IOWA BLACKS IMPRISONED AT HIGH RATE

Only D.C. Puts A Larger Proportion Of African-americans Behind
Bars.

At least 1 in 12 black Iowans is in prison, on parole or probation - a
ratio that surpasses most others across the United States, a Des
Moines Register analysis of incarceration rates found.

The ratio for whites is 1 in 110.

"I wasn't aware the disparity was that big," said state Rep. Clyde
Bradley, a Republican from Camanche. His district includes parts of
Scott County, where half the people who go to state prisons are black.

"I don't know if any legislators are."

That so many black Iowans are in prison or under corrections
supervision comes as a troubling, even appalling, surprise to some
state leaders - but it shouldn't.

The number of blacks behind bars, which grew rapidly during the crack
cocaine epidemic of the early 1990s, has been the cause of prickly
tension between residents and police, a pet topic of academic study
and community forums, even a source of consternation for the Iowa
Supreme Court.

Despite a great deal of hand-wringing over the past two decades, the
disparity has become worse.

Iowa's proportion of blacks behind bars was second highest in the
country, behind the District of Columbia, in a 1997 study by the
Sentencing Project, a nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C.

Today, blacks account for 2 percent of Iowa's population but
one-fourth of the state's prison population.

"Nothing is being done to focus on the problem," said Gary Cook, one
of dozens of black preachers across the state who consider the
disparity one of the bigger crises facing black families. "There are
plenty of people working, but we're not working together."

NO EASY ANSWERS

State officials and analysts say blacks and other minorities continue
to face longer sentences and other bias in Iowa's criminal justice
system, a widespread problem first documented for the Supreme Court in
1993.

Further, many blacks say, the drug trade, economic blight and
distressed family conditions that breed crime continue unabated in
predominantly black neighborhoods, despite drops in the overall crime
rate in recent years.

Surrounded by drug trade and with little exposure to alternatives,
they say, many black youths succumb to the powerful allure of crime
and fast money.

"Knowing what my kids were made of, the chances should have been far
less likely for this to happen," lamented Cynthia Hunafa, a Des Moines
schoolteacher whose 19-year-old son is serving a 10-year sentence at
the penitentiary in Fort Madison on drug-related charges.

In part, Hunafa blames her husband, who turned to crime early in their
marriage. Over 17 years, she estimated, her husband was home for three.

In many ways, Al-Amin Hunafa's absence created more problems than his
crimes, Cynthia Hunafa said. She wonders whether the results would
have been different if more had been done to hold her husband
accountable and to keep him nearer his family while he served time.
He was released last year; the couple is divorcing.

"Something, somewhere along the line has failed, and as a result I now
have a child in prison and a daughter and a son struggling to find a
niche with their father, a parent-child relationship. But that is
something that has to be so constant, so unbroken, that it makes it
really rough," Cynthia Hunafa said.

With the state prison population expected to nearly double to 14,000
inmates by 2008, few state leaders expect the number of blacks in
prison to level off soon. Today, about 4,450 black Iowans are in
state prisons, on parole or probation - a number far greater than the
2,763 black students enrolled in the state's post-secondary
institutions.

With so much money being spent to build and sustain the state's prison
system, some Iowans are increasingly skeptical of state leaders'
resolve to address the problems that contribute to the disparity.

They say the situation bodes ill for Iowa.

"I see the problem getting a lot worse before it gets better," said
Anthony Haughton, a former probation officer from Iowa City who
estimates that every black family in the state has been touched by the
problem.

"Right now, there are a whole lot of kids who aren't relating to their
fathers in a functional way. They're just out there. It becomes a
cyclical problem that just continues and continues and continues."

WHAT CRACK HAD TO DO WITH IT

The disparity was not always so large.

In the 1980s, blacks accounted for fewer than 1 in 5 state prison
inmates. In the latter part of the decade, heavy crack cocaine trade
and gang violence erupted in depressed urban areas across the country,
including inner cities in Iowa. Lawmakers retaliated with the most
severe penalties for drug crimes in the nation's history.

"The origins of that policy began when folks in Congress decided - I
think on a very emotional and political basis - to penalize crack at a
rate substantially more severe or higher than powder cocaine," said
Don Nickerson, U.S. attorney for Iowa's Southern District.

"Some people will argue at that point that the decision was
discriminatory. I don't know if it was. But I can definitely say it
had the effect of being discriminatory."

In federal courts, the penalty for possessing 5 grams of crack - a
concentrated, smokable form of cocaine - was made the same as
possessing 500 grams of powder cocaine. In courtrooms across the
state, phrases like "mandatory minimums" and "sentencing enhancements"
were introduced to dead-eyed addicts and hardened street kids. Police
locked up as many hard-core gangbangers as they could.

Slower than the coastal states in joining the drug war, Iowa soon
caught up. When the crisis peaked in the early 1990s, violence and
crime began to ebb, but the drug problem continued.

