Hakeem Jeffries gives the prison-gerrymander presentation at his old law school
Hakeem Jeffries at N.Y.U. Dan Rosenblum
5:31 pm Jan. 24, 2012
Last night, a little more than a week after officially announcing his official run for Congress, Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries spoke to approximately 150 law students about New York’s “prison-industrial complex.”
In N.Y.U.’s Vanderbilt Hall, law professor Samuel Rascoff introduced Jeffries (a 1997 N.Y.U. Law School graduate) as a near-extinct species of politician: “politicanus seriosis.”
Jeffries, who was a victim of gerrymandering when he first sought to run for office and, later, a sponsor of the legislation that outlawed prisoner-based gerrymandering (whereby prisoners were counted as voters in the districts in which they were incarcerated, rather than at their home addresses), briefly outlined his path from law school to a clerkship in U.S. District Court to a position at a law firm to a run for State Assembly in 2000. He lost that race, but eventually won a seat six years later.
Jeffries questioned the idea of prisons as economic-development tools, comparing them a “field of dreams” (similar to a reference he used Sunday for Atlantic Yards).
He said until the bill passed that prohibited prison-based gerrymandering, right-wing politicians effectively maintained a pipeline of minorities from New York and poor urban areas upstate that sustained prisons and inflated the influence of prison districts, even as New York City had to pay the costs of rehabilitating ex-convicts.
What’s more, Jeffries said, the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy and the Rockefeller Drug laws had helped to fill the prisons with nonviolent inmates.
“And I’m sure some of it had to do with the fact that people of good will were of the view that drugs are an evil thing in their society, and certainly, from my vantage point, I’m not an advocate for the legalization of drugs,” he said. “But I am an advocate for a fair and rational and even-handed drug policy.”
Jeffries said this was clearest in 2008, when then-governor Eliot Spitzer met resistance in the State Senate as he tried to close four prisons upstate.
“The arguments that were made had nothing to do with fiscal sanity, they had nothing to do with the need to keep those facilities open from a Census standpoint,” said Jeffries. “They had everything to do with the notion that these facilities had become, part and parcel, the economic supplier of certain communities.”
Jeffries talked about gentrification in his district, which covers Fort Greene and Prospect Heights, over the last decade.
“The G Train is very important in those communities, but when I was growing up, you couldn’t pay me to take the G Train,” he said. “Back then, it was one of the most dangerous lines in the system. I used to think that the ‘G’ stood for ‘gansta.’”
Since then, he said, artists who pioneered the neighborhoods became victims of their own success, and now rising rents threatened to price them, and the original residents, out. But the fight for affordable housing shouldn’t be a divisive one, Jeffries said.
“In many ways, it’s not a black issue, it’s not a white issue, it’s not a brown issue, it’s all about the color of green,” Jeffries said.
An audience member asked why Jeffries wanted to leave the Assembly to run for another office.
“When I first ran for the Assembly and certainly when I was even elected in 2006, I remember folks saying to me, ‘Why in the world would you want to leave this practice that you’re developing to go to that cauldron of dysfunction up in Albany?’" he said. “And I met a little bit of success and got my act together to some degree in Albany. But I’m fascinated now, because I often hear the question, ‘Why in the world would you want to leave that bastion of democracy in Albany to go to that cauldron of dysfunction in Washington, D.C.?’”
Jeffries is challenging longtime incumbent Ed Towns in a district covering Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn Heights and East New York. The district is overwhelmingly Democratic, and the winner of the Democratic primary will almost certainly win the general election.
Since announcing his bid for Congress earlier this month, Jeffries has so far been reluctant to criticize Towns or the other declared Democratic candidate in the race, Councilman Charles Barron.
“I believe that everyone’s record clearly speaks for itself,” said Jeffries after the lecture.
“Given the fact that you’ve got a councilman who has served for more than ten years, a congressman who has served for over 30 years and myself with the privilege of being able to be in the legislature for more than five years, I expect that our public records will be scrutinized for our ability not just to speak on issues, but to get things accomplished,” he said.
Jeffries stayed after the hour-long lecture and talked to various students who had follow-up questions. Some of them offered to volunteer for his campaign.
First-year law student David Leapheart, 23, said he was encouraged to see someone from the school working his way up.
“Every now and again you’ll get someone like the assemblyman who comes here and reenergizes you,” he said. “A lot of us came here because we want to change the world and you get here and they send you down in torts and contracts and civil procedure and they make you wonder what this has to do with changing the world.”
