Today, the institution of mass incarceration subjects Lennard Ward to the same discrimination inflicted on his ancestors
Ga lo Vann is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Eastern Oklahoma and a prisoner at Oregon State Correctional Institution in Salem. Read more of his columns.
Lennard Ward is a 52-year-old Black man.
His family ancestry has been traced as far back as 1735 to a white man named Newitt Ward Sr.
Two generations later, on April 14, 1841, in Oak Vale, Mississippi, Newitt Sr.’s grandson Jesse Ward purchased a 15-year-old enslaved girl named Rhoda for $5 from his brother-in-law, William Daniels Sr.
Jesse Ward impregnated the enslaved Rhoda, who gave birth to Wiley Ward on April 15, 1850. Rhoda and her son, Wiley, both born slaves, marked the beginning of the Black line of the Ward family, to which Lennard belongs.
Lennard’s childhood was spent on the South Side of Chicago with his father, a pastor, and his mother, who worked with many Black empowerment and social justice movements. At 12, he moved to Oregon with his mother, then back to Chicago, and then again to Oregon.
Before we discussed the circumstances of his incarceration, we walked the track during our yard time (at Oregon State Correctional Institution).
“I want you to know I was not perfect out there (in the free world),” Lennard said. “Far from it. But, I always had one or two jobs and did what I could for my kids. And I had scrapes with the law.”
Lennard’s second and current incarceration is the result of a burglary gone wrong. Lennard and his co-defendant intended to steal from a drug house. He bought a shotgun, but no shells, he told me.
“I never wanted to hurt anyone. Nothing in the world could be worth me using a gun on somebody,” he said. “What I did want was to put the fear of God into them.”
(Editor’s note: According to the Lane County District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted the case, the victims of the robbery were bound with duct tape and “two were struck with the shotgun: one to the chin and cheek, the other on the top of the head. Mr. Ward admitted to investigators being the one armed with the shotgun.”)
There were five adults in the house, and one managed to call the police.
When Lennard was approached for a plea bargain, he found he was being charged with five counts of robbery in the first degree, burglary in the first degree, five counts of kidnapping in the first degree, two counts of assault in the second degree and felon in possession of a firearm — all to carry a sentence of 20 years.
At first look, these charges seem excessive, and so Lennard elected to go to trial. It is often this choice that causes the entire ferocity of the criminal justice system to become activated against a defendant, especially one who is willing to concede that they are guilty but seeking a modicum of fair sentencing.
Immediately, Lennard ran up against a ubiquitous hurdle experienced by almost all impoverished defendants, the public defender. Both district attorney offices and public defender offices receive funds from their counties to operate, yet many counties allocate more money for prosecutors’ offices than they do for the fair defense of the accused citizenry.
Lawyers working for public defenders’ offices are given astonishingly large caseloads and lesser pay, with longer hours than their D.A. office counterparts.
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Despite failing to investigate mitigating factors, failing to object to factually incorrect assertions, Lennard said, the lawyer guaranteed to Lennard that most of the charges would not stick. The public defender printed a list of the 76 other judgments in Lane, Multnomah and Washington counties from the Oregon Judicial Information Network. Each case listed defendants with similar criminal histories facing similar charges almost all receiving 90-month prison sentences, at most.
This was presented to Lennard as proof the lawyer could secure a better deal. During trial proceedings, it became clear to Lennard that the outcome was not looking good, and he asked his lawyer what would happen if he asked to cut a deal.
His lawyer advised the worst that might happen is receiving the 20-year sentence. For comparison, a life sentence for murder is 25 years.
In trust, he requested to proceed with a bench hearing, leaving his sentence in the hands of the court.
Lennard was sentenced to five counts of robbery in the first degree and two counts of assault in the second degree, to be served consecutively — 49 years, day for day.
His co-defendant received 10 years for the same crime.
At sentencing, Lennard’s public defender stated to the court he believed the D.A.’s prosecuting attorney was vindictively sentencing Lennard as retaliation for not previously accepting her initial plea offer.
Lennard was 29 years old. If he had intentionally killed someone, he would be eligible for release in two years, be he didn’t. He made sure he couldn’t, he said, when he brought a gun with no bullets. Lennard will be 78 years old when he is released. In the past 23 years, his children have become adults.
