The Black KKK

If you're like me, you worry about the terrorists at home. You worry about the boys who turned your grandmama's neighborhood into a war zone, the ones who snuffed out NFL star Sean Taylor, leaving another black child fatherless, the people who invaded NBA forward Antoine Walker's home.

You accept that Osama bin Laden is a threat, but you know a toxic culture of self-hatred, indiscriminate violence and gang combat is the reality that disturbs your day-to-day existence. You realize it's not just a black thing. Mexicans experience the same problems. Even suburban white kids drift toward gangsta culture.

You wonder about the silence. A presidential debate is raging, and all the fuss is about who will be ready on day one to confront Al Qaeda. But the hypothetical three a.m. phone call that frightens you is the one with a policeman on the other end, telling you your son or daughter has been caught in the homegrown terrorism that pervades this nation.

How did we get here? How did we become so embarrassingly violent? How did black kids wearing white T-shirts learn to mimic the behavior of white men wearing white hoods? How did kids soldiering for the Mexican Mafia replace the Crips, Bloods and Gangster Disciples as the meanest

ones on the block? And why are white kids so attracted to the hatred, disrespect and danger?

Welcome to Incarceration Nation. We're doing life, and no one seems interested in parole. To comprehend the price we pay for America's 40-year love affair with waging a drug war and locking up the users, hustlers and occasional kingpins, you

have to spend time in Cali­fornia, the capital of Incar­ceration Nation, the first place to think it could lock its problems away.

I hit Los Angeles in early March of this year, a few days after a member of the Mexican 18th Street Gang gunned down a black high school football star three doors from his home, esca­lating already high black-brown tensions in the state. I came to Cali because its government is in crisis. Gov­ernor Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger, frustrated with a budget that calls for $9 billion of spending on corrections, would like to release 20,000 of the state's 180,000 pris­oners. It's unlikely he'll be able to do so. because his power-like that of the two governors who preceded him-pales in comparison with the state's most influ­ential lobby, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. Prison guards run the state, and they have no interest in fewer bodies to supervise.

You can't understand how America came to jail more than 2.3 million of its citi­zens—a full one percent of its adult population-without examining how California went from having 24.000 inmates to 180.000 in little more than 30 years. And you can't fathom where we should go from here without spending time with Julian Mendoza. Until this moment I've only heard stories about him and the work he performs trying to defuse the hopeless culture that spills from our love of incarceration.

But here we are on an early Thursday evening,

locked in a youth camp a few miles outside LA. We're sur­rounded by 22 white chairs with 17 brown and black boys filling them. Mendoza, with words and a cool confidence, is tossing cups of water on a blaze of rebellion.

He teaches from an Amer-I-Can manual, the bible he has believed in for 16 years. He thinks it can help him per­suade hardened gangbangers to pursue a positive lifestyle. A convert himself. Mendoza is a true believer. So much so that, at the risk of alienating his family. Mendoza crossed

Los Angeles's sometimes lethal Mexican-African American dividing line to become the leading facilitator and instructor in Amer-I-Can, which is NFL legend Jim Brown's grassroots prison- and gang-reform movement.

As the session begins I subconsciously and skeptically wish Mendoza luck. The scene is chaotic. From his open classroom

you can see and hear female prison staffers barking orders as teenage boys shower and dress. Mendozas congre­gation of the unconvinced struggles to maintain focus amid the distractions and the desire to say something tough or humorous.

Mendoza. 49, never blinks. He has driven to this facility a couple of times a week for more than a decade. He knows the obstacles. He recognizes the self-hatred. He refuses to surrender con­trol. More than anything, he forces young boys yearning to gain a rep in their hoods and grown men doing life without to confront the emotion that controls their life. "Fear," he says. "That's why you're here. That's why you come back. That's why you won't change."

Mendoza offers that admonishment to the young inmates when he summarizes a discussion they had about a black man in the 1960s who respected the rules of seg­regation inside a movie theater long after the laws had been repealed. But Mendoza was really speak­ing to all of us.

