November 23, 2021 • 24 mins
Alexander McLean joins Jason to talk about his work with Justice Defenders. Justice Defenders is a non-profit that works to provide prisoners and prison officers with legal education, training, and even law degrees to help facilitate legal processes.
To learn more and get involve, visit:
https://www.justice-defenders.org/
https://lavaforgood.com/righteous-convictions
Righteous Convictions with Jason Flom is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Co No1.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Rageous Convictions with Jason Plan, the podcast where
I get to interview folks who see the wrong in
the world and are driven to make it right. Today's
guest is a British attorney who volunteered in an African
hospice as a teenager, sending him on a hero's journey
in service of others and the defense of justice. We
see that there's cuts in funding available internationally for justice work,
(00:24):
and so we're asking what does it look like to
raise up lawyers and are illegals from those communities, Those
who know what prison feels like and smells like, those
who are living it and breathing it. They understand what
it's like to have hope taken away, and they want
to bring agents of hope to go to the places
that others don't want to go, to serve the people
that others don't want to serve, and to say I'm
here for you. His organization, Justice Defenders, provides legal education
(00:49):
and defense to the defenseless. Alexander McClean right now on
Rageous Convictions. Welcome back to Righteous Convictions. This is a
(01:16):
podcast where I have the privilege of interviewing some of
my heroes people who are doing just amazing, amazing stuff
in the world for no reason other than that because
they can. And today is no exception. Today I'm gonna
be interviewing my friend and you know, just a guy
who's an absolute beacon of light and hope, Alexander McLean. Alexander,
(01:37):
Welcome to Righteous Convictions. Thanks Jason, it's great to be
with you. Alexander is a senior Ted Fellow and a
Showka Fellow. He's been named Young Philanthropist of the Year
one of times thirty under thirty changing the World. I
could go on and on, but the most important part
is the work that you've done and how you got
(01:59):
into with at such a young age. Yeah, the experiences
I had as a child growing up in London, the
son of a Jamaican immigrant. Poor but the British government
used to pay for poor but bright children to go
to expensive schools. I loved public speaking. I became interested
in the law when I was very young, especially through
learning about the death penalty in America. And I had
(02:21):
incredible experiences in Britain and then later in East Africa
which formed me and led to me being where I
am today. And this started when you were eighteen. I
think it was really your AHA moment, right you went
to Uganda to volunteer at a hashpice. I've been involved
in a hospice in London from when I was sixteen,
(02:41):
and I realized very quickly I could learn a lot
from those who are coming to the end of their lives.
None of us know how much time we have, and
I really wanted to make the most of each day.
I read when I was sixteen about a hospice in Uganda,
Hospice Africa Uganda, which cares for people dying in their
homes around Kamparla, taking morphine and other pain relief and
food to them. The work sounded incredible, so I wrote
(03:02):
asking if I could go and volunteer with them my
school holidays, but they said at sixteen I was too young,
so I continued. I finished secondary school in the hospice
said now I was eighteen, they'd have me. I got
an incredible welcome by this hospice community and initially spent
a month with them, following their doctors and nurses as
they cared for their patients dying in their homes. But
(03:23):
one day we went to Uganda's main government hospital. The
hospital was taking morphine to a patient there. We went
onto this ward. I saw a guy lying on the
floor naked on a plastic sheet. I said to a nurse,
what's up with him? He said, we think he's in
a diabetic coma. The police found him unconscious in the market.
You don't know his name. We don't know if he
has any family. Because he doesn't have money, he doesn't
(03:45):
get care. I saw he was lying in a pool
of urine and the flesh and his bottom and back
was rotten down to the bone. He was decomposing while
he was still alive because he got no care. I
went back to the hospice I was staying at. I
spoke to Ann Merriman, the lady who founded it, a
former nun doctor has been work in Africa since nineteen sixty,
someone who shaped me deeply, and she's taught me that
we're never too young or old to serve others. And
(04:07):
she said, with someone like that guy, he might be dying,
but he could die when he feels loved and cared about.
So I went back the next day with the help
of a nurse trained by the hospice, I bought a
basin and some soap in a towel and we washed
him together, and I got him some clothing. I tried
to advocate for him with the doctors that although he
didn't have family or money, they might care for him
for a number of days. I'd washed him and try
and advocate. I came one day and he died the
(04:29):
night before. He was lying dead and filthy on the floor,
and a porter came with the trolley with a dead
lady and put the man on top of the lady
and said they're going a mass grave with everyone else
who had no one to bury them. And I called
my mom that day, and I cried for that guy,
because I had never really considered that there are people
in our world whose lives were judged to have no value.
(04:49):
So my life changed that day. And I went on
to spend three months on that hospital ward, which was
chiefly for patients with AIDS and tuberculosis who had been
abandoned by their families. And it was there that I
met prisoners as or that in hospital they could be
rejected by the doctors and nurses, they could die of
starvation or dehydration because of their prison uniform. And I'd
wash them and feed them and try and advocate for them,
(05:10):
and all sorts of people came by my side, security
guards from the hospice, and gardeners and medical students and
student nurses, and we created this little group of people
who would go and tend to those that others had rejected.
