Cincinnati's in a World of Trouble, But All the Rulers Want is a New Jail
by
Dan La Botz
"Liberal
Democratic City Council candidates have also been told that they will be
expected to support the jail or loose the party's support."
This article previously appeared in Counterpunch.org.
Why six years after police killed an unarmed black man and
the city was rocked by riots, has everything in Cincinnati come down to the
building of a jail? How did the liberals' darling Todd Portune end up joining
hands with conservative moral crusader Sheriff Simon Leis? Why has the
Democratic Party placed all of its chips on 800 more jail beds in a city and a
county with a declining population? Why have not only Democrats and Republicans,
but also the corporations and the labor unions joined together to build a jail
that is opposed by the NAACP and most black Cincinnatians? How did what began
as a search for racial reconciliation lead to a jail that is to many here the
emblem - that is, both the symbol and the reality - of racial discrimination?
In April,
2001, Cincinnati was shocked by a police officer's killing of 19-year-old,
unarmed black man named Timothy Thomas and then convulsed by an inner-city riot
with arson and looting, a black urban rebellion much like one that had taken
place thirty years before. The city - suddenly shaken by the realization that
in three decades it had made no progress whatsoever in race relations - came
all at once to its feet with gasp. Pastors, priests and rabbis summoned their
congregations who prayed for understanding, reconciliation and peace.
The city council showed sudden new interest in
long-neglected issues of poverty and housing. Mayor Charles Luken created a
blue-ribbon commission charged with improving police-community relations. After
a suit by the Black United Front and the ACLU, a Federal judge took charge of
overseeing the reform of the Cincinnati police under the Collaborative
Agreement. There were promises of summer jobs for youth and pledges to bring
economic development to the old, inner-city neighborhoods of Cincinnati.
"The gay and
black boycotts continued for years, until gays won and blacks gave up."
African
American groups, with little faith in such promises, called for another boycott
of Cincinnati - in addition to the one already enforced by the gay community -
until the local government could create economic and social justice for the
Cincinnati's black people. City Hall responded with a public relations campaign
proclaiming that Cincinnati was all the things they wished it were and that we
knew it was not. The gay and black boycotts continued for years, until gays won
and blacks gave up, but by then the white power structure had tasted victory at
Taste of Cincinnati and Oktoberfest and blacks had forgotten the boycott and
returned to the Black Family Reunion.
Progress and Poverty
For the
last six years the city has wrestled with its identity, and there was some
undeniable progress. The notorious city ordinance prohibiting gays and lesbians
from invoking civil rights law to defend themselves from discrimination was
overturned in a referendum. In what was clearly a vote against the old white
power structure, the city elected Mark Mallory, an African American, to be its
mayor, defeating Councilman David Pepper. SEIU's Justice for Janitors campaign
brought union organization, higher wages, and health benefits to some of the
city's lowest paid workers. We even passed by referendum a no smoking ordinance
for bars and restaurants to protect the health of workers and the public,
despite the tobacco lobby's attempt to confuse us with a look-alike
proposition,
Yet after
six years, things had not improved much in the neighborhoods, and in some ways
they have gotten worse. Cincinnati and Hamilton County employers continued to
move further out into the surrounding suburbs in both Ohio and neighboring
Kentucky. Cincinnati's unemployment rate is now 5 percent and black
unemployment over 10 percent, while unemployment for black teenagers has
reached a staggering 30 percent. Poverty seems to have become endemic.
In 2007 Cincinnati, a city of 317,000 people, 53 percent
of them white and 42 percent black, won the title of third poorest city in the
nation after Detroit and Buffalo. The U.S. Census Bureau reported that
Cincinnati had 27.8 percent of its residents living in poverty, up from number
8 in 2006 with 25 percent among the poor, and up from number 22 in 2004 with
19.6 living in poverty. In many black neighborhoods the poverty level is much
higher than almost one third in poverty in the city.
"The river city has a scandalous infant morality rate of 13.1
per 1,000 - about the same as Jamaica and French Guiana."
The poverty
hits children hard. The river city has a scandalous infant morality rate of
13.1 per 1,000 - about the same as Jamaica and French Guiana. Hamilton County
is not far behind with a rate of 10.5, far worse than that for Ohio at 7.6 or
the United States at 6.8 per 1,000. (Just to put things in perspective, the
rate for Sweden with a national health care system is 3.2 per 1,000.)
