 Thank you for coming today. Welcome to the Brooklyn Museum. Thank you for being here for becoming Ms. Burton, reentry, healing, and a new way of life. My name is Rebecca Taffel. I am the director of programs at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. And I'm so happy that you're here for this important conversation. It's really thrilling to have our panelists here today. Susan Burton has been called a national treasure by Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times and a modern day Harriet Tubman by Michelle Alexander, the author of The New Jim Crow. It's very clear once you read her memoir, Becoming Ms. Burton, which hopefully you all got copies of when you walked in, that these descriptions are more than fitting. Her journey has made her a powerful advocate for ending mass incarceration, for imagining and most importantly, enacting systemic change. We are honored to have you here today. So thank you very much for being here to share your story, your truth, and ultimately your triumph. We're equally honored to have Topeka K. Sam and Corey Greene here, two formidable and fierce organizers based in New York City to add their own stories and to join her in conversation. And of course, to guide the discussion, we have our moderator Cecilia Clark, president of the Brooklyn Community Foundation. So thank you all very, very much. This is the final program in 2017 of the ongoing series, States of Denial, the illegal incarceration of women, children, and people of color, which is produced by the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. The foundation began the series here at the Sackler Center in March, 2014. And all of our previous programs are available online, as well as other Sackler Center programings at our website, which is www.brooklymuseum.org slash E-A-S-C-F-A slash video. If you're interested in joining our mailing list in order to receive updates about this programming since the series is ongoing, just find me after the program. Give me a business card or your email address. We will start up again in the spring of 2018. Our next program will be March. A big thank you, huge thank you to our partners on this program, both vitally important organizations located here in New York, The New Press, and Brooklyn Community Foundation. And lastly, one more note of thanks for Novo Foundation, who has supported this programming series and continues to support this current 2017-2018 these programs. So just quick housekeeping information. After the panelists finish their discussion, there'll be time for questions from the audience, there are two microphones on each aisle, and then following that, Susan will be available on stage to sign copies of her book. And we ask that when that time comes, you line up on the right side of the auditorium. And now, I'd like to start the program and welcome Cecilia Clark to the stage to take us into today's conversation. Thanks, Rebecca. I'm so delighted to be here. This is our fourth partnership with the Sackler Center. So thank you so much, Rebecca and Elizabeth, who couldn't make it. And our third with Sackler and New Press for the States of Denial series. So it's an immense honor to be able to be the Brooklyn Community Foundation and partner with the amazing Brooklyn Museum and the Sackler Center. So we are the Community Foundation for Brooklyn, and we partner with generous Brooklynites, innovative nonprofits and community leaders to take on Brooklyn's most pressing challenges and to spark lasting change. One of the ways we do that is by bringing together change makers in critical conversations like the one we're about to do. So I'm gonna ask Susan and Topeka and Corey to come up and introduce all of you to them. So you heard a little bit about Susan from Rebecca, but Susan is the founder and executive director of a new way of life, a nonprofit that provides sober housing and other support to formerly incarcerated women. She's nationally known as an advocate for restoring basic civil and human rights to those who have served time. She was a winner of AARP's prestigious purpose prize and has been a Starbucks Upstander, a CNN Top 10 Hero, a Soros Justice Fellow, and a Women's Policy Institute Fellow at the California Wellness Foundation. She's the co-author with Carrie Lynn of Becoming Ms. Burton from the New Press and she lives in Los Angeles. Topeka Sam is the founder and executive director of the Ladies of Hope Ministries, whose mission is to help disenfranchise and marginalize women and girls transition back into society through spiritual empowerment, education, entrepreneurship, and advocacy. She's also the co-founder of Hope House NYC, a safe housing space for women and girls based on the model of new way of life. She is a Beyond the Bars 2015 Fellow and a 2016 Justice and Education Scholar at Columbia University, a 2017 Soros Justice Advocacy Fellow working on probation and parole accountability, and a founding member of the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls. Corey Green is a formerly incarcerated co-founder and healing justice organizer with How Our Lives Link All Together, Hala. A, Hala. Hala. I'm very proud to say, Hala is a Brooklyn Community Foundation grantee and they are committed to working for a world where young people from historically oppressed communities are engaged in movements of deep relationship building transformation and resistance. Corey is currently invested in developing and supporting the development of an intergenerational youth-led city-wide healing justice movement. Corey is also the community researcher and training manager with the Center for New Leadership on Urban Solutions. He's also a PhD candidate at the Graduate Center CUNY and a loving father. Thank you. Today's conversation and our featured panelists embody a belief we hold at the Brooklyn Community Foundation that those who are closest to the problem are also closest to the solution. It's a belief that is often best illustrated when it comes to our criminal justice system. Susan Topeka and Corey's journeys to where they are today are surely different but they share the same basic experience of being failed by a system of so-called justice, the praise-abond communities of color all across the country. And yet, they are all here today because they took that experience, that deep injustice that sought to break them down and defeat them and instead turned it into a commitment to healing and repairing the lives of others who are going through the same experience. There's so much to talk about today and I also want to acknowledge and honor the young people here today. Are any young people Ron? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And also from Atlas, two of our grantees, both fantastic organizations were so proud to support at the Foundation. We really look forward to them opening our audience Q&A in a bit and keeping us honest and accountable in this conversation as young people are so wonderful at doing. So let's begin by hearing your stories and how you came to found your organizations respectively, new way of life, ladies of hope and how our lives link together. Take it away. Thank you so much. I'm really, really honored to be here. And I want to give a shout out to the Good Earth Social Justice Book Prize, a new, becoming Ms. Burton won the Book of the Year Prize from the Good Earth Foundation and I had the opportunity to meet the person it was named after. Could you stand and let's give you a hand and it's the first and thank you so much for coming. Thank you. So a new way of life was founded out of my lifetime of pain, trauma and incarceration. So I experienced so much violence and trauma as a kid growing up, as a young girl, as a young woman and then as a mother. My five year old son was accidentally killed by LAPD police, LAPD detective and I just could not hold any more pain. I began to drink that escalated to a drug use, illegal drug use. The war on drugs was just ascending upon our community. There was illegal drugs cracked everywhere and I medicated my pain and my grief. And for that I was incarcerated. I was incarcerated over and over and over again over a 16 year period and I spent a total of 20 years under the authority of the California Department of Corrections and then I found help in Santa Monica about five miles down the 10 freeway was a world away from South LA where resources were plentiful. I landed a bid in a upscale drug treatment program, a couple of blocks from the beach. I began to get therapy every week. I was introduced to the 12 step program and I thought what a concept. Why don't we have this in South LA? So I left that treatment center and came back to South LA, landed a job, saved my money, bought a house and went down to the bus station where women were getting off the bus. My friends, my community who were also cycling in and out of prison and as they walked off the bus I'd say, hey girl, I have a house and if you want a bed there, you can have one. And we created a community of women helping women, formerly incarcerated women, sharing our resources, sharing our defeat, sharing our joys and out of that bond was created a new way of life reentry project. So that's almost 20 years ago and over that time the houses have multiplied. We put in legal services. We have six attorneys on staff. We do advocacy, policy, organizing, leadership development