And it taught me a lot about community and serving
together and when you're doing work that can feel overwhelming,
or the rabbinical saying says we mustn't get tired of
doing work that has no end, and that kind of
(05:32):
work and justice work feels like that. I saw that
as parents solidarity, and I think that when we get
proximate to people, even proximate to those who are accused
of crimes, or approximate to those whose lives look different
from ours, we can't help but be shaped by them.
And I was fascinated by prison conditions, and I ended
up bulldozing my way into Uganda's maximum security prison to
(05:53):
see where these guys came from. Right, And that prison,
of course, is the zero prison, which I had the
distinct owner of visiting with you. Now, there were different
colored uniforms depending on whether they've been sentenced to death
or life or something else, and they are wedged into
these cells. While that you describe it, Alexander, because you
(06:14):
know I've heard that. We've had Pete Buko on the show.
He was, of course, um promptly convicted and sentenced to
death in Kenya, and he talked about how they had
thirteen other men in the cell with him and they
had to sleep more or less like sardines in a cairn.
Is that typical? Is that what you witnessed that La Zia.
When I first went to Lazira prison, I started by
(06:35):
going to death row. It was built to hold fifty
and then it had five hundred condemned men. I was
told that they got the death penalty for crimes including
treason and cowardice and mutiny. I heard of a man
called Edward and Paggy who've been sent to death for murder.
After twelve years on death row, it turned out the
person he'd killed was still alive. They still took about
another six years for him to be released. I heard
(06:55):
someone had stolen a mango from a neighbor's mango tree
and they used standing knife to cut it off. They
got the death penalty as an armed robber. Very often
they were teenage boys, often in prison for having underage sex,
which has a maximum penalty of death in Uganda, so
I saw that there was massive overcrowding. I heard that
many prisoners had never met a lawyer. In Uganda and
(07:16):
Kenya and around Sub Saharan Africa, somewhere between eight prisoners
will never meet a lawyer. At that time, two thirds
of prisoners in Uganda were awaiting trial, sometimes in prison
for many years, occasionally over a decade awaiting trial. So
you've just said a lot of things that I could
really benefit from some clarification on. So somewhere between eighty
(07:38):
and ninety of prisoners in Uganda, Kenya and Sub Saharan
Africa will never meet a lawyer, which just seems like
a crime in and of itself. Two thirds of prisoners
are just awaiting trial, so they haven't been convicted of anything,
and without likely ever meeting a lawyer, the outcome of
the trial is probably a foregone conclusion anyway. It I'm
(08:00):
really struck by some of the charges you mentioned. They
sound old timey, like treason, cowardice, mutiny, and the fact
that underage sex between two consenting teenagers can mean the
death sends. I mean, think about this for a second.
Something like three quarters every ever said of human beings
(08:23):
lose their virginity before they turn eighteen. Now you can't
condemn three quarters of humanity to death, right, I mean,
where the hell did these laws even come from? In
Commonwealth Africa in form of British colonies, the laws largely
haven't changed since colonial times when the law was around
(08:43):
command and control. So people in prison for loitering, or
being vagrants and vagabonds and debtors, or for being gay.
I met women whose children have become very unwell. They
take in the hospital, there's no medication for them, the
child dies, and then the mom's arrested for are neglect
and taken to prison with her other children. Or women
whose husbands have beaten them and beat them for years,
(09:06):
or the husbands have got aids and he tries and
rapes the wife, and then the wife fights back and
she finds herself imprisoned, And Sir, I think it's a
consequence of having laws which haven't evolved, having countries whose
populations have grown massively over the last decades, which have
overwhelmed prison capacity. In Uganda, prisons are at about three
of capacity, so where one person should be sleeping, there
(09:29):
are three. I think for governments which don't have enough resources,
very often prisons and criminal justice aren't their priority, and
it's expensive to pay for lawyers, and so you find
people in prison facing very long sentences or sometimes the
death penalty, who don't understand the law, don't understand how
they can engage with it. Very often we letter believe
that the laws is highly complex thing that we need
(09:52):
very qualified lawyers to help us to navigate. But we ask,
what does it look like to recognize that the law
affects us all from before we're born until after we die.
What does it look like to understand that all of
us have a right to know the basic concepts of
the law. No one should go to court and not
know how to address a judge or know that they
have a right to ask questions of those who are
making accusations against them, or if they're convicted, to appeal
(10:14):
against that conviction. And so we're asking how do we
take that knowledge into the communities which needed the most,
into the communities of those who are poor, those who
are minorities or refugees, or homeless people or sex workers,
the kind of people who tend to be overrepresented in
prison say, the laws here for you, the laws here
to protect you, not just to hold you to account.
(10:35):
YouTube can understand it, because it's going to be a
long long time until most countries around the world will
prioritize paying for lawyers for everyone who finds themselves in prison.
(11:01):
Again and again, in my teens and in my twenties,
I had experiences in prisons around Africa, seeing things which
I couldn't unsee and which I felt I had to
respond to. I went to Juba Women's Prison in South Sudan,
and as the gate was opened, I saw a woman
with chains on her arms and legs, and I said
to the officer escorted me when she chained up? So well,
we chain up our lunatics. That's about a third of
(11:23):
the prison population. As far as I could understand, I
could point to anyone say that I thought that they
had a mental health problem there being in prison. They said,
we also chained up those who are going to be executed.
