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CLEVELAND – When Joseph Worthy thinks of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old shot by Cleveland police while playing with a pellet gun, he sees family.
“I have a lot of nieces and nephews in the city of Cleveland. They like to play in the park,” Worthy said. “So for me, when I see what happened to Tamir, I cannot see how that can not happen to my own family, to the kids that I’m responsible to help raise and bring along in this world.”
Worthy runs the Children’s Defense Fund Office in Cleveland. Last June, he became one of the “Cleveland Eight,” a group of community activists and church leaders who petitioned an Ohio state court to hear evidence in the Rice case. The group had felt frustrated by the local prosecutor’s failure to seek indictments against Officer Timothy Loehmann, who shot Rice only two seconds after arriving in a local park. What the “Cleveland Eight” sought was a clear legal evaluation of the evidence, and in response to the group’s petition, Cleveland Judge Ronald Adrine found probable cause that a crime had been committed.
But Adrine’s ruling failed to have an enduring effect, as a local grand jury declined to indict Loehmann and his partner in late December. Nevertheless, Joseph Worthy says he is vowing to keep up fighting for the cause of non-violent change in the criminal justice system, to help other youth in Cleveland avoid the same fate as Rice.
“As a community of activists and non-violent practitioners, as people who believe black lives matter, we have to commit ourselves to struggle in this country to get it done,” he said. “It’s the only way its ever gotten done in this country.”
Worthy described community activism in prosaic terms – picking up participants for meeting, delivering writing supplies and ordering food, but he said that in these simple actions lie the seeds of democratic change.
“I don’t have the luxury of being tired. I have family in this city who are on the prison pipeline, who have stared down the barrel of police guns. Some who are not even one year old yet,” he said. “I understand that, so I can’t be tired. I can’t give up. I just have to look at new ways to get this done. I’m not going to sacrifice the lives of my nieces and nephews by being overwhelmed by the situation. I can’t. My family can’t do that. We aren’t afforded that privilege.”
America Tonight sat down with Worthy and his colleagues at the New Abolitionist Association, formed through the Children’s Defense Fund to address issues of incarceration, or what its members call the “cradle-to-prison pipeline.”
Below, hear from those activists, who described their work as following a decades-old legacy of social activism advanced by Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, and Gene Sharp, a leading philosopher of non-violent struggle for social change. Responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.
On his role in Cleveland: “What I do at Children’s Defense Fund is train young people from across the country on how to build and develop a movement for children in this country. Here, specifically in Cleveland, we have built the New Abolitionist Association, which is tasked with dismantling the prison pipeline. The fact that a black boy born in 2001 has a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison, a Latino boy a 1 in 6 chance of going to prison, all of these things are because of desperation, poverty and lack of health care [and] lack of educational opportunities in this city. All of these things lead to one of two things: Either being jail or being dead. We’re here specifically as an association to build a non-violent strategic movement for children not only in the city, but in the country.”
On Ohio’s prison population: “Ohio is one of the largest prison states in the country, and looking at Cleveland, we supply 33 percent of Ohio’s prison population. All the policies that they pass, all the things they do here in the city that keep the system going. You have all these black voices that are missing in action – the 33 percent, and then, [there’s] the fact that the number of women is rising. So, the entire black community is on the verge of non-existence in the civil life here in Cleveland.”
On his greatest fear: “We have ‘Freedom Schools’ in the juvenile prisons in Ohio. I worked in one in Massillon. Because [inmates are] not taught anything while they’re there, they recognize things as “insti,” like you’ve been institutionalized. One of the guys there had “Juvie life,” and “Juvie life” means you’re there until you’re 21. His greatest fear was that his homeboy got out before him. And so, when his homeboy got out, a week later he was in the adult system, because he had no skill set. He was in the adult system in the same clothes that they let him out in. So, it was a rapid thing, and it scared him to death. It terrified him because there was nothing he could do to prevent that from happening to himself.”
On the early process of the prison pipeline: “It’s starting early here. They’re getting juveniles, kids and adolescents, and putting them in the system. Then, they’re out of the system, if they’re lucky enough to get out. And they have repercussions and they’re kept on a leash and they can’t do things. They are yoked back, in another cell, in another adult system, and then, they can’t do anything really for the rest of their lives.”
On seeing loved ones go to prison: “A lot of my friends, where I’m from, they have gone to prison. What they feel like is that they can’t get a job, or go back to school, because they feel like they’re going to get in trouble again. And then, they do something stupid just to go back [to prison]. With these events that we are throwing, it gives them hope. I’ve seen a couple of my friends come to the poetry slams and they felt that maybe I don’t have to do do something dumb just to go back, because they can just express it from their art."
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