In time, a quarter of the state's prison population was
black.

Teams of young men like Willie Gibson of Davenport - fatherless, poor,
addicted and foundering in school - found it easier to join the game.
Now serving time at the Clarinda state prison for his part in a
drive-by shooting, Gibson said all but one of his close friends are
still on the streets "doing the same things," in prison or "waiting
for their turn to go to the graveyard."

None, he said, even thought of going to college.

Some longtime community activists criticized police sweeps in their
neighborhoods, asking why white criminals did not receive the same
scrutiny. At the time, however, others said the problems spawned by
the drug trade could hardly have been exaggerated.

Paulette Wiley, the executive director of Des Moines' Willkie House,
left a bank job in 1993 to run the nonprofit community center at a
time few people drove the streets near the center at night. Even in
daylight, she said, that block along 17th Street near the MacVicar
Freeway was lined with idle cars and attitude. Inside the Willkie
House gymnasium, men traded cash for rock cocaine. Dried blood
stained the cement walls.

Each day from her office window, Wiley said, she witnessed the makings
of another tragedy.

'IT WAS A WAR ZONE'

"It was a war zone," said Wiley, who sat through five funerals and
watched four young men go to prison for life. "That's when your
neighborhood became a "hood."

Similar stories played out in Waterloo, Cedar Rapids, Ottumwa,
Davenport, Iowa City. Iowans became prisoners of their fear. Drive-by
shootings forced families to change where they slept. Entire blocks
were abandoned. Businesses pulled out. Some drivers instinctively
locked their doors when they saw a group of young men.

Though much maligned, the heavy police presence was needed then,
longtime residents say.

"They couldn't ignore what was there," said Bob White, a retired
probation officer who chose in those years to stay in his home near
17th Street and Washington Avenue in Des Moines, even though many
neighbors moved.

For every young, black male who chose the easy money or the security
of a gang, however, others said they struggled simply to survive the
times and the intense eye of police.

Charles Zanders Jr., an assistant basketball coach at Hoover High
School, vividly remembers a summer day in 1993, after wrapping up a
basketball game at Evelyn K. Davis Park. Zanders said an officer
tailed his freshly washed Jeep Cherokee until he reached about 19th
Street and Martin Luther King Parkway.

"Then, sure enough," he said, "here come the cherries."

The officer asked him for his license and registration. Two more
patrol cars arrived. The officer asked why the Jeep was registered in
the name of Zanders' wife, a local attorney. Eventually, the officer
let Zanders go, warning him that his license plate tags would soon
expire.

"I feel the pressure," said Zanders, whose best friend was shot in the
head over a pair of tennis shoes a few years ago. "I can't make a
mistake."

Black leaders say the absence of more men, then women, became visible
in church pews, school conferences and homes in predominantly black
communities.

"It was always, "Where's so-and-so?" And the answer was always, "Oh,
he went down" or "He's been gone," said White, who watched close
friends take up crack and a small army of nihilistic youth take over
his neighborhood.

For Ako Abdul-Samad, the oft-quoted voice of Des Moines' central city,
the incident that drove home the hopelessness left by the drug war
came last summer, after most of the worst violence was over, after his
20-year-old son was killed in an accidental shooting.

Abdul-Samad remembers trying to break up a fight between two young men
not far from Creative Visions, the youth center he runs at 13th Street
and Forest Avenue. It quickly grew volatile. Some young men talked
of getting their guns, he said.

Repeatedly, Abdul-Samad said, he scanned the neighborhood to find
other adults to help him calm the fracas. No one came, including
parents driving by who knew some of the young men.

"We have to come back to the streets," he said. "We have never been
at risk of losing an entire generation of young people, but we're at
the crossroads of losing one now."

CHANGE IS POSSIBLE

A number of explanations have been offered for the overrepresentation
of blacks in prisons in Iowa and across the country: Systemic racism
and biased laws. Poverty and poor educational opportunities. Lack of
black leadership and too much hollow political rhetoric. Indifferent
and morally corrupt parents. Indifferent and morally corrupt
policy-makers.

Many have merit, to varying degrees, said Kenyon Burke, a New
Jersey-based consultant who has studied race issues since the 1960s.
In part, the problem remains unchanged because it is heavily
influenced by racial perceptions, he said.

Burke said blacks who complain are sometimes dismissed by whites for
attributing the entire problem to racism; whites, meanwhile, lose
credibility for failing to acknowledge bias and advantages that they
have in the justice system.

Often, Burke said, talks that could result in change are paralyzed by
denial and the absence of political will.

Change is possible. Communities across the country, from Baltimore to
Newark, N.J., to Cleveland have reclaimed areas overrun with blight
and drugs and given youths something to experience besides the thrill
of earning $100 on a street corner, Burke said. Others have focused
on education and drug treatment.