and a new way of life is a model for our country, a proven model of what could be and should be in every community to welcome people back. Round of applause, amazing story. Segway to you Topeka. Yeah, for sure. As the model. Yes, thank you also for having me here. Thank you, Susan. I'm Corey. So my journey started, I guess when I went to college really. I was raised in New York in Manneville, Long Island, had every opportunity. My parents were franchise business owners still together after 50 years. And I went to Baltimore to go to college because I wanted to be at HBCU, Historically Black University because we were the only black family in our neighborhood and I wanted to be around other people that looked like me. And so I got to Baltimore and I just started kind of veering off of campus and started going into the city and I guess what seemed to be exciting for me I got really, really heavy engaged in. And so I would continue to hit the criminal legal system whether it was get arrested and I would kind of have probation and then it would stop and then I would go back to school and this whole cycle trying to find myself or where I thought I belonged. And so years later, I ended up in prison for conspiracy drug charge. And I thought all the while that people took drugs because they wanted to. People took drugs, it was their choice and they just made this decision and that was it. And it wasn't until I was incarcerated in the county jail in 2012 that I realized that that was not the case, that women were being criminalized and it was this history of abuse. It was violence, trauma, just like Susan shared something that had happened in their life and no access to resources, to healthcare, to even someone to sit and talk to about their experience landed the cycle with the war drugs and everything else and had people coming in and out of prison. And I would see women come in and leave and come in and leave and then leave and never come back because they had overdosed and died. And so the more and more I talked to the women and they continued to tell me of these stories and experiences, I realized what I had done and what I had contributed within this construct. And so I went through a healing process of my own and I had reconnected with my higher power which is God and I forgave myself and it started to go on my road to redemption which then I ended up in Danbury, Connecticut federal prison and the ladies of hope ministries was birthed there. And so no matter who I spoke to, it was just this whole thought and cycle of needing spiritual development, healing of this trauma that was even generational trauma that had happened. And lack of resources, like I knew that when I had come home that I would have been able to transition because my parents were still together so I had safe housing. I had education, I had entrepreneurship skills so I knew that I would come right back out and be okay with the resources and the friends that I had but I also knew that that was a rarity and that many women wouldn't have had that same opportunity so it was my obligation. I knew when I came home that I had to help other women through the transition so they would not go back to prison. And so while I was in, I met my partner, Vinay Sykes, who's here in the front row, Vinay. Yeah, we were in Danbury together and someone told me she wanted to do a house for women coming back to Brooklyn and they're like, you need to talk to Vinay. So we talked and we started just talking about the vision and what we wanted to do and the name came Hope House and it was a scripture in Job that said, even for a tree that have cut down that it will sprout again and that the tender branches thereof will not tarry. So if you give hope to anything, it will grow and it will not tarry and it will flourish. And so we decided that we were gonna move with that thought and when I was released in 2015 in May, I started organizing and moving around the country and still hearing the same thing, no housing, no jobs, no help. And I was told to reach out to Susan. It said, Susan has the model, she's doing the work. She's been doing it for 20 years. And so I did and I called Susan and I said, really excited, this is what I wanna do. God said, this is what we have to do. And so she called me back and she was like, I wanna help you, like you've been on my spirit. And I keep bringing spirit into the room because we're talking about healing and transformation. And she was like, I wanna help and she did. And you think about resources and you think about connectivity, you think about building coalition and how do you help other formerly incarcerated women? And it is providing that safe housing in that space but it's also providing that assistance to start your organizations and help. And she did just that. And so I wanna give Susan a round of applause because many people do not do that. They don't grab back. They don't go into their own pockets and say, here, I see what you're doing. I know that this works and I wanna help you and not just talk about it, but she was about it. So we're here and we were able to open Homehouse which is in the Bronx on October 28th. And so we're really, really excited to move and really help to make women hold and provide them the access to the resources within the community. But when I say community, I really within our community, a formerly incarcerated people because we do know what we need in order to succeed. Thanks, Rebecca. Corey. Peace, what's up? Good afternoon, everybody. And yeah, thanks to everybody who put this together and particularly putting a panel together with formerly incarcerated leadership, so things BCF and everybody who organized this. Yeah, man, a story about me, I think I'm an indigenous person and it's really hard to tell a story about me like just in my physical lifetime because you don't really understand how trauma and how my connection to my mother and her mother, how that has shaped how I come to this work and how I show up and how I've been battered and taught to internalize certain ideas and certain ideas that lead to certain behaviors in myself and outside of myself. So my mom's, so I'm gonna start my mom's and kind of like walk up a little bit to like how Holla was started. My mom's was born in Mississippi in the 50s, Jackson, Mississippi. And I like to identify myself as like old school black. You know, and I say old school black because like our blackness in this country starts with like the Atlantic Ocean and it starts in the deep South and like for us it was the Delta, Mississippi. And as we were trying to run to Hillan and run to re-entry from slavery, from colonization, we was moving away from as far south as we can go. I mean, far as north as we can go. And for us to start at Jackson, Mississippi, that was a little bit away from the Delta. Then, you know, by the time my mom's was 12, she found herself in Chicago. We started moving to Chicago and we set up shop in Chicago. And by the time I was born, a little bit before I was born in the 80s, my mom's, we done set up shop in New York. But through those experiences, my mom's at 12, she was like raising all her little siblings who were like nine, 10, four. She was working because as a young person, this is how you show up and like to try to like support your family. So she was migrating, moving to different places to try to like help family as we move and migrate away from the violence of the South and trying to move up. She was trying to take our family and be a young leader in the family supported. And in the 80s when she landed in New York, also, you know, there's real forces that we're running from, crack epidemic hit. And as my mom's who came out of the army, who was in job corps, who did all of the things that black people tried to do to be good black people in the world. We just trying to like, we just trying to be seen as human. Like we can do this, we can go to school, we can work. She was trying to do all that, she wasn't organizing, but she was doing all the things in mainstream world that we say we do those things, we should be seen as human. We should be seen as people. She was trying to do those things. And when she ended up in New York, out of that army, she ran into crack. And it was all over our neighborhood. And for her that one night turned into like 35 years on going of a struggle. And me being born three years after my mom's was addicted to crack cocaine, I inherited the deep history that my mom's journey through and where she came from. And also the material consequences of like disinvestment in our neighborhoods that are facilitated through the war on drugs policy. But that is like, if you start there, that's not the beginning of the conversation either. You know what I'm saying? That's like a chapter, it's chapters along. So, and I say this thing, and I say this because a lot of the stuff that I was living through and experiencing growing up, I thought was regular. I thought that made sense. When I was getting stopped by police at 12, 13, 14, six times a day and everything, I thought that was regular. That's what we go through. When my mom's was going like really struggling to make ends meet, I thought she was just a bad mother. Thought she just didn't do it, she just didn't get it. You know, so I started, the things that we see in our neighborhood without deep like connection to like our