January 25, 2023 • 47 mins
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Bill Keller has spent years examining what is possible if prisons focus on preparing the incarcerated to be good citizens when they return to society, which the overwhelming majority will. In his new book, he shows us how we can reform our prisons and why there’s a reason for cautious optimism. Rehabilitation, he argues, is not only an investment in public safety but a moral imperative. What’s Prison For? examines the “incarceration” part of “mass incarceration.” What happens inside prisons and jails, where nearly two million Americans are held? Bill Keller, one of America’s most accomplished journalists, has spent years immersed in the subject. He argues that the most important role of prisons is preparing incarcerated people to be good neighbors and good citizens when they return to society, as the overwhelming majority will."What's Prison For" by Bill Keller: https://www.amazon.com/dp/173591374X/Contact Dave:www.survivingthesystem.orgwww.facebook.com/survivingthesystemwww.twitter.com/STSthePodcast
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The thirteenth Amendment to the United StatesConstitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude except as
a punishment for a crime. Everwondered how we ended up with the largest
prison population of any country. Haveyou noticed that those whose jobs it is
to protect and serve seem to bedemanding more and more blind obedient. You
didn't think it just happened by chance, did you. It's time to call
(00:23):
attention to the fact our government asthe most prolific slave owner on the planet.
This is Surviving the System. Thankyou for joining me today on Surviving
this System. This is Dance andDave and today I am going to keep
the introduction as short as possible becausewe have a guest coming on today to
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talk about his new book and someof his experiences. And I'm not sure
if he was told this or not, but I have been trying to get
him or someone from his organization onmy show since I first started. So
this is going to be a treatfor me. Hopefully it provides value for
you as well. So we'll getright into the housekeeping items. Don't forget
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to check out the website Surviving theSystem dot org. I do have my
contact me part on there. Iwould love to hear from you, folks.
I'd love to hear your stories,feedback on anything you've heard, as
well as the archive of the showson there. If you don't listen to
podcasts, check me out on socialmedia Facebook, dot com, slash Surviving
the System and on Twitter at ststhe podcast, and don't forget to check
(01:30):
out as well. I know Idon't mention this very often, but I'm
going to start more now that myproducer and owner of the Fringe has been
spending so much time. Don't forgetto check out the website Fringe dot fm.
You can find information about me myshow page on there, as well
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as everybody else available on the station, all the great shows available. Check
out the shop on there, takea look at see if there is anything
that might strike up your fancy.Go there when you can. You can
drop me a line through there tooif you're not able to catch me on
the website or on social media.And as always, right before we get
started, I do want to quicklystart with that moment of gratitude, just
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to make sure that we keep thatvibration high, keep the frequency high.
As we can talk about some moredifficult topics on this show, those that
can tend to strike a chord ofanger or frustration or resentment, and so
we want to make sure that wecan handle these topics in a productive and
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constructive manner. So with that beingsaid, I just want to say that
I am I am so grateful tobe here with you, allowing me to
live out my purpose to help toremind you of who you really are and
what you're truly capable of. Ourguest today is the esteemed mister Bill Keller.
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Now. Bill Keller is the foundingeditor in chief of The Marshall Project.
That is a nonprofit news organization thatcovers criminal justice in the United States.
If you've been listening to me fora while, you know that I
have talked about this website on myshow. I use it as a resource.
I get their emails daily, Icheck out all of the stories that
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come through there. I've actually beenable to contact some of the people who
have written articles that have been onthat website to come on and speak in
the past. But as I mentionedat the beginning of the show, I've
never had someone from the Marshall Projecton. So I am very excited about
this He was also the executive editorof The New York Times and a winner
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of the Pulitzer Prize in nineteen eightyfive for his reporting on the USSR.
We will get into all of that, as well as his new book,
What's Prison for Punishment and Rehability inthe Age of Mass Incarceration? Bill.
Thank you very much for joining metoday on Surviving the System. How are
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you. I'm good, Thanks forhaving me on. Absolutely, thank you
for coming on. I am.I am very excited to have you here.
If you can't tell I follow,I follow the work of the Marshall
Project very very frequently. I'm involvedin criminal justice reform here myself in Omaha,
Nebraska, so I try to stayas connected as I can, and
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it's always good to have someone onthat I can that I can learn from.
So, just to be clear,I retired as editor of the Marshall
Project a couple of years ago.I saw the board and they're still my
friends and I occasionally edit for them. But just to be I don't want
to take credit for more than I'veactually done. Understand completely, Understand completely.
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Well, let's start a little bitwith your your past. You have
a pretty distinguished past in journalism.So how did you what led you to
get started in journalist and when didyou decide that that was that was your
calling, your chosen field. Probablyin high school, not that we had
much of a school paper, butI developed the sensitivity, so somebody who's
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more comfortable being on the sidelines thanin the parade. I like being the
observer. I like calling people outon their claims. I'm proud to say
that our high school paper got introuble occasionally. Then I went off to
college and I went to little liberal'scollege called Pomona in southern California. And
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I always say that my major wasthe school paper, which is kind of
true. And those are those arein the days when the newspapers actually had
money. So I got a summerinternship at the Oregonian. That was my
first real hang job in journalists didthe summer. When I finished the summer,
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they asked me to come back afterI graduated. So that's how I
started out. That's fantastic. Andthen from there, obviously there was a
path that led you to the NewYork Times. Did you go from the
Oregonian over to New York or whatwas your what was your journey like it
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was a little circuitous. I workedfor the Oregonian for eight or nine years,
the last half of it was intheir Washington, DC bureau, and
then I quit and took a gapyear. I'd saved up enough money so
that my girlfriend and I could travelfor We thought for six months. We
ended up traveling for a year.Oh wow, you're willing to eat street
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food and sleep in the sleeping bag. You can stet your money a little
farther, That's true. Then Icame back worked for a weekly magazine called
Congressional Quarterly. Why it's called CongressionalQuarterly as another story? And I worked
in the Washington bureau of the DallasTimes, Harold, And from there I
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went to the Oregonia. Gotcha so? And I am curious? Then,
So you won the Pulitzer Prize innineteen eighty nine for reporting on the USSR.
What was the story, like?What was the topic that you were
covering that that drew so much attention? The story that when I was there
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was a guy named Mikhail Gorbachev andwho was promising to change the country radically.
People weren't quite sure. People inAmerica weren't quite sure whether to believe
him or not. So when Iarrived, he was still a little bit
of a mystery. And I didfive years in the Moscow Bureau. I
started with Gorbachev letting a lot ofdissidents out of jail and exile, which
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helped demonstrate his bona fides. Andit ended about a month after my time
there, ended about a month afterthe military establishment the KGB tried to overthrow
Gorbatouf. Oh wow, so itwas. It was one of those I
mean, I always tell people I'ma believer in luck, and I mean
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you can't pick assignments like that andknow that everything he writs going to go
on the front page, because youknow, this is like the Soviet Union,
for God's sake. Yeah, whenI left, it wasn't the Soviet
Union anymore. It was humpty dumpty. Now did you any if I missed
it? My apologies, But didyou get the chance to actually the interview
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mister Gorbach Schaffer? Was this allfrom the outside looking in? He didn't
give a lot of interviews. Hetended to come out and lecture, so
you could ask him a question,but there'd be a gaggle of reporters around
him and he did the same thingwas to his own citizens. You gather
a bunch of them around. Insteadof you know, asking them questions,
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he would hold forth on they hadto do to straighten out their lives.
He was a little full of himself. Sure, sure so then. And
I'm curious then, So from workingin the New York Times over to the
Marshall Project, how much time wasin between there? What was that journey?