Although suth Sudan was a newly formed country, it was
still hanging people. So well, what's going to happen to
this woman? And the officer said, well, with her and
a number of the other women here she's not done
anything wrong. Her husband was accused of a capital crime,
(11:46):
but because the police couldn't catch him, the wife was
arrested and tried and sent to die in his place.
And Australian prison officer working with the United Nations in
prisons in South Sudan told me about a five year
old child swimming a river with a three year old friend.
The three year old round and the five year old
was arrested and sense to death for murder. So again
and again I saw things which I couldn't really understand,
(12:07):
so so I just felt I had to to respond,
and that's how I ended up starting the African Prisons Project,
which has become Justice Defenders when I was twenty one.
Around the world, according to the World Justice Project, there
are five point one billion people who are affected by
inadequate access to justice, two and fifty three billion people
living in situations of extreme injustice, ten million in prison,
(12:28):
three million of those waiting for trials. We see that
there's cuts in funding available internationally for justice work, and
so we're going to be waiting a long time. If
the solution is that every person in prison must have
access to a lawyer, and so we're asking what does
it look like to raise up lawyers and to raise
up parallegals from those communities, those who know what prison
feels like and smells like, those who are living it
(12:49):
and breathing it, and those who want to respond and
to do this work not because it's going to make
them rich, not because it's going to make them powerful,
but because they understand what it's like to have hope
taken away and they want to breathe agents of hope.
And we're asking, how can we equip this community of
prisoner and ex prison and prison officer paralegals to go
to the places that others don't want to go, to
serve the people that others don't want to serve, and
(13:10):
to say I'm here for you. You too deserve to
have your voice heard. The law can protect you as well.
And so far we've trained just under three hundred prisoner
in prison officer paralegals. We've got thirty nine prisoners and
ex prisoners and prison officers who have graduated with their
University of London law degrees having studied in prison. In
the first six months of one alone, we've served thirteen thousand,
(13:32):
seven hundred and eight prisoners without adequate representation, resulting in
two thousand and forty five of them having been released.
And so we see that there are people who are
willing to step forward, willing to do the work, willing
to serve others who will be trained on the job,
and as justice defenders, we ask, how do we equip them?
How do we give them access to knowledge and skills.
(13:52):
We used to do it in person with COVID, we've
been taking this work online and offering paralegal courses online,
training prisoners and prison officers with law degrees online, facilitating
virtual court attendance, establishing online case management systems. Because we
see that there's a justice crisis around the world, and
we see that there are people who are willing to
step forward and to respond. I sense that you have
(14:14):
the same feeling that I get, which is that when
I visit prisons and people were over in the prisons
in the United States, I often come out feeling like
there's more humanity in a certain sense inside those walls
then outside. When I first started this work, I looked
(14:34):
on prisons and those that I met as being filled
with people who needed help, whose circumstances looks desperate, but Actually,
as I gained understanding, I saw that prisons were filled
with people who had gifts and talents and skills and
gifts that they were offering others. People in prison have
been my my teachers, and they've educated me about resilience
and courage and compassion and perseverance and determination and so
(14:59):
much more. Again and again I came across these examples
of prisoners who were serving others, leading the prison football
team or having little farming projects to grow extra food,
or leading the prison church or mosque, or caring for
their fellow prisoners when they were sick, and I saw
the prison officers are doing the same. And so I
saw that prisons were filled with people who have this
(15:21):
incredible potential to offer their families, their communities, but also
wider society. William, one of my colleagues, who was on
death row in Kenya for many years, said, in prison
there are brains that can move mountains. St Oscar Romero said,
there are certain things that can only be seen with
eyes that have cried. And we saw that someone who
(15:42):
knows what it is to have their fingernails pulled out
in the police station, or to be years in prison
without a trial or to get sentenced to death but
never to get a copy of their judgment. Has this
desire for justice that comes from their first hand experience,
and so our work started shifting about ten years ago
towards equipping prisoners and prison officers with legal knowledge, training
them as paralegals through a three week paralegal course in
(16:05):
criminal law, but also giving them access to formal law
degree studying with the University of London by correspondence, as
Mandela did from his prison cell in in South Africa.
And that's now our focus as justice defenders. We've wound
up how other health and basic literacy worked just to
focus on equipping those we've lived experience of confidt with
the law with legal knowledge to serve their communities, so
(16:26):
the defenseless become the defenders. I mean, the numbers are
absolutely staggering, the number of people that you've been able
(16:47):
to help, the people been able to free. And I
was able to participate in it. I guess it was
a zoom or some sort of a video conference where
you sort of looped me in with people in different prisons,
and I was struck first of all by the fact
that that doesn't exist in America. Somehow you've been able
to get Internet inside the prisons, and we can't do
(17:09):
that here here we have this j K collect call
phone systems, you know. But I was also struck, Alexander
by the fact that the guards seemed to be, you know,
not just willing participants, but active participants in this process
of trying to help the people who they are in
charge of overseeing or what do we want to call it?
