My Visit to a Las Vegas Jail
by Brian Terrell
“What happened to us was a
shakedown by gangsters wearing police uniforms and judges’ robes, not for the
sake of justice, but to maintain the civic infrastructure behind the glittering
façade of Las Vegas with dollars squeezed out of its poorest citizens.”
“The degree of civilization in a
society,” wrote the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, “can be judged by
entering its prisons.” As a frequent visitor to Nevada in recent years, I have
often been surprised by the cultural diversity and spiritual richness that can
be found in Las Vegas. Still, I think that Dostoyevsky was right. A more
accurate assessment of the degree of civilization in Las Vegas and for the
broader society that the city claims to be “The Entertainment Capital” of can
be made by entering the cells of the Clark County Correctional Center than by
going to the top of the Stratosphere, cruising the Strip or even by taking in a
Cirque du Soleil show.
I was one of twenty five arrested by
Las Vegas Metropolitan Police at Creech Air Force Base, the center of drone
assassination by the US Air Force and the CIA some forty miles northwest of the
city on March 31 and April 1. “Shut Down Creech” was a weeklong convergence of
activists from around the country. Most of us staying in tents at a makeshift
“Camp Justice” in the desert across the highway from the base, our days of
discussion, study, song, reflection and strategizing built up to a dramatic
series of coordinated actions, including street theater and blockades, that
disrupted the lethal business as usual of Creech. While we expected to be
arrested, this was not our desire or our goal. Once again, the police arrested
the wrong people as they abetted the criminals and took those who acted to stop
a crime in progress down town to be booked.
Since 2009, I have had at least two
other trips on the police from Creech to the county jail at the prestigious
address, 330 S Casino Center Blvd in Las Vegas, to undergo the tedious process
of booking, the fingerprinting, mugshots and other indignities before getting
kicked out onto the sidewalk a few long hours later. This time, however, after
my friends and comrades were released one by one, I remained behind. I was kept
in jail for the next four days, not for my part in the day’s protest, but on a
bench warrant due to an unpaid traffic fine.
I had been arrested a year before at
another protest at Creech and cited for the misdemeanor crime of impeding
traffic and released with 30 some others on our promise to return for trial.
Some weeks later, the charges on ten of us were reduced to the traffic offence
of “pedestrian soliciting a ride or business on a roadway” and we were assessed
a $98 fine with no apparent way to plead not guilty. While those who eventually
went to trial on the original charges were found not guilty or had their
charges dismissed, those of us in the “hitchhikers’ club” all failed in our
various attempts to have our cases heard. “How can I contest this ticket?” I
asked the clerk at the Justice (sic) Court in Las Vegas. “You don’t contest
it,” was the answer, “you PAY it.” In Las Vegas, it is easier to plead not
guilty to a violent felony than it is to contest a traffic ticket.
In due course I got a glossy post
card in the mail with a color photo of a perp getting handcuffed against a
Metropolitan Police squad car, with the clever warning “Pay the Ticket, Avoid
the Click-it.” This image, that can also be found on the court’s website, came with this threat: “The Las
Vegas Township Justice Court will issue arrest warrants for all unpaid traffic
tickets. An additional warrant fee of $150 and a late fee of $100 will be added
to all tickets that proceed into warrant status. In addition to warrant fees
and penalties, all unpaid traffic tickets will be reported to national credit
reporting agencies.” A search of my case on the court’s website showed that I
had been charged to pay for my own warrant and another “compliance fee,”
apparently to pay for my account getting referred to a collection agency,
bringing my bill up to $348.
These mounting fines and lack of access to
the courts and the calls that started to come from a collection agency were a
small annoyance to me, but are an indication of a larger systemic problem. The
Las Vegas Justice Court Mission Statement (“The vision of the Las Vegas Justice
Court is to maximize access to Justice, in order to achieve the highest
possible level of Public Trust and Confidence”) notwithstanding, these
practices and those like them in courts around the country are illegal.