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Like? What was it that openedyour eyes and you said, hey,
this is something I want to getmore involved in. I've been at
the Times for about thirty years.I had, in addition to covering Russia,
I was a correspondent in South Africawhen Nelson Mandela took over. So
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refer back to my comments about luck, Yeah, that was a lucky draw
too. And I was Foreign editorfor a few years. Then there was
a I was managing editor. Therewas a competition to be executive editor high
law. So I went into avery happy exile as a magazine writer and
columnist for the op ed page.Then the guy who got the executive editor's
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job imploded and got himself fired,and so I became an executive editor,
did that for eight years, thenretired from that was about as much time
as anybody should have to spend amanagement job. And then I went back
to the writing gig for a fewmonths, and that's where I was when
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I was found by a guy namedNeil Barsky. Neil Barsky is the founder
of the Marshall Project. Neil Barskystarted out as a Wall Street Journal reporter
and he used to cover Donald Trump. He covered real estates, so he
ended up covering a lout of Trump, and he's very proud to have on
his wall a page of a bookthat Trump wrote which he said Neil Barsky
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was the biggest asshole he ever whoever covered him. I don't think he
said asshole. I think he wasthe most of oxious. But Neil carries
out as a badge of pride.Neil also likes to say that working at
the Wall Street Journal teaches you youdon't have to be all that smart to
get to get rich. So hewent and got rich, and then he
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became a philanthropist, giving away moneyand giving back to society. His parents
were active in civil rights movement,so he was naturally inclined to sort of
criminal justice and social justice issues.So he came up with this hairbrained idea
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that in twenty fourteen, when newspaperswere dying and newsrooms were eviscerated by budget
cuts, he was going to starta newsroom from scratch. And he put
up a bunch of his own money, recruited some friends to contribute, hired
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somebody to do to be a regularfundraiser, and he called me up.
I'd never met him. He calledme up sort of dropped the name of
a mutual friend and invited me tobreakfast coincidentally in the restaurant of the Trump
Tower on the south end of CentralPark. So Donald Trump was part of
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our marriage, I guess anyway,So he said he wanted to start this
news organization that would be a realnews organization, not just a lobbying group
or an adric I mean love patrimacygroups. But we didn't want to be
one, and he so he pitchedme this idea. And I was in
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the midst of writing newspaper columns forThe Times. I'd never covered criminal justice
as a beat, except like mostnewspapers, when you start out, you
spend some time covering the police beat, usually the night police beat, because
it's the least desirable assignment. Sojust to get a sense of what he
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was up to, I wrote acouple of columns on criminal justice, and
I got really engaged and really interestedin the subject. For this will be
no surprise to you whatsoever, butI was appalled at how badly I understood
that's how the system works or doesn'twork, how little I knew about it,
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and decided I was on board,and so I went to work in
twenty fourteen for the Marshal Project.Started hiring people, kept hiring people.
Neil and his designated fundraisers did terrific, terrific job, and the Marshall Project
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now has I think of about fortypeople working for it. And as you
know, because you're a regular readerand pretty damn good, very yeah,
and they don't pull any punches either. It's it's definitely the best phrase that
I can come up with is it'sit's in your face. If it's a
difficult topic or a tough subject,they don't they don't soften the blow.
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And I like that. I'm gladyou noticed that. Pride ourselves and it
brings me up just not necessarily offtopic, but I'm I'm always curious when
I speak with people that are involvedwith the media, and you having such
a long career, how do yousee journalism different today than it was thirty
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forty years ago? And I askthat because there seems to just be a
marriage between politics and journalism at thistime in our history, where you've got
one side of the media is allabout republic ends and why their agenda is
correct and why Democrats are evil,and on the other hand, you've got
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the exact opposite, why the Democratsare right and why Republicans are evil.
It doesn't really seem like it's veryunbiased any longer, where it's just this
is the story, kind of makeup your own opinion from here after we
give you the facts. Well,if you succeed in being in your face,
a lot of people are going totake you for biased. They don't
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like what you write. So Ithink I'll speak for so called mainstream media
at the Times, the Washington Post, you know, the major networks,
some of the magazines, the supposedlyresponsible journalists. I think any of them
will tell you that we aim tobe impartial, not to be prescriptive about
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what what should happen, but tobe revealing what is happened, and to
be analytical about it. But Ihave to say that two factors have made
it more polarized, made the mediamore polarized, and include the New York
Times in this too. One ofthem is social media, which which changes
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you mean, one of the thingsthat protects you against being too opinionated is
you have the time to write astory, You have the time to report
it out, to get all alternateviews and try to make sense of it.
The internet means you don't have nearlyas much time, because that's the
why somebody's going to be posting thatstory in five seconds. So you so
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you sort of go with your gut. And if your gut happens to be
liberal, which it probably is inthe majority of mainstream news media out that's
um, you know, then it'sgoing to show in in in the copy.
So social media is one thing thathas changed the way the press soup
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rates. They Oh there is kindof obviously Donald Trump, who was he
didn't invent populist populism or the sortof nationalist street, but he sure drove
at home, drove a stake intothe into the property. Yeah. Um,
and because he declared war on thepress, and you know, we
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all said well, we're not goingto be bated into being being at war
with the President of the United States. We've got to cover him seriously,
and you know, straight down themiddle. But there's you can't cover Donald
Trump down the middle or not downthe middle that anybody would recognize as the
middle. Um, he's just twoout there, yeahs. And he knows
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how to I mean, he knowshow to get the reaction that he's looking
for. Yes, he does.And I would say I would say,
you know, if any White Housecorrespondent tells you that he doesn't that didn't
feel manipulated by Trunkey's lyne I hewas massive manipulator, even even at the
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point it reached the point where hewas being called a liar using the L
word on the front page of newspapers. Even then, Uh, he was
loving it. Oh sure, becauseeverybody was talking about him. Everybody was
talking about him. Yeah, what'swhat's the old adage, there's no such
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thing as bad press, have badpress? Right, So we've got just
about three minutes before our break atthe bottom of the hour. Um,
So I don't want to get inanything two in depth yet we will.
We'll get into your book and alittle bit more of the uh, the
in your face type stories. Atthat point, what I'm curious to what
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what led you to decide to writethis book? Um, after I'd spent
about five years immersed in the subject. With my fellow editors and reporters,
I feel they felt that was agood cycle, a good time to retire
and do some other stuff, includingsome teaching. And I thought I had
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some stuff that I'd learned that wouldbe worth sharing. And along came Columbia
Global Reports, which is an imprintassociated with Columbia University, and they do
these small books. I thought Icould write a small book. They're the
guy who found it at the placecalls them non fiction novellas. You know,
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they come out in paperback. Theydo about six of them a year.
They're really good. I think I'mjust speaking about my own U And
so I've known the editor of thatpublication for quite a while. I told
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him I was interested in pitching somethingto him, and he said, pitch
away, And I pitched the ideaof doing prisons. Criminal justice system,
as you know, has lots ofcomponent parts, and you know, policing
gets a lot of attention of courts, operate pretty much in the open,
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but prisons are a little bit ofa mystery. I mean, partly because
people don't want to see what goeson in prisons, partly because the people
who built the walls want to keepyou out. So I thought I would
try to do a primer on whatI understood about the prison system, and
it's we've got just about a minutehere and then we'll get into we'll get
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into the book, and as Imentioned, get into a lot more detail
about that. I think that wasthat was my eye opening experience as having
been through the system. That's howI learned all about it, unfortunately,
and I think that that's in manycases, you don't know what's happening or
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what's going on in there unless youeither go through it, or you're a
friend or family member that has someoneclose to you go through it and you're
on that journey with them. Sowe'll talk a little bit more about that
coming up here again. We arespeaking with Bill Keller, author of What's
Prison for Punishment and Rehabilitation in theAge of Mass Incarceration. When we get
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back from the break, we'll talka little bit more about the book.
We'll get into some of the topicsthat it covers, and we'll learn a
little bit more about mister Keller aswell. Stay tuned, Welcome back to
Surviving the System. This is Danceand Dave and we are speaking with mister
Bill Keller, author of What's PrisonFor. I'm going to go ahead and
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we're going to open up the phonelines and the chat just in case if
anyone has any particular questions that theywould like to ask of myself or mister
Keller. The number is one eighthundred five eight eight zero three three five
eight hundred five eight eight zero threethree five, or just drop them in
the chat on discord. I willmake sure to grab that for you.
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So, mister Keller, again,thank you so much for your time.
And I really want to get intoI want to get into the book now.
Now I full disclosure, I'm notdone with it yet, but that's
because I let my mother borrow itand my mother read it and just got
it back to me last weekend.But she loved it. She said it
was great, the research was verythorough. So give your mother my best.
