It’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself. You become a collaborator, an accomplice of your own murderers, because you believe the same things they do.
―James Baldwin, A Dialogue
The phone rang. Was this the call I had been waiting for?
“Hello,” said the digital woman from the Michigan Department of Corrections, letting me know Jeremiah was on the other end of the line. I pressed 0 to accept the call right after she finished her warning about his potential for extortion and right before she gave me the option to block numbers from the facility.
“What’s up, Ruber Scoober,” he said. I could tell that he was smiling. It was August of 2018. He should have come home in June, but his release date had been pushed back after the parole placement failed. I was still in faculty housing, so he couldn’t live with me. Jeremiah and his wife had divorced by then, so he couldn’t parole to her house. My friend still had two German shepherds, and there was still a man with a felony record living in his basement apartment. With no family to parole to in Chicago, he had to stay in prison until the MDOC found a place for him to live. But we were in luck. A bed had opened at a transitional-housing facility in Ypsilanti. It was already two months beyond his scheduled release date, and he would not be coming home to Chicago anytime soon. He had two years of probation to serve, and felons can’t cross state lines. But Jeremiah had a place to live, at least for ninety days.
We spent the next fourteen and a half minutes going over new plans. I would reach out to friends to see if they knew someone willing to hire Jeremiah. I would call around to find a landlord willing to do us the favor of renting him a room. I would pay his rent until he got back on his feet, and I would pick him up from the Gus Harrison Correctional Facility in Jackson, Michigan, where he had been transferred. He would be out in seven days. I had to get to the prison by seven a.m., which was when they opened the gate for visitors.
His counselor said he would give us extra time since I was coming “all the way from Chicago.” After I picked him up, the plan was for us to grab breakfast, then check in at the parole office in Ypsilanti, buy a cell phone, grab lunch, and get Jeremiah an ID. We would catch a movie if there was time, and then have a big dinner in celebration of Jeremiah’s almost freedom. I was always so worried about him being hungry. Prison food was never enough for him. On holidays, when we were little, my brother would eat dinner rolls until his back hurt. First he would stuff the rolls with turkey and macaroni and cranberry sauce and Ma Ma’s oyster dressing and drizzle the top with her famous gravy, the one with giblets and onions that sat in the special dish. The boy would eat maybe five of those, then he would lie on the floor, holding his back, complaining. When we were grown, he would come by and eat all the groceries in our house, even after I’d made a Costco run. Well, at least he’d eat all the Oreos. And he’d drink all the liquor when we went out, even the bottle of scotch I got from Glasgow on my first trip to Europe.
I was happy he was coming home. I also had appointments the day before and deadlines to make that evening. I left home at two a.m. on the day of his release. Chicago is on central time. I was dead tired, but if I slept any longer, we would be late to meet his parole officer. Besides, Jeremiah was getting out of prison. This was really no time to sleep.
He was released on August 13, 2018, from the Gus Harrison Correctional Facility. There were two families picking up their loved ones when I arrived: A woman in a black hoodie and pajama pants sat in the center aisle. An elderly couple came in and sat not far from her on the left. The guard was friendly, like last time, a nice man with a boyish face. There was some infomercial on the television suspended over the change machine in the center of the waiting room. The couple’s son came out first. Next, Jeremiah and the woman’s loved one were buzzed out from behind the Plexiglas-and-steel doors, cracking jokes with each other as they left. Jeremiah was wearing oversize khakis, those awful boots, and a white button-down shirt, but he looked good. He might have gained or lost weight, I wasn’t sure, but he had a freshly shaved head and face. We gave each other dap, left, jumped in the car, and headed out.
He showed me his ankle bracelet, and we made small talk about I can’t quite remember what. I was just happy to see him, and I was tired and hungry, and I had to use the bathroom. We didn’t stop for breakfast because he told me his prison counselor had insisted he go straight to the parole office. We needed to be there by seven thirty when his agent showed up. The office was forty-five minutes away. We did stop to get gas and use the bathroom and pick up a pack of cigarettes. I was worried we were late, knowing that parole officers can be irrational. But Jeremiah had just gotten out of prison. Nothing would ruin our day.
We pulled up earlier than expected. He hopped out of the car and walked inside while I found a space in the parking lot. There were already ten or so men in the waiting room, and other men trickled in and out, most in jeans or tracksuits, for the next few hours. Some had better haircuts than others. Some had on clothes that looked like giveaways: blue or white button-down shirts tucked into their jeans, the kind of shirts you see in recovery homes. They greeted each other and cracked jokes. A few talked about their jobs. A group of them worked at a nearby factory. A big, friendly, and talkative man in his fifties came in, saw Jeremiah in his “fresh fish” khakis, and started a conversation.
