Is Kalief Browder’s Story a Case for Reform or Abolition? (Part 1)
“Is Kalief Browder’s Story a Case for Reform or Abolition?” will be an six part series following the episodes of “Time: The Kalief Browder Story,” in which the politics, realities, and necessary conditions of prison abolition will be considered in relation to Kalief Browder’s case and the greater context of the criminal justice system in America. This series will also discuss prison reform efforts under way and how they can reduce the harm of the system, or potentially reinforce or reinvent it.
The gross miscarriage of justice faced by Kalief Browder has been told and retold since his first interviews describing his case and the circumstances of his mistreatment. The story was understandably revisited after he took his life, and again with subsequent death of his mother Venida. At just under 22 years of age, Kalief Browder commited suicide by hanging himself after serving three years for a crime of which he was never convicted. Arrested at 16 years old, allegedly stealing a backpack — a crime which nobody could corroborate precisely when, how, or even if, it actually happened — Kalief would have his childhood violently torn from him by the state which picked him up, sent him to Rikers, set a cash bond he couldn’t afford, then denied him bail, and put him through a three year circus of a trial on unsubstantiated charges they would eventually have to drop. As the case dragged on, Kalief was put through the textbook definition of torture on Rikers Island in an environment where violence is propagated unchecked, and frequently stoked and perpetrated, by the state. After receiving his eventual freedom, Kalief would find that the torture inflicted upon him would not subside or be reparated, eventually leading him to take his own life in the same fashion Browder had learned on Rikers Island.
“The System,” the first episode of the new Jay-Z produced multi-part documentary, Time: The Kalief Browder Story, premiered March 1st on Spike TV. The documentary uses Kalief’s case to discuss many flaws within the criminal justice system and to highlight potential areas of prison reform. In the beginning of the episode Jay-Z states, “Sometimes our prophets come in the form of young undeveloped energy that will teach all us grown-ups how to love better and have more compassion. And Kalief Browder was a prophet.”
In this episode, Kalief talks about being haunted by the demons of his incarceration, of the things he witnessed and had been through, during those three tormenting years. The psychological impact of incarceration and the barriers it places to re-entry are well documented. Browder couldn’t sleep at night and the stress of those traumatic days and nights on Rikers Island was something he couldn’t escape even upon release.
Kalief spoke of his stolen childhood, of his sixteen year old self who, like many of us at that age, loved going to the park, playing sports, and going to parties. After his release, Browder punched through his own bedroom walls attempting to expel the “demons” which the state had imbued within him. His mother Venida suggested that when Kalief came out he was physically present, but mentally he was not there. The episode states that “40% of Rikers inmates are diagnosed with mental illness.” One is left to ponder how many of those inmates develop mental illness on Rikers Island and how many received proper treatment for their mental illness prior to ending up on Rikers. Studies have been done to show that there is a relationship — although not as stark as some might suggest— between how we treat, or don’t treat, mental illness and the rise of mass incarceration. There is undoubtedly a connection between imprisonment and the development of mental illness and there is a clear correlation between a lack of mental health services and an increased number of incarcerated mentally ill individuals.
Episode one describes Kalief’s case against the state in this way:
Kalief’s allegation that he was wrongfully arrested by the NYPD
Denied a fair and speedy trial by the Bronx District Attorney
And was beaten, starved and tortured at Rikers Island.
Arrested at 16 years old, spending more than 1,000 days on Rikers Island, with over 800 days in solitary confinement (a reminder to readers that the UN has defined more than 15 days of solitary confinement as torture). If the state had cared at all about the well-being of this child — who was arrested for a crime seemingly nobody could even substantiate had actually occurred — they could’ve dismissed the case against Browder at any of his over 30 court dates.
Van Jones suggests, during the first episode, that people want to believe what Browder states about the system is wrong, because “he’s got to be wrong, otherwise what the (expletive censored) are we doing?” He refers to the notion that if Kalief’s suit was accurate, then it is an indictment of the justice system as a whole from police, corrections officers, judges, and prosecutors, to jails and prisons.
The problem is that anyone who pays attention to the issues faced by the approximately 12 million people who cycle through different levels of incarceration annually know that Kalief is not wrong. Anyone who has ever been swept up in a “Stop and Frisk” search or been impacted by Rikers Island in New York City knows that Kalief is not wrong. Whether every aspect of Kalief’s story is 100% accurate, we cannot deny the truth within his indictment of each aspect of the American criminal justice system that impacted his life.
A portion of the episode focuses on the deposition that Kalief has to give the state in the filing of his case against the state. The slogging interrogation process, the probing and searching for inconsistencies, and any ammunition to discredit him as a plaintiff. However, we should know better than to leave the merits of Kalief’s case up to the state that inflicted the torture upon Kalief in the first place.
Kalief was born into child protective services because of a law — a seldom-discussed aspect of the war on drugs — that denied drug-addicted parents the right to parent their children. As Michelle Alexander adds, “It’s a mistake to look at Kalief’s story just as as snapshot. Here is a young man who was raised in the system, swept then into a criminal justice system. A system that failed him every step of the way.” The system also failed Kalief’s birth mother. If her addiction had been treated like any other illness, if we had a medical system that prioritized the health of the most marginalized, rather than criminalizing them and their families, how could Kalief’s life have been different?
