December 21, 2021 • 25 mins
Katie Schaffer teams up with Jason to discuss educating prisoners, bail reform and making our penal system more humane.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Righteous Convictions with Jason Flam the podcast where
I have the privilege of speaking with people who see
the wrong in the world and are driven to make
it right. Today I speak with the native New Yorker
who saw the differences between the experiences of her own
family and those of her friends within the criminal legal
system and threw herself into the work of leveling the
playing field. If people have what they need, if people
(00:24):
have housing, if people have healthcare, people have the mental
health access that they need, education and job opportunities, that
world will really be fundamentally different, and we wouldn't see
some of the kinds of harm that we see in
the world as it exists right now, in which we frankly,
deeply and structurally deprive people of what they need with
(00:46):
experience and bail, pre trial justice, and educational access reform.
She now leads the organizing and advocacy efforts of the
Center for Community Alternatives Katie Schaffer Right now on Righteous Convictions,
Ye Welcome back to Righteous Convictions with Jason Fom. Today's
(01:17):
guest is Katie Schaeffer. Basically, she is leading the charge
to reform the criminal justice system in New York State,
bail reform, pre trial justice, community support, rehabilitative alternatives, and
making our system more humane both inside and outside the walls.
(01:40):
And her work continues now at the Center for Community Alternatives,
where she serves as the director of Organizing and Advocacy. Wow,
that's an awesome title and we're gonna get right into it. So, Katie,
welcome to Righteous Convictions. Thanks much for having me. So, Katie,
I mean, I know you or a fourth generation New Yorker,
(02:01):
and I know you have a big heart and you
care about fairness and justice and equity. But what led
you into this work? So my family are white, are
Ashkenazi Jews who have now lived in New York City,
as he said, for four generations. And when I was ten,
m Do Diallo was murdered by the ny p D,
(02:22):
who was shot forty two times. It was unarmed, and
it was I think for me, the sort of first
time I had really understood that state safety and state
violence were not equitably distributed, and that sort of systemic
racism could mean death. And I didn't come from a
(02:44):
family that sort of louded the policing or carcetorol system.
But I was also not told as a kid to
be scared of it, and that was sort of an
early politicizing moment for me. And then as I got
a little older, I became really clear of the ways
that my white family and my friends, my black friends,
(03:05):
my Dominican friends in New York cities families did not
have the same relationship to this system, and I started
organizing with other people. And then a bit later on,
after I had graduated from college, I started to do
college in prison work. So I was working at the
City University of New York helping bring in college access
(03:28):
and organizing with incarcerated college students, and we sort of
did what we could to organize behind the walls, you know,
from the tiny material things, the sort of banality of
evil of the prison system, trying to get highlighters for
college students behind the wall. Sort of everything was a
(03:49):
was frankly an organizing fight, and I had, sort of
outside of my education work, was organizing in a volunteer capacity,
and it just became clear that those things needed to
come together, and so I started working at an organization
that was launching Bill reform and pre Trial Justice campaign
to try to end a system of pre trial incarceration
(04:12):
and of wealth based attention. And that's a little bit
at least of how I got into this work, so
out of college and right into the fight, right, And
you know, I'm glad you talked about college in prisons.
You know, I don't think the public has any grasp
on just how transformative education is behind bars and how
(04:32):
much it helps on the outside, because plus percent of
people that are in our prison and jails are going
to come home and it makes a gigantic difference on
how they're going to fare on the outside and whether
or not they'll ever recidivate. So it helps everyone. So
you served as the director of college access at the
Prisoner re Entry Institute. You seem to get saddled with
(04:54):
long titles of long named organizations, and that, of course
was at the Venerable John J College and now it's
called the Institute for Justice and Opportunity. I like that name,
by the way. So you collaborated, I mean not just teaching,
but you also collaborated with incarcerated students to develop and
expand college access in New York State prisons. I know
(05:16):
there were a lot of challenges to that because the
public is like, right, why should we pay are harder
intact dollars to educate people in prisons. So in the
federal government past was called the Crime Bill, which eliminated
PELL grants federal financial aid grants to incarcerated college students.
New York State followed suit in eliminating state financial aid
(05:41):
for incarcerated college students, and this really destroyed access to college.
So what we were doing by the time that I
was there is trying to sort of rebuild this decimated system.
And one of the things that started to make that
more possible was there was an exception to the prohibition
(06:03):
on financial aid under Obama that allowed some colleges to
receive federal financial aid dollars to expand college access. And
then the recent victory of eliminating that prohibition on PELL grants,
and I'm no longer personally doing this work, but creates
a sort of new and expanded opportunity to increase college access.
