8 Start at the Finish Line

I was hiding in the brush by the Ohio River
Sarah by my side, the baby in my arms
When the slave catchers found us
With our backs against the water
Winter come late, and the ice not formed

And they sold me back South
To the old Vann Plantation
Two hundred miles from my home and kin
To be buried in a grave with no marker on it
Right on the spot where the new prison stands

I was walking the streets by the Anacostia River
But no one was hiring a young Black man
When the District police picked me up for no reason
Gave me 15 years for less than ten grams

And they sent me down South
To the old Vann Plantation
Two hundred miles from my home and kin
To be buried in a cell in a for-profit prison
To make some men rich from the trouble I’m in

There were four million slaves from the African nation
Now there’s two million prisoners
In the ‘land of the free’
It might be right on this spot
That my great-great-grandmother
Had done to her what they’re doing to me

I can feel her spirit on the old Vann Plantation
Beneath the towers and the razor wire
All for the profit of some prison corporation
If you say that’s not slavery
You’re a goddamn liar

Like so many other people, when somebody first told me that there were for-profit private prisons in the United States and elsewhere, I didn’t believe them. As not only an organizer, but also a historian with a particular interest in African American, southern, and labor history, I knew that in the period following the Civil War southern states had hired out their prisoners to corporations that were industrializing the South, as well as to plantations that were reestablishing themselves. Prisoners mined coal, harvested timber, tapped trees on turpentine plantations, chopped and picked cotton, built roads, laid track, dug railroad tunnels, cut sugar cane, sweated in cotton mills. Called the “convict lease system,” it was so brutal that each year an estimated one-third of these prisoners died, literally worked to death.

By the end of the nineteenth century, under pressure from progressive activists in the South and nationally, the last southern state had abolished its convict leasing system. Was it possible, I wondered, that at the very end of the twentieth century, on the verge of the new millennium, imprisonment for profit was back?

It was, with a vengeance.

It’s not that everything was all right with this country’s criminal justice and prison systems before the opening of the United States’ first modern for-profit private prison in Houston in 1984. As the country approached the end of the twentieth century, prisons, jails, and detention centers constituted, to poor and working people of many races and ethnicities, a structural barrier comparable to that of legal segregation fifty years ago.

Think of the teenager—Latina/Latino, Appalachian white, African American, Native American, South Asian, Pacific Islander —who makes one mistake, a mistake that neither threatens nor hurts anyone else, and ends up doing five to ten years’ hard time in an adult facility.

When that person, now no longer young, finally gets out from behind bars, they’re not just an ex-prisoner. They are poor, deeply and desperately poor, and more likely than not will remain so as long as they live. Though some remarkable individuals overcome their years behind bars, the great majority are de facto barred for life: from employment, opportunity, stability, advancement. Any time in prison is almost always a life sentence.

Hard though it may be to believe, the “land of the free” currently imprisons more people than any other country in the world. With only 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Of equal significance, we incarcerate at a rate that is on average five to six times that of any comparable nation. Right now, that adds up to over 2.2 million human beings.

But the issue affects more than just those in prison. Their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, partners, children, neighbors, friends, and other loved ones are all affected. Their neighborhoods and communities suffer the impact as well, both when they leave for prison and when they come back from it. When people have no hope and no prospects, the disempowerment they experience extends to the places they come from and return to.

The creation and growth of the for-profit private prison industry have helped create the radical expansion of incarceration that’s taken place in the United States over the last twenty-five years. Current projections are that one in every fifteen Americans—one in every fifteen Americans!—will spend some time in a prison, jail, or detention center during their lifetime. That’s twenty million people, more than the population of most of the world’s countries.

The more prisons, the more prisoners. The more prisoners, the more long-term poverty and deprivation. It’s as simple as that. A history of incarceration, whether in a prison, jail, or detention center, virtually guarantees lifelong poverty after release—assuming the person is lucky enough to be released at all.

Every time organizers help a community stop a prison from being built; close an existing prison, jail, juvenile or immigrant detention center; persuade a state to cut the funds in their corrections budget and/or to allocate public monies to alternatives to incarceration, we are helping to remove structural barriers to economic self-improvement for individuals and communities. Every person who, because of the work of creative community organizers, goes to a job or school instead of a prison, jail, or immigrant detention center represents a victory over poverty and inequity.

