Life in Prison for Clippers: A Racialized Justice System
In 1997, Fair Wayne Bryant stole a pair of hedge clippers. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Just last week, the Louisiana Supreme Court voted to uphold his sentence.
Bryant—a Black man—had previously been convicted of 3 “petty theft” crimes and one count of armed robbery almost 20 years before the incident in question. However, using habitual offender statutes, the prosecutor of the case pushed for life in prison. Without parole.
Retired New Orleans judge Calvin Johnson speaks to the gross inhumanity of the punishment. Bryant is forced to live the rest of his life at the Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana—the largest maximum security prison in America—performing backbreaking labor. All for a pair of hedge clippers. Bryant’s sentence has cost Louisiana taxpayers more than half a million dollars to date. Given that such a harsh sentence has no penal benefit and is exorbitantly expensive, why was such a punishment ever requested? Furthermore, why does our justice system vigorously defend life in prison and other excessive punishments for crimes where they have no criminological benefit?
Numerous data points can explain why such a sentencing was pushed for. First of all, 95% of elected prosecutors are white and 71% of district court judges are white. Adding on the fact that juries are selected from voter rolls, which are in turn susceptible to massive attacks on Black voters, and that Black jurors are almost twice as likely to be rejected from the panel, it is no surprise that old, white citizens are vastly overrepresented in juries in Louisiana. Due to all of this, Black defendants often find themselves in a room of all white people when fighting for their freedom. Therefore, according to the US Sentencing Commission itself, Black men are sentenced for almost 20% longer than white men for the same crime.
Regardless of why the punishment was chosen, the larger question is how the United States continues to justify such punishment within its legal systems. Chief Justice Bernette Johnson—the lone dissenter to the Supreme Court’s decision as well as the only woman and Black person on the Court—offers a historical explanation.
Johnson notes that each of Bryant’s crimes were for theft, i.e. dependent on financial situation, and that his life sentence was made possible through habitual offender laws. These laws were created by southern states during the Reconstruction era to “excessively criminalize petty theft associated with [the] poverty” of newly emancipated slaves. Since freed slaves had not been taught English and had no capital of their own, they either had to sharecrop for their previous enslavers or turn to petty theft in order to provide for themselves. Habitual offender laws for theft allowed states to convert those instances of petty theft into long sentences of forced labor on plantations. Essentially, the U.S. constructed a legal system that provided the backbone for legal modern slavery.
This history is particularly strong in Angola—the prison where Bryant is kept. Angola is on the site of a former slave plantation and is named after the African country where the majority of the slaves were taken from. To this day,thousands of prisoners work the fields as free labor for the government. Not surprisingly, 80% of the prisoners at Angola under habitual offender laws are Black—further implicating the current use of these already racialized laws.
We can no longer avoid these uncomfortable conversations about race in our society. In the words of Chief Justice Johnson, “we can only accomplish [change] by honestly and objectively examining our past in order to understand our present, and then critically examining our present in order to create a better future.” Only then can we truly understand the ugly truth of how the laws on the books today were created during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras and are thoroughly informed by race. It is a disservice to the millions of Americans of color for us to continue to ignore these facts and fight against reform to the justice system.
