Bussed Out: How America Moves Its Homeless

Each year, US cities give thousands of homeless people one-way bus tickets out of town. An 18-month nationwide investigation by the Guardian reveals, for the first time, what really happens at journey’s end 

The Guardian

Quinn Raber arrived at a San Francisco bus station lugging a canvas bag containing all of his belongings: jeans, socks, underwear, pajamas. It was 1pm on a typically overcast day in August.

An unassuming 27-year-old, Raber seemed worn down: his skin was sun-reddened, he was unshaven, and a hat was pulled over his ruffled blond hair. After showing the driver a one-way ticket purchased for him by the city of San Francisco, he climbed the steps of the Greyhound bus.

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A Bernie Sanders-Led Party Still Would Be an Imperialist, Pro-War Party

by Glen Ford
Black Agenda Report via Truthdig


The United States is a predator nation, conceived and settled as a thief, exterminator and enslaver of other peoples. The slave-based republic’s phenomenal geographic expansion and economic growth were predicated on the super-exploitation of stolen African labor and the ruthless expropriation of native lands through genocidal wars, an uninterrupted history of plunder glorified in earlier times as “Manifest Destiny” and now exalted as “American exceptionalism,” an inherently racist justification for international and domestic lawlessness.

Assembled, acre by bloody acre, as a metastasizing empire, the U.S. state demands fealty to its imperial project as a substitute for any genuine social contract among its inhabitants?a political culture custom-made for the rule of rich white people.

The American project has been one long war of aggression that has shaped its borders, its internal social relations, and its global outlook and ambitions. It was founded as a consciously capitalist state that competed with other European powers through direct absorption of captured lands, brutal suppression of native peoples and the fantastic accumulation of capital through a diabolically efficient system of Black chattel slavery?a 24/7 war against the slave. This system then morphed through two stages of “Jim Crow” to become a Mass Black Incarceration State?a perpetual war of political and physical containment against Black America.

Since the end of World War 2, the U.S. has assumed the role of protector of the spoils of half a millennium of European wars and occupations of the rest of the world: the organized rape of nations that we call colonialism. The first Black U.S. president, Barack Obama, was among the most aggressive defenders of white supremacy in history?defending the accumulated advantages that colonialism provided to western European nations, settler states (like the U.S.) and citizens?having launched an ongoing military offensive aimed at strangling the Chinese giant and preventing an effective Eurasian partnership with Russia. The first phase of the offensive, the crushing of Libya in 2011, allowed the United States to complete the effective military occupation of Africa, through AFRICOM.
The U.S. and its NATO allies already account for about 70 percent of global military spending, but Obama and his successor, Donald Trump, demand that Europeans increase the proportion of their economic output that goes to war. More than half of U.S. discretionary spending?the tax money that is not dedicated to mandated social and development programs?goes to what Dr. Martin Luther King 50 years ago called the “demonic, destructive suction tube” of the U.S. war machine.

The United States does not have a national health care system worthy of the name, because it is in the war business, not the health business or the social equality business. The U.S. has the weakest left, by far, of any industrialized country, because it has never escaped the racist, predatory dynamic on which it was founded, which stunted and deformed any real social contract among its peoples. In the U.S., progress is defined by global dominance of the U.S. State?chiefly in military terms?rather than domestic social development. Americans only imagine that they are materially better off than the people of other developed nations?a fallacy they assume to be the case because of U.S. global military dominance. More importantly, most white Americans feel racially entitled to the spoils of U.S. dominance as part of their patrimony, even if they don’t actually enjoy the fruits. (“WE made this country great.”) This is by no means limited to Trump voters.

Race relations in the U.S. cannot be understood outside the historical context of war, including the constant state of race war that is a central function of the U.S. State: protecting “American values,” fighting “crime” and “urban disorder,” and all the other euphemisms for preserving white supremacy.

War is not a side issue in the United States; it is the central political issue, on which all the others turn. War mania is the enemy of all social progress?especially so, when it unites disparate social forces, in opposition to their own interests, in the service of an imperialist state that is the tool of a rapacious white capitalist elite. Therefore, the orchestrated propaganda blitzkrieg against Russia by the Democratic Party, in collaboration with the corporate media and other functionaries and properties of the U.S. ruling class, marks the party as, collectively, the Warmonger-in-Chief political institution in the United States at this historical juncture. The Democrats are anathema to any politics that can be described as progressive.

Bernie Sanders is a highly valued Democrat, the party’s Outreach Director and therefore, as Paul Street writes, “the imperialist and sheep-dogging fake-socialist Democratic Party company man that some of us on the ‘hard radical’ Left said he was.” Sanders is a warmonger, not merely by association, but by virtue of his own positions. He favors more sanctions against Russia, in addition to the sanctions levied against Moscow in 2014 and 2016 for its measured response to the U.S-backed fascist coup against a democratically elected government in Ukraine. Rather than surrender to U.S. bullying, Russia came to the military aid of the sovereign and internationally recognized government of Syria in 2015, upsetting the U.S. game plan for an Islamic jihadist victory.

Back in April of this year, on NBC’s Meet The Press, Sanders purposely mimicked “The Godfather” when asked what he would do to force the Russians “to the table” in Syria:

“I think you may want to make them an offer they can’t refuse. And that means tightening the screws on them, dealing with sanctions, telling them that we need their help, they have got to come to the table and not maintain this horrific dictator.”

Of course, it is the United States that has sabotaged every international agreement to rein in its jihadist mercenaries in Syria.

Sanders is a regime-changer, which means he thinks the U.S., in combination with self-selected allies, is above international law, i.e., “exceptional.”

“We’ve got to work with countries around the world for a political solution to get rid of this guy [Syrian President Bashar al-Assad] and to finally bring peace and stability to this country, which has been so decimated.”

During the 2016 campaign, Sanders urged the U.S. to stop acting unilaterally in the region, but instead to collaborate with Syria’s Arab neighbors?as if the funding and training of jihadist fighters had not been a joint effort with Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchies, all along.

According to Politico, “As late as 2002,” Sanders’ campaign website declared that “the defense budget should be cut by 50 percent over the next five years.” But all the defense-cutting air went out of his chest after Bush invaded Iraq. Nowadays, Sanders limits himself to the usual noises about Pentagon “waste,” but has no principled position against the imperial mission of the United States. “We need a strong military, it is a dangerous world,” Sanders told voters in Iowa, during the campaign.

Like Paul Street said, he’s an “imperialist ... Democratic Party company man.”

At last weekend’s People’s Summit, in Chicago, National Nurses United executive director RoseAnn DeMoro endorsed Sanders for a mission he finds impossible to accept: a run for president in 2020 on the Peoples Party ticket. Sanders already had his chance to run as a Green, and refused. He is now the second most important Democrat in the country, behind the ultra-corrupt Bill-Hillary Clinton machine?and by far the most popular. On top of that, Sanders loves being the hero of the phony left, the guy who gimmick-seeking left-liberals hope will create an instant national party for them, making it unnecessary to build a real anti-war, pro-people party from scratch to go heads up with the two corporate machines.

Sanders doesn’t even have to exert himself to string the Peoples Party folks along; they eagerly delude themselves. However, a Sanders-led Party would still be an imperialist, pro-war party.

The U.S. does need a social democratic party, but it must be anti-war. Otherwise, it commits a fraud on social democracy. The United States is the imperial superpower, the main military aggressor on the planet. Its rulers must be deprived of the political ability to spend trillions on war, and to kill millions, or they will always use the “necessity” of war to enforce austerity. The “left” domestic project will fail.

For those of us from the Black Radical Tradition, anti-imperialism is central. Solidarity with the victims of U.S. imperialism is non-negotiable, and we can make no common cause with U.S. political actors that treat war as a political side show, an “elective” issue that is separate from domestic social justice. This is not just a matter of principle, but also of practical politics. “Left” imperialism isn’t just evil. It is self-defeating and stupid.

Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

America on Memorial Day, 2017

“Everywhere I go, every town I visit, you don’t see any industries. You don’t see any factories. You don’t see anything. We don’t make anything. We are really the poorest country on earth, but people refuse to see that. We are only surviving. We are only looking good because of our military might, because we are an empire. But this force cannot go on forever. It should be so obvious that we’re only chugging along, bullying people into lending us money and sending us stuff that we don’t deserve, that we haven’t earned. How can we survive? Hundreds of thousands of Americans have been reduced to living like savages in this self-proclaimed greatest country on earth.” - Linh Dinh, Poet

 Colin Kaepernick’s Message to Chicago Youth: ‘Know Your Rights’

by Dave Zirin
The Nation

NFL quarterback took his Know Your Rights Camp to the South Side of Chicago. Here is an exclusive look inside.


It starts with Colin Kaepernick. The free-agent NFL quarterback came to the South Side of Chicago last Saturday to hold one of his Know Your Rights Camps: full-day youth seminars that Kaepernick organizes, funds, and emcees. Already staged in New York City and the Bay Area, with more cities to come, these are not open events for sports fans, the press, or random people. Their aim is to speak directly to black, brown, and economically disadvantaged youth, invited through local community organizations, about history, nutrition, legal rights, and financial literacy. As Kaepernick said to me, “Every city has grassroots resources. Our goal is to raise awareness about those resources and help young people access them to empower themselves and the people around them.”

It might start with Colin Kaepernick, but it doesn’t end with him. There is a young multiracial network of roughly 50 Know Your Rights volunteers. They have flown in from all over country to handle logistics at the event’s site, the DuSable Museum of African American History in Hyde Park. These are people like Kerem from Orange County who said, “This message is about equal rights. Often people in underserved communities don’t understand that they have these rights and they need to claim them…. Colin has sacrificed a lot to get to this point. It shows he is passionate about this and we all feed from that.”

