Angels with Dirty Faces. Walidah Imarisha
labor for life, could be legally sentenced to penal servitude. In the immediate aftermath of slavery, the southern states hastened to develop a criminal justice system that could legally restrict the possibilities of freedom for newly released slaves. Black people became the prime targets of a developing convict lease system, referred to many as a reincarnation of slavery.
Davis quoted Mary Ellen Curtin’s study of post-emancipation Alabama prisoners to show that before the abolition of the state’s 400,000 enslaved Africans, ninety-nine percent of Alabama’s prison population was white. Scant years after the end of slavery, Alabama prisoners overwhelmingly took on a darker hue. Scholar Michelle Alexander has shown there are now more Black people in prison then there were enslaved at the height of slavery.
The plantation haunts us, as a living specter, not a past dead and buried. The foundations of our justice system are rooted in enslavement, in the concept of white supremacy as law. The template for the modern police force is the slave patrol, as Kristian Williams shows in his book Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. The foundation was only to serve and protect those who were white and wealthy. For those who lived in Blackness, the predecessors to the police were there to ensure our obedience to chattel slavery. Slavery to prisons. Slave catchers to police. After Black youth organized and rebelled in the streets to bring attention to it, we heard the names last year of Black people murdered by the police, in rapid fire, with no end in sight: Michael Brown, Taylor Garner, Tamir Rice, Darrien Hunt, Akai Gurley.
There were the names from the same time we did not hear as well—Tanisha Anderson, an unarmed Black woman killed by Cleveland police. Aura Rain Rosser, killed in Ann Arbor. Black women and Black trans people are subject to state and police violence as well as intimate violence in their own homes and communities, and they are often erased from the public outcry. In this way, we lose the connections between state violence and the violence we inflict on one another, which serves to uphold the state.
Another name is added to this litany of death and mourning every twenty-eight hours. Every twenty-eight hours, a Black person is killed by law enforcement or white vigilantes, according to the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement’s Operation Ghetto Storm: 2012 Annual Report on the extrajudicial killing of 313 Black people by police, security guards and vigilantes. The FBI’s own 2012 data admits that white police killed a Black person almost twice a week for a seven-year period. And during Jim Crow segregation, a Black person was lynched every four days in this country. History is not just the past, but a living legacy, continuing to crush the breath from our lungs.
We say we prepare our children for the future. But really, we lie to our children about the present, shield their eyes from looking directly into the sun. We know they would never willingly emerge from the womb if they knew the truth. And once they learn the truth, it becomes a struggle to keep them here, on this planet. Black children, especially, seem to be born with terminator seeds planted deep in their bellies, seeds activated by lack of resources, decent education, adequate housing, lack of jobs, opportunity, dignity, respect, freedom, self-determination—lack of their faces reflected back at them in anything other than a mug shot shown on the 5 o’clock news. We tear at the faces we are told are the enemy’s. We tear at our own faces.
And while prisoners are overwhelmingly Black and brown, prisons themselves dominate all of our landscapes. Rural white towns devastated by the flight of capital overseas, by a globalization that too often makes the world tight as a noose around working necks, have looked to prison developers as prophets. Blue-collar industrial workers based in U.S. urban settings used to be necessary for the stability of the U.S. economy. But corporations have gone global, exploiting communities of color across continents, enacting a typhoon of monetary destruction that sends waves of economic refugees to our shores. As Chicano emcee Olmeca rapped, “You must be stupid/ No one crosses a desert cause they want to. It’s a necessity/ A sacrifice for the family/ You don’t call ’em illegals/ Call ’em economic refugees.”
The working class here in the U.S. has shifted faces. No longer white male factory machinists with lined faces and heavy gloves; now they are immigrant, brown. Often women. Cleaning the messes we do not see, which we work so hard not to see. Robin D.G. Kelley wrote in his contribution to Race, Class and Gender: An Anthology:
In a world of manufacturing, sweatshops are making a huge comeback, particularly in the garment industry and electronics assembling plants… These workers are more likely to be brown and female than the old blue-collar white boys we are so accustomed to seeing in popular culture.
Communities of color that are not being exploited for their labor are left with double and triple rates of unemployment when compared to the national average. Ruth Wilson Gilmore wrote in Golden Gulag, “Convicts are deindustrialized cities’ working or workless poor.” Black unemployment is more than double that of whites. In devastated urban areas, it is much higher. Kelley stated, “The ghetto is the last place to find American workers.” Contrary to the message that things get better for Black and brown, this is the highest rate of unemployment in almost thirty years. As reggae prophet Bob Marley warned us, “A hungry man is an angry man.” So what is to be done with this surplus, unneeded labor, this hunger simmering into rage?
America used to make cars. Now we make prisoners.
“Not in our backyard!” was the past response to the faintest whiff of a prison near rural white town limits. Now towns clamor for an institution, outbidding each other to provide the most enticing package. Prisons mean jobs, economic stimulation, normalcy returned to downsized lives. That’s what the brochures say. They don’t read the fine print. They don’t know the majority of people building the prison will be out-of-area contractors, most of the guards will be hired from surrounding areas, and those who are “lucky” enough to land a job will bring violence home. Prison is not something you clock out of, you cannot hang it up at the end of the night next to your uniform shirt. The increased rates of intimate violence, drug and alcohol addiction, assaults and suicide in prison towns bleed that truth.
There was a time I believed prisons existed to rehabilitate people, to make our communities safer. I thought they might need tweaking now and then, but what system didn’t? I thought bad apples sometimes infiltrated, but there were ways of rooting them out. The prisons I have been to, the hands that have held onto mine a moment longer than necessary, the stacks of prisoner mail that crowd my desk no matter how many I answer, all contradict that belief even more than the books I have read and the lectures I have attended. When I saw for the first time (but not the last) a mother sobbing and clutching her son when visiting hours were up, only to be physically pried off and escorted out by guards, I knew nothing about that made me safer. This is the heart of this country’s prison system. And the prison system has become the heart of America.
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I got to my California small town motel room late the night before my visit. I robotically unpacked my small bag. Though I would be visiting both days it was allowed, I had only brought one pair of pants: my black pinstriped interview pants. They were the only pair of pants I owned that weren’t jeans. At this prison, you weren’t allowed to wear denim. That was what the prisoners wore, and the administration feared—I was told—a clothing swap under the ever-present eyes of the guards and the all-seeing gaze of the surveillance cameras, allowing the prisoner to make a break for freedom. It was a security risk, and the regulation was necessary for the smooth running of the institution, and for the safety of the larger community. But only in Oregon, New Jersey, and California. In New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas, security and safety wore a completely different outfit, so my jeans were regulation approved there.
These arbitrary guidelines, which must be followed to the smallest detail, have all blurred in my mind, until I forgot where I am allowed to wear open-toed shoes and which metal detector was set off by my lip ring. For the sake of my sanity and for simplicity, I developed one outfit that worked at every prison I have visited (so far): black tank top with a red button down long sleeved shirt, the pinstriped pants, black tennis shoes, and no jewelry other than my lip and ear piercings (I found if I don’t add additional metal, the detectors won’t go off). Like the prisoners, I created my own prison uniform; I wear it summer or winter, sun or hail.
At the motel, I finished packing. I lay down in bed, flipping through the endless chatter