Decarceration Nation (with Josh And Joel)

Josh talks with Reuben Jones and Jondhi Harrell about recent criminal justice reform victories in Philadelphia My newest article is about taking a new approach to sentencing reform that ties reform directly to redressing racial disparity. I have written recaps of all 65 episodes of Orange Is the New Black. Reuben Jones is the Executive Director of Frontline Dads in Philadelphia. Both Reuben and Jondhi are Just Leadership USA Fellows. Reuben worked at the Pennsylvania Prison Society. Reuben discussed working with both the Leon Sullivan Trust and the Pan-African Studies department at Temple University. There is a lot of press discussing the Coalition For a Just DA that resulted in the election of Larry Krasner. Some of the press talked about how broad-based the coalition was. I think Reuben also made reference to what has come to be called the "Krasner Memo" where Mr. Krasner ordered his prosecutors to change the ways that they charge crimes in Philly. I was not able to find the 88.7% figure that Reub

Josh talks with Rochard Bronson, CEO of 70 Million Jobs about his mission to help one million formerly incarcerated people find meaningful work. I wrote recaps of all 65 episodes of Orange Is the New Black from the perspective of a formerly incarcerated person. I will continue my series Orange, Black, or Bleak the day after Season 6 starts (July 27th). Jeffrey Korzenik, of Fifth-Third bank, has been arguing that the hiring of formerly incarcerated folks is critical to maintaining our current economy. The Prison Policy Institute published a recent paper arguing that employment discrimination for formerly incarcerated people is worse than it was during the great depression. If you want to know more about Richard Bronson's past, you can find many popular press pieces and a very detailed Reddit AMA. Richard makes references to studies that support the hiring of formerly incarcerated folks, they are detailed at the bottom of this handout. And more can be found in this ACLU report.

Josh interview Donna Hylton, the author of the book "A Little Piece of Light" Donna's book "A Little Piece of Light" is available for purchase now. Donna helped create the ACE program at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. The ACE program helps incarcerated people in coping with HIV/AIDS. Donna was also instrumental in the creation of the Domestic Violence Program at Bedford Hills. Donna participated in the Bedford Writing Group created by Tony Award Winning Playwright Eve Ensler. The group was featured in the Documentary, "What I Want My Words To Do To You."

Josh interviews Thomas F. Lennon and Brandon Chrostowski, Director and principle from the Oscar-Nominated Documentary "Knife Skills" I wrote an article about Justice Kennedy's retirement. I also wrote an article about my own experiences in Solitary Confinement. You can watch the entire documentary "Knife Skills" on YouTube. Brandon also did a Ted Talk. If you want to visit Edwin's, check out their website and make a reservation the next time you are visiting Cleveland.

Josh discusses the ongoing problem of Juvenile Life Without Parole sentences. You can easily join Nation Outside or Nation Outside Detroit, we would love to have you on our team. The NFL Players Coalition wrote a letter in response to President Trump's request for them to send him a list of commutations which they would like for him to carry out. I agreed with the vast majority of their letter, my only request, in my response, was that they stop using the term "non-violent" to qualify who was worthy of relief. If you want to watch Knife Skills, it is well worth your time, I am looking very much forward to this upcoming interview. It is about a restaurant in Cleveland that serves as a training center to teach formerly incarcerated people the skills to work in a fine dining environment. Donna Hylton's book, "A Little Piece Of Light" is available for purchase now. Pennsylvania recently passed Clean Slate legislation. Rebecca Vallas is also the host of the Off-Kilter podcast and a friend. Jay

Josh interviews Bruce Western about his book Homeward: Life in the year After Prison. Bruce Western is a professor of Sociology at Harvard, Visiting Professor at Columbia, and Distinguished Visiting Research Professor at the University of Queensland in Australia. We both mention Bryan Stevenson several times in the interview. Mr. Stevenson is the creator of the Equal Justice Initiative, the force of nature behind the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and the author of the book Just Mercy (Bryan is also one of the best public speakers I have ever seen). I make reference to the book Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, but I would also highly recommend his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.

Josh talks to Katrina Burlet who was the coach of the Stateville Correctional Center Debate Team (until the Illinois DOC canceled the program with no explanation). Katrina Burlet heads the Justice Debate League in Illinois. The first story I read was this overview of what happened with Katrina's class. WGN-TV did a feature on the Stateville Debate team just before the class was canceled. Here is the referenced feature discussing juvenile lifers and the quote about numbness and parole. This is the evidence I found suggesting that the Illinois DOC controls parole. Katrina talked about her recent press conference, this Injustice Watch article was about the aftermath of that press conference. Katrina suggested that folks make FOIA requests to the Illinois Department of Corrections about Katrina Burlet's class. Here is a guide to making an FOIA request in Illinois. If you want to write letters to any of the inmates in the stories, you can look them up.

