Two federal agents paid $2,800 to a dealer and $100 to Karen Blakney to “cook” the cocaine and convert it to crack. Karen faced a mandatory minimum sentence of ten years because the substance was crack-cocaine. The trial judge ruled that a mandatory ten-year sentence for a minor player like Karen would be “cruel and unusual” punishment. The judge also noted Karen’s successful completion of drug treatment. He sentenced her to thirty-three months, the sentence she would have received if the substance were powder cocaine. The government appealed her sentence reduction and the judge was ordered to re-sentence Karen to the mandatory minimum. Ultimately, Karen pleaded to general conspiracy and was sentenced for time served.1
Karen Blakney
MY NAME IS Karen Michelle Blakney. I was born in 1960 in Washington, D.C. I grew up in Southeast D.C., where I went to elementary, junior high, and high school. I quit school in the twelfth grade when I got pregnant with my son. Later, I took some courses at Federal City College, but I stopped going there. After I got out of prison, I went back for my GED.
After I dropped out of school I had my son, and then my daughter. Around that time I started getting into the “street life.” I started smoking weed and hustling. I was about fifteen or sixteen when I started smoking weed in junior high. The crowd I hung out with, kids from school, started smoking it. They were doing weed, angel dust, and other things. I saw them smoking and just wanted to try it. I would see people out there selling it, so we bought a bag and we started smoking it. We went up on the roof of the building, and then from there we started doing it up there and on the way to school and after lunch. I liked the feeling I got from smoking. It made me happy. It made me laugh and made me hungry. I knew I couldn’t stop. My girlfriend and I just couldn’t wait until we could get another bag and get high again. I never thought it would get out of control, but now I know it was only the beginning.
I started using cocaine after my son’s godmother turned me onto it. I started hanging around her, smoking weed at her house. At first I didn’t want to try the cocaine. I thought about the people I saw with all of those sores—I thought cocaine was like heroin. I didn’t think cocaine was on the same level as weed and I tried PCP a few times, but never used it again. I didn’t like the feeling of it—the high. Once she explained to me that cocaine wasn’t the same as shooting dope, I tried it, but I didn’t do it for a while after that first time.
I stayed away from my son’s godmother for the next six months. At the time, I was about nineteen. I became addicted to cocaine, but didn’t realize it at first and didn’t want to face it. I felt like I was supporting myself. I was out there selling it and nobody was giving it to me. I started seeing people turning tricks for it, but I never went through that stage. I lied and stole, but I never turned tricks. I sold drugs and stole from my family and kids—I was spending their money on drugs, so really it was like stealing from them. I lived with my sisters and sometimes I’d take something from them. I was really out of control.
During this time I had a job as a nurse assistant. It started off as a summer job. My mom ran the recreation center at the community center. She told us to fill out some forms for a job and I was sent to the hospital. I worked there and some other places, but the deeper I got into my habit, the more I missed work. I wanted to hustle. I didn’t have a job, but my kids’ father worked; he hustled.
I have nine kids—seven girls and two boys. The youngest is three and the oldest is twenty-four. The first seven kids are by one father and the other two by a second father. I am good friends with them now.
My mom knew I was using drugs and I was addicted. She knew I smoked weed and did coke, but it was at the time when I didn’t do it around my mom, and my mom couldn’t really put her hands on it. She didn’t see me, but I was taking care of the whole house and taking care of all of my brothers and sisters, doing the laundry. I got my sisters ready for school. I took my mom to the doctor and was always there for her. They say I was her favorite because I was always there for her.
There were nine children in my family: seven girls and two boys, with one set of twins. I had an older sister and an older brother. Then I was the third kid, but everybody thought I was the oldest. We all grew up together in D.C. My mom never allowed us to be separated, so we were very close. We all stayed around the house and people would come see my mom, who was like a community mom.
My mom didn’t allow men to be around us. She didn’t bring men around the house. She taught us not to sit on men’s laps, even if it was a brother. I was brought up in a Christian home. My grandmother was very religious. My mother was into Black awareness and taught us morals, principals, and respect. She wanted us to be proud of who we were and wanted us to make the best of ourselves. She told us never to be ashamed to ask anything. She said, “If you don’t know something, ask somebody.” My mother taught us to respect ourselves as women. She also wanted us to remember that beauty is not only on the outside; it’s on the inside too. She didn’t want us to make fun of others, but instead think about what that person might have gone through. I’ve always tried to remain true to the convictions she instilled in me. I don’t blame my mom for the things that happened to me. I chose to get into drugs and live the life I did because I wanted to grow up. I just ended up on the wrong path.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a doctor or a teacher. I wanted to be a teacher because I really liked dealing with children, and I still do. Now, I work at a clinic. I register the patients through the computer system, and I talk to them. When I think about it, I’m like my mom—a people person, a community mom.