(06:24):
There continues to be college programs, and only a pretty
small fraction of the prisons in New York State and
certainly much less than the demand of folks behind bars
for access. And so I think that piece about access
and also about quality strong academic access is the important
(06:45):
next stage of that fight. Yeah, you literally flipped the
script because everybody's heard about the school to prison pipeline, right,
and then you've got now the prison to college pipeline, right.
It's really it's kind of poetic. Righteous Convictions with Jason
flam is super excited and honored to have the support
(07:07):
of a great organization like Galaxy Gives. Galaxy Gives leads
the filmthropic efforts of the Novograts family. They invest in organizations, campaigns,
and leaders who are directly impacted by and working to
dismantle the current punitive justice system. Galaxy Gives also builds
power for the community's most harmed by mass incarceration and
forges transformative solutions for responding to that harm. They envision
(07:30):
a society where the structural barriers created by racism, poverty,
and inequality are no more, where instead all people have
the dignity, freedom, and rights needed to thrive. Talked to
(07:51):
me about the Envisioned Freedom Fund. So I did some
work for the Envisioned Freedom Fund back when it was
called the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, and the organization has
played a really important role both in freeing people in
a day to day way and paying people's bail. We
(08:11):
have a system in which huge numbers of people are
incarcerated pre trial on bail they cannot afford, and the
Bail Fund was literally restoring people to their homes, to
their families who were locked up, functionally for the criminalization
of poverty. The Bail Fund, now the Envisioned Freedom Fund,
also played a really important role in showing that money
(08:32):
was not necessary for people to return to court, and
that had sort of been the premise of bail. You
have to set a money bail. Somebody needs to be
financially in debt to the court in order for them
to come back to court. And what the Envisioned Freedom
Fund was able to show is that even when they
paid the bail, so the person themselves was not on
any financial talk that people come back to court, and
(08:54):
that the way that you support people is actually really simple.
It's reminding them they have court and people have busy
and complicated lives, and that sort of really basic court
reminders helped and that if you ask people sort of
what other kinds of support they needed and tried to
provide that support, that was the ticket. And so they
(09:15):
played an important role in the fight for Bill Reform
in New York State to try to drastically reduce the
number of people who are incarcerated pre trial and all
of the cascading harmful consequences that pre trial detention has,
from taking people away from their families, to lost jobs
(09:37):
and housing, to unjust case outcomes in which people take
guilty please frankly, just to get out of jail pre trial,
this sort of system of conveyor belt plea deals, and
so they played an important role in that fight, and
in the passage of Bill Reform in New York State,
we saw a decrease of the number of people incarcerated
(09:58):
pre trial by forty per cent. But it is also
a tinged victory. It's one that we're continuing to fight
as we see the forces of backlash of sort of
lock them up political coarce role conservatism show up. And
so we have been in a sort of continuous battle
on bail reform, which I think we all wish was
(10:20):
moving forward to even further reduce and end pre trial incarceration,
and instead has had to be a battle of defending
what we've won so far. If you could design the
bail system, what would it look like and what do
you say to people that say, well, what are you
gonna do when somebody goes in spraysing McDonald's with bullets
(10:42):
and then you're gonna let them out on the street.
And there's you know, we know what some of the
pitfalls are, but what would your ideal bail system look like.
The vision is from our system's own articulation of itself
that you were supposed to be treated as innocent until
proven guilty. And what pre trial incarceration is is fundamentally
treating people as guilty until they can prove otherwise and
(11:05):
putting them into a setup in which they are very
likely to then end up being coerced into pleading guilty.
And so the vision is for as few people to
be incarcerated pre trial as possible. The way that we've
looked to accomplish that in New York is to guarantee
pre trial freedom for as many people as possible, and then,
(11:26):
in cases where somebody can still be incarcerated pre trial,
to have as many due process protections in place as possible,
to try to again limit the number of people who
are incarcerated pre trial rather than have jail b A
knee jerk response and to prevent the treating of what
(11:48):
police say as the be all and end all that
we see in the reporting in the press quite frequently
that what police say is taken as truth with very
little journalistic integrity or fact checking. But also an arrest
is taken to be somehow equivalent to a conviction in
(12:10):
ways that imbue police with far too much power paymen
to that. And we see it day in and day
out on the news and in video after video, and
it's numbing, you know, But we can't be numbed, and
we can't relax in the world that I want to
live in. We don't put people in cages, so we
(12:31):
do not have jails or prisons. That we have other
ways of dealing with harm, that we meet people's basic needs.
