Across the US, some 50,000 incarcerated people are kept under conditions of solitary confinement. Advocates and prisoners have pushed to define the practice as a form of torture, pointing to the devastating psychological and physical effects it has on victims. In Texas, dozens of prisoners are now hunger striking against the use of solitary confinement in the state’s prisons, which they say disproportionately targets Latinos. Jorge Antonio Renaud, National Criminal Justice Director of Latino Justice, joins Rattling the Bars to discuss the hunger strike and conditions of solitary confinement in Texas.

Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Mansa Musa:  Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m Mansa Musa, co-hosting with Eddie Conway. And as I always do, I try to update everyone on Eddie Conway, how Eddie Conway’s doing. We ask that you continue to keep Eddie Conway in your prayers, or whatever spiritual medium that you utilize, as he goes through this process of recovery. We ask that you continue to support him and continue to support Rattling the Bars.

Today, as always, we try to bring the news, the real news about events and things going on, particularly in the criminal injustice system, the prison-industrial complex, which is the new form of slavery, mass incarceration, which are chattel. Today, we have an extraordinary story that we shouldn’t even be revisiting, but we are revisiting primarily because of the racism, fascism, and oppression that exists when it comes to people of color, poor people. Today, we have Jorge Antonio Renaud, who is a prison advocate in Texas. He’ll tell you a little bit more about himself. Introduce yourself to the Rattling the Bars audience, Jorge.

Jorge Renaud:  Hey, man, so glad to be here. Yeah. My name’s Jorge Antonio Renaud. I’m the National Criminal Justice Director at a group called Latino Justice. First, I want to say the folks in Latino Justice want to send a message of solidarity to the individuals there who… Individuals who are in cages anywhere, but specifically today to the individuals who are incarcerated in solitary confinement in Texas, who have lifted up their voices and banded together into an hunger strike to try to bring attention to the fact that the conditions in solitary confinement are so terrible, they have gotten so much worse with all the money being funneled out to Operation Lone Star here in Texas, to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice being willing to give funds to the apprehension and criminalization of migrants at the border that they’ve ignored those even worse, even more so, the individuals who they deem and the public tend to believe are the worst and the worst, who are locked up in solitary confinement here in Texas.

Mansa Musa:  All right. Talk a little bit before we delve into, and which we will, before we delve into the repression that the Texas prisoners are undergoing and the community in general, the suffering as a result, talk a little bit about your organization so we can get an overview [inaudible].

Jorge Renaud:  Yeah, thank you. Latino Justice just celebrated its 50th year. It’s a group that specializes in class action litigation based on the model, of course, of the NAACP, that was the first one to do that and focus on ethnicity, because of historic oppression against that ethnicity. Latino Justice originally started as a Puerto Rican legal defense and education fund, and now it tries to, through the legal arena, bring mass litigation to try to lift the burden of oppression and marginalization that has been placed on the Latino community.

About four years ago, they got off into advocacy on the ground. They figured out that what they needed to do was find people who had been directly affected by the criminal legal system or detention and deportation, and they hired me. We’ve got some folks all around the country who are doing this in different states, different regions, Florida, Texas, and the Northeast. We look for people who’ve been affected, directly impacted by those systems. We have them train other individuals, find and train other formerly incarcerated or detained individuals to try to change by using their stories, their direct experiences, to change the systems that have oppressed them and incarcerated them.

Mansa Musa:  Okay, now, we recognize that a story came out saying that Texas prisoners are on a hunger strike, and mainstream media really glossed over it. It was alternative media that really set the table in terms of what was going on. Now, when I was researching for this story, I’m looking at the conditions, one – And you can address them as I put them out there – One, they saying that the information that’s coming out is that the Texas prisoners went on strike, specifically the ones that’s housed in solitary confinement, and that they’re on strike primarily because they’re saying that the policies and procedures that’s being utilized to keep them confined to solitary confinement for endless years with no redress or no way to getting out is both draconian, arbitrary and capricious, if not racist.

Address what are the reasons that they’re using for confining men, and women as well, if you are in a female prison, if you are considered a threat. What are they using to justify doing this particular practice that they’re taking these men and women to prove?

Jorge Renaud:  Yeah, thanks for that question. The main reasons that TDCJ uses to put people in solitary confinement –

Mansa Musa:  What’s TDCJ? What’s TDCJ?

Jorge Renaud:  Yeah, I’m sorry. TDCJ is a Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

Mansa Musa:  Okay, come on.

Jorge Renaud:  That is the state prison here in Texas. They use the same excuses that other states do, hyper-violent against guards or other incarcerated individuals, attempt to escape, things of that nature. But by far, the majority of people who are locked up in ad-seg, administrative segregation in TDCJ, are people who have been identified as members of a security threat crew. And, of course, a prison gang. That was policy in Texas since the mid ’80s. In the mid ’80s, they had some gang wars going on after they took the building tenders out, they were fighting for control. Well, TDCJ couldn’t control them, so they started putting them in ad-seg, and they were still using those reasons to put people in ad-seg.

So the thing is that while they may say, well, these folks are really dangerous, that they’re the worst to the worst, you can have a five-year sentence for a non-violent crime, not ever had committed a violent crime, be in the county jail, get confirmed as a member of a security threat group, you hit TDCJ and you immediately get put back in ad-seg. Of course, in Texas, the gangs that are considered the most dangerous are the Latino gangs, the Mexican Mafia, the Aztec Warriors out of El Paso, those folks. So the majority of the people you have back there are Latinos. And there are some people who’ve been there 20 or 30 years, right?

And it’s circular logic. It’s like you’re dangerous because you’re in a gang and the gang is dangerous because you’re in it, even though you may have never committed any violence anywhere. But TDCJ has decided these groups are dangerous. These people are too dangerous to be let out. We have no way to really protect ourself from them. We don’t know how to deal with that, so we’re just going to put them in ad-seg, throw these sham reviews at them, and keep them back there.

Mansa Musa:  You know what? [crosstalk].

Jorge Renaud:  Go ahead. Go ahead.

Mansa Musa:  Go ahead.

Jorge Renaud:  No, I was going to say [crosstalk].

Mansa Musa:  You made a good point. You made a good point, though, on how this particular attitude is nationwide. Because when I was in, I did 48 years in the Maryland system. When they first came out with, it’s a case called Helms v Hewitt. That’s the case that they came out with that validated admin-seg. That’s the case that gave birth to admin-seg, saying that I think the case was where we used to use the mandatory language, shall, will, and the Supreme Court was saying that prisons you come through legislations and cases to find the mandatory language of, if you do this, that, and the third you will be…

So they came up with this perspective that, okay, admin-seg is legal, and they primarily came into existence because of a lot of the revolutionaries that was being locked up, white radicals, again, Puerto Ricans, and it was more designed around more of the political element. But now going back to your point, it’s designed around, really it’s racist in this intent, because as you just outlined, it’s primarily isolating Latinos and saying that you going to be tagged as soon as you come through the county jail. You going to be tagged. You going to be tagged.

If you Latino, they going to say, tell me who you with. You MS? You Mexican Mafia? They going to go down the list and if you say, I’m none of them, they going to put one on you so they can maintain their thing. But let’s talk about what’s being done in terms of trying to change these draconian policies and racist policies that’s taking place right now against specifically Latino men and women, but in general, the population in general.

Jorge Renaud:  That’s a good question. What is actually being done on the ground? You mentioned policies. As you and I know, there’s a huge gulf between policy and practice when it comes to prisoners.

Mansa Musa:  Come on.

Jorge Renaud:  A family member will call up, and my son says that this is being done, or, my daughter said this is being done. They’ll say, well, ma’am, here’s a policy, we don’t do this by policy, but of course, you and I know Texas has 109 units and 109 prison units. I’m not sure how many of them right now have ad-seg cells, but I want to say a few dozen at the bare minimum. They have two super max units, right?

What’s being done on one, and I don’t know how it is in other states, but in Texas, the warden is God. There are fiefdoms, and what’s being done on the Estelle Unit may be totally different 12 miles down the road on the Eastham Unit.

Prison policy is meant, I hate to say it, but it’s all to the public, here’s how we do things. We do things that’s governed by whatever accredited body is said to come review us. But when they’re gone, but when they’re at the door and the warden’s at the house, the sergeants on the wing are running the unit or running ad-seg. If they don’t like one guy, and if some dude has been rattling on the bars or trying to get his mail or something, he may not go out to rec that day. He may not get to shower for a week. He may not go out to rec for two weeks.

And all the complaints, Texas has no oversight. Texas has the Ombudsman, which is under the Texas Board of Criminal Justice. Texas has a grievance system that’s pretty well a joke. Also, the only oversight is the Texas Board of Criminal Justice, which is a group of usually law enforcement compliant individuals that are appointed by the governor, same thing as a parole board, right? So there is no oversight. So what’s being done is what you’re doing. What’s being done is what Brittany is doing, the woman who’s from Wisconsin and somehow has taken a deep abiding true interest in the plight of incarcerated individuals everywhere, specifically in Texas. So we try to bring attention to it, but I don’t know if legally we can do anything to change the system.

Now, 10 years ago there was 9,000 people incarcerated back in ad-seg in Texas. It has changed. It has changed. I don’t know if that’s because of the review process, if TDCJ went through and said, this person has been there two years for kicking the bars or what… I don’t know. But I do know that the 3,100 back there have been, I want to say, I forget how many hundred of them, I want to say 500 and something have been back there over a decade. Those individuals are members of a security threat group. Pardon me?

Mansa Musa:  No, go ahead. Go ahead.

Jorge Renaud:  Go.

Mansa Musa:  I ain’t mean to cut you off, go ahead.

Jorge Renaud:  I was going to say that the ones who have been there long term are almost exclusively individuals who have been back there confirmed as members of a security threat group who refuse to renounce. Because renouncing, as you and I know is going to mean, tell us everything you know about the gangs. Tell us everybody you know who is doing this. Tell us all that.

It goes not only against whatever moral code these individuals have, but it may involve incriminating other individuals, and they’re just not going to do that. But the thing is, they don’t pose a threat. That’s the thing. They don’t pose a threat.

Mansa Musa:  Hey, look, and we going to talk about this right here because another good point you made, you have people locked up and secured in the admin-seg or supermax that you are saying that no matter what, if you Latino and you a prisoner, and you in the criminal injustice system, and you on the plantation, you are gang. That’s just the nature of it. I don’t care what you say. You can say whatever you want to say, if you are Latino, you are in a Texas prison, you are in California prison. When you come through the county jail, you are a gang. You’re a gang. So now you don’t have no choice but to say, well, put me with somebody.

Okay, but that aside, this is what I want to talk about. I want to talk about how when if you saying that I’m a gang member, this is what you do. You say based on your intel, I’m a gang member. All right, and that right there, that’s enough. Not that you got information that I stabbed nobody. Not that you got information that I killed nobody. Not that you got information that I’m extorting anybody. All the things that were going in to make me a threat to the disorder of your environment, you don’t have no evidence to that. Talk about why they’re so adamant about a person telling all the intricacies of a gang, when all they want to do is say, well, I’m no longer a part of that, and why is that not sufficient enough? Talk about why they’re so adamant about them divulging information that they might not even know.

Jorge Renaud:  Yeah. Yeah. Okay. [crosstalk] You asking me to speak to a policy that I’m not… So what I’m going to have to do is maybe speak to my belief in the way that system operates.

Now, let’s be honest about some stuff. There are individuals in ad-seg, there are individuals in prison, there are individuals walking the street who are violent, who have committed violence, who can be a threat to themselves or others. I’m an abolitionist. I don’t think that putting people in a cage is going to improve that in any way. There are other ways to deal with that: mental health issues, family issues, providing them the dignity that should be accorded to every individual. There are other ways to deal with that other than saying, we can’t do anything with you, so we’re just going to lock you up in a cage and forget about you.

Having said that, if I’m confirmed as a member of a security threat group and they say, well, if you want to start the process to get out, you have to tell us everything you know about everyone who’s involved in that system, everything you know about this crime, that crime, this crime. It could very well be that what they’re doing is that they suspect other individuals who are also involved in this, it could be that they want to bring an indictment on someone who they believed was involved in some sort of violence against another individual or a guard. I don’t know. Or that’s just their procedure, and I think that’s the big thing.

Prisons are slave to procedure. They have a way of doing things. This is a way that maybe worked, again, 30 years ago. In the ’80s, they were locking folks up. In the ’80s, you could get a shank for a bag of coffee, a serious shank. In the ’80s, if you committed a murder or something against somebody, you might get five years if they decide to try you. Well, those were the policies that were used to say, these folks are dangerous, so we’re going to lock you up now. Well, the fact is, in TDCJ now, in 1985, they had 23, 25 people murdered in TDCJ by other encaged individuals. They had 39,000 people locked up there. They got 124,000 people locked up now, and there’s maybe three murders a year now. Security is much tighter. It’s almost impossible to get a real weapon. Things don’t happen like that anymore. But they’re still using those same policies that were put into place 30 or 40 years ago.

So their belief system is still the same. They have not changed. And a lot of that is because the people at the top were guards in the ’80s, the ’90s, the ’70s. They worked their way up, and they have yet to update the policies and their approach toward the individuals who were incarcerated. Let’s use a humanitarian approach. Let’s go and see what the issue is, why that person joined a gang. Does that person not have a family? Let’s find some emotional, personal, societal, community support for this individual. That’s not the TDCJ way. Their thinking is still stuck in the ’80s.

Mansa Musa:  I think and I want to venture an observation that, one, when you look at the prison-industrial complex in Texas, and okay, when you look at Texas, California, New York, this might be one of your larger plantations. Then you got a large plantation, you have people that are immigrants, children of immigrants, or haven’t been nationalized according to America’s standard, so you got this large prison population. I will venture to say that you’re using this as more for a control mechanism than for anything else, because the reality is that if you are saying that – And we were talked about this off camera – If you’re saying that I’m a threat, and we recognize that some people could be threats, that’s not even an issue. But if you’re saying that I’m a threat and you review me every year ’cause they got a modicum of due process in the process, in this concept that they put out, admin-seg.

They don’t give you notice, and they bring you up every year to tell you that they not going to let you off, ’cause this is how it come into existence. The concept is that I’m on admin-seg being investigated, I’ve been identified as being a threat. Once you say put me in a security threat group category, then you taking me up. Now you not taking me up to say that I’m no longer a threat, and this is the control mechanism I’m talking about, now you taking me up to say, well you can come off if you divulge information about the intricacies of this group. So therefore, you got complete control over this population, because now everybody that come in, all you gotta do is say, security threat group, you can isolate them, you can lock them down, and you can keep them locked down forever.

But talk about where the strike stands at, or what’s going on with the strike. Because I know that a lot of individuals opted out of it, but the last time I read it was maybe 40 men was holding fast to it, and continued to stay steadfast in terms of trying to get some… Having a hunger strike in order to try to get some attention to the arbitrary and capricious nature of the Texas Department of Corrections.

Jorge Renaud:  Yeah. It’s real difficult to get information that you can rely on [inaudible] people who are incarcerated. This ain’t like some other states who just have eight or nine prisons, and really we have prisons scattered all over the state. And of course, they shut down the mail, they shut down visits to those folks. So there’s anywhere from a few dozen to maybe a 100, but who knows. [crosstalk] Even if there’s one, if there’s one individual out there who’s saying that, who we believe that they’re worthy of support.

And I think that what they have been protesting, I’ll go down two tracks. One is, as you said, the capricious nature of assignment to ad-seg, and then the sham nature of the review. It keeps you back there. Two is the fact that TDCJ has historically relied on the definition of a security threat group as something that is dangerous inherently in and of itself, and just being a member of that group means that you are something or somebody who is too dangerous to walk the halls of any prison in general population, and they’ve been assigned back there.

So some of the conditions are, of course, that they’re not getting recreation like a support group, that they don’t like… Most of the people who watch the show probably know prison and ad-seg, I would think. But in ad-seg, you get no contact whatsoever, no human contact with anybody. None whatsoever. Even the guards don’t touch you. Nobody touches you. You go out in the yard by yourself. You have an hour yard, supposedly, every day, or an hour of recreation. It may not be the yard, but recreation.