To suggest that, in the twenty-first century, poor and working people anywhere in the United States can change the conditions of their lives and communities without stopping prison expansion, reducing current levels of incarceration, and substantially changing the structural barriers erected by current U.S. prison and criminal justice systems and policies would be almost like arguing in 1950 that African Americans could achieve full political and economic equality without first dismantling this country’s system of legal segregation.

The voice on the other end of the phone belonged to Gail Tyree, one of the most creative organizers I’ve ever worked with. Gail grew up in Florida and got a job with the phone company while still a teenager. Active in her union, the Communications Workers of America (CWA), she had worked her way up to president of her local. Eventually, she made her way to Grassroots Leadership, where she was now our Mississippi-Tennessee organizer.

“Si, you’re not going to believe this one.” Gail was breathing hard.

“I don’t know if I will or I won’t, Gail,” I came back. “Try me.”

“Are you sitting down?”

“I’m not, but I’ll do it.” I sat down. “Okay, go ahead. I’m listening.”

“Corrections Corporation of America just offered Shelby County $30 million free and clear if they’ll let them build a private jail here.”

“They did what?” I was back on my feet.

Gail repeated what she’d just said.

“They can’t do that. That’s a bribe.”

I could almost hear Gail shrugging over the phone. “Well, of course it’s a bribe. But it’s a legal bribe. They’re offering the money to the county above board, not to some elected official under the table.”

“What do they want for their $30 million?” I asked.

“Oh, nothing much.” Gail could have been talking about what she had for supper. “Just a little old fifty-year contract.”

I won’t repeat what I said at that point.

When I finally calmed down, what I said was, “So what are we going to do?”

Gail didn’t hesitate. “Fight them,” she said. “It’s what we do, isn’t it?”

In every campaign, there is a magic moment just before the victory (and, unfortunately, sometimes just before the defeat). No matter how experienced and skillful we are as organizers, we usually never find out exactly when, where, or why that moment took place.

But we do know that it happened. It’s the moment in which one person changes her mind.

In that instant, one corporate CEO says, “I know that many of you on the board disagree with me, but we’re settling this right now. Furthermore, we’re going to do it on their terms because, if we don’t, it’s only going to get worse.”

In that moment, the vote on the county council stops being seven to six against us, and becomes seven to six for us—because one council member switched her vote.

In that flash, one lone person says, “Enough.”

How do we as creative community organizers get from here to there? Ironically, we start by thinking about how to get from there to here. That is, we start the process of strategy development by imagining the instant just before victory, and then, working backwards, do our best to figure out the steps that will lead to that moment.

We usually don’t know in advance who that one person is going to be. But, as we practice our craft, we can learn to become reasonably good at making educated guesses—and then at developing strategies for helping that person, whether or not we know for sure who they’re going to be, come around to our point of view.

That’s one of the fascinating secrets at the heart of creative community organizing. In order to move forward, we need to start at the finish line.

Gail Tyree met me at the Memphis airport.

“Where do we start?” I asked.

“Isaac Hayes,” Gail said.

I couldn’t have been more impressed. “He’s working with us?” I asked. “That’s amazing. How did you pull that off? How did you get to meet him? What did you say to him?” My excitement was uncontainable, and I had lapsed back into the rapid-fire verbal delivery of my northern childhood.

Gail shook her head. “Si, what makes you think I know people like Isaac Hayes? I wouldn’t know how to find him if we were both lost.” She grinned. “But I do know how to find his restaurant. He’s got a rib joint downtown you really don’t want to miss.”

Gail was right. As I licked the last drop of barbecue sauce from my thumb, I agreed, “These are fine ribs.”

“Si, we don’t want you going back to North Carolina saying we didn’t treat you right.” Jacob Flowers spoke with a soft, almost sweet drawl.

I couldn’t quite place the accent. “Jacob, where are you from?” I asked.

“I’m a Memphian.”

“I don’t care what your personal religious beliefs are.” Gail had on her most serious look. “You’re all right by me.”

Jacob ignored us both. “Les, how do you like those ribs?”

