A lifetime of violence and poverty led Aaron Kinzel to shoot at a state trooper during a traffic stop when he was 18 years old. Two decades later, he’s a university lecturer, with no illusions about the “justice” of this country’s criminal justice system.
Kinzel told that story of his life, profession, and path towards criminal justice reform on the latest episode of WNHH Radio’s “Criminal Justice Insider with Babz Rawls Ivy & Jeff Grant.”
Kinzel currently works as a lecturer in criminology and criminal justice at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
Before he entered the world of academia, the Michigan native served nearly 11 years in maximum security federal prison after shooting at a state trooper and leading cops on a day-long, high-speed chase while steel a teenager. He had violated the terms of his felony probation by crossing state lines from Michigan to Maine, he said, and was spooked when a trooper pulled him and his girlfriend over.
He had grown up in an abusive household, one where his stepdad tried to kill him when he was only eight years old, and then had led him into a young career of interstate gun and drug sales.
By the time the Maine trooper pulled him over, Kinzel said, he had spent most of his youth being beaten by his stepdad, in and out of juvenile detention, and working his way towards his own violent career. “This is the path to the penitentiary,” he said about his childhood and early adolescence.
When he saw the trooper with his hand on his holster, Kinzel said, he panicked, drew a gun of his own, and shot through his car’s window. Right after that, a second officer standing on the other side of the car unloaded 15 rounds at point blank range at Kinzel’s vehicle.
Somehow, neither Kinzel nor his girlfriend nor the troopers were hit during the fusillade.
Kinzel was locked up, served nearly 11 years for attempted murder of a police officer, and was released at age 28 on mandatory parole. He managed to earn his associate’s degree, and then his bachelor’s degree, and then his master’s degree back in Michigan, with the emotional and intermittent financial support of his grandparents propping him up every time he got turned away from a job he knew himself to be qualified for.
While working his way towards a PhD in sociology at Western Michigan University, Kinzel so impressed a professor during a guest lecture he gave that she asked him to teach his own class on Introduction to Criminal Justice. He eventually left WMU and enrolled in an education PhD program at University of Michigan-Dearborn, where another impressed faculty member offered him a job as lecturer, which he serves in today.
All the while, the more he reflected on his own upbringing and his own crimes in the context of his academic research on criminal justice, Kinzel said, he became more and more convinced that the justice system is not broken. It’s working exactly as it is intended to: “to control, marginalize, and oppress” poor people, and in particular people of color.
Nearly everyone who is not a multi-millionaire is negatively impacted by the criminal justice system in some way, he said, whether by having a friend or family member committing crimes because of a lack of economic opportunity in their hometown, or being stuck in jail for longer than they should because they can’t make cash bail.
He described as absurd the prospect that his 18-year-old self might have been released on bail if he could have made 10 percent of the $100,000 bond set after he shot at that officer. Of course he didn’t have anywhere near that much money, he said. But if he did, he should not have been allowed to leave prison, because he was, at that moment, a true danger to himself and to others.
The United States spends between $30,000 and $50,000 per incarcerated person evey year, he said, but refuses to spend a percentage of that amount on rehabilitation, education, housing, and job services to help those people reacclimate to society after being released. Because of that disinvestment, he said, 83 percent of former inmates go back to prison within a 9‑year-period of being released.
“It’s not broken,” he said. “It’s intentional.”
“Mass Incarceration And Mass Deportation”
On the previous episode of “Criminal Justice Insider with Babz Rawls-Ivy and Jeff Grant,” the first episode of the WNHH program’s third season, Kahlik Cumberbatch, the chief strategist at New Yorkers United for Justice, told a similar story of a crime committed in his youth, resulting in a lengthy prison sentence and subsequent epiphany as to the importance of reentry programs in the fight against recidivism.
Born in Guyana but raised in Jamaica, Queens, Cumberbatch was arrested and sentenced to 11 years in prison when he was just 20 years old after joining a group of friends in committing an armed robbery against two white women at 96th Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan.
