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href="http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/39651-mass-incarceration-in-the-cornfields-shattered-families-and-racial-profiling-in-small-town-america">http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/39651-mass-incarceration-in-the-cornfields-shattered-families-and-racial-profiling-in-small-town-america</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">Mass Incarceration in the Cornfields:
Shattered Families and Racial Profiling in Small-Town America</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">James Kilgore - <span
class="itemDateCreated">February 28, 2017 </span></div>
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<p><em></em><em>This story is the second in a new Truthout
series,</em> <a
href="http://www.truth-out.org/severed-ties"
target="_blank">Severed Ties: The Human Toll of
Prisons</a><em>. 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.</em></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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."</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The stories of Taylor and Harvey-Robinson parallel
those of the more than <a
href="http://www.lrcvt.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/fact_sheet_mc.pdf"
target="_blank">2.7 million</a> 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.</p>
<p><strong>Champaign County</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-kelly-lowenstein/in-champaign-similarity-a_b_5692130.html"
target="_blank">reported</a> in 2014 that Champaign
had even greater racial disparities in arrests than a
well-known town just three hours away -- Ferguson,
Missouri.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://college.usatoday.com/2015/08/03/illinois-named-top-party-school/"
target="_blank">ranked</a> 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 utilizing<a
href="http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/25792-the-banality-of-police-militarization-how-champaign-urbana-acquired-its-mrap"
target="_blank"> the Mine Resistant Armor Protected
(MRAP)</a> vehicle recently acquired by the sheriff.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.uillinois.edu/"
target="_blank">mission</a> 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."</p>
<p><strong>A History of Segregation</strong></p>
<p>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 "<a
href="http://sundown.tougaloo.edu/sundowntownsshow.php?state=IL"
target="_blank">sundown towns</a>" -- 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 <em>Brown v. Board of Education</em>,
Champaign still had all-Black and all-white schools,
despite Illinois laws prohibiting school segregation. In
1961, the League of Women Voters <a
href="http://www.usd116.org/profdev/ahtc/lessons/Adrian2007/Adrian07L1/Housing102061.pdf"
target="_blank">found</a> that 98 percent of
Champaign-Urbana landlords refused to rent to Black
people. By the mid-60s, restaurants, bars and barber
shops remained segregated.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://archives.library.illinois.edu/slc/oral-history-portal/project-500/"
target="_blank">240 of them were arrested</a>. Instead
of settling into the comfortable student life, many of
these students spent the bulk of the year resolving
their court cases.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>"Fishing With a Brick": The Rise of Mass
Incarceration in the '80s and '90s</strong></p>
<p>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."</p>
<p>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."</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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."</p>
<p>The national <a
href="http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/03/very-brief-history-super-predators"
target="_blank">fear campaign focusing</a> 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.</p>
<p>Moreover, a newly militarized police force was stepping
up patrols on the North End. Mass incarceration was
taking root in Champaign County.</p>
<p><strong>Pushing Back Against Mass Incarceration and
Heavy Policing</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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, "<a
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjbeWQlVqV0"
target="_blank">One More Day</a>," 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: <em>Remember Kiwane: No Stolen
Lives. </em></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.smilepolitely.com/splog/c_u_black_activists_call_for_diversity_and_access_at_the_university_of_illi/"
target="_blank">study</a> 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.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, the university's emphasis on international
students has yielded dividends for its balance sheets.
The University of Illinois now <a
href="https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/news/25-us-universities-most-international-students"
target="_blank">ranks</a> 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." </p>
<p><strong>Families Resist</strong></p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/33435-children-with-incarcerated-parents-played-key-role-in-phone-justice-victory"
target="_blank">tell the story</a> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em>Note: The author would like to thank Brian Dolinar
for advice on this article.</em></p>
<p><em><a href="http://www.truth-out.org/donate-now/#top"
target="_blank">Inspired to take action? Do your
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