 Good afternoon I'm Elizabeth Sackler, and it's wonderful to have everybody here today This is our final program of our spring if you can believe it's spring with the snow outside, and it is snowing actually It is in Manhattan anyway. It's not in Brooklyn, but This is our final program for our spring series of states of denial via legal incarceration of Women children and people of color and I welcome you If you missed the previous two panels one was burning down the house rebuilding juvenile justice together with Burning down the house author Nell Bernstein and a panel of Brooklyn based Prisoner advocates or if you missed a last week prison women and change a conversation With Nagechi Taifa and Susan Rosenberg who's author of an American radical prisoner An American radical prisoner in my own country Susan talked about her nearly two decades of Incarceration as a political prisoner and what it was to be incarcerated for your ideas Susan was released in 2001 or she would still actually be incarcerated She was released in 2001 through executive clemency by President of Bill Clinton you can view both of those programs if you missed them at www Brooklyn museum org slash EACFA slash video and I encourage you to do so they were wonderful in 1862 Dostoevsky wrote the degree of civilization in a society Can be judged by entering its prisons That in the house of the dead and a hundred and fifty years later I think it is still a true benchmark and in our country Abominations continue in prisons in jail stay after day without any repercussions people are Isolated to insanity 70 million people who have been incarcerated face laws in our country today that completely disenfranchised them and guarantee Those laws do the dissolution of an entire population of peoples so I ask Where is the civil in our civilization and if you haven't seen it already New York Times magazine section is finally taking This question on it was online yesterday. It's now in the magazine section today and it's On American prisons called the title is inside America's toughest federal prison It's by Mark Benelli And I'd say in comparison with the radical humanness of Norway's Halden prison by Jessica Bencoe and if you know anything about Norway's prisons, you know something about a civilized Country and the way in which a civilized nation handles people who have not Behaved properly, but we'll go back into society and be productive human beings Which is really what we need to strive for For six months. I led a workshop up at York Penitentiary It's a women's maximum security prison up in Niantic Connecticut and the fruit of our labor Created by nine women is a wonderful work of art entitled shared dining By women of York and the women were inspired by seeing photos of the dinner party by Judy Chicago at the Sacro Center here and of honoring Women that they cared to honor and shared dining will be on view here This August in the Sacro Center's herstory gallery next to its big sister the dinner party So I invite you and urge you to take note because it is quite an extraordinary work of art by a group of very extraordinary women The power of art cannot be overstated to heal and reveal The power of art to express and sometimes express the otherwise inexpressible author Wally Lamb has for over ten years led writing workshops up at York and published two books of writings by those women Couldn't keep it to myself in 2004 and I'll fly away in 2008 and I'd just like to Read you a short poem written in prison by Kimberly Walker Its title is lavender and vanilla Mom lies still in the hospital bed Lavender and vanilla radiating from her skin Spirit at peace body at rest. She is in her father's arms Upon her face glorious light shines The wind blows I love you kisses the rain falls Tears of I miss you the sense of lavender and vanilla say I will always be with you She was not with her mother and she was Today we are inside out with Piper Kerman and Joe Loya in 2004 during her year in In prison Piper began a correspondence with a then stranger Joe Loya who had served seven years in prison for bank robberies and who survived two years in solitary confinement by reading and writing During and after serving her sentence Piper Loya encouraged Kerman to write to write honestly and with humor about her experience and Without regard for established ways of thinking about crime punishment and prison and I have the pleasure today really of welcoming the two of them in conversation about memoir about Prison narratives and the life saving and life changing power of storytelling It had occurred to me earlier, and I mentioned it to Joe just before we began that There is a moment where you have it when you reach a critical mass and things shift and a lot has been bubbling up and of course Michelle Alexander wrote the great the new Jim Crow and With Piper Kerman's orange is the new black both the book and the Netflix series Suddenly there has been a shift of a major major sort and So much is going on now in recognizing the inhumane treatment and the horrors that are taking place Right in our front and backyards and part of the reason that we have this ongoing series is to continue To talk about all of the things that need to be talked about and things that some people don't know about and Sometimes things that people don't want to know about So I will read you their bios Piper Kerman is the author of the best-selling memoir orange is the new black My year in a woman's prison an account of her 13-month incarceration for a drug Decade-old drug offense and the now popular Netflix series Piper is a communications consultant for nonprofits and philanthropies and serves on the board of the Women's Prison Association She is frequent speaker at colleges and universities and has recently addressed groups including correctional officials Federal probation officers public defenders justice reform advocates and volunteers and formerly and currently incarcerated people She is the recipient of the 2014 justice trailblazer award from the John Jay College Center for Media Crime and Justice Joe Loya is an author essayist Playwright actor and soon to host and produce to his very own podcast The allure of crime His op-eds have appeared in national newspapers. He has done commentary on television and radio Lectures at colleges across the country speaks with prisoners here and abroad and with Walden house to help former prisoners re-enter society While serving seven years in prison for bank robbery, he began to write his life story Which eventually became the man who outgrew his prison cell Loya has received a Sundance Writing Fellowship and the Sun Valley Writers Conference Fellowship and a Soros Justice Fellowship. Loya is currently working on a memoir about daddyhood and His commitment to raise his kid to do well despite his past commitment to behave badly Data tell data tell me a zombie story is also the story of how he prepared His daughter from childbirth for the day. He'd have to tell her he'd once been incarcerated for bank robbery and it occurs to me that we have to thank Joe for having encouraged Piper Nagt her and rooted her on to write orange is the new black So that all of you and all of us will hear the two of them speak today, and I'm very happy Please help me join in welcoming Comfortable Yes, and thank you for that really lovely introduction. Thank you for that warm Brooklyn welcome on a snowy spring day I Hello my friend Really, I think what y'all are about to participate in is an ongoing conversation that's been taking place for over a decade and It's nice to be here with you. It's very humbling always to be in the situation like this Because I remember it started off with a correspondence and it was just letters and we were strangers And I knew what you were going through kind of not specifically and then you would give me information and now we're here Yes, and everything the book and everything. Yeah, so in 2004 I was incarcerated in federal prison and I was very lucky because I got mail And at mail call every single day every single person on the unit shows up, right? Absolutely everybody wants a Letter or a postcard you crowd you crowd a magazine like anything some sign from the outside world, right? That you have not been forgotten and I began to get letters from a complete stranger because my friend Laura out in California had put out an APB Hey, my friend Piper is incarcerated. Please send her books and You did not just send me books. You began to send me letters what I would describe and characterize as demanding letters And you said hey, I'm Joe. I'm Laura's friend. I did a lot of time And you began to ask me questions like all kinds of questions questions about my fiance Larry That I found you know from my waspy perspective to be like, oh, well He said you know Joe said how do you think this experience will change your your relationship with Larry? What do you think about when you think about getting out? So many questions that were intense and personal and pointed and the other thing that you began to say to me in those letters Was to write and you related a little bit of your own story Yeah And so that was a great comfort to me and maybe you just tell people a little bit about like what you described in brief Because those letters tended to be like, you know a page or two and believe me if I didn't respond fast enough Joe would write again and be like, why didn't you write me back? Like I'm not going to get the excuse. Oh, I don't have time. You know, I can't write you back Give me time But more importantly the thing is that I had done time and in time I had relationships with with people who visited me and I had love relationships people who loved me and that I Eventually intended to have a relationship when I got out So I was tending to my my connections with people while I was in there So I was I'm always interested when people are inside and we're talking about the component of how you're existing in here But also what's going on with your connections out there? How are you? How are you managing those? But also what I understood is once you hit prison the density of that experience Totally job like you could go in wasp. You can't you can't stay wasp. You're like Everything like or even me I went in there with this real sense of like I'm smarter than everybody here have better education than them More savvy and nothing could be farther from the truth I mean the first time that I got there and I had been playing chess and memorizing Bobby's Fisher Boris Foskey games like in sixth grade I was like a little chess champ in my little junior high and I go there to prison and some guy who has no teeth And he's 68 years old and he beats me soundly like within five minutes I was like that was my introduction like there's some very savvy clever guys I'm not going to be the smartest guy here, especially when it comes to thinking ahead So I feel like what prison does is it? It has this great Thing where it breaks you down and and puts you in flux So you can start making connections with people in that time and start thinking about things differently than you had before So my thing was you're in there. I know you're gonna be in there for a while I know what you know. You don't know yet And I know your fears. I know I know the people around I know all this stuff already And then my letters I basically can't that said nobody you who will talk to you about anything you're going through I know We'll understand you better than me. That's just and because I'm a stranger It's even better because I had had a correspondence in prison for two years my last two years with the writer and essays Richard Rodriguez and and we wrote and wrote and wrote and in those letters. In fact, he never visited me I never called him, but those letters We confess that it's easy to confess to strangers You could tell people that you don't know all sorts of stuff You can't tell your family you can convey fears, but you don't want to tell your family because they're gonna say Oh my god, I should start worrying. This person's worrying inside. There's a lot of things I get So I felt like I was gonna give you that opportunity and then I was gonna give it again I was gonna you know, and I'm a I'm an ex-bank robber So one thing I do is like I transgress borders easily, you know I've been like, you know, I have I have priors for jumping over boundaries and Like tower stations and stuff. So like when it comes to me and people I don't have a problem saying hey, hey Hey, and that's what I was kind of doing urging you thinking think about writing Yeah, so those letters told me that you know writing essentially saved your life in a lot of senses or certainly Transformed your life. Maybe it saved your sanity and transformed your life. That might be a more accurate. Yeah While you were incarcerated and so you were really urging me to write while I was incarcerated Which I did end up doing in the in the sense that I wrote copious letters and very occasional journal entries But but I didn't start writing my own sort of narratives while I was incarcerated But you