 And tonight we are here to see Dr. Keisha Middlemass and Ruben J. Miller discuss their books. I have put some chat links into the chat box. I'm going to do it again. This is the links to tonight's event and our YouTube recording which you can watch again. And as our presenters speak, I will add resources that come up. This is a very full resource list already. So lots of stuff in there. Again, welcome tonight. And we want to thank our friends of the San Francisco Public Library for helping us support this event and Oakland Public Library for partnering on this event with us. We want to welcome you to the unceded land of the Eloni tribal people and acknowledge the many raw mutish Eloni tribal groups and families as the rightful stewards of the lands in which we reside. Our libraries committed to uplifting the names of these lands and community members from these nations with whom we live. We encourage you to learn more about first person culture and land rights and are committed to hosting events and providing lots and lots of reading lists and resources on this topic. And that can all be found within the link that I placed in the chat box. Just a couple quick announcements from library news. We have a bi-monthly read called on the same page. On the same page is where we encourage all of San Francisco to read the same book. August, July and August we're celebrating Jacqueline Woodson and her book read at the bone. Jacqueline Woodson will be in the virtual library August 12 discussing her youth focused books and children's books. If you went in for that, we'll also have a book club for read at the bone. Muslim American writers on July 26, 6pm again virtual library. This Saturday come out to hear about the Mexican Museum's online exhibit of Nahum, Zaniel, and his amazing artwork it's it's so stunning and so gorgeous so please come here and learn about more of that. And we have academics talking about the Black Panther, Black Panther tales of Wakanda. I am really excited for this one as well. And then a plug for our event with our friend Troy Williams will do a film screening and film this filmmaker discussion following the screening. The prison within follows the powerful stories of survivors of violent crime and prisoners incarcerated for murder as they participate in an innovative restorative justice program to heal the roots of their untreated traumas. The film is a journey into the redemption and forgiveness inside the unlikely walls of San Quentin prison. And with that, I would like to turn it over to Jeannie Austin, who is part of our jail and reentry services department. Jeannie. Thank you, Anissa. I first want to just tell you all a little bit about jail and reentry services at San Francisco public library in case you haven't heard of our program. We provide in jail library service to everyone who's incarcerated in the San Francisco jails. We also run a reference by mail service and I'll put the address in the chat in just a moment for people who are incarcerated throughout California. So you might know that people who are incarcerated don't have access to the internet. And that often means don't have access to information so people can write to us at the library to get information. We also do reentry programming and we're part of the reentry council of San Francisco. And we're very lucky to work in a library system where so many of the librarians are starting to think through how to bring reentry into our existing programs and how to create more programs to support people who are in the process of reentry. And I wanted to open this presentation by reading the reentry bill of rights which was created by the people's paper co op, which is a women's woman led co op in Philadelphia, and in collaboration with 1200 formerly incarcerated people. And it was put out in 2017. It reads, we the people the other side of America, the 70 million plus with criminal records, we exist in multitudes, we lead many lives. We are all ages, we are 1657 35 years old. We are not criminals. We are survivors, scholars, artists, the leaders you need your father's mothers, daughters, sons, friends and family. We are human beings. We deserve a chance to prove our worth. We work volunteer mentor and use our knowledge experience and skills to give back to the community. Where am I, you see me in the mall, we sat next to each other at the movies, we shared a smile once in the line at the grocery store the bank the church pew. But you put an X on my face, you turned me into a number. See me. I want a beautiful future. Are you part of it. Let's talk close. If I was your child, would you treat me differently. I am a slave to my past. I refuse to be intimidated by your misperceptions. Understand the value I have to contribute. Do not be paralyzed by data. I am real not numbers. I will not subject myself to fear nor anxiety but walk boldly. I will prosper. Let me be free. Believe in me and I will be the best parent I never had. I will mobilize communities will be a catalyst for change will make history will achieve all of my goals will be a role model for the youth. Let us become who we want to be. My mom always told me her people will hurt others, but healing for me is harder than you think. Sometimes I feel like I'm reading a story that isn't mine. I need those around me to listen to lend an ear to try to understand the root causes of violence and crime to help me get support and resources. Today I can be a wounded healer. I want to apologize to listen to people I've harmed to volunteer to speak out to teach to learn and understand that not everyone is ready to heal. We are hurt. We have harmed and we have the power to help others heal. But it's not black and white. Some of us came home to housing. Some of us were homeless some spent seven months trying to get an approved home plan while wasting away in halfway houses. Some of us struggle finding positive support from family and friends while others came home to mentors, wives, husbands, and so many open arms. Even after being out for years we struggle. I struggle to keep me and my children together. I struggle to afford more than a room. I struggle to find a job I'm not over qualified for. I struggle to feel human, not look down upon. I want you to remember that we need to change people's environment if we want to change their future. That we are so much more than our past. That people need community, not condemnation. That we need more support to become what we dream of. That the world is wrong about us. That we've already come so far. That we are learning to forgive ourselves. And so should you. That we can make difference in the life of others, but we need a chance to prove our worth. That we are powerful. And I am so thankful that this project was done and the collaborators contributed so much. And I think this really sets the conversation that we're going to be having tonight. And before we move on, I also want to thank librarians at Oakland Public Library who are working to support our patrons and people who are in reentry. And so I'll pass now to Natasha. Thank you, Jeannie. I'm Natasha Mullen. I'm with Oakland Public Library. I'm a teen librarian here. I just want to talk a little bit about what we've done for reentry. You may already be familiar with the concept of the public library as a third space, a community gathering space separate from home or work. Sometimes the library is the first place that folks go upon reentry. Sometimes they are looking for a job or housing or checking in. It's a trusted institution. And if we're doing our job right, we've cultivated relationships in the community where we're located, which means the library is the place they go when they get out. A recent example was I'll call him a teenager, regular at 81st Avenue, one of our D beast Oakland branches. He lived in the neighborhood and liked to hang out and chat with staff. Last month he came in after getting into a fight with his dad, which had sent him to Santa Rita. His dad wouldn't let him come back home. He came to the library because he was staying in a shelter and they kick you out during the day. We worked on helping him find something less transitional and coaching him on his job search. Oakland Public Library teen services has taught the beat within an Oakland youth poet laureate writing workshops at Camp Sweeney. We live in the Alameda County's juvenile justice facility, and we've attended resource fairs held there serving incarcerated youth as a way of meeting patrons where we're at, where they're at, sorry, and putting a face on the library as a welcoming place for them. One of those relationships with an incarcerated youth poet led to the library hiring him as a library aid. He works in the teen zone. The reentry options the library has provided youth are sometimes assigned community service hours as a condition of their sentencing so they'll come to the library and volunteer to work off their hours. This provides us with another opportunity to build relationships and trust. A community members privilege or lack thereof can directly impact their ability to access the services a library provides. If the library doesn't take purposeful action