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I will absolutely do that. I'lltell her you said thank you,
so I know you you got intoa little bit about what led you to
write the book and how you pitchthe topic. But what what I appreciate
about it so far is you're comingat it from both I guess, both
sides of the aisles, so tospeak. This isn't just all about how
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poorly inmates are being treated and allof the human rights violations and all of
the atrocities, et cetera that aregoing on. You're actually talking about the
guards, the CEOs and the peoplethat work on the other side of the
fence and their view of it aswell, and how they're involved with that
and they're invested. So where wheredid you get some of these stories from?
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Were these people that you met orinterviewed, or was it through the
Marshall Project or how did you comeup with these these topics? Some of
it was through the Marshall Project,and I tried wherever I was relying on
the research of one of the Marshallreporters to credit them in the in the
text and in the footnotes. ButI I did a fair amount of reporting
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while I was running the Marshall Project, either collaborating with other reporters or just
doing something that caught my fancy andthen after I left, I spent a
year and a half doing what journalistsdo, which is call up smart people
and ask them stupid questions. Iinterviewed a lot of people, starting with
some of the sociologists and criminologists whostudy what works and treating people who are
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incarcerated, but also a lot ofpeople who are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated,
and obviously the advocacy communities, includingthe advocacy advocates of the guards. I'm
glad you mentioned that, because Imean, guards are often rightly portrayed as
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an obstruction to change, because they'rethere to protect bested interests. But what
people overlook is that guards are toa large extent as much victims the system
as the inmates are. UM Iinterviewed one guy who runs an alliance of
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CEO unions who said he'd never beenand he's been like forty years thirty forty
years in corrections. He said he'dnever met a corrections officer who woke up
in the morning and said, boy, I can't wait to get to work
today. It's you know, they'rein the this kind of cast system of
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law enforcement. They're regarded as nearthe bottom, you know, they're not
exactly up there with the air Force, right, and they work in really
difficult conditions. In some cases,they contribute to the difficulty of the conditions
because they're they're trained not to betherapists, they're social workers. They're trained
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to be guards, even though theycan prefer as a group to be referred
to as corrections officers, and Itry to honor that just out of courtesy.
But what they're trained to do iscrowd control and self defense. No,
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yeah, I'd absolutely answered my questionand my experience. As I mentioned
before, it was very eye openinglearning all about it, but I learned
all about the guards as well.And you may or may not be familiar
with this, and if I'm beingredundant, please forgive me. I just
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for emphasis and for anyone listening thatmight not know, but Nebraska is the
second most overcrowded prison population in thecountry at a time, for a short
amount of time, it overtook thenumber one spot, but as dropped back
down to number two. We havea severe crisis not just with or crowding,
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but understaffing as well. They justthey can't find anybody to work,
and when they do, they getin there and They're like, are you
forget this? Man, I'm outof here. This is you're asking way
too much for this. So myexperience inside I had I met some actually
really decent CEOs. I met acouple of people who were there who really
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were all about trying to change people'slives and trying to take that opportunity to
say, here's how you can helpto better yourself. So that's a story
that I try to tell from this, And I've actually brought on a CEO
that oversaw my unit so that Ican have him tell his story. He
started the Seven Habits on the insidecourse, or that the entire Department of
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Corrections in Nebraska very devoted to tryingto help people get back on their way.
So I think it's I can't imaginethat his interview with you helped his
career a lot. He had beenfired by that point, which is why
I asked him to come on,And funny enough, he was let go
specifically because they were they used himas an example because he was trying to
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help the the inmates too much andthey were like, you got to stop
talking to them, and he's whatare you talking about. I'm trying to
help and they just he was gone. So yeah, otherwise I wouldn't have
I would have put him in thatkind of a jeopardy. But it was
an interesting story, and I said, come tell me about it. So
one of the things that you probablynoticed in the book, I dwell for
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a couple of chapters on how theydo things in Europe. I was just
about to segue there. Yes,in Norway and Germany. We sent a
reporter to a trip to Germany witha bunch of American Directions officials and one
of there a bunch of eye openingthings about these these physits, which led
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to some interesting experiments on the backwhen they got back home. So we
can talk about it. But oneof the things that just blew their minds
was the role of the treatment andpreparation and role of staff. If you're
going to be a corrections officer inGermany in a German prison, you're going
to go to school for two yearsand you're going to study, among other
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things, human rights law and psychology, and then you're going to be paid
really well, and it's a prestige'sjob they get, you know, it's
like it's getting admitted to a expensive, you know, high quality university in
the US. As you know,your training consists of weeks, not years.
Yeah, and it's likely to focuson crowd control and self self defense.
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Right, they just try to usethe pepper spray. Yeah. Yeah,
So what what were some of thethings that you saw overseas. I've
talked about this, but it's beena very long time. There's been a
lot of studies coming out recently talkingabout some of the facilities over in Europe
where they're almost it's almost like alike a college where they really focus on
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that rehabilitation where they say, okay, you're you're going to maximize this time
so when you come out, you'regoing to be set for success. Yeah.
The philosophy. I have not beento the European prisons. We sent
reporters there, and I've interviewed alot of American officials who have been there
and had their eyes open to justdivide them overclaim of course, but they
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start with a different philosophy, andit's pretty pretty much the same whether you're
in Germany or Norway, or Swedenor the Netherlands, and the philosophy starts
with you you're being punished for breakingon a society's rules, your punishment is
you're deprived of your freedom, andthat's it. All your other rights stay
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intact, the right to conjugal visits, the right to safety, the right
to have a decent diet and healthcare, the right to vote, which is
only allowed in a couple of USstates. Prison within the prisons. So
that's that's rule number one is it'syour punishment extends to the fact that you're
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locked up. It doesn't extend tohow you're treated. And then point number
two is the job of the system, the German system or the Norwegian system,
is to figure out what it wasthat led you to do the bad
things you did and work on them. As long as we've got you here,
let's do some anger management to alcoholicsanonymous. Let's give you an education,
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let's give you skills. And thethird principle is what they call the
normality principle, which is you're goingto be leaving the prison at some point.
You shouldn't it shouldn't be a shockto your system when you leave to
discover what's going on out there.You should have some trade the responsibilities and
the experiences of normalcy while you're inside, meaning simple things like you wake yourself
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up in the morning and you goto class or you go to work,
depending on what you're what you're doing. You fix your own food. Sometimes
you iron your own clothes or youruniforms, so that when you get out
and you have maintain as much contactsas they can possibly arrange with your family,
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with other outsiders, volunteers. Andthe other thing is that we talked
a little about the CEOs when there'sa great YouTube video of the warden of
Halden Prison in Norway talking to theCEOs at Attica and they're all and they're
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all safety. These guys are killersand violent people. What do we do
about them? And he points outthat there's a different way to maintain to
contain violence. That's if you're engagingwith the prisoners on a regular basis.
You eat meals with them, youtalk to them, you you keep an
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eye on how their lives are going. You can anticipate when there's a fight
that's going to break out, orwhen somebody's going to have a crisis,
a trauma, a mental breakdown,and you can deal with it, you
know, in real time. Andthat is more a reliable way of keeping
yourself safe than just risking everybody forships twice a day. Yeah, it's
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interesting. It's interesting from from thisside having gone through it, because I
see those people who are, youknow, branded as the quote unquote the
worst of the worst of society,the dangerous people, the killers, the
murderers, the thieves, are thepeople that are in for a long time.
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They put on a show for theguards, is really what it comes
down to. When they're around.They puff their chests up and they get
mouthy, and there's a very clearseparation of us versus them, and then
the CEO takes off and it They'rethe most intelligent and reasonable human being I've
ever ever met. I've had someof the greatest conversations of my life with
(34:22):
those people. But they it's theway that the system is set up here
in America really just feeds into thatthat separation. You've got the guards over
here and you've got the inmates overhere, and they're the bad guys.