(17:30):
And was I wrong about that? That spot on we
trained prisoners in prison officers side by side as paralegals,
and in our law classes. We equipped prison officers to
go to court and speak on behalf of prisoners who
don't have anyone to speak for them. The head of
Uganda Prison Service said to me a few years ago,
We've got the gallows, we've got the executioners, but we
(17:52):
can't be sure if we're hanging anyone that's actually guilty
of any crime, because we know that our criminal justice
system is broken. Senior officers in the Kenya Prison Service, Ay,
we estimate about half of our prisoners are here innocently.
They've not had representation at trial. We want you to
train our prison officers in law so they can work
on appeals because our prisons are massively overcrowded and we
can't actually cope, and so we see that there's this
(18:15):
appetite for justice from prison services and prison officers as
well as from prisoners. I don't think anyone finds joy
going to work as a prison officer, being with people
who you know haven't got justice and feeling that you're
powerless to do anything about it. And so that's why
we're really committed to equipping prison officers to play their
role in working for justice. And I think now globally
we're asking, in light of COVID, what does it look
(18:37):
like to rebuild our societies on this foundation of access
to justice, on the foundation of the rule of law.
Since George Floyd's death and in light of Black Lives Matter,
I think we're thinking about the idea that we can't
have peace without justice on a micro or macro level
in new ways. And we love to bring together prisoners
and prison officers who are working with us as paralegals
or as law students or graduates with prosecutor US and
(19:00):
with judges, with the police and others involved in delivering
justice in that community. Wherever possible, We do it over
a meal, and we asked, how do we work together
to create a community that's just No one gains when
innocent people imprisoned, and if people are guilty, we want
them to have due process. We think, if it's possible
for that to happen with their throw inmates in Uganda,
what would that look like with their throw inmates in Alabama?
(19:23):
And coming together with guards and with judges and with
prosecutors and with police officers, and dreaming about what justice
looks like in that community. And so I'm excited by
the changes which are happening in America. Over the last
six months, We've been approached by prisoners in twenty two
different U. S States asking for our supporter, asking for
us to train them as paralegals. We've had approaches from
(19:44):
another seventeen countries beyond that, and thirteen non governmental organizations,
including the u N. There there's this growing group of
formally incarcerated Americans who are using the law to serve
their communities, who have this hunger for justice, and we're
excited to stand in solidarity with them to understand how
we can equip and support and learn. Yeah, and I've
read that your goal is by to help a million
(20:09):
people get fair hearings, and also to have expanded Justice
Defenders work even further around the globe and developed as
well as developing countries and prisons, refugee camps, home the shelters,
and brothels. I can't think of a more noble goal
than that. We're going to put all the information for
people to donate to Justice Defenders and and of course
(20:32):
the website is Justice dash Defenders dot org and you
can go there to get involved, to volunteer, to learn
to donate. I hope everyone will click on the link
that will be as I said in our bio. So
now we have two last things I promised. This is
it and then I'll let you go back to work.
(20:53):
So the my favorite question that I asked on the
show of all of our wonderful guests is if you
had a magic wand and you could change one thing,
what would it be. Let me tell you a short story.
When I was eight or nine, I went to my
local library with my dad and I picked up a
book and there was an African American guy being strapped
(21:14):
into the electric chair by a group of white men
in suits with these wide leather straps all over his body,
and there wasn't a mask over his face yet, but
the look in his eyes was expressionless. It was like
he was dead before he had actually been executed. I
realized that's the power that the law can have to
strip hope or agency or life from us. As I
(21:34):
looked at the future, I hope for an end to
the death penalty. But I also hope that around the
world there's no one whose eyes are lifeless like that.
I hope that we can raise up a new generation
of paralegals and laws with lived experience, who served those
that others refused to serve, so everyone feels that the
law is for them, that they have a chance to
tell their side of the story before they're convicted or punished.
(21:55):
Amen to that, and thank you how Axander McClain for
the incredible work you do with Justice Defenders, and of
course for sharing your story with us and to our audience.
