LEWIS WEBB JR.

LEWIS 's STORY

I was a prosecutor for about 12 years. While I was a prosecutor, my brother was arrested and convicted of murder. I now had the outside perspective of watching my mom endure that reality. Over the years of going to visit him, after I decided it was worth my time to do that, I became convinced that there's a level of brokenness that I was contributing to as a prosecutor. That's the primary reason I left the profession and decided to be an advocate for more a more just and healing approach. Today I work with a number of other organizations that do criminal justice work in the area of brokenness.

Often in conversations with colleagues we drop the “justice” from “criminal justice system” because we know justice is not really not part of it. We replace it with criminal legal system because it's really about the laws and how we respond to them and how we treat people. A true criminal justice system is one that values every human being.

We have racism built into almost every component of the criminal justice system. We see it in the war on drugs, which, in some of his back interviews, President Nixon’s policy advisor clearly said was his way to control the black community. And it worked. When you go into a community and you identify things that “they” do as contributing to the drug epidemic and you identify ways to punish “them” that result in life sentences for a first offense related to drugs, then you actually achieve the goal of racism which is to separate and demonize the particular population.

When you look at the actual numbers that identify criminal behavior, it's clear that whites use drugs more than blacks, it's clear that Whites engage in as much criminal behavior as Blacks, but sixty percent of our prisons are black and brown, so racism is there and there's no denying it.

We have something called mandatory minimums. If someone is convicted by plea or by trial of a certain offense to which a mandatory minimum applies, the judge must sentence them to a certain number of years of incarceration. Even if there are a bunch of mitigating circumstances that the judge would want to use to lessen that, his or her hands are tied by this system of mandatory minimums. We all know about the disparity between crack and cocaine. If you were convicted of a crack-related offense, judges were forced to sentence you to a minimum of five years in prison during the 1990s. But if you were similarly convicted of a cocaine offense, there was no absolute minimum, so probation and community service were options. What's the problem there? Where did we find crack? In the black and brown community as opposed to the use of powdered cocaine in the other communities. You take racist mandatory minimums and you get mass incarceration of my people.

You also see broken windows policing which is always taking place in the “ inner-city” or black community. When you saturate a community and you tell the police to arrest for anything because they're serving a greater good, it results in the disparity in our prison systems that we see today.

But the deeper issue here when we talk about the racial component of our criminal justice system, is about who is in control. When I joined the Brooklyn Attorney's Office in 1992, I was two of maybe a hundred and sixty prosecutors that were people of color. I don't think I fought a case before a judge of color until I was in my eighth year. And when I looked at jury boxes, they were almost always eighty percent white, the reason being, if you have a criminal conviction you can't usually serve on a jury.

Even when you don't see intentional racist acts, you have a system that is destined to have racially disparate results. It's easier to prosecute someone who doesn't look like you. It's easier to convict someone who doesn't look like you and it's easier to send away someone who doesn't look like you. If you don't have people of color on the bench, in the jury box, or at the prosecutor’s table, you are destined to have a system that sends black and brown people into prison at rates that just don't make sense.

This is why mass incarceration is often referred to as the new Jim Crow. As you incarcerate people, you put them into a caste system. You identify things that they will no longer be allowed to do. When you compare those things to the former Jim Crow, they end up mirroring exactly. If you're formally or currently incarcerated, you cannot vote, not unlike not being able to vote in the 40s and 50s when you were a black man. You cannot get higher education access, something that was clearly the intent of the original Jim Crow. Housing limitations are significant once again. How do you keep communities out of your community? By denying them access to housing.

Young people of color are impacted by racism through the school to prison pipeline. The school to prison pipeline starts when we identify our young people as criminals or soon-to-be criminals. Right then, you have a system where you have to put police in the schools and you have zero tolerance approaches to behavior, which results in suspensions, which puts people in the street and therefore more likely to get caught up in the system.


I am the parent of three young men. Two of them were in high school a number of years ago. I was arriving to work one morning and I walked past the front of a school, near my office, called Friends Seminary which is for people who are financially able to spend forty to fifty thousand dollars a year, a position that I'm just not in. My kids were going to the public school in the Bronx.

I noticed that the principal was greeting the young people with a smile and a handshake. The reason that stopped me was because I had recently had a conversation with my son. His school day starts with the need to go through a metal detector. For me that's where the reality of the School to Prison Pipeline. It's greeting young people with the notion that you can't be trusted and that we're going to identify you as potential criminals at 8 a.m. in the morning. What that results in, is a sense of worthlessness that I think often results in decisions that are poorly made.

That experience has two effects on me. The most drastic one was shame. I had left a fairly lucrative position to do the advocacy work that I'm doing now. I did it, not only for my sons, but for the overall society. But then I asked myself if I was sacrificing my own children's welfare in this work. My first reaction was I need to stop. I need to go back to an opportunity where I can afford to put my children in a position where metal detectors were not where school started for them. But within a half an hour of beginning to write a letter of resignation I realized that that's just not how I do my work. I can't do it for the select few. I have to work for all young people.

This is the most important part of me, that I’m a parent of three young men of color, who for a variety of reasons, are living the issues that I work around. I get to work for my children, literally and figuratively. Every day I go to work with one goal and that is to decrease the likelihood that one of my children will go to prison. That’s it. I wake up, and think how am I going to further that cause today? And I go home and I judge whether or not I was successful.

The place to start the conversation about ending mass incarceration is around the way we look at each other. Racism allows us to see each other as the “other.” If you're black or Latina or Latino, the “other” becomes less than, making it easier to punish and not worry about. So the beginning is “how do you see me and how do I see you?” If I don't see you as equal or fully human, which is what racism is, then I'm more comfortable punishing you.

For me reform is out the window. We have to just tear the system down because its foundation is based on the notion of the “other” and until we can replace that with the notion that we're all to be viewed as human and worthy of redemption and restoration and fair treatment, we can't have a criminal justice system.

We've got to to understand that there's a better way. Until that happens, the agents of mass incarceration are going to continue doing what they do and that is prosecute, incarcerate, forever punish those who we identify as criminal.