•••
The length of Lennard’s sentence is due to Oregon’s mandatory minimum sentencing requirements, and the factors that played into the unfairness of his legal proceedings were propelled into law on the same wave of tough-on-crime legislation that reformists are now working to reverse.
Oregon’s one-strike law, Measure 11, is facing proposed reforms in our current legislative session.
Adopted by voters in 1995 through a ballot initiative, Measure 11 enjoyed bipartisan legislative and public support mandating longer, harsher and non-negotiable sentencing guidelines for violent crimes and accidental deaths due to addiction issues.
Of the 12,416 prisoners in Oregon Department of Corrections custody, 5,965 are currently serving these one-strike sentences.
The Oregon Criminal Justice Commission released a report in early March finding over 65% of men indicted for a Measure 11 crime have no felony criminal history, only 20% were previously incarcerated, 75% of women whose sentences were subject to Measure 11 guidelines have no prior felony criminal history, and only 8% were previously incarcerated.
While most prisoners subject to Measure 11 are first-time offenders and arguably would be more receptive to rehabilitative interventions in the form of prison programs, they are largely shut out.
Measure 11-sentenced prisoners are not eligible for any help to mitigate the behaviors that bought them to prison. Cognitive behavioral therapy, addictions counseling programs and other intervention programs supported by state funding is reserved only for some of the 6,451 Oregon prisoners (almost half) who are eligible for good time.
Oregon’s tough-on-crime laws were predominately authored by five-term Oregon House Rep. Kevin Mannix. In 1996, the year after Measure 11 passed, Mannix authored Measure 40, placing sentencing in control of elected county district attorneys, removing the ability of judges to oversee sentencing.
Additionally, Mannix’s Measure 17 forces prisoners to work full time, including as leased labor for companies such as Oregon Corrections Enterprises, of which he is a current seated advisory board member. (Editor’s note: Oregon Corrections Enterprises is a public-private entity created to provide employment for incarcerated Oregonians.)
After public office, Mannix led efforts to implement or increase mandatory minimum sentences for low-level drug offenses, theft and identity theft crimes, as well as to eliminate certain taxes on the wealthy.
These tough-on-crime measures mirrored preceding federal legislation that led to the singular American phenomenon termed “mass incarceration,” resulting in the disparate incarceration of BIPOC communities.
Where incarceration is the imprisoning of groups, the political right supported these laws for their tough-on-crime penalties. The political left claimed mandatory minimums would bring equality in sentencing to a criminal justice system that created racial disparities: The same illegal actions would result in the same prison sentences, regardless of race.
But the companion bills to mandatory minimum sentencing adopted in state legislatures, placing sentencing at the discretion of publicly elected district attorneys, ensured charging would not be equal across all groups.
District attorneys’ offices are publicly judged by how many convictions they are reported to win in courts. More convictions contribute to the illusion that their office more successfully convicts guilty people and thereby enhances the D.A.’s personal electability by seeming to get criminals off the street.
However, this conclusion is specious. Convictions do not mean trials using evidence are taking place, with factors being weighed by competent lawyers. Almost all criminal cases are decided by plea bargaining, where the D.A. initially stacks many charges — more than can realistically stick — to threaten the accused with exceedingly long prison terms to serve, and then offers lesser charges in order to secure a guilty plea.
When over-charged by a D.A. — facing a prospective 10 or 20 years in prison if they decide to go to trial, especially in Oregon where, until 2020, a unanimous jury was not necessary to secure a conviction — many defendants choose to plead guilty to a lesser charge offered in a bargain to serve less time, even if they are completely innocent.
In its Dec. 8, 1991, issue, The Mercury News in San Jose, California, reported an analysis of 700,000 criminal cases resolved through the plea-bargaining process. The study compared defendants with the same charges and compared criminal histories, only separated by race. County D.A.s were found to grant more favorable pleas and outcomes for white defendants than Black and Latinx defendants.
As of 2018 in Oregon, according to the Criminal Justice Commission report, over 23 years of one-strike-sentencing D.A.s in our state indict Black men at a rate 4.4 times greater than the rate at which they indict white men, and they indict Latino and Indigenous men at a rate 1.6 times greater than white men.
