There has been plenty of discussion about whether prison is more about rehabilitation, punishment or keeping society safe. However, for Black people especially, it often seems like there’s a fourth option: Prison is about throwing undesirable people away.
The Washington Post reports that Fair Wayne Bryant was 38 years old when he was arrested in Shreveport, La., and has now spent nearly 23 years at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, which happens to be America’s largest maximum-security prison and one that sits on land that used to be home to a slave plantation.
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Chief Justice Bernette Johnson was the lone voice of dissent, the only African American justice and, apparently, the only one among her colleagues able to see systemic racism working in real-time.
“Mr. Bryant has already spent nearly 23 years in prison and is now over 60 years old,” she wrote in a statement. “If he lives another 20 years, Louisiana taxpayers will have paid almost one million dollars to punish Mr. Bryant for his failed effort to steal a set of hedge clippers.
“This man’s life sentence for a failed attempt to steal a set of hedge clippers is grossly out of proportion to the crime and serves no legitimate penal purpose,” she added.
Prior to being condemned to spend the rest of his life in a maximum-security prison, Bryant had four felonies on his criminal record. His most serious and only violent crime was an attempted armed robbery of a cab driver for which he was convicted in 1979 and served 10 years in prison. His other crimes include being in possession of stolen goods and forging a check. In 1992, he was convicted of breaking into a home and stealing personal property for which he served another four years in prison.
In 1997, when Bryant was convicted of attempted simple burglary for stealing the hedge clippers, prosecutors cited Louisiana’s habitual offender laws, which “allows prosecutors to seek harsher sentences for lesser crimes if a defendant has previous convictions,” the Post reports.
Johnson believes those laws are a “modern manifestation” of the “Pig Laws,” which she said were designed to keep Black people in poverty during the Reconstruction era.
