Six in 10 Delaware inmates are black

More than 200 children are locked behind bars in Delaware – and 76 percent of them are black. In Delaware’s prisons, African-Americans make up 56 percent of inmates.

Yet only 22 percent of the state’s population is black.

Teens who have had run-ins with police or spent time in prison told The News Journal that it feels like the system is stacked against them. And some see a stint in prison as an inevitability – at least once in their lifetimes.

“That is how the world operates,” one teen said last week, leaning back in a bean bag chair at the Youth Empowerment Center on Sycamore Street in Wilmington.

Added another: “If I was white, it would be different."

Leo E. Strine Jr., chief justice of the Delaware Supreme Court, is alarmed by the disproportionate number of African-Americans imprisoned statewide. He's created a committee of prosecutors, public defenders, judges, law enforcement officials, community members and academics to explore why the system appears to be so far out of sync.

“The numbers are shocking,” said Bartholomew J. Dalton, a Wilmington lawyer and the committee’s co-chair.  “What it looks like is we are incarcerating a generation of young black men. How is that going to work out?”

What the numbers don’t show is why these disparities exist. Some blame it on police strategies that target city neighborhoods where more African-American men live. Some claim judges disproportionately send minorities to prison. Others say the root of the problem is cyclical poverty and shortcomings in education.

“We are all caught up in this sticky web of injustice,” said Yasser Payne, a committee member and professor at the University of Delaware who released The People's Report in 2013 after researching violence in Wilmington. “There is a part of the system that is institutionally racist.”

The disparities play out every day on the streets of Wilmington’s poorest neighborhoods, said committee member and Hope Commission Executive Director Charles Madden.

Two-thirds of the men in some neighborhoods are either locked up or on probation and parole, Madden said, meaning children are growing up without fathers and parents are struggling to find decent jobs.

“Anytime you have communities where two-thirds are absent, you see what you keep seeing in Wilmington,” he said. “These men have the potential to be caregivers and productive members of the community.”

Del. chief justice targets prison racial disparities

Take 25-year-old Wilmington resident Eugene Pennewell, for example. He was arrested as a teen for carrying half a pound of marijuana. Seven years later – after serving 18 months in prison for violating probation – he is still required to check in with probation officers.

Pennewell hopes that his felony record won't get in the way of his dream of going to culinary school.

“I don’t even have a traffic ticket; I just have that one marijuana charge for my entire life,” he said. “If it wasn’t for that, none of this would exist.”

"The most urgent justice issue we have is the continued inequality in our society," Chief Justice Strine said in an interview with The News Journal.

“It is unjust for a 5-year-old in this society to grow up and have a markedly different opportunity to enjoy the blessings of liberty than others,” Strine said. “The way that manifests itself is that kids in Greenville and Hockessin get a fourth or fifth chance and in other communities don’t. That is just not something we can be proud of.”

State Prosecutor Kathleen Jennings, Chief Defender Brendan O’Neill, Department of Correction Commissioner Robert Coupe and Division of Youth Rehabilitative Services Director Nancy Dietz are among the 30 professionals who joined the chief justice on the new Access to Justice Commission’s Committee on Fairness.

It will hold two hearings in October and November where experts from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, the University of Delaware and the Equal Justice Initiative, headed by Delaware native and noted civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson, will offer ideas that have worked in other states.

Then four forums will be held in December in Wilmington, Middletown, Dover and Georgetown to give the public a chance to sound off.

Ending mass incarceration

The United States incarcerates 2.2 million people in prison and jail – a 500 percent increase since the war on drugs ramped up – according to data from the Sentencing Project. The United States now leads the world in the number of people incarcerated.

“In the late '80s or early '90s, crime was increasing and we were very concerned about what appeared to be a never-ending cycle of increasing violence, particularly amongst young people,” said University of Pennsylvania criminology professor Emily Owens, who speaks in Wilmington on Thursday. “State and federal policies began increasing the length and time for incarceration.”

These tough-on-crime strategies disproportionately affected poor minorities, she said. But, there has been a nationwide push over the last year to reverse the trend – both with political might and with the Black Lives Matter activist movement.

President Barack Obama made headlines in July at the NAACP conference in Philadelphia when he said the nation is being robbed of too many men and women incarcerated for nonviolent offenses.

“It’s not keeping us as safe as it should be,” Obama said. “It is not as fair as it should be. Mass incarceration makes our country worse off, and we need to do something about it.”

The U.S. Justice Department is releasing over 6,000 nonviolent drug offenders – less than 10 of whom will be from Delaware – from federal prisons later this month.

Strine joined the chorus after the high court created the Access to Justice Commission last year to identify barriers to access that exist in Delaware.

“The idea that we can incarcerate our way to safety or to justice – we are at the end of that experiment,” he said.

Likewise, Attorney General Matt Denn announced this week a series of proposals, such as eliminating automatic life sentences for a third violent felony, commonly referred to as the “three strikes and you’re out” law.