Cincinnati's
high school drop out rate is reported between 50 or 75 percent, depending on
who's counting and how. Students who were once dropouts, for example, have now
become part of a "virtual" education program that has yet to prove it works.
Interestingly,
according to the Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services, violent crime in
Cincinnati rose at the slowest rate in the state in 2006, just 1.2 percent.
But, while other violent crimes were down, murder in Cincinnati went up an
alarming 10 percent - presumably driven by the violence of drug gangs - though
that 10 percent was less than half the increase in Cleveland and Columbus where
murders rose by over 20 percent. With these sorts of problems, perhaps it is
not surprising that Cincinnati's population has been declining for decades and
Hamilton County's for the last several years as people have moved to distant
counties or across the state line to Kentucky where the past of the segregated
city is mirrored in the present of the big houses and green lawns of the
segregated suburbs.
Now It Has All Come Down to a Jail
As is
apparent to all, Cincinnati and Hamilton County have many problems-yet
strangely enough as we approach the November election the one problem that
occupies center stage, the one issue that has been the focus of attention is
not education, employment, improving race relations, or that vague but
inspiring notion of social justice, but rather the building of a new county
jail. The construction of a new Hamilton County jail has become the central
issue in local politics and the focus of an unprecedented cooperation between
liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. Urged on by David Pepper, son
of a Proctor & Gamble CEO, Democrat Todd Portune of the County Commission
has embraced the notorious right-wing sheriff, Republican Simon Leis, and the
three together have pledged to build a new jail come hell or high water.
Other
things are going on, of course. There has been Operation Vortex/Operation Take
Back Our Streets a joint effort by the Cincinnati Police Department and the
Hamilton County Sheriffs to drive criminals out of the Over-the-Rhine
neighborhood in order to make the area more attractive to investors and
developers. Those developers, led by 3CDC, the Cincinnati Center City
Development Corporation, which has more or less replaced the city's defunct
planning department, smile upon the removal of poor blacks to make way for the
creative class, the young, the hip, the childless, the folks with surplus
expendable income. The operation has turned Vine St., Over-the-Rhine's
principal thoroughfare, into the main street of a ghost town and has driven
crime into nearby communities and even into the suburbs. A new arts center has become
the anchor for investors, developers and the creative class - but most of them
have yet to arrive.
"Developers smile upon the removal of poor blacks to make way
for the creative class, the young, the hip, the childless, the folks with
surplus expendable income."
Then, too,
there's the decade old off-again, on-again Banks Project, a multi-million
dollar commercial and residential development project planned to be built on
the Ohio River. The city's elite and investors debated whether or not to have 30-story
towers along Second Street that might block the view of corporate leaders
sitting in the mahogany rooms of an older generation of skyscrapers. The Banks
- if it ever gets built - will be an expansion of Cincinnati's downtown meant
to attract Fortune Five Hundred companies and to employ that creative class
that if all goes as planned will live among the boutiques and trendy
restaurants of the new Over-the-Rhine where once German immigrants, the
Appalachians, and African Americans lived.
But the central
struggle isn't being fought over 3CDC's makeover of Over-the-Rhine, nor over
the multimillion dollar Banks Project. Like a chess match where for several
moves everything seems focused on what might otherwise simply be an
insignificant pawn, so in Cincinnati all of the powers-that-be and all of the
people that oppose them have focused their energies on the issue of the new
Hamilton County Jail that - in a city and county with declining population -
would add 800 prisoner beds.
The Odd Fellows: Leis-Pepper-Portune
Sherrif
Simon Leis, a conservative moral crusader who closed down Last Tango in
Paris when it was to be shown at a Cincinnati theater in 1972 and convicted
Larry Flynt of Hustler magazine of obscenity in 1977, is the heavy in
this drama. Leis's central role in closing down the exhibition Robert
Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment at the Contemporary Arts Center in 1990
brought him national notoriety and the opprobrium of artists, intellectuals,
and those who valued First Amendment rights. Several months later a jury found
the Maplethorpe photographs were not obscene and a decade later Mapplethorpe's
photos were shown in Cincinnati in a retrospective. The times had changed and
even Cincinnati had changed, but Leis held on to his power and sought to expand
it. At the center of his ambitions was a new county jail that he has fought for
throughout the last 15 years.
"The County Commissioners put the issue to the voters as a
referendum on the November 2006 ballot. But the people didn't want it."