"A lot of it has to do with leadership," he said. "If the political
will is there in your community to get a handle on it, it can be done."

Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack has begun to take an interest in the disparity.
Haughton, the former probation officer in Iowa City who is now a
doctoral student, alerted him to the problem weeks ago. After reading
the University of Iowa student's master's thesis on the subject,
Vilsack asked Supreme Court, Department of Corrections and state
public safety officials to bring him up to speed.

"I'm not certain most of our policy-makers are aware of this," Vilsack
said. "My guess is that this was not the result of overt racism . . .
but I won't comment on the policies of the past. I can only accept
responsibility for what happens from here on."

In many ways, the opportunities to make lasting gains have never been
better, but many observers say they might just as easily be missed:

* For the first time in nearly 30 years, black men ages 16 to 24 with
high school educations or less are joining the work force in
increasing numbers, earning more money and committing fewer crimes,
according to a new study of 322 metropolitan areas, including Des Moines.

The booming economy has created unprecedented opportunity for those
previously excluded from the job market, said Richard B. Freeman, a
Harvard University professor who helped conduct the study.

"It's not going to get any better than this," he said.

But Freeman's study excluded those in prison.

Warned Nickerson, the U.S. attorney: "They will come out, for the
most part, uneducated, emotional and social misfits and having no
career and no job skills. And what do you do? You put them back into
the community, and the community is not going to grow."

* Although Nickerson and others say it's unlikely that Congress will
soon overturn laws that make penalties for crack more severe than
those for powder cocaine, momentum is building in the Legislature to
make sentencing fairer and more colorblind.

A legislative task force studying other states' sentencing practices
has said reducing the disparity is one of its goals. The absence of
any minority representation on the panel has troubled some prominent
blacks in the state, including state Rep. Wayne Ford and Alfredo
Parrish, a Des Moines attorney.

With the proportion of Hispanics and women also on the rise in Iowa
prisons, Ford, a Des Moines Democrat, would like to provide the
commission with the perspectives of more minorities to give the report
credibility.

"We have some unique problems in Iowa when it comes to incarceration,"
he said. "We can blame people until hell freezes over, but the
question is what does it take to make people move?"

* Many blacks are disappointed that it wasn't until methamphetamine, a
drug used mostly by whites, came along that many Iowans acknowledged
the extent of the state's drug problem. They concede, however, that
meth may begin to balance the racial disparity in prisons. Already,
some say, it has drawn more whites' attention to the problem of
substance abuse.

From the White House down, pressure is building for states to
apportion more money to treatment and education and to acknowledge
drug addiction's true impact on crime, regardless of the race of the
offender.

"Addiction is about brain change. It is not about moral corruption,"
said White House drug adviser Donald Vereen. "Not every criminal
should come out of prison, but if someone is there because they have a
brain disease, you are discriminating in an unlawful way. It's like
locking up someone because they're black."

COST IS THE BOTTOM LINE

While state leaders have not attacked the racial disparity behind bars
with the vigor many black residents desire, they may be forced to
address the issue. The cost of incarcerating thousands, particularly
the rising number of drug offenders, worries some Iowans.

Cynthia Hunafa, for example, wonders if more nonviolent offenders
could be punished in their communities while still being allowed to
work and help support their families.

Vilsack said if "a sense of fundamental fairness" is not enough, the
cost of warehousing so many people might force the the state to
approach its social ills differently.

"I think there is political will to stop spending millions and
millions and millions of dollars on building prisons," he said.

Civic leaders like Wiley, meanwhile, say without more focus on the
needs of poor, urban neighborhoods, all Iowans pay a heavy price.

"We thought we could lock it up, buy a security system or move out of
the neighborhood and it would go away," she said. "Well, there's a
bonfire burning now, and not all the water hoses in the country can
put it out. Not anymore."

STUDY DONE 6 YEARS AGO, BUT LITTLE HAS CHANGED

Six years have passed since a sweeping two-year study for the Iowa
Supreme Court documented racial bias in the state's criminal justice
system.

The 2-inch-thick study by a 29-member task force concluded that
minorities face stiffer charges and higher bonds and that they are
more likely to be denied pretrial release and to be sent to prison.
Bias was strongest in Black Hawk County, where minorities were almost
twice as likely to be charged with a serious felony.

"There is no question that some quantum of race- and gender-bias
exists, and that it is unlikely to disappear solely with the passage
of time," the panel concluded.

At the time, James Havercamp of Davenport, former chief judge of the
7th Judicial District and chairman of the task force, said the
findings were correctable. Many black Iowans say, however, that bias
persists, even though a subsequent panel continues efforts to improve
conditions for minorities and women in the system.

Havercamp concedes that little has changed.

"It's a very pervasive problem, he said. "I don't think we've made a
great deal of progress."