Mansa Musa:  Right, exactly. Yard, shower and [crosstalk]

Jorge Renaud:  Right. Right. You get no programming whatsoever, by programming any education or religious studies, or anything that you want to do to occupy your mind. And hopefully, I don’t use the word rehabilitation, but I use the word personal transformation of yourself, or trying to achieve some better version of yourself, as we’re all trying to do, everybody in existence, hopefully. They’re not allowed to get that and to have any personal interaction with anybody. They’re trying to say that, hey, we need that. There’s a ream of studies out there talking about how the denial of personal contact has negative effects on folks.

I hesitate to use that, ’cause I know people who’ve been in ad-seg for a while and came out and seemed to be pretty well. I’m not going to say that ad-seg in and of itself is going to destroy you and your spirit and your mind to such a degree that it affects everybody. It affects us all in different ways. We all have a different degree of resilience. But the practice in and of itself is inhumane. Treating any individual like that is inhumane, and that’s the point that they keep trying to make. So I think those are some of the goals, and they timed this to begin on the first day of the legislative session.

Mansa Musa:  Right. Right. Talk about that.

Jorge Renaud:  And well, the legislative session in Texas will have it every other year for six months, January through June. There is a legislator named Terry Meza that I’m going to have a conversation with that has filed a couple of bills to amend ad-seg. Now her reasoning is that these individuals are going to get out of prison, and do you want them to be living in your neighborhood if they’ve been in ad-seg the way it is?

I disagree with that reasoning, because what it is doing is saying that if you don’t change it, those people are inherently dangerous. Instead of saying, they could be contributing members to your community if we gave them the program that they need, if we didn’t treat them in such a way, if we didn’t model these things. But it’s hard, that’s a policy arena. Sometimes you have to make alliances with folks. You have to make arguments to get an end. I tend to argue on the revolutionary edge of reform, which comes from a moral standpoint and not a transactional standpoint, which she’s doing. But it might bring about some change, I don’t know.

But that’s what they’re shooting for. I’ve seen quite a bit of media attention being given to it, and that’s driven by individuals such as you yourself, this program, again, Brittany up in Wisconsin and I thank y’all for that.

Mansa Musa:  In terms of the legislative disposition, because I remember when I locked up and I was on admin-seg, and when I got on admin-seg because I knew that case that came in Helms v Hewitt, I knew it was a couple of other cases that came out that pretty much said that this is the new way of doing things. At that time, I had a life sentence. I was saying, a life sentence on admin-seg is like being on death row, because I ain’t going to never get no moves.

So I started litigating, but what I came across in the process of it, they had a parallel regulation for protective custody, and they said that admin-seg and protective custody would be treated the same in terms of the way they… Conditions. So we was able to get a lot of things done as a result of that.

But I’m interested in have anybody thought about this being a Eighth Amendment violation, or in terms of a lot of the arbitrariness that’s going on, the fact that you’re not allowed no program, the fact that you’re not allowed no type of information, no type of contact, no type of information that will allow you to even develop some type of social skills because…? Maybe you can speak on this here, because I’m of the opinion that everybody in Texas on admin-seg, on supermax, I’m of the opinion that not all of them are serving life sentences.

Or at some point in time, it might be somebody back there that got 10 years and they going to be released. It might be somebody that they didn’t identify as a security threat, being a member of a security threat group that has a sentence that’s going to ultimately allow for them to be released. So it stands to reason that you would want to try to do something in terms of putting some information out there to allow these people to develop some type of social skills. Have y’all considered filing some type of litigation against the Texas Department of Corrections?

Jorge Renaud:  That’s a good question. I don’t know. I’m not an attorney. Like you, I spent a lot of time in law libraries reading stuff when I was incarcerated… So I don’t know. I would assume that individuals in ad-seg have filed every governor under every Amendment that you could think of, that they’ve probably taken every approach. But as you and I know, the courts have taken the approach that every individual during the course of their confinement is going to be faced with the possibility of being assigned to ad-seg, which is what made it an assignment and not a punishment. For those who don’t know, solitary confinement used to be the hole, that kind of stuff. They’d send you back there three days a week, 30 days if they were really cruel, but they let you out. Administrative segregation is an assignment. You are assigned to live 24 hours a day in a cell by yourself.

It’s an assignment, and the courts have said, everyone’s going to face that at some point. As long as they set up a meaningful review, all this other stuff, they can do that to you. Again, I’m not an attorney, so I don’t know if the Eighth Amendment would be a good way to go about it, I’m sure it would be, but I’m sure there’s some folks back to have already tried that. The Fifth Circuit is not going to let pretty well anything pass that. The Supreme Court we have now is not going to let much pass that. They’re very much on the side of law and order.

I think pretty well the only things that we can rely on are caring, compassionate legislators that will file stuff. Again, they have gone down from nine, 10,000 to 31. Movement such as ours that are of people who were formerly incarcerated who can use their direct experience, the lived experience, and talk to, well, you see me now, you say, oh, you’re articulate, all this, or whatever, so prison can’t be that bad. You try to explain to them about your children and your children, how you can subject them to different experiences, and they’re all going to react in different ways. They have different degrees of resiliency or whatever, but is that the humane thing that you want to do to them? Do you guide them by punishing them? Do you guide them by rewarding them and molding them and giving them examples of what you should do?

So I have faith in our communities and our communities moving forward in that way. I don’t know how much time it’ll take, and I don’t know if the legal arena is the way to do that, because that’s so stacked against us. Again, we don’t have a Willie Wayne Justice around anymore. We don’t have people on the Supreme Court saying that there is no… What is it? That there is no law [crosstalk]

Mansa Musa:  Law occurring?

Jorge Renaud:  Right.

Mansa Musa:  Law occurring between the Constitution –

Jorge Renaud:  Yes.

Mansa Musa:  …And the prisoners’ rights.

Jorge Renaud:  Between people who are incarcerated and people out here, yes.

Mansa Musa:  Right. Right. Thurgood Marshall –

Jorge Renaud:  The Burger Court. The Burger Court. Yeah, we don’t have that anymore.

Mansa Musa:  Yeah, the Burger Court.

Jorge Renaud:  We got the Roberts Court.

Mansa Musa:  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jorge Renaud:  Yeah.

Mansa Musa:  Hey, I’m going to close on this –

Jorge Renaud:  All right. All right.

Mansa Musa:  …And let you have the last word. But I want to offer to the brothers and sisters, and mainly the ones that’s on the strike that seem to think that this is a way, and I’m in agreement if you take the approach that you think, I’m going to remind him of Bobby Sands. Bobby Sands was a member of the Irish Republican Army, and the Irish Republican Army was in conditions much like these, that everybody that was locked up, they say if you was in Ireland and you was Catholic, then you was considered a member of the Irish Republican Army. So they put you in the worst plantation that’s known to humanity.

Bobby Sands went on a hunger strike and ultimately perished. But in doing so, it changed the narrative over the prison. It changed the attitude of the prison population. It changed the attitude of society as they looked at Ireland and the occupation that was taking place. But you have the last word. What do you want? What do you want our listeners to know and the takeaway from this conversation that we’re having today? More importantly, where can they contact you at, or how can they get involved?

Jorge Renaud:  Yeah, thank you. I would like our listeners to walk away with the idea that judging individuals by things that they may have committed in the past, or things that they did commit in the past, or judging them by those things, or denying everybody’s capacity to use insight into themselves and to the system, to the system that has enslaved them and brutalized them and find some sort of forgiveness and try to transform themselves into somebody different, as we all do. We all go through phases. And that to continue to treat people, every individual matters, not just the individual in ad-seg who’s poetic, who’s good-looking, who maybe isn’t back there for a heinous crime, but the ones that are back there for some really ugly shit, every individual, no human is disposable.

 For us to continue in that fashion is a reflection on the ugliest part of ourselves. It’s not that ag-seg itself that molds people into that way, it’s us that rely on that system because of individuals that we fear or can’t somehow control. If we can get away from that idea and try to see individuals as the humans that they are, as the beautiful humans that they are, we won’t resort to that sort of stuff. And that there are people such as yourself, such as these organizations that are the face of people who have been there, and you show dignity and compassion and understanding towards people, then I think if we turn to you for guidance or whatever, then I think this would be a better place. That’s a little wordy, man. I’m sorry.

Mansa Musa:  Hey, but well put, well put. How can we get in touch with you?

Jorge Renaud:  Yeah. My email is jrenaud, jrenaud@latinojustice.org.

Mansa Musa:  Okay.

Jorge Renaud:  If y’all want to contact and maybe see what we’re doing or have other conversations like this, and they don’t always have to be on TV, man. They could be at a coffee shop in DC, or at a deli in New York, or in Austin. Come to Austin, man, but come holler at me.

Mansa Musa:  Yeah, most definitely. All right. There you have it, the real news about Texas prison and the prison strike. More importantly, what’s behind it? This is a control issue on the part of the Texas Department of Corrections, but it should be a humane issue on the part of society. You can’t treat people like animals and expect them to come out and be human. We’re asking that all our viewers and all our listeners look into this and develop some type of conscience about what you think should take place in this situation. Jorge, thank you very much for –

Jorge Renaud:  Thank you. It’s been an honor, man.

Mansa Musa:  …Giving us this opportunity and this insight. We look forward to working with you at some point in time.

Jorge Renaud:  Anytime. Anytime.

Mansa Musa:  We remind our listeners to continue to support Rattling the Bars and The Real News. It’s because of The Real News that you get information like this. You’re not going to get Jorge on main media talking about the conditions that’s going on in prison without him having to endorse some commercial. We are nonprofit, we’re not commercial. We are actually what we say we are. We are actually The Real News. And thank you very much.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

In this urgent, exclusive interview for Rattling the Bars, Mansa Musa speaks with Carla J. Simmons from inside the Georgia prison system, as well as Page Dukes of the Southern Center for Human Rights. Simmons, who has been incarcerated since 2004, recently published an article in Scalawag magazine on the irreparable psychological damage our inhumane system of mass incarceration inflicts on incarcerated people, prison staff, and the communities returning citizens re-enter upon their release. “There needs to be accountability for the psychological damage caused by incarceration as more and more members of society experience it, for longer periods of time,” Simmons writes. “If society upholds the pretense that jails and prisons act as a rehabilitative service, we must consider what condition these people will be in when they re-enter society.”

Pre-Production: Frances Madeson, Kayla Rivara, Cameron Granadino
Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Mansa Musa:  Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m Mansa Musa, co-hosting with Eddie Conway. And as I always do, I’ll update you on Eddie Conway. We ask that you continue to have Eddie Conway in your prayers or whatever medium that you use to invoke a spirituality towards humanity. We ask that you channel that towards Eddie Conway as Eddie Conway recovers through this journey that he’s undergoing right now.

Today we have Carla Simmons, who is making a phone call from prison, and this is not an easy task. So we ask our audience to really pay attention to this subject matter because it’s important. She’s been incarcerated for 20 years. She recently wrote an article entitled “Sentenced to Trauma: Inside the Volatility and Disorder of Prison”. It was published in the Scalawag magazine. Scalawag is a leftist organization that has the agenda of abolishing prisons, humanizing people that’s coming out of prison, and challenging capitalism as we know it.

Welcome, Carla. First of all, why would you take on such a monumental subject? And second of all, why do you think people in society should care about what a person undergoes in prison mentally?

Carla Simmons:  So why I would take on it is monumental, but it’s the thing that I’m most passionate about, the thing that I have been most deeply affected by. So I have experienced all of these different afflictions throughout my incarceration, and trying to soul search and improve myself and survive my experience. I’ve dug down to the root of each of my struggles, and at the bottom of each one I find an aspect of trauma, a way that I have been damaged or affected negatively, in the way that trauma is understood by science, which I’m also extremely interested in. So I feel like it is a very, very important topic. It’s very close to my heart. And also, if I had a career dream or a goal, it would be to research trauma and to work with the Center for Disease Control and really bring to light the science and what incarceration does to the physical mind.

Mansa Musa:  Why do you think, and I’m just asking this question more so for the purpose of educating our audience, why do you think people in society should care about the mental… We’re talking about an environment that creates such oppressive and dehumanizing events and circumstances that, mentally, a person lacks the ability to be able to make the necessary adjustment, therefore they suffer some type of traumatic experience and recognize that it has a physiological impact on them. But why should people in society care about –

Carla Simmons:  Right. Yes, sir.

Mansa Musa:  The mental –

Carla Simmons:  It’s so important, and I could think of a lot of reasons why we should care about the humanity of individuals and their health and wellbeing. But from the perspective of society, I think that what they could focus on would be that most people understand the carceral system to be a system that intends to reintegrate its population back into society. And so we could go on and on about all the ways the system fails to prepare people for that, whether it be job skills, social skills, emotional intelligence, and whatnot. So not only does it neglect to provide people those things that would be really helpful and beneficial to society, it damages people, making it harder to see the results or success that they’re looking for with re-entry. So if you expect to understand that 90-something% of them will reenter society, we should be very, very concerned about their mental state when they get there.

Mansa Musa:  All right. Now, in your article you wrote that it’s a different type of trauma that comes from long-term imprisonment, because here in your analysis that you was making about trauma in particular, was more specifically the impact that it has on long-term imprisonment. You saying that it’s a different type of trauma that comes from long-term imprisonment. How so?

Carla Simmons:  Yes, sir. So the one thing is that there’s science behind that. So we have a parasympathetic and a sympathetic nervous system. And the sympathetic nervous system works like the gas. It’s the thing that triggers our bodies that says that we are in danger. And so when you have a one-time traumatic event, like you’re in a natural disaster or a bad car accident or some sort of an assault, your body hits the gas because it’s in danger, and it’s providing you with what you need to know, fight or flight responses. And then when the event is over with your parasympathetic nervous system [inaudible]

Mansa Musa:  …Solitary confinement, I went through being isolated 24/7. But to reflect on your point, I want you to give me some examples. Because as you said, when we find ourselves in a long-term environment, long-term imprisonment, we lack the ability to make the distinction. Or because we are in that hostile environment that we always got our foot on the danger pedal and less on the brakes. So do we find out, is it safe to say that that’s why when we see situations in prison where the issue don’t be that severe, it might just be no more than somebody getting in front of you in the line in commissary, or the shower’s crowded and people standing outside waiting to get in the shower and somebody root the line and wind up come from a minor incident to something more volatile and violent. Would that be an example, or would those type of things take place, or can you give us some examples of what you just outlined?

Carla Simmons:  Oh, yes, sir, for sure. I think that those examples are good. They highlight a particular aspect of that, and that when you put a body in a high stress response, a perpetual high stress response for years and years and years, the resilient zone, meaning the place where we can handle life’s ups and downs and little stressors: being cut in line, being in an anxious or crowded environment, maybe having where they say line up, no, get back, no, line up and then all frustrated and running into each other. Those are naturally stressful. But when you’ve pushed people to the breaking point, or when people’s bodies have been stressed to the max here, then those minor aggravations become major because the threshold is very, very small. So those examples are great when you’re talking about how this plays out, where little things become big things.

And I think that another thing to think about is that, in a cumulative nature, is how it all just piles up and piles up and piles up on each other. And it could be, I talk about in the article about how the noise inside the institution is maddening. And so how people are always very vigilantly listening because you never know if there’s a fight or if there’s an instruction or if there’s a fire or if it’s nothing. And so you just get up and look, look, look, look all day long. And of course, at the end of the day, nothing has happened, but you’re exhausted.

Mansa Musa:  Right, right, right.

Carla Simmons:  …All the time. And then of course, at any time during that, if there’s an actual problem or an issue that would require us to regulate ourselves and to use good social skills and some sort of ethical interaction with each other where we would require patience and good listening skills, it’s very, very difficult to expect people to be able to do that under those circumstances when they’re exhausted and have been exhausted by the sheer unpredictability of the environment.

