How One Person Can Fix a Broken Justice System (Pt 2)

After helping free his childhood friend who spent 18 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, Georgetown professor Marc Howard couldn’t return to his normal life. Instead, he built programs that have exonerated 13 innocent people, educated 250 incarcerated people, helped 150 people return to society, and have brought to normal folks into 30 prisons across the country. This powerful conversation challenges us to rethink justice, redemption, and the role each of us can play in bringing light into broken systems.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Everybody is Bill Courtney with an army and normal folks.
And we continue now with part two of our conversation
with Mark Coward. Right after these brief messages from our
general sponsors.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
I talk to a lot of police officers and I
do so again with a lot of respect, and there
are many who tell me that that's what they wish
they could do, but that there's a lot of pressure,
deep hard career pressure in the other direction, which is
not to root them out, just to look the other

(00:47):
way at misconduct and abuse.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
By guys, and police departments are often hated.

Speaker 3 (00:53):
That's right, and look how they're treated.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
They're called rats when they're what they're trying to do
is actually find the truth and ferret out misconduct, but
they are viewed as the enemy. And I think the
work they're doing is really important, because again I want ethical,
honest policing. I think we all do, but I don't
think it takes place regularly. And I think that when

(01:15):
you look at it through the lens that I have
been exposed to, which is wrongful convictions. First with Marty's case,
through and through police misconduct like disgusting, absolutely indefensible police
work in his case but then you start looking at
other cases, as I do all the time.

Speaker 1 (01:33):
But before you go to other cases, who want to
go to it can't go without saying, it's not just scollops,
it's prosecuting job. When it gets to the process, it
is the entire a sparatus that is stained by.

Speaker 3 (01:46):
The Absolutely, it's the entire apparatus.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
So it often starts with cops who you know, Again,
it might be intentional, it might not. I mean, they're
trying to close cases. There's a lot of pressure by
the way to close cases. Typically the pressure comes from
the pre oscutor's office because they're up for reelection, right,
so remember that we're the only country in the world
that has elected prosecutors and elected judges in most states,

(02:09):
that's huge political pressure to close cases. And as it
turns out, and a lot of research is shown, not
to appear to be soft on crime.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
The kiss aim to look tough on crime.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
That's right, because the kiss of death, if you're a
prosecutor or a judge, the kiss of death is to
look like you're soft on crime.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
Yeah, you're going to get well, you're going to go
extra hard.

Speaker 2 (02:29):
And there's all this research showing when an election's coming up,
they go for longer sentences judges when they're up for
re election. Give you know, there's some studies you're like
twenty eight thousand more years given to sentences.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
Are you kidding?

Speaker 3 (02:40):
In a like an eight year period.

Speaker 1 (02:42):
Is directly correlated to the time of the elect campaign. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
So, like, if you're a defendant, if you could magically
pick your judge, which you can't, you would literally want
to see, like when is the next election. I know,
if this guy's up in six months for election, you
do not want that. But if someone just got elected comfortably, okay,
maybe they're going to give you a fair chance.

Speaker 3 (03:02):
That's crazy.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
Holy smokes. Okay, So Marty, not only did you not shrink,
it exploded you. It exploded me and you from Marty
started your first real project. Yeah, and that.

Speaker 2 (03:17):
Was well, the Georgetown Prisons and Justice Initiative, But I
really started several things at the same time. And so
it's kind of hard to sequence it exactly chronologically because
there's another branch that maybe we can hold off on.
But let me just mention, which it involves when I
started volunteering in prisons, teaching classes in prisons, and that

(03:39):
was in about twenty fourteen. Marty's exonerating in two thousand
and seven, so it was kind of all Marty, all
wrongful convictions. And then I started to realize, I want
to understand prisons. I want to understand what goes on
inside of these spaces that are closed off to society,
where people get sentenced, where our country has over two
million people locked in cages, and I don't even know

(04:00):
what that's going on there. Most people don't. Sure you
can see oz or the wire or get some fictional
sense of it, but I wanted to go in. That
led me down a path that has also completely changed
my life and led to a lot of the work
that I do with the Georgetown Prisons a Justice Initiative,
teaching in prisons, running educational programs in prisons, having a

(04:21):
bachelor's degree program in prison, doing a lot of work
when people get out of prison so we can get
into that, but also the Frederick Douglas Project for Justice,
which is about bringing people inside of prisons and jails.

Speaker 3 (04:34):
All around the country.

Speaker 2 (04:35):
We're a national organization and that has come through that
twenty fourteen turning point where I started going inside regularly,
and now I'm at a point where I'm in prisons,
in jails two or three times a week all over
the place. I have something like fourteen hundred days spent
in prison, but no nights, which is a key.

Speaker 1 (04:53):
You may have a latent desire to be arrested as
much time as you spend in prison. I'm just kidding.

Speaker 3 (04:58):
Well, I hope the judge will count my time served.

Speaker 1 (05:02):
Roughly. So all right, at first, it was the Marty
story invigorated you, and you worked with other wrongfully convicted people,
So just tell me about that a little bit. Yeah,
but at first that was it.

Speaker 3 (05:20):
That was it.

Speaker 2 (05:20):
Yeah, So tell me we can see like this expanding circles.
First it was Marty, then it was other wrongfully convicted people,
and now it's become really all incarcerated people, but still
a lot of attention.

Speaker 3 (05:34):
Placed on wrongfully convicted. So let's go there.

Speaker 2 (05:37):
So one is, I just started reading about meeting people,
talking to other exgneries, talking to other people working on
wrongful convictions, lawyers, and that was a part of what
I was doing when I went to law school and
then became an attorney myself.

Speaker 3 (05:53):
But then through that, Marty and I.

Speaker 2 (05:56):
Started something together, and there's a really interesting backstory to that,
which is that I teach a class at Georgetown. It's
now a huge lecture class and has a big waiting
list and all that.

Speaker 3 (06:04):
It's called Prisons and Punishment.

Speaker 2 (06:07):
And initially when it was a smaller class, I would
always have well I still actually have Marty to give
a guest lecture, and that was often a highlight for
my students. And he was a great speaker. You know,
he had this incredible personal story. I mean it was like,
you know, all the right there.

Speaker 1 (06:23):
Yeah, so and it's you know, my own story too. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (06:26):
Yeah. So that was a highlight.

Speaker 2 (06:28):
But then we started to talk and think, what if
we did more than that, more than just a one
off lecture within my lecture class. What if we taught
a class together, and we put together the initial ideas
for a class that's now become another huge institution at
Georgetown called Making an Xannai, so Making x Houneries now

(06:50):
and it's ninth year. It's a spring semester class with
fifteen students, highly selective. We get about one hundred applications.
They have to submit video implications, by the way, so
it's really intensive in terms of what materials they have
to propose as a way for us to select them
for the class. So the fifteen students who get in,

(07:11):
they feel like they just want the lottery because it's
so hard to get into and in that class. What
we do is we have our students work on other real,
live wrongful conviction cases, so they work in teams of three.
We picked five cases every spring semester in how do
you know the wrongfully convicted? In the social Initially the
first year it was through word of mouth. We knew

(07:32):
people who were lawyers or who heard about the case.
One guy Marty knew from or had a connection to
when he was in prison.

Speaker 1 (07:39):
No, no, no, not. How do you know about the cases? Well,
then we do our resul do you know they are?
We do our relationship wrong.

Speaker 3 (07:47):
We don't always know for sure, and that's what our.

Speaker 1 (07:49):
Students actually let's vet.

Speaker 2 (07:52):
Yes, yeah, we do what you might call pre vetting beforehand.
In other words, when we hand them over to our students,
we have a good sense that the person was wrongfully convicted.
But then sometimes we've had to drop cases. We've had
to say, you know, we found out some stuff that's
more complicated.

Speaker 3 (08:06):
We don't like this.

Speaker 2 (08:07):
We're not comfortable, and so we always have alternates, and
sometimes we use those alternates. So, but the model is
fifteen students, five cases, working in teams of three, and
they have to reinvestigate the cases, which means they travel,
they go to the crime scene. They are investigating some
of them. They're like on a fire escape measuring the

(08:27):
trajectory with a string and where they said that our
guy was shooting.

Speaker 3 (08:32):
Supposedly, which was total bullshit, and then the.

Speaker 2 (08:35):
Autopsy report that shows the bullet going and an upward
trajectory clearly having even shot like basically you know, parallel
or from a little below. They are going interviewing witnesses,
they're interviewing the original prosecutor, defense attorney, judge.

Speaker 1 (08:49):
Actually doing the police work they should have been done
in the first place.

Speaker 2 (08:52):
Every single case. Within two weeks they're like there was
no investigation. So we found I think the critical missing link,
which is that while the Innocent Project and other organizations
they typically do DNA testing in cases that have sort
of legal room for appeals with the new evidence from DNA,
we take cases that are at legal dead ends but

(09:13):
that have never been investigated, and then what we provide
is a full investigation that unearths all kinds of new
evidence and from that program, now, over this last what
we've done at eight times so far and are starting
our ninth semester, thirteen people are now free. Thirteen people
who had served over three hundred years in prison are
now free. And the program is not just a Georgetown now,

(09:36):
but we've franchised it, We've spread it. It's now at
five universities. It's been at Princeton now this is its
fourth year, New York University, University of California, Santa Cruz
its second year at both of those places, and now
it's starting at Rice University in Texas. So we're from
east to west, north to south, and we're working with

(09:56):
this model of having students reinvestigate cases, creating doc umentaries.
That's what their task is. It's not writing a paper
or emotion. It's actually creating a documentary which we launch
and share with the public, and through that we create pressure, attention,
and play a role in helping people get free.

