September 22, 2025 • 41 mins
Anna sits down with author, lawyer and activist; Leigh Goodmark, to discuss the problems of prisons. Especially when it comes to imperfect victims, like Kelly.
And Anna asks - is prison abolition really the answer?
If you’re affected by any of the themes in this show please reach out to NO MORE at https://www.nomore.org a domestic violence charity we’ve partnered with.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, girlfriends, it's Anna. Welcome to Bonus. Episode three. You're
going to hear a lot of discussion about the prison
and justice system, which probably won't be a surprise if
you've made it this far into the series. There's also
going to be references to domestic violence, as well as
other tough subjects like sexual abuse and addiction.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
But it's also a.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Really vital conversation about what we can all do to
change the system for the better. In the last episode,
I introduced you to a woman we called Tina. Following
a lifetime of abuse from family and others, one night,
she violently attacked her boyfriend, nearly killing him. It was
(00:45):
fueled by a drug induced psychosis, but there's no doubt
that Tina did it.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
She admitted it right away.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
She got sixteen years, but only served seven and a
half after receiving clemency from the governor. Clearly, at some
point it was understood that locking her behind bars for
any longer didn't serve anyone.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
At the end of the.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Episode, I asked the question, what is the actual best
recourse for someone like Tina? How can we reconcile between
her crimes and her experience as a victim, and if
the current justice system isn't serving women like her, what
is the best solution. All the way through making Jail
(01:32):
House Lawyer, I kept asking myself that same question and
panicking because I wasn't coming up with an answer.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
So I called up Lee good Mark.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
She's the author of a book called Imperfect Victims, Criminalized Survivors,
and the Promise of Abolition Feminism. This conversation profoundly changed
the way I think about the prison system. And today
I'm going to let you evesdrop on that call. I'm
(02:06):
Anna Sinfield and from the teams at Novel and iHeart Podcasts,
this is the Girlfriend's Gelhouse Lawyer.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Is that bonus?
Speaker 1 (02:35):
Episode three is abolition? The answer? So tell me about
that journey that you took in order to get to
writing in Perfect Victims.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
I came out of law school in nineteen ninety four
and knew that I wanted to work with children. Very
quickly learned that children had families, and then equally as
quickly learned that no one in Washington, d c. Which
is where I was a legal services lawyer, was systematically
providing legal services to women. And at that time, we
(03:16):
really only talked about women who had experienced intimate partner violence.
And at that time when I came out, we had
been taught that the way that you dealt with intimate
partner violence was to lock people up. That these guys,
and at the time we were only talking about guys,
and we were generally only talking about straight relationships, were monsters,
that they couldn't be helped, and that the criminal legal
(03:38):
system was the best way to address this problem. That
the problem had been that we had failed to look
at intimate partner violence as a crime like any other crime,
and the solution was to do exactly that. The more
I practiced, the more clients I had, the more I
came to understand that the legal system, in particularly the
criminal legal system, was not a good option for many
of them. And what the research was telling me was
(04:00):
lots of people never come into the criminal legal system.
About half of people never call anyone about the violence
that they're experiencing. Now, when people do come into the system,
what they learn is that the system actually doesn't stop
the violence. It might stop it in the moment right
in the separation of the two people, but it doesn't
change the underlying correlates and behaviors. That are leading to
(04:22):
the violence in the first place. About eleven years ago,
I came to the University of Maryland Carrie School of Law,
where I started representing criminalized survivors for the first time.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
So, just for a kind of a basic definition, what
is a criminalized survivor as you'd see it, and who
would qualify as one.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
A criminalized survivor is someone whose criminal conviction is directly
tied to their own experience of victimization. So in the
classic case, that looks like a person who's been subjected
to abuse who fights back against their abusive partner, maybe
kills their abusive partner think Farah Faucet in the Arning
bed back in the eighties. But it can also look
(05:03):
some different ways as well. So it can be somebody
who acted under the duress of an abusive partner, who
would not have been involved in a crime but for
being forced by an abusive partner, or somebody who happens
to be present when an abusive partner commits a crime
and finds them self criminalized as a result of things
like felony murder laws who told everyone who is involved
(05:25):
in any felony responsible for a death that occurs during
the commission of that felony, it can look like being
held responsible for someone else's actions. In other contexts as well,
we have clients who have been convicted of failing to
protect their children from their abusive partners. And then it
can also look like people who are self medicating, who
(05:45):
are using drugs or other illicit substances, and who are
doing things to support their drug habit and who end
up incarcerated as a result of that. And because almost
every woman, and frankly most people I've ever met who
are incarcerated have experienced some form of trauma or some
form of gender based harm, one could argue that the
(06:06):
vast majority of particularly women, who are in prison are
criminalized survivors. I had written about criminalized survivors. I had
been involved in the margins of people's clemency campaigns, but
I hadn't really done the work. When I started doing
the work, something for me just snapped into place. This
was the work that I was meant to be doing,
and it brought me face to face with the carceral system,
(06:30):
with the prison system in a way that I had
never been before. I was now going into the prison
on a regular basis, and then I was looking at
what prison was doing to these people that I cared
about so deeply, and that's when I kind of made
a real shift for me. I'm going into prisons. I'm thinking,
this can't be a way to make people less violent.
Prison doesn't make people less violent. Prison exacerbates all the
(06:52):
things that tend to make people use violence. And then
I think, for me, like a lot of white people,
twenty twenty was a real time of reckoning to make
us see that the system wasn't going to change because
the system was doing exactly what it was meant to do,
and that this was not a system that you could reform.
And so between seeing how the system reacted to the
murder of George Floyd and some of the abolitionist literature
(07:16):
that was being published at that time, most notably for me,
Mariamkaba's We Do This Till We Free Us, I came
to see that I didn't think this system was ever
going to do the work that we were saying that
it could do back in nineteen ninety four, and then
in fact, it was an impediment to stopping violence. And
that's when I started to identify as an abolitionist. My
(07:36):
Twitter formerly twitterisse my Blue Sky handle. My Blue Sky
handle now is recovering carceral feminist. Ask me how some
people see carceral feminism as an insult. I just see
it as a descriptor. A carceral feminist is somebody who
believes in using the police power of the state to
change people's behavior. And that was me in nineteen ninety
(07:57):
four and for some years thereafter. It certainly not me now,
And I think it's important to talk about that arc
because people are so afraid to admit that they've made
mistakes or that they've seen differently. And I know better
now having been face to face with the carceral system
for the last eleven years.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Wow, amazing, I mean, yeah, I think that could be
a bit of an arc for this feed of you know,
it's brought into the Castle system and this series. I
hope it's going to be as kind of exploring that
it's actually more complicated than that idea of bad guy
goes away and everything solved. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
I was listening to the first season and I was
yelling at the at the radio.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
I'm enjoying. I liked the idea of you yelling at
the radio at the work that idea. I think that's great.
I too want to be, you know, a former castle feminist.
If that's what it takes, I can wear that loudly
and loudly the stuff that you're talking about in your journey.
It makes so much sense for you. But I think
(09:06):
for a lot of people getting to the point of
being an abolitionist, there's so many hurdles before that.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
What I would say is that it's worth asking ourselves
why is it that we think people need to be incarcerated.
What is it that we think incarceration is doing. If
we think that it's to incapacitate people because they're likely
to do harm, we should ask ourselves, are there ways
to remedy the harm that these people have already experienced,
to deal with the trauma that's leading them to act
(09:35):
in ways that may cause harm to others, rather than
just locking them up in places where they will absolutely
have trauma inflicted upon them, where they are likely to
be the victims of further physical or sexual trauma, and
where nobody is giving them any kind of counseling or
support to mitigate the effects of that trauma, so that
when they are released into society, they're not likely to
(09:56):
do it again. If we think that punishment is about
to terrence, do we really think that continuing to pile
on to people who've already experienced so much harm is
going to deter the person whose fight or flight response
is triggered in that moment? Is that a real possibility
that someone who gets triggered like that stops and goes.