We people have access to equality, housing and healthcare and
educational access and economic opportunities, and that when harm does occur,
that we have restorative processes, that we have other ways
(12:52):
of addressing it that do not mean that people are
in cages for years, decades their lives. And so that
is the sort of long term goal, and it means
that in that context, it requires a sort of fundamental
reimagining of what any of these systems would look like
I'm interested in this point of view. So what happens
(13:15):
they have no prisons at all? Like to take that example, right,
somebody does walk into a McDonald's or or into a school,
right and you know, murder a bunch of people. What
do we as a society if we don't have a
place to put them a prison, for lack of a
better word, what what do we do? I think to
(13:37):
some extent, we collectively haven't answered that question, right that
this is the part of the sort of radical and
visionary work of dreaming a different world, and there aren't
necessarily in this moment sort of the easiest of answers.
I think it begins before somebody has done harm, that
(13:58):
we treat sort of viole as really self evident in
a particular kind of way, as opposed to looking at
the sort of larger structural forces, that if people have
what they need, if people have housing, if people have healthcare,
people have the mental health access that they need, if
people have education and job opportunities, that that world will
(14:20):
really be fundamentally different and we wouldn't see some of
the kinds of harm that we see in the world.
Does it exists right now in which we frankly, deeply
and structurally deprive people of what they need. Then I
think the second piece, because what the criminal legal system
does is once harm has been done, they respond to
(14:42):
that harm. But that's not actually the world that we
want to live in. We want to live in the
world where that harm didn't happen. And so I think
this sort of next piece of it is what is
community safety and violence prevention look like? That isn't just
respond into violence once it has already happened. And I
(15:02):
think some of that is work with and opportunities for
young people, particularly in communities where we have systematically divested
from access and opportunity. Some of that looks like really
important work that violence interrupters and that other kinds of
community based organizations are doing. So you can see sort
(15:25):
of all of the answer that I have given to
you so far is about how do we actually fundamentally
transform the world we live in in such a way
that we don't see the kinds of violence at the
scale that we currently see in the US. And I
think that is actually the vast majority of where I
think energy should be going. Is that kind of systemic
(15:47):
and structural transformation. And then I think there is the
sort of final piece, which is what you're pointing to,
which is even in that world, harm of various scales
will continue to occur. And so how do we address
that harm? What does it look like for somebody to
be held accountable for harm that they've done, for them
(16:08):
to engage in restoration that we have a system right
now in which survivors of harm do not get what
they need. Right if you think about even in in
sort of a casual way of times that you have
been harmed by somebody, what you want is an apology.
(16:29):
You want sort of restoration of whatever was harmed, if
something happened to you know, somebody messed up your favorite hat,
whatever it is that you want something restored. You want
a commitment and some evidence that it's not going to
happen again or happen to somebody else. And these are
things in the important research on sort of like what
do survivors actually want? These are the important things that
(16:52):
people want, and people get none of that in our
criminal legal system as it currently exists. And there are
various groups doing restorative justice in schools, doing restorative justice
in cases where people have been arrested who are trying
to figure out sort of what does that kind of
process look like? And I think that there are some
(17:14):
really powerful models. And also it's something that I think
we're collectively still trying to figure out. You know, I
can see it someday, but until we can answer the
question of what do you do with the guy you
know who goes and shoots up Sandy Hook. Yeah, I
think even for people where it's sort of like harder
to imagine an abolitionist future, I think it is a
useful sort of like provocation for us to be thinking
(17:37):
about sort of what are the underlying or root cause issues,
how do we address those? But even when we address them,
there's still going to be people who are just mentally
disturbed and they're going to go shoot up at school.
That's just what they're gonna do because there's guns. Because
not everybody who does these things was deprived of anything.
Some of them were raised in perfectly normal like Ted Bundy, right,
I mean, what do you do with Ted Bundy when
(17:59):
you catch him? You don't go, hey, Ted, we gotta
get you some mental health treatment. You know, you're not
doing so good there, buddy. He was doing fine. He
was having a great time, and he didn't have any
bunderlying issues and he wasn't a victim of any of
this stuff. I totally hear that. Although I think c
S I, I think, has convinced everybody that there are
a lot of serial killers out in the world, and
I think there aren't. That is really untrue. And I
(18:20):
think having a system where you know, two point three
million people are behind bars every day because but what
I'm saying is that the zero zero is also not
the right number in my opinion. The number was three
hundred thousand a long time ago, and that was too high,
and maybe the number should be fifty thousand, you know,
(18:40):
or maybe it should be ten thousand, but it isn't zero.