Another volunteer, someone just hanging out in a Know Your Rights T-shirt, was Kaepernick’s San Francisco 49ers teammate Eric Reid. “I came here to support Colin,” he said to me. “I want to show these kids that there are people who want them to succeed despite how they may feel when they go to school. But I also came here to learn.”

Reid also spoke about the last season of anthem protests, where he kneeled alongside Kaepernick. He explained in a quiet but proud voice, “All we wanted to do was expand the discussion. People were being killed by police and we wanted that recognized and discussed. And I think we accomplished that.”

The day started with breakfast: eggs, yogurt, biscuits, and fruit for the 200 young people who were at the door by 9:00 am. A 12-year-old named Daymien gave up the opening game of his baseball season to attend. “I wanted to play today, but I think this is more important,” he said. “I wanted to come here for knowledge and learn my history.” In addition to the breakfasts and lunches provided, young people were given T-shirts that read “Know Your Rights” on the front. On the back, the shirts listed the following 10 points:

YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE FREE.
YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE HEALTHY.
YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE BRILLIANT.
YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE SAFE.
YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE LOVED.
YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE COURAGEOUS.
YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE ALIVE.
YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE TRUSTED.
YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE EDUCATED.
YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW YOUR RIGHTS.

The free breakfasts and the 10 points both derive, intentionally, from the political legacy of the Black Panthers. I spoke with Ameer Loggins, a young writer and PhD candidate at Cal-Berkeley who helped develop the Know Your Rights curriculum as well as the ten-point plan. “This is an extension of the Freedom Schools of the civil-rights movement, the Panther schools, and all non-institutional educational programs that go out into the communities. The only difference is that we are mobile and we are associated with Colin, and that puts it on a different kind of platform.” As this camp was in Chicago, the particulars of the city’s history and policing were central to the agenda.

After breakfast Kaepernick introduced the day, saying, “We are here to uplift each other. We also have great speakers and guests who are here for no other reason than that they love you and they want to support you.”

He then brought out “one of the great men of Chicago,” hip-hop icon Common, who flew in just for the camp and stayed the entire six-hour day. Common said, “I’m honored to be here. I’m here because last September I saw Colin Kaepernick standing up for us as a people. I thought, ‘Man that’s one of the most courageous acts I’ve seen by someone in the spotlight since Muhammad Ali.’ I’ve always said that Muhammad Ali was one of my heroes, so now I have to say that Colin Kaepernick is one of my heroes. But it’s not just Colin now. He has a team. We have a team: The Know Your Rights team speaking about how we can exist not only to fight but to elevate and reach our goals and dreams…to go out there and be the kings and queens we were created to be. I want each and every one of you to know that we care and I want you to listen, ask questions and take notes today, and as then go out onto our city and spread the message for people who aren’t here.”

The first speaker was the aforementioned Ameer Loggins, who gave a college-level seminar on Chicago history, segregation, and structural racism. Loggins said, “Chicago is the most segregated city in the United States and no one talks about the effects of that in 2017. We talk about Selma and Jim Crow and the harm of segregation in the past but not the present. It’s not just segregation of space. It’s a segregation of resources and economics, food access, and property ownership…. Even if you say, ‘We had a black mayor, and Barack lives in Chicago,’ it doesn’t trickle down. People say we made it, but if our community doesn’t collectively benefit with resources, what the hell did we make it for?”

After going through the effects of 21st-century segregation?how it puts a person in a penned-in environment where they can be policed, subjected to violence, and denied resources?he made the argument that “young people just like you” made the civil-rights movement by “contesting segregated space,” and said, “You have the same power. Turn your segregated space into contested space. Don’t just sit there and take it. You don’t need to break windows. Arm yourself with enough knowledge and you can whip ass with your brain.”

It was rousing and, by my informal polling, a highlight for the students in attendance. One young woman said to me, “I wish my social-studies teacher was here taking notes.”

After Loggins, Kaepernick returned to the stage to underline the message, saying, “We are trying to show you what you are dealing with so you can combat it.” Then he introduced the next speakers. “We are now bringing out the legal defense team so you can protect yourselves, protect your family, protect your communities.”

Out came Guillermo Gutierrez and Charles Jones from First Defense Legal Aid, with the message that “Chicago is the false-confession capital of world.” To drive the point home, these “street attorneys” educated the students about Jon Burge, the South Side police officer and now convicted felon who tortured confessions out of more than 200 suspects between 1972 and 1991.

They said that the future of some people in the room could depend on knowing their rights when approached by law enforcement, and hammered home what to say if stopped by police. “First and foremost, you always have the right to ask, ‘Am I free to go?’ That is your constitutional right. If they say ‘no,’ you have the right to say, ‘I do not consent to be searched.’ If you don’t say those words, they can and will search you.”

Then they stressed, “Always remain silent. Call us. Have an attorney present. That is your right.”

Gutierrez and Jones made the students repeat their hotline number?1 (800) Law-Rep4?as well as promise to distribute cards with the number to family and friends.

Students asked about retaliation from police if they invoked these rights, concerned that they would be pegged as uncooperative. The First Defense Legal Aid performed skits to show not only how to resist any police coercion but also how to articulate their rights to minimize conflict.

Kaepernick came out and reinforced the point, saying, “So if an officer stops you, what do you say?” The students all said as one, “Am I free to go?’”

Then Kaepernick became an organizer?or the world’s chillest public-school administrator?dividing the students into breakout sessions that would cover “holistic health” and “financial literacy,” directing them into what rooms to go to by colored wrist-bands they received upon registration. He also said, “Remember, we have snacks that you can grab between sessions. But please, no eating in the auditorium.”

Yareli Quintana, a food consultant and spirited speaker, then took the stage to speak about making intelligent eating choices and how to take “baby steps” for healthier living. She made the case that food is self-determination and to integrate fruits and vegetables into their diets to better develop their minds. She even did a PowerPoint presentation about how different foods affect the brain. Kaepernick came up afterward and said, “we will have a resource map for you so you can find community gardens that grow their own healthy foods.”

The emphasis on healthy choices was evident throughout the day. One of the more harrowing moments came when radio host Ebro Darden asked the students, “How many of you have eaten fast food three times this week?” Almost the entire room raised their hands. Then he asked, “How many of you have members of your family with cancer or diabetes?” Again, almost the entire room raised their hands.

The talk of community gardens and, in the financial-literacy section, the importance of dressing and speaking in a professional manner, also produced a robust debate about whether it was realistic for these students to even find healthy food, save money, or dress a certain way, and whether those kinds of personal choices could beat back oppression. It was the century-old debate about what is known as “respectability politics”?whether racism needs to be fought systemically or by changing individual habits. Different speakers articulated different sides of this, with the students chiming in as well.

The substance of this discussion was perhaps less important than the fact that the dialogue was open, intense, but also friendly: a display for the young people in the audience of what debate looks like and how adults can disagree without being disagreeable. The students shaped this debate by speaking about their own experiences, what was realistic for them and what was not.

Kaepernick ended the day by speaking to the students about his own journey. He talked about growing up as the adopted son in an all-white home. He said, “I love my family to death. They’re the most amazing people I know. But when I looked in the mirror, I knew I was different. Learning what it meant to be an African man in America, not a black man but an African man, was critical for me. Through this knowledge, I was able to identify myself and my community differently…

“I thought I was from Milwaukee. I thought my ancestry started at slavery and I was taught in school that we were all supposed to be grateful just because we aren’t slaves. But what I was able to do was trace my ancestry and DNA lineage back to Ghana, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, and saw my existence was more than just being a slave. It was as an African man. We had our own civilizations, and I want you to know how high the ceiling is for our people. I want you to know that our existence now is not normal. It’s oppressive. For me, identifying with Africa gave me a higher sense of who I was, knowing that we have a proud history and are all in this together.”

Then he took a deep breath and said, “This was so important for me and I want to share it with you. So when you leave, you are all getting backpacks, and inside of them are Ancestry DNA kits so you can trace your ancestry and connect with your lost relatives who may have taken this test as well.”

The students exploded with joy upon hearing this. I was told there was a similar reaction in Oakland and New York.

Then he said, “I love you guys. I appreciate you. Build with each other. Because you will be this community moving forward.”

Afterwards, I spoke to Kaepernick at some length. He is training every day for the 2017 season and, optimistic that his hard work and stellar 2016 season will be rewarded, believes that he will find an NFL home. But we kept the conversation focused on the camp.

“I thought it was amazing,” he said. “Every time we do an event, leading up to it, I’m always a little bit nervous. ‘Do we have everything in line? Are the Ts crossed and the Is dotted?’ But once the program starts running, you see the kids having fun and and absorbing what we are saying. That’s the win for us…to see them get the tools to navigate an oppressive society.”

He compared the Know Your Rights team to a football squad: “It’s the same sense of camaraderie. Building toward a common goal. And in this space we are trying to help communities that are oppressed. That’s what we want. We want to show that we can build with each other and love each other because in oppressed communities no one is going to help them but themselves. It’s so exciting to see it come together.” He then smiled so wide and looked so relaxed, I thought he would float to the ceiling. “It’s a very liberating thing to feel. It’s hard to explain.”