What a waste of human potential.Yeah, that's the thing that my first
(34:42):
visceral lesson in dealing with people who'vespent time in prisoner who are in prison,
some of whom I'm still in touchwith, it was just imagine that
these guys had not spent twenty yearsof their life at a cage, because
you know, a little education anda little sense of purpose, it could
(35:04):
be really contributing to society. Thatsounds like a sort of, you know,
squeaky liberal point of view, ButI don't see how it's conservative to
squander the potential of human life.Sure, I'm my views are for the
(35:24):
most part, fairly conservative. Idefinitely don't call myself Republican. I don't
call myself democrat either, but man, when it comes to this topic,
I'm definitely very, very liberal.I'm right there with you, having met
those individuals and myself being one ofthose individuals. They were the most compassionate,
(35:47):
reasonable, intelligent human beings I evermet. Some of the people that
are in there for life are theones that got me through my initial first
few months, which were the worst. The absolute word. So what do
you think? And this can playinto your opinion if you've got statistics to
(36:07):
back it up or studies, I'dlove to hear about it. But what
is it in your opinion that youthink still continues to feed into the system
running as it is here in AmericaDespite all of the evidence showing how it
doesn't work, and how all ofthese other countries are doing something that seems
to be working much better. Westill have that tunnel vision and just won't
(36:30):
budge. The answer to that ispretty complicated. I think the big picture
is that this is going to bea little oversimplified. But the prison system
is like a sewer for all theproblems of society. It's like a big
catch basin. Oh, people whohave poor education or no skills, or
(36:55):
no healthcare or no housing, allthe all the social problems created by those
flow into the prison system. Soyou can't really that radic There's a limit
to how much you can change thesystem when you have a deluge of bad
stuff flowing in. Not bad people, just bad attitudes. Um. You
(37:20):
know, bad experience is bad traumas. So that's that's that's part of it.
Um is why the system stays away. It is part of it is
politics. It's it's easy to demogoguethe issue of crime again now um.
And part of it is money.You know, they're we spend eighty billion
(37:45):
dollars a year on jails and prisonslocking people up. Um. And some
states, some states have because thecourts told them to her because they decided
they wanted to save them. Andyou have cut back on the cost of
prison and closed prisons. Um,sorry, I lost my train of thought
(38:07):
there. No, you're fine,You're fine. So and on that,
on that same line of thinking,though, I was hoping you would get
into that, because that's my opinionis the number one issue is the money.
What about the for profit prison system? How did that even how did
that even come about? And againi'll still allowed to operate. Yeah,
(38:30):
Well, started with slavery and thencontinued with the big gluephole in the thirteenth
Amendment, which I'm sure you're familiarwith, which very well, very well
for people convicted of crimes, yep, which led to you know what,
we're plantations. What were slave plantationsbecame convict plantations. There's there's for it's
(38:52):
not a new thing that there's aprofit interest in prisons, but then they
are. I think the places likeCca began in the seventies or eighties with
the idea that they would manage theprison the whole, but manage the whole
prison for you, yeah, andjust pay us the same way the hotels
(39:12):
get paid by occupancy. You know, if we keep the sales full,
we get more money. Now,private prisons only add up to about ten
of the capacity of the prison capacityand jail capacity of in this country.
But private management doesn't tell the wholestory. As you well know, there
are all kinds of services that publicprisons contract out for their healthcare, the
(39:38):
transport, telecommunications, meals, uniforms. Those are all made by almost all
made by four profit companies that sellthem to the state. So there's the
profit motives not only been going onfor one hundred and fifty years. Uh,
(39:59):
it's it's bigger than it looks onthe surface. Sure, And not
to mention the companies that that contractwith the state to have the inmates produce
a product for them at literally pennieson the dollar and then turn around and
sell it at the most massive markupin the inhuman history. That's correct.
(40:24):
So how do you I always tryto end the shows as constructively as I
can and try to put some somethingproductive on the table, some type of
ray of hope or something that somebodycan do. So what do you think
are some things that I or anyonelistening can can do to take action with
(40:47):
this subject? Say, it's it'ssomeone who has someone who's inside and they're
seeing all of these things that we'retalking about, and they're screaming from the
rooftops and they feel like nobody's listeningto them. What are some steps that
the average person can take to tryto start to draw some of that awareness.
Well, mostly the obvious things thatyou try to do when you're when
(41:10):
you want to change institutions, youvote, You call your congressman and try
to get him or heard of,vote for legislation to make things better.
If you have money to give theChristmas time, you give a little money
to the places that the not forprofits that handle reentry or education. You
(41:36):
don't. You don't elect people whopander to your sort of nastier instincts,
because it's I mean, let's staysaid. Everybody has has the experience of
thinking this guy should be punished,yeah, into his life, and it's
a human nature to think that.But when politicians pander to that, you
(41:58):
get indifferent to cruel treatment of thepeople. Yeah, And I always I
always try to underscore as maybe obvious, but it's not a gift that you're
getting to somebody who committed a crime. It's an investment in somebody who's going
to be your neighbor. Because ofthe people incarcerated are going to be free
(42:20):
Monday, and you know, doyou want to send them home alienated and
brutalized and with no skills and stigmatized, or would you rather have them with
a real chance of readjusting to reallife? Yeah, in my heroes in
the book. One of the reviewersdescribed the book as surprisingly optimistic, and
(42:45):
it's not. I'm not really optimistic. I mean because because prisons are a
sewer for all of society's problems,and I don't see us solving all of
those problems instantly. But I dofocus on my sort of heroes, who
range from corrections officers who went toGermany and tried to adopt some of those
(43:06):
practices, to teachers who run collegelevel classes and in prisons, to volunteers.
I think not because those people arenecessarily going to win the war of
what prisons are like, but becausethey show the possibility and I like to
(43:28):
hold up at least the hope ofsome solution. Sure, that's my goal
too, And my standpoint from evenstarting this show was there's more people that
are inside of prisons that come backout into the community and successfully reintegrate.
(43:51):
They live a quiet life, theyhave a job, they have their family,
and they don't ever go back.But that's not newsworthy, So you
don't ever hear about that person.You hear about like being in Nebraska.
You hear about the Mother's Day riotand all of the people that started that,
and how those people got more convictionson top of that. Or Nico
Jenkins from many years ago who wasset out on parole and told the parole
(44:15):
board I'm gonna go do it againif you let me out, and sure
enough he did so. But thoseare the stories that make the news.
It's never about the guy who getsback out and goes and works his job
and pays his bills and has agood relationship with his wife and kids and
has a happy life happily ever after. Well, that's a fair indictment of
(44:37):
the media's role in all of this. I mean, I do think there
are places, I hope the Marshallpractice is one of them, that are
part of the solution, But there'sstill an awful lot of sensational coverage that
contributes to the fear, which contributesto harsh policies. Yep, that's all
right. I really take the stanceof you be the change you want to
(44:58):
see in the world. So that'sthat's what I'm doing, is focusing on
the hope, focusing on those positivestories. So we've got just about little
over a minute here. I wantto make sure to give you some time
to tell us where we can findthe book. Should someone feel so inclined
to reach out and contact you,if they have questions or comments, how
can people reach you? You canget the book anywhere where you can get
(45:23):
books, or you can go tothe Columbia Global Reports website in order to
them. But you know, Amazon, Barnes, and Noble, well,
all of the big booksellers will makeit available. And I am Although I
have used social media, I mostlydon't like it very much because either you
(45:46):
spend your life doing social media oryou spend your life living. Yeah.
But my email address, which Idistributed pretty freely, is NYC Keller at
gmail dot and that's NYC K EL L E R at gmail dot com.
Exactly perfect. Well, thank youvery much for your time. We
(46:10):
are winding down. I do appreciateyou staying up late with me as this
was this was a great honor forme, so I wish you the best.
I hope the book does fantastic,and I hope to have you back
at some point in the future,and thank you for listening. As always,
I hope you have found value inthe show today. Don't forget the
(46:30):
website Surviving the System dot org,on Facebook at facebook dot com, slash
Surviving the System, Twitter at sts, the podcast, and of course Fringe
dot fm. And as always,don't forget, keep your head up,
don't let him get you. Itmay be easy to look at all the
(46:50):
corruption and manipulation in the system andfeel hopeless. Here at Surviving the System,
we hold to the belief that greatnessis born in the midst of extraordinary
struggles. You were created with apurpose, with infinite potential, and many
have lost sight of that fact.We're here to remind you of who you
are. The best revenge the success
The thirteenth Amendment to the United StatesConstitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude except as
a punishment for a crime. Everwondered how we ended up with the largest
prison population of any country. Haveyou noticed that those whose jobs it is
to protect and serve seem to bedemanding more and more blind obedient. You
didn't think it just happened by chance, did you. It's time to call
(00:23):
attention to the fact our government asthe most prolific slave owner on the planet.
