Locked Up Inside
Isaac Fulwood's Feelings As Parole Commissioner: Couldn't Be More Personal

By Wil Haygood
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 18, 2005

Always, the black has taunted the blue.

Time and time again, the blue -- the law enforcement officer, and all the things he swore to uphold -- won out.

Crackheads: Lock 'em up.

Pedophiles: Lock 'em up.

"I've locked up more people than most people in America," says former D.C. police chief Isaac Fulwood.

Drug pushers: Lock 'em up.

"Nobody could call me soft on crime," he says. "Nobody."

Teddy Fulwood: Lock him up.

That was the former chief's brother. He had a record that went from simple assault to bank robbery. "I loved him," Fulwood says, "but hated his behavior."

The black meant he could be his brother's keeper. The blue meant all he could do was safely arrange his surrender and escort Teddy to police headquarters.

Neither the black nor the blue, however, could stop Teddy's murder. Blue-suited police officers, middle of the night, knocked on Ike Fulwood's front door.

"Must have cried for 40 minutes," he says.

But plenty of times, the black -- the man, the experience of the '60s and '70s when he was cutting his eyeteeth on the streets of Washington, the reality of what he calls "this visibility jacket," his skin -- has burdened the soul of Isaac Fulwood Jr.

"I can't take the jacket off. Ever," he says.

Fulwood grieves. Over black crime feeding black recidivism feeding, at times, black stereotype. "Some way, we've got to figure all this out," he says, the voice an edgy, police station staccato.

He spent 28 years wearing a badge, rising through the ranks. At one point during his tenure, the city was called the murder capital of the nation. It was loaded with staggering news: a crack-cocaine epidemic, a mayor arrested on drug charges. And all those awful murders.

Sometimes it seemed the sheer number of crimes numbed everyone -- politicians, experts, the media -- even the police.

In 1992, after only three years as chief, Fulwood resigned. The murdered kids chilled him. All those bodies at the morgue.

He did some teaching. He added pictures on the wall of the den at home. There was more time for summer cookouts. His first grandchild was born.

Last year the White House nominated Fulwood to serve a six-year term on the U.S. Parole Commission, which deals with federal and District offenders. The Senate approved his nomination, and Fulwood, now 65, began commuting to a grand office in Chevy Chase.

And then, one afternoon, it all came tumbling back -- the long nightmare of crime and punishment, the questions about racial justice, a cry for the victims -- all of it wedged into a brown folder detailing the case of Veronza Bowers. He's a former Black Panther and self-proclaimed "political prisoner" who has been behind bars more than 30 years for killing a white law enforcement officer. A 59-year-old inmate who was eligible for release, his freedom papers waiting to be stamped by the five members of the Parole Commission.

The case stirred something in Fulwood, surfacing all those questions about race and crime that had plagued him for decades. While he was studying Veronza Bowers, he was also studying himself. For the first time, he agreed to talk publicly and at length about what it means -- really means -- to be a black man who put other black men in a cell.

"The Bowers case, to me, is the whole ballgame," Fulwood says. "You have to ask yourself the question: Do you ever forgive a black person when they do something wrong? That's why the issue -- rehabilitation and reform -- can turn on the issue of race. Would Bowers still be locked up if he had killed me -- a black man?"

Yet again, Fulwood began the struggle: Keep the uniform on, or try to take it off. View the Bowers debate with a just-the-facts-ma'am approach -- or through his own peregrinations. "I am who I am," Fulwood says.

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."

A high murder rate wasn't the only challenge when Fulwood was chief. In 1990, Mayor Marion Shepilov Barry Jr. was arrested at a downtown hotel and charged with possession of crack cocaine. He would subsequently receive a six-month prison sentence.

"I remember the evening leading up to Barry's arrest," says Rodney Monroe, a police official under Fulwood and now police chief in Richmond. "He sat quietly in his office the entire day. He was very solemn. But he's a person who's gonna do what's right. I remember afterwards, someone close to the mayor called him a Judas. That really offended him."

Once, when Fulwood was chief, a riot broke out inside Lorton Correctional Facility. (The Virginia penitentiary, which housed inmates from the District, closed in 2001.) Fulwood helicoptered over. "I'm inside the jail, looking around. There are a couple thousand people in there. I swear, they all look black."

After he and his men had Lorton under control, Fulwood took a walk around the place, bullhorn in hand. He heard a voice, a very loud whisper.

"Junior! Junior!"

Fulwood wheeled. He spotted an old family friend from the neighborhood around Kentucky Avenue SE where he grew up. "I said, 'Come here. What you in here for?' He said, 'Robbery.' "

The man asked Fulwood to visit his mother, tell her he was all right, which Fulwood did.

"I looked around that prison and said, 'What a waste of human life,' " Fulwood recalls. "I came home and said to my wife, 'Why can't we break this cycle?' It's still a question I'm always struggling with."