Please join us here next week where we will speak
with a tremendous figure in education, civil rights, and the
Black Lives Matter movement, Deray McKesson. And now we turned
(22:17):
to the closing of the show. Something we call words
of Wisdom, and it works like this, I turned my
microphone off, kicked back in my chair and just listen
to anything else you want to share. Thank you for
sharing this conversation with me, Jason. Thank you for what
you role model in terms of being an advocate for
justice and your commitment and your perseverance. And to anyone
(22:40):
who's listening to this show, which maybe you feel angry
or challenged, or frustrated or confused by, or you've heard,
my encouragement is that each of us can play a
part in creating the community that we want to be
part of, the community where no one innocent is imprisoned
and where those who are guilty of crimes have a
chance to tell their side of the story and to
be punished in a way that allows for rehabilitation. So
my invitation to each of you this to ask how
(23:02):
we can each live lives where we're quick to listen
and quick to love and slow to judge. Thank you
for listening to Righteous Convictions with Jason Flamm. I'd like
to thank our production team Connor Hall, Jeff Clyburne, and
(23:25):
Kevin Wardis. The music in this production was supplied by
three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Follow us on
Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Twitter at wrong Conviction, and
on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction. Podcast Righteous Convictions with Jason
Flam is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and
association with Signal Company Number one two
Welcome to Rageous Convictions with Jason Plan, the podcast where
I get to interview folks who see the wrong in
the world and are driven to make it right. Today's
guest is a British attorney who volunteered in an African
hospice as a teenager, sending him on a hero's journey
in service of others and the defense of justice. We
see that there's cuts in funding available internationally for justice work,
(00:24):
and so we're asking what does it look like to
raise up lawyers and are illegals from those communities, Those
who know what prison feels like and smells like, those
who are living it and breathing it. They understand what
it's like to have hope taken away, and they want
to bring agents of hope to go to the places
that others don't want to go, to serve the people
that others don't want to serve, and to say I'm
here for you. His organization, Justice Defenders, provides legal education
(00:49):
and defense to the defenseless. Alexander McClean right now on
Rageous Convictions. Welcome back to Righteous Convictions. This is a
(01:16):
podcast where I have the privilege of interviewing some of
my heroes people who are doing just amazing, amazing stuff
in the world for no reason other than that because
they can. And today is no exception. Today I'm gonna
be interviewing my friend and you know, just a guy
who's an absolute beacon of light and hope, Alexander McLean. Alexander,
(01:37):
Welcome to Righteous Convictions. Thanks Jason, it's great to be
with you. Alexander is a senior Ted Fellow and a
Showka Fellow. He's been named Young Philanthropist of the Year
one of times thirty under thirty changing the World. I
could go on and on, but the most important part
is the work that you've done and how you got
(01:59):
into with at such a young age. Yeah, the experiences
I had as a child growing up in London, the
son of a Jamaican immigrant. Poor but the British government
used to pay for poor but bright children to go
to expensive schools. I loved public speaking. I became interested
in the law when I was very young, especially through
learning about the death penalty in America. And I had
(02:21):
incredible experiences in Britain and then later in East Africa
which formed me and led to me being where I
am today. And this started when you were eighteen. I
think it was really your AHA moment, right you went
to Uganda to volunteer at a hashpice. I've been involved
in a hospice in London from when I was sixteen,
(02:41):
and I realized very quickly I could learn a lot
from those who are coming to the end of their lives.
None of us know how much time we have, and
I really wanted to make the most of each day.
I read when I was sixteen about a hospice in Uganda,
Hospice Africa Uganda, which cares for people dying in their
homes around Kamparla, taking morphine and other pain relief and
food to them. The work sounded incredible, so I wrote
(03:02):
asking if I could go and volunteer with them my
school holidays, but they said at sixteen I was too young,
so I continued. I finished secondary school in the hospice
said now I was eighteen, they'd have me. I got
an incredible welcome by this hospice community and initially spent
a month with them, following their doctors and nurses as
they cared for their patients dying in their homes. But
(03:23):
one day we went to Uganda's main government hospital. The
hospital was taking morphine to a patient there. We went
onto this ward. I saw a guy lying on the
floor naked on a plastic sheet. I said to a nurse,
what's up with him? He said, we think he's in
a diabetic coma. The police found him unconscious in the market.
You don't know his name. We don't know if he
has any family. Because he doesn't have money, he doesn't
(03:45):
get care. I saw he was lying in a pool
of urine and the flesh and his bottom and back
was rotten down to the bone. He was decomposing while
he was still alive because he got no care. I
went back to the hospice I was staying at. I
spoke to Ann Merriman, the lady who founded it, a
former nun doctor has been work in Africa since nineteen sixty,
someone who shaped me deeply, and she's taught me that
we're never too young or old to serve others. And
(04:07):
she said, with someone like that guy, he might be dying,
but he could die when he feels loved and cared about.
So I went back the next day with the help
of a nurse trained by the hospice, I bought a
basin and some soap in a towel and we washed
him together, and I got him some clothing. I tried
to advocate for him with the doctors that although he
didn't have family or money, they might care for him
for a number of days. I'd washed him and try
and advocate. I came one day and he died the
(04:29):
night before. He was lying dead and filthy on the floor,
and a porter came with the trolley with a dead
lady and put the man on top of the lady
and said they're going a mass grave with everyone else
who had no one to bury them. And I called
my mom that day, and I cried for that guy,
because I had never really considered that there are people
in our world whose lives were judged to have no value.
(04:49):
So my life changed that day. And I went on
to spend three months on that hospital ward, which was
chiefly for patients with AIDS and tuberculosis who had been
abandoned by their families. And it was there that I
met prisoners as or that in hospital they could be
rejected by the doctors and nurses, they could die of
starvation or dehydration because of their prison uniform. And I'd
wash them and feed them and try and advocate for them,
(05:10):
and all sorts of people came by my side, security
guards from the hospice, and gardeners and medical students and
student nurses, and we created this little group of people
who would go and tend to those that others had rejected.
And it taught me a lot about community and serving
together and when you're doing work that can feel overwhelming,
or the rabbinical saying says we mustn't get tired of
doing work that has no end, and that kind of
(05:32):
work and justice work feels like that. I saw that
as parents solidarity, and I think that when we get
proximate to people, even proximate to those who are accused
of crimes, or approximate to those whose lives look different
from ours, we can't help but be shaped by them.