history and who we are and what's being thrown at us, we start to really, and that's a violence. Cause those things help shape who I could be. Could I be a father? If I think of myself in a certain light, I don't see myself as a father. I don't see myself as a PhD graduate. I don't see myself as an organizer holla. I can see myself robbing somebody from my hood to survive. So I started internalizing deep things about my family, about my neighborhood, about myself, that really started to facilitate who I could be and how I showed up. And so what that means is when I was making high honor roll at like what I stopped going to school at like 14, 15, when I was a high honor roll student, I made a conscious decision that like, this doesn't make sense. When I was going home, we wasn't eating. My mom's like lost rent money. She's getting locked up. And I got to go into programs and then I got to go to people who are not really care for me. And I got to figure out how to eat. How my little sister's like 12 now. So there's like so much going on in the body and internal that like is facilitating like my hope that is facilitating the next step I'm gonna take. And when you're in these situations, every step that you take feels so critical. And like you don't see 10 years out. You don't see five years out. You don't see being patient, being processed. You are in death. You are like in structural violence. Last thing I would say before I move on is that I was a high honor roll student at some point like the things that I was seeing and living through and feeling and connected to, I felt like it made sense. I feel like my only option was to go to the streets. I felt like my only options was to live a certain thing because of who I thought I was, what I thought my community was, how we interacted with each other and with society, the media, scholarship, super predator, all those things have told about us. You're super predators, you know, black people are lazy. Black women don't do nothing. Your mom's like all these things, I was holding those things. And I went deep, deep into hurting myself and hurting my community. And it led to me catching a case when I was 21 for homicide and when I was locked up, my son and my wife were in the building right here. My son was six months in my wife's womb when I got locked up for homicide. And that was a deep reflection for me. I had to really pause and I had to really wrestle with the fact because a lot of the conversations I had with myself growing up, watching my moms and my family go through it, I was like, damn, I used to tell my moms too, but I didn't really understand. But the question that I was asking, I was like, if you wasn't ready to have children, like why did you have it now? And I was telling her that when it's my turn if I ever decide to have children, I would try to, but when I was having a child, I was in prison. And I was grappling with the same thing that I was trying to question her about. And that process put me through my own, like Topeka was saying, my own spiritual process, my own healing process, my own transformation to start thinking about who I am and how I show up and what I've been through. When I started reading, I started learning, I started putting myself in different situations. And inside of prison, I met other brothers who were doing the same thing. And through those conversations over the last four years I was in prison, those healing circles started developing to ideas of what we call Holler now, how our lives link all together. So me and these brothers, we were standing on a lot of prison history from New York, from Chicago, from LA, that came before us about people doing real rehumanizing work about how do you work through trauma in a dehumanizing place? And we started using that model to kind of like build with each other. And through those conversations, we were sharing real stories about ourselves, the guilt, the hurt, the shame, the ways we didn't show up, the ways we felt confused, the ways we was front and throwing on mass trying to be something that we wasn't. And we was honest with each other. And when we was building and through those conversations over years, we started saying, how do we get this back to our young people? How do we get this back to our block? And through that, we started co-constructing how our lives link all together. And currently right now we got Alex and Kieran in the building. The goal was that like the neighborhoods that we live in and the conditions of those neighborhoods, along with the prison system, were no places for us to raise our young people, our future. So the structural conditions in our neighborhood that facilitate interpersonal conditions in our neighborhood are not a condition for our young people. And punishing that dynamic by sending us to prison isn't a condition for our young people either. So we need to create a space where we can talk about leadership, healing and transformation and do that with our young people that didn't rely on prison. And we start a holla. A lot of questions. Thank you all so much for sharing these stories. There's definitely questions about gender in here, but I'm not gonna go to gender right away. I guess I do, what's interesting is we should just close. Every year we do an invest in youth grant cycle. We deploy over $2.5 million annually to young people in under-resourced communities in Brooklyn largely. And healing justice is just, at this cycle, started to pop up in a lot of the grants. And I met with one of my colleagues at New Cecilia. We need to look a little deeper into this concept of healing justice. It wasn't just holla. And I think that hearing three very clear stories about trauma and in essence what it really, the common denominator here is the trauma of systemic and structural racism, right? And so I guess I'd like to know what does healing justice mean? I obviously it's connected with this trauma. Where did it come from? And what does the movement for healing justice look like in your perspectives? I mean, Cora, you use that very clearly. As an organizer, we could start with you, but I would love for the two of you to speak about it as well. Yeah, for holla, healing justice is a framework. It's pedagogy and it's organizing for us. So we see it on three different levels. As a framework, it's really a deep understanding analysis that understands that social development, that trauma, that oppression has a historical, that what we see today has historical roots that we can't just look at today at the school to prison pipeline or stop and frisk or the immigration stuff that Trump is saying today without tracing the roots of it. Secondly, we understand that healing is a collective process, that you can't heal alone, that you gotta heal in community with people and collect in collectivity with people. Third, we really believe that as we do, that healing starts with the self, that it starts local. And that could mean a bunch of the self-meaning internal, like how you internalize stuff. Also local is like within your family, within your home. Like healing happens within homes. And then another local part is like your blocks next to you. And then another local is you formerly incarcerated, the community of formerly incarcerated people. Whatever the communities that you're close to, it starts with a really intentional process that healing local, healing is important for moving outward. And then as pedagogy, how do you create platforms, activities, curriculum, environment that understands people deep trauma around gender, around mass incarceration, around sexuality, and you gotta like, I know I'm from old school black. So I know how we show up on things taken, on things given, on Christmas, when we just on the corner chilling or we just in a hallway. Those are like moments to analyze, to say how does the interpersonal dynamics play out? How do some of these larger issues play out in our real relationships? So it's about honoring how we all been hurt in different ways based on our blackness, our brownness, our queerness and really creating the conditions and that welcomes all of that trauma in so that we can start sharing that in a way that's about moving us forward. And that takes intention, that takes study to understand how to bring people together so that you can get to a point where everybody feel like they can go deeper or let some vulnerability out. And then the last thing I would say is that as far as the organizing practice is that a lot of people, and we are one of the people too, how in the center from the leadership think that healing and transformation happen at the policy level? And from our 50 years of organizing, like we don't want mad policies. And like from even the reason why we know about stopping frist is because we organized and got them to disclose how they stop and frist people. That's the reason why we's able to count how many times they stop and frist. And when you look under the policy when we win, when you go to Brownsville, when you go to South Jamaica, when you go to the middle of Queensbridge Projects, our life still feel the same. Like even when we win the policy, our life, because the policy still has to be facilitated and implemented by people. And the culture of white supremacy, the culture of racism, the culture regardless of like, I'm talking about people's hearts, people's spirit. Like policy can't