Orphaned By the Drug War

"I live a sad life," says Mattie White. "Every time I think it's going to be okay, it's not, and I just get sad again."

And there is no happy ending in sight for Mattie, who at 51 is raising her granddaughter Roneisha, 8, and grandson Cashawn, 5, while their mother, Kizzie White, 25, serves a 25-year sentence in a Gatesville, Texas, prison. Kizzie was arrested in 1999 for selling cocaine as part of a large-scale and now highly controversial sting operation in Tulia, Texas. Cashawn's father was also arrested as part of the same bust, and is now serving an 80-year sentence. Her kids ended up with Mattie.

A Tale of Injustice

Kizzie was one of 46 defendants -- 37 of them black -- who were rounded up in a mass arrest that netted roughly one out of every eight residents of Tulia's small African- American community. There are an estimated 300 black residents in Tulia. Three of Mattie's kids were arrested: Kizzie, Kareem (sentenced to 60 years), and Donnie (sentenced to 12 years). "I just couldn't believe it -- all these people locked up like this," says Mattie White, who manages the Tulia 46 Relief Fund. "Ain't no 50 people selling drugs, ain't no 30 people selling drugs (in Tulia)."

And Mattie has no doubts of her daughter's innocence. To her knowledge, Kizzie never used or sold drugs. "They didn't find no drugs," she says of the bust.

The massive drug sweep was based on the word of one officer, Tom Coleman, who is now accused of being corrupt, and a tiny bag of cocaine. The ACLU -- which, along with the NAACP of Texas, filed a civil rights complaint with the US Department of Justice in Oct., 2000 -- called the 18-month-long Tulia sting "a blatant, racially-motivated act of police and prosecutorial misconduct."

Reform advocates see Tulia as a high-relief example of the way the war on drugs is prosecuted nationally. "Drug abuse cuts across class and race lines, but drug enforcement is located in low-income communities of color," says Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Washington DC-based prison reform organization and author of the book, "Race to Incarcerate."

Mom is in Jail

Like Kizzie, most women of color in prison are doing time for minor non-violent drug offenses, which account for the rapidly growing rate of female incarceration. A Sentencing Project report shows that the number of women incarcerated for drug offenses rose a breathtaking 888 percent from 1986 through 1996, fueled by the escalating war on drugs. Drug offenses accounted for nearly half of all female convictions. And 80 percent of these female inmates had children.

Significantly, a large percentage of women sentenced for drug offenses are African-American and Latina; in New York, a staggering 91 percent of those sentenced to prison for drug offenses are black or Latina, as are 54 percent in California.

And they are overwhelmingly poor. According to sociologist Dorothy Ruiz, "Eighty percent of imprisoned women report incomes of less than $2000 in the year before the arrest and 92 percent report incomes under $10,000." Kizzie, who worked at a meat processing plant making a paltry $8 an hour until a month before her arrest, was actually better off than most others.

A vast majority of women convicted for drug offenses are involved with holding and using small amounts of narcotics, while others get caught for conspiracy, that is, being involved with men who use and sell. Both men and women can serve long sentences thanks to mandatory minimum sentencing, but women usually end up serving more time for lesser offenses. Kizzie, for example, was imprisoned on charges of delivering cocaine on three occasions and marijuana on one. According to Mattie, her daughter would be facing 52 years behind bars but for the judge's decision to run the sentences concurrently.