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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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“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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Keith Tharpe

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He died quietly and almost unnoticed on Georgia death row on January 24, 2020.

Roughly one in four people sentenced to death will die of natural causes before they can be executed.

News accounts reported that Tharpe died from “complications of cancer.” His death gained national media notice only because his case raised serious questions about his death sentence being the byproduct of institutionalized racism.

Tharpe was convicted for the September 1990 murder of his sister-in-law and sentenced to death on January 10, 1991.

Like most death penalty cases, Tharpe’s case began a convoluted legal odyssey in the state and federal court systems to have his conviction and sentence reviewed for possible constitutional reversible errors.

These reviews can lead to men spending anywhere from 5 to 41 years on death row, like Raymond Riles who has spent 41 years on Texas’s death row. He will also die, more likely than not, just as Tharpe did in Georgia.

Seven years after Tharpe was sentenced to death, the Georgia Resource Center conducted interviews with his jurors as it does in all capital cases. These interviews discovered one juror, Barney Gattie, who “harbored very atrocious, racist views about black people”

In the wake of these revelations Gattie signed an affidavit in which he said, “In my experience I have observed that there are two types of black people: 1. Black folkts and 2. ‘N….ers.” He would later say that since he did not believe Tharpe fell into the “good black folks” category, he should be executed in the electric chair for the crime he committed.

The lower state and federal courts did not see much harm caused by Gattie’s racist views, and, therefore, repeatedly upheld his conviction and sentence.

Finally, in 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed an execution date set for Tharpe, saying he has presented a “strong factual basis” that he did not receive a fair and impartial jury verdict. The high court sent his case back to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals for additional review.

Unimpressed, the 11th Circuit refused to hear the case, saying he had delayed too long in presenting the racial juror bias claim.

Last May the U.S. Supreme Court refused to intervene, paving the way for Tharpe’s execution. Justice Sotomayor concurred with the court’s decision but issued a lame, sophomoric statement that she was “profoundly troubled” by the “truly striking evidence of juror bias” in the case, but she felt the execution should be carried out.

Put simply, it may be a tad troubling to execute a man whose death sentence was infected with juror bias, but it’s constitutionally okay to kill him anyway.

But Keith Tharpe escaped the State of Georgia’s final indignity. He died before the State could kill him. Perhaps prison officials knew he was dying and just let nature run its course.

It has been said that Keith Tharpe was a Christian—a “God-fearing” man, as Christians are commonly referred to. I do not accept that. A Christian is a “God-loving” person because Jesus Christ walked this earth, if for no other reason, than to teach love, not fear; that God’s children should love, not fear, Him.

Whatever passageway, if any, that opens on the other side of death, it should not be feared, rather embraced as a new journey in a different life form.

The people who knew, and loved Keith Tharpe, can sleep well knowing he is now beyond the suffering caged life inflicts.

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Doomsday Clock.

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The world is going to end. Human life and most likely all other life forms that inhabit the earth will also end. Nothing will then exist on the earth—not even an echo of what once was called “humanity.”

There is a clock that measures how much time life has left on earth. It’s called the “Doomsday Clock.” It was established in 1947 by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists—a group of scientists at the University of Chicago who participated in the Manhattan Project, an American-led project that build the first workable atomic bomb.

The “Bomb” showed that human life is not only fallible but extinguishable. It was the first real warning to all mankind that human beings had, in effect, created their own potential extinction.

The Doomsday theory predicts that once the clock strikes midnight the world will end. Scientists from around the world monitor human activity on a regular basis to gauge the amount of time human life has left on earth.

These scientists have methodically inched the Doomsday Clock toward midnight since 1947 when it was set at 11:53 p.m.

Each January the scientists warn the human population that it has only so many minutes left on earth.

As mankind has continued its determined suicidal efforts over the past 73 years to destroy the earth’s environment, to create more lethal weapons of mass destruction, and to plunder all of the earth’s finite life-sustaining resources, the time left on the clock has been reduced to just 100 seconds, according to the January 2020 statement by the Atomic Bulletin of Scientists.

This dire warning is the closest the Clock has been to human extinction.

“Humanity,” the Thursday warning by the ABS read, “continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers—nuclear war and climate change—that are compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare, that undercuts society’s ability to respond. The international security situation is dire, not just because these threats exist, but because world leaders have allowed the international infrastructure for managing them to erode.”

This relentless, irreversible march toward human self-destruction is caused by the one force that has driven, motivated, and even consumed human endeavors throughout its existence: the corruption of power.

 Power indeed corrupts, and it corrupts wholly and without distinction. Power corrupts governments, political institutions, religions, human institutions of every stripe, and even individual human relationships.

From the first moment of its constitutional existence in 1787, America has been, and continues to be, an experiment in how much corruption a nation can absorb before it falls into ruin. Our own history, even as told from a self-serving perspective, teaches that corruption lies deep in the core of the nation’s political institutions; it has shamed, in one way or another, every religion practiced in the nation’s history; it has tarnished every method for securing wealth and progress in the name of good capitalism; and it has kept Americans divided and polarized along racial, ethnic, and cultural lines in the most despicable ways imaginable, including slavery.

And, yet, until recently, America has always been considered the “model” of peace, liberty and justice for all by other countries throughout the world. This despite the fact that America created the atomic bomb, has destroyed more of the earth’s environment than any other nation, and has pillaged the earth’s resources more than anyone else just to make its citizens more comfortable, more consuming, and more insatiable.

And, so, here we are—just 100 seconds left on the Doomsday Clock with old bubba down on the Alabama river bank commenting, “shit, them damn scientists don’t know what they talking about … there’s plenty fish left in this river.”

Yes, bubba, and the Pacific’s high tide will soon be rising in Tucson.

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Copyright © 2019 Jodie Sinclair| Author