June 5, 2025 • 32 mins
Newt talks with Gerard Robinson, a professor of practice at the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia, about his recent article on how World War II influenced prison policy. Their conversation explores Robinson's experiences mentoring youth in the juvenile justice system and teaching fifth grade, which shaped his views on criminal justice reform. They discuss the impact of high suspension rates on future incarceration, the importance of education in reducing recidivism, and innovative programs like Texas's Prison Entrepreneurship Program. Robinson shares insights from international prison visits, highlighting Norway's principle of normality and its potential application in the U.S. Their discussion also covers historical treatment of prisoners of war in the U.S. compared to Japanese Americans during WWII, and the implications of the 1871 Virginia Supreme Court ruling on prisoners as "slaves of the state." Robinson's work and publications are available through the University of Virginia and the American Enterprise Institute.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
On this episode of the News World, I'm really pleased
to welcome my guest, Gerard Robinson. He's a professor of
practice in public policy and law at the Frank Baton
School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia.
We're discussing his latest peace for the Virginian Pilot, entitled
How World War II Became a Fork in the Road
(00:25):
on prison policy. We're going to discuss what he's learned
from visiting prisons around the world, how World War Two
shaped prison policy in places like Norway, and what lessons
we can learn here in the United States. Gerard, welcome
(00:49):
and thank you for joining me again in the News World.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Yes, the speaker, always a pleasure to be with you.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
You know, you grew up in Los Angeles and you
studied philosophy at Howard University, and while there you und
local youth and the juvenile justice system. How did your
experience as a mentor in the juvenile justice system in
DC shape your views on criminal justice reform.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
The young men that I worked with were between the
ages of sixteen and nineteen, mostly African American and now Salvadorian,
and they were involved with a lot of trouble with
the law, and it was a forward thinking just you said,
tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to
put you in a diversion program, and if you go
through the program, I'll take care of your record. You
can move forward. The one thing all of those young
(01:32):
men which they would have had in their lives were
strong literacy skills. And for me, that was aha to
say that if I want to help move us close
what we call now in the school to prison pipeline,
to open up a school to prosperity pipeline, I've got
to focus more on literacy. So that decision maybe become
a fifth grade school teacher instead of going into the
(01:54):
private sector. But it also shaped really early. If there
was a link between the likelihood of finding yourself incarcerated
and the link between education.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Given your general background and what you were studying at Howard,
that's a pretty amazing thing. What was it like to
teach fifth grade?
Speaker 2 (02:13):
It was great for a couple of reasons. Number one,
the students were old enough to still be interested in learning,
and yet old enough not to be too cool to care,
and so they really thought that history was interesting. I
loved it. In fact, one of the greatest compliments I
ever received as a fifth grade school teacher. One of
(02:34):
my fifth grade students invited me, my wife, and two
of my three daughters to his home for Thanksgiving a
year ago, and his mom came to my wedding, and
so it just showed the kind of impact I had
on his family but also on mind. But I also know,
and you probably know this as well as the speaker,
seventy percent of the American students who drop out of
(02:55):
high school they drop out in the tenth grade. It's
not because there's something magical about the tenth grade. It's
because what you didn't master in elementary school, particularly in reading,
will catch you. So I was glad to start off
as a fifth grade teacher.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
When you look at the study about Mecklenburg and the
students that they had studied for the entire period from
ninety eight to twenty eleven, and they tracked twenty six
thousand students, and they concluded the young adolescents who attend
school with high suspension rates are a lot more likely
to be arrested and jailed as adults. In a sense,
(03:33):
the school behavior relates pretty directly to what's going to
happen to him.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Later on, when I would meet with other teachers in
Los Angeles, both public and private school, and we had
conversations about family, about communities, one thing that would always
come up in the conversation is Girard or Karen or
Susi or La Kwan missing too many days. And we
know from research that if you miss more than five days,
(03:58):
there's a trickle effect on you falling behind, particularly in mathematics.
But we also know that if you're falling behind in
middle school, it's tougher to catch up in high school. Now,
we have plenty of examples of people who've been able
to overcome, but absenteeism is a major factor that we
often do not talk about because it's not something that
(04:19):
we think about. What we hear a fight and that
leading to out of school suspension, a student not doing
well and maybe having to go to summer school. Well,
you know what, sometimes absenteeism are being involved or being
away from school involved in outside activities can influence it.
So I'm not too shocked about it, but it's one
reason why we as a nation, particularly we're going to
(04:40):
look at NAPE scores, should talk about absenteeism. And it's
long term impact on families.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
So the whole issue. If they're not in the classroom,
they're not learning. And yet, if I understand it correctly,
back in nineteen seventy four, they're about a million, seven
hundred thousand students who are suspended from school. By the
early nineties that number had jumped like to three point
one million. I don't know what the current number is,
but in a sense, it's counterproductive to be kicking them
(05:10):
out if the net result is they're more likely to
end up in prison.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Absolutely, and that's why some reformers in the eighties and
the nineties created alternative schools. These were more of a
halfway spot. We're not going to send you back home.
We know you're probably not going to do well there.
We can't keep you in school, and so we'll create
an alternative school. And that's one way to address some
of the challenges you mentioned. But there were some students who,
(05:36):
because of the type of crime or infraction, could not
go to an alternative school. They had to go to
a juvenile justice system. And there are some places like
Texas and Georgia, which in fact your state, which in
fact has a state wide school district made up of
juvenile justice age young men and women with the goal
(05:57):
of trying to give them a GED or high school
diploma to complete. And so we've got some experience with
addressing what we can do with those students. But you're right,
if you're not in and you're out, we're going to
see you in a caartural system at some point.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
I was surprised when I was looking at this study.
Fifty two percent of people in prison score below level
two on a numerousy test, vastly more than the country
at large. And also twenty five percent of the people
in prisons came from a household where neither parent had
gotten a high school diploma. So is there a problem
here of people growing up in a household where nobody's
(06:34):
been educated. Compounds the problem over time and creates sort
of a continuous linkage to you don't learn, so you
end up as a criminals who end up in jail.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Absolutely, you know, we know that one of the top
five determinants on how well is do in school is
the education of the mother, something that my wife reminds
me with greatly. So one is if you're from a
home where neither parent finished high school, the chances of
you finishing are tough. Again, there are examples of people
who are now holders of a PhD from a home
(07:07):
without it, but for too many children, it puts you
on a school to suspension pipeline or a school to
drop out pipeline. And so in a place like Virginia
where I am right now, just a year ago, we
celebrated awarding more than five hundred GEDs to incarcerated people
here in the Commonwealth. Well, the reason I celebrate that
(07:30):
is because it's great to see our Virginia Department of
Corrections and our leaders Governor Youngkin, Secretary Amy Gudera, and
others making a big push to close the achievement gap
by providing an education. Some will say a second chance.