Speaker 1 (10:15):
It's a lot. I'm conflicted.

Speaker 3 (10:17):
Yeah, sure, let's go there.

Speaker 1 (10:22):
I have personal friends who have been victims of very
violent chrome. I know this may sound weird, and it's
a one off, but I will tell you that rape,
to me, it's so much more than physical and you know,

(10:49):
stuff against children. I mean, I can get in a
really dark place in the way I think about what
I'd like to do to somebody who's sort of child
or innocent, or picked on, somebody who simply didn't have
the ability to defend themselves. It makes me sick. Then

(11:10):
the frustration with you know, well, you have insurance. Having
your car stolen, it's not that big a deal. If
you've ever had your car stolen, even if you had
an insurance, you will understand the undue pressure it puts
on you, especially if you're among the working poor and
you can no longer get to work and you have
to get a new license plate. There's no such thing

(11:31):
as victimless crime, and oftentimes the victims of crime or
the family of the perpetrators. And I have studied and
kind of gotten into all that. So my conflict comes
from on the one hand, there's crime, and people that

(11:53):
perpetuate that crime deserve to pay a penalty a civil
society requires. I think I also fully understand that if
you don't read on grade level by that time you're
in third grade, you're sixty percent more likely to either

(12:15):
be in poverty or have incarceration in your life, and
then that compounds itself generationally. So there's a societal issue
to all of it. One of my very, very dear friends,
who is the president of the Chamber of Commerce here

(12:37):
in Memphis. Four years ago, now, I was walking down
the street. Three guys got out of the truck right
on the curve, point blank, right in the back of
the head. That one was juvenile, one was I would

(12:57):
say mentally he was challenged, and one was the ringleader.
One was a female. And they left my friend there
and he died and his family's devastated still to this day.
On the other hand, the system that's supposed to hold

(13:20):
those people accountable and needs to for our society, that
also you have had to work to free. I think
you said thirteen people in three hundred hours of three
hundred years. Excuse me of jail Tom who never did
anything to be put in jail. That is a borring.

(13:41):
So all of what I just said to tee up
this before we as listeners, before we as society, and
before I personally sit before you and kind of make
my continue to evolve. My construct around justice in America.

(14:01):
What do we have to understand that's actually happening? What?
What does the average person get wrong about all this incarceration?

Speaker 2 (14:10):
Yeah, well, these are really tough issues. Let me just
start by saying I share your horror at the crime,
certainly against.

Speaker 1 (14:23):
And by the way Marty's parents were killed. Absolutely, he
was a victim of it too. So how does he
reconcile justice in America with having been unfairly locked up
that he needed justice for his family? I mean, and
I think that struggle is universal forever, Any any clear

(14:44):
thinking citizen in this country has to have a struggle
with this. And so to get to that, what do
we have wrong? What? What? What is the misconst what?

Speaker 3 (14:55):
Yeah, we us about a lot wrong. But there's a
lot to unpack here.

Speaker 2 (14:59):
And so so I just want to say from the
outset that I agree with your characterization and that everything
I do has a goal of preventing crime, minimizing crime,
preventing and minimizing suffering and particularly of defenseless people. I
also agree, and we'll get into some of this more,
I'm sure, but I have a very hard time with

(15:21):
sex crimes and crimes against children.

Speaker 1 (15:24):
For the very same reasons.

Speaker 2 (15:25):
It's a lot easier for me to take someone who
you know, pull the trigger in a moment of panic
or inebriation or all signs of kinds of situations than
somebody who physically hurt another human being over a long
sustained way. There's something about a gun that is somehow

(15:48):
easier to understand than the harm against a defenseless person.

Speaker 3 (15:56):
But it's all horrible and life sufferings. Oh yeah to
the survivor.

Speaker 2 (16:02):
Yeah, oh, I get that, And I've been through that
with someone close to me, and I share all those
feelings of.

Speaker 3 (16:11):
A desire for suffering from a person who did it.
But there's an important butt and I want to make
sure that we get to that.

Speaker 2 (16:20):
A lot of what I struggle with is that impulse
on the one hand, which is real and I think
that just about everyone can share or would share if
they were in that situation unfortunately, but with another one
that looks at what are we doing to a hold
the person accountable and prevent that from happening more in

(16:43):
the future. And I don't think we're getting much right
on that front. But before I get into that, I
just want to especially highlight the wrongful conviction part because
when you have a horrific crime and you have victims,
whether it's a crime where the victor survives but is
deeply traumatized, such as rape, which is the worst situation

(17:07):
where someone's surviving and has that lasting trauma.

Speaker 3 (17:12):
Or if it's a crime of murder where you have
a loss of life that's fully permanent.

Speaker 2 (17:17):
That is so horrific. But is that victim made better?
Is there any justice? Is there accountability when the wrong
person gets sent to prison for it?

Speaker 1 (17:30):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (17:30):
I think it's the victimized exactly.

Speaker 1 (17:32):
They are because one a free person is locked up
as a result of what happened to them, and two
the person that actually did it it's still out there.

Speaker 3 (17:41):
That's right, exactly.

Speaker 2 (17:43):
And so what the problem is is that most experts
say that about five percent of convictions are of the
wrong person. That what some people say it's as high
as ten percent. Let's do some quick math. There's two
million people in prisons today. Five percent is one hundred
thousand people. Ten percent is two hundred thousand people. But
let's just go with five percent. Be CONSERVETI one hundred

(18:04):
thousand people in prison for something they didn't do. That's horrifying.

Speaker 1 (18:11):
We'll be right back. What's the entire prison population in
the UK.

Speaker 3 (18:25):
It's about roughly eighty thousand.

Speaker 1 (18:28):
So we have more wrongfully convicted people in a prison
in the United States than the UK has a total
in their entire prison. Just consider that. Yeah, that's right,
that's that's equally horrifying. And the trauma that happened. You
talk about victims, then they go to prison and they
become traumatime.

Speaker 3 (18:46):
Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 (18:48):
And then let's drill into what makes for a wrongful conviction. Sure,
sometimes it's a mistaken identification. You know, somebody was hurt,
let's say it's the crime of rape, looks at a lineup,
says it was that guy. It turns out it with
someone else who wasn't in the lineup or whatever. You
could call that, just a honest human mistake. Those are
actually rare. The vast majority, overwhelming majority, ninety percent of

(19:14):
wrongful convictions have misconduct by somebody, police or prospers in
the system, in the system, and that's because they need
to close a case, and so they have a case,
they have a horrible crime. It's in the news. You've
got victims, there's noise. We need to make this go away.
And so what they typically do is they find somebody

(19:35):
who maybe could be could have done it in theory,
has a criminal record, was up to no good, doesn't
have an alibi, doesn't have really much of a defense, meaning.

Speaker 3 (19:48):
Resources to pay, its the profile.

Speaker 2 (19:50):
There's huge disparities in wrongful convictions and boom, we focus
on this person. Any disconfirming evidence we shove out of
the way. Anything else we incentivize. We get somebody else
in jail and we say, hey, we'll take five years
off your sentence if you can say the person confessed
to you. There's all kinds of both ways in which

(20:11):
cases get made. And they might believe in their minds
that they're doing the right thing. They say, hey, we're
taking someone off the treat he's doing bad, he's dealing drugs, whatever,
let's get him out of here. Anyway, it doesn't really matter.
But what they're really doing is sacrificing the truth. And
what they're offering doing is what you alluded to, which
is leaving the real perpetrator out there. And there have
been multiple exonerations that have taken place, and these were

(20:33):
through DNA when they did not want the truth to
come out. And it turns out was the wrong person,
and guess what, the real person raped and or killed
other people.

Speaker 3 (20:43):
To me, that's on the stage. Stop.

Speaker 2 (20:44):
But the blood is on their hands, right, the state
is contributing to the very evil that we are all
against and that the system is supposedly trying to eliminate.
Think about that. But there are no consequences. Their police
have what's called qualified immunity. It's very hard to sue
police officers. They have very strong unions and they rally

(21:06):
together to prevent it.

Speaker 3 (21:07):
It's very very hard.

Speaker 2 (21:08):
Prosecutors, you can't even try it. They have what's called
absolute immunity. A prosecutor can lie, cheat, steal, cover up evidence,
falsify testimony put onnowingly false and they will face no consequences,
no civil consequence, they won't have to pay, no criminal consequences,
they won't spend.

Speaker 3 (21:24):
A day in jail.

Speaker 1 (21:25):
Isn't it interesting? It's nuts that the absolute immunity for
lawyers comes from the lawyers who are often connected with
or end up in Congress or state senates where they
have made laws to protect themselves from their own Yeah,

(21:45):
I mean self protection.

Speaker 2 (21:48):
But it's something that is defended by frankly, both Democrat
and Republican administrations. There's this institution that is placed on
the prosecution, this value that they need to be protected from,
you know, some potential avalanche of frivolous lawsuits, and that

(22:11):
it's better off for them.

Speaker 1 (22:13):
To have full immunity.

