WHO’S PROFITING FROM OUR PAIN?
More than twenty new prisons opened in California from the mid-1980s through the mid-2000s—compared to a total of twelve new prisons from 1852 to 1984.
It began when I saw a flyer for a group called the Community Coalition, looking to organize leaders of nonprofits in South L.A. The year was 1999. I showed up to their meeting—and my life’s path was changed forever.
The Community Coalition was founded in the 1980s when Karen Bass, then an emergency room physician’s assistant—she’d go on to be elected to California’s state legislature, followed by the U.S. House of Representatives—gathered in a living room with a group of action-oriented residents of South L.A. Alarmed by the carnage of the crack epidemic and the increasingly violent response of law enforcement, the coalition organized residents who felt helpless and in despair to work together to build up and strengthen the community.
Now, more than a decade later, I sat in a meeting room hearing that, sadly, not much had improved. Incarceration rates in our community had increased astronomically, especially for women, and especially for poor black women. It lit me up knowing I was in those statistics. I should have been an activist in that living room with Karen Bass, but instead I’d been caught in the vicious cycle.
Leading the meeting was Saúl Sarabia, a twenty-nine-year-old recent graduate of UCLA School of Law. It was as though Saúl was speaking directly to me. He discussed the barriers and lack of services for people coming home from prison, a topic, of course, that I knew all too well. But then he added something I’d never heard anyone talk about before: that the barriers were by design.
“In this country, there’s a public policy commitment to incarceration,” Saúl said, explaining how those in charge had made a conscious decision to treat addiction and mental illness not as the public health problems that they were, but as criminal justice problems. “What does it mean that the number-one funder for political campaigns in our state is the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, which is the prison guards’ union? It means that law enforcement organizations are deciding who will be our governors and our state senators, who in turn write laws to expand prisons. What does it mean that recidivism rates are at an all-time high? It means that, rather than create more mental health treatment centers and hospital beds, there’s an incentive to create more prisons and prison beds. The State of California profits from the expansion of incarceration. It benefits from repeat customers. Our state’s coffers are being bankrupted to create the most well-funded prison system in the world.”
My eyes were popping. I knew the phrase the forest for the trees, but now I got it. Could it be that I’d been barking up a single tree, when all around me a wildfire was raging?
Saúl explained that the first goal was to expand the Community Coalition’s Prevention Network, a collaboration between nonprofits and community residents fighting for a stronger social services safety net. “We need to utilize the power of those who are directly affected, and give community leaders and the people in South L.A. a voice,” he said. “Welfare recipients fighting the injustices and inefficiencies of welfare reform, young people working to improve their schools, neighborhood residents fighting to shut down liquor stores that profit off addiction by selling drug paraphernalia, ex-offenders advocating for sentencing reform. We’re also specifically committed to building black-brown unity.”
I was so inspired I could barely sit still. After the meeting, I approached Saúl and told him about A New Way of Life.
“Are you a 501c3?” he asked.
At that point, I was still waiting for the approval to come through. “Not yet,” I said, worried he might turn me away.
But he didn’t. He said that if I was interested in becoming a member of the Prevention Network he would need to do a personal visit to my organization, agency, or home. In my case, A New Way of Life was all three.
When Saúl arrived, I gave him the grand tour of A New Way of Life: the women’s rooms, each bunk bed made up pristinely; the dining room that doubled as my bedroom and office; and the kitchen, where I introduced him to Mitzi, who was cooking the evening’s dinner.
“How do you recruit residents?” he asked.
I explained how I’d visit prisons, that we wrote letters to women in prison, and that I’d go meet the bus in Skid Row.
“Wow, Susan, that’s such a direct and obviously effective approach,” he said, then gave me a warm smile. “It’s also an act of love.”
Before Saúl came to the Community Coalition, he was doing welfare case management in the basement of a church in San Pedro, California, trying to help eligible families actually receive their welfare benefits and medical coverage. In 1996, President Bill Clinton had signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act—otherwise known as welfare reform—but it was riddled with barriers, and as Saúl saw family after family come through that church basement, he grew increasingly frustrated. He used his own sick days to attend L.A. County Board of Supervisors’ meetings to advocate for sorely needed welfare policy changes. But change wasn’t happening.