change that. So the kind of organizing work that we do is about changing people's hearts. And spirit is about transformation. So we definitely target policies, all of them. And we understand, cause we won policy already, that like transformation in healing doesn't just happen at the policy level. So we make sure that while we fight it for policy, that we are definitely doing human justice, building with all of our people for individual transformation as well. Damn Cory. Fantastic. I think Cory covered it. So I just want to say that when I started, a new way of life, I didn't have the words or the framework to actually talk about this sort of justice healing work. What I had though was the action that created a safe welcoming household where we could bond, live and support one another through the healing process. I didn't have the organizing sort of frame, but I began to understand my voice is powerful. And I need to go in those places and speak truth to power and make people uncomfortable about what they're doing to us. And that began it for me. You know, it was such an eye-opener for me to go to Santa Monica, a beach community, a wealthy beach community, and watch how those individuals was treated when they were arrested for crack or drunk driving or possession of these charges. They got deferred to treatment. They didn't get put on a chain gain and sent to work for eights in an hour. They got a court card. I can remember being in a meeting and a man stood up and began to talk about how he hated the color green because he drove under the influence, had an accident, hurt people, and he was sentenced to community service and had to paint the jail green. And I'm sitting there after six prison terms where I hurt no one. I medicated my grief and pain after a law enforcement officer killed my five-year-old son. And I'm thinking, damn, I had to live in it over and over and over again. So, leaving there and coming back to South LA, I was just like, I got to do something to try to recreate that experience and help my community heal because I learned something out there. I learned a new approach because I thought that's what happened. You break the law, you go to jail. Taking drugs is against the law, even though it was all I had after my son left. So, I didn't have the framework for it. I didn't have the healing justice, but I knew what was happening was wrong and something had to be done. So, I just, you know, clang my little pennies together and out of it grew a house where women could come together and make a community and support one another and grow stronger. And I just want to add to what both of you said. A part of healing justice also is this. People who have lived the experience who are the best mentors and who have all the knowledge and who can then guide and change and transform not only our communities within our communities, but within ourselves. Every time I come and I'm able to be around someone else who has experienced the same things that I've had and get poured in in the way that this is happening, that's part of healing. And so, it's important to continue to provide platforms like this, right? And to provide access and resources for people who are doing this work so that we can continue to heal our communities because we are healing each other. That's awesome. So, really great. One of the things I just heard, listening to the three of you. By the way, to prepare for this, I went online and I, because I wanted to see, there are quite a few videos of a new way of life, kind of a day in the life of new way in life. And they're really beautiful documentaries. They're some are five minutes, some are 20 minutes. And I kind of couldn't stop watching them because I just want to tell you that even this sense of healing justice when Susan in some of the videos, you just turn around and you're just like, anything you want, we're here for you. And there's so much power in that. So when I think about healing on that, there's such a deep, lots of people are crying in those videos, but they're really crying from joy. And I think they're crying from a sense of justice and healing and relief. And you have started that and now you're modeling that and you're all doing this work. So I want to commend you for that. But also I just recommend you look at the videos because they're really incredibly moving. And one of the things I like that the three of you touched on is that clearly, and I don't think you need to name it, but we'll name it for now, healing justice. There is a relationship here between what you can do interpersonally and in your community and with those you love and what you can do on the macro, right? On the policy level. And that Susan, you kind of came to that because well, first of all, you understood how white people live, which apparently is very different, which they're painting the jail that you're in, right? And so you know there's something wrong and you know the history that I think Corey spoke about so beautifully. So I'd like to kind of talk a little bit about the necessity of both the really deep work, but also the policy work. And I know Susan, you had a huge triumph in California, Prop 47, which we'll talk about. We've had some really great victories here. Certainly raise the age. New York was about 49 states behind raising the age of criminal responsibility from children to still young adults, but and then also recently closed Rikers and which is interestingly, now technically a policy, we'll see about the implementation. So I do think making the distinction between policy change and implementation is really, really sound point. But do you want to talk a little bit about some of your, you ended up doing policy work, even though you just thought you were buying a house for some women. Yeah, yeah. So what I began to recognize is that a house and a place to come back to wasn't enough. There were structural barriers, structural racism, straight disinvestment and inequality that was just humongous, no matter how hard and how consistently we worked to raise ourselves up out of the bottom. There was always these things that kept us from rising. So we got into organizing and policy and ballot initiatives. And you know, our ancestors died and were bitten by dogs and were sprayed with water hoses, hung from trees around voting, just being able to cast a vote. So it's important that we exercise that right to vote and that we organize and go into places where people are held and kept from voting, held on this wretched bail system and kept from voting. So we organized around voting in 2014, 2012, 2010, 2008, and in 2014, it kind of paid off in a big way because there was a ballot initiative, Proposition 47. Proposition 47 reduced six misdemeanors, six felonies to a misdemeanor, non-violent drug possession, and so on and on and on and on and on and on and on. Oh, what a drug possession, receiving stolen property, writing a bad check, petty theft, forgery for less than $800, and it's one other one. I can't think of any one other one, but they reduced all of these to misdemeanors. It took $100 million that was transferred out of the state prison system back into the community, and it created programs of victims, Victims Fund, Drug Treatment, Mental Health, and K through 12 school, that money went into those pots and we're just now, that money is just now hitting the community. But what it also did is that it took, I wanna say, I use the phrase, it took the wind out of law enforcement and state prisons because the day that measure passed, the next day they had to open the gates and people flowed out by the thousands back into the community from county jail and from prisons, and also those that had to actually, some people had to file to reduce the measure, to reduce the drug possession to a misdemeanor, and then they flowed out, and our legal department helped to implement that, and we're still implementing it. I myself have my drug charges reduced to a misdemeanor, but it kind of put faith back into our, the low voter turnout community that our vote does matter, and my homeboys are coming home, and my mom's coming home, and my sister and cousin is coming home because I cast that vote, and so after that we did Proposition 57, which gave people more credits that they could come home, but it's ongoing, and we went into the jails. The sheriff tried to keep us out of the jails. We filed a suit through the legal department to get access to people inside that we could register them to vote, and I tugged, and I fussed, and I called my supervisor, and I'm like, the sheriff's gotta open up the doors and let us in there, because we registered our folks to vote even there, and we did, and we went back to ensure that they cast their vote, but this is the work that really energizes me, and I'm glad to see the young people here, because I don't know how long the work gonna keep energizing me, but these are the things that we did, and so, yeah, it's like, you know, I feel like I got a foothold, and I'm not stopping. You know, I'm gonna raise as many Topeka Sands up as I can, and I brought with me April Atkins, wanna stand up, April, April just came home, and I wanna thank the Shackler Foundation for bringing her with me. She just came home after almost 28 years, 27 years, four months, and five days, or something like that. She's been home a few months now, and so we're gonna