The importance of reentry and reintegrating formerly incarcerated individuals back into society has belatedly emerged as a major issue among criminal justice policy makers. Although prisoner reentry is not a new criminal justice matter, its importance is exacerbated by correctional policies that have resulted in the incarceration of large numbers of persons for significant periods of time, the release of prisoners who have not received treatment, and the failure to provide adequate services and surveillance in the communities after release.3 Recently, prisoner reentry has garnered bipartisan attention. Both Republican4 and Democratic5 elected officials have recognized the importance and impact of prisoner reentry. Congress is in the process of considering “The Second Chance Act,”6 which boasts both liberal and conservative support and offers a wide range of reentry activities. But this belated political attention may prove too little, too late.
The public debates over reentry that have emerged have begun to offer an important glimpse into the challenges of life after prison. Still, as important as these discussions are, they have too often missed the mark. These debates have frequently taken place in a race-neutral context, thereby ignoring the elephant in the room—the fact that we are talking about a problem that predominantly affects only certain populations in this country. This book aims both to rectify this oversight and to advance the public debate by situating the issue of reentry squarely in its peculiarly U.S. context: one influenced by race, power, and the media. This book examines the ways in which political leaders have successfully wielded the twin weapons of racial bias and raced-based fear to launch their political agendas and propel their careers. Elected officials have built electoral platforms on the backs of communities of color, waging wars on crime and drugs with little consideration of, or concern for, the communities that would suffer the greatest casualties. And, despite full-throated claims of objectivity and neutrality in reporting, the media has been complicit in our prison boom and the subsequent reentry crisis. By demonizing men of color and spreading misconceptions about crime and men of color, the media has played a vital role in dooming efforts at reentry. Finally, this book aims to move to the foreground considerations of the disproportionate impact of race-based policies on communities of color. The individual and collective stories of reentry and its relentless challenges can no longer be relegated to the background.
I have chosen to write this book because the subject is personal to me. The intersection of race, reentry, and politics has always shaped my perceptions of, and approach to, the criminal justice system. Pretty early in my personal life and then again later in my professional career, I noticed that people of color received quite different treatment from the criminal justice system. Before I knew to use the term “reentry,” I recognized the difficulties that individuals in my community faced as they tried to reintegrate into the neighborhoods they had been forced to leave. After law school, I chose to return home to work in the San Francisco Bay area; I settled in the east bay, in the very community where I had been reared. I spent a decade working as a public defender in that community. As a resident, I sought to be active in the social, cultural, and political fabric of the community. I saw no conflict between my community involvement and my role as a public defender, and I viewed my practice and my concern for the community as fundamentally linked. By the time I began practicing criminal law, drugs, drug cases, and drug probation and parole were the primary driving force in the criminal justice system. We knew so little about how to address drug problems that when someone tested positive for drug use, judges simply sentenced them to prison. There was little data on the process of recovery from drug addiction. Court actors considered relapse nothing more than volitional conduct on the part of probationers and parolees who were making conscious decisions to use drugs. Later, of course, we learned the error of that perception: research and experience taught us that relapse is a part of recovery and that graduated supportive sanctions rather than custody were the appropriate responses to recovering addicts.
Years after becoming a law professor, as a participant in criminal justice meetings and in conducting Socratic dialogues with judges, often I heard them say, “Oh, I have learned so much about relapse and recovery. I remember when I used to send someone to prison for one dirty test.” Strikingly, as we developed our knowledge base, we did not go back and adjust sentences or sentencing schemes to compensate for our new knowledge. Rather, the criminal justice players and policy makers simply sat back idly and let a generation of young men and women, most often persons of color, sit needlessly and uselessly behind bars. Too often, those men and women received no treatment, vocational training, or education. As the decades of the 1980s and 1990s passed, I continued my community involvement and activism. Slowly, the political discourse began to include and embrace broader notions of punishment and community corrections. But reconnecting with the community is difficult for recently released individuals. We never stopped to think that limiting access to education and vocational training would make reentry so terribly challenging.
At the same time, no one focused on the fact that employers habitually discriminated in hiring ex-offenders. Moreover, by limiting access to drug treatment both inside and outside of prison, we did not recognize that the temptation ex-offenders faced upon release was a recipe for disaster. We spent so much time trying to fend off the incredibly long and harsh prison sentences that we lost sight of how our clients were being transformed in prison. The civil rights of probationers and parolees were so limited that as the 1990s began and the politicians’ lightly camouflaged use of racial imagery became the norm, we didn’t anticipate the long-term negative consequences of the policies that were developing.
Racial imagery, mixed with police practices and racial profiling, transformed our society. The confluence of pervasive media images, popular culture, and our nation’s history has led us to an almost unconscious acceptance of racial stereotyping and a deep-seated fear of people of color. Socially, politically, and culturally we continue to remain two societies—one White and one of color. A collision course of race, and the presumptions about crime, and the tacit acceptance of police misconduct began a chain of events whose effects and implications we are only now beginning to feel.
In communities of color—the African American community in particular—there are certain social and cultural “norms” that don’t exist in the White community. My father-in-law, a world-renowned jazz pianist, jazz educator, and television personality is as prepared to be stopped and harassed by the police as my twenty-something, college-educated nephews. It is understood that law enforcement will act differently toward men—and increasingly women—of color than toward all others.
As a law professor I have observed, analyzed, and taught the cases that present an illusory world, absent race, that serves as the construct and foundation of the bulk of United States Supreme Court decisions regarding the conduct of police officers in immigrant, poor, and of-color communities. In traffic stops, pretextual justifications for race-based behavior are no longer frowned upon but instead lauded as good police work. Although superficially addressed in election years and occasionally given media attention, racially charged differences continue to be seen in discretionary decision making. Numerous studies have brought race to the surface in various aspects of the decision making that occurs throughout the criminal justice system. In arrests, charging, plea bargaining, and sentencing we see people of color treated differently than their White counterparts. The criminal justice system, although based in large part on the need for the public to believe in its even-handedness, is replete with evidence to the contrary.
In jury trials, where a cross-section of the entire community is supposed to be included, the courts have allowed for the exclusion of people of color with little more than “plausible excuses” from the prosecutors using peremptory challenges. In both state and federal court trials, it is not unusual for judges to ask potential jurors of color if they can be fair and impartial in cases where the defendants were also people of color (of the same race) without considering the atmosphere this creates in a courtroom: the question itself presumes same-race bias and plants