When Saúl went to his boss to discuss how the group could advocate for policy changes, she told him, “We don’t do organizing here, that’s left to the flamethrowers.” He was shocked that his boss didn’t realize that the only reason they were doing welfare case management was because of the original flamethrowers, who fought for the strong safety net for Americans. He soon left to work at the Community Coalition.
As we sat in the living room of A New Way of Life, Saúl described how he envisioned starting an Ex-Offender Task Force, equipping people like me to lead action campaigns and engage in policy advocacy. I’d never heard anything like this—most everyone who hadn’t been incarcerated thought ex-con was a dirty word, and I was used to being perceived as someone lacking. This was in the years before we had the language for what would come to be known as re-entry. Yet here was Saúl, saying formerly incarcerated people should be viewed as a population with something to offer, whose collective voice deserved to be cultivated, valued, heard. But, he cautioned, it was a stigmatized issue, and most in the political arena wouldn’t give the time of day to a group with no political presence. Especially because this was also a group with restricted voting rights. Most states banned the right to vote until your sentence plus parole or probation was complete.
“There’s this book I read as a child,” Saúl said. “It was called The Little Red Hen, where a hen finds a grain of wheat and goes around asking all the other farm animals to help make it into bread. But no one will help. Finally, when the hen manages all on her own to make the bread, everyone who wouldn’t help shows up to eat the bread. This is not unlike what I see when I advocate for the needs and rights of people who’ve been incarcerated. Even within organizations created to defend civil rights, the responses I often get are, ‘There are so many needs in black and brown communities, we don’t have the resources to advocate for the criminal element.’ And yet, everyone wants safer communities and low unemployment. People don’t realize these things go hand in hand. I believe that when formerly incarcerated people flex their political muscle, we will change the skeptics’ hearts and minds. We will also possess the power to impact laws and policy. People lead, politicians follow.”
Then Saúl took a deep breath. “Susan, I’d love for you to be part of the Prevention Network and the Ex-Offender Task Force.” I nodded eagerly, but he gave me a hesitant look.
“Since we’re dedicated to forming an independent organization that’s not solely dependent on foundations for support,” he continued, “we’re asking residents to become dues-paying members.” Some years later, Saúl admitted I was his first ask—and that he’d been so nervous and conflicted about asking for money, especially from a small organization like mine. But I thought it an honor to be asked to take ownership and to be invested in this movement as a card-carrying member. I got my checkbook and joined both as an organizational member and an individual member.
Though Saúl wasn’t from South L.A., our lives weren’t as far apart as I’d otherwise have thought. He grew up poor in Cypress Park in northeast L.A., a high-crime area of predominantly Latino and Chinese immigrants. When he was fifteen, his family moved to Baldwin Park in the suburban San Gabriel Valley, which wasn’t as rough—the working poor versus abject poverty was how he described it—but, still, a lack of decent wages coupled with the availability of the underground drug economy made for limited choices. “Many of my family members were drawn into the web,” he told me.
“One relative, who wasn’t doing or selling drugs, still wound up arrested after her boyfriend had been stashing drugs in the walls of her apartment, without her knowing,” he described. A law student at the time, Saúl was in Washington, D.C., doing a summer clerkship and didn’t know what was happening in his family until it was too late. “A lawyer told her that if she agreed to a plea bargain, she’d only be sentenced to a year,” Saúl said. “The bigger problem was that, because she’d been born in Mexico, she only had a green card. When she accepted that guilty plea, it transformed her from a ‘bystander’ into an ‘aggravated felon,’ a conviction that could get her deported.” He detailed how, in 1996, President Clinton passed what was commonly known as immigration reform, broadening the criteria for deportation and solidifying it as a major collateral consequence of the War on Drugs for legal immigrants. Even misdemeanor drug offenses could lead to deportation.
“Here I’d been thinking the War on Drugs was really a war on black people and on poor people,” I said. “Now I’ve got to add a war on immigrants to this list.”
Several of Saúl’s family members had been incarcerated or deported, or both. The region his family hailed from in Mexico was controlled by some of the most powerful drug cartels and, from the outside, it seemed like his extended Mexican family was part of a vicious cycle destroying the lives of so many. “But people in that part of the world aren’t in the drug trade by choice,” Saúl described. “They are poor peasants living in the mountains. What are they supposed to do? Tell the cartels they want to grow coffee beans instead of drug crops? Not everyone is allowed to make such decisions about their lives.”
