Reclaiming 'DC Blacks' And Rethinking Youth Justice

We share how Eyone Williams is reclaiming the name "DC Blacks" and trace how his support network grew from social posts into real connections. We go on to challenge a new push to try DC kids as adults and remove judicial discretion for people under 24. Our stories show how adult prisons teach violence to children and why prevention and second chances work.

We explore:

• The DC-to-federal prison pipeline.
• The early indoctrination of youth on juvenile blocks and in jail.
• The myths of the super predator narrative in the media.
• Why teens’ impulsivity and environment matter for accountability.
• The healing offered by violence interruption, credible messengers and second-look sentencing

Follow this podcast so you'll be informed when new episodes are uploaded (twice a month). Meanwhile, read more stories and learn how you can contribute to reform; visit MoreThanOurCrimes.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Guest Introduction
• 0:33 DC Blacks: Origins And Mission
• 4:31 Reclaiming A Stigmatized Label
• 9:02 Prison Culture And The “DC Blacks” Stereotype
• 15:26 Youth In Adult Prisons: Early Indoctrination
• 21:52 Policy Shift: Charging DC Kids As Adults
• 27:08 Were We Children Or Adults

Transcript

Hello, I am Pam Bailey. I am co-host of Voices Unlocked, which is the podcast produced by More Than Our Crimes, which advocates for individuals in federal prison. We want to bring their voices and experiences out to you. My co-host is Robert Barton, who's co-founder of More Than Our Crimes. He just got out in February after 30 years. A special guest today is Eyone Williams. We're going to get into the meat of the subject in a little bit, which is this move to treat really young people as adults in the criminal justice system. But first I want Eyone to talk a little bit about his organization, which is called DC Blacks. It's interesting, because you may not know that if you talk to people in prison who are not from DC, both staff and prisoners, you hear a really negative response when they hear DC Blacks, people from DC who are Black. Even if you Google it, which you might want to try to do, you come up with associations with gangs, violent gangs. So Eyon, why did you choose the name DC Blacks for your movement, when it has such a negative connotation?

ROBERT BARTON: Because of the same thing you just talked about. I'll let him explain.

EYONE WILLIAMS: Yeah, I mean, I was listening to the word you used, "co-opt," and I never used that word. I'm going to use that word. I always used to use the word "commandeer." Like Rob said, DC Blacks is a movement that has gone through many different phases. In the beginning of it, it was just something that I was doing because I had figured out social media and I had a lot of friends that were still in prison and I got a lot of calls for things like books or money orders, things that I really couldn't facilitate for everyone.

For some of my buddies who were closer than others, I could send 'em $20 or something, but I was just coming home. So what I did was, I created this thing on social media where I was...There's a saying, "out of sight, out of mind," where we come from. I figured that if I put up a lot of these guys' pictures -- from Rob to all the other guys that we know that have gotten second chances and are home doing good things -- that some people would remember them. And in the process, I could generate support and contacts for them. I know guys who have been in prison 50 years and they've lost contact with everybody. I put a picture of them on the internet and their granddaughter found them and they got a letter and that's support. So it just started out as something like that. But later on, when I realized that [DC Blacks] has such bad connotations, which we already know because we experienced it, I said I'm going to take it and I'm going to make it something else. It was only supposed to be a support system, but I learned this community work thing by working in other spaces, which we could talk about later. But when I go in any room, I'm kind of quiet, I learn things. So in the process of working with all these nonprofits, I seen what they were doing geared toward kids, geared toward gun violence, even geared toward reentry. But nothing was geared to just connecting. So I thought I could fill a void and that's how I started my version of what this DC Blacks movement is. But it just came from a support system, an idea of me not knowing what to do, but just wanting to do something.

PAM BAILEY: And you wanted to make it a positive.

EYONE: Exactly.

PAM: DC Blacks were being [disparaged], so positive in terms of community helping each other.

