Legal resistance:
Jarrett Adams helps others wrongfully convicted

When Jarrett Adams was 17 years old, he was just out of high school and looking forward to starting college, dreaming about all of the things he would do as an adult. After a trip to Whitewater, Wisconsin with his friends in the fall of 1998, those dreams ended abruptly. Three weeks after Adams and his two friends returned to Chicago, they were arrested and extradited to Wisconsin, charged with sexual assault.

Meanwhile, the WIP kept pushing for his exoneration. Finally on June 20, 2006, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit overturned the District Court’s decision and Adams’s conviction, releasing him in January and dismissing the charges in February 2007. Nearly 10 years of Adams’s adult life was gone, but he wasn’t done fighting.

“As soon as I got out I knew what I wanted to do,” Adams said. “I knew what my future was going to be, so I committed to it. [Compared to my friends], I came home with my youth, so I was able to focus on school.” Adams worked full-time while pursuing a criminal justice degree at Roosevelt, graduating in 2012 with honors.

He also won the Chicago Bar Foundation’s Abraham Lincoln Marovitz Public Interest Scholarship, and attended Loyola University’s law school. Adams graduated in 2015, and a short two years later opened the Law Offices of Jarrett Adams. His work now focuses on helping people in circumstances like the ones he faced.

“If we were able to cut in half the number of people returning to prison, do you know how much money we’d save, how much good we’d do for society?” Adams asked.

Jarrett Adams appearing on Steve Harvey.
 
According to the Prison Policy Initiative, as of 2018 the American criminal justice system holds approximately 2.3 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 1,852 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,163 local jails, and 80 Indian Country jails, as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals and prisons in the U.S. territories.

People of color are dramatically overrepresented in the nation’s prisons and jails. These racial disparities are particularly stark for black people, who make up 40 percent of the incarcerated population despite representing only 13 percent of U.S residents.

“When a court sentences a person to prison, they don’t send them to reform. They call it the Department of Corrections but nothing is being corrected,” Adams said. “Clearly, the system isn’t designed to correct, it’s designed to warehouse. Your job as a prison is to go out of business — to correct and send people out. That isn’t happening.”

In 2018, the prison industry enjoyed a total revenue of $6 billion, according to market research firm IBISWorld.

“Think of it this way: If a car company had 50 percent of its cars returned, there would be a national debate in Congress, but somehow we haven’t done this with human lives, especially black and brown lives,” Adams said.

Extending the metaphor, Adams continued, “When a person jumps out of an airplane they have a bunch of gear, goggles, harness, parachute and so on. They don’t put it on for the jump, they put it on for the landing. When people are locked up and treated like animals and then they’re just sent out into the world, there are no reentry services. They’re just sent out and expected to land. Some people come home [from prison] at the age of retirement and I have to ask: How can they pull themselves up by their bootstraps?”

Unsurprisingly, Adams receives countless requests for help on a daily basis, but the process of selecting clients is arduous. Most of the cases are years old, with thousands of pages of documents to review, so things can move very slowly. Adams goes back and investigates cases from the start, and once he finds a credible claim, he moves forward and finds funding on the way. He already knew his first client though, a person he served with who’d been imprisoned for 30 years. Adams got him released.