Mansa Musa:  And talk about some of the things that go on in terms of the administration, because we recognize that in the prison-industrial complex and mass incarceration being the new form of slavery, we also recognize that there’s no iron curtain between the guards and the prisoners. So is it safe to say that the traumatic experiences that people are undergoing in prison, is it safe to say that the guards are not immune to it or immune to being traumatized? Or have you made this observation?

Carla Simmons:  Oh no, that is a really good point. And I’ve actually been talking about that lot. Because as we see that the staff in our institution, and I’m sure [inaudible] has decreed, that there’s much more pressure on the guards to perform with less and less resources, so they also are experiencing trauma. Personally, I think that there’s a certain moral injury that becomes involved when your career asks you to lock human beings in cages and deny them their basic human rights. Even if you don’t recognize it, I think that there’s something that shuts off inside of us that would make that possible to do as a vocation and have some sort of pride or even feel decent about it, would be to sort of cut off that part of your humanity that is denying another person’s [humanity]. Whether or not anyone is willing to recognize that, from my observation, I see it as a very traumatic act, even on its best day.

And now that the system is getting crippled over time, and the job has become much harder, and they’re exposed to violence more and more and less and less resources, then they in turn become more stressed, more on edge, and less and less able to perform their job in a humane, ethical way.

Mansa Musa:  And then, too, we recognize that, from your article, that you made the observation that, I think it was in there, where they were saying, you said that the rec officer and the [inaudible] officer, they was getting ready to go the blows, or something. Am I correct?

Carla Simmons:  Oh, yes, sir. Yes, sir.

Mansa Musa:  [inaudible]

Phone operator:  You have one minute left.

Mansa Musa:  Okay, we’ll come back.

Carla Simmons:  Uh-oh.

Mansa Musa:  Just come back in. Just dial back in.

Carla Simmons:  Okay. Yes, sir.

Phone operator:  The caller has hung up.

Mansa Musa:  Carla? 

Carla Simmons:  Yes, sir. Hello?

Mansa Musa:  Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. We are back. Look. Carla, talk about the correlation between the trauma as it relates to the staff and the fact that we know that if you’re in this type of traumatic environment and you work in this environment to retirement like 20, 30 years, is it a correlation between that and alcoholism on their part, or domestic violence on their part? Or the fact that, is it a correlation between that and the guards being the most, you find guards in prison, some of them to be the most brutal? In your observation, have you been able to discern either of those things?

Carla Simmons:  Yes, sir. Actually, and I haven’t done a lot of research to know what research would say about it. From my own experience, though, being here for 20 years, I’ve seen some officers throughout their career, so they would start off as CO1s and work their way up into administration. And I know that on more than one occasion, I watched their health deteriorate, their appearance deteriorate. I heard them talk about alcoholism and their struggle with substance abuse. I’ve seen, or at least heard, of their marriages failing and their estrangement with their children.

I mean, yeah, it is obvious that working under these, and their health, did I mention that? Their health just deteriorates. I’ve seen them experience cardiac arrest and having all sorts of really negative physical responses to the stress of being here and the poor conditions and the long hours, and then the trauma that I’m sure that they experienced by being here, and also that they witnessed being inflicted upon the population. So I would be very, very interested to read studies to see if people have been looking at these correlations. But just from my experience and observation, as narrow as it may be, I would say that it’s obviously a problem.

Mansa Musa:  And talk about how, ’cause we spoke on this a minute ago about how we become desensitized to certain things going around us. And you was talking about the noise. And I remember my own personal experience when I was in prison, I did a lot of time on lockup. And one of the environments that I was in, lockup environments, in order to get the police attention when somebody was sick, we were banging on the doors, and the police would shut the door and try to muffle out the sound until it become so deafening they had to respond. But I spent maybe a year, two years, or three years in this environment, and the noise don’t affect me. During the years of incarceration, they could be banging, I go straight to sleep. But I became so desensitized to that type of environment. Speak on that and how you might have witnessed some of the desensitization of some of the women that’s around you in terms of them being traumatized and not being able to process it.

Carla Simmons:  Oh yeah, sure. So I think desensitization is a major topic here, because I’ve got tons of examples. And the one that pops to my mind, the most obvious, is where people have seizures. And several years ago it was like an epidemic. People were having seizures all over the place. And I don’t know if it was the medicine or the water or maybe the heat. We don’t have central heating and air, so it gets really, really hot in the summer. But regardless, people would just fall out and have seizures all over the place. And of course, it was hard to get somebody’s attention, so people would be running around trying to get help for the people who were having the seizure. But by and large, most people just carried on with what they were doing while people were just falling out. People would keep playing cards and they would keep eating lunch [inaudible].

Mansa Musa:  Right, right, right.

Carla Simmons:  And you would just have folks on the ground. And then as the environment has become more violent, I’ve heard stories – Which I’ve been very fortunate, I’ve lived in the honor dorm since our environment got incredibly… Since the shift has happened where it’s not the same place as it used to be. But the stories that I hear. I had a close friend who watched this girl, they had been in a fight and there had been an injury, and the girl had passed out, and they had sort of drug her body by the door into a room to try to revive her or hide her. I don’t know what they were going to do. And she said that she just watched the trail of blood slide past her door, and then she went back to reading her book. ‘Cause she can’t get involved because then she could get hurt. And even if she could, there isn’t really an officer to tell. And so people have just had to turn their heads in many, many circumstances where in another environment, without this sort of conditioning, we would be compelled to intervene and to assist.

And I think more and more, I’ve seen people express how detrimental that is to their humanity and their wellbeing. And they live with all kinds of guilt and shame and regret, but it’s buried down so tight underneath the sense of survival and the sense of not really having a choice. You just get used to this. It’s just the way that it is.

Mansa Musa:  And do you think it’s a correlation between people leaving out of prison long-term, short-term, and recidivism? You think it’s a correlation?

Carla Simmons:  Yes.

Mansa Musa:  If so, how so? How so?

Carla Simmons:  Well, we know that life is hard. We know it’s hard out there. And if you’re suffering from some socioeconomic disadvantage to begin with, which there’s many, then you’re already at a higher risk for incarceration to begin with. And then we’re going to add on a felony conviction, which makes it harder to get a job. And then of course, it’s difficult. You have to reinstate your license, which takes money that you don’t have, and a job that you can’t get, and a probation or parole fee that you can’t pay, with transportation that you don’t have. And on top of that, you’ve got your system in an uproar, your resilient zone at an all time low, your stress level incredibly high. And then most people will leave with the subsets of the PTSD problems that make it difficult to socialize and interact in normal ways.

We have this desensitized behavior so that we don’t know when to intervene and when not, and our agency has been crippled. And then what else is there for us to do it? Foucault is one of my very favorite historian philosophers, the French guy. And in his writings, The Birth of the Prison, he says something that I’ve always found as very, very profound. He said that the institutionalized prison system as we know it today was established about 250 years ago. And that 10 years after it was established, there was such a thing as recidivism. And that his claim is that if 200 years later we haven’t freaking figured it out, it’s because it’s not broken, but designed to do exactly what it [inaudible]

Mansa Musa:  Exactly, exactly.

Carla Simmons:  – Which is to oppress and to segregate. And it’s very interesting, because the act of confinement as punishment in and of itself rose into being at the exact same time that the body began to earn hourly wages for labor. So when the body became a method to make money is when it became held captive for punishment. And so there’s this idea that if we can keep people working and we can keep money and we can keep doing this for free, then the systems designed to do that are perfect. And that clearly we’re not trying to help people or integrate people into successful lives where they can go on and live the dream. It’s just not possible.

Mansa Musa: I know. And I was thinking about my own, when I got out, and I’m working with an agency that deals with men and women coming out, helping them get situated. But when I got out, the first thing I got was mental health for myself and mental health space. I already knew that I had issues, but I remembered one incident in particular where I was getting some dental work done. The dentist told me everything he was going to do, and he was doing it. But somewhere along the line, my teeth became so sensitized that when I started eating, I couldn’t hardly eat. So I’m thinking that he did something wrong.

But in my traumatic thinking, I was thinking about how, when you in prison, you have to go to sick call, and you get in and your arm could be falling off, they say, well, put a sick call slip in. They don’t have no emergency mechanism. So I was telling my sister, I said, look, I’m going down to this dentist, and if you do anything other than fix my mouth, I’m going to wind up going back to prison, so I need you to intervene. And she said, very simple, oh, they got to take care of you because you paying for it. But I had lost that ability in that moment to make the connection that I’m in society and I’m paying for a service. And I consider myself relatively intelligent, but the trauma. But talk about why you don’t think that the prison-industrial complex overall should have a more trauma informed type agenda.

And when I say trauma informed type, CDC that came out with a study on what trauma informed environments look like. And one of the things they talk about is safety would be a key component of it. Peer support would be a key point of it. It would be like a culture, historical, and gender recognition would be a key component of it, but it’s another thing. But why do you think that the prison-industrial complex, overall, recognizing that PTSD exists and it exists in prison, why do you think that there hasn’t been a call to have a more trauma informed approach to the prison environments?

Carla Simmons:  Yes, sir. I think that’s an excellent question. And it’s really at the heart of why I started doing this writing, because it occurred to me how beneficial it was for the facility, the institution, the system itself, to continue and to perpetuate trauma in this way. Because what we know is that if we can deregulate, desensitize, and completely destroy people, then they are much less likely to become a security threat. And I would argue that it’s done intentionally. Now, I recognize that it may be just a byproduct of all sorts of other factors, just a lack of organization, a lack of resources and staffing, or whatever. But I also know that counterinsurgency is a thing, where if we can take a population and we can imbalance them to such an extent that they will not organize, they will not communicate, they don’t have the mental strength or capacity to demand their basic needs, to talk about their rights.

And so it’s like if there’s the study from the ’70s with Seligman and he is talking about learned helplessness. They use dogs. And so they just shocked them, shocked them, shocked them. And then when they quit shocking them, the dog had been so deteriorated by the shocking process that when it was free to go it just sat there, because it didn’t know what even else to do. And so I make the connection with, if I have to constantly worry about if I have toilet tissue to wipe my ass, then I won’t even be thinking about how I could get out of here or how I could demand that we have clean water or a new pair of pants. Much less to look to my neighbor and see what maybe we could accomplish together, because I’m too worried about whether or not I’m going to miss lunch and if my socks will come back in the laundry, or if there will even be laundry, or if there will even be lunch.

Mansa Musa:  Right, right, right.

Carla Simmons:  I don’t know if it’s –

Mansa Musa:  Go ahead.

Carla Simmons:  Go ahead. I’m sorry.

Mansa Musa:  No, go ahead. Finish your thought.

Carla Simmons:  I’m just saying that, again, I believe that it’s intentional, but I don’t know that it is. And even if it’s a byproduct of a lot of other flaws in the system, that it definitely works to its advantage. I don’t see anyone stepping in and say, oh, well, let’s make these people healthier, when it’s doing such a good job allowing us to police ourselves in the way that we just become very compliant.

Mansa Musa:  Well, we know that, according to penology, the concept of punishment is that the punishment is the sentence, and the carrying out the punishment is not to further punish a person, but to prepare a person to return, ultimately, back to society. And that’s in stages. But talk about where are you at right now in terms of, what’s on the horizon for you? Tell our audience. And tell our audience some of the things that you think that they might want to be doing in terms of helping to raise the awareness of the trauma that goes on in prison, and more importantly, the necessity to have a proactive approach to resolution of trauma in prison.

Carla Simmons:  So what I think is that, for me, I know that I’m getting near the end of this, and whether that’s two years from now, five years, within the next 10 years from now I’ll be gone. I’m serving a life sentence here in Georgia, so we don’t know what that looks like. It’s been uncertain in its nature from the beginning. And I used to think that if I could emotionally survive this, that I’d be good. So then I got strong enough to handle it, and I think, well, if I can psychologically make it through it. And so I got some therapy and I’ve been reading a lot of books, and I’ve been examining my own self in the traumatic environment and trying to do healing work and whatever it takes to make myself capable of making it –

Mansa Musa:  That’s right. That’s right, that’s right.

Carla Simmons:  Lately, I’ve been on this kick where I was like, well, now it’s a physical survival, my body we don’t have vitamins and we don’t have adequate nutrition. And like I said, medical care is scant, and the people around me, they get a really bad cancer diagnosis. Now, if we can just make it physically, then we’re getting near the end of it. But that’s just my experience. And what I know is that there’s young people that come into the system every day and the life sentence in Georgia, it used to be a 14-year policy before you were considered for parole. And then, of course, a long denial process. But the kids that are coming in right now, they have 30-year life sentences where they’re not even eligible for parole until after 30 years.

And they’re coming into this very, very crippled environment where, for me, 20 years ago, it wasn’t quite like this. And more and more, we see this rise in violence, this lack of resources, the staff dealing with their own trauma, and the stakes just get higher and higher. And so I think that what we need to really be focusing on is where we’re headed. And where we’re headed is down the freaking drain. It’s not getting better. People are getting hurt, people are being harmed. And that’s something that we really need to reckon with as a society that has the pretense of rehabilitation.

We really need to decide, are we punishing people or are we trying to help them? And riding the line, using one when it’s convenient and the other when it’s convenient is bullshit. And I think that when we confront that and say, no, we really need to be clear about what it is that we’re doing, and then once we get clear, we need to do that. And then that requires society to really take a good hard look at their values, their collective values: who are we and what are we aiming to do? And then taking accountability for the steps to back that up, leave that in. Really, it boils down to policy.

Mansa Musa:  And Carla, there you have it. The real news about trauma and the impact that trauma has on the prison-industrial complex. Carla, how can our audience get in touch with you? How can our audience become more aware of some of the things that you are doing?

Phone operator:  You have one minute left.

Carla Simmons:  Oh yeah. I don’t know. Keep reading, keep watching, keep listening for the voices that go unheard. I think a lot about power and how it is that we try to generate power from this point in society, this very oppressed place. And I know that, culturally, is the only place that I can interject any kind of power. And that’s through art, through writing, through recording this experience. And so as we continue to cultivate these records in our culture, then it becomes ingrained and it becomes, in its own way, powerful. And then one day it will affect the values of an upcoming generation.

Phone operator:  Thank you for using Securus. Goodbye.

Page Dukes:  It looks like Carla may be trying to call back. Do you want me to try and patch her back in? Okay.

Mansa Musa:  Yeah, yeah. Tell her to come back so we can wrap her up. And then Page, at the end, you can say something like –

Phone operator:  An incarcerated individual at Arrendale State Prison. This call is not private. It’ll be recorded and may be monitored. If you believe this should be a private call, please hang up and follow facility instructions to register this number as a private number. To accept this free call, press one. To refuse this call… Thank you for using Securus. You may start the conversation now.

Mansa Musa:  Looking forward, you expect to be out maybe in the next two to five years. Looking forward, what can we expect from Carla from that point on out?

Carla Simmons:  Oh yeah. Okay. That’s a good question. What can we expect? Well, you can expect me to keep writing and to keep talking and to keep reliving the hell that we’ve seen and been through. I know that there’s members of my family who would like me to walk out of here and never look back, and I think that that’s impossible. And I think it’ll always be a part of who I am and what I do. And anything that I can do for the rest of my life that can reach back and bring some awareness, that would shed some light to make this a more humane experience while it exists. And I hope to live to see one day when we’ve erected justice to such an extent that it doesn’t look like bars and wire and cages and punishment and torture. So I want to keep writing and I want to keep talking.

I do a lot of art. I hope that somebody can find me out there expressing this experience and this trauma and the healing that I hope to one day accomplish. I also want to get involved in the scientific side of these things so that we can make real hard proof that it’s not just criminals talking about not getting their way or not having what they want or wanting less steel and more cushion or something, but that we’re talking about a real human experience and real psychological damage that’s irrevocable, and that we can have scientific evidence that proves that it’s wrong. And that way, if we can’t do it on the moral side, then we can do it with the hard evidence that things need to change and that we can do better.

Page Dukes:  Hey, Carla, do you want to stay on or do you want to go?

