Mansfield: Green Up! & Gangs and Guns

Green Up!

The move to turn Cleveland into a greener, more sustainable city is gaining steam this spring. Fifty-eight Re-Imagining Cleveland grants were awarded for “green” projects around the city, and my non-profit, Neighborhood Solutions (see our website at: http://www.neighborhoodsolutionsinc.com) snagged one of them to put in a vineyard at 66th and Hough. Groundwork is underway as you read this, and in a week or so I’ll be inviting any wannabe viticulturists (or would-be-winos) over to help plant the vines and establish the trellises. There’ll be some experts from The Ohio State Extension Service on hand to make sure we do the work right.

Also, my “orphan fruit tree” program is moving right along. Rather than plant an orchard and wait the five or six years for the trees to bear fruit, I want to “adopt” the fully-grown abandoned fruit trees that sit in vacant lots and behind houses. If these trees are pruned and cared for they will produce edible fruit this fall, and once the fruit is picked I’d like to dig the trees up and move them all to one site to create an “instant orchard.” If there are enough trees located, we could establish orchards on numerous sites. Any of you readers who know of — or have — a fruit tree that has not been cared for, let me know about it via email: mansfieldfATgmail.com. Our team would like to see if we can put it back into production. Thanks.

Gangs and Guns

For a few years now I’ve concurred with the “get tough” policy of locking away dangerous predators that would do harm to us … not only for our own protection, but for theirs as well: Young males who have dropped out and have adopted thug life are twice as safe in prison as they are on the mean streets of Cleveland. If they run afoul of the law they should be incarcerated until they acquire a marketable skill and demonstrate a mindset which indicates they are no longer a threat to society.

However, with that said, just how draconian are sentences going to be under the new gang initiative that a multi-jurisdictional law enforcement task force is about to embark upon in the City of Cleveland? Sending young men — yes even gang-bangers — away for sentences averaging 18 years under the Hobbes Act goes far beyond what is necessary to control the problem, and, in all likelihood will be selectively enforced.

When overly tough laws are passed police and prosecutors always find clever ways to insure they are not applied evenly across the board … certain folks are somehow always given immunity from feeling the full brunt of such draconian laws.

We have a penchant in America to overreact: We feel that if sentencing someone to three years for a gun specification will make us safe, sentencing the same person to 18 years for the exact same crime will make six times as safe … but that’s just not so. All it does in prove how cleverly law enforcement can be in fashioning unjust sentences and getting a frightened public to go along with them in the name of “public safety.” Never mind the fact we are breaking budgets by keeping people behind bars for far too long … indeed, much longer than any other country on the face of the earth.

Recently the family of a young man that was involved in a killing in a parking lot in downtown Cleveland posted a $1 million bail for his release. Just watch this case and see how Lady Justice peeks out from under her blindfold to ogle the size of the bankroll of the person in the docket and their race. If this young white man is eventually convicted, the lightness of the sentence in his case is going to be astonishing, but ultimately not surprising, because it will simply match the lightness of his complexion.

Money talks and Justice certainly has a price in America, and when young and poor persons of color are the primary focus of law enforcement, the resulting outcomes historically amounts to overkill. Justice is supposed to be dispensed with a fine scalpel, but in virtually all instances when the focus is on young minorities, a machete is used instead. Again, I’m all for locking dangerous young men up, but for how long, and how much rehabilitation will they receive while they are behind bars? They all do eventually come back. Warehousing them is not the answer, nor is it fair or just — unless the real goal is to keep them incarcerated during their peek procreating years.

From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://www.frombehindthewall.com.

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