The proposal will ensure only people who deserve to be in prison are there, and that could be a savings to the state, he said. The state currently spends $277 million on corrections – $36,232 per year for each inmate.

Delaware Prisons: 6 out of 10 are black

Delaware's racial gap is clearly evident in prison data.

There were 5,667 people, mostly men, incarcerated in Delaware in December 2014. Nearly six out of every 10 were black, according to data provided by Coupe.

Death row is no different: nine of the 15 people now being held are black.

“When we look at Delaware, we know that 87 percent of those convicted for drug offenses are black," Payne said. "Anytime you see high numbers of any population doing one thing, then we know that is structural because no one population does any one thing.”

The racial disparities are worse for youth housed at the New Castle County Detention Center, Ferris School and other state facilities run by the Division of Youth Rehabilitative Services. Only 17 percent of the youth are white – the rest are Hispanic and black.

The Division of Youth Rehabilitative Services, however, has reduced the number of youth admissions from 2,651 in 2003 to 987 in 2013, Dietz said. She added that only youths convicted of and facing the most serious of charges are being held, while others are being guided toward treatment and rehabilitative services.

‘We didn’t create the 'hood’

Solving the racial disparities starts with giving people economic and educational opportunities, experts said, noting that research shows a direct correlation between opportunity and success later in life.

“It is a crime for people to be sustained in economic poverty,” Payne said. “We are talking about generations and generations being subjected to economic poverty.”

That is why between 80 and 85 percent of the inmates in the prison's adult basic education in Delaware test at or below a ninth-grade education level, Coupe said.

Standing near his home in the 1000 block of Lombard St. – a crime-ridden area just blocks away from major credit companies and the courthouse where businesses settle their disputes – 38-year-old Daroun Jamison talked about what it was like to grow up in Wilmington.

Jamison's childhood was spent in a city housing project. He observed that teens who struggled in high school had difficulty finding jobs as adults. Out of reach of the American Dream, many turned toward selling drugs.

That was Jamison's path.

“We didn’t create the 'hood. We were born into it," he said. "We responded the only way we knew how.”

Jamison was on track to become a junior deacon at his church. But after his family was evicted from its home, he dropped out of school and began selling drugs.

Three days before his 18th birthday, Jamison shot someone. He pleaded guilty to attempted murder and served 16 years in prison.

He said he had a change of heart while living behind bars, and wanted his life to be different when freed.

But that wasn’t easy. A college refused his admission because of his criminal record. And during one job interview, a potential employer asked Jamison to come back in six years – after he had proven he was on the right path.

Jamison persisted and today takes entrepreneurship classes at Delaware Technical Community College. He's writing a book about overcoming hardship.

Jamison is one of the few who've turned their lives around after leaving prison. Over 70 percent of men released from Delaware’s prisons will return to prison within three years, Madden said.

"Becoming a felon is more devastating today than what existed during Jim Crow," said Gregory B. Williams, a committee member, a corporate lawyer in Wilmington and past president of the Delaware State Bar Association.

Those released from prison are often denied jobs when employers find out they have a felony record. To help ex-offenders re-enter society and stay out of prison, the Hope Commission started a program last year called the Achievement Center.

Poor relationship with the police

Yet those involved in the re-entry program there are frequently stopped and searched while going about mundane tasks such as walking to the deli or sitting on their front stoops, Madden said.

“If that were to happen to the person who lives in Pike Creek or Hockessin, they probably would have the same frustration because this is home,” Madden said. “Over time, that presence is likely to yield the data that we see – the arrests, the incarceration – and I don’t know that that would be different whether you are black or white.”

The four teens shared similar stories.

One of the teens, a 17-year-old girl, said she was walking on Sycamore Street with her cellphone in the front pocket of her hoodie sweatshirt when a police officer pulled up behind her.

“I had my earphones in and didn’t hear him say ‘stop,’ ” she said.

He yelled at her to put her hands up and get on the ground.

“He thought I had a gun,” she said. She didn’t.

The girl, in eleventh grade at a Newark high school, said the experience reinforced her distrust of the police.

“If you are just walking down the street wearing a hoodie, they think you are a killer,” she said.

Another girl said cellphone videos of police shooting citizens, like the one where Jeremy “Bam” McDole was shot by four Wilmington police officers while sitting in his wheelchair in the 1800 block of Tulip St. in September, make the relationship even worse.

David Rudovosky, a University of Pennsylvania Law School professor who will speak about policing methods at the November hearing, said studies show targeted policing measures lead to racial disparity.

“What we found is very high numbers of stops and very low hit rates in terms of weapons or drugs,” he said. Rudovosky will encourage the committee to collect data from Delaware’s police forces to determine if the same is true here.

Delaware’s American Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Kathleen MacRae said society needs to look at where policing efforts are being placed.

“If the police made the same effort at the University of Delaware to identify students smoking marijuana as they do in the African-American communities to identify people carrying small amounts of drugs, we wouldn’t have the racial disparities we have today,” she said.

