy Midwestern college town.

Moreover, a newly militarized police force was stepping up patrols on 
the North End. Mass incarceration was taking root in Champaign County.

*Pushing Back Against Mass Incarceration and Heavy Policing*

Just after the launching of the consent decree, residents stepped up 
efforts to push back against police violence targeting the county's 
Black population. In 2003, Martel Miller, along with his cousin Patrick 
Thompson formed an organization called Visionaries Educating Youth and 
Adults (VEYA). The organization focused on recording police activity in 
the Black community. When they compiled a 40-minute film that chronicled 
a number of incidents of police abuse, the pair was arrested and charged 
with felony eavesdropping. Eventually the eavesdropping cases were 
dropped, but Thompson got additional charges, including home invasion 
and criminal sexual abuse, stemming from a domestic incident in the 
community. Thompson eventually won an acquittal, but his case sparked 
the formation of a local social movement dedicated to racial justice, 
Champaign-Urbana Citizens for Peace and Justice (CUCPJ). For the next 
decade, the multiracial CUCPJ, under the leadership of local 
African-American activists Aaron and Carol Ammons, spearheaded local 
resistance to mass incarceration and police abuse.

The peak of CUCPJ's mobilization came in reaction to the police killing 
of 15-year-old Kiwane Carrington in 2009. Reports from the family say 
that Carrington and a friend were trying to get into his aunt's house 
through a window. A neighbor spotted him, mistook him for a burglar, and 
called the Champaign police. According to police reports, the two police 
officers who arrived suspected the youth might be armed, so one of the 
officers, Daniel Norbits, drew his gun. Police alleged that a scuffle 
ensued and Norbits discharged his gun "accidentally," fatally wounding 
Carrington. Community spokespersons and CUCPJ leaders questioned this 
version of events and pushed for charges to be filed against the 
officers. Despite repeated pleas and mobilizations of youth and family 
of Carrington, no charges were filed. Norbits was taken off patrol duty 
but received regular pay for the next four years, despite being away 
from Champaign much of the time. He eventually qualified for disability 
as a result of the incident. The city ultimately reached a settlement 
with the Carrington family in 2010, paying $470,000 without any 
admission of guilt.

While the legal case was finished, the trauma to the community caused by 
Carrington's death did not go away. In 2013, rapper J. Tune, a friend of 
Carrington's, composed a spoken-word piece, "One More Day 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjbeWQlVqV0>," in his memory. It has 
drawn nearly 11,000 views. When asked by Truthout for a comment on his 
memories of Kiwane, J. Tune simply replied: "Pain that will never fully 
heal." The local Independent Media Center, the focal point of social 
justice organizing in the community, still bears a banner that reads: 
/Remember Kiwane: No Stolen Lives. /

CUCPJ also sparked the birth of Build Programs Not Jails, which has been 
fighting efforts by the county to build new jail cells since 2012. The 
organization has repeatedly attacked the racial disparity in the jail 
population. In 2015, along with the local chapter of Black Lives Matter, 
the members of Build Programs Not Jails pressured the county to 
establish a Racial Justice Task Force to investigate the causes of the 
jail population's disparity and recommend policy changes. The county 
eventually acquiesced, and the task force is still carrying out its 
work. Another CUCPJ spinoff is Community Courtwatch, a group of social 
justice activists who monitor the courts and provide support to 
individuals facing criminal charges.

Due to pressure from local social justice groups, as well as policy 
reforms, the county jail population has fallen by nearly 40 percent in 
the last decade. However, racial disparity in the population has not 
declined. Moreover, 2015-2016 saw a rash of deaths in the jail. Within a 
span of seven months, three Black people -- Toya Frazier, Paul Clifton 
and Veronica Horstead -- died shortly after being locked up. All three 
had grown up in Champaign-Urbana. Family members and friends flocked to 
the county board after their deaths to question why the authorities 
continued to incarcerate their loved ones, known to have substance abuse 
challenges, instead of building a treatment center in the community.

A million-dollar lawsuit has been filed by the family of Toya Frazier 
for wrongful death. The suit alleges that jail and medical staff ignored 
her pleas for help while she was withdrawing from heroin, causing her death.

