 Hi, my name is Deborah Espinosa, and I am both an artist and an attorney. My preferred means of advocacy is through visual storytelling, multimedia storytelling. So today I'm going to share with you a bit about my work and about my project called Living with Conviction, Sentence to Debt for Life in Washington State. So before I do that, I'm going to also share with you a few examples of going back in time in which photography in particular has been used as examples for a variety of legal advocacy efforts. Okay, so I'm going to share my screen. I'm going to try to, and at one point I'm going to flip over to a really quick three-minute video, so hopefully that will be seamless. Okay, so hold that thought. I'm going to share my screen, and then I will get started. Thank you. Thank you for your patience. Okay, sharing screen. Here we go, share, and we'll start the, there we go. Okay, so like I said, my project is called Living with Conviction, Sentence to Debt for Life in Washington State. And I'm going to start out with this quote, which in my mind really sums up the overall purpose of the project really, and that is a quote from Mahatma Gandhi. And the quote is, An unjust law is itself a species of violence. A rest for its breach is more so. So you're going to hear about when I first heard about this particular issue and that I really needed to do something about it. So just a quick overview, we're going to focus on a few examples of the historical use of visual media for legal advocacy. And then I'm going to talk about the legal issue that I learned about and was frankly appalled by. And then I had to do some thing about it. And then I'll share with you what has done about it, and then we'll talk about what's next. Okay, okay. And like I said, in the middle of this, I'm going to try to flip over to a three minute video that's online. We'll see how that goes. Okay, so just bear with me. Okay, so first, my guess is there's people out there watching this who have recognized this image, or at least recognize what the image is of. And this is Yosemite Valley. This image was taken in 1864 by a gentleman named Carlton Watkins. And this image of Yosemite Valley and Half Dome made its way because Carlton Watkins really felt like this was a beautiful place that needed to preserve, be preserved. His images made their way via a California senator to president at the time, Abraham Lincoln. And as you can imagine, if you think about it, 1864, that's during the Civil War. And despite that, President Lincoln, when these images arrived on his desk in Washington, D.C., he was so moved by the imagery. He was the first president to set aside any land actually in the world for preservation and enjoyment by future populations. So that was the beginning. He didn't, in fact, establish the National Park at that point, but that was the precursor. It was basically a set aside. And then later on, the National Park was established, I think, by Roosevelt. But that was a really central example of the use of media impacting somebody who actually cannot be present to enjoy it or to do anything about it. Okay, another example. And this is, now we're going over to New York City. This is an image by Jacob Rees. And Jacob Rees was an immigrant to the United States to New York from Europe. And he basically was living in tenements. And he ended up, because he was so appalled by these conditions, tenement housing, which actually housed over two-thirds of New York City population, he started documenting it. And he actually created a book called How the Other Half Lives. And in this book, he documented the living conditions. And the living conditions were such that these enormous tenement housing was going up. And the only place where they had any windows was on the front side of the street side, right? But because the buildings were built less than an inch apart on the sides and in the back, there was no other window access except for the front to the street. They also, in addition to not having any windows in the vast majority of the apartments or the homes there inside, they also had a zero ventilation. And so the child infant mortality at the time was horrific because, you know, one germ in particular would just run rampant throughout these communities, these families who are living under extremely terrible circumstances. So Jacob Reese's work, his photography, got the attention of the mayor of New York City at the time, who was Theodore Roosevelt. And Theodore Roosevelt was appalled by the conditions that he had no idea because he's from the elite upper class. And so upon becoming governor of Washington, excuse me, governor of New York State, Theodore Roosevelt then was started and pushed for the Tenement Housing Act, which basically prohibited these types of housing, this inferior public housing for poor people, and basically required that every single new building going up had sunlight as well as air ventilation so that these conditions would go away. So that was an example really about a housing justice issue. OK, and next is where we are going to try to flip over to a three minute video. And so bear with me, I am going to unshare and then I'm going to share again, OK, to go to the video. And like I said, it's about three minutes, so it's not too bad. So this video we are going to share is about the photographer Jacob Reese, OK, and I am hoping that the volume you'll be able to hear the video. In the early 1900s, the general population in those years had very little understanding of what was meant by child labor and child exploitation. The kinds of jobs you would find children working in range from the mines, the factories, the cotton mills to working out on the streets selling newspapers, injuries, even deaths were very common among children. The parents would often say that they needed the income that their children brought in, that that was what