How jails extort the poor | Salil Dudani

One summer afternoon in 2013,

DC police detained, questioned and searched a man

who appeared suspicious and potentially dangerous.

This wasn't what I was wearing the day of the detention, to be fair,

but I have a picture of that as well.

I know it's very frightening -- try to remain calm.

(Laughter)

At this time, I was interning

at the Public Defender Service in Washington DC,

and I was visiting a police station for work.

I was on my way out,

and before I could make it to my car,

two police cars pulled up to block my exit,

and an officer approached me from behind.

He told me to stop, take my backpack off

and put my hands on the police car parked next to us.

About a dozen officers then gathered near us.

All of them had handguns,

some had assault rifles.

They rifled through my backpack.

They patted me down.

They took pictures of me spread on the police car,

and they laughed.

And as all this was happening --

as I was on the police car trying to ignore the shaking in my legs,

trying to think clearly about what I should do --

something stuck out to me as odd.

When I look at myself in this photo,

if I were to describe myself,

I think I'd say something like,

"19-year-old Indian male, bright T-shirt, wearing glasses."

But they weren't including any of these details.

Into their police radios as they described me,

they kept saying, "Middle Eastern male with a backpack.

Middle Eastern male with a backpack."

And this description carried on into their police reports.

I never expected to be described by my own government in these terms:

"lurking,"

"nefarious,"

"terrorist."

And the detention dragged on like this.

They sent dogs trained to smell explosives to sweep the area I'd been in.

They called the federal government to see if I was on any watch lists.

They sent a couple of detectives to cross-examine me on why,

if I claimed I had nothing to hide,

I wouldn't consent to a search of my car.

And I could see they weren't happy with me,

but I felt I had no way of knowing what they'd want to do next.

At one point, the officer who patted me down

scanned the side of the police station to see where the security camera was

to see how much of this was being recorded.

And when he did that,

it really sank in how completely I was at their mercy.

I think we're all normalized from a young age

to the idea of police officers and arrests and handcuffs,

so it's easy to forget how demeaning and coercive a thing it is

to seize control over another person's body.

I know it sounds like the point of my story

is how badly treated I was because of my race --

and yes, I don't think I would've been detained if I were white.

But actually, what I have in mind today is something else.

What I have in mind is how much worse things might've been

if I weren't affluent.

I mean, they thought I might be trying to plant an explosive,

and they investigated that possibility for an hour and a half,

but I was never put in handcuffs,

I was never taken to a jail cell.

I think if I were from one of Washington DC's poor communities of color,

and they thought I was endangering officers' lives,

things might've ended differently.

And in fact, in our system, I think it's better to be an affluent person

suspected of trying to blow up a police station

than it is to be a poor person

who's suspected of much, much less than this.

I want to give you an example from my current work.

Right now, I'm working at a civil rights organization in DC,

called Equal Justice Under Law.

Let me start by asking you all a question.

How many of you have ever gotten a parking ticket in your life?

Raise your hand.

Yeah. So have I.

And when I had to pay it,

it felt annoying and it felt bad,

but I paid it and I moved on.

I'm guessing most of you have paid your tickets as well.

But what would happen if you couldn't afford the amount on the ticket

and your family doesn't have the money either, what happens then?

Well, one thing that's not supposed to happen under the law is,

you're not supposed to be arrested and jailed

simply because you can't afford to pay.

That's illegal under federal law.

But that's what local governments across the country are doing

to people who are poor.

And so many of our lawsuits at Equal Justice Under Law

target these modern-day debtors' prisons.

One of our cases is against Ferguson, Missouri.

And I know when I say Ferguson,

many of you will think of police violence.

But today I want to talk about a different aspect

of the relationship between their police force and their citizens.

Ferguson was issuing an average of over two arrest warrants,

per person, per year,

mostly for unpaid debt to the courts.

When I imagine what that would feel like if, every time I left my house,

there was a chance a police officer would run my license plate,

see a warrant for unpaid debt,

seize my body they way the did in DC

and then take me to a jail cell,

I feel a little sick.

I've met many of the people in Ferguson who have experienced this,

and I've heard some of their stories.

In Ferguson's jail,

in each small cell, there's a bunk bed and a toilet,

but they'd pack four people into each cell.

So there'd be two people on the bunks and two people on the floor,

one with nowhere to go except right next to the filthy toilet,

which was never cleaned.

In fact, the whole cell was never cleaned,

so the floor and the walls were lined with blood and mucus.

No water to drink,

except coming out of a spigot connected to the toilet.

The water looked and tasted dirty,

there was never enough food,

never any showers,

women menstruating without any hygiene products,

no medical attention whatsoever.

When I asked a woman about medical attention,

she laughed, and she said, "Oh, no, no.

The only attention you get from the guards in there is sexual."

So, they'd take the debtors to this place and they'd say,

"We're not letting you leave until you make a payment on your debt."

And if you could -- if you could call a family member

who could somehow come up with some money,

then maybe you were out.

If it was enough money, you were out.

But if it wasn't, you'd stay there for days or weeks,

and every day the guards would come down to the cells

and haggle with the debtors about the price of release that day.

You'd stay until, at some point, the jail would be booked to capacity,

and they'd want to book someone new in.

And at that point, they'd think,

"OK, it's unlikely this person can come up with the money,

it's more likely this new person will."

You're out, they're in, and the machine kept moving like that.

I met a man who,

nine years ago, was arrested for panhandling in a Walgreens.