keep exposing and raising people up and bringing them home, and exposing them, and encouraging them, so yeah. So I just went on one, yeah. I love that, we love that, we love it. Do either of you wanna speak a little bit about policy before I, no? You're good? So I do wanna talk about gender, because I do think, and if you look at research and statistics, that trauma, so a lot of this trauma is shared by people of color because of structural racism, and then I think there's another layer of gendered violence that has brought trauma into communities for women, and in fact, if you look at the research around women who are incarcerated, they estimate that maybe up to 90% of women who are incarcerated have in fact survived sexual violence or certainly gendered violence, so which does not mean that men who are incarcerated themselves have not been traumatized by violence, but I do think that their gender is playing a role in terms of the violence. So, and both of you have started programs for women, and Corey, of course, you're welcome to also speak about. I'm curious, in fact, in your original group with Hala, if women were at the table, not obviously while you were inside, but later. So anyway, could any of you, or would any of you like to speak to that? So I'll talk about it, and in the book, I write about a long history of trauma and violence that I experienced prior to incarceration, and what, I've come to the place that among black women, among poor communities is what we do in this country is actually incarcerate trauma instead of address it in a way that can be resolved. In Santa Monica, again, things happen out there, too, but I went to therapy every week, and they get to go to therapy every week and have a place to actually, other communities, other people have the resources that they can go and they can work through it in a way that it's not internalized, it's not digested as me not being enough or I turn around and become harmful because I'm harmed so much. So the disinvestment in our communities still come to my mind here around addressing trauma and not only the disinvestment, but the overinvestment in law enforcement and tactics of oppression and suppression that we experience, which is another form of trauma. And they say in LA, I don't know what y'all got on your police car to protect and serve, but we say who? Who are you protecting and who are you serving? But in our homes, there is a safe environment that people can actually, women can sit in a circle and talk about what their experience has been, but also there's a therapist that every Thursday you can go and sit down with him, you have the choice to, and it has to be your choice. It's not a mandate from me, even though I might feel like you would be, it would be to your advantage to go. It has to be your personal choice and desire to actually go and talk, we call him Dr. Phil. And we got our own Dr. Phil. And if they're not comfortable with Dr. Phil, we have another therapist that's on staff under Dr. Phil that they can sit with who is a woman. So I think it's really, it's real that we incarcerate trauma instead of providing resources which should be much more effective and much more cost effective and better for us and our communities. And we as frontline community warriors must be the resource that we see needs to happen. I'm curious, did any of you receive counseling, therapy, mental health services while incarcerated? I went to a trauma class and when I was in that trauma class is when I found out that I was a victim of sexual abuse. I didn't know. I mean, I was in a relationship and I thought that this is my boyfriend and I was told that this is what you do when you're in a relationship, even though I may have said no. And so I've realized that that has happened to a lot of women, that you do not know that you're actually a victim or a survivor. Until someone has told you what those things are. And so I too have learned in the incarceration and even in having access to mental health that there was something that had happened to me that had also changed a part of me in my life and that until I was able to understand what that was and that I had certain rights, that that changed. So these, that's another example of what happens to women and specifically women of color. A lot of times when abuse and things, when you talk about histories and things that have gone to lineage and the ancestry and during slavery, the things that have happened to our grandmothers and mothers and then happen to us, it's that thing that we're told to go pray. And you pray it away. And so, and then you don't talk about it. And yet you don't realize that you're internalizing this. And then it changes the way you see things. And so we don't know. And again, that's the part of the healing justice and having access and bringing these resources and things within our communities and within our homes so that women do understand that they do have choices, right? Thank you to be here. Yeah, I would just add on, I think most people in prison are people who experience trauma. And I think like I was saying earlier, when you think about, particularly thinking about gender, like when you dive into like how we've been socialized from our gender places, it gives you more insights about what that violence has been. So I would assume, because my experience in prison, like when you are in that experience of deep kill, of deep dehumanization and you're trying to fight for your life, you're building with people in deep ways. So I'm pretty sure like Topeka, like beyond what we know statistically have deep wisdom about what, in those circles and those spaces that you have with women about what it means to like, and then another thing, like my wife who like we also think about like the 2.3 million people in prison or the whatever, 8 million people on papers. But we don't think about the communities and the families who love us, who are in prison with us, who got to like go through visits, who got to get violated, who got to like be separated from their family. So I think there's another, we was to put our analysis on gender violence in that category and see our women and our sisters and our siblings who love us while we are in prison. I think that's another kind of like opening of like how trauma works too. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I listen to Syrenes all day coming back, it's trauma, you know, you know something has happened. What has happened? Where are they going? Who is it? So would any of you like to say something before we go into audience Q and A about this topic, something that you think is important to share? You know, I wanna give a really, really good open example of what's happening right now in relation to the opioid crisis. In our country's response to the opioid crisis. So I already experienced this response 20 years ago in Santa Monica when the guy was painting the jail instead of where I had to live in the jail. But you know, the opioid crisis is hitting a different segment of America than the cocaine epidemic or the cocaine attack that happened in black communities. And while I think that there should be a response that says this is a health issue, but when it was us, it was a criminal issue and we just all have to be cognizant and aware and not actually just like sweep that under the carpet and let it pass without giving it the type of attention and recognition of what's happening and what's been happening. And we need people to just be cognizant of that and you know, rallying for more resources for communities a different approach to safety. You know, our communities are not safe with more police. Our communities would be safe with victim services, therapy services, mental health services, arts, recreation. I was looking at the things that were going on in the museum today. Same things that make other communities safe, make arts communities safe, prosper and instill hope for a better life and so we need all of you to be thinking and pouring the resources in that our community needs and thinking about a better approach to what a safe community means. That's excellent and great place to finish. Thank you. So I'm gonna actually ask Ron who's here from Holla, Ron to start us off with a question and their microphones are on both sides and we really encourage you to ask these extraordinary panels, any questions? Ask the question, don't go home thinking about it. Excellent advice. So y'all talk about healing for about 45 minutes now and I was listening and to Pika, this is for you and for everybody on the panel. So you have experienced healing justice, but you have experienced it with the Youth Organizing Collective. How has that experience helped you to do the work you are doing right now? And for people who don't know what healing justice is, I would love to get involved and also wanna help Holla to achieve his healing justice movement. Sure. Yeah. All right, so when I was invited by Corey to come experience the circle, it was life changing for me because it was led by the young people and it was dynamic because the engagement was very, that well the knowledge and the level of engagement really changed my life and it opened me to be able to share in a way that I was able to touch, but also be touched, to sit directly in front of someone who is younger than you where you can see your younger self and to really