You know, there are people who will do terrible, terrible
things given the opportunity, and they can't wait to get
out and do it again, and they've already done it.
And I think that's that's where I draw the line
and say, you know, it's utopian and it's great, and
I love the idea and paper, but unfortunately we're never
(19:01):
going to live in a society that doesn't have that ship.
So so the halt bill, I don't think a lot
(19:23):
of people know about this, but this bill, which was
passed in two thousand nineteen in New York State, stands
for humane alternatives to low term solitary confinement. Its passage
was hailed as a major victory by criminal justice reformers,
you know, everywhere. This was pushing a very large snowball
up a very steep hill, as I recall, So tell
(19:45):
us how you got this done and what it means.
I am sort of humbled and honored for the small
piece of this work that I was able to play.
But this was a decade long fight to get this
bill passed, and it was tenaciously led by survivors of
solitary who continued to fight for the end of the
(20:09):
torture of solitary confinement in New York State. And it
was a narrative fight, It was an organizing fight, It
was a political education fight, and the strategies of the
campaign were creative and brilliant and powerful, and they included
everything from a model solitary confinement cell that would be
(20:33):
brought to events or brought to the state capital for
legislators to be able to step inside and see what
it would mean to be incarcerated for days or weeks,
or months or years in a cell smaller than a
parking space. It included work to build off the declaration
(20:54):
from the u N that incarceration and solitary confinement for
more than fifteen days is torture. It included the nuts
and bolts basic legislative advocacy work of getting supporters co
sponsors among Senators and Assembly members. By the time the
bill had passed, there was majority support from co sponsors
(21:18):
in both the Assembly and the Senate, and had been
for over a year at that point, and that's actually
pretty unusual, and it just shows the tenacity of the
campaign and this sort of willingness to go person by
person to get it done. Yes, I think the sensory
experience of being inside of a jail cell would transform
(21:42):
even some of the hardest hearts. And that's why that
was I think such a you know, stroke of genius.
And the results speak for themselves. So Katie, Um, we
have a tradition, I guess we can call it now
because we've been doing this for a while on Righteous Convictions,
(22:02):
which is that I ask two questions in order of
each of our amazing guests, And of course I start
by thanking you again for being here and for all
the great work you're doing. And the first question is
if you had a magic wand and could fix one problem,
what would it be. This is a hard question to
(22:24):
answer because on some level, I think all of the
problems are interconnected. I don't know how to answer it
is it's sort of one thing. I think. This sort
of thing that I want is for there to be
a commitment to meeting people's needs and for jail in
prison to not be the kinds of knee jerk responses
(22:47):
that they currently are. And I think to do that
requires addressing a really complicated set of interconnected problems, from
white supremacy on the one hand, to a million sets
of state, local, and federal laws and practices. And so
(23:10):
I don't think I'm going to do a good job
of answering a one thing question. All Right, we're gonna
we're gonna kick that down the road. And um. On
that note, I'd like to invite our audience to tune
in next week for a re release of our interview
with Mike nov Grats. Demand behind all of the efforts
of Galaxy gives the philanthropic arm of the nov Grats Family,
(23:31):
and then we're gonna be kicking off two with James Anderson,
an attorney who began his career fighting capital cases in Pennsylvania,
first in the courtroom and eventually in a more macro
sense from his position at the Rand Corporation, where his
research leads to policy prescriptions for the criminal legal system
at large. And now we go to the closing of
our show, which is called Words of Wisdom, where first
(23:53):
of all, I thank you Katie Shaffer for joining us,
and then going to turn my microphone off, leave my
headphones on, kick back in my chair, and just listen
to anything else you feel is left to be said.
Jails and prisons don't solve harm. They create harm, and
much of that is motivated by the fears of white
(24:14):
people and for those of us who are white and
who come from communities that these systems were quote unquote
supposed to protect. We have work to do to both
support and elevate the leadership of people who have been
harmed by these systems, but also to get our folks
and to organize and deal with and educate and support
(24:38):
the people who ostensibly are supposed to benefit from these
systems to see the kind of violence they perpetrate across
the board. Thank you for listening to Righteous Convictions with
(24:58):
Jason plom I'd like to thank our production team Connor Hall,
Jeff Claverne, and Kevin Wardis with research by Lava Robinson.
