Criminal Justice on Camera

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

The New Yorker magazine, in partnership with The Marshall Project (a truly wonderful nonprofit news group that writes about the American criminal justice system), has created a series of short films about the system, which has put two million, two hundred thousand persons behind bars.

No other country on earth locks up its residents with greater ferocity.

China, second to the U.S. in prison population, has more than four times the people who live there, but one-seventh the rate of incarceration.

One of the U.S. two million-plus was Ayana, subject of the first film who had the great good fortune of being born black and beautiful, but the somewhat lesser good fortune of being born black and beautiful in the United States and growing up to be neither an entertainer nor sports star.

Ayana was married to another black person neither entertainer nor sports star; he played fast and loose with his business, she put some of the money he illegally earned into her own account. Though she had nothing to do with her husband’s business, both were charged with bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

It wouldn’t happen to most suburban housewives: the government wouldn’t orphan most white kids aged six and twelve by putting both their parents in prison. It wouldn’t happen to the current First Lady of the United States, for example, who’s likely lived most of her married life benefiting from laundered money. But it happened to Ayana.

Three years. The same sentence as her husband.

Her first day was the worst day. Thrown into a dorm of newbies — soccer moms detoxing from oxycontin addictions, throwing up all over themselves. Most of them there for money and drug crimes committed by their husbands or boyfriends. Knowing no one. Fearing everyone.

All ages. All cultures. Though inmates hung out mostly by culture, her best friend was a white girl: two suburban housewives, hanging together.

Visits were the best days, and the worst. Her children had gone to school the morning of her arrest, and when they returned, their parents…just gone.

Their caretakers told the children their parents were called into the military. The green jumpsuit mommy appeared in on visitation days was her military uniform. It could not have fooled the twelve-year-old.

Once her daughter didn’t want to leave. She told Ayana, “I just want to stay here with you.” We can go get McDonald’s, she pleaded with her mom, bring it back.

It felt like her kids were ripped from her, again and again. “You kind of feel like a failure, and now you’re failing again.”

She’s out of prison, now, living with her kids. She divorced the man who gave her a little extra money for her own account.

She’s making it on her own, and doesn’t feel like a failure anymore.

“We have our own place, and we have stability, and we stay where we are, and we happy where we are.

“I did it.”