Image courtesy of Juvenile Justice Exchange
Last week, on Larry Wilmore’s The Nightly Show, the New York Times columnist, Charles Blow was part of a panel discussing persistent and disturbing stereotypes of black men as irresponsible fathers. When Blow mentioned his own dad’s alcoholism and problems raising his son (Charles), he said about his father: “He is not a broken person, he was broken in the moment.” That phrase resonated for me, and I think that concept is pertinent because it applies to all of us. Who of us hasn’t been broken in the moment at some point in our lives?
It might seem strange to you that “broken in the moment” sent me to a recent juvenile lifer parole hearing I attended in Massachusetts. I have now been to eight of these hearings for juveniles and each one is filled with pain but also has demonstrated first-hand the plight of parents as well as the nature of kids who have killed and lived behind bars for years. I wrote about one parole hearing that was filled with healing here, but that is not the norm.
This hearing brought home to me (far more than any I have attended) how awful sentencing juveniles to life without parole really is. Laws have been modified, however 2500 juveniles nation-wide are still serving such sentences since they were behind bars before changes occurred.
In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision, Miller v. Alabama. Miller said science had proven juveniles were different from adults; they needed a judge’s thorough consideration, case by case, and could not automatically be sentenced to life without a meaningful chance at parole.Then in 2013, Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) went further in its interpretation of Miller with the Diatchenko v. District Attorney decision. The SJC struck down all sentences of life without parole eligibility for juveniles. This made sense; no other country allows juveniles to live behind bars until they die. A Massachusetts juvenile first-degree lifer was to serve at least 15 years before parole eligibility— a number deemed to allow a meaningful chance at rehabilitation. But the Massachusetts legislature changed that last year insisting that these juveniles serve somewhere between twenty and thirty years before parole eligibility, and allowing no parole in some exceptional cases. Other states have been slow to react wrote Josh Rovner for the Sentencing Project, and many require “decades-long minimum sentences” and, unlike Massachusetts, “few have applied the changes retroactively.”
However, the parole petitioners in these cases that are now coming before the Massachusetts Parole Board, believed when they were sentenced that they would be in prison forever. Many of these teens were indeed broken in the moment. And they made choices in prison that reflect their youth, their despair, and their surety that prison was where they’d die.
Such was the case with Malik Abdul Asaz. Asaz came before the Parole Board at age forty-seven, having served more than thirty years in prison. His crime was horrendous. He killed a man who tried to help him, Stephen Lanigan, a literal good Samaritan who stopped his car, worried that something was wrong when he saw a kid lying in the middle of the road. But the boy jumped up— sixteen-year-old Malik was then named Norman Hawkesworth—and tried to see what it would be like to scare someone, brandishing a gun, and using it. He shot Lanigan in the back, watched him get in his car and drive away; the teen then heard a crash, wondered what had happened, but scared to find out instead fled with his friends.
This action had roots, like most of these murders do, in a childhood filled with trauma: beaten mercilessly by his stepfather as a boy, and knowing only a mother who abandoned him, Asaz barely attended school and got in trouble at a young age. When he entered prison, he believed he needed protection, and as a sixteen year old, maybe he did. In any case, he made the mistake of joining a gang. His entire world became rebellion. He earned 142 disciplinary reports, and his goal turned to becoming a gang leader.
Why on earth, I thought, sitting at this parole hearing and listening to this gruesome tale would we put a sixteen year old in with men who would school him in gang behavior, teach him that the only way was anger and hate? Why is our system not set up to treat these kids but to deprive them of hope? Certainly that will never bring back Stephen Lanigan. Is it really so absurd if you knew you would never get out of prison to lose all hope? In any case, Asaz did. He spent half of his thirty years in solitary confinement.
In 2010, the light bulb went off for Asaz. By this time he had become a Muslim, and he was beginning to realize violence was wrong and a life of hurting others was not what he wanted. But he had become a gang leader by the time this realization occurred. He had ordered “hits” in the prison–having people hurt under his direction, in other words, being violent and encouraging violence. He made these choices, and he admits that now wholeheartedly, but I wonder, how much does our punishment system encourage these choices?
Renouncing a gang is not easy. Luckily, he was transferred to prison in Montana both for his own protection and because of his behavior. There were no gangs there and Asaz began to change. He immersed himself in his faith and in violence prevention programs. He renounced the gang. He realizes that will need a different kind of protection perhaps for the rest of his life. He did this before he knew that he could ever have the opportunity to get out of prison. But would this light have gone off earlier if he had imagined a future?
Asaz came to Massachusetts from Montana and appeared before the Board asking for a two-year setback, not for release at this time. He wants to be returned to Montana to do more violence prevention programs. He realizes he needs more time to work on the kind of anger that he honed behind bars. The Board can grant him that request or they can give him a three, four, or five year setback.
But the question remains for me: what would Asaz be like today if he had not been put in an adult prison? Certainly Stephen Lanigan’s family suffered enormously because of his actions. But was being locked up with adults the best way for him to deal with that crime? Was it the best for our citizenry, the country, the world?
Professor Jonathan Simon from UC Berkeley who has written extensively on how much punishment is enough, said when I interviewed him for another article, that the standard across the world for such cases is ten to fifteen years behind bars. He said that “One thing that favors ten years is that beyond ten years, there is no deterrent value. It is inevitably degrading after that.” The person sentenced in many cases is assumed ready to be released (presumptive parole) but here in the states, he often must prove he is ready for release before he gets out of prison. In the case of Asaz, if he had been locked in a juvenile facility where people acted as educators and counselors, aiming to deal with the deficits in his youth while learning new ways of thinking and behaving—if he got support as well as supervision—wouldn’t he have been able to change in ten to fifteen years?
I do understand that retribution is an important part of our punishment paradigm in the United States. But how much punishment is enough and to what end? Is Asaz ready to come out of prison now? Probably not, and yet he knows that. Will the Board allow him to come back before them in two years, which in my mind would acknowledge that he wants to change, is trying to change, and aims to repair the harm he has caused? Maybe. But it is conceivable that they will give him five years, without believing that the system itself has caused him to be broken even more than he already was.