The music in this production was supplied by three time
OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook,
and Twitter at Lava for Good. You can also follow
me on TikTok and Instagram at it's Jason Flom. Righteous
(25:20):
Convictions with Jason Flom is a production of Lava for
Good Podcasts and association with Say About Company Number one
Welcome to Righteous Convictions with Jason Flam the podcast where
I have the privilege of speaking with people who see
the wrong in the world and are driven to make
it right. Today I speak with the native New Yorker
who saw the differences between the experiences of her own
family and those of her friends within the criminal legal
system and threw herself into the work of leveling the
playing field. If people have what they need, if people
(00:24):
have housing, if people have healthcare, people have the mental
health access that they need, education and job opportunities, that
world will really be fundamentally different, and we wouldn't see
some of the kinds of harm that we see in
the world as it exists right now, in which we frankly,
deeply and structurally deprive people of what they need with
(00:46):
experience and bail, pre trial justice, and educational access reform.
She now leads the organizing and advocacy efforts of the
Center for Community Alternatives Katie Schaffer Right now on Righteous Convictions,
Ye Welcome back to Righteous Convictions with Jason Fom. Today's
(01:17):
guest is Katie Schaeffer. Basically, she is leading the charge
to reform the criminal justice system in New York State,
bail reform, pre trial justice, community support, rehabilitative alternatives, and
making our system more humane both inside and outside the walls.
(01:40):
And her work continues now at the Center for Community Alternatives,
where she serves as the director of Organizing and Advocacy. Wow,
that's an awesome title and we're gonna get right into it. So, Katie,
welcome to Righteous Convictions. Thanks much for having me. So, Katie,
I mean, I know you or a fourth generation New Yorker,
(02:01):
and I know you have a big heart and you
care about fairness and justice and equity. But what led
you into this work? So my family are white, are
Ashkenazi Jews who have now lived in New York City,
as he said, for four generations. And when I was ten,
m Do Diallo was murdered by the ny p D,
(02:22):
who was shot forty two times. It was unarmed, and
it was I think for me, the sort of first
time I had really understood that state safety and state
violence were not equitably distributed, and that sort of systemic
racism could mean death. And I didn't come from a
(02:44):
family that sort of louded the policing or carcetorol system.
But I was also not told as a kid to
be scared of it, and that was sort of an
early politicizing moment for me. And then as I got
a little older, I became really clear of the ways
that my white family and my friends, my black friends,
(03:05):
my Dominican friends in New York cities families did not
have the same relationship to this system, and I started
organizing with other people. And then a bit later on,
after I had graduated from college, I started to do
college in prison work. So I was working at the
City University of New York helping bring in college access
(03:28):
and organizing with incarcerated college students, and we sort of
did what we could to organize behind the walls, you know,
from the tiny material things, the sort of banality of
evil of the prison system, trying to get highlighters for
college students behind the wall. Sort of everything was a
(03:49):
was frankly an organizing fight, and I had, sort of
outside of my education work, was organizing in a volunteer capacity,
and it just became clear that those things needed to
come together, and so I started working at an organization
that was launching Bill reform and pre Trial Justice campaign
to try to end a system of pre trial incarceration
(04:12):
and of wealth based attention. And that's a little bit
at least of how I got into this work, so
out of college and right into the fight, right, And
you know, I'm glad you talked about college in prisons.
You know, I don't think the public has any grasp
on just how transformative education is behind bars and how
(04:32):
much it helps on the outside, because plus percent of
people that are in our prison and jails are going
to come home and it makes a gigantic difference on
how they're going to fare on the outside and whether
or not they'll ever recidivate. So it helps everyone. So
you served as the director of college access at the
Prisoner re Entry Institute. You seem to get saddled with
(04:54):
long titles of long named organizations, and that, of course
was at the Venerable John J College and now it's
called the Institute for Justice and Opportunity. I like that name,
by the way. So you collaborated, I mean not just teaching,
but you also collaborated with incarcerated students to develop and
expand college access in New York State prisons. I know
(05:16):
there were a lot of challenges to that because the
public is like, right, why should we pay are harder
intact dollars to educate people in prisons. So in the
federal government past was called the Crime Bill, which eliminated
PELL grants federal financial aid grants to incarcerated college students.
New York State followed suit in eliminating state financial aid
(05:41):
for incarcerated college students, and this really destroyed access to college.
So what we were doing by the time that I
was there is trying to sort of rebuild this decimated system.
And one of the things that started to make that
more possible was there was an exception to the prohibition
(06:03):
on financial aid under Obama that allowed some colleges to
receive federal financial aid dollars to expand college access. And
then the recent victory of eliminating that prohibition on PELL grants,
and I'm no longer personally doing this work, but creates
a sort of new and expanded opportunity to increase college access.