Leis and
his various Republican and Democratic allies have argued that the jail is
necessary to replace or supplement already existing jail space, some of it
older space renovated only a few years ago and some of it relatively new,
including the modern Justice Center finished in 1985. The immediate principal
beneficiary of a new jail would be Leis who would oversee the new expanded
facility and a much larger budget. The Sheriff's opponents counter that the
county has enough jail space if only it were properly administered. The jail,
they point out, regularly houses alcohol and drug abusers accused of pissing in
the park, the homeless found sleeping on the streets, the mentally ill found
wandering the city lost in their psychotic fears and fantasies, and many poor people
who would be released if they could make bail or if there were a functioning
night court. Leis, however, wants a bigger jail not a better run one.
Last year
Leis's fellow Republican Phil Heimlich put forward the plan for a bigger jail
with the 800 additional beds to be paid for by a regressive sales tax. Carl
Lindner, the multimillionaire, former owner of Chiquita Brands, and dominant
figure in the Republican Party, backed up Leis and Heimlich. The County
Commissioners - then two Republicans and one Democrat - put the issue to the
voters as a referendum on the November 2006 ballot. But the people didn't want
it. Conservatives argued that it cost too much, while progressives
argued that the jail was no way to fight crime and the regressive sales tax was
no way to pay for it. Cincinnati Progressive Action, a small group of local
activists, created No Jail Tax PAC and carried out a campaign stressing the
need for education, jobs, and facilities for mental health and drug and alcohol
addiction. While Lindner and other backers of the jail put up $250,000, No Jail
Tax opponents raised about $1,000 to oppose it. Voters left, right and center
went to the polls in large numbers and defeated the jail tax.
Hemilich's jail went down to defeat, so did Heimlich himself,
and former mayoral candidate Democrat David Pepper, Jr., a Cincinnati City
Councilman who had originally introduced what became one of the country's
harshest anti-marijuana laws, was elected to the Hamilton County Board of
Commissioners. Leis, Pepper and Portune then took up the jail issue anew, now
adding some modest mental health and drug treatment programs for jail
prisoners, but still calling for the additional 800 beds. And, as with
Heimlich's jail, the new facility would be financed by a regressive sales tax -
an even larger tax - falling heaviest on working people and the poor. Portune
and Pepper then passed the measure at the three-member Board meeting over the
contrary vote from Republican Pat DeWine, imposing a new jail on citizens who
had only a few months before rejected a similar proposal. Two white men had
voted for a jail that if built would, like every other jail and prison in the
country, house an inordinate number of black people. Voters, however, still had
the right to put the measure on the ballot, and immediately the organizing
began.
"Opponents of
the jail were led by the NAACP and included Cincinnati Progressive Action and
the Green Party on the left and COAST (Citizens Opposed to Additional Spending
and Taxes), various Republican officials, and the Libertarian Party on the
right."
Furious
that the commissioners had voted for the jail when only a few months before it
had gone down to defeat in a county-wide referendum, critics of the jail tax
launched a campaign for another referendum. Opponents of the jail were led by
the NAACP and included Cincinnati Progressive Action and the Green Party on the
left and COAST (Citizens Opposed to Additional Spending and Taxes), various
Republican officials, and the Libertarian Party on the right. Those groups
created a tacit alliance and cooperated in circulating petitions to give
citizens the right to vote on the jail in the November 2007 election. Leis,
Pepper and Portune responded by taking their case to dozens of groups around
the county, urging voters not to sign the petitions which, they said, would
only delay the inevitable. But citizens rushed to sign the petitions at local
church fairs, block parties, and summer festivals. The opposing groups, led by
the NAACP's grassroots activists, collected over 54,000 signatures, with 38,961
of them declared valid, 10,000 more than the number needed to put the issue on
the ballot.
The Jail: The Democratic Party Stakes All its Chips
The
Democratic Party has decided to make the jail the issue of the election,
invoking party discipline to keep the unions, the social service agencies, and
new city council candidates in line. Pepper and Portune prove to be a potent
pair, the Janus face of the Democratic Party. Pepper's face turns toward the
corporate powers. It was Pepper, son of a P&G CEO, who played a crucial
role on the Cincinnati City Council in multimillion dollar concessions to keep
Convergys and Kroger from leaving Cincinnati. Portune's face turns toward the
social service agencies and other do-gooders who have depended upon him during
the Republican lean years to keep them afloat. Pepper and Portune, having added
some in-jail mental health and substance abuse programs, claim that building a
new, bigger jail is now a progressive measure. Now known as Issue 27, the jail
proposal, would raise the county's sales tax a half-cent for eight years, lower
it a quarter-cent for seven years and then eliminate it after 15 years. The tax
would build a new $198 million, 1,800-bed jail an $11 million juvenile detention
facility. Hamilton County, its population still declining, would have the
biggest jail in Ohio.