But wait, I might get criminally punished. I should stop
(10:18):
right now. All the research shows us that deterrence is
not actually deterring anybody. And so if you think about
the theories of punishment, the reasons why we punish people,
none of them holds up particularly well. In the case
of criminalized survivors. We don't believe prisons are rehabilitating anybody.
We know they're not doing that kind of work. And
so really the only justification for punishment that holds water
(10:41):
is retribution. And I don't want to live in that
kind of society. That's part of what gets me to
abolition is I don't need to have my just deserts
against people who've already experienced so much harm coming into
the system.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
So what do you do if someone's just coming it's
a really serious, potentially lethal crime.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
The thing about abolition is that, first and foremost, abolition
has to be about building. We don't live in a
society right now where we have the what do we
do next? Answer, and that keeps a lot of people
from being able to say, well, then I can espouse abolition.
I feel comfortable with that. And so we don't know
that yet. I don't have to have that answer yet
(11:25):
because we don't know. We don't know what the scope
of the problem is going to be unless and until
we do the kind of investment that is necessary to
build to get us to a place where abolition can
be a reality. That means ensuring that everybody has physical
health care and mental health care, and safe places to
live and enough to eat, and green spaces and all
(11:45):
of the things that we want people to have to thrive.
And then when they're not coming in with all of
this trauma, with all of this abuse, we know what
the problem looks like, and then we can make a
determination about what we do with someone who does serious harm.
At the very least, right now, we could be making
calculations about whether we think people are genuinely a risk
(12:08):
to others, or whether they've acted in a situation in
which they felt trapped or felt like they had no
other alternative. We could have more robust self defense law.
There are lots and lots of things we could do
short of abolition, to deal with a lot of the
harm that we're seeing. But I can't give you the
answer to what it looks like on the other side
because I don't even know what the scope of the
(12:29):
problem is going to be.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
And thought about it that way of abolition being it's
more of a belief system that this just isn't working.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
And a process because it translates directly into policy. So
rather than continuing to put roughly one hundred and eighty
billion dollars into policing and prisons every year, imagine what
would happen if we put one hundred and eighty billion
dollars into safe and affordable housing, and mental health services
and physical health services and all of the things that
people actually need.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
I guess people are just so hungry for solution because
it feels like a solution to put people away in
a cage. You know, it's doing something, it's taking them
away from society, you know, and.
Speaker 3 (13:12):
It's scary not to have a solution. The thing is,
we let the criminal system fail every single day. It
fails over and over and over again. People continue to
get hurt in that system. People come out of that
system deeply damaged. People come out of that system economically disadvantaged,
which is a driver of violence. People come out of
(13:32):
that system further traumatized, another driver of violence. And we're
okay with letting it fail over and over and over
because it's the system that we have, and because we
can't see anything else.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
When it comes to the survivors that kind of get
caught in between. One thing I'm kind of wandering and
grappling with when it comes to how to put them
across to my listeners, is like, what should they make
of them?
Speaker 2 (13:56):
How do we describe these people?
Speaker 3 (13:58):
So often my clients are people who have something happen
in a split second that changes their lives irrevocably, that
they didn't intend to have happen, and that they never
would have rationally sat there and thought this is a
good course of action. That's not true of everyone. I
(14:19):
have a spectrum of clients. I have clients who I
genuinely believe are innocent, who have done nothing wrong and
have been wrongfully convicted. I have clients who've done things
that are technically criminal, like failing to protect their children
from their abuser's harm, but who didn't do anything to anyone. Similarly,
clients who've been convicted of felony murder who never killed anyone.
(14:43):
I have clients who've done something really wrong but for reasons.
And then I have clients who just did really bad
stuff and who now are remorseful about it, who've atoned
for it, who really want to.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Have the opportunity to go back into society.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
And that's a pretty wide spectrum of people.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Something that I thought was interesting in your book, or
at least it charmed with me because of working with
Kelly over the past few months, was this idea of
an imperfect victim. There's obviously a lot of variables to that,
but there was one particular section that was about just
victims not behaving victimy enough.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
We want victims to be weak and meek and passive.
We want them to be white and straight and middle
class and cisgender and able bodied. We want them never
to use substances that are illegal. We want them not
to have mental health issues. We want them never to
(15:45):
use foul language. And even if you do manage to
stay on that very, very narrow path, you might still
do something that leads a prosecutor or someone else to
suggest that you're not a perfect victim. You do sex work,
you're boisterous, you do all these things that make people say, well,
that's not how a victim acts. And the reality is
(16:07):
there isn't a way that a victim acts. They are stereotypes.
And for women of color, all of this is exponentially worse,
particularly for black women. All of the stereotypes about black women,
the angry, loud black woman fight against this idea of
the perfect victim. It makes it very very hard for
anybody to be legible as a victim at all, let
(16:28):
alone once they've been charged with a crime. And once
you've been charged with a crime, it's like a switch
flips for prosecutors and police and judges, because every case
has a victim and an offender, and if you're the offender,
you can't possibly be a victim. And of course, what
we know is that most people have been both at
(16:50):
some point in their lives. That very few people come
to use violence for the first time as perpetrators of violence.
Most people come to violence for the first time as
victims of violence. It changes fundamentally how you look at
the world when your belief systems are challenged by what
actually is in a prison. Just so people understand, my
(17:13):
clients aren't getting mental health services in prison. The vast
majority of women in prison have some kind of mental
health issue. People are getting some drugs, not always the
drugs that they need, but they're certainly not getting therapy,
at least not my clients. They're not getting access to
any kinds of supportive services that would change what that
looks like if and when they're released. And I think
(17:35):
you have to ask yourself, is this really justice?
Speaker 1 (17:55):
In your book, I know that you break it down
via survivors interaction with the legal system, and I was
wondering if you could kind of explain why you did that,
and also like why things like arrests are particularly bad.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
I wanted people to understand how victims come to get
enmeshed in the system and then what it looks like
as victims move their way through the system. So some
people come in when they are victims of crimes, right
they call the police and the police say, Nope, not
going to arrest him. But I am going to arrest
you because you mouthed off to me, because he has
defensive injuries. For whatever reason. People come into the system
(18:33):
as witnesses to crimes, and then obviously people come in
as defendants. One of the big drivers in the context
of intimate partner violence for bringing survivors into the system
has been mandatory arrest laws. Mandatory arrest laws require police
to make an arrest in a case of intimate partner
violence whenever they have probable cause to do so, regardless
(18:55):
of what the people who are involved in it want.
So if they want to press charges, they don't want
to press charges, doesn't matter. After the inception of mandatory
arrest laws, arrest rates not surprisingly went up, and they
went up for one group of people more than anyone else,
and that was women, not because women had all of
the sudden become more violent, but because of the way
that police were implementing the laws. So it's what the
(19:18):
criminologist Metachesney Lynn calls the vengeful equity story, kind of
you want to be treated equally, You want us to
treat intimate partner violence equally. Well, look, this is what
it's going to look like. We're just going to arrest
you and those arrests happen because police can't figure out
who the primary aggressor is. You also see dual arrests
where police say, well should you say this, and he
(19:39):
says that I don't know who did what. I'm taking
you both in. We'll let the court sort it out.
And arrest has really profound implications for survivors of violence,
both in terms of the trauma that it inflicts and
the idea that after enduring a tremendous amount of abuse,
all of the sudden you've been labeled somebody who uses violence.
That's psychically really damaging. Also costly, so there's the cost
(20:02):
of bail, there's the cost of lawyers. There's electronic monitoring costs.
If you're let out, but you're monitor at that costs,
Your arrest can show up in the public record. It
can be a reason why you lose your job, you
lose your apartment, you lose custody. It can be a
reason why your kids are taken into what some of
us call the family policing system and other people call
the child welfare system. So the knock on effects of
(20:26):
arrest are really quite serious. And as I said, once
a victim is arrested, for a crime, it's as though
that history of victimization is just wiped out as far
as prosecutors are concerned, because in order to make a
decision about charging, what prosecutors are doing is they're making
kind of a case theory. They're seeing the world in
(20:47):
a particular way, and they're bending the facts. I'm not
suggesting this is nefarious in some way, but they are
using the facts to support their view of the world.
