 Hello, good afternoon. And you made it through the heat, 72 degrees and counting. Welcome. I'm Elizabeth Sackler. And it is a delight for me to welcome you to our first of their 2016-2017 series of States of Denial, the Illegal Incarceration of Women, Children, and People of Color. Firstly, I'd like to thank the Novo Foundation, who is our senior sponsor for the series. And also thank the Brooklyn Museum for giving us a really a very important venue to bring these matters of urgency to the public and to you. I'm delighted that Piper Kerman is returning as she has again and again to open a new season. And as many of you probably know that the Troika of Michelle Alexander and Piper Kerman and Brian Stevenson during the last four years created an outreach. And we reached a critical mass of public's awareness of the horror of our penal system, which was built as we know to disenfranchise populations of people and institutions within our country, right here in our city, that continue to engage in unspeakable human rights violations. There are now hundreds of organizations and legal offices working nationwide to dismantle the system. And of course, the great news this summer, which is the move toward the closing of privatized prisons, is a very major step forward for all of us for our country. But we do obviously have to keep pushing. We have to keep educating. We have to keep talking. And we have to keep demanding. I know for a fact that the Brooklyn Museum is very proud to educate our public on the struggles that our communities right around us face and also the wonderful organizations that are here in Brooklyn that fight for our people and equity and justice. For today's program, I want to give a special shout out and thanks to Cynthia Gordy. Cynthia, where are you? You were just here. Thank you very much. Cynthia is with ProPublica. Please stand up so we can acknowledge you. It was Cynthia who suggested this program with Piper and Ginger together. And she proposed the conversation because she felt it would offer us an opportunity to focus on the drug wars from different angles. One mass incarceration of low level offenders of women who have become the fastest growing segment of the prison population. And also the international drug cartels in which American policies contribute to staggering rates of violence with impunity. So I thank you, Cynthia, and ProPublica, very much for being with us today. Before continuing with the introduction of our speakers, I'd like to point out to you that Mother Jones Magazine is celebrating its 40th year. And it has devoted its last two issues, which is July, August, and September, October, to investigative reporting. One on privatized prisons. The journalist went in and applied for a job called My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard. And the other, which is in this month, Minor Threats, which reveals how and why thousands of girls are being jailed for talking back, for staying out late, for skipping school. And I recommend both of these to you. So with that, I would like to introduce our wonderful speakers today, our conversants, Piper Kerman. Piper is the author of the memoir Orange is a New Black, My Year in Woman's Prison from Spiegel and Growl. The book has been adapted by Jenny Cohen into an Emmy and P buddy award-winning original series for Netflix. We're probably all very familiar with that. Piper works with Spitfire Strategies as a communications consultant with nonprofit philanthropies and other organizations working in the public interest. She's a frequently invited speaker to students of law, criminology, gender and women's studies, sociology, and creative writing, and also to groups that include the American Correctional Association's Disproportionate Minority Confinement Task Force, federal probation officers, public defenders, justice, reform advocates, and volunteers, of course, book clubs, and formerly and currently incarcerated people. Piper does serve on the board of the Women's Prison Association, which I'm sure most of us are familiar with. And she has been called as a witness by the US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights to testify on solitary confinement and women prisoners. So she has spoken at the White House on reentry and employment to help honor champions of change in the field. And in 2014, Piper was awarded the Justice Trail Laser Award from John Jay, and the Media Crime and Justice and the Constitutional Commentary Awards, excuse me, from the Constitution project. I think it is fair to say, and sometimes it's awkward reading somebody's bio, but I think that we are all probably aware of the important impact that Piper's book has had and that the Netflix series has had. We're reaching population. She has reached populations with her book, with the series, that otherwise wouldn't be familiar with these areas. And so it is an extraordinary honor to continue to have you come, Piper, and I thank you very much. Ginger Thompson is here, and she is a senior reporter at ProPublica. She is a Pulitzer Prize winner. She previously spent 15 years at the New York Times, including time as the Washington Correspondent and as an investigative reporter whose stories revealed Washington's secret role in Mexico's fight against drug traffickers. Thompson served as the Mexico City Bureau Chief for both the Times and the Baltimore Sun. While at the time, she covered Mexico's transformation from a one-party state to a fledgling multi-party democracy and parachuted into breaking news events across the region, including Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela. For her work in the region, she was a finalist for the Pulitzer's Gold Medal for Public Service. She won the Maria Morse Cabot Prize, the Selden Ring Award for investigative reporting, and Inter-American Press Association Award, and an Overseas Press Club Award. Thompson was also part of a team of national reporters at the Times that was awarded a 2,000 Pulitzer Prize for the series, How Race is Lived in America. Thompson graduated from Purdue, where she was managing editor of the campus newspaper, The Exponent. So she's been at this a long time. She's earned a master of public policy from George Washington with a focus on human rights law. So we are really fortunate to have these two incredible women with us today. We are also really fortunate to have these two incredible women out there doing the work that they do do. And so please join me in welcoming them, and I look forward to a really interesting conversation. Hello. Hi, everyone. Thank you all for being here, and thank you to the Brooklyn Museum for having us. Thank you, Elizabeth. This is a treat for me. I read Piper's book and devoured it, and I'm looking forward to our talk. So the subject that brings us here is the drug war and how images in popular culture shape our views of it. Popular culture has been fascinated by the drug war since Nixon declared it in the early 1970s. And why wouldn't it be? The so-called war seems like it was written for motion pictures. It's a colossal epic fight. It's covered in blood. It's fueled by greed and corruption at the highest levels of government. And it's led, bless you, it's led by a broad array of riveting characters, some of them larger than life, some of them totally beaten down by it, all of them deeply flawed. It's hard to keep up with who's good and who's bad. It's kind of got its own soundtrack that sort of fits all musical tastes. It's got acid rock, gangster rap, cartel corridos. And best of all, the war is an absolute mess. There's no winners or winning in sight. It's one of those subjects where real life is better than fiction. Writers don't need great imaginations. They need just good eyes and ears. The stories, when you can find people who are courageous enough to tell them to you, write themselves. But do they do more than entertain? In showing the war's myriad failings, does popular culture generate indifference or cynicism or show us ways out? Should it show us ways out? These are the subjects that I feel that Piper is particularly well-suited to explore with us. I mean, how many people in the audience have served time in prison and who are willing to talk about