Carla Simmons:  Oh, it doesn’t matter. Yeah, I’ll stay on a while, if that’s okay.

Page Dukes:  Okay, cool. Carla and I met in prison. We were both in the choir, the Voice of Hope Choir together. We also took a lot of classes together about trauma and how we could manage that with things like zen meditation. We took a class on cognitively-based compassion training, and so we had a lot of conversations about trauma and the way that we could mitigate it in our own lives and also help other people to cope.

Mansa Musa:  And overall, what do you think about the overall attitude of the criminal justice system or the prison-industrial complex in terms of their approach to resolving the impact of trauma?

Page Dukes:  I think that it is nonexistent. There’s not much of an effort to mitigate the impacts of trauma. At least in my experience, the prison response to mental health is to give you a level. They assign you to a mental health level, and then often they prescribe medication, sometimes very heavy medication. And so medicating people, sedating them might work for the prison-industrial complex, it might work for an individual on the level that they’re able to survive or cope on a medicated basis, but it’s not really doing anything for a person to deal with their trauma, either the trauma that they came with or the trauma that was impounded by incarceration. So I think we have to support each other, because the prison’s not doing anything to help us resolve that trauma.

Mansa Musa:  All right. Thank you. We appreciate you being the link between us and Carla. This is a good opportunity for our listeners to be able to get a broader perspective of the overall effects of the prison-industrial complex and mass incarceration. A lot of times people have an attitude or a tendency to think that people incarcerated have a cushy life, but we recognize that overall it’s not like that. It is really brutal, hostile, and dehumanizing. Thank you very much, Page.

Page Dukes:  Thank you so much. I’m glad I could be a part.

Mansa Musa:  All right, there you have it. The real news about trauma in the prison-industrial complex where we recognize that the ultimate goal of imprisonment is to help a person change from what they was to becoming a better human being. But as we see from this interview will Carla, the prison-industrial complex is using the most harsh, brutal living condition to affect the mentality of most men and women that’s incarcerated, damaging them beyond repair, and not taking any effort to provide them with the necessary mental health that would allow them to remain in society upon release. Thank you, Carla, for this enlightening conversation, and we hope to see you out here making an impact on the prison-industrial complex.

Carla Simmons:  Well, thank you so much. It’s been an honor to speak with you.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

Endless expansion of the system of mass incarceration is one of the few guarantees of American politics. Across the country, communities are embroiled in fights to halt the growth of new jails. In a special episode of Rattling the Bars, the Prison Policy Institute convenes activists fighting jail expansion from coast to coast to discuss strategies and methods to fight back.

The resources below were curated and shared by the Prison Policy Initiative and webinar panelists from Building Justice in Berks, Families for Justice as Healing, and the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls. We hope they will be useful in your follow-up work fighting jail expansion projects in your communities.

• Arguments against jail expansion (Prison Policy Initiative)
• A how-to guide: Critically reviewing a jail assessment calling for a bigger jail (Prison Policy Initiative)
• Does our county really need a bigger jail? A guide for avoiding unnecessary jail expansion (Prison Policy Initiative)
• Smoke and Mirrors: A cautionary tale for counties considering a big, costly new jail (Prison Policy Initiative)
• A guide to public records requests for advocates seeking reform of the criminal legal system (Prison Policy Initiative)
• Winnable criminal justice reforms in 2023 (excerpt): Establish moratoriums on jail and prison construction (Prison Policy Initiative)
• Incarceration Trends: a data tool from the Vera Institute of Justice
• Empty MCI-Framingham, close it forever; and never build another prison in Massachusetts, by Andrea James (Boston Globe)
• Inside the battle over a new women’s prison for Massachusetts, by Dan Atkinson (Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism)
• Follow up: Mass is still ignoring public input and trying to build a new women’s prison, by Dan Atkinson (DigBoston)
• Massachusetts organizers call for no new women’s prisons and an end to their construction, by Tamar Sarai (Prism)
• Stop Building Prisons (podcast) with Sashi James, Maggie Luna, and Avalon Betts-Gaston (Failed Architecture) (featuring members of the National Council)
• See also: The Free Her Institute and No New Women’s Prison webpages from Families for Justice as Healing and the National Council
• A Co-Governance Success Story (Berks County)
• Building Justice in Berks says jail decision premature without additional analysis
• Criminal justice group calls for limiting pretrial detention on eve of final film in series (Berks County)
• CGL response to community questions about jail assessment (Berks County)
• Berks needs new jail with nearly 1K beds, assessment says (This article includes Building Justice in Berks’ critique of the assessment), by David Kostival and Jaccii Farris (Berks Regional News)

Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars, I’m Mansa Musa, co-host for Eddie Conway. And as I always do, I try to update everyone on Eddie Conway’s progress and Eddie Conway’s condition. We ask that you keep Eddie Conway in your prayers, whatever spiritual medium you identify with, as he go forward in his recovery and getting his health back. Today we have a remarkable program. The Prison Policy Initiative is a organization that’s in the forefront of raising people’s consciousness about all aspects of the criminal injustice system, the prison industrial complex and mass incarceration, the new form of slavery.

Through the Prison Policy Initiative’s research, people are made aware of how these blood sucking institutions are exploiting and oppressing people, but more importantly, how people can organize and advocate to change this exploitation and oppression. The webinar, Fighting Jail Expansion, is such an example. Naila Awan, Director of Advocacy for Prison Policy Initiative, hosted a webinar with five remarkable women who offer strategies and taxes on how they effectively organize to stop the expansion of a jails and prison within their community.

The webinar is a textbook example of advocacy and organizing and can be used to raise people’s conscience on how to be effective in doing both. The Prison Policy Initiative has always did outstanding research, and it’s through their research that this particular webinar has come into existence. The Real News and Rattling the Bars is thankful to the Prison Policy Initiative for allowing us to be able to share this webinar with our audience. We hope that in doing so, it will spark a purifier of consciousness and cause people to become more focused on organizing and advocating against injustice everywhere.

As one of the women said, there’s nothing more powerful than the power of the people, and this reminds me of when the Black Panther Party first came into existence, one of the slogans that we had was, all power to the people. So we say, all power to the people, and thank the Prison Policy Initiative for giving us this opportunity to share this remarkable webinar with our listeners and viewers. In closing, we ask that you continue to support Rattling the Bars and the Real News. It’s because of your support that we’re able to bring this type of information to you. Thank you very much and enjoy.

Naila Awan:

Across the country, counties are proposing to build new, larger jails. Community groups, organizers and activists have successfully pushed back on a number of these proposals. However, they often see the proposals being reinitiated year after year, causing them to focus resources on defensive fights, and having less time to push and explore progressive reforms aimed at reducing the number of people incarcerated. Today we’re going to talk to organizers who’ve successfully pushed back on proposals to build bigger jails and explore an alternative strategy aimed up pausing the year in and year out fights to prevent counties from moving ahead on jail expansion. We’re also hoping to have time to discuss how records request, technical challenges and interventions in jail assessment processes and analysis of such assessments can help in these fights.

I’m just going to double look at the poll results now and share the results with you all. So it looks like a number of folks here are here because of a general interest in the topic, but also a good proportion of you are in counties where a new jail is being proposed or where you’ve actively been involved, or are engaging in a fight to stop a jail from being expanded or constructed.

As we head into our discussion today, I just wanted to do a quick introduction. My name is Naila Awan, and I’m the Director of Advocacy at Prison Policy Initiative. Today I’m excited to have Mallory Hanora, Executive Director of Families for Justices as Healing in Massachusetts, and a proud member of the National Council. And Sashi James, Director of Reimagining Communities at the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls. Mallory and Sashi’s organizations are both leading an important legislative effort in Massachusetts to establish a five-year moratorium on jail and prison construction or expansion.

And Crystal Kowalski, founding member of Building Justice in Berks, which is located in Pennsylvania. Building Justice in Berks has been actively and successfully pushing back on the county’s proposal to build a larger jail and aims to monitor the planning and building of the new Berks County Jail. You’ll also likely hear from two additional Prison Policy Initiative staff members, Wendy Sawyer, our Research Director who might be providing some additional information during this discussion, and Emily Widra, our Senior Research Analyst who will be reviewing your questions as they come in and fielding them at the end of today’s webinar.

Now Crystal, I’d like to start with you. Your Pennsylvania County was trying to build a bigger jail based on community action, focused on reducing the jail population. And pushing back against the need for a larger facility, you’ve all gotten the county to change its plans. Can you tell us how you first learned about your county’s plan to build a bigger jail, how your coalition came together, and maybe most importantly, how your group managed to get a seat at the table during the jail assessment phase, when we frequently see that only criminal legal system actors like sheriffs, prosecutors, judges, and jail administrators are being consulted?

Crystal Kowalski:

Thank you, Naila. First, I want to thank you, Naila, for holding this webinar, Prison Policy Initiative, and for having me be a panelist and for also your incredible data and reports. We have used those and they have been really helpful. I want to thank everybody who’s attending the webinar, and it is really an honor to be on this panel with Mallory and Sashi. I’ll start with how we knew we were building a new jail, and that was by attending county commissioner’s board meetings.

I initially went, because I guess I saw in the newspaper, the county was thinking about privatizing the jail. And so I went to a commissioner’s meeting, and then I just stayed attending those meetings. And by attending on a weekly basis and studying agendas and paying really close attention to budget proposals that happened, like presentations happened in November, you can see what’s coming down the pike, and what we saw was that they would be building a new jail and contracting with CGL.

Our core group of Building Justice in Berks, came together also through county commissioner’s meetings. The core group of us knew each other from a previous battle to keep our county owned nursing home in county hands. This was a long and pretty involved fight. It went on for about a year and a half. So during that time we built relationships with each other, and we figured out how the county works, how they make decisions and how we could impact those decisions. So that was a group that had done something previously together, we were the core group. Our first action was to send a private letter to the stakeholders, the prison board, which is the commissioners, the DA, other stakeholders saying, we understand that you’re going to contract with CGL. We are asking you to also get information from agencies that do criminal justice reform and have current data. So we recommended Prison Policy Initiative and we recommended the Vera Institute.

We had this letter signed by community leaders. So we basically tried to gather the most powerful, impactful people we could that looked like broad-based community support, not just activists. So this letter went out to them, that was the initial action. We had a couple responses. Then the core group got together and we expanded by holding a criminal justice film series, and we also, in that, reached out to a bunch of community groups to partner with us. And by holding this series, the audience that gathered was really diverse and amazing, and we invited all the stakeholders in the county to attend, and to our surprise, they did. We had commissioners come, we had people from Saint Berks come. It was a series of four films, so they were week after week. Once we started getting some people coming, I think there was a feeling of expectation maybe that they should attend.

So they did, and that really helped us to connect. CGL also sent representatives to this film series. We got press coverage and that also helped us broaden our reach. Originally, Naila, we were talking about what the greatest challenges were that we faced, and I think that’s an important thing to bring up. I think, staying ahead of upcoming action items and decision points and getting press releases out prior to decisions being made by the county, so the way that, that’s done, is by covering every single meeting if you can. And that was operations meetings, jail board meetings, commissioners meetings, steering committee for the jail project meetings. An example of why this is important was, I was at a prison board meeting, and at the end of the meeting they were saying, “Oh, something about this meeting on Thursday at 11:15.” And I thought, wait, there’s not meetings on Thursday at 11:15, they’re at 10 and one.

So I contacted the county, I said, “Oh, I heard this in this meeting. What is this meeting?” And they said, “Oh, it’s the visioning session with CGL.” And I said, “Oh.” And they said, “Well, you can come if you want.” And so, that day before, three of us in the core group changed around our schedules, got to that visioning session the next day, and it was a really important meeting to be at. We would not have been notified or known about it had we not been at that other meeting.

All right, now to the, being able to speak with CGL, the people who did the assessment. I thought about this, and I think it happened for a number of reasons. I would say, I’m going to enumerate them. One, our history here in Berks County. Berks County had a bad history in criminal justice.

Berks County had a woman die in our jail in June of 2014, she was in there, serving a 48-hour sentence on an inability to pay truancy fines, $2,000 in truancy fines. The woman who was in the jail cell with her, was in there on parking tickets. She notified them that she was having problems. She died of a heart attack, because she didn’t get medical service, and that got national attention. Losing my place. Sorry. Okay. So that got national attention and it also woken local activists. That’s how I got involved in all of this. I was reading that article and I’m like, everything about it was shocking, literally everything. So that was number one that happened. Then we held other records.

We had the highest constable pay, we had the highest amount of non-traffic cases in one MDJ’s office. We had the highest amounts of incarceration on failure to post collateral. And this is in Pennsylvania, so in all the counties in Pennsylvania, we were twice as high as the second place county, which was York, on incarcerating people for failure to post collateral, that’s bail on very low level summary offenses. On all these things, we had fantastic press coverage and really in depth investigative reporting, and at that time the newspaper was giving a lot of room to this reporting. It connected us together, it connected us with the ACLU, which really helped. Number two, we have at least one commissioner who I believe has a true interest in criminal justice reform, and he happens to be the head commissioner and a Republican. This helps us a lot that he has these feelings.

Number three, the Board of Commissioners saw how we fought to keep Berks Heim, that was the nursing home, in public hands, and they knew we had the drive and the connections to collect the data and to make it public. So from the beginning they emphasized how transparent this jail building project was going to be, and we tried to hold them to it. We attended every meeting, we commented, we placed right-to-know requests, we held a very public film series with broad-based community partners and invited all the stakeholders.

Number four, So CGL also attended our film series, which helped connect us with CGL. On the model of CGL and how they were going about business, we conducted our own stakeholder meetings. We had meetings with the MDJs, Pretrial Services, Parole and Probation, some of the commissioner’s community leaders, the warden and the deputy warden.

And on a regular basis, if we had a question, we just emailed CGL directly, and they would get back to us and they would answer our question. We submitted daily right-to-know requests for the daily jail admission logs. This gave us information about jail population and level of offense. And I mean, the people who were in jail on a introductory level, but it also let, I think the county know and CGL know that we knew all this.

And then last one, number six, we were a constant presence for years, and we always approached every comment using the subject, we, presuming that these decisions will be made with input from the community. This past November, the commissioners announced that they were taking the next year to reduce the jail population to below 700 people, and we plan to help them surpass their goal. I’m open to any questions and talking after this, I know that was a barrage of information. Thank you, Naila.

Naila Awan:

Thanks, Crystal. And Mallory and Sashi, as mentioned at the outset, jail expansion efforts frequently like revive year-after-year in counties, but you all are trying to flip the script in this bite against jail expansion and construction by leading an effort to get the Massachusetts legislature to pass a Jail and Prison Moratorium Bill. Can you describe what that looks like, why you chose this strategy, and the obstacles you’ve faced in advancing that legislation?

Sashi James:

I’ll start. So my name is Sashi, and I’m with Families for Justice As Healing in the National Council. And we started, we wrote the [inaudible 00:17:05] bill following the leadership of formerly incarcerated women. Our organization is a abolitionist organization that’s founded by formerly incarcerated women, so it was founded inside of a prison and we do believe that they have the vision and that we follow their leadership. And so, formerly incarcerated women directly impacted women to wrote a Prison and Jail Moratorium Bill, because one, we tried many angles, which was, write letters to the Board of Directors, two of HDR who actually has the contract in Massachusetts for the women’s prison, but we tried to have conversations with architects. Some were successful, which thank you to the architects that actually pulled out and chose not to move forward with this project.

But some architects, one primarily being HDR, decided not to pull out of this project and also decided to blatantly ignore formerly incarcerated women, directly impacted women and our allies from across Massachusetts and even broader from across the country, because they’re the second largest architectural firm in the country that’s just building prisons and jails everywhere.

And so, we wrote a Prison and Jail Moratorium Bill, because our first attempts were just being ignored. And the Prison and Jail Moratorium Bill is a five-year pause on all construction prisons and jails for five years, which first, we believe that this could be a beautiful model across the country, because one, it’s exhausting to keep fighting prisons and jail construction. We don’t have the capacity as the people. We’re trying to heal people. We’re trying to create what- I’m going to scale back. We’re not trying to create what different looks like, we are creating what different looks like, and that takes a lot of our time and energy and everything in itself. So to continue to fight prisons and jail construction, when we know that if they build a bed, they’re going to fill the bed. It’s exhausting.