(06:24):
There continues to be college programs, and only a pretty
small fraction of the prisons in New York State and
certainly much less than the demand of folks behind bars
for access. And so I think that piece about access
and also about quality strong academic access is the important
(06:45):
next stage of that fight. Yeah, you literally flipped the
script because everybody's heard about the school to prison pipeline, right,
and then you've got now the prison to college pipeline, right.
It's really it's kind of poetic. Righteous Convictions with Jason
flam is super excited and honored to have the support
(07:07):
of a great organization like Galaxy Gives. Galaxy Gives leads
the filmthropic efforts of the Novograts family. They invest in organizations, campaigns,
and leaders who are directly impacted by and working to
dismantle the current punitive justice system. Galaxy Gives also builds
power for the community's most harmed by mass incarceration and
forges transformative solutions for responding to that harm. They envision
(07:30):
a society where the structural barriers created by racism, poverty,
and inequality are no more, where instead all people have
the dignity, freedom, and rights needed to thrive. Talked to
(07:51):
me about the Envisioned Freedom Fund. So I did some
work for the Envisioned Freedom Fund back when it was
called the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, and the organization has
played a really important role both in freeing people in
a day to day way and paying people's bail. We
(08:11):
have a system in which huge numbers of people are
incarcerated pre trial on bail they cannot afford, and the
Bail Fund was literally restoring people to their homes, to
their families who were locked up, functionally for the criminalization
of poverty. The Bail Fund, now the Envisioned Freedom Fund,
also played a really important role in showing that money
(08:32):
was not necessary for people to return to court, and
that had sort of been the premise of bail. You
have to set a money bail. Somebody needs to be
financially in debt to the court in order for them
to come back to court. And what the Envisioned Freedom
Fund was able to show is that even when they
paid the bail, so the person themselves was not on
any financial talk that people come back to court, and
(08:54):
that the way that you support people is actually really simple.
It's reminding them they have court and people have busy
and complicated lives, and that sort of really basic court
reminders helped and that if you ask people sort of
what other kinds of support they needed and tried to
provide that support, that was the ticket. And so they
(09:15):
played an important role in the fight for Bill Reform
in New York State to try to drastically reduce the
number of people who are incarcerated pre trial and all
of the cascading harmful consequences that pre trial detention has,
from taking people away from their families, to lost jobs
(09:37):
and housing, to unjust case outcomes in which people take
guilty please frankly, just to get out of jail pre trial,
this sort of system of conveyor belt plea deals, and
so they played an important role in that fight, and
in the passage of Bill Reform in New York State,
we saw a decrease of the number of people incarcerated
(09:58):
pre trial by forty per cent. But it is also
a tinged victory. It's one that we're continuing to fight
as we see the forces of backlash of sort of
lock them up political coarce role conservatism show up. And
so we have been in a sort of continuous battle
on bail reform, which I think we all wish was
(10:20):
moving forward to even further reduce and end pre trial incarceration,
and instead has had to be a battle of defending
what we've won so far. If you could design the
bail system, what would it look like and what do
you say to people that say, well, what are you
gonna do when somebody goes in spraysing McDonald's with bullets
(10:42):
and then you're gonna let them out on the street.
And there's you know, we know what some of the
pitfalls are, but what would your ideal bail system look like.
The vision is from our system's own articulation of itself
that you were supposed to be treated as innocent until
proven guilty. And what pre trial incarceration is is fundamentally
treating people as guilty until they can prove otherwise and
(11:05):
putting them into a setup in which they are very
likely to then end up being coerced into pleading guilty.
And so the vision is for as few people to
be incarcerated pre trial as possible. The way that we've
looked to accomplish that in New York is to guarantee
pre trial freedom for as many people as possible, and then,
(11:26):
in cases where somebody can still be incarcerated pre trial,
to have as many due process protections in place as possible,
to try to again limit the number of people who
are incarcerated pre trial rather than have jail b A
knee jerk response and to prevent the treating of what
(11:48):
police say as the be all and end all that
we see in the reporting in the press quite frequently
that what police say is taken as truth with very
little journalistic integrity or fact checking. But also an arrest
is taken to be somehow equivalent to a conviction in
(12:10):
ways that imbue police with far too much power paymen
to that. And we see it day in and day
out on the news and in video after video, and
it's numbing, you know, But we can't be numbed, and
we can't relax in the world that I want to
live in. We don't put people in cages, so we
(12:31):
do not have jails or prisons. That we have other
ways of dealing with harm, that we meet people's basic needs.