One thing we did not talk about was whether he was being politically blackballed by the league for his political ideas and activism. There was no need. After spending the day with Colin Kaepernick, all I could think about was a quote from Bill Russell in 1967 when he was asked about how Muhammad Ali was coping with being stripped of the heavyweight title. Russell said, “I’m not worried about Muhammad Ali. I’m worried about the rest of us.”

I’m not worried about Colin Kaepernick. As for “the rest of us,” we’ve got work to do.   

American Takes the Life of Yet Another Black Boy

by Jennifer Gonnerman
The New Yorker

In the early hours of Saturday, May 15, 2010, ten days before his seventeenth birthday, Kalief Browder and a friend were returning home from a party in the Belmont section of the Bronx. They walked along Arthur Avenue, the main street of Little Italy, past bakeries and cafes with their metal shutters pulled down for the night. As they passed East 186th Street, Browder saw a police car driving toward them. More squad cars arrived, and soon Browder and his friend found themselves squinting in the glare of a police spotlight. An officer said that a man had just reported that they had robbed him. “I didn’t rob anybody,” Browder replied. “You can check my pockets.”

The officers searched him and his friend but found nothing. As Browder recalls, one of the officers walked back to his car, where the alleged victim was, and returned with a new story: the man said that they had robbed him not that night but two weeks earlier. The police handcuffed the teens and pressed them into the back of a squad car. “What am I being charged for?” Browder asked. “I didn’t do anything!” He remembers an officer telling them, “We’re just going to take you to the precinct. Most likely you can go home.” Browder whispered to his friend, “Are you sure you didn’t do anything?” His friend insisted that he hadn’t.

At the Forty-eighth Precinct, the pair were fingerprinted and locked in a holding cell. A few hours later, when an officer opened the door, Browder jumped up: “I can leave now?” Instead, the teens were taken to Central Booking at the Bronx County Criminal Court.

Browder had already had a few run-ins with the police, including an incident eight months earlier, when an officer reported seeing him take a delivery truck for a joyride and crash into a parked car. Browder was charged with grand larceny. He told me that his friends drove the truck and that he had only watched, but he figured that he had no defense, and so he pleaded guilty. The judge gave him probation and “youthful offender” status, which insured that he wouldn’t have a criminal record.

Late on Saturday, seventeen hours after the police picked Browder up, an officer and a prosecutor interrogated him, and he again maintained his innocence. The next day, he was led into a courtroom, where he learned that he had been charged with robbery, grand larceny, and assault. The judge released his friend, permitting him to remain free while the case moved through the courts. But, because Browder was still on probation, the judge ordered him to be held and set bail at three thousand dollars. The amount was out of reach for his family, and soon Browder found himself aboard a Department of Correction bus. He fought back panic, he told me later. Staring through the grating on the bus window, he watched the Bronx disappear. Soon, there was water on either side as the bus made its way across a long, narrow bridge to Rikers Island.

Of the eight million people living in New York City, some eleven thousand are confined in the city’s jails on any given day, most of them on Rikers, a four-hundred-acre island in the East River, between Queens and the Bronx. New Yorkers who have never visited often think of Rikers as a single, terrifying building, but the island has ten jails--eight for men, one for women, and one so decrepit that it hasn’t housed anyone since 2000.

Male adolescents are confined in the Robert N. Davoren Center--known as R.N.D.C. When Browder arrived, the jail held some six hundred boys, aged sixteen to eighteen. Conditions there are notoriously grim. In August of this year, a report by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York described R.N.D.C. as a place with a “deep-seated culture of violence,” where attacks by officers and among inmates are rampant. The report featured a list of inmate injuries: “broken jaws, broken orbital bones, broken noses, long bone fractures, and lacerations requiring stitches.”

Browder’s family could not afford to hire an attorney, so the judge appointed a lawyer named Brendan O’Meara to represent him. Browder told O’Meara that he was innocent and assumed that his case would conclude quickly. Even the assistant district attorney handling the prosecution later acknowledged in court papers that it was a “relatively straightforward case.” There weren’t hours of wiretaps or piles of complicated evidence to sift through; there was just the memory of one alleged victim. But Browder had entered the legal system through the Bronx criminal courts, which are chronically overwhelmed. Last year, the Times, in an extended expose, described them as “crippled” and among the most backlogged in the country. One reason is budgetary. There are not nearly enough judges and court staff to handle the workload; in 2010, Browder’s case was one of five thousand six hundred and ninety-five felonies that the Bronx District Attorney’s office prosecuted. The problem is compounded by defense attorneys who drag out cases to improve their odds of winning, judges who permit endless adjournments, prosecutors who are perpetually unprepared. Although the Sixth Amendment guarantees “the right to a speedy and public trial,” in the Bronx the concept of speedy justice barely exists.

For as long as Browder could remember, he had lived in the same place, a two-story brick house near the Bronx Zoo. He was the youngest of seven siblings; except for the oldest two, all the children were adopted, and the mother fostered other children as well. “Kalief was the last brought into the family,” an older brother told me. “By the time it came to Kalief, my mom had already raised--in foster care or adoption--a total of thirty-four kids.” Kalief was the smallest, he recalled, “so my mom called him Peanut.”

As a child, Browder loved Pokemon, the W.W.E., free Wednesdays at the Bronx Zoo, and mimicking his brother’s workout routine. “At six years old, he had an eight-pack,” his brother said. When Browder was ten, their father, who worked as a subway cleaner, moved out, though he continued to help support the family.

For high school, Browder went to the small, progressive New Day Academy. A former staff member remembered him as a “fun guy,” the type of kid others wanted to be around. Occasionally, he would grab a hall pass, sneak into a friend’s classroom, and stay until the teacher caught on. He told me that his report cards were full of C’s, but the staff member I spoke to said, “I thought he was very smart.”

Inside R.N.D.C., Browder soon realized that he was not going to make many friends. He was assigned to a dorm where about fifty teen-age boys slept in an open room, each with a plastic bucket to store his possessions in. “Their conversations bored me,” he told me. As far as he could tell, the other inmates were interested only in “crimes they committed and girls that they did.” When Browder asked a guard how inmates were supposed to get their clothes cleaned, he was told that they had to wash them themselves. He thought this was a joke until he noticed other inmates scrubbing their clothes by hand, using their bucket and jailhouse soap. After he did the same and hung his wet clothes on the rail of his bed, he wound up with brown rust stains on his white T-shirt, his socks, and his boxers. That day, he told himself, “I don’t know how I’m going to live in this place.”

Browder’s mother visited every weekend. In the visiting room, he would hand her his dirty clothes and get a stack of freshly laundered clothes in return. She also put money in a jail commissary account for him, so he could buy snacks. He knew that such privileges made him a target for his fellow-prisoners, who would take any opportunity to empty someone else’s bucket of snacks and clothes, so he slept with his head off the side of his bed, atop his bucket. To survive inside R.N.D.C., he decided that the best strategy was to keep to himself and to work out. Before Rikers, he told me, “every here and there I did a couple pullups or pushups. When I went in there, that’s when I decided I wanted to get big.”

The dayroom was ruled over by a gang leader and his friends, who controlled inmates’ access to the prison phones and dictated who could sit on a bench to watch TV and who had to sit on the floor. “A lot of times, I’d say, ‘I’m not sitting on the floor,’ ” Browder said. “And then they’ll come with five or six dudes. They’d swing on me. I’d have to fight back.” There was no escape, no protection, and a suspicion that some of the guards had an agreement with the gang members.

Browder told me that, one night soon after he arrived, a group of guards lined him and several other inmates up against a wall, trying to figure out who had been responsible for an earlier fight. “They’re talking to us about why did we jump these guys,” he said. “And as they’re talking they’re punching us one by one.” Browder said that he had nothing to do with the fight, but still the officers beat him; the other inmates endured much worse. “Their noses were leaking, their faces were bloody, their eyes were swollen,” he said. Afterward, the officers gave the teens a choice: go to the medical clinic or go back to bed. But they made it clear that, if the inmates went to the clinic and told the medical staff what had happened, they would write up charges against them, and get them sent to solitary confinement. “I just told them I’ll act like nothing happened,” Browder said. “So they didn’t send us to the clinic; they didn’t write anything up; they just sent us back.” The Department of Correction refused to respond to these allegations, or to answer any questions about Browder’s stay on Rikers. But the recent U.S. Attorney’s report about R.N.D.C. recounts many instances in which officers pressured inmates not to report beatings--to “hold it down,” in Rikers parlance.

On the morning of July 28, 2010, Browder was awakened at around half past four. He was handcuffed to another inmate and herded onto a bus with a group of other prisoners. At the Bronx County Hall of Justice, they spent the day in a basement holding pen, each waiting for his chance to see a judge. When Browder’s turn came, an officer led him into a courtroom and he caught a glimpse of his mother in the spectator area. Seventy-four days had passed since his arrest. Already he had missed his seventeenth birthday, the end of his sophomore year, and half the summer.

A grand jury had voted to indict Browder. The criminal complaint alleged that he and his friend had robbed a Mexican immigrant named Roberto Bautista--pursuing him, pushing him against a fence, and taking his backpack. Bautista told the police that his backpack contained a credit card, a debit card, a digital camera, an iPod Touch, and seven hundred dollars. Browder was also accused of punching Bautista in the face.

A clerk read out the charges--“Robbery in the second degree and other crimes”--and asked Browder, “How do you plead, sir, guilty or not guilty?”

“Not guilty,” Browder said.

An officer escorted him out of the courtroom and back downstairs to return to Rikers. It no longer mattered whether his mother could find the money to bail him out. The Department of Probation had filed a “violation of probation” against him--standard procedure when someone on probation is indicted on a new violent felony--and the judge had remanded him without bail.