* * *

On Aug. 5, 1973, Kenneth Patrick, a 40-year-old Park Service ranger, was at Point Reyes National Seashore outside San Francisco looking for deer poachers. According to the authorities, Veronza Bowers, Alan Veale and Jonathan Shoher had entered the park, armed with crossbows, to hunt deer. At some point they retreated to their Pontiac in a remote part of the park to sleep. Patrick, spotting the car, walked up to it and flicked on his flashlight. Someone fired a gun and Patrick was killed. Veale would sign a confession stating that Bowers fired the fatal shots into Patrick's chest with a 9mm handgun. Bowers, who denied involvement, would be convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Patrick left behind a wife and three young sons.

* * *

A man who now spends his time trying to juggle crime and the attendant punishments watched Hurricane Katrina unfold. To him, it was a bad dream: "An awful lot of whites are in denial in this country about race," Fulwood says. "And some blacks are, too -- the Clarence Thomas believers. To his credit, President Bush, after Katrina, said race is a problem -- and we gotta do something about it. Katrina lifted the blanket and made nerves raw. Most reasonable people saw the conditions down there and were offended. The level of anger didn't start subsiding until the president went down there. To his credit, he said, 'This is not acceptable.' "

Then there's the other side of Fulwood, the man who long lived in police-issue dress blues.

Looters after the hurricane: Lock 'em up.

"I think there's been some failure in the social control system -- schools, families," Fulwood says. "People's behavior is off the hook."

He knows all about the racial disparities in criminal justice. But when there's yellow tape in your front yard, black or white goes out the window. Find the perps. Lock 'em up.

"I live in Southeast Washington," he says. "Beautiful yard, grass, flowers. I want to be able to walk out there and smell the flowers without being busted in the head."

He goes on:

"Folks say, 'Fulwood, 50, 60 percent of the people in jail look like you. And yet only make up 12 percent of the population.' And then they ask you, 'Why are you there?' " he says of the Parole Commission.

He ponders the question as a man who came of age in a segregated America, a man who has shaken hands with presidents and been whispered at -- "Junior! Junior!" -- inside the bowels of a penitentiary. "I been here a year," he says of his service on the commission. "Some of it is very perplexing to me. This is the struggle."

He says: "I believe communities have a right to be safe."

He says: "You try to be tough. But at the same time you try to figure this damn thing out."

"I would refer to his style as street-smart," says Edward Reilly, chairman of the commission. "He's seen what's gone on out in the real world. And he reads between the lines."

Fulwood -- one of two blacks, along with Cranston J. Mitchell, on the commission -- says spending less money on prison programs, release programs and substance abuse programs will foretell disaster: "With less money you do less."

And he keeps trying to push the debate to acknowledge the realities of race in sentencing. "Most of the people I deal with look like me," Fulwood says of inmates. "And when I say it at these meetings, you can hear a rat [peeing] on cotton."

* * *

Over the years, Bowers was transferred to and from various federal penitentiaries from Kansas to Florida. He learned to play the flute. He meditated. He grew dreadlocks and acquired supporters. And he repeatedly said to anyone who would listen that the government had locked up the wrong man. The '70s became the '80s, which became the '90s. The dreadlocks grew longer and longer.

* * *

"The gravity of crime weighs on my mind," Fulwood says. "You a pedophile, I'm gonna be hard on you. I don't want you causing any other family grief. If you a murderer, I'm gonna make sure, in my own mind, we don't get to a point where you do that again."

Teddy Fulwood was family, and Teddy Fulwood was a criminal. Once, he stole hundreds of tools from their father. "Drugs," says Isaac Fulwood.

Fulwood is one of nine siblings. Born in Washington, he went to Eastern High School, then started working for his uncles in the laundry business. He joined the police department because the stability of a government job appealed to him, as did the possibility of upward mobility.

When Fulwood became police chief in 1989, his younger brother Teddy was sitting behind bars, unable to make bail after being charged with selling drugs. (Teddy, a Vietnam War vet, had been paroled on a 1986 bank robbery charge.)

"A smart guy," says Fulwood. "You know how you get off track and can't get back on?"

He would have liked to hang out with his brother, go out with him at night and not have to worry. But he couldn't. "I used to tell him: 'I ain't going to jail with you. No way.' "

Teddy, once released, asked his brother if he'd come to his rehab meetings. He was police chief. He had a hundred things on his daily calendar. But there he sat, family bigger than any missing saw, screwdriver, hammer or monkey wrench.

"It was hard on Ike," recalls Richard Pennington, a former D.C. police officer who is now Atlanta's police chief. "Here he was a police official and his brother was in the criminal justice system. Ike used to tell Teddy how embarrassing it was. Not for Ike, but for their mother. He worried about her. She had high blood pressure."