it publicly? Handful. How many of you have written a memoir or anything, for that matter, that has been turned into a widely acclaimed film or television series? You're about to get a firsthand look at both. I found Piper's book hard to put down. And I found the series, the characters in the series, sort of cinematic works of art. Some of Piper's story may be new to you. And so if you're OK with this, Piper, I'd like to start with sort of talking briefly about your book, talking briefly about the experience of turning the book into television and then about the impact of popular culture on these attitudes, on public attitudes. And of course, we'll leave time for questions from the audience and comments. So start with the book. Can you tell us sort of why you went to prison and what it's like to go to prison? Sure. I want to echo your thanks, Ginger, to the Brooklyn Museum and especially to Elizabeth Sackler and the Sackler Center for Feminist Art for their commitment to holding these conversations. At this point, year after year, I think this is the third year of this series. So I just wanted to say thank you, Brooklyn Museum. Thank you for coming. OK, in 1992, I graduated from college. And that was a confusing moment in time for me, that transition from adulthood or from that intermediate post childhood towards adulthood is challenging for folks whether they're fortunate enough to go to college or not. Those moments of independence when you are sort of striking out and trying to figure out what your place is in the world are thrilling and terrifying and confusing. And in 1992, that was the first Bush recession. We did have a second one. And there were not a lot of jobs to be had. So I was sort of drifting about and I was lucky enough to get a job waiting tables. And that's when I crossed paths with somebody who I became involved in a relationship with who was involved with drug trafficking. And so when I think about my own experience and the experiences of a great number of the women that I was incarcerated with and a great number of the people, the both the men and the women that I have known over the many, many years since I was incarcerated, a person's involvement in the illicit drug world always begins with some kind of a relationship. It might be a romantic relationship. It might be a friendship. It might be a family relationship. But a person's moment when they cross the line, cross a legal line, is always predicated on some kind of a relationship that contributes to that decision making in terms of, is this the right thing for me to do even though it's an illegal thing to do? Is this a safe thing for me to do? Is it not safe for me not to do this? Like there's a whole host of those decisions. The bad decision that I made was to carry a bag of drug money from Chicago to Brussels, just like in the series. Though the series makes some significant departures from my life, it's not a biopic. In 1998, two federal agents knocked on my door. I was living over on West 4th Street. I'd just moved to New York City a month before. How many years ago, I mean how many years after your crime was that? Five years had passed. I was fortunate. I was able to end the relationship, which contributed to me being involved with drug trafficking. I was able to come back to the United States. I was able to get my life back on track without, with help from friends of mine, but without me needing to rely on a social service net, which many people do. So those sort of course corrections had happened. And that's when the knock on the door came. And so two federal agents let me know I'd been indicted. I needed to show up for my own arraignment. I needed to prepare myself. I needed a lawyer. I needed a lot of things. All of a sudden, all those bad decisions I had made five years prior came sort of crashing down. And so that experience of being a defendant in a criminal proceeding was shocking to me. And it was a profoundly confusing, overwhelming, obviously, staggering experience. I brought this book as a prop because that was 1998 when that happened, when that knock on the door came. And I was just trying to make sense of what was happening to me. My lawyer was telling me that I might spend 12 years in prison for this crime that I had committed, which was a first time offense, which was what many people would describe as a nonviolent offense. And that was hard for me to understand. And I got this book, which is called Drug Crazy, How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out, which was written by a man named Mike Gray. At the time. It was published in 1998. And I can't even remember how this came into my hands, but I remember that I read it in about 24 hours. And it's basically sort of a brief and very accessible history of drug policy in this country over the last 100 years. And so right from the very beginning in 1998, I was able, in part because of this book, to understand what was happening to me in a broader context. I had no idea, I'd never thought about drug policy or the drug war or why we have the history of prohibition other than what I had learned about alcohol prohibition and the 14, you know, all that. And so I had never thought about the fact that our drug policies are predicated on foreign policy in China at the turn of the century. And that the movement towards drug prohibition had only really started in the 1900s. Prior to that, drugs like opiates and cocaine were sold over the counter. And the face of sort of substance use disorder or addiction was very much very different than our current portrayals of it. I had never thought about the connections between social control and the period of the, you know, the heyday of lynching. And that's, those things all start to intertwine when you look at the history of drug prohibition in this country. And I didn't really understand, I had never even thought about those things before, but now I was gonna go to prison, right? Right, did that help you? Did that sort of change the experience in some way of actually going to prison? I think, I mean, on a personal level, I think it did help me. When you walked through the door of that prison, you felt different than you think you would have. I think I comprehended that what I was experiencing, what I might have otherwise thought was happening to me, quote unquote, was something that had been happening to a lot of people. And at that point, for some period of time, we were decades into the set of policies which is known as the war on drugs. And so in a strange way, in a strange and very small way, I didn't feel as alone as perhaps I might have because I had a tiny bit of understanding of my own situation in this broader context. But in a way, what's so interesting about your story is that you are unique in terms of the criminal justice system. And it's kind of one of the things that I found most intriguing about the book and one of the reasons it was hard to put down was that you are so unlike most of the women in the criminal justice system. And I felt a bit conflicted about my feelings about this character, you, in that you sort of go, why is it that we're paying attention to the white middle class or well-to-do woman in this story and not sort of would this story have gotten or had the same appeal? Had it been written by one of the other women who are more representative of the population? And I wonder, did you feel conflicted? In fact, I sort of think that's the genius of the character is that you were conflicted and you sort of humanize the sort of advantages that are built into the system for women like you. So the experience of incarceration is an incredibly difficult one, but the more privilege you enter into that experience with just like any other experience in life, your good fortune contributes to your ability to navigate it. So one of the ways that I was able to navigate prison was by always seeking common ground with the women that I was doing time with rather than trying to think about all the ways that I was different from them. And there's enormous amounts of common ground to be found between one person or another, whether you're in Mexico or on the other side of the planet or you know, across town here. But as you