were encouraging me to do so and you were describing I think really clearly in those letters why The power of writing was transformative for you to think about for me writing had actually Had actually helped me organize my story on the page So what I had had up until going to prison. I was just this Person who acted I was a person of action and I would get angry and I'd get prompted to do something And I would just focus. Okay, I'm gonna go rob a bank. I'm gonna go hurt this person or whatever and What what how I was functioning was my my life for these memories is kind of discreet memories running around something would happen It would trigger a memory and it would come there. I'd remember something horrible humiliating It would incite the rage and I would act so these memories were like not connected to each other But they were there and they were very powerful when I started writing the stories out Individually the death of my mother, you know different different traumas or different things I'd done in my life And I started putting it was like a puzzle and all these things that I thought I was because these stories had once I had identified them as this or this or this or that I saw that they were all connected I could start recognizing patterns in my life and more importantly what I saw there was like evidence that once upon a time I'd been this decent kid and that was that was the startling Epiphany and prison that well I actually forgotten a lot of the beautiful things in my childhood and it was exactly that Reminder that said I think that is still in me somewhere and rather than like start thinking about Sort of Appropriating some things that I could be better I felt like I just needed to find a way to let that thing assert it let the goodness in me assert itself and that's all writing all these stories from childhood and Like really beautiful story before my mother died and before my father went totally demented and Really violent? They they were powerful in an acting change in my life and wrecking and letting me see myself Really in great detail My own my story with it the bad and the good So your book was published during the year that I was incarcerated So eventually that book came into my hands While I was incarcerated. I remember you were so shocked. I wrote to you that I had your book And you were so shocked. You were like, how do you have a hardcover book? But when I read that book, I began to truly comprehend just how different in many respects your story is from mine in that You experienced a ton of childhood trauma As you just alluded to you know, you're the death of your mother and then your father's reaction Which was really to go towards a place of great violence Not focused on you focused on your brother and the the trajectory that starts Perhaps leaping off from that moment when you stabbed your father in the neck and Leading you towards a path of robbing 21 banks 30 banks 30 banks Rob for one day once for which you were eventually incarcerated and your incarceration was actually a lot more tumultuous than mine Because just tell a little bit about how that that two years of solitary confinement came to pass Yeah, so when I went to prison, you know, my thing was I was still a criminal I was I was like you got me but all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna spend these seven years actually rising in the ranks I'm gonna become you know I'm gonna because I went to federal penitentiary and I was a maximum security penitentiary. I I met every member of every mafia in the country from the Dixie mob to the You know the area of brotherhood to the irish Italians Colombians, you know everything so I felt like okay. Good. I'm in my space. I'm gonna rise in the ranks I'm gonna become a better criminal for three years when approximately three years. I still Was be committing crime in prison, but as our most people in prison That's he survived. You have that's how many rules exactly right I mean if I'm if fruit man brings smuggles a sandwich from the kitchen and I eat it I mean that's you know, correct. There is a violation. That's a crime right There is no survival in prison by following the rules. No, you can't yeah so but and but we were doing other thing we were doing like different various kinds of like Like making knives and whatever everything so but I go to solitary confinement and even solitary confinement I get I get pulled in for this homicide investigation my excel me was murdered and they pulled up a little group of Mexican guys and I'm in there and I'm for the first year. I'm like, you know, I'm this is my earning my bones I'm actually it's it's helping me to to to have this aura who I might have been involved with with this part of this These guys who could have done this to embody this story. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely So but I'm in there and solitary confinement as that that article was it was actually very Challenging for me to read that article again. It was really really horrible solitary confinement broke broke me And when I came out of prison people would ask me well, you know, you change your life in solitary confinement Why don't we lock everybody in solitary confinement? I said that the paradox of solitary confinement was that it was the worst thing that ever happened to me I literally hallucinated. I was hearing voices But it was also the best thing that ever happened to me and paradoxes are like that So I never say one without the other it it this this bald boy was in the corner of my cell and And and shocked me so so I was so stunned how I had lost my ability to see reality and fantasy To recognize the difference that it broke me that broke me and humbled me and made me realize What I know about myself now everything is up for grabs everything of Who I think I am what my strengths are and up until that point I thought I had a really really strong mind, but it was it was it was challenging And that's where that's where solitary I started turning into writing every day I wrote about that boy fact that was the first story ever wrote that made into the memoir It turns out that I when I was seven there was a seven-year-old boy who had leukemia Who was my neighbor wrote we rode bikes around and then he died three months after I met him And we used to play in this house and everything and that boy triggered the memory of that And that's where I went in earnest started writing all these stories about my childhood When my mother was still alive when she was healthy and that's where all these memories came back And I wrote that and it it was painful but It was so urgent that I had to write the next memory that came from that and read and then I was writing every day Yeah, basically writing every day till I got out of prison the next three and a half years Yeah, so I read your book and I was like oh Okay, I get it. I understand why Joe has been encouraging me to write because writing literally saved his sanity literally transformed his life and your book is Really not just about your time incarcerated obviously in fact I think on balance, you know it's at most it's at most 50 percent about incarceration and the experience of incarceration and Gives us this incredibly beautiful portrait of you as a child you as a rising and changing adolescent and then You know brings us into that experience of incarceration and Really really closely into the experience of solitary confinement and what life on that solitary unit is like and one of the things That I think is so interesting about your depiction of the shoe and not just your own Internal experience, which you just described so beautifully, but the interaction between all the other people on the unit Yeah, is that it's told with humor, which is not what we expect when we think about the torture of solitary confinement We all more and more people recognize and acknowledge that any lengthy period of time in total isolation Basically functions as a form of torture. Again this New York the most recent Description of the Florence super max super isolation unit gives you a really clear picture of why solitary is so disturbing that said The way that you chose to write about the experience Offers an access point for those of us who have been fortunate enough including myself never to set foot into an isolation unit Which I think is really unique and I think that is from my point of view one of the most important things for people who choose to write Certainly prison narratives, but also narratives that relate to human rights abuses and to really traumatic experiences is how can we Find an access point for those who have not shared those experiences And I think you made some fascinating choices in your book you know when when when Oranges a new black at the TV show came out I read a couple things and people were like There was there were some folks who didn't like it for whatever reason And I wrote a piece for medium about it and like not only defended You know the book but also the show and my greatest defense of the show was People I knew I'd spend time with in prison and Rob McClary. Are you here? No, so I have a friend lives here in Brooklyn. He was gonna try and make it. He's a guy I did time with When when I was in prison and friends knew I was writing to Richard Rodriguez And they knew that he was asking me when you get out We want you to write for us. We want you to write about your experience My friends would tell me when you get out. Tell them how we're funny Tell them how we laugh and that was like not one person not two people One of the things we don't like is in the way people are characterized prisoners are characterized including serious criminals I mean a lot of murderers. I know are actually were some of the funniest guys I met and just for whatever reason but I felt like I needed to treat prison like a dramedy because I Laugh so much. In fact, I was notorious for my laugh People could take a track where I was in the unit by where I was laughing I have a really bellicose laugh and I throw my head back even my eight-year-old daughter laughs like me know Right, so it's kind of it's kind of grotesque, but the thing is That I felt like I needed to write how I also felt my experience and and it was You know my mother died my dad beat me so badly. I stabbed my father and in in self-defense in self-defense they're vicious beating in which you know, there's broken bones at the end of it all my bones were broken, but We and as a family later on after it all was over and done and we've grown up We were able to laugh about when like we laugh about it a joke me my dad and my brother There's some dark humor, so I wanted to do that and I've been encouraged They were telling me right. We're funny one of the things none of my favorite crime filmmakers is Michael man But the thing that drives me mad about Michael man is none of his criminals ever say anything funny They're all stoic around it's an impression that people have of hardcore criminals But like I said most of the murderers I knew you know gang of mafiosas We're actually very funny witty We'd like to laugh and so when I would write about solitary confinement I had to write about the guys in there who made me laugh and Because they help them live that helps you that helps that helps us lie. Yeah, because there's just so much terror and I mean Flannery O'Connor I had this actually this quote in my cell on my wall the maximum amount of Seriousness admits the maximum amount of comedy and that's how I felt was my life and even to this day I'm a very serious person and but who doesn't I don't take myself seriously That's you know always laughing always undercutting myself and trying to see the wit and in and other people and laughter and things But when it comes to like dealing with my life, I'm very serious about it But I like to laugh too much to be too heavy and dark even now I want to like say something funny or tap dance or something So, you know, I read I Read your book while incarcerated for the first time I read it with you know with Fascination because suddenly this person who I'd been corresponding with Was revealed to me in a completely different way and I felt really differently about those letters. I was getting from you Then I found myself transported out of a minimum security setting and into a far worse You know prison and into conditions of confinement that were a lot worse still nothing close to solitary confinement But much much worse You know a place where even more pressure was brought to bear on me I sort of I often say to folks the last two months of incarceration were way harder Yeah, that was the worst 11 for me the worst and I remember feeling incredibly incredibly desperate during those weeks and Ultimately picking up a pen and being like there's literally one person on the outside who is going to understand what I'm talking about And yeah, and I wrote to you and I was grateful and then that was really close to my update and Not so long after I came home. We had the opportunity to meet in person, which was you know amazing for me Personally, I was just like