This morning, as I sat inside my Criminology lecture with shoes wet from the rain, I heard something that was absolutely absurd to me. We had been discussing the debate on the legalization of marijuana in New Jersey when somebody sitting near me raised his hand to share his perspective. To be honest, it was still pretty early in the morning and I didn’t really register what he was saying until he said something that made my mind say, “Sorry, WHAT?!”
He said that people in prison for marijuana-related offenses are never arrested for something as small as just one joint. Upon hearing that, I was floored, because it astounded me how little people know about the criminal justice system in America. People, at least, black people, absolutely get arrested for having even tiny amounts of marijuana.
Take the case of Bernard Noble, a father of seven from New Orleans, Louisiana. He is serving more than 13 years in prison with no chance of parole for possessing two joints. In 2010, he was found with having two joints’ worth of marijuana in a small bag. He has no chance of parole simply because he hasn’t served ten years in prison yet; Louisiana state law requires that inmates be in state custody for at least ten years before being eligible to request parole.
I should probably mention that Noble didn’t even own the marijuana. As Noble retold in an interview with Huffington Post, he had been walking in New Orleans after visiting his father’s shop. He was walking with two other men when all of a sudden, five police cars rounded the corner. Noble moved out of the way to make room for the police cars to drive by. The other two men with him were startled and one of them threw a small bag of marijuana a little distance away from them in the hopes that the police officers wouldn’t find it so as to avoid arrest. Unfortunately, the officers did find the bag and decided to arrest Noble because his reaction to the police cars (moving away) made him seem suspicious (they claimed they thought he was nervous because the marijuana belonged to him). To summarize, Noble was put into prison for 13 years with no chance of parole because he was standing near a bag containing two joints’ worth of marijuana. Even though he was innocent, he was still arrested and imprisoned, because the criminal justice system doesn’t care about what actually happened, at least when it comes to people that belong to minority groups. They don’t care about putting an innocent man in jail as long as it aligns with their racist agenda.
Take the case of one man whose life was quite literally destroyed by the New York City legal system. His name was Kalief Browder. In 2010, when he was 16 years old, he was arrested after being accused of stealing a backpack. A man saw Kalief and a friend walking home from a party one night and claimed that those were the two young black men that had stolen his backpack two weeks prior. Kalief was taken into custody and was told he would almost certainly be able to go home that night.
He did not go home for three years.
After an interrogation by police officers and a prosecutor, he was charged with robbery, grand larceny, and assault. Because he was on probation, he was not released. Bail was set at $3,000, but his family could not pay that amount, so he was imprisoned at Riker’s Island, a prison known for being extremely violent. Kalief, being of smaller stature, was a target of the notoriously violent inmates. He was put into solitary confinement for two years after defending himself from the violence (the UN defines more than 15 days in solitary confinement as torture, might I add). During his time in solitary confinement, he endured extreme abuse from the prison guards.
Every time Kalief was brought before a judge, he maintained that he was innocent. He was offered a plea bargain- that if he pleaded guilty, he would only get 3.5 years in prison. However, if he decided to go to trial and was found guilty, he would face 30 years in prison. But Kalief did not take the bargain. He maintained that he was innocent. He knew a lot of people, especially people from “the hood”, took the bargain because they wanted to go home, but he refused to say that he was guilty when he was not. His trial was continuously pushed off due to a backlog of work at the Bronx County District Attorney’s office. Each time, the plea bargain was offered with an increasingly enticing deals, with the judges offering gradually reducing prison times that he would face if he pleaded guilty. Eventually, they offered a plea bargain of immediate release if he pleaded guilty. He did not take the offer. A few months later, the case was dismissed because the accuser could not give testimony against Kalief and he was released.
However, his time in solitary confinement had led to a development of multiple mental illnesses, mainly instances of psychosis and severe depression. These haunted him greatly, despite his efforts to rebuild his life. He attempted suicide on multiple occasions and was admitted to the psychiatric ward of St. Barnabas Hospital three separate times.
(image source: Campaign for Youth Justice)
Kalief committed suicide on June 6, 2015.
All because he might have stolen a backpack when he was sixteen years old.
(You can find out more about his story by watching TIME: The Kalief Browder Story, a biological documentary about his case, available on Netflix.)
So, to my dear friend in my criminology class, you are wrong. People, specifically black people, absolutely get arrested for having a single joint. Heck, they get arrested just for being near a small amount of marijuana, like in Noble’s case. And more people need to be made aware of that.
America is set up to screw over minorities. It always has been, ever since our country’s foundation. First, there was slavery. And once slavery was made illegal, the loophole in the 13th Amendment (the 13th Amendment made slavery illegal unless as a punishment for a crime) was taken advantage of. Today, the criminal justice system enables and endorses legalized slavery through imprisonment. After slaves were legally emancipated and the 13th Amendment was passed, white people would arrest freed black people for extremely petty crimes, such as standing in one place for too long. That practice has continued today into arresting black people for similarly petty crimes- such as in the cases of Bernard Noble and Kalief Browder- and then in turn ruining their lives. Once there is an arrest on their record, it will be almost impossible for them to get a job. This can and often does lead to a cycle of joblessness, homelessness, and then poverty. And of course, nothing does a better job of fostering crime than poverty does. Once a black man has become involved in the criminal justice system, it will become almost impossible for him to clear his name and rebuild his life after that, because the criminal justice system does not care whether or not he is innocent. Or rather, it has already made up its mind that he is guilty.
Unless significant moves are made to change the way in which the criminal justice system regards minorities, namely black men, racism will never be erased from our society. And until more people become aware of the reality of how the criminal justice system works, our prisons will be filled with people imprisoned for petty crimes while many people who have actually committed crimes walk freely through society, because the criminal justice system does not care about crimes committed by rich white men. The only time it bats an eye is when they find a young black man that they can screw over.