I will say some of these adults, as high school
students or middle school students, they ever had a first chance.
So that's a great thing, but it's also a sad
(07:52):
reminder that we have to wait for someone to go
to prison in order to earn a GED or a
high school diploma.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
So your experience way you've seen so far that the
act of earning the GED dramatically increases the likelihood the
one they get out of prison, they'll stay out.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Yeah, there's a grade two studies one in twenty nineteen,
one earlier twenty fifteen from the RAND Corporation, and those
scholars identify that if you participate in a correctional education program,
that's a dope basic secondary. Well, that's a dope basic education,
which many Americans are involved in. Now that's also high
school what they call adult secondary education. There's also post
(08:33):
secondary education, which is college and career in voke tech.
If you participate, there's a thirty two percent less likelihood
that you will actually return to prison. Follow Up studies
have identified that people who actually earned a certificate for
a job, the likelihood of them returning to prison as
well has dropped. There's some challenges along the way, but
(08:55):
there's definitely at least someone will say was is it
causal or was a correlation? While I'll let the economists
and the others debate that, I just know, having talked
to employers and having talked to college professors and to
the incarcerated themselves, when they find a great education program,
some may lead to a degree, some may not. It's
(09:16):
the whole idea of being enlightened or reawakened and use
that education and say, you know what, I'm going to
do something differently, particularly for those who become entrepreneurs.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Now Texas has taken I think an interestingly different approach
and what they call their Prison Entrepreneurship Program, where they
actually trained people into the principles of business so that
they could become entrepreneurs when they get out, which is
I think an interesting approach.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Yeah. I had actually had an opportunity to see the
prison Entrepreneurship program in person several years ago when I
was visiting Texas and I happened to arrive at one
of the days where I sat as a judge and
had an opportunity to hear the job pitch. Well. I
was so moved by what I saw that some years
after that, when I was full time at the American
(10:05):
Enterprise Institute, we partnered with the University of Baltimore doctor
Andrea Contoora, and we had a joint conference where we
brought in people from the Prison Entrepreneurship Program, the entire panel,
and just imagine when the audience learned that here were
three men who have been formally incarcerated. One of them
(10:25):
was out of prison. Now he had a truck driving
business making more than ten thousand a month, and another
who had a construction company where he would gross over
a million a year. And so it showed people in fact,
who had no criminal record, who were in college or
law school or a master's program. People were earning more
than we would coming out. And it was just like, Aha,
(10:46):
people can make a big change. But that's one great program.
I also think about programs closer to home. In DC,
doctor Stanley Andrews was formerly incarcerated. He has a PhD
in an NBA. He's got a nonprofit call from prison
sales to PhD where he's taking people to the next
level and saying, you know you can do this well.
(11:08):
And even here in Charlottesville, we have Resilience Education, which
is a nonprofit organization that partners with the Dark School
of Business at UVA. We've awarded more than a thousand
certificates in business entrepreneurship and people are coming out creating
jobs or getting jobs. So those things matter.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
We've been talking about different projects around the country, but
you now teach a course at the University of Virginia
entitled Education inside the US and International Prisons. What inspired
you to start looking internationally in.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Twenty eighteen and Elizabeth Smith where at AEI working with
a group of people on the left and the right
to try to lift the peil Grant band. And during
that bipartisan work a metal gentleman by the name of
Author Riser. He at the time was working for a
right of center think tank. Well author has since then,
(12:18):
he's enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Oxford.
He and his wife, who are both Army veterans, they're
the founders of the Aero Center for Justice and they're
looking at criminal justice in particular. And a good friend
of ours named Mark Howard, who's a professor at Georgetown University,
runs a exoneration project and the Frederick Douglass Project. The
three of us got together and Authors said, listen, I'm
(12:41):
taking a group of Americans left right, formerly incarcerated reformers
and others to visit prisons in other countries, just so
you can see what they're doing. Well, lo and behold.
Our group had an opportunity between twenty twenty three to
twenty four to go visit prisons in Norway, in Germany,
and Brazil. With another organization, had a chance to go
(13:02):
to Kenya, but what we learned from There were a
couple of things. At number one, there are some great
things that other countries are doing that we can adopt here.
But number two that there are actually some programs here
in the United States that other people like Norway, for example,
Norway's drug Court was adopted from the United States, which
was created, you know, in the late eighties in Florida.
(13:25):
And so that was the first AHA. And then I
went to my forward thinking dean at both the law
school and Batan School and said, if in fact we
want to train or prepare our students for leadership domestically
and internationally, we've got to get them on the other
side of the Atlantic or the Pacific. And so that
started a class where I'm bringing international concepts into our conversation.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
You know. I was also surprised. I didn't realize that
it's been a very long process of Europeans and Americans
looking at each other's prison practices, apparently going on all
the way back to alex Detoquil in the eighteen thirties.
What is it do you think that we're all sort
of floundering trying to find answers to similar problems.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
We are when you think of Norway. The first things
that come to mind are, you know, Christine Mountains, the
Northern Lights, and Great Salmon. When I told friends of
mine that I was taking eighteen UVA students to visit prisons,
the response was, wait, what Why would you go to
such a beautiful country to see such an ugly thing?
The thing the prison that Nathaniel Hawthorn in the Scarlet
(14:33):
Letter referred to as the black flower of civilization or
civilized society. And I said, because Norway is doing something differently,
and the way in which it educates as correctional officers,
one example, in the way that it addresses what we
call rehabilitation. The Norwegian says, ah, you Americans have the
wrong term. I said, well, what do you mean by that?