Josh discusses clemency for Matthew Charles with Kevin Ring of FAMM. Thanks to The Crime Report for publishing my Op-Ed supporting passage of the First Step Act. Our new dedicated website is DecarcerationNation.com Kevin Ring is the President of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. As near as I can tell, this is the original Julietta Martinelli story from last December, she also wrote this article last week as Mr. Charles was returning to prison. The Career Offender sentencing guidelines (like the ones that forced Mr. Charles back to prison) are pernicious and are often very counterproductive. We all hope you will join us in signing "This Petition" for clemency/commutation for Mr. Matthew Charles. The first tweet in the amazing Twitter thread from Kevin Ring we discussed during this episode started with the linked tweet. You can read Mr. Pfaff's book "Locked In" or any of the articles quoting his recitation of the evidence proving that people "age out" of violent crime." Epi

Josh discusses the First Step Act with Ames Grawert, Jessica-Jackson Sloan, and Jason Pye The First Step Act will be voted on in the U.S. House of Representatives on 5/22/2018. Ames Grawert is a Senior Counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice. Jessica Jackson-Sloan is the co-founder of the Cut 50 initiative. Jason Pye is the Vice-President for Legislative Affairs at Freedom Works. Jess Sessions is well-known for his antipathy towards criminal justice reform and for his undying commitment to mandatory minimum sentencing. Jared Kushner's father did 14 months in a Federal facility in Montgomery. Senator Chuck Grassley has introduced the complementary (or rival) Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, which is currently in the US Senate. I misspoke, a President cannot "table" passed legislation but he can refuse to sign it for up to ten days. If the President does not sign a passed bill after ten days it becomes law. The First Step has exposed splits in the left-leaning criminal justice reform community

Josh talks about the importance of voting as a formerly incarcerated person and the problems caused when we don't vote The 14th Amendment to the Constitution allows states to deny the vote to formerly incarcerated folks. I quoted two articles about poor folks not voting, first an article from The Guardian and second an article from The Root. I have written two pieces about Medicare work requirements and both include links to all of the important research that has been done demonstrating that Medicaid work requirements don't work. The first article was about the history of work requirements in general and the second article was about the bill inserting work requirements into Michigan's Healthy Michigan plan. I also made reference to research from the University of Michigan published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The citation is in the two articles above. The hashtag is #Bars2Ballots.

Josh talks with guests Steve Bailey of the Post & Courier and Victoria McKenzie of the Crime Report about the Lee Correctional Facility Riot. The Lee riot was the deadliest prison riot in 25 years, resulting in 7 dead and many more injured. Steve Bailey has written many articles about the problems with the prison system in South Carolina including this article which preceded the riot but predicted something terrible was building. Victoria, writing on assignment for CBS News, wrote one of the better articles I have seen about the Lee Correctional Riot. The articles that angered me included this article from Newsweek and this article from Greenville Online. I was also angered by this article quoting South Carolina's governor Henry McMaster (I believe I said his name incorrectly a few times). There were some good details that could be gleaned from some of the great journalism, unfortunately, most of the reporting was simply a recitation of the official story about the riot.

Josh and Joel talk about the effect Suboxone smuggling has on prison mail across the United States. I felt the 14th episode, where I interview Michigan's gubernatorial candidate Bill Cobbs was symbolically important. I can't imagine that many Gubernatorial candidates have sat down for an hour-long podcast interview with a formerly incarcerated registered citizen. Thanks to Mr. Cobbs for a great discussion and for his political courage. There are lots of conflicting stories about how the Suboxone strip came to be. From what I can discern, Invidior was trying to protect its patent by changing from pill to strip. There is a difference between llow-level (Suboxone) opiates and low-level opiates (Heroin etc.). The end result of Suboxone being released in strip form has been a mail crisis in America's prisons and jails. There is persuasive evidence that America's War on Drugs has failed at its main goal (reducing the supply of drugs) since 1971 and that imprisonment is a poor indicator of drug war success. The ba

A recent interview between Michigan Gubernatorial Candidate Bill Cobbs and Josh about criminal justice reform in Michigan. If you are not familiar with what is going on with water in Michigan. The State approved Nestle's new contract to remove even more water from the Great Lakes, Flint had State supplied water suspended while the Flint school's were and are still testing high for lead and we discussed Detroit's ongoing water crisis. The crisis in public schools in Michigan accelerated after the onset of the so-called "school choice" reforms in Michigan. Abandoned houses and how to deal with them is a huge issue in Detroit. Michigan is one of five states in America that has not raised the age to ensure that 17-year-olds are not presumptively tried as adults. I am a volunteer at MCCD who are working to Raise the Age in Michigan. Michigan passed a number of mental health reforms recently, including diversion programs, but mental health care inside our jails and prisons still lags far behind. The Subox

It is interesting to me that we are releasing this episode on equal pay day. Not because I want to distract from women's equal pay but because it is a common cause (and there are plenty of women in prison earning pennies on the hour). The Shawshank Redemption is not just a great movie, it gets a lot of the details of prison life right. Scenes from the movie were quoted every day in every prison and jail I was in. The article I referred to as "Talk Poverty" was published on many platforms, the point is that the people involved in the system are very aware that they are getting benefit from cheap labor. The never-ending debate over if prison labor is exploitation or a way to fill dead time is discussed in this LA Times article. The article also explains the problem of having too many inmates and too few jobs. There was a recent time when many major companies were using prison labor, many of these companies have stopped using this practice. If you are wondering how exploitative prison labor is legal it

