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NINE

One Big Happy Prison

IT WAS A few minutes after 10:00 PM. on October 4, 2000, one month before the presidential election. The previous night, the first of three debates between Al Gore —and George W. Bush had taken place.

On this balmy October evening in Lebanon, Tennessee, John Adams, sixty-four, had just sat down in his favorite tan recliner to watch the evening news. His cane, the result of a stroke a few years earlier, rested beside him. A well-respected member of Lebanon’s African-American community, Adams was now on disability after working for years at the Precision Rubber plant.

The anchors on TV were dishing out their postmortems on the debate. Adams and his wife, Lorine, were discussing their intention to vote for Al Gore when there was a knock at the door.

Mrs. Adams left the room, came to the door, and asked who was there. Two men demanded that she open the door and let them in. She asked again who they were, but they refused to identify themselves. She again refused to open the door.

At that moment, two unidentified officers from the Lebanon Police Department’s drug task force broke down the door, grabbed Mrs. Adams, and immediately handcuffed her. Seven other officers burst into the house. Two of them ran around the corner into the back room, guns drawn, and pumped several bullets into John Adams. Three hours later, he was pronounced dead at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

The raid on the Adams house had been ordered after an undercover informant purchased drugs in the house at 1120 Joseph Street. Lebanon’s narcotics unit, funded along with thousands of others around the country as part of the Clinton administration’s “War on Drugs,” obtained warrants from a local judge to arrest the occupants of the house.

The only problem: the Adamses live at 70 Joseph Street. The drug-war police had the wrong house.

A few miles down the road in Nashville, as John Adams was being accidentally executed, scores of paid and volunteer staff bustled about inside Al Gore’s national campaign headquarters. Their main concern that night was damage control, as they tried to distract voters from the spectacle of their candidate sighing through Bush’s responses the previous night. Phones were lighting up, shipments of bumper stickers and yard signs were being rerouted, strategists were huddling to plan the next day’s campaign stops. On the table sat copies of Gore’s anticrime proposals, including more funding for additional police and more money to fight the Drug War, None of them knew that their out-of-control efforts to eradicate drugs had just cost them a potential vote that of an elderly black man across town.

Killing off your voters is no way to win an election.

This was just one of too many incidents in recent years where innocent people have been shot by local or federal drug police who thought they “had their man.”

Worse still is the way so many citizens have been locked up in the past decade thanks to Clinton/Gore policies. At the beginning of the nineties, there were about a million people in prison in the United States. By the end of the Clinton/Gore years, that number had grown to TWO MILLION. The bulk of this increase was the result of new laws being enforced against drug users, not pushers. Eighty percent of those who go to prison for drugs are in there for possession, not dealing. The penalties for crack use are three times as high as those for cocaine use.

It doesn’t take much to figure out why the drug of choice in the white community is treated with so much more leniency than the drug that constitutes the only affordable high in the poor black and Hispanic community. For eight years there was an intense, aggressive move to lock up as many of these minority citizens as possible. Instead of providing the treatment their condition demands, we dealt with the problem by sending them to rot inside a prison cell.

But forget for a moment about helping the less fortunate. Who was the genius in the Clinton/Gore administration who said, “Hey,