Ziggy Mack
"We are worse off in some ways,” Demetria Frank says, in characteristically forthright fashion, comparing the Memphis of today to the Memphis of 1968. (Frank’s surname certainly fits.) What are those ways? “The way we incarcerate black men.”
Frank, the executive coordinator of Project MI, a collaborative aimed at ending mass incarceration, has served since 2013 as assistant professor at the University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law.
A dramatic increase in incarceration rates over the past four decades has granted the United States the dubious distinction of being the world’s foremost jailer. According to data gathered by the American Civil Liberties Union, the U.S. accounts for 25 percent of the world’s prison population, despite being only 5 percent of overall global population. Within our booming — and profitable — prison industry, layers of disparity persist, like the rates at which black and white offenders are imprisoned for drug offenses. Though drug use is roughly equivalent among blacks and whites, blacks are incarcerated for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of whites.
Early in her career, as a community prosecutor in Dallas, Demetria Frank learned to approach law enforcement “with the spirit of restorative justice.” She was on the scene during prostitution stings, setting up a “courtroom on the spot” so that arrested women — almost always dealing with issues of economic disenfranchisement, domestic violence, chemical dependence, or some combination — could be arraigned then and there. The women then would be presented with rehabilitation options — treatment, shelter — rather than jail time.
Also in Dallas, Frank was appointed an associate judge, with a courthouse “in the middle of the county jail. I would see all these black men, who were young, who were suffering from different social issues — addictions, domestic issues, anger management issues.”
After returning to the private sector for a time, during which she practiced toxic torts law (a type of personal-injury law when the plaintiff sues for damage related to exposure to a chemical or dangerous substance), Frank found that “my life had changed.” Litigation wasn’t the right fit anymore. She was a single mother; she couldn’t drop everything and leave town to try a case. An academic job, she realized, would suit her life-stage better.
Which is how she “ended up in Wyoming — the biggest, craziest transition I’ve ever made,” she laughs. Frank connected with her students at the University of Wyoming College of Law, but “the lack of diversity there — I felt useless in academia in a way. The things I cared about, that I wanted to write about — none of those are issues there.”
Those things are certainly issues in Memphis. In the classroom, Frank — a native of Galveston, Texas — teaches evidence, trial practice, litigation; her work touches on implicit bias, on the role race plays in the courtroom and in the justice system. Outside the classroom, “it was as easy as turning on the nightly news, or seeing those pamphlets in the drugstore with all the people who’ve been arrested — I’d never seen one of those before I got here.”
Building on the community model that she had practiced in Dallas, Frank approached her academic work on trial fairness with a knowledge of how “deeply embedded the problems are, even before you get to the trial phase.”
Frank cites estimates that onein three black men in Memphis will be incarcerated at some point in his lifetime. “And in specific communities,” she points out, “that number turns into almost half.” By comparison, only one in every 17 or 18 white men in the city will be incarcerated in his lifetime. For black women, the numbers are roughly comparable to white men; white women are locked up at significantly lower rates.
“Mass incarceration increases violence,” Frank asserts. In her view, beginning in the post-Civil Rights era, “These groups were painted as lawless. And now, it’s ‘justified’ because our kids are violent, but mass incarceration increases that. You take one-third of the black male workforce out of the community — what happens?” The feedback loop of violence and mass incarceration.
“We tell our kids to deal with social circumstances most of us could not deal with as adults,” Frank says. It’s like, she says, if “as a parent, I told you to clean the house — but I’m not going to give you any cleaning supplies, any equipment; I’m not going to give you the time to do it, or any resources to do this project, which is to stay out of trouble.”
Project MI exists to provide those resources.
Other groups working in the same space are there to intervene once an individual already has been caught up in the justice system. Project STAND, for instance, or JIFF Memphis (Juvenile Intervention & Faith-based Follow-up) — “they do great work,” Frank says, “but it’s an after-the-fact intervention. They have to get in trouble first.”
By contrast, Project MI tries to find ways to reach young people before that first ticket is written.
In late 2016, Frank and other professors at the university (“we have a partnership with our Institute of Health Law and Policy,” she notes, as well as in relationships with scholars of criminal justice and education) began to collaborate in collecting data on how to keep youths out of the justice system. One goal of the initial collaboration was to deconstruct the silos that often separate work that could logically, and productively, be connected. Those studying education may not be looking at outside social circumstances, public health experts not looking at school settings, policy wonks not examining imprisonment, release, recidivism.
“But,” Frank comments, “I felt like we were doing this Petri dish approach. Like, let me have some of your stuff, you have some of mine, and we’ll just study it.” The work has evolved quickly, and far beyond any single Petri dish. Today, Project MI encompasses academic collaboration, as at its inception. But the collaborative is finding its way, more and more, into the community. To that end, they have partnered on programs and projects with Just City, the Black Lives Matter Memphis Chapter, and the Ben F. Jones Chapter of the Black Bar Association.
