Doing Life For Non Violent Crime

I know what some of you are thinking. "There goes that PR Brown again criticizing the criminal justice system as If these people aren't guilty and don't bring it on themselves." No that's not the case. Many of the people who are incarcerated are actually guilty, and deserve to incarcerated. But when the scales of justice are so statistically unbalanced that African-Americans receive the lions share of long prison sentences for non-violent crimes, I would be remiss if I did not shed light on yet another "design flaw" in the system especially given the fact that the ranks of those who have been doomed to live out their days as state property has increased.

A new academic study of 58,000 federal criminal cases has found significant disparities in sentencing for blacks and whites arrested for the same crimes. The research led to the conclusion that African-Americans’ jail time was almost 60% longer than white sentences.

While serious crime rates in the U.S. have been declining for the last 20 years, the number of prisoners serving life sentences has more than quadrupled since 1984. As documented in a new report done by sentencingproject.org over 159,000 people were serving life sentences in 2012, with nearly 50,000 serving life without parole.

Key findings from the report include:

• One of every nine individuals in prison is serving a life sentence.
• The population of prisoners serving life without parole (LWOP) has risen more sharply than those with the possibility of parole: there has been a 22.2% increase in LWOP since just 2008.
• Approximately 10,000 lifers have been convicted of nonviolent offenses.
• Nearly half of lifers are African American and 1 in 6 are Latino. 
• More than 10,000 life-sentenced inmates have been convicted of crimes that occurred before they turned 18 and nearly 1 in 4 of them were sentenced to LWOP.

 Here is one mans story.

Robert Booker admits that he didn't really need the money he got from drug dealing. He grew up in a two-parent, middle-class family in Detroit in the 1970s, and his job as a lifeguard for the city's parks department paid "good money." But the drug business paid more, and by the late 1980s nearly all of his friends were showing up to the pool with new cars and expensive sneakers. "I was smarter than the average cat, and I was like, 'If they could do it, I could do it easy,'" Booker said by phone on Monday from the Federal Correctional Institution in Schuylkill, Pa. "I left lifeguarding and started hanging around."

Twenty-five years later, at 47 years old, Booker is two decades deep into a life sentence in federal prison for three related, nonviolent drug crimes: possession with intent to distribute crack cocaine, conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute crack cocaine, and operating a "crack distribution house." Although a trial judge initially sentenced him to 20 years in prison, the prosecutor filed two separate appeals, ultimately triggering an automatic sentencing mechanism that forced a federal judge to send Booker to prison for the rest of his life. 

He has used his time in prison to study law and write fiction, and published a crime novel, entitled "Push," in 2006.

PR