allowed them to continue to survive. A number of parents were advocates for child labor and their children thought that that was the way life was. One of the first things the National Child Labor Committee did was to hire a photographer. They hired Lewis Hine, who was then their photographer for the next two decades. They sent him around the country to identify, find and photograph children in exploitative situations. He promoted himself as a Bible salesman. He said he was bringing his camera along so he could photograph kids reading Bibles. A boy would say he was 13 when in fact he was 11 or a girl would say she was 12 when in fact she might be nine. The photographs of a young girl, 10 or 11 years old, her name was Sadie Piper at a cotton mill in Lancaster, South Carolina. She's standing in front of a large loom on a long hallway, staring at and working hard on the job of selecting the quality products. She's probably worked most of the night. It's nearing the end of her shift. She stands there iconic as a representative of hundreds of other girls who are being treated just like her and who have no choice. That photograph raised the consciousness immediately. You see that photograph and you cannot look away from it. It doesn't say America. Lewis Hine's stark photographs influenced legislation over a period of roughly 35 years. This body of work on child labor represented how he thought and how he felt the children must not be exploited. He represents the most important photographer in terms of social advocacy and social change in the first half of the 20th century. OK, whoops. Oh, I got to stop that. Hold on. Sorry about that. OK, so now we're going to go back to my slide. And that is Lewis Hine. And so here we go from current slide. And oh, sorry. I'm not sharing my screen yet. I have to remember to share my screen, right? Share screen and now go back to my PowerPoint. Thank you for bearing with me. I got this down. And now I'm going to I want to go into slideshow and I want to. I don't want to hear current slide. There we go. OK, so that's Lewis Hine and I find these examples really inspiring, really compelling and that a long time ago, I to embrace the power of photography in order to change minds and for social change. And so as I said, I'm both an artist and a photographer. I'm an artist and an attorney. And so for a good portion of my career, I was working for an international NGO or international nonprofit organization as both staff attorney and staff photographer. And we were we advocated for poor people in the global south to have rights to land because in the global south, if you don't have a right to land, you are not going to survive and your children aren't going to survive. So this is an example of a photograph that my organization, former organization called Landesa, used hugely. And this is a photo of her name is Bertha and she is a widow and a mother of eight. And Rwanda was the first country to undertake complete titling of all the land in the country. Most of the land in Africa is not titled at all. It's just undocumented land, but there are very there's informal claims to it. So Rwanda was the first country that basically titled all the land and here Bertha is standing there and she's showing the title to her land. Clearly she's really proud and what this image and and so I was interviewing a group of women about their experiences in this titling process. And I said, does anybody have their title with them? Or did anybody receive a title? And then does anybody have a copy of their title with them? And Bertha raised her hand and she was like, you know, I carried around with me in the pocket of my skirt. And that is an indication of how important to her it is. So after the meeting, I said, hey, let's go outside. Can I talk to you more? Can I photograph you? And in the end, this image has been used for fundraising. It has been used for advocacy. It has been used the New York Times. I mean, it's it's so, you know, she's emoting. And basically, through photography, you can show our common humanity, you know, someone on the other side of the planet who supposedly is very different from us, is in fact, completely the same and wants to just take care of the children, right, lead a good life. So anyway, so that's Bertha. Then move over to Brazil. I was also doing some work. This I did leave. So I started freelancing and consulting. And I did some work in Brazil. And Brazil has a constitutional right to housing. Despite that, in anticipation of the World Cup coming to Brazil, they were basically evicting, forcibly evicting people from their homes. These homes are primarily called flums or favelas. And so this is Jean-Paulo who shared with me, shared with our team that he had been forcibly evicted by gunpoint with no notice to vacate his home. And he's standing in this photo in front of a variety of images of the actual eviction. And you can see just above his left shoulder there that there's police officers holding a man on his knees at gunpoint. So this was a very forcible eviction contrary to the constitutional right. So these images were used and Jean-Paulo's story was used to kind of advocate for, wait, this isn't right. He's homeless. He's standing there with just some clothes. That was the extent to which he was able to grab him and his family's belongings and get out of the way before he and his family were harmed. Now ironically, Jean-Paulo had come to Fortaleza City on the northern coast of Brazil. He had come to Fortaleza because for construction job. So it's those construction jobs are coming up because of the tourism industry because the World Cup was coming. So it's kind of a vicious circle. So anyway, that's another example of, you bring to life an issue, you bring to life an injustice through photography, but also personalizing a legal issue, personalizing an injustice. Okay, so this slide is to