Fear controls us. It has us surrendering our consti­tutional rights and incarcer­ating our countrymen at an insanely vicious and destruc­tive rate. And fear won't even let us talk about it.

For the first time in our history we are seriously wrestling with the idea of electing a black man to the nation's highest office. But the cost of Barack Obama's candidacy is that he has to ignore the crisis crippling black and brown family

structures and cultures, savaging state government budgets and poisoning American society.

The mixed-race man who is best qualified on day one to fight domestic terrorism and explain to white America why it's in everybody's best interest to disarm, convert and rehabili­tate the Crips, Bloods and Mexican Mafia members in our pris­ons hasn't addressed the topic, because he runs the risk of being labeled too nonwhite. "It's not the kind of issue he should focus on right now," says (continued on page 122)

BLACK KKK

(continued from page 64) Bishop Harry Hendricks, pastor of South Central L.A.'s Church of the Liv­ing God, which is fenced, barred and protected by an elaborate alarm system to ward off gangs. "If he did, it would scare off too many Caucasian voters." Fear. It explains several troubling statistics that detail America's fast-growing prison population (the first four are from studies conducted by the Pew Center, the last from the Department of Justice):

• One in every 100 American adults resides behind bars.

• One out of every nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34 is incarcerated.

• Hispanics outnumber all other ethnic groups in prison.

• America incarcerates 800,000 more people than China and nearly three times as many people as Russia.

• If current rates of incarceration remain unchanged, 28.5 percent of black men will be confined in prison at least once during their lifetime.

The Pew study effectively argues that, in terms of expense, recidivism and crime rate, America's 40-year lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key binge has been a failure. By giving in to our fear of crime and by letting that fear and our embrace of a drug war rule our criminal-justice policies, we've efficiently cultivated fertile gang-recruiting soil and multiplied 20-fold the number of Americans dam­aged by the pain of incarceration.

A man does not suffer the anguish of internment alone. Every person who loves him sutlers too and is afflicted with the cancers of hostility and bitterness. With more than 10 percent of black men in their prime caged inside walls of despair, it is not at all surprising that black youth culture—music, communi­cation, appearance, attitude, parenting and socializing—reflects values associ­ated with surviving while incarcerated.

The tattoos, sagging pants, down-low sexual lifestyle, stop-snitching advo­cacy, cornrows, child abandonment and other short-term, instant-gratification genocidal characteristics and behav­iors are driven by a mentality refined behind prison walls and celebrated, exploited and promoted by the music industry and Hollywood.

What we foolishly term "hip-hop culture" is really prison culture. Its defenders say rappers such as 50 Cent (ex-con), Lil' Wayne (in trouble now), T.I. (ex-con and in trouble now) and Rick Ross (named after a famous drug dealer) don't represent true hip-hop. Well, they symbolize the hip-hop genre that sells. Many of us—black, white and brown—have ingested these prison

values and characteristics without con­templating the consequences, without considering what they have normal­ized: violent death, disrespect, hatred.

An understanding of prison poli­tics also illuminates the origins of the black-brown animus that has come to light during Obama's and Hill­ary Clinton's race for the Democratic nomination. The enmity and distrust are forged in a prison system that pits Mexicans against African Americans for control of the institutions and the highly profitable drug-and-contraband trade within them.

We've locked up, brutalized and institutionalized millions of Americans in a fruitless war more prolonged and costly than the conflict in Iraq. In the process, we've unleashed a deadly cul­ture in our society that reaches deep into the suburbs, seduces our young and tears at the patriotic fabric neces­sary to sustain a free nation.

Stripped of parents by drugs and imprisonment, desensitized to car­nage by video games and pop culture and robbed of the will and know-how to parent by a desperate pursuit of money and fame, our children have grown ferociously homicidal. Teen­age boys in a parentless apartment in Chicago (mother in jail), watching Denzel Washington play a murderous drug dealer in American Gangster, alleg­edly killed 29-year-old college student Amadou Cisse in a robbery that turned bloody. Little was unique about the way Cisse's life ended in late 2007.