This is Surviving the System. Thankyou for joining me today on Surviving
this System. This is Dance andDave and today I am going to keep
the introduction as short as possible becausewe have a guest coming on today to
(00:43):
talk about his new book and someof his experiences. And I'm not sure
if he was told this or not, but I have been trying to get
him or someone from his organization onmy show since I first started. So
this is going to be a treatfor me. Hopefully it provides value for
you as well. So we'll getright into the housekeeping items. Don't forget
(01:06):
to check out the website Surviving theSystem dot org. I do have my
contact me part on there. Iwould love to hear from you, folks.
I'd love to hear your stories,feedback on anything you've heard, as
well as the archive of the showson there. If you don't listen to
podcasts, check me out on socialmedia Facebook, dot com, slash Surviving
the System and on Twitter at ststhe podcast, and don't forget to check
(01:30):
out as well. I know Idon't mention this very often, but I'm
going to start more now that myproducer and owner of the Fringe has been
spending so much time. Don't forgetto check out the website Fringe dot fm.
You can find information about me myshow page on there, as well
(01:51):
as everybody else available on the station, all the great shows available. Check
out the shop on there, takea look at see if there is anything
that might strike up your fancy.Go there when you can. You can
drop me a line through there tooif you're not able to catch me on
the website or on social media.And as always, right before we get
started, I do want to quicklystart with that moment of gratitude, just
(02:15):
to make sure that we keep thatvibration high, keep the frequency high.
As we can talk about some moredifficult topics on this show, those that
can tend to strike a chord ofanger or frustration or resentment, and so
we want to make sure that wecan handle these topics in a productive and
(02:36):
constructive manner. So with that beingsaid, I just want to say that
I am I am so grateful tobe here with you, allowing me to
live out my purpose to help toremind you of who you really are and
what you're truly capable of. Ourguest today is the esteemed mister Bill Keller.
(03:00):
Now. Bill Keller is the foundingeditor in chief of The Marshall Project.
That is a nonprofit news organization thatcovers criminal justice in the United States.
If you've been listening to me fora while, you know that I
have talked about this website on myshow. I use it as a resource.
I get their emails daily, Icheck out all of the stories that
(03:22):
come through there. I've actually beenable to contact some of the people who
have written articles that have been onthat website to come on and speak in
the past. But as I mentionedat the beginning of the show, I've
never had someone from the Marshall Projecton. So I am very excited about
this He was also the executive editorof The New York Times and a winner
(03:45):
of the Pulitzer Prize in nineteen eightyfive for his reporting on the USSR.
We will get into all of that, as well as his new book,
What's Prison for Punishment and Rehability inthe Age of Mass Incarceration? Bill.
Thank you very much for joining metoday on Surviving the System. How are
(04:06):
you. I'm good, Thanks forhaving me on. Absolutely, thank you
for coming on. I am.I am very excited to have you here.
If you can't tell I follow,I follow the work of the Marshall
Project very very frequently. I'm involvedin criminal justice reform here myself in Omaha,
Nebraska, so I try to stayas connected as I can, and
(04:28):
it's always good to have someone onthat I can that I can learn from.
So, just to be clear,I retired as editor of the Marshall
Project a couple of years ago.I saw the board and they're still my
friends and I occasionally edit for them. But just to be I don't want
to take credit for more than I'veactually done. Understand completely, Understand completely.
(04:49):
Well, let's start a little bitwith your your past. You have
a pretty distinguished past in journalism.So how did you what led you to
get started in journalist and when didyou decide that that was that was your
calling, your chosen field. Probablyin high school, not that we had
much of a school paper, butI developed the sensitivity, so somebody who's
(05:15):
more comfortable being on the sidelines thanin the parade. I like being the
observer. I like calling people outon their claims. I'm proud to say
that our high school paper got introuble occasionally. Then I went off to
college and I went to little liberal'scollege called Pomona in southern California. And
(05:41):
I always say that my major wasthe school paper, which is kind of
true. And those are those arein the days when the newspapers actually had
money. So I got a summerinternship at the Oregonian. That was my
first real hang job in journalists didthe summer. When I finished the summer,
(06:03):
they asked me to come back afterI graduated. So that's how I
started out. That's fantastic. Andthen from there, obviously there was a
path that led you to the NewYork Times. Did you go from the
Oregonian over to New York or whatwas your what was your journey like it
(06:24):
was a little circuitous. I workedfor the Oregonian for eight or nine years,
the last half of it was intheir Washington, DC bureau, and
then I quit and took a gapyear. I'd saved up enough money so
that my girlfriend and I could travelfor We thought for six months. We
ended up traveling for a year.Oh wow, you're willing to eat street
(06:47):
food and sleep in the sleeping bag. You can stet your money a little
farther, That's true. Then Icame back worked for a weekly magazine called
Congressional Quarterly. Why it's called CongressionalQuarterly as another story? And I worked
in the Washington bureau of the DallasTimes, Harold, And from there I
(07:08):
went to the Oregonia. Gotcha so? And I am curious? Then,
So you won the Pulitzer Prize innineteen eighty nine for reporting on the USSR.
What was the story, like?What was the topic that you were
covering that that drew so much attention? The story that when I was there
(07:29):
was a guy named Mikhail Gorbachev andwho was promising to change the country radically.
People weren't quite sure. People inAmerica weren't quite sure whether to believe
him or not. So when Iarrived, he was still a little bit
of a mystery. And I didfive years in the Moscow Bureau. I
started with Gorbachev letting a lot ofdissidents out of jail and exile, which
(07:54):
helped demonstrate his bona fides. Andit ended about a month after my time
there, ended about a month afterthe military establishment the KGB tried to overthrow
Gorbatouf. Oh wow, so itwas. It was one of those I
mean, I always tell people I'ma believer in luck, and I mean
(08:16):
you can't pick assignments like that andknow that everything he writs going to go
on the front page, because youknow, this is like the Soviet Union,
for God's sake. Yeah, whenI left, it wasn't the Soviet
Union anymore. It was humpty dumpty. Now did you any if I missed
it? My apologies, But didyou get the chance to actually the interview
(08:37):
mister Gorbach Schaffer? Was this allfrom the outside looking in? He didn't
give a lot of interviews. Hetended to come out and lecture, so
you could ask him a question,but there'd be a gaggle of reporters around
him and he did the same thingwas to his own citizens. You gather
a bunch of them around. Insteadof you know, asking them questions,
(08:58):
he would hold forth on they hadto do to straighten out their lives.
He was a little full of himself. Sure, sure so then. And
I'm curious then, So from workingin the New York Times over to the
Marshall Project, how much time wasin between there? What was that journey?
(09:24):
Like? What was it that openedyour eyes and you said, hey,
this is something I want to getmore involved in. I've been at
the Times for about thirty years.I had, in addition to covering Russia,
I was a correspondent in South Africawhen Nelson Mandela took over. So
(09:46):
refer back to my comments about luck, Yeah, that was a lucky draw
too. And I was Foreign editorfor a few years. Then there was
a I was managing editor. Therewas a competition to be executive editor high
law. So I went into avery happy exile as a magazine writer and
columnist for the op ed page.Then the guy who got the executive editor's
(10:09):
job imploded and got himself fired,and so I became an executive editor,
did that for eight years, thenretired from that was about as much time
as anybody should have to spend amanagement job. And then I went back
to the writing gig for a fewmonths, and that's where I was when
(10:31):
I was found by a guy namedNeil Barsky. Neil Barsky is the founder
of the Marshall Project. Neil Barskystarted out as a Wall Street Journal reporter
and he used to cover Donald Trump. He covered real estates, so he
ended up covering a lout of Trump, and he's very proud to have on
his wall a page of a bookthat Trump wrote which he said Neil Barsky
(10:54):
was the biggest asshole he ever whoever covered him. I don't think he
said asshole. I think he wasthe most of oxious. But Neil carries
out as a badge of pride.Neil also likes to say that working at
the Wall Street Journal teaches you youdon't have to be all that smart to
get to get rich. So hewent and got rich, and then he
(11:16):
became a philanthropist, giving away moneyand giving back to society. His parents
were active in civil rights movement,so he was naturally inclined to sort of
criminal justice and social justice issues.So he came up with this hairbrained idea
(11:37):
that in twenty fourteen, when newspaperswere dying and newsrooms were eviscerated by budget
cuts, he was going to starta newsroom from scratch. And he put
up a bunch of his own money, recruited some friends to contribute, hired
(11:58):
somebody to do to be a regularfundraiser, and he called me up.