I knew what he was talking about: the chasm between making a decision and winding up someplace. The truth was, your decisions hardly mattered if none of your options were any good to begin with. Like Saúl’s family: be involved in the drug economy or starve to death? Like the women I knew: stay with an abusive spouse who at least provided for the family, or take your children onto the street? What kinds of decisions were these?
The youngest of five, Saúl had been the only one in his family to finish high school. He’d never met a lawyer when he set his sights on law school, but he knew there was power there, that a law degree could be a tool for change. When he graduated UCLA Law, he decided to work in communities like his, where most people hadn’t interacted with lawyers before—or, if they had, they’d come away feeling exploited.
“Living in a household ravaged by drugs,” Saúl said, “I wasn’t supposed to end up here, an attorney, a community organizer. I was supposed to be in a gang, or in prison, or dead. We should be participating in making the laws that are about us. We, the people who aren’t supposed to be here.”
As part of the Prevention Network, Saúl began a study group, populated with social services providers from around the community. Within that group, I found people with a vision broader than just themselves. Now, I was standing with them.
“Any successful movement has a combination of social services and organizing,” Saúl taught us. “But where do we start? How do we find the people who should be here with us? How do we create a plan to go from fifteen to five hundred to five thousand of us? There’s a science to building community power. You build a base with outreach and recruitment, then you sustain that base by developing leadership skills from within.”
Saúl taught us how to analyze community conditions and services and ask, “Who’s profiting from this?” He taught us to know our audience. “Everything I’m sharing with you, I also lived through,” he said. “It’s scary going out there and recruiting. It’s scary being told no over and over, but you get good at not taking it personally.”
I soaked up every bit. And by doing that, I also began to develop a level of forgiveness for myself. All this time I’d lived with great sadness and disappointment over what I’d thought was my own inability to pull myself up for all those years. Only now did I see all the ways these barriers had affected me, pushing me back into the prison system. I’d been considered a throwaway. And this oppression caused me to become depressed and aggressive, ruthlessly seeking what I thought I needed. The more my understanding of these social and political structures deepened, the more I was able to release myself.
So many people in communities like mine were caught in the same vicious cycle of desperation and punishment. Only to be subjected to continued punishment and exclusion even after paying their debt to society. Able people wanting to work who were shut out from jobs—that shouldn’t be the norm. Parents who served their time, but still lost their children even when their parenting had never been in question—that shouldn’t be the norm. Saúl had sparked something deep and vital in me. I needed to raise my voice. We all deserved an opportunity—not just for a second chance, but for a first chance.
I accompanied Saúl to meetings, to service providers, to church groups, to local and state government hearings. “Who’s working for brown and black people who’ve made mistakes?” he’d say. And soon, I was echoing him. “Where’s the elected official who’s going to embrace this issue?” “Who’s working for us, the throwaways?”
Back in our study group, Saúl spoke about the generations of children left behind because of the War on Drugs, and the lack of assistance for relatives raising children when one or both parents have been incarcerated. “Children’s group homes and private foster agencies receive thousands more dollars in monthly funds per child than does a relative who steps up to care for a child,” he said. “The truth is, most relatives receive no funding at all, even though, by law, they should.”
He explained how a 1979 U.S. Supreme Court case ruled that child welfare agencies must provide the same compensation for relatives approved to care for a child as for unrelated foster parents. “But what’s really happening,” he continued, “is that relatives get strong-armed by the system. Most people are so scared, so they end up saying, ‘I don’t want money, I just want to take care of these kids.’ I saw it happen in my own family. When my uncle died, my mother wanted to care for his son but was bullied by the system.” He described a social worker questioning how some of his siblings had turned out and insinuating his mother had nothing much to offer the child. Then, the social worker, noting that Saúl’s parents lived with his sister, said there were too many people in the house. “What this really was,” Saúl said, “was an interrogation about poverty. There’s hard-core evidence of far fewer instances of incarceration or homelessness for children in the care of relatives as opposed to a group home. Children have a legal right to be with relatives.”
Saúl had been in Central America doing human rights work when the custody battle over his cousin began. Realizing there was a human rights violation happening right in his own family, he returned home. He filed a civil rights complaint, claiming his mom was suspect based on the fact that she was poor. The next time the social worker visited the home, Saúl was there. He offered a seat to the social worker, and watched her notice his UCLA diploma, crookedly hanging on the wall. A few days earlier, his cousins had been roughhousing and cracked the diploma’s frame. You couldn’t help but notice it.