America is sick, crying out for change and desperate enough to believe an unproven charismatic speaker can provide the revolution we need in the Oval Office. No American institution is in more need of "change we can believe in" than our prison system. It has pro­duced a new. more harmful form of segregation, a phenomenon 1 contend is similar to the stocking of 19th cen­tury Indian reservations with liquor and diseased blankets.

You know what? It's slavery. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. And the last time we had that, it led to a bloody civil war. We can't afford another one of those. Not with China's power growing and enemies throughout the Middle East.

We had better heed the advice of the abolitionists, men such as David Simon, the creator of HBO's magnificent anti­drug-war show The Wire. Upon the series's completion, Simon and his writ­ers issued a manifesto that implored fans of the Baltimore-based drama to practice jury nullification (i.e.. to defy the court and refuse to prosecute) in all nonviolent drug cases. Quoting American revolutionary Thomas I'aine and anti-death-penalty Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, the writers

urged, "No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonvio­lent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens."

These are seeds of a revolution I predict will begin first in California, the mecca of America's prison-industrial complex, the stale with the largest Financial outlay tied to maintaining the status quo. In the words of"Tupac Shakur and Dr. Die, "California knows how to party." It does so at ihe expense of its expanding prison population. "The problem is, the caterer and the liquor store have contacted a collection agency to pursue payment of their bills. The average taxpayer has no idea that drunk-on-power prison guards are in control of the state's checkbook.

"How are we going to unlock Califor­nia?" asks Gerald Harris, from Gilrov. California, who in 2006 retired after 30 years of service as an administrator in the state's Department of Correc­tions. "We might as well put gun towers around the borders of California. We're all incarcerated."

Harris had a front-row seat as Cal­ifornia's prison population multiplied eight times during his career. He wit­nessed the devastating effects of Gover­nor Pete Wilson's popular three-strikes crime bill, which dictates a mandatory 25-year sentence for third-time felons, including those convicted of a non­violent third offense. Harris benefited financially from California's prison-spending explosion that erected 20 new facilities, escalated the state's cor­rections budget from $300 million to S9 billion and turned the California Cor­rections Peace Officers .Association into the political heavyweight it is today.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported California will soon have the dubious distinction of spending more on prisons than on higher education. "In my time in corrections," Harris remembers, "we built 20 prisons and one university in the state of California."

No one eats in the Golden State until the 30.000-plus-member prison-guard union is fed, and the high-school-edu­cated, six-weeks-trained keepers of Shawshank form a hungry lot. Prison guards in California are paid at a rate 60 percent higher than the national average for the job. Their starting salaries and benefits dwarf those of the 300.000-meniber California Teachers Association. Including overtime, it is not uncommon for a state prison guard to earn a six-figure income. Remark­ably, some reportedly lake in more lhan Schwarzenegger's salary of S212,000. Even more preposterous is the

CCPOA's political clout. Under the direc­tion of former Folsom prison guard Don Novey, CCPOA hired a public-relations firm in the 1980s and laid the ground­work for its rise by spending millions on political candidates. Every California governor since Wilson has been in the thrall of the labor union. Schwarzeneg­ger's early attempt to break the union's hold on the governor's office and reform the prison system failed.

Rod Hickman, the black prison czar Schwarzenegger appointed, had a two-year tenure as a reformer before he succumbed to CCPOA intimidation and stepped down as secretary of the Depart­ment of Corrections. Hickman's failure was a painful reminder of the CCPOA's formidable political strength, a shrine of power fortified in the late 1990s when the union sabotaged the reelection bid of a district attorney who dared to con­vene a grand jury to examine allega­tions that Corcoran State Prison guards had viciously pounded 36 inmates.

"CCPOA runs the prison system," explains Wanda Briscoe, the former chief of education and inmate pro­grams for the California Department of Corrections. "Based on the fact that there is strength in numbers and money, I would think the system works very well for them. They are hiring more prison guards. I see employment opportunities every month. They want more custody, more guards. It is the most powerful union I have ever seen in my lifetime."