(14:55):
They said, when you use the term rehabilitation, the assumption
is one that some thing is innately wrong with the person,
and that number two, that your institutions are carcer institutions
in and of themselves can change people. In Norway, we
have something called the principle of normality, and that says
what's that? They said, We want to make your life
(15:17):
during incarceration as normal as possible, so that when you
leave prison or we call re entry. It's not such
a big shock, and so rather being called number seven
five six twenty seven eight, they call me Gerard Robinson.
I wear my daily clothes. I don't wear an orange jumpsuit.
I have my own cell. I have a working relationship
(15:40):
with the parole officer as well as the correctional officer.
So the principal normality is one. And I think another
point is the Norwegians are very clear that your punishment
is your loss of liberty. That once you've lost your
liberty to have interaction with your family on a daily basis,
you know you've lost your job. There's a shame or
who wants to aspect that's your punishment once you walk
(16:03):
into the prison. The goal isn't to punish you more physically,
emotionally and spiritually.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
From your perspective, given problems like gangs, et cetera. Do
you think this kind of approach would work in American prisons?
Speaker 2 (16:17):
I think it will because I'm looking at principles, not
at populations. And here's why I say that. People initially
will say, well, what you're talking about can't work in
the United States because we're more racially diverse. We have
a much larger prison population one point nine million compared
to three thousand. They have one to one guard to
(16:40):
correctional officer to prisoner ratio in the United States could
be one to fourteen, in some places one to thirty,
which is why several states have in fact employed the
National Guard to serve in prison because there's a staff
in shortage. Where those are population dynamics, I'm talking principle.
I'm saying that the principal normality in fact can work
(17:01):
in the United States because the whole idea of treating
people with dignity using this opportunity of incarceration to try
to support you isn't a new idea. I mean, when
toeuk Deville and Beaumont traveled to the United States in
the early eighteen thirties to visit America. When we think
(17:23):
about Tolkeville, we naturally go to Democracy in America, which
was published in eighteen thirty five, but we often forget
that Beaumont and Tolqueville, in fact, they published a book
on the American penitentiary and its application to France, and
so democracy in many ways had to go through the
prison system. They were looking at American prisons because while
(17:44):
we didn't call it a principle of normality, we were
trying to normalize through education, through religious instruction, through self betterment,
and through work how to make this happen. So at
one level, this is partly what we're built on. That's
number one. Number two, there are places who are actually
experimenting with this. Now. When I was at the University
(18:06):
of Oslo, I had an opportunity to meet a professor
who was part of a coalition supporting a program called
Little Scandinavia. And it's the Scandinavian Prison Program Norway, of course,
including Sweden, Iceland, others, and they've implemented it in a
prison outside of Philadelphia. They had the correctional officers from
(18:27):
Pennsylvania traveled to Norway, spend time with their correctional officers,
return to the United States and slowly but surely began
to implement what they've seen in Norway. Now there's actually
a documentary with one of the guards from Pennsylvania said, listen,
I just don't believe this. I'm not sure it's going
to work, but hey, I'm going to get a great
trip to Norway. Well, today, he's one of the biggest
(18:50):
proponents of the trip because he said what he realized
we had to change in the US wasn't simply the
color of a prison or paint on the wall or uniforms.
It was a cultural shift. And we know from social
anthropology that cultures define as a transmission of hope, ideas,
beliefs from one generation to the next. Well, we can
(19:12):
inculcate ideas of human dignity, of reform, of betterment through
a cultural change. It's not going to be easy, it's
not going to be overnight, but you have organizations who
are doing that, so it's starting to work. It's already
here in the US. But you also have organizations like
Prison Fellowship started by Chuck Colson, who've been involved in
prison work for over thirty years, who are doing great work.
(19:35):
So we have examples. But yes, it could work here.
It'll just take a cultural shift. A phrase of often
heard you use, we have to get rid of the
prison guards of the past.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Mentally, that phrase may apply more to this podcast than
to most of them. One of the things that you've
really mentioned is that we actually ran much much bigger
prisoner of war camps in the United States. We had
about four hundred thousand prisoners of war, some three hundred
and fifty thousand Nazis. But we dealt with them in
a context of the Geneva Convention of twenty nine. What
(20:10):
was the effect of that? Mean, to what extent were
the prisoners dealt with and a humane system that enabled
them to return to civilian life afterwards.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
One of the benefits of my trip to Germany with
the cohort from the Aer Center was to actually visit
different camps. So we went to Hamburg, which the second
largest city in Germany, in May of twenty twenty three.
We had a chance to go to the New and
Gummen concentration camp, and it was created by the Nazis
(20:41):
in nineteen thirty eight. By the time we get to
nineteen forty five, forty thousand prisoners had died in the camp.
And so we're taking a tour of the camp with
a great God who has given us the history. He
happened to mention in me to be in passing. He says, well,
you know, you Americans had some of our guys or
in your and I knew we had some, But to
(21:02):
be honest with the speaker, when I returned home from
that trip and began to do research. I was shocked
to know that at my gut level, I figured we
had twenty thousand prisoners of war in the United States.
In fact, when I asked friends of mine, both who
are university professors and otherwise, no one's gotten over fifty thousand.
When I mentioned we had more than four hundred thousand
(21:25):
prisoners of war in forty two states between nineteen forty
two and forty five, They're like, wait, now, that can't
be true. And then I began to send them information
and even in Virginia we had seventeen thousand. Now here's
what's different. To get to your question, the Geneva Convention
of nineteen twenty nine established a playbook for how to
(21:47):
treat prisoners of war who were captured. And so, if
you were a prisoner of war in the United States,
there were a few things you received. Number one, you
received nutritious meals per day, not just any meal. There
was actually a coleric minimum per day that POW's had received.
They had an opportunity to work. Some of them worked
(22:09):
on the grounds of the prison camp. Some were actually
working outside the prison camp in local businesses in park.
Because many men had gone off to war, and some
other dynamics. Many of them had an opportunity to enroll
into free education classes. Not simply high school, but there
were also college classes that they can roll in for free.
(22:32):
And they were also able to drink beer. Now, this
was primarily the treatment for prisoners of war. If you
were a general or higher ranking, you even received better treatment.