Speaker 2 (22:14):
By the way, I hope you's become clear build that,
but I want to make it explicit that everything I
do is totally nonpartisan. I don't give what party you're in.
I'm an independent. I think like an independent. I think
for myself and I'll work with anybody from the right
or the left who wants to help get people out
of prison and don't belong there. So that's my only view.

Speaker 1 (22:32):
I'm pretty invented too. I think both parties saw I
could only say that because Alex Left he hates when
I go political. So with regard to understanding what's going on,
what's wrong with incarceration in our country, I think you
laid that out well. You have a metric ton of
statistics and I'm sitting here staring at some of them.

(22:56):
One of them I think that I'd like you to
talk a little bit about, is that we have this
inaccurate notion that since the seventies or eighties, crime has
actually been on the increase in the US, and it's
actually decreasing.

Speaker 3 (23:13):
Talk about it.

Speaker 1 (23:13):
It's been decreasing consistently for decades. Meanwhile, our prison population
has quintupled. That's right, So let's go through that. Yeah,
I mean, I think it's really important people understand that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:26):
Yeah, Now, a lot of this has to do with
the lies of politicians to play up fear of crime
as a way to get people to vote for them.

Speaker 3 (23:38):
By saying they're going to do this says.

Speaker 1 (23:40):
Well, into what you're doing, now why you're doing it.
So talk about one of the things I read, and
I'll just see this up and you can go on
it is property crime or violent crime wasn't increasing, but
incarceration was. There were decisions that were made politically in
order to deal with the perception of fear arise in crime,

(24:01):
and that's very different from reality. I have a pushback
on that that I don't really believe, but I think
some of our listeners may say when they hear that, is,
could it not be argued that crime wasn't increasing because
incarceration was.

Speaker 2 (24:20):
Yeah, that's not the case. But I understand that and
I've heard but that's a perception, sure, so talk to it. Yeah, So,
all types of crime have been decreasing from a high
that was basically in the nineteen seventies and eighties, where
there really.

Speaker 3 (24:34):
Was a lot of crime, where New York had two
thousand murders a year. I mean think about that.

Speaker 2 (24:38):
That's you know before a day, right, it's even more
than that. So and they were unsolved and it was
out of control, and that led to both a lot
of tough on crime policies that involve policing, but also
in terms of incarceration, and you saw the numbers of
people in prison go from historically roughly like about one

(25:01):
hundred and fifty two hundred thousand suddenly with the spike
in late seventies, especially during the eighties, accelerated in the
nineties under President Bill Clinton, so Republican Democrat president didn't
really matter, and passed the two million mark in the
two thousands.

Speaker 1 (25:17):
And that's when three stricture out came around all of it.

Speaker 3 (25:20):
Yeah. Yeah, now in terms of so and meanwhile crime
was going down.

Speaker 1 (25:26):
So it would be argued, look, we're locking up all
these bad people crime, shopping.

Speaker 2 (25:32):
Yeah, well, so this is where it's important to have
a little bit of a political science background. Fortunately I
do have and still have, which is that correlation does
not mean causation. In order to be able to analyze
cause and effect, you need to be able to control
for other factors. And you can't just look at two
things that are correlated. Otherwise you could say, you know,
people eat a lot of ice cream in the summer,

(25:53):
and they're more shark attacks in the summer, so eating
ice cream with the shark attacks.

Speaker 1 (25:58):
Right, So that's just my favorite example. You remind me
of my old economics and political professors when you say
stuff like that, because stuff like that if i'd just
so interesting. But it's true, you eat more ice cream
in the summer, there's more shark attacks and scrammer. Therefore
the increase in consumption of ice cream causes sharks to buy.

Speaker 3 (26:20):
But yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1 (26:21):
Well, I mean, honestly, if you if you stick with
a strict associative policy of agles be and equal c
than aqles see, you can draw those inaccurate conclusions, right right, yeah,
so just prove it.

Speaker 2 (26:36):
So you need to look at each of those things separately.
So in terms of the decline in crime, it has
to do with a lot of factors, involving economics, involving opportunity,
involving activities for people, involving addiction, involving guns, and you know,

(26:57):
there's so many factors that go into crime. Now it
is possible that when somebody goes to prison, then they're
not on the streets and they're not communing other crimes,
of course, unless it was a wrongful conviction, which five
or more percent are, But the research on crime says
that it's a very small percentage that involves what's called incapacitation,

(27:20):
which is basically people being in prison so they can't
commit other crimes. And the vast majority of the decline
has to do with other factors that are separate from
the prison population. In terms of the prison population itself,
that rise has to do with policies that were made
in terms of sentencing, so three strikes law, as you mentioned,
length of sentencing, the War on drugs, which would send

(27:44):
people to prison for decades for crimes that weren't violent,
for having a buyer weed. Yeah, and then you have,
of course, the interests that went into building prisons in
the nineteen nineties, when again Bill Clinton was president, you
had a prison opening every ten days in America.

Speaker 3 (28:00):
They're building them in rural areas.

Speaker 2 (28:02):
Land was cheap, you know, get a license for building,
and you know a lot of corruption going on of
course with these contracts and whatnot, and a lot of
vested interest that wanted to fill these beds. You know,
they talk about occupancy rates in prisons like their hotels,
so you know they want to fill.

Speaker 1 (28:19):
Them well, especially if they're probably run.

Speaker 2 (28:22):
Yeah, which is only seven percent. I think there's some
misunderstandings about what.

Speaker 1 (28:25):
That point is. To pay for a prison, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:29):
There's somebody paying for it, and you know. Yeah, So
there has been a really striking decline in crime, and
from the nineteen nineties the murder rate was going down
every single year up until COVID, which is you never
have any trend that's that strong where it's literally it's

(28:50):
not even a blip here and there.

Speaker 3 (28:52):
Other years it was going on every year.

Speaker 2 (28:53):
And then it went up a bit, and then it's
been going back down ever since. But if you listen
to politicians and again public and democratic alike, they will
constantly refer to a rise in crime, spike in crime,
fear of crime, giving the impression that it's this upward trend,
when in reality it's been a consistent downward trend. And

(29:15):
that has to do sadly with politics, where politicians' priorities
is not the truth. It's not a study, it's not
careful research. It's about getting elected. And this tough on
crime message and this fear based thinking wins in elections,

(29:35):
to put it very simply, and so you have this
phenomenon where there's this constant reference. And so what they'll
do is they'll be a story. They'll be a carjacking,
they'll be a murder, they'll be a very highly publicized case,
and they will make it out. It'll be on the news.
You know, could you be next? And it creates this fear.
And by the way, it's real, like I get it.

(29:57):
It affects me, it affects you, affects all of us, right,
I mean, that's why it works so well. But it's
not born out by facts, it's not born out by evidence.
It's certainly not born out by trends over time.

Speaker 1 (30:08):
It's not something I've heard you talk about at all,
not that you haven't. I just got aware of it.
But as I was considering what you're talking about now
as I was preparing to talk to you, something popped
in my head too. Doesn't social media play a role
in this as well from a standpoint of policy, because

(30:34):
you know, back when you and I were coming up,
if it was local, we knew about it, but we
didn't know about what was going on in Denver, we
didn't know about from Memphis, we didn't know what. But
now anytime there's some horrific murder whatever in any corner
of the world, we know about it within minutes. Does

(30:54):
that not then make the public think crimea is out
of control? When paired with the politicians and accurate narratives,
you do not think that place all rolling that that.

Speaker 2 (31:08):
I mean, it definitely had started well before social media,
so I don't think it's a new thing, but I
do think social media amplifies it and certainly makes it
more immediate and has now become the source of information
for most of people and most people overall.

Speaker 3 (31:24):
Yeah, because it leads to one very short.

Speaker 2 (31:28):
Obviously in terms of attention span, and then therefore you
don't get into depth, you don't get nuanced, you don't
get analysis careful, and then it's also rushed. It's fast,
it's immediate, so it's not necessarily based on reflection or
letting the sort of facts emerge and so on. That said,
it can also be really effective. And I you know,
use social media and think that a lot of special media.

Speaker 1 (31:52):
I'm just saying it feels like the more you see,
the more you hear, the more you feel, the more
you believe, even though the data the fact don't bear
out what you're being fed.

Speaker 2 (32:03):
Yeah, and then there's the silos part. I mean, I
do think the algorithms are really damaging because you get
fed what you like, and that might be what your
friends like. So you're getting just the same thing over
and over and over and you get a sense of, well,
this is everywhere right, So you don't get the wide view,
you don't get the parts you might not agree with.

Speaker 3 (32:24):
But you need to know in.

Speaker 2 (32:25):
Order to form fully, you know, fledged opinions about issues
you made otherwise not know much about.

Speaker 1 (32:31):
Along those that's a problem. Along the lines of what
we also don't understand about incarceration in America, one thing
that I read really stuck out to me is that
thirty percent of the female population of incarceration and the
entire world is in the United States.

Speaker 2 (32:49):
Yeah, well, twenty five percent of the overall population is
in the of incarcerated populace. So we have five percent
of the world's population twenty five percent of the world's prisoners,
right among women, which by the way, is only seven percent.
I'm going to throw some numbers out here. Seven percent
of American incarcerated people are women. So it sounds like
it's very little, but it's actually several hundred thousand people,

(33:14):
which in a world perspective is thirty percent of world's
female incarcerated population. In other words, we incarcerate a lot
of women as well, even if they tend to be
forgotten in the American context, but the global context bears
that out.