thank you man, and you were like so when are you gonna write about it? Cuz remember in the letters I would write you I would say every night Write something that you saw funny during the day I mean going to my flannery old Conner thing write something funny You heard or saw and then write, you know, just know something serious or somebody tragic you saw I wanted you to be like collecting little stuff because that's what was helpful to me was to actually be Writing down things that I had heard and seen and yeah, I was in there And even at that point, you know, even though it was just so exciting to sort of be together, you know in the flesh I was still like Joe. I'm not a writer like you know get off my back on some level like I'm not a writer That's that's you that's not me You know, you were not the only person who encouraged me to write But I just sort of feel like you you just led by this incredible example in terms of your refusal to consider your experience in the most In a way that was completely grounded in received wisdom of you know, you have to write a redemption story this way You have to write about crime or punishment in this way. I just felt Like you had big shoes that I needed to step into so I was grateful for that and ultimately, you know You're nagging paid off My nagging did pay off. You know, I my feeling is you know I came out of prison somebody said how'd you change your life and 19 years ago? I was saying I owned my story and I described it like I described it to you I wrote the narrative down I recognized patterns habits of thinking and I was able to learn about myself see all the connections. I thought I started Covering money at a certain age it turned out once I wrote it down. Oh, I was involved with coveting money earlier Oh, I thought I didn't experience much racism as a kid. Oh my god I experienced it like and I could like I was learning all these things And so part of my encouragement to you also was for me writing Writing wasn't just I want to get out of prison and stop robbing banks It was I want to get out of prison and I want to reconcile myself with myself And I want to live a peaceful life in my relationship with people That was like that was my ambition Not just don't rob banks anymore And I feel like when you write these stories when you really go there and you dig deep and you see this stuff That is transformational personally not just how can you own your story? So you can move forward and speak to groups of people what how can you heal yourself? How can you heal your relationship with people? That's what I was kind of always promoting with anybody who I mentor And that's why I ended becoming friends with everyone I met I'm like I'm part of these mentor programs where they're like, hey, can you just read this and give them comments? And Shonda will tell you someone that I've worked with here I'm like I want to talk on the phone with you how you're doing what's going on What's in your life like the writing is informed by your life? What's happening? What are you experiencing that kind of thing? Because I think writing is that powerful if you have to own your narrative, right? I mean one of the things that I'm Sort of in all of you know Obviously, I am not the only person that you've encouraged to write about their own about their life more broadly But the only you know person who has experienced incarceration the only person who has gone through that incredibly Whoa transformative experience And so I just wondered if you would elaborate a little bit more about why I mean you are very generous with your time and you know with your big heart And with your big mind to a lot of people and why is it so important for people like us to write our lives? Ah, that's a big question. That's a giant question. Well, you know, I'm the son of a preacher anyway So I'm the son of a pastor or a minister and I always thought I was going to be in the ministry So I was raised like my dad. I like I actually enjoy My help I like I like to help. It's it's just like in my DNA I and it feels selfish like I like to help people because I like the hit I get, you know, somebody pops me. Oh, I like that But more importantly when I was in prison, I was writing my story One of the things I recognized was that as a man in the world I had moved and function in a hypermail way And I was shutting down everything. I mean part of being the kind of prisoner I was I really turned everybody into abstractions like people were not flesh and blood to me They were chess pieces. Where can I put you? You belong here come over here Come over here and literally the bank robberies can be understood as me doing the same thing Bank manager come with me. You're taking a minute of all you come over here. You need your key Let's do that like moving people around It was that sort of people only mattered to me in the abstract And when I started changing my life, it was that reconciliation with people I wanted and what I recognized was Every time I had been involved in relationships with women one of my greatest regrets More so than even the bank robberies Because I was the part of the bank robberies that is still the big part of my regret was the terror in my relation with the Teller not that oh my god chase got fucked out of you know, $4,000 $12,000. It's the it's the person thing It's the image of the terror on the face that is a big regret But also the relationships I had and what I wanted when I came out was to Listen differently and learn From voices that I had never listened to before and it was basically female voices And so I started and I knew that I would know that my change was real when I started hanging out with women who were smarter than me and And um saying things once upon a time that I would have been offended by and then now I was like Oh my god, teach me. Teach me. Teach me. I would call friends. Now bursting was here a couple weeks ago Now bursting's an old friend of mine. I met her. Um, she wrote a book called burning down the house I don't know if any of you were here Now bursting has like a mind like a It's just the horsepower and bandwidth is intense And so we would get and I would come out and when I came out of prison I would call her sometimes saying Hey, so this somebody said this and they said that and I think I I think there's like misogyny in there Can you help me figure that out and like she would like I was really curious I wanted to learn how could I be I how can I learn from people who know about stuff? I don't know anything about or a lot smarter than me and um part of the thing about encouraging other narratives Now it doesn't matter male or female I just want other voices to inform me at this stage in my life about something I don't know anything about and in your narrative is your Something about you that I want to know about I want to know about your ambition I want to know about your desires. I want to know about your resentments I want to know about I want to I want I want to see all that I want to know and That's part of the reason I encourage people give me what you got and dig deeper And I challenge people to to go as deep as possible to get that stuff out. It's a lot of work You know people will tell you who I've worked with I'm like Pull out pull out more right It's a lot of work in the setting of prison Also, especially I think because prison and the experience of incarceration The way that those Buildings that you know, literally the everything about a prison or a jail the way it's built the way that the experience is structured Is designed to make the people inside both the people who live there and the people who work there Locked down. I think locked down emotionally locked down intellectually In other words, there's nothing about the experience of prison or jail as designed that is intended to open you up Right granted, but did you said you wrote all these letters and stuff? How did where'd you how'd you carve out that time? To write to to actually do that to to get on the page and write letters and that I was just so grateful that anybody on the outside was writing me that they remembered me that they valued me enough to Make time in their day to to write to me I felt that way about your letters like some total stranger is actually making enough time in his busy day to like Ask me what the hell is going on with me. So I was very grateful for that um, I think that Doing the work that you're describing of that kind of writing which is hard to do Is in some ways, maybe even harder to do in a prison or a jail though, of course, there is the time Not the time all day long. So um I wrote my book because I hoped that uh People would come away from it with a different idea about people in prison For the very reason you describe when you talk about the entirety of yourself as a human being on some level or other people Suddenly they are not simply defined as a bank robber a criminal or their id number. Yes your id number So, um, you recently came out to visit me not in brooklyn But in columbus, ohio Because no, yeah, because uh, i'm out there now spending my time in two medium security facilities A men's prison and a women's prison And i'm teaching writing classes and what we're doing in those classes Is reading the writing of people like us who have Been incarcerated or in in some broader senses sometimes touched by the criminal justice system And also we're reading the writing of people who've worked in the system people have worked as co's people have worked as prison librarians Some really interesting narratives there doing time who are doing time too. So um The guys i started my guys class first and uh, the first book i assigned for them to read was your book and you were Kind enough to come out and visit with them and visit with me. That was a great And it was tremendous and uh I wanted to tell you that the week after your visit i went to class, you know, it's early on monday morning And i said well, what y'all think since you got to you got a shot at the author, right? You got you got to inquire or interrogate the author about and his intentions in writing the book The way he chose to do it to write a comprehensive story about his whole life Not just a narrow story about your incarceration and they said It's pretty crazy to reconcile that guy with the person who stabbed his father in his in the neck the person who You know did this did that and some of your uh, the things you relate about you and incarceration in there where they were particularly interested in reconciling Thank you for coming to the class in the first place And you know just what did you think about the guys and their questions for you? that's funny i've always Everyone has always had a problem like reconciling Reconciling the only guys who didn't ever have a problem reconciling what they saw with with my like my criminal pedigree Were like the guys who were really really High-ranking Mafioso because what they knew is that kid was 16. He stabbed his dad Like everybody gets everybody in this prison got beat up by their dad And very few people actually attacked the guy who's attacking them They grow up and they take it take it out in the world and that showed a level of like this guy's ferocious You know there's there's they recognize that part of me But in terms of going going back to the prison the I was We remember we even stopped at one point So so piper I was in prison. I get out piper goes to prison. We write She gets out we meet that's cool But then we were like going into this prison together And now we're hearing the sounds the doors closing the keys the smells the the paint chipping everywhere the The the buzzers the the intercom everything it has a and it has a prison smell It has a sensory experience, which is incredibly enveloping and to walk down the corridor with with you was like it was uh, it was um It was powerful. It was it was again the only word I could use that kind of humbling that it all comes to this And now we're going to go talk to guys about what we have done right our story. They can do it too So when I go in there, I see guys who are medium security So already I know That the advantage I have going to places like this is I say bank robber And people like boat they stopped they want to listen. They're going to give me all their attention in the world That in the prison in the in the prison milieu Bank robber is like like out here in a weird way bank robber is like a kind of a sexy crime Like the guys who do that like if I come in there and I'm like hi You know my crime was that I flayed people and I wore their chest like a vest people would be like We don't want to talk to you man. That's kind of gross and miss us with that John Wayne Gacy stuff Right, they don't want to I'm about that guy But I come in there and all through Hollywood history every hollywood hunk has played a bank robber from gay park gable paul newman redford Clooney like everybody has played a bank robber Al Pacino and so it's a sexy crime So when in prison as well like I've gone into many prison groups with men as many as this and they see me come up