And I was fascinated by prison conditions, and I ended
up bulldozing my way into Uganda's maximum security prison to
(05:53):
see where these guys came from. Right, And that prison,
of course, is the zero prison, which I had the
distinct owner of visiting with you. Now, there were different
colored uniforms depending on whether they've been sentenced to death
or life or something else, and they are wedged into
these cells. While that you describe it, Alexander, because you
(06:14):
know I've heard that. We've had Pete Buko on the show.
He was, of course, um promptly convicted and sentenced to
death in Kenya, and he talked about how they had
thirteen other men in the cell with him and they
had to sleep more or less like sardines in a cairn.
Is that typical? Is that what you witnessed that La Zia.
When I first went to Lazira prison, I started by
(06:35):
going to death row. It was built to hold fifty
and then it had five hundred condemned men. I was
told that they got the death penalty for crimes including
treason and cowardice and mutiny. I heard of a man
called Edward and Paggy who've been sent to death for murder.
After twelve years on death row, it turned out the
person he'd killed was still alive. They still took about
another six years for him to be released. I heard
(06:55):
someone had stolen a mango from a neighbor's mango tree
and they used standing knife to cut it off. They
got the death penalty as an armed robber. Very often
they were teenage boys, often in prison for having underage sex,
which has a maximum penalty of death in Uganda, so
I saw that there was massive overcrowding. I heard that
many prisoners had never met a lawyer. In Uganda and
(07:16):
Kenya and around Sub Saharan Africa, somewhere between eight prisoners
will never meet a lawyer. At that time, two thirds
of prisoners in Uganda were awaiting trial, sometimes in prison
for many years, occasionally over a decade awaiting trial. So
you've just said a lot of things that I could
really benefit from some clarification on. So somewhere between eighty
(07:38):
and ninety of prisoners in Uganda, Kenya and Sub Saharan
Africa will never meet a lawyer, which just seems like
a crime in and of itself. Two thirds of prisoners
are just awaiting trial, so they haven't been convicted of anything,
and without likely ever meeting a lawyer, the outcome of
the trial is probably a foregone conclusion anyway. It I'm
(08:00):
really struck by some of the charges you mentioned. They
sound old timey, like treason, cowardice, mutiny, and the fact
that underage sex between two consenting teenagers can mean the
death sends. I mean, think about this for a second.
Something like three quarters every ever said of human beings
(08:23):
lose their virginity before they turn eighteen. Now you can't
condemn three quarters of humanity to death, right, I mean,
where the hell did these laws even come from? In
Commonwealth Africa in form of British colonies, the laws largely
haven't changed since colonial times when the law was around
(08:43):
command and control. So people in prison for loitering, or
being vagrants and vagabonds and debtors, or for being gay.
I met women whose children have become very unwell. They
take in the hospital, there's no medication for them, the
child dies, and then the mom's arrested for are neglect
and taken to prison with her other children. Or women
whose husbands have beaten them and beat them for years,
(09:06):
or the husbands have got aids and he tries and
rapes the wife, and then the wife fights back and
she finds herself imprisoned, And Sir, I think it's a
consequence of having laws which haven't evolved, having countries whose
populations have grown massively over the last decades, which have
overwhelmed prison capacity. In Uganda, prisons are at about three
of capacity, so where one person should be sleeping, there
(09:29):
are three. I think for governments which don't have enough resources,
very often prisons and criminal justice aren't their priority, and
it's expensive to pay for lawyers, and so you find
people in prison facing very long sentences or sometimes the
death penalty, who don't understand the law, don't understand how
they can engage with it. Very often we letter believe
that the laws is highly complex thing that we need
(09:52):
very qualified lawyers to help us to navigate. But we ask,
what does it look like to recognize that the law
affects us all from before we're born until after we die.
What does it look like to understand that all of
us have a right to know the basic concepts of
the law. No one should go to court and not
know how to address a judge or know that they
have a right to ask questions of those who are
making accusations against them, or if they're convicted, to appeal
(10:14):
against that conviction. And so we're asking how do we
take that knowledge into the communities which needed the most,
into the communities of those who are poor, those who
are minorities or refugees, or homeless people or sex workers,
the kind of people who tend to be overrepresented in
prison say, the laws here for you, the laws here
to protect you, not just to hold you to account.
(10:35):
YouTube can understand it, because it's going to be a
long long time until most countries around the world will
prioritize paying for lawyers for everyone who finds themselves in prison.
(11:01):
Again and again, in my teens and in my twenties,
I had experiences in prisons around Africa, seeing things which
I couldn't unsee and which I felt I had to
respond to. I went to Juba Women's Prison in South Sudan,
and as the gate was opened, I saw a woman
with chains on her arms and legs, and I said
to the officer escorted me when she chained up? So well,
we chain up our lunatics. That's about a third of
(11:23):
the prison population. As far as I could understand, I
could point to anyone say that I thought that they
had a mental health problem there being in prison. They said,
we also chained up those who are going to be executed.