to design services that overcome those barriers. Some ways that Oakland Public Library has reduced barriers to access have been through our policies. For example, we no longer require proof of address to obtain a library card. We've eliminated late fees and even way fines. And finally, we have partnered with SFPL's reference by mail program as Jeannie mentioned earlier. I've participated personally and answered reference questions about everything from cabala TV schedules Shakespeare seven stages of man's life and how to draw. But some careers queries are even more directly really related to reentry like sober transitional housing in LA County somebody was asking for resources about that. How to get started in the import export business how to launch a vending machine business. Somebody was writing a novel and wanted pop culture facts and figures. So that that has been some of the stuff that Oakland Public Library is participating in, as far as reentry services. And I will hand it back to you, Anissa. Thank you Natasha. That's really wonderful. Yeah. We appreciate the partnership today, and in our future of course. And now I'd like to introduce our panelists tonight are speakers. Dr. Keisha middle mass is a trained political scientist on faculty at Howard University. She is nationally known expert on race policies, politics, and the law and how the law impacts marginalized population. She studies the holistic experience of how men and women reinter society after serving time in prison by incorporating interviews focus groups, participant observation policy analysis and ethnography to better comprehend the lived experiences of moving from prison to society. This is the award winning book convicted and condemned the politics and policies of prisoner reentry and multiple articles. Dr. middle mass is a former Andrew Mellon post doctoral fellow on race crime and justice at the Vera Institute of Justice in New York City, a former American Political Science Association congressional fellow, and she earned her PhD from the School of Public International Affairs at the University of Georgia. And Jonathan Miller is a sociologist criminologist and social worker and associate professor at the University of Chicago in the School of Social Service Administration, where he studies and writes about race, democracy, and the social life of the city. He is the author of the 2021 book halfway home race punishment and the afterlife of mass incarceration. Miller has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, a fellow at the New American Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, a visiting scholar at the University of Texas at Austin and Dartmouth, and a native son of Chicago near he lives with his wife and children on the south side. So for further ado, I would like to turn it over to Keisha middle mass and Ruben Miller. Thank you both for being here tonight. Thanks for having us. Yes, indeed. Thank you so much. I just wanted to echo what was said earlier about the reentry bill of rights and hearing the stories of those who have returned. That is exactly what Professor Miller and I do in our work is we capture those lived experiences to try to explain describe in detail. The goals, the ups and downs, the wins that returning citizens experience, and then layer it in layer those experiences then into society. And so I just wanted to emphasize that the struggle that those that are returning home to feel human that really resonated with me because that is what resonated in terms of the participants that I spoke to. I'm going to do a quick screen share. I have found out on zoom that PowerPoint gets stuck so I'm not using the traditional format but as you can see starting off with prisoner reentry it's always good to start off with a, a point of understanding what does it mean to be a former prisoner to then reentry society. And as a political scientist I came to this study via public policies. I was interested in the policies of housing education employment and other areas to figure out how those policies affected individuals coming home. But then you look at the policies you got to think about the politics in the United States you must consider race. I feel that it's a derelict of duty as academics to think about the criminal justice system and ignore the issue of racism criminalization of black and brown bodies. The issue of surveillance. And then you have this whole milieu of individuals that have their lived experiences. And we have to think about what those lived experiences actually mean so individuals come home and yes sometimes they are welcomed home but oftentimes they are not, which means they experienced food insecurity. And there are angry family members and, and the idea of being homeless. And then we no longer as a country, put as much effort into providing safe mental health, housing, medical assistance, psychologist psychiatrist to actually help those that are challenged instead United States just incarcerates them. And this then adds to the trauma of individuals. I do want to make a point that the focus of my research is on those that are coming home. This does not mean however I do not think about the victims of crime. My goal is to if we improve prisoner reentry, we will have fewer victims in the future, like that is my whole goal if we fix prisoner reentry and returning to society, we can actually reduce the number of people that are harmed in the future. So where does reentry take place rural and urban communities. Reentry is fast becoming an issue that is understudied majority returned to urban core communities. There are some urban communities where half the men and quarter the women have a criminal record, maybe just arrest and misdemeanor and felony conviction. But reentry, regardless of where it takes place is a local problem. So in the reentry way, or at least me, I think about it as what does the felony conviction do and how does it create hurdles. The law literally socially and legally disables individuals policies will deny individuals access to rights based on a felony conviction. This creates the common denominator of a civil death. Without help or accommodations, it is hard to reenter. So to structure this idea, and I'm, I'm not a theorist but I believe wholly in theory, I use the social model of disability. So looking at disability studies and this idea of how individuals that have a felony conviction are disabled when they come home, they're not physically disabled per se. But they are disabled in the way society individuals, politicians respond to the prejudice and fear and ignorance if you find out someone has served time in prison. They experienced social isolation, they lack a social network because they've been locked away. There are insufficient job prospects. Literally employers won't don't want to hire people. There's inflexible employment, like in terms of criminal background checks. There's the issue of racism companies now literally will not hire black people because the assumption is they have a felony conviction this is men and women. Unfortunately, the idea of poverty is rampant in the criminal justice system from who is arrested who is convicted who is incarcerated and then who reenters that it is a common theme amongst the individuals that get caught in the criminal justice system. So if we think about the actual idea of social disability, we can think about disability and the Americans with Disabilities Act. We have lots of accommodations created for those that have sight vision or those that are not able to navigate stairs. We accommodate these differences on the right hand side of course is not ADA compliant, but this is what reentry looks like is individuals don't have the ability to go up that steep side to the left of the stairs. So here's another visual representation of having a felony conviction and coming home and being socially disabled. Literally this is a ramp to nowhere that someone with a wheelchair would be able to get up the first four stairs and then what they still cannot actually access a building. Well think about that as someone coming home with a record and trying to access housing trying to access educational programs trying to access everything that you need to actually live in society. Here's another visual representation. As we get older, we may need assistance to get off the toilet, but if the bar is so far away you may literally be stuck. So when we start thinking about what happens when you're in prison to actually being outside of prison I focused on what happens when individuals come out. But this is really important to think about is our prisons have become warehouses for people and rehab is taking place a very small numbers rehab IE getting access to educational programs or getting access to actual employment or vocational training that actually links to a job on the outside. Most individuals are not getting rehabilitated in prison. So what does this mean. Individuals coming home. It's hard to access a job it's hard to access educational vocational programs criminal background checks now are normal. And they take place at low level, mid level and jobs that require a masters. The