“He’s not going to answer you.” Gail punched Les gently on the shoulder. “Les doesn’t ever say anything unless he needs to.”

Les nodded in agreement, gnawing on a rib all the time.

Jacob looked at the tall pile of almost bleached bones on Les’s plate. “That’s how he managed to eat twice as many ribs as the rest of us.”

“He’s smart that way.” Gail had joined Jacob in staring at Les’s bone collection, then shifted her gaze to her own much smaller pile. “We kept talking. He kept eating.”

Les nodded again, still holding on to the rib.

Jacob moved his gaze up from the rib pile. “So where do you fit in all this, Les.”

Gail didn’t wait for Les to answer. “He’s a Roman Catholic priest.”

Jacob was trying hard not to look skeptical.

“He’s a priest, not a saint,” Gail explained. “If he wants to wear Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts, that’s his business.”

Les stuck out his hand to Jacob. “Les Schmidt. Glenmary Order of Priests and Brothers.”

“Les and I have been friends for forty years,” I added. “His order loans him to Grassroots Leadership half time to help us work with the faith community. That’s what he’s doing here in Memphis.”

Les nodded. “Glad to be here, too,” he said, in a way that made it clear the introductions were over, and it was time to get down to work.

I caught Gail’s eye. “So how does it look, Gail?”

Gail pushed her plate away. “Well, it doesn’t look good, when you come right down to it. From everything I can tell, they’ve got the votes on the council pretty well sewed up.”

“The city council?” I was trying to understand the local scene.

“No, the county council. We’re still trying to figure out which way the mayors are going to go.”

“Mayors?” I asked. Gail had clearly used the plural. “Memphis has two mayors?”

Gail shook her head impatiently. “Si, don’t you know anything? There’s a city mayor and a county mayor. Where have you been?”

I’d never heard of such a thing. “Kind of like the city mouse and the country mouse?”

Gail grinned. “Not country, county. See, we don’t have a merged city-county government like you all do over in Charlotte. So there’s a Memphis mayor and a Memphis city council. Then there’s the Shelby County mayor and the Shelby County council. Do you think you can remember that?”

“I’ll do my best, Gail.”

“I’d appreciate that, Si. It would mean a lot to me.”

“So who’s got the power?” I asked. The question was meant for anyone. I looked around the table.

Jacob spoke first. “It’s a county issue, Si. There are two facilities we’re talking about. There’s the Shelby County Jail, and then there’s the Shelby County Correctional Center, which most folks call the penal farm.

“The Shelby County council has authority over both. They delegate the authority to run them to the sheriff. In the long run, though, the council makes the decisions. It’s up to them to decide whether or not to turn it all over to Corrections Corporation of America.”

“So where does the sheriff stand?” I asked.

“Between the two facilities, you’re looking at about fifteen hundred public employees. Basically, when you come right down to it, they all work for the sheriff. That’s a serious political power base, and right now it pretty much belongs to him. If they privatize, he loses it all. He’s going to be careful, because he doesn’t want to get on the wrong side of the real power people. But he’s not going to support anything that undercuts his base.

“That’s the case pretty much anywhere you look,” Jacob continued. “Where sheriffs and police chiefs control the jail workforce, they’re going to oppose privatization. But it’s not about ideology— it has to do with preserving their personal and political power.”

I turned to Gail. “You sure told me right, Gail. He’s really good.”

“Si, he’s a whole lot older than he looks,” Gail answered, looking warmly at Jacob. “He could be as much as twenty-four years old.”

“Twenty-five,” Jacob said.

“See, just like I said.” Gail was on a roll. “But he’s been running the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center ever since I got to Memphis, anyway. He kind of grew up in the business, if you know what I mean.”

I looked at Jacob. “Gail means my folks are activists,” he grinned. “It kind of runs in the family.”

Well, and a good thing, too. But also something of a new thing, at least in the Deep South. There have always been a handful of courageous white antiracist southerners, voices of conscience in a tough part of the world. But they were the exceptions, rebels with an apparently hopeless cause, prophets crying out in the racial wilderness. But by 2006 it was no longer all that strange to find young white southerners whose hearts were in the right place, creative community organizers believing in and working to build something that seemed impossible in 1965.