And so I sat here for a moment and said,
wait a minute, you mean at the same time that
we were fighting overseas, that when we brought three hundred
(22:54):
and fifty Nazis and some Italians and others over to
the United States, that they were being treated more humane,
with more dignity, receiving an education at a time in
American history when many whites in the United States, particularly
in the South, could not afford to go to a
public or private university. At the same time, you had
(23:15):
black soldiers who were fighting overseas only to come back
home and sit on trains guarding the Nazis, only to
find out that once they passed the Mason Dixon line
that they told the black soldiers they had to go
to the back of the train, while the white soldiers
sat in the front laughing at them, calling them monkeys
and all kinds of names that you and I know about,
(23:37):
And so I was like, how is it that this
could happen? Well, digging deeper to Geneva Convention of twenty nine,
I understand why. But the bigger takeaway for me is
we don't need a new experiment on whether or not
in America can treat people who are incarcerated with human dignity.
We already have an example of doing so. It just
(23:57):
happened to be other people's prisoners. Now.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
One of the points you make, though, is that we
actually treated the Nazis better than the one hundred and
twenty thousand Japanese Americans who went to the US and
tournament camps, even though two thirds of the Japanese were
American citizens. Why were we treating our own citizens worse
than we were treating the Nazis?
Speaker 2 (24:38):
Were definitely part of it is cultural. At the time
that the Executive Order assigned to round up one hundred
and twenty thousand plus Japanese, this was built on over
seventy five years of anti Asian laws and policies in
the US, all the way from California to Washington, d C.
And what's so interesting is that two thirds of them
(24:59):
again where Americans g but we also put them in
we called them internment camps. We'd call them concentration camps.
They were called internament camps because for legal reasons they
were technically different. But when you looked at the treatment
and the way in which the Japanese Americans were treated
compared to the Nazis, culture was definitely dynamic. Number two
(25:20):
was also international law. We wanted to treat the Germans
and the Italians and the others well in hope and
Japanese well in hope that they would treat our prisoners
of war with the same dignity. Well, we know it
didn't happen to a lot of POWs in Japan. It
was a movie several years ago about that story, and
we know some similar tragedies happened over there. But race
(25:44):
and class definitely had a role to play in how
we treated the Japanese. And it was later Ronald Reagan
signing legislation to provide their descendants reparations for that type
of tragedy.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
It's one of the grammar parts of twentieth century American history.
Although the treatment of African Americans and the treatment of
Native Americans was a continuing problem throughout that entire century.
Part of this which got us on the wrong track.
I think you mentioned that there was a eighteen seventy
one Virginia Supreme Court ruling. Can you explain it?
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Yeah, absolutely, And so there were a few men who
had found themselves in trouble with the law, and the
case ultimately made its way to the Virginia Supreme Court.
It's the Rough and the Commonwealth case. And when they
were trying to decide on what to do with the
men here, there was a phrase that was used to
(26:42):
determine how to treat them, and it's this term. They
basically said that prisoners were merely slaves of the state,
and that phrase helped lay the foundation for what in
penal practice is called the hands off doctrine, simply meaning that,
(27:03):
for the most part, prison and incarceration is a state function.
Of the approximately one point nine million people who are
incarcerated today, less than two hundred thousand of those are
in federal prisons. And so they're saying this is a
state function. And when the incarcerated began to identify indignities
(27:24):
placed upon them by Wharton's correctional officers, either other incarcerated
men and women. They said, we need legal relief. And
from the eighteen seventies up until around the nineteen fifties,
before the start of the civil rights movement, many judges said, listen,
we simply can't have the judiciary involving itself in the
(27:46):
day to day management of prisons as once as just
as Thomas said, course decades later, these are naturally dangerous places,
and so the hands off doctrine basically said, listen, prisoners
are mere slaves of the state, looking at this metaphorically
and otherwise, and therefore we cannot do much for you.
And so when the Germans or the POWs from other
(28:10):
countries are here, they're treated with dignity because they're not
slaves of the state. They're citizens of another country, citizens
that were at war with But we've signed on to
a doctrine and a social compact that says we will
treat these people differently. And yet in your state of Georgia,
(28:30):
where there were approximately twelve thousand POWs, some of them
at Camp Wheeler and Macon and others at Camp Stewart
and Savannah, they weren't treated with the same dignity, even
though they were American citizens. In many ways, symbolically and metaphorically,
they were still slaves of the state.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
The date of this decision, eighteen seventy one, is only
six years after the Civil War. So the term slave
in Virginia had a very vivid, complete state of impotence
and subservience. Wasn't just a rhetorical term. It had a
very vivid and real meaning.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Absolutely. Yeah, after the Civil War. Before the Civil War,
the majority of the people who were incarcerated in state
prisons and federal to some extent in jails were white.
And my students are often shocked by that statement, and
I said, well, it's because the blacks were already in prison.
It was called slavery. Now, of course there were free
blacks who found themselves incarcerated, but after the Civil War,
(29:32):
going up to nineteen hundred, many prisons, particularly in the
Deep South, became ninety percent black. And so that phrase
slave of the state, naturally, as you mentioned, was more
than just symbolic.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
So REMARKA, you know, I always find when I talk
with you, I learned stuff that I had no notion
of because of the range of research and the work
you do. Where can listeners read more of your work
or follow the projects you're involved in.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
So if you go to my website at the Batin
School of Leadership and Public Policy at UVA, you could
find not only my web page, but a link to
some of the work that I do, both publication wise
and also presentations. Second is to go to my page
at the American Enterprise Institute. I've got articles there from
(30:20):
twenty fifteen moving forward, and also you can purchase a
book that I had a chance to co author, publishing
twenty nineteen, is called Education for Liberation, The Politics of
Promise and Reform Inside and Beyond America's Prisons, and the
forward is written by two people speaking New Gingrich and
Van Jones.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
That was one of our early collaborations, which seems to
always surprise people. We're going to post those on our
show page so that people who listen this can find
all of your points of entry. You're very busy and
very creative. I'm really grateful that you would take the
time to join me, particularly since in the next few
days your daughter is going to get married, so it's
(31:03):
very cool that you take the time out. Thank you
for joining me. Your recent op ed piece how World
War Two became a fork on the road on prison policies.
It's available now on the Virginian Pilot website at Pilot
online dot com, and we'll post all of the ways
of reaching you on our show page. Thank you very much, Gerard.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Thank you, missus Speaker, for your continued leadership in this
and so many other areas of social and pullet policy.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Thank you to my guest Gerard Robinson. You can learn
more about criminal justice reform on our show page at
newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld is produced by Ganglish three sixty
and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloman. Our researcher
is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created
by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team in ganlishtree sixty.
