Sunday, April 06, 2008
A+E, Music, In this Issue...

Beating the rap

T.I.’s unusual sentence ignites controversy—but can it save his soul?

CREDIT: Vince Bucci/Getty Images
T.I. on MTV’s “TRL” in July 2007—before the fall
BY KEVIN FOREST MOREAU

You had to appreciate the timing.

As Atlanta and the nation prepared to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, a fierce debate continued to rage across phone lines, radio airwaves and Internet message boards—a debate that the late civil rights leader would have found fascinating. A week after the rapper T.I. pled guilty to federal weapons charges and cut a deal that shortened the amount of jail time he’d have to serve, many—including his own fans—were still arguing that the hip-hop superstar wasn’t being punished enough.

“I don’t care how much money a person has, they shouldn’t be able to get away with stuff that a person with less money couldn’t,” an observer called NYCutie posted on the site of Atlanta-based photographer Sandra Rose, echoing the sentiments of a large swath of commentators. “Justice was NOT served!”

No doubt the Rev. King would have been intrigued by the notion that a popular black entertainer—one of the most popular entertainers, black or white, in the country—could face criticism from fans, many of them also black, for having been perceived as beating a system historically seen as either stacked against or actually targeting others of his race. Certainly, one wonders what King, who at the time of his assassination was working on the Poor People’s Campaign—a mammoth crusade to eradicate poverty and economic disparity—would have made of a case in which a wealthy black figure was accused of receiving preferential treatment from “the Man.”

In fact, in the days following the March 27 announcement of T.I.’s plea deal with federal prosecutors, most of us, it seems, are still trying to figure out what to make of that scenario—and of the many other complex factors at play. And as revelations about the exact nature of that arrangement continued to surface last week, answers to the growing list of questions proved harder and harder to find.

Among those questions: Does T.I.’s arrangement with the United States Attorney’s office—which involves 1,000 hours of community service over the next year, mostly spent speaking to at-risk youth groups, followed by a year in prison, a fine, another 500 hours of community service and three years’ probation—constitute special treatment? Was he singled out by prosecutors? Did he snitch—give up information on others—in return for the agreement, thereby committing the cardinal sin of the gangsta rap culture he embodies? Doesn’t he deserve a chance at redemption? And, perhaps thorniest of them all: Was justice served?

WHAT YOU KNOW?

Before we tackle those issues, it’s easy to clarify what we do know. The facts of the case are these: According to U.S. Attorney David Nahmias, during September and October of 2007, a bodyguard for Clifford Harris, aka T.I., purchased nine firearms for Harris at the rapper’s request, and delivered them to Harris’ home in College Park—weapons that Harris, a convicted felon (for a 1998 conviction of possession of crack cocaine with intent to distribute), is barred from owning.

On Oct. 12, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s office, “Harris arranged for that same bodyguard to pick up $12,000 in cash from Harris’ bank. Harris told the bodyguard to use the cash to buy machine guns for him. Later that day, the bodyguard was arrested by ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms] agents after he purchased three machine guns for Harris and also bought two silencers to deliver to Harris, from an undercover ATF agent. The machine guns and silencers were not registered to the bodyguard or to Harris in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record, as would be required for a lawful purchase of machine guns or silencers.”

The U.S. Attorney’s office further asserts that the bodyguard agreed to assist the ATF and told them of T.I.’s involvement. Over the next couple of days, the bodyguard made several monitored calls to Harris, leading to the rapper’s arrival at a Midtown Publix parking lot on Oct. 13—the same day he was to appear at the BET Hip-Hop Awards in Atlanta—with the intention of taking possession of the guns from the bodyguard, and his subsequent arrest at the scene. Additional weapons—eight in all—were found in his vehicle and at his home. Four days later, Harris was arraigned on charges of possession of unregistered weapons and silencers, unlawful possession of the machine guns, and possession of machine guns and silencers by a convicted felon.

Meanwhile, Harris was placed under house arrest, prohibited from leaving his home. Federal authorities denied Harris’ request to hold a large Thanksgiving event at his house, but did allow him to attend Easter services for New Birth Missionary Baptist Church at the Georgia Dome on March 23, scant days before entering his guilty plea in federal district court.

