Talk at the UNC Conference on Race, Class, Gender and Ethnicity

I am here today to try to imagine what a more loving and compassionate justice system would look like. It is a real honor and joy to get to return to UNC law and the Conference on Race, Class Gender and Ethnicity. I remember working as a law student with a group of students in the early days of this conference, and it is inspiring to see how far these law students have brought this conference in 17 years.

 

 I am also inspired to see so many people here to talk about the prison pipeline and mass incarceration. You all could be anywhere else on this beautiful Saturday morning, and you have chosen to be here because you do not want to live in a divided community. You understand that there is a great injustice happening in our midst, and you are here to do something about it. I hope to depress you, and to give you hope. I want to give you something for your tool kit to address these divisions of class and race that drive the outcomes in our schools and justice system.

I look into the audience and see many familiar faces of friends who are working hard on this problem in a wide variety of ways. I see many faces I don't know, and believe I will get to know you in the future because we are a community committed to ending this prison pipeline and system of mass incarceration. You belong to me, and now I belong to you, so please do not hesitate to email me if I can assist you in you as we dismantle this system.

With that in mind, let's turn our attention to this idea that the United States has the largest incarceration rate in the world. I am sick a tired of talking about this problem as an "incarceration rate" - like some invisible hand swooped down and incarcerated people. It's like the unemployment rate. People didn't magically become unemployed, they were fired. The same is true for our justice system. Our children were not kidnapped by an invisible monster. Our children are manufactured into "criminals" by racism and poverty to supply a prison industrial complex. No child woke up and dreamed one day of becoming a criminal. It is the adults who are failing the children, and not the children who are choosing to fail.

Our schools and justice system are too punitive. All we have is a hammer. We are using incarceration to "fix" poverty, mental illness, addiction, and children who are struggling in failing communities.  But these are problems which need other tools like treatment, economic opportunity, and social support. But when all you have is a hammer, every child looks like a nail.

We need to look at these kids struggling in our society as our own children. We need to give them the love and support we would give our own flesh and blood. We need to shift from a punitive and divisive view of us versus them, to a more connected view of our community. We are all connected, and succeed or fail together. There is no one beyond our love, and every sheep is worth risking everything to find and return to our flock.

So let me tell you a little about these kids. They are hungry. Physically hungry. There are 13,000 children living below the poverty level in my community. They come to school hungry. Maybe they pick up some breakfast out of the trashcan at McDonalds on the way to school. They are hungry for love, attention, and an achievable dream. Their father is in jail, their mother is an addict, and their grandmother is trying to raise six other children when she should be kicking her feet up and relaxing. This kid struggles to find a consistent place to stay, clothes that fit, and food. One kid saw his cousin gunned down before his very eyes. When he returned to school in the fall, the teacher asked him to write an essay about his summer vacation. What a joke. There is no vacation on the street.

In addition to being hungry, these kids are hunted by the police. They are singled out as potential trouble makers long before they make any trouble. Their trouble is a socially self-fulfilling prophecy. The statistics on the racial disparities in suspensions and searches at traffic stops tell an undeniable story of racial profiling for poor people of color. The authorities are only fishing in the pond of children of color. The police are not setting up undercover drug transactions with Duke Students; they are paying bonuses to snitches in poor communities for convictions in small marijuana purchases. When a person of color sees blue lights in their mirror they feel dread and fear because they can expect to be bullied, harassed, and disrespected. They may even get beat up, tasered, or killed. When a white person of privilege sees those lights, they have nothing to fear, even if they have cocaine in the glove compartment. 

There was a kid who was charged with resisting arrest for failing to tell a school resource officer his name; he got an attitude so the officer sent him to court. But the kid could not have been resisting arrest because he was not under arrest. So they changed the charge to obstructing an investigation. But there was no investigation either. It was a sham. He was convicted and suspended. Because he is 16, the conviction will stay on his adult record for ever. When he is suspended, there is no one to take care of him so he is adopted by the street.

The gang can feed him. They understand what he is going through. He is not alone. He can make some money to pay his grandma's power bill. He is “protected” and understood. He has “power.”

We complain about dropout rates in our school. Staying in school is the greatest predictor of success, avoiding jail and bullets. I figured out how we can keep more kids in school - we can stop kicking them out.

In addition to being hungry and hunted, these children are haunted. They have seen more violence in their young lives than some soldiers see in a deployment: A cousin who caught a stray bullet and died in front of them, a mother beaten and tortured in front of them, a policeman busting into their apartment with tear gas and putting everyone in handcuffs. They live in a perpetual state of post-traumatic stress. They can't sleep, or they sleep in the bathtub to avoid bullets. And the teacher wants an essay on their summer vacation.

The children have no hope. They grow up in a place where there are few examples of successful people. The only people with regular income are hustling on the street. They have nice shoes, a nice ride, and can keep grandma's lights on. They have a low expectation for their life expectancy, and expect to be dead or in jail by their late twenties.

I had a client early in my career who was caught up in the street.  He had a pending charge; I worked out an agreement for probation. He looked me in the eye and swore he would never spend another night in jail. It was great. He volunteered at church, mentoring youth and coaching basketball.  Then warrants for an old charge caught up with him and I got a call from the family he had been picked up. The next day I got word that he had committed suicide in the jail. He actually tied one end of the sheet to the door knob and the other end around his neck, got on his knees, and choked him-self to death. I was devastated. I interviewed detention officers. I went to the autopsy. I watched them take out each organ and weigh it. I looked into his lifeless eyes. He had lost hope, if he really ever had any.

It changed me forever. I have blood on my hands, and I am complicit in this horrible system. We are all complicit. We are also the only hope for change.

We need to bring our compassion to court. We need to infect the system with fierce and unflinching love.  We need a pre-charge diversion program to keep kids out of the pipeline. We need to keep kids in schools, and help them deal with their problems instead of calling the children themselves "problems." We need to find ways to interrupt the pipeline at every point of entry and reentry with compassion. We need to have circles of support for people returning from incarceration and assist with social reintegration.

We need to try restorative justice programs which shift the focus from the hammer, and ask how we can heal the victim's harm, hold the offender personally accountable, and involve the community in the process.

As public defenders we have to be fearless in the assertion of our client's rights against all odds and caseloads. We have to demand the time necessary to do a great job in every case, and not let the system turn legal work into triage. As civil rights lawyers we have stop the police from hunting our children. We must end racial profiling in schools and in the street. Treating our children like criminals in school becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It can look daunting, but I have faith in what we are doing. It reminds me of the story of a child who found thousands of starfish washed upon the beach. He was throwing them back in the ocean when the man said, “You will never make a difference.” The boy stopped a second, smiled, and threw another one in the ocean. "Made a difference to that one."

And that's what I have to do, that's what you have to do, that's the work we must do together.