And so, the Prison and Jail Moratorium Bill gives communities like mine, which I live in Roxbury, which is primarily a Black and Brown community, it just happens to sit in the most incarcerated court of the commonwealth of Massachusetts. And so, we know that this new prison and jail is only going to impact communities like mine, and it’s just going to cause further harm. And so, five years looks like we’ll be able to just have a breathing period of, look at all the beautiful things that we are creating that $50 million can actually go towards, versus why would we be spending $50 million on a new woman’s prison? And in addition to saying, we want a five-year moratorium, we’re also saying that, because in Massachusetts it’s a plan to spend $200 million on new women’s prisons over the next 10 years. It might even be 500.

I’ve been saying so many millions of dollars that’s not getting funded to us, but to DOC and all these architects to build prisons and jails. So I apologize if that number isn’t completely accurate, but we’re also challenging and saying, the amount of money what you’re planning to spend on prisons and jails over the next five years, you need to give that directly to the communities that are mostly impacted, that would have been impacted once we get this prison and jail infrastructure moratorium in place. The beautiful process of it all is that we know, as movement people, there’s no power greater than the power of the people, and the power of the people in Massachusetts has spoken. We did a 90-mile walk across Massachusetts, which was just a raising awareness walk, where we talked to people that were not impacted by incarceration and actually had yard signs in their community that said, Back the Blue.

And it was so funny, because in our community is the total opposite. You know what I mean? Here’s a community where you see grass, trees and happiness. And then you go into our community where it’s just a gloom, and you can see we’re like, “Keep the police out.” And then they’re like, “No, we want the police.” And well, obviously we can see where resources are lacking, and why shouldn’t we be creating what different looks like? But out of the 90-mile walk, we were able to shift the conversation from, yes, to building new prisons or even Backing the Blue, to saying, you know what? We need to be giving communities what they need, and a jail and prison is only going to cause more harm. And it’s also setting us back generations and decades and just beyond, because when you talk about building a new prison, you are not talking about my generation, although my generation is impacted, but you’re also talking about my daughter, my daughter’s daughter, my daughter’s daughter’s daughter.

Because that building is not going to just get destroyed out of nowhere. And so, that’s where we’re headed, and we have a beautiful infrastructure which we call Reimagining Communities. And so, I love the fact that when we talk about creating what different looks like, everybody’s like, “Oh, well, why should we have a Prison and Jail Moratorium Bill? Because why don’t you want to build a new prison and jail, and what should we be doing instead?” And the answer is that we should be investing in communities. If you see a problem, invest in it. Figure out how we can respond to the harm, and create healing. So that way we know that if you create a healthy, thriving person, then they can go off and create healthy, thriving communities, and that should be our only focus. I’m going to kick it to Mall, in case you would like to add something.

Mallory Hanora:

Sure. I think I can, I don’t know if we’re out of time, I can definitely answer the next question.

Naila Awan:

I was going to say, if you want to take a few minutes, please go ahead and take a minute.

Mallory Hanora:

Okay, awesome. I mean, Sasha, you said it beautifully. I think the only thing I would add is, we have the dubious distinction of MCI-Framingham being the only, I mean to say, the oldest operating women’s prison in the United States of America. So what we are saying in our organizing is, MCI-Framingham, close it forever and never rebuild or replace it. And so, when we talk about conditions of confinement, we’re led by women who have lived in some of the oldest, most decrepit, most disgusting prisons in the United States. They survived that. And they know that any building anywhere is going to become that same level of devolved and disgusting.

And the harm that happens is both physical in the environment, as well as cultural. Everything that women go through when they’re separated from their children, all of the sexual violence, all of the abuse that our incarcerated community experiences. So for us, as Sashi mentioned, it’s really talking about what else is possible, what different looks like. So the Prison and Jail Construction Moratorium does leave room to make needed essential repairs for the quality of incarcerated people’s lives. What it prevents is massive construction projects for the purposes of doing exactly what Sashi said, which is extending the capability of that building to incarcerate people for 150 more years. And Massachusetts and your states probably have unique histories as well. We have a record of county leaders meeting in the 1870s, talking about what they should do for incarcerating women, because it’s not safe to incarcerate women with men.

And the best thing that they could come up with, was building MCI-Framingham the women’s prison. So part of our organizing has been 150 years later. Shame on you if the best thing you can think of is another version of MCI-Framingham. We refuse to accept that, we won’t go along with that. But what we’re absolutely not saying is let women sit in there. So all of our organizing on the ground, our participatory defense work, our campaign work to free the mothers, free individual women, we’re doing everything possible and exploring every single pathway to release and talking with people about how that’s possible as we’re organizing for this pause. And just to emphasize, that’s what that five years is for, to focus on doing that work, instead of digging holes in the ground where we’re going to bury women for another four generations.

Sashi James:

Naila, if you don’t mind, I just wanted to just add one more thing. I’m really sorry, this question gets us going. But I also wanted to put it out there that we’ve done a listening tour. That was a two and a half year listening tour where we asked women across the country, women and girls, what people needed, and what caused them to end up on a prison bunk? How could we have supported? Even a question of, what made you happy so that way you would never end up in a prison bunk, which is something that even as a young black girl in the community, I have never been really asked. Except for my mom, who’s Andrea James, she’s always like, but she’s a little bit different. But what makes you happy? And so, we the research to show what our people need, so that way we’re not spending $167,000 in Massachusetts on incarcerating a woman.

And the most important thing that I always lead with, is that when we did our listening tour in Massachusetts, one of the things that came out of the listening tour, which as a mother, it hits me so hard, is that the number one reason why women ended up incarcerated in Massachusetts, is because of lack of access to affordable housing. And so, I like to always emphasize that 82% of those women are mothers. And so, when you say that a mother doesn’t have access to affordable housing, we’re also talking about children. And then we’re also thinking about the most vulnerable thing you would do as a mother to be able to ensure that your child has access to housing or food or just basic needs that most communities have, that hours does not.

And so, when you talk about spending $167,000 a year to keep a woman incarcerated, and then you think, for me, I pay about maybe $28,000 a year for housing, the numbers are not adding up. And that’s literally four or five women that we could provide housing for if we actually focused on what the people needed, versus not keep allowing a business to keep oppressing a certain group of people. I just wanted to uplift that.

Naila Awan:

No, I really appreciate that, because I think it really points to how we need to be looking at different strategies that will in fact reduce the number of people coming into contact with the criminal legal system in the first place, and reducing the number of people who ever experience incarceration. I want to take us a little bit to talk about some other strategies next. So besides public awareness campaigns and legislative strategies, I’m interested in hearing about other kinds of tactics you’ve all tried to pause, delay, obstruct jail construction and expansion. And Mallory and Sashi specifically, I’d be interested in hearing about the technical challenge you all brought using the Massachusetts RFP process. Maybe explain what an RFP is. And then Crystal, if you could discuss how you all have used public records in Berks County, I think that, that would be helpful for folks.

Mallory Hanora:

Sure. We’re organizing to stop the new women’s prison by any means yet necessary, so we’re using all the tools in the toolbox. And we found out that they were going to build the new women’s prison, because overnight in a move of crisis and chaos that was incredibly harmful to women’s lives, they shipped out about 200 women from the state prison. These are county sentence women and women being held before their trial, they had been at the state prison. They moved those women to South Bay, which is a county jail. We immediately raised the red flag about that and said, why is this happening? Women weren’t notified, their families weren’t notified, the community was not engaged at all. What else is possible besides trapping women in yet another jail, a jail that’s locked down for even longer, and also terrible conditions. And through that, that’s how it got exposed that just months later, an RFP came out, a Request for Proposal.

It’s the bidding process for companies to win the contract to do the first phase of the work. So I think that’s another thing that I would say is, anytime you can intervene, even if it’s already in process, you should do it. And if there’s shovels in the ground, get your people together for some civil disobedience. But in any case, in every phase of the process, there’s hopefully an intervention that you can find. The first phase in Massachusetts is a study and design phase. It’s still incredibly expensive, $550,000. And like Sashi mentioned, what grassroots groups can do on the ground without money, is far different than what these multi-billion dollar, sometimes global companies can do just business as usual. So we’re talking about HDR that was awarded this contract, built 270 jails and prisons in the United States, absolutely directly affected. People are trying to hold them accountable for profiting off our people’s suffering and bondage.

And so, that’s ongoing. But in any case, in Massachusetts, and I’m sure where you are, there’s some laws and statutes that govern how you have to advertise these projects. And they very often don’t follow them, because this is a old boys network where they’re trying to give whoever they want to give the money to, where they’re trying to do it as quickly and as expeditiously as possible and cut out the public from any feedback. So we did some research on what the state statutes are, and in fact, there’s this old part of it where you have to list the request for proposals, you have to publish that the job was announced in multiple newspapers. And so, we have a crew of allies and supporters to help us do this type of research. We did the legal research, we had folks look in all the newspapers when it was supposed to be published.

They didn’t follow the law. And so, the way that you file a complaint about that in Massachusetts, is with the attorney general’s office. We had no idea. We know that the attorney general’s a top cop, we know she does some consumer stuff. We’re like, “Okay, whatever.” But as it turns out, there’s something called a bid unit office that is responsible for oversight for how these contracts are distributed and awarded. And it’s actually super important, and some of you might already be engaged in this work, because it’s also a massive racial justice issue. So in Massachusetts, the overwhelming majority of all state contracts go to white-owned companies. So there’s tons of issues in this area, no matter which way you look at it. And so anyways, part of the reason why we want to pass the Jail and Prison Construction Moratorium is because this takes months of energy and effort to figure out how this works.

So formerly incarcerated women, women with incarcerated loved ones, community members, are sitting at a table in our office with our computers open, literally teaching ourselves how the process works in local government to get from, here’s their vision, their plan. And by the way, you should read it anyways, because reading the state’s language about what they want to do with our people, really grounds you in why we have to be on point about our resistance every step of the way. They’re trying to build this as a trauma informed prison. All these disgusting words that we know is just synonyms for suffering and harm. It’s just business as usual in a different building. So in any case, we learned a lot about what they were planning to do and we had to teach ourselves the process.

But what we were able to do, we were right. It was as plain as day that they did not follow the law. And so, interestingly enough, what they did in order to not have the ruling that, and again, I’m sorry, I should say that in Massachusetts, the agency that governs, that manages these projects, basically has a project manager role. It’s called the Department of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance. So you and your team can figure out which of your state or local agencies actually does the day-to-day work of pushing these contracts. It’s likely not your Department of Correction or your Sheriff’s Department. There’s another agency that’s managing the land and managing the water issues, et cetera, all points of where you can push. But they very clearly didn’t follow the law. And so, in order to not get a ruling from the attorney general’s office that they were out of compliance, they actually withdrew the bid.

And that bought us months and months and months more time. Then we challenged them again, because they knew that we were now looking, they knew we were mobilizing, they knew we were making noise, and they tried to bury this project inside of another contract called a House Doctor contract, which is basically an architect on retainer. I don’t need to go on all those details, but they tried a shady way to hide it from public scrutiny within an existing contract, so there wasn’t a public bid process. That actually got leaked by a staff person of DCAMP.

And so, we filed yet another administrative challenge, and there’s no arguing that they were clearly wrong about this as well. And so again, we were prepared for a hearing at the attorney general’s office. We had submitted pages and pages of documents. The 11th hour or the night before the hearing, they yet again withdrew the proposal, which again bought us months and months more time, and they had to refile it a third time. And so every time, that meant that we got to show up to more hearings, we got to talk to more leaders, we got to build more power, and we got to delay the process so that we could keep organizing. And Sashi, do you want to add anything?

Sashi James:

No, I know we are at time, but the most beautiful process is that we also got to learn more and more. That’s why we can give all our knowledge to the people in the movement, so that way everybody else doesn’t have to go through this draining process.

Crystal Kowalski:

That was amazing. I was so involved with what Mallory and Sashi was saying that I forgot the question. So right-to-know requests and how they impacted the fight, was that it? Okay.

Mallory Hanora:

Yeah, [inaudible 00:34:58] right-to-know requests.

Crystal Kowalski:

Yeah, I went along first, so I did touch on this. We do a daily right-to-know request for the jail logs. I think basically it just shows that we know what’s going on. So recently, a little example would be, well, a couple examples. During the pandemic, our county was putting people in jail, weekenders in jail during the pandemic. So when you saw that and you’re thinking, what’s this stop the spread? You’re taking people in and out. And we’re seeing people going in for non-support now, which we had not for years, and that’s happening, low level offenses. And Sashi mentioned, it’s exhausting. It’s exhausting work to have to just every single day put this in. But you know if you don’t do it, and they don’t feel you watching, that it’s going to go back to the way it was.

Naila Awan:

Right. And Wendy, I think maybe you have something you can briefly add about how we saw one other partner organization in Michigan used public records request.

Wendy Sawyer:

Yeah, that’s right. Some folks from Utica County in Michigan reached out to us for the umpteenth time. The county was trying to push this new jail, and they reached out just for some outside perspective. But it was very similar to, Crystal, the way you described your coalition. It was just folks who were very new to the issue and were just going to meetings and trying to figure it out. But they had an attorney amongst their numbers who realized that they could do a public records request, because they had this argument they were using to try and justify or rationalize having a bigger jail, which was, “Oh, we’ve got 1,100 outstanding warrants”, as if all these people are roaming the streets and are so dangerous. So they actually did a public records request to see what those outstanding warrants were for.

And a ton of them were just bench warrants that were a million years old that were for, oh, someone missed a court appearance, so there’s a bench warrant out, but very, very little of it was anything that would actually be jailable, especially because this jail was being proposed after the state had just passed all of these pretrial reform. So a lot of these offenses that folks were getting arrested for, were not jailable offenses anymore. So we were able to break down that list of outstanding warrants and go, okay, well only this many actually look like they’d even be jailable, so this is no way to rationalize a bigger jail. And I think that was pretty persuasive for folks, because that was a key part of their communication strategy in that county.

Naila Awan:

Yeah, and I think what all of this underscores, is just the importance of understanding the rules and the laws and your county and your state, and knowing what different levers there are to pull, because folks have sometimes been able to stop construction by forcing something onto the ballot. One other person we talked to actually got communication between the county and the jail assessment authors where they basically were like, “Oh, the sheriff wants us to actually propose a larger jail, so we should include that in the assessment.” And that was used to publicize it and defeat the jail.

So I mean, really understanding what these different mechanisms are, I think are important, because you never know which ones are going to be the strategies that can help you win in your county. Now again, a slight shift in topic, Mallory and Sashi, when you all were talking earlier, you were talking about what the alternatives might look like to incarceration. And I know you’ve worked to redirect the conversation in that way, away from incarceration and one that’s directed towards alternatives. Can you talk a little bit more about the alternatives to incarceration people should be thinking about and advancing and how shifting the conversation in that way fits in with your strategy?

Sashi James:

Well, I like to think of it, and this is just from a visionary perspective and a person that is on the ground and directly impacted, I like to think of it not as an alternative, but as preventatives. And so, what can we be exploring that does not include incarceration? So for an example, we’re actually working on the ground, and I’m not going to say that it’s only us, because we have a beautiful infrastructure that is called, Reimagining Communities, that was created through a listening tour from across the country. So it’s not only the National Council’s work, it’s not Families for Justice as Healing’s work, it’s the people’s work, because we really got on the ground and listened to what the people said that they wanted, and then we created an infrastructure that really addressed the root issues of what even had people land on a prison bunk.

And so for an example, there are crisis response teams where we know that in Massachusetts we’re working to create, every four blocks, we’re going to have a crisis response crew, that if there’s any mental health breakdown, mental health issues or anything in beyond that are just day-to-day issues that need to be addressed, the crisis response team will be able to provide that resource to the people. But in addition to that, they’re not going to be people that come from other communities, they’re going to be people that are from that community. And we know that if we have people that are from the community responding to people that are in the community, you’ll get a better outcome immediately. You have a better chance of deescalating situations, you have a better chance of just preventing situations. You have just a better conversation with people that you know and you can trust.