I'd never met him. He calledme up sort of dropped the name of
a mutual friend and invited me tobreakfast coincidentally in the restaurant of the Trump
Tower on the south end of CentralPark. So Donald Trump was part of
(12:18):
our marriage, I guess anyway,So he said he wanted to start this
news organization that would be a realnews organization, not just a lobbying group
or an adric I mean love patrimacygroups. But we didn't want to be
one, and he so he pitchedme this idea. And I was in
(12:43):
the midst of writing newspaper columns forThe Times. I'd never covered criminal justice
as a beat, except like mostnewspapers, when you start out, you
spend some time covering the police beat, usually the night police beat, because
it's the least desirable assignment. Sojust to get a sense of what he
(13:05):
was up to, I wrote acouple of columns on criminal justice, and
I got really engaged and really interestedin the subject. For this will be
no surprise to you whatsoever, butI was appalled at how badly I understood
that's how the system works or doesn'twork, how little I knew about it,
(13:28):
and decided I was on board,and so I went to work in
twenty fourteen for the Marshal Project.Started hiring people, kept hiring people.
Neil and his designated fundraisers did terrific, terrific job, and the Marshall Project
(13:50):
now has I think of about fortypeople working for it. And as you
know, because you're a regular readerand pretty damn good, very yeah,
and they don't pull any punches either. It's it's definitely the best phrase that
I can come up with is it'sit's in your face. If it's a
difficult topic or a tough subject,they don't they don't soften the blow.
(14:15):
And I like that. I'm gladyou noticed that. Pride ourselves and it
brings me up just not necessarily offtopic, but I'm I'm always curious when
I speak with people that are involvedwith the media, and you having such
a long career, how do yousee journalism different today than it was thirty
(14:41):
forty years ago? And I askthat because there seems to just be a
marriage between politics and journalism at thistime in our history, where you've got
one side of the media is allabout republic ends and why their agenda is
correct and why Democrats are evil,and on the other hand, you've got
(15:05):
the exact opposite, why the Democratsare right and why Republicans are evil.
It doesn't really seem like it's veryunbiased any longer, where it's just this
is the story, kind of makeup your own opinion from here after we
give you the facts. Well,if you succeed in being in your face,
a lot of people are going totake you for biased. They don't
(15:28):
like what you write. So Ithink I'll speak for so called mainstream media
at the Times, the Washington Post, you know, the major networks,
some of the magazines, the supposedlyresponsible journalists. I think any of them
will tell you that we aim tobe impartial, not to be prescriptive about
(15:54):
what what should happen, but tobe revealing what is happened, and to
be analytical about it. But Ihave to say that two factors have made
it more polarized, made the mediamore polarized, and include the New York
Times in this too. One ofthem is social media, which which changes
(16:19):
you mean, one of the thingsthat protects you against being too opinionated is
you have the time to write astory, You have the time to report
it out, to get all alternateviews and try to make sense of it.
The internet means you don't have nearlyas much time, because that's the
why somebody's going to be posting thatstory in five seconds. So you so
(16:40):
you sort of go with your gut. And if your gut happens to be
liberal, which it probably is inthe majority of mainstream news media out that's
um, you know, then it'sgoing to show in in in the copy.
So social media is one thing thathas changed the way the press soup
(17:00):
rates. They Oh there is kindof obviously Donald Trump, who was he
didn't invent populist populism or the sortof nationalist street, but he sure drove
at home, drove a stake intothe into the property. Yeah. Um,
and because he declared war on thepress, and you know, we
(17:26):
all said well, we're not goingto be bated into being being at war
with the President of the United States. We've got to cover him seriously,
and you know, straight down themiddle. But there's you can't cover Donald
Trump down the middle or not downthe middle that anybody would recognize as the
middle. Um, he's just twoout there, yeahs. And he knows
(17:49):
how to I mean, he knowshow to get the reaction that he's looking
for. Yes, he does.And I would say I would say,
you know, if any White Housecorrespondent tells you that he doesn't that didn't
feel manipulated by Trunkey's lyne I hewas massive manipulator, even even at the
(18:11):
point it reached the point where hewas being called a liar using the L
word on the front page of newspapers. Even then, Uh, he was
loving it. Oh sure, becauseeverybody was talking about him. Everybody was
talking about him. Yeah, what'swhat's the old adage, there's no such
(18:34):
thing as bad press, have badpress? Right, So we've got just
about three minutes before our break atthe bottom of the hour. Um,
So I don't want to get inanything two in depth yet we will.
We'll get into your book and alittle bit more of the uh, the
in your face type stories. Atthat point, what I'm curious to what
(18:57):
what led you to decide to writethis book? Um, after I'd spent
about five years immersed in the subject. With my fellow editors and reporters,
I feel they felt that was agood cycle, a good time to retire
and do some other stuff, includingsome teaching. And I thought I had
(19:23):
some stuff that I'd learned that wouldbe worth sharing. And along came Columbia
Global Reports, which is an imprintassociated with Columbia University, and they do
these small books. I thought Icould write a small book. They're the
guy who found it at the placecalls them non fiction novellas. You know,
(19:48):
they come out in paperback. Theydo about six of them a year.
They're really good. I think I'mjust speaking about my own U And
so I've known the editor of thatpublication for quite a while. I told
(20:08):
him I was interested in pitching somethingto him, and he said, pitch
away, And I pitched the ideaof doing prisons. Criminal justice system,
as you know, has lots ofcomponent parts, and you know, policing
gets a lot of attention of courts, operate pretty much in the open,
(20:29):
but prisons are a little bit ofa mystery. I mean, partly because
people don't want to see what goeson in prisons, partly because the people
who built the walls want to keepyou out. So I thought I would
try to do a primer on whatI understood about the prison system, and
it's we've got just about a minutehere and then we'll get into we'll get
(20:52):
into the book, and as Imentioned, get into a lot more detail
about that. I think that wasthat was my eye opening experience as having
been through the system. That's howI learned all about it, unfortunately,
and I think that that's in manycases, you don't know what's happening or
(21:14):
what's going on in there unless youeither go through it, or you're a
friend or family member that has someoneclose to you go through it and you're
on that journey with them. Sowe'll talk a little bit more about that
coming up here again. We arespeaking with Bill Keller, author of What's
Prison for Punishment and Rehabilitation in theAge of Mass Incarceration. When we get
(21:37):
back from the break, we'll talka little bit more about the book.
We'll get into some of the topicsthat it covers, and we'll learn a
little bit more about mister Keller aswell. Stay tuned, Welcome back to
Surviving the System. This is Danceand Dave and we are speaking with mister
Bill Keller, author of What's PrisonFor. I'm going to go ahead and
(22:00):
we're going to open up the phonelines and the chat just in case if
anyone has any particular questions that theywould like to ask of myself or mister
Keller. The number is one eighthundred five eight eight zero three three five
eight hundred five eight eight zero threethree five, or just drop them in
the chat on discord. I willmake sure to grab that for you.
(22:22):
So, mister Keller, again,thank you so much for your time.
And I really want to get intoI want to get into the book now.
Now I full disclosure, I'm notdone with it yet, but that's
because I let my mother borrow itand my mother read it and just got
it back to me last weekend.But she loved it. She said it
was great, the research was verythorough. So give your mother my best.
(22:48):
I will absolutely do that. I'lltell her you said thank you,
so I know you you got intoa little bit about what led you to
write the book and how you pitchthe topic. But what what I appreciate
about it so far is you're comingat it from both I guess, both
sides of the aisles, so tospeak. This isn't just all about how
(23:11):
poorly inmates are being treated and allof the human rights violations and all of
the atrocities, et cetera that aregoing on. You're actually talking about the
guards, the CEOs and the peoplethat work on the other side of the
fence and their view of it aswell, and how they're involved with that
and they're invested. So where wheredid you get some of these stories from?