Until I went to prison, I did not really know how much I hurt my family. When I was getting ready for court, I asked my daughter, who was nine at the time, to pray for me. She said “Mommy … I’ll pray for you, but I pray that you don’t come home if you’re going to do the same thing.” I asked why she said that. She said, “Because it hurts me when you do those things.” That was when I realized I hurt my family. When I got out in 1991, I made a real effort to get off drugs and not to sell drugs.
My first drug charge was for possession of cocaine. I think it was in 1987. I jumped bond, and was sentenced on that charge; the drug possession charge was dropped. I was sentenced one to three years in federal prison on the bond violation. Then I was sentenced to probation for three years. I was charged with another cocaine charge, but it was dropped later. Later I was charged in district court with possession with intent to distribute cocaine, but was found innocent by a jury.
The 1991 charge occurred after a major incident in May, but they arrested me in September. I didn’t know the co-defendants very well. They came over and wanted somebody else to cook the crack, and at the time my sister was on crack, so that’s who they were looking for. They asked me to cook it up, but I didn’t want to. When he asked again, I gave in, being the people pleaser. I thought it would just be one time and it wouldn’t do any harm, but I ended up doing it twice in a couple of weeks. The second time, they weren’t looking for my sister, they wanted me to cook it up for them. They brought some guys with them that they wanted to sell some crack to. They didn’t know that the buyers were undercover DEA agents. The undercover agent gave me the drugs to cook up. When I was done, he gave me one hundred dollars, even though I didn’t charge him. Later at the district court trial the undercover agents were asked, “Why did you want it turned into crack?” They said, “Because crack carries more time.”
There is a skill to cooking crack. You have to know how to bring it back up to weight. Some people have to add more to bring it back up to the weight that the customer is paying for. If you don’t do it right you might lose a gram or two. When the agent gave me the cocaine, there was no reason for me to suspect the man was an agent. Everybody in the neighborhood wanted crack. In the Black community people buy it as crack, because if you cook it yourself, you lose some of it. If he had wanted something else, then we would have known right away that he was an agent. The thing is, you can have a kilo of powder and get five years. Or, you can have a kilo of crack and you get 40 or 50 years. I knew this at the time because I’d done time before. But when the agents gave a piece of crack to me I didn’t think I was dealing with DEAs, and besides, I didn’t know I could get in so much trouble for only cooking it up. I had nothing to do with the sale; I just cooked it up.
I figured that I was arrested because they wanted me to be an informant. They thought they could lock me up and get me to snitch or something. This happens to a lot of women. They get locked up because they were riding along with their boyfriend, and the cops think that if they can get the woman to snitch on the boyfriend, their case will be much stronger. I think a lot of Black women are locked up because they don’t know anything. The cops think that the women know something just because they are in the car with the boyfriend, but the boyfriends never tell the women what’s going on. The cops wanted me to be a snitch, but I refused because I had morals and principles—loyalty. If I had agreed to snitch, they would have dropped the charges. Instead, I faced twenty years. It wasn’t like somebody threatened me, in order to stop me from snitching—I’m just not that kind of person. As far as my family situation, it didn’t affect my decision not to snitch and serve time instead.
There were four of us and our cases were consolidated, and each of us had our own attorney. The judge didn’t feel that two of us played a major role. I faced twenty years, but the trial judge had a few lawyers from a big law firm investigate the case and determine how involved my co-defendant and I were in the crime. The judge cut my sentence down to ten years. Then, after some more investigation, he cut it down to thirty-six months. The government was mad. Immediately, they said they would appeal my case. In the meantime, I went home, and I came out of the halfway house, and started working and everything. Then, all of a sudden they said I had to go back to prison; the appeals court overturned the sentencing. The trial judge sentenced me again—to the same sentence: thirty-six months. The government appealed again and asked that the trial judge be removed from the sentencing. During this time, I just thought, “Praise God.” I knew that God hadn’t released me the first time so I could be sentenced a second time. I strongly believed that I would not be put back in again, so much so, that I had another baby. I just treated the situation as another test.