Although suth Sudan was a newly formed country, it was
still hanging people. So well, what's going to happen to
this woman? And the officer said, well, with her and
a number of the other women here she's not done
anything wrong. Her husband was accused of a capital crime,
(11:46):
but because the police couldn't catch him, the wife was
arrested and tried and sent to die in his place.
And Australian prison officer working with the United Nations in
prisons in South Sudan told me about a five year
old child swimming a river with a three year old friend.
The three year old round and the five year old
was arrested and sense to death for murder. So again
and again I saw things which I couldn't really understand,
(12:07):
so so I just felt I had to to respond,
and that's how I ended up starting the African Prisons Project,
which has become Justice Defenders when I was twenty one.
Around the world, according to the World Justice Project, there
are five point one billion people who are affected by
inadequate access to justice, two and fifty three billion people
living in situations of extreme injustice, ten million in prison,
(12:28):
three million of those waiting for trials. We see that
there's cuts in funding available internationally for justice work, and
so we're going to be waiting a long time. If
the solution is that every person in prison must have
access to a lawyer, and so we're asking what does
it look like to raise up lawyers and to raise
up parallegals from those communities, those who know what prison
feels like and smells like, those who are living it
(12:49):
and breathing it, and those who want to respond and
to do this work not because it's going to make
them rich, not because it's going to make them powerful,
but because they understand what it's like to have hope
taken away and they want to breathe agents of hope.
And we're asking, how can we equip this community of
prisoner and ex prison and prison officer paralegals to go
to the places that others don't want to go, to
serve the people that others don't want to serve, and
(13:10):
to say I'm here for you. You too deserve to
have your voice heard. The law can protect you as well.
And so far we've trained just under three hundred prisoner
in prison officer paralegals. We've got thirty nine prisoners and
ex prisoners and prison officers who have graduated with their
University of London law degrees having studied in prison. In
the first six months of one alone, we've served thirteen thousand,
(13:32):
seven hundred and eight prisoners without adequate representation, resulting in
two thousand and forty five of them having been released.
And so we see that there are people who are
willing to step forward, willing to do the work, willing
to serve others who will be trained on the job,
and as justice defenders, we ask, how do we equip them?
How do we give them access to knowledge and skills.
(13:52):
We used to do it in person with COVID, we've
been taking this work online and offering paralegal courses online,
training prisoners and prison officers with law degrees online, facilitating
virtual court attendance, establishing online case management systems. Because we
see that there's a justice crisis around the world, and
we see that there are people who are willing to
step forward and to respond. I sense that you have
(14:14):
the same feeling that I get, which is that when
I visit prisons and people were over in the prisons
in the United States, I often come out feeling like
there's more humanity in a certain sense inside those walls
then outside. When I first started this work, I looked
(14:34):
on prisons and those that I met as being filled
with people who needed help, whose circumstances looks desperate, but Actually,
as I gained understanding, I saw that prisons were filled
with people who had gifts and talents and skills and
gifts that they were offering others. People in prison have
been my my teachers, and they've educated me about resilience
and courage and compassion and perseverance and determination and so
(14:59):
much more. Again and again I came across these examples
of prisoners who were serving others, leading the prison football
team or having little farming projects to grow extra food,
or leading the prison church or mosque, or caring for
their fellow prisoners when they were sick, and I saw
the prison officers are doing the same. And so I
saw that prisons were filled with people who have this
(15:21):
incredible potential to offer their families, their communities, but also
wider society. William, one of my colleagues, who was on
death row in Kenya for many years, said, in prison
there are brains that can move mountains. St Oscar Romero said,
there are certain things that can only be seen with
eyes that have cried. And we saw that someone who
(15:42):
knows what it is to have their fingernails pulled out
in the police station, or to be years in prison
without a trial or to get sentenced to death but
never to get a copy of their judgment. Has this
desire for justice that comes from their first hand experience,
and so our work started shifting about ten years ago
towards equipping prisoners and prison officers with legal knowledge, training
them as paralegals through a three week paralegal course in
(16:05):
criminal law, but also giving them access to formal law
degree studying with the University of London by correspondence, as
Mandela did from his prison cell in in South Africa.
And that's now our focus as justice defenders. We've wound
up how other health and basic literacy worked just to
focus on equipping those we've lived experience of confidt with
the law with legal knowledge to serve their communities, so
(16:26):
the defenseless become the defenders. I mean, the numbers are
absolutely staggering, the number of people that you've been able
(16:47):
to help, the people been able to free. And I
was able to participate in it. I guess it was
a zoom or some sort of a video conference where
you sort of looped me in with people in different prisons,
and I was struck first of all by the fact
that that doesn't exist in America. Somehow you've been able
to get Internet inside the prisons, and we can't do
(17:09):
that here here we have this j K collect call
phone systems, you know. But I was also struck, Alexander
by the fact that the guards seemed to be, you know,
not just willing participants, but active participants in this process
of trying to help the people who they are in
charge of overseeing or what do we want to call it?