And once you've committed to that case theory as a prosecutor,
it's really hard to be shaken from it. So once
you've decided this wasn't self defense. In fact, she was
(21:08):
acting aggressively, she was angry, she wasn't afraid, she was jealous,
it's hard to come off of that narrative. And because
prosecutors have so much power in the system, once a
prosecutor has decided to charge you, there's a whole host
of things that happen that you have very little control over.
Prosecutors decide about whether they're going to oppose bail, they
(21:31):
decide who the witnesses are going to be, they decide
what you're going to be charged with, and in that
charging decision can actually dictate what the punishment will be
if what they decide to charge you with is something
with a long mandatory minimum sentence. So prosecutors have enormous
amounts of power in the system and a commitment to
(21:52):
getting prosecutions, to getting convictions. And so while the job
of the prosecutor is supposed to be to do justice,
and while many prosecut believe that they are doing justice,
they also are concerned about their conviction rates. They're concerned
about their elections, they're concerned about being able to say
to the public, we're tough on crime because we're sold
this narrative that says crime is out of control, when
(22:14):
in fact, crime is lower than it has been in decades.
But prosecutors are married to that narrative.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Well, there's so much in that that I found amazing
reading in your book the first time round, especially the
mandatory arrest rule.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
I get it.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
I like follow the arc, like I can see how
when you first hear about that, it sounds like a
sensible solution, but it feels like the perfect way of
exposing how the system is broken. That gets introduced with
all of this good will, but then actually, because of
so much inherent bias women still end up suffering the
(22:49):
most because of it.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
I feel like one of the things that we and
I say we advisedly. I am very much part of
the anti violence movement, one of the things we as
a movement haven't done well is to stop and think
about what the unintended or just the consequences of our
choices might be. Their arrest rates immediately went up for
women they've stayed high.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
I was thinking about the arrest portion of what you
spoke about in your book and thinking about applying it
to Kelly. Things really started to look bad for her
quite quickly when she was first arrested.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Of course this is what.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
She says, but she was treated like really poorly, to
the extent of like she started menstruating and they stripped
her and made her wear a white suit and didn't
give her any sanitary products. She really needed medication that
they wouldn't give her, which included a huge methodone dose
that she was on, as well as seizure medications which
(23:52):
she says that they withheld from her until she gave
a written statement, so she had seizures.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
It seems like.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
The treatment that she experience there was just kind of
absolutely abhorrent. From what I read, it seems that's not
totally unusual. But does that chime as true to you?
Speaker 3 (24:10):
None of that surprises me even a little bit. Yeah,
all of that rings completely true to me.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
I think one of the things that I've struggled to
understand a little bit is that the police had a witness,
though later on it seems the witness were kind of
confused and was very far away and maybe didn't see
all that much. But at the time, all the information
they had was that they saw Tommy committing the crime,
but also saw Kelly kick this man.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
But it makes it messy.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
So remember I said spectrum of cases, right, Yeah. Is
it possible that Kelly did nothing? Absolutely? Is it possible
that what the witness saw was Kelly pushing Tommy to
try to get him off of this person, and that
looked like kicking.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Is it possible that Tommy said to Kelly kick him,
and Kelly thought he's going to kill me if I
don't kick him. Did Yep? All of those things are possible.
Is it also possible that Kelly's memory is affected by trauma? Certainly?
Is it possible that in that traumatic memory she's blocking
off the things that she doesn't want to remember. Absolutely,
(25:17):
trauma has that impact on memory. It is also possible
that she did a bad thing, not the thing that
killed the victim in this case, but a bad thing. Yeah,
it's possible. Does that change whether we think domestic violence
was a significant contributing factor to her crime and whether
(25:38):
the sentence was disproportionately harsh as a result. For me,
that doesn't change that.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
I think what the sticking point for me is, you know,
in that particular instance with the kicking thing, It's not
that it changes anything for me because like, if she did,
it would have been done under duress from her abusive partner,
so whatever. It's more what bothers me is that my
job as a journalist, like there's certain rules on podcasts
(26:08):
when it comes to how we put things across legally,
where I had to say stuff like Kelly says, and
I don't want to say because it can't be substantiated
or proved or it goes against what is actually in
kind of legal documents that we have that fact check
as a lawyers are going to rely on. I can't
just say this is the truth, you know, and I
(26:30):
don't like not supporting a victim's narrative because that feels
icky to me.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
I get that, and I just don't believe in truth.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
You blow him my mind herely.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
I just you know, we talk about trials as truth
finding expeditions, and judges as finders of fact or juries
as finders of fact. It's just finding one version of
the facts. But there's no objective truth that's out there
that we're going to capture that gives us the three
(27:02):
hundred and sixty degree view of whatever it was that happened.
I think it's hard because you're telling a story, and
you know, one of the things that we want out
of our narratives is we want them to be clean
and linear and makes sense internally and externally, and right,
we know all the storytelling things. Life is not like that,
and recreating a chaotic and violent incident is really not
(27:24):
like that. Yeah, And I think that's hard for you.
For lawyers, it's actually a lot easier because we just
get to tell our version. But I know that I'm
making choices all the time about what I include and
what I exclude. Right, I'm not telling some unvarnished version
of the truth. I'm telling my particular story in a
persuasive way. So, yeah, my job's different than yours in
(27:45):
that way.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Yeah, I'd love to just have your perspective.
Speaker 3 (27:51):
I might get you into trouble as a journalist.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Yeah, exactly. This is the annoying thing. I'm on the
wrong side.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Though.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
It wasn't making me think hearing you say that. It's
it sounds like there's so many kind of well worn
parts of the legal system that you just don't kind
of buy into.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
You but you're still part of it. Yeah, how do
you cope with that? So I'm still part of it
because I have a set of skills that enables me
to do a couple of things. One is to get
people out of prison. A second is to give students
a healthy perspective on the legal system. We have sold
(28:26):
this vision of a system that is infallible.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
That is, just.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
Because we've sold that vision, we allow that system to
do a lot of harm. We have to be more
thoughtful about what we say about that system. We have
to make every actor in that system recognize how profound
the responsibility is to make it work as justly as
it possibly can. Laws and exercise of power, both in
(28:53):
the laws that get passed and in the laws as
they're enforced. So somebody's got to be there to counter
that power.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
Yeah, well be me, I guess. I mean, I'd rather
it be you, for sure.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
I was wondering if you could just talk to me
about the prison system generally. I heard from your book
it's like the statistics just seem crazy about the numbers
of people in past rated and we'll just talk about
the United States obviously, like what has caused that growth?
Why is there like a benefit to somebody? Can you
(29:46):
talk to us about that sort of system as a whole.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
You see the jump start to happen in the nineteen
seventies and into the nineteen eighties. The war on drugs
is a significant driver of a lot of this, but
also so tough on crime rhetoric. The nineteen ninety four
Crime Bill ratchets things up, and so that's when you
start to see this huge jump in the prison population,
but not just the prison population, the jail population, that
(30:11):
detained populations, kind of everybody. And you know who benefits.
Prosecutors benefit because they can say they're tough on crime,
and judges and courthouses benefit because we need more of them.
And certainly correctional officers benefit because we need more of them,
and small towns benefit because we build more jails and
prisons to put people in. And anytime that you build
(30:33):
a jail or a prison, you're gonna fill it. You
got to fill it.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
Yeah, because I've had a few people talk to me
about how the prison system is for profit. But is
that just the private prison thing.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
People point a lot to the kind of private prison
system as creating the capitalist motive for increasing mass incarceration.
That's true to us some extent, but not much, very
very small part of the prison population is actually in
private prisons. It's also about the ways that prisons create
economic wealth in a community that becomes a significant part
(31:05):
of your economy. In Maryland, which is where I am,
the Maryland Correctional Enterprises shops makes furniture for public institutions.