When I went before the next judge, the prosecution said, “In all my thirty years I have never seen anything like this happen.” I said, “Maybe in all your thirty years you never met a person that believed that God would work it out.” And that is how I left it. The judge asked me how I felt about the situation and I told her that I knew that God didn’t make mistakes and that God brought me through. I thank the trial judge, but most of all, I thank and praise my God. The sentencing judge gave me five more years of probation to see if I stayed clean.
I served some of my time in D.C. Then I went to Connecticut for a year, and later to West Virginia for six months. Because I violated probation, I had to serve some time for D.C. So, I did twenty-four months for the feds and eighteen months for D.C. I spent the last six months in a halfway house in D.C. Some of the places were dirty and nasty, but others were nice and clean, not really like a prison. The time gave me a chance to realize I needed to change. I really put my mind to it and my faith in God. I had a baby girl while I was away. My sister took care of her until I came home. She was fourteen months when I got out. Prison was mainly what you made of it. In the federal prisons you have to go to school or work. It’s almost like being on a college campus, its not all that bad. When you are in there, you know you were doing the wrong things and destroying yourself. You get to a point where you want to turn everything around.
There are a lot of Black women locked up, but sometimes we do it to ourselves. We want to stick with our men and do what our men say, but sometimes the men want to blame the women. The man isn’t thinking about the woman and the woman gets in over her head without any way out until it’s too late. A lot of the women in prison have been on crack, heroin, or other drugs. Some of them have been raped and abused by stepfathers, fathers, or brothers. Some of them have been pimped by their own mothers, so that their mothers could get drugs. So you have some women who just didn’t care, and just went their own way, but you also have women who were set on the wrong path by those who were supposed to protect them.
For some people, prison presents a chance for them to turn their lives around. For others, it does not do a thing for them, and they spend their life getting out and going back. For so many Black women in prison, they don’t even know why they are there. Many of them are babies—young women—that didn’t know what was going on. This sort of situation doesn’t just happen to Black women. I also met Latinas and White women that had similar experiences that led them down the same path I took to prison. I think we need to build rehabilitation centers where women can live and have visits from family. The violent criminals need to be separated from the women who committed nonviolent crimes. They have to be given a chance to better themselves, and to go to school. I know everyone has different beliefs about religion, but I think getting God into their lives would really make a difference. I think it helps people to have a program to help them turn their lives around. Prison cannot solve all of the problems. In cases where people are in prison for things they didn’t do, the people become worse—their bad side is brought out. Particularly with young Black mothers, you have a woman locked up who is a mother of a very young child. The father is already locked up and he is responsible for her getting locked up. The woman won’t snitch because the man is the father of her child. The man isn’t going to defend the woman because he resents being imprisoned and feels that if he is in there, then there is no reason why she should be free.
I saw my youngest children when I was in prison in D.C., but I didn’t see any of my children when I was in federal prison. This was mostly because they didn’t have a way of coming to see me. I was in touch with my children, though; I called them. My relationship with my kids is beautiful now; it’s a blessing. My drug addiction never came between me and my kids because they knew how strong our relationship was before drugs. When I would get high, they didn’t want to be around me. I tried to stay out of their sight and out of the house when I got high, but when the oldest one saw me, he cried. After that I made sure I didn’t get high when they were around. When I was in jail, my children wrote to me, even my youngest one, who was six. Even if they mailed off letters without stamps, they always made it to me. It was like the postman thought, “These kids are writing their mother who’s in prison.” It touched my spirit and heart each time. They always stayed in touch and to this day, they never throw that time in my face.
As I said before, I was raised in a Christian home. My mother instilled her beliefs in me. She would cry out and pray to God, so I knew He was real. So, when I was in prison, I just gave my life to God and I have stayed with Him since I left. For some people in prison, a program helps them get their life back, but for me it was God. The feds put me in a twelve-step program, but when it was my turn to participate, I stood up and said, “My name is Karen Blakney and I used to be a drug addict. Now I am a child of God.” The man supervising us said I couldn’t say that and I said, “Yes I can, because all God said when I gave my life to Him was all old things have passed away; behold all things become new.” My probation officer took me out of the program because she knew how dedicated I was. Religion has helped me overcome a lot because I know that all people fall short of the glory of God. No matter what, God tells us we have to show each other love and respect.