"Every young black man should have a little bit of that in their teen years, which is sad,” Frank says. She’s talking about self-advocacy: helping young men develop a working knowledge of the criminal justice system, their rights within that system — and how to stay out of it.
Attorneys are inundated; a young man who finds himself in the system may have little or no sense of what’s going on, what the process is. That lethal combination produces unintended and often uncorrectable consequences.
Project MI, along with Project STAND (a Memphis-based community-outreach initiative centered around providing resources for survivors of domestic violence) has launched a pilot program at Carver High School, an alternative school in South Memphis. Frank explains that many — though not all — of the students at Carver have been expelled or suspended from their original school, the school where they are districted. And some students at Carver are there after having been detained — upon release, they float out to Carver, where they can work on job readiness — “making them employable so that they don’t commit crimes. That’s the idea, to put it bluntly,” Frank explains.
“One of the biggest weaknesses in our juvenile system: Once a kid is given their list of things to do, or given a trial date, they don’t know what to do in the meantime to make a good showing to the court. We help them with court portfolios. Help them develop more of an awareness of the system. I think it’s sad that a kid could get arrested, serve six months in detention, get out, and still know nothing about the justice system.”
Frank assesses the self-advocacy work with youth — as practiced at Carver — as the most important piece of Project MI’s current work.
“Circumstances for our youth, in Memphis, are so debilitating, for so many kids, that they need the same kinds of tools that kids with physical and mental disabilities have. Socially, they are debilitated. I don’t like how that sounds — but that’s basically what it is. Most kids in Memphis have been exposed to at least two ACEs.
ACEs: adverse childhood ex-periences. These include abuse (including child abuse, domestic abuse, psychological and verbal abuse), alcoholism or other chemical dependence in the family, dysfunction, neglect. These experiences are found to produce toxic stress and the kind of debilitation that Frank references. More than 50 percent of all youth in Shelby County have been exposed to at least one ACE, with 12 percent exposed to four or more ACEs.
So in the program at Carver, for example, Frank hopes — down the line — to incorporate more holistic education. “If we want to stop kids from cycling into the juvenile justice system, and into the adult system, we need to address the bigger picture,” she says. That’s where she sees the academic side of Project MI and the community work merging: determining what policy shifts are needed in order to provide holistic education.
This coming summer, Project MI will host a youth leadership summit, called My City, My Voice. The overarching goal of the summit is to resource under-resourced kids.
Leading up to the summit, an art contest is in the works. “One of the ideas,” Frank says, “being that kids need other ways to let out their expression, to express themselves. They need to be heard. So that’s a big part of what we try to provide, too: voice.”
Frank sees the summit as the inception of programming that will continue throughout the year: more youth reached, through more partnerships developed across the community. For the summit, Project MI has secured partnerships with the public defender’s office and with Project STAND; other agreements are in the works.
“Our unofficial slogan,” Frank says, “is that we are trying to solve the problem of mass incarceration by connecting communities to lawmakers.” She mentions a listening session coming next month, for example, an opportunity for the community to, well, listen. But, she points out, that event is being “driven by law enforcement. You may come and listen, but the people being affected don’t know how to translate their concern. You have to not only go and listen: You have to have people there who are listening with the right ear.”
“Listening with the right ear” guides much of the mission of Project MI. The collective includes an “incubator committee” responsible for developing new directions to explore. One example Frank mentions is asking the youth with whom MI works to think constructively about blighted properties, developing their perspective and proposal over the course of a school year. “Those kids know a lot about those houses — houses people don’t take care of, where people squat, run drugs, smoke drugs,” she says. “They have a very different perspective, and we just never really consider their voice. We would like for them to be able to exercise their voice.”
Many other programs for local youth, Frank points out, cost money. And, “as we know,” she says, “38 percent of all kids in Memphis are in poverty. That’s an embarrassing number. That gets us back to holistic education — and what we’re trying to do.” Programs other than MI, in other words, either cost money — or they are available to young people only after those young people have accrued one negative consequence or another. Project MI’s community outreach work exists in the elusive middle space: neither charging young people (who haven’t money to spare), nor only intervening after someone has been detained. And in that middle space: possibility. Hope.
"We’re spending so much money on this day,” Frank says. The day she’s referring to: April 4, 2018, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “In a poorly resourced city, when you have an almost 40 percent poverty rate — I have a hard time looking at my brethren in this space, struggling the way that they do, while we spend so much money to get media attention. I think there were not a lot of people really doing the work who were consulted in a lot of the things that are happening.”
In Project MI, Frank sees a chance to make real progress in addressing an issue that knits together so many surrounding threads. Mass incarceration has its roots in 1980s pushes to get “tough on crime.” Project MI holds that, instead of moving towards a crime solution, mass incarceration is tough on people, black and white, solves nothing — and needs to end.
