Authors: Steve Bogira
The drug war has tightened the criminal justice grip on blacks in particular. Blacks are
incarcerated for drug crimes at a rate fourteen times that of whites. While the imprisonment rate for white drug offenders doubled between 1986 and 1996, it quintupled for blacks. Bates is one of 133 drug defendants on Locallo’s docket in March 1998. Five are white, fifteen Hispanic. Bates is among the 113 who are black.
The current drug war is
a rerun of a 1950s campaign, with racial overtones.
With heroin use climbing in northern ghettoes after World War II, white elected officials and civic leaders demanded action,
fearful that the scourge could spread to their neighborhoods. The
ghettoes were swelling in these cities—it wasn’t only heroin that whites feared moving in next door.
Police began sweeping addicts into jail, and
lawmakers greatly toughened drug laws.
Officials acknowledged that whites were the main drug profiteers, but those caught and prosecuted were almost always minority users and street dealers. The dealers were equated with murderers. In 1951
Frank Lopez was tried at 26th Street for selling marijuana to a person under twenty-one. Lopez was a “vicious, contemptible man,” the prosecutor told the jury in his closing argument. “He doesn’t have to have horns on his head. He doesn’t have to be carrying a pitchfork. He doesn’t have to wear a dark and sinister look.… Right before you today you see a dope seller. You see a man … who tears the living soul out of human beings.” Lopez was convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years to life.
In the 1960s a kinder
attitude toward illicit drug use developed, a change of heart that coincided with more illicit drug use by whites. Sentences were eased. Treatment centers sprouted thanks to federal funding. At 26th Street judges began tossing out more and more drug cases in preliminary hearings. This happened especially when the defendants were “
white kids from the suburbs” whom the judges didn’t want to jail, Chicago police sergeant John Killacky recalled in a 1986 interview with a University of Chicago researcher.
But in 1979 the use of illicit drugs by whites
began falling, and as it did, so did support for a compassionate approach to drug abuse.
In 1980, with the economy in recession, Bates, then twenty-six, was laid off of the warehouse job he’d held for five years. His drinking increased, and he was smoking marijuana frequently. He thinks a regular full-time job would have gotten him back on track, but all he could find on the west side
were “little old jive-time jobs”—day labor, drywall, part-time gas station attendant. He was still without a regular job in 1982—and he wasn’t alone. The national
unemployment rate for blacks that year was 19 percent, more than twice the rate for whites. As joblessness soared in urban slums, so did drug use. President Ronald
Reagan responded with the current war on drugs. The heavy reliance on law enforcement ultimately
brightened the unemployment picture: it increased the need for cops, lawyers, judges, clerks, prison guards, and construction workers; and it moved many of the jobless into jails and prisons and thus out of the unemployment totals.
Even with severe mandatory minimum drug sentences at the federal level, and in New York and several other states, the vast majority of drug offenders don’t receive the draconian terms often recounted in the media. Nationally, a third of state drug offenders are sentenced to probation, and, for those who are incarcerated, the average term is
two and a half years. Those harsh mandatory minimums induce drug defendants to plead guilty to lesser charges, making felony convictions quicker and easier. In courthouses like the one at 26th Street, addicts like Bates often do indeed make progress: they work their way up from probation to a short prison sentence, to longer and longer ones.
AFTER THE JURY RETIRES
to deliberate in the carjacking trial, Locallo says he’ll handle one more case before releasing his hungry staff for lunch. “I’m just gonna take this Nelson Mandela plea,” the judge says.
“Miranda,” prosecutor Mark Ostrowski corrects him.
Locallo’s slips of the tongue tend toward the grandiose—it’s not the first time he’s elevated Miranda from accused car thief to Nobel Peace Prize winner. Ushered before the bench now by Deputy Guerrero, Miranda is a broad-shouldered, goateed Puerto Rican. He was caught in a stolen 1984 Buick Riviera last June. That case was still pending, with Miranda out on bond, when he was caught a few months later in another stolen car—this one an ’85 Riviera.