remind me now to switch over. So as I mentioned, I am an attorney. I am licensed in the state of Washington. I do maintain that license just in case, right? Just in case it's a global pandemic and I can't travel or something. So anyway, so as an attorney, I'm required to maintain my license by taking continuing legal education courses or CLEs. So in August of 2014, I took a CLE by the ACLU. And in 2014, the ACLU was quite not very, I mean, not a lot going on. But I took a one hour CLE and it was on debtors prisons. And I thought, debtors prisons, there's no debtors prisons in this country. There's debtors prisons in Africa. There's debtors prisons in Latin American countries, but not where I have worked, but I was wrong. And so on that day, I basically, to be perfectly melodramatic, my life changed, okay? So debtors prisons, this one hour CLE was all about what are called legal financial obligations and that's what my project is about. So I'm gonna give you really basic information about it so you know what we're talking about, okay? Okay, it's just gonna take a second. So legal financial obligations are the costs, fines, fees and victim restitution, which I will explain, but a variety of different types of debt that are imposed on a criminal defendant at the time of criminal sentencing. So for example, you might get a five year prison sentence. You also might get $5,000 in quote, legal financial obligations or LFOs, okay? Those are imposed at the time of sentencing. Nobody really pays attention to them, but some of them are mandatory. The average amount in Washington state, people receive is about $2,500 in LFOs, but significantly those LFOs accrue a 12% interest up until 2018, which we'll talk about. 12% interest, like who gets that, right? The state of Washington has been getting that for decades. 12% annual interest. Significantly, this interest would start accruing from the date that you're convicted. So those five years that you might be sitting in prison, you're also that $5,000 you've also been assessed is also accruing interest while you're sitting in prison and can't do much about it. Okay, and so, yep, accrues while we're in prison. So I wanna give you a couple examples. I hope you can see this couple examples. They take a DNA collect, whoops, that shouldn't happen. They take a DNA collection fee of $100. There's a mandatory victim penalty assessment and that is for $500. And that's regardless, regardless, $500 per felony. Then there's also in some counties, you are assessed $100 per day for every day that they have sentenced you to prison. So every day of incarceration. There's also user fees and sometimes many of these are mandatory. And these are user fees like court costs, public defender use of a criminal lab to run some chemical test. You might be charged if you have a six-person jury. You might be charged if you have a 12-person jury. You might be charged for a witness fee. Department of Corrections supervision, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, and then also there's crime-specific fees. And what the acronym there is the VUXA, the V-U-C-S-A, it's the violation of the Uniform Controlled Substances Act. So when you get a drug offense, you're likely to get a additional fee related to whatever that is. So like there's a whole, there's a very expensive meth cleanup fee, stuff like that. And then there's victim restitution. Victim restitution isn't always applied, but victim restitution is intended to make the victim whole if that's possible. So for example, let's say you have stolen some of these car and you completely destroy it in the police pursuit and run into a dump truck, you know, and that car is damaged, they will assess the value of that car to you and you will owe them $25,000 if that's how much the car was worth, okay? So those are just some examples. There's over like 150 of them. So don't get bogged down in the details, just know these LFOs come in a variety of different types and different reasons, et cetera, okay? So then for LFOs, once you get, okay, so while you're in prison and you know that interest is occurring, da-da-da-da, if you're making like 25 cents an hour doing something, the Department of Corrections is going to deduct a percentage from those prison wages. They also will deduct 80, 78% of any amount that your family member gives you if you're on the inside and they wanna give you $100 for your account so you can go to the commissary or you can go to get something inside, they will deduct that as well. Okay, so that's why you're in prison. Now, once you get out, you have 30 days to make the first monthly payments, okay? The monthly payments can vary hugely, but hopefully it's not more than $25 because usually when you, as you know, you likely know when you get out of prison, it's hard to find a job, it's hard to find housing, it's hard to get an ID, I mean, it's just like goes on and on, okay? So importantly, these LFOs or legal financial obligations, they cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, like credit card debt, right? They cannot defer them while you're in college so a lot of people after going to prison will go to college and they get no relief then. Then if you also have a job and you haven't been paying, you also can get your wages garnished and that's super common. They, I know people who they've taken as much as $500 per paycheck from them if they're making that much money. And lastly and importantly, if and when you miss monthly payments, which is quite common for this population with so many barriers to successful reentry, you can get arrested for failure to make those payments and that's because you're either held in contempt of court for not complying with the court order for you to pay or you are found in violation of your sentence. Either way they can issue an arrest warrant and arrest you for failure to pay your LFOs, okay? So