ROB: And I think that the key point is that he knows all these people from being in these spaces. We've done time together and all those things. But it's just like you was talking about, how you had close partners. We know bunches of dudes from doing time over those years. But there's different levels of friendships and comradeships and all that. So, you know, I can [take care of] the ones who are mine or my partner's. At the same time, I want to help some of the others. But I don't have the motherfucking means to do that. And so what I saw, is on certain days, you would put certain people up and then people would be sending that guy money.

EYONE: Right. Even if they weren't people that I knew.

ROB: Even if they weren't people that you knew. And I thought that was big because it's like, it is giving access to everyone to help. Called "Free the Real [Men] Fridays.

EYONE: Free the Real Fridays. And it is like crowdsourcing help for guys in prison. And there wasn't nobody thinking of it in that aspect. So man, I commend you for that. Thank you.

PAM: But so why does DC Blacks have a negative connotation to other people?

EYONE: In my opinion, DC Blacks has a negative connotation because over the years, some of the guys from the District of Columbia that were sent to the federal system were your guerilla convicts, so to speak. You have good stories and bad stories, but for some reason the bad stories are the ones that live on like legends. And a lot of people that encountered guys from Washington, DC, hadn't met convicts like what we were. And what I mean by that is that you had some guys that were intellectuals, they were law library legends; you had some guys that were gladiators; and you had some guys that were into other less reputable things. But that's a core reason. And I always say, for a person that's from somewhere that's like a state or a county, they would never fully understand a whole influx of DC guys because it would be the equivalent of closing the California Department of Corrections or the New York Department of Corrections.

Of course, that's on a much bigger scale, but my point is you'll get everything from a pickpocket to a kingpin. Most jurisdictions only send their federal prisoners to federal prisons. So you encounter a certain type of convict, human being, whatever word we choose to use for these people, to walk through the door. With DC, they don't realize that they're meeting people everywhere on the criminal scale. So I think that is what leads to some of these bad connotations. And to be honest, as a guy from Washington, DC, if we don't understand you, and there is a culture clash... A lot of times we grow up here and we never see some of the things we see in federal prisons. So if you send an aggressive group of people to a place where they really aren't used to seeing some of those things, I think a lot of bad stories may come out. And some of those stories were in effect years before we got there.

ROB: It was in effect years before we got there. But I just was thinking of the issue we're focusing on in this episode. You never see a young, white child in a penitentiary. I've never seen nobody under 25, 28 that's white in a penitentiary. You’re sort of molded when you come through Lorton [the original DC prison], come through the juvenile block. You have to... I always tell the story when I came to juvenile block -- and you know this, Eyon -- I got through the sally port and I heard "hot dogs. I got chicken." I got this that and the third. They were calling [dibs on] my food. They called it a tray. They called for my tray, but I didn't really know what they said until I woke up in the morning and my food ain't in my slot and now I got to fight to eat in the morning. And so that breeds you in a certain way from the beginning that you have to be that.

EYONE: I don't think that a lot of other states or other cities or people that's coming to prison now go through those type of gladiator schools or introductions into prison. And so, when you talk about sending us [into prison] as kids and we're getting that type of introduction or we're getting that type of indoctrination, that you have to be this way to survive in this environment... And then you're sending me to the federal penitentiary, where it's like, now I'm dealing with ABs, now I'm dealing with Aryan Brotherhood, I'm dealing with Mexican Mafia, all these different types of gangs in the gang culture. Then of course we're going to coalesce with each other, and we're going to keep that same mentality. And I think that that's where that came from.