Department of Corrections most of the time presupposes families will care for their loved ones. They just assume it. But some families are unable or unwilling to help, which means that homelessness becomes normal. And when you're homeless when you're jobless when you are lacking access to educational vocational programs or even just to food. Adults will remain disconnected from society and these policies worse than then these policies that restrict access to social benefits traditional welfare. They worse than racial disparities and inequalities. This is particularly true when it comes to black and Latina women. If women are incarcerated and their children are under the age of 18 those children will go into foster care. So now we've worsened the issue of incarcerating somebody. Why is reentry so hard. So there's uncoordinated state federal policies, policy discretion at the local level remember I talked earlier about that reentry is a local issue. This is where discretion plays out where there are blanket exclusions those administrators administrators or bureaucrats literally at the front lines will say no, you can't access public housing because you've got a felony conviction, despite what the law actually states. As I mentioned these policies and worse than racial and gender inequalities and so before I hand it off to Professor Miller I just want you to think about the numbers. 12,500 adults will reenter this week between 650 or 750,000 individuals are released from state and federal prison and the models the system as it is currently structured means that failure to reenter is actually expected. And therefore we need to advocate for policymakers to actually change the laws so that reentry actually becomes a success story versus a story of failure. Dr Ruben all back to you. I appreciate you I appreciate you Professor middlemaster this is you know Dr middlemaster laid out. I think quite beautifully. The landscape and and and teed us up to talk to spend time together to think about I think the stakes of it all, you know what is, you know what it, what it all means, and there was just I was just struck by the opening reading. I believe in me I will be the best parent I never had. We've done our time let us become who we want to be who we let us become who we want to be this powerful statement of agency, this powerful statement of dignity. Let us become who we want to be how we how we see and understand ourselves not not how we're misrecognized by by state institutions by by family members who perhaps written us off sometimes for a good reason, you know for being honest by social service who who who only view us through a politic of charity, which means, once the good will has run its course, then we're left to blow in the wind. And it's like this for so many people. It's like this for the 2.3 million people that we've locked away and forgotten about. Unless you're a non violent non serious non sexual offender, then our politics are tuned toward you. So, so, so if you're if you're if you're if you're the good offender, the quote, good offender, you're really like, and then we use this language offended fellow and convict. But anyway, so we lock you away and we forget about you. And then you come home, as Professor middle mass said 650,000 people to 750,000 so many people come home each year. There was a study that estimated the number of people who are currently alive with felony records by Sarah Shannon and colleagues a brilliant sociologist out of the University of Georgia. And what what what they found was that using life table, a life table model which the model that insurance agencies use that to think through things like risk and other sort of demographic tables. They found it's something like 19.6 million people alive today who have a felony record. 19.6 million people as a figure 10 times the size of us prison system. But yet and still, the number of folks who've been locked away who returned home to us who are alive today was a felony record are all but forgotten. But they're also not forgotten they remembered in the worst possible way they remember our policymakers who want to legally exclude them. You know, Professor middle mass T this up, I think quite nicely went when she talked about the number of measures that prevent people from doing the things they need to do but just to just to put the number on the table there over 45,000 laws policies and administrative sanctions that target people with criminal records 45,000 19,000 and I heard an even higher number just last week but I haven't had a chance to verify it so so I won't use it. But but but over 19,000 employment restrictions 19,000 state of Illinois where I'm from that I know we're zooming into California. There are over 1000 laws policy administrative sanctions in the state of California that bar people's criminal records from from accessing housing from from from from from living with people who would take them in who would love them whom they love spending time with people who they care for in ways that they might find meaningful. In my state, Illinois. They're over 1300 now we're smaller than California we have more restrictions. There were 1300 broad restrictions. This includes 500 employment restrictions in one state. That number that number jumps up to 960 just in my state. If you include limitations on access to occupational licenses and property rights. That's about entrepreneurship. That's about hanging a shingle and providing a service. That's about access to things like a realtors license. What's the thing that buys you something called the good character clause. A clause in in in in in our law and policy that allows people to judge you based on whether or not you've had a prior conviction and if you have if you've ever been arrested in fact I was just filling out my global entry form. So that I could move up you know internationally and you know I my family and I broken into the middle class I grew up poor and black after 1972 which is the year the mass incarceration begins in earnest is the year that we arrest and incarcerate more people. Every year for 27 straight years at a greater rate than the year before. But anyway so so we finally clawed our way into the middle class so I'm trying to get my pre check on and in the airport I'm trying to I'm trying to do global intrigue right because because I'm traveling internationally such things because I'm studying prisons and jails and also because I want to relax to do my thing. And what do I see I see a checkbox for felony record and it's not just a felony record the question is have you ever been convicted of a crime. They don't ask if it's a misdemeanor. They don't ask if it's a felony. And you can be barred access to other countries what if you do commerce in other words what we're trying to do is I'm trying to help sort of add to this beautiful sketch that's already been provided and say that what we've done is we've locked people with criminal records out of the political economy and culture and out of the social life of the city. What happens when you take that seriously what you see and what I think we both investigate in our own ways. Professor middle mass and her book convicted and condemned and me in my book halfway home. If we see that when you lock people out of the political economy and culture you produce a kind of precarity that keep people stuck right where they are that people never quite make it home. And that is this staircase to know where in fact a staircase to greater burdens to greater barriers to a to a to a larger hill decline. There's a there's a comment in the comment section now about the staggering recidivism rate that's 67% that comes from the largest recidivism state of date that's from the Bureau of Justice Statistics Bureau of Justice Statistics recidivism study where they follow 400,000 people released across across 30 states this is more than a referee what we will call a representative sample. So scientists look for representation. You know what is a representative can we can we use this to generalize can we use this to predict things can we use it to say that to predict with with with with a certain degree of accuracy what people might do or to or to what extent. The given thing you're studying has the effect you say it does this is more than representatives to mad people 30 states 400,000 people he found after a five years the recidivism rate was 67%. They did a follow up study, finding that after nine years that the recidivism rate exceeded 80%. So the prison fails. And of course the prison fails because what we've done is we've locked people out of the political economy and culture what we've done through law and policy is we've created the condition that produced crime. Any criminologist worth their salt will tell you unemployment housing instability and limited access to services lead to crime to great it's a win when Professor middle mass says, you know, I'm all about getting the reentry side of things right. This is a powerful statement because getting it wrong for so long has produced greater amounts of crime so much so that over a quarter of all new arrests every year are for technical violations