Browder repeatedly told O’Meara, his court-appointed lawyer, that he would never plead guilty and that he wanted to go to trial. O’Meara assumed that his courtroom defense would be “Listen, they got the wrong kid.” After all, the accusation had been made a week or two after the alleged robbery, and the victim had later changed his mind about when it occurred. (The original police report said “on or about May 2,” but Bautista later told a detective that it happened on May 8th.)

With each day he spent in jail, Browder imagined that he was getting closer to trial. Many states have so-called speedy-trial laws, which require trials to start within a certain time frame. New York State’s version is slightly different, and is known as the “ready rule.” This rule stipulates that all felony cases (except homicides) must be ready for trial within six months of arraignment, or else the charges can be dismissed. In practice, however, this time limit is subject to technicalities. The clock stops for many reasons--for example, when defense attorneys submit motions before trial--so that the amount of time that is officially held to have elapsed can be wildly different from the amount of time that really has. In 2011, seventy-four per cent of felony cases in the Bronx were older than six months.

In order for a trial to start, both the defense attorney and the prosecutor have to declare that they are ready; the court clerk then searches for a trial judge who is free and transfers the case, and jury selection can begin. Not long after Browder was indicted, an assistant district attorney sent the court a “Notice of Readiness,” stating that “the People are ready for trial.” The case was put on the calendar for possible trial on December 10th, but it did not start that day. On January 28, 2011, Browder’s two-hundred-and-fifty-eighth day in jail, he was brought back to the courthouse once again. This time, the prosecutor said, “The People are not ready. We are requesting one week.” The next court date set by the judge--March 9th--was not one week away but six. As it happened, Browder didn’t go to trial anytime that year. An index card in the court file explains:

June 23, 2011: People not ready, request 1 week.
August 24, 2011: People not ready, request 1 day.
November 4, 2011: People not ready, prosecutor on trial, request 2 weeks.
December 2, 2011: Prosecutor on trial, request January 3rd.

The Bronx courts are so clogged that when a lawyer asks for a one-week adjournment the next court date usually doesn’t happen for six weeks or more. As long as a prosecutor has filed a Notice of Readiness, however, delays caused by court congestion don’t count toward the number of days that are officially held to have elapsed. Every time a prosecutor stood before a judge in Browder’s case, requested a one-week adjournment, and got six weeks instead, this counted as only one week against the six-month deadline. Meanwhile, Browder remained on Rikers, where six weeks still felt like six weeks--and often much longer.

Like many defendants with court-appointed lawyers, Browder thought his attorney was not doing enough to help him. O’Meara, who works mostly in the Bronx and in Westchester County, never made the trip out to Rikers to see him, since a visit there can devour at least half a day. To avoid this trek, some lawyers set up video conferences at the Bronx courthouse with their clients who are in jail. O’Meara says he’s “pretty sure” he did this with Browder, but Browder says he never did. Court papers suggest a lawyer in a hurry: in the fall of 2010, O’Meara filed a notice with the court in which he mistakenly wrote that he would soon be making a motion on Browder’s case in “Westchester County Court,” instead of in the Bronx.

New York City pays lawyers like O’Meara (known locally as “18-B attorneys”) seventy-five dollars an hour for a felony case, sixty dollars for a misdemeanor. O’Meara handles all types of cases, from misdemeanors to homicides. When I met him, earlier this year, he was eating a hamburger and drinking coffee at a diner in Brooklyn after an appearance at a courthouse there. He was about to take the subway back to the Bronx, and his briefcase was bulging with papers. He told me that Browder, compared with some of his other clients, “was quiet, respectful--he wasn’t rude.” He also noted that, as the months passed, his client looked “tougher and bigger.”

Most of the time, however, Browder had no direct contact with O’Meara; the few times he tried to phone him, he couldn’t get through, so he was dependent on his mother to talk to O’Meara on his behalf. Every time Browder got the chance, he asked O’Meara the same question: “Can you get me out?” O’Meara says that he made multiple bail applications on his client’s behalf, but was unsuccessful because of the violation of probation. Meanwhile, other inmates advised Browder to tell his lawyer to file a speedy-trial motion--a motion to dismiss the case, because it hadn’t been brought to trial within six months. But, with so many one-week requests that had turned into six-week delays, Browder had yet to reach the six-month mark.

For a defendant who is in jail, the more a case drags on the greater the pressure to give up and plead guilty. By early 2012, prosecutors had offered Browder a deal--three and a half years in prison in exchange for a guilty plea. He refused. “I want to go to trial,” he told O’Meara, even though he knew that if he lost he could get up to fifteen years in state prison. Stories circulate on Rikers about inmates who plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit just to put an end to their ordeal, but Browder was determined to get his day in court. He had no idea how rare trials actually are. In 2011, in the Bronx, only a hundred and sixty-five felony cases went to trial; in three thousand nine hundred and ninety-one cases, the defendant pleaded guilty.

Not long after arriving on Rikers, Browder made his first trip to solitary confinement. It lasted about two weeks, he recalls, and followed a scuffle with another inmate. “He was throwing shoes at people--I told him to stop,” Browder said. “I actually took his sneaker and I threw it, and he got mad. He swung on me, and we started fighting.” Browder was placed in shackles and transferred by bus to the Central Punitive Segregation Unit, which everyone on Rikers calls the Bing. Housed in one of the island’s newer jails, the Bing has four hundred cells, each about twelve feet by seven.

In recent years, the use of solitary confinement has spread in New York’s jails. Between 2007 and mid-2013, the total number of solitary-confinement beds on Rikers increased by more than sixty per cent, and a report last fall found that nearly twenty-seven per cent of the adolescent inmates were in solitary. “I think the department became severely addicted to solitary confinement,” Daniel Selling, who served as the executive director of mental health for New York City’s jails, told me in April; he had quit his job two weeks earlier. “It’s a way to control an environment that feels out of control--lock people in their cell,” he said. “Adolescents can’t handle it. Nobody could handle that.” (In March, Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed a new jails commissioner, Joseph Ponte, who promised to “end the culture of excessive solitary confinement.”)

For Browder, this was the first of several trips to the Bing. As he soon discovered, a prisoner there doesn’t leave his cell except to go to rec, the shower, the visit room, the medical clinic, or court; whenever he does leave, he is handcuffed and strip-searched. To pass the time, Browder read magazines--XXL, Sports Illustrated, Hip Hop Weekly--and street novels handed on by other inmates; one was Sister Souljah’s “Midnight.” He’d always preferred video games, but he told me, “I feel like I broke myself into books through street novels.” He moved on to more demanding reading and said that his favorite book was Craig Unger’s “House of Bush, House of Saud.”

Summer is the worst time of year to be stuck in the Bing, since the cells lack air-conditioning. In the hope of feeling a breeze, Browder would sleep with the window open, only to be awakened at 5 A.M., when the cell filled with the roar of planes taking off from LaGuardia, one of whose runways is less than three hundred feet from Rikers. He would spend all day smelling his own sweat and counting the hours until his next shower. He thought about the places he would have been visiting if he were not spending the summer in jail: Mapes Pool, Coney Island, Six Flags. One day, when he called home to talk to his mother--he was allowed one six-minute call a day while in solitary--he could make out the familiar jingle of an ice-cream truck in the background.
There hadn’t been much to do at R.N.D.C., but at least there was school--classrooms where the inmates were supposed to be taken every day, to study for a G.E.D. or a high-school diploma. The Bing had only “cell study”: a correction officer slid work sheets under the door in the morning, collected them a few days later, and, eventually, returned them with a teacher’s marks. Some inmates never bothered to fill in the work sheets, but Browder told himself, “I’m already in jail--I might as well keep trying to do something.” There were times, however, when nobody came by to collect the work sheets on the day he’d been told they were due. If Browder saw a captain walk by through the small window in his door, he would shout, “Where is the school correction officer to pick up the work?”

Near the end of 2010, Browder returned to the Bing; he was there for about ten months, through the summer of 2011. He recalls that he got sent there initially after another fight. (Once an inmate is in solitary, further minor infractions can extend his stay.) When Browder first went to Rikers, his brother had advised him to get himself sent to solitary whenever he felt at risk from other inmates. “I told him, ‘When you get into a house and you don’t feel safe, do whatever you have to to get out,’ ” the brother said. “ ‘It’s better than coming home with a slice on your face.’ ”

Even in solitary, however, violence was a threat. Verbal spats with officers could escalate. At one point, Browder said, “I had words with a correction officer, and he told me he wanted to fight. That was his way of handling it.” He’d already seen the officer challenge other inmates to fights in the shower, where there are no surveillance cameras. “So I agreed to it; I said, ‘I’ll fight you.’ ” The next day, the officer came to escort him to the shower, but before they even got there, he said, the officer knocked him down: “He put his forearm on my face, and my face was on the floor, and he just started punching me in the leg.” Browder isn’t the first inmate to make such an allegation; the U.S. Attorney’s report described similar incidents.

Browder’s brother reconsidered his advice when he saw him in the Bing visiting area. For one thing, he says, Browder was losing weight. “Several times when I visited him, he said, ‘They’re not feeding me,’ ” the brother told me. “He definitely looked really skinny.” In solitary, food arrived through a slot in the cell door three times a day. For a growing teen-ager, the portions were never big enough, and in solitary Browder couldn’t supplement the rations with snacks bought at the commissary. He took to begging the officers for leftovers: “Can I get that bread?” Sometimes they would slip him an extra slice or two; often, they refused.