My desk that I am sitting at was made by
an incarcerated person. If I wanted to try to not
use products by incarcerated people, I think I could touch
my carpet in my office, but I'm pretty clear that
(31:28):
I couldn't touch anything else. Wow, it's pretty profound. Do
they get paid at all?
Speaker 2 (31:34):
The pay is.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Almost nothing, and the commissary costs are much much much
higher than you would pay for similar kinds of products
on the outside, and so you earn less, but you
have to pay more for the same products.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
Yeah, what's the point in that?
Speaker 3 (31:49):
Why the pain, the indignity, the harshness, that's the point.
We can say everything we want to say about prison,
but at the end of the day, we are a
deeply attributive society. We think that people deserve to experience
pain once they've been convicted of a crime, regardless of
where they fall on my spectrum of all of my clients,
(32:12):
and the pain is the point.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
Yeah, it's disgusting.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
That's what I'll get you to abolition. You know, the
point of incarceration is not supposed to be the loss
of dignity, the loss of health care, the loss of safety,
the loss of human connection, the loss of your family.
It's supposed to be the loss of your freedom for
a period of time that ensures the safety of the community.
But it's become all these other things, and once you
(32:39):
start to see all of these other things, you can't
unsee them.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
We were talking about the fact that you were listening
to the first series and you were like screaming at
the radio certain bits from where we kind of were
really endorsing some parts of the legal system and keeping
in this case, Bob behind bars. That's actually kind of like,
you know, a peek into the production room. That was
(33:04):
something that me and the editor had a really hard
time deciding to do and include, because.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
We both quite liberal.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
People, and so we were never of the mind that
somebody who's been in prison that long should necessarily stay there.
But the problem was was this wasn't really my story.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
It was the story of these.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Women who had been victimized by this guy, and especially
the story of Elaine, who has worked incredibly hard to
make sure.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
That Bob stays behind bars.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
And it just didn't feel right to try and impose
my own belief systems onto something that felt so significant
for them. Yeah, but it's something They're still friends of mine,
and I keep up with them, and Elaine is still
fiercely fighting to keep Bob behind bars, and I'm kind
of nervous about her hearing this series and feeling like
I'm no longer endorsing some thing that's so important to her.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
You know, what do you say to someone like that?
Speaker 3 (34:04):
I completely understand having heard a lot of Elane, why
she feels the way that she feels, and he's I mean, look,
I'm not a psychologist, but he's a sociobab. You know
there's something deeply like I get that, and I don't
know what I would tell her about. Okay, so what
do we do with him?
Speaker 2 (34:23):
Then?
Speaker 3 (34:23):
Like, I don't know the answer to that yet. So
I get that impulse that says, you know, this is
someone who hurt a lot of women and would have
hurt a lot of amorse, and I we can't take
that chance. I don't endorse that, but I understand that
people do. And so one of the things that I'm
kind of careful to do in the book is to say,
it took me twenty eight years to get to abolition.
(34:47):
It's not where I started. I don't expect people to
get there overnight, particularly people who've had people that they
love harmed so grievously. So we have to give people
things that they can do along the way way so
that if they're not at abolition, they can say I
can't see this yet. I can't see the end of prison,
(35:08):
but I can see getting rid of mandatory arrest. I
can see getting rid of mandatory minimum sentences. I can
see getting rid of cash bail. I can see involving
communities in defense of survivors. I can see doing the
preventative work that we need to do to make sure
that people have the things that they need. I can
see supporting geriatric parole for people who have simply aged
(35:30):
out of crime. I can see supporting compassionate release so
that people don't die in there. There are all kinds
of things that people can get on board for that
don't require them to say, but this one guy who
killed my sister, he should get out. And I understand
that I've actually had this conversation with my family to say,
(35:51):
if anything ever happened to me, I would not want this.
You need to know that I would not want this.
But would I blame them if they wanted it.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
No.
Speaker 3 (36:01):
Part of that is about the way in which we've
defined justice. We have told people that when you have
been harmed, the way that you get justice is if
someone else is incarcerated. We haven't offered people anything else.
We particularly haven't offered them anything else in the context
of intimate partner violence. So if people want justice, then
(36:23):
what they know to want is punishment, and unless and
until we can offer people something different, we can't expect
them not to want that.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
That's very profound. I don't think I'd had it put
so plainly before. It's so gross that that is our
idea of what justice is that it has to be
linked to somebody suffering. It's very eye for an eye,
it is. I mean, that was going to be one
of my final questions. Is you know, obviously you're right
(36:53):
in the thick of it, but most of the people
who are listening to this show a normal people. What
is it that normal people can do to help with
the building?
Speaker 3 (37:02):
Normal people, normal people, whoever they are, whoever they are,
people should know what's being done in their names. Go
into a prison, see what's being done with your tax dollars.
Think about whether that's something that you're comfortable with if
you're not, think about supporting efforts like defund the police
that got so maligned. Think about whether you want to
(37:24):
offer a volunteer program in a prison that makes up
for some of the deficits that exist. There's so many
different entry points for people who are interested in dismantling
this system. You can find something that speaks to you,
so find what that thing is and do it.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
Make a podcast.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
Make a podcast. What you are doing this season is
turning some of what you've put out there on its
ear in ways that I think is really important. And
I do think you're getting to an audience that I
would never get to. So it's important the journalists are
pushing on these narratives, and you know, not just for petite,
cute white women, but for women who tell fabulous tales
(38:06):
and who maybe use language in ways that we're not
one hundred percent comfortable with.
Speaker 4 (38:11):
But that's how Kelly talks, right, Yeah, Kelly is not
a perfect victim, right, she very much fits and getting
that message out to people and letting them know that's
really important.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
So I think podcasts are really important in this space.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
Well, thank god.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
Yeah, I think that I tried so hard to treat
victims who were just pure victims with grace, and then
now I'm learning that I'm meeting a lot of victims
who are the exact same, but they ended up stepping
onto the other side of doing something criminal. I need
to find a way to try and persuade myself and
(38:46):
the listeners to treat them with the same empathy that
they've treated Gael or hid from the first two series.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
Yeah, people who've done harm and people who've been harmed,
they're the same people. We treat it as though it's
a binary, but it's not.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
It's like the boris, isn't it it's eating its own tail.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
It is exactly, or the ven diagram where the circles
are completely overlapping.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
Yeah, this has been like one of the best chats
I've done for this whole series. Thank you so much,
Thank you, and I hope it becomes a series that
you don't have to scream at the radio for.
Speaker 3 (39:18):
But if I do, I have an email address now
and I can just email you and tell you when
I'm doing it.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
Yeah, exactly. Thanks Sally good Mark for keeping me on
the right track. Next week, in our final installment of
The Girlfriend's Gelhouse Lawyer Bonus episodes, I'll be popping on
my bucket hat and rolling up my jeans because The
Girlfriends is heading to its very first festival, Wilderness in Oxfordshire, UK, where,
(39:47):
in front of a live audience, I'll be talking to
the prolific true crime writer Kate summer Scale about her
book peep Show and how the role of true crime
reporting has changed over time and crucial what we're both
doing to try and make it better.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Catch you then, The.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
Girlfriend's Gelhouse Lawyer is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts.
For more from novel, visit novel dot Audio. The show
is hosted by me Annasinfield and is written and produced
by me and Lee Meyer, with additional production from Jako
Taivich and Michael Jinno. Our assistant producer is Madeline Parr.
(40:38):
The editors are Georgia Moody and me Annasinfield. Production management
from Shari Houston, Joe Savage, and Charlotte Wolfe.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
Our fact checker is Daniel Suleiman.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Sound design, mixing and scoring by Daniel Kempson and Nicholas Alexander.
Music supervision by me alis Infield, Lee Meyer and Nicholas Alexander.
Original music composed by Nicholas Alexander, Daniel Kempson and Louisa Gerstein.