Speaker 1 (33:29):
So leaning back on before we go on next, is
what you're doing, what you transitioned into. I have to
understand this because I think it all synergizes together. Leaning
back on your three two thousand and one life is
a or simple political science professor who's fluid in about

(33:54):
nineteen thousand languages you're fluent in, like French or German,
which is crazy, but who wrote his thesis on different
approaches to I'm butchering this but different approaches to government. Well,
part of government is criminal justice and crime and prisons

(34:19):
and all of that. I just can't help but think
with that background, you haven't looked at the American justice
system and started comparing it to those and other developed
countries to form some ideas and conclusions about what's ailing
us and what other people do well, right or wrong.

(34:41):
And I think it's interesting how your two worlds allied there.

Speaker 2 (34:46):
Yeah, so I'm glad you bring that up because my
third book and most recent book.

Speaker 3 (34:51):
I'm working on a new one with Marty.

Speaker 2 (34:52):
Actually that's going to be a big one with a
major publisher and totally different audience than the academics.

Speaker 1 (35:00):
You will get one.

Speaker 2 (35:01):
But I wrote my third book was like a bridge book,
which was still academic, ye, but more for a popular
audience and with a trade branch of Oxford University Press.
And it's called Unusually Cruel and the subtitle is Prisons,
Punishment and the Real American Exceptionalism.

Speaker 3 (35:20):
So I compare the US to a set of European countries.

Speaker 2 (35:24):
Yeah, well, you know, the way that term has been
used is sort of city on a hill, beacon of democracy.
And what I'm saying is for a country that's built
on a slogan of land.

Speaker 3 (35:36):
Of the free.

Speaker 2 (35:36):
We sure have a lot of people that are living
in cages in captivity. We have incarceration rates that are
ten times higher than comparable European countries. So what explains that.

Speaker 1 (35:50):
We'll be right back, I won't take this up for you. Sure, well, yeah,
we incarcerate more because we have more chrime.

Speaker 3 (36:03):
Yeah, so that's actually false.

Speaker 2 (36:04):
So if you look at thank you for saying that,
if you look at studies of crime comparatively, we actually
with one exception, which is homicide, which of course has
to do with guns. We have more guns than people
in this country, and a lot of other countries don't have.
For use of guns, homicide, we have higher rates, but
the vast majority of crime, of course, is not homicide,
property crime, all kinds of other violent crime, drug crime.

(36:29):
Our rates are actually slightly lower than average among other countries.

Speaker 3 (36:33):
We do not have higher crime.

Speaker 2 (36:35):
That is completely categorically false, with the exception of homicide.
Yet our incarceration rates are basically seven to ten times
higher depending on the country, And there's not a single
European country that's even close to the US.

Speaker 3 (36:48):
I mean, I have these charts in my book that
are just show.

Speaker 2 (36:50):
It's like off the rails, off the track, completely different
from all countries. Well, and it wasn't always the case,
by the way, So there's the fifty years ago. Yeah,
if you go back to nineteen seventy one, before the
real rise started, and that's the first year where I
was able to find data in other countries.

Speaker 3 (37:09):
The US is pretty close.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
If you look at the number of incarcerated people per
one hundred thousand, that's the usual metric word, about one
hundred and sixty per one hundred thousand at that time.
European countries there are about like eighty ninety one hundred,
so we're kind of like close. But then they stay
more or less flat, go up a tiny bit, like
five ten percent, it's pretty flat, and we go up
like this. It's just spike that takes place to the

(37:34):
point where we reached seven hundred people per one hundred thousand,
so five times higher than it was, you know, in
the nineteen seventies. What explains that? So this is what
I argue in the book. That has to do with
four factors that all changed in different ways in the
nineteen seventies. So one is race, the way in which
in the post Jim Crow era mass incarceration became basically

(37:58):
a proxy for race when you could no longer have
explicitly racial exclusion in their laws. It's second to do
with religion, when you had suddenly what was always a
very strong religious existence identity movement in this country, but
became very very political starting in the late nineteen seventies,
the religious right, Jerry Folwell and others became very very

(38:23):
politically active, whereas before they were explicitly a political.

Speaker 1 (38:26):
There's a big difference in what Billy Graham was and.

Speaker 2 (38:28):
Absolutely that's right. Third, you've got politics, the elections of judges.
You have the whole Willy Horton scandal where this sort
of the election presidential election of nineteen eighty eight, many
argue was decided based on a political advertisement that had
to do with a message that Ducacus was soft on
crime because he.

Speaker 3 (38:48):
Let someone out on a furlough commit another crime.

Speaker 1 (38:50):
And so actually remember that. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (38:54):
And then fourth is business.

Speaker 2 (38:57):
That you have a lot of vested interests that now
have real given the game money skin in the game,
and that don't want to change that. And that's not
just the private prison companies, but I'm talking more importantly
all the vested interests, all the commissary products, and all
the prison unions that want a need prisons to be full.

(39:19):
And so with that, it makes it very distinct in
the US to other countries.

Speaker 3 (39:23):
And I've been to prisons in other countries.

Speaker 2 (39:24):
I've been to prisons in France, Germany, Norway, and I've
also been to prisons in Brazil and Japan, and you know,
totally different experiences everywhere. It's not I'm not trying to
say it's it's better everywhere and always worse in the US.
And there's some much better prisons in the US in
some places than elsewhere, and there's different security levels, and
there's some that.

Speaker 3 (39:44):
Have a lot of programs.

Speaker 2 (39:45):
And by the way, I'm not an enemy of private
prisons per se, and I don't think that they're necessarily worse.
I just want prisons to treat people in humane ways
and to.

Speaker 1 (39:56):
Hear people that are in the be guilty, be guilty.

Speaker 3 (39:59):
That's right. That's about the judicial system.

Speaker 2 (40:01):
But I've seen other countries where it works much much better.
And that's what I try to bring forth in this book,
is to learn from successful models because the US is
doing everything wrong, everything wrong on a judicial level, everything
wrong in terms of prison conditions and how people are
treated when they're incarcerated.

Speaker 1 (40:19):
As an aside before we go forward, I would love
for you to call me later. But I get we
have more homicides because of our right to bear arms
and guns and all of that that don't exist in
most of the other world. But we had that same

(40:39):
right in nineteen sixty We had all those same rights
Friday nineteen seventy one. Yeah, so I would argue based
on that, maybe inaccurately, but I don't want to be
the shark with the ice cream guy. But we had

(41:02):
the right to bear arms Friday night.

Speaker 2 (41:04):
Homicide rates have always been higher in the US, but
I'm not trying to say that changed per se.

Speaker 3 (41:09):
And I agree that's just.

Speaker 1 (41:11):
Put I think that's an interesting, maybe an interesting thing
just to look at because Okay, yeah, we got guns.
Homicides higher than everywhere else because we've got guns, And
I get it, and we could in good Lord, that's
another five month conversation and argument to be had. But

(41:31):
the point is, if the homicide rates have also spiked,
we can't just say it's because of guns.

Speaker 2 (41:36):
We haven't spiked. They've always been high. Yeah, it's not
it's not a spike. They are just consistently higher in
the U less than in other countries that don't have guns,
got it, But they're not.

Speaker 1 (41:48):
It's not a causal argument. It's just that that's just.

Speaker 2 (41:51):
The way it basically always has been.

Speaker 1 (41:54):
So, Marty. Yeah, free the free theo that are wrongfully convicted.
But now you have, as you you talked about just
a little bit earlier, you're now embracing the guilty. They
did it. Yeah, Why why are you embracing them? Yeah?

(42:15):
And that's a little tongue in cheek, take it up
for you again, But I mean, why embrace the guilty?

Speaker 3 (42:22):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (42:23):
And let me just first say this is something I've
spent a lot of time thinking about, working through, struggling with,
and so what I'll ask you and especially your listeners
is for.

Speaker 3 (42:36):
A little bit of grace to allow.

Speaker 2 (42:38):
Me to explain how I got to this point, because
it's not something that you can.

Speaker 3 (42:42):
Just sort of like intuitively grasp.

Speaker 2 (42:46):
It's not something that, certainly from a position of thinking
of victims of crime, that automatically makes sense. Because I
understand the perspective of someone who says, this person committed harm,
why should they ever get to enjoy a single thing
of life ever? Again, I understand that, but I ultimately

(43:09):
in the end think differently, respectfully. And the reason why
is that ninety five percent of people in prison are
getting out one day. In other words, they don't have
life without parole sentences, they don't have a death penalty.
They have a sentence that will allow them to get free.
Going back to what we talked about earlier, I want

(43:29):
a society that has low crime. I don't want people
to be hurt. I don't want there to be future victims.
If there's anything I could do that would be for
the future, it would be to minimize future people from
being hurt.

Speaker 3 (43:42):
I believe very.

Speaker 2 (43:43):
Strongly now based on evidence and their stats to back
this up, but also my own lived experience now that
when people who are incarcerated, and let's say, who were
guilty of the crime they were convicted of, when they
are given opportunities to grow and change, they will not

(44:06):
go back to a life of crime. And so when
they reach that exit door one day, they will be
prepared to come out and to stay away from crime,
to succeed and to be positive, contributing members of society.
And I've seen this over and over again. So either
we say, hey, anyone who commits a crime should never

(44:27):
ever get out period.

