Without breaking cycles, tough-on-crime policies don't serve victims

When I was growing up in San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood , my father was in and out of jail and prison. He ultimately received a three-strikes sentence for a nonviolent third strike that might keep him behind bars for the rest of his life.

During my childhood, my older brother also began cycling through the criminal-justice system. Both are currently living in what is now San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.

I spent much of my teenage years getting into minor scrapes with the law and did a short stint in jail for shoplifting.

Yet, I was luckier than most.

After jail, I decided to change my life. So, in my early 20s, I left San Francisco, hoping to reinvent myself somewhere else.

For several months, I worked as a flight attendant. When I lost that job, I moved to Georgia and decided to try my hand at trucking.

I got my qualifications and set up a company that I named Concrete Rose Transportation LLC after Tupac Shakur’s poetry collection, “The Rose That Grew From Concrete.” It was about good things sprouting out of desolate landscapes, and given my history, it seemed all too appropriate.

That tale of success and reinvention is, however, only a part of my story.

I am also a crime survivor: In 2021, my younger brother, Thomas, who suffered from bipolar disorder, was killed in an altercation. It was the most devastating event of my life. It made me realize the cycles of trauma, pain, suffering and death that so many people in poor communities are caught up in.

And that, in turn, made me want to find ways to break those cycles.

I got involved with criminal-justice reform groups that were pushing for legislation and ballot initiatives such as California’s Proposition 47 — which redefined certain crimes as misdemeanors instead of felonies, and reinvested the money saved from incarcerating fewer people in intensive intervention programs and institutions.

I did this not because I was “soft” on crime, but because, even in my grief and fury at Thomas’s killing, I realized that without funding trauma-recovery centers in poor, crime-hit neighborhoods, investing in job training, providing housing, substance-abuse treatment and mental-health services in these vulnerable communities, the endless cycle of crime, pain, lives lost and survivors’ lives emotionally shredded would keep piling up.

These days, with the public increasingly anxiou s following crime spikes during the first couple of years after the pandemic, it’s become fashionable again for politicians, DAs and social commentators to push “get-tough” policies — more and longer prison sentences, rollbacks of important reforms such as Prop. 47 .

This is snake oil masquerading as common sense. As often as not, especially in poor communities, the people who are “criminals” overlap with the people who are “victims.” People can be hurt one day and can turn around and hurt the next.

Breaking these circles of pain through large-scale investments in carefully targeted social, medical and mental-health services, along with well-crafted job-training programs, is the only way to reduce criminal activity.

I am doing my part. Last year, I partnered with my father inside San Quentin to offer a Concrete Rose Correspondence School for incarcerated individuals so that they can learn the basic requirements of trucking and be primed to come out of prison ready to take truck-driving lessons, and, someday, qualify for jobs as truckers.

Concrete Rose’s first class, made up of roughly 50 students, graduated in May. The warden attended the ceremony, and San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins delivered the keynote address.

When I think of honoring my dead brother’s life, I no longer think of punishment. Instead, I think of rehabilitation and anti-violence interventions. If we are serious about supporting crime victims, as a society we must make the investments against crime that actually work rather than those that simply let us posture about how “tough” we are.

Autumn O’Bannon, the founder of Concrete Rose Transportation and Concrete Rose Correspondence School, is a native of San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood, where she still resides.