There would be times when Fulwood and Pennington would be in a police car, and they'd find themselves in Fulwood's old neighborhood. Fulwood would hop out and try to persuade guys on street corners to turn their lives around. Some were getting gray at the temples -- ships with tattered sails. "Of course, they had to want to do it themselves, but there he was, trying," says Pennington.

It was Nov. 19, 1992 -- a year so scary and awful it practically left a feeling anyone in the city could be slain -- when the pop-pop of gunfire yanked a police officer to 16th Street SE. There lay Teddy Fulwood in a pool of blood. Several bullets in the head and chest, and he was gone.

It happened a few blocks from the Fulwood brothers' childhood home.

It was the 401st murder in the so-called murder capital that year.

Maybe it was a gambling debt. Maybe it was a drug debt. "We just don't know," says Fulwood.

This is what Fulwood has concluded in his time serving on the Parole Commission: "People who go back to prison, in the main, it's for drugs."

He's referring to the inmate who gets out, but with stipulations. On any day, there might be a knock at the door: Take the cup and give us a sample. And the urine often becomes a go-back-to-jail card. "We give them conditions of release," Fulwood says. "We say: 'You've got to learn how to conduct yourself. If you don't, we'll put your ass back in jail.' "

"Some people say, 'Put 'em back in for 30 to 60 days so they know this is not a game.' And some people say, 'This is just a junkie. Ain't causing no harm but to himself.' "

Fulwood appreciates both arguments. "But if you live in one of these neighborhoods, it's more than that. The community is facing peril because of their conduct."

And they go back, and keep going back. "That's why it's so frustrating on this side," he says. "You're seeing life's failures."

Fulwood long ago concluded that the roots of black-on-black crime lie in history. "Often what happens in the criminal justice system is blacks have victimized each other. What is that about -- self-hatred? Take slavery. Slavery speaks to the issue of whether a person is human. You don't feel good about yourself. That has traveled right through our race. All of these things have happened to us on this traveling."

Traveling: He was on 14th Street once, behind the wheel of his Mercedes. Going the speed limit. He was assistant police chief at the time but wearing civilian clothes. He noticed a police car behind him, then the twirling lights. The officer asked him for ID. "He didn't catch who I was," says Fulwood, who handed over his driver's license. Then he asked the officer -- who was white -- why he was stopped. "The officer told me that 'things didn't look right.' " It was then that Fulwood identified himself, got out of his car and summoned the officer's superior. There was a lecture given on the spot about unwarranted stops. "My analogy is this: A black man who steals is a thief," he says. "A white man who steals is a kleptomaniac."

Any Given Sunday

In Fulwood's office at the Parole Commission are picturesque moments of a large life: him and President Ronald Reagan, him and Nelson Mandela, him and President Bill Clinton, him and Elijah Muhammad.

On his desk is a picture of him and his grandson, Brayden. There's also a picture of him and Ruth, his wife. There are two children, Angela Wood, 37, and Gary Fulwood, 40. He plays golf when he can. He dresses elegantly in threads from the Charlie "Bird" Parker fashion playbook. He attends Ebenezer AME Church in Prince George's County. Some Sundays he'll look around, pew to pew, and notice who is missing. "I say, 'Where are all the black men?' "

Ruth says her husband tried valiantly not to bring police department problems home when he was on the force. But still: "I don't think a day goes by that he doesn't think about the death of his brother," she says. "It strengthened his resolve that we have to do something about crime."

And there he sits, on the Parole Commission, the fate of so many black men in his hands.

"His life -- growing up in the District, high school here, his career in law enforcement, his brother -- it all adds essence to the individual," Mitchell, who is vice chairman of the Parole Commission, says of Fulwood. "He has a 'There for the grace of God go I' kind of approach. A vast majority of these inmates have great potential. And to see it go to waste is painful."

There are 2.1 million people locked away in state and federal prisons in America, Fulwood says. "And nearly 60 percent are black, and yet blacks are 12 to 15 percent of the population. Most substance abusers in America are white," he says. "Most substance abusers locked up are black. You say to yourself, 'Why is that?' "

The most vexing cases, Fulwood says, are the convicts who have been sentenced to life.

"At some point -- unless it's life without parole -- if you're sentenced to straight life and you have been incarcerated 30, 40 years, there's a point you may need to be released," Fulwood says. "You may be ready to re-integrate yourself into society."

And when someone tells him some crimes are so gruesome as to be unforgivable, he's quick to remind: "With DNA, we've seen guys on death row get out."

Yet nothing seems as raw in the public mind as the killing of a law enforcement officer and the possibility that such a murderer could be released. It is the type of emotional issue that often finds its way into political campaigns.