And then even beyond, we have the basic income, we have basic housing. We mentioned earlier that the number one reason in Massachusetts that even ends up to have women have any interaction with incarceration, is because they don’t have access to affordable housing. We have a basic housing program where we are providing housing for women that have children that just need a place to stay, and they can feel safe, though they don’t feel like they have to take from Peter to pay… What is it? Pay Paul, or whatever. You can actually pay your rent, feed your children, and survive. Speaking of surviving, the community that I live in, we have been in survival mode forever. And this is what is leading us directly to incarceration, because of the pain, the suffering, the oppression, the unheard visions that people don’t want to believe in.

And so, while we’re creating all of those things, we’re really allowing women to just live in the community. And I mean, how beautiful is that to actually see women that have been directly impacted, oppressed, struggling to take care of their kids, fighting to keep their kids, rebuilding their relationship with their kids, because they were incarcerated on a prison bunk and were separated from their children, and now they’re reestablishing their children. But now they don’t have to worry about all the things that would have landed them into prison, because all they need to worry about, is focusing on healing. And so, we’re giving communities the tools that they need. We have three hydroponic farms. One is in Pittsburgh, one is in Roxbury, which got landed a couple of weeks ago, which we’ll be able to teach people how to grow vegetables. And then we’ll be also giving the vegetables away for free, that’s responding to food justice.

I mean, we have so many infrastructures, and it’s not only us, its other states across the country that are also doing these things, so that way they can stop the transgressions in communities from communities causing harm, just because they need specific things and they don’t have the things that they need. So communities are actually working, community members are working to provide the tools that people need. And I was on a call the other day, and we were just talking about what communities need and the different infrastructures or whatever, what people need. One of the things that came out was welfare versus basic income. I just really wanted to emphasize and show that, yes, they have systems that provide welfare and food stamps and Section 8 and all of these things, but we have to also understand that a lot of the city implemented structures only cause further harm, and literally keep people oppressed.

And I know, one of our basic income recipients had said to me, when she got a student loan because she’s in college, when she got a student loan, the housing authority threatened to take away her housing because she got a student loan. So now we’re telling people who are on housing, who are trying to get more education, that they can’t get education. So you just have to understand the barriers and the difference between what basic income looks like. We’re seeing is, sometimes people need a extra push. Sometimes people need to just be given $500 a month just because they need to pay their phone bill, they need to buy extra food. I always love when I’m like, “Oh, I got a stipend.” Sometimes I get paid to do a call and I’m like, “I got a stipend”, which is very rare, but I’m very appreciative of it as a single mother, and the struggle. And so many other people are appreciative of that.

And that is very different from you asking a person for their social security number, you having all of the restrictions on the way people should and should not spend their money, or you just having restrictions on how much education they should get. And so, we’re really just trying to figure out and we are figuring out what we can do to support the people, build the people, empower the people, and just be all about the people, and not create systems that cause further harm. And that means that we have to dismantle the current system that we have and build a system that is for all people and not a specific class of people. Is this a perfect time for me to just jump right in with my FreeHer Institute, because I’m really proud of that. And speaking of creating what different looks like, the National Council, Families for Justices as Healing, the women in the community, we are really working to create a space where women can work on policy research.

They can go to a space where we can cook breakfast together, we can train each other, we can just exist. I always use this as an example, but I want to say this. In Massachusetts, I learned that there is a retreat area for police officers. It’s called Police Academy or something like that, maybe I’m mixing the name up with Chicago, but the Police Academy that they had built in Chicago, HDR also built that. But anyway, they have a center where if they witness maybe an aggressive situation or they go through a traumatic experience or mental health, they can go to a home and they can be around animals and milk cows and get males cook for them, and just woo off for three or four days.

It’s covered by their insurance. You can go whenever you want. It’s a small grant that just covers them. They cook, they get separated from their family, they just take a deep breath. Communities witness all of this and above, we actually live in it all day long, community members. And we still have to go inside the house, especially women, mothers still go inside the house and cook meals for our family, still provide, most of our households are single family households. Now we’ve been at a 700% increase of incarcerated women. Sometimes our grandmothers are taking care of the family, because our mothers are now incarcerated as well. But the point is that our people need the same resources and beyond, so that way we can heal. As I mentioned earlier, healthy, thriving people create healthy, thriving communities. And so, we have an inherited land on Martha’s Vineyard on Oak Bluffs, which is a historical landmark for Black people.

And we’re working to build a retreat center that is $1.5 million, because we did the land survey and everything to build the most beautiful street retreat center that will support the people. And so, we are selling FreeHer T-shirts. They’re called the FreeHer Institute T-shirts. This is really going to be a groundbreaking retreat center, because it’s going to allow women to come and learn research, think and do all of the work that Mallory and I talked about around the Prison and Jail Moratorium Bill. I mean, that was work that we just were head banging on walls to just try to get, but being that, we literally created an infrastructure, we can now go to the retreat center and show women the blueprint of what we have, so that way women are not spending wills in their community and doing the same thing that we had to do and beyond.

What does Reimagining Communities look like? What does it look like to create basic income? What does it look like to create a housing program? What does it look like to bring a hydroponic farm to your neighborhood? Just all of these beautiful processes. And then also, what does it look like to just sit there and relax, or maybe go read a book on the beach, or maybe go see some greenery. I told you already, I’m not into the greenery, but some people may be into the greenery. I know Andrea is, but that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to build a center that is for the women, and we need people to buy T-shirts to support all the processes.

All the fees from the T-shirts go directly to building this retreat center, and it’s for the people, and I’m really excited. This is what we need when we say, we need to create and build what different looks like. And of course, like I said, there’s no power stronger than the power of the people, because this is one of the most beautifulest centers that will probably be built in my lifetime for me. That’s because of the power in the people, not because of the government or anybody else. It’s because we are believing in the power of the people, which has directly impacted women and girls or the most vulnerable population.

Naila Awan:

Thank you so much, Sashi. We’re going to just jump into sharing some of the different resources PPI has that folks might find helpful in some of these fights. We’re then going to be going into the question and answer, and we’ll be giving each of the panelists a few minutes to make a brief closing remark. So just to shift over to that very quickly, let’s see. Before turning to the question and answer segment, like I said, we want to quickly share a few resources PPI has been made available for folks fighting jail expansion.

The first two slides I’m going to go over just provide information on materials, ranging from reports to briefing to training documents that Progressive Policy Initiative has created that you might find helpful when a jail proposal is being advanced. Does our county really need a bigger jail? Outlines mechanisms for decarceration, the county should take into account before a new jail is even proposed or any progress is made, like a proposal. Smoke and mirrors provides an in-depth look as a jail assessment report completed by a private group asserting that a Michigan County needed a new jail. Arguments against jail expansion provides findings about jail overcrowding, counter-arguments against jail expansion, endpoints of intervention in jail fights. And our how-to guide for critically reviewing jail assessments provides questions that should be asked and considerations that should be taken into account when examining a jail assessment.

I’m going to quickly outline some of what’s provided in this final guide, given the jail assessment analysis are really one of the things we receive the most questions from groups that are fighting jail expansion about. To start jail assessments, which may be referred to by several names, are analysis often conducted by private companies who have been hired by a county to analyze the operations of the current jail, and make recommendations for building a new jail or expanding an existing one. These assessments are done before any final decisions are made and often are filled with faulty assumptions, misleading data, and are rife with other problems. So we put this guide together to help folks spot some common problems that exist in jail assessments. Problematic assumptions are often made. It’s often important to consider what those assumptions are. For example, most assessments assume no change in the status quo.

That means that if reforms are moving, there’s no analysis of what the impact of those reforms might be. And even when reforms have passed that will directly reduce the number of people being incarcerated, the assessments may entirely ignore the impact in realities of those already enacted reforms. Oftentimes, only individuals whose opinions are taken into account in assessments, are those who work within the current criminal legal system, like the police, the sheriffs, jail administrators and district attorneys. The voices of community members, people directly impacted by the criminal legal system, mental health and substance use disorder providers, are not even part of the process in most instances.

The numbers, the data, the graphs and the trend lines themselves can be highly misleading. For example, if the image on the top had started with any year after 2012, it would’ve shown a decline, rather than an increase in the number of cases pending, or the trend line on the image furthest to the right of the screen shows an upward trend, despite the final year, 2017s numbers being below those of 2008, and there have been a significant downward shift in the final few years on that graph. Also, keep in mind that the data provided in the assessments themselves can be used to identify reforms that, if implemented, could immediately reduce the jail population. For example, what would the jail population numbers look like if the county were to end reincarceration for technical or noncriminal violations of probation or parole, or enact bail reform and reduce its pretrial population?

These assessments are also often advocating for jails that place what should be community provided services available to people with substance use disorders, mental illness, and sometimes even chronic or terminal conditions into the jail. Questions helpful to ask as well as common themes or problems to look for, are provided throughout our training guide. We’re now going to move to the question and answer portions of the webinar. And as we do that, I’m putting up a slide with all of our panelists, as well as Wendy and my contact information. That information’s also going to be being shared in the chat. So don’t worry if you don’t get this down right now, it will be in the chat of the webinar. And Emily, would you mind getting us started with the questions?

Emily Widra:

Sure. I think the first question we can start with, I’m just going to go a little bit out of order how they were coming in, but one question we got is, what is the best way for larger organizations to help support more localized movements like you folks have been taking part in, in pushing back against jail expansion? I think that’s for everybody or whoever chooses to answer. It’s not specific.

Sashi James:

I think one of the most important things that we follow our own, just from the National Council’s perspective, is that we never go into communities without getting to know the community, the organizations that are on the ground that are doing the work. And so, we have ecosystem check-ins, and we are like, “Hey, how can we be supportive of you?” Versus a lot of organizations would just jump in and say, “This is what you need to do.” But what is important as a national organization, is to whatever state you’re trying to work with, go in there and figure out what is the problem, pay homage to the land, and also get to know the people that are on the ground that are doing the work. And they will be able to tell you, you got to listen to the land. They’ll tell you what needs to be done and how you can plug in and what support you can give as a national organization. That’s my perspective.

Naila Awan:

And I guess, I’ll just briefly answer as a rep from another national organization. And I think it’s really about capacity building. The folks that are on the ground, like Sashi was saying, they know what needs to happen. They know what reforms will be most impactful in their community. They know what other alternatives should be being designed, what preventive measures should be being put in place. What we’ve found is that we tend to get asked for things unsurprisingly, like data that groups might find helpful, like reviewing jail assessments. And we really do just try to help groups in whatever ways are additive to their campaigns without imposing any ideas on how things should be moving forward.

Emily Widra:

Great. Thank you. Oh, sorry, go ahead, Crystal.

Crystal Kowalski:

No, I would just say that you do in fact do that, and that’s been our experience as a local group, is that the groups that have helped us Prison Policy Initiative in the ACLU, have really been respectful of our knowledge and have supported us.

Emily Widra:

Okay, great. So another question that’s come in is about, if anybody has been able to partner with local public defender offices on these efforts, because they often have access to data to support these movements or other information, like insider information, have any of you utilized that or do we know of anybody who has?

Mallory Hanora:

I’ll speak to this in a more broad way. I think, individual defense work of our people, either to stop our people from going in or to bring our people home, is incredibly important. So we are a participatory defense hub here in Boston. So Participatory Defense is the movement strategy developed by Silicon Valley De-Bug in California, and then the National Council also helped to increase the reach of this and increase the number of hubs across the country with our Director of Participatory Defense, Justine Moore, training. So many of us across the country to use this strategy, and it’s just building on what people and families have done forever, which is fight for our people, instead of just stopping outside the courtroom. I can picture Raj in my head doing this part of the training. We have the free so-and-so signs outside, and we would just stand there and look in the court.

But really, it’s about going into the court and shifting the power dynamic, so many of you might already be practicing this. There might be a local hub that you work with, so public defenders can be brought into that process, with a people-led strategy, a community-led strategy to fight for our people, to represent our people as whole and needed and valued to offer our own crafted alternative sentencing, or diversion from conviction in the first place. And really bringing public defenders in to be part of process, as opposed to just another person in the system that’s there for business as usual, asking you to accept a plea deal that you don’t want, or facilitating incarceration as the norm.

One thing that we’re thinking about is, what does it look like to have individualized case review for those folks that have smaller jail or prison populations? Every single person getting an exit strategy, every single person getting a plan A, a plan B, a plan C about how they could come home. And that could look like engaging with law students to help with that review, that could look like engaging with folks that are in other type of law practices to come in and support in other ways. Or that could be really pushing your local defender’s office to join you in the resistance to the project, and to show how many people are in on certain types of charges or how they could come home anyway. Defense work is an incredibly important part of both stopping people from going in, and bringing people home, so definitely a strategy that we’re using.

Emily Widra:

Great. Thank you, everybody. All right, another question that’s come in is, do we have any advice for how to work against the alternatives to jail that include things like other types of carceral techniques, like home incarceration, surveillance, other things that aren’t technically jail, but might sound good to folks who aren’t totally involved, but these are still punishment and still take up resources.

Sashi James:

I think that participatory defense is a really good tool to help fight against those, especially if you’re talking about case-by-case situations. But also, I think that it’s also important that we start, why shifting the public opinion and changing the conversation is important, because a lot of people are advocating for ankle shackles. A lot of people are advocating for air incarceration. And then after we spend 10 years saying, oh, everybody needs an ankle shackle, and then when everybody gets an ankle shackle, they realize that it’s another form of incarceration, and they’re upset about the ankle shackle. And so this is why we need to listen to directly impacted people and the people that are leading the ground. And this is what we say, this is what we are talking about when we say dismantling the system and not just putting a bandaid on there or turning it to the left or turning it to the right, because it’s only causing further harm we know we’re in.

I mean, on my corner right now, they just installed another camera that I’m like, they’re just going to watch us go to the corner store. Meanwhile, there’s the police cruiser on the corner as well. These are all forms of that system of open air prisons and it only causes more harm. So that’s why we have to watch the bills that we pass. This is why we have to watch the organizations that we support, especially the national organizations that are not really connected to the ground, but think they’re connected to the ground but want to speak to the ground. And so, it’s important and that’s all.

Mallory Hanora:

Yeah, that’s such an excellent answer and a massively important question. And I just want to affirm what Sasha said, it’s just like all of us holding the line that those are not alternatives. So when we say, we do try to answer proactively the question, what else besides a jail or prison? And we are very clear that those are not alternatives that we’re trying to build systemically. In the immediate, do we recognize that on individual freedom campaigns, that people are going to take certain arrangements on an individual level for their own freedom toward the goal of liberation? Yes. But systemically, are we ever advocating for the expansion of incarceration either in the open air or in the jail or prison? Absolutely not. And we talk about why that’s not. So some of it is offering, what’s working on the ground in your community?

What we always say is, that doesn’t have to be a program that specifically says we are an alternative to incarceration. Free housing is an alternative to incarceration. It is not a jail or a prison. Giving money directly to women, is an alternative. It is giving people what they need to live so that they’re not entrapped in the system, so we broaden the idea of what’s possible. And then I think the other thing that’s even more insidious and something that we’ve had to really push around allies, is also just shifting the responsibility of incarcerating people to a different agency, for example, the Department of Mental Health. We know that women have unmet mental health needs who are incarcerated, and just shifting the owner of the building who locks the doors at night, to being DMH rather than DOC, the Department of Mental Health. First of all, our members are like, “Absolutely, we do not trust DMH.”

They’re very clear about their relationships with the Department of Mental Health, so we don’t have any question about that. But for people outside that are like, but what about this? But what about this? That’s also part of it, is that we’re not just changing owners of the building. We’re really, really exploring what else is possible and what does different look like in pathways out of the system. It’s a really big challenge, but we’re in it together, and we’re developing what those things look like, so we have offerings to show that other things are possible. And also just frankly, it’s made up. I know I’m going on, but there’s so many loved ones of us, close members of ours that come to our women’s circle every Thursday that their parole officers insist on shackling them. They are in their 60s. It is just outrageous.