understand what you're saying, how that can affect their lives, but also seeing yourself. So it was felt like I was talking to myself that it was extremely powerful. And so just thinking about also working with you all and bringing that into Hope House for the women because that takes part of healing with the children and building from that. And so I would encourage, as far as getting involved with Holla, I mean afterwards to see one of you or to Corey and to continue to one, get engaged in the circle because it was everyone there. It was black, white, brown, everyone was there and everyone actually, I felt like there was kind of like a release afterwards, it was just a great experience. Cool. Also I have a question for Corey too. This ain't biased, bro. Corey, I want you to tell everyone in the room your perspective of what healing justice means to you. Again? To you, this is your perspective of healing justice on the inside. On a local level, it means, like what I said earlier, like me, my wife is here, my son is here, we love each other, but real family and real people, we have real issues that make our love complicated. So what it means to me is really honoring and grappling with the ways that I play a part in complicating our relationship. And trying to build with my family and creating a situation where we can see each other in a full way. So it starts with what I said earlier, really it's about building, expanding hope. It's about shared leadership. It's about understanding how you hurt other people and how you may hurt, whether you know it or not consciously or unconsciously, how, because how people have been raised or what they experience or how they internalize stuff, like just you being you sometime, even when you don't have any bad intentions to it. And this is particularly like, you know, for dudes who are in spaces with women, for white people who are in spaces with a lot of black people, like just you being you and who you've been socialized maybe landing on somebody in a real bad way because you're not, because if you're not conscious, so it starts with like loving my family and figuring out how I could be better as a father, as a husband and taking that into my movement of social justice and sharing that with the world. It's about deep vulnerability. It's about owning the hardest parts. It's about working through fear. The last thing I would say is about working through fear because sometimes we are worried about how, so it's a lot of self love to help you work through fear and to help you dive into a vulnerable place where I believe is a lot of our magic powers at. So that's all I would say too. So this is sort of an honor for me too. This is a question I have for Susan. So this was a long-term executive director of a community agency on the Upper West Side and spent over 40 years doing community work and when I retired this year, they named the book, it was worked for the Goddard Riverside Community Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, similar issues and they named it the Goddard Riverside, Stephen Russo Book Prize for Social Justice in the winter this year, the first year was becoming Miss Burton's Sue's book, which is quite moving and I'm very honored that the book that was named after my career that Sue's was, and then New Press was one and Sue was the book was the first year winner so it's really, really very moving and thank you. My question for you, Susan, what struck me was, could you talk a little bit about your process for writing the book? Because there are a lot of different experiences in different ways that we express it but it's a real leap to be able to figure out how to put it down in such a way that you did in a book and so a little bit about how you did that and how your whole experience and what you went through in the organization that sort of became this book that's a way of sharing it with so many other people. So I think the process for me understanding the journey, the my life trajectory started with the reading of the New Jim Coral and because the depth of the injustice, I knew there was stuff that happened that shouldn't have happened but the depth of it and our government's interaction with that produced some of the experiences and the environment that came out of the environment in which our government was really accomplice in producing allowed me to go back and reexamine not only my life but my parents' life and that's where I began to really line up my experiences that landed me into much of the harm and the pain that I experienced so I started with my mother and father running from the deep south, Texas, looking for a better life and a better place to raise their children and be and you know, the came to California, the land of milk and honey but they landed in the projects an area that had been constructed to receive black people fleeing from the south. They had already laid the plan out and my mother and father unspeak knowing just like fell into it and I talk about playing jacks on the floor of the projects which were concrete and I loved playing jacks there cause the ball bounced real high and I could screw my jacks in, I could catch the ball and I could be a good jacks player but later I would be walking on semen floors in prison and there were no jacks. There was a job that paid me 8 cent an hour and so I went through my early life, I went through year by year by year starting with my mom and experience by experience by experience and it was painful at one part, one morning I remember waking up in my living room and there was a ball of sadness around me as big as this room and I just had to sit there in it and say, how do does a little girl, how does a little girl, a woman be treated this way? How could the response be so cruel and so harmful? But then I checked back in with my therapist and went to a few sessions and then it was like, damn, I survived it and I'm kicking butt now, you know, and so I got to the second half of becoming Ms. Burton, the half where Ms. Burton is developing fully and wholly and powerfully but it was a year and three months of reliving colors and characters and feelings and taste and pain and hurt and victory and, you know, insights and so it was, I needed to do that. We need to talk about women and mass incarceration. Women are the fastest growing segment of the prison system. We need to talk about what happens when all of the men have been, most of the men, not all of them, most of the men have been labeled second class and now you're coming after the women. What's left for our children? What's left for our community? So we need to talk about that and what that looks like and what that brings. So that was the reasoning around writing the book. I didn't know it was gonna get you a war. So that's just the cherry on top. Thank you so much for being here. Who got there at first? I don't wanna, all right, go ahead. Thank you guys all for talking. I know when I was incarcerated, I did like a lot of motivating and counseling and things like that, but it weighed heavy on me but I always had somebody I can go to which was a facilitator or something. Who feeds you guys? After you give all that you have to everybody else, who feeds you? Who gives it to you? Great question, thank you. So what, a lot of people, watching you take pictures yesterday was food for my soul? Yeah, I would say, yeah, my mom's. I started up the story of my mom's because my mom's is still struggling and she was calling me literally right now probably. And texting me, but she's still fighting and that strength is just beautiful. That's a beautiful strength to hold on to and be close to. The people that touched me in prison, there's so many people that blessed me with wisdom, with potential, with hope that would never come out of prison the way the system is designed. Who just gave it to me, seen me in a yard and invested deepness in me as a way of living for themselves. But it may have been selfish for them in that moment but it was really precious for me because I didn't even understand who I was. My son, my wife, I can just keep going. YOC, like our young people, like just seeing Kieran and Alex in the building, we got two programs that our young people are going through an 18 month leadership process. We spent a lot of time together, like three times a week, six hours at a time. That's not even talking about when we got to prep for a panel like this or anything else. We just spent a lot of time together and we struggled but to see that the transformation they're taking as individuals. It lets us know that the work that we're doing to see Susan, to see Topeka, to see the work that formerly incarcerated folks are doing, it lets us know that we're still alive and that we still gotta add on. So I'm motivated by us and by my connection to me that know that I'm us. And who feeds me, my sisters inside? Like I get emails and phone calls every single day. Women who have life sentences and double life sentences, 13 life sentences. And who may never even come home if policies don't change, right? First time offenses. And when I get a call from them and they just wanna know what's going on and that they're proud because with the hope that they have a one day coming home that they're hoping to come to Hope House, you know, that allows me to know that I have to move. Like, you know, that gives you the energy to say