He couldn't afford his fines and his court fees from that case.

When he was young he survived a house fire,

only because he jumped out of the third-story window to escape.

But that fall left him with damage to his brain

and several parts of this body, including his leg.

So he can't work,

and he relies on social security payments to survive.

When I met him in his apartment,

he had nothing of value there -- not even food in his fridge.

He's chronically hungry.

He had nothing of value in his apartment except a small piece of cardboard

on which he'd written the names of his children.

He cherished this a lot. He was happy to show it to me.

But he can't pay his fines and fees because he has nothing to give.

In the last nine years, he's been arrested 13 times,

and jailed for a total of 130 days on that panhandling case.

One of those stretches lasted 45 days.

Just imagine spending from right now until sometime in June

in the place that I described to you a few moments ago.

He told me about all the suicide attempts he's seen in Ferguson's jail;

about the time a man found a way to hang himself

out of reach of the other inmates,

so all they could do was yell and yell and yell,

trying to get the guards' attention

so they could come down and cut him down.

And he told me that it took the guards over five minutes to respond,

and when they came, the man was unconscious.

So they called the paramedics and the paramedics went to the cell.

They said, "He'll be OK,"

so they just left him there on the floor.

I heard many stories like this and they shouldn't have surprised me,

because suicide is the single leading cause of death in our local jails.

This is related to the lack of mental health care in our jails.

I met a woman, single mother of three, making seven dollars an hour.

She relies on food stamps to feed herself and her children.

About a decade ago,

she got a couple of traffic tickets and a minor theft charge,

and she can't afford her fines and fees on those cases.

Since then, she's been jailed about 10 times on those cases,

but she has schizophrenia and bipolar disorder,

and she needs medication every day.

She doesn't have access to those medications in Ferguson's jail,

because no one has access to their medications.

She told me about what it was like to spend two weeks in a cage,

hallucinating people and shadows and hearing voices,

begging for the medication that would make it all stop,

only to be ignored.

And this isn't anomalous, either:

thirty percent of women in our local jails have serious mental health needs

just like hers,

but only one in six receives any mental health care while in jail.

And so, I heard all these stories about this grotesque dungeon

that Ferguson was operating for its debtors,

and when it came time for me to actually see it

and to go visit Ferguson's jail,

I'm not sure what I was expecting to see,

but I wasn't expecting this.

It's an ordinary government building.

It could be a post office or a school.

It reminded me that these illegal extortion schemes

aren't being run somewhere in the shadows,

they're being run out in the open by our public officials.

They're a matter of public policy.

And this reminded me that poverty jailing in general,

even outside the debtors' prison context,

plays a very visible and central role in our justice system.

What I have in mind is our policy of bail.

In our system, whether you're detained or free,

pending trial is not a matter of how dangerous you are

or how much of a flight risk you pose.

It's a matter of whether you can afford to post your bail amount.

So Bill Cosby, whose bail was set at a million dollars,

immediately writes the check, and doesn't spend a second in a jail cell.

But Sandra Bland, who died in jail,

was only there because her family was unable to come up with 500 dollars.

In fact, there are half a million Sandra Blands across the country --

500,000 people who are in jail right now,

only because they can't afford their bail amount.

We're told that our jails are places for criminals,

but statistically that's not the case:

three out of every five people in jail right now are there pretrial.

They haven't been convicted of any crime;

they haven't pled guilty to any offense.

Right here in San Francisco,

85 percent of the inmates in our jail in San Francisco

are pretrial detainees.

This means San Francisco is spending something like 80 million dollars

every year

to fund pretrial detention.

Many of these people who are in jail only because they can't post bail

are facing allegations so minor

that the amount of time it would take for them to sit waiting for trial

is longer than the sentence they would receive if convicted,

which means they're guaranteed to get out faster

if they just plead guilty.

So now the choice is:

Should I stay here in this horrible place,

away from my family and my dependents,

almost guaranteed to lose my job,

and then fight the charges?

Or should I just plead guilty to whatever the prosecutor wants and get out?

And at this point, they're pretrial detainees, not criminals.

But once they take that plea deal, we'll call them criminals,

even though an affluent person would never have been in this situation,

because an affluent person would have simply been bailed out.

At this point you might be wondering,

"This guy's in the inspiration section, what is he doing --

(Laughter)

"This is extremely depressing. I want my money back."

(Laughter)

But in actuality,

I find talking about jailing much less depressing than the alternative,

because I think if we don't talk about these issues

and collectively change how we think about jailing,

at the end of all of our lives,

we'll still have jails full of poor people who don't belong there.

That really is depressing to me.

But what's exciting to me is the thought that these stories can move us

to think about jailing in different terms.

Not in sterile policy terms like "mass incarceration,"

or "sentencing of nonviolent offenders,"

but in human terms.

When we put a human being in a cage for days or weeks or months

or even years,

what are we doing to that person's mind and body?

Under what conditions are we really willing to do that?

And so if starting with a few hundred of us in this room,

we can commit to thinking about jailing in this different light,

then we can undo that normalization I was referring to earlier.

If I leave you with anything today, I hope it's with the thought

that if we want anything to fundamentally change --

not just to reform our policies on bail and fines and fees --

but also to make sure that whatever new policies replace those

don't punish the poor and the marginalized in their own new way.

If we want that kind of change,

then this shift in thinking is required of each of us.

Thank you.

(Applause)