At the start of my second year, however, I was arrested and jailed twice more.

During that fall quarter, while my peers attended graduate seminars and held discussions about this theorist or that method, my life descended into a blur of constant court appearances. Between them, I maintained my single-father duties and kept up with graduate work as best as I could. But when I was arrested a third time a few months later, I gave up fighting my cases and was expelled from my graduate program. I arranged for my son to stay with my mother, and I surrendered myself for a 180-day sentence which could be completed in 120 days with good behavior.

That might have been the end of my story, but I turned what began as a personal journal into a full ethnography of a Southern California county jail system that ultimately became the basis for my dissertation and a new book, Indefinite: Doing Time in Jail. As an academic who experienced jail with all my senses, I wrote Indefinite to toe the line between what scholars need to know about jail and what someone who’s done jail time needs to see to make the experiences I describe recognizable.

When I tell my colleagues that I conducted an ethnography in a county jail, they start talking to me about state prisons. I tell them how understudied jails are; they tell me about a recent article or book about prisons. When I tell my friends outside academia about my book, they start with congratulatory comments that evolve into concern. One of my bolder friends unmasked the rest: He wanted to know whether I’d seen or heard about “rapes in jail,” and by implication, he wanted to know whether I’d been victimized.

I told him that sexual assault is more common in prison than jail, and he revealed that he’d always thought “jail” and “prison” were completely interchangeable terms for the same place. It’s a common misapprehension; many of my colleagues are only marginally more aware that jails and prisons are different places.

In fact, justice advocates, punishment scholars, and many others hold folk knowledge about jails that alloy myth, sensational media depictions, and some measure of truth.

In some ways, the folktales are understandable. I never shared my jail experiences with friends or family. One of my close friends—who wondered but thought it rude to ask me about fights and sexual assaults in jail—is surrounded by family members who’ve done jail time: his father, an uncle, his two brothers, and his sister. None of them had described their experiences to him. (It’s worth pausing for a moment to ponder why Americans tolerate the expectation that going to jail means you’ll likely be raped.)

So what are the realities of jail time? At any given moment during the last 20 years, there have been over 700,000 persons held in jails in the U.S. Generally, several hundred thousand more persons are in custody in state and federal prisons, but jails are by far the more active organizations, with over 10 million admissions annually.

Jail time always comes first—that is, everyone in prison spent some time in jail, was convicted of a felony, and was given a sentence greater than a year. (Felony convictions with sentences less than a year are carried out in jails.)

Of course, not everyone in jail has been convicted of a crime. Most, in fact, are the “innocent until proven guilty”—at least in name. They generally constitute over 60 percent of the jail population.

As a rule of thumb, prisons are resourced for long-term holding, and jails are resourced for short-term holding.

In practical terms, this means jails are harsher environments than prisons. Anyone who has been to both will attest to this: jail facilities are far shabbier and under-resourced compared with prisons. Whereas the misery of prison time might be eased with a hotplate to cook, a radio, an MP3 player, a television, skill-building programs, time on the yard, the stability of a lower turnover rate, and better food, jail cells don’t have wall outlets. If there is a working television, it is perched on a wall in the dayroom, and who controls what is watched must be worked about among everyone in the housing unit. Skill-building programs are nonexistent. The food (e.g., skim milk, an ice cream scoop of peanut butter in the middle of white bread and an apple) is as likely to kill off an appetite as it is to satisfy one. The churning of new faces and frequent shuffling between and within jails and housing units makes instability a normal aspect of life. And it is possible to go weeks at a time without smelling natural air or seeing natural light. That’s jail.

Not every jail is the same, even within the same county system. Are there gangs? Is a person held in a podular housing unit with common areas or a dormitory-style unit? How old is the jail? How do custodial staff manage overcrowding? Many county jails regularly operate more than 10 percent above capacity. Across different jails, the only constant is the set of the problems that come with doing indefinite time while innocent until proven guilty.

Prison time comes with a release date—maybe 18 months, 18 years, or natural life, but knowing your “out date” creates a goal to achieve. The mind can be oriented toward the future, and where there is a future, there is hope. Jail, with its unknowable end time, robs most of its prisoners of that hope.