here Middle-aged man and and I'm just here whatever and they're like Then they say yeah, I'd like to introduce the bank robber boom all the eyes on me everyone's quiet It has that kind of thing in there that was odd Is that the guys in prison who are bank robbers are just like basically a bunch of low-level dope fiends but But it's you know, this thing is projected on them and they they we run with it So I know I have I know I have the narrative that's going to be there and say by the way And they've read my book But by the way, I'm an ex bank robber and so let's talk about that at 30 banks And that immediately gets their attention as well But the violence the most important thing is They recognize that in front of them my narrative I am a person who like them. I have a lot of rage in me I've had I had a rage I had the requisite rage to do immense amount of harm on guys like them because I was a higher level maximum maximum security prison and they're all medium level guys So going in there already I have that so I do the opposite which is like let's just talk Let's be friendly remember the bidda bidda What I had going for me this time too is that you're in there and these guys love piper It was really a kind of a beautiful thing to see they were already playing with her They were like a lot joking with her at one point I don't I hope you don't want me sharing this one thing because it cracked me up So was one guy he's really sharp. I don't remember remember his name But he says like when you were in prison talking to piper He was like he was asking a question and he gets the point like like when you were in prison for two weeks And he made fun of her prison sentence because Prison one of the like ways you trump other prisoners is like how much time are you doing in fact? I'm doing five years. Oh, yeah, you're doing whinoa time They say like like you're like spending a weekend in prison kind of thing Right in a drunk tank because they're doing 15 years or 20 years So there's that like that that kind of positioning apostrophe and they were doing it with her It was like and we were laughing and and playing around so that kind of camaraderie that you got instantly with them and that Respect was um was was very good. The other thing I liked is they asked great questions All over the place like specific parts of the book. What was your choice here? Why did you do that? um And they asked a little bit about some of the the more glamour stuff, but it was a good group but I was so happy that they were engaged and um legitimately want to do that They want to now you explain to me again. How did you choose them? How did those guys get to be in that room? The guys there's a dozen guys they all have Fairly serious felonies ranging from murder and rape to assault or armed robbery Doing again a range of time from life To relatively short whinoa time as you put it I don't think two years of whinoa time personally two years of time two years is two years Yeah, yeah, yeah They all had to write an essay to get into the class and they simply wrote an essay about an unusual morning in their life And it was completely up to them what they thought was unusual Some of them chose to write about something related to their offense the reason they're there locked up Some of them chose to write about their childhood. They chose to write about you know a fascinating range Some of them wrote with just you know incredibly entertaining grasp of story You know, there's a couple guys in there who get narrative structure like on a possibly a cellular level And some of them wrote with insight and some of them just wrote with a lot of emotional honesty like all of them displayed different strengths in the essays that they wrote to get into the class And they are Amazing, you know, I go in there and we've been up there for like seven weeks And and you dropped in there right sort of in the middle of there that time Um, and yeah, they are seven weeks already We're all yeah well last week we were at seven weeks And so and we and we're gonna have a year with them and that's amazing because they have stories to tell That will make you cry that will make you howl with laughter all of those things And they are all wrestling with some form of Violence and those breaks in their lives That you describe so incredibly well in your own book And that's particularly interesting for me because you're right There is a lot going on in that class and in the things they choose to write about That have to do with masculinity in a way that is for me personally very novel and interesting And in a way that I think is completely worthwhile for them to To work on and think about regardless of whether they choose to become writers Or you know as an avocation Or not Well, the things I liked about that group is Often, you know, you got to choose these guys and they want to they're they want to be there They wrote something to get in and then you chose you you pick the ones that you thought would work best Um oftentimes when I've conducted writing groups in seminars in the the prison I don't like they people some of them have to be there as part of the programming And so what I would get in there is um uh Some some antagonisms So that they're not there necessarily to Write some of them are there and they're still kind of the stuff from the prison is coming into the room And you see you can feel there's tensions and and people are trying to like You know develop a pecking order in the class And that's always a challenge to to try and work around that What I loved about your group is I felt like there was a tiny tiny bit of it, but it's totally manageable and Um, in fact, everyone still wanted to work and they're going to be working through that And there seemed like there was a something of a camaraderie in there already Well the interesting thing about this Place where the class is taking place the reason that you know, I had to go all the way to Ohio to run these classes is because uh, this med and medium security Is a little bit different than some other prisons and I sort of felt like a lot different a lot different that it was not like going into a desert because I think a lot of times You go in I visited a lot of prisons and jails in the course of my my life And sometimes you really feel what incredibly Desperate parched places they are for the people who are struggling to survive inside of them But this prison though, it is a shitty, you know Minutely medium security state prison in terms of its physical plant And it is filled with all of the men that we typically incarcerate in places like medium security prisons Meaning disproportionately people of color, you know disproportionately men from poor communities All those things are definitely true But I sort of felt like it was a place that was fertile ground for the work that you're describing to take place Because they do things a little bit differently there You had the opportunity to meet the warden who is very young who was trained as a social worker He just never met a warden like this one. This warden strikes me as the kind of warden He goes up and shows up at all the warden meetings in the state and like gets bullied probably by all the other wardens He's such a nice like I mean he has his issues. I mean he's a warden but But and you know like there's some blind spots that warden all wardens have but I mean he gets something Very well, which is the the outside and the inside we need to make it more porous So that the outside the inside is implicated in the success of the guy's inside And so he does these things like But bring your cars in and these guys will fix it bring your animals in for for daycare animal daycare And they'll walk the the inmates will walk or walk them around the guards and the guards bring that do that too They bring their animals in they bring their cars in for repair. So the guards are like What did he say he said to me if If a guy is going to be walking your dog every day and feeding your dog You're going to think differently about putting your boot on the back of his neck I think something like that, right? It's like there were there were really thoughtful ways the plays or whatever It was as close to norway. I've been in the norway prisons I actually went and spoke last year in the norway prison that was mentioned in that article and norway Was freakish like freakish I went to give us to give a talk to prisoners And in like a group like this and there was a guard there and a guard there and a guard there And they were looking at me naughty They were as engaged as the prisoners were and they were like they were buddies They were like it was and and they were nice and they came up to me afterwards and thanked me as much as the other people Like, you know, I'm going through this and I'm going through that. I felt like There was it was um, there was that humanness It was like the guards were the guards, but in as little With as little power dynamics as possible. It was it was really startling like wow We like no, we'd have to really wind things back to get to a place where Norway is in the relationship between the you know, the confine the people confine them and the people are confined It's sort of an interesting You know, we get so accustomed to sort of operating in the american context of thinking about crime and punishment That when you do Go to a place like norway, which you know is always held up as the most progressive approach to these questions of crime and punishment But also places like germany or portugal or you know, there are lots of places that are doing things differently Um, it's a little bit of a wake-up call I wanted to talk a little bit about the podcast the allure of crime Which is going to launch in about two weeks in april and uh and hear about like what your cut on that is Because your perspective is unique, obviously Yeah, um, but also broad because you have been spending a lot of time in norway With, you know, norwegian, you know clinicians and writers and also visiting those prisons. So Yeah, so, you know, my my whole thing when I wrote the book I wrote I wrote the book It starts from before I was born my parents meeting and then it ends my first day out of prison age 35 and almost 36 And the reason I wrote it Intentionally that you know, we make all the choices. What part yours was the you know, the incarceration very narrow narrow Mine was 35 years. They're almost 36 years. And the reason I did that is I really wanted to show people Look at my life as a text to understand people in prison That we are not just the crime spree. In fact the crimes my crime spree in prison only take three chapters in my book There's seven or eight chapters that are have nothing to do with that Um, and so I mean there's one chapter. It's my first day out that that first day that I got out but My my whole approach to trying to be moving the world and talking about crime now isn't necessarily, you know policy I didn't go back to school to get a degree and and in the academy to talk about this and write books like that Because there's people who do it brilliantly like I was you know, I was a soros fellow with michelle alexander And professor alexander. That's her thing. She does it brilliantly. I'm not that guy but I do feel like um The stories that I want to tell and the the approach I want to have on crime is Let's humanize that population to people out here Do what they told me to do joe tell them we're funny tell them we laugh and um I forgot to tell a story. I do want to tell the story right now the first I was in prison two days And I went to chow hall And this big, you know chow house fool and it's segregated. You know whites there blacks there mexicans here and then a couple tables for other and Oh the other and so I always wonder what is the other like I think they might be hawaiian some of them like whatever like The native americans like the southeast asian. You're like, oh man Like this is not isolating and lonely enough. Yeah, so so i'm there. I'm a second day maximum security penitentiary alampak And um, this big guy gets up big zZ top beard Muscles tattoos, you know, just kind of classic Um biker kind of thing But like giant guy and he puts both his hands in his armpits and he goes quack quack. I'm a duck I can't call games worth a fuck quack quack. I'm a duck and he does it three times loud And it turns I look at the guy next to me. I said, what what what is that because he sits down and everyone's like Yeah, all right, whatever And i'm thinking that is the craziest thing what happens is you bet quack quacks during football See or any basketball any sport season and instead of you paying me like my friend joe here We we had a game. He said, what do you want to bet? I would say let's bet three quack quacks in the chow hall So instead of instead of money I want to humiliate you by making you go there and say you can't call games worth a fuck that you're a loser gambler So that was like the kind of humor like just pops up all over the place in prison Anyway, the point is that the humanizing thing I wanted i'm