“Is that yours?” she asked. Saúl nodded and added that he’d just finished law school at UCLA as well. At this, the social worker’s demeanor changed, and she listened. Saúl said, “My cousin lost his father, and he needs to be in a home with people he feels close to, not taken from us and given another reason to be angry at the world.” After the meeting, the social worker requested that the judge make a discretionary decision to let the child stay. At last, Saúl’s mother was approved to care for her nephew. Even still, it took eight months before his mother saw a single payment to cover the child’s needs, bringing to light another major challenge, another so-called decision with no good options: low-income families are often forced to choose between going broke or losing the children.
Saúl passed around to our study group a sheet with columns of numbers—numbers I’d soon grow accustomed to studying—detailing payment rates for foster care. Group homes received the most, several thousand dollars a month per child, though the group home system was riddled with documented cases of severe neglect and abuse. And, once children turned eighteen, they were automatically booted from a group home and expected to somehow possess the know-how and resources to create a productive life on their own. C’mon, now.
“We can’t sit here and talk about trying to keep kids with their families without talking about the whole political equation,” Saúl said. “So many children are relegated to the foster system because of tough-on-crime initiatives. We need to be talking about how, the tougher politicians are on crime, the more they are applauded, and that’s because the media and political rhetoric has caused this country to wrongly believe that locking up more people for longer is the right and only answer.”
My perspective continued to expand, my mouth filled with new words. At night when I came home, it was no longer enough that ten women were sleeping soundly in their bunks. I’d lie on my cot in the dining room, staring at the light of the fax machine, and think about how much more there was to be done. And then, one night, I heard rocks.
Someone was throwing rocks at the window. I turned on the lights but saw nothing. The next morning, I found the rocks on the ground. Not pebbles or small stones, but palm-sized rocks that should have broken the window, but, miraculously, didn’t. Night after night, I’d hear the rocks, and I’d hold my breath, waiting for the sound of shattering glass. In the morning I’d clear away the rocks and wonder how it was that the windows never broke. One of the women in the house quoted a Bible passage to me, “No weapon that is formed against you will prosper.” Just as inexplicably as the rock throwing had begun, it stopped.
If, indeed, someone, something, was watching over me, then this was also my chance to do more. A New Way of Life was about individuals; but helping woman by woman wasn’t going to fix the broken and discriminatory system. What if we could have a system that wasn’t about chaining people and throwing them in cages? What if the general public understood that prison was a tool of social control, and that locking up more people did little to enhance public safety? What if our country could adopt a holistic approach that helped both the individual and the community? What if the massive amount of money spent on prisons was put toward education, so that our country was no longer a leader in the prison business, but in the long-term venture of providing urban schoolchildren with more opportunities than just drugs or crime?
Fixing the system had to be a part of A New Way of Life. As Saúl taught me: a component of helping people was getting them involved and invested in the larger movement. This shift, this new and broader commitment—this is what would truly make my mission unique.
Some months later, the Los Angeles Times wrote about the Community Coalition’s tenth anniversary conference: “With a passion reminiscent of the 1960s, residents and social service providers vowed to organize themselves and push to change public policy and laws detrimental to residents of South Los Angeles—such as those pertaining to the current foster care system.” Saúl was quoted about our “Family Care, Not Foster Care” campaign and conference, which I and the study group helped spearhead. I was quoted too. “‘We have a voice,’ said Susan Burton, a member of the coalition, echoing the theme of the conference. ‘I can’t do it alone, you can’t do it alone, but together we can.’”
Saúl eventually left the Community Coalition for a professorship at UCLA, believing he needed to involve students in his mission. “Legal education normalizes everything,” he said. “We’re not talking about these issues to aspiring lawyers, and we need to be.”
Several years later, in 2010, as if Saúl hadn’t already done enough for me, he filled out an online nomination form: “Courage. This is the word that ran through my mind when I first met Susan ten years ago,” he wrote. “She did not know how to incorporate a non-profit organization and had no financial grants or donations. She just knew she was going to provide a high-quality environment to support women who had been exactly where she had once been.” I was driving down La Brea, not far from where K.K. was killed, when my cell phone rang. A voice said, “Are you sitting down? You’ve been named a Top Ten CNN Hero.”