go through such an incredibly difficult experience together, whether or not you're always enjoying each other's company or not, people's willingness to help each other survive is incredibly profound. And the fact that so many of the women that I was incarcerated with had not enjoyed some of the simple privileges that I had always taken for granted like a safe place to live and a school that functioned the way we expect a school to function. And yeah, the ability to sort of walk down the street with reasonable safety. Some of those things, access to healthcare. Some of those things which many middle-class people, fewer and fewer middle-class people take for granted, but many of us sort of go through life fortunate enough to have those things. Many of the women that I did time with had not. And leaving that experience, especially given that I left that experience after serving 13 months and some of those women were doing a lot more time for reasons not having to do with their offenses, but rather having to do with socioeconomics and in some cases race was not, that was not a sort of inequity that I could really tolerate or put behind me. Did you feel though that in writing the book was sort of the objective, was your objective to sort of turn this book into a bit of a lightning rod for reform of the criminal justice system when we at ProPublica sort of think about what stories we want to pursue, we ask ourselves, is this the kind of story that's going to cause change? Will it provoke reform? Will it start a national conversation or some soul-searching? Was that on your mind when you all those things were on my mind very much? I think one of the questions you also probably ask that's tucked away in there is like, is this story reflective of a typical truth or a broader fundamental truth or is this an outlier story? And so when I thought about writing the book and telling the story and writing about sort of the stupidest, most immoral thing I ever did and the consequences of it, I thought about what difference that story might make in terms of how people think about the over 2.3 million people who are incarcerated in this country and there are many millions more people who churn through our jail systems so that 2.3 number is actually sort of artificially low when we think about who experiences the inside of a cell. I was quite certain that if somebody sort of looked through my eyes at that one year, they would think really differently about who's incarcerated and why and what really happens to them when they're incarcerated. And so my own experience had just been so dramatically different than what I had seen reflected in popular media or in the news media. Low-level nonviolent drug offenders are not the typical characters in most of the media that I had seen growing up myself in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. And so I was pretty confident, not that I could write a good book, I'd never written a book before, I was like, let's see if we can do this. But I just believed that if somehow I was able to be successful telling the story that someone would hopefully come away from the story thinking differently about these questions and I also believed that I might be able to get somebody to read a book about prison who wouldn't otherwise read a book about prison or about these broader questions, not just prison. And so I thought that was exceptionally important. I thought that there was a core, a small group of core people who cared passionately about prison and justice and the broader questions around drug policy, but it needed to be a much bigger crowd if we were ever gonna get to a better place. And so what, in the decision to share your work with Hollywood, sell your work to Hollywood, was there some concern about losing some of the sort of, the power of authentically telling the stories of these women? Sure. What do you give up and what do you gain when you do something like this, when you let your book become a teller? So the book is, I take full responsibility for every word in that book. That book is my choice, I tell the story the way that I see it, I have full responsibility and pride of place with the book. When you hand it over to be adapted into some other medium, whether that might be a film or a TV series or a video game, there's all kinds of different ways that people have of telling stories now. You generally relinquish creative control, that's how the market works. For me, I believe that that was a risk worth taking because even the best best-selling book reaches a much smaller number of people than filmed entertainment. Particularly television has just this incredible reach. It reaches so many people. As I was thinking about the questions that we're talking about today and you start to look at what even a very average television show, the number of people that that TV show reaches, it's quite astonishing. It's far more than what a book typically reaches. I also think that visual media has a different kind of emotional power and a different modality around storytelling. To me, the prospect of extending the point of view which is put forward in the book, which is that a person in prison is still the protagonist of their own life and that other people can get on board with them as a protagonist as opposed to thinking of them solely as an antagonist or a villain. And I thought that was really, really important. So it was a roll of the dice, but I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to give the book over to an audacious female creator who is interested in provocative storytelling. And that was a scary thing to do, but I was really fortunate. And so have there been any sort of moments in the transition from book to television series that have made you cringe? Have there been scenes that you go, ugh. I mean, I don't write the scripts for the show. I know, I know. And if I did, they would probably be different and the show would probably be a lot less successful because I'm not a television maker in that classic sense. I will tell you that when season four came out, I teach in a state prison in Ohio. And when season four came out, I started to get a squirrely eye from some of the staff there. Yeah, so I think that some of the provocative content of season four, which of course does not come directly from the book in terms of narrative, continues to push the envelope. I mean, I sort of, you know, going to this question that we're raising, which is how are public attitudes shaped by popular culture? I wonder what you think in terms of, I would, I could imagine people reading your book and feeling outraged and thinking, we've got to do something about this. But somehow when you watch television, I don't know about most people, but I know for me, I suddenly feel that I'm escaping the world. I'm escaping the real world. And yes, there are themes that are reflective of real world realities, but I also understand there's a lot of exaggeration there. And so I don't necessarily watch TV with the same sort of feeling that we ought to do something about this. And I wonder, do you sort of, do you feel that television is sort of an agent for change, scripted television shows? I think that television is an agent for change. I think, again, when I was thinking about this topic, I saw that the TV show Dragnet substantially increased support for reading Miranda rights. Attitudes about torture. And attitudes about interrogation and so on and so forth. But there was the law around Miranda rights, which probably everyone here can recite. You have the rights to remain silent. You, anything you say can and will be used against you. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided to you. So the actual Miranda decision is a little muddier than what we think of from television. But I was reading that actually the TV show Dragnet and law enforcement, unsurprisingly, wasn't that enthusiastic about having to do, having to give Miranda rights. And that the TV show actually substantially increased not only public awareness and public support for it, but then the actual actions of law enforcement officers. And so I think that's just a really small example. We could look at many, many examples of scripted television, including half hour sitcoms, and think about how those things have moved the needle on LGBTQ rights, civil rights, and awareness around AIDS and HIV. And there's a host of examples on how, especially specifically scripted fictional television has affected and transformed, in some cases, public opinion around some very central and important social questions. Well, there was actually one of the things I did when we were thinking or preparing for this is there was a study by the Lear Center at USC that talked about, it basically analyzed several scripted television shows during the 1990s and early 2000s, and found that not only does popular culture shape public views, but public views that Hollywood is very attuned to public attitudes about things. And so courtroom scenes are very rare now. Prior to 9-11, there used to be a lot of courtroom scenes, but now it's sort of considered boring television. That there was one finding in their study that said that in storylines about the war on drugs, drug users are not arrested, and drug suspects are often portrayed as morally ambiguous. And that often that shows will start with a drug trafficker being a bad guy, and then sort of by the end of the show, the drug trafficker is not so bad. And that these shows are sort of reflective of the public's ambiguity about criminal justice and about the drug war. Yeah, I think that that's true. Norman Lear is a fascinating example of somebody who not just in one show, but in multiple shows, whether it's Maud or All in the Family or a variety of programs that he was responsible for injected really serious questions about social issues that confront all of us often into comedies. So what would you say the takeaway from the Netflix series is? Like what do you think viewers watching that, how is that shaping attitudes you hope or you think? So I think when we think about these issues that we're looking at, and sometimes it can seem incredibly complex, right? And certainly if you think about the criminal justice system, it is complex. You have street level law enforcement, you have the cop on the beat, you have the courts system, which is a horrifying mess, and also in some ways at times, mind numbingly dull and hard to dramatize. You have that punishment phase, and we have virtually no punishments in this country other than the punishment of prison or no accountability measures other than prison sentences. You have reentry and probation, and so you have this sort of complex and somewhat disconnected system, they're linked, but all of those aspects of the system work in their own strange way, and sometimes at cross purposes. And then you have all of the things which are driving all of the complex issues which are driving people into the system, right? Like racism and racial hierarchy, and health crises and mental health issues, and poverty of course, those things seem really complicated too. So the thing about the chicken's eye view, a story about either one protagonist or a group of protagonists is that it starts to make complex things more understandable. And I think that's particularly true when we think about stories that are told in that entertainment paradigm because there's more leeway to tell a story in a way that's fully engaging than a journalist like you, the construct of journalism is neat, is very necessary in terms of all of the things that your entire career you've developed as a journalism in terms of how do you ask questions, how do you report, et cetera. But those are constraints also in terms of how you can tell a story. Absolutely. So pop culture doesn't have those constraints. And that means that pop culture takes license with the quote unquote truth, though John Edgar Weidman said, all stories are true. Meaning that all stories, even a fictional story, is grounded in the reality that we think we know, right? One of the things that I have learned over time about storytelling is that even when you wanna correct a misconception or something that the reader or the listener might think they know that might not be accurate, it's pretty tough to just go toe to toe. You have to sometimes lean into what people think they know in order if you ever wanna flip it on its head. Does that make sense? Absolutely. So those are things that there's more license to do with a pop culture approach than with a traditional journalism approach, which is very frustrating for journalists, I think, or for academics, folks who work in academia who put tremendous years and years of their life in incredible amounts of work towards studying and analyzing whether you're talking about the criminal justice system or whether you're talking about the broader set of policies known as the war on drugs. People put out an academic study or a report and are often frustrated that it doesn't get as much attention as it deserves from a wider public, but some of that has to do with that storytelling paradigm, which is so predicated on these things that we learn when we are little tiny children about protagonists and about different types of conflict like person versus person or person versus nature, person versus society, person versus self. And the beauty of pop culture storytelling and I think very skillful journalism as well, like literary journalism, is that you can see all of those different layers of conflict in one story. And that is what makes for truly engaging and emotional storytelling. Let's take a look at some of the clips then and take a look at the show and see some examples of what we're talking about. Cynthia's got them queued up in the back, I believe. So we're gonna start with a couple of clips from Orange is the New Black. And the first clip is about a character who I love. Her name is Tasty, or she's known as Tasty, that's not her name. And Tasty was imprisoned on a nonviolent drug charge and she had been released on parole, but a few weeks later she reappeared at Lichfield because she couldn't make it on the outside. It's a heartbreaking scene, let's watch. So if you don't watch that scene and get angry, I don't know what you do. Tell me about sort of the kind of people that you've encountered both in prison and in your current work who've shared those experiences. This happens to many, many women and men who leave prison. Yeah, countless, countless numbers of people. And so one of the things that this scene is particularly close to my heart and related to people who I did time with, it's very hard to come home. That's reflected in our recidivism numbers in this country, which are sky high. And yeah, having a system with such a high failure rate is indefensible. And what's important to me is, again, that you get to pack an enormous amount of information into this exchange between these two women that those things are important to convey in journalism or in academia, but there's the ability here to convey what collateral consequences, we start to get into jargon around collateral consequences of a felony conviction or of incarceration, but Tasty's experience makes that clear. We can talk about the consequences of maternal incarceration, but Poussé's dialogue makes that clear in a way that really gets us in the gut instead of in the head. Most women in prison are moms. Most of them are the moms of minor kids. One of the big discussions that I had with Genji when they were working on the first season, and that clip is from the first season, was the fact that the single most important relationship if you're talking about a women's prison is the maternal relationship, and that's true whether you're talking about a prisoner who has children, but also prisoner's relationship with their mothers. I'm incredibly struck. I teach now, both men and women who are incarcerated. I teach nonfiction writing, and the number one topic is their mothers. Which, you know. Both men and women. Both men and women, which I'm a mom and that gives me pause. I'm like, uh-oh. But I do think that also that scene for me just says so much about how powerful the television is in terms of, I mean, I can't imagine writing that for a magazine and having it be as powerful as that. There's so much, as you say, that's packed in there. It's poverty. It's relationships with family. It's