In a January appearance in 302, Neil Cohen, the private lawyer Miranda’s family had managed to retain, told Locallo his client was a drug addict who needed treatment. Under Illinois law,
addicts accused of nonviolent crimes can be sentenced to probation and treatment under certain circumstances, even for nondrug offenses. But Locallo pointed out that Miranda wasn’t eligible for that because more than one case was pending against him. And prosecutor Alesia interjected that Miranda already had three felony convictions—for two car thefts and one other theft. He’d been to prison once and he’d gotten probation twice, once with drug treatment. He was still on probation when he was arrested for the Buick thefts.
Miranda had already been given “every opportunity” to reform and hadn’t, Alesia said, and so now it was time he received “severe sentencing.”
Miranda has worked as a carpet layer and a mechanic, but all his earnings “go in his veins,” lawyer Cohen says later. Cohen has had innumerable clients like Miranda, addicts who strip or steal cars or break into garages to fund their addictions. Cohen would like to see more spending on drug treatment and job training, less on “judges, cops, prosecutors, guards, and prison cells.”
Cohen once sang a different tune. In the mid-1980s he was a Cook County prosecutor assigned to the office’s narcotics unit. But he says that unit focused on high-level dealers and was lenient with addicts. Prosecutors today are less interested in drawing distinctions, and get-tough laws have limited the discretion of judges as well, Cohen says. “It’s the Eichmann mentality. Isn’t it simple if you don’t have to think?”
To Cohen, the fact that one dose of treatment failed to cure Miranda’s addiction isn’t cause for giving up on that remedy. Even if it has to be repeated, he says, treatment saves money in the long run compared with warehousing an addict in prison. And it’s the compassionate approach: “Imagine that it’s your child who becomes an addict. Are you going to put him in prison? Or are you going to try to get him some help? I believe we’re the family of man. What are we going to do with that child of ours?”
Cohen thought he might be able to win one of Miranda’s two cases. But the other one seemed a sure loser, and beating one case wouldn’t help Miranda much since the state could also prosecute him for violating his probation. Because of his previous convictions, and because he allegedly committed one of the car thefts while on bond, he was looking at twelve years minimum.
Locallo had worked out a way to give Miranda just ten years. At a plea conference earlier this month, the judge had said he would sentence Miranda to ten years on one of the car thefts if the state would drop the other case. Locallo would also give Miranda four years for the probation violation. This would run concurrent with the ten-year term, so it wouldn’t increase the total sentence, but it would give the state a second conviction. Prosecutor Alesia had grudgingly agreed to the judge’s proposal. Miranda had then asked for a continuance to consider the offer—annoying Alesia. “We’re bending over backwards to give this guy a deal,” the prosecutor had told Locallo. “It can only last so long.”
Today Cohen tells the judge his client will take the offer. Locallo leads Miranda through the admonishments, and soon it’s official. With day-for-day credit, Miranda will be incarcerated for five years. That’ll cost taxpayers at least $100,000.
• • •
AT THE LUNCH BREAK
the gallery empties, except for Bates. He doesn’t have money for lunch. He drained his pockets earlier on a Snickers bar from the Gangbanger Café, but he’s decided to save that for later, when his stomach is less jumpy, when he’s on his way home. He hopes.
He still finds it hard to believe how low he’s sunk. “I used to buy my first wife coats and things,” he says in the gallery. “We never were starving, never got set out [evicted].” That was back in the 1970s, when Bates was stocking shelves and filling orders in a pharmaceutical warehouse in Oak Brook. The job paid well enough that Bates could keep his wife, himself, and his Monte Carlo looking good. “During the time when the Pierre Cardins was out? I had me a couple pair of them boots. Big ol’ leather coats, suede, cashmere. Guys at my job would ask me to lend
them
money sometimes. Had a bank account.”
He didn’t drink or use drugs until his mid-twenties, he says. His father, a truck driver, worked steadily but stayed with the family off and on. A heavy drinker, he died of liver cancer. Bates, the oldest of twelve, wanted to set a better example for his siblings. His mother was a teetotaler and an ardent Pentecostal, and Bates followed in her footsteps. At first.