BIG THINGS POPPIN’

In the days immediately following March 27, fans began debating the merits of Harris’ sentence at venues like the hip-hop Web site SOHH (www.sohh.com). But the discussion blew up the following week, after rumors circulated that Harris and his live-in girlfriend Tameka “Tiny” Cottle were spotted at a party.

On April 1, SOHH reported that contrary to his previous house arrest conditions, the terms of Harris’ new deal left him “free to go and do anything, basically,” as Steven Sadow, one of Harris’ defense attorneys, put it, although he is, Sadow said, under curfew—11 p.m. to 6 a.m., or 1 am. to 8 a.m. when he’s working. (What that "work" would entail, since T.I. was already recording his new album at home while under house arrest wasn’t made clear. Surely Harris isn’t out speaking to at-risk youth groups at 1 in the morning?)

These revelations ratcheted the ongoing arguments and conversations about Harris’ sentence to another level, igniting a new round of back-and-forth on blogs, in bars and even on Q100’s “The Bert Show,” as listeners called in to remark on the leniency of the agreement. More than ever, the notion that Harris had become the latest celebrity to receive special treatment was inescapable.

But is that perception of special treatment based in fact, or in our deep-rooted suspicion that the wealthy, famous and powerful are simply treated differently than the rest of us?

“Do celebrities get special treatment?” asks Philip Auslander, a professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Communication, and Culture. “Well, yeah, of course they do.”

But, he cautions, “It’s sort of a matter of context. To be able to perceive something as a slap on the wrist, you have to know what the norm is, and I’m not sure how much the casual audience knows that.”

Elizabeth Griffiths, a sociology professor at Emory University, agrees. 

“I think it’s more a factor of us not being aware of … the average sentencing of a similar offender,” Griffiths says. “The problem is, we only see the criminal justice outcomes for celebrities, rather than those off the street.”

Some of these deals—especially high-profile ones like T.I.’s—may appear lenient, Griffiths says, “but plea bargains happen every day. Ninety percent of cases end up in plea bargains, and were they not to plea bargain,  the system would grind to a halt.”

Besides, Auslander argues, “Slap on the wrist or not, it is nevertheless the case that this person did get caught, and did get punished in a very visible way. And I don’t think you can discount that completely in terms of having an impact.”

That impact, says Nahmias with the U.S. Attorney’s office in Atlanta, is what Harris’ deal is all about. To the extent that he is getting a different kind of plea bargain than your average offender, Nahmias stresses that those special circumstances are contingent upon the potential good work T.I. can do in return.

Sadow tellsThe Sunday Paper that the rapper’s talks with at-risk groups will involve anti-violence, drug and gang messages and, oddly enough for a gangsta rapper, “a mutual respect for law enforcement and law enforcement’s respect for certain minorities. He wants to push that mutual respect, something that’s sadly needed on both sides.”

“He’s getting treatment we believe is appropriate for all the acts and circumstances of his case,” Nahmias tells SP. “We’ve said he’s in an unusual position because he has the ability to reach and influence a specific group to avoid crime, and particularly gangs and guns and drugs and violence. If I were the defendant and I said ‘I’ll go spend 1,000 hours talking to kids about gangs and guns,’ I don’t know that I’d extend the same agreement to me. It’s harder for me, as an older white man, to reach kids who are at risk.”

As for charges of preferential treatment, "the best way to respond to that is to say he is still going to jail for a considerable period of time,” Sadow says. “He’s got to devote 1,000 hours of community service before he goes to jail, which involves him spending half of every week for the next 52 weeks [traveling and addressing youth groups]. It’s a complex agreement. I don’t think he was treated special; I think he was given the opportunity to do something special by the government.”

Nahmias contends that while Harris isn’t under house arrest, he doesn’t have it quite as easy as it might appear. He under a curfew while at home and traveling, and has to be accompanied at all times by a 24-hour monitor, a former U.S. Marshall. In addition, he must receive approval from Pretrial Services, the arm of the probation system that monitors all defendants on pre-sentencing bonds, to leave the Northern Judicial District.  

