Source: AP Images
Not a single banker, speculator or Wall Street fat cat has gone to prison for their role in causing the housing market crisis, which damn near bankrupted the entire globe, but a single Black possibly mentally ill woman will be spending nearly three decades years in prison for stealing the bank’s property. This is some kind of world we live in…
What I’m talking about is Tabitha Gentry, who last Tuesday was sentenced to a total of 34 years in prison for squatting in a $3 million dollar Memphis mansion, theft of property within the mansion she was squatting in, and assault two police officers. According to previous published reports on her case, the mother of six and self-proclaimed sovereign citizen who also goes by the name of Abka Re Bey, occupied the 10,000 square feet, five bedrooms and seven baths foreclosed property after filing transfer of inheritance paperwork with the Shelby County, Tennessee Register of Deeds in 2013. Although she was not related to the former tenants of the foreclosed home, Gentry claimed that she had “rightful claim” to the Shady Grove mansion because she is a Moorish National, who does not believe that she should be subjected to taxes, laws and other U.S. government mandated requirements. However, Shelby County felt differently and took actions to evict her. It would take the assistance of SWAT to remove her out of the property.
Currently Gentry’s six children are in the care of the foster care system. As reported back in 2013 by News One, it was Gentry’s own 15-year old daughter who made the call to police for intervention. Also, “the young woman, who family members say was a high school honor student/basketball player with a promising future, was reportedly introduced to the movement by someone she fell in love with. Soon after, she did an about-face, changing her name and appearance.”
Fourteen of those 34 years come courtesy of a previous conviction in 2014 for alleging attempting to run over a police officer. According to WMCA Action News 5, those two sentences will run consecutive to each other. Gentry would become legendary for her courtroom outbursts, rants and ejections, which would go viral.
I don’t really want to get into the whole legitimacy argument surrounding the whole sovereign citizen movement, particularly the Moorish Nation, mainly of our fear that the entire comment section will be flooded with angry ranters with ‘Bey’ written somewhere in their screen names and pictures of Noble Drew Ali as their profile pictures. However her action does highlight the horrible income inequality and affordable housing crisis, which exist across the state of Tennessee. According to a fact sheet the Economic Policy Institute and Center on Budget and Policies Priorities, the richest 5 percent of households in Tennessee have incomes which are 4.9 times bigger than the middle 20 percent and 13.4 times as larger as the bottom 20 percent.
Likewise, a recent report by a Vanderbilt University professor and urban planning team shows that Nashville in particular is having an affordable housing and gentrification “crisis,” which not only affects the poor, but even households of four earning slightly above the median income of $56,377. And closer to Gentry’s neck of the woods, Memphis is ranked second in a list of metros with the highest income segregation in America. With this sort of economic inequality, you could sort of understand why someone would be willing to commandeer something from the rich in order to provide a chance in this world for both themselves and their children.
But in the case of Gentry, I truly believe that income inequality and the affordable housing crisis is secondary to a more important issue here: and that is the lack of attention to those in need of mental health treatment within our nation’s criminal justice system. According to this article in the Huffington Post by Alana Horowitz, entitled Mental Illness Soars in Prison, Jails While Inmates Suffer:
“A 2006 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that over half of all jail and prison inmates have mental health issues; an estimated 1.25 million suffered from mental illness, over four times the number in 1998. Research suggests that people with mental illness are overrepresented in the criminal justice system by rates of two to four times the normal population. The severity of these illnesses vary, but advocates say that one factor remains steady: with proper treatment, many of these incarcerations could have been avoided.”
I am not a doctor, but when your own daughter is calling the police on you asking for help, it is safe to say that something isn’t quite right. And I’m afraid that once again, we are locking a sick person away in prison – for a very long and unnecessary time – instead of getting them the necessary mental health treatment they need.
Meanwhile the sociopaths and egomaniacs who cause the global economic crisis are still running free, and untreated, among us.