Speaker 3 (44:29):
I would disagree with.

Speaker 2 (44:30):
That, but I would understand that somebody would have that
view when they're pissed and they're vengeful. But since that's
not the case, and I don't think that will be
the case, I think it's very important to do everything
we can to change people when they're in prison. That's
what they do in Norway and Germany and other European countries.

(44:52):
Prison is the punishment for having committed a crime, and
that punishment is the separation from society. You don't get
to live at home anymore, you don't get to be
with your family anymore. You are put in an institution
for a certain number of years decided by a system
by judge, et cetera. And then during that time, the

(45:14):
prison and the prison system will work on rehabilitation, on
making it so that you change, so that you overcome
your addiction problem, if that was a.

Speaker 1 (45:22):
Part of it. You work through your violence and your anger.

Speaker 2 (45:27):
You you know, are given time to change and age
out of crime. So much of crime is simply about
simple biology. And you know, people who are young, who
don't have their prefrontal cortex form and make stupid decision,
especially boys especially.

Speaker 3 (45:42):
Yeah, I mean there's so much evidence on that.

Speaker 1 (45:45):
I mean, is still forming.

Speaker 3 (45:47):
I know, yeah, arguably, yeah.

Speaker 1 (45:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:54):
But so if you accept the reality that ninety five
percent of people are going to get out, and if
you want to prevent and minimize crime in the future,
you would and should, I would argue support programs that
will allow people to improve while they're in prison and

(46:15):
that when they get out they will not even think
about going to a life of crime. And I hope
I'll get a chance to talk about some of the
programs that I've been running in prisons in jails, because
it is proof of that concept.

Speaker 1 (46:27):
This is it. So I want to hear about it.
I think our listeners need.

Speaker 3 (46:34):
Yeah, I know. And again, this is really tough.

Speaker 2 (46:36):
This is tough to grasp, and so I'm asking you
and listeners to kind of walk into prison with me
to see this both now as I talk about it
and then eventually with the Frederick Douglas Project on a
visit in prison to meet actually persons.

Speaker 1 (46:51):
As I listen to you, I'm reminded of one of
my favorite quotes, little perspective. Yeah, maybe a little wake
up call is that we are still a predominantly Christian
country and our whole faith is based on grace, which

(47:14):
is forgiveness. Yeah, I know, and the irony that still
more than sixty percent of us say we are at
least in some way Christian or faithful subscribing to the
notion of forgiveness and grace. Because without grace and forgiveness,
what's the point Christianity in the first place. That's the
whole story of the Crucifixion, to then turn around when

(47:40):
we are sinners and expect grace and forgiveness for our
own salvation and then not want to offer it to
another fallen human being. So from a faith standpoint, I'm
very conflicted. Yeah, And I'm also reminded of one of
my favorite codes quotes is from JFK and he said,
there is a difference in a pardon and forgiveness. Society

(48:03):
cannot pardon the missteps, but we have to forgive them. Yeah.
So I just thought i'd tea up that perspective in
your progress.

Speaker 2 (48:13):
Yeah, Yeah, because I think that perspective is really important.
I don't want to delve too far into the religious aspect,
but I would love to see a lot more forgiveness, grace, redemption, compassion,
all of which I think are very deeply.

Speaker 3 (48:34):
Central to.

Speaker 2 (48:37):
Christianity, but I think tend to get a little forgotten
in this criminal justice discussion.

Speaker 1 (48:43):
And the same people who like to stand on the
foundation and beat their chest that this country was founded
on Judeo Christian values are oftentimes the same people that
say they want to be tough on crime and throw
these people in jail forever. And it's hypocritically yeah, yeah,
so go into your prog Yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:00):
So you know, I started, as I mentioned earlier, I
started volunteer teaching in prison in twenty fourteen, and that
was because I was starting at that point to teach
about prisons. I was reading about them, but I really
had very little understanding of what actually took place inside.
I was able to start taking my students on a
tour and visiting a prison, but it was under very
restrictive conditions.

Speaker 3 (49:21):
The warden would say things.

Speaker 2 (49:23):
Like no eye contact with the inmates, you know, and
it was like this, by the way, I don't use
that word inmate, and I want to get you and
others to never use that word. It's a very like dehumanizing,
stigmatizing word that just doesn't see them as human beings.

Speaker 1 (49:36):
What do you want to call them?

Speaker 3 (49:37):
Incarcerated people? Okay, so.

Speaker 2 (49:42):
Those visits, you know, I could see, like I would
walk through and see where the buildings were and what
a cell looked like, and that was useful. But I
couldn't talk to people, and I wanted to talk to people.
So I found out about a program that was in
a prison in Maryland, not too far from DC. I
started volunteering, started teaching, and I just got hooked. And
I developed incredible ties with a group of incarcerated men

(50:04):
thirty or so plus or minus and over different courses
for years, where I was going in week after week,
you know, fully volunteer, paying my own gas whatever, just
because I loved the exchanges that we had, and I
would be teaching. But I was learning so much more
than I was teaching when it comes down to it.

Speaker 1 (50:24):
I was learning from them.

Speaker 2 (50:25):
And I saw this transformation happen in front of my
own eyes. I saw a man with a huge tattoo
on his forearm that said kill A with an A
who left his gang as a result of the first
class he took with me and ended up becoming an
amazing student, ended up getting a bachelor's degree that he

(50:49):
was almost done with in prison, and then got released
from prison and got it when he came home from prison.
I've seen so many other people who previously have been violent,
committed harm, have hurt people. I don't want to mince words.
I don't want to shy away, you know, I want
to be real. I'm not trying to say like they
were in for you know, smoking a joint and got
pulled over, and sense that the years they're talking people

(51:11):
who were bad dudes and did bad things, but who
are capable of so much more, and who are capable
of transforming as they age, as they grow, as they learn,
as their priorities shift, and who when they get released again.
I'm not controlling their release. That's the court system, which
is flawed too. But eventually they get to that door

(51:34):
and they're going to be ready. And now through that
I taught in that program. Then the program got canceled, ironically,
because we were doing such a good thing and there
was so much interest in these classes, and the prison
was like, oh, this is like too much. Now they're
you know, they're writing like grievance letters and they're demanding
their rights and so on. So they shut it down.

(51:54):
Then I went to a different facility. You know, expression
one door closes and another door opens, started up a
program at the DC jail. This time, I built up
more of an institution at Georgetown. I'd started the Prisons
and Justice Initiative, and I said, hey, how about we
bring a Georgetown program to the DC Jail. The director responded, yeah, yesterday.
We started two weeks later. Then a semester after that,

(52:16):
we started offering credit bearing courses. Now we have four
credit bearing courses a year, taught by Georgetown faculty at
the dcjail.

Speaker 1 (52:23):
We have students by Georgetown.

Speaker 3 (52:25):
Georgetown.

Speaker 1 (52:26):
We're a better education than I mean, that's a lot
of people.

Speaker 3 (52:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:30):
And then we started hold on a bachelor's degree program
in a Maryland prison.

Speaker 1 (52:33):
Which took so much work. A bachelor's a.

Speaker 3 (52:36):
Georgetown degree program. It's a five year program. We have
one more year and we're.

Speaker 2 (52:42):
Gonna have our first graduation in a prison with Georgetown
diplomas that are handed out to incarcerated students.

Speaker 1 (52:49):
And when I get out of prison, they will have
a diploma from Georgetown.

Speaker 3 (52:53):
Right, They're going to have it even while they're in prison.

Speaker 1 (52:55):
How could that not be life changing?

Speaker 3 (52:57):
It's totally life changing.

Speaker 2 (52:58):
What But now I know there's a pard to you
and certainly listeners who are saying, why do they deserve that?

Speaker 1 (53:03):
Why are they getting a Georgian degree?

Speaker 3 (53:04):
And it's for free.

Speaker 2 (53:06):
We have it funded by donors and by foundations that
have supported our program. And my answer is, we are
reducing crime. We are reducing costs. It costs fifty thousand
a year on average to incarcerate somebody. Some states it's
as high as eighty thousand a year. When somebody is
ready to return to society and when somebody does not

(53:26):
commit a future crime. We are saving money. We are
saving victims, which is even more important than money. It's priceless.
We are reducing crime, and we are making our society better.
We're helping children. Fifty percent of incarcerated people have kids. Imagine,
and I know you had some on your football team
that you coached who've got a parent in prison.

Speaker 3 (53:45):
How hard is that that kid just doing the time.

Speaker 2 (53:49):
Many many yes, I know that kid's doing the time too,
and they are fully innocent, and so what we're doing
with these programs. We also have reentry programs which I
can get into too. We'll get out, but we are
helping to reduce crime and cost and making our society
better by giving people support in prison so they can
change their lives and turn their lives around and be

(54:10):
positive contributors and role models to society.

Speaker 1 (54:15):
We'll be right back. All of that is so pragmatically,
fantastic pragmatically, but I think there's another reason. The question

(54:37):
was that you just asked us that we should be
asking ourselves, is why do these people deserve it? Why
are they getting this? And the pragmatic answer is everything
you just said. I think there's an idealistic answer to
that actually matters, and it comes from this question. What
percent of the people you work with in prisons are

(55:01):
victims of some kind of childhood trauma themselves?

