Invisible Men
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Invisible Men

A Contemporary Slave Narrative in the Era of Mass Incarceration

Flores A. Forbes

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eBook - ePub

Invisible Men

A Contemporary Slave Narrative in the Era of Mass Incarceration

Flores A. Forbes

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About This Book

Winner of the 2017 American Book Award Flores Forbes, a former leader in the Black Panther Party, has been free from prison for twenty-five years. Unfortunately that makes him part of a group of black men without constituency who are all but invisible in society. That is, the "invisible" group of black men in America who have served their time and not gone back to prison.Today the recidivism rate is around 65%. Almost never mentioned in the media or scholarly attention is the plight of the 35% who don't go back, especially black men. A few of them are hiding in Ivy League schools' prison education programs—they don't want to be known—but most of them are recruited by the one billion dollar industry reentry employee programs that allow the US to profit from their life and labor. Whereas, African Americans consist of only 12% of the population in the US, black males are incarcerated at much higher rates. The chances of these formerly convicted men to succeed after prison—to matriculate as leading members of society—are increasingly slim. The doors are closed to them. Invisible Men is a book that will crack the code on the stigma of incarceration. When Flores Forbes was released from prison, he made a plan to re-invent himself but found it impossible. His involvement in a plan to kill a witness who was testifying against Huey P. Newton, the founder of the Black Panther Party, had led to his incarceration. While in prison he earned a college degree using a Pell Grant, with hope this would get him on the right track and a chance at a normal life. He was released but that's where his story and most invisible men's stories begin.This book will weave Flores' knowledge, wisdom, and experience with incarceration, sentencing reform, judicial inequity, hiding and re-entry into society, and the issue of increasing struggles and inequality for formerly incarcerated men into a collection of poignant essays that finally give invisible men a voice and face in society.