“What’s up, big bro,” my brother said, looking relaxed but in a way that seemed to me intentional. I could tell he was watching the man. The man had been home a few years, gotten married, and figured out how to “live for God.” He had clothes and job leads that he was willing to share. He gave Jeremiah a card and told him to come by his house.
When the religious man got in the back of the line, none of the other men in line acknowledged his presence. Jeremiah glanced at me in a way that said all he needed to. “Fuck outta here,” he said under his breath as the man walked behind the door to give his urine sample.
We had been sitting in the hard plastic chairs in that waiting area for an hour and a half when Jeremiah’s parole agent came in. He didn’t look our way, but we could tell it was him. I waited while Jeremiah got in line with the fifteen or so other men. He walked through the door when he got to the front. Five minutes later he walked out of the door, quickly.
“I had to pee, Ruber Scoober,” he said as he walked to the bathroom around the corner in a different section of the building. I wondered why he didn’t pee in the cup like the other men. I let it go.
He got back in the line to go meet with his parole officer again. Fifteen minutes later he was back out the door.
“Mr. Asshole heard you were here,” he said. “He wants to talk to you, but fuck that,” he said. Jeremiah got back in the line and was called to the back, again. Another twenty minutes went by. He came back out the door.
“This asshole,” he said quietly, exasperated. “He wants you to come to the back.”
I walked with Jeremiah to the cubicles behind the door in the waiting room. His parole officer was sitting at a desk. He was staring at what looked like a map on his computer screen. He asked if I had questions; I didn’t. He asked if we had plans for the day; we did. I asked about Jeremiah’s curfew. The agent said on normal days he would need to be back by three o’clock, but he would let him stay out today until six since I had driven all the way from Chicago. He asked if I had any more questions. Jeremiah cut in, asking if he could use the bathroom again. The parole officer, annoyed, waved for him to go and said, “You know, I can make this last all day.”
He asked about my occupation while Jeremiah was in the bathroom. I told him that I worked at the University of Chicago but that I used to work at the University of Michigan. He told me he knew that from my letter. I wondered why he’d asked. He talked about his goals for Jeremiah. He had to go to treatment. He had to get a job.
“We know that people fail,” he said, but he wanted to see Jeremiah succeed. Then the agent showed me his computer screen. No fewer than three people would be monitoring Jeremiah’s movements. The agent would be watching, someone from MDOC headquarters in Lansing would be watching through a GPS satellite, and someone from the private company that MDOC contracted to provide the satellite images would be watching.
“We can tell which direction he’s facing in the car,” he said, then gave some obscure example of how knowing which direction a man with an ankle bracelet sat could somehow keep him out of prison.
Jeremiah came back from the bathroom and looked annoyed that we were still talking. He gave me the signal that I’ve known since we were kids that it was time for us to leave. I walked back out to the waiting room and sat there for an additional hour. Jeremiah finished his appointments. In the car on the way to breakfast, he told me what bothered him. He had gotten a warning after just one encounter with his parole agent. Other men told Jeremiah that his agent gave violations for the “pettiest shit.” “I got the worst fucking agent,” he said.
My family calls Jeremiah the grill master. This man, the one with an iron stomach who ate three chicken breasts, two lamb chops, and nearly a plate of mashed potatoes the last time he visited our house, couldn’t eat for the rest of the day. We went to Zingerman’s Delicatessen for breakfast. He ordered but didn’t touch his food. We went to a fancy diner for lunch. He ordered, but ate only a few bites. We stopped at Outback Steakhouse for dinner. He ordered but couldn’t finish his burger.
“I’m supposed to be happy. I’m free, and he got me fucked up,” he said as I drove him to the transitional-housing facility where he’d stay for the next ninety days.
The phone rang and my stomach sank. The digital woman was calling me again.
“Hello,” she said, “you’ve got a collect call from”—there was no sound, or at least no one gave a name—“an inmate at the Washtenaw County Jail.” I pressed 0 and grabbed my wallet, hoping this was some kind of mistake.
“Ruber Scoober,” Jeremiah said, “just did a quick ten days. I was calling to let you know what’s going on.”
Shit, I thought. He had been arrested again.
“Mr. Asshole was on some bullshit,” he said. Jeremiah had been late for an appointment and he violated him, sending my brother to jail to teach him a lesson.
It had been four months since he got out. I’d thought he was doing well. He had gotten a job at a diner up the street from the transitional-housing facility and had worked there for two months. I remember the first time I visited him there. He’d always been proud of me, but this time he was proud of himself. I took a picture of him that I look at from time to time to remind me of when he was happy. He smiled this goofy wide smile as he posed in front of the grill with his spatula raised in his right hand. He made me a milkshake. It was a surprise and took him ten minutes. He worked the back usually but convinced the cashier to let him make me the shake.