Like the presumption of innocence principle, the right to a speedy trial becomes a hollow statement in jail. Nationally, the average length of stay in jail is 26 days, but in every housing unit, there is a cadre of prisoners who spend years awaiting trial or any conclusion to their cases. Two years. Four years. Nine years! If in my research I had not seen the booking numbers, indicating the year and admission number in a long succession of annual admissions, I would not have believed it.

While I met some men who were delaying trial as a legal strategy, most were anxious to go to trial. Their hopeful emotions swelled before every court appearance, only for that hope to be turned against them after their “time in court” amounted to them sitting silently in the prisoner gallery while their public defender, the assistant district attorney, and the judge spoke in legalese before issuing a continuance.

More jail time means dealing with the constant cold. It means dealing with others who have temporarily lost the ability to endure the vagaries of the jail environment and are thrusting their breakdown at everyone.

And it means more evidence of guilt. One may be awaiting trial, but the jail uniform speaks for prisoners. It conveys to all who see it that the person wearing that uniform is a “criminal” and is, therefore, deserving of punishment. The cell lights never go off, so prisoners must learn to sleep under unrelenting institutional lighting or go mad trying. One prisoner is in for shooting a BB gun in an open field, and his “celly” is in for attempted murder. Race relations and gang politics restrict where a prisoner can walk and with whom he can talk, and these conditions are more or less understood as appropriate because you are in jail.

There are more uncertainties in jail than the mind can handle. There is the indefinite nature of jail time. But also an unexpected transfer to a new jail or housing unit in the dead of the night; an unexplained lockdown; a fight; a miraculous release; canceled clothing exchanges and commissary; mealtimes moved two hours ahead or three hours behind; canceled mail and visiting hours. All jail prisoners suffer such unplanned and unexplained events, but a prisoner with a release date can reason that all this mess is temporary.

Prisoners doing indefinite time, however, have only an undefined expanse of time ahead of them. This produces a gnawing need to tie yourself to something real and knowable. In the end, the innocent until proven guilty concern themselves only with the present—the only real thing that can be controlled. For many, jail time is done moment by moment. The future is too uncertain.

To be unconvicted and in jail counts among the most demoralizing kinds of penal time a person can “do.” But let me give you the wisdom a guy gave me while in a holding cell. “In prison, you’re home. You’re just home. They try to make it comfortable for you. Jail is punishment. Prison is like working for the government. You’ll be taken care of. You just do your job, and you’ll be OK. Jail is like working at McDonald’s. You could be fired. The pay sucks. The whole thing sucks.”

The post What I Learned From Being Sent to County Jail appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Slave dealers bought enslaved individuals whom owners deemed surplus and warehoused them at pens in the District of Columbia until they had assembled a full shipment for removal southward. Half a mile west of the U.S. Capitol, and just south of the National Mall, sat William H. Williams’ notorious private slave jail, known as the Yellow House.

By the mid-1830s, the Yellow House was one more piece of the machinery that controlled slave society. Whip-wielding owners, overseers, slave patrollers, slave catchers with vicious dogs, local militias, and a generally vigilant white population, who routinely asked to see the passes of enslaved people whom they encountered on the roads, all conspired against a freedom seeker’s chances of a successful flight. Private and public jails lent further institutional support to slavery, even in the heart of the nation’s capital.

Some slave owners visiting or conducting business in Washington detained their bondpeople in the Yellow House for safekeeping, temporarily, for a 25-cent per day fee. But mostly it was a place for assembling enslaved people in the Chesapeake who faced imminent removal to the Lower South and permanent separation from friends, family, and kin. Abolitionist and poet John Greenleaf Whittier condemned “the dreadful amount of human agony and suffering” endemic to the jail.

The most graphic, terrifying descriptions of the Yellow House come to us from its most famous prisoner, the kidnapped Solomon Northup, who recounted his experiences there in Twelve Years a Slave. Northup, a free Black man from the North, was lured to Washington in 1841 by two white men’s false promises of lucrative employment. While in the capital, the men drugged their mark into unconsciousness, and Northup awoke enchained in the Yellow House’s basement dungeon. He vividly described the scene when his captor, slave trader James H. Birch, arrived, gave Northup a fictive history as a runaway slave from Georgia, and informed him that he would be sold. When Northup protested, Birch administered a severe thrashing with a paddle and, when that broke, a rope.