I thought back to the last time I had been in Memphis. Forty-one years had passed since I drove my beloved ‘53 Chevy from Forrest City to the Memphis airport to pick up SNCC leaders Julian Bond and James Foreman and bring them back to Arkansas for a strategy retreat. Back then, white southerners tended to be more like the angry young men at the Wagon Wheel restaurant in Forrest City, staring furiously at half a dozen Black teenagers trying to eat their ice cream in peace.

Forty-five years ago, if Gail, Jacob, Les, and I, a Black woman and three white men, had sat down to eat in a restaurant in downtown Memphis, we would have been arrested.

Sure, many things were just like they’d always been. Racism was still raw. Poverty still clouded lives and dragged them down. But something basic had changed for the better.

Jacob Flowers was one of the young southerners helping make that change happen.

I was back home in Charlotte, talking to Gail on the phone.

“What’s the count on the faith petitions?” I asked.

“We’ve got over a thousand signatures.” Even over the phone, I could almost hear Les proudly laying the stack of petitions on the table. “We’ve got leaders from religions I didn’t even know we had here in Shelby County.” There was a serious sense of accomplishment in Gail’s voice. “Les, how are we doing with the Wiccans?”

I could barely hear the rustle of Les’s voice over the phone, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. I did hear Gail say, in mock horror, “No, no, they don’t do that kind of thing here in Shelby County, Les. I think they’re just some kind of weird Presbyterians.”

“Si—Jacob, Gail, and I think that’s enough signatures to go public.” Les was trying to get us back on track. “We’re planning a vigil in one of the largest churches in downtown Memphis.”

“Black church?” I asked.

“No, that’s what they expect.” This was turning into a long speech for Les. “We want to show them how much white support we’ve got.”

“How are the visits going?” I was running through my checklist of the various tactics we had agreed to use in the campaign.

Gail took back the mike. “Les and I have seen almost all of the ministers.”

“How are you structuring the visits?”

“Like this. First, we show them the resolutions against private prisons that we’ve received from the Presbyterians and the southern Catholic bishops.”

“We frame it as a moral issue,” Les added. He and Gail were tossing the conversation back and forth between them, a technique I figured they’d probably worked out for when they went to talk with the ministers. “We don’t try to argue the politics or the economics.

“Then, once they’ve warmed up to us, we ask if we could meet with them and the county council member who’s a member of their church, just to explore the ethics of the situation together.”

I was pleased, but slightly puzzled. “I thought you were having a hard time figuring out which churches some of them went to.”

I could hear Gail chuckling. “Well, Si,” she said, “some of these union correctional officers have their Sunday mornings off. It’s in their contract, you know. So I asked them if instead of going to their regular church they’d like to go to church with one of the county council members.”

“You did what?” I was having a hard time following.

“Well, since we didn’t know which churches those particular county council members went to, we couldn’t very well ask the correctional officers to meet them there, now could we?”

Okay, finally something made sense. “No, I guess you really couldn’t.”

“Right.” Gail was having a good time telling the story. “So Les and I asked the correctional officers to follow them to church instead.”

“Follow them to church?”

“Well, at a respectful distance, of course.”

I was lost. “Gail, you’re going to have to break this down for me. I don’t get it.”

“I told the correctional officers to park a little ways down the street from where the county council members lived and, when they saw them pull out of the driveway, to follow them to church.”

Gail Tyree is a very creative community organizer.

Now I was the one laughing. I took a deep breath, trying hard to shift gears.

“So how does it look to the three of you?”

“Hard to tell. But two of the white Republican women are at least listening. They go to the same church.” Les had climbed back into the ring. Gail must have tagged him. “Gail and I built a really good relationship with the minister before we asked him to arrange a meeting with them. He’s helping us a lot.”

“So, basically, you’ve got to get one of them to switch her vote.”

There was a long pause.

“No, Si.” It was Gail. “Les and I have been to see the six Black Democrats. No matter what we do, we’re going to lose one of those votes.”

“Which means?

This time, Gail didn’t pause. “We don’t need to get just one of those two Republican women to vote for us. We’ve got to get them both.”