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Publisher
Skyhorse
Year
2016
ISBN
9781510711716
CHAPTER 1
Wolf by the Ear
“But, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”
—Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, Monticello, 22 April 1820
The wolf-by-the-ear quote is from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Holmes about the pending legislation regarding slavery and how it was being regulated state by state that became the Missouri Compromise. To me, Jefferson was quite clear about his attitude toward slaves and their presence in his country and that if there was a general emancipation, expatriation must follow quickly. That is the only way to release the wolf’s ear, his elegant metaphor for slavery. The issue of slavery and mass incarceration go hand in hand as they are coupled constitutionally at the hip within the Thirteenth Amendment. Jefferson did not believe in emancipation without expulsion from America, and many in today’s society do not believe black men who have been to prison should walk the same streets as they do. But if they do walk the same streets, many believe this should only happen with limitations to their freedom. In addition to the Thirteenth Amendment, which makes you a slave if convicted of a crime and sentenced to prison, there are many more obstacles once you are released. There are various laws, public statutes, and specific occupational hiring restrictions, disenfranchisement as well as parole. When black men are released, they have another strike against them: the fact that they are black and historically oppressed and still seamlessly connected to the peculiar institution of slavery.
Loïc Wacquant targets this historical perspective brilliantly in his 2002 article in the New Left Review, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration.” Slavery up to the Civil War made the free labor of African Americans the foundation of the American economy. After slavery, it was Jim Crow, establishing as it did legal racial apartheid to support an economy based on agriculture. The civil rights movement broke that system, but in its place emerged urban ghettos outside the South, “corresponding to conjoint urbanization and proletarianization of African Americans from the Great Migration of 1914–30 to the 1960s 
 slavery and mass incarceration are genealogically linked and that one cannot understand the latter—its timing, composition and smooth onset as well as the quiet ignorance or acceptance of its deleterious effects on those it affects—without returning to the former as historic starting point.”
So apparently, according to Wacquant, Jefferson’s elegant metaphor for slavery has transformed into the carceral state of today.
Nevertheless, one must adjust to the reality of prison as one must adjust again to the reality out of prison. The newly released black man is an invisible man due to his incarceration, but will remain invisible by choice until he overcomes the stigma of that experience.
August 9, 1985, I was released from the California Department of Corrections (CDC) after serving four years, eight months, and nine days for felony murder. I used a gun against someone. That was thirty-plus years ago, and now I have a nice life: meaningful work, a wife, a family, and my health.
I did my time under the guise of a political prisoner, but that means something only in prison, not in society. Upon release, I was a black man with two felony convictions, a prison term, and no record of having had a job; I was thirty-three years old. I am a part of a group of black men without a constituency or advocate and all but invisible in this society. That group is black men in America who have served their time and not gone back to prison. Most of us are invisible by choice and will not reveal ourselves. We cannot because of the stigma attached to being formerly incarcerated.
Mainstream media, and even scholars, talk a lot about the recidivism rate and the disproportionate sentencing of black men by the courts. They don’t spend enough time talking about people who don’t return to jail—the people who remain free, work, and contribute to society after serving their sentences. The formerly incarcerated are an understudied population. Today the recidivism rate is around 65 percent. We need to pay attention and do the work of lowering that rate down to zero. But, we can’t continue to neglect people who make an effort to stay out of the criminal justice system. The ones who don’t get hooked on being locked up—the 35 percent who don’t go back, especially black men. It is they who have been a primary target of this country’s history of selective discrimination against nonwhites in general and the formerly incarcerated in particular. According to the NAACP’s Criminal Justice Fact Sheet, one in six black men had been incarcerated as of 2001. If current trends continue, one in three black males born today can expect to spend time in prison.
One of the reasons why I fared well since my release from incarceration was I had a vision and a plan to reinvent myself. Even before prison I had spent eighteen years completely in hiding from the authorities, off the grid of a normal life. I chose that life because I felt the reasons why I was an outlaw were justified.
As a young black man growing up in Southern California, I, along with my peer group, was terrorized by the police. We often spoke about what to do and one day we saw what two black men were doing in Oakland, California. Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale had started an organization called the Black Panther Party, and one of their first efforts was to patrol police with guns and law books in an attempt to end police brutality and the murder of black people. At the age of sixteen, I joined and spent the next ten years fighting for my people. I believed deeply in what we were fighting for, so deeply I embraced the most radical of our internal beliefs. We believed, as did most sovereign states and other revolutionary movements, that violence was a policy instrument. I was recruited into the Panther military unit after several years of service.
My work in this section of the party was mostly in the underground as well. I was part of a group within the BPP that provided protection to our leaders as well as doing covert work in the streets against our various enemies. I was also the Black Panther Party armorer, or, if you use the regular, more traditional military term, I was the quartermaster who acquired, stored, and maintained the arsenal of weapons we had collected over the years. In 1977, I, along with two of my comrades, attempted to kill a witness who was testifying against Huey P. Newton. The operation was botched: friendly fire killed one of my comrades and I was wounded. Friendly fire is when you and your comrades accidentally shoot one another. If someone is killed during the commission of a felony, everyone involved who lives can be charged with felony murder. I was involved and survived to live another day and went underground. I remained a fugitive for three years. I turned myself in of my own volition in 1980 and was eventually convicted of felony murder. I was sentenced to eight years.