We people have access to equality, housing and healthcare and
educational access and economic opportunities, and that when harm does occur,
that we have restorative processes, that we have other ways
(12:52):
of addressing it that do not mean that people are
in cages for years, decades their lives. And so that
is the sort of long term goal, and it means
that in that context, it requires a sort of fundamental
reimagining of what any of these systems would look like
I'm interested in this point of view. So what happens
(13:15):
they have no prisons at all? Like to take that example, right,
somebody does walk into a McDonald's or or into a school,
right and you know, murder a bunch of people. What
do we as a society if we don't have a
place to put them a prison, for lack of a
better word, what what do we do? I think to
(13:37):
some extent, we collectively haven't answered that question, right that
this is the part of the sort of radical and
visionary work of dreaming a different world, and there aren't
necessarily in this moment sort of the easiest of answers.
I think it begins before somebody has done harm, that
(13:58):
we treat sort of viole as really self evident in
a particular kind of way, as opposed to looking at
the sort of larger structural forces, that if people have
what they need, if people have housing, if people have healthcare,
people have the mental health access that they need, if
people have education and job opportunities, that that world will
(14:20):
really be fundamentally different and we wouldn't see some of
the kinds of harm that we see in the world.
Does it exists right now in which we frankly, deeply
and structurally deprive people of what they need. Then I
think the second piece, because what the criminal legal system
does is once harm has been done, they respond to
(14:42):
that harm. But that's not actually the world that we
want to live in. We want to live in the
world where that harm didn't happen. And so I think
this sort of next piece of it is what is
community safety and violence prevention look like? That isn't just
respond into violence once it has already happened. And I
(15:02):
think some of that is work with and opportunities for
young people, particularly in communities where we have systematically divested
from access and opportunity. Some of that looks like really
important work that violence interrupters and that other kinds of
community based organizations are doing. So you can see sort
(15:25):
of all of the answer that I have given to
you so far is about how do we actually fundamentally
transform the world we live in in such a way
that we don't see the kinds of violence at the
scale that we currently see in the US. And I
think that is actually the vast majority of where I
think energy should be going. Is that kind of systemic
(15:47):
and structural transformation. And then I think there is the
sort of final piece, which is what you're pointing to,
which is even in that world, harm of various scales
will continue to occur. And so how do we address
that harm? What does it look like for somebody to
be held accountable for harm that they've done, for them
(16:08):
to engage in restoration that we have a system right
now in which survivors of harm do not get what
they need. Right if you think about even in in
sort of a casual way of times that you have
been harmed by somebody, what you want is an apology.
(16:29):
You want sort of restoration of whatever was harmed, if
something happened to you know, somebody messed up your favorite hat,
whatever it is that you want something restored. You want
a commitment and some evidence that it's not going to
happen again or happen to somebody else. And these are
things in the important research on sort of like what
do survivors actually want? These are the important things that
(16:52):
people want, and people get none of that in our
criminal legal system as it currently exists. And there are
various groups doing restorative justice in schools, doing restorative justice
in cases where people have been arrested who are trying
to figure out sort of what does that kind of
process look like? And I think that there are some
(17:14):
really powerful models. And also it's something that I think
we're collectively still trying to figure out. You know, I
can see it someday, but until we can answer the
question of what do you do with the guy you
know who goes and shoots up Sandy Hook. Yeah, I
think even for people where it's sort of like harder
to imagine an abolitionist future, I think it is a
useful sort of like provocation for us to be thinking
(17:37):
about sort of what are the underlying or root cause issues,
how do we address those? But even when we address them,
there's still going to be people who are just mentally
disturbed and they're going to go shoot up at school.
That's just what they're gonna do because there's guns. Because
not everybody who does these things was deprived of anything.
Some of them were raised in perfectly normal like Ted Bundy, right,
I mean, what do you do with Ted Bundy when
(17:59):
you catch him? You don't go, hey, Ted, we gotta
get you some mental health treatment. You know, you're not
doing so good there, buddy. He was doing fine. He
was having a great time, and he didn't have any
bunderlying issues and he wasn't a victim of any of
this stuff. I totally hear that. Although I think c
S I, I think, has convinced everybody that there are
a lot of serial killers out in the world, and
I think there aren't. That is really untrue. And I
(18:20):
think having a system where you know, two point three
million people are behind bars every day because but what
I'm saying is that the zero zero is also not
the right number in my opinion. The number was three
hundred thousand a long time ago, and that was too high,
and maybe the number should be fifty thousand, you know,
(18:40):
or maybe it should be ten thousand, but it isn't zero.
