Reflections on Criminalization

By Aimée Josiane

I’ve been arrested once for being unable to pay off a mountain of vehicle-registration related fees, and that is lucky considering the fact that I’m a Black, immigrant lady in Ol’ Dixie. For those of us who have been arrested and detained, we understand how much, well, how much it sucks. And while our local, state and national legislators continue to push policies that promote arrests as the way to resolve issues like school truancy, drug trafficking, migration and visible sex-work, they fail to realize how much these arrests affect our communities. Criminalization has a lasting, day-to-day effect on our lives, for example, no matter how qualified you might be for a job, simply admitting to having been convicted of a crime on the application, is enough to disqualify you from that job. Even worse, it can be (and often is) a barrier between some of us and affordable housing, and it can prevent us from participating in a number of state and federal programs.

But what I really want to talk about in this reflection on criminalization, is how the public conversation about crime meets the (annoyingly incomplete) conversation about movement. For instance, I sat through a neighborhood association meeting a few weeks ago where one of the speakers, a county prosecutor, lamented about the Juvenile Justice Act passed last month, which aims to keep low-risk juveniles out of detention centers. This prosecutor’s main issue was that all these “bad kids” that APD arrests (which in April 2013 meant 22 Black kids and 1 white kid) would have nowhere to go but back home. So I have to wonder, when did our neighborhoods become inappropriate places for these kids to exist anyway? And at which point did we agree that shuffling kids into “out-of-sight-out-of-mind” detention centers is an adequate way of moving crime out of our neighborhoods?

When people talk about getting rid of crime, we have to ask ourselves who the “criminals” are, and why some of our neighbors, council members and state legislators are so eager to move them away from their own homes and into an unexamined alternative space, also known as the county jail/state prison. Shouldn’t our elected leaders focus on reducing displacement rather than sanction it? Another example is the ongoing effort to redefine our neighborhoods as Drug-Free Commercial Zones, so that individuals caught holding or trafficking drugs will be banned from the police beat where they are arrested (which is often home or close to home for the offender). So again, when did we decide that it was appropriate to ban people from their homes and loved ones? Such ordinances are based on an incomplete discussion about what ‘moving crime out of the neighborhood’ really means, without any idea of where people  ought to go or better yet, what has moved people INTO these criminalized activities in the first place.

And a last example of the shifty meeting-point of criminalization and movement, is the banishment ordinance on street-level sex-workers, which the city has recently tried to enforce in order to remove poor (mainly Transgendered) people from visible public spaces. I recently sat in on a meeting of the city’s “Working Group to Reduce Prostitution”, where testimonies were heard from many outreach organizations that work with street-level sex-workers,  some of which have organized into the Solutions Not Punishment (SNaP) Coalition, in response to the longstanding ordinance. This banishment is yet another example of how incomplete our elected officials’ idea of mobility truly is. They banish people, and then what? Where do people go once banished and carrying with them a trail of arrests and convictions?

We’ve been putting up with criminalization for centuries, and it’s gotten us nowhere. Many of us come from histories of vulnerability to racist law enforcement practices, forced evictions and other forms of disenfranchisement. Our present isn’t too far removed from that, in fact, this April, over 2300 Black people were arrested in Atlanta for non-violent crimes, versus about 300 white people, and of the Black people arrested, the largest group was 24 to 29 year olds. Do you smell what I’m smelling? Meanwhile, almost every other house on my street has been foreclosed on and abandoned, but the city isn’t pressed to move criminal bank operations out of its limits.

Mm-mm, something in the milk ain’t clean.

Aimée Josiane has been part of the Fulton County Greens since 2013. Originally from Rwanda, she is now a proud  and active Oakland City resident, a queer and quirky co-mama of 3 pets, a wannabe housewife, a jeweler and political organizer. You can Tweet her @Rwandalicious.