I also think that that's how they interpret or put a label on us, as if we're a gang. We've never represented or operated in a gang sense, but then you put us in a place where everybody else has a gang mentality or gang formation. They address you as that, which is where the term DC Blacks, in my opinion, came from. Because the BOP had no way to label them. There were Crips, there were Bloods, there were the Aryan Brotherhood. So who the hell are these guys? And they refused to call the guys what they really were at the time. The guys really were Moorish Americans. Those were the guys that were standing out, making this thing .... like some type of a flag being planted. Now, I'm not going to say that all of them were like that, but the Moors and the Black nationalist movement that came out of the DC Department of Corrections were these guys that were "quote unquote" problem inmates, whether it was violence or litigation. Then I think it exploded into other things. And now they had to label us as a group. But not everybody from DC was included in the problem group. If you go back and look into the cases from the Aryan Brotherhood and the Cadillac stories, if you read the things that were filed by Tommy Silverstein after being in isolation for 42 years, [you'll see] there's a history of racial problems that exists in the paperwork. It's bigger than we just making up stories.

PAM: Yeah, I think the two most important things you said is: One, most -- 98% -- of people from DC who are incarcerated are black. If you take yourselves out, and just look at federal cases, it's mostly white. And No. 2, the others are coming in with federal sentences, which is a lot of racketeering, a lot of conspiracy,

ROB: Different behavior.

PAM: Very different. And you guys are street crimes, which, in any other state, would be in the state prison. Exactly.

EYONE: Which is a humongous difference culturally, for a prison population.

PAM: So they see you guys as black and violent, which feeds into some of the stereotypical stigmas we find out in the community. You mentioned something that is the other thing we wanted to talk about today, which is that there is a movement in Congress right now. There's a bill that's going to be going to the Senate, that was instigated by President Trump to 1) allow kids as young as 14 to be tried as adults (usually it has been older) but also takes the discretion away from judges. We're talking about DC specifically, he's singling out DC. They want to take the discretion away from judges to give more lenient sentences to people under the age of 24. Both of you went in at the age of 16, which is really close to the age of 14 they're talking about. So I'm just sort of curious, I'm going to ask you both individually to comment first. Think about when you went in the criminal justice system, before you even got to prison. How do you think it changed your trajectory to be treated as an adult at that age? I guess one thing I want you to address is: People think that because you committed a crime associated with murder, you are no longer a child.

And so, looking back to that time from today, and looking back retrospectively, I understand that I was a child. I understand how immature my mind was. And so my mind was so immature that... My co-defendant was already 18 at the time when I was arrested because he got arrested before me. And because he was over at the jail, I kind of wanted to get Title 16 so I could go over to the jail! Now ,to think back and look...Think about that. You just see how immature and stupid that was because that's the difference between me spending 30 years in jail and just being locked up until I'm 21 years old. Just that decision period [had that impact]. And so, going through these jails...We used to be on the juvenile block: We used to have to get an adult commissary slip to get cigarettes. Remember that? Yeah. So it's like you're telling me that you're about to give me a hundred years [in prison], and you treat me like an adult in all other aspects. Like, we're not going to school for nothing. We barely getting out for rec. You got us on the tier all day with nothing but a phone for us to fight over and all those type of things. But I can't get no cigarettes because I'm a juvenile.

ROB: I use that as an example. A lot of times people think that that's irrelevant, but that was huge symbolically to me. Yeah. And so it's like, in every other way you treat me as an adult. And what that did to me was, it's kind of like what we was just talking about, with that indoctrination process. So it's like, when you're were down in Oak Hill (I went through the juvenile system, and that was our juvenile prison, Oak Hill) the counselors were always telling you about graduating and going over to the jail. So when you go over to the jail, with this immature mind, it is like the next step up the ladder. And so they plan on that and you get in there, but because I'm over in the jail, they don't fight no more. They're stabbing. And so now you're getting into this culture and you're getting indoctrinated into this, and this is how locking up a juvenile, locking up a child, and not giving 'em no services or no type of help, only makes them worse because you are setting them up for failure. Their brains are still malleable, they're still immature, all those type of things. And then you're placing them around adults and it is just crazy. If it wasn't for my mother giving me a solid foundation of education and all those things... I mean, a lot of people don't make it back from that.

PAM: When you think back, were you a kid or were you an adult because you'd entered into this world of crime?