barriers to re-entry, to successful re-entry. Completely. So, all right, so we're gonna watch another from Orange Is the New Black, and this one, let me think. Let me see if I have over a pet. Oh, this is about drug abuse in prison. And this is a character named Nikki, and she's relapsed, and it's not pretty. Again, I think a lot packed into one scene and also I find the idea of having women sort of in these positions to be particularly powerful and rare on television when it comes to the criminal justice system, when it comes to prison, when it comes to drug abuse in this way. Is there something about, you know, you're currently writing about men, and I'm sorry, I've lost my train of thought for a second. Yeah, I don't know what is going on with that, I apologize. Because, and I particularly love the character of Nikki and some of those interactions between her and Pensatucky during this most recent season, season four, because we don't see very many depictions of a person who is struggling with substance use disorder or addiction in a way that humanizes them and makes them anything other than either terrifying or pathetic as opposed to, again, that protagonist who we can get on board with and identify with. But in many ways, I think that is another sort of one of the key parts of the show is that there aren't many people who just feel like they are hardened, cold-hearted criminals either in the show or on the series. Am I right about that? Maybe I might have missed, Pensatucky doesn't, I mean, she has terrible moments, but even she becomes. Yeah, we all have terrible moments, don't we? Right, I mean, so I sometimes felt like is there sort of just a hardened person who chose crime for not because they were sort of sucked into it but because it was purely greed, purely sort of dark, horrible, hardened motives? So I, as I said, I teach now and so my students are writing their own stories, right? We've been at it for a while and now, so some of them are starting to experiment with things like literary journalism, we've been talking about literary journalism, but at a fundamental starting point, non-fiction writing, telling their own stories in ways that are compelling and creative. When I think about my students, and I have, again, a group of students in the women's facility and a group of students in the men's facility, and the stories that they've chosen to talk about and to write about because it's completely up to them what they write about. We give them writing prompts which are quite open-ended so that they have a lot of liberty and choice around what they wanna put their energy into. But over time, these questions around addiction and substance use disorder come up again and again, whether that's true because my student themselves has struggled with those things and that's certainly true in both the men's and the women's class, or because they were raised by a parent who was struggling with addiction and that's certainly true for many of the people who are in my class. Some of my students have very serious offenses and so the portrayal of sort of the drug war as necessary because otherwise we would be overwhelmed with violence, which is a very common theme in news media and also in pop culture media as well and has been for many years is not always, is sometimes present and true in my students' stories but not always and that's true of the women that I did time with and it's true of these characters which are fictional but grounded in reality. Are there other shows that you might, that you feel accomplished sort of some of what you- Well I think we're gonna look at some clips from the wire and I think that the wire was truly like a watershed moment in terms of challenging people to think differently about these questions of drug prohibition, the wisdom or the folly of the war on drugs and thinking about people who are active participants in drug selling as human beings and as driven by something other than necessarily greed or sort of a lust for violence which are sort of the sole reasons that we often are told that drug selling exists. So we are actually going to look at a couple of clips from the wire and the first one is, and you all know the wire, I should sort of describe it quickly. It was David Simon's sort of sprawling HBO series about urban decay and how it's been brought on by a lack of resources and political commitment from government institutions and the media. It may seem somewhat dated to if you go back and watch it now because you'll see drug traffickers sort of looking for street phones and struggling with internet searches but when it ran in the early 2000s it felt like we were watching sort of decay in real time and so it's often been hailed as the best series on television ever. The first clip is from season one, episode 11 and this is a, it sort of talks about how we measure success in the drug war. It depicts a police department where budgets and promotions depend on the numbers of people arrested and the numbers of kilograms of cocaine seized. So let's take a look. I've actually attended so many of those kinds of press conferences especially in Mexico. I actually worked in Baltimore for many years as a police reporter when I started my career and then in Mexico where it seems that authorities have a very clear count on the numbers of drug kingpins who have been arrested and the amount of cocaine or marijuana or heroin that's been seized but no one can seem to give a very accurate count of how many people have been killed or disappeared in the drug war in Mexico and so I feel like this is how the success of the drug war often gets measured and what gets lost except at times in television or in newspaper stories is sort of the toll that these programs take on communities. Yeah, absolutely. I mean it's really interesting to look at the role of the news media as opposed to the popular culture media in terms of setting the parameters of how we think about these policies. So the very fact of drug prohibition is only a hundred years old, right? Only a hundred years. Basically the early 1900s is when drug prohibition became a thing and the idea that the fundamentals when you look at news coverage are really never wander outside of an accepted framework which starts with social control, having those laws, having drug prohibition on the books which is sort of just this idea oh it's always been like this but it's been like that only for a hundred years and the idea that controlling supply is the approach that will get us some kind of progress even though every law enforcement officer I've ever known who is in the least bit forthright and honest about it said yeah there's absolutely no hope in this approach and yet supply reduction remains the fundamental sort of accepted approach and that's what you read about in the news media and then the idea that law enforcement is the only instrument or implement by which we can look at things like addiction and substance use disorder which is also widely debunked both by the medical establishment and also again if you go to any prison warden, any police chief, any honest law enforcement officer they will tell you we cannot incarcerate and arrest our way out of the problems which stem from addiction or substance use disorder and yet we remain in this sort of very narrow frame. It's sort of to me like I always compare it to the immigration system I feel that there is broad consensus that the immigration system is broken but you can't get people to agree on how to fix it and I think the drug war is somewhat similar in that I think many people consider it futile or failed. I think most people on the street do and I think many law enforcement when they're honest about it but I do think that it's been very other than marijuana there's no support, public support and much less congressional support for legalization and I'm not sure it's all the news media I'm gonna sort of push back a little bit. I do think that the news media has written thoughtfully and at length about sort of the costs and other avenues for fighting the supply and certainly fighting drug abuse but I don't think that somehow that message doesn't seem to translate and somehow the attitudes about the drug war