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Indiana: A state of injustice

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Known as the “Hoosier State.”

The slang definition for the term “Hoosier” is not very complimentary, but it is apt for Indiana.

I’ve known two people from Indiana: an inmate in prison and a long lost cousin who contacted me after I got out of prison. Both were crazier than a Betsy bug and avowed racists.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the entire Indiana criminal justice system is also crazier than a Betsy bug and is racist.

Here’s why.

In 2017, Alan P. Friz and his wife, Aimee, were arrested in Dubois County, Indiana on 11 felony counts of child neglect and 11 felony counts of child confinement involving their juvenile daughter. Alan Friz, a local dentist, had four additional sexual assault counts placed against in connection with inappropriate sexual touching of the girl.

Local and national media reports said the couple converted a section of a bedroom in their home into a “lockable cage” where they kept their supposedly “out of control” daughter.

Police mug shots of the couple at the time of their arrest showed them smiling as though they had won the lottery

And they had.

The local prosecutor allowed the pair to enter into a plea agreement to misdemeanor charges this past Monday that gave them a total sentence of 730 days of jail time, credit for six days spent in jail after arrest, and the rest of their sentence probated.

That’s what you call a “sweetheart deal.”

The prosecutor said he believed “closure” was in the “best interest” of the victim.

This dentist and his wife are white folks – and what they received is specialized white justice that is systemic in Indiana.

Indiana has 6.6 million folks living in the state—83.5 percent of them being white and 9.3 percent of them being black.

Indiana sends people to prison at a higher rate than the national average, according to the World Atlas. Indiana’s incarceration rate is 910 per 100,000 people; the U.S. incarceration rate is 716 per 100,000 people.

So Indiana’s criminal justice system believes in sending more than its fair share of people to prison, especially if they are African American.

The Prison Policy Initiative reports that Indiana sends to prison 2,814 black people per 100,000 people as compared to a mere 542 white people per 100,000 people.

The Sentencing Project reports that the national average of the African American incarceration rate is 1408 per 100,000 people.

The ACLU reports that 24 percent of prisoners in Indiana are serving sentences for drug offenses—that’s roughly 12,000 inmates, the overwhelming majority of whom are African American.

But the Indiana criminal justice system could not find a prison bed for the smiling dentist and his wife who denied food, water and sanitary facilities to their daughter during those periods when they kept her caged. Yet the system made extra prison beds for black folks convicted of minor drug offenses, sort of like smoking pot on their front porch.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the Russian author who spent four years in a Siberian prison in the brutal 1850s, once wrote that “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”

The Sentencing Project reports that Indiana is one of three states with 11 percent of its prisoners (five times more likely to be African American) serving sentences of 50 years or more.

Yet the smiling, affluent white Dubois County dentist and his wife got probation for caging their own daughter.

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The True Stories of Inmate Suffering Finally Emerging

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Every day, there’s a story in the news about the brutal treatment of an inmate or prosecutorial misconduct in a case that has kept an innocent man behind bars for decades.

For me, the stories are a dream come true. For too long, the truth about America’s criminal justice system has been hidden from the public. Outrage is unlocking its secrets. It’s a blessing for advocates of prison reform, because these days, “crime” is getting great ratings. 

According to Variety, “primetime programming at Fox News Channel, MSNBC and CNN rose 8% in 2018…while total revenue rose 4% to $5.3 billion.”  

Prime time crime shows are raking in big bucks from advertisers, including Chicago PD, FBI and FBI Most Wanted, NCIS, Law & Order Special Victims Unit, Blue Bloods, How To Get Away With Murder, SWAT and Hawaii Five-O, among other hugely popular crime programs currently on TV.

It’s prompting news networks and newspapers to cover the real stories behind the bars. NBC Nightly News is a prime example.

In September 2019, NBC anchor Lester Holt went to Angola, Louisiana’s maximum security prison, to talk to inmates and spend 2 nights in a cell.  A few days later, he held a town hall with prisoners at Sing-Sing, a New York State maximum security prison. NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt was “the #1-most watched newscast in the key A25-54 and A18-49 demos for the week of September 2, 2019,” according to the ratings giant, Nielsen Media Research.

Am I grateful that big time journalism is getting the message? You bet.  Because I’m not a lone voice in an abyss anymore. 

After a 25-year battle to free my husband, publishing two books with him  – one while he was still in prison and writing my memoir – “Love Behind Bars:  The True Story of an American Prisoner’s Wife,” I am so glad others’ stories are getting the attention they deserve.

Because America’s prison system is an inhumane mess.

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Love Blossoms in the Death House

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I met Billy Sinclair on the 17th of March 1981 in the Death House at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. I was a TV news reporter doing a five-part series on the death penalty.  In 1981, he was a national award-winning inmate writer for Angola’s uncensored inmate magazine, The Angolite. He had been sentenced to death in 1966 for an accidental shooting after an abandoned robbery attempt in 1965. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned his death sentence in 1972.