He graduated high school in 1973. Two years later he married a fellow church parishioner named Vanessa. They had daughters in 1976 and 1977. Soon after the second child, Latisa, was born, Vanessa took her back to the hospital with nosebleeds on several occasions. Bates recalls a doctor insinuating that he or Vanessa was causing the nosebleeds by sticking something up the child’s nose. “Do you really want this baby?” Bates remembers the doctor asking. Bates didn’t know what to make of it. In retrospect, he thinks he was afraid to admit to himself that something was wrong with Vanessa. She’d been acting oddly since Latisa was born. She seemed jealous when he gave the baby any attention, she talked vaguely of voices she was hearing, and she called Larry so often at work it was irritating his bosses.
Then one morning Vanessa called him at work again, distraught. Someone had broken into the house and taken Latisa, she shrieked. Bates rushed to their west-side flat. Detectives were searching the house and the alley when he arrived. They said they saw no sign of a break-in, and it was clear they doubted Vanessa’s story. The next morning Vanessa called the detectives and told them where they could find the baby—submerged in a covered diaper pail. Latisa was twenty-two days old; the cause of death was drowning.
At Vanessa’s murder trial at 26th Street, psychiatrists testified she was paranoid schizophrenic. Before Larry left for work on the morning of the
killing, Vanessa and Larry had argued—an argument that a psychiatrist said “was probably responsible for finally precipitating a psychotic breakdown of an already stressed and vulnerable Vanessa Bates.” She was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a mental hospital.
Larry Bates says he started drinking regularly not long after Latisa was killed and Vanessa jailed. After he was laid off in 1980, his drinking jumped, from two six-packs a day to as much as a case. “I guess it’s like they say, you drink to drown your problems, but the next day you wake up, they’re still right there.” He was smoking marijuana regularly too then. In 1983, his twenty-two-year-old brother was stabbed to death on a street corner. Bates married twice in the 1980s, but both marriages quickly failed.
One afternoon in 1986 or 1987 he walked in on some friends just as they were passing a pipe. “They said, ‘Man, you ever smoke cocaine? C’mon, Larry, check this stuff out.’ So I checked it out.
Boom
. You know how you feel when you making love? It felt like that, just all over your body. I thought, man, where’d they come up with
this
? The rat race begun then.”
He moved to Milwaukee in the early 1990s “to try and turn my life around.” He spent three years there working in factories and warehouses. He was still smoking cocaine but less often; it was easier to avoid it when he wasn’t surrounded by friends who smoked. But in 1995 he returned to Chicago, to be closer, he says, to his four children.
Then came his first felony, in 1996, for buying one rock on a street corner for five dollars. When his PD told him he could get probation if he pled guilty, he quickly did so. The PD never asked him about his drug use or whether he was interested in treatment—not that Bates would have jumped at the idea. “I was in a whole lotta denial then. I might have did me a rock, and then right afterward if somebody asked me about it, I’d say I didn’t do nothin’.”
Bates kept smoking crack while on that first probation. At one point he was smoking $70 to $100 of rocks a day. There were two ways to pay for that—thieving or dealing. He still cared enough about his reputation not to steal. “It’s too much publicity, you know what I’m saying? People start talking about how you not only using drugs, now you stealing, too. Nobody in my family can ever say I stole this or that from them, even when I stayed with them. I was a working addict.” Working on a corner, that is. “I’d be on the spot hollering, ‘Rocks and blows.’ ”
Then he got busted again, in 1997, for drug delivery. “I was the watch-out man,” he says. Right before this arrest, he thought he recognized an undercover car coming down the block. “I said, ‘Five-oh, man, five-oh!’ ” Too late.
Since he was on probation, there was no I-bond this time. He spent
seventy-eight days in jail while the case was pending. It was his first time in the Cook County Jail, and he went in scared to death, certain he’d get beaten or raped. But early on he met a prisoner he’d gone to high school with, a man who’d since risen to high rank in the Vice Lords and who put out word that no one was to mess with Bates. The seventy-eight days were still an ordeal. Bates has often felt anxious in confined spaces. There was also the constant buzz of friction around him—guards going off on inmates, inmates going off on one another. And there was the ever-present worry that Locallo would send him to prison. At night, when his cellmates were asleep, he often cried quietly into his pillow.
He got himself transferred to the jail’s drug treatment division. While in that program, he became convinced that his addiction was ruining his life. But he’d only been in the unit a few weeks when Locallo offered him probation again, in March 1997. Once again no one mentioned treatment. Bates stayed clean for a few months after he got out of jail. But now here he is again.