Growing up as black boys in rural Gadsden county, Morris Young and Jaron McNealy would have had the same instinct in their youth when they saw the police: run.
“I saw them as a foe. They’d only come by to arrest,” said Young, whose younger self would be surprised to discover he is now a veteran sheriff of the same northern Florida county where he was born and raised.
McNealy, 28, took a different path in his teens, getting involved with gangs and a string of arrests and jail time eventually landed him in state prison for four years.
But on a recent stormy Florida Saturday, the two sit in McNealy’s mother’s house across from one another on opposing couches with no tension and no drama.
The sheriff and his deputy have come by to say hello to McNealy and his three sons, aged 10, eight and seven, as part of Young’s commitment to a new program to prevent children from following their parents into the criminal justice system. The scheme links children with professional counselors and life coaches.
- Jaron McNealy, 28, with his children at his mother’s home.
“We’ve seen a trend where the children start coming up through this same cycle as those incarcerated parents,” Young said. “We wanted to sort of wrap our hands around them and put them on the right track.”
The scheme is just part of Young’s community policing approach which includes decarceration and prisoner “re-entry” to lawful society to try to tackle recidivism. “I believe in giving folks two, three, four and five chances to get it right,” he said.
Since his first election in 2004, Young has pushed prosecutors to get low-level offenders out of long jail stays, and has encouraged deputies to use arrest power with discretion. “If we pick up a young man with a piece of crack cocaine in his pocket, instead of making an arrest, put it on the ground and just mush it up. Tell him: ‘OK. The next time.’”
And while it’s difficult to attribute cause and effect when it comes to social issues like crime, over Young’s tenure crime in Gadsden has roughly halved and juvenile arrests are down by more than 75%. The county is also sending 65% fewer inmates to state prison than it was eight years ago.
Young has survived as the longest-serving black sheriff in Florida state history despite his philosophy facing significant challenge. Prosecutors attempted to run Young out of office in 2014 for his liberal use of furloughs, which allow inmates out of custody for short predetermined stints of time, usually a few days.
Young believes resistance to his approach comes down to the financial incentives that incarceration creates. As Major Shawn Wood, Young’s loquacious right-hand man, puts it: “No one in this country should even make one penny off people being locked up in chains.”
But don’t misunderstand the two, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows either. “We’ve got a reputation for catching our man,” Young said. “Commit a serious crime and you’re going to go in and you’re going to do time.”
But all that is qualified by a few progressive mantras that undergird daily decisions at the Gadsden sheriff’s office: arrests don’t necessarily resolve crime, and when arrests must be made, that’s the exact moment where re-entry ought to begin.
‘This is the best I’ve been’
Errick Feaster always loved cars and got pretty good at fixing them with his dad as a kid growing up in Gadsden. Yet having failed to ever get his license, Feaster wound up in jail for 11 months last year for driving without one. It wasn’t the first time. Feaster, 44, had been in and out on drug and other minor charges for much of his adult life.
But within a few days of getting to jail some inmates suggested Feaster go speak with Ed Dixon, head of the “crossing over” re-entry program in the jail. The program places inmates at job sites outside the jail during the work day with businesses who train them. No guards. No bars. Rather than sitting in a cell, Feaster was working fixing cars.
“It gave me some time away from that building I was in,” said Feaster.
- Errick Feaster is now a foreman at a tire store after completing the re-entry program.
And after he got out, with recommendations from the program, Feaster found work easily. “I went on interviews and for the first time in my life all of them called me back,” said Feaster, who is now working as a foreman at a tire shop in Valdosta, Georgia.
“Throughout my whole adult life, this is the best I’ve been. I am not struggling like I was before.”
Dixon, a former county commissioner, was recruited by Sheriff Young to head up re-entry because of his deep ties to the community. “Every inmate we surveyed said: ‘Hey, they’ve got great programs in jail and prison, but as soon as I get out, all that support is gone.’ So we said: ‘How can we make it last?’” Dixon said.
Dixon’s philosophy is based on an obvious, but often overlooked fact of local incarceration. “They’re going back into Gadsden county and they just went from being inmate Johnson to Mr Johnson.”
When they do so without support, recidivism is common.
“We’ve had people call us and say, ‘Look I don’t want to go back to jail, but I need you to help me find a job because if I don’t get one, I’m going to go back to what I know,’” said Maj Wood.