Northup, like most who passed through the Yellow House’s iron gate, was destined for sale in the Deep South. A few of William H. Williams’ captives attempted to evade that fate. In October 1840, Williams’ younger brother and partner in the slave trade, Thomas, purchased an enslaved man named John at Sinclair’s Tavern in Loudoun County, Virginia, for $600. Twenty years old, less than five feet tall, but referred to by the National Intelligencer as “stout made,” John escaped from Williams’ clutches while still in Virginia, but he was eventually apprehended in Maryland and retrieved by someone under William H. Williams’ employ. Despite his efforts to resist, John, like thousands of other enslaved people who ended up in the Williamses’ possession, was conveyed to the New Orleans slave market for auction to the highest bidder.

For the Williams brothers, every man, woman, and child they bought and sold were commodities in which they speculated. Their entire business was based on assuming the risk that they could buy low in the Chesapeake and sell high in the slave markets of the Old South. Occasionally, they even tried to profit by betting on people fleeing their owners. In 1842, Thomas Williams purchased two escapees from Auguste Reggio of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. According to Williams’ agreement, “It is … understood that … Enoch and John are sold as runaway slaves & are now absent.” Nevertheless, Williams was so confident that the police state of the Old South would soon apprehend them that he paid $650 apiece for two absconded men he might never see. In an undeniable gamble, the slave dealer wagered that they would both be recovered and fetch a far more handsome price in the New Orleans slave market than what he had paid for them.

Despite the odds against them, certain enslaved individuals who fell into the Williams brothers’ orbit determined to resist the system that oppressed them. In 1850, William H. Williams placed advertisements in the Baltimore Sun to alert the public to five enslaved people who had evaded his grasp. In May, Williams offered a $400 reward: $100 apiece for 26-year-old James; 25-year-old Sam, who was missing a front tooth; 20-year-old George; and the ailing Gusta, described as “ruptured,” likely indicating that he was suffering from a hernia.

In August, Williams again sought public assistance, this time in the recovery of “my MAN JOE,” a six-foot-tall 26-year-old who had been recently purchased from a doctor in Fauquier County, Virginia. Joe absconded near Fredericksburg and was heading, according to Williams’ prognostications, for Pennsylvania by way of Winchester, Virginia, where he had a grandmother and other relatives. Neither runaway ad mentioned whether the escapee had fled while in transit to Williams’ Washington slave pen or from the Yellow House itself.

One dramatic escape attempt from the Yellow House was documented in 1842 by Seth M. Gates, an antislavery New York Whig in the U.S. House of Representatives. Writing as an anonymous “Member of Congress” in the pages of the New York Evangelist, Gates described an unnamed “smart and active” woman deposited in Williams’ private prison who, the evening prior to her scheduled departure from Washington for sale in the Deep South, “darted past her keeper,” broke jail, “and ran for her life.”

She headed southwest down Maryland Avenue, straight toward the Long Bridge that spanned the Potomac and led to that portion of the District of Columbia ceded by Virginia. “It [was] not a great distance from the prison to the long bridge,” Gates observed, and on the opposite side of the river lay the Custis estate and its “extensive forests and woodlands” where she could hide.

Her flight took the keeper of Williams’ jail, Joshua Staples, by surprise. By the time he secured the other prisoners and set off in pursuit, she had a sizeable head start. Also working in her favor, “no bloodhounds were at hand” to track her, and the late hour meant that Staples had no horses available. A small band of men at his immediate disposal would have to overtake her on foot.

Although they “raised the hue and cry on her pathway” to summon the public’s aid, the woman breezed past the bewildered citizens of Washington who streamed out of their homes, struggling to comprehend the cause of all the commotion along the avenue. Realizing the scene unfolding before their eyes, residents greeted this act of protest in starkly different ways. Those who were antislavery prayed for her successful escape, while others supported the status quo by joining the “motley mass in pursuit.”

Fleet of foot and with everything to lose, the woman put still more distance between her and her would-be captors. In this contest of “speed and endurance, between the slave and the slave catchers,” Gates related, the runaway was winning. She reached the end of Maryland Avenue and made it onto the Long Bridge, just three-fourths of a mile from the Custis woods on the other side.

