Biden Granting 1,500 People Clemency Was A Historic Act. To Actually Make History, Far More Is Needed.

Source: Andrew Harnik / Getty

Waking to the news that President Biden had granted a historic number of clemencies in a single day–1,499–while also granting 39 people pardons wasn’t, to me, at all breathtaking. Rather, it was absolutely breathgiving. 

But as I read more about the decision, I was a bit stunned to read that those being granted clemency–a presidential act that doesn’t erase your record as a pardon does but reduces your sentence–were all already out of prison. They’d been released to home confinement during the pandemic following the passage of the Cares Act in March of 2020. But I was still grateful. America has spent so much of its short history on harming rather than healing, on condemnation rather than compassion, that we’re not just off track on the road to realizing a fully expressed democratic state, we’ve gone careening down a hill in the exact opposite direction.

Andrea James, center, between Reps Cori Bush and Ayanna Pressley Source: Paul Morigi / Getty

But as Andrea James,  founder and executive director of the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, reminded me during our discussion yesterday, “Many of the people who were released because of the Cares Act lived with the threat of being reincarcerated every day.” She’s right. People who were released in 2020 but still on paper–parole, that is–were subject to being snatched back at any second. They wouldn’t even have to commit a new offense.

Listen to Andrea discuss the National Council:

The National Conference of State Legislatures reported last year that,

“On any given day, around 280,000 people are in prison for violating a condition of probation or parole according to research from the Council of State Governments Justice Center (CSGJC). This is nearly 25% of the total prison population in the 50 states and Washington, D.C.”

That percentage and number–280,000–were locked up not because they committed a crime, but because they’d slipped on a technical rule, like quite innocently missed curfew by 15 minutes–a traffic jam, a bus running behind. They may have been 10 minutes late to meet with their parole officer. Maybe struggling with pressures of social reintegration, they relapsed one night, pulled themselves back together, but still tested positive for marijuana or some other drug a week later. 

Why should they languish in prison–and as Andrea James has been demanding us to ask and act on–why should the women and girls she serves languish either?

“Clemency is a tool of racial and gender justice.” ~Andrea James

It’s Not Disparity. It’s Discrimination.

The use of incarceration has been less a tool for securing society and more one of subjugating certain members of society. Every piece of credible data we have demonstrates that the more we incarcerate, the less safe our society becomes. And every piece of credible data we have demonstrates that none have been more targeted for harm than Black people. Nearly 30% of American prisoners are Black, more than double our presentation in society. It might be easy–but it would be, frankly, stupid–to say Black people just commit more crimes.

Convictions are all about where and who police choose to target. More crack and powder cocaine was bought and sold on Wall Street in the ’90s and 2000s than in Washington Heights. But the people who participated in those acts were deemed too valuable to throw away.

In the upper-middle-class, mostly white neighborhood of my Manhattan childhood, there was this mother. A ballerina, no less, married to a well-known Metropolitan Opera singer. They were separated but combined two apartments so both could participate in their daughter’s lives. But dad’s career was getting bigger and bigger (he’s been honored by the White House), and mom’s wasn’t, and her screaming rage shook the apartment I lived in directly above her with my parents.

She beat her daughters regularly and with precision. Cops were called, but none ever came. One year, they didn’t even come when the oldest daughter, maybe 8 at the time, screamed in pain all night. We would learn that her mother threw her into a hot tub, breaking her arm and then leaving her there until the following day when the child’s grandmother showed up and intervened.

In part because the sheer number of men in prison as opposed to women is so much higher, and in part because our society (and much of the Western world) has valued men generally more than women, campaigns to support prisoners, strategies for reform, and the actual experience of reform in prisons, and demonstrations of compassion have tended to miss women more often than not. And none more so than Black women.

