Low Road (14 page)

The joint had become a place of self-education for many of the brothers who found themselves incarcerated. In fact, prison was often seen as the virtual equivalent of college for young men who had rejected the dictates of society, particularly the educational and social standards that evolved from European, Christian value systems. While it was true that they had been charged and convicted of crimes, it was an undeniable reality that race and class thought patterns were still a major influence on the workings of American criminal justice. Many a convict was led to the conclusion that his incarceration was a direct result of the intolerance of a government that had never really intended for him to have freedom to begin with. Prison was not so terribly different from a slave plantation, after all. Corrections officers served as the equivalent of overseers. Inmates were dressed as they were told to, fed only when it was determined that they should eat, and disciplined in various ways when they disobeyed. A number of deputies even took their racism to work with them and acted out their aggressions toward black prisoners in much the same way slave owners sought to maintain control.

Such an analysis, of course, was partially flawed. Those who were lawfully convicted had forfeited their rights because they had violated state code and statute. Their freedoms had not been arbitrarily restricted based upon their race. Yet the similarities and the recognition of the suffering a hateful environment had put them through were enough for many a black man to reach the common conclusion: He must learn what he was not taught about himself and other cultures in order find pride despite hostile circumstances. As a result, inmates frequently turned to African history, Islam, the study of Eastern philosophy, and other sources of enlightenment that had never been offered to them in school.

One of the enlightened, Huey P. Newton, had been accused of murder just a month after Donnie's arrival in Indiana. Newton, who cofounded the Black Panther Party barely a year earlier, was charged with killing an Oakland police officer and wounding another in a shoot-out. The Panthers were inspired by and became students of Third World nationalist struggles, such as that of Fidel Castro in Cuba and Mao Zedong in China. Based in California, the Panthers sought to link the black liberation movement with other freedom movements throughout the world. They patrolled neighborhoods with shotguns as a show of unity and as an indication of the protection they were willing to give citizens who had been victimized by the very law enforcement assigned to serve them. They made publicly known their intention toward “defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality.”

Imprisonment, however, became an effective weapon in the government's battle against so-called subversives, who had nerve enough to assert their rights to humanity by methods that did not include pleading on bended knee. Apart from any preactivism encounters with the law, such as Newton's unrelated prison terms, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, Fred Hampton, Assata Shakur, and numerous other revolutionaries spent time in the joint. A major casualty of the jail-as-a-weapon strategy against Panthers and other freedom fighters was Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt, a Vietnam War veteran, who brought his courage and experience to the movement. Pratt would spend nearly three decades incarcerated after he was convicted of murdering a white couple on a Santa Monica tennis court, in spite of the fact that he was 400 miles away at the time. This could be proven by the government itself, which had placed Geronimo under surveillance. The bureau's notorious Counterintelligence Program—COINTELPRO, as it became known—was designed to neutralize the efforts of organizations and movements that threatened the status quo. Through the use of internal disruption, character assassination, false propaganda, outright violence, and the criminalization of actions in pursuit of change, the FBI achieved measurable success. By imprisoning the most fiery and charismatic young leaders, it was possible not only to disturb the momentum of energy created by their words and behavior but also to discourage their supporters with the threat of lost freedom.

As a number of their own fearless and sacrificial soldiers experienced life behind bars, the Panthers took notice of the devastation that imprisonment was creating in the black community at large. The American judicial system was inherently biased in its treatment of people of color, they concluded. All things considered, how could any true justice be administered on stolen land? In each and every courtroom where defendants had ever been sentenced to prison or death, there was a red, white, and blue flag: a reminder of the very crime. A reminder that the country had been captured from dark men and women, colonized, and redistributed in the fashion that Europeans—who disregarded and changed all the preexisting standards of order—saw fit for establishing law. The system was literally poisonous at its root. Its primary beneficiaries, even hundreds of years later in the 1960s, were the progeny of statesmen, judges, and the most common of Caucasian ancestors, whose skin and citizenship came with entitlements. It seemed no wonder, then, that as men and women of color continued to press for equal treatment toward the end of the modern civil rights era, they consistently found themselves charged with landing on the wrong side of the law. Among the nation's general population of incarcerated criminals, there were frequently the common denominators of race and class status. In and of themselves, such circumstances should not have mattered when applied to those who had actually broken the law. Still, the quality of legal representation, efficiency of trial proceedings, and even the actual determination of sentences were all consistently related to the physical complexions and economic standing of those who were charged with crimes and brought to court. Those immediately receiving any advantage from the output of the flawed process were a part of something scholars and writers began to call the prison industrial complex.

In this setup, the industry, much like automobiles or fast food, was driven by its manufacture. The product was the prisoner. And the industry of confinement was one that involved dollars and the potential for financial gain. When a prison was built, there was the promise of contracts, and with contracts often came the promise of renewals. Not including the requirement for staff to supervise the inmates, the possibility of stable employment in various capacities came along with operating a correctional facility. The inmates, in turn, could be selectively used—some would have argued that they were deliberately exploited—to provide cheap labor that ultimately would profit the state. In a particular way, the operation was just as seamless as Henry Ford's assembly line, for while it wasn't due to the same demand for access to capital, no one anticipated there would ever be a problem with filling prisons. Crime was a reliable source of lawful capitalism. The Panthers recognized such social patterns, and within a few years they released their party's ten-point program. No. 9 stated:

We want freedom for all black and oppressed people now held in U.S. federal, state, county, city and military prisons and jails. We want trials by a jury of peers for all persons charged with so-called crimes under the laws of this country
[italics used for emphasis]. We believe that the many Black and poor, oppressed people now held in United States prisons and jails have not received fair and impartial trials under a racist and fascist judicial system, and should be freed from incarceration. We believe in the ultimate elimination of all wretched, inhuman penal institutions, because the masses of men and women imprisoned inside the United States or by the United States military are the victims of oppressive conditions, which are the real cause of their imprisonment. We believe that when persons are brought to trial they must be guaranteed, by the United States, juries of their peers, attorneys of their choice and freedom from imprisonment while awaiting trial.