of probation approach is for it's for the the fact that we produce the fact that we send people back to jail for missing an appointment with a parole officer the fact that we send people back to jail for not reporting to enough social service agency, but for pissing hot. It's kind of the anyway. So to talk a little bit about my own work and then maybe bring us into a question I'd love to ask, Professor middle mass, I'll say a bit about this book that I wrote which which which is titled halfway home and, and what I've done is I follow people across a few American cities primarily Chicago and Detroit but there are also people in there from LA from from from from Florida from you know different places. And what I do is I draw on about 15 years of research and practice which include about 250 interviews that I did over time. It included ethnography and in Chicago and Detroit or participant observation where I spent time with people doing the things that they did to better understand what they experienced and what I tried to track was the many ways that mass incarceration has changed the world has changed the social what I call the social life of the city. So to conclude my own experiences, I began this work I cut my teeth as a volunteer chaplain at the Cook County jail, which started largely from an ethical impulse I want to be a do good I want to do good and there was a scripture that moved me that asked you know when I was sick and imprisoned did you visit me this this is what this is what the thing that I believe is my God is asking of me. I was sick and imprisoned and I didn't have an answer for that. So I went to the jails to visit with with with the imprison to try to have an answer for that. Anyway, well, while I was doing my work. This led me to do to study it so I started as a volunteer chaplain as it didn't mass incarceration starting studying it. While I was doing this research, my father was incarcerated of course he was I was born poor and black after 1972 that he wasn't incarcerated while I was in I met him while I was doing this work and learn that he had been incarcerated for 20 years I was 26 years old when I met this man, and perhaps this is the reason why he wasn't there perhaps it wasn't perhaps he was just a jerk and just absent. But what I do know is that he did 20 years and two of his sons followed him there. While I was doing my field work for the book that I wrote, my brother got locked up and got sent to prison and so I write the book, following families were caring for their loved ones. As I care for my own loved one I write that in the book in it, and one of the strategies was not to be a distant observer, but to be very present to to be with people to be emotionally present. As I as I as I write about the experiences of people as I write about many ways that mass incarceration has changed the social world how it's fundamentally altered the nature of family life in the city. How it's fundamentally altered the world, the worlds of work. So we do a lot of work preparing people for the worlds of work but we don't do a lot of work preparing the worlds of work for the people we're sending to them. Anyway, that's the birth of the book. And it was very important for me to be present to be with people and Professor middle mass I noticed that when I read your book, this was also very important for you. You know, you didn't you didn't you didn't just you didn't just swoop in and drop a survey and ask people how they felt about this and that. But you were with the people you talk in the very beginning about the importance of building trust and rapport. And I just I would love for you to talk a little bit about your process and what that was like for you. I was sitting here shaking my head like I was a bobble dog doll because I was agreeing with everything that you were saying. So, and this is yes to to our respective horns is that Ruben and I are not unusual and studying reentry. But what makes our books separate and apart from others that have studied reentry is we spent time with people. Now Ruben spent more time than I did. I don't even want to claim my 29 months because it seems minimal in comparison. But the idea is that I spent 29 months at a reentry organization in Newark, New Jersey. I showed up every week. And I was questioned, like why is this professor here. I was paroled so that they like if they spoke to me they thought they may end up getting violated and sent back to prison. So to build trust the easiest way to build trust and if, and this is really an inherent quality of the black community is we break bread. The best way to communicate with people is through food. And unfortunately I did not have a lot of funding, but I would go to Dunkin Donuts. I would bring donuts and people would just come by and pick up a donut we would say hi. And then the next day they may say hi and like oh what are you doing. And I gave them the time to be in person with me like in in a very unstructured way before I even talked about my research. In an unstructured way I'm talking like months like six or eight months of just showing up bringing donuts. A few individuals would sit down and talk to me so I started taking their coffee orders. And so when I showed up in the morning I'd be like oh yeah sweet. Oh here's extra sugar because I don't know how sweet is sweet. And this food and exchanging just general, you know what we would call her what we would call water cooler conversations is was able to build trust between people that I was not parole. And then they would open up about their stories. They would. So, although this was an ethnography when Ruben and I talked about ethnography it's just basically being with people. Think about Jane Goodall and studying gorillas. She hung out with the gorillas until she could literally communicate with them and I don't like using the animal analogy. But the fact is is universally most people know who Jane Goodall is and what her study was. We took the same kind of methods and sat with people. And learning about their lives versus me telling them about their lives. I was a note taker, and I learned from them and I think that's also why Rubens and my books are different than other scholars is because we do not just pop in for a day or two and then claim that we're experts. I have a follow question for you teacher which is, which is really something that struck me while I was reading your book was was the importance of history and you alluded to it here. And to me it's also very important I think history is an actor I think I think we can't understand, you know what it means for a young black man or a poor white boy, or young black boy to interact with a judge. If we don't know something about the seat of that judge, you know what does it mean to occupy that seat. And how do we how do we get here. You do really interesting work in the book thinking about the history of different things so I'm the two spots that really struck me one was, I'm thinking about housing exclusions and the ways that people experienced that and you can on the transfer like policy transformations and how that leads us to a place where people begin to get rejected in the housing market and have to rely on families that themselves housing unstable. I found that quite powerful, but but also the way you you think about race and and and and and the role that race is playing in all this racial animus and how we view and and distrust people and so I just want to sort of open the conversation a bit for us to think together about the role of history and how these how these how these, you know, larger social forces show up in people's lives on the ground. It's a, it's a great question. And I think the main thing or the main takeaway with history is things do not just appear out of nowhere. They come with a foundational, either structure or foundational knowledge or some something started before we got where we are today. And in my book I really start sort of with slavery I go a little bit further back with the construction of a felony conviction from English settlers and so forth but really when we think about the American criminal justice system it's a white system and black system, and there still continues to be a white system and a black system. But historically, the criminal justice system really was created to target survey police and incarcerate black people to reinforce the concept of slavery, the actual lived experiences of slavery. And you may be sort of, I can't see my audience's faces because this is a zoom of course, but look at parchment prison in Louisiana. If you need a 21st century example of what we currently do. Look at the chain gangs in Alabama. Look at the way that the policies actually treat people. And these did not just come out of nowhere. There is a history of race and institutions and public policy and politics that really does affect the practices of reentry but also the criminal justice system. And I think what is also really important and I'd like to send this back to you Rubin is this idea of the practices and policies and the legal systems, literally excluding people. You craft this powerful narrative about this legal