EYONE: Rob said something that, man, took me into a memory. He said that his co-defendant was already over at the jail and, in some type of way, he wanted to do that, wanted to go that route with whatever occurred. And, in some type of way as we grow up, we had this thing, at least when we come from backgrounds like us, that we already want to be a big boy. We don't necessarily accept it, but we want to be grown already. So when you asked me to think about that, of course I echo everything Rob said, but it took me until I grew into a full-fledged adult to acknowledge that I was a child. And I would've never agreed with you that I was a child. I knew that I was young, but I would only use words for myself like "juvenile" and "teenager" because it fit into the terms that the media was propagating already about super predators, which took me back to some things you said when you first asked this question.

But once you hold me accountable as an adult and you send me over to DC jail and now you're charging me as an adult, everything changed. But I'm a child at heart. For an example, I work with different organizations. They go into some of these juvenile places and one of the organizations, and I'm not going to be long-winded about it, they had a problem with when I individually encountered some of the youth. I would get away from what the criteria was for what they were coming there for. They would come in there quote unquote for education, but the youths that were charged as an adult had already figured out that the GED was not going to help them right now. Now, no way am I stomping or spitting on education. But some of 'em would ask me, "You got charged as an adult at 16, how can you help me?"

What is a 23 110 ? What is the stuff my lawyer is talking about? And the organization which I was with encouraged me not to get into law or legal conversations with 'em. And my problem -- which is one of the reasons why I started the nonprofit component of DC Blacks, at first it was just the movement -- the reason why I got legal was for me to be able to go and do what I wanted with these people. So anyway, my point to them [the nonprofit] was, I have a problem sitting there telling him "let's read this book" or "let's do this arithmetic" when he's about to get 60 years. And he's asking me, how does he prevent himself from spending 60 years in prison. And I'll just stop there. So some of those things are the things that drive me right now because I know that when I was 16, going back to being a child, going back to being immature, I didn't know what a lawyer was supposed to do for you.

I didn't understand what a 4th amendment issue was. I didn't understand what ineffective assistance of counsel was. But they're saying that you are a child and now you may get life in prison and these are things that we are supposed to help you with. But how can you ever help me? Like they say, the closed mouth don't get fed. If I can't articulate to a lawyer or a paralegal that “Yo, this is what really happened” or “This isn't what happened, and my buddy said that this is the law.” But everybody that's coming to help me that's getting paid to come to help me is telling me, read Dr. Seuss. I'm going to stop there.

ROB: I mean, what I gather, I just feel as though a lot of times, especially in this super predator era that we was just talking about, when you're growing up in these communities and you're young and your brain is malleable, a lot of times you're a product of your environment for lack of a better word. And on top of that, I feel as though I was one of the best students ever. I got all As in school. I wanted to be a mathematician. But as I was looking around in my school and my community, I didn't see nobody doing this type of shit. I don't see it, and I see slim right there getting some money on the corner. I see this dude, he hitting there. This is what I see, this is what is being shown to me. And then not only when I'm seeing in my community, but when we're talking about the super predator and the news and the media, everything is telling me that this is what I am, this is what I'm supposed to be. Right? So subconsciously, you're taking all those things on and then you're saying, yeah man, I'm this big bad, tough guy. I'm grown. I'm a man. And so I want to be in these situations to actualize this or to show you that I can deal with this. And that's the part that I don't think people understand. And that shows your immaturity.[18:05  

You see what I'm saying? So to tell me...So, now when we're talking about 15 years [in prison] for IRAA, the Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act, and they're saying that kids are feeling as though they can do 15 years, I think that what they're hearing is that 1) a child, just like we did, a lot of times says things to what we call "look sweet" or "sound sweet." They don't know what the fuck they're saying. They don't really even believe what they're saying. They don't really understand. They don't think that far. That's the part of the brain science that we talk about. They don't think that far to really understand what's going on. And I know that because when you go in and you talk to 'em and you're talking about a person that did 20 years and all that, and they say, damn, you did 30 years, how you do that? This that and the third. They're amazed because they can't see that far. And I think that that's something that ain't really highlighted and that really needs to be highlighted.