A March 16, 2016, “Dear Colleague” letter from the Office for
Access to Justice of the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division,
addressed to state and local courts lays it out: “Recent years have seen
increased attention on the illegal enforcement of fines and fees in certain
jurisdictions around the country—often with respect to individuals accused of
misdemeanors, quasi-criminal ordinance violations, or civil infractions.
Typically, courts do not sentence defendants to incarceration in these cases;
monetary fines are the norm. Yet the harm caused by unlawful practices in
these jurisdictions can be profound. Individuals may confront escalating
debt; face repeated, unnecessary incarceration for nonpayment despite posing no
danger to the community; lose their jobs; and become trapped in cycles of
poverty that can be nearly impossible to escape. Furthermore, in addition
to being unlawful, to the extent that these practices are geared not toward
addressing public safety, but rather toward raising revenue, they can cast
doubt on the impartiality of the tribunal and erode trust between local
governments and their constituents.”
This letter cites a Supreme Court ruling
that the due process and equal protection principles of the Fourteenth
Amendment prohibit “punishing a person for his poverty” and further insists
that “the use of arrest warrants as a means of debt collection, rather than in
response to public safety needs, creates unnecessary risk that individuals’
constitutional rights will be violated. Warrants must not be issued for
failure to pay without providing adequate notice to a defendant, a hearing
where the defendant’s ability to pay is assessed, and other basic procedural
protections. … When people are arrested and detained on these
warrants, the result is an unconstitutional deprivation of liberty.”
Somehow, the memo did not make it to Las
Vegas. While the statistics are not available, during that long weekend I was
not the only inmate in the Clark County jail locked up solely for not paying
fines on minor offenses.
The deplorable conditions and cruelties of
this jail defy exaggeration and are as extravagant as the floorshows at the
city’s casinos and hotels. It was more than eight hours after getting arrested
that I was finally taken out of shackles. We were packed standing room only,
more than forty people in a small cell those first hours in chains.
Not long after I arrived, as a guard
opened the door to push in yet another prisoner, a very slight young man edged
his way to the front and tried desperately to explain that he was suffering an
anxiety attack and needed air. Not listening, the guard tried to slam the door
on this young man who stepped forward into the door jamb. The guard then
grabbed the young man, threw him down onto the hallway floor and even though
his hands were shackled at his waist and he could not hit back, at least five
guards, all larger than him, all had their knees on his body and were pummeling
him with their fists. The last I saw of him, his face was bloodied and he was
being wheeled away, his wrists and ankles chained to a restraint chair. This
was the jailers’ response to a normal human reaction to an inhuman situation
and those suffering from mental illness or the effects of withdrawal were
treated no less harshly.
Like some bizarre board game, we prisoners
were inexplicably moved from cell to crowded cell at all hours. Sometimes a
prisoner would only just arrive before their name was called for another move.
Sometimes the guards went from cell to cell shouting a name of someone they had
somehow misplaced. Some of our cell mates insisted that they had been in the
same place for many days and worried that they had been lost as well. Guards
were constantly giving contradictory and erroneous “information,” such as when
we would get to court or be moved to more spacious and comfortable quarters
upstairs. Some of the guards, not restrained by their own lack of credentials,
were generously distributing legal advice to those preparing to see a judge. I
found out later that my friends outside were likewise misled by jail employees
as they tried to keep track of me.
I had arrived at the jail early on a
Friday and was kept in these holding cells until Monday morning at 3 o’clock.
Meals were unsatisfactory nutritionally and esthetically, but also, served as
they were at 3 AM, 9AM and 3PM, did not even serve to mark the passage of time
in this dungeon without windows and where the lights never dimmed. These cells
varied in size and the body counts in them varied hour to hour. There were
narrow benches around the walls where a few could lie down and nap, but most of
us were lucky when there was room enough to stretch out without a blanket on
the cold, filthy concrete floor. There was an open toilet in each cell- to use
toilet paper, one had to find and wake the prisoner who had appropriated the
roll for use as a pillow. In the wee hours after my third night on concrete, I
was finally taken upstairs, given a change of clothes and a blanket and shown a
cot in a fairly quiet and almost clean dormitory of some 80 men.
About 10 on Monday morning, I was chained
up again and led through a series of tunnels and elevators to traffic court.