The Democratic Party plays a powerful in Cincinnati's
labor and social movements - not in providing leadership, but in exerting
discipline over those that might get out of line. Democrats have told the
unions that they must not only support the party's candidates but also its jail
tax. So unions that one might expect to take a progressive position - such as
the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers or the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists
- have toed the line. The Building Trades, of course, can be counted on to
support building anything so long as it provides jobs for their almost
all-white membership. Similarly, Todd Portune has made it clear to social service
organizations that serve the poor and that he has often lobbied for that he
expects them to support the jail. Liberal Democratic City Council candidates
have also been told that they will be expected to support the jail or loose the
party's support.
"Hamilton
County, its population still declining, would have the biggest jail in Ohio."
The only
major organization in the city that has had the courage to stand up to the
Democratic Party on this issue is the NAACP chapter led by Christopher
Smitherman. Smitherman, a stockbroker, a fiscal conservative and a former city
councilman, infuriated the establishment and especially the police department
when he attempted to use his seat on the city council to examine the
institutional racism of the city. Smitherman's demands for answers to police
killings and his suggestion that the police department was controlled by an old
white boys network led to accusations by County Prosecutor Michael K. Allen
that Smitherman himself was involved in "racial profiling." Shocked and
angered by the reaction to his attempts to get at the truth of Cincinnati's
racism, Smitherman became the council's angry young man. The media turned on
him and Smitherman went down to defeat in the 2007 elections.
More
determined than ever to fight the racism of the white establishment, Smitherman
then ran for president of the NAACP promising to make the organization a more
aggressive presence in the region, winning only after a bitter organizational
and legal battle with his opponent Edith Thrower. Smitherman, whose moderate
politics were long ago overtaken by his sense of indignation at the racist
treatment of African Americans in Cincinnati, has proven to be one of the few
people in the city with the courage to speak out and to act, no matter what the
establishment thinks, conservative or liberal. At the same time his essentially
conservative political views make it possible for him to work with the
right-wing Republican anti-tax crowd led by Pat DeWine. Smitherman seems not to
realize that his conservative worldview and his search for racial justice are
at odds, but thankfully it is the latter that seems to drive him.
Smitherman
speaks for many black Cincinnatians when he says, "Until the justice
system is fair in Hamilton County, the Cincinnati branch of the NAACP cannot
support building a new jail. The NAACP knows well that the sentences and
punishments for African Americans are harsher and longer. It is this disparity
in the justice system that underscores the discrimination of African-American people
in Hamilton County and across the nation." (Kevin Osborne, "Jail
Break," City Beat, Sept. 12, 2007.)
"Until the justice system is fair in Hamilton County, the
Cincinnati branch of the NAACP cannot support building a new jail."
The Cincinnati Democrats, locked in the embrace of
Republican Sheriff Leis and apparently oblivious to the racial divide that they
are exacerbating, have turned the jail into the central political issue for
November. What explains this strange turn of events? Some speculate that
Portune and Pepper must believe that their alliance with Leis on this issue
will make it feasible for them to portray themselves as the party of law and
order and therefore to win enough independent and Republican votes to turn
their two-to-one majority on the County Commission into a permanent state of
affairs. Portune will certainly find it a lot easier to run for office in the
next election if he doesn't have to contend with Sheriff Leis and Carl Lindner.
In any
case, Pepper and Portune seem to be able to count on Cincinnati's Democratic
Party which during the last national election became a much better organized
and more disciplined outfit. Whether or not that Democratic organization can
deliver the voters, particularly black voters, remains to be seen. As they take
the case to the people, the new liberal activists of the party organization may
wonder if a Democratic Party victory on this issue is really worth it if in the
end it means that Simon Leis has a bigger jail and a bigger budget and that black
Cincinnati feels betrayed. What will Cincinnatians say to themselves six years
after Timothy Thomas was killed and the riots broke out, that we have a bigger
jail? And here we thought all that soul searching had something to do with
racial and social justice.
Dan La Botz is a Cincinnati-based teacher, writer and
activist. He is a member of Cincinnati Progressive Action (CPA) and No Jail Tax
PAC (nojailtax.org).
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