approach my approach is how can we humanize let everyone know that people on side are A lot like people in here and the pressures on their poise are Resemble a lot of the pressures on your poise except they didn't have the skills to manage that pressure and they screwed it out in here And they ended up becoming offenders So my podcast is called the allure of crime. It's a tacit tacit understanding that Six seven out of the most popular tv shows every week are crime shows From csinus ncis shows. I don't watch law and order Because some of them are which I love I have friends who love law and order boy, you know, so Because I hear it's a great show But and and or even you know reality shows i'm on there's an episode of me on I almost got away with it And it's a very popular show and they locked up abroad all that stuff Which I was watching on jet blue last night on the way here So people love crime. They love crime tv shows. They love crime movies every year Hollywood Churns out one or two heist movies and now they got like eisenberg and and aziz on zari being by everybody's a bank robber now So the bank robbery films or heist films are a big thing. It's in the it's in the consciousness So what I want to do is I want to with my my podcast I'm starting it off and I talk a little bit about something that's going on in my life Talk about something that is very human about us. For example Talked about how I told my daughter that I robbed banks You know, I finally did when she was seven years old it started coming up And she was curious about she'd heard me talk a lot about things and did you ever go to prison? She asked and I had to eventually talk about that. So I talk about how My life my life choices things that happened in there things that happened since and then the second half is me talking with Friends of mine about their favorite heist film or a heist film and I had piper and I we talked about Set it off. I am edgar right a friend of mine as a director did shot of the dead and You know scott pilgrim that kind of thing. He's he's he's making a bank heist movie this year In which I will play a bank guard. I'm going to actually act in it as a bank guard who gets shot Had a pivotal point in the movie. So I'm going to have a cameo for helping him on the script And but you know friends of mine have written for ray donovan People have acted in crime stuff people have written for homeland and we're going to be talking about Hollywood stories and what our fascination with crime So it's like that is me bringing folks in who Already have a following who love to to hear these people talk about Movies and tv shows. I'll be talking about the culture And crime in the culture as well as talking about people. I know and things I've done and and and my life is an X felon and moving in the world. Yeah, so these questions of crime and punishment. You're right are completely central and yet You know, most of the 2.4 million people who are actually in that moment of confinement are completely out of sight Out of mind. And so I think it's really interesting sort of the The cut you're taking out at the approach that you're bringing to the you know, I was on when I was a source fellow I was on a panel and this is 2003 or 2005 And everyone was talking about the policies around this and so that and I felt like, you know What you need to do is you need to make entertainment That is about crime that lets people feel like they can see the humanists the humanity and people behind Bars I was making this argument and I looked at I felt like everyone looked at me like man. You're a deletante Why are you talking about this stuff? That's not how you're going to change it. It's going to be hard hitting journalism It's going to be you know a lot of papers and this and this that and I felt like that is part of it It's already all there. We need some some sort of sort of catalyst And it turns out orange is the new black is that kind of thing because the the the netflix show in particular And where I realized it was All these people who all listen talk about it who never did crime will all say oh, it's fascinating about it It's I want you know fish out of water story. They're attracted to the fact that they would never be there They don't know how they would be there But they know that if they were there they'd be the fish out of water Like your character like the character of Piper in orange is the new black and it implicates them They get there and now they're they want to talk they want to be Be engaged more there. It's altered the imagination and a lot of people About folks behind bars. They're present in this story. They see how they're part of the story I think that that was important to me in terms of how I chose to tell it that narrow You know focus on a 13 month thing as opposed to You know the story of you know, middle-class white women, which is very familiar in the popular culture I think that that's one of the things that I so respect about the way you chose to tell your book the story in your book Because you insist you really bring the reader through the life of a young boy who is struggling with You know the things he's learning about being a good person in a very Religious context and the things he's learning about being a quote-unquote bad person in terms of You know any number of things including violence and but not limited to that so I thank you for that All right. I think we want to open up to Questions I want to remind everybody of a couple things though before we open up the florida questions And that is that this Is part of a series and so we're so grateful to the Sackler center for feminist art For launching this series some time ago Focusing on mass incarceration and particularly its impact on women on children and on people of color And grateful we are to that and to the brooklyn museum for providing such an incredible home for these dialogues It's a beautiful place a beautiful space This is the eighth Actually in the series and so anyone who is interested can go and check out all of the preceding Dialogues and presentations as part of this series and they are fascinating I was here last march with three other women who had you know been through incarceration and three women who started really remarkable projects programs And talked about leadership and incarceration and they were wonderful and all of the all of the programs have been great So you can check out those videos and know that this is an ongoing series So in the fall in september We will be back here at the brooklyn museum as part of you know the Sackler center for feminist art Talking about mass incarceration further and I believe the first of those fall events will be on september 13th So look forward to that Thank you so much joe. Thank you for sharing your story in the first place Wow Great There are two microphones stage right and stage left So if you have a question just come on down for me for joe serious or silly because joe and I are both Serious and both very serious and silly. All right. Hi there Hi Thank you both for being here um, I guess this is Comment and a question One of the things that I really love about both of your work In contrast to something like serial the Super famous podcast that everyone was obsessed with is that you guys seem to really Move away from this fetishizing of innocence Right, both of you of innocence. Yeah, right both of you um Don't deny having be misbehaved or you know, you don't deny doing what landed you in prison And and yet still and I think like in your show piper you you know You show women who are guilty who have done things that are Reprehensible and yet they're still Human and they still deserve right our sympathy and our empathy and our care And I wonder like how you guys think that we can Contribute to further undermining that kind of obsession with innocence that you know Did Adnan Said like deserve to be in prison for 25 years? Based on whether or not he committed this crime or the bigger What I think more important question of like does anyone deserve to be in prison for 25 years or Do we deserve to treat members of our? Extended community like this right aren't there other ways that we can Better their lives and so like how do we chip away at this? Obsession with innocence as the thing that determines whether or not you deserve to Rot in prison or you know be a Member of our society. Yeah, that's very good. Yeah I mean, I really think that what you're talking about is spot-on and hopefully is the sign of an evolving conversation Like a conversation that is progressing So I think you know when we think about death penalty reform for example We know that the most effective argument about ending the death penalty has been The the question of innocence and we know that many innocent people have been exonerated from death row And that is one effective way to talk about it But there is this supposition that people who are not innocent don't deserve empathy and don't deserve A full consideration of their humanity and their possibility for reconciliation and redemption and so Yeah, I mean, I think that interestingly the sort of the counter to that Is that the reason I believe people respond to You know the story that's told in my book The story that's told in your book is that people all have their own Failings their own moral failings their own bad mistakes Regardless of whether they're crimes or not that they can reflect on and that those are big touchpoints So people really love a survival story Americans love a comeback kid And so that's a really interesting those are interesting sort of cross currents like cultural cross currents I hope that what you're describing is an evolution away from simply saying innocent people are You know deserve empathy and the criminal justice system makes mistakes, which is clear To saying human beings deserve empathy and everyone makes mistakes and how can we best Move towards a place of healing where people can realize their full potential as human beings I think it's a great question. But I think the way I look at it is it starts with metaphors and Willie's a friend of mine as you know, I'm all about metaphors metaphors and how I change my life I change my metaphors one thing you'll never hear me say is the word evil I don't like evil Because evil implies some supernatural force at work that takes away volition and our choices But also another word for evil. It means the opposite is good And once we people talk about good and evil a lot you have you're gonna The punitive thing is going to come up because you want to get real punitive on the evil What you're talking about is a problem with punitive nature Our punitive Instinct you wanted to have people care about people who have offended then you can't be so fucking goddamn Punitive every time somebody does something we're long or we got it like that's what has to change But the language has to change my in my home I never used the word evil not once and in raising my daughter from the very beginning anytime she watched the show It didn't matter if it was nihokailan or kayu or whatever I knew one day I was going to have to tell her that I transgressed And that the community has embraced me and I made moves toward it And I've been made whole by my relationship with the people who love me. That was a narrative I was always going to tell her so I spotted it in every little tv show I would highlight that when some little character would mess up and then be ostracized I would say watch what they do they bring them back and I would tell her they're not bad And they're definitely not evil. That's not even my lexicon But they're not bad But they have they have offended somebody they've done some offense But they're going to look at them get reconciled from the very beginning. I've been teaching her you don't punish them You try and move towards them. You try and you know have compact like that's the thing That is not taught a lot In fact, you walk anywhere listen anybody on the phone. You're going to be hearing people complaining. He made me do this He made me do that. He made me so mad. She made me this should make make make Everyone's being made and being made to be angry at somebody and then made to feel insecure and lash out and get punitive in personal relationships So of course it's going to mirror the way society looks at people who Do things there and make them upset about it. It's a punitive issue It's a way we think about Being punitive and I think a lot of the more moral morality stories We have really kind of like encourage some sort of punitive thing I try to stay away from that sort of punitive stuff as much as possible Which is why in these stories we try to show yes, they did something wrong and you you put them away But we're not going to talk about the fact that you put them away We're going to talk about look at the person look at their relationships with their family Look at their relationship to themselves their regret and all that kind of stuff And that's one of the reasons that show is so beautiful It shows you their story how they got there and it