haven't so far translated into sort of an agreement about a different approach. I think that the constructs I think that the way that the discussion both sort of socially and in pop culture and also on a policy front I think that race is so central to this discussion the impediment in getting to a logical place so when we think about social control social control by definition means that some people are getting marginalized right and there's many people who might get marginalized but we know that race and racial hierarchy is a really important part of social control. Well and I think that's why some of the conversation I think recently around the drug war is changing because our perceptions of who's addicted to drugs is beginning to change and no longer are they necessarily people of color and urban. They are people, they are white people and they are suburban or rural and I do think that's beginning to sort of start a conversation that isn't only supply driven. Right so when we stop thinking only about supply we have to actually be self-reflective and look long and hard at what drives demand but who uses drugs in the first place which is many of us who has used at some point who struggles with addiction who struggles with substance use disorder but that brings us back to that question around law enforcement being the only tool because if we're honest about those things if we're honest about what generates demand then we have to look at again racial hierarchy we have to look at poverty and we have to come up with better responses and that proves very challenging when you go to places like Dearborn, Indiana which is one of the most punitive places in the country and what we're finding around the country when we look at drug policy and how like the rubber is meeting the road as the conversation starts to shift is that cities like New York are making progress at doing things in at least a slightly more sensible way and that's true in many cities around the country but more rural places or county governments often remain very punitive, very harshly punitive. In fact, when you look at the populations of women and where it's growing fastest in the country it's growing fastest in counties with populations of 200,000 people or less it's not happening fastest in sort of big urban scary cities and so there is something going on there. Let's look at one more clip I think. Do we have time? And this clip is also from The Wire and let's see. Oh, I like this clip. This is a clip that it shows a scene that's not set in the justice system. It's a glimpse at the dynamics that propel kids into the justice system and the scene stars Michael B. Jordan, he was very young, as Wallace, he's a teenage drug dealer in the low rise projects in Baltimore and he's getting his siblings ready for school. Now what I love about that scene is it takes you home with the drug traffickers, it takes you home with the people who are living these lives. Do you go home with the people that you write about? Have you been home with the women from Orange is the New Black or with the men or gone to their families or hung out with them at home? You know, most, all of the women who are depicted in my book who I'm still in touch with and I am in touch with many of them are home now. I'm happy to say. Some of them have come home and gone back to prison and been released again, I'm happy to say, but I'm not in touch with every person who's depicted. Some people have sort of disappeared a little bit and you wonder and you worry, but folks ability to come home successfully and safely varies widely. But have you gone home with them? Have you gone home? Literally home? Yeah, in some cases, sure. Yeah, in some cases. I just, I find that I always, when I'm writing about someone, if I can see them where they live, you learn so much about them. Like, you might see this kid on a street corner and not have any idea where he came from that day and so I wondered in your own writing about the people that you write about. Yeah, in the case of the memoir, yes. In the case of some of my current students, I have met a number, not all of their family members, but a number of their family members, ironically, a number of their mothers. And in some cases, siblings. And that's fantastic because you're right. When you reveal or expose to a completely different layer of that person's life, whether it's via their own words on the paper or by actually standing and talking to their mom, it's just revelatory and it continually deepens your understanding of who that person is and it brings to mind Adrian Nicola Blank's tremendous book, Random Family, one of these incredible works of literary journalism, which spent 10 years with an extended family in the Bronx trying to understand their lives and their family and their reality. So we're gonna see one more clip, I think, before we open it up for questions and it's a clip from the new series, A Night Of, which is, I think, on HBO, correct me if I'm wrong? Okay, and this clip is the scene where, well, if you don't know the show because it is new, it's a show about the son of Pakistani immigrants who is accused of and arrested for murdering a wealthy white woman. And a lot of this particular scene talks about how justice is sort of, or your access to it depends on the resources that you have. And so let's run that scene. I'm sorry, I actually thought this was a different clip but this is a great clip because it also talks about a terrible reality of the current justice system, which is sort of how many people are forced to plea. Part of what is driving up incarceration rates in the country isn't that crime is going up, it's that punishments are harsher and judges have less discretion to determine how long you could be sentenced for a crime. There are mandatory minimums that if you are convicted, the judge is required to sentence you to a certain number of years. And so many people don't go before juries. Trials are becoming rarer and rarer and more and more people are pleading guilty, which is in fact what you did in your case, right? Absolutely, 95% of people plead. The vast majority of people who are accused of a crime, 80% of whom are too poor to afford a lawyer, which of course doesn't map to actual commission of crimes, right? But yeah, everybody pleads, everybody pleads. And that scene illustrates really well how much pressure somebody is under and generally a huge number of people are under that pressure, not free on bail like I was, at least with some experience of freedom in terms of their decision making, but while they're being held on, they have not been convicted, but they are still being held in a jail of some sort, be it a federal county or a city jail. And it's hard to overstate how much the experience of incarceration and confinement contributes to somebody's willingness and readiness to take a plea deal that they probably shouldn't take. This brings us back to that question of how much screen time is spent, quote unquote, on the conflict of the commission of crimes or potentially punishment, but so little at this point in time on sort of the decisions around how justice is meted out. And it's tricky because it's a wonky and disturbing process. It's part of the brilliance of some of the most recent podcasts like Making a Murderer and several other works that have really managed in a very ingenious way to get people to focus on a part of the justice system that deserves far more scrutiny and really frankly is where a lot of things, like the wheels really fall off in the court system. And so much of that does hinge on sort of access to justice and access to counsel because if those 80% of people who have been accused of a crime, who are too poor to afford a lawyer, actually got their six amendment rights and got a robust defense, like I was able to pay for an afford, you know, painful and difficult, difficult, very difficult though that was, we would have far fewer people in prison. And you know, that punitiveness is very capricious, right? So in Ohio, there's a county called Crawford County, which is just north of where the men's prison is where I teach and it's very rural, you know, it's basically Ohio farmland. And the head of the Ohio