(17:30):
And was I wrong about that? That spot on we
trained prisoners in prison officers side by side as paralegals,
and in our law classes. We equipped prison officers to
go to court and speak on behalf of prisoners who
don't have anyone to speak for them. The head of
Uganda Prison Service said to me a few years ago,
We've got the gallows, we've got the executioners, but we
(17:52):
can't be sure if we're hanging anyone that's actually guilty
of any crime, because we know that our criminal justice
system is broken. Senior officers in the Kenya Prison Service, Ay,
we estimate about half of our prisoners are here innocently.
They've not had representation at trial. We want you to
train our prison officers in law so they can work
on appeals because our prisons are massively overcrowded and we
can't actually cope, and so we see that there's this
(18:15):
appetite for justice from prison services and prison officers as
well as from prisoners. I don't think anyone finds joy
going to work as a prison officer, being with people
who you know haven't got justice and feeling that you're
powerless to do anything about it. And so that's why
we're really committed to equipping prison officers to play their
role in working for justice. And I think now globally
we're asking, in light of COVID, what does it look
(18:37):
like to rebuild our societies on this foundation of access
to justice, on the foundation of the rule of law.
Since George Floyd's death and in light of Black Lives Matter,
I think we're thinking about the idea that we can't
have peace without justice on a micro or macro level
in new ways. And we love to bring together prisoners
and prison officers who are working with us as paralegals
or as law students or graduates with prosecutor US and
(19:00):
with judges, with the police and others involved in delivering
justice in that community. Wherever possible, We do it over
a meal, and we asked, how do we work together
to create a community that's just No one gains when
innocent people imprisoned, and if people are guilty, we want
them to have due process. We think, if it's possible
for that to happen with their throw inmates in Uganda,
what would that look like with their throw inmates in Alabama?
(19:23):
And coming together with guards and with judges and with
prosecutors and with police officers, and dreaming about what justice
looks like in that community. And so I'm excited by
the changes which are happening in America. Over the last
six months, We've been approached by prisoners in twenty two
different U. S States asking for our supporter, asking for
us to train them as paralegals. We've had approaches from
(19:44):
another seventeen countries beyond that, and thirteen non governmental organizations,
including the u N. There there's this growing group of
formally incarcerated Americans who are using the law to serve
their communities, who have this hunger for justice, and we're
excited to stand in solidarity with them to understand how
we can equip and support and learn. Yeah, and I've
read that your goal is by to help a million
(20:09):
people get fair hearings, and also to have expanded Justice
Defenders work even further around the globe and developed as
well as developing countries and prisons, refugee camps, home the shelters,
and brothels. I can't think of a more noble goal
than that. We're going to put all the information for
people to donate to Justice Defenders and and of course
(20:32):
the website is Justice dash Defenders dot org and you
can go there to get involved, to volunteer, to learn
to donate. I hope everyone will click on the link
that will be as I said in our bio. So
now we have two last things I promised. This is
it and then I'll let you go back to work.
(20:53):
So the my favorite question that I asked on the
show of all of our wonderful guests is if you
had a magic wand and you could change one thing,
what would it be. Let me tell you a short story.
When I was eight or nine, I went to my
local library with my dad and I picked up a
book and there was an African American guy being strapped
(21:14):
into the electric chair by a group of white men
in suits with these wide leather straps all over his body,
and there wasn't a mask over his face yet, but
the look in his eyes was expressionless. It was like
he was dead before he had actually been executed. I
realized that's the power that the law can have to
strip hope or agency or life from us. As I
(21:34):
looked at the future, I hope for an end to
the death penalty. But I also hope that around the
world there's no one whose eyes are lifeless like that.
I hope that we can raise up a new generation
of paralegals and laws with lived experience, who served those
that others refused to serve, so everyone feels that the
law is for them, that they have a chance to
tell their side of the story before they're convicted or punished.
(21:55):
Amen to that, and thank you how Axander McClain for
the incredible work you do with Justice Defenders, and of
course for sharing your story with us and to our audience.
Please join us here next week where we will speak
with a tremendous figure in education, civil rights, and the
Black Lives Matter movement, Deray McKesson. And now we turned
(22:17):
to the closing of the show. Something we call words
of Wisdom, and it works like this, I turned my
microphone off, kicked back in my chair and just listen
to anything else you want to share. Thank you for
sharing this conversation with me, Jason. Thank you for what
you role model in terms of being an advocate for
justice and your commitment and your perseverance. And to anyone
(22:40):
who's listening to this show, which maybe you feel angry
or challenged, or frustrated or confused by, or you've heard,
my encouragement is that each of us can play a
part in creating the community that we want to be
part of, the community where no one innocent is imprisoned
and where those who are guilty of crimes have a
chance to tell their side of the story and to
be punished in a way that allows for rehabilitation. So
my invitation to each of you this to ask how
(23:02):
we can each live lives where we're quick to listen
and quick to love and slow to judge. Thank you
for listening to Righteous Convictions with Jason Flamm. I'd like
to thank our production team Connor Hall, Jeff Clyburne, and
(23:25):
Kevin Wardis. The music in this production was supplied by
three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Follow us on
Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Twitter at wrong Conviction, and
on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction. Podcast Righteous Convictions with Jason
Flam is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and
association with Signal Company Number one two
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.