Browder’s brother also noticed a growing tendency toward despair. When Browder talked about his case, he was “strong, adamant: ‘No, they can’t do this to me!’ ” But, when the conversation turned to life in jail, “it’s a totally different personality, which is depressed. He’s, like, ‘I don’t know how long I can take this.’ ”

Browder got out of the Bing in the fall of 2011, but by the end of the year he was back--after yet another fight, he says. On the night of February 8, 2012--his six-hundred-and-thirty-fourth day on Rikers--he said to himself, “I can’t take it anymore. I give up.” That night, he tore his bedsheet into strips, tied them together to make a noose, attached it to the light fixture, and tried to hang himself. He was taken to the clinic, then returned to solitary. Browder told me that his sheets, magazines, and clothes were removed--everything except his white plastic bucket.

On February 17th, he was shuttled to the courthouse once again, but this time he was not brought up from the court pen in time to hear his case called. (“I’ll waive his appearance for today’s purposes,” his lawyer told the judge.) For more than a year, he had heard various excuses about why his trial had to be delayed, among them that the prosecutor assigned to the case was on trial elsewhere, was on jury duty, or, as he once told the judge, had “conflicts in my schedule.” If Browder had been in the courtroom on this day, he would have heard a prosecutor offer a new excuse: “Your Honor, the assigned assistant is currently on vacation.” The prosecutor asked for a five-day adjournment; Browder’s lawyer requested March 16th, and the judge scheduled the next court date for then.

The following night, in his solitary cell on Rikers, Browder shattered his plastic bucket by stomping on it, then picked up a piece, sharpened it, and began sawing his wrist. He was stopped after an officer saw him through the cell window and intervened.

Browder was still on Rikers Island in June of 2012, when his high-school classmates collected their diplomas, and in September, when some of them enrolled in college. In the fall, prosecutors offered him a new deal: if he pleaded guilty, he’d get two and a half years in prison, which meant that, with time served, he could go home soon. “Ninety-nine out of a hundred would take the offer that gets you out of jail,” O’Meara told me. “He just said, ‘Nah, I’m not taking it.’ He didn’t flinch. Never talked about it. He was not taking a plea.”

Meanwhile, Browder kept travelling from Rikers to the Bronx courthouse and back again, shuttling between two of New York City’s most dysfunctional bureaucracies, each system exacerbating the flaws of the other. With every trip Browder made to the courthouse, another line was added to a growing stack of index cards kept in the court file:

June 29, 2012: People not ready, request one week.
September 28, 2012: People not ready, request two weeks.
November 2, 2012: People not ready, request one week.
December 14, 2012: People not ready, request one week.

By the end of 2012, Browder had been in jail for nine hundred and sixty-one days and had stood before eight different judges. He always maintained his composure, never berating his attorney or yelling protests in court. O’Meara was impressed by his control. “I can’t imagine most people sitting in there for three years and not becoming very upset with their attorney,” he says. “He just never complained to me.” Privately, though, Browder was angry. About the prosecutors, he would tell himself, “These guys are just playing with my case.”

On March 13, 2013, Browder appeared before a new judge, Patricia M. DiMango, who had been transferred from Brooklyn as part of a larger effort to tackle the Bronx’s backlog. She was known for her no-nonsense style when dealing with defendants; at the Brooklyn courthouse, she was referred to as Judge Judy. (As it happens, this year she became a judge on “Hot Bench,” a new courtroom TV show created by Judge Judy.) In the Bronx, DiMango’s job was to review cases and clear them: by getting weak cases dismissed, extracting guilty pleas from defendants, or referring cases to trial in another courtroom. At the start of 2013, there were nine hundred and fifty-two felony cases in the Bronx, including Browder’s, that were more than two years old. In the next twelve months, DiMango disposed of a thousand cases, some as old as five years.

Judge DiMango explained to Browder, “If you go to trial and lose, you could get up to fifteen.” Then she offered him an even more tempting deal: plead guilty to two misdemeanors--the equivalent of sixteen months in jail--and go home now, on the time already served. “If you want that, I will do that today,” DiMango said. “I could sentence you today. . . . It’s up to you.”

“I’m all right,” Browder said. “I did not do it. I’m all right.”

“You are all right?” DiMango said.

“Yes,” he said. “I want to go to trial.”

Back at Rikers, other prisoners were stunned. “You’re bugging,” they told him. “You’re stupid. If that was me, I would’ve said I did it and went home.” Browder knew that it was a gamble; even though he was innocent, he could lose at trial. “I used to go to my cell and lie down and think, like, Maybe I am crazy; maybe I am going too far,” he recalled. “But I just did what I thought was right.”

On May 29th, the thirty-first court date on Browder’s case, there was another development. DiMango peered down from the bench. “The District Attorney is really in a position right now where they cannot proceed,” she said. “It is their intention to dismiss the case.” She explained that this could not officially happen until the next court date, which ended up being a week later. “I will release you today, but you have to come back here on time without any new cases,” she said. “Do you think you can do that, Mr. Browder?”

“Yes,” he said.

Browder could not believe what was happening. His battle to prove his innocence had ended. No trial, no jury, no verdict. An assistant district attorney filed a memo with the court explaining that Bautista, the man who had accused Browder, had gone back to Mexico. The District Attorney’s office had reached his brother in the Bronx and tried to arrange for him to return and testify, but then the office lost contact with the brother, too. “Without the Complainant, we are unable to meet our burden of proof at trial,” the prosecutor wrote.

Browder had to spend one more night on Rikers. By now, he had missed his junior year of high school, his senior year, graduation, the prom. He was no longer a teen-ager; four days earlier, he had turned twenty.

He didn’t know what time he would be released, so he told his mother not to bother picking him up. The next afternoon, he walked out of jail, a single thought in his mind: “I’m going home!” He took the bus to Queens Plaza, then two subways to the Bronx, and his euphoria began to dissipate. Being around so many people felt strange. Except for a few weeks, he had been in solitary confinement for the previous seventeen months.

After leaving Rikers, Browder moved back home, where his mother and two of his brothers were living. Everybody could see that he had changed. Most of the clothes in his bedroom no longer fit; he had grown an inch or two while he was away and had become brawnier. Many of his former pastimes--playing video games, watching movies, shooting hoops in the park--no longer engaged him. He preferred to spend time by himself, alone in his bedroom, with the door closed. Sometimes he found himself pacing, as he had done in solitary. When he saw old friends, he was reminded of their accomplishments and what he had not achieved: no high-school diploma, no job, no money, no apartment of his own.

Before he went to jail, he used to like sitting on his front steps with his friends, and when a group of attractive girls walked by he’d call out, “Hi. What are you doing? Where’s the party at? Can I go with you?” Now, if he managed to get a girl’s number, the first real conversation would always go the same way: she would ask him if he was in school or working, and he would feel his anxiety rise. Once he revealed that he was still living at home, without a job or a diploma, “they look at me like I ain’t worth nothing. Like I ain’t shit. It hurts to have people look at you like that.” He could explain that he’d been wrongfully arrested, but the truth felt too complicated, too raw and personal. “If I tell them the story, then I gotta hear a hundred questions,” he said. “It gets emotional for me. And those emotions I don’t feel comfortable with.”

Not long after Browder returned home, one of his relatives called an attorney named Paul V. Prestia and told him that Browder had spent three years on Rikers only to have his case dismissed. “Send him down,” Prestia said. A former prosecutor in Brooklyn, Prestia now has his own firm. On his office wall hangs a 2011 Post story about a Haitian chef from the Bronx who was mistakenly arrested for rape and spent eight days on Rikers; Prestia got the case dismissed.

When Prestia first heard Browder’s story, he thought there must be a catch; even by the sorry standards of justice in the Bronx, the case was extreme. “It’s something that could’ve been tried in a court in a matter of days,” he told me. “I don’t know how each and every prosecutor who looked at this case continued to let this happen. It’s like Kalief Browder didn’t even exist.” Earlier this year, Prestia filed a suit on Browder’s behalf against the city, the N.Y.P.D., the Bronx District Attorney, and the Department of Correction.

Robert T. Johnson, the Bronx District Attorney, will not answer questions about Browder’s case, because, once the charges were dismissed, the court records were sealed. But recently when I asked him a general question about cases that drag on and on, he was quick to deflect blame. “These long delays--two, three years--they’re horrendous, but the D.A. is not really accountable for that kind of delay,” he said. His explanation was that either the case did not actually exceed the six-month speedy-trial deadline or the defense attorney failed to bring a speedy-trial motion.

Prestia, in his lawsuit, alleges “malicious prosecution,” charging that Johnson’s prosecutors were “representing to the court that they would be ‘ready’ for trial, when in fact, they never were.” Prestia said, “The million-dollar question is: When did they really know they didn’t have a witness? Did they really not know until 2013?” He suspects that, as he wrote in his complaint, they were “seeking long, undue adjournments of these cases to procure a guilty plea from plaintiff.” The city has denied all allegations of wrongdoing, and Johnson, when I asked about these accusations, said, “Certainly if there is something uncovered that we did wrong, I will deal with that here. But I don’t expect that to be the case.”

Prestia has represented many clients who were wrongfully arrested, but Browder’s story troubles him most deeply. “Kalief was deprived of his right to a fair and speedy trial, his education, and, I would even argue, his entire adolescence,” he says. “If you took a sixteen-year-old kid and locked him in a room for twenty-three hours, your son or daughter, you’d be arrested for endangering the welfare of a child.” Browder doesn’t know exactly how many days he was in solitary--and Rikers officials, citing pending litigation, won’t divulge any details about his stay--but he remembers that it was “about seven hundred, eight hundred.”