“The deal is structured entirely to put the risk on Mr. Harris,” Nahmias says. “If he lives up to the community service program he’s proposed, and he lives up to every condition in his bond—which is still very stringent—he still is not walking away with no sentence. He still will spend a year in federal prison and another year in home confinement and will owe another 500 hours of community service, for 1,500 hours total.”

And there’s always the risk of failure. If he doesn’t live up to either his bond or his community service requirements, Nahmias says, Harris will be subject to federal sentencing guidelines, which would put him behind bars for a significantly longer period.

“The guideline for Mr. Harris, assuming he pleaded guilty and accepted responsibility and assuming no departures, would be 57 months. And that would have been the guidelines if he had just come to court and said ‘I’m pleading guilty’ with no agreement.”

The community service program is “designed to reach those specific groups, because those are his fans,” Sadow says. “He can talk to those kids who wouldn’t listen if someone didn’t have the same hip-hop stature that T.I. does.”

T.I. VS. T.I.P.

Of course, T.I. enjoys that stature precisely because he’s wrapped himself in the thug-life flag and in fact was a convicted felon well before he undertook his rap career. Which begs the question: Isn’t it a little hypocritical of us to carp about T.I.’s perceived special treatment, when we’ve all given him special treatment by revering him for effectively glorifying a criminal lifestyle?

“The hypocrisy is deep, and it’s layered,” says Matt Miller, a Ph.D candidate at Emory who’s written about hip-hop for different scholarly publications. “Just the fact that he [T.I.] has gotten involved in this kind of violence—creatively or aesthetically involved as well as actually, physically involved—it’s not isolated in terms of the increasing marginalization of young black men in America. There are societal, structural issues increasingly pushing young black people into the mentality that these are the only options they have: a life of crime, or rapping about a life of crime.”

At the very least, says Auslander, T.I.'s past could make it difficult for his community service to have the desired impact.

“If your credential for having this audience is having performed a criminal act, inevitably there’s a mixed message," he says. "‘I am the gangsta rapper that I am today because I do this kind of thing, but don’t do the kind of things I do.’ I don’t mean to single out rappers, because the same thing happens with a Lindsay Lohan or a Paris Hilton. … It creates an ambiguity and a complication. It’s like rock and rollers saying, ‘Don’t use drugs.’ The question becomes, what conclusions does the audience draw from that?”

The answer to that question remains to be seen. But Curtis Benjamin, executive director of It’s Cool To Be Smart, says that T.I. has already made a positive impact on at-risk children, and has been doing so for years. Since 2001, his group has worked with celebrities including T.I. (“We’ve been working with him for six years”), putting them together with children “to inspire them to do better, tell their life stories.” Just last week, on Monday March 31, It’s Cool To Be Smart and the Music Education Group, which promotes music education in schools, brought T.I. together with local at-risk children from programs at the Inner Harbour for Children and Families and the George Washington Carver Boys and Girls Club of Metro Atlanta.

“What we want people to understand is, yes, Mr. Harris has to do 1,500 hours, but what we’re concentrating on is not the hours; it’s on outcomes for the kids,” Benjamin says.

What’s more, Benjamin is just as concerned with helping achieve a positive outcome for someone whose well-being has been overlooked in much of last week's debate: T.I. himself.

“This is about Mr. Harris. It’s not about T.I., it’s not about Tip,” Benjamin says, referring to Harris’ other alter ego, T.I.P., referenced in many of T.I.’s songs and the title and concept of his hit 2007 album “T.I. vs. T.I.P.,” which outlined a struggle between Harris’ conflicting sides as a businessman and a man of the streets.

“After it’s over,” Benjamin continues, “we want two changed people: We want changed youth, and we want a changed Mr. Harris, saying ‘Wow, I can make a difference. This is really about making changes in my life.’”

For his part, T.I. is "really looking forward—and I can’t put it in strong enough terms—to engaging kids in not making the mistakes he’s made,” says Sadow. “He’s in a good position to push that through with his own life experiences. It really is for his benefit. It’s an opportunity at redemption, and he wants it to be a total success.” SP