While in prison, I read and studied and took college courses, using a Pell grant. While at Soledad State Prison, I enrolled in a college-degree program being run by San JosĂ© State University. Once completed, I could receive a bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies of the Social Sciences. The professors were all full-time faculty from this California state university, and they taught courses in psychology, sociology, American literature, statistics, philosophy, and the capstone course for the degree, the Social Sciences Seminar. In the California Department of Corrections, once you started serious programming, your schedule involved one week of work (I was a tutor who taught life skills to the inmates), and an education week, filled with classes from SJSU.
The life-skills classes I taught were very depressing. I worked with mostly black inmates who could barely read. It was troublesome to me to hold up a flash card with the word truck on one side and the only way the inmates would discover what the word was was when I flipped the card to its reverse side to reveal the photograph of a truck. But I was finding my real self and developing a plan during the week of my education program.
There were about thirty inmates taking the bachelor of arts (BA) courses. About five were black, maybe ten were white, and the balance was Chicanos and Pacific Islanders. It was fabulous taking these classes, but one had to pay attention during these periods as half of the white guys were part of the Aryan Brotherhood, which was the Nazi gang in the joint. Their remarks about Boers and other racist bullshit made me keep one eye on my coursework and the other on them. Nevertheless, I began to understand that this intense coursework was part of my process of reinvention, which was not unfamiliar to me as a black person in this country.
I remembered how my father and mother shifted their lives from a segregated, nondescript, working-class livelihood to a middle-class livelihood. They were hard working and good, churchgoing black people. My father, who I loved dearly, taught me good lessons as a black man in America. He used to tell me and my siblings not to take shit from anyone and that you should never feel sorry for a white person as they have never given a shit about you. Sadly, my father who was a great believer in education did not live long enough to experience my educational achievements. He died of a heart attack while I was a fugitive. That was the saddest moment of my life. For a while my family believed I was dead. But I shocked them all when I resurfaced and turned myself in. My mother was the only immediate family member who visited me in prison, along with two girlfriends, Frances and Veronica. My mother was a real trooper, as she sent me care packages of cigarettes, coffee, and other sweets that we called zoo zoos and wham whams.
I studied self-hypnosis in an attempt to devise a plan to help myself. I do not remember the name of the book, but it basically taught you to think deeply enough to believe you had put yourself in a trance. Once in the trance you were supposed to make positive suggestions to yourself, like I will get a good job and make some money. I used to chant that once I got out I was going to stay out. I read books that could help me redirect my life. Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill, was the most useful and helped me draw a road map for my life once I was freed. I followed all of his steps to success, such as developing a plan and writing it out. Each day you were supposed to read your plan and devise other steps to success, like finding other types of support going forward, like creating a mastermind group comprised of a network of advisors within the field of one’s choice.
My plan once released was to finish college, go to graduate school, and become a professional urban planner. I decided to become an urban planner because I saw many similarities between my years in the BPP doing community development work and the work that urban planners do. They are in a position to plan and reshape communities, towns, and cities and create better environments for people. That’s what I wanted to do. So, I became determined to find a way to do that.
Release from incarceration frees you from a concrete and metal box, but as a result, if you need a job once you are out, another form of oppression excludes you from obtaining that job. That is the “Box.” The question that all formerly incarcerated people dread: Have you ever been convicted of a felony? It’s there to torture and bar you even if the literal metal box is not there. If yes is your truth, then you’ve got some explaining to do: the date, type of offense, docket number, etc., associated with this felony charge. Today, however, over one hundred municipalities and some states and federal employers have banned the Box. But in the early days of my freedom, it was, and still is in many instances, rigorously applied. But even with progressive reforms looking to open things up, the real issue is the attitude of the hiring manager who believes you are as guilty of your crime as you were when you were incarcerated and should be punished for the balance of your life.
Follow the advice of the literature, such as the book What Color Is Your Parachute? and you’ll answer yes. They advise that if you then get an interview, you can explain. Well, in my experience and as in the experience of many others, that is not the move. When I checked “Yes,” it seemed an invisible hand would come out from under the table and yank the job application out of my hands, flinging it into the trash bin. When I was lucky enough to get an interview, I followed the book’s advice when the interviewer asked, “Is there anything else you would like to tell us that is not on your rĂ©sumĂ©?” Well, I’d truthfully and fully answer and that would also quickly end the interview. I finally took another approach: for years I just flat-out lied. Those in the know called it being job smart, especially if the company was not doing a background check.