Literally, one of our members who we brought home, who the state said she was supposed to die in prison, miss Angie Jefferson, and her family and community led her fight for liberation. She is home after 31 years to be a mom and a grandmother. She has arthritis and significant… I’m not going to share her health business, but her ankle shackle is hurting her. Physically, it’s hurting her. And so, it’s made up that people have to be on their shackle when they come home on parole. That is something that does not have to exist. We should fight about it. We should get people’s lawyers engaged in fighting these restrictive conditions of release.

We should show up and say, as a community, we don’t accept this and we want our people home, and this is how we want our people to live, and just continue to fight those battles too, because it’s shameful. It’s shameful, like Sasha is saying, at this point it’s become so normalized that even people who have perfect records of compliance with every other condition, are still forced to be shackled, and just people go along with it because they don’t have the support or resources to challenge it, so we should absolutely be doing that as well.

Emily Widra:

All right. I think we have time for probably one more of the questions that have come in, but definitely feel free to reach out to the panelists, to everybody here, where everybody’s willing to tackle any other questions that don’t get answered live in the webinar. I think for the last question, we’ll go with this one, which is about, what to do if the decision has already been made to expand a jail or to begin construction on a new jail. Is there anything left to do? What can people do? Where should they be looking for next steps? It sounds like there’s a specific situation in California where there’s not a lot of opposition to the jail, and so the folks here are obviously in opposition and trying to figure it out. I don’t know whoever wants to answer that one, please go ahead.

Sashi James:

I wanted just say one thing, because we know that the system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. And so, they might still build a new woman’s jail. And it’s just, when we talked about the Prison and Jail Moratorium Bill, one thing that we didn’t mention, Mallory, is that through all of our hard work and public awareness, we actually got the Moratorium Bill passed, and the governor vetoed the bill. So the people spoke, but the governor just was like, “I don’t really care what people said, it’s what I want.” So that shows that the system is going to do what they want to do regardless.

And one of the beautiful things that our founder, Andrea James said, also my mom, she said that if Reimagining Communities is so important and giving people the tools that they need, so that way we can create healthy, thriving people, so they can create healthy, thriving communities, is so important because, yes, if they go build all these new prisons and jails, then imagine a world where like in the Planet of the Apes, we have given our people all the tools of success that they have needed that they won’t even have any interactions with the police in jails and prisons, because they have what they need to be successful.

And so, the prisons and jails will be just, she had a vision of these green trees just growing over it and just being all rotten, because nobody’s in there, because we’ve given the people what they needed. So this is why we are on the ground, creating the tools and giving people the tools and the infrastructure that people need so we don’t even have any interactions with jails and prisons. So I’m really sorry in California, that y’all at a space where it feels like y’all have nowhere to turn, but the best place to turn is to the people, and figure out what can we give to the people so that way they’re not even going into the prison and jail.

And then we start to talk about clemency, so that way we can bring our long timers home. I want to uplift Miss Angie, because Miss Angie was incarcerated to die in prison, but she’s home right now, and she was just on participatory defense with us last week, and she’s probably going to be on with us this weekend. We have beautiful conversations. So don’t ever think that if your family member or loved one is sentenced to die in prison, that there is no avenue for them to come home, because there is always a space for them to come home. You just have to fight and you have to just keep chucking along and have faith, and that’s it. And just remember, the system is going to do what it is designed to do. And that’s why, until we dismantle it, we have to create our own system.

Mallory Hanora:

Yeah, absolutely. I would say, just keep on building the resistance, like the beautiful organizers on this call that are resisting, like Sasha said, turn to the community, door knock, canvas, let people know about it, because so often our people would be against it, but we’re busy working, we’re busy parenting, we’re drowning in our own stuff, and the states and the cities try to hide this from our people.

So educating to prevent any further, or engaging people in ongoing resistance, like what could creatively be done at or near the site to raise an awareness that there are community members that don’t want this, there are people that are loved and cared about that they’re planning to move into this building, and that they should be moved home and come home instead. So yeah, keep going. Keep going, for sure.

Sashi James:

Yeah, and one thing that I was taught is that we don’t fail, but if they do build a prison jail in that state, and we keep going and shifting public awareness and having people move towards what different is, we have to remember that the organizing we’re doing is impacting generations, seven generations forward and seven generations behind us. So yes, this year they built a new jail, but if we keep going and keep fighting, next year they won’t build no new jail, and the year after that and the year after that or the generation after that, that might be the last jail that they might ever build in the history of jail building. So we have to have faith.

Crystal Kowalski:

I love that, having faith. The other thing that here in Berks County, people are like, “Well, why do you think the commissioners changed their mind a bit?” And I was thinking about it, and I’m thinking, I think it might be inflation and the recession. So if you’re in a community, the question asker, and they haven’t started building yet, and you probably already done this, but know how much every little bit of it costs, because in one of the meetings, they said, “Oh yeah, we’re going to not have work release anymore, and that’ll bring down a pod and that’ll be $8 million in building costs for one pod.” And then that pod has to be staffed 24/7, the amount of money. So if you can say, “Hey, in a time of record expense for construction, you’re going to build this?” I feel like that’s what impacted some of the decision in our county.

Naila Awan:

Thank you, everyone. And I’d also just refer folks back to the RFP technical challenges Mallory was mentioning too. Sometimes there still haven’t been decisions on the number of beds. There might be certain interventions that are-

Mallory Hanora:

I’m so sorry, I just put in the chat. I don’t know where my… Don’t forget about the architecture firms that probably have an office in your state, and the construction companies. And so, our union siblings could be a source of power, the union member to union member. How do we communicate about actually the people that are building the walls and pouring the concrete? Individuals are choosing to advance the project, and it’s always an opportunity to talk to people about what else is possible, build something else instead. We don’t want to take money out of our community member’s pockets, and we want to create a vision of what we could be building instead. And so, lots of opportunities to talk to all types of decision makers, even decision makers that are showing up to their job site for the day.

Naila Awan:

Absolutely. And I realize we’re hitting the time we told folks we’d be wrapping up at, so I just want to give each of the panelists, maybe if you could keep it to one, one and a half minutes, just share some advice for folks who are getting started or actively involved in fights to stop jail expansion, or any challenges you faced that were anticipated that folks might find useful.

Crystal Kowalski:

I could go first. This is basically what we did. Attend every meeting, take notes, collect data, question their assumptions, broaden your community connections, get press coverage, attend the budget proposal presentations, make the fiscal arguments, know who is in your jail and make it public. Make sure everybody knows who’s in your jail, and presume that you have a place at the decision-making table.

Mallory Hanora:

I’ll go and then pass it to Sashi. I just saw a couple questions about conditions of confinement really being heavy on our hearts. We know people by name. We love people in these jails and prisons. They’re our siblings, they’re our friends, they’re our cousins, they’re our children. And at the end of the day, there is no such thing as a safe prison for women or for people. All of our people who survive, tell us that. And then also, the politicians conveniently wants to improve these conditions only when it’s good or right for them or there’s a benefit for them. For years, people languish and try to raise issues and they fall on deaf ears. And it’s only when it’s profitable or beneficial to the people in power that, that ever gets addressed.

So I would say, as coming from a state with the oldest women’s prison in the United States, that DOC is going to DOC, and any building we put women in with them. So we’re fighting for our women’s freedom and we’re fighting for what else is possible and that we’re really holding a line around that, to bring our people home and showing that we can do it with individual cases and continuing to do it. And then, supporting each other across the country by echoing what we’re saying. So FreeHer, and good luck to y’all, and hopefully we can come right, and I’ll pass it to you, Sashi.

Sashi James:

No, I really feel like I’m really happy to have this platform, and then also have the solidarity, and I hope that this conversation that we had today reaches people to, one, think about the alternatives that we can think about, or not the alternatives, like I said, the preventative methods that we can take to not have anybody incarcerated. And then also, to begin to listen to the blueprint that formally incarcerated women are giving you. So that is grounded in abolition, that is grounded in the people, and that is really creating what different looks like, so that way we can finally get out into the world that this is not an imaginary world, this is really happening on the ground. People are really creating a crisis response team. People are really creating housing programs. All these things are really happening, and I would love to connect with more people.

So if you reach out to the National Council, Families for Justice as Healing, like I said, I know that there are people in the community that are doing the same type of work, but maybe in a different shape and form that works best for their city or state or wherever their community. And we would love to figure out what does that look like, because we’re all student teachers and we all have a lot to learn, and then we all have a lot to teach. And so, I’m excited and cheers to a future with no jails, prisons or police, and cheers to a future that is grounded in the healing and wellbeing and support of all people.

Wendy Sawyer:

I just want to quickly make a pitch. I mean, there’s no way to follow all that, but to just question any information that’s put forward by the architects or the construction, whoever’s doing these assessments, I have yet to see an assessment where we didn’t find some hole in it that we could push back on. So yeah, don’t assume that those are written by people more expert than you. And feel free to reach out to other folks, folks here at PPI, or folks wherever people, and have them help you read that with a critical eye, and try and find some opportunities to push back, because that’s very persuasive for folks when they start to see, oh, the experts messed something up, or they’re trying to put one over on us, or something. So I think that’s a pretty successful strategy that I’ve seen folks use. Obviously, it’s only one of very many, but it’s something that we here at PPI can also help with. That’s my pitch.

Naila Awan:

Amazing. Thank you everyone, and thank you everyone who attended, for your time. I know we didn’t get to all the questions. We had a lot come in. Again, if you have a question that wasn’t answered, don’t hesitate to reach out to any of today’s panelists. Everyone’s information was shared in the chat. We hope that this webinar is helpful and will be helpful to your future efforts. Materials shared by our presenters are at the link in the chat and will be shared with you along with the video of this presentation when it is online.

You’ll see a survey when you close your web browser as you exit, and you’ll receive it by email tomorrow as well. Please respond if you’d like to provide feedback, or let us know about other topics you’d like to hear about in the future. If you’d like to receive more information from Prison Policy Initiative about future programming or our work, please sign up for our newsletter through our website, and follow us on social media at Prison Policy on both Twitter and Instagram. Thank you again everyone for joining today. Have a good rest of your day.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

The start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 exacerbated the existing crisis of incarceration in the US, which has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. During this time, a group of women with loved ones incarcerated in Nevada’s prison system founded the organization Return Strong to fight for decarceration and the successful re-entry of formerly incarcerated people into society. Return Strong Executive Director Jodi Hocking and Community Organizer Ashley Gaddis join Rattling the Bars to discuss the fight against mass incarceration in Nevada.

Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

The following is a preliminary transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa: Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m Mansa Musa co-host with Eddie Conway. As I always do, first, I want to say Happy New Year to all the Rattling the Bars listeners and viewers and The Real News watchers and listeners. I want to update you all on Eddie Conway. I had the opportunity to visit his wife Dominique and Eddie Conway is doing great.

At some point in time, we hope to have Eddie Conway make a cameo appearance on this program that he created and the network that he loved. Today we have an extraordinary group of people, but more importantly, we have an extraordinary example of what George Jackson described in his essay towards the United Fronts.

He said that the sheer number of people that are incarcerated, when you compare that with the people that are incarcerated and their family members, the only logical conclusion you can draw is that we have a massive amount of people that, if organized, could really have impact on the way the system is structured and the way the system treat people.

Here today to talk about just that are two extraordinary women. One is Jodi Hocking and Ashley Gaddis. Welcome to Rattling the Bars.

Jodi Hocking: Thank you.

Mansa Musa: First, let’s start with you Ashley. Tell the Rattling the Bars a little bit about yourself.

Ashley Gaddis: Well, my name is Ashley and I’m from Las Vegas and I’m formally incarcerated. I have been in and through both systems, the federal and state system. I’ve been directly impacted by the conditions of prison and the justice system as a whole. I am part of Return Strong now as staff to try to make a difference within the system and policy and hope for better conditions.

Mansa Musa: Okay. Jodi, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell the Rattling the Bars viewers and listeners a little bit about yourself.

Jodi Hocking: Yeah. Hello. Thank you for having us. My name is Jodi Hocking. I have been a Labor Organizer for a very long time and am impacted, my husband’s incarcerated. I founded, and now I’m the Executive Director of Return Strong, which is an organization that is really two-sided.

On one side, we really center the voices of formerly incarcerated and currently incarcerated people, and then on the other hand, we work with families of the incarcerated to actually be the hands and feet of this movement.

Mansa Musa: Okay. You all primarily located on in Nevada, right?

Jodi Hocking: We are primarily located… Well, let me say this. We are focused on work in Nevada because what we have in common is either loved ones who are incarcerated in Nevada, but our activists really are all over the world because our loved ones are incarcerated in Nevada, but we don’t all necessarily live there.

Mansa Musa: Okay. That’s good. All right. Let’s start by examining, because we’re talking about Return Strong, which is a grassroots organization that was created by the family members of men and women that are incarcerated. As you outlined just a minute ago, as the men and women return, they become a part of Return Strong.

But let’s talk about… Before we go into talking about the organization, and I’m going to direct this to you, Ashley, because you experienced a lot of the horrendous conditions that take place in the prisons.

You can weigh in on as well, Jodi. But let’s talk about the prison industrial complex in Nevada. Ashley, you served federal prison and you served state prison as well. Talk about the prison industrial complex in Nevada as you understand it.

Ashley Gaddis: Okay. From my experience, I started my time in a private prison here in Nevada when it was CCA. I’ve been involved in this system from privately ran institution to a state ran institution. Basically, I’ve seen it go from reform to human warehousing, meaning conditions just worsen.

The problem or the major issues that are happening are, there’s a lot of abuse, physical, mentally, and verbal abuse within the institution. A lot of the staff that work there have worked at a man’s prison so they come there treating the women like men.

Mansa Musa: Right.

Ashley Gaddis: Any complaints that happen, for the most part get ignored, get shift around, not heard.

Mansa Musa: Okay.

Ashley Gaddis: Unfortunately, it’s a system that really doesn’t take women prisoners serious from our mental needs, our medical needs, our physical needs and we’re just categorized as one.

Mansa Musa: Let me ask you this here, because I know from doing previous reports on dealing with women prison. How many women prisons, to your knowledge, are in Las Vegas or are in Nevada?

Ashley Gaddis: There’s approximately 800 to a thousand between the main prison, which is Smiley Road, Florence McClure, and our camp in Jean, Nevada.

Mansa Musa: So 800 to a thousand women?

Ashley Gaddis: Yes.

Mansa Musa: But how many prisons do they have? Because for example, in the state of Maryland, they have one woman’s prison for the state of Maryland, and that one woman’s prison is consist of security-wise, maximum, minimum and because they don’t have no pre-release system, they don’t have the right to progress through the system.

I’m trying to think and see if this is the consistent concept when it comes to women prison throughout the United States. So how many women prisons do they have?

Ashley Gaddis: Yes, you’re correct. We have one prison that holds medium maximum and we have one camp.

Mansa Musa: Okay. So this goes… Go ahead.

Ashley Gaddis: No, and this goes from… Our Florence McClure prison holds the approximately 800 to 850 women now. That’s just recently because of Covid, but they’ve been over-populated over a thousand, which is not supposed to happen and housing women in the gym or in other units on bunk beds because of the overcrowding.

Mansa Musa: So this is consistent. When we’re talking about the prison industrial complex and mass incarceration, which is the new form of slavery, the narrative is consistent throughout the nation that, as if prison in and of itself is not [inaudible 00:08:24] and horrendous, now women are discriminated against in society.

Misogynistic society, racist society, a sexist society, but then they find themselves incarcerated and discriminated against again in the form of not being given no equity. Jodi, talk about how did Return Strong come into existence.

Jodi Hocking: We started like many places did in reaction to some circumstances that were going on in 2020. One, was my own personal response to the murder of George Floyd and feeling as a middle-aged white woman, what do I do to start to… ?