Yet just as Staples and his men set foot on the bridge, they caught sight of three white men at the opposite end, “slowly advancing from the Virginia side.” Staples called out to them to seize her. Dutifully, they arranged themselves three abreast, blocking the width of the narrow walkway. In Gates’s telling, the woman “looked wildly and anxiously around, to see if there was no other hope of escape,” but her prospects for success had suddenly evaporated. As her pursuers rapidly approached, their “noisy shout[s]” and threats filling the air, she vaulted over the side of the bridge and plunged into “the deep loamy water of the Potomac.” Gates assumed that she had committed suicide.

The unnamed woman who leaped from the bridge would not have been the first enslaved person imprisoned in the Yellow House to engage in a willful act of self-destruction. Whittier, the abolitionist, mentioned that among the “secret horrors of the prison house” were the occasional suicides of enslaved inmates devoid of all hope. One man in 1838 sliced his own throat rather than submit to sale. The presumed, tragic death of the woman who fled down Maryland Avenue, Gates concluded, offered “a fresh admonition to the slave dealer, of the cruelty and enormity of his crimes” as it testified to “the unconquerable love of liberty the heart of the slave may inherit.”

In antebellum Washington, D.C., African Americans were smothered by a Southern police state that treated them as property and demanded that they labor for the profit of others. Thousands upon thousands were swept up in the domestic slave trade, their lives stolen for forced labor in the Deep South. But a few, like the woman who fled the Yellow House, courageously transformed Washington’s public streets into a site of protest and affirmed their personhood in the face of oppression. Now, more than a century and a half later, echoes of that struggle can still be heard.

The post How the Yellow House Helped Make Washington, D.C. a Slavery Capital appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The untapped potential in South L.A., where I live and work, is huge. There are an estimated 690,000 people in Los Angeles County alone that are eligible for expungement or felony reduction. By getting rid of their convictions, people will have more opportunities to get jobs, start businesses, earn housing benefits, go back to school, or even win back custody of their children.

There are two big challenges. The first is that not enough people know about the possibilities under Prop. 47. The second is that the process of changing your record is not as easy as it could be. But it’s still well worth doing. I know because I’ve recently been through the process of reducing a felony myself.

Indeed, Prop. 47 helped change my life even before it was passed. After I got out of jail in 2009, I began volunteering at the Community Coalition, an innovative nonprofit in South L.A. Eventually, my responsibilities grew, and I became a member of the staff, working on civic engagement and neighborhood improvement.

Through that, I got deeply involved in the campaign for Prop. 47 back in 2014. We held town hall meetings and weekly rallies and made over 40,000 calls to residents throughout City Council District 8. We also knocked on thousands of doors, educating our communities about Prop. 47 and building a larger movement regarding criminal justice reform.

To me, a major point of Prop. 47 was to redirect criminal justice funding away from our racist and broken prison system and invest those dollars into community-based prevention, re-entry, and treatment programs. Non-violent offenders are also coming home early from prison or jail through the Prop. 47 resentencing process.

In its details—which need to be better understood—Prop. 47 allows people who have certain non-violent felony offenses on their record to get those reclassified to a misdemeanor, no matter how old the charge. These include simple drug possession, petty theft under $950, shoplifting under $950, forgery under $950, receipt of stolen property under $950, and writing a bad check under $950. The money saved from having fewer people in the prison system is supposed to go towards programs for crime victims, to help people re-enter into society, and to reduce recidivism and deter people from getting into trouble in the first place.

During the campaign, I was upset by a troubling narrative being pushed by our opponents—that Prop. 47 was going to let out a bunch of violent rapists and murderers. So, in advocating for Prop. 47, I used myself as an example: I had reducible low-level felonies under Prop. 47, and I had been out of jail for five years, was married, was a father, and was doing work that benefited my community.

The slightly longer version of my story is that I grew up in the Hyde Park neighborhood of South L.A., and went to Crenshaw High School. But I grew up around a gang element, a criminal element, and gravitated toward street activity. I was in and out of jail between the ages of 18 and 27 and ended up with a couple of felonies.

The last time I was incarcerated was seven years ago. When I got out, I looked for a job, and my felony drug conviction was held against me, even by companies that are supposed to be “felon-friendly.” So I worked dead-end jobs for a few years. I drove a truck without receiving benefits. I was a cook and a dishwasher. I worked for a contractor.