With no criminal record before that, Cumberbatch said he is convinced that his sentence had as much to do with who he robbed as with what he did. If he had robbed a black woman in the South Bronx, he said, he wouldn’t have gotten 11 years. But for two white women in Manhattan, he was sent to Green Haven Correctional Institution for what wound up being six-and-a-half years served.
“I was looking at a prison sentence that was more than half of the life I had lived up until that point,” he said.
While in state lock-up, he participated in a host of volunteer programs, including youth assistance programs, the Alternative to Violence Project, and Prisoners for AIDS Counselling and Education. One program led to the next, he said, and eventually he found himself in a college program, studying theology for a year.
“That completely transformed the way that I saw myself,” he said, “that I saw my role as a young man in this world, let along in the prison, let alone in the community.”
Upon release, Cumberbatch returned to New York, a major metropolitan city where he already knew of a half-dozen organizations in his neighborhood alone designed to help people in his situation. He had a family who supported him, and formerly incarcerated people giving him professional advice on how to get a job, housing, and rebuild his life.
“Those are all the opportunities that I had access to that helped stabilize me,” he said. So many people in rural communities, or in families where parents are not waiting for them with open arms upon their release, simply do not have that support.
But Cumberbatch’s time behind bars wasn’t over yet.
Four years after his release from state prison, after he had successfully completed parole, had a job and was paying taxes, and was one week away from finishing his master’s degree, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials came knocking on his door.
Having come to this country from Guyana with his mom at the age of four, Cumberbatch was not a naturalized citizen. And he had a criminal conviction. Even though he was a productive member of society, and the primary breadwinner in his household, ICE locked him up in an immigration detention facility for five-and-a-half months with the imminent threat of deportation.
A community of family and friends and immigration rights advocates rallied to his support during that time, he said, and, improbably enough, ICE released him from detention and he returned to his family after nearly half a year.
“I like to say that I’ve survived both mass incarceration and mass deportation,” he said. He called on criminal justice reform advocates to focus their attention not just on shutting down prisons and helping the formerly incarcerated reenter society, but also on shutting down immigration detention facilities and pushing comprehensive immigration reform.
So long as any form of oppression exists in this country, he said, criminal justice reformers should be working hand in hand with their social justice allies in bringing that oppression to an end.
“Criminal Justice Insider” is sponsored by The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven.
Previous articles based on the program:
• A Second Chance In Washington State
• From Community Health Patient To CEO
• The Problem With Punishment
• Rowland: Criminal Justice Reform “Sands Have Shifted”
• Ex-Inmate Seeks To Raise The Bar
• New Corrections Chief Vows Prison Reform
• 1,000 Books Laid Path For Reentry
• 16 Years For A Crime He Didn’t Commit
• Insider Trader Cases Sexier To Prosecute
• Next Goal: Ban The Box For Housing, Too
• Criminal Justice Crusader Reflects On Mass Incarceration, #MeToo
• Society Needs A “Second Chance,” Too
• Imagining A Less Incarcerated World
• Criminal Justice Reformer Refuses To Give Up
• Criminal Record Controversy Propels Legislative Candidate
• ‘If’ Injects Humanity Into Incarceration
• Carbone Fans The Youth Justice Flame
• Forman: We’re Expelling Our Own, Too
• Lawlor Sees Progress On Reform
• From Mortgage Fraud To Criminal Justice Reform
• Teen Encounter With Cops Spurred Reform Advocate
• From Second Chance To No Chance Connecticut?
• Project Longevity Coordinator Works Off A Debt
• Ex-CEO Serves Justice Reform “Life Sentence”
• Ganim Describes Path Back From Prison
• Transition Time For Teens In Trouble
• Parole Holds A Key To Reentry Puzzle
• Organizer Takes “Sawdust-On-Floor” Tack
• Female Ex-Offenders Band Together
• German-Inspired Reform Calms Prison
• Son’s Arrest Helped Shape Porter’s Politics
"With no criminal record before that, Cumberbatch said he is convinced that his sentence had as much to do with who he robbed as with what he did. If he had robbed a black woman in the South Bronx, he said, he wouldn't have gotten 11 years. But for two white women in Manhattan, he was sent to Green Haven Correctional Institution for what wound up being six-and-a-half years served."
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How does he know this to be fact?