this was my reaction, right? I'm like, wait a second, what? You've got to be kidding me. I was like, this was an hour and I'm like, what is wrong with this world? So in my mind, I've seen a lot of injustice in other parts of the world. I had no idea that this was happening here. Most people don't and that's one of the main reasons for the project is to educate the public and policymakers about the fact that these even exist and then the impacts of that legal debt on communities who are trying to rebuild their lives or individuals who are trying to rebuild their lives. So this LFO policy, which nobody knows about is both inequitable and unconscionable. And I use that, that is a really strong word and you don't really use that very often but that's in fact what this is. I mean, I just like my whole body reacted to it because it's just ridiculous. And that's in part because 80 to 90% of criminal defendants are indigent. And what that means is their income is less than 125% of the federal poverty level. So these are low, low income people that are primarily criminal defendants. So as someone said, the state of Washington and trying to collect on these LFOs, they are spending dimes in order to collect pennies. So not just from my perspective, but anybody who hears about this, this is serious punishment for the poor because what happens is if you are rich and you're convicted, you typically have a private attorney instead of a public defense attorney but a public defender and your private attorney will say, pay those off before you go to jail before you go to prison. And I've known people and I've interviewed people who have criminal records and yet have no LFOs and that's because they hired a private attorney and were able to afford to pay that off before they went into prison and before that 12% started to crew. So because of that, this policy that is both inequitable and unconscionable, disproportionately impacts the poor and people of color. Those are the people who can't afford pay. Those are the people who are not gonna be able to get out from their criminal convictions because of it. Those are the people who are going to be under constant financial supervision from the criminal justice system. And with a 12% interest rate, they will not be able to pay it off, right? So studies also show for Washington state, the highest proportion of LFOs are imposed on Latino males. I have my own guesses as to why that's the case. We do know that rural counties tend to be county courts, tend to be more aggressive in imposing these LFOs and a great deal, a vast majority of Latinos live in rural areas being in the agricultural sector. So anyway, so yeah, that's LFOs. So here I am, I'm like, oh my gosh, I've been doing all this work on the other side of the world, and here I felt somewhat complicit in this. I don't practice law in the United States or in Washington state, but as a member of the state bar, I felt like I needed to do something about it. For some reason, it just flipped a switch in me. And so my skillset, I'm a lawyer, but I also, I photograph and interview people and generate stories about people's lives and also the injustices that are impacting individuals because the law is supposed to be there to serve us, it's not supposed to be there to hold us down and hold us back, but in this case it is. And I say us on purpose. So what I did is it took me three years, two years to gain access to this community and because there's a lot of trust that's needed in order to have very open conversations with people, for people who may feel a great deal of shame about their criminal history. And so this led to my project, Living with Conviction, Sentence to Debt for Life in Washington State. And what I do is I seek volunteers, volunteers who are willing to sit down with me and we do a pretty long interview and then multiple photo shoots depending on the person and depending on a variety of things. And so if you wanna take a look at the Living with Conviction website under Stories, each person you can click on and like this is Sabrina, Kashina and Michael, you can click on those and it'll bring up their story. It'll bring up personal narratives. Some of them have audio, some of them don't. But this way my goal is to have 100 people on the website and my goal is to really show the volume of the problem but also the various factors that went into the person entering the criminal justice system and now they can't get out. So that's the websites. I love for you to take a look at it. But what was happening is I wanted to create a short film because I've done some filmmaking while I was in my other work. But at this point, they're about to launch the next legislative session in Washington State and they're going to advocate for legal reform of their LFOs, of our LFO laws again. So all of a sudden I had to stop wanting to create a film and flip over and basically get the website going. And so I wanna give you an example. This is Michael. Michael when I met him was a 60-something year old Vietnam veteran who was living on his, he was living on his VA pension of $1,070. He has three criminal convictions and because of that, he makes a total of $75 payments to the county courts so that he won't get arrested. His $1,070 VA pension is his only source of income and every month he'll go and get money orders in order to make those payments. He says, when I took my guilty plea, I didn't think that I was going to be doing a life sentence. The interest on these fines makes it where a person with a limited income will never be able to get out from the wreckage of the past. And Michael is Native American as indicated by his tattoo. And you know, so anyway, I'll move on about Michael. And this is Breon. Breon is also in the short multimedia piece that I've prepared for you. Breon shares that these LFOs stop people from succeeding. Your whole objective is