One day last November, six months after his release, Browder retreated to his bedroom with a steak knife, intending to slit his wrists. A friend happened to stop by, saw the knife, and grabbed it. When he left the house to find Browder’s mother, Browder tried to hang himself from a bannister. An ambulance rushed him to St. Barnabas Hospital, where he was admitted to the psychiatric ward. In his medical record, a social worker describes the suicide attempt as “serious.”

One afternoon this past spring, I sat with Browder in a quiet restaurant in lower Manhattan. He is five feet seven, with a high forehead, tired eyes, and a few wisps of hair above his upper lip. “Being home is way better than being in jail,” he told me. “But in my mind right now I feel like I’m still in jail, because I’m still feeling the side effects from what happened in there.”

When I first asked if I could interview him, he was reluctant, but eventually he agreed, and we met many times. We always met in downtown Manhattan, near Prestia’s office. He didn’t want to meet in the Bronx, and seemed to feel more comfortable speaking where nobody knew him. He almost always wore the same uniform: a hoodie with the hood pulled down; a pair of earbuds, one stuck in an ear and the other swinging free; rosary beads dangling from his neck--not because he is Catholic (his family are Jehovah’s Witnesses) but “for fashion,” he said. When I asked him about Rikers, he surprised me with his willingness to speak. At times, he seemed almost unable to stop, as if he had long been craving the chance to tell somebody about what he endured. Other times, though, the act of remembering seemed almost physically painful: he would fall silent, drop his gaze, and shake his head.

Ever since Browder left Rikers, he has tried to stay busy. He sat through G.E.D. prep classes, signed up for a computer course, searched for a job, and attended weekly counselling sessions. This past March, he learned that he had passed the G.E.D. on the first try. “I gained some of my pride back,” he told me. He landed a job as a security guard--not his dream position, but it would serve while he looked for something better. By coincidence, one of the places he was sent was St. Barnabas. On his second day there, he overheard some employees talking about him; somebody seemed to have figured out that he had been in the psychiatric ward. Soon afterward, with a vague explanation, he was fired.

Prestia helped him find a part-time job, working for a friend who runs a jewelry business in the same building as Prestia’s office, near Wall Street. On May 29th--four days after his twenty-first birthday, and a year to the day after DiMango told him that he would be set free--Browder stood on a sidewalk in front of a Chase bank, handing out flyers advertising the jewelry business. He told me that he liked Wall Street--being surrounded by people with briefcases and suits, everyone walking with a sense of purpose. “When I see professional people, I see myself,” he said. “I say, ‘I want to be like them.’ ”

Exactly how he would manage this he was not sure. Most days, the progress he had made since coming home did not feel like progress to him. “It’s been a year now, and I got a part-time job, and I got my G.E.D.,” he said. “But, when you think about it, that’s nothing. People tell me because I have this case against the city I’m all right. But I’m not all right. I’m messed up. I know that I might see some money from this case, but that’s not going to help me mentally. I’m mentally scarred right now. That’s how I feel. Because there are certain things that changed about me and they might not go back.”

This month, Browder started classes at Bronx Community College. But, even now, he thinks about Rikers every day. He says that his flashbacks to that time are becoming more frequent. Almost anything can trigger them. It might be the sight of a police cruiser or something more innocuous. When his mother cooks rice and chili, he says, he can’t help remembering the rice and chili he was fed on Rikers, and suddenly, in his mind, he is back in the Bing, recalling how hungry he was all the time, especially at night, when he’d have to wait twelve hours for his next meal.

Even with his friends, things aren’t the same. “I’m trying to break out of my shell, but I guess there is no shell. I guess this is just how I am--I’m just quiet and distant,” he says. “I don’t like being this way, but it’s just natural to me now.” Every night before he goes to sleep, he checks that every window in the house is locked. When he rides the subway, he often feels terrified. “I might be attacked; I might be robbed,” he says. “Because, believe me, in jail you know there’s all type of criminal stuff that goes on.” No matter how hard he tries, he cannot forget what he saw: inmates stealing from each other, officers attacking teens, blood on the dayroom floor. “Before I went to jail, I didn’t know about a lot of stuff, and, now that I’m aware, I’m paranoid,” he says. “I feel like I was robbed of my happiness.”

Kaleif Browder, 1993-2015

Kalief Browder, 1993–2015

by Jennifer Gonnerman
The New Yorker

Last fall, I wrote about a young man named Kalief Browder, who spent three years on Rikers Island without being convicted of a crime. He had been arrested in the spring of 2010, at age sixteen, for a robbery he insisted he had not committed. Then he spent more than one thousand days on Rikers waiting for a trial that never happened. During that time, he endured about two years in solitary confinement, where he attempted to end his life several times. Once, in February, 2012, he ripped his bedsheet into strips, tied them together to create a noose, and tried to hang himself from the light fixture in his cell.

In November of 2013, six months after he left Rikers, Browder attempted suicide again. This time, he tried to hang himself at home, from a bannister, and he was taken to the psychiatric ward at St. Barnabas Hospital, not far from his home, in the Bronx. When I met him, in the spring of 2014, he appeared to be more stable.

Then, late last year, about two months after my story about him appeared, he stopped going to classes at Bronx Community College. During the week of Christmas, he was confined in the psych ward at Harlem Hospital. One day after his release, he was hospitalized again, this time back at St. Barnabas. When I visited him there on January 9th, he did not seem like himself. He was gaunt, restless, and deeply paranoid. He had recently thrown out his brand-new television, he explained, “because it was watching me.”

After two weeks at St. Barnabas, Browder was released and sent back home. The next day, his lawyer, Paul V. Prestia, got a call from an official at Bronx Community College. An anonymous donor (who had likely read the New Yorker story) had offered to pay his tuition for the semester. This happy news prompted Browder to reenroll. For the next few months he seemed to thrive. He rode his bicycle back and forth to school every day, he no longer got panic attacks sitting in a classroom, and he earned better grades than he had the prior semester.

Ever since I’d met him, Browder had been telling me stories about having been abused by officers and inmates on Rikers. The stories were disturbing, but I did not fully appreciate what he had experienced until this past April when I obtained surveillance footage of an officer assaulting him and of a large group of inmates pummeling and kicking him. I sat next to Kalief while he watched these videos for the first time. Afterward, we discussed whether they should be published on The New Yorker’s Web site. I told him that it was his decision. He said to put them online.

He was driven by the same motive that led him to talk to me for the first time, a year earlier. He wanted the public to know what he had gone through, so that nobody else would have to endure the same ordeals. His willingness to tell his story publicly--and his ability to recount it with great insight--ultimately helped persuade Mayor Bill de Blasio to try to reform the city’s court system and end the sort of excessive delays that kept him in jail for so long.

Browder’s story also caught the attention of Rand Paul, who began talking about him on the campaign trail. Jay Z met with Browder after watching the videos. Rosie O’Donnell invited him on “The View” last year and recently had him over for dinner. Browder could be a very private person, and he told almost nobody about meeting O’Donnell or Jay Z. However, in a picture taken of him with Jay Z, who draped an arm around his shoulders, Browder looked euphoric.

Last Monday, Prestia, who had filed a lawsuit on Browder’s behalf against the city, noticed that Browder had put up a couple of odd posts on Facebook. When Prestia sent him a text message, asking what was going on, Browder insisted he was O.K. “Are you sure everything is cool?” Prestia wrote. Browder replied: “Yea I’m alright thanks man.” The two spoke on Wednesday, and Browder did seem fine. On Saturday afternoon, Prestia got a call from Browder’s mother: he had committed suicide.

That night, Prestia and I visited the family’s home in the Bronx. Fifteen relatives--aunts, uncles, cousins--sat crammed together in the front room with his parents and siblings. The mood was alternately depressed, angry, and confused. Two empty bottles of Browder’s antipsychotic drug sat on a table. Was it possible that taking the drug had caused him to commit suicide? Or could he have stopped taking it and become suicidal as a result?

His relatives recounted stories he’d told them about being starved and beaten by guards on Rikers. They spoke about his paranoia, about how he often suspected that the cops or some other authority figures were after him. His mother explained that the night before he told her, “Ma, I can’t take it anymore.” “Kalief, you’ve got a lot of people in your corner,” she told him.

One cousin recalled that when Browder first got home from jail, he would walk to G.E.D. prep class every day, almost an hour each way. Another cousin remembered seeing him seated by the kitchen each morning with his schoolwork spread out before him.

His parents showed me his bedroom on the second floor. Next to his bed was his MacBook Air. (Rosie O’Donnell had given it to him.) A bicycle stood by the closet. There were two holes near the door, which he had made with his fist some months earlier. Mustard-yellow sheets covered his bed. And, to the side of the room, atop a jumble of clothes, there were two mustard-yellow strips that he had evidently torn from his bedsheets.

As his father explained, he’d apparently decided that these torn strips of sheet were not strong enough. That afternoon, at about 12:15 P.M., he went into another bedroom, pulled out the air conditioner, and pushed himself out through the hole in the wall, feet first, with a cord wrapped around his neck. His mother was the only other person home at the time. After she heard a loud thumping noise, she went upstairs to investigate, but couldn’t figure out what had happened. It wasn’t until she went outside to the backyard and looked up that she realized that her youngest child had hanged himself.