(31:51):
If you've been enjoying Nutsworld, I hope you'll go to
Apple Podcasts and both rate us with five stars and
give us a review so others can learn what it's
all about. Right now, listeners of newts World can sign
up for my three freeweekly columns at Ginglish three sixty
dot com slash newsletter. I'm newt Gingrich. This is Newtsworld
On this episode of the News World, I'm really pleased
to welcome my guest, Gerard Robinson. He's a professor of
practice in public policy and law at the Frank Baton
School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia.
We're discussing his latest peace for the Virginian Pilot, entitled
How World War II Became a Fork in the Road
(00:25):
on prison policy. We're going to discuss what he's learned
from visiting prisons around the world, how World War Two
shaped prison policy in places like Norway, and what lessons
we can learn here in the United States. Gerard, welcome
(00:49):
and thank you for joining me again in the News World.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Yes, the speaker, always a pleasure to be with you.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
You know, you grew up in Los Angeles and you
studied philosophy at Howard University, and while there you und
local youth and the juvenile justice system. How did your
experience as a mentor in the juvenile justice system in
DC shape your views on criminal justice reform.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
The young men that I worked with were between the
ages of sixteen and nineteen, mostly African American and now Salvadorian,
and they were involved with a lot of trouble with
the law, and it was a forward thinking just you said,
tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to
put you in a diversion program, and if you go
through the program, I'll take care of your record. You
can move forward. The one thing all of those young
(01:32):
men which they would have had in their lives were
strong literacy skills. And for me, that was aha to
say that if I want to help move us close
what we call now in the school to prison pipeline,
to open up a school to prosperity pipeline, I've got
to focus more on literacy. So that decision maybe become
a fifth grade school teacher instead of going into the
(01:54):
private sector. But it also shaped really early. If there
was a link between the likelihood of finding yourself incarcerated
and the link between education.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Given your general background and what you were studying at Howard,
that's a pretty amazing thing. What was it like to
teach fifth grade?
Speaker 2 (02:13):
It was great for a couple of reasons. Number one,
the students were old enough to still be interested in learning,
and yet old enough not to be too cool to care,
and so they really thought that history was interesting. I
loved it. In fact, one of the greatest compliments I
ever received as a fifth grade school teacher. One of
(02:34):
my fifth grade students invited me, my wife, and two
of my three daughters to his home for Thanksgiving a
year ago, and his mom came to my wedding, and
so it just showed the kind of impact I had
on his family but also on mind. But I also know,
and you probably know this as well as the speaker,
seventy percent of the American students who drop out of
(02:55):
high school they drop out in the tenth grade. It's
not because there's something magical about the tenth grade. It's
because what you didn't master in elementary school, particularly in reading,
will catch you. So I was glad to start off
as a fifth grade teacher.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
When you look at the study about Mecklenburg and the
students that they had studied for the entire period from
ninety eight to twenty eleven, and they tracked twenty six
thousand students, and they concluded the young adolescents who attend
school with high suspension rates are a lot more likely
to be arrested and jailed as adults. In a sense,
(03:33):
the school behavior relates pretty directly to what's going to
happen to him.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Later on, when I would meet with other teachers in
Los Angeles, both public and private school, and we had
conversations about family, about communities, one thing that would always
come up in the conversation is Girard or Karen or
Susi or La Kwan missing too many days. And we
know from research that if you miss more than five days,
(03:58):
there's a trickle effect on you falling behind, particularly in mathematics.
But we also know that if you're falling behind in
middle school, it's tougher to catch up in high school. Now,
we have plenty of examples of people who've been able
to overcome, but absenteeism is a major factor that we
often do not talk about because it's not something that
(04:19):
we think about. What we hear a fight and that
leading to out of school suspension, a student not doing
well and maybe having to go to summer school. Well,
you know what, sometimes absenteeism are being involved or being
away from school involved in outside activities can influence it.
So I'm not too shocked about it, but it's one
reason why we as a nation, particularly we're going to
(04:40):
look at NAPE scores, should talk about absenteeism. And it's
long term impact on families.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
So the whole issue. If they're not in the classroom,
they're not learning. And yet, if I understand it correctly,
back in nineteen seventy four, they're about a million, seven
hundred thousand students who are suspended from school. By the
early nineties that number had jumped like to three point
one million. I don't know what the current number is,
but in a sense, it's counterproductive to be kicking them
(05:10):
out if the net result is they're more likely to
end up in prison.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Absolutely, and that's why some reformers in the eighties and
the nineties created alternative schools. These were more of a
halfway spot. We're not going to send you back home.
We know you're probably not going to do well there.
We can't keep you in school, and so we'll create
an alternative school. And that's one way to address some
of the challenges you mentioned. But there were some students who,
(05:36):
because of the type of crime or infraction, could not
go to an alternative school. They had to go to
a juvenile justice system. And there are some places like
Texas and Georgia, which in fact your state, which in
fact has a state wide school district made up of
juvenile justice age young men and women with the goal
(05:57):
of trying to give them a GED or high school
diploma to complete. And so we've got some experience with
addressing what we can do with those students. But you're right,
if you're not in and you're out, we're going to
see you in a caartural system at some point.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
I was surprised when I was looking at this study.
Fifty two percent of people in prison score below level
two on a numerousy test, vastly more than the country
at large. And also twenty five percent of the people
in prisons came from a household where neither parent had
gotten a high school diploma. So is there a problem
here of people growing up in a household where nobody's
(06:34):
been educated. Compounds the problem over time and creates sort
of a continuous linkage to you don't learn, so you
end up as a criminals who end up in jail.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Absolutely, you know, we know that one of the top
five determinants on how well is do in school is
the education of the mother, something that my wife reminds
me with greatly. So one is if you're from a
home where neither parent finished high school, the chances of
you finishing are tough. Again, there are examples of people
who are now holders of a PhD from a home
(07:07):
without it, but for too many children, it puts you
on a school to suspension pipeline or a school to
drop out pipeline. And so in a place like Virginia
where I am right now, just a year ago, we
celebrated awarding more than five hundred GEDs to incarcerated people
here in the Commonwealth. Well, the reason I celebrate that
(07:30):
is because it's great to see our Virginia Department of
Corrections and our leaders Governor Youngkin, Secretary Amy Gudera, and
others making a big push to close the achievement gap
by providing an education. Some will say a second chance.
