Sherman & Cynthia
Cynthia’s brother Sherman has been incarcerated in Kansas for burglary and robbery charges since he was 19.
He is 56 now.
Cynthia and her brother Sherman, with their late sister Lisa.
It’s been nearly four decades since Cynthia Crawford’s little brother went to jail a second time on burglary charges and never came back.
Years of stealing to get by, combined with the tough-on-crime, “three strikes” and “habitual offender” laws of the 1980s, layered on top of constant surveillance by the neighborhood cops - one in particular who endlessly followed him around - culminated in a de facto life sentence for then-19-year-old Sherman.
Nobody died, and nobody was seriously hurt in his crimes. But still, Sherman, 56 years old now, has spent much of his life in prison since 1988. He’ll be 61 before he sees the parole board for the first time and can start to even imagine finally joining his sister at her home in Kansas City, Kansas.
When their mother moved out on her own with the five kids and left behind a crowded house at 13th and Barnett, Cynthia was around eight years old, maybe nine, she’s not entirely sure. Sherman would have been around four at the time. There had been three different families packed into that old house on Barnett, and with that crowding came a certain security and stability. There was a comfort in familiarity, in having so many adults and children in the same space - overlapping meals and couch time, starting the morning hours and shutting off the nighttime bed lamps in synchronicity.
After Barnett, life at the house on Waverly “at the heart of the ghetto” in Kansas City, Kansas, was different. At the old house, there had been no cursing or fighting. After the move, the first time they went to the park across the street and met the other neighborhood kids who were “cursing up a storm,” Cynthia and her siblings were shocked.
But it wasn’t just the new language. The family was poor now - much poorer. And the new neighborhood was rough, with regular violence and “stuff happening” even during the daytime and “winos" hanging around at the park across the street.
“Being poor wasn’t enough,” Cynthia says. “We had to adjust to the neighborhood.”
With their mother now working constantly, the five siblings were mostly on their own. The kids all had to learn to fight - quickly and a lot.
“We had to adjust from being good kids,” Cynthia says. “You gotta get with the program or you gonna get beat down. We had to adjust to that and show them that we were hard - or we would have gotten tore down.”
In about a year, the Waverly house caught on fire. The family lost everything. They ended up at the St. Margaret’s projects.
In the years since Sherman left home and didn’t come back, Sherman’s contact from other family and friends has waxed and waned, but Cynthia has remained a steady, unflinching connection for him to the outside. The calls are expensive, but they still talk almost weekly. Before the COVID-19 pandemic struck Lansing Correctional Facility suddenly and brutally last May, Cynthia was coming to the facility to visit with Sherman twice a month.
But the support goes both ways, Cynthia says, “When I call, he lifts me up. He’s a remarkable person. He’s changed so much. His heart is so big.” Her brother seems to always be thinking about other people, and over the years of incarceration, has trained several service dogs for assistance of the disabled and served as a caretaker for disabled individuals. At one point, Sherman took speech classes and delivered speeches to young people in the community to deter them from repeating some of the mistakes he made every week. He was director of United States Junior Chamber chapter at the facility, where group members raised money from incarcerated individuals to support various charitable causes.
“That makes me wonder - is that why they’re keeping him there?” Cynthia says. “He helps quiet the storms that rise - people go to him and talk to him. He should be a social worker - he wants to be a mentor and talk to young people.”
“That makes me wonder - is that why they’re keeping him there? He helps quiet the storms that rise - people go to him and talk to him.”
Cynthia still remembers the first time she saw someone die, when she was still very young, shortly after moving to the St. Margaret’s complex. From their apartment’s porch across the street, she watched an encounter between two gangs, and the gruesome scene unfolded in the daylight, indifferent to her young horror.
One minute, “guys were in the park, drinking, acting a fool. Then one guy... bricked this other guy to death. Those bricks they use for cars. That was just the first time.”
“That traumatized me. We were listening to the radio on the porch, and the song that came on when the guy got bricked to death - every time I heard it after I would break down in tears, hyperventilate.”
Cynthia stops there. She doesn’t say what song it was, and this writer doesn’t ask. A moment passes, the memory clearly vivid, and then she concludes the thought: “We had it real rough - hard childhood. And Sherman really had a hard time - the guys around there were really rough, too.”
As their mother struggled to support them all, it wasn’t long before the ache of poverty began to set in. The kids began to steal from local grocery stores - cookies, a loaf of bread, sometimes lunchmeat.
“That’s how we ate,” Cynthia says. “It put too much pressure on her. We were hungry. So we did what we could to relieve her of that pressure - we’d steal food and go in our garage and eat it.”
Sherman, she remembers, wasn’t very good at it. He got caught more than the others, and in particular there was a white police officer who would harass Sherman constantly.
“He’d say, ‘I don’t know why that man hate me,’” she says. The same officer was often involved in Sherman's arrests throughout his teenage years, and it wasn't long before Sherman had a juvenile record and spent time at “the boys’ home.”
Cynthia doesn’t know a lot of the details of the seven aggravated robbery, burglary, and theft charges listed on Sherman’s Kansas Department of Corrections profile today. “But I know for a fact that he didn’t do all those crimes,” she says. People in the neighborhood would often get Sherman mixed up with one of their other brothers, so it seemed that he was innocent of at least some of them. Plus that same officer was constantly on his back. So Sherman didn’t fight the case too hard, and he assumed the jury would see the truth.
