There’s a chilling scene in “Surrendered,” the 2011 memoir Kwame Kilpatrick wrote with Khary Kimani Turner, that Kilpatrick witnessed when he was heading to a maximum security prison in 2010.
Kilpatrick, aka inmate #702408, was on a bus with other inmates when they stopped at a prison in St. Louis, Mich., that also served as a transit center for prisoners being moved between institutions. As Kilpatrick entered the compound, some 20 other buses idled in the driveway.
“I saw something that will haunt me for the rest of my life,” Kilpatrick (or Turner) wrote.
“The haunting sight was the cargo – scores of inmates, dressed in their ‘state blues,’ pouring from each vehicle like black chattel. I had a perfect vantage point. Dozens – and I do mean dozens – of young men, mostly African American, all in belly chains, ankle cuffs, hand restraints and padlocks just like mine, stepped from these buses and formed lines. Corrections officers, most of whom were white, ordered them, ordered them again, and they shuffled off to other buses.
“I thought of Jamestown, Virginia. It looked like a slave trading post, the marketplace where slaves were bought and sold. Strong, abled-bodied black men were moved from plantation to plantation, from one person’s control to another…”
Kilpatrick’s observation is stark and self-serving, but he’s not necessarily wrong.
Many observers of the American penal system have been pointing out for several years that more people end up in prison in this country than anywhere else in the world, and they are overwhelmingly the nation’s poorest, most mentally ill, and least-educated citizens, as historian Heather Ann Thompson described in an article this week on the Atlantic.com.
They also are disproportionately black. Michelle Alexander, a law professor, wrote a bestseller in 2010, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” that argues that the war on drugs and other crime crackdowns have overwhelmed black America. She writes that nearly one-third of African-American men will spend time in prison and will be second-class citizens once they get out.
But where does Kwame Kilpatrick fit into that big picture, if at all?
He is African American, but he is not poor, mentally ill or uneducated. In fact, he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He attended one of the best high schools in Detroit, got a college degree, graduated from law school and passed the bar.
Both his parents were successful politicians; his mother essentially ceded her seat in the state House to her son when she was elected to Congress. The Kilpatricks attended one of Detroit’s power churches, the Shrine of the Black Madonna, and Kilpatrick writes how his parents’ love and support for him never waned. For years he also has praised the strength he drew from his extended family, and he put multiple generations of Kilpatricks and Cheeks on stage during his inspirational first inauguration, at the Fox Theatre, in 2002.
That is assuredly not the backgrounds of many inmates Kilpatrick will encounter over the next couple decades he spends in federal prison. He is like the Piper Chapman character in the Netflix hit, “Orange is the New Black,” the upper-middle class college grad doing time for transporting drugs amid poor black, white and Latina women in a prison in upstate New York.
Kilpatrick is witty, charismatic, and had the city’s power brokers and tycoons eating out of his hand during his first term in office. In the state legislature, he befriended outstate Republicans and had northern Michigan residents in awe of him. If Kilpatrick had had the ethics of a Dennis Archer or Damon Keith or Carl Levin, he could have had a shot at becoming Michigan’s first black governor or U.S. Senator.
So why does someone who had every break in the book do things that have put him in the county jail, state
prison and, after Thursday’s sentencing, a federal penitentiary? Why does a gifted man like Kilpatrick get caught up in such a complicated web of lies, stretching over a decade? Why does a man with Kilpatrick’s brains believe he can get away with running a criminal enterprise out of the mayor’s office that, officials say, cost his impoverished, bankrupt city that he supposedly loves millions of dollars?
Why does a self-proclaimed family man leave his three young sons without a father?
Kilpatrick has blamed a variety of people: Wayne County Prosecutor Kim Worthy, the media, unspecified Detroit business people, racists – even women, though at times when he discussed his need for sex he used a crude profanity. Armchair psychologists have diagnosed Kilpatrick as an extreme narcissist. If nothing else, he is a straight-out conundrum.
Almost exactly five years ago, Kilpatrick was in Wayne County Circuit Court to be sentenced in the perjury case in which he had pleaded guilty. He spent the hearing frowning, shaking his head, smirking, laughing and goofing around. At one point, he even needled Prosecutor Worthy and her assistants.
Afterward, when a seething Bernard Kilpatrick, Kwame’s father, was asked what he felt while he watched his son led into custody, he replied: "The anguish of thousands of black fathers for years who watched their sons being railroaded into jail."
Something is not right about that. The mass incarceration of black men in America is a serious issue. But Kwame Kilpatrick does not qualify as being railroaded just because he is black.
When Kwame Kilpatrick faces the judge Thursday morning, he has only one person to blame: Kwame Kilpatrick.
