KHALIL CUMBERBATCH

KHALIL's STORY

My name is Khalil Cumberbatch. I'm a resident of New York City. My mother and I migrated here in 1986 when I was four years old. We migrated from my country of birth, Guyana, which is in South America. I've never gone back. I view myself as a citizen of this country even though legally, I'm not a naturalized citizen.

I am formerly incarcerated. I survived six and a half years in the prison system and then five and a half months in immigration detention. When I tell my story, I always lead with that. I have lived through two systems that are working intentionally well, as they were designed to work. They are designed to break you. They are designed to tell you that you are less than human. When someone survives that, that makes them an expert.

I am currently the Associate Vice President of Policy at the Fortune Society, an organization in New York City that helps about 7000 people annually who are re-entering society after serving stints in prison or jail. My role is to focus on policy and advocacy. Outside of working for Fortune, I also lecture at the graduate students at the Columbia School of Social Work. When I talk, I don't mention at first that I graduated from CUNY with a Masters in social work, graduated at the top of my class, because although I believe that academics are strongly important, I also believe that lived experience, particularly being incarcerated, should also be given the same amount of weight in terms of respect that a degree does, that a best selling book does, or that a PhD does. But all too often in this field of work of criminal justice reform, that's not the case.

I grew up in a neighborhood called Southside Jamaica, Queens. It was one of the neighborhoods that was ravished by the crack epidemic in the late eighties and early nighties. Southside Jamaica is one of seven neighborhoods, in NYC’s five boroughs, that have historically fed almost 70% of the New York State prison system. Those seven neighborhoods are policed more and have more social and economic issues problems because of a lack of opportunities and lack of investment. Growing up in that environment, I was highly susceptible to being funneled into the criminal justice system.

Now that doesn't mean that I was not aware of the bad choices that I was making, but when you give a person limited choices, they have to literally choose the lesser of two evils. When you are in that situation, you say to yourself “I'm making the best choice that I have.” If you tell someone from the time that they are young and you show them through your actions that all that they can ever do in life is sell drugs, or be in a gang, or shoot people, or rob people, the likelihood of them doing that is very high. And vise versa. You wanna be a doctor? That's fine! Now if you are around people who also have been to grad school, who also have been to college, who also may be a doctor, the likelihood of you becoming a doctor is possible. If I was around people who were doctors, maybe my life would’ve been different.

At the age of 20, I and some childhood friends, at the time childhood friends, robbed two women on 96th Street and Park Avenue. You don’t have to be from this city to know that 96th and Park Avenue is very different than Southside Jamaica, Queens. I was convicted of robbery in the first degree. The reality is that we were punished not necessarily for what we did, but for who we did our crime to. Had we robbed two women of color in Southside Jamaica Queens, or in South Bronx, or in Brownsville, or in Bushwick, we wouldn’t have received the punishment that we did.

I went upstate at 22. I spent six and a half years in prison.

I was released from prison in February of 2010. By the fall, I was enrolled in college. I finished my undergrad by May 2012. In August 2012 I started a graduate degree. I was home all the way until May of 2014. That's almost four and half years of me being in the community working, going to school, starting a family, getting married, doing all of the stuff that the system would ask of you and even more in some respects. I was one week away from completing my graduate degree when immigration officials came to my house one morning and arrested me in front of my wife and children. Not because I had committed a new crime, not because I had unpaid parking tickets, but because and only because I had a criminal conviction, that was at that point, a decade old.

Immigration held me for five and a half months and they were determined to deport me. I was at the top tier of who the previous administration was targeting: immigrants with criminal records. This an important point. All too often now, it is the current President that is painted as anti-immigrant because of the things that he says. That's fully warranted but the immigration machine he is now controlling was not built by him. It was built by the previous president, Barack Hussein Obama, the first black president to be elected in this country who is from the southside of Chicago, who was a community organizer, a constitutional law professor, who was all the amazing things you want from a president. He also left that office having deported more people than all of the previous presidents combined. I was ready to start this whole new life during that administration. There was a lot hope. But it was under his policies that I was taken from my family and was going to be deported to a country that I didn’t consider to be home.