I will say some of these adults, as high school
students or middle school students, they ever had a first chance.
So that's a great thing, but it's also a sad
(07:52):
reminder that we have to wait for someone to go
to prison in order to earn a GED or a
high school diploma.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
So your experience way you've seen so far that the
act of earning the GED dramatically increases the likelihood the
one they get out of prison, they'll stay out.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Yeah, there's a grade two studies one in twenty nineteen,
one earlier twenty fifteen from the RAND Corporation, and those
scholars identify that if you participate in a correctional education program,
that's a dope basic secondary. Well, that's a dope basic education,
which many Americans are involved in. Now that's also high
school what they call adult secondary education. There's also post
(08:33):
secondary education, which is college and career in voke tech.
If you participate, there's a thirty two percent less likelihood
that you will actually return to prison. Follow Up studies
have identified that people who actually earned a certificate for
a job, the likelihood of them returning to prison as
well has dropped. There's some challenges along the way, but
(08:55):
there's definitely at least someone will say was is it
causal or was a correlation? While I'll let the economists
and the others debate that, I just know, having talked
to employers and having talked to college professors and to
the incarcerated themselves, when they find a great education program,
some may lead to a degree, some may not. It's
(09:16):
the whole idea of being enlightened or reawakened and use
that education and say, you know what, I'm going to
do something differently, particularly for those who become entrepreneurs.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Now Texas has taken I think an interestingly different approach
and what they call their Prison Entrepreneurship Program, where they
actually trained people into the principles of business so that
they could become entrepreneurs when they get out, which is
I think an interesting approach.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Yeah. I had actually had an opportunity to see the
prison Entrepreneurship program in person several years ago when I
was visiting Texas and I happened to arrive at one
of the days where I sat as a judge and
had an opportunity to hear the job pitch. Well. I
was so moved by what I saw that some years
after that, when I was full time at the American
(10:05):
Enterprise Institute, we partnered with the University of Baltimore doctor
Andrea Contoora, and we had a joint conference where we
brought in people from the Prison Entrepreneurship Program, the entire panel,
and just imagine when the audience learned that here were
three men who have been formally incarcerated. One of them
(10:25):
was out of prison. Now he had a truck driving
business making more than ten thousand a month, and another
who had a construction company where he would gross over
a million a year. And so it showed people in fact,
who had no criminal record, who were in college or
law school or a master's program. People were earning more
than we would coming out. And it was just like, Aha,
(10:46):
people can make a big change. But that's one great program.
I also think about programs closer to home. In DC,
doctor Stanley Andrews was formerly incarcerated. He has a PhD
in an NBA. He's got a nonprofit call from prison
sales to PhD where he's taking people to the next
level and saying, you know you can do this well.
(11:08):
And even here in Charlottesville, we have Resilience Education, which
is a nonprofit organization that partners with the Dark School
of Business at UVA. We've awarded more than a thousand
certificates in business entrepreneurship and people are coming out creating
jobs or getting jobs. So those things matter.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
We've been talking about different projects around the country, but
you now teach a course at the University of Virginia
entitled Education inside the US and International Prisons. What inspired
you to start looking internationally in.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Twenty eighteen and Elizabeth Smith where at AEI working with
a group of people on the left and the right
to try to lift the peil Grant band. And during
that bipartisan work a metal gentleman by the name of
Author Riser. He at the time was working for a
right of center think tank. Well author has since then,
(12:18):
he's enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Oxford.
He and his wife, who are both Army veterans, they're
the founders of the Aero Center for Justice and they're
looking at criminal justice in particular. And a good friend
of ours named Mark Howard, who's a professor at Georgetown University,
runs a exoneration project and the Frederick Douglass Project. The
three of us got together and Authors said, listen, I'm
(12:41):
taking a group of Americans left right, formerly incarcerated reformers
and others to visit prisons in other countries, just so
you can see what they're doing. Well, lo and behold.
Our group had an opportunity between twenty twenty three to
twenty four to go visit prisons in Norway, in Germany,
and Brazil. With another organization, had a chance to go
(13:02):
to Kenya, but what we learned from There were a
couple of things. At number one, there are some great
things that other countries are doing that we can adopt here.
But number two that there are actually some programs here
in the United States that other people like Norway, for example,
Norway's drug Court was adopted from the United States, which
was created, you know, in the late eighties in Florida.
(13:25):
And so that was the first AHA. And then I
went to my forward thinking dean at both the law
school and Batan School and said, if in fact we
want to train or prepare our students for leadership domestically
and internationally, we've got to get them on the other
side of the Atlantic or the Pacific. And so that
started a class where I'm bringing international concepts into our conversation.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
You know. I was also surprised. I didn't realize that
it's been a very long process of Europeans and Americans
looking at each other's prison practices, apparently going on all
the way back to alex Detoquil in the eighteen thirties.
What is it do you think that we're all sort
of floundering trying to find answers to similar problems.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
We are when you think of Norway. The first things
that come to mind are, you know, Christine Mountains, the
Northern Lights, and Great Salmon. When I told friends of
mine that I was taking eighteen UVA students to visit prisons,
the response was, wait, what Why would you go to
such a beautiful country to see such an ugly thing?
The thing the prison that Nathaniel Hawthorn in the Scarlet
(14:33):
Letter referred to as the black flower of civilization or
civilized society. And I said, because Norway is doing something differently,
and the way in which it educates as correctional officers,
one example, in the way that it addresses what we
call rehabilitation. The Norwegian says, ah, you Americans have the
wrong term. I said, well, what do you mean by that?
(14:55):
They said, when you use the term rehabilitation, the assumption
is one that some thing is innately wrong with the person,
and that number two, that your institutions are carcer institutions
in and of themselves can change people. In Norway, we
have something called the principle of normality, and that says
what's that? They said, We want to make your life
(15:17):
during incarceration as normal as possible, so that when you
leave prison or we call re entry. It's not such
a big shock, and so rather being called number seven
five six twenty seven eight, they call me Gerard Robinson.
I wear my daily clothes. I don't wear an orange jumpsuit.
I have my own cell. I have a working relationship
(15:40):
with the parole officer as well as the correctional officer.