The first episode also delves briefly into a prior incident in which Kalief took a “joy ride” in a bakery truck that lead to an arrest. While the state would use this incident to discredit Kalief, it’s important to consider the conditions of the Bronx and the types of things all young kids do when confronted with peer pressure, the fledgling decision making skills of adolescence, and for many, a phase of rebelliousness. I often find it difficult when conversing with fellow white people, particularly those with suburban or rural upbringings, to convey how little room exists for adolescent misbehavior within densely populated and over-policed neighborhoods with limited usable private property or unsurveilled public space. While allegedly driving someone else’s bakery truck is a very poor decision, how many of us have made a similar mistake outside of the watchful eye of the police? With New York setting the age of criminal responsibility at sixteen years old and the wide net that the NYPD sets on a daily basis, there is no opportunity for youthful indiscretion for people of color in New York City, where — as the docuseries states — “72% of teens arrested are Black or Latino.” Until we come to grips with and dismantle the racist underpinnings of the criminal justice system and of urban segregation, these atrocities will continue to be replicated over and over with children denied their childhood and denied a fair shot at adulthood.
The predatory nature of the cash bail system is also highlighted in the first episode of Time. A system that, like mass incarceration itself, simultaneously criminalizes, controls, and profits off of impoverished disproportionately black and brown communities. Kalief had two options: $3,000 bail or plead guilty to a crime he knew he didn’t commit. The first episode points out that “60% of those unable to produce bail are in the poorest third of society.” Kalief’s mother Venida was not able to work due to heart problems that only enabled her heart to pump 25% of the blood her body needed, a condition she had to take medication for just to keep herself alive until her eventual death due to heart failure.
Cash bail is a tremendously predatory alliance between for-profit bail bonds agencies — making up a figure conservatively estimated at $2 billion per year connected in with the bail bonds insurance agencies which bring a greater profit — the state, and the politicians who receive millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the bail bonds industry.
During the first episode Kalief’s brother, Rasheed, states that Kalief’s father could have posted Kalief’s bail. Venida explained however — that in much the same way that society generally perceives the relationship between criminality and incarceration — Kalief’s father assumed that Kalief ending up on Rikers implied guilt. Additionally, it was ultimately not just the cash bail issue that kept Kalief from being able to leave Rikers while awaiting trial, but also the parole violation he was tagged with in connection with the prior offense from allegedly joyriding on the bread truck as a teen.
In a society where 97% of individuals charged with a crime take a guilty plea, regardless of guilt or innocence, due to the deep flaws of the system and the unrelenting violence of psychological, physical, and sexual violence of incarceration, what is most amazing about Kalief’s story is that he chose to fight a system that would’ve preferred to disappear him, confine him, and perhaps profit from what prison labor advocates refer to as prison slavery.
With the launching of the docu-series, SpikeTV has simultaneously launched a website, which offers opportunities to “take action,” including various prison reform campaigns, some national — like Van Jones’ #Cut50 program, the Innocence Project and Stop Solitary for Kids — and some local to New York — like Raise The Age NY, Bronx Defenders and even the Kalief Law, legislation proposed to increasing the speediness of trials in the bogged down pre-trial New York system that swallowed up and shattered the end of Kalief Browder’s childhood.
There are no prison abolition organizations listed on the SpikeTV hosted website because prison abolition organizations tend to be small grassroots campaigns, unfunded or poorly funded. This is not because prison abolition is such a radical concept. As Angela Davis reminds us, prison itself is a relatively new phenomenon, a product of another reform movement, and mass incarceration is merely America’s latest system of social and racial control and oppression. Prison abolition organizations are not listed because corporations and politicians haven’t figured out another way to profit off and control the people held within the prison industrial complex. Prison abolition is not listed because while it may not be too radical, it is anti-capitalist, as it at a minimum requires the development of social safety net strong enough to deal with all of the societal problems that are exhibited in the lives that the prison industrial complex disappears, those same people prison profiteers make millions off of to lobby and contribute to politicians pushing to increase incarceration and the ability to profit from it.
Within the episode, Michelle Alexander suggests, “poor folks and folks of color born into ghettoization, in child protective services, in failing schools, they are the others, we allow to exist just on the periphery of our own imagination. We are going to have learn to care about them.”
The collateral damage of “The System” is children, fathers, mothers, families, Black people, Latinx, Native Americans, Muslims, trans women, and overwhelmingly those who are already impoverished and under-served by a society which refuses to adequately educate them, pay them a living wage, and provide them with the health care, and dignified retirement. It is interesting that in all of the reform measures noted, there is no mention on the Spike website of the very substantial #CLOSErikers campaign. Prison abolition necessitates that we think not just about ending solitary confinement, bail reform, sentencing reform, raising the age, reducing incarceration, public defense systems, and the wrongfully convicted — all of which are worthy causes — it necessitates that we reconsider the foundational aspects of our capitalist society and its lack of services for those it desires to profit from, but not serve.