Locked Up Inside

The black taunting the blue.

Squinting at the Law

It's early morning and Fulwood is in his fifth-floor office. He's got soul crooner John Legend -- volume down low -- on the CD player. "I like the way he sings about love," Fulwood says.

This is what Fulwood does in his new life: He reads stacks of documents about prisoners and their approaching release dates. He reads stacks of reports about former prisoners who have violated conditions of their release and decides whether to send them back to prison.

In the mid-'80s, Congress essentially abolished parole for new federal offenders. But the Parole Commission still oversees anyone sentenced for crimes committed before November 1987. Those with a life sentence must serve 30 years before they can be released. A convict's release date can be voided if a prisoner attempts to escape or has accumulated a record of bad-conduct violations behind bars, or if the commission feels the inmate is likely to commit more crimes.

Once, Fulwood locked people up. Now it's about letting people out and then sending them back to prison if they violate the terms of their release.

And often race, in his mind, cannot be avoided.

"Ideally," says Fulwood, "no one wants it to be race. . . . Blacks just want a level playing field. But all too often we're slapped in the face."

He can still sound -- his voice deep and his words sometimes profane -- as if he'll yank a mugger or thieving crackhead by the scuff of the neck. But there's been some new angles, a softening in his thinking, he admits. "I've always said you got to have a better approach than locking everybody up. If you got money, you can get a good criminal lawyer. If O.J. had been a poor black man, he'd still be locked up. Remember, [Robert] Blake got out on bail. O.J. stayed locked up. For O.J., it was a metamorphosis. He was the chosen black man. And yet whites were so shocked when the system said, 'Beyond a reasonable doubt.' "

He goes on:

"Johnnie Cochran beat the racist system," he says of O.J. Simpson's lead attorney. "Nobody was cheering for O.J. He was irrelevant. It was the process. L.A. had been so notorious in dealing with black folks."

In his office, Fulwood reads about towns in the Midwest and South undergoing a prison-building boom. "Whole towns survive on these new jails!" he says.

He can sound like a law-and-order man who wants order, but finds himself sometimes squinting at the law. "It is hard in this job not to be conflicted when you see the devastation on black males," Fulwood says. "Up here, I read these cases of broken families, no opportunity. Now, that's not a reason to go bust somebody in the head, but you have to look at those factors."