that sisters are being released every single day and someone has to be there to receive them. You know, when I think about Susan in 1998 and where was I in 1998 and where am I now just starting the things that she's done for decades and what is it gonna look like decades from now? You know, that what feeds me, the understand that, you know, you're moving in purpose. You know, that's you, you feed me, the equation feeds me, you know? Hey, Corey, you talked about the need and the lack of opportunity for people of color, people who are, you know, in the LGBT community to kind of get help and also to connect with their vulnerabilities. So are your organizations kind of, do you think this is a concern, right? To help out the LGBT community and kind of are the current opportunities out there for people of color, women and children kind of encompassing of LGBT struggles as well? Yeah, definitely. I think it's definitely of a concern. I think, like I said earlier, I think there's a lot of policy and political climate stuff that we can address around LGBTQ stuff. But just thinking about us and healing justice and just thinking about our own internal spaces, thinking about our own communities. There's a lot of healing that we gotta do but amongst ourselves around how we show up around other people's humanity. The stuff that we internalize about who we think we are versus who we think other people are. So yeah, the work that I'm talking about, the curriculum that we design, the space that we do in HALA is not perfect. You know, we're always learning but the intention is that we're trying to create a space that brings in all our humanities so that our young people are learning, studying the history of some of these topics. We're bringing our real life experience. Some of us are queer, some of us is trans. So our crew is undocumented, formerly incarcerated queer, trans. We got like four sisters, we got some South Asians. We got a young white youth who grew up in Bushwick who's, so we have a really dope collective that have like standpoints of really deep experiences and deep wisdom. So for us to function every day, we gotta be intentional about how we create that space to welcome folks in. But on a larger thing, I think, yeah, I think like there's a lot of conversations around policy outside of our immediate space in our homes and the culture of our world and the workplace that like, yeah, like black LGBTQ, black trans. Like it's not just LGBTQ. When you throw trans and you throw blackness on top of those things, those things complicate the issue even more. So yeah, we need to keep having more conversations about that. And I mentioned that point because a lot of times when we talk about LGBTQ, like I'm connected to a lot of like trans identifying folks and they are not even in that conversation sometimes because their transness and their blackness still doesn't fit the model what LGBTQ should look like or should roll out like with. So it's a lot of like work around like, like who fits the category of LGBTQ and who is still excluded from that too. So it's just a lot of work that we all, like this is another thing about Hill injustice. It's about your own work, your own individual work that you need to do to understand what humanity is going through. Like even though I'm not queer or my trans, I don't mean it's not my job to understand and learn more about what queer and trans people are going through in my community. If I say that's my community. So I think, so with the point that I'm saying is that we all, every day, every second, every conversation we should be working on our individual transformation to move us to a different place. And I just like to add that people, all people leaving those places of torture, those places of confinement, those places of exploitation are criminal justice, are injustice, or are jail, leaving chains, leaving captivity, coming back to our community need a safe place to land where they can be welcomed, where they can heal. And that's all communities across this country. So what we're doing at a new way of life is working with UCLA to create a model replication study to roll out next year, the opportunity for people to learn from our model how to do effective community base, grassroots, underground railroad reentry. And that includes all communities. So that's where my next phase of my life of development is to support the development of safe homes nationally. And Topeka opened the first one in the Bronx on October 28th. But we're gonna scale it up. We hope Brooklyn is next, Topeka. So we have time maybe for two more questions, and then- You have four more people. I know. So how about four more questions, but we're super efficient. And then don't forget that Susan's gonna be here signing our book. I hope you all got a copy of a book on the way in. We're gonna be signing on the right. But if we don't get to all your questions, then I hope the three of you will be hanging around a little to answer questions, but go for it. Okay, this is a hard question. So brace yourselves. What is justice? Yeah, justice is me. Justice is young and dope, grass root leadership being shown in Brooklyn Museum on a public stage, that's what it looks like. That's what it smells like. Justice is, yeah, I think it depends on what time frame we in in history. I think about, it depends on what's the conversation, who's in the room. So, because justice means different things to what we're speaking to. But I think it means facing like the history of things that denied ideas of what justice may be. And then it also means investing in the communities and the people who receive some of the brutal end of that injustice. Like you got like two dope black women up here on a panel who are formerly incarcerated. And you got me who's also formerly incarcerated up here. Like this is what justice looked like, this is what it smelled like. Like we need more, this needs to be normal more. We need to, like justice is really like coming out with a new normal and reshaping some of the relationships that we have with institutions, that we have with who's an expert, but we, sorry. Yeah, and I think it's the same for you as it is for me. The same for the West side, the East side, the Bronx Manhattan as it is for the next person. And I guess equality, you know, really quality. I would just say justice is love. I was gonna say that too. Somebody go, I just stood up for y'all. Somebody jump up. So I'm a former high school teacher and I have been following the conversation around restorative justice a lot. And I know that's a little different from the framework of healing justice. I imagine you all are supporters of restorative justice as a concept, but I'm wondering if there are any nuances or watch-outs or sort of critiques you would have of that movement in schools right now. I don't wanna be guilty before I'm restored. You know, don't tell me, you know, I don't wanna be guilty before I can get some restoration. You know, restore me, you know, yeah. So you gotta watch who's pushing restorative justice out. And also restorative, from what I understand about the teachings and the history, like as an indigenous person, I'm keep throwing it out there because I feel like restorative circling is an indigenous practices. And it's not just about when so-called conflict happens, it's about how we govern our life, how we hold space, how we build relationships, how we build institutions, how we build babies, how we build community, we're always in circle. We don't just do it when so-called conflict happens. So I think part of my thing is that the way it rolls out in school, I think it's not, for one, culturally, it's not something that's culturally in the whole institution. Like the principal, dean, and superintendent, none of them are going through the circle process. It's just about the young people who are bad at a certain moment. Maybe teachers who are like dealing with that every day are more in it, but it's not a cultural, foundational principle to governing our everyday cultural life. So for me, I feel like when you, like it loses a lot of its history and its philosophy of why it's important, why it brings people together, why people are able to show up a certain way when they're always in a step and when you just send them in there when they go into the box or when they go into the dean. So I feel like, and Hollis started off in schools, like when we came out of prison in 2009, our first four years was volunteering in public schools in New York City with the at-risk youth. And the way policy is so flooded on public schools in New York, like deans and principals are being impacted by that policy too because they're teachers assessment. So there's all kinds of like, so the school situation to me is just, that's a sight of extreme like fear. Everybody is like fear from their school getting closed, fear that I'm gonna get a bad score on my testing thing, that I'm not gonna be a good teacher anymore, fear that I'm gonna be a one. As a student, you're fear that you're gonna be a one, that you ain't gonna be a four. A four means that you are good in all your stuff. You're gonna be a one. So all these testings, it's a lot of fear that I think is counterproductive too to like the philosophy of where restorative justice is. I can just keep going, but I think, I also think it's really important too though to bring