EYONE: You made a point that made me think about it. To go back to our personal experiences, when I was young and I was living that particular lifestyle, I was never participating in anything I was doing based on, "I will get out in this amount of time" or "I will get out in that amount of time." In my mind, my young impressionable mind, I thought that since I was under 18, I wasn't going to get charged as an adult at all. And if there was a law back then that said that if you were charged as an adult, you would get out at 15 [years], I still wouldn't have deliberately made a conscious effort to commit a crime and say, "Yo, I'm only going to have to do 15 years." I don't think there's no young’un out here right now committing no crime saying "I'm going to get out in 15 years anyway."

I don't think they think they're going to get caught. I think they're thinking that they're not going to get caught. And if they do, they will be charged as a juvenile.

ROB: And on top of that, in a lot of cases, in a lot of ways, and Pam always talks about the statistics for this. Most of 'em are impulsive crimes.

EYONE: I mean the science and the Supreme Court has agreed that that's how we made the decisions at the time.

ROB: So it's not even a contemplated thought.

PAM: When you think about the fact that you were...One thing you said that I think was really important at that age, you do not want to be labeled a child because you'd never say you were a child.

EYONE: A real child. And what I mean by real child is raised in a childlike environment. At 12 and 13, some of us we coming from war zones.

PAM: Yeah, no. Plus I remember even with me for instance, and I didn't come from those backgrounds, I wouldn't have wanted to be labeled a child.

EYONE: Yeah, I mean you always want to be sophisticated enough to be a little bit older.

PAM: But do you think if you were to answer somebody who said that if you were old enough to commit an act that most -- in their minds, people who come from very different neighborhoods, would say a real child would never even conceive of doing something like you did. So how would you respond if you say that even in that context you were still a child. Do you think the main thing is that you couldn't see ahead to the consequences or what else would you say?

EYONE: I definitely would agree with how you framed that, but what I would like to start off by saying, and I'm participating in it as well, is to define a child: A child in Vietnam that grew up during the Vietnam War is still a child. But if you place him in a room with even myself at 12 or 13, he's experienced some traumas that I would never understand and I grew up in the murder capital area. That's nothing to what we see on TV about Vietnam: napalm and things like that. So my point is, first and foremost, a child from Omaha, a child from Vietnam or a child from southeast Washington, DC is a child. That's what I had to grow into understanding. Now, in the culture that we came from, we grew up in the late 80s, early 90s. Gangster music was our music, gangster rap, the movies that we seen that was presented to us, and I'm not trying to blame everything on society.

What we were into was street hood, gangster, thug things. So we were already in a subculture. You dig what I'm saying? I'm saying that we were already in a subculture. I'm talking about these children that were labeled as super predators and attacked for such -- which again, I got to keep saying it, is a recycle of the same thing. Now they're trying to lower the age to go at the people that are 14, to say that, "Yo, they are as dangerous as sophisticated older criminals." I just don't believe it. So I don't think that we should differentiate what is a child. I mean, I do understand that this is a country where we're supposed to be held accountable or some of us are held accountable, if we don't have the privilege to not be held accountable. And if a child falls victim to this situation, that means it takes other people like myself and Rob and you to be able to understand what the dangerousness of the matter is.

The way it works is that, in all the other jurisdictions, the judge basically has a hearing for a juvenile to ascertain whether or not they have basically outgrown the juvenile system and it don't work for them no more. And so, because we don't get this [in DC], juveniles are tried as adults and they're not going to ever get a second chance to get out of jail when you give 'em 70, 60, 80 years and all those type of things, because in DC you don't have no parole. When you're sentencing these juveniles, these 14-year-olds, to life and all those things, that's exactly what it is. They're going to do life in prison. They're never going to come home. And you're never going to meet an Eyon, you're never going to meet a Robert Barton. You're never going to meet Halim Flowers and all these other people out here, like James Carpenter, and on and on and on who are doing all these amazing things and all this amazing work out here. And so those are the things: Yes, there needs to be accountability, but you got to take it in the context of where are we sending children to.