The union is so powerful, it got former governor Gray Davis to hand over pay

raises when nearly everything else in the budget was being slashed. Rock Johnson, an Amer-I-Can facilitator for 16 years and an original Crip who spent 17 years in California's maximum-security facili­ties, says prison guards are invested in stirring up trouble among the inmates. "Riots translate to overtime and triple-time pay," he says. "Man, I've been in the joint when the guards have opened all the cells and shouted 'Charge!' They know what they're doing. All you have to do is set a Mexican gangster and a black gangster in the same cell and wait for it to jump off. It's on."

It goes even deeper. Prisons sustain vibrant, lucrative hard-to-tax economies that line the pockets of guards, prison­ers, wardens and organized-crime fig­ures. San Quentin is much like Vegas, fueled by drugs, gambling and prostitu­tion. A crackdown at Pelican Bay State Prison revealed high-level Mexican Mafia lieutenants had thousands of dol­lars on their commissary books.

Then there are the legal hustles that prey on the prison population. It goes without saying it is extremely expensive to retain and employ competent lawyers and secure bail bonds even when you're legitimately innocent of the charges. Had the Duke lacrosse players accused of rape been poor, they would more than likely have sat in jail or accepted plea agreements while awaiting trial.

Yeah, prison building has slowed, but the exploitation of prisoners (and their families) is on the rise. Their dirt-cheap labor is in high demand throughout California. In some indus-

tries they're more valuable and cov­eted than illegal immigrants.

Prisons empower gangs and make them more necessary. Behind the walls, there is safety in numbers. America's street-gang eruption tlowed directly from its mixture of mass incarceration and punishment.

"Prisoners are the puppet masters pulling the strings on everything out on the streets," says Harris, who was also chief deputy warden at Salinas Val­ley State Prison. "You don't rehabilitate when your primary day-to-day concern is your survival. You can't limit gang affil­iation when prisoners have to stay close because they need the protection."

"You have to clique up," explains John­son. "You can try to mind your own busi­ness and do your own time until trouble happens, and then you have to choose a side for your own survival."

What's happening is no secret. You can find the stories in every American newspaper. Gang violence and its ever younger perpetrators make great copy. The media, however, fail to connect the dots. Steve Lopez, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, begged his city's mayor to "act now to stop the gangs" in a col­umn published on March 12, the day the Times ran harrowing photos of 17-year-old Jamiel Shaw's funeral. A high school football star, Shaw was gunned down three doors from his home as he talked to his girlfriend on a cell phone. Lopez's column focused on a 15-year-old boy who affiliated with a gang while in a juvenile-detention facility and was home awaiting a call to get officially "jumped" into a gang. The problem is, gang initia­tion requires a lot these days. You can't fight your way in. You gain standing by pulling the trigger, and in California the quickest route to gang stripes is to claim a body in the black-brown war. The young boy featured in Lopez's col­umn was expecting the same kind of call that in all likelihood led to Shaw's death. Shaw's alleged shooter, a 19-year-old, had been released from jail less than 24 hours earlier. You can't reduce violence without reducing the influence of gangs. You can't reduce the influence of gangs without reducing the number of people in prison. We can't stem the pervasive­ness of prison culture without stemming the pervasive hopelessness and fear inside prison walls.

Given California's ahead-of-the-curve descent into Incarceration Nation, it makes sense that gangsta rap and the glorification of prison values sprang from Compton in the late 1980s. N.W.A rebelled by rapping "Fuck tha Police," and Eazy-K, Ice Cube, Dr. Die, MC Ren and Yella got paid for songs like "Gang­sta, Gangsta," "Dopeman" and "A Bitch Iz a Bitch." I hev basicallv immortalized

the three commandments of hip-hop prison culture: killing, drug dealing and disrespecting women.

From there hip-hop artists across the country took it upon themselves to define black people and black culture as criminal and worthy of mass incarceration. It all reached a climax when a Rollin' 20s Crip (Snoop Dogg), a Mob Piru Blood (Suge Knight), Tupac and Dr. Dre joined forces to make Death Row Records the strongest force in the rap industry, and possibly in pop culture, in the mid-1990s.