shows you the relationship the complicated relationship to their own narrative As well as a complicated relationship to the the other relationships they have does that answer your question? Yeah, thank you. All right. Thank you All right Hi, so i'm assuming that um any mail that comes into or leaves a prison gets read And um if that again, i'm sorry that that any mail that comes into or leaves a prison gets read and in terms of surveilled Yeah, okay exactly and and and if that's true Did that present any concerns and or limitations on what you wrote to each other, huh? Um, I think the truth is you know, hopefully in most facilities there's a volume of mail Which really prevents them from Really digging in on it. Uh, what they're usually looking for when they open, you're right Every single piece of mail is at least opened whether it's read or not is an open question So what they're looking for first and foremost is contraband So for example, I got uh, somebody started sending me the believer In prison. Um, and at some point they sent a version which had a cd attached to it So I got a piece of official mail saying somebody sent you contraband Yeah, little did we know it was a copy of the believer somebody sent me a chisel in my cake. Yeah, um I doubt that all prison gets mail gets carefully read unless they're keeping an eye on that prisoner You know if if prison administration is interested in a prisoner for some reason Then for sure they might read your mail, but they're not reading every single person's mail And plus, you know the the the texture of my language Was not something that I think some guards are going to be like, oh, let me get into this guy talking about Emancipation and you know the texture of your soul and all that I was hoping I could read some like, you know sex letters or this isn't it? Like, you know, so they're not going to be going through all that stuff looking for nudie judies Yeah, the landscape of your soul. He's gonna be like, yeah, no forget that So you didn't think about it. So you didn't think about it too much. Great. Thank you. Thank you Hi, thank you so much for being here. My name is Julie. I have a two-part question. They're not really related So feel free to answer one or both Um, one is more of a human question and one is more of a factual question Um, so Joe, you spoke very beautifully about um reconciling Reconciling your childhood and being filled with rage and I was wondering and maybe that's true for you as well Piper, what do you do? I was like, nope What sorts of things do you do to stay human and to reconcile that rage and whether it be meditation or spirituality? What sort of skills can you offer? And then the other the factual question you spoke about the norwegian prison system What sorts of things do you notice in their country that we're not doing that? You think would be best to bring to the reform movement. Yeah, okay Yeah, I gotta I gotta re-emphasize like the guys in my class were like, wow, that dude is really different Yeah, I'm a little different. So, um, the rage thing was was in my house Um, we don't say the word make as well. Nobody makes and you can't say you make me mad. You can't say you make me happy We don't say make in prison. I realized that a lot of the problem I have with my rage Was when when I started reviewing my life carefully I could see how I justified every violent act in my life because that person That person basically, you know, my hands were tied They did that and it was the only option available to me. I had to do it They actually were begging for me to do it because of the way they had in my head They made me do hurt them victimize them Um, for the most part interpersonal relationships are, you know, when I committed violence other than the bank robberies Um, so it was important for me to try to come up with a new way of Of of a new metaphor a new way of saying what's the dynamic here and how could I change the language make implies I had no volition you You compelled me to do it. I had to do it and you lose any sense of responsibility I wanted to start taking responsibility so that the metaphor I came up with um You did something And you clearly did something you called me whatever you called me, but All you did was create the occasion For me to choose to either be mad about it or not care about it And when I acted I chose to get angry about the thing that you had created the occasion for But that had nothing to do with you Anything I choose to do anything I do was my call and excuse me That changed my life radically Because now I'm in prison and I want to stab the guy in the sound next to me who's just banging on his His he's like listening in his head to some hip hop and he's banging on his table And I feel in the past that noise is intruding in my airspace That means I have to go over there and I have to put him in check with a knife and say you do that again That you know, we I'm going to have to attack you Um, I now saw that all he's doing is creating the occasion for me to want to pick up my knife To go over there and and scare him But I didn't have to and I now I put the onus was on me to become very creative about how I dealt with this thing in me that would want to be punitive and go and show power and all that stuff Writing was the thing John Paul Sartre said the most liberating moment in his life was the time he killed somebody on the page and I had read a lot of of of Interviews of Dean Coons because I read a lot of Dean Coons in prison And He said that the thing that kept him saying was that he got to create all these horrible monsters that all this terror to people And I felt like good. I'm gonna put I'm gonna put my rage on the page. I'm gonna make bad stuff happen So that was that was it meditation too and yoga, um, which I don't do anymore, but I did You know, right out of prison Uh, norway norway is a lot like this prison here Norway the prison that she's working in in that the thought is These are us And they're coming out. Mm-hmm. And we don't want them to bring some The the toxic stuff that is in there We don't want them to bring it out. And so that's why when I walked in there What I mostly saw was these discreet people who had toxicity because we do we were just we're so troubled And but I did not feel like when I walk in a prison here in this country I feel it in the air I mean, I I remember walking out of a chow hole once and I thought somebody's gonna stab me It's in the air It's crackling and I walk a couple steps I've been down to tie my shoe and I'm looking around and I know somebody's gonna happen Sure enough a guy gets stabbed a little bit in front of me. These two guys made a move on him You could feel it every the toxicity is in the air toxicity is in the air Um in in in uh, Norway smaller population smaller population prison Because they're trying not to Create more surface space for more toxicity to occur And the more that you limit the people who are in there you limit that then the opportunity for that So that was a big thing that they limit that they don't there's not a punitive and the drug thing They look at the drug thing. We're not going to send you prison just because you use drugs No, that's you're going to go over here. You're going to get some treatment and that stuff We would lose 50 60 of our population right now if we did that and our population would shrink the surface and contact space for a lot of Crazy stuff to happen that then bleeds out through the guards and bleeds out through the other inmates who are there and comes in our community And and and has an effect on that would shrink If we just let people out and let them go and deal with what just forget Their um rehab just make drugs legal and we we you know, we don't have the problem we have Um, we don't have the population problem But norway was big because of the guards to their approach the guards are not there with guns and guard towers Trying to shoot people when they see them getting a fight very Um, yeah, it was really strange Guys talk and they argued and there was no fighting And that was it They got it off the chest and the guards sat there and didn't say nothing Okay, that's it. It was like a big family. It was crazy. It was really crazy Yeah, I'm baffled by how people get to like get that and we have this, you know But the prison where she was that had that that there were so many programs like that they had a room Filled with parakeets. Was it parakeets parakeets and other birds and you get to have a bird in your cell If you want to earn the right. Yeah, you earn the right to take care of a bird. Yeah, they are they have they have what? Oh You bring your animals in for um for um Animals who have been yeah who have been uh, like they need someone to do a rescue Yeah, so animal rescue. So they got rabbits and squirrels and all sorts of things in there. I read Like that's amazing in this one prison. I walked out of there thinking this is the model This is starting to work toward if you're going to incarcerate people You want the community to see that these guys are not only responsible for healing themselves They're responsible for healing a lot of the things in the community in various ways healing, you know in various ways And are and are um and have value more importantly have value They could be in there one day. They can be in there for 20 years 20 years. They have value We need to like Do more of that and the humanness We all and when you connect with somebody have sympathy They have value you give them what you assign to them value. You know, does that answer your question? Yeah Yeah, I'd be curious piper. What do you think is um the most important movement? Things to bring over to the reform movement prison reform um, I think I echo joe's point that uh, it's incredibly important to get people out of confinement who don't really belong there in terms of the seriousness of their offenses and their propensity for violence because Not only does like that confinement um Not really contribute much to public safety But it does, you know make prisons a very you know the incredible overcrowding of prisons and jails makes them more violent Right, that that makes them more violent. It creates that's interesting that that analogy of providing surface area for things to happen Yeah, I always I always use an example if you have this much surface only so much things can hit it When you make this much more surface more things can do it and you create a more of a population That's more traumas inside there that can occur It's all that yoga No, that's kind of embarrassing. Anyway, the point is that Contact surface. Yeah, like that's I think of that. That's what we do We've created more place for traumas to hit people And and then that comes out and then you know coming back to that question of trauma, which you find It's sort of acknowledged with female prisoners that you find incredible histories of trauma victimization Sexual abuse physical abuse in their histories But what is totally apparent to me from my time spent in this medium security prison is that when you crack These men's lives open the same stories exist Just like a story and so, you know Recognition that the incredibly traumatizing experience of being incarcerated Raises all kinds of problems for a group of people who are who who, you know For whom that just triggers all kinds of shit pardon my french So that's an inherent problem with the the construct of a prisoner of jail. Okay. Cool. Good question. Thank you over here, sir Hi so I did some work Up at Sing Sing and as part of that we were shooting a documentary and There was a point at which myself and the crew were Intermingling with a pretty large group of prisoners without any kind of interference from the guards and What I sort of took away from it, you know, I talked to a bunch of different they were Surprisingly Grateful or you know that just just that we were there That we were talking with them They wanted to know what was happening on the outside any kind of news. They were just like really Grabbing on to but what I was sort of ashamed of about my reaction was that, you know, I was interacting with them You know, it's just, you know, you would anybody else and and and was able to engage in that conversation but then afterwards All I could think of was like I wonder what that guy did like, you know, and I Because we had some inside information there were some of them that I then found out what it was they did It was very difficult for me not to sort of judge them based on that and have some bias towards You know afterwards and I wonder if you ever, you know, you talked about the work you're doing now Are you ever do you ever find yourself judging the person by like Almost how could you not and you talked about like oh this guy, you know Flaid some people or whatever like is there a different sort of bias in a class where you're teaching and you're sort of like Oh, that guy's really bad, you know, and this guy I can kind of I think you get the idea Yeah, I think a good question Singsing of course is a maximum security prison so you can