There were some 30 of us in that batch, by no means everyone who had been
jailed over the weekend for unpaid traffic charges. Each case was decided by
the judge in seconds, with no defendant allowed to say anything beyond affirming
their identity upon hearing their name called. Most of the fines and added fees
assessed against these men and women amounted to many thousands of dollars.
Based on an informal formula of dollars per days in lock up, the judge shaved
off some off the fines owed and let most of the prisoners out with the threat
that if the remainder was not paid in 30 days, more costs would be added, a new
warrant issued and the cycle would be repeated.
None of us in traffic court that morning
had been granted a “hearing where the defendant’s ability to pay is assessed”
that the law demands before putting us in jail. Few of us, if any, had been
found guilty by any judicial process before being fined in the first place.
Debt collection, not guilt or innocence, was the only concern of this “court.”
What happened in court that morning could be called “criminal justice” only in
that what was done to us by the court was criminal. What happened to us was a
shakedown by gangsters wearing police uniforms and judges’ robes, not for the
sake of justice, but to maintain the civic infrastructure behind the glittering
façade of Las Vegas with dollars squeezed out of its poorest citizens.
Through this experience, I met many
interesting people, mostly young black and brown men. A few of them were locked
up for alleged criminal offenses, but many seemed to be caught up in the same
collections racket as me. The calls made from the phones in the cells were
mostly frantic appeals to family and friends for money to pay the fines or the
bail that would get them released. Unless they were wearing badges and carrying
keys, there was no one I met at the Clark County jail that I feared as a threat
to myself or to the public safety.
If the machinations of the Las Vegas
Justice Court are not about justice, neither are the drones controlled from
Creech Air Force Base 40 miles away about defense. By remote control and often
under the shadiest of orders by the CIA, military personnel at Creech are
assassinating suspected enemies far from fields of battle, based on unproven
allegations or on “patterns of behavior,” often incinerating their families or
the strangers unfortunate enough to be close by. It should not be surprising
that a government that executes suspects, sometimes even its own citizens,
without trial in places far way will also imprison its poorest people at home
without due process.
Among those who stood with me in traffic
court that morning, my own debt of $348 was one of the smallest and the judge
summarily sentenced me to time served, crediting my four days in jail to wipe
away all my fines and added costs. I was not even allowed to explain that I had
never solicited a ride on a roadway in the first place. Although the judge said
I was free to go, the bureaucracy of the jail took another 12 hours to get me
released. It was after 10:30 Monday night that I was finally given back my
clothes and sent out the long tunnel that leads from the jail to the bright
lights of downtown Las Vegas, onto the sidewalk and into the embrace of
faithful friends who had been keeping vigil for me the whole time of my
incarceration.
I left the Clark County jail exhausted and
happy to be out, but grateful, too, for the hospitality and patient endurance
of those who shared their harsh, constricted space with me for a few days. It
is a hard but precious privilege for this middle aged white man to visit such
places where other good people have no choice but to inhabit.
The same drama is being played out in
jails and courtrooms around the United States, the country that imprisons more
of its people than any other. With more than 95% of criminal charges now
settled with plea bargains instead of going to trial, many defendants are
convicted and put away for years with not much more in the way of due process
than I was afforded with my little trumped-up hitchhiking ticket.
It is unclear if what happened to me in
Las Vegas Justice Court on April 4 was a conviction in the strictly legal
sense, but what happened there has certainly deepened my conviction that the
so-called war on terror is just one front of the vicious war on the poor and on
people with black and brown skin here at home as well as abroad. This
conviction will lead me back to Creech and other drone bases, to the places
targeted by their Hellfire missiles when I can and, if need be, to back to the
Clark County Correctional Center.
Drawing on these connections, Voices for
Creative Nonviolence is organizing a “NO Thomson Prison De-Incarceration Walk,” 150 miles from Chicago
to Thomson, Illinois, from May 28 to June 11. Thomson is where the federal
government will soon open a new “super-max” prison that is expected to keep up
to 1,900 prisoners in solitary conditions that have been condemned by the
international community as amounting to torture. Please join us if you can
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master
class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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