When a jury handed down the guilty verdicts this week in the subway beating case, Philadelphia-area bloggers and crime watchers breathed a collective sigh of relief.
You know the well-publicized story: 36-year old Sean Patrick Conroy, a Starbucks coffee shop manager, was walking underground in the Market-Frankford El concourse on the afternoon of March 26, 2008, headed to work just up the stairs at 13th and Market streets.
Conroy was met by a group of teenagers, all playing hooky from Simon Gratz High School, wandering around downtown and looking for something to do.
On one of those stupid if-you-don’t-do-it-you’re-a-punk type teenage dares, Arthur Alston, Ameer Best, Rasheem Bell, Nashir Fisher, and Kinta Stanton, jumped Conroy, beating him until he was on his knees gasping for breath.
Although the attack was witnessed by a SEPTA police officer, by the time he got across the platform, the teens had scattered. Only Stanton was arrested at the scene. Also by the time the officer arrived seconds later, Sean Patrick Conroy was in fatal distress. The stress of the beating had triggered an asthma attack, and Conroy died at the hospital.
The five teems were arrested, and as happens often in these cases, they immediately turned on each other. Bell and Alston pleaded guilty to third-degree murder and conspiracy, with Bell agreeing to testify against his buddies at trial in exchange for a lighter sentence.
The others each claimed to be a non-combative bystander who watched while the others did the beating and kicking. In the end, the jury didn’t buy the finger pointing and convicted them of conspiracy and third degree murder. All the teens face a mandatory minimum of five years, with a maximum that could keep them behind bars until they are very old men.
Immediately the self-satisfied “throw away the key” crowd wrote triumphant posts on local message boards, positively giddy that these “animals” and “savages” would no longer plague society.
I don’t think it stands in the way of justice to say that while we should be grateful that these criminals will be made to pay for their crimes, we should also be mindful of who else is paying a heavy price – us.
In so many ways, these five young men represent an entire generation of young black men in deep, desperate trouble. Our communities have become little more than places for our young men to hang out between periods of incarceration, and we watch helplessly as they are used by the American system of justice for fun and profit.
They are, in fact, worth more to society as inmates.
Too harsh? A horrible thing to think, let alone say out loud?
Ponder this: While the state’s general population stagnated over the past nine years, Pennsylvania's prison population swelled by nearly 40 percent, prompting state officials to take an old prison out of mothballs, farm inmates out to county jails and house some prisoners in pre-fab modular units set up in prison yards.
The state legislature allocated funds for four new prisons at a cost of $200 million each in last year's capital budget, and the state's corrections budget has increased by 50 percent — from $1.2 billion to an estimated $1.8 billion — since the beginning of the decade.
Contrast that $1.8 billion for prisons with the $1.59 billion the legislature allocated for higher education, and you get about $33,000 per prisoner per year, compared to $4,000 per college student per year.
According to state-by-state studies backed by the Washington, D.C.-based Justice Policy Institute, there are about 22,000 African-American males incarcerated in Pennsylvania, and about 19,000 African-American men enrolled in Pennsylvania colleges and universities. That represents an increase over the past 25 years of 5,000 more black students, but 15,000 more black inmates.
Factor in the thousands of jobs created by the prison industry statewide- everything from construction, maintenance, prison guards and support personnel – then count those millions in fat contracts for every prison service from food to clothing to health care – and it isn’t much of a stretch to start thinking there’s a lot more profit in incarceration than there is in rehabilitation or prevention.
Those five young men are now officially part of a justice system in which politicians will use them as boogeymen to strike fear into the hearts of ordinary citizens - who will then hand over suitcases full of taxpayer money to those politicians, with little oversight and with no questions asked, just to keep these "savages" away from the rest of us.
Yet, somehow, we feel safer.