Story development by Nell Gray Andrews and Willard Foxton. Creative
(41:10):
director of Novel, Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan are executive
producers for Novel, and Katrina Norvell and Nicki Eator are
the executive producers for iHeart Podcasts, and the marketing lead
is Alison Cantor. Thanks also to Carrie Lieberman and the
whole team at WME.
Hey, girlfriends, it's Anna. Welcome to Bonus. Episode three. You're
going to hear a lot of discussion about the prison
and justice system, which probably won't be a surprise if
you've made it this far into the series. There's also
going to be references to domestic violence, as well as
other tough subjects like sexual abuse and addiction.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
But it's also a.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Really vital conversation about what we can all do to
change the system for the better. In the last episode,
I introduced you to a woman we called Tina. Following
a lifetime of abuse from family and others, one night,
she violently attacked her boyfriend, nearly killing him. It was
(00:45):
fueled by a drug induced psychosis, but there's no doubt
that Tina did it.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
She admitted it right away.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
She got sixteen years, but only served seven and a
half after receiving clemency from the governor. Clearly, at some
point it was understood that locking her behind bars for
any longer didn't serve anyone.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
At the end of the.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Episode, I asked the question, what is the actual best
recourse for someone like Tina? How can we reconcile between
her crimes and her experience as a victim, and if
the current justice system isn't serving women like her, what
is the best solution. All the way through making Jail
(01:32):
House Lawyer, I kept asking myself that same question and
panicking because I wasn't coming up with an answer.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
So I called up Lee good Mark.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
She's the author of a book called Imperfect Victims, Criminalized Survivors,
and the Promise of Abolition Feminism. This conversation profoundly changed
the way I think about the prison system. And today
I'm going to let you evesdrop on that call. I'm
(02:06):
Anna Sinfield and from the teams at Novel and iHeart Podcasts,
this is the Girlfriend's Gelhouse Lawyer.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Is that bonus?
Speaker 1 (02:35):
Episode three is abolition? The answer? So tell me about
that journey that you took in order to get to
writing in Perfect Victims.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
I came out of law school in nineteen ninety four
and knew that I wanted to work with children. Very
quickly learned that children had families, and then equally as
quickly learned that no one in Washington, d c. Which
is where I was a legal services lawyer, was systematically
providing legal services to women. And at that time, we
(03:16):
really only talked about women who had experienced intimate partner violence.
And at that time when I came out, we had
been taught that the way that you dealt with intimate
partner violence was to lock people up. That these guys,
and at the time we were only talking about guys,
and we were generally only talking about straight relationships, were monsters,
that they couldn't be helped, and that the criminal legal
(03:38):
system was the best way to address this problem. That
the problem had been that we had failed to look
at intimate partner violence as a crime like any other crime,
and the solution was to do exactly that. The more
I practiced, the more clients I had, the more I
came to understand that the legal system, in particularly the
criminal legal system, was not a good option for many
of them. And what the research was telling me was
(04:00):
lots of people never come into the criminal legal system.
About half of people never call anyone about the violence
that they're experiencing. Now, when people do come into the system,
what they learn is that the system actually doesn't stop
the violence. It might stop it in the moment right
in the separation of the two people, but it doesn't
change the underlying correlates and behaviors. That are leading to
(04:22):
the violence in the first place. About eleven years ago,
I came to the University of Maryland Carrie School of Law,
where I started representing criminalized survivors for the first time.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
So, just for a kind of a basic definition, what
is a criminalized survivor as you'd see it, and who
would qualify as one.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
A criminalized survivor is someone whose criminal conviction is directly
tied to their own experience of victimization. So in the
classic case, that looks like a person who's been subjected
to abuse who fights back against their abusive partner, maybe
kills their abusive partner think Farah Faucet in the Arning
bed back in the eighties. But it can also look
(05:03):
some different ways as well. So it can be somebody
who acted under the duress of an abusive partner, who
would not have been involved in a crime but for
being forced by an abusive partner, or somebody who happens
to be present when an abusive partner commits a crime
and finds them self criminalized as a result of things
like felony murder laws who told everyone who is involved
(05:25):
in any felony responsible for a death that occurs during
the commission of that felony, it can look like being
held responsible for someone else's actions. In other contexts as well,
we have clients who have been convicted of failing to
protect their children from their abusive partners. And then it
can also look like people who are self medicating, who
(05:45):
are using drugs or other illicit substances, and who are
doing things to support their drug habit and who end
up incarcerated as a result of that. And because almost
every woman, and frankly most people I've ever met who
are incarcerated have experienced some form of trauma or some
form of gender based harm, one could argue that the
(06:06):
vast majority of particularly women, who are in prison are
criminalized survivors. I had written about criminalized survivors. I had
been involved in the margins of people's clemency campaigns, but
I hadn't really done the work. When I started doing
the work, something for me just snapped into place. This
was the work that I was meant to be doing,
and it brought me face to face with the carceral system,
(06:30):
with the prison system in a way that I had
never been before. I was now going into the prison
on a regular basis, and then I was looking at
what prison was doing to these people that I cared
about so deeply, and that's when I kind of made
a real shift for me. I'm going into prisons. I'm thinking,
this can't be a way to make people less violent.
Prison doesn't make people less violent. Prison exacerbates all the
(06:52):
things that tend to make people use violence. And then
I think, for me, like a lot of white people,
twenty twenty was a real time of reckoning to make
us see that the system wasn't going to change because
the system was doing exactly what it was meant to do,
and that this was not a system that you could reform.
And so between seeing how the system reacted to the
murder of George Floyd and some of the abolitionist literature
(07:16):
that was being published at that time, most notably for me,
Mariamkaba's We Do This Till We Free Us, I came
to see that I didn't think this system was ever
going to do the work that we were saying that
it could do back in nineteen ninety four, and then
in fact, it was an impediment to stopping violence. And
that's when I started to identify as an abolitionist. My
(07:36):
Twitter formerly twitterisse my Blue Sky handle. My Blue Sky
handle now is recovering carceral feminist. Ask me how some
people see carceral feminism as an insult. I just see
it as a descriptor. A carceral feminist is somebody who
believes in using the police power of the state to
change people's behavior. And that was me in nineteen ninety
(07:57):
four and for some years thereafter. It certainly not me now,
And I think it's important to talk about that arc
because people are so afraid to admit that they've made
mistakes or that they've seen differently. And I know better
now having been face to face with the carceral system
for the last eleven years.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Wow, amazing, I mean, yeah, I think that could be
a bit of an arc for this feed of you know,
it's brought into the Castle system and this series. I
hope it's going to be as kind of exploring that
it's actually more complicated than that idea of bad guy
goes away and everything solved. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
I was listening to the first season and I was
yelling at the at the radio.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
I'm enjoying. I liked the idea of you yelling at
the radio at the work that idea. I think that's great.
I too want to be, you know, a former castle feminist.
If that's what it takes, I can wear that loudly
and loudly the stuff that you're talking about in your journey.
It makes so much sense for you. But I think
(09:06):
for a lot of people getting to the point of
being an abolitionist, there's so many hurdles before that.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
What I would say is that it's worth asking ourselves
why is it that we think people need to be incarcerated.
What is it that we think incarceration is doing. If
we think that it's to incapacitate people because they're likely
to do harm, we should ask ourselves, are there ways
to remedy the harm that these people have already experienced,
to deal with the trauma that's leading them to act
(09:35):
in ways that may cause harm to others, rather than
just locking them up in places where they will absolutely
have trauma inflicted upon them, where they are likely to
be the victims of further physical or sexual trauma, and
where nobody is giving them any kind of counseling or
support to mitigate the effects of that trauma, so that
when they are released into society, they're not likely to
(09:56):
do it again. If we think that punishment is about
to terrence, do we really think that continuing to pile
on to people who've already experienced so much harm is
going to deter the person whose fight or flight response
is triggered in that moment? Is that a real possibility
that someone who gets triggered like that stops and goes.
But wait, I might get criminally punished. I should stop
(10:18):
right now. All the research shows us that deterrence is
not actually deterring anybody. And so if you think about
the theories of punishment, the reasons why we punish people,
none of them holds up particularly well. In the case
of criminalized survivors. We don't believe prisons are rehabilitating anybody.