Speaker 2 (55:04):
Almost all of them? And that is so important, So
grateful that you brought that up. It's something to be honest,
I didn't fully recognize and appreciate when I first started
doing this work, and I remember getting a little bit
of a sense of it, and then, you know, because
society likes to make this distinction, you know, good and evil.

(55:26):
You've got shows like Law and Order where there's like,
you know, the good people trying to solve the crimes
and the bad people committed them, and it's just like
all one of the other.

Speaker 1 (55:34):
And it's so neat. Exactly every episode you tie up
in a.

Speaker 2 (55:37):
Bow and go to sleep at night feeling good, Oh
I got caught, We're all safe.

Speaker 3 (55:41):
Ry well.

Speaker 2 (55:43):
I remember once being in a room and by this
time I'd been going and regularly these guys we had trust,
we had a bond. They trusted me, and that's in
some ways was harder to earn. I had to earn
their trust. I do every single time I go into
a prison, which again is like you know, several times
a week. But I remember one time, I just said,
you know, I'm curious, how many of you, before he

(56:05):
came to prison, how many of you lost a close person,
I mean close, you know, someone that you grew up with,
a parent, a sibling. There were like thirty guys in
the room, like twenty eight hands went up, and I'm
thinking that is just unimaginable to me. I can't real that,

(56:27):
and in a way, I think is a direct cause
for the conduct they then committed that led them to
go to prison. There's a guy that I remember.

Speaker 1 (56:36):
How many of them were abused? How many of them?

Speaker 3 (56:38):
So many?

Speaker 1 (56:38):
How many of them children had.

Speaker 2 (56:40):
Cigarette butts in the head by their dad or stepdad
or whatever, you know.

Speaker 3 (56:45):
I remember a guy, Bobby who he was.

Speaker 2 (56:49):
He was telling a story and he mentions in passing
that he was about, I think about ten years old,
and he was going to get to another part of
the story, which I don't even remember, and I want
to doesn't it's not even relevant, But just in passing,
he's telling me how he had these two older brothers
and they were his role models, and they were really
close in age, all three of them, and he was
the youngest of the three, and they were.

Speaker 3 (57:09):
Two older sisters.

Speaker 2 (57:10):
But he was so tight with his brothers, and he
just admired them and idolized them the way a younger
brother does his older brothers, right, And he mentions that
they were both murdered within like three months of each other.
And he was then getting on to a point and
I stopped my bud. Her you were ten years old

(57:31):
and you lost to murder. You lost your two brothers.
And then at sixteen, he commits murder and goes to
prison for life, But so is he guilty of murder?

Speaker 3 (57:42):
Did he take a yes? But you got to take
that into context.

Speaker 2 (57:48):
And when you start hearing those stories over and over,
you realize we're not really solving the problem of harm.

Speaker 1 (57:55):
We're just sort of actually perpetuating it over and over.

Speaker 2 (57:59):
And the way we do it now in general, doesn't
help people. People come out worse than when they went in,
which is why we need these programs, why we need
so many more of them. They should be all across America.
Prisons should be about rehabilitation. I'm not and I'll be
clear on this, and I have sometimes students who are
like strident, like I'm a prison abolitionist.

Speaker 1 (58:19):
No one should be in prison. I don't agree with that.

Speaker 2 (58:21):
I think somebody is hurting other people should be separated
from society, but they should be safe. Shouldn't be subject
to violence, sexual violence. If we didn't even get into that,
that's the horror show that takes place in a lot
of prisons too. But they should be given opportunities to
change and to improve and to come out better. Other
countries do that. Some American prisons do that. Some programs,

(58:46):
including the programs that I run in prisons, do that.
But we need them to be everywhere because otherwise we're
literally just contributing to more crime. So we think it's
being tough on crime, but we're actually enabling and contributing
to more crime down the road.

Speaker 1 (59:01):
That's the What does it? What does it cost to
house a not an inmate, an incarcerated person annually?

Speaker 2 (59:09):
It costs anywhere from thirty to seventy thousand a year,
so I say roughly fifty thousand on average nationally, depends
on the area.

Speaker 1 (59:16):
What's it cost to educate one of them in prison? Oh?

Speaker 2 (59:19):
I mean a fraction of that, you know, I mean,
you know when you have another present.

Speaker 1 (59:23):
Answer to it right there? I mean, just from a
cost standpoint, what are we doing? We spend more to
imprison a person than we do to educate h I
mean in Memphis, to Sendeka to school is sixteen thousand
dollars a year all in, and it's fifty to lock
one up. We can educate three for locking up every one.

(59:44):
What are we doing? That's right?

Speaker 2 (59:47):
So there's a lot that should be done on the
early end too, and a lot of states have cut
their education budgets just as they're increasing their correction budgets.
These are like two lines that cross like an X.
But I really believe, and I know you leave this
as well, that we should never give up on anybody.
I believe people.

Speaker 1 (01:00:04):
Are capably believe the human is redempt of Now, yeah,
there are some people who are.

Speaker 2 (01:00:13):
Yeah, there's some some very psychotic.

Speaker 3 (01:00:17):
Something or other. Yeah, but that's not the tiny percentage.

Speaker 1 (01:00:20):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:00:21):
The vast majority of people are capable of change, are
capable of overcoming circumstances, are capable of being.

Speaker 3 (01:00:29):
Good and doing good.

Speaker 2 (01:00:32):
And I believe that, and I think that I've helped
to create that and want to continue to expand it.

Speaker 1 (01:00:37):
So then the next step is after prison. I asked
you earlier what do people not really understand about incarceration
in the United States? And I think you amply answered that.
The next step is what do people not really understand
about re entry? Which is horrifically difficult.

Speaker 3 (01:00:55):
It's really hard.

Speaker 2 (01:00:56):
Yeah, So I should say again, learning from the European model,
as I wrote about in my book Unusually Cruel and
have experienced in spending time in other countries other countries.
Not only is incarceration about rehabilitation and preparing you.

Speaker 3 (01:01:12):
But they actually help you with the re entry process.
They help you get a job.

Speaker 2 (01:01:16):
Your last six months of incarceration, you're working in a job,
going out of the prison, and then coming back. So
it's all about a gradual transition process that makes you
a contributing member of society. They work with you on
your resume and how to explain in interviews that you
were incarcerated.

Speaker 3 (01:01:33):
Right, what do you do when you have a gap
like that?

Speaker 2 (01:01:36):
I mean, in this country, you come out and your
records still haunt you. You run a big scarlet f on
your chest for felon, and that in every job application.

Speaker 3 (01:01:46):
Is going to come up.

Speaker 2 (01:01:47):
There's this whole thing about banned the box, about the
first stage when you apply, about whether there's a box
to check that you're a felon or not.

Speaker 1 (01:01:53):
And a lot of people are excited because some.

Speaker 2 (01:01:55):
Cities and states have banned the box so that you
don't have to do it, but it comes up later anyway.

Speaker 3 (01:02:00):
It's just as damaging.

Speaker 2 (01:02:01):
The problem is that you never really get over your
past in this country, and they are all these what
are called collateral consequences, these ways in which you're restricted
from public housing, from food stamps, from you know, it
depends on the state or on the jurisdiction. But there's
all these ways, like you can't do certain professions, be
a firefighter, be a barber, but you know, things that

(01:02:22):
are totally irrational. Yeah, and many states you can't be
a barber and sometimes job yeah yeah, well, oh, you know,
scissors could be a violent weapon. So there's so much
irrational fear. And in many states it's hard to vote.
You know, some argue that the termine the two thousand
presidential election. I don't want to get into that, but

(01:02:44):
you know, there's a lot of people in a number
of states where you can't vote for certain of a
year's even potentially for life, when you have a felony
record in the past. Most other countries you can vote
while you're incarcerated, which, by the way, you can do
in Maine, Vermont, and DC those the three jurisdictions with
the tiny populations. But let me say this what we've

(01:03:04):
done at Georgetown in our programs through the Prisons of
Justice Initiative, and then we've had two re entry programs.
One is called the Pivot program, so you pivot, you know,
change direction and that's in business and entrepreneurship. It's a
ten month program, fully paid in partnership with the DC government.
We've had we're now on our eighth cohort, eighth year

(01:03:27):
a year, yeah, so it's a year. It's a ten
month program, so it's every year we started.

Speaker 1 (01:03:32):
It's a year of the program. Yea.

Speaker 2 (01:03:34):
Each cohort is a different group of people. And then
we have a paralegal program.

Speaker 1 (01:03:40):
You're on your eighth of the pivot yeah, yeah, and
what are the results?

Speaker 3 (01:03:43):
Well, I'm going to get to that.

Speaker 2 (01:03:45):
And then we've got six cohorts that we've had so
far of our paralegal program, so six years of that
and that's a six month fully paid program in paralegal studies.
Combined with those pivot and paralegal programs, we've had one
hundred and fifty graduates. One is back in prison out

(01:04:05):
of one hundred and fifty. The national rate is seventy percent.
We are under one percent.

Speaker 1 (01:04:10):
The national recidivism, right, yeah, is seventy percent. That's right,
meaning within three years people are back someone released will
be back in prison. That's seven out of ten.

Speaker 3 (01:04:19):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (01:04:20):
We are one out of one hundred and fifty one
hundred and fifty that's right.

Speaker 2 (01:04:24):
So what this ninety three percent have jobs within three months.
Some have started their own businesses. And I'm so proud
of them because I know them, I care about them,
I love them. But I'm also happy to say that
this shows that it can work. In other words, people

(01:04:46):
are capable of doing making good choices and having good outcomes.