We married in June 1982. My privileged background didn’t protect mewhen I became an inmate’s wife. A violated sense of justice was my only compass in his alien world for the 25 years I fought to free him.  But I brought with me the ability to chronicle how America’s criminal justice system shreds lives in the name of justice

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Over that quarter century, I saw through one of the biggest lies ever perpetrated in America—that an unprecedented era of violent crime in the late 20th and early 21st centuries was afflicting the nation and an unprecedented number of Americans had to be imprisoned to stop it. For decades, the United States has had the highest incarceration rate in the world although it only has 5% of the world’s population, it incarcerates 25% of the world’s prisoners.

What I witnessed as an American prisoner’s wife was a kind of selective slavery based on the public’s insatiable desire for vengeance. At its worst, it’s a throwback to the Dark Ages, the Spanish Inquisition or the witch hunts of 17th Century America—eras that glorified brutal punishments for crime. The first order of government is to protect its citizens; not to torture them in the name of justice.

There is no reward for standing by an incarcerated loved one. Love and loyalty sentence inmate family members to years of contempt and hard time.  Revenge, not rehabilitation is the byword at the polls.  It moved across my life like a glacier on vulnerable land for the 25 years I fought to free my husband from prison.  It was there in the millions of goodbyes over the seemingly endless years and thousands of miles that I drove to see him, in the countless nights in cheap motels waiting to see his morning smile, in haunting nightmares about his safety and the fear I felt on the highway alone at night on 600-mile round trips from Texas to Louisiana and back to see him twice a month.  

I was just one of thousands of inmate family members across America enduring the punishment of loving one behind bars. Every weekend, in New York, Houston, Los Angeles and scores of cities and towns in between, across the United States, families board buses before dawn for trips to prisons up to seven hours away.  Others cut back on groceries to save money for gas and jerry-rig old cars hoping they won’t break down on the trip.

Corrections departments don’t care.  They offer few, if any, programs to ease their plight.  They ignore children with parents in prison and how it impacts their lives.  No one can calculate the ultimate cost of America’s War on Crime, or how long it will last.

One day, historians will document the rise of the Prison State in 20th Century America, laying bare the distortions of fact and public hysteria that has given modern society its merciless view of the “criminal class.” Until then, the stories of those nailed to its cross will bear witness to a society obsessed beyond all Christian measure with revenge. 

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“For Life”

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A new ABC drama about an inmate wrongfully convicted on a drug charge and given a life sentence. While imprisoned, the inmate character, Aaron Wallace, secures a law degree, works both as a “jailhouse lawyer” and “inmate rep” for other inmates, and is determined to bring down the corrupt prosecutor who sent him to prison by working on behalf of other inmates also wrongfully convicted by this prosecutor.

The prison and courtroom scenes are rather sophomoric but the quality acting by all the characters involved in the show allow you to get past these minor details.

That Wallace has “anger issues” is an understatement. He roils in the stuff. Light a match around him and he would probably wake up St. Louis.

But “For Life” is both timely and needed.

Political corruption, misconduct, and cheating are woven into the nation’s prosecutorial system. There are scores of prosecutors who, despite having a strong case of guilt, will use perjured testimony, manufacture evidence, and conceal mitigating case to secure a conviction for a higher grade of offense. For example, prosecutors turning a non-death penalty case into a death penalty case because it enhances their “conviction resume.”

“For Life” serves an additional benefit besides exposing this kind of official wrongdoing.

The show speaks to the issue of  “jailhouse lawyering.”

The practice of “jailhouse law” received constitutional blessing from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1968. Virtually every prison, even jails, now have “law libraries” staffed by inmates (often referred to as “ inmate counsel-substitutes”) who assist inmates with post-conviction pleadings, lawsuits against prison conditions, and before prison disciplinary proceedings.

Jailhouse lawyers keep the hope machine ginning in the prison community. They work long hours (often under official duress), constantly face official harassment or retaliation, and try to keep under control clients who have little experience or training in control.

I won the first “prisoner rights” lawsuit in Louisiana in 1971 and one of the first in the nation. That lawsuit opened the door to many “reforms” in the prison system and legitimized the practice of jailhouse lawyering in the state’s prison system.

But former Louisiana Corrections Secretary C. Paul Phelps once told me: “You’ve done more to change the prison system with the lawsuits you didn’t win than with those you did win. Good prison administrators pay attention to all inmate lawsuits – they often tell us what we are not doing right.”

That said, Aaron Wallace needs to get his anger issues under control, although there is not much chance he will do that in the coming episodes. He is a man on a mission. Having a mission and the determination to fulfill that mission has made many inmates achieve incredible accomplishments behind bars, not just for themselves but for others as well.