"Anytime you read any case where a law enforcement officer has been murdered," he says, "you try to digest everything. You bring all your life experiences to it. I was in law enforcement. Know a lot of police officers. You're like, 'This guy killed a police officer.' You try to think your way through these things. Sometimes you are stuck on empty. You're sitting there thinking, 'Can I make a decision that's fair and impartial?' Part of it is that I'm a Christian. I believe in forgiveness. I say, 'Is there a point we need to forgive and move on?' "

"Hell, man," Fulwood is starting up, "I remember when the Black Panthers were feeding people free lunches. You talk about California -- everybody out there thinks they're a political prisoner. That's the language they use."

* * *

By April 2004, Bowers had served 30 years, and was eligible for parole. There were hearings, and time passed, but on Jan. 24, 2005, the bureaucracy settled on a release date of Feb. 21. He'd live with a sister in Capitol Heights. A job awaited him as a legal assistant in Washington. But the Fraternal Order of Police objected, as did Patrick's widow. The FOP complained to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, arguing that Bowers shouldn't be eligible for parole, in part because he had tried to escape in 1979. The widow -- she has since remarried and works for the National Park Service in Alaska -- declined, through an assistant, to comment. She told the commission that she suffers nightmares and fears the murderer might come after her if he's released. The Bowers case was sent to the Parole Commission for reconsideration.

And thus, the case would come to land on the desk of Isaac Fulwood, the newest commissioner, a man who had worn blue all his life, a black man who knew the sting of America's racial past, a man aware of how black can taunt blue and disturb the sleep.

* * *

"It took nearly 30 years to get Geronimo Pratt out," Fulwood is saying. "Johnnie Cochran got him out. When you're a black person, you understand that."

Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt was a Vietnam War hero who would later be convicted in California for a 1972 murder and kidnapping. All along he maintained his innocence. In 1997 a California court ordered Pratt, also a Black Panther, released, citing misconduct by the Los Angeles prosecutor's office. (Pratt served 27 years.)

Fulwood thought long and hard about the case of Veronza Bowers. He read the files again and again.

A convicted murderer, a man with black skin proclaiming his innocence.

The victim, a park ranger. A man doing his job under a California sky. Bullets and blood. A wife and children left behind to live in anguish.

Law and order.

The black taunting the blue.

Before the Parole Commission voted, Fulwood spent nights anguishing over the case. In the end, though, he announced that he would recuse himself. "I felt I couldn't be fair because of where I come from. There's the side that this guy killed a law enforcement officer. I also have some appreciation of him talking about being a political prisoner."

On May 16, the commission voted 2 to 2, which should have meant Bowers would be released, even with Fulwood abstaining, says Alan Chaset, a member of Bowers's legal team from late 2003 until last August. A release date was set for June. But the Justice Department persuaded the commission to take the unusual step of convening again to review the Bowers case, in particular his 1979 escape attempt from a California prison. (Bowers never made it outside the prison, and had six months tacked onto his sentence.)

In the commission's second vote -- which came Oct. 7, again with Fulwood having recused himself -- the commission voted 4 to 0 against Bowers, thus ending his flirtation with freedom.

Chaset feels that the political climate weighed heavily against Bowers. "We follow the politics of the day," he says. "It's easier to keep him in -- given his background and who he killed -- than let him out."

The commission will be obliged to look anew at Bowers's case in another two years.

Chaset is doubtful whether the outcome will be any different. "The reality is that the high-profileness of this case, and the fact that the victim was a law enforcement officer, and the fact that the institutional memory of it is still very high, clearly contributed to a full-court press in keeping him inside."

Several commissioners have expressed concerns that the Bowers case might set a precedent for future parole requests from inmates serving life sentences that is too difficult to meet and could be hard to defend in court.

For Fulwood, the case continues to torment him. One more instance in a life of glory and pain: plaques and awards, murdered children inside the yellow tape, the black and the blue.

Fulwood has been known to show up at area junior high and high schools with paroled inmates by his side. They'll riff about life, crime, reform. He believes in forgiveness.

His daily schedule is fairly consistent: Off to work in the morning. Home to his wife in the evening. Sometimes on the drive home, he'll stop at the store, the dry cleaners. And then there it comes -- Junior! Junior! -- voices from the past flying out to him across the pavement. Cats who've done prison time. Cats from the old neighborhood. Red-eyed dudes who say they think they know somebody who might know something about Teddy's murder. He beats it on home.

And every evening when he arrives, he gets a hearty hug from his 2-year-old grandson, Brayden.

"This little boy has changed his life," says Angela Wood, Brayden's mother. "I think he has softened him."

"I look at this boy," Fulwood says, "and I say: 'I want you to be a good, decent person. Then get a good education. Then make a contribution to society.' "

Fulwood says the boy has an excellent chance.

"He is surrounded by black males who are not locked up."