“But we didn’t have money for a lawyer,” she says, who may have advised them to do otherwise. Sherman hadn’t revealed who other participants were, and the DA was perturbed. Sherman had also turned down a plea bargain, thinking he had nothing to lose, not realizing the amount of time he was facing. And when the trial came, his court-appointed lawyer had nothing to say. The jury convicted Sherman of three robberies - one of them of a judge’s car and another victim, a bailiff.
It’s likely Sherman would have been out years ago had Kansas made retroactive the changes to its sentencing guidelines passed in 1993.
It’s likely Sherman would have been out years ago, had Kansas made retroactive the changes to its sentencing guidelines passed in 1993.
The long years inside have been hard on Sherman’s body. Healthcare is notoriously insufficient in Kansas Department of Corrections facilities, and Sherman suffers from high blood pressure, diabetes, and high cholesterol. He has constant knee pain and muscle cramps, and some days it’s harder to get up and move around than others. At his age and with his issues, he can’t get himself up on a top bunk anymore, so he has a permanent bottom bunk assignment.
But, Cynthia says, Sherman’s endurance of being warehoused away over the decades has been especially hard as Sherman’s friends and roommates, killers, sex offenders, and others in prison for the same crimes seem to just come and go. “I can’t even get a chance to show how I’ve changed and what I could give back to society,” Sherman told her once.
Recently, he told her, a guy who had been in there for 30-something years was released. “He’ll be back,” Sherman said. “But if they let me out, I could show the whole world how to do it.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit Lansing Correctional Facility, Cynthia emailed every organization, prison administrator she could think of. She wrote the governor multiple times. She never received an answer from anyone, except the ACLU of Kansas’ Clemency Project, who filed an application for Sherman on June 9, 2020. Pro se habeas corpus appeals and motions to correct his sentence have gone nowhere.
“All that good stuff he’s done - I don’t think they even look at that,” she says. “He’s helped paralyzed people - bathed them, things they couldn’t do. He would do stuff like that. He’s trained dogs for disabled people. He mentored over in Hutch [prison] - every Thursday, he’d talk to a group of teenagers.”
Cynthia speculates that somewhere in between a slap on the wrist and the upwards of 400 months he’s served was, perhaps, some form of the “right” punishment. But that evasive ideal consequence has surely passed by now, sometime before the now-13,000-or-so-day sentence, and it’s hard to imagine what Sherman feels waking up each morning knowing that had he committed the same crimes after 1992 he would have been home years, even decades ago.
“I just don’t understand how the system can let someone else in and out and in and out,” Cynthia says. “I mean, it seems like other people have been in for stealing 10 times in the past 20 years. But Sherman can’t get a break.”
“This is the only one I found with my mother and sister and Sherman together. Mom died in 2016 and Lisa passed in 2009.”
“All these years,” Cynthia says, “he gives me strength. When I’m going through things, I look at him, and I think about how I need to suck it up.”
It’s unclear whether Sherman has a choice but to be strong. One Christmas four years ago, Cynthia was standing in a long line at the post office with no end in sight.
“I said I’m gonna write Sherman while I stand here - and that was nothing but God because that letter kept him from taking his life.” When he got that letter, Sherman later told her on the phone, he had been writing a letter to her saying goodbye.
The holidays are the hardest. The pair of siblings lost their mom and dad month apart in 2016, and that loss of their parents was heavy, a final ruling denying them what had been a lingering hope, a thin sense of possibility that someday, the whole family would sit on the porch together again.
Cynthia tries hard to keep things “up” on the phone when they talk, and she still holds on to the possibility that she and Sherman will have a chance to reminisce over old memories in person rather than over a call that will cost $15 or $20 by the time they are done. Now in her early 60s, she also has two daughters, four grandchildren, and some great-grandchildren now, one of them an especially affectionate toddler who repeatedly climbs into her lap during our Google Meet call.
Since the late 80s, while she’s watched Sherman grow old from across the visitation table, she, too, has aged. She has her own array of health issues - diabetes, high cholesterol, thyroid disease, and congestive heart failure, and she’s in remission from leukemia after a diagnosis two years ago.
“My sister died from leukemia,” Cynthia says. “What she went through was terrible. I thank god it’s in remission. I was scared.”
Cynthia also fell ill with COVID-19 in mid-October, although a few months later she glosses over its seriousness. She was sick for two weeks.
“All I could think about was Sherman,” she says. “I’m really afraid of dying and leaving him by himself. Yeah, I’m getting older, I have complications, and blah, blah, blah.” She shifts the toddler to the other side of her lap.
“I’m not afraid of dying,” Cynthia says. “I just want some life with him, before I go. When I had that virus - my biggest fear was I’m not going to get to share a life with my brother.”
“I’m not afraid of dying. I just want some life with him, before I go. When I had that virus - my biggest fear was I’m not going to get to share a life with my brother.”
Sherman received a letter that his application had been sent to Kansas Governor Laura Kelly’s office on September 10, 2020.