Should monetary bail be eliminated?

The committee is also expected to look closely at Delaware’s bail system, which uses a mix of monetary bail and assessment factors, such as flight risk, community ties and criminal history. Monetary bail is in play when a defendant, or the bail bondsman, posts money in order to get out of jail while his or her case is pending. A judge can set the amount based on several factors.

Bail money is returned at the conclusion of the case, provided the defendant appears in court.

Stephanos Bibas, a law and criminology professor at University of Pennsylvania Law School who will speak at the November hearing, said monetary bail disproportionately affects poor minorities who often do not have the money to get out of jail.

About 60 percent of the 750,000 people held in prisons each year are awaiting trial, Bibas said. He said 90 percent of them are there because they cannot secure enough money for bail. Poor defendants are more likely to take a plea –– even if they are innocent –– just to avoid spending more time in prison, he said.

“Poor and minorities wind up getting hurt by bail policies that cut them off from their lawyers, from their families, their jobs, their homes,” Bibas said. “There are real problems with depending as heavily as most states do on money bail.”

Bibas suggested Delaware could move toward a non-monetary bail system with more emphasis on community supervision.

Other states have also been successful with speeding up cases, consolidating court appearances, and providing more reminder phone calls, emails and letters to ensure appearance, he said. In Jefferson County, Colorado, a study found that 92 percent of defendants appeared for court when they were contacted by phone ahead of time, he said.

“Most people who don’t appear in court are not missing court because they skipped the country, most are because they don’t carry iPhones that beep at them,” he said.

O’Neill, the head of the Office of the Public Defender, said Delaware moved toward a more risk-based assessment for bail last year. Data is still being assessed for that program.

“The more people we can get out of jail pending trial the better we can defend them successfully,” O'Neill said.

Robert Bovell, the owner of one of Wilmington’s largest bail bonds businesses, said moving to a non-monetary bail system could lead to higher crime rates and would put more of a burden on the state in terms of monitoring pre-trial defendants.

“That is what a bail bondsman does – guarantees appearance,” he said. “We make sure they check in and make sure they get jobs. We help them get back in school or pick up a trade.”

‘I’m on my own out here’

After the public hearings, the Committee on Fairness will continue to meet with experts and review data before issuing proposals on how to make the system more just.

"Let’s talk in a real way," Payne said. "That will reduce the kinds of disproportionate outcomes from pre-detention to death row.”

Bibas is encouraging the state to look at how decisions are made about charging, prosecuting and sentencing to see if the disparities are being exacerbated at any of those points in the process.

“We don’t have any data about Delaware that would impute conscious or unconscious bias,” Bibas said. “We are talking about statistical disparities that could be unintentional or a legacy.”

Jennings, the state prosecutor, said the end result will likely be proposals in all areas of the system.

“We have to look inside ourselves and make sure we are treating similarly situated defendants the same,” she said. “It is not any one thing.”

She cautioned against solely looking at the racial disparities for defendants and losing sight of the victims.

“Over 80 percent of homicide victims this year in Delaware have been African-Americans,” she said. “The victims of violent crimes suffer; the entire community suffers when there is a shooting on a block.”

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The group of teens say they want to be able to trust the police and have a court system that is fair to them, but they also need resources to help reach their potential.

Hanging on the brightly colored walls of the Youth Empowerment Center are motivational quotes reminding the teens to dream big.

One boy wearing basketball shorts said he wants to be a video producer or work in a trade, such as welding or as a mechanic, but he has few resources to help him get there.

“It is all about dream-chasing,” he said. “But sometimes I just feel like I’m on my own out here.”

Contact Jessica Masulli Reyes at 302-324-2777, jmreyes@delawareonline.com or Twitter @JessicaMasulli.

Public hearings

The Access to Justice Commission’s Committee on Fairness in the Criminal Justice System will conduct a series of informational hearings and public forums. They will be held:

• Oct. 22 at the Double Tree Downtown Wilmington, 700 N. King St. Experts will focus on alternatives to incarceration from 1 to 3 p.m. and education and root causes from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. Public comment will not be accepted.

• Nov. 13 at the Chase Center on the Riverfront, 815 Justison St. in Wilmington. Experts will focus on bail and pretrial detention from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m.; charging, plea bargaining decisions and sentencing from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m.; and policing strategies that have worked elsewhere from 3 to 5 p.m. Public comment will not be accepted.

• Public comment will be accepted from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at four locations: Dec. 1 at First State Community Action Agency, 308 N. Railroad Avenue in Georgetown; Dec. 2 at Middletown High, 120 Silver Lake Road in Middletown; Dec. 8 at Howard High, 401 E. 12th St. in Wilmington; Dec. 9 at William Henry Middle School, 65 Carver Road in Dover.

Those interested in offering comment at the public forums can pre-register at courts.delaware.gov/supreme/accessform.stm. Same day registration also will be available at each location. Comments will be limited to five minutes.

Written comments can be submitted through Dec. 18.