So the principal normality is one. And I think another
point is the Norwegians are very clear that your punishment
is your loss of liberty. That once you've lost your
liberty to have interaction with your family on a daily basis,
you know you've lost your job. There's a shame or
who wants to aspect that's your punishment once you walk
(16:03):
into the prison. The goal isn't to punish you more physically,
emotionally and spiritually.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
From your perspective, given problems like gangs, et cetera. Do
you think this kind of approach would work in American prisons?
Speaker 2 (16:17):
I think it will because I'm looking at principles, not
at populations. And here's why I say that. People initially
will say, well, what you're talking about can't work in
the United States because we're more racially diverse. We have
a much larger prison population one point nine million compared
to three thousand. They have one to one guard to
(16:40):
correctional officer to prisoner ratio in the United States could
be one to fourteen, in some places one to thirty,
which is why several states have in fact employed the
National Guard to serve in prison because there's a staff
in shortage. Where those are population dynamics, I'm talking principle.
I'm saying that the principal normality in fact can work
(17:01):
in the United States because the whole idea of treating
people with dignity using this opportunity of incarceration to try
to support you isn't a new idea. I mean, when
toeuk Deville and Beaumont traveled to the United States in
the early eighteen thirties to visit America. When we think
(17:23):
about Tolkeville, we naturally go to Democracy in America, which
was published in eighteen thirty five, but we often forget
that Beaumont and Tolqueville, in fact, they published a book
on the American penitentiary and its application to France, and
so democracy in many ways had to go through the
prison system. They were looking at American prisons because while
(17:44):
we didn't call it a principle of normality, we were
trying to normalize through education, through religious instruction, through self betterment,
and through work how to make this happen. So at
one level, this is partly what we're built on. That's
number one. Number two, there are places who are actually
experimenting with this. Now. When I was at the University
(18:06):
of Oslo, I had an opportunity to meet a professor
who was part of a coalition supporting a program called
Little Scandinavia. And it's the Scandinavian Prison Program Norway, of course,
including Sweden, Iceland, others, and they've implemented it in a
prison outside of Philadelphia. They had the correctional officers from
(18:27):
Pennsylvania traveled to Norway, spend time with their correctional officers,
return to the United States and slowly but surely began
to implement what they've seen in Norway. Now there's actually
a documentary with one of the guards from Pennsylvania said, listen,
I just don't believe this. I'm not sure it's going
to work, but hey, I'm going to get a great
trip to Norway. Well, today, he's one of the biggest
(18:50):
proponents of the trip because he said what he realized
we had to change in the US wasn't simply the
color of a prison or paint on the wall or uniforms.
It was a cultural shift. And we know from social
anthropology that cultures define as a transmission of hope, ideas,
beliefs from one generation to the next. Well, we can
(19:12):
inculcate ideas of human dignity, of reform, of betterment through
a cultural change. It's not going to be easy, it's
not going to be overnight, but you have organizations who
are doing that, so it's starting to work. It's already
here in the US. But you also have organizations like
Prison Fellowship started by Chuck Colson, who've been involved in
prison work for over thirty years, who are doing great work.
(19:35):
So we have examples. But yes, it could work here.
It'll just take a cultural shift. A phrase of often
heard you use, we have to get rid of the
prison guards of the past.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Mentally, that phrase may apply more to this podcast than
to most of them. One of the things that you've
really mentioned is that we actually ran much much bigger
prisoner of war camps in the United States. We had
about four hundred thousand prisoners of war, some three hundred
and fifty thousand Nazis. But we dealt with them in
a context of the Geneva Convention of twenty nine. What
(20:10):
was the effect of that? Mean, to what extent were
the prisoners dealt with and a humane system that enabled
them to return to civilian life afterwards.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
One of the benefits of my trip to Germany with
the cohort from the Aer Center was to actually visit
different camps. So we went to Hamburg, which the second
largest city in Germany, in May of twenty twenty three.
We had a chance to go to the New and
Gummen concentration camp, and it was created by the Nazis
(20:41):
in nineteen thirty eight. By the time we get to
nineteen forty five, forty thousand prisoners had died in the camp.
And so we're taking a tour of the camp with
a great God who has given us the history. He
happened to mention in me to be in passing. He says, well,
you know, you Americans had some of our guys or
in your and I knew we had some, But to
(21:02):
be honest with the speaker, when I returned home from
that trip and began to do research. I was shocked
to know that at my gut level, I figured we
had twenty thousand prisoners of war in the United States.
In fact, when I asked friends of mine, both who
are university professors and otherwise, no one's gotten over fifty thousand.
When I mentioned we had more than four hundred thousand
(21:25):
prisoners of war in forty two states between nineteen forty
two and forty five, They're like, wait, now, that can't
be true. And then I began to send them information
and even in Virginia we had seventeen thousand. Now here's
what's different. To get to your question, the Geneva Convention
of nineteen twenty nine established a playbook for how to
(21:47):
treat prisoners of war who were captured. And so, if
you were a prisoner of war in the United States,
there were a few things you received. Number one, you
received nutritious meals per day, not just any meal. There
was actually a coleric minimum per day that POW's had received.
They had an opportunity to work. Some of them worked
(22:09):
on the grounds of the prison camp. Some were actually
working outside the prison camp in local businesses in park.
Because many men had gone off to war, and some
other dynamics. Many of them had an opportunity to enroll
into free education classes. Not simply high school, but there
were also college classes that they can roll in for free.
(22:32):
And they were also able to drink beer. Now, this
was primarily the treatment for prisoners of war. If you
were a general or higher ranking, you even received better treatment.
And so I sat here for a moment and said,
wait a minute, you mean at the same time that
we were fighting overseas, that when we brought three hundred
(22:54):
and fifty Nazis and some Italians and others over to
the United States, that they were being treated more humane,
with more dignity, receiving an education at a time in
American history when many whites in the United States, particularly
in the South, could not afford to go to a
public or private university. At the same time, you had
(23:15):
black soldiers who were fighting overseas only to come back
home and sit on trains guarding the Nazis, only to
find out that once they passed the Mason Dixon line
that they told the black soldiers they had to go
to the back of the train, while the white soldiers
sat in the front laughing at them, calling them monkeys
and all kinds of names that you and I know about,
(23:37):
And so I was like, how is it that this
could happen? Well, digging deeper to Geneva Convention of twenty nine,
I understand why. But the bigger takeaway for me is
we don't need a new experiment on whether or not
in America can treat people who are incarcerated with human dignity.