We know they're not doing that kind of work. And
so really the only justification for punishment that holds water
(10:41):
is retribution. And I don't want to live in that
kind of society. That's part of what gets me to
abolition is I don't need to have my just deserts
against people who've already experienced so much harm coming into
the system.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
So what do you do if someone's just coming it's
a really serious, potentially lethal crime.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
The thing about abolition is that, first and foremost, abolition
has to be about building. We don't live in a
society right now where we have the what do we
do next? Answer, and that keeps a lot of people
from being able to say, well, then I can espouse abolition.
I feel comfortable with that. And so we don't know
that yet. I don't have to have that answer yet
(11:25):
because we don't know. We don't know what the scope
of the problem is going to be unless and until
we do the kind of investment that is necessary to
build to get us to a place where abolition can
be a reality. That means ensuring that everybody has physical
health care and mental health care, and safe places to
live and enough to eat, and green spaces and all
(11:45):
of the things that we want people to have to thrive.
And then when they're not coming in with all of
this trauma, with all of this abuse, we know what
the problem looks like, and then we can make a
determination about what we do with someone who does serious harm.
At the very least, right now, we could be making
calculations about whether we think people are genuinely a risk
(12:08):
to others, or whether they've acted in a situation in
which they felt trapped or felt like they had no
other alternative. We could have more robust self defense law.
There are lots and lots of things we could do
short of abolition, to deal with a lot of the
harm that we're seeing. But I can't give you the
answer to what it looks like on the other side
because I don't even know what the scope of the
(12:29):
problem is going to be.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
And thought about it that way of abolition being it's
more of a belief system that this just isn't working.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
And a process because it translates directly into policy. So
rather than continuing to put roughly one hundred and eighty
billion dollars into policing and prisons every year, imagine what
would happen if we put one hundred and eighty billion
dollars into safe and affordable housing, and mental health services
and physical health services and all of the things that
people actually need.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
I guess people are just so hungry for solution because
it feels like a solution to put people away in
a cage. You know, it's doing something, it's taking them
away from society, you know, and.
Speaker 3 (13:12):
It's scary not to have a solution. The thing is,
we let the criminal system fail every single day. It
fails over and over and over again. People continue to
get hurt in that system. People come out of that
system deeply damaged. People come out of that system economically disadvantaged,
which is a driver of violence. People come out of
(13:32):
that system further traumatized, another driver of violence. And we're
okay with letting it fail over and over and over
because it's the system that we have, and because we
can't see anything else.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
When it comes to the survivors that kind of get
caught in between. One thing I'm kind of wandering and
grappling with when it comes to how to put them
across to my listeners, is like, what should they make
of them?
Speaker 2 (13:56):
How do we describe these people?
Speaker 3 (13:58):
So often my clients are people who have something happen
in a split second that changes their lives irrevocably, that
they didn't intend to have happen, and that they never
would have rationally sat there and thought this is a
good course of action. That's not true of everyone. I
(14:19):
have a spectrum of clients. I have clients who I
genuinely believe are innocent, who have done nothing wrong and
have been wrongfully convicted. I have clients who've done things
that are technically criminal, like failing to protect their children
from their abuser's harm, but who didn't do anything to anyone. Similarly,
clients who've been convicted of felony murder who never killed anyone.
(14:43):
I have clients who've done something really wrong but for reasons.
And then I have clients who just did really bad
stuff and who now are remorseful about it, who've atoned
for it, who really want to.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Have the opportunity to go back into society.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
And that's a pretty wide spectrum of people.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Something that I thought was interesting in your book, or
at least it charmed with me because of working with
Kelly over the past few months, was this idea of
an imperfect victim. There's obviously a lot of variables to that,
but there was one particular section that was about just
victims not behaving victimy enough.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
We want victims to be weak and meek and passive.
We want them to be white and straight and middle
class and cisgender and able bodied. We want them never
to use substances that are illegal. We want them not
to have mental health issues. We want them never to
(15:45):
use foul language. And even if you do manage to
stay on that very, very narrow path, you might still
do something that leads a prosecutor or someone else to
suggest that you're not a perfect victim. You do sex work,
you're boisterous, you do all these things that make people say, well,
that's not how a victim acts. And the reality is
(16:07):
there isn't a way that a victim acts. They are stereotypes.
And for women of color, all of this is exponentially worse,
particularly for black women. All of the stereotypes about black women,
the angry, loud black woman fight against this idea of
the perfect victim. It makes it very very hard for
anybody to be legible as a victim at all, let
(16:28):
alone once they've been charged with a crime. And once
you've been charged with a crime, it's like a switch
flips for prosecutors and police and judges, because every case
has a victim and an offender, and if you're the offender,
you can't possibly be a victim. And of course, what
we know is that most people have been both at
(16:50):
some point in their lives. That very few people come
to use violence for the first time as perpetrators of violence.
Most people come to violence for the first time as
victims of violence. It changes fundamentally how you look at
the world when your belief systems are challenged by what
actually is in a prison. Just so people understand, my
(17:13):
clients aren't getting mental health services in prison. The vast
majority of women in prison have some kind of mental
health issue. People are getting some drugs, not always the
drugs that they need, but they're certainly not getting therapy,
at least not my clients. They're not getting access to
any kinds of supportive services that would change what that
looks like if and when they're released. And I think
(17:35):
you have to ask yourself, is this really justice?
Speaker 1 (17:55):
In your book, I know that you break it down
via survivors interaction with the legal system, and I was
wondering if you could kind of explain why you did that,
and also like why things like arrests are particularly bad.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
I wanted people to understand how victims come to get
enmeshed in the system and then what it looks like
as victims move their way through the system. So some
people come in when they are victims of crimes, right
they call the police and the police say, Nope, not
going to arrest him. But I am going to arrest
you because you mouthed off to me, because he has
defensive injuries. For whatever reason. People come into the system
(18:33):
as witnesses to crimes, and then obviously people come in
as defendants. One of the big drivers in the context
of intimate partner violence for bringing survivors into the system
has been mandatory arrest laws. Mandatory arrest laws require police
to make an arrest in a case of intimate partner
violence whenever they have probable cause to do so, regardless
(18:55):
of what the people who are involved in it want.
So if they want to press charges, they don't want
to press charges, doesn't matter. After the inception of mandatory
arrest laws, arrest rates not surprisingly went up, and they
went up for one group of people more than anyone else,
and that was women, not because women had all of
the sudden become more violent, but because of the way
that police were implementing the laws. So it's what the
(19:18):
criminologist Metachesney Lynn calls the vengeful equity story, kind of
you want to be treated equally, You want us to
treat intimate partner violence equally. Well, look, this is what
it's going to look like. We're just going to arrest
you and those arrests happen because police can't figure out
who the primary aggressor is. You also see dual arrests
where police say, well should you say this, and he
(19:39):
says that I don't know who did what. I'm taking
you both in. We'll let the court sort it out.
And arrest has really profound implications for survivors of violence,
both in terms of the trauma that it inflicts and
the idea that after enduring a tremendous amount of abuse,
all of the sudden you've been labeled somebody who uses violence.
That's psychically really damaging. Also costly, so there's the cost
(20:02):
of bail, there's the cost of lawyers. There's electronic monitoring costs.
If you're let out, but you're monitor at that costs,
Your arrest can show up in the public record. It
can be a reason why you lose your job, you
lose your apartment, you lose custody. It can be a
reason why your kids are taken into what some of
us call the family policing system and other people call
the child welfare system. So the knock on effects of
(20:26):
arrest are really quite serious. And as I said, once
a victim is arrested, for a crime, it's as though
that history of victimization is just wiped out as far
as prosecutors are concerned, because in order to make a
decision about charging, what prosecutors are doing is they're making
kind of a case theory. They're seeing the world in
(20:47):
a particular way, and they're bending the facts. I'm not
suggesting this is nefarious in some way, but they are
using the facts to support their view of the world.