(23:37):
Were these people that you met orinterviewed, or was it through the
Marshall Project or how did you comeup with these these topics? Some of
it was through the Marshall Project,and I tried wherever I was relying on
the research of one of the Marshallreporters to credit them in the in the
text and in the footnotes. ButI I did a fair amount of reporting
(24:02):
while I was running the Marshall Project, either collaborating with other reporters or just
doing something that caught my fancy andthen after I left, I spent a
year and a half doing what journalistsdo, which is call up smart people
and ask them stupid questions. Iinterviewed a lot of people, starting with
some of the sociologists and criminologists whostudy what works and treating people who are
(24:26):
incarcerated, but also a lot ofpeople who are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated,
and obviously the advocacy communities, includingthe advocacy advocates of the guards. I'm
glad you mentioned that, because Imean, guards are often rightly portrayed as
(24:48):
an obstruction to change, because they'rethere to protect bested interests. But what
people overlook is that guards are toa large extent as much victims the system
as the inmates are. UM Iinterviewed one guy who runs an alliance of
(25:12):
CEO unions who said he'd never beenand he's been like forty years thirty forty
years in corrections. He said he'dnever met a corrections officer who woke up
in the morning and said, boy, I can't wait to get to work
today. It's you know, they'rein the this kind of cast system of
(25:33):
law enforcement. They're regarded as nearthe bottom, you know, they're not
exactly up there with the air Force, right, and they work in really
difficult conditions. In some cases,they contribute to the difficulty of the conditions
because they're they're trained not to betherapists, they're social workers. They're trained
(25:56):
to be guards, even though theycan prefer as a group to be referred
to as corrections officers, and Itry to honor that just out of courtesy.
But what they're trained to do iscrowd control and self defense. No,
(26:18):
yeah, I'd absolutely answered my questionand my experience. As I mentioned
before, it was very eye openinglearning all about it, but I learned
all about the guards as well.And you may or may not be familiar
with this, and if I'm beingredundant, please forgive me. I just
(26:38):
for emphasis and for anyone listening thatmight not know, but Nebraska is the
second most overcrowded prison population in thecountry at a time, for a short
amount of time, it overtook thenumber one spot, but as dropped back
down to number two. We havea severe crisis not just with or crowding,
(27:00):
but understaffing as well. They justthey can't find anybody to work,
and when they do, they getin there and They're like, are you
forget this? Man, I'm outof here. This is you're asking way
too much for this. So myexperience inside I had I met some actually
really decent CEOs. I met acouple of people who were there who really
(27:25):
were all about trying to change people'slives and trying to take that opportunity to
say, here's how you can helpto better yourself. So that's a story
that I try to tell from this, And I've actually brought on a CEO
that oversaw my unit so that Ican have him tell his story. He
started the Seven Habits on the insidecourse, or that the entire Department of
(27:48):
Corrections in Nebraska very devoted to tryingto help people get back on their way.
So I think it's I can't imaginethat his interview with you helped his
career a lot. He had beenfired by that point, which is why
I asked him to come on,And funny enough, he was let go
specifically because they were they used himas an example because he was trying to
(28:11):
help the the inmates too much andthey were like, you got to stop
talking to them, and he's whatare you talking about. I'm trying to
help and they just he was gone. So yeah, otherwise I wouldn't have
I would have put him in thatkind of a jeopardy. But it was
an interesting story, and I said, come tell me about it. So
one of the things that you probablynoticed in the book, I dwell for
(28:33):
a couple of chapters on how theydo things in Europe. I was just
about to segue there. Yes,in Norway and Germany. We sent a
reporter to a trip to Germany witha bunch of American Directions officials and one
of there a bunch of eye openingthings about these these physits, which led
(28:55):
to some interesting experiments on the backwhen they got back home. So we
can talk about it. But oneof the things that just blew their minds
was the role of the treatment andpreparation and role of staff. If you're
going to be a corrections officer inGermany in a German prison, you're going
to go to school for two yearsand you're going to study, among other
(29:17):
things, human rights law and psychology, and then you're going to be paid
really well, and it's a prestige'sjob they get, you know, it's
like it's getting admitted to a expensive, you know, high quality university in
the US. As you know,your training consists of weeks, not years.
Yeah, and it's likely to focuson crowd control and self self defense.
(29:41):
Right, they just try to usethe pepper spray. Yeah. Yeah,
So what what were some of thethings that you saw overseas. I've
talked about this, but it's beena very long time. There's been a
lot of studies coming out recently talkingabout some of the facilities over in Europe
where they're almost it's almost like alike a college where they really focus on
(30:06):
that rehabilitation where they say, okay, you're you're going to maximize this time
so when you come out, you'regoing to be set for success. Yeah.
The philosophy. I have not beento the European prisons. We sent
reporters there, and I've interviewed alot of American officials who have been there
and had their eyes open to justdivide them overclaim of course, but they
(30:30):
start with a different philosophy, andit's pretty pretty much the same whether you're
in Germany or Norway, or Swedenor the Netherlands, and the philosophy starts
with you you're being punished for breakingon a society's rules, your punishment is
you're deprived of your freedom, andthat's it. All your other rights stay
(30:52):
intact, the right to conjugal visits, the right to safety, the right
to have a decent diet and healthcare, the right to vote, which is
only allowed in a couple of USstates. Prison within the prisons. So
that's that's rule number one is it'syour punishment extends to the fact that you're
(31:17):
locked up. It doesn't extend tohow you're treated. And then point number
two is the job of the system, the German system or the Norwegian system,
is to figure out what it wasthat led you to do the bad
things you did and work on them. As long as we've got you here,
let's do some anger management to alcoholicsanonymous. Let's give you an education,
(31:42):
let's give you skills. And thethird principle is what they call the
normality principle, which is you're goingto be leaving the prison at some point.
You shouldn't it shouldn't be a shockto your system when you leave to
discover what's going on out there.You should have some trade the responsibilities and
the experiences of normalcy while you're inside, meaning simple things like you wake yourself
(32:07):
up in the morning and you goto class or you go to work,
depending on what you're what you're doing. You fix your own food. Sometimes
you iron your own clothes or youruniforms, so that when you get out
and you have maintain as much contactsas they can possibly arrange with your family,
(32:28):
with other outsiders, volunteers. Andthe other thing is that we talked
a little about the CEOs when there'sa great YouTube video of the warden of
Halden Prison in Norway talking to theCEOs at Attica and they're all and they're
(32:50):
all safety. These guys are killersand violent people. What do we do
about them? And he points outthat there's a different way to maintain to
contain violence. That's if you're engagingwith the prisoners on a regular basis.
You eat meals with them, youtalk to them, you you keep an
(33:12):
eye on how their lives are going. You can anticipate when there's a fight
that's going to break out, orwhen somebody's going to have a crisis,
a trauma, a mental breakdown,and you can deal with it, you
know, in real time. Andthat is more a reliable way of keeping
yourself safe than just risking everybody forships twice a day. Yeah, it's
(33:37):
interesting. It's interesting from from thisside having gone through it, because I
see those people who are, youknow, branded as the quote unquote the
worst of the worst of society,the dangerous people, the killers, the
murderers, the thieves, are thepeople that are in for a long time.
(33:57):
They put on a show for theguards, is really what it comes
down to. When they're around.They puff their chests up and they get
mouthy, and there's a very clearseparation of us versus them, and then
the CEO takes off and it They'rethe most intelligent and reasonable human being I've
ever ever met. I've had someof the greatest conversations of my life with
(34:22):
those people. But they it's theway that the system is set up here
in America really just feeds into thatthat separation. You've got the guards over
here and you've got the inmates overhere, and they're the bad guys.