We already have an example of doing so. It just
(23:57):
happened to be other people's prisoners. Now.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
One of the points you make, though, is that we
actually treated the Nazis better than the one hundred and
twenty thousand Japanese Americans who went to the US and
tournament camps, even though two thirds of the Japanese were
American citizens. Why were we treating our own citizens worse
than we were treating the Nazis?
Speaker 2 (24:38):
Were definitely part of it is cultural. At the time
that the Executive Order assigned to round up one hundred
and twenty thousand plus Japanese, this was built on over
seventy five years of anti Asian laws and policies in
the US, all the way from California to Washington, d C.
And what's so interesting is that two thirds of them
(24:59):
again where Americans g but we also put them in
we called them internment camps. We'd call them concentration camps.
They were called internament camps because for legal reasons they
were technically different. But when you looked at the treatment
and the way in which the Japanese Americans were treated
compared to the Nazis, culture was definitely dynamic. Number two
(25:20):
was also international law. We wanted to treat the Germans
and the Italians and the others well in hope and
Japanese well in hope that they would treat our prisoners
of war with the same dignity. Well, we know it
didn't happen to a lot of POWs in Japan. It
was a movie several years ago about that story, and
we know some similar tragedies happened over there. But race
(25:44):
and class definitely had a role to play in how
we treated the Japanese. And it was later Ronald Reagan
signing legislation to provide their descendants reparations for that type
of tragedy.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
It's one of the grammar parts of twentieth century American history.
Although the treatment of African Americans and the treatment of
Native Americans was a continuing problem throughout that entire century.
Part of this which got us on the wrong track.
I think you mentioned that there was a eighteen seventy
one Virginia Supreme Court ruling. Can you explain it?
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Yeah, absolutely, And so there were a few men who
had found themselves in trouble with the law, and the
case ultimately made its way to the Virginia Supreme Court.
It's the Rough and the Commonwealth case. And when they
were trying to decide on what to do with the
men here, there was a phrase that was used to
(26:42):
determine how to treat them, and it's this term. They
basically said that prisoners were merely slaves of the state,
and that phrase helped lay the foundation for what in
penal practice is called the hands off doctrine, simply meaning that,
(27:03):
for the most part, prison and incarceration is a state function.
Of the approximately one point nine million people who are
incarcerated today, less than two hundred thousand of those are
in federal prisons. And so they're saying this is a
state function. And when the incarcerated began to identify indignities
(27:24):
placed upon them by Wharton's correctional officers, either other incarcerated
men and women. They said, we need legal relief. And
from the eighteen seventies up until around the nineteen fifties,
before the start of the civil rights movement, many judges said, listen,
we simply can't have the judiciary involving itself in the
(27:46):
day to day management of prisons as once as just
as Thomas said, course decades later, these are naturally dangerous places,
and so the hands off doctrine basically said, listen, prisoners
are mere slaves of the state, looking at this metaphorically
and otherwise, and therefore we cannot do much for you.
And so when the Germans or the POWs from other
(28:10):
countries are here, they're treated with dignity because they're not
slaves of the state. They're citizens of another country, citizens
that were at war with But we've signed on to
a doctrine and a social compact that says we will
treat these people differently. And yet in your state of Georgia,
(28:30):
where there were approximately twelve thousand POWs, some of them
at Camp Wheeler and Macon and others at Camp Stewart
and Savannah, they weren't treated with the same dignity, even
though they were American citizens. In many ways, symbolically and metaphorically,
they were still slaves of the state.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
The date of this decision, eighteen seventy one, is only
six years after the Civil War. So the term slave
in Virginia had a very vivid, complete state of impotence
and subservience. Wasn't just a rhetorical term. It had a
very vivid and real meaning.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Absolutely. Yeah, after the Civil War. Before the Civil War,
the majority of the people who were incarcerated in state
prisons and federal to some extent in jails were white.
And my students are often shocked by that statement, and
I said, well, it's because the blacks were already in prison.
It was called slavery. Now, of course there were free
blacks who found themselves incarcerated, but after the Civil War,
(29:32):
going up to nineteen hundred, many prisons, particularly in the
Deep South, became ninety percent black. And so that phrase
slave of the state, naturally, as you mentioned, was more
than just symbolic.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
So REMARKA, you know, I always find when I talk
with you, I learned stuff that I had no notion
of because of the range of research and the work
you do. Where can listeners read more of your work
or follow the projects you're involved in.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
So if you go to my website at the Batin
School of Leadership and Public Policy at UVA, you could
find not only my web page, but a link to
some of the work that I do, both publication wise
and also presentations. Second is to go to my page
at the American Enterprise Institute. I've got articles there from
(30:20):
twenty fifteen moving forward, and also you can purchase a
book that I had a chance to co author, publishing
twenty nineteen, is called Education for Liberation, The Politics of
Promise and Reform Inside and Beyond America's Prisons, and the
forward is written by two people speaking New Gingrich and
Van Jones.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
That was one of our early collaborations, which seems to
always surprise people. We're going to post those on our
show page so that people who listen this can find
all of your points of entry. You're very busy and
very creative. I'm really grateful that you would take the
time to join me, particularly since in the next few
days your daughter is going to get married, so it's
(31:03):
very cool that you take the time out. Thank you
for joining me. Your recent op ed piece how World
War Two became a fork on the road on prison policies.
It's available now on the Virginian Pilot website at Pilot
online dot com, and we'll post all of the ways
of reaching you on our show page. Thank you very much, Gerard.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Thank you, missus Speaker, for your continued leadership in this
and so many other areas of social and pullet policy.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Thank you to my guest Gerard Robinson. You can learn
more about criminal justice reform on our show page at
newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld is produced by Ganglish three sixty
and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloman. Our researcher
is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created
by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team in ganlishtree sixty.
(31:51):
If you've been enjoying Nutsworld, I hope you'll go to
Apple Podcasts and both rate us with five stars and
give us a review so others can learn what it's
all about. Right now, listeners of newts World can sign
up for my three freeweekly columns at Ginglish three sixty
dot com slash newsletter. I'm newt Gingrich. This is Newtsworld
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