American Way of Life

A dozen young men sit in a circle, their bodies hunched over in chairs, pencils poised above notebooks in studied deliberation. The room is silent except for the persistent scratching of lead against loose-leaf paper. Leon Miller, a student of the Free Minds Book Club and an inmate of the D.C. prison, rises and clears his throat.

“I’ve seen the lowest of low and been the highest of high, but when it’s all over something inside you dies. I could be a coward, lower my head and cry, crawl into my cell then lie down and die. But I know life’s not over; my heart tells me to fight; if I look hard enough I see my freedom in sight. Though I am behind these bars, I’ll start my life anew. Despite these walls around me, my sun will still shine through.”

Miller, like the room’s other young poets, is a juvenile who has been charged as an adult in the District’s criminal justice system. Denied access to even the limited rehabilitative programs offered to incarcerated adults, these young men cultivate their hope for a better future through an organization called Free Minds Book Club, learning to resurrect the “something inside” lost in the cramped corridors of this Southeast edifice of concrete and florescent lighting.

Former television reporters Tara Libert and Kelli Taylor founded the Free Minds Book Club after doing extensive reporting on the plight of juveniles in adult prisons. While they noted the lack of educational, vocational, and social rehabilitative resources available to youth behind bars, it was the death of Taylor’s friend Glen McGinnis that moved the duo from observation to action.
McGinnis, an inmate on Texas’s Death Row whose capital sentence stemmed from a crime he committed at 17, was executed in 2000. The execution ignited Taylor’s “desire to do more than just report on the problem.”

Two years later, the Free Minds Book Club began offering incarcerated youth in D.C. an emotional support system and a unique academic experience. Most importantly, through the Book Club, inmates gained the chance to reclaim themselves—through the evocative power of written and spoken word; they navigated their history of poverty, violence, and pain, using paragraphs and stanzas to build a better future.

Today, Free Minds serves more than fifty young men who are charged and incarcerated as adults at the D.C. Jail and has served over 200 youth since its start. In the District, as in many states, children as young as 15 can be prosecuted as adults, making juveniles offenders eligible for life imprisonment and the death penalty. Dozens of 16- and 17-year-old boys are currently incarcerated in the D.C. Jail, and are often transferred to federal adult prisons in Ohio and Virginia after they reach legal age. According to Free Minds’ Web site, the group’s members are 92 percent African American and 8 percent Latino. The majority of these youth come from D.C.’s most crime-stricken neighborhoods—neighborhoods where nearly half of the children live below the poverty line.

Products of these neighborhoods, many of them 16- and 17-year-old children, read at a fifth grade level. Most of them have completely disengaged, if not dropped out from school. More than half of the youth involved in Free Minds have parents or other close family members who have been incarcerated, and many have children of their own.

Studies have shown juveniles incarcerated in adult facilities are more likely to remain entangled in the criminal justice system throughout their lives, although those who have access to support programs like the Free Minds Book Club are less likely to end up behind bars again.

By engaging in intellectual discussions, penning essays and poems, and corresponding with pen pals, Book Club members reconnect to the creative and expressive facets of their personalities repressed by failing school systems and difficult personal histories, according to the Free Minds Web site.

“Free Minds has changed my life,” said Lamarz Wilson, a member of the Book Club since 2004. “I’m no longer the thug I used to be but a loving and kind person.”

Wilson, now a free man, still remains involved in the organization. He described his experience with the group as “amazing, generous, and loving” during a panel discussion at AU.

In addition to the Book Club, Free Minds runs reentry and continuing support programs for former members. Many credit the group with their personal success after their release.

Wilbert Avila began participating in Free Minds when he was just sixteen and incarcerated in the D.C. Jail.

“Free Minds has inspired me,” Avila said, during a talk at AU. “I understand myself better. [The organization] showed me that in my moments of my anger and sadness I can look at life in a different way. Even though I may feel at the bottom, I can reach out for my goals.”

After leaving the D.C. jail, Avila participated in Free Minds reentry program and now attends University of the District of Columbia on scholarship. A mechanical engineering student, he excels academically while still maintaining a part-time job.

Programs that help juvenile members after their release give inmates like Avila opportunities to stay on the outside, and not return to the habits that originally brought them to incarceration.

“It’s very hard for [these youth] to change their lives when they face an array of obstacles,” Libert said.

The average incarceration rate of inmates is four years, and once out, they are faced with a daunted structure: the work force.

Compounding the difficulty of getting a job with a felony conviction and little education or life skills, recently released inmates also deal with issues surrounding affordable housing, lack of family support, peer pressure, and low self-esteem, according to Libert.

“Free Minds connects released members to the people, programs and services in the community that will help them to achieve their new educational and career goals,” she said.

More than jobs, Free Minds has connected inmates to the world outside 1901 D St. SE. Poetry created within those walls has gone on to literary readings and library displays, praised for its ability to convey the experience of youth behind bars.

Free Minds’ candid verses are a salient reminder of the pervasive inequalities that lead youth to prison and the dehumanizing nature of an institution that saps away the vestiges of individuality. With so many people trapped in isolation behind bars, can a society truly be free?

How long will we as citizens, sisters, brothers, friends, parents, spouses, and children of the 2,258,983 people imprisoned in the United States stay complacent in the face of such a broken system?

