Imani Tafari-Ama | Incarceration and injustice: who pays the price?

The film 13th is adapted from the book by Michelle Alexander entitled “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colourblindness.” which provides a sharp critique of the prison industrial complex in the United States (US), the leader of the “free world”. President Barak Obama provides the opening statement of this feature on racialised inequalities.

“So let’s look at the statistics,” President Obama said. “The United States is home to five per cent of the world’s population but 25 per cent of the world’s prisoners.”

A further statistical drill down is provided in the documentary’s introductory storyboard, which reveals that the prison population spiralled upwards from 300,000 in 1972 to a whopping 2.3 million at the time that the film was released on October 7, 2016. This certainly puts a twisted spin on what it means to live in the land of the free. One cannot help being cynical, and this was evident in Ms Alexander’s comment that “the very folks who often express so much concern about the cost and expense of the system are often very unwilling to talk in any serious way about remedying the harm that has been done”.

The title of the film refers to the Thirteenth Amendment in the Constitution of the US, which grants freedom to all Americans except criminals, even after they have served their prison terms. As Henry Louis Gates Jr comments, in relation to the mass incarceration of African Americans after the Civil War, “they had to provide the labour to rebuild the economy of the South”. Many major companies invest in this profitable economic arrangement, which depends on the felonisation of the African population in a virtual reinvention of enslavement. The racialisation of the prison system is at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement.

In light of the millions of citizens who have been disappeared in this system, why did the W.E.B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts add the papers of Benjamin LaGuer, a convicted felon, to its collections? The library is also home to the W.E.B. Du Bois Center, which, according to its website, was “established in 2009 to engage audiences in discussion and scholarship about global issues involving race, labour, and justice”. The LaGuer papers fit in with that mission. They are in more than 20 boxes containing legal documents, essays, and extensive press coverage of the much-publicised case of a man who spent most of his life in prison, accused of raping a white woman, a crime he maintained he did not commit.

NO REPRIEVE

LaGuer’s refusal to bow to the overwhelming pressure that he faced from the US justice system did not earn him brownie points or reprieve, even when he contracted cancer. Just before he died, he was released for a month based on his terminal diagnosis before being sent back behind bars on a technicality. The long reach of the law was relentless.

Ben LaGuer, Puerto Rican-American, was born in 1963 and incarcerated when he was 27 for the rape of Lenice Plante, then in her 50s and his next door neighbour. LaGuer had just moved into his father’s apartment on his release from the army. His father was not home at the time, so it was his word against the victim’s. One glaring anomaly was that Plante, who suffered from schizophrenia, was put on the witness stand and pointed to LaGuer, the only dark-skinned person in the room, as her attacker. No other evidence linked him to the crime. And another Puerto Rican, who had visited the victim in her apartment several times and who had a history of violence, was never questioned.

Benjamin spent 36 years fighting to be free and died in 2020 without achieving this objective. He could have enjoyed parole if he had admitted to the rape charge and subjected himself to requisite therapy offered to sex offenders. Instead, he stolidly maintained his innocence and opted to stay behind bars from where he earned a Liberal Arts Degree, graduating magna cum laude. In his chronicling of the life and times of Ben LaGuer, veteran journalist Eric Goldscheider, has poked several holes in the case, which suggest multiple instances of prosecutorial malpractice (https://bookmarkmagazine.library.umass.edu/unprecedented-miracles).

LaGuer wrote copious legal strategies, directing his defence in his many challenges to his conviction. Over the years, he was the subject of substantial press coverage. He was also a flashpoint for the election campaign of Deval Patrick when he ran for governor of Massachusetts because he had previously contributed money to LaGuer’s cause. He withdrew his support for the celebrated convict after a DNA test seemingly implicated LaGuer. It has since been established that underwear police illegally took from LaGuer’s apartment (not the crime scene!) and then mixed in with other evidence was the source of the DNA. Benjie attracted the advocacy and attention of a panorama of political commentators, including Noam Chomksy, who corresponded with and spoke out on behalf of the erudite prisoner. Over time, LaGuer became extraordinarily proficient in law, and this enabled him to present his own case and make submissions on behalf of his fellow-inmates.

STARK DESCRIPTION

In 1998, Benjie was the winner of the Pen Writing Award for Prisoners with an essay A Man Who Loves His Mother Loves Women, an insightful biographical treatment. In his opening sentence in another essay, “Quarantined Behind Concrete and Steel,” he provides a stark description of his social context: “The first thing I see in the morning is the sunlight coming through the bars. The first thing I hear is a whistle signalling five minutes to count. Everybody has to be on his feet at 7:15 a.m. so the guards can check to make sure that nobody’s dead.”

Joy James, who has published two articles referencing LaGuer’s case, concurs with Michelle Alexander when she asserts that no one can compensate the victim for the harm they suffer at the hands of those smeared by wrongful accusations. Incarceration compounds the trauma of the miscarriage of justice. In LaGuer’s case, the race-sex stereotyping of the accused, even without material evidence, had such a profound impact on the public mind that nothing could erase the misleading impression. Comparing LaGuer’s case to the travesty suffered by the young men accused of the attack on the Central Park “jogger,” James, in The Case of Ben LaGuer and the 2006 Gubernatorial Election, notes that the 2002 exoneration of the falsely accused young men was too little, too late, to heal the hurt.

The UMass Ben LaGuer collection provides a rich trove of primary documents that seasoned authors, as well as undergraduates writing a term paper, can now access to reach their own conclusions and then examine the consequences of those conclusions. LaGuer’s case invites academics and policymakers to invest in archiving and analysing the stories of underserved communities, including the incarcerated – the invisible as well as the famous.

So in addition to being preserved for posterity, the papers have the potential to be a teaching tool for conveying lessons and experiences, from one generation to the next (https://www.umass.edu/news/article/papers-benjamin-laguer-acquired-umass...).

Dr Imani Tafari-Ama is a research fellow at The Institute for Gender and Development Studies, Regional Coordinating Office (IGDS-RCO), at The University of the West Indies. She is the author of ‘Blood, Bullets and Bodies: Sexual Politics Below Jamaica’s Poverty Line’ and ‘Up for Air: This Half Has Never Been Told’, a historical novel on the Tivoli Gardens incursion. Send feedback to imani.tafariama@uwimona.edu.jm.