State Prison System said to me, Crawford County used to put two women a year into prison, into our prison system. There's a new judge there. And he sent 62 women to prison last year, which is staggering, like there's not a crime wave in Crawford County. Rather, there is one individual, you know, or perhaps a new prosecutor, but I think, you know, what the prison head attributed it to was, you know, was a judge, a new judge who perhaps doesn't really understand what the community needs and wants. That's amazing. Yeah. That's amazing. So I'm going to open things up to you all if you have questions. I think the mics are on either side of the room here. Please come forward. All right. Hello. Thank you. What was the process of consuming media in prison like when you were in prison? Consuming media. That's an interesting question. So there's a lot of televisions in prison. And so people do watch television. I personally didn't watch a lot of it because television rooms can be a little conflict-ridden for a variety of reasons. Access to other media other than television and the television rooms is very much reliant upon the individual prisoner and what their connections to the outside world are like because whether you can get your hands on a newspaper or a magazine or a book is completely dependent on whether somebody on the outside will send those things to you. And also what kind of censorship the prison facility or the jail facility has in place because there is an incredible, there is total latitude from a prison perspective in terms of controlling people's access to information. When you're incarcerated, one of the only rights that is ever much protected are rights around religious practice. So things like First Amendment rights or your right to communicate or to read are very limited. Now in practice, there's a lot of television consumed and so it's really fascinating actually to me what is popular. Popular entertainment is popular. People watch the news with interest and sometimes with a lot of concern. I remember when I got to prison, my monkey had been incarcerated for a long time. She was a woman who was serving a long sentence. She was at the end of a long sentence. And she talked about what it was like in that prison on September 11th, 2001 because so many of the women who are incarcerated there were from New York City and also from New England and from places like Boston. And so they cut off all their access to outside media and locked down the prison and people were really, of course, scared and confused and worried about their families and really had no idea what was actually happening outside the environs of the prison. Are there daily newspapers? Do you guys get it? When I was incarcerated in the Federal Bureau of Prisons, you were not allowed to get a date. You were only allowed to see a newspaper the day after. It was published. And why was that? It's just a measure of control. We come back to that question of social control. And so one of the things I was reminded when we were watching that scene with Nikki was that there's an earlier scene before she relapses where she's attending like an NA meeting in prison, like a narcotics anonymous meeting. And so she's talking and it's great and she's sober and she's been sober a long time and she's proud of that. And she gets her chip in narcotics anonymous and AA you get a chip when you reach certain posts, signposts of sobriety. So she gets the chip and she's talking about why she's proud of it and her life and she's fantastic. Of course, Natasha Leone is amazing in the role. And then when she's leaving the meeting, the correctional officer confiscates it because it's contraband. And that's, I love that scene because it's just so indicative of the plight of people who are addicted or have substance abuse disorder in the criminal justice system because the system is set up to punish people, not to heal people and not to help people get better. And so that in every prison at least, not necessarily in every jail, you generally do see some focus on substance abuse or substance use and addiction because so many people who are incarcerated have struggled with those problems. And yet all of any of that work which is in theory rehabilitative is also taking place in this incredibly punitive institution of social control. And so the effectiveness of that, that's another good example of a way that they show something rather than tell us. Good question though, thank you. Hello. Hello. Hi, Piper and Ginger. Thank you both. I'm big fans of both of your work. And the topic of how popular culture or TV and movies influence stuff, I'm very interested and I think there's no doubt watching Orange is the New Black that it humanizes people behind bars, the issues of reentry, substance abuse and everything else. One, another big issue, I do the media work at the Drug Policy Alliance and for a long time I felt like how do we convey that a lot of the violence that we see in Mexico or in Baltimore or whatever is a lot of times resulted of prohibition and not the fact that it's drug use that all the violence in Mexico is not necessarily marijuana but prohibition, et cetera. And so when I think about what movies have been able to portray that, I think a little bit about Breaking Bad which was very popular. And I wonder when I watch that movie I think if you think about it intellectually you could get the points that the drug war doesn't stop drug availability and it also leads to violence and stuff like that. But I don't know, it was a very entertaining show but I don't know if anyone comes away with that kind of stuff. And so I'm wondering what you think of like something like Breaking Bad, what kind of, how did something like that influence drug policy and the drug war, lessons that people may take from it? I'm just curious your thoughts on that. You wanna take that one first? I have an opinion about it, you first. Well so first of all, I have a cousin who teaches high school science in New Mexico. No lie. Breaking Bad is a really interesting example. It's really tremendous storytelling, incredibly compelling character study, sort of that classic white male anti-hero that we've become so accustomed to which is very different storytelling than in the Netflix series I think. I came away from watching Breaking Bad with a sense of futility and hopelessness which I do not think is very helpful. Now someone might say, hey, we're trying to tell an accurate and truthful story as opposed to just a quote unquote inspiring story. But if I think about the way that we think about people who struggle with substance use disorder addiction or whether there are better, smarter or different ways that we could approach problems like the violence that comes from prohibition, I don't know that it necessarily conveyed those. I think you'd probably have some opinions from your perspective in terms of cross-border issues. Well I mean, speaking of Breaking Bad, I do feel that sometimes shows like Breaking Bad can be so hopeless that you end up almost leaving with some sense of indifference. I didn't particularly love the show and I think that part of the reason was I wasn't sure how much it was conveying sort of the real world. It felt to me, it was just sort of, there were times when it was violent just in a way that went overboard for me perhaps and so I sort of turned off to that and I think I sort of feel similarly to Piper in that it just felt that instead of walking away from Breaking Bad with a sense of here's some clear problems it felt, I just left feeling sort of numb and indifferent by that. I think my last comment on Breaking Bad because I know there's more questions, I think that there's a lot of nihilism attached to that white male anti-hero and when we think about things like drug prohibition and social control, what's far more interesting is to look at the people who have been marginalized by those approaches, whether you're talking about people of color, whether you're talking about women, whether you're talking, there's all kinds of people who are pushed to the margins by these tools of social control and those tend to be the stories which are A, most interesting and also most illuminating and so the