exclusion. And I know, I know that people have addressed this issue differently but you really talk about the culture and society and the impacts of legal exclusion so can you expand upon that. Yeah, no I'm happy to I mean I think I'm, you know to this point that you raise about the role of history and the fact that things don't just drop out of the sky you don't just have a criminal justice system thinking quite a bit about. You know, my experience moving through Chicago and just to say a little bit about this and to sort of walk into the legal exclusion point. Chicago is founded by Jean Baptiste point disciple who's a who's a Haitian, a Haitian migrant who was the first person to settle and take he took up Potawatomi wife, Kitty Howa, and they raised children that would have been labeled quadruped along the banks of the Chicago river, but he wasn't the one who was given credit for for founding the city for about 75 years. So for many, but what's striking about this so that that's that's interesting, you know, in and of itself is a sort of interesting racial factoid or something like that this is what we want to do. But what's striking is that is that do Sabo who's a who's a who's a fur trader and becomes fairly wealthy in his own right and settles this, what will become a global city is arrested by the British. So the black founder of Chicago is made a quote convict. And then he's finished into to to he's been from there they they the command down to the fort, you know, sees his skills as a trader who's multi lingual and and sends him threat. He's a threat. But he's a useful threat. He gets sent to trade in the area that we now know is Detroit. Anyway, he's got this whole interesting history, this very interesting history. So that's DeSable, I'm moving through Chicago, I'm in the Cook County jail, I'm walking through the prisons and I'm noticing there's this very strange architecture there because at different buildings built at different moments, three distinct moments of jail expansion to address the problem of black crime in the city of Chicago. So by the time I show up, the first director, the first black director of a Department of Corrections is the director of the Cook County jail at the time, Winston Moore. Winston Moore is also arrested for the crime of supposedly beating three convicts. This is something that esteemed black journalist Vernon Jarrett calls the return of dunk the darkie. This is what he says. Anyway, so you can't understand, I don't think you can't understand why at the moment I'm in that jail, starting in 2003 to about 2008, that there are 10,000 people who get processed who are in that jail on any given day, that there are over 100,000 people who get processed through that jail in a given year, that is that at one moment in time it's the largest single site jail facility in the country, which necessarily, which almost necessarily means one of the largest in the world. You can't understand without understanding the history of mass incarceration in Chicago and the history of racial animus in the city and what they did to black folks when they cleared the slums and what they did to black folks, but it's not just black folks because mass incarceration doesn't stop at the seat of the black family. Mass incarceration extends one in two people in this country have someone who's been to an American jail or prison that they love, a loved one who's been to jail or prison. So say stats on the connectedness to incarceration, one in eight white women has a currently incarcerated loved one, the mass incarceration to stop the threat of the black family. And what does that mean? When you walk out of the jail or prison, you're handed a sheet of paper called your conditions of release. People who've been incarcerated who are on this call understand exactly what I'm talking about. You can hand a sheet of paper called your conditions of release that tell you where you must go. You must report to the probation apparel officer. You must go to services. I can't, you must pee in a cup when you show up there. You must refrain from drugs and alcohol. I can't make University of Chicago students pee in a dog on cup. Right? So many lawyers, to live in the dorms, you must pee in a cup. So many lawyers will be calling my house. They have my job in five minutes, tenured or not. Right? That's part one. And I'm too recently tenured to pull that anyway. That's part one. But the legal school starts with this slip of paper. But it doesn't stop with the slip of paper. It also tells you what you may not do. You may not congregate with so-called non-offenders. Well, North Laundale, Paul Street, a famous reporter, reported that up to 80% of the men on one of the blocks in North Laundale had a felony record. How don't you associate with non-offenders? That's part one. Part two, the bedrock of democracy is association. The idea that we come together to change things we don't like. And so we break the democratic project with the slip of paper that we hand people. That's where it starts. That's not where it ends. When you walk out and you walk into over 1,000 housing restrictions, if you document this in your book, I think quite beautifully in this point about legal exclusion. I mean, by the time Bill Clinton gives the one strike rule in 1996, he's following on the heels of a set of bills that have already passed in the 80s that say that you can kick somebody out of public housing if they've committed a crime ever in their lifetime. Or if anyone who's quote, under their control, meaning anyone who visits the home, meaning any grandchild that a grandmother let sleep on the couch, you can evict that grandmother. And that has happened. The Supreme Court has upheld the eviction of a grandmother who was visited by her grandchild because the grandchild had a felony conviction and she lived in public housing. Grandchild did not live there. Locked out of the housing market, locked out of the labor market, locked out of most forms of civic participation, including jury service in about 30 states. And then we say, and this is where you and your book, you talk about this this deeply individualizing process, this this year on your own, the responsibilities on your own. I think this would be a great place for you to pick it up. But then we say to you, stay out of jail or prison with no job, no housing, no access to services and the punishment of your family members. If they if if they help you, we say to them, it's on you. The the actual part of reentry is up to the individual. So they are incarcerated lack of services because we have over incarcerated. We don't allow easy access to teachers. I mean, we there's news news reports about, you know, great inside out programs where there's teaching in the jails and prisons. But in reality, that only happens at a like a drop of the actual thousands of prisons and jails we have in this country. So we just it's easy to make the assumption you're not really rehabilitated in prison. You're not seeing any actual mental health experts. We those individuals that are incarcerated are not actually getting their basic health care needs met. So then they're coming out with diabetes, high blood pressure, bad eyesight because lighting inside they have a form of prison PTSD, which is a growing study within psychology. And then they're told, oh, by the way, you can't live with your family members. That's right. That's right. OK, so I just want people to pause. What would you do? If you had $50 to change as a close a bus ticket. And nothing else. What would you do? Oh, and by the way, you're hungry and you do not have picture ID because that's another thing that are rules. And I'm not talking a driver's license and I like to make this distinction. There are state picture IDs that individuals can get to show who you are. Legal document, but it is not the equivalent of a driver's license. And certain people, most people coming home can't get that ID because the rule says you got to have an address. Ruben's identity doesn't change based on his address. His his eye color, his height. Well, we talk about precovid weight. We we can talk about you as a person do not change based on where you live. So the individuals come home and they are then responsible for being successful. Yes. And the policies have excluded them from the basic handrails that they need to actually not commit new crimes. This is why you're a metaphor about social disability. I mean, so, you know, similarly, you know, there's some folks who like there's a there's a literature that your work corresponds, I think, very nicely with and thinking about the literature. There's a literature on what we might call civic death, you know, which is a playoff of Orlando Patterson's powerful work on social death. There's a beautiful book on this on social death and incarceration that I'll remember and put in the the chat, by the way. But right now, the title has escaped me. I see the cover and the titles escaping me. But but but I wanted to I wanted to sort of just tee up this idea of social disability. And then also I wanted to talk a little bit before we jump into the Q&A about the many ways that people with criminal records are pushing to find a way out. You know, this very important work they're doing. But but but but let's let's tee up. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much for putting the book in the in the chat a little bit. Let's tee up. Let's let's let's let's let's think a little bit together about social disability. I think I think that's I mean, you talked about it a bit. But this is this is this is sort of I think this is the moment. This is why you say like this idea of handrails and stuff like that. Like this is why you talk about it in your in your book and in the beginning of this talk, right? So we have to think about the ways that we punish and now we have perfected punishment for longer periods of time. So it's not just the criminal sentence and Ruben does a really good job about looking about life after mass incarceration, but he also does a really good job of looking at parole. So what we have now is we have people that are coming home that have lifetime parole. They've been released from prison. Maybe they serve 20 years and now they have lifetime parole, which all those things not to do are literally the manifesto of how you can screw up and actually be revoked and sent back to prison. I use social disability theory because I'm also visual, where people understand having handrails and and they see the yellow areas for those that are sight, so that have sight challenges and can use to navigate sidewalks and the ways that we accommodate deaf people, at least in Washington, D.C., the the crosswalk signs will now have a blaring blaring noise, particularly for those of hard of hearing, so they know when they can cross or if they're sight, sorry, if they're sight challenged, they know they can cross. But the idea is to visualize people not having the the sidewalk curb cut out for them. And and using that sort of analogy, then people understand what what those thousands of laws will literally do to somebody trying to come home. Before we go to actually Q&A, Reuben, if you can talk about the importance of stories and lived experiences. Yeah, yeah, because that actually is another thing that we do differently is, yes, we we include statistics because it's important to have this the sort of large representative sample. But the live stories really tell you how bad all those administrative policies are. Yeah, no, I appreciate that very much. So so I think I think you're right. Like the the stats are necessary for them and they do very important work, for example, knowing that there are two million people in prison, knowing that nineteen point six million people with who have felony records, knowing that there are five million people, roughly four point six to five million on probation or parole in any given day, knowing that there are forty five thousand laws and policies that affect people with criminal records, whether or not they're on probation or parole. So after their probation or parole ends, I mean, if you've got this I mean, I was asked on my global entry form if I've ever been arrested and if I've ever been convicted of a crime ever, ever, ever. Of course, I've been arrested. I'm a black man in America. I've been arrested like every other black man. Of course, I've been arrested. And so have, by the way, forty thirty nine percent of white boys who have been arrested before they turned twenty three, which is why I'm calling boys forty thirty nine percent of white men will be arrested before they turn the age of twenty three for non-trial violation. This is the world that we've made an overly carceral world that impacts all of us. But disproportionately affects black people disproportionately in states of California, the pack, the mong, the Vietnamese, right, like Filipinos, you know, so so whoever your out group is, those are the folks who are going to be in your jails or prisons. And no matter where you go in the world, when you look inside that jail or that prison, you're going to find the out group in that jail or that prison. OK, OK, that's one point, though. So the stats tell us that and that's beautiful and powerful and important. But people live out social policy. People live out the statistics. People live out the numbers. So it's one thing to know that people with criminal records are unable to get jobs. This brilliant work that Diva Pager did that really set on fire. The world of not just criminal justice research for criminal justice reform, criminal justice activism, when people learned that people with records were highly unlikely to be called back for jobs. And that race impacted it even more that that that that to be a poor and black meant that you'd be almost as unlikely to be called back for a job as a white man who had a criminal record. So so it's a total both the criminal record story and the race story and led to a bunch of reforms, including ban the box and stuff like that. But there are different sets of questions that we need to know, like, what does it mean to live with this record? What does it mean to experience it? And this is what policymakers need to know. It's not enough to know you can't get a job. Is it, you know, I want to know what happens when you finally get that job that was almost impossible for you to get. I want to know what happens when the boss tries to abuse you when you're on that job, whether or not you feel the agency that you need to leave that job. Well, it's almost impossible to get a job under these circumstances. How do you then leave the abuse of us? These are things that we learn through stories. We learn about about what it means to never be tried by a jury. One spears what it means to go into a courtroom in that jury box to not reflect anyone with the lived experience of incarceration and knowing that no one in that courtroom understands what it's like to be you. Those are the kinds of things that allow activists like Susan Burton to push for legal reform in states like California, pushing right now to allow for folks with criminal records to sit in the jury pool, which leads me to this point, the power of the narrative, not just some voyeuristic poverty porn where we're sitting back and sort of consuming someone's trauma, right? But understanding the lived experiences of people to help us understand where to use our leverage to bring about the greatest amount of change. The people who I see doing this the most skillfully are the many formerly incarcerated activists, many of whom are doing important work in places like California, especially in the Bay. If I think about all of us are none, for example, an organization in California that consists of formerly incarcerated people that have been leading the way for the kinds of reforms that I believe are most impactful in the system. If I think about the many hundreds of thousands of formerly incarcerated abolitionists who are pushing us to reimagine what a political system, what a polity might look like without jails or prisons. If I think about organizations, national organizations like Just Leadership USA, all of these folks have done 98 very important things. On the one hand, they've become experts in understanding what policies are in place, where and how, who's on whose team, what those policies do and what their effects are, who to align with and who not to. But they've also learned and I think mastered the art of storytelling in such a way that it's not exploitative. You know, storytelling can also be dangerous. I should say this, you know, funders rolling out people with criminal records to talk about their terrible experiences at the fundraiser so that the people with the deep pockets feel some kind of sympathy and start writing the check, you know, it gets old after a minute. And so does the story. You have to tell when you're faced with legal exclusion, when you're faced with the thousands of knows that you get that can be dangerous. And so what we don't want to do is pimp the story, right? We don't want to pimp the story, but the narrative, the story is powerful, not only in moving the needle, but in showing us new places to intervene. The last thing I'll say about this is that, you know, I have a dear friend and brother, Ronald Simpson Bay, who's a formerly incarcerated activist in 27 years on a wrongful conviction. He shows up in my book. He's brilliant brother, you know, gets himself out of prison. One of the few people who jailhouse lawyers that I know who managed to get himself exonerated. He did that without, you know, giant clinics coming to his aid. He wrote his own. He filed his own papers. He walked out of that prison. It took 27 years, though, and there's a series of tragedies that happen to the brother. But he's anyway, but beyond those tragedies, a series of triumphs that that brother experienced and made happen because he's powerful and brilliant and just an incredible legal mind. But you know, Ronald Simpson Bay would say to me, often and not just me, to everybody he meets, that you've got to change hearts and minds. I think the only way to do that is with narrative, by the way. But when he'd say that, I would be like, come on, man, hearts and mind change, we talk about. And he'd say, well, you can change all