And once you've committed to that case theory as a prosecutor,
it's really hard to be shaken from it. So once
you've decided this wasn't self defense. In fact, she was
(21:08):
acting aggressively, she was angry, she wasn't afraid, she was jealous,
it's hard to come off of that narrative. And because
prosecutors have so much power in the system, once a
prosecutor has decided to charge you, there's a whole host
of things that happen that you have very little control over.
Prosecutors decide about whether they're going to oppose bail, they
(21:31):
decide who the witnesses are going to be, they decide
what you're going to be charged with, and in that
charging decision can actually dictate what the punishment will be
if what they decide to charge you with is something
with a long mandatory minimum sentence. So prosecutors have enormous
amounts of power in the system and a commitment to
(21:52):
getting prosecutions, to getting convictions. And so while the job
of the prosecutor is supposed to be to do justice,
and while many prosecut believe that they are doing justice,
they also are concerned about their conviction rates. They're concerned
about their elections, they're concerned about being able to say
to the public, we're tough on crime because we're sold
this narrative that says crime is out of control, when
(22:14):
in fact, crime is lower than it has been in decades.
But prosecutors are married to that narrative.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Well, there's so much in that that I found amazing
reading in your book the first time round, especially the
mandatory arrest rule.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
I get it.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
I like follow the arc, like I can see how
when you first hear about that, it sounds like a
sensible solution, but it feels like the perfect way of
exposing how the system is broken. That gets introduced with
all of this good will, but then actually, because of
so much inherent bias women still end up suffering the
(22:49):
most because of it.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
I feel like one of the things that we and
I say we advisedly. I am very much part of
the anti violence movement, one of the things we as
a movement haven't done well is to stop and think
about what the unintended or just the consequences of our
choices might be. Their arrest rates immediately went up for
women they've stayed high.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
I was thinking about the arrest portion of what you
spoke about in your book and thinking about applying it
to Kelly. Things really started to look bad for her
quite quickly when she was first arrested.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Of course this is what.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
She says, but she was treated like really poorly, to
the extent of like she started menstruating and they stripped
her and made her wear a white suit and didn't
give her any sanitary products. She really needed medication that
they wouldn't give her, which included a huge methodone dose
that she was on, as well as seizure medications which
(23:52):
she says that they withheld from her until she gave
a written statement, so she had seizures.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
It seems like.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
The treatment that she experience there was just kind of
absolutely abhorrent. From what I read, it seems that's not
totally unusual. But does that chime as true to you?
Speaker 3 (24:10):
None of that surprises me even a little bit. Yeah,
all of that rings completely true to me.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
I think one of the things that I've struggled to
understand a little bit is that the police had a witness,
though later on it seems the witness were kind of
confused and was very far away and maybe didn't see
all that much. But at the time, all the information
they had was that they saw Tommy committing the crime,
but also saw Kelly kick this man.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
But it makes it messy.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
So remember I said spectrum of cases, right, Yeah. Is
it possible that Kelly did nothing? Absolutely? Is it possible
that what the witness saw was Kelly pushing Tommy to
try to get him off of this person, and that
looked like kicking.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Is it possible that Tommy said to Kelly kick him,
and Kelly thought he's going to kill me if I
don't kick him. Did Yep? All of those things are possible.
Is it also possible that Kelly's memory is affected by trauma? Certainly?
Is it possible that in that traumatic memory she's blocking
off the things that she doesn't want to remember. Absolutely,
(25:17):
trauma has that impact on memory. It is also possible
that she did a bad thing, not the thing that
killed the victim in this case, but a bad thing. Yeah,
it's possible. Does that change whether we think domestic violence
was a significant contributing factor to her crime and whether
(25:38):
the sentence was disproportionately harsh as a result. For me,
that doesn't change that.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
I think what the sticking point for me is, you know,
in that particular instance with the kicking thing, It's not
that it changes anything for me because like, if she did,
it would have been done under duress from her abusive partner,
so whatever. It's more what bothers me is that my
job as a journalist, like there's certain rules on podcasts
(26:08):
when it comes to how we put things across legally,
where I had to say stuff like Kelly says, and
I don't want to say because it can't be substantiated
or proved or it goes against what is actually in
kind of legal documents that we have that fact check
as a lawyers are going to rely on. I can't
just say this is the truth, you know, and I
(26:30):
don't like not supporting a victim's narrative because that feels
icky to me.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
I get that, and I just don't believe in truth.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
You blow him my mind herely.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
I just you know, we talk about trials as truth
finding expeditions, and judges as finders of fact or juries
as finders of fact. It's just finding one version of
the facts. But there's no objective truth that's out there
that we're going to capture that gives us the three
(27:02):
hundred and sixty degree view of whatever it was that happened.
I think it's hard because you're telling a story, and
you know, one of the things that we want out
of our narratives is we want them to be clean
and linear and makes sense internally and externally, and right,
we know all the storytelling things. Life is not like that,
and recreating a chaotic and violent incident is really not
(27:24):
like that. Yeah, And I think that's hard for you.
For lawyers, it's actually a lot easier because we just
get to tell our version. But I know that I'm
making choices all the time about what I include and
what I exclude. Right, I'm not telling some unvarnished version
of the truth. I'm telling my particular story in a
persuasive way. So, yeah, my job's different than yours in
(27:45):
that way.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Yeah, I'd love to just have your perspective.
Speaker 3 (27:51):
I might get you into trouble as a journalist.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Yeah, exactly. This is the annoying thing. I'm on the
wrong side.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Though.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
It wasn't making me think hearing you say that. It's
it sounds like there's so many kind of well worn
parts of the legal system that you just don't kind
of buy into.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
You but you're still part of it. Yeah, how do
you cope with that? So I'm still part of it
because I have a set of skills that enables me
to do a couple of things. One is to get
people out of prison. A second is to give students
a healthy perspective on the legal system. We have sold
(28:26):
this vision of a system that is infallible.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
That is, just.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
Because we've sold that vision, we allow that system to
do a lot of harm. We have to be more
thoughtful about what we say about that system. We have
to make every actor in that system recognize how profound
the responsibility is to make it work as justly as
it possibly can. Laws and exercise of power, both in
(28:53):
the laws that get passed and in the laws as
they're enforced. So somebody's got to be there to counter
that power.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
Yeah, well be me, I guess. I mean, I'd rather
it be you, for sure.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
I was wondering if you could just talk to me
about the prison system generally. I heard from your book
it's like the statistics just seem crazy about the numbers
of people in past rated and we'll just talk about
the United States obviously, like what has caused that growth?
Why is there like a benefit to somebody? Can you
(29:46):
talk to us about that sort of system as a whole.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
You see the jump start to happen in the nineteen
seventies and into the nineteen eighties. The war on drugs
is a significant driver of a lot of this, but
also so tough on crime rhetoric. The nineteen ninety four
Crime Bill ratchets things up, and so that's when you
start to see this huge jump in the prison population,
but not just the prison population, the jail population, that
(30:11):
detained populations, kind of everybody. And you know who benefits.
Prosecutors benefit because they can say they're tough on crime,
and judges and courthouses benefit because we need more of them.
And certainly correctional officers benefit because we need more of them,
and small towns benefit because we build more jails and
prisons to put people in. And anytime that you build
(30:33):
a jail or a prison, you're gonna fill it. You
got to fill it.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
Yeah, because I've had a few people talk to me
about how the prison system is for profit. But is
that just the private prison thing.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
People point a lot to the kind of private prison
system as creating the capitalist motive for increasing mass incarceration.
That's true to us some extent, but not much, very
very small part of the prison population is actually in
private prisons. It's also about the ways that prisons create
economic wealth in a community that becomes a significant part
(31:05):
of your economy. In Maryland, which is where I am,
the Maryland Correctional Enterprises shops makes furniture for public institutions.
My desk that I am sitting at was made by
an incarcerated person. If I wanted to try to not
use products by incarcerated people, I think I could touch
my carpet in my office, but I'm pretty clear that
(31:28):
I couldn't touch anything else. Wow, it's pretty profound. Do
they get paid at all?
