An incarcerated writer slammed conditions at the Pierce County Jail. We should listen | Opinion

Christopher Blackwell is a success story. At 42, he’s the co-founder of a nonprofit working to improve Washington’s criminal legal system. He’s also an accomplished restorative justice mentor and facilitator. On top of that, Blackwell, who recently married, is an award-winning journalist, despite having dropped out of school by the time he was 14. He’s been published in outlets across the country. Earlier this month, he had a piece in the New York Times.

Blackwell, who grew up on Hilltop — at South 14th and L Street, just off MLK — is also incarcerated, approaching the halfway mark of a 45-year combined sentence for murder and robbery. He’s been in prison since he was 22, shortly after a tragedy he describes as a “drug robbery” gone horribly wrong. He committed the most serious of offenses, “taking another human’s life,” and he pleaded guilty. By his own telling, Blackwell’s interactions with the carceral system started long before the 2003 crime that put him behind bars for decades. Starting at the age of 12, he was in and out of juvenile detention centers. For at least half of his life, Blackwell has been locked up.

All this gives Blackwell, who’s affable and brutally honest about the damage he’s caused and his quest for “true accountability,” a unique and important perspective on our criminal justice system.

Here’s why:

If we have any hope of improving the way society seeks to hold those who’ve committed crimes accountable while also rehabilitating them for their eventual release — and the vast majority of incarcerated individuals will someday be free — we have to face the hard truths and system shortcomings that Blackwell knows better than most.

To put it bluntly, we’ve designed a system that too often spits people out more damaged than when they arrived, Blackwell said.

That includes here in Tacoma, at places like the Pierce County Jail, which was the subject of Blackwell’s recent New York Times opinion piece.

“It’s a humanitarian issue,” Blackwell told me by phone this week from the Washington State Corrections facility in Shelton, discussing the ways in which our national impulse to be tough on crime backfires by subjecting incarcerated individuals to layers of violence, mistreatment and new traumas. “If we’re a solid society with sound morals and principles, we would treat people as human beings. That should be first and foremost. … Even if you don’t care about people because they caused harm, you do care if they come out and cause harm again.”

So what does that have to do with the Pierce County Jail, a facility that, for most, represents a small piece of a much larger crime-and-justice landscape? It’s simple: For people accused of committing local crimes — including some who will ultimately be found not guilty or never face trial, avoiding prison altogether — it’s their entry into a system. It’s also an experience capable of helping to shape the rest of their lives, potentially in a negative way.

As Blackwell detailed in his recent New York Times opinion piece, last December he returned to the Pierce County Jail for two weeks while he awaited a resentencing hearing that was eventually delayed. Having written extensively about his experiences in the state’s prison system, he’s seen plenty of things while serving his lengthy sentence, he said, including solitary confinement, which he’s vocally opposed, including submitting testimony to the state Legislature.

None of it prepared Blackwell for the conditions he confronted during his stay at his hometown jail, he said.

According to Blackwell, the red flags and indignities he encountered at the Pierce County Jail ran the gamut. He described food that made prison rations look enticing and exorbitant prices at the jail’s commissary — a 24-pack of Top Ramen cost more than $26, three times as much as it does in prison and four times what it costs on Amazon, he wrote — along with much more serious concerns, like an alleged assault, by prisoners and guards, of his cellmate, a man with diagnosed mental health issues.

More broadly, Blackwell saved some of his sharpest critiques for the problematic nature of the cash bail system, which effectively locks up anyone who doesn’t have the money or assets to secure their release on bond, disproportionately affecting the poor and people of color. Like other developed countries, Blackwell believes it’s a system the United States should do away with, for good reason. As he wrote in the NYT, “Along with people serving short sentences for relatively minor offenses, jails house people who are awaiting trial and either didn’t get bail or simply couldn’t pay it — people, that is, who have not been convicted of any crime.”

On Tuesday, Pierce County Sheriff’s Department spokesperson Sgt. Darren Moss responded to the conditions Blackwell described in his recent New York Times piece, noting that the altercation Blackwell learned of from his cellmate and then relayed in print, with permission, occurred in November, a month before he arrived at the Pierce County Jail. Moss provided what was described as a “report summary” from the incident, which indicated that the prisoner showed signs of aggression and failed to obey commands before being taken down and subsequently shocked with a Taser.

Moss also provided an example Pierce County Jail dinner menu, which included a Salisbury steak patty and pudding.

The question, then, is what’s a reasonable person supposed to make of all this? Two people, looking at the same thing from diametrically opposed vantage points and positions of power, describing something completely different.

Before we hung up the phone, that’s the question — “What do you hope people take away from this?” — that I posed to Blackwell. He readily acknowledged that some readers will likely ignore his words and others, including law enforcement officials, will be dismissive. It’s a reality he’s grown accustomed to as an incarcerated writer, and a frustration he deals with daily.

At the same time, Blackwell said he hopes that shining a light on what he saw and heard during his time in the Pierce County Jail will help people realize that what happens in local jails across the country really does matter.

The way the justice system treats people is a decision we all have a stake in, he says, and when the system turns a blind eye to people it locks up — including housing them in local facilities that lack adequate resources and staffing to address things like addiction and chronic health conditions — it ultimately chips away at the health and safety of our communities.

Most importantly, it inflicts unnecessary, lasting harm on people who we should be trying to rehabilitate, he says, for the common good.

“People come home. People are going to re-enter the community,” Blackwell told me.

“And just like the old saying, ‘Hurt people hurt people.’”