the law and policy you want without the heart and mind change. And when a new administration comes in, they'll change all those laws and policies with the stroke of a pen. We've literally seen that at the change of every administration, whether it's federal or national. As soon as a new administration comes in, they get rid of the program from the old administration and do their own thing. And so what we need to do is we have to change hearts and minds the way people think, the way people think about the group and the decision. The ethical commitments that people make one to another, even people who've caused them harm. We have to change hearts and minds, change the ethical commitments that people make one to another so that so that so that the decision about justice doesn't blow in the political winds of the day. That's what I'll say that I feel like that's a drop the mic moment. Ronald Simpson Bay, Ronald Simpson Bay. Like, like he's anyway, he's he's he's incredible. He's incredible. He's right, right. And and I think it's also really important to lift the narratives of those who often go silenced. I had so many participants been like, no one's asked me these questions about how I feel, how I've been treated. Like, do maybe I don't care and then they would have this this self-reflection been like, I know I committed a crime and I've served my time. And but am I not supposed to have feelings about this? Am I not supposed to express anything that I've experienced? How do I how do I then process this so my kids don't end up where I am? And so asking people who tend to be voiceless is actually a really powerful way for others. To then be able to advocate. So I've taken those I've taken narratives and I continue, despite covid, continue to talk to people and I because of just my life experiences and being a former congressional fellow, I know how to talk to staff members and now I'm educating them. I'm not I'm not claiming that I'm changing any policies. But someone saw me give a talk and said, oh, she talks policy. And then when I talk policy, I also then give the lived experience. And they're like, oh, because policymakers, staff, elected officials don't look at the past. They just add stuff. So there's I don't know. There's 12 or 15 ways that murder is cataloged and actually labeled in the United States, vehicular homicide, manslaughter, first degree murder. And then there's infants that I always get that wrong. If you kill your children, if you murder your children, it's a whole another term killing an elected official. I'm not advocating for any of this, but this is one is assassination. But the idea is politicians don't think through these things. But if you can bring the lived experience, the narratives of those that have actually lived the life of those policies, then people actually sit back and be like, oh, OK, how can we do this better? And that's that I know Ruben and I have the same mentality is like, we got to do better. So your last question about positive. I know I know we've got three cute questions in the in the queue. But Ruben, you also asked about what can we do to help to improve the process? There are positive stories out there. They just unfortunately get drained on the negatives. Yeah, well, well, I think one one major thing, I think we look to the leadership of of people with criminal records. I mean, there's so many organizations run by people who are system impacted. And I think we look to their leadership and we look to them to help us. Understand their stories, understand our interpretation of their stories, understand what the stats mean, what it means. I think I think and I think that just a million five organizations in every locality, especially a place like the Bay all over Cali, but definitely in the Bay. This is a hotbed of of of of activism among formerly incarcerated people. And I think they have a lot to say about that. But anyway, we'd love to take questions. I think I think I think we've come to the place with at Q&A. And this is a wonderful place to be. So should I should I just read? Should I just jump in? OK, let's jump in. OK, so Mason Waller asks, can you speak to the specific impacts of reentry after misdemeanors versus felony convictions, differences in barriers or important areas of support that need attention? So I put a little bit in the chat about the difference on the punishment part on misdemeanors versus felonies. But where we're getting this sliding sort of the slippery slope is when Ruben was talking about answering questions on his global entry form, is have you ever been arrested? That's right. That's right. That gets to the misdemeanor. That's right. We talk about the ban the box, which is related to employment application. This tends to be advocates or individuals advocating for the removal of this question on on job applications until the person has actually gotten to the point of hiring, then you should ask about criminal convictions. And my sense is you should never ask anybody about their arrest record or their criminal conviction if they're capable of doing the job. With some caveats. If you have a track record of being a bank robber, maybe you should not deal with cash. If if you have a crime that is clearly connected to the job, then perhaps we can talk about like moving you to something else. But the problem is, is employers use these blanket exclusions. And that's where the misdemeanor and felony conviction have converged onto onto these questions on job applications, housing applications. And I'm not talking about just public housing. I'm talking about private companies that went to you. So wide open on the on the housing. We're the previous president implement re-implemented the Pell Grants. And the Biden administration is continually rolling this out. So hold still on the Pell Grants, but that is one way for individuals to be able to access educational funding. But the problem is is not the problem. The challenge is we must continue the fight and the pressure to make sure those Pell Grants get to people in need. Absolutely. Absolutely. You could probably add to the. Yeah, you know, I was thinking I was thinking specifically is there's a really well done beautifully written paper on this very question by Chris Eugen, Sarah Legas and others about the effects of Mr. Mena versus felony arrest on, for example, employment. And they find that misdemeanor arrests have a less less powerful effect on employment, but have an effect nonetheless, have a significant effect nonetheless. In other words, having misdemeanor arrest really matters. There's a really interesting book about the use of misdemeanor arrests to manage urban poor populations by, I'm thinking specifically about ether, coal or housements, beautiful book, misdemeanor land that thinks about the ways that the churning of folks through these misdemeanor courts and what that is and what that does and what that means. But I'd like to also highlight an effect that I saw in my own stuff. And so something that I think needs some attention here too. And I think this will dovetail into the things that can be done. So one thing is to raise attention. This is dovetail into the next question that we'll take in a second. But what I saw was the use of misdemeanor arrests to demonstrate what prosecutors will call a pattern of criminality. I mean, so I'll give you an example. One brother who I followed for about 13 years, his name was Martin. And Martin had been in trouble with his entire life. I mean, if it's actually abused, you know, a bunch of stuff that happened to Martin and his dear friend was killed when he was very young. He was young and homeless. He was young and homeless with two other children and they were kind of running together as a group. And one of the boys was murdered and Martin stayed on the street and he took to alcohol and drugs. And he was homeless because he's run away from home. You know, he might have been classified as a runaway as a sympathetic classification. This is a young black boy in 1970s at this moment, Chicago. You know, he's, you know, I call it a runaway. He's called something else called criminal. But anyway, but to the point about Martin. So Martin's now homeless. He's homeless for 10 years of his life and Martin's an adult now. And Martin has arrested 14 times for trespassing while he's homeless. And so this seems like a small thing. It seems like the misdemeanor isn't a big deal to intervene in, oh, it's just an inconvenience even though the disruption of misdemeanor arrest does incredibly powerful and awful work. To think about folks in jails, by the way, there's a beautiful new book coming out by the sociologist Michael Walker. This thing's gonna change the game. It's called indefinite. It's an ethnography of doing time in jail. It is powerful and important. And it talks about what jailing does and what jailing is. But to think about this point I'm trying to raise what these misdemeanors do specifically. 