advent of storytellers like Ryan Coogler who I was watching Michael B. Jordan in the clip and I was thinking about Creed and you know what Ryan Coogler chose to start that movie with a scene set in a juvenile justice facility and Ryan Coogler of course did the amazing film Fruit Veal Station about an Oscar Grant who was killed by a transit cop in Oakland and so the advent of storytellers who are interested in telling those stories that move away from the stories we're most accustomed to based on racial and gender hierarchies tend to be the ones that illuminate the world in a way that can help us imagine a better way and so I'd be fascinated to see a film or a series set in Portugal where they have decriminalized drugs and reduced violence and reduced many of the harms that we associate with addiction and substance use disorder so that's a story I'd like to see told. Can you imagine it as a television series though? I don't know if I'm well-informed enough about how it all went down but when I think about traffic which started as a mini series I think in Britain and then was translated into a film here in the US there's interesting ways to tell a story that really compels. Yeah, no traffic is one of my favorite films and I do think that traffic unlike sort of Breaking Bad it was, it sort of captured in almost the epic way that the drug war exists for the US Mexico border and it was very much a cross-border story and what I loved about it was that because the stories I write often involve both countries and I think many times in the United States the United States feels that Mexico's drug war is Mexico's problem and it is so interconnected in terms of money transfers in terms of weapon transfers in terms of the people who are fleeing from one side of the border to the other and back the families and so a movie-like traffic to me and everything from the drugs are in Mexico being corrupt and horrible to the drugs are in the United States having a daughter who was addicted to drugs it just touched everything and so those kinds of movies while they are full and they are complicated they leave you feeling like you have a sense of how it all fits together and I think those are the kinds of portrayals that give people thoughts about what should be different or why things should be different who's involved, who's affected you have a question? Yeah, I wanna thank you both for the work that you do and for being here today and I wanted to say that there are a lot of us especially at the Brooklyn Museum that really believe that culture leads to social change and social change leads to policy and public and political change, right? So when I watched the last episode of Oranges in New Black I was amazed by how you really gave it to the privatized prison system They deserve it I was like, yes, it's great and then read the headlines two weeks ago and the ruling about federal prisons no longer being privatized and I was cheering you on and giving you complete responsibility and kind of work but I wanna know if in fact you think that Oranges in New Black had a real impact on changing the consciousness that changed the policy? I hope so, it's hard to say the current administration has done more the current, the Obama administration has done more to think about things differently than prior administrations have done grounded in a host of different values, I think that doesn't mean the Obama administration is above criticism on many of these fronts so I'm not a big fan of the DEA and its existence but that's a whole separate conversation, right? I would say that Shane Bauer's story which Ms. Sackler referred to at the very beginning also was, I mean, which just came out very recently but that's a great example of how journalism and pop culture sort of combine to create an environment where a policy change is possible or desirable and is received and understood in a way that's different, so if the, you know these questions of what creates political prioritization bedevil advocates obviously who want their issues prioritized so I was thrilled though, you know it affects a relatively small number of federal prisoners overall and would make a much, much bigger impact if the Department of Homeland Security follows the Department of Justice's lead and also because that's really where those private prisons are making all their money but we were thrilled to see that policy announcement and we've been pleased with many of the decisions of the current federal administration but it still comes back to Dearborn, Indiana or that judge in Crawford County, Ohio because those folks are the folks who are really driving mass incarceration by and large the federal government has a really important role to play very, very important and especially when it comes to drug policy however, when we think about mass incarceration and having fewer people in prisons and jails those private prison corporations are of course now scrambling to think about how they can make money outside of the walls of prisons because I think what is hopefully transpiring is that the confinement of people into cells and buildings that are brutal and punitive is becoming less acceptable but that doesn't mean that having people on probation and having people sort of under correctional control is not still potentially very profitable so that sort of broader question of the carceral state is not to start sinking into jargon but devils us like those private prison corporations are gonna be nimble and quick to try and think about how they can do things differently but it's a victory, I mean I can't describe it as anything other than a victory and we need victories because they build our momentum to have far fewer Americans in prison or jail. I also wanna thank you for all of the work that you were both doing. I'm a retired high school principal from New York City and I'm concerned about how the education system of the United States and all over are really approaching the fact of drug abuse in the schools. The money is not there, of course not and how do you feel about the reforms in education that we could possibly put in to help keep people out of the prison system? Well, we know that keeping kids in school, in school all the way through high school is a hugely important point around keeping somebody out of the system so if a kid drops out of high school their chances of going into the criminal justice system just skyrocketed and so the recognition that it's all of our shared, not only responsibility but it's in all of our best interest to make sure that kids, particularly kids who struggle in a traditional learning setting get what they need to learn, to persist and to graduate so they're able to go forward and do what they wanna do and accomplish what they're capable of and all the things that they dream of doing. We know that there have been some really bad incentives for schools to in fact push the kids who are struggling the most in a traditional school setting out of school entirely and that has been disastrous for those children, for those families, for those communities and for all the rest of us as well. So there's a lot more attention to this, of course the kids who are most likely to be affected by that sort of push out effort tend to be kids of color and there's an amazing book called Push Out by Monique Morris which just came out this year which focuses specifically on the criminalization of black girls in schools. Is there a good show today about drug abuse in schools or drug trafficking involving kids or? Not that I can think of the top of my head. I think there's a sentimentality about portraying children often which gets in the way of tackling some of those really difficult things. Yeah, hello. Wonderful segue for us because our next two programs of States of Denial have to do with children and the criminal justice system and children and their family. In fact on Thursday night at seven o'clock Jill Becker who's a trustee for rehabilitation through the arts is gonna be a moderating panel called Inside, Outside, Prison Walls, Children and Families and we'd certainly have to take a look at that very carefully. I thank you both very much for a very wonderful time. Thank you. Thank you.