Everyone deserves a second chance, or else the idea of serving your time and paying your debt to society is bullshit. The reality is that your indebtedness, or rather your punishment, damn near never ends. I was felony-free for fifteen years and had a bachelor’s and master’s degree in urban planning. And yet I had to work my way through the secondary labor force in New York City because of the Box. That means I did menial labor at very low wages and with scant benefits that one did not receive until after a period of probation. My goal was to enter the primary labor force, which included salaried jobs with real benefits that you received the day you signed your hiring letter.
My luck didn’t change for the better until I found an NYC Department of Investigation (DOI) investigator who trusted and understood me, and knew something about urban American history.
You reach points when you feel stuck and in a rut. I began to feel that way. As I was working my way through the workforce system of New York City as an urban planner, I discovered that working in the public sector was a better pathway to success. Otherwise, you can find yourself relegated to low-level and low-paying positions that lead to a dead end. The ideal position in the field of urban planning is to get a high-level policy job within NYC’s public sector, where one is dealing with the NYC Zoning Resolution, land use–zoning and interacting with architects and engineers developing brick and mortar projects in and around NYC. This kind of position brings you into contact with real estate developers, financial intermediaries, and other movers and shakers shaping the streets and skyline of New York City.
An opportunity presented itself for me to move closer to where I wanted to be. A friend of mine from graduate school came to see me one day at work. He was working with the Manhattan Borough president, C. Virginia Fields, and said they were looking for someone to head up planning and development efforts in Harlem. He said he thought I had the chops for the job and asked that I consider applying for it.
There would be a background check, but he assured me that being open and honest about my past would not pose a problem. I was the best-qualified person he said, and that’s all that mattered. The New York City Department of Investigation wanted everything on the application except blood, a urine sample, and semen. I was fingerprinted twice, once for the state and again for the FBI. They did a credit check, income tax review, and wanted to know every address I had lived at for the past ten years. As I went through the grueling application process, the borough president’s general counsel kept reminding me: “tell the truth, that’s what counts.” She was right and I was hired.
After four months on the job, I got a call from the New York City Department of Investigation. The investigator on the phone from DOI said, “We just got the last of your FBI information back from your fingerprints.” He paused for a moment. I could hear him breathing as he said, “Mr. Forbes, you have eight major felony arrests, two felony convictions, and one prison term, can I ask what in the hell were you doing?”
I said, “I was in the Black Panther Party for ten years.”
He laughed and said, “Oh, okay, now let’s talk about your taxes.”
CHAPTER 2
Freedom and Slavery
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
—Amendment XIII, Section 1, US Constitution
T he Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution did two contradictory things at the same time: making slavery illegal on one hand and making slavery legal as a punishment for a crime on the other hand. This classic white supremacist loophole, so to speak, opened the door to continuing the enslavement of people by criminalizing them, particularly the black and poor.
In his classic book Black Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois writes about the slave following Emancipation, saying, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” The day I left prison was the brightest day of my life, as much as it is with most black men who’ve served time in prison. That’s when you understand the value of freedom because you know from experience what it means to be enslaved. We’re not always ready for the freedom we seek, but as human beings regardless, we deserve it. The bright moment can also leave a man newly released from incarceration feeling lost and befuddled. Finding your place in society again is hard. Finding your place in a society that had categorized you as property, forced your labor, held you against your will, and tortured you is a Herculean task.
It was believed by slave owners in antebellum times that the enslaved couldn’t flourish and survive as freedmen without their help. They believed we were incapable of running our own lives, to justify their desire to control us. Chattel slavery ended, but the enslavement of men has continued in new forms. One of the major forms of slavery today is imprisonment: the prison industrial complex. After Emancipation the future shock of the Thirteenth Amendment’s “exception clause” brought many black men back into various forms of servitude. There was the prison leasing system that was set up to enslave black men, who were in many cases unjustly convicted of a crime, and once incarcerated, their services were leased out to various contractors. Many of these contractors were former slave owners. Similarly, the Black Codes, a form of long-tailed parole, confined many black people beyond the bars by taking away any civil rights they thought they had by excluding them from participating on juries or owning property or a business, and making it illegal for them to ever testify against a white person. So many black people after Emancipation were relegated to a segregated lifestyle of squalor and poverty with no rights at all.
Mass media and popular culture have promoted images of the black man as a boogeyman, a hulking creature, and a menace to society. A police report after an arrest in 1974 described me as innately intelligent in a spooky or mystical way. I refused to cooperate and respond to their questions without a lawyer present. They wrote, “[We can’t look at him because] his eyes seem to be peeking inside our brains.” More broadly, I recall the stories of my male relatives and my fellow Black Panthers, Army grunts in Vietnam during the war. The white US soldiers told the Vietnamese that all black men grow tails when they reach the age of twenty-one. My cousin said while he was being serviced by a prostitute in Saigon that she kept looking at his butt curiously. He asked her what was the problem, and she pointed and asked, “Where is black man’s tail?”
These examples, while ludicrous and insulting, are not as damaging as the way white society has cast the black man as the poster boy for criminality. Khalil Muhammad, in The Condemnation of Blackness, discusses how “blackness” became “the si...

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