In the documented cases of racial misclassification of Indigenous men in the law enforcement data system, the 1.6 rate of Measure 11 sentencing is certainly an undercount.
Black women are indicted at a rate that’s 3.5 times greater than white women, Latinas at a rate 1.1 times greater than white women, and Indigenous women at a rate 2.3 times greater than white women.
Tough-on-crime legislation has placed the power to send people to prison in the hands of politicians — D.A.s seeking reelection — and has removed any of the previous checks preventing wrongful prosecution.
Judges, defense lawyers and even victims do not have power beyond words to influence charging or the conviction of defendants. If a crime is committed and the victim does not wish to seek legal action through the courts, but perhaps using restorative justice practices instead, the D.A. will pursue a judicial criminal conviction regardless. The U.S. Supreme Court only ruled Oregon’s non-unanimous jury convictions unconstitutional last year. This year will mark the first full year Oregon prosecutors will be asked to convince an entire jury to agree on the guilt of defendants to secure a conviction in the few cases that go to trial.
Oregon’s split-jury convictions were adopted early in statehood, motivated by anti-Semitism that Oregonians have tolerated from the 1930s up until the recent Supreme Court ruling.
Some of this legislative session’s proposed reform bills affecting Measure 11 are Senate Bill 191 (which died in committee), Senate Bill 401 and House Bill 2172, which create pathways to earning good time for people who would otherwise be ineligible.
There is also House Bill 2002, which seeks to do away with mandatory minimum sentences altogether, except in cases of murder.
In Oregon prisons, earned good time is lost through disciplinary infractions, refusing to participate in programming or work assignments, and failing drug tests. Once earned time is lost, it cannot be regained. For one-strike-sentenced prisoners, there is very little holding them accountable or causing them to address the behaviors resulting in their incarceration, as they are ineligible for most programs.
In tandem, there is a pervasive prison philosophy that if violence is to be done by prisoners, a one-strike-sentence prisoner should do it because all others would lose good time or be denied release by the parole board. This is how Measure 11 has contributed to making prisons more dangerous places for prisoners, officers and communities alike.
Employees and researchers of the American criminal justice system have proposed that two to five years of incarceration tend to produce productive introspection and reformation in prisoners, while longer sentences have effects more deleterious than what prisoners entered prison with. Beyond two to five years, despondence, depression and increased delinquency are produced as a result of corrections environments. The Oregon Criminal Justice Commission reported in November 2020 that 60% of the Oregonians released from prison in 2017 were rearrested within three years.
The U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics published a nine-year follow-up of its recidivism study tracking 401,288 state prisoners across 30 states released from incarceration in 2005. Findings show an estimated 68% of prisoners were rearrested within three years of release. These measures nestle Oregon state closely with the 30 states included in the study, which further found that after nine years, 83% of subjects had been rearrested after release. This is how mass incarceration is measured and proven.
•••
Nearly two centuries — 180 years — separate the sale of Rhoda Daniels to Jesse Ward and the incarceration of Lennard Ward today. Rhoda and later her son, Wiley, were both born into the peculiar American institution of slavery where predominantly white men used the lawful threat of violence to control their bodies, deny their suffrage and limit personal development. Today, Lennard Ward is subject to the same discriminations in the peculiar American institution called mass incarceration.
We sit beside each other at work for nine hours, five days a week. When we heard about this legislative session’s Measure 11 reform bills, we spent our 15-minute break calculating how soon we might get out with good time.
Lennard is a strong, resilient, kind Black man. He does not sugarcoat the truth but appropriately uses humor to make it more palatable for the rest of us. When I, or one of our fellow prisoners is down, he lifts us up without fail. He only begrudgingly admits race may have played a role in his sentencing. In his soul, he is an optimist, and we look to him for sound advice.
I could hear him with his calculator, thinking out loud: “OK, if they give us 20% good time, that’s 9.8 years off 49 for a total of 39.2 years. I’ll be 68. That’s all right. I can live with that. That gives me some more time with my kids and grandkids. I can live with that, 68.”
My friend’s self-talk and the brutality of that moment caused all else to fall away.
A moment with no room for anything but overwhelming injustice.
On the indenture records signed between William Daniels and Jesse Ward for the purchase of Rhoda, it was written: “A slave for life … and all those of her, slaves for life.”
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