Jeremiah got a grant for a vocational-training program. He asked his parole agent and mandated reentry-program case manager if he could go to truck-driving school. The case manager was kind. She found him a bike and arranged for him to have a bus pass to get around the city. She was responsible for coordinating his classes—anger management, workforce development, drug-relapse prevention. And this had been his dream. He’d gotten a CDL a few years prior, right before he went to prison, but Jeremiah was a drunk. He got a DUI, and his license was immediately suspended. Now he had an opportunity to start over. He imagined that he would make more money driving trucks than he’d made at any other job in his entire life. We talked almost every night. He stayed in a hotel by the Detroit Airport, the grant covering his food and lodging for the three-week program. He checked in with me after every test to celebrate on the phone. He graduated easily. There wasn’t a ceremony for me to go to, but I sent him money and told him I would drive up to see him in a few weeks.
He had a good relationship with the job coordinator at the trucking company. They found him a job right away, but then I got a call from him one night, late. He was hot. He told me he couldn’t take the job as a driver because felons couldn’t cross state lines. Even if he got a job as a local driver, he had a curfew and his travel had to be approved. There was no way the parole supervisor would sign off on the new job, even if his parole agent went to bat for him. I’d worried about this when he signed up for the program, but if they knew this would be a problem, why did they send him to truck-driving school? What did they think would happen? A man who had been homeless. A man who just got out of prison. A man who would have a terrible time finding work otherwise. What good would a truck driver’s license do?
After ten days, his parole agent picked him up from the jail. He had a surprise for him.
“He felt sorry for me,” Jeremiah said. The agent found him a job working the second shift at a tortilla factory. Jeremiah would have to ride his bike across town, but it paid ten dollars an hour, more than he’d made at the diner he left but less than he would have made driving a truck. For some reason they approved the hours. Working nights, or even sporadic hours, apparently wasn’t the problem; the parole department just couldn’t imagine letting a man with a felony record only a few months home from prison have access to a truck. I suppose it was too much freedom.
He took the job at the tortilla factory but hated every minute of every day. He said he’d thought he had to take it. “I’m too old for this manual-labor shit, Scoober,” he said on more than one occasion. He was fired a few weeks later. The job was too demanding. “They changed my shift, and I couldn’t keep up,” he said.
This too is the afterlife of mass incarceration—to be separated from your hopes and any real idea of freedom. Millions of people are unable to decide for themselves where they will work or live or spend time. Millions more can’t find a job or housing at all. There is no place for them to go because no place has been made for them, not even in the public’s imagination.
The problem of mass incarceration has never really been about crime. It’s that the people who Americans are afraid of are subject to a separate set of rules. They live in a separate and altogether different social world, because they belong to a different political community. No social-service agency, no matter how well funded, can bridge the divide between these two worlds, nor can any of our criminal justice–policy reforms. We have not yet come to grips with our problems or imagined an adequate response because our assumptions about the extent and causes of crime have been wrong from the beginning. You cannot treat or arrest or, perhaps, even reform your way out of mass incarceration because mass incarceration is about citizenship, not criminal behavior, and citizenship is about belonging.
I was on a date with my wife, maybe six months later. Robert Glasper was in town to play at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago. I was walking to an Indian restaurant to grab dinner for the event. (The showcase lets you bring a meal.) We had gotten there early enough to get a table in front of the stage and had a glass of wine. I was walking back with our meal when I got a call. It was the digital woman again. I pressed 0 to accept the call.
“Scoober,” Jeremiah said, sounding panicked. “I’ve never been in trouble like this. I’ve been in jail more times in this shitty town than in my whole criminal career.”
He was serious, and he was worried, and he was telling me the truth. He had already been re-arrested four times. Once he’d stayed in jail for three days. Twice for ten. Once for thirty. This time he was being sent to a ninety-day residential drug-treatment program in a small town in western Michigan. (They didn’t tell him it was ninety days. They never told him how long he would have to stay. And he didn’t know this at the time either, but his two-year parole would start all over when he was eventually released.)
I live in a paradox. I am privileged. I’ve worked in elite institutions. I have a wife and a loving family. We’ve somehow managed to break into the middle class. But I was born poor and black in the age of mass incarceration. Prison follows me, just like it does the people I’ve written about. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t been convicted of a crime. I’m as close to the subject of this book as I am to any member of my own family. Jeremiah has been to many prisons, just like the brothers, sisters, fathers, daughters, lovers, and sons I’ve followed for the past fifteen years. I write this book living like they do, hoping and bracing myself and preparing for the day that I can welcome my loved one home.
Jeremiah was arrested twice more over the next four months. He was sent to another drug-treatment program, this time in Detroit. He did ninety days there, telling me he thought he’d gotten something out of the program.
“Hello,” said the digital woman. “You’ve got a phone call from a prisoner at the Michigan Department of Corrections.” Goddamn, I thought, then I pressed 0 to accept the call.