For Gadsden’s sheriff’s office, finding that person gainful employment is every bit as much their job as arresting them if they do turn back to crime. “I put the entire community on notice that we all are responsible for this,” Young said.
‘Church is it’
Race and economics are prologue to understanding Gadsden. It’s the only majority-black county in Florida, and it’s planted firmly in the bottom 10% of median household income in the state. Fully 25% of residents live in poverty, 56% higher than the national average.
Through the 1800s and 1900s the county was well familiar with the violent repression that defined so much of life in the south for blacks. Gadsden was home to at least four lynchings in the late 19th early 20th century, including the killing of AC Williams in 1941.
Having survived a white mob’s first attempt on his life, Williams was intercepted en route to the hospital, shot dead and left on a bridge. He had been surrendered to the mob, it’s worth noting, by employees of the sheriff’s office.
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Segregation and outbursts of racist violence against blacks in Gadsden persisted well into the second half of the century. In the 1960s, voter registration drives by the Congress of Racial Equality (Core) were routinely harassed and assaulted by whites, and even had their Quincy headquarters burned down in 1964. The schools here did not desegregate until 1970, 15 years after the supreme court declared segregation unconstitutional in Brown v Board, and only did so under threat of a federal court order.
A less contentious form of racial splintering still weighs heavily on Gadsden’s most ubiquitous social institution: the church. Like in much of the country and nearly all of the south, segregation in these spaces is nearly absolute.
- A Bible study session at the Gadsden county jail.
The county boasts about 250 registered churches, one for every 180 residents, which is a lot even for the heart of the Bible belt. “We don’t have a whole lot of nightclubs and nightlife or those kind of social things to do so church is it,” Young said.
As much as possible, Young asks churches to invite the department in, and strongly encourages attendance among his staff of more than 100.
At a law enforcement celebration event at First Baptist, Gadsden’s oldest white church, black deputies gladhand and joke with gray-haired parishioners over a breakfast of biscuits, sausage, eggs and gravy.
Faith is a major component of Young’s programming, going so far as to perform baptisms of willing inmates behind jail walls. The jail chaplain Jimmie Salters estimates he has performed more than 400 inmate baptisms in a galvanized water tank that sits in a garage on the jail grounds.
Religious services are a regular staple in the jail. Sometimes the Gadsden sheriff’s office employee choir comes along to sing. Inmates are encouraged to sing along and even get up and join, standing among their jailers in jumpsuits but unshackled, together in praise.
‘They got a lot of people behind them’
After Jaron McNealy was sent to prison, the mother of his sons and daughter was arrested too.
With nowhere left for them to go, they wound up at the home of their grandmother Natalie Johnson. “It was a blessing but it was a lot. I was sitting there having a panic attack thinking about – what are we going to do?” Johnson said.
Last year, when the sheriff’s office approached her about putting the boys (his daughter was too young) into a pilot mentoring program for children with incarcerated parents, Johnson admits she was hesitant. “I was afraid it would make them withdraw more,” Johnson said.
“But it did the opposite, it completely drew them out,” Johnson said. “It’s been real good, because they were lost.”
The children work with a counselor and life coach who tutors them every day on their academics, and on life skills like self-esteem, social interactions and even basic things like personal hygiene.
- Jaron McNealy with his daughter, six. He has begun reconnecting with his children since leaving prison.
Gadsden isn’t reinventing the wheel. Work release programs are a time tested (and historically exploited) tradition in the US criminal justice system.
Mentoring for children with incarcerated parents has been a priority for youth advocates for at least a decade, and even enjoyed a healthy federal grant outlay in the early days of the Obama administration.
Community policing is a major priority of many departments in the wake of the Black Lives Matter moment at least in word if not in deed.
But what Sheriff’s Young’s team does seem to be showing is that an earnest commitment to rewriting the southern tradition of harsh and punitive punishment can have real impacts on how communities perform and how they relate to the police.
When McNealy was released from prison in April and started trying to reconnect with the boys, the program had him a bit miffed initially.
“At first I’d look at seeing the sheriff around and be like ‘I ain’t talking to them,’ McNealy said. “But now I look at it as beneficial and I’m loving it. If they get in trouble, guess what? They got a lot of people behind them.”
One of the boys, who has watched police arrest both of his parents, says for a long time he was scared of them. Now he wants to be one: “So I can tell people how to learn to make good decisions and not do bad things.”
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