Josh and Joel discuss the problems with prison food. The story about the Alabama Sheriff who spent money allocated for food for his jail prisoners to buy a beach house is pretty unbelievable but 100% true. Yup, I was part of the lucky group of inmates who got to "brown bag it" for a few months at the Macomb County Jail. Hey Kool-Aid! I think it is awesome that inmates all over Michigan donate the vegetables grown in their gardens to food banks, I just think the program should be expanded to include fresh vegetables for inmates too. This is the article in the Atlantic magazine discussing the high-level of pathogens in prison food compared to food in the general population. You can find the data the Atlantic magazine discussed in this study in the American Journal of Public Health. There are lots of post-mortems on Michigan's privatization experiment. Here is one from the Metro Times. This well-researched Prison Policy Initiative article makes the long-term vs. short-term argument about the health car

Josh and Joel discuss mental health care in America's Jails and Prisons. The Bureau of Justice Statistics article details the high prevalence of mental health problems in prisons and jails. The results of the Michigan House C.A.R.E.S. task force were compiled into this report. My Daily Kos article, that Joel refers to, was one of my most popular. Tom Dart is an important figure, he was on 60 minutes, he put out a really influential guide on mental health care in prisons and jails, and he also has been oddly resistant to bail reform (given some of his statements on the appropriateness of jails and prisons). Mr. Dart also hired a psychologist as warden at Cook County Jail, which IMO makes a lot of sense. There are a lot of popular press articles that give good summaries of the deinstitutionalization of American Mental Health facilities decades ago. John Pfaff discusses the strange incentives that are often set up at the county level to push people to State facilities in his book "Locked In." Some fol

Josh and Joel discuss prison (and jail) service provider Jpay Technically, a regressive tax is a tax that decreases as the amount of money taxed increases. But, functionally, this means the poor are taxed more of their income (and certainly more of a percentage of their income). Nothing has ever looked as friendly and unthreatening as Jpay's website . For many of the families with a loved-one in prison or jail, the costs can be massive and often beyond their ability to pay. We quoted two reports on this topic: "Who Pays, The Cost of Incarceration On families" and "The Economic Burden of Incarceration in the United States." The breakdown of the changes from pre to post-Jpay was provided by the Center for Public Integrity. You can also find a great deal of additional information about Jay's usurious charges on that site. There were two sources we used for the information about release cards: a ThinkProgress article and I read a court case filing for the class action suit against Jpay. This c

Josh and Joel discuss Josh's criminal history There won't be too many notes since this episode is mostly personal reflections but I will add some context. I said a lot of terrible things in chat but the description of where and how that happened was exactly correct. I also pled guilty to sharing adult content which was links to free and freely available web pornography during chats. All of this occurred in the same chat rooms I discussed. All of these things were 100% wrong. The claim that 1 in 4 people in Michigan prisons has a sex offense (Criminal Sexual Conduct) was determined by someone literally evaluating Michigan's registry. My understanding is that the number of people stays relatively flat but as reform happens for other groups the percentage increases. When I said "Charlottesberg" I meant "Charlottesville." There is evidence of cycles where abused become abusers, especially among men. VIctim's rights groups think the point of making this argument is to shift the blame but the po

Josh and Joel discuss both the Dignity For Incarcerated Women Act and the National Day of Empathy (March 6th). The National Day of Empathy was created by the Cut 50 organization (created by Van Jones). The main campaigns for the 2018 Day of Empathy are to push: The Dignity For Incarcerated Women Act of 2018 and Clean Slate Legislation Cut 50 has several pages on their site about the Dignity Act. I created this easy to use guide to all 65 of the recaps that I wrote of the episodes of Orange Is the New Black. There is a lot of popular press on the erasure of women from the national discussion about criminal justice reform. There has also been good work done clarifying the need for specific work to be done on women's issues within criminal justice reform efforts. i made one really dumb statement. Many of the reforms for women in Michigan's DOC were created by the HARD work of the inmates (not just because of Heidi Washington). Thanks to folks like Monica Jahner and lots of other women in Michigan, we have a be

Josh and Joel talk about pre-sentencing investigations and indigent defense in depth. The book "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee is available at bookstores and the movie starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch is considered a modern classic. When I discuss Pre-Sentencing Investigations with other formerly incarcerated folks, they had similar experiences to the ones we discuss. PSI's are incredibly under-covered in the criminal justice literature. This CJCJ overview does a good job of covering the basics. This St. John's Law Review article talks about many of the prejudicial elements in a pre-sentencing investigation. Here is the Ogeltree article that Joel references throughout the episode. And this Burkhart article does a good job of explaining how overworked and understaffed public defenders are. The sociological study "American Apartheid" and the book "When Affirmative Action Was White" are available at bookstores.