And what are we doing with these children that are at risk to commit these crimes or be victims? What are we doing before that? What are we doing before that? I mean, if you could say we're throwing 'em away at 14, what are we doing with them? The population that is most likely to fall into this trap, what are we doing for them?

ROB: Exactly.

PAM: And I think you said something important, Rob. For those who do get out, they're not in for life, we are re-sending them [home]. What happens to them later?

ROB: They will now be hardened because they're around much older people.

PAM: Sometimes violent.

PAM: Yeah. Right. I mean, so I guess that's the last question to you Rob. So how would you describe the impact of someone who was a child now being housed with people who are adults?

ROB: I mean, the impact is that I felt as though I had to be that. I had to be a man. I learned that. I learned that the system don't care nothing about you. And once you walk through these doors, Tony Hammonds used to say that: I don't care if he's 16, 17, he come in here and you're a grown man. And I'm going to treat him as such. And so nobody's looking at you as a youth. He's a 50-year-old man that has been doing 20 years already in penitentiary. They'll slap your head off your shoulder if you disrespect 'em because this is his land and this is the order of how we conduct things in this place. It is a different world: You're going to to fall in line and do what we doing or you're going to get ran over. And so because you understand that at that young age, now I have to quote unquote elevate my game at a violence level just to survive these type of violence. And so, you go a long time in those stages until you mature and now you can navigate your environment and you understand. Your social intelligence is built up. Now you can navigate violence without violence. Now you have the cache because you've done all those things, so you don't need to use violence. And so now you have the breather or the time. But when you're a child, you don't get that leeway. And this is what this type of prison and all that does to children.

EYONE: I mean, you just made me remember all of our buddies that didn't even make it to their 24-, 25-year-old stage when they was able to do it. They had already got life sentences between 16 and 26 for catching murders and assault in jail. And I don't want to name nobody that I'm thinking about right now, but one particular person is one of the best people that you would ever get to know. And every time he was in this situation, he was being attacked. He didn't even have the skills to be able to avoid what the attack was. He was attacked just because of where he was from and how he looked. And he ended up having two and three murders along the way. When you just use the word "murder" people automatically go, "Oh, what did he do?" But you don't understand what happened to him in the process of, I mean, and this one particular guy was placed in some prisons that he was never supposed to be at a certain age.

PAM: So basically you've taken somebody who maybe had potential and you put him in an environment where they have to survive and watch his back every minute, and now you've made him, if he wasn't violent before, he has to be violent.

He learned it the same way people learn negotiation skills. His negotiation skills that he learned was to speak the same language that was being spoken to him.

PAM: So I think a good thought to end with is that, going back to what you said about a child being a child is a child is a child, you can't just decide that in a particular setting, all of a sudden they're not a child. A child that goes through trauma is going to act differently, but they're still a child. So hopefully everybody will speak out to their...Please. If you have somebody who votes in Congress, like DC people don't, we need to speak out and protect DC laws, but also really across the country, we should resist this kind of push.

EYONE: I mean, I would like to just add one more thing: If we are going to hold children accountable on this extreme level, can we do more to help them before they get to the point where they deserve this extreme attention?

ROB: Yeah, that's a key point. I don't need to say nothing. That's a key point. That's the most important point. What I would say is that, man, we are living examples that no kid is irredeemable, no kid is incorrigible, no kid is irreparable. And that before you judge the book, read what's inside, look at the nurture and the nature and all those things and what's going on and then come back with a decision.

PAM: Yeah. Well, thank you for listening. I hope you subscribe and hey, discuss this around the dinner table. It's a really important topic. Thank you.

ROB: Thank you.