“If you don’t resolve the problem, the consequence will last eternity,” says 17-year-old Free Minds member Raphael Ward.

Armed with ink and creative vigor, the young men of Free Minds demonstrate humanity’s capacity for change and the dire need to question the power structures behind prison institutions.

For more information on the free minds book club & writing workshop, or information on how you can support the organization, visit freeemindsbookclub.org, or contact by telephone at 202.468.4809 or by email at mail@freemindsbookclub.org.

The war in Iraq calls attention to many problems of governance in the United States, beyond just a wrongheaded policy of preemptive warfare. No-bid contracts to large corporations, the transfer of resources from domestic priorities (perhaps most tragically apparent in the neglect of New Orleans’ levies), the disproportionate number of poor people in the military, all shed light on long-standing social problems that have too often been ignored. For D.C. residents, the war in Iraq demonstrates deplorable ironies and hypocrisies and highlights the long-standing injustice of the District’s lack of voting rights.

Since there were no WMDs in Iraq and the claim that Iraq was an imminent threat no longer flies, the revised objectives of the war are about bringing democracy to the people of Iraq. Meanwhile, in our nation’s capital, residents who pay tax dollars that fund the war—D.C. has the second highest per capita tax rate in the nation—and who risk their own lives to fight the war—D.C. residents have fought in more wars per capita than residents of any state—are denied the right to elect the Congressional leaders who make decisions about the war. As we pay lip service to the importance of democracy overseas in Iraq, over half a million people in D.C. are denied democratic participation here at home.

But, of course, this is an imperfect analogy. Iraqi citizens are being freed from a violent and oppressive dictator and some would argue that District residents already live in a prosperous democracy that values individuals’ rights and opportunities. So what’s the big deal? Why should Congressional representation matter to D.C. residents?

To answer these questions fully is impossible in this space, but one example of the cost of the District’s disenfranchisement is its lack of budget autonomy. The District’s budget must be approved each year by Congress, which has the power to overrule democratic decisions made by D.C. residents. For example, gun control laws and needle exchange programs that residents have supported to address problems specific to their community have been overruled by Congress for political reasons. Congress prevents D.C. from spending its own local tax dollars on programs that taxpayers have deemed important, affecting public services and limiting the ability of local government to address issues of poverty, homelessness, health care, education, and crime prevention in our community. But perhaps more important, especially to those of us who are in D.C. because we want to participate in our nation’s political process, is the hypocrisy of a nation that claims to be a beacon of democracy while denying citizens in its capital the right to participate in the federal government.

The disenfranchisement of D.C. residents and persons convicted of a felony means the denial of voting rights to over 6 million people in the United States. A look at the historical roots of this policy offers little clarity; our government is holding onto archaic practices of a “civil death” to all lawbreakers. In medieval Europe, infamous offenders suffered “civil death” which entailed “the deprivation of all rights, confiscation of property, exposure to injury and even to death, since the outlaw could be killed with impunity by anyone.” In England, a person convicted for a felony was stripped of the ability to inherit or bequeath property and considered civilly dead—unable to bring suit or perform any other legal function. English colonists brought these concepts with them to North America, resulting in an unjustified denial of liberties.

As for the justifications behind these policies, some courts have argued that ex-offenders should not be able to vote because they have shown themselves to be lacking the “requisite judgment and discretion” needed to be able vote “responsibly.” Contextualize this statement with the fact that nearly three-quarters—73 percent—of the disenfranchised are not in prison, but are on probation or parole or have completed their sentences, and we see a gross misuse of ‘pure democracy’ to strategically deny rights to large portions of the population. Our criminal justice system is clearly not just “in the business” of restoring justice, but perpetuating the criminalization and incarceration of certain sectors of our population—as deprivation of the right to vote does nothing to promote the reintegration of offenders into society, but further marginalizes them and thus participates in perpetuating the circumstances that caused their crime.

We begin to question our nation’s commitment to democracy for all when we see how democracy is carefully granted to some and denied to others. After the Civil War and passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave blacks the right to vote, southern opposition to black suffrage led to the decision to use numerous ostensibly race-neutral voting barriers—e.g., literacy and property tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses and criminal disenfranchisement provisions—with the explicit intent of keeping as many blacks as possible from being able to vote. Although laws excluding criminals from the vote had existed in the South previously, these and other exclusionary voting regulations laws were used after the Civil War specifically to prevent black citizens from voting.

Over 70 percent of District residents are African American, while the national figure is roughly 25 percent. These 570,000 citizens continue to shoulder all the responsibilities of federal citizenship, from serving and dying in the military, sitting on federal juries, and paying federal income taxes. In D.C., African Americans are incarcerated at ten times the rate of whites. Nationwide, African Americans are incarcerated at a rate of more than eight times higher than whites.

Disenfranchisement has a devastating footprint beyond just the District, a strategic and, at times, permanent denial of rights to 13 percent of the nation’s African American voting population. This is the denial of basic citizens’ rights to former felons; a policy of exclusion both within D.C. and nationally that has a disproportionate impact on the voting power of minorities. Currently 5.3 million people are disenfranchised due to felony convictions and over 2 million of these persons are permanently disenfranchised—silenced forever from the political system.