Conversely, imprisonment and the death penalty were about the extent of the government's deliberation as it pertained to addressing upheaval and disorder. There was no room for socialist analysis, particularly among the capitalists who thrived off of the industry and all its imperfections. In accordance with their approach, at least one of the system's internal failings was actually a plus of sorts where helping the prison machine to function was concerned. Recidivism, as the process of repeat offense and reentry to the world of corrections was called, accounted for a sizable portion of the inmates. First-time criminals could see the inside of the penitentiary, of course, depending on the nature of their legal violations; however, recidivistic felons found themselves in a routine. Existing outside of the law became a means of survival, as time spent in the joint, without significant preparation for handling freedom, only made assimilation more difficult. Interaction with more seasoned criminals behind bars could also be partly blamed for the return rates: Just like university courses for undergraduates, the pursuit of worldly education was valued by students of the street. Donnie's recidivism was significant in the manner of its progression: He had climbed, or perhaps descended, from incarceration in state-run facilities to serving time in the federal pen. The distinction was not necessarily a reflection of the seriousness of his crimes, at least probably not by what the woman he'd held a gun on at the numbers house would have said. It was more of a subtle statement about the tolerance levels that robbery and alcohol violations were assigned by lawmakers. It screamed irony. One act was pretty much stamped as unsurprising, typical nigger misbehavior, while the other could be compared with literally taking money from the government. Having the balls to try to beat Uncle Sam at his own damn hustle. And the government's hustles were not ever supposed to be fucked with.

Another small percentage of the inmate population was actually comprised of ex-government personnel. Vietnam War veterans, having returned home from yet another American confrontation in Asia, found it hard to get their lives back on track in many cases. For vets of color, the odds of unemployment and poverty were even greater than for the average. Out of desperation and, in a number of instances, feeling completely abandoned by the society and institutions they had supposedly fought to help preserve, some chose crime as a last resort. After standing on the front line in Southeast Asia, as one of the popular Motown artists put it, they found themselves at the back of the line when it came to getting ahead. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops had arrived in Vietnam by the mid-1960s. As the decade moved along, the term
alienation
could be frequently heard in discussions about the political and social climate of the country. The so-called ideological and more liberal “left” was generally given the responsibility for this phenomenon, which came to be associated with ongoing race problems and protests against the war. Those who wore the “hippie” label, students of higher education, and any scattered number of genuinely progressive thinkers were coming to reject the image of America they had grown up learning about. Believing in. Pledging allegiance to. It seemed a bullshit notion that in a freedom-loving society, young men were being drafted into military service to kill and be killed, if necessary, for the nebulous purpose of gaining victory in foreign lands. World domination was the farthest thing from their minds. And there was little defensible logic to believing a government that appeared so preoccupied with it could stand for anything resembling civility and democracy. Divided opinions about action in Vietnam affected American communities more dramatically than had any war before it.

More outspoken leadership elements had been critical of any black involvement in the conflict as far back as 1963. It was outrageous, according to their position, for more men of color to die in defense of a nation that had consistently refused to protect their women and children from the dangers they lived with on a daily basis. One
New York Times
reporter would note that, among those who refused to outright condemn the war, there was still hesitation when it came down to encouraging black participation in the effort. For the first time in America's history, his article noted, “national Negro figures are not urging black youths to take up arms” in the hopes that they could “improve the lot of the black man in the United States.” Apparently, after decades and generations, truth had sunk in. Black soldiers could go wherever they were commanded, bleed rivers on enemy soil, lose precious limbs, leave their loved ones widowed or fatherless, and it would never make a goddamned bit of difference in the level of respect or acceptance in first-class citizenship afforded their people. In an abstract confirmation of this reality, even the predominantly white local draft boards wasted little time in doing what they could to preserve discrimination. Board members preferred to conscript young black men. In 1967, 64 percent of those eligible were drafted, compared to only 31 percent of eligible whites. A year later, black recruits made up about 10 percent of the total United States military but only 2 percent of all officers, typically suggesting the establishment's belief that they were best suited to receive orders rather than issue them. For reasons more appropriate than one, the black servicemen referred to one another as “blood.” They formed the battalions that engaged in violent jungle warfare with Vietcong.

Just as Donnie had experienced years earlier, the Asian terrain also produced recreational dangers. Hash, marijuana, and smack were again made available to the soldiers, both black and white. Just as Donnie had, a good number developed addictions and ultimately experienced life-altering consequences. When they returned to the States, they counted themselves among the junkie populations that struggled between the listlessness of drowsy, drug-induced nods, to survive in the ghetto. At home, black popular opinion turned steadily in opposition to the war. The objections continued, even as Washington ordered growing numbers of men to join the fray of troops already engaged. Meanwhile, the questioning of authority at home gradually rippled from the civilian population all the way across the ocean to the ranks of the servicemen. With the eastern-accented words of Vietnamese disc jockey Hanoi Hannah working to sweetly persuade them that they shouldn't be there—even as she entertained them by playing all their Motown favorites—the black soldiers began doubting the wisdom of their superiors. Along with the Mexican recruits, they faced the most perilous and thankless combat assignments. Where they had once been excluded from battle, now they were virtually condemned to it. Black soldiers wound up as about 20 percent of the American battlefield casualties. The last units wouldn't leave Vietnam until 1973, two years before the conflict's end. As the American occupation increased, though, so did enemy resistance.