In the meantime, the university next door persists in operating as if 
it's located in a separate universe. The University of Illinois 
continues to "focus on responding to the global market for international 
students rather than to the challenges confronting the local community," 
according to Ken Salo. In 2013 the university had 356 Black freshmen, 
nearly 40 percent less than it did in the Project 500 days. A 2015 study 
<http://www.smilepolitely.com/splog/c_u_black_activists_call_for_diversity_and_access_at_the_university_of_illi/> 
done by Miller and local resident Terry Townsend revealed that from 
2012-2014, 60 percent of the more than 600 trespassing arrests on campus 
were of Black people.

Nonetheless, the university's emphasis on international students has 
yielded dividends for its balance sheets. The University of Illinois now 
ranks 
<https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/news/25-us-universities-most-international-students> fifth 
in the nation for international enrollment, with just over 7,000 
students, the majority from China. While the Black unemployment rate in 
Champaign county remains above 17 percent, along the border of the North 
End, construction companies are busy repopulating University Avenue with 
luxury apartments aimed at the international student market. In Salo's 
words, this puts the university at the "leading edge of gentrification." 
For Martel Miller, these buildings are just further proof that the 
University of Illinois is "in the community but not of the community."

*Families Resist*

For their part, Wandjell Harvey-Robinson, Annette Taylor and Donte Lotts 
continue the struggle to keep Black families together and halt the 
scourge of incarceration. Harvey-Robinson was a major player in the 
national campaign for prison phone justice in 2016. She traveled to 
Washington, DC, to tell the story 
<http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/33435-children-with-incarcerated-parents-played-key-role-in-phone-justice-victory> of 
how over-priced phone calls restricted her communication lifeline to her 
incarcerated parents throughout her youth. She provided similar 
testimony for the Illinois State Legislature.

Annette Taylor is the leader of a local residents group, Ripple Effect. 
Ripple, which stands for Reaching Inside Prisons with Purpose and Love, 
brings together families of the incarcerated, especially children, for 
sessions during which they share experiences and write letters to their 
loved ones inside. Under a slogan of "reconnecting our community one 
letter at a time," Taylor estimates the group sends out about 100 
letters each month.

Lotts has spent more than two decades as a social worker in the Black 
community, focusing his work on young men like himself who are growing 
up in the absence of an incarcerated father. Lotts spent several years 
in an alternative school but grew disillusioned by its zero tolerance 
policies, which he said often made the place "like a prison." Today he 
is the director of a new program, CU Fresh Start, which seeks to support 
and re-direct young men with a history of criminal justice involvement. 
The program also aims to reduce the rash of gun violence that has 
plagued the North End in the last year.

Martel Miller continues his work of being what he calls a "community 
ambassador." Carol and Aaron Ammons have moved into electoral politics, 
where they remain focused on issues of racial and social justice. Just 
last month, Aaron Ammons led a push to resist efforts by the Urbana City 
Council, of which he is now a member, to hire more police in response to 
the recent gun violence. Ammons was advocating more expenditure on 
services to keep youth out of jail. (Unfortunately, the council moved 
forward with its plans to increase the number of police.) He and Lotts 
are also leaders of the North End Breakfast Club, a 
social-justice-oriented group of Black men who focus on challenging 
police misconduct and providing opportunities for youth in the community.

Meanwhile, Carol Ammons has entered Illinois' state legislature. In her 
first year, State Representative Ammons sponsored and led the campaign 
to pass the Illinois bill on prison phone justice, one of the most 
progressive in the nation. The measure cut the cost of phone calls by 
more than half and eliminated the $12 million in kickbacks the 
Department of Corrections was receiving each year from phone charges.

Even with the lack of concern from the university, the pushback against 
police abuse and mass incarceration continues. And despite five years of 
trying, county authorities have still not been able to procure a single 
cent toward building new jail cells. It's not a revolution, but in some 
historical moments resistance is at the leading edge of the struggle.

/Note: The author would like to thank Brian Dolinar for advice on this 
article./

/Inspired to take action? Do your part to strengthen a powerful voice in 
the battle for truth and justice: Make a tax-deductible donation to 
Truthout! <http://www.truth-out.org/donate-now/#top>/

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
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