Give “For Life” a view. At least it will make you think about criminal justice. There are enough pro-prosecution/cops shows on T.V. to add another thousand people to the prison system each week. Give, and, yes, share of little equal opportunity with Aaron Wallace as he fights to change a corrupt criminal justice system—one that favors wealth, privilege, and social status over poverty, deprivation and social disenfranchisement.

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Prison

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A place of sudden violence, unexpected explosions of anger, and unanticipated consequences of seemingly rational choices—not a place for the faint of heart.

In the decade between 2007 and 2017, thirty-four states engaged in efforts to reduce their bulging prison populations by removing—through a variety of strategies—non-violent offenders from the incarceration mix.

The federal prison system joined this effort with the passage of the First Step Act of 2018 and Mississippi followed suit last year with its Fresh Start Act of 2019.

Prison reform advocates have long pushed for, and given praise to, the reduction of non-violent offenders in jails and prisons throughout America. They say these efforts are necessary to bring about badly need reforms to the nation’s criminal justice system from point of arrest and offense charging, through trial and sentencing, and into the conditions of penal systems.

There is no doubt that these reforms are sorely needed up and down the criminal justice pipeline.

Equity and fairness must replace the privilege of wealth decision-making that has historically undermined the integrity of this nation’s methods for dispensing justice. While crime most certainly demands social accountability, it should never be a license to punish based on wealth and social status.

But the current wave of criminal justice reforms, like all good deeds, have produced unexpected consequences.

The removal of non-violent offenders from the prison setting has crested more violence within that setting.

Non-violent inmates generally have the best, most trusted jobs in the prison. More often than not, they are involved in rehabilitation programming, allowing them to rise to positions of leadership and responsibility within the prison community. They are, for the most part, rule-abiding, responsible individuals. In effect, they are a stabilizing influence in any prison system.

Removing that stabilizing influence allows more violent prisoners to fill the void. These are individuals who respond to any personal conflict or territorial dispute with violence—knives, pipes, locks in socks, acid, fire and gang assaults.

Prison staff do not interact with violent prisoners as well as they do with non-violent ones. There is constant tension–always rife with the potential for violence—between prison staff and violent prisoners, most of whom who are members or have some affiliation with prison gangs formed along racial lines. This tension inevitably creates the need for the use of force—many times too excessive—by prison staff to maintain some semblance of control of these violent prisoners.

The failure of staff to control violent inmates has disastrous results, as evidenced by the dramatic increase in violent inmate-on-inmate fatal assaults, suicides, and staff corruption that have plagued the Mississippi prison system in recent years. The state’s former corrections secretary is currently serving a 20-year federal prison system for corruption and its entire prison system is now under a U.S. Justice Department investigation.

In a recent excellent article for the Texas Tribune, Jolie McCullough pointed out that in 2009 there were 6,624 instances in which Texas prison staff used major force in a wide variety of situations against inmates.

The numbers explain why. As the state’s non-violent inmate population decreased over the past decade, the number of major force instances rose to nearly 11,000 in 2019.

But the problem inherent in the use of major force as a control tool is that the force too often becomes excessive, even fatal to the inmates.

In the past three years, three Texas prison guards have been investigated for the use of fatal excessive force on inmates with one of those investigations resulting in a criminal conviction.

McCullough discovered that there are 3,000 more violent prisoners today in the Texas prison than there were in 2009. During that time, there has been a 12 percent increase in inmate-on-staff assaults which were responded to with a 69 percent increase in the use of major force by staff on inmates.

The penal picture in Texas now is this: the state’s prison system is doing what the Mississippi prison system failed to do over the past decade. As the Texas non-violent prisoner population decreased while the violent prisoner population increased, the state’s prison staff has used major force as a tool to maintain control and provide as much inmate safety as possible.

Bottom Line: prison is about control. Loss of control by prison staff inevitably increases the level of violence, both in inmate-on-inmate and inmate-on-staff assaults.

With more than 162,000 inmates in the nation’s prison system serving life sentence, with roughly 44,000 of them being life sentences without parole, and with another nearly 45,000 inmates serving sentences of 50 years or more with few parole and goodtime prospects, prisons across the country have become roiling caldrons of potential violence in need of control.

But how to control violent inmates without hope is the dilemma.

This will be the major penal challenge each state will have to face over the next two decades.

Right now Texas is maintaining control with the use of major force.

But that is a short-term solution.

Texas, and other states, had better consider significant prison reforms:Increased use of conjugal visitation, better paying prison jobs, improved physical conditions such as air-conditioned living areas, increased availability of diverse religious programming, strong emphasis on sports programs, a free penal press, healthier food, improved medical delivery systems, and humane hospice care units run by inmates—just to name a few.

The alternative?

The current Mississippi prison system.

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Copyright © 2019 Jodie Sinclair| Author