You know, there are people who will do terrible, terrible
things given the opportunity, and they can't wait to get
out and do it again, and they've already done it.
And I think that's that's where I draw the line
and say, you know, it's utopian and it's great, and
I love the idea and paper, but unfortunately we're never
(19:01):
going to live in a society that doesn't have that ship.
So so the halt bill, I don't think a lot
(19:23):
of people know about this, but this bill, which was
passed in two thousand nineteen in New York State, stands
for humane alternatives to low term solitary confinement. Its passage
was hailed as a major victory by criminal justice reformers,
you know, everywhere. This was pushing a very large snowball
up a very steep hill, as I recall, So tell
(19:45):
us how you got this done and what it means.
I am sort of humbled and honored for the small
piece of this work that I was able to play.
But this was a decade long fight to get this
bill passed, and it was tenaciously led by survivors of
solitary who continued to fight for the end of the
(20:09):
torture of solitary confinement in New York State. And it
was a narrative fight, It was an organizing fight, It
was a political education fight, and the strategies of the
campaign were creative and brilliant and powerful, and they included
everything from a model solitary confinement cell that would be
(20:33):
brought to events or brought to the state capital for
legislators to be able to step inside and see what
it would mean to be incarcerated for days or weeks,
or months or years in a cell smaller than a
parking space. It included work to build off the declaration
(20:54):
from the u N that incarceration and solitary confinement for
more than fifteen days is torture. It included the nuts
and bolts basic legislative advocacy work of getting supporters co
sponsors among Senators and Assembly members. By the time the
bill had passed, there was majority support from co sponsors
(21:18):
in both the Assembly and the Senate, and had been
for over a year at that point, and that's actually
pretty unusual, and it just shows the tenacity of the
campaign and this sort of willingness to go person by
person to get it done. Yes, I think the sensory
experience of being inside of a jail cell would transform
(21:42):
even some of the hardest hearts. And that's why that
was I think such a you know, stroke of genius.
And the results speak for themselves. So Katie, Um, we
have a tradition, I guess we can call it now
because we've been doing this for a while on Righteous Convictions,
(22:02):
which is that I ask two questions in order of
each of our amazing guests, And of course I start
by thanking you again for being here and for all
the great work you're doing. And the first question is
if you had a magic wand and could fix one problem,
what would it be. This is a hard question to
(22:24):
answer because on some level, I think all of the
problems are interconnected. I don't know how to answer it
is it's sort of one thing. I think. This sort
of thing that I want is for there to be
a commitment to meeting people's needs and for jail in
prison to not be the kinds of knee jerk responses
(22:47):
that they currently are. And I think to do that
requires addressing a really complicated set of interconnected problems, from
white supremacy on the one hand, to a million sets
of state, local, and federal laws and practices. And so
(23:10):
I don't think I'm going to do a good job
of answering a one thing question. All Right, we're gonna
we're gonna kick that down the road. And um. On
that note, I'd like to invite our audience to tune
in next week for a re release of our interview
with Mike nov Grats. Demand behind all of the efforts
of Galaxy gives the philanthropic arm of the nov Grats Family,
(23:31):
and then we're gonna be kicking off two with James Anderson,
an attorney who began his career fighting capital cases in Pennsylvania,
first in the courtroom and eventually in a more macro
sense from his position at the Rand Corporation, where his
research leads to policy prescriptions for the criminal legal system
at large. And now we go to the closing of
our show, which is called Words of Wisdom, where first
(23:53):
of all, I thank you Katie Shaffer for joining us,
and then going to turn my microphone off, leave my
headphones on, kick back in my chair, and just listen
to anything else you feel is left to be said.
Jails and prisons don't solve harm. They create harm, and
much of that is motivated by the fears of white
(24:14):
people and for those of us who are white and
who come from communities that these systems were quote unquote
supposed to protect. We have work to do to both
support and elevate the leadership of people who have been
harmed by these systems, but also to get our folks
and to organize and deal with and educate and support
(24:38):
the people who ostensibly are supposed to benefit from these
systems to see the kind of violence they perpetrate across
the board. Thank you for listening to Righteous Convictions with
(24:58):
Jason plom I'd like to thank our production team Connor Hall,
Jeff Claverne, and Kevin Wardis with research by Lava Robinson.
The music in this production was supplied by three time
OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook,
and Twitter at Lava for Good. You can also follow
me on TikTok and Instagram at it's Jason Flom. Righteous
(25:20):
Convictions with Jason Flom is a production of Lava for
Good Podcasts and association with Say About Company Number one
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