That evening, in a room packed with family members, Prestia said, “This case is bigger than Michael Brown!” In that case, in which a police officer shot Brown, an unarmed teen-ager, in Ferguson, Missouri, Prestia recalled that there were conflicting stories about what happened. And the incident took, he said, “one minute in time.” In the case of Kalief Browder, he said, “When you go over the three years that he spent [in jail] and all the horrific details he endured, it’s unbelievable that this could happen to a teen-ager in New York City. He didn’t get tortured in some prison camp in another country. It was right here!”

State Terror Against People of Color

by Chris Hedges
Truthdig

SANTA ANA, Calif.--The police murder of poor people of color--occurring at a rate of roughly two a day across the country--is not only about the indiscriminate use of lethal force. It is also about maintaining an ongoing climate of terror in marginal communities. It is about making it impossible for the poor, cast aside by corporate capitalists as surplus labor, to organize and build meaningful lives and to resist. It is terror by design. And it will not stop until police are disarmed--the authority to use lethal force should be restricted to specialized, highly regulated police units--and finally held accountable under the law. Until the rule of law becomes a reality for those who live in marginal communities, until we obliterate the poverty--the mechanism that keeps people trapped in squalor like penned animals--until we stop gunning the poor down in our streets, the nightmare will not stop. In fact, as poverty and inequality expand, this nightmare will only grow.

Families, suffocating in grief, terrified for their children, unable to find justice, rendered invisible by the media and crushed by poverty--the worst of all crimes--endure a hell that is directly linked to the plague of mass incarceration, Jim and Jane Crow laws, sunset laws, lynching and slave patrols. This terror is the latest manifestation of white supremacy and the expression of a corporate capitalist state that consciously creates huge pools of unemployed and underemployed. The destitute, desperate for work and kept in a state of constant fear, are easily exploited and unable to rise up against their oppressors.

Joel Acevedo

Several days ago I met three mothers in Santa Ana whose sons had been murdered by police here in Orange County, Calif. Manuel Diaz, who was unarmed, was shot to death July 21, 2012, by Anaheim police Officer Nicholas Bennallack, also responsible for a fatal shooting in 2012. Bennallack was cleared in both killings. During protests over the Diaz killing, Joel Acevedo, 21, was killed July 22, 2012, by Anaheim police Officer Kelly Phillips, who had been involved in the fatal shooting of Caesar Cruz in 2009. Phillips too was cleared twice. Paul Joseph Quintanar, 19, died when he was struck by freeway traffic as officers of the Tustin Police Department tried to arrest him on Sept. 8, 2011. He had been on his way to buy a bottle of water from a 7-Eleven. Marcel Ceja, on Nov. 4, 2011, was shot to death by a police officer in Anaheim as he was walking to a store with two friends.

In Anaheim alone, where Disneyland markets a fantasy vision of a happy America, the police shot 37 people between 2003 and 2011, killing 21 of them, mostly people of color. As is usual across the United States, all of the police officers involved were cleared of criminal wrongdoing.

“It was 4 o’clock in the afternoon--in the neighborhood, there was a couple of children’s parties going on,” said Genevieve Huizar, the mother of Manuel Diaz. “They had jumpers for children to play on. My son was in the alley talking to a couple of friends. A police car came into the alley. The police got out. They pointed at him for some reason. When they pointed at him he ran. He ran around our apartment building, to the right. He was blocked by a gate. Officer Nick Bennallack came around the corner. He said he thought my son had a gun in his hand. It turned out to be my son’s cellphone. My son was shot in the lower back. As Manuel was falling to his knees, the second bullet got him in the right side of the head.”

Manuel Diaz

How could the police do this in broad daylight in front of children?” she asked. “My son wasn’t doing anything. He wasn’t on parole or probation. He wasn’t committing a crime.”

The Diaz shooting triggered an uprising in Anaheim. Residents hauled mattresses onto the streets and set them on fire. Crowds threw rocks, bottles and other projectiles at police. Police officers fanned out in the neighborhood to buy the cellphones of witnesses to the Diaz shooting in an attempt to keep any video of the killing from being made public, neighborhood residents told the media. The day after the killing, with protests still taking place, police chased and fatally shot Joel Acevedo. In response to the protests, members of the police force patrolled the streets in camouflage uniforms, as if they were at war.

First they [the police] pushed him down,” Marie Sales said of her son Paul Quintanar. “They searched him. Then they started to rough him up. He was talking to them. He complied with everything that they wanted. Then two to three officers were on top of him. He got scared. He was chased onto the 5 Freeway. They pulled guns on him. He was hit [by vehicles] and thrown to the onramp on the 5 Freeway. The police were never investigated.”

Paul Quintanar

Barbara Padilla lost her son Marcel Ceja on Nov. 4, 2011, in Anaheim as he was walking to the store with two friends. Anaheim police Officer David Garcia approached the young men. Ceja ran. Garcia shot him twice in the chest.

“My son was taken to UCI hospital,” Padilla said. “Nobody called me. He died alone at the hospital. The police then appeared at my house and searched it without a warrant. The officer was never charged. We went to trial twice [after filing lawsuits]. We lost both times.”

These killings do not end with the funerals of the young men. They reverberate, as they are meant to do, through poor neighborhoods, leaving in their wake constant stress, anxiety and fear that infect households.

The message this violence sends to poor people of color is this: We can kill you and your children with impunity. There is nothing you can do about it. You have no rights. You will never be safe. And if you attempt rise up and resist we will kill you and your children en masse.

“I’m constantly screaming, ‘Where are my kids?’ ” Sales said. “I am constantly calling them to make sure they’re not outside, or that they are at least inside the gate. Your mind is always on ‘it’s gonna happen again, it’s not gonna stop here.’ My son’s little brother was beaten by the cops two days before my son was killed. I think, ‘They are going to kill another one of my kids.’ I can’t get that out of my head. I constantly ask, ‘Who is next, what are they going to do to us next?’ I don’t have any ease. You can’t let your kids go down the street to the store because the cops are there. You don’t know if they are going to get stopped, or if they are going to get beat up, or worse. My son was just getting a bottle of water, no crime, no dispatch, no call, and now he’s not here. Who’s to say it won’t happen again?”

The killings routinely shatter and at times destroy the lives of families left behind.

“My daughter turned to drugs and alcohol because she misses her brother so much,” Huizar said. “She can’t stand to be sober. It impacts your whole family. It impacts her children.”

Huizar asked me if she could read some of the names of those killed by police in Anaheim and other cities in Orange County. She pulled out a paper and recited from the long list, made up almost entirely of the names of people of color. The women remained silent after she finished, grief etched across their faces.

After losing a child to police violence, said Padilla, “it is like you just barely exist.” She has two other sons. One is a U.S. Marine.

Orange County is divided between the wealthy white elites, notorious as conservative Republicans, and impoverished Hispanic and black populations, especially in Anaheim, Santa Ana and Tustin. Police shootings take place almost exclusively in the areas where poor people of color reside. Those who hold power, however, even in cities such as Anaheim, where Hispanics are at least half the population, are usually rich and white. And in cities where people of color are integrated into the power elite, such as Santa Ana, quislings doggedly protect the status quo.

It is common to see rows of poor black and brown men seated abjectly in a line along a curb in poor neighborhoods as police officers check their documents. Police routinely search backpacks as children leave schools, uttering threats, according to mothers, such as “You could be next.”

“I’ve lived in Anaheim my whole life, my parents were born in Anaheim,” Padilla said. “It’s been going on for forever. Anaheim has always been a racist city. The Ku Klux Klan used to meet at Pearson Park.”

“And it’s gotten worse,” she added. “The police are now on a killing spree.”

The mothers said they discovered online posts by gang-unit police officers boasting that they were part of a “shooting squad.” The posts included drawings of high-caliber weapons, skulls and the Grim Reaper. After the mothers used the downloaded images in a street protest against police violence, the images were hastily removed from the Internet.

“Revolt is simmering,” said Chicanos Unidos’ Gaby Hernandez, whose nephew’s father was murdered by police. “People don’t even want the police to come in anymore. They say, ‘We’ll handle our own issues. Stay away.’ ”

The killings and police intimidation in Anaheim are carried out within sight of Disneyland, a tourist attraction the women detest. And when the one-year anniversary of the uprising put protesters in the streets, the Anaheim Police Department brought in military-style gear and armored vehicles to protect Disneyland and intimidate the marchers.

“Disney is a corporation that wants to take these neighborhoods and pretty much wipe them out,” Huizar said, “even though we are the ones serving the food and cleaning up around Disney for minimal pay without medical benefits.”

“Disney functions as a Brave New World form of oppression,” Gabriel San Roman, a journalist for the OC Weekly, said to me in an interview. “There’s this corporate image of childhood innocence. Then, when riots happen, you have ‘1984.’ It’s the bludgeon of repression.”

San Roman said participants in a July 2012 street protest against police were startled to hear huge explosions. “There were people’s cathartic outbursts in the streets, yelling, people getting out their frustrations against what they’ve experienced for years, and at that very moment at 9:30 everyone heard explosions in the sky,” he said. “It was the Disneyland fireworks. That moment tells you everything you need to know about Anaheim and about corporations like Disneyland.”

America's Unpeople: Criminalizing Poverty in the Richest Country in the Wolrd

by Charles Davis
The Intercept

A year ago he slept in his own apartment, but today Charles Jackson sleeps under a bridge bordering Silver Lake, one of the more fashionable neighborhoods in Los Angeles. A few dozen strangers share the encampment; some become neighbors, while others come and go. Jackson wants to get off the streets, but as many of those who live on the margins have found, it is easier to lose a home than find another.