Speaker 2 (31:34):
The pay is.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Almost nothing, and the commissary costs are much much much
higher than you would pay for similar kinds of products
on the outside, and so you earn less, but you
have to pay more for the same products.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
Yeah, what's the point in that?
Speaker 3 (31:49):
Why the pain, the indignity, the harshness, that's the point.
We can say everything we want to say about prison,
but at the end of the day, we are a
deeply attributive society. We think that people deserve to experience
pain once they've been convicted of a crime, regardless of
where they fall on my spectrum of all of my clients,
(32:12):
and the pain is the point.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
Yeah, it's disgusting.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
That's what I'll get you to abolition. You know, the
point of incarceration is not supposed to be the loss
of dignity, the loss of health care, the loss of safety,
the loss of human connection, the loss of your family.
It's supposed to be the loss of your freedom for
a period of time that ensures the safety of the community.
But it's become all these other things, and once you
(32:39):
start to see all of these other things, you can't
unsee them.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
We were talking about the fact that you were listening
to the first series and you were like screaming at
the radio certain bits from where we kind of were
really endorsing some parts of the legal system and keeping
in this case, Bob behind bars. That's actually kind of like,
you know, a peek into the production room. That was
(33:04):
something that me and the editor had a really hard
time deciding to do and include, because.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
We both quite liberal.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
People, and so we were never of the mind that
somebody who's been in prison that long should necessarily stay there.
But the problem was was this wasn't really my story.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
It was the story of these.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Women who had been victimized by this guy, and especially
the story of Elaine, who has worked incredibly hard to
make sure.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
That Bob stays behind bars.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
And it just didn't feel right to try and impose
my own belief systems onto something that felt so significant
for them. Yeah, but it's something They're still friends of mine,
and I keep up with them, and Elaine is still
fiercely fighting to keep Bob behind bars, and I'm kind
of nervous about her hearing this series and feeling like
I'm no longer endorsing some thing that's so important to her.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
You know, what do you say to someone like that?
Speaker 3 (34:04):
I completely understand having heard a lot of Elane, why
she feels the way that she feels, and he's I mean, look,
I'm not a psychologist, but he's a sociobab. You know
there's something deeply like I get that, and I don't
know what I would tell her about. Okay, so what
do we do with him?
Speaker 2 (34:23):
Then?
Speaker 3 (34:23):
Like, I don't know the answer to that yet. So
I get that impulse that says, you know, this is
someone who hurt a lot of women and would have
hurt a lot of amorse, and I we can't take
that chance. I don't endorse that, but I understand that
people do. And so one of the things that I'm
kind of careful to do in the book is to say,
it took me twenty eight years to get to abolition.
(34:47):
It's not where I started. I don't expect people to
get there overnight, particularly people who've had people that they
love harmed so grievously. So we have to give people
things that they can do along the way way so
that if they're not at abolition, they can say I
can't see this yet. I can't see the end of prison,
(35:08):
but I can see getting rid of mandatory arrest. I
can see getting rid of mandatory minimum sentences. I can
see getting rid of cash bail. I can see involving
communities in defense of survivors. I can see doing the
preventative work that we need to do to make sure
that people have the things that they need. I can
see supporting geriatric parole for people who have simply aged
(35:30):
out of crime. I can see supporting compassionate release so
that people don't die in there. There are all kinds
of things that people can get on board for that
don't require them to say, but this one guy who
killed my sister, he should get out. And I understand
that I've actually had this conversation with my family to say,
(35:51):
if anything ever happened to me, I would not want this.
You need to know that I would not want this.
But would I blame them if they wanted it.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
No.
Speaker 3 (36:01):
Part of that is about the way in which we've
defined justice. We have told people that when you have
been harmed, the way that you get justice is if
someone else is incarcerated. We haven't offered people anything else.
We particularly haven't offered them anything else in the context
of intimate partner violence. So if people want justice, then
(36:23):
what they know to want is punishment, and unless and
until we can offer people something different, we can't expect
them not to want that.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
That's very profound. I don't think I'd had it put
so plainly before. It's so gross that that is our
idea of what justice is that it has to be
linked to somebody suffering. It's very eye for an eye,
it is. I mean, that was going to be one
of my final questions. Is you know, obviously you're right
(36:53):
in the thick of it, but most of the people
who are listening to this show a normal people. What
is it that normal people can do to help with
the building?
Speaker 3 (37:02):
Normal people, normal people, whoever they are, whoever they are,
people should know what's being done in their names. Go
into a prison, see what's being done with your tax dollars.
Think about whether that's something that you're comfortable with if
you're not, think about supporting efforts like defund the police
that got so maligned. Think about whether you want to
(37:24):
offer a volunteer program in a prison that makes up
for some of the deficits that exist. There's so many
different entry points for people who are interested in dismantling
this system. You can find something that speaks to you,
so find what that thing is and do it.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
Make a podcast.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
Make a podcast. What you are doing this season is
turning some of what you've put out there on its
ear in ways that I think is really important. And
I do think you're getting to an audience that I
would never get to. So it's important the journalists are
pushing on these narratives, and you know, not just for petite,
cute white women, but for women who tell fabulous tales
(38:06):
and who maybe use language in ways that we're not
one hundred percent comfortable with.
Speaker 4 (38:11):
But that's how Kelly talks, right, Yeah, Kelly is not
a perfect victim, right, she very much fits and getting
that message out to people and letting them know that's
really important.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
So I think podcasts are really important in this space.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
Well, thank god.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
Yeah, I think that I tried so hard to treat
victims who were just pure victims with grace, and then
now I'm learning that I'm meeting a lot of victims
who are the exact same, but they ended up stepping
onto the other side of doing something criminal. I need
to find a way to try and persuade myself and
(38:46):
the listeners to treat them with the same empathy that
they've treated Gael or hid from the first two series.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
Yeah, people who've done harm and people who've been harmed,
they're the same people. We treat it as though it's
a binary, but it's not.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
It's like the boris, isn't it it's eating its own tail.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
It is exactly, or the ven diagram where the circles
are completely overlapping.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
Yeah, this has been like one of the best chats
I've done for this whole series. Thank you so much,
Thank you, and I hope it becomes a series that
you don't have to scream at the radio for.
Speaker 3 (39:18):
But if I do, I have an email address now
and I can just email you and tell you when
I'm doing it.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
Yeah, exactly. Thanks Sally good Mark for keeping me on
the right track. Next week, in our final installment of
The Girlfriend's Gelhouse Lawyer Bonus episodes, I'll be popping on
my bucket hat and rolling up my jeans because The
Girlfriends is heading to its very first festival, Wilderness in Oxfordshire, UK, where,
(39:47):
in front of a live audience, I'll be talking to
the prolific true crime writer Kate summer Scale about her
book peep Show and how the role of true crime
reporting has changed over time and crucial what we're both
doing to try and make it better.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Catch you then, The.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
Girlfriend's Gelhouse Lawyer is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts.
For more from novel, visit novel dot Audio. The show
is hosted by me Annasinfield and is written and produced
by me and Lee Meyer, with additional production from Jako
Taivich and Michael Jinno. Our assistant producer is Madeline Parr.
(40:38):
The editors are Georgia Moody and me Annasinfield. Production management
from Shari Houston, Joe Savage, and Charlotte Wolfe.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
Our fact checker is Daniel Suleiman.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Sound design, mixing and scoring by Daniel Kempson and Nicholas Alexander.
Music supervision by me alis Infield, Lee Meyer and Nicholas Alexander.
Original music composed by Nicholas Alexander, Daniel Kempson and Louisa Gerstein.
Story development by Nell Gray Andrews and Willard Foxton. Creative
(41:10):
director of Novel, Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan are executive
producers for Novel, and Katrina Norvell and Nicki Eator are
the executive producers for iHeart Podcasts, and the marketing lead
is Alison Cantor. Thanks also to Carrie Lieberman and the
whole team at WME.
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