be fairly sure that most of the guys you interacted with had serious felonies and probably crimes of violence Um, I find myself reflecting, you know, we're sort of at the beginning of this process of this writing class With these in the men's facility in my women's class Most of the women are there for Relatively short sentences and for nonviolent offenses Which is so typical of the women and girls that we incarcerate in this country very few women Commit really really serious crimes of violence in the men's facility and in the men's class, you know The guys have done much more serious things and some of them have committed murder and some of them have committed rape and that is Something that is very interesting for me To try to reconcile and I think about it every single week Obviously when I'm not while I'm in class But as I leave class and I'm thinking about the work that the guys did How hard they worked the stories they told the insight they may have revealed the way they're thinking about their own lives Their own stories and all the ways that joe um talked about so beautifully But I am thinking a lot about my own reconciliation Especially for the guys who committed the most, you know, heinous or serious offenses And it's not easy, right? It's not easy, particularly when someone's done something really amazing in class Or I'm also aware of some of the things that these guys this particular group of guys are doing in the prison Of value, right and it's incredible. I can only say that the That reconciliation to me is everything like that is actually like that's where the action is That's what's fundamentally worthwhile to me as a human being to go in there and do the work with them It's I hope really clearly apparently worthwhile for them But I also think it's worthwhile for us as a community because of course There's a growing consensus that locking people up for things like You know drug addiction or even simple drug retailing is pretty pointless It doesn't get us closer to a community. You know a society that has less substance abuse certainly Um, but those crimes of violence that most concern us. We don't want to see those things. We want to see People and particularly guys not do that sh stuff Um, you can speak french. Yeah, and so Um some sense of like how can we actually bring an end to those cycles of violence because there are cycles of violence again You crack open people's lives and very few people just get up one day and commit some horrific act of violence Which is no precedent in their lives in terms of being exposed to be to violence or being the victim of violence so To me that reconciliation has like just an astonishing amount of value But it's really difficult like I would never suggest that it's the easy It's the easy stuff. It's the hard hard stuff for for me It's like when I was in prison and I started changing my life I started seeing prisoners differently because in my when I first went in I was prisoners were in a pecking order And there was you know who the prisoners you hate and you hoped bad things happen to them And when you heard that it did happen, you were grateful and happy And when I changed my life, I had to start having a different relationship to the men and their narratives And one of the guys I knew a killer He had got drunk and he beat a guy so badly In a bar the guy died, but that happened 25 years earlier Now this guy Was one of the most ethical men I knew like real roughly ethical like just everything was like joe I'm never gonna lie to you man So somebody just said this to me and and I told him this and your your name dropped out of my mouth And I had to tell you right away and he would find me to come and tell me like and he had like that resting grouch Grouch like uh, what's that? What's the sesame street character of the Oscar the grouch Oscar the grouch He had resting Oscar the grouch face. So he was all even when he was having And he was really an intense guy and he had been a killer But the killing took five minutes Five minutes of his life and for the rest of his life. He was considered that And everyone in the community didn't want him to come out because I have five minutes and 25 years later This is a guy who's leading all the AA Meetings and every guy's coming in coming out and how he's helping them get right and get straight and sending them back On the community how a healthy Reconnected with their family and he still had to stay there for 25 years even though it was only five minutes That's when I realized you know what everybody in this room If you tracked the worst five minutes of your life and you put them in a video We put it on the screen you would be ashamed and every in this room would like look at you like oh my god Like we all if you have you look if we are the sum of the worst five minutes of our lives We would all be harsh on ourselves We would be even harsher on ourselves and other people would if we actually condensed them because we already hate ourselves For a bunch of things that we've done that we know our regrets But no, we can't be we can't define people by that act even when Abner Louima was raped by Officer Volpe when that happened here in new york I wrote an op-ed When he everyone was talking everyone in my community who like oh we need graduations and sentencing And you know no mandatory minimums and like get like people were very sympathetic towards the person who had offended And they wanted to make sure that they got the right the right, you know calibrated sentencing for their crime When that happened they were all like lock them up forever You know life sentence and I had to actually I wrote an op-ed that was in the daily news, I believe and it's basically said I mean I got I got grief for this I said if that man did 25 years Do you know what 25 years 25 years is a long time and he did this for 15 minutes 15 minutes of his life and he's going to have to deal with it for 25 years And you're acting like 100 years of life sentence is nothing I know guys in there like my friend andre who was in there He did this murder which took five minutes of his life. He's been in there 25 years That's 25 years He shouldn't have been he should they should have let him out and he's never going to get out because People will come from the community and say we don't want them out. We don't want we don't want them out We don't want them out. So my perspective is Justin Volpe officer Justin Volpe did something heinous and horrible But I look at it as you did something heinous and horrible and in 25 years You're not going to be the young man who was full of rage who did that to that man when you're in prison for 25 years You're going he's going to be somebody else and already in my imagination I know who he's going to be and so I'm willing to give that when I'm in a group of people And I know that they have done this and this and this and that I'm like that's what you did there And I'm not going to assign that permanently to to who you are That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, I'm just the That makes a lot of sense the the other thing is do you ever feel almost like guilty that you're Enhancing their life experience because somehow you're obligated to the victim of whatever crime It was they committed to make that their lives are supposed to be somehow miserable because you know for like Okay, you're you're getting locked up. You're supposed to be miserable for 25 years And then you come in and you're doing a writing program. You're offering reconciliation Do you sort of does it ever occur to you that in other words like Oh, I'm making this person's life better and that is in some way a violation of their the victims rights I'm not I'm not saying that's the correct View to have I'm just saying it might it might occur to you. I get it But you're looking at somebody who like I told my wife. I don't care who kills me I don't care if anyone kills me and they do something really horrible to me Do not fight for the death penalty for that person. I don't want it for them. I don't care what they do to me So and I would be the victim and I don't I just know I'm not gonna So it's easy for me to understand as a victim if I was you know a victim of any crime I'm gonna have a different look at the person who does it I'm gonna try to understand that person's gonna have to go and do something in prison a long time Deal with it and everything that I went through and now that person's gonna have to struggle with And so from the gate I want to give that person as much compassion as possible Because that is a long road that they're gonna have to hoe and it's already going to be filled with all sorts of landmines and stuff that are akin to sadism sending somebody behind prison in some of those environments And with relish is akin to sadism in my imagination sometimes What do you think? I think about victimization a lot because I think that it is just so incredibly apparent every single time you look at Any of these serious offenses like you just Like I said, you don't people don't get up in the morning and go out and do something heinous Absent like a whole history. And so I'm much more interested in what will break cycles um, I think that I mean my personal opinion is that victims and the voices of Sort of a broader recognition of who is victimized in this country are largely absent actually from the proceedings Of the criminal justice system. That's true. You know, you go into a court proceeding and the victim is typically very Silenced other than several opportunities with the prosecutor to sort of advocate for what kind of sentencing they want But it's not like they have a great range of choices in terms of how The person who has harmed them is going to be held accountable. It's a very narrow range of choices um, and there's very little focus on restorative justice in this country And I would say that one of the fundamental issues with the way we approach punishment when it comes to prisons and jails Is that we take someone who has unquestionably done harm? They may have victimized one person individually They may have done harm more broadly to the community And we remove them from the you know, we put them in an adversarial Position where as a defendant in a court proceeding, all you're working to do is to minimize the penalty that you face Right. So you're suddenly forced into that mindset Right from the jump as opposed to really considering the harm you've caused And then once you're incarcerated The blunt truth I think is that most people most prisons and jails are in fact such incredibly heinous places Horrible places that all anyone is thinking about while they're incarcerated is their own survival So you are not generally reflecting on the harm you've caused On what has happened to your victim on whether they'll ever be made whole whether they'll ever feel safe again Because you are so removed from that person and you're now experiencing this incredible experience of trauma and you know You know this experience of survival and that's really all you're thinking about unless you're an incredibly Fortunate person and you find on your own steam Some kind of space to reflect on the harm you've caused and that's a big flaw In turn if we want to if we want to actually end those cycles of violence because Joe's right Almost everybody who's locked up is coming home someday, right? I'm going back to the streets. So great question though That's the heart of the matter Hi, this is a question for both of you But in the interest of full disclosure, I want to tell the audience this month I would a year ago this month. I was released from your correctional institution the same prison that Miss Sackler did all of her work at. Um, I served six years three months and 11 days So I I know I know the experience. Um, when I when I was released I was lucky enough actually to be assigned Joe Loy as a mentor editor through the op-ed project And my question focuses on what you and I worked on Joe, which is the Redeem Act Much of the current criminal justice reform effort focuses on Expungement or somehow removing One's record in the in the vein of making sure that a mistake doesn't follow someone or be held against someone for the rest of their lives How does that square with your advice to current offenders people in jail people who are leaving jail Who your advice to tell them to tell their stories to own their stories? As you said Joe Rather and then be told when they are released or further down their reentry to delete or hide those stories How does that those two things for me do not work together? Why I think okay my feeling is this The narrative That is going an ex con or somebody who's in reentry Is going to grapple with Is the story that they have in public when they go get a job or something like that But the one that I found that's more troubling That you can't get rid of by simply expunging it from google Is the narrative that people have about themselves And that narrative is the thing that always undercuts people and sends them back I don't have I've never met a guy who said hey, I