Speaker 1 (01:04:50):
And I cannot go back to the pragmatic what is
the What is the financial benefit of taking somebody who's
costing society fifty to seventy thousand dollars a year and
they are now part of society, buying homes, paying property packses,

(01:05:12):
paying income taxes, paying into the Social Security administration. It's
I mean it literally is if it costs somebody, If
it costs fifty thousand to keep somebody locked up, and
then you turn around and somebody's contributing positively twenty thousand
dollars in taxes to society, that is a seventy thousand

(01:05:33):
dollars a year. Pragmatically, we're not even talking about the
human side. That is seventy thousand dollars per person per
year times one hundred and fifty bill Yeah, actually right,
that's it at times one hundred and fifty. That is
twelve and a half million annually positive save to just

(01:05:58):
that one community, these callers.

Speaker 2 (01:06:02):
It's staggering, but it's also saggering. It's also easy in
the sense that it's cheap. It makes perfect sense economically,
and we just.

Speaker 1 (01:06:11):
Got to get over our sense of they don't deserve it.
They got to be punished, but we got to get
to our sense of what's right for society. And they
are being punished. Their freedom has been taken. Children are
being punished. Their children are being punished, but they are
being punished again. It's a difference in a pardon and forgiveness.
We're not saying it harden them now, We're just saying

(01:06:32):
forgive them and let's make society better with them. If
there's a better answer, that's right.

Speaker 2 (01:06:37):
Yeah, And so I believe strongly that again through this
bizarre route that I've taken that started with Marty and
then went to wrongful convictions and then started going into prisons,
that I've been able to see a magic formula that
with proper support and a lot of this, all I mean,

(01:06:57):
all this depends on philanthropy. Everything I do, and I've
got four nonprofits, and I have to raise every penny
of it, and it all depends on people who care
and who see the good that's created and believe that,
you know, this is a better way.

Speaker 3 (01:07:07):
We don't get, you know, government funding.

Speaker 2 (01:07:10):
We have some small grants in here and there, but
it's really donor based philanthropy five oh one C three
funding that allows us to do this work that ultimately
saves taxpayers, you know, like you said, millions of dollars
and creates a lot.

Speaker 3 (01:07:22):
Of good and beautiful stories of redemption.

Speaker 1 (01:07:28):
We'll be right back. You alluded to the Frederick Douglass Project,
and I wanted to give you a quick opportunity. It's

(01:07:49):
built on a pretty simple idea of people change when
distance appears, which I found kind of interesting. That's that's
really interesting because I think that could be even multi
layered itself to disappears, distance disappears and what actually happens
when someone sits from the outside across from someone inside

(01:08:10):
of prison. And I want to also offer the opportunity
when we talk about distance disappearing not only from people
working with folks who are incarcerated, but also when family
is able to visit and that distance disappears.

Speaker 2 (01:08:27):
Yeah, Well, for most people when they get incarcerated, they
might as well go to Mars. They're so cut off
from society. They might have some family visits, but frankly
those are often few and far between. It's really hard
to visit prison. They're far away, people are poor, they
can't get there.

Speaker 1 (01:08:45):
Lots of prisons have found that contraband gets into the
prisons through those visits. In so many prisons in the
United States have just suspended all of the family visits. Unfortunately.

Speaker 3 (01:08:56):
Yeah, which.

Speaker 2 (01:08:59):
Because that's the story that prisons will give you about contraband.
But the vast, vast majority of contraband comes through guards,
from the guards who are corrupted. I'm sorry I misstated
that it's no.

Speaker 1 (01:09:12):
The argument is that contraband comes in so the prisons
have used this as a way to spend So when
you say people on Mars and then they have to
pay for phone calls, they literally the distances you might
as well be on one. Yes, that's all the Federal
Project says.

Speaker 2 (01:09:29):
We break down the barriers, break down the distance, and
we create proximity. We bring people inside. So it's not
just the physical distance, it's like emotional distance because if
maybe like your average listener who probably has never visited prison,
maybe has had a family member incarcerated, maybe not, but

(01:09:51):
doesn't really know more than what's on TV shows, and
probably has a sense that, you know, there's like prisons
are scary and people are coming running around with shanks,
and that it's you know, it's sort of like dangerous place,
and that couldn't be further from the truth. You've got
a lot of people who've again done bad things, made
bad choices, but are trying to get on a better path.

(01:10:14):
And what the Frederick Douglas Project does is it brings
members of free society into prisons and jails all around
the country. We're in we're about to be in our
seventeenth state, and we're in about thirty facilities, and we're
spreading quickly, and we're coast to coast. I could name
all our states, but really like from New England to
you know, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi. We've been departure and farm

(01:10:38):
into some prisons outside of Jackson.

Speaker 3 (01:10:41):
I know you've got off, Yeah, yeah, very tough. We yeah, we're.

Speaker 2 (01:10:47):
About to start soon in Texas, but we're we're in California,
We're about to start in Arizona, Washington State, and we're
in Idaho and and a lot of the Midwest to Illinois, Ohio, Michigan,
so we really in all different areas and we bring
people inside for about a two to three hour experience,
the heart of which there's a visit of the prison,

(01:11:08):
you get ce cells, but the core of it is
sitting down with incarcerated people, men and women, and talking
with people. And we have a set of conversation starters
framing the first of big group conversation introductions and then
small groups where people go really deep into who they are.
It's not about crime, it's not about prison, It's about
who we are as people. And let me tell you,

(01:11:30):
when people walk out after those experiences, they are changed,
they are moved. The outside participants as we call them,
we don't use the word inmate. So the outside participants
come out blown away by the people they met, by
just the richness and complexity of the conversation types. Just
everything melts away, and then the inside people suddenly they

(01:11:50):
have purpose, they have hope.

Speaker 1 (01:11:52):
They realize there's a society out there that's.

Speaker 2 (01:11:54):
Going to welcome them when they come home, that they
might have job opportunities, that they're capable, that they're worth something.
I cannot tell you how many times I've had someone
say I feel human today, and then they call their
loved ones, their spouse or their children, and you know,
it creates this connection to the outside world that gives
them meaning, gives them purpose. And so it's a beautiful

(01:12:15):
program for everyone who participates.

Speaker 3 (01:12:18):
And the amazing part of it.

Speaker 2 (01:12:19):
When I started this, I thought it's going to be
hard to get correctional officials to trust me enough in
my program enough to let us in. Well, now they're
calling me they want this program because it works so well.
I've never had a program get canceled even though they couldn't,
you know, like that if something went wrong, and they

(01:12:40):
realize that it makes their prisons easier to run because
people are more upbeat, they're doing positive things, travel exactly exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:12:48):
So feel more like human beings, and they're more energized
and hopeful. They're less likely to do something stupid. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:12:55):
So our matra in that program is common humanity.

Speaker 2 (01:12:57):
And that's something emphasized in all my programs and my work,
which is that we need to.

Speaker 3 (01:13:01):
Recognize the common humanity.

Speaker 2 (01:13:03):
We need to support each other as human beings, regardless
of where we've been, regardless of what we've done. That
we need to rise above these categories that society has
imposed and regularly reinforces on us and to achieve something
better as human beings together.

Speaker 1 (01:13:20):
So once someone from the outside, I think you call
them from the outside.

Speaker 3 (01:13:25):
Yeah, outside for the world.

Speaker 1 (01:13:27):
Yeah, I feel like I'm talking about water World or something.
But from want somebody from the outside the system sees
people inside the system, it's hard to stay a bystander.
What does that realization ask the rescue of us today?
What does that ask of our listeners? What does that
ask of the army and normal folks? What what does

(01:13:49):
that realization from what you've seen in the program you've created,
need to say to.

Speaker 2 (01:13:55):
The rest of Yes, yeah, no, I have a clear
and simple answer to that.

Speaker 3 (01:13:59):
So I'll say it in two parts.

Speaker 2 (01:14:01):
One is, if there's ever an opportunity to visit a
prison through the Frederick Douglas Project for Justice, please join us.
Go to Douglas Project dot org, look at our sites
and join a visit if there's one in proximity to
where you live, and then you'll have that experience firsthand.

Speaker 4 (01:14:18):
Actually one thought I had in real time, Bill, this
would be great for our army activations, So for our
service clubs for lost and six around the country. I
was telling you in the car, it'd be a great
thing for these service clubs to do as a group.
I love going there together absolutely.

Speaker 1 (01:14:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:14:31):
Anyway, yeah, we love bringing full groups in too.

Speaker 2 (01:14:33):
So that's a great idea organizationally to do to link
us together. But for those who can or who won't
for any reason, although little footnote, I have brought in
a number of people who've been victims of crimes.

Speaker 3 (01:14:47):
And that's really powerful because that leads to.

Speaker 2 (01:14:49):
This incredible realization that is liberating for them as victims
to achieve that type of forgiveness and to understand people
bull who even have committed harm it's not necessarily their
own perpetrator in their case.

Speaker 1 (01:15:04):
But what is it for an incarcerated person to watch
a victim of crime. It's moving forgiveness that incarcerated person
must be like, Okay, it is possible that I could
be worthy for society.

Speaker 2 (01:15:19):
Again, let me tell you, incarcerating people are not supposed
to show emotion in prison, especially men.