After being held for five and half months, I was released in October of 2014, and then in December of the same year, I was granted a pardon by New York State governor Andrew Cuomo to relieve the immigration consequences of my criminal conviction. I received that pardon on December 31st of 2014. A pardon is basically saying that you can no longer face any consequences because of your criminal conviction. And so January 1st began not only the beginning of a new year but also the beginning of a new life in all respects. I no longer felt that I had this cloud hanging over my head. Had I not gotten a pardon, there's no telling what would happen to me now under this current administration. Although I am here as a legal permanent resident and the current administration’s focus seems to be undocumented people, the reality is that they could've come for me again.

Malcolm X said that it is not criminal to have been a criminal, it is criminal to remain a criminal.
I want us to be careful about our use of the word criminal, because language dictates thought and thought shows up in action. When we say that the Obama administration was targeting “criminals,” there's a lot in that statement. One is the assumption that once a criminal always a criminal, that some people can’t be redeemed. If we go by that, then I’m still a criminal. We have to challenge and question that assumption at its core, because the moment we don’t is the moment that it becomes easy to write people off, to just think “ well you shouldn’t have committed the crime.” But that's not always the case.

Stop and frisk was what they call broken windows policing theory. At its height, the stop and frisk policy had more stops of black and brown youth, particularly black and Latino males, than there were registered black and Latino males in the city of New York. When youth were stopped and frisked, the police would say “Turn out your pockets. What do you have in your pockets? Take out what’s in your pockets.” Youth, not always being aware of their rights, and just wanting to get out of there would turn out their pockets. Some had weed on them. They got dragged into the criminal justice system for having possession of marijuana. But is that person a criminal?

We should hold people accountable when they do something wrong, but before they even get to that, we should be investing in everyone. Everybody needs help, but some need it more than others. If we did that early enough, we wouldn’t have some of the major issues that we have today.

I’ve met some very smart people who have sold drugs in their life. If they had been given access to a bank loan, if they had been taught the benefits and value of having good credit and how you can use credit to actually operate without having liquid cash, and if their products were t-shirts or anything other than cocaine, I think that they would’ve been some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world. But the reality is that they weren’t given access to those opportunities.

Why are there neighborhoods like Southside Jamaica, Queens? Why are certain neighborhoods in DC, certain neighborhoods in Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, all the major metropolitan cities across the country, why are those neighborhoods in the condition that they are in? And why are they allowed to be like that, still, to this day? We say things like there's a lack of resources but is there really a lack of resources in this country? Our government spends billions on weapons. We are engaged in a war in Afghanistan that is the longest-running war in this country’s history and they have no qualms about sending more troops. The truth is that our country doesn’t have a lack of resources, what we have is a lack of political will to fix certain neighborhoods.

We know what the solutions are. Those neighborhoods weren’t always the way that they are. Incarceration rates weren’t always the way that they are. There are moments in this country’s past when politicians had to take bold actions. The Great Depression is a good example. What the country did was create safety nets, social security, Medicare, healthcare systems, roads. They started to invest. We can do the same thing as a country now to fix those neighborhoods.

I’m not an abolitionist, I believe that there are people who have to be removed from society but if you are going to do that, it should be the last option, and if you do that, you should still be investing in them as human beings throughout their entire removal process. That doesn’t mean put them in solitary confinement, continue to dehumanize them, continue to belittle them. It means give them access to resources that they need and then release them.

I was invested in by men who are going to die in prison. They had already accepted that and the way they give back to society is by investing in people like me who have an opportunity to go home. I landed in the maximum security prison with the most programs developed and implemented by men in that facility, not by the New York State Corrections Institution, but by men who knew what other men needed.If everyone had the same experience that I had and were given the same opportunities, more people would come out of prison and not recidivate.

The hardest part of this work is investing in something when the likelihood of it happening in your lifetime is very slim. The system and society that I envision is much bigger than the criminal justice system, it is literally how we have not resolved the issue of how we founded this country. When you think of the Civil Rights Movement, you think “it’s amazing what Rosa Parks did” but it couldn’t have only been her. “It’s amazing what MLK did” but it couldn’t have only been him. There will be the MLKs and the Rosa Parks in this movement, the people whose stories will be idolized. But there will a bunch of other people too. I want to be able to tell my grandchildren that I did something, not just that I made it out and that was it.