Source: YouTube screenshot / youtube screenshot

The most disrespected and unprotected

The National Black Women’s Institute on Justice reported that:

“Black women account for roughly 13% of the general population yet account for 29% of incarcerated women. Between 2008 and 2020 there was a 2% increase in the number of women imprisoned for a violent crime, but a 20 % increase in the number of women serving a life sentence and a 43% increase in women serving a life without parole (LWOP) sentence. Black women account for 1/3 of women serving life sentences and virtual life sentences in the US. One of every 39 Black women in prison is serving life without parole (compared to one of every 59 imprisoned white women). As of 2020, Black women account for 25% of the women on death row and are confined in the following states: Alabama, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Texas.”

Women’s incarceration rates have risen 700% — almost double the rate of the increase in men’s incarceration–since 1980. And Black women, by far, are targeted far more than their white and Latinx counterparts.

Andrea James and the National Council have made it their life mission to stop the harm directed at our sisters. And our sisters who are locked up despite it being known the trauma and mental health harms they’ve borne because Black women are also more likely the targets of violence.

We’re three times more likely to die at the hands of a current or ex-partner than members of other racial backgrounds, the National Black Women’s Institute on Justice reports. And that we have less access to crisis intervention programs and are more likely to distrust the police, putting us more at risk of intimate partner violence, other violence, and criminalization.

“Black women are arrested and incarcerated more often because Black women’s survival strategies are criminalized, including self-defense or being forced to engage in illegal activities by intimate partners or others who have harmed them physically and emotionally.” ~ The National Black Women’s Institute on Justice

More, once “Black women are involved in the criminal legal system, we know that system actors (such as prosecutors, judges, etc.) are more likely to treat crimes as ‘violent’ when the crimes are committed by Black people. There is less leniency for Black women who face the burden of extreme sentences, especially when compared to white women. All of this leads to harsher sentences.”

President Biden has a moment, as James wrote in her letter to him in August, to let these women in federal custody who’ve served decades in federal prison, finally come home. In James’ words, they “are mothers, grandmothers, and caregivers. Their prolonged absence deeply impacts their families, especially their children… Clemency is a significant step toward family restoration, reuniting these women with their loved ones, in the spirit and tradition of Jubilee.”

She’s right.

There’s never been a social intervention that healed Black people, including our children, as extensively as the American punishment system has harmed them.

Dear President Biden…

Had it been my decision to make, I would have pardoned my son–especially if he had the kind of traumatic background and conviction history that Hunter has. As far as I’m concerned, any parent who says otherwise should have their parenting license revoked. Enough with the tough love, authoritarian nonsense. In the words of Toni Morrison, “Love is, or love ain’t.”

President Biden, this is a moment for you to be the great liberator rather than the great incarcerator.

Please immediately release these women. What good is keeping them in prison doing? Please hear the words of Andrea James and the National Council. They are words of justice, compassion and truth. America is so desperate for these. The world is.

Please embrace whole and just course correction to the 1994 crime bill, including needed post-incarceration supports. If you can embrace that with the same fire that punishing people unfairly was embraced, you move us closer to realizing the unmet promise of America. Please finish the work you and President Obama began to right the sentencing wrongs of the crack era. People who should be home are languishing behind bars because of bureaucratic failure. Don’t do that to them–or their children and families.

And President Biden, you know–as most of the modern world knows–that the death penalty is a brutal, moral, and social failure.  It’s racist, it targets the poor, and it doesn’t make anyone safer! The data tells us that at least one in eight on death row are innocent.

Show America and the world that we do not have to be bloodthirsty revenge seekers. We do not have to be those who, in pursuit of revenge, learn they must dig two graves. Enough graves have been dug–and filled. Give the people on death row clemency.

Set the bar on human rights, justice,  and courage so high it would take generations to match.

Be the great liberator.

Note: The National Council / Free Her Campaign will be calling for clemency in front of the White House on December 16, 17 and 18. For more information, visit them at nationalcouncil.us and stay with NewsOne and me as stories of women in prison are shared over the next week,

SEE MORE:

Jada Pinkett Smith, Viola Davis And More React To Cyntoia Brown Being Granted Clemency

I Don’t Fault Joe Biden For Pardoning His Son, But He Should Also Use Those Powers For Others