Dre's The Chronic (8 million in sales), Snoop's Doggystyle (more than 10 million) and Pac's All Eyez on Me (more than 12 million) are considered three of the most influential and memorable CDs of all time. They perfectly reflect California's transformation into a giant prison yard, which can best be witnessed at the state's urban schools.

Claudius Shropshire, 56, a teacher, coach and assistant principal in the Los .Angeles Unified School District for 25 years, explained to me the inherent complexities of teaching in California's inescapable terror zones. Teachers daily walk a fine line of demanding too little and too much respect from students with gang affiliations.

"The way you treat the kids determines how safe you are in an area," Shropshire says. "I rode my bike to school one day, and a student told me, 'You don't know how hard I had to work to stop you from getting jacked.'" Shropshire's story illus­trates an ill that is widespread in most of California's major cities.

"The prison system extends right into the schools." says Harry Edwards, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California-Berkeley. "The values and perspectives of hopelessness spawned in society are intensified inside prison walls and then are revisited upon the community. In consequence we have schools that are literally locked down for security purposes. Once you go in, you can't simply walk back out, because in many such institutions gates are locked behind you. You walk through metal detectors, and there are shakedowns for contraband—including the use of dogs. You have fences and barred win­dows, just as in prison. In fact, today many schools are indistinguishable from prison. Teachers and administrators in far too many instances are as worried about their own safety as they are about their teaching responsibilities. The very vehicle—education—that is supposed to give kids hope is now an extension of the prison system."

You can't teach when you're worried about safety- You can't learn when your primary concern is safety. It's sad. If change will ever happen, it's difficult to see it coming.

What's easier to distinguish is the vast subculture that has zero faith in the American dream. Rebellion and govern­ment instability are the companions of nations that choose incarceration and enslavement as primary tools of preserv­ing order and allegiance to the flag.

Our exaggerated fear of crime has sanctioned the brutality and political clout that work against our self-interest and the quality of our lives. Has there been any proof during the past 100 years that public safety improves and hostility decreases when you pulverize a segment of society with punishment? And do alcoholics and junkies—the majority of the offenders we incarcer­ate—deserve such an attack?

We need to explain to Americans that our drug war has proved futile. It holds our cities hostage and corrodes the foun-dationul values that made our society the world's envy. We are better served selling hope, opportunity and second chances. We cannot short-circuit the culture that has ensnared our youth without first providing hope to our most hopeless citizens', the humanity decomposing in our jails and prisons.

In order to fix our prison system, reduce the violent criminal activity of gang members, make our schools safer and purify a toxic culture, we must move beyond our fears. We have to reinstitute rehabilitation and start aggressive (and expensive) drug and alcohol treatment programs in prisons. We need to revamp our drug laws and sentencing guidelines and, most important, work with gang leaders on neighborhood safety issues.

Where will the money come from?

According to the American Friends Service Committee, the Iraq war costs us $720 million a day. Do the kids in our city schools feel any safer? How about the elderly living in homes with iron-barred windows? Or the parents worried their children may ride their bike into the wrong neighborhood? Those people are more terrified today than they were before President Bush disarmed Saddam Hussein.

The movement needs a leader with deep roots and credibility in prison and gang culture and reform. Whether America is comfortable with him or not. Jim Brown has the best credentials to spearhead such a fight. In his intel­lect, connections across ethnic, political and economic boundaries and years of commitment to the cause, no one can match Brown. Name another indepen­dent activist who can happily break bread with NFL coaches, billionaire businessmen, entertainers, politicians, athletes, religious leaders and heads of the Bloods. Crips. Mexican Mafia, Hells Angels and Gangster Disciples.

Brown and his 20-year-old Amer-I-Can program are not saviors, but they are committed—a starting point—tested, backed by vision and a 15-chapter cur­riculum gaining popularity nationwide. Brown's relationships give the program almost limitless street credibility. His Hollywood Hills home just off the Sun­set Strip has long been a neutral, safe

meeting ground for L.A. gangs to work out peace agreements.