Speaker 3 (01:15:25):
Right, there's a whole that's a whole toughness.

Speaker 2 (01:15:28):
It's a whole thing, right, And I've seen a lot
of really tough guys cry in prison. I mean, you'd
think there were chopping onions all day long when I
go in there. I mean, we're talking heavy emotions because
it has to do with harm caused, with forgiveness, with redemption.
They go really deep inside of themselves and.

Speaker 1 (01:15:50):
I can't imagine a more mental experience. Yeah, it's watching
the transformation of a grown up human being who's been
through it. That's right.

Speaker 2 (01:15:59):
So let me get the general answer now that I
would love everyone who's listening to think about, which is
picture somebody you know in your life, and it could
be a brother or sister, or a good friend, or
somebody who struggled, somebody who has problems with addiction, has
made bad choices, has just put themselves in the wrong
situation with people and just done stupid things, stupid shit.

(01:16:22):
I mean, you know, my best friend died of an
overdose this past summer. I'm still devastated by and don't
know how it happened and can't believe it. But I
want you to think about somebody who made bad choices,
the kind of person you just love, but you just
think why why? And imagine that person going to prison

(01:16:45):
making a decision that crosses the line of the law.
They get caught, they go to prison, would you stop
loving them? Imagine it's your kid. I mean so many people.
They have parents, they have moms dads who love them.
Would you stop loving them? Would you want them to
be mistreated? Would you want them to be abused? Would
you want them to suffer? No, you would want them

(01:17:05):
to rehab. You would want them to get better. You
would want them to be treated in a way that
allows them to turn their life around. So what I
say is I think of every incarcerated person in the
United States that way. I think of them all like
they're my brother, sister, or my best friend.

Speaker 1 (01:17:22):
Well they are.

Speaker 3 (01:17:24):
They are.

Speaker 2 (01:17:24):
That's right, and I want That's what I try to spread.
If I had to generalize it to one message, it's
care about all incarcerated people like they're your own brother
and sister, and then treat them that way and support
programs that will treat them that way, because.

Speaker 3 (01:17:38):
We will all be better off.

Speaker 2 (01:17:39):
We will reduce crime and reduce costs, and we will
be a much more healing and loving society.

Speaker 3 (01:17:45):
If we can do that.

Speaker 2 (01:17:45):
And you know what, it might sound like a pipe dream,
but it's not like it works when others are doing
it like it's doable. We need to scale it and
do it more. But we actually have the solution at
our fingertists.

Speaker 3 (01:17:59):
We need to just.

Speaker 1 (01:18:00):
When you put it on that word parsonal level, it
is profound. I did what you asked me to do
as you were talking, and I thought about somebody who
I love very very much, who has struggled with bad
decisions but as a really good person, and the last
thing I want them to do is end up in prison.
But if they did, I would, I would do everything

(01:18:20):
I could to support the revolentation. And if it's okay
for that human being, why not for all the others.
And that's what you're saying.

Speaker 3 (01:18:31):
That's exactly what I'm saying. And I didn't just.

Speaker 1 (01:18:33):
And in that context, how can you not support that?

Speaker 3 (01:18:37):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:18:38):
Yeah, And I didn't just sort of have this from
the beginning. I didn't just sort of invent it. It's
not some slogan. It's literally something that I've worked through,
painstakingly in a torturing myself, trying to grapple with these
really hard questions like I'm in a room with thirty

(01:18:59):
people who took a lot. I mean that's heavy. You
know that weighs on me. Yet I love them and
I try to understand it all and balance it all
and think about it and come up with a solution
that will improve their lives and improve us as a society.

Speaker 3 (01:19:18):
And you know what, I'm a much better person for
it too.

Speaker 1 (01:19:21):
I think that's why your story, more honestly, is so compelling,
because you're not some guy standing on the corner wave
in some flag with a bullhorn, screaming society for being
that unfair. No, you're not doing it at all. No,
you're simply trying to support the broken. That's right.

Speaker 4 (01:19:43):
More than simply like you built a really comprehensive solution
for one human being from exoneration in the prison to
re entry. I mean, it's remarkable. It is comprehensive you've
been as one human being. What's also remarkable is it
started defending the unjustly incarcerated and now are defending the

(01:20:05):
incarcerated justly.

Speaker 1 (01:20:07):
Right, crazy, Yeah, Marty involved.

Speaker 3 (01:20:10):
Yeah, Marty's on the board of the Douglas Project. Of
course we work together exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:20:15):
No, because you know, many xuneries like Marty, they through
their own experience, they saw, you know, well they live,
they made bad choices, and they still support them and
they want to see them getting free as well and
doing good, the right thing.

Speaker 1 (01:20:30):
When they're out. Good people do bad things all day,
every day. And if we really are the country and
the society and candidly the culture, the Judeo Christian culture
that we claim ourselves to be, redemption has to be
a part of this. And if you can come up
with ways to creat programs that people can actually earn

(01:20:53):
redemption and rear inner society from both the human and
pragmatic when in situation, you know, I just can't understand
how we can't start listening to this. Yeah well one of.

Speaker 2 (01:21:15):
You, Yeah, yeah, Well, I'm trying to create programs that
are scalable, you know, And I'm trying to build teams
in all my programs and organizations who are devoted and
who get the message and support the cause and are really,
you know, as committed as I am. So it's by
no means just me, and I'm trying to set them

(01:21:38):
up so that they will survive me. And if I
get hit by a bus, you know tomorrow that everything
will be okay and the mission will continue. You know,
as I said, a lot of it depends on on
philanthropy and on donors. I realize also that there's a
paradox here, which is especially for an army of normal folk,
which is that you know, I do have fancy degree

(01:22:01):
and you know, I sometimes can play those up. I
can turn up you know, Yale, UC Berkeley, Georgetown and
all that. I can go into these fancy crowds. I
was also, you know, the lead tennis player and played
you know, at a closter pro level with Evon Lindell's
practice partner when he was winning Grand slams.

Speaker 3 (01:22:16):
And I can play up the country club crowd.

Speaker 2 (01:22:20):
But when it comes down to it, where I really
find my moral compass is in prison. And that's totally bizarre,
and I realized that doesn't make sense. Hopefully after this
conversation it makes a little more sense. But when you're
around people who have experienced real suffering, real struggle, real redemption,
it's very different than just being in a world among
privileged people. And I've been in both of those worlds

(01:22:42):
and I benefit from that. I'm not going to, you know,
pretend that that's not the case. But where I think
I truly find myself and where I've truly grown is
through my experience with incarcerated people, and that's something I
want to continue.

Speaker 3 (01:22:57):
But I also want to spread and I want more.

Speaker 2 (01:22:59):
People to have that disposure, to see that beauty and
find that magic that I found.

Speaker 1 (01:23:05):
We often talk about on the show that the magic
in life happens when one's passion collides with opportunity. And
your passion probably really fueled by your buddy Marty, and
then the opportunity from both your political science background, your

(01:23:26):
academic background and the story of Marty collided at this
world of incarcerated people with your passion. And you know, Mark,
it doesn't matter about all the degrees and stuff. Sure
the pedigree is cool, but none of that really matters.

Speaker 3 (01:23:42):
It doesn't matter to me.

Speaker 1 (01:23:44):
Does matter is you've become passionate about a need and
you figured out ways to fill it. And it feels
like every step of your life, from knowing Marty in
preschool until this point has led to this work. Yeah,
it's just a normal do finding his passion as opportunity
and do it.

Speaker 3 (01:24:03):
That's how I feel.

Speaker 2 (01:24:03):
I mean, I don't have my diplomas up honestly don't
give it, but I don't care.

Speaker 3 (01:24:08):
It's a piece of paper. To me. What matters is
the life experience that I've led.

Speaker 2 (01:24:12):
And sure it took me through some fancy places at times,
but where I've really developed my moral core and compass
is in working with incarcerated people. And I find so
much humanity, so much beauty, so much character in them,
and that's what I want to spread to people around
the country, around the world.

Speaker 1 (01:24:33):
Mark Howard Everybody, founding director of the Prisons and Justice
Initiative at Georgetown University and founder of the Frederick Douglas
Project of Justice, and more importantly, a guy whose story
if you hear it and you listen to the data,
and you listen to the advice, and you listen to

(01:24:54):
the real world experience, has got a challenge us to
think about all this stuff, all prison reform and criminal justice,
all of it a little differently, and challenge ourselves to
remember what our foundation on our basis is as citizens
of this culture and this society, and recognize we can

(01:25:15):
do more. Mark, thanks so much, Thanks for what you do,
Thanks for flying into Memphis real quick to share the
story with us, and I just got to believe there's
more down the road, and so I can't wait to
keep in touch with you and hear what's next.

Speaker 3 (01:25:32):
I look forward to that.

Speaker 1 (01:25:33):
Thank you, Bill really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you, and
thank you for joining us this week. If Mark Howard
has inspired you in general, or better yet, to take
action by bringing making an exoner ree to your university,
or visiting a prison with the Frederick Douglas Project, or

(01:25:55):
something else entirely, I'd love to hear about it. You
can write me anytime at Bill at normal folks dot us,
and I will respond. If you enjoyed this episode, share
it with friends and on social subscribe to the podcast,
rate it, review it, join the army at normal folks
dot us. All of these things that will help us
grow an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Cortney. Until

(01:26:18):
next time, do what you can