“People say, ‘This is going to be temporary, you know, until I get out from under this rock,’” he told me. A kind-looking brown-eyed man in his mid-50s, Jackson stands in front of the tent he lives in, looking away as we talk, his voice barely louder than a whisper. Beside us, Jackson’s white-and-tan terrier, Ozzie — well-groomed and clearly beloved — pokes his nose out from the front of the tent, panting in the midday sun. “Two years pass by, four, five years pass by; before you know it, you’re ten years homeless in the streets because out here, time is nothing. You get to not know what day it is, what month it is.”

Life on the streets, he said, “grows on you.” His well-stocked tent is evidence of this. There’s a full-size mattress, a stool, a big jug of water, pots and pans — the makings of an apartment, underneath a bridge.

Charles Jackson outside his tent under an underpass in Los Angeles, California.

 

Photo: Theeightpointone for The Intercept

Jackson, originally from Chicago, came to live under the bridge after serving nine months of a two-year prison sentence for possession of crack cocaine. He got out early thanks to California’s Proposition 47, a 2014 measure that reduced most drug possession cases from a felony to a misdemeanor. He’s clean now, he said, but many of those around him use drugs. The influences that come with his living environment, Jackson said, were not making the road to recovery any easier.

In the last couple of years there has been a significant increase in homelessness around Los Angeles. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the city, with its Mediterranean climate and 300 days of a sunshine a year, is second only to New York City when it comes to its population of people without homes. Since 2013, the number has increased by at least 12 percent across Los Angeles county, according to a biannual count conducted by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. In the areas served by the authority, 41,174 people are homeless, only a third of whom live in shelters or transitional housing. In the city itself, 9,535 people are homeless.

“There’s clearly a crisis,” said Maria Foscarinis, founder and executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. It is not one confined to Southern California. Nationally, according to her organization, “at least 2.5 to 3.5 million Americans sleep in shelters, transitional housing, and public places not meant for human habitation” each year; another 7.4 million Americans have lost their homes and are living precariously, “doubled-up with family or friends.” On any given night, at least 578,000 people sleep on the street, according to federal numbers. As the number of people living in poverty jumped nearly 20 percent over the last decade, the country lost about10,000 units  of affordable public housing annually.

Skid Row in Los Angeles, California.

 

Photo: Theonepointeight for The Intercept

These figures are sobering, but in Los Angeles advocates for the homeless point to an even more disturbing trend: the increasing criminalization of people without homes. Public officials and business leaders “are looking for a quick fix,” Foscarinis told me, and while imprisoning a homeless person may cost more than securing his or her housing, hauling someone away and out of sight creates the appearance of doing something. On June 16, the city council voted 14-1 to make it easier to confiscate the possessions of homeless people, reducing the three-day notice currently required to 24 hours (and subjecting bulky items, such as mattresses, to immediate removal). The move was finalized a week later, with the support of Mayor Eric Garcetti, though on July 22 he called for these measures to be enforced compassionately. Responding to the complaints of property owners in Venice, the city is also looking to reinstate a ban on living in vehicles.

“The de facto policy on homelessness in L.A. is enforcement and criminalization,” said Eric Ares, an organizer with the Los Angeles Community Action Network, a group on skid row that advocates for the homeless. Ares sees the mayor’s call for compassion as empty rhetoric that distracts attention from what the city could be doing. “At this point it’s no secret what the solution is: it’s housing and services,” Ares said. “But what we’re seeing is — and this has been going on for at least 10 years, particularly in the gentrifying parts of Los Angeles — a blank check for policing.”

Charles Jackson has experienced this aggressive policing firsthand. Downtown, cops regularly do what he calls “jump-outs,” where they grab you and “get you up against the wall,” he said, searching for any contraband that might justify a citation or stint in jail. More than half the $100 million a year L.A. spends combatting homelessness — as much as $87.3 million — goes to the police, who use it to patrol homeless communities and put people in jail. In 2013, the Los Angeles Police Department arrested 15,000 homeless people, accounting for 14 percent of all arrests. (Neither the mayor’s office nor the LAPD responded to several requests for comment.)

A sign posted on a wall on Skid Row, Los Angeles, California.

 

Photo: Theonepointeight for The Intercept

In 2014, the L.A. County Department of Health Services proposed converting a dilapidated hotel in downtown L.A. into housing for those who lack it, complete with in-house mental health care and substance abuse treatment. It’s a proven model carried out most successfully in Salt Lake City, where the number of people living on the streets has declined 72 percentsince officials there realized it costs a third as much to house the poor as it does to criminalize them. In L.A. the plan was defeated amid vocal opposition from developers and property owners. Rather than housing for the poor, the area needed, the president of the downtown neighborhood council told the Los Angeles Times, was a boutique hotel.

L.A. is not alone in treating the side effects of housing insecurity as a crime.According to the National Law Center, around the country there has been a 60 percent increase in city-wide bans on camping in public, and a 119 percent increase in bans on sleeping in vehicles since 2011. “This is a trend,” says Foscarinis. “In many cities, there’s a misguided view that ‘doing something’ means passing a law that makes it a crime to be homeless. Clearly that doesn’t work.”

Indeed, while cities are busy treating symptoms, the root of the problem is not that hard to figure out: People most often become homeless when they do not have enough money to live in a home — and so long as that is not addressed, the problem will persist. The homeless authority in L.A., which oversees the city’s shelters and services for those living on the streets, has been clear about this; the authority traced increases in homelessness to lingering effects of the economic recession and what it called “the trifecta of unemployment, stagnant wages and a lack of affordable housing.” (A spokesperson for the homeless authority did not respond to an interview request.)

City officials say the right things. “Ending homelessness is one of my top priorities as mayor,” said Garcetti, a Democrat who took office in 2013. Last year, he pledged to end veteran homelessness in L.A. within 17 months. That was 11 months ago — and the number of homeless veterans has not gone down at all. (That initiative, while laudable, also sends a troubling message: that some of those without homes are more worthy of help than others.)

A makeshift shelter on Skid Row in Los Angeles, California.

 

Photo: Theeightpointone for The Intercept

The city does provide services for the homeless, of course, but advocates say those services are underfunded and not always attainable in practice. “I’ve known people who have been on Section 8 [public housing] wait lists for literally 8 to 10 years,” said Ares. Meanwhile, while the vacancy rate in L.A. is set to drop to an historic low of 2 percent, meaning that each unit available to rent in what one study calls the “most unaffordable rental market in the nation” has a line of applicants who can pay out of pocket. For those with Section 8 vouchers, “it’s difficult … to locate units right now,” according to the director of the city’s program, and if they can’t find a unit within six months of getting the voucher they lose it — as happens to a quarter of those lucky enough to receive them.

When I spoke to Jackson outside his tent, he told me he moved away from downtown to avoid police harassment. “I’ve been to a lot of cities and a lot of states,” Jackson said. “The Los Angeles police? They are a joke. I’ve seen some of the pettiest stuff I have ever seen out here in California.” He showed me a citation he received the day before when he said police came by, lined him up alongside a dozen of his neighbors, then cited them for blocking the sidewalk. The citation means Jackson will have to go to court — and “that’s the cycle,” he said, one of the many ways homeless people get caught up in the criminal justice system. “They might intend to show up, but they don’t,” he told me. “It then turns into a warrant and then you’re going to the county jail.”

It’s only getting worse, according to Eres. In addition to the new laws, police are stepping up enforcement of older laws, particularly downtown. The effect is not to decrease homelessness, but to push it somewhere else, to make it another neighborhood’s problem, until those residents complain and people without homes must again move on. “We’re seeing more and more laws being passed that end up, practically speaking, punishing people for being homeless; punishing people that have no other options,” said Ares.

The emphasis on policing can also have deadly consequences. LAPD officers have recently killed several homeless people in a spate of incidents that have not yet led to any consequences for those in uniform. In July 2014, officers shot bean bag rounds at Carlos Ocana, a man with mental illness who had climbed up to a billboard; the aggression resulted in Ocana falling to his death. In March 2015, police shot and killed an unarmed man in his tent on skid row, Charly “Africa” Leundeu Keunang, alleging he reached for an officer’s gun, And in May, police shot and killed another unarmed man,Brendon Glenn, after responding to a report that he was harassing customers outside a bar in Venice.

Charles Jackson with his dog, Ozzie, inside his tent in Los Angeles, California.

 

Photo: Theonepointeight for The Intercept

For his part, Jackson understands why some residents might not like having an encampment nearby. “Not everybody here is respectful,” he told me. “The majority do meth, speed, they steal from each other,” he said, without judgment. “Their parent was most likely on drugs too.” Still, “others of us land here because of hard times,” he continued. “We fell through the cracks.”

Whenever I talk to Jackson, he says it’s time for him and Ozzie to go. “I need to move on,” he told me one of the last times we spoke. “The majority of people that are out there, they have grown comfortable in this mess.” It’s not just some of those on the streets who have achieved some level of comfort with their situation, a commentary on the human ability to adapt to trying circumstances, but the rest of us — the housed majority — who have accepted a status quo that treats the homeless as little more than a human nuisance, their inconvenient existence reduced in practice to the threat they allegedly pose to property and commerce.

“If you have nowhere to go,” Ares told me, “by virtue of your not being able to go anywhere you’re breaking the law.” In L.A. and cities across the United States, it is effectively illegal to be dirt poor in a country where more than45 million people live in poverty. “We can’t arrest our way out of this problem,” said Ares. For now, though, we’ll keep trying.

See The Intercept’s photo essay “Scenes from Skid Row.”