If you remember really the racial divide that was going on in the country at that time and I had done a lot of anti-racism work. I started with a book club and I worked with teachers across the country. And then I decided my husband was incarcerated and had just gone back on a violation.

I started to really think about how families of the incarcerated, a lot of times over accentuate personal responsibility and somebody’s personal piece of a crime or conviction, and that they miss some of the systemic issues that happen in addition to that.

I decided to start. Really, it was supposed to be just a family Peer Learning Circle, was where it started. My background is in organizing though. I’m a Labor Organizer and believe so deeply in the power of collective action and that we’re always stronger together.

We started, on August 6th, 2020, we had our first family meeting. There were about 10 women there, and three weeks later, Nevada Department of Corrections in response to Marcy’s Law, implemented an 80 to a hundred percent deduction of any money that went on people’s books, any money they were making from prison industries.

I felt like we had to make a choice. We were either going to fight for everyone or we were going to try to figure out how to pay for ourselves, our loved ones’ restitution. We took on that fight and we really weren’t even in existence yet.

We had had one family meeting and people who knew us back then, I kept telling people, I don’t know what we’re doing, but we have to do something. Which is my standard answer to everything is, I don’t always know the answers.

I just know the only thing we can’t do is stand still and watch this stuff go down. We started fighting that. We actually were able to get a stay within the first month of it happening.

We got to stay from the governor for about five months and eventually stole a bill out from under NDOC, flipped it and put statutory caps on restitution and deductions, which was amazing. They had to repay people any money that they had taken without [inaudible 00:11:38]. It was a huge win. I would’ve loved to get it to go to no restitution.

Mansa Musa: Zero. Right.

Jodi Hocking: Sometimes you have to fight for the best case scenario and then we don’t have control over all of it. But it made a huge difference for people who were in prison and owed any money to the prison system because they were literally, if you put a hundred dollars, I know my husband was getting $8 out of that a hundred and they were taking all the rest of it.

As soon as we got the stay on that, the Covid outbreak happened in Nevada and Warm Springs Correctional Center went from zero cases to about 400 cases within days. We had been tracking that information and so had been going to the media saying, NDOC, they’re lying about their numbers. That can’t be true. This isn’t true.

When the outbreak happened, it created a lot of questions for NDOC. Even though we don’t win every battle we’re in with them, we have gotten the attention of media really across the country and then other grassroots organizations. It’s created a situation where we have won multiple fights with them, where nobody has ever won before. It’s just created a huge difference.

Mansa Musa: Ashley, as it stand right now, you’re formerly, you are in the halfway house?

Ashley Gaddis: Yes, I’m in a special… I’m in a specialty program that gave an early release and this program is through the courts.

Mansa Musa: All right. How did you become involved with Return Strong, or when did you become aware? Because Jodi, you all have been in existence since 2020 what? Two?

Jodi Hocking: 2020. Our non-profit formed in 2022.

Mansa Musa: Okay. Ashley, how did you become involved with Return Strong?

Ashley Gaddis: Okay. There used to be another group called Nevada Cure that helped inmates. They fell off and then I started to get literature from Return Strong. As an inmate, we’re always leery on these organizations because are they just talking? What do they do? Are they going to help us? Do they care?

All those questions go [inaudible 00:14:16] until we see the existence of it and the actions behind the organization. Like Jodi said, the restitution issue came up that affected many people. We started getting literature from them and I’m like, okay, they want to know.

They sent these surveys through asking who has been affected how. And I’m like, wow, okay. They’re engaging, they want to know. I reached out to them. I didn’t necessarily have a restitution issue, but I knew many people that did. They don’t know how to reach out so I guided other people at first.

Here, this is who you need to talk to, this is who you need to contact. And then as I saw Return Strong making moves and really making noise and making a difference, I’m like, yeah, this is who I need to connect with. I stayed connected.

Because I do have my paralegal cert, so I know what kind of system that I’m dealing with. I’m dealing with the system that, anything we do is obsolete. But anything constitutional as far as violations of our rights, I will jump.

I got involved with that, be it through the grievance, be it through reaching out to Jodi because that’s what matters, not curling irons and stuff, but [inaudible 00:15:57].

Mansa Musa: Right.

Ashley Gaddis: Yeah, as more problems started progressing, Covid hit, like Jodi said, and we had another issue that was upfront. I organized and I communicated and I got people involved and stepping out of prison into a specialty court, I stayed connected and reached out to Jodi and here I am. I know Nevada’s policy is real trickery and it’s a lot of words [inaudible 00:16:41].

Mansa Musa: What do you mean by that?

Ashley Gaddis: The laws and the AR policies, the prison policies. They use a lot of meaningless language and there’s a lot of confusion with it. But because I’ve done a lot of time in this system, I got very familiar with the language and that’s what I help Return Strong with is interpreting some of that language where there’s a lot of confusion.

Mansa Musa: Jodi, because Ashley just talked about how from her own personal experience and being a victim of a lot of the abuses, how when they became aware of you all, the way they vetted you all in terms of making sure that you all was serious about the work that you all was doing, because I’m familiar with that as well.

Being formally incarcerated people oftentimes come in the system, but they’re not prepared to do the heavy lifting in terms of staying the course. They’ll give a lot of lip service to our issues and concerns.

Talk about why is it that you all have been so successful at mobilizing the prison population? Because according to you, you all got over 4,000 people that’s involved. Talk about how you all have been able to mobilize the prison population, to have the impact that it has had in terms of changing policies. We’ll talk about some of you all future objectives.

Jodi Hocking: Ash, feel free to contradict me if you don’t think this is accurate. I think what happened is in the beginning, we right away started writing to people because I was like, I wanted to hear from people who were being impacted by deductions, by what’s going on with Covid.

Are they feeding you? All of the different issues that were happening and I used to beg them. I would ask questions. Here’s some questions about Covid. What’s going on with bed transfers? Because we were hearing from… I’m a big Howardson fan.

Howardson always talks about, during any period, there’s always the government’s version of history and there’s the people’s version of history. I was listening to NDOC at every one of their meetings and I was like, they are lying. That’s not what people are telling us. They would come to meetings and give this false testimony.

I got my team together and we just started begging people practically to just communicate with us, tell us what’s going on with Covid. Tell us what’s going on with bed transfers, food, medical care, whatever it was. We wanted to know what was going on.

I used to tell them, and I still do the same thing when we send newsletters in is, I can’t promise we’re going to work on every issue right now. Tell us the story. We now use a database that catalogs every letter that we get.

If you wanted to know about how many people have written to us about solitary confinement conditions, I can run a report, we can pull those letters and I can answer that. When we first started it was a box of letters. Do you know what I mean? But we now get thousands of letters.

I think we’re probably close to 4,000 letters in 2022. We tell people, we set the expectation that we’re not going to be able to answer everyone. We’re working full-time jobs. This is not… Up until a few months ago we were unfunded. We were just open and honest.

I think I wrote to people more like I was writing to friends of mine than I was writing a professional letter, which is how, the way that I interact anyway. But it was a two-way street. They would share information with us and we would use that information to move forward an agenda that took what they were the most important thing that they were bringing.

Mansa Musa: Right.

Jodi Hocking: In addition, we had to balance that with areas that we thought we could win and what resources. But then I would explain to them, this is why we’re doing this instead of this or we’re trying to file a complaint with the DOJ, we’re trying to do…

It’s something where we worked together. So really what we did is organize and we really used a union structure to organize inside the prisons. As people would write to us, we had people that were jailhouse lawyers or unit organizers so I would have a contact and our goal is always to grow that.

If I need to get a message in, Ashley was a unit organizer and a jailhouse lawyer. Another role we have is key documentors. Those people who can take what the issues are and break them down into ways that when we read them, for people who haven’t been incarcerated that we’re like, that’s what they mean.

That’s what matters. Right? [inaudible 00:21:41] of issues and we use their letters to change hearts and minds. We’re the hands and feet of this work, but formerly incarcerated [inaudible 00:21:49].

Mansa Musa: Sound like in terms of organizing, you all have the perfect union. Jodi, what’s you all strategy going forward?

Jodi Hocking: I think going into 2023 and 24, we’re a biannual legislature. We only have legislature every other year. This year we have a double opportunity, which I always like to look at everything as opportunities. We have a new governor. He is 30 years in law enforcement, so there are some challenges that are going to be there.

But we also have a new Director of Prison. Right before Covid hit, we had a new director who was forced to resign, I believe in October of last year. There’s some hope there that they don’t want the bad press that the old administration had.

There’ve already been some moves. The new director is already meeting and we’re planning some meetings, but we have a plan that we are delivering a letter and asking them for certain meetings and the first 100 days of their administration.

Mansa Musa: Okay.

Jodi Hocking: The first thing we’re asking for them to do is to meet with formerly incarcerated people and stakeholders. We’re also asking them to come to the table with NDOC to talk about issues that are happening within facilities.

And then to also hold a public meeting where people can come and actually express what their concerns are and what the stress has been of the past several years, in order to really pivot the direction of corrections.

With this new administration, I feel like it is an opportunity to pivot into a new direction of what do we want corrections to look like in Nevada in five years and 10 years and 15 years. We don’t want more of the abuses that are going on now. We don’t want our prisons to be on the top 20 worst prisons in the United States that Ely is always on the list of.

It’s time to do something different. While we’re dealing with administration that may be more conservative in some ways, as an organizer, I look at, there’re going to be parts that we completely disagree, but the sweet spot of where we can make change is on the areas that we agree.

We agree that [inaudible 00:24:11] need to be treated humanely, that solitary confinement isn’t the answer. That rehabilitation is more important than punishment and pain. Focusing on those areas that we can change. We’re working on that in the hundred-day plan.

The other thing that we are working on is, I think one of the struggles for our in organization has been that corrections can keep us fighting things that are the tip of the iceberg. They’re not feeding people, they’re not doing this, all the things they’re doing wrong, the restitution, Covid.

We could fight those things at the tip of the iceberg and we’ll never run out of fights. But one of the really core changes that we want to make is, how do we change the culture around incarceration?

We’re abolitionists, well, not all of us are, but we’re founded on abolitionist beliefs that we have to deconstruct these systems while we’re also building communities that are ready for worlds without prison. How do we educate people who are not touched by incarceration? I think…

Mansa Musa: Right and I think that conversation is going to be the larger conversation because that’s a conversation that’s starting to take shape nationwide. But Ashley, talk about what you see in terms of the prison population and the future as it relates to your role in Return Strong.

Ashley Gaddis: Well, I am hoping that the system becomes more conducive with reform and eliminating the stereotyping of high risk offenders, not giving them the opportunity to reform and keeping that stigma there as well as the conditions.

I mean it’s just something has to break. What’s going on right now can’t continue to be happening and the whole thing with Covid, a lot is being blamed on Covid. Well, we’re out of Covid and it is time to move forward in a new direction.

Mansa Musa: Right.

Ashley Gaddis: Yeah.

Mansa Musa: And [inaudible 00:26:42].

Ashley Gaddis: I just [inaudible 00:26:43].

Mansa Musa: Go ahead, come on.

Ashley Gaddis: I’d like to highlight something real quick with Nevada and the women, okay. Because it doesn’t start in prison. It starts with the sentencing and the courts. It starts with the disappropriateness of the sentence structures. You have women and men committing crimes together.

You have the man with a record and he’s getting less time than a woman, than a mother, a wife, and that’s a big number in Nevada’s prison of women that are on co-defendant conspiracy charges.

You have women coming in there just broken off the top. Spiritually, mentally, physically, all of that and then you have a system that is abusive and neglectful and there’s no dignity there. There’s no humaneness there. So what do they expect to happen [inaudible 00:27:51]?

Mansa Musa: I think this is a attitude nationwide when it come to women in general and this deal with this racist, sexist, misogynistic society that we find ourselves in. Like I told you, they got one woman’s prison in Maryland, maximum security and medium security and mental security.

But women can’t get to work release because you don’t have no work release environment. But Jodi, give us a contact for your organization and how people can get in touch with you all and what you want people to know, what you want people to do in terms of supporting you all.

Jodi Hocking: I think there’s a few things. One, we always are looking for volunteers and you would easily reach our social media on our website, everything is the same. It’s Return Strong NV for Nevada. Maybe someday we’ll drop the NV and just be nationwide. Who knows?

That’s the easiest way. If you go to the website, we’re on Instagram, we’re on Twitter and we’re on Facebook with that same. The other thing that we are opening up this year and that really people are welcome nationwide is, we are going to be implementing, they’re called Peer Learning Circles.

One of the things about the change that needs to happen is that it’s not just… I think it needs to be led by people who are impacted, but Peer Learning Circles are really a space where everybody’s a learner. You can learn from a harm reduction specialist, somebody can learn from you if you have a loved one that’s incarcerated or you were formally incarcerated.

We will be starting Peer Learning Circles. I think the first one is actually in February and we’re going to open that up to anybody. It’s going to be on Zoom. We can have up to a hundred people. We can break out into small groups.

It’ll be once a quarter, but it gives you the opportunity to really, not even network, but just come and learn from other people. No matter how you learn, what you learn, it’s a space that really respects that. I think that is how we start getting to the root of the problem is…

Mansa Musa: Okay. There you have it. The Real News about Return Strong and the Nevada prison system as we just was given this information by Jodi and Ashley. We wanted to remind our listeners and our viewers to be mindful of, we’re talking about prison industrial complex and we’re talking about mass incarceration.

We are also talking about the blatant discrimination against women in the Nevada prison system as Ashley just outlined. We encourage everyone to go to the Return Strong website and check out what they got to offer. Thank you ladies for this and delightful conversation.

Jodi Hocking: Thank you so much for having us.

Ashley Gaddis: Thank you.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

In 2020, San Quentin State Prison in California had some of the worst rates of COVID-19 infection in the nation. At least 23 people died from COVID-19 after contracting it at the prison. Prisons, jails, and detention centers across the US proved similarly vulnerable to the pandemic, which easily spread among incarcerated populations and into surrounding communities due to the already abhorrent health, sanitation, and human rights conditions of such facilities. Two years later, COVID-19 remains a challenge for San Quentin and California officials. While prisoners are tested regularly multiple times a week, guards and other prison staff are exempted from testing. Sanitation within the overcrowded prison remains atrocious, and prisoners who are exposed to COVID-19 are often quarantined in solitary confinement units. Although California has a more rigorous COVID-19 policy than much of the nation, the state’s inability to protect prisoners is a reflection of the fundamental violence of the mass incarceration system. Incarcerated journalist Juan Moreno Haines calls in to Rattling the Bars from San Quentin prison with his colleague, journalist Katie Rose Quandt, to discuss COVID-19 policies at the prison, how the ongoing pandemic has made life considerably worse for prisoners, and why freeing people could be a better solution than the band-aid solutions California has attempted thus far.

Juan Moreno Haines is an award-winning incarcerated journalist and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists. He is the editor of the San Quentin News.

Katie Rose Quandt is a freelance journalist who writes about criminal justice, incarceration, and inequality. She is a senior editor at the Prison Policy Initiative, and a writer and editor at Solitary Watch.

Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

The transcript of this interview will be made available as soon as possible.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

All across the United States, city and state governments have increasingly turned to fines and fees to make up for budget shortfalls. This has required a corresponding explosion in police department budgets, creating a perverse cycle where local governments must consistently expand policing in order to continue to pay for policing. Rural America has not escaped this trend, and a new Vera Institute report has found that small and rural counties are now the main drivers of growth in the prison industrial complex. According Vera’s research, the boom in county jails appears to be driven by an increased amount of people who are either held pretrial or warehoused for federal, state, or other municipal authorities.

Stephen Janis and Taya Graham of Police Accountability Report join Rattling the Bars to discuss these findings in light of their own reporting on rural policing. In a wide-ranging conversation, Stephen and Taya help connect the dots between the rural jail boom and the rural police boom, the opioid crisis, and the decades-long economic crisis in rural America.

Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino, Brett Tomchik

Transcript

The transcript of this interview will be made available as soon as possible.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.