"I've never talked a man out of a gang," Brown says from his couch. "That's not what we do. We talk people out of doing gang criminal activity. We have 20 years of experience, 20 years of relationships. We've been in the streets. We've had dealings with Larry Hoover, Raymond Washington, Tookie Williams, all the historical figures in the prison sys­tem. I know all these characters and have spent time with them. You can't intro­duce education and tap into the power of the culture and effect change without having these relationships. We've culti­vated this over a period of time and have become experts in the field."

Amer-I-Can has had success stories, most notably in California, Louisiana and Florida. When, for budgetary rea­sons, its contract was not renewed at the Wayside Detention Facility. 45 minutes outside Los Angeles, violence rose inside the maximum-security unit and Amer-I-Can was quickly retained.

"I'm going to say it straight out. Amer-I-Can is the strongest educational compo­nent in the system in terms of developing positive change." Brown claims. "It's not even close. Education has to be the root of it all. If you don't educate, you'll never get change. You start with life-skills edu­cation, where a person decides to take responsibility for his actions.

"We've gone into the worst violent sit­uation a jail has had in the state of Cali­fornia and made it nonviolent just by engaging more individuals in the educa­tion process. That's up at Wayside. It's in our contract that our job is to stop riots. For four years we did it without incident, and then they didn't renew us. They had to bring us back."

Amer-I-Can played a role in the Angola (Louisiana) State Penitentiary's amazing transformation from "America's bloodi­est prison" to a relatively safe environ­ment for thousands of men doing time with little chance of parole. Real change stretches beyond the empowerment of one organization. Churches have to become more heavily involved in prison ministry. It will take a group effort to change a culture gone haywire.

"America has to restore its family struc­ture," says Bishop Hendricks, a former cop and juvenile-prison chaplain. "We've run the man out of the family. First it was welfare, and you couldn't get a check if the man slaved in the home. Now it's prison and men not wanting the respon­sibility of family. There's no stigma when you go to jail. When I was growing up the family was embarrassed. When you went to jail it was a mind-boggling expe­rience. Nowadays going to jail is a badge of honor. I used to tell these young peo­ple that juvenile facilities were nothing more than institutions to prepare them for the next step, so they could make the transition to prison easy"

America's demonization of ex-cons will have to be challenged too. You can't provide hope to the hopeless if there is no light at the end of their incarceration. Julian Mendoza deplores California's probation and parole rules that prohibit ex-cons from associating with gang mem­bers and visiting drug neighborhoods.

"You're basically telling guys. 'Don't go home and don't associate with your family,'" Mendoza explains. "What are they supposed to do, never see their brother or cousin again? It's just an easy parole violation. The police can lock you up again anytime they want."

Rock Johnson believes prison violence and corruption make smart inmates dis­connect from their families on the outside. "The mind-set I needed to survive didn't allow for me to think about my daughter or mother." says Johnson, who survived 11 bullet wounds and recuperated at Brown's home not long after being released from prison. "The moment I thought about them was the moment I might let my guard down and get killed. I didn't want them to visit me. 1 didn't want anyone

inside to think I had someone close to me, someone who could be extorted."

Ex-felons need to have their voting rights restored. Thirteen percent of the black adult male population has lost the right to vote because of felony disenfranchisement laws. And if an ex-con stays clean for three years, we should allow him to fill out a job application without having to list his non­violent felonies. We need to end our "war on drugs." It's a war on poor people, a war we're losing badly. We will have to legalize drugs and use the tax money to fund treat­ment centers and prison reform. I'm not interested in debating what's worse, drugs or alcohol, drugs or tobacco. Prohibition doesn't work, especially in a free society.

Rehabilitating our penal system and let­ting the steam out of prison culture will take resources and time. It won't take the hun­dred years John McCain is prepared to commit toward civilizing Iraq. Civilizing .America will mostly take a reduction in fear.