had to go cop Because I kept trying to get a job and they wouldn't give me a job It works well as a narrative in the movies. I never met one person who did that They did it because they were addicted. They did it for other press, you know other Other things that they had not dealt with the internal conversation. They didn't have that And so my feeling is you can get you can wipe everybody's criminal history away From online so nobody can find out that the person looking for a job is an ex con And that person is still going to have a relationship with themselves and dancing in their imagination With their regrets and their griefs and all the stuff that drove them to get in prison in the first place Because most of the guys who went in to get in prison in the first place when they committed a crime They didn't have a job. It wasn't because they had a hard time getting a job Most of them that I that I knew especially in the maximum security prisons. So um, I look at it like own your narrative and Open your narrative and dance with your like get in there Figure it out let other people know hey It has some it has some value because if anything I know what I know about these stories including yours It has opens people's eyes It opens people's eyes Especially where there's there's access points in your story because when I wrote my story Interesting thing in the book tour where people come up and say oh, I totally relate it to your story Oh, but not the bank robberies because there's a lot of access points in my story about the death of a mother About Demento religiosity in the home about physical abuse sex abuse Um, just like a bunch of ways where people could hear my they could access my story So I feel when you tell your story, I'm we're not only telling you people tell your crime story Like in this class we're telling them tell your story get you understand that it has it can be used as a text Just like anything that Shakespeare is written just like anything that that's on on tv shows Like, you know, hopefully and hopefully you don't do it too cheesy like these reenactments and I almost got away with it Which are really bad reenactments of my crime story, but you know I think there's power in that Yeah, that's how I feel about it You can get rid of the all the google stories about you but you're we're all going to have to dance with what's in our Imaginations about ourselves. Yeah, I mean I think trying to void out parts of your You know history, which are really important even if they were traumatic and difficult and crappy Is probably actually impossible to do there's a big difference though between a private story and a public story and a story that you sort of understand and acknowledge And that resides in your life and one that you sort of put on your resume or you know put out there in some incredibly public way So those determinations have to be made based on Safety based on privilege based on, you know, a lot of factors Depending on what kind of path you're trying to seek After incarceration and the one thing that I always Every opportunity I get to talk to people who are incarcerated and especially to women or girls I talked to them about their Whatever story it is that preceded them being incarcerated You know is important But they need to have a forward-looking story. I talked to them about that like i'm gonna hit the gate one day And what's next for me? What do I want? What are my what are my strengths? What can I do that's a value to other people and to myself and like what is that story that That story going forward going to be and I tell them to really work on that story and think about that story and Visualize that story a lot that's good Because they're going to go home and they're probably going to go back to the exact same neighborhood and the same sort of situation That they came from And there's going to be people in their lives who are like, oh this story is is bull because I know who you really are You're that person and it's going to be really grounded in the past And so they have to have a lot of confidence in that story So they aren't knocked off balance By people confronting them with the old story and I think it's really important I mean, I think people talk all the time about Visualization being a really important part of success and achieving a goal I think that's exceptionally important for people who are in the midst of confinement and are looking to go home Excuse me piper and joe. I just wanted to give you the 10 minute work So as many questions as we can get in 10 minutes. Thanks. Doki. Super. Hello, sir. So hi piper joe I was very much taken with your you know, you joe and particularly when you spoke about Your your colleague in prison the the the gentle giant who who you know killed somebody during a drunken rage But it's been basically an ethical person Since and maybe before but you know And and I think As a society we are finally americans are finally beginning to sense not just You know in liberal states like new york but across the country even conservatives are being to see that we incarcerate too many people for too long for too little purpose Yet, um, the question remains for me for other people. What about the truly Pack sociopathic psychopathic people who kill not in one Moment of rage that's out of sync with their life But there are people who really they're really evil people in the world Um, I mean my my particular people who commit offenses in the world. Yeah yeah, I mean the example in my mind is the uh The gang members who executed the police officers in statin island, uh in cold blood And You know that if that if there's any crime that to my Mind this deserving of capital punishment. Maybe that's it as compared to you know, your general giant who had five minutes of rage So how can you talk about what can be done for people like that that pretty much every one of the grieves We don't want them out there in society at large That's a large that's a larger conversation. Um So i'm just gonna i'm just gonna say two things about that one I have a lot of friends who are prison abolitionists who believe We shouldn't incarcerate anyone and i'm not i'm not that but Everybody I know That I know who has done serious time and committed serious offenses And is now out and has done some radical stuff to alter the trajectory of their lives and contribute in ways Raising their family being there whatever All of us who have done time And serious time like some of these guys are ex dropouts of mafias and stuff like that We all know that there's a certain percentage of people who don't play well with others and we were that for a moment But there just are some people and even us who were that have a challenge understanding What do you do with them? You just for a while you just all we can think about is this put them there None of us think you kill anybody for anything they do none of us Um, we believe that when we were actually prisoners we thought certain sex offenders when they got killed We were happy But we don't believe in the death penalty But we also do believe that there is a segment of people that we know That maybe even we were at one time that don't play well with others and can't be trusted to make choices out here That's all I can say about because it's a really long and complicated Conversation we've got 10 minutes, but that's my thing I don't believe in death penalty and i'm not an abolitionist as well So i'm in the middle some people need to be there for right now until we can figure out Okay, I wanted to get the last question before we're out of time. Thank you great. Hi um, so I was wondering if you could speak to the kind of Dual facet of the fact that prisons are sort of flattening Both to the criminals and to the guards in that they have very distinct roles Um, and yet the people who go into them on both sides come from contexts usually of poverty extreme sort of Horribly violent masculinity um, and So I guess I was wondering if you could speak to The sort of state of mind between the prisoners and the guards Regarding the fact that many of the guards have had similar experiences commit similar offenses in the prison that kind of thing Yeah, I mean it's interesting when you talk to people who are correctional workers, you know broadly You know, especially the line staff, you know sort of you know, co's and so on and so forth What you often find you talk to them. They're like, oh, I've got family in prison You know, you're absolutely right, you know Both the people who are incarcerated and many people who work in corrections come out of the same milieu I managed to squeeze in a french word And uh, and that's really interesting in a lot of senses. Um, it is of course Very difficult to conceive of a less equal relationship than the relationship between A prisoner and a prison staffer, whether that's a co or somebody else who works inside of a prison And so that power differential leads to all kinds of crazy Stuff And often by saying crazy, I mean horrible though sometimes very funny and strange, you know, it's not all, you know All of those interactions are not colored by violence and abuse Sometimes you have incredibly beautiful moments of humanity between prisoners and staff and those are worth relating Yes, though. I wouldn't call them the definitive norm Uh, how things are structured. What do you think about the masculinity piece because I'm just yeah I'm just dipping my toe in that masculinity piece personally Okay, I'm going to give you a small answer a soup song. They seem french um the the What's interesting to me when you talk about the the the relationship that that they have Um, and they're they come from the same milieu, of course, but also more importantly they come from the same frame of mind around morality When you listen to an a prison guard Talk about how he has a certain generosity towards inmates And how he thinks that they're they're actually they can change You're going to always hear him talk in the term morality of religion and the redemption story always He believes that his god allows him to believe that these prisoners they can find jesus And the prisoners when they're in prison and they change your life Which is really remarkable how many of them do it and it's underwritten by religion Like i'm the only person I know who made secular change Like I didn't have god or any a lot or anything to pray to So it's interesting to me when you ask that question Is look at they're the same in there and how do we get it so that they're not flattened I want to I ask the same question. How can we get it? So the only way we can understand prisoners is through a religious morality And the only way you can get better and we could look at you as being better is you got to find god And I'm not saying you have you can't find up, but that's where we are That's the reality of it a lot of people a lot of people have that and they're kind of and to me that flattens them Flattens them too. I love the fact that you talk about that if prison flattens us But that said We have turned ourselves into cliches before we went in there and we flanned ourselves We did not allow for enough texture in ourselves to think we had other options And so we walk into that one of the complaints about that I read about oranges new black as they said that that Some of these characters were cliches And I laughed my first response was to a friend was we are I was a walking cliché I was a walking cliché we are clichés. So it actually characterized who we are We don't have that imagination. We flatten ourselves. I love that word. That's a good way to describe it What I like about that term flattening is that you know You may have meant all kinds of things but that two-dimensional quality of like playing like there is no place more Obsessed with role playing than a prison, right? I am playing the role of prisoner I am playing the role of jailer. It's all performance It is incredibly performative and the interactions between prisoners are incredibly performative in terms of like Securing your own safety or perceived safety um, so you know anything that allows For people to actually inhabit their three-dimensional selves um, is a good thing Uh, and so many of the things that joe has described and that you know that I've perceived on the positive fronts You know do have totally to do with that Recognition of people as three-dimensional characters. I would say that the most three-dimensional interactions That I've ever seen or experienced between prisoners and prison staff are often around work rather than really And so those were often the meeting points when when prisoners are allowed to work and when they work under you know You know for you know correctional officers who are primarily responsible not for supervising them as prisoners But for supervising them as workers That was often where you found sort of the most human interactions in my experience. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Good question Oh, good question. Thank you everybody. Good answer all night, but thank you so much all for coming Thank you