What a waste of human potential.Yeah, that's the thing that my first
(34:42):
visceral lesson in dealing with people who'vespent time in prisoner who are in prison,
some of whom I'm still in touchwith, it was just imagine that
these guys had not spent twenty yearsof their life at a cage, because
you know, a little education anda little sense of purpose, it could
(35:04):
be really contributing to society. Thatsounds like a sort of, you know,
squeaky liberal point of view, ButI don't see how it's conservative to
squander the potential of human life.Sure, I'm my views are for the
(35:24):
most part, fairly conservative. Idefinitely don't call myself Republican. I don't
call myself democrat either, but man, when it comes to this topic,
I'm definitely very, very liberal.I'm right there with you, having met
those individuals and myself being one ofthose individuals. They were the most compassionate,
(35:47):
reasonable, intelligent human beings I evermet. Some of the people that
are in there for life are theones that got me through my initial first
few months, which were the worst. The absolute word. So what do
you think? And this can playinto your opinion if you've got statistics to
(36:07):
back it up or studies, I'dlove to hear about it. But what
is it in your opinion that youthink still continues to feed into the system
running as it is here in AmericaDespite all of the evidence showing how it
doesn't work, and how all ofthese other countries are doing something that seems
to be working much better. Westill have that tunnel vision and just won't
(36:30):
budge. The answer to that ispretty complicated. I think the big picture
is that this is going to bea little oversimplified. But the prison system
is like a sewer for all theproblems of society. It's like a big
catch basin. Oh, people whohave poor education or no skills, or
(36:55):
no healthcare or no housing, allthe all the social problems created by those
flow into the prison system. Soyou can't really that radic There's a limit
to how much you can change thesystem when you have a deluge of bad
stuff flowing in. Not bad people, just bad attitudes. Um. You
(37:20):
know, bad experience is bad traumas. So that's that's that's part of it.
Um is why the system stays away. It is part of it is
politics. It's it's easy to demogoguethe issue of crime again now um.
And part of it is money.You know, they're we spend eighty billion
(37:45):
dollars a year on jails and prisonslocking people up. Um. And some
states, some states have because thecourts told them to her because they decided
they wanted to save them. Andyou have cut back on the cost of
prison and closed prisons. Um,sorry, I lost my train of thought
(38:07):
there. No, you're fine,You're fine. So and on that,
on that same line of thinking,though, I was hoping you would get
into that, because that's my opinionis the number one issue is the money.
What about the for profit prison system? How did that even how did
that even come about? And againi'll still allowed to operate. Yeah,
(38:30):
Well, started with slavery and thencontinued with the big gluephole in the thirteenth
Amendment, which I'm sure you're familiarwith, which very well, very well
for people convicted of crimes, yep, which led to you know what,
we're plantations. What were slave plantationsbecame convict plantations. There's there's for it's
(38:52):
not a new thing that there's aprofit interest in prisons, but then they
are. I think the places likeCca began in the seventies or eighties with
the idea that they would manage theprison the whole, but manage the whole
prison for you, yeah, andjust pay us the same way the hotels
(39:12):
get paid by occupancy. You know, if we keep the sales full,
we get more money. Now,private prisons only add up to about ten
of the capacity of the prison capacityand jail capacity of in this country.
But private management doesn't tell the wholestory. As you well know, there
are all kinds of services that publicprisons contract out for their healthcare, the
(39:38):
transport, telecommunications, meals, uniforms. Those are all made by almost all
made by four profit companies that sellthem to the state. So there's the
profit motives not only been going onfor one hundred and fifty years. Uh,
(39:59):
it's it's bigger than it looks onthe surface. Sure, And not
to mention the companies that that contractwith the state to have the inmates produce
a product for them at literally pennieson the dollar and then turn around and
sell it at the most massive markupin the inhuman history. That's correct.
(40:24):
So how do you I always tryto end the shows as constructively as I
can and try to put some somethingproductive on the table, some type of
ray of hope or something that somebodycan do. So what do you think
are some things that I or anyonelistening can can do to take action with
(40:47):
this subject? Say, it's it'ssomeone who has someone who's inside and they're
seeing all of these things that we'retalking about, and they're screaming from the
rooftops and they feel like nobody's listeningto them. What are some steps that
the average person can take to tryto start to draw some of that awareness.
Well, mostly the obvious things thatyou try to do when you're when
(41:10):
you want to change institutions, youvote, You call your congressman and try
to get him or heard of,vote for legislation to make things better.
If you have money to give theChristmas time, you give a little money
to the places that the not forprofits that handle reentry or education. You
(41:36):
don't. You don't elect people whopander to your sort of nastier instincts,
because it's I mean, let's staysaid. Everybody has has the experience of
thinking this guy should be punished,yeah, into his life, and it's
a human nature to think that.But when politicians pander to that, you
(41:58):
get indifferent to cruel treatment of thepeople. Yeah, And I always I
always try to underscore as maybe obvious, but it's not a gift that you're
getting to somebody who committed a crime. It's an investment in somebody who's going
to be your neighbor. Because ofthe people incarcerated are going to be free
(42:20):
Monday, and you know, doyou want to send them home alienated and
brutalized and with no skills and stigmatized, or would you rather have them with
a real chance of readjusting to reallife? Yeah, in my heroes in
the book. One of the reviewersdescribed the book as surprisingly optimistic, and
(42:45):
it's not. I'm not really optimistic. I mean because because prisons are a
sewer for all of society's problems,and I don't see us solving all of
those problems instantly. But I dofocus on my sort of heroes, who
range from corrections officers who went toGermany and tried to adopt some of those
(43:06):
practices, to teachers who run collegelevel classes and in prisons, to volunteers.
I think not because those people arenecessarily going to win the war of
what prisons are like, but becausethey show the possibility and I like to
(43:28):
hold up at least the hope ofsome solution. Sure, that's my goal
too, And my standpoint from evenstarting this show was there's more people that
are inside of prisons that come backout into the community and successfully reintegrate.
(43:51):
They live a quiet life, theyhave a job, they have their family,
and they don't ever go back.But that's not newsworthy, So you
don't ever hear about that person.You hear about like being in Nebraska.
You hear about the Mother's Day riotand all of the people that started that,
and how those people got more convictionson top of that. Or Nico
Jenkins from many years ago who wasset out on parole and told the parole
(44:15):
board I'm gonna go do it againif you let me out, and sure
enough he did so. But thoseare the stories that make the news.
It's never about the guy who getsback out and goes and works his job
and pays his bills and has agood relationship with his wife and kids and
has a happy life happily ever after. Well, that's a fair indictment of
(44:37):
the media's role in all of this. I mean, I do think there
are places, I hope the Marshallpractice is one of them, that are
part of the solution, But there'sstill an awful lot of sensational coverage that
contributes to the fear, which contributesto harsh policies. Yep, that's all
right. I really take the stanceof you be the change you want to
(44:58):
see in the world. So that'sthat's what I'm doing, is focusing on
the hope, focusing on those positivestories. So we've got just about little
over a minute here. I wantto make sure to give you some time
to tell us where we can findthe book. Should someone feel so inclined
to reach out and contact you,if they have questions or comments, how
can people reach you? You canget the book anywhere where you can get
(45:23):
books, or you can go tothe Columbia Global Reports website in order to
them. But you know, Amazon, Barnes, and Noble, well,
all of the big booksellers will makeit available. And I am Although I
have used social media, I mostlydon't like it very much because either you
(45:46):
spend your life doing social media oryou spend your life living. Yeah.
But my email address, which Idistributed pretty freely, is NYC Keller at
gmail dot and that's NYC K EL L E R at gmail dot com.
Exactly perfect. Well, thank youvery much for your time. We
(46:10):
are winding down. I do appreciateyou staying up late with me as this
was this was a great honor forme, so I wish you the best.
I hope the book does fantastic,and I hope to have you back
at some point in the future,and thank you for listening. As always,
I hope you have found value inthe show today. Don't forget the
(46:30):
website Surviving the System dot org,on Facebook at facebook dot com, slash
Surviving the System, Twitter at sts, the podcast, and of course Fringe
dot fm. And as always,don't forget, keep your head up,
don't let him get you. Itmay be easy to look at all the
(46:50):
corruption and manipulation in the system andfeel hopeless. Here at Surviving the System,
we hold to the belief that greatnessis born in the midst of extraordinary
struggles. You were created with apurpose, with infinite potential, and many
have lost sight of that fact.We're here to remind you of who you
are. The best revenge the success
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