I was very fortunate to find Community Coalition—CoCo as it’s called—which gave me opportunities to do amazing work and to grow professionally despite my criminal record. I discovered that I had a talent for organizing people, and in 2012 worked on the Proposition 30 campaign to raise income and sales taxes temporarily statewide.

Before Prop. 47, I had tried to get my simple drug possession and commercial burglary charges expunged, but it was very hard—and I was ineligible to do anything about my record while I remained on probation. When I got the job at CoCo, it seemed less urgent. But after Prop. 47 passed in 2014, I wanted to use the new process myself, both for my own benefit and so I could help others who might be navigating the process.

It can be cumbersome and confusing. You start by getting a copy of your “rap sheet” or criminal record, and that means going to the different counties and the various superior courts where you might have had cases. For me, that would have meant going to Riverside, San Luis Obispo County, and various L.A. County courts.

But another option is to request a copy of your record from the state Department of Justice—which is how I decided to do it. That requires getting fingerprinted. The Live Scan usually costs money—$25 is the state fee, and there can be other charges that bring the total above $50. There are fee waivers, but that requires you to submit more forms and proof that your income is under a certain level. CoCo and other organizations, thankfully, have implemented huge resource fairs that allow people to get their record for free. I got my rap sheet in three weeks.

Once you have your record, you fill out forms. The process can vary depending on your county, but for me, it required three different forms—a petition to reduce the felony, a petition to expunge the charge, and then a petition for a fee waiver.

You put those together into a “reclassification packet” one conviction at a time—a package for each charge.

You can mail in the documents, but I was advised to head to the courthouse as a way of avoiding mistakes. Any errors in your application can send you back to the beginning of the process.

The process at the court took an entire day. You get directed to the clerk, who directs you to the public defender and the D.A. for different signatures and to submit your forms. It was hard to navigate, but being there allowed me to ask questions. I also found that at L.A. Superior Court, at least, many of the people who worked for the courts didn’t seem to understand the process themselves, and I got some instructions that proved to be wrong.

Once you’ve submitted your packet—as I did last summer—you wait, for weeks or even months, while the D.A.’s office confirms your eligibility and then notifies the Superior Court, which then must document the reclassification of your record. Usually, you just get the notice in the mail, but you can get called to court for a hearing.

There are many programs and legal professionals working pro bono to help people navigate the process. Several community organizations in South L.A. and around California are running clinics or Prop. 47 fairs to help people out. I went to CoCo’s own Prop. 47 clinic at Southwest College and found the advice I got there useful in my own case. I also found the instructions on the MyProp47 website very helpful.

In my case, my felony was reduced to a misdemeanor by mail. If I wanted the charge totally expunged, I’d have to go to court, which I haven’t yet done. When I have time, I also think I am going to use the process again to reduce or expunge another charge.

In the meantime, I’m hoping to build on Prop. 47. The initiative should be expanded to include any type of nonviolent crime. And we need to take this opportunity to build a much stronger re-entry system to serve people coming out of jails and prisons, especially in Los Angeles County. This need is related to the homelessness we’re seeing; people who are getting out of prison and jail are saying they don’t have many options of where to live.

I’m hopeful that the new federal Promise Zone designation for South L.A., which is supposed to bring new resources to the area, will help. And the state needs to do more too. I’m already involved with Gov. Jerry Brown’s Public Safety Rehabilitation Act, a ballot initiative that gives judges more discretion in sentencing people and releasing them early.

We have such a moment of opportunity to transform people’s lives and our communities; our elected officials can’t afford to be cheap. Recently, Gov. Brown’s January budget allocated a mere $29 million in Prop. 47 savings (later revised up to $57 million) for prevention and anti-recidivism programs, as well as victim services, but that was $100 million less than what the nonpartisan legislative analyst office had identified as savings. This is a longer-term fight that I believe the people can win.

For those of us with records, taking advantage of Prop. 47 means we need to understand what’s available and what rights we do have as citizens. Too many people think, mistakenly, that if they have a felony or a misdemeanor, they can’t vote in California, and that keeps us powerless as a constituency. The sooner we can correct misimpressions, and help people throw off the burden of a criminal record, the better South L.A. will be.

The post Prop. 47 Has the Power to Transform South L.A., If More People Used It appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.