Culpability: Examining the Moral Hazard of Excusing Criminal Conduct on Slavery, Mass Incarceration and Structural White Supremacy

In this Jan. 5, 2012 photo, razor wire tops the fencing at the Polunsky Unit prison in Livingston, Texas. Declines in state prison populations across the country and the shifting politics around mass incarceration have created opportunities to downsize prison bed space. ( Bob Owen/Houston Chronicle via AP)

Understanding how the founding of the United States was built by the exploitation of the world’s migrating poor, indentured servants and enslaved captives should be required for all. However destructive that paradigm is, it doesn’t excuse today’s violent criminal street gang conduct any more than it does aggressive policing. There is no room for permissible othering en route to a moral reckoning.

Societal power structures were shaped via the strategic and codified dehumanization of all persons of color in order to achieve a compliant labor force that enriched lawmakers, empowered whites, and built the securities and insurance industries. This ugly truth of the industrial revolution is something we shouldn’t sweep under the rug, ignore, or deny. Though disgusting and reprehensible, it doesn’t excuse the robbery of a food truck any more than it does welfare fraud.

Connecting the dots on how social policies addressing poverty and crime have led to racialized policing and mass incarceration is as informative as any other analysis of the governmental power humans have wielded against one another. That said, moral clarity is a two-way street. Sooner or later, we all have to be accountable for our reprehensible conduct; we have to own it, call it out and disavow it by way of contrary action. As the acclaimed poet Reginald Dwayne Betts has said candidly on his Freedom Takes podcast and in his writings, while scoffing at how some academics and en vogue commentators insinuated a safe harbor justification for criminal conduct – sometimes “it’s about a pistol.”

Within the small rooms where conscientious incarcerated men gather voluntarily to discuss choices and consequences, excavate trauma, examine generational legacies and explore transformation, accountability in spite of grievance is an imperative. While minimizing neither the need for personal responsibility for criminal acts, nor the need to punish criminality, Harvard professor Randall Kennedy wrote in his book Race, Crime and the Law that, “society faces both real racism and real criminality,” emphasizing “a long-term need to address socioeconomic inequities and a short-term need to provide for public safety – now.” His book’s 1998 thesis was grounded in what he diagnosed as “a crisis in individual moralities and a crisis of social justice.”

The moral reckoning we know is owed to persons of color by a government that must amend how it serves and protects its citizens regardless of class or color, is the same moral reckoning lurking over the sheet-covered bodies lining the streets of places like Chicago that fall in pursuit of what two-time American Book Award-winning poet Randall Horton calls “hardism.” As he writes in his memoir Dead Weight, “help, compassion, empathy and grace” are what incarcerated folks need to offer one another, via poetry, in pursuit of the hope we all need in order to anchor real change. That change requires a long stare into an unforgiving mirror and an honest broker truth-teller to hold you—and the mirror—still.

Escalators might get you there easily, but the arrival is earned by exercising the limbs during locomotion. The same is true for doing the hard work of accountability – cop outs rob you of the life-altering insight that comes with acquiring an unforced empathy.

The gatherings we convene via the Barz Behind Bars (B3) Creative Writing Spoken Word Performance Art Workshop at Valley State Prison study the scholarship of historians like Yale’s Elizabeth Hinton, whose book From The War On Poverty To The War On Crime presents a roadmap for understanding how governmental policies impacted the everyday life of persons of color and criminalized public spaces in ways that made incarceration more likely. Hinton’s work and books by folks like Heather Ann Thompson, Michelle Alexander and Angela Davis present abolitionist arguments we believe stakeholders need to hear and evaluate.

There remains however, a persistent bogeyman who keeps the room honest, no matter how intoxicating the anger becomes when our group makes a historical discovery that reveals a calculated move against their respective culture. If freedom is what we hope to achieve, the moral crisis Professor Kennedy wrote about must be tackled.

This is the obstacle course we navigate while negotiating unfairness and accountability. It requires a judicious temperament to know the deck has been stacked, but that you must play by the rules anyway. For the lifers among our ranks who must travel through the gauntlet of accountability when going before the Parole Board, they know their obligation. For those with determinate sentences who need not perform for the Parole Board in order to get their date and hit the gate, their personal reconciliations are more commendable in light of there being no compulsory authority mandating any change whatsoever. Alas, when these guys do decide to flip their scripts, they really change course.

In the same way that one’s ethics are best revealed when nobody is looking, so too are the butterfly effect changes happening in this offender category. To the extent we have been successful at all in prompting these men into any sort of introspection and recalibration when they have no mandate to do so, is pretty damn gratifying.

Transgressions require repentance and selfish perspectives require empathy if they are to ever mutate into selflessness. In our view, presenting the fractured parts of a country using historical records that reveal systemic crimes against humanity serves to make the same case for reparations that it does demonstrating the need for moral reconciliation by those serving prison sentences for crimes they committed. Examining injustice doesn’t only need to be a call to intellectual arms that crusades for the dismantling of the Prison Industrial Complex—it can also serve to personalize the inhumane history of Black America for men of color and activate the empathetic impulse that leads to ethical renewal.

Though we disagree with the concept of rehabilitation on the basis that we believe few incarcerated folks were ever wholly habilitated in the first place, owing to all manner of familial and societal stressors, we assert that by responsibly deconstructing warped belief systems, addressing sublimated trauma and regulating the primary emotions, every incarcerated person can transform themselves into a mindful being who respects the life, autonomy and property of others. By moving with a renewed perspective rooted in personal responsibility and accepting behavioral culpability for their personal conduct, incarcerated men can acquire a healthy disdain for their prior choices, pivot into healthy roles of selfless service and become the change society needs.

Harnessing the accurate history of how a country dehumanized a segment of the population can serve as the activating driver of that population’s moral evolution. Victimization enables awareness, but understanding how power structures exploit populations is more than a blame-game dice roll of convenience. We can be personally accountable and still have systemic critiques on standby that diagnose societal ills.

History warns—it doesn’t excuse.

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