Life sentence
Director Jamal Joseph uses his own history as an ex-con to tell a man’s post-prison Harlem tale
IN the Harlem-based drama “Chapter & Verse,” screening Friday in New York, a former gang leader named Lance (Daniel Beaty) leaves prison with a degree in computer repair. He ends up delivering food for minimum wage because no tech shop will hire an ex-con.
It’s an experience Jamal Joseph, the movie’s director and a professor in Columbia University’s School of the Arts film program, knows firsthand.
“That’s what happened to me when I was a young man coming out of prison,” he says. As a teen, Joseph joined the Black Panthers and ended up doing time at Rikers Island and Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas for aiding the group’s fugitive members.
Lance’s struggle to make a living touches on many of the causes Joseph, 62, has been fighting for since spending 9 ¹/2 years in prison, during which he earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. One of his initiatives is “Abolish the Box,” a campaign devoted to removing the section on job applications that requires someone to divulge a criminal background.
This doesn’t mean never answering that question, Joseph says, but “at least you can make it to the interview.” People turn back to crime if there’s no legitimate way to make money, completing a tragic cycle.
It’s all part of the tale of two Harlems, says Joseph.
“Daniel and I have lived through all this change in Harlem,” Joseph says of his star, with whom he co-wrote the script. “One that’s gentrified and thriving and has multimillion-dollar brownstones and great places to eat. And other places, just a block away, [in] housing projects, where there are people who can never afford to eat in those restaurants, never afford to live in those brownstones.”
Statistically, one in three young black men in the US will wind up in prison, Joseph says, a sobering number that hits close to home.
“Of the nine boys in our building, three are dead, three went to prison and three, including my two sons, went to college,” Joseph says, referring to his Harlem home.
How do you break the cycle of violence? By educating kids, says Joseph, who speaks about his own radical past as a stark introduction to the power of reading.
When he went to his first Black Panther meeting at 15, its 19-year-old organizer called him up to the front of the room.
“My heart’s pounding in my skinny little chest,” he says. “I’m thinking he’s gonna give me a gun. And he reaches down and hands me a stack of books: ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X,’ Eldridge Cleaver. I say, ‘Excuse me, brother, I thought you were going to arm me.’ And he says, ‘Excuse me, brother, I just did.’ ”