14 arrests for trespassing while he's homeless which is understandable. Not the arrest themselves with the fact he was arrested. But even if you say, oh, he's just, he's a couple hours to a couple of days in prison. He doesn't have a home anyway. Three hots in the cot. So be it, when he's finally arrested for drug use, he's arrested and have a three crack rocks in his pocket. He's got an overzealous prosecutor who wants to say those three crack rocks were for drug distribution. This is why who you vote for matters. Question number two, what can we do about it? Think about your prosecutor. He charges him with felony distribution. This is in the 2000s. The judge says, I'm in the court with him. This is, you know, feels to me this kind of an overreach. It feels, I forgot exactly what he said, but it feels like an overreach. The prosecutor said, but your honor, he's been arrested 14 times for trespassing. He's got a quote pattern of criminality. And so what the misdemeanor is often used for is to establish the fact of one criminality so that by the time there's a charge, even a small one that would get them the more serious conviction in this case of felony for something that we will call a misdemeanor now. It doesn't matter. This man was branded and marked as such for the rest of his life. Okay, so this dovetails into the second question, what can we do? This is both in the chat and also in the Q&A. Do you see solutions in this judicial system? Do you see a world without jails, prisons or confines of reentry? That's a broader question. We're gonna come to that part two. Let's jump to this first question. What can we do? One thing we can do is pay attention to the prosecutor. Now let's jump into the, do we see a world without jails and prisons? And so, Keisha, if you wanna take that, I always have thoughts. So I can take a back seat for a minute. I have thoughts too. We both have thoughts on this. Solution to the judicial system. Oh my goodness. When I think the judicial system is very specific meaning the courts, when I think about the criminal justice system and because I'm on a Zoom, I will do this. I think about the whole linear part of policing all the way through incarceration and reentry. That it is not just the justice system. I think the justice system is unjust. It is biased. It privileges the rich. It demeans the poor. It totally, totally incarcerates mentally ill people. And this whole idea of marking people with misdemeanor convictions. Just think about that trespassing in your homeless. You can be trespassing if you fall asleep on a public bench in some areas. That's a misdemeanor. But if you're homeless, you're committing a misdemeanor all the time and the police will choose to then police the easy targets. And so solutions, who is your prosecutor? That is like vote about your local prosecutor. That matters. We are actually seeing changes and diversion programs that prison and jail is not the first option. So changes become the prosecutor because the prosecutor has so much discretion, so much power to literally bring charges. And our system is actually created for plea deals. So they overcharge to the maximum that they can get so that the individual will plead guilty and then they can move that file off their desk because a trial actually takes longer. So prosecutors first. I don't even want to touch policing because that's a whole thing. But we have to think about alternatives, particularly for young people. And when I say young people, I'm really talking like 30 and under because Ruben and I have already talked about the fact that people are poor. They tend to already be socially marginalized and then they get caught up in the criminal justice system. And this could literally be through the school to prison pipeline. Think about policing in underfunded schools. They don't use alternative options. They just police students. And so what used to be in the 70s and 80s just a fight at school, the police now are brought in and that person is tagged as a violent offender. So that has to start is we got to think about alternatives because there are lots of alternatives that actually have good outcomes. Do I see a world without jails, prisons? Sorry, solutions before we jump in the second one, Ruben. Well, I think we should jump into the last one because I think this is the last question we get the answer. So maybe I'll say something about my thoughts on abolition and you say something about your thoughts on abolition and then we bounce. But so I think we need abolitionists. So whether or not you're an abolitionist. I'm not an abolitionist in part because I'm working on, I think it's right ethically and morally but I'm working on my own impulses to punish. And so I'm trying to work out in my own heart and mind how I might see a world that doesn't control for sort of the worst case situation. And that's, I know in some ways a distraction from this broader call but that's what I'm doing in my own sort of with my own theory of justice. And I think we have to do the important work of coming up with a theory of justice. What do we believe is just and right? And I think the abolitionist call for a world without jails and prisons in my mind is morally right. It is morally right. It is morally right because none of the things that we've used jails or prisons for have resulted in any of the outcomes that we've hoped for, literally none of them. By any measure prison has failed by any measure. But the call to reimagine society in such a way that we don't produce greater degrees of criminality is an important call. So I think whether you're an abolitionist or not that is incumbent upon us to take the call from abolitionists seriously. At the very least the the exercise and the imaginative exercise, right? To have an abolitionist imagination when I'm thinking about how a functioning government could work at the very least is generative. In other words, at the very least it produces new kinds of questions that we might ask that we hadn't asked before. The fact that we have police officers in schools the fact that education is built around the idea of controlling delinquents the fact that violence pervades how we do housing policy is in fact a problem. And if we don't identify the carceral logic that guide us as such then we'll continue to reproduce the problems that we see. And so even if you don't believe at the end of the day as I don't, I still haven't worked out what to do with sort of the worst case scenarios I still haven't worked out my own vengeance by the way I have to say that my own need for retribution which I'm not sure is all the way wrong. Like I'm working this out, right? Like I'm working out what you do when somebody hurts you, I'm working it out. But even if you haven't all the way worked it out it's more than an intellectual exercise. It's very important for us to think about how to live together without resorting to violence ourselves, that's what I think. But Kisha, what do you think as we walk out the door? I have actually a very similar thought as I am not an abolitionist. There are some people that unfortunately must be incarcerated. Now what and who those people are and what crimes do they commit? We can debate on that. But I believe for the broader protection of society some people need to be locked up. But then I question myself about punishment and what are the ramifications of punishment and what does that mean for broader society? But I am not quite, not close to a point where we get rid of prisons, just not there yet. But on the other hand, I think with this idea of not doing the same thing over and over and over again. Ruben and I both talked about the 67% failure on recidivism rates. You get a D in my class if you got 67%. So can we aim for a C plus? Can we like have 78% success instead of 33% success? So you notice I flipped that from success to failure. If you were getting like, so the Department of Corrections is literally getting a D on all measures of Department of Rehabilitation. They're getting a D. I would like to flip the script and go for a C plus or a B minus. I'm not brilliant, but I work really hard at school. That's how I got good grades is I worked really hard at school. So if we could just aim for a C plus or B minus, 78 to 82% of re-entry success, that would be a win. Win because we'd have fewer victims. We'd have fewer property crimes. We as taxpayers would be spending less money on the foster care system and the criminal justice system. We could then like defund the police maybe extreme because people are sort of like, oh my goodness, police. But we could reimagine where that money could go to actually be helpful for people to not commit crime. So the alternatives are vast and all that we're missing is our imagination. The professor said, get a C. I did. C plus, get a C plus. Thank you. There's all sorts of chat thank you coming through and for making this difficult topic so approachable for both of you, we thank you for that. And attendees, I knew there was gonna be just a barrage of links. So you can find those all in this main link that I put in the chat box right now, here it comes. And we wanna thank Dr. Keisha Midlemass and Reuben J. Miller for being here tonight and San Francisco Public Library community and Oakland Public Library community. Thank you all for being here as well. Have a wonderful night. Thank you. Thank you.