to keep people, the community safe. But you're trying to keep the community safe from people that you're forcing to be failures. And Breon is a father of two teenage girls. And at the time that I met him, he was commuting three hours to go to college and basically working two jobs, a father, et cetera, et cetera. And he was barely able to make his LFO payments. So because this legislative session was opening up, there was, I was part of a coalition that was advocating for LFO reform. So we generated a magazine of all these stories and photographs. We created postcards and a whole lot of different nonprofit organizations throughout the state were purchasing these postcards to share with their state legislators to advocate for the LFO reform. And in the fourth year I was involved in year three and four. In the fourth year, there in fact was LFO reform. And that LFO reform occurred in June, 2018. And what it did, it didn't go far enough, but it did do something. It basically removes the 12% interest for new convictions as of June 7th, 2018, but only the ones not related to restitution. Remember we talked about this victim restitution and that's where there's a victim who needs to be reimbursed, made whole again. So these are all those other, there's no interest right now on 12%, no 12% interest on these other, all these other categories, which is significant. It's absolutely significant for newly convicted individuals as of June 7th. It also significantly stopped accrual of 12% interest on existing LFOs. Again, excluding non-restitution interest or non-restitution. So that's really exciting, but it wasn't, I mean, it stopped the accrual, but that interest is still sitting there, right? So it's just not growing anymore except for restitution. Also removed a mandatory $100 DNA fee if your DNA is already in the system because you've reoffended, that's kind of minor, but a hundred bucks is on the box. And then it also granted a right to a waiver of non-restitution interest for people with LFOs, but only if you requested from the court, if you file a motion, which pretty much means nobody's gonna do it almost, okay? Let's just be clear about that. So it did make some progress, but not go far enough. So what it didn't do, this is the, it's a really long name, is what does the E2HSB, that's the Engrossed Second House Senate Bill 1783. It's not automatic waiver or reduction of LFOs. It has to be upon a motion. And it really illustrates the, if you guys have talked about rule of law issues or think about rule of law issues, it's really, here's a great law in the books, but it's not being implemented. A, because nobody knows about it. B, because nobody has any money to do it. And C, because you don't know about it, it's not gonna happen, right? So living with conviction also has a whole legal empowerment initiative now related to that. But I wanted to share this. This was an unsolicited email from a person that I've never met in person. And it basically is from a Washington state public defender who also was a lobbyist. And he said, congratulations on the asset success of living with conviction. It's clear that your project was instrumental in the Washington state legislature finally making real change to legal financial obligations. I can't thank you enough for telling me stories. So that was a really unexpected, very kind and very generous statement. And it's really about the people who are brave enough to share their stories. So to some extent, in some way, these stories have made an impact and we're continuing, I'm continuing to collect and share living with conviction stories. But I also wanna move into, there is somewhat like a theory of change around using storytelling, whether that's visual storytelling, literature, a variety of different artistic works. If you have a compelling story, you can use that story to raise awareness, right? You start at the top, you can then raise awareness. And when you start raising awareness, among my community, my family, my friends, they're like, you're kidding, what can I do to help, right? That engagement then generates a stronger movement and then which eventually can lead to social change. So I did not make this up. This is from the Fledgling Fund, which is a foundation that supports mission-driven visual storytelling. And it's from there, it's called Assessing Creative Media's Social Impact. So I just kind of wanted to give you kind of some theoretical underpinning around that. So I'm gonna stop there because we're gonna get together on June 2nd at 11 a.m. And it basically, this is a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. And it, he says, an individual has not started living until he or she can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. And I wanna stop there because I want to encourage everybody who sees this, everybody who is even slightly interested in criminal justice in who's watching this is that there is a lot of, there's a lot of issues out there that needs our attention. And I say our because we are the community, our community, our humanity. So I'm going to invite you to think about what issues really annoy you, really upset you and go do something about it. And whether your skill set, you are an artist, whether you're an engineer, whether you are a poet, go do something because we need you to, okay? So that's why living with conviction, the name of the project, yes, it is about living with a criminal conviction, a criminal record, but it's also about living in a way that honors your beliefs, living with conviction. What is it the courage of your convictions? So thank you for that. I do hope you'll watch the five minute multimedia piece created around LFOs and the project. And I look forward to seeing you along with a panel of storytellers on Tuesday, June 2nd. Thank you so much. Take care. Bye-bye. I'm going to unshare now. Unshare. Thank you. Bye-bye.