people together and to negotiate stuff. But I think like, yeah, we need to be honest about the things that doesn't make sense in that situation too. Can I, I'm just gonna insert the Brooklyn Community Foundation. Three years ago, we launched a restorative justice pilot in Brooklyn in three high schools and a middle school. And I just, you know, to be clear and I completely agree with my colleagues here on the stage, not my colleagues, but my friends here on the stage. Come on, we're calling. All right, all right, all right, thank you. I'm not sure I deserve that place of honor, but it is completely about the whole community and one thing. So one thing I'd say is check out our website about this project that we're doing. And the second thing I'd say is you should look at transformative justice. Actually one of the people delivering in our pilot really subscribes to this concept of transformative justice, which really takes into account pretty much the conversation we've had here today, which is really looking at cumulative historic violence and trauma and what it brings into schools. But one thing I would say about restorative justice is at least we are maybe reconsidering a conversation about thinking about children in any way that is punitive. And it's entirely rooted in racism and it's absolutely new Jim Crow. So just even the idea that maybe there's an opportunity that we can rethink. And I think in some ways I would say that about justice. You know, there's a lot of conversation now about it's not reproductive rights, it's reproductive justice. And I totally agree with that because I think it's really about reimagining. So restorative justice definitely has some issues but the idea that there's even an opportunity for a counter narrative, I think is what's really clear. So that would be my answer to your question. All right. Sorry, it wasn't very efficient and I was saying that we should be efficient. Okay, go for it. First off I'd just like to say how inspirational it is to see three people that have worked through such tremendous trauma and have come to a place in their lives where they can express the power within themselves to both make, you know, to be positive individuals but also positive influences on their communities. And I was wondering if any of all of you had some sort of epiphanal moment where you kind of saw your way out of the cycle of trauma that is kind of internalized, I feel, or that, well at least I have found myself and with an internalized cycle of trauma and how you kind of got yourself out of that both in terms of how you could enact personal growth but then also how you could take that personal growth and start having that be a positive effect on your community. I would say that for me when I was able to actually see someone for and relate to someone to see their experiences and humanize it really, you know, because when we also think about racism and we think about privilege, you also have to think about that as the constructs of even within our race, African-Americans, you know, and so for me to be able to connect with other people of color who had different experiences than I that were impact by a system which I too end up being politicized after reading the New Jim Crow when I was inside was something that had been built for generations and generations to come. So despite me thinking that it was in us and them I was able to say, okay, this is me. And then once I went through that process of really understanding the things that bought them through trauma and then bought them to trauma and then bought them to incarceration where despite whatever experiences I had had in my life that may have been different than theirs, we ended up at the same place. So it was a common thread. And so I was able to heal because that was my moment where I said, okay, I see myself and I see what's happened to me and those before me and next to me. And so how do we begin this process of healing? And so that's was my journey. And I write about in the book a day when I was incarcerated in prison in the sergeant's hall. And I stopped this instructor and I tell her about some things that happened in my childhood. And her response to me was, don't worry about passing my class. You have enough to deal with. And that was the first time anyone had actually verified. Something went really, really wrong in my life. And that began the process of introspect and healing. But it is a process. And I'm still in that process. I'm not done yet. There's more, but that was the pivotal aha moment for me. And this lady, she was feared. In order to get out of that particular prison, that particular prison sentence, I had to pass that class. And she was feared for flunking her entire class. But she said to me in this moment of pity, compassion, empathy or whatever it was. She said, don't you worry about my class. And I was like, damn, something really went wrong. And then I could begin to really begin to look at what my experiences had been. And it was like, I got permission in that moment to begin the process of introspect and healing. And I'm still introspecting and healing. Yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. So that is Ellen Adler. Right there, stand up, Ellen. She published The New Jim Crow and Becoming Ms. Burton along with a lot of other books. She is the publisher. Yes. And one of my goals and dreams and realities now is that Becoming Ms. Burton is going to be made, there's gonna be a prison addition. 11,000 books are being printed, especially just for people incarcerated. So next year I'll be going on a tour. My tour will consist, next year my tour will consist of being included women's prisons across the nation. And then in those prisons with those visits, I'll be looking for places to replicate a new way of life also. I was in Alabama three weeks ago. I went there, they let hard copies in there. And I went there and a woman sat down next to me and she said, she was in prison for drug conspiracy. I mean for drug trafficking. So I looked her up when I left. She said, I asked her when she was coming home, she said she's never coming home. When I looked her up for trafficking drugs and she's from New York y'all, she got 999 years, 99 months and 99 days for being on the train between New York and Alabama with drugs. Yes, devastating. 999 years, 99 months and 99 days. And it's been searing into me what are we gonna do about her? What can I do? So this prison tour, well I'm working on how to build a campaign for her. And now we have the opioids crisis and it's a health problem. Should, did you talk to Brian Stevenson when you were down in Alabama? I did. The next day I went to Brian. He'll take care of her. No, the next day I went to Brian Stevenson's office and I said, do you know Ms. Cooley? And they said Geneva. And they said there's nothing we can do for her. There's a little glitch in the law that was passed for people like her that excludes her. But I've been back in contact with him and we're looking at, I have the attorneys at a new way of life also looking at it to see what we can do. But look at that sentence and look at the health approach for opioid. Did you hear me? So, yeah. She's 70 years old. She's been in prison 15 years. And she's 70 years old. We gonna get up out of there, right? We gonna get up out of there. Good afternoon everyone that's on the panel. Welcome back to a free world. Not completely free cause it's something that you really have to fight for. The important thing that I wanted to bring out is that in this country until it hits home, nobody cares. Everybody looks away until it hits their own house, their personal hearts and their personal minds. That's when they really start to think about how does system work. This system is really not about the little man, the little nine to fivers. This system is about the clock. How much you can put in before you leave this planet. We have to come together as a people and recognize that these people went through hell just to tell their stories. Just to be sitting there right now and sharing this. Believe me, I know the gates are still in your hearts. The bars, the locks, the keys, the time. Check in, check out. I have friends that have been incarcerated and they're working and they're doing their best but it's still not good enough. Boredom and torture is very, very important for us to think about. Because in some family right now, someone is going through torture and they're going through boredom. Why do you think they came up with pre-K for every kid? Because those little kids was bored, sitting home doing nothing all day. And so they came up with pre-K for everyone. They opened the gates for these little minds to start getting busy so they can stay out of mischief, so they can start doing things that's productive to society. We have to get on board and stop looking the other way, thinking, oh, it's not about me, I don't care. We gotta start looking at people like this. People who are trying to be good. People who are trying to do something better. And we got to give them the support they need. So my name is Patricia Hill. Anything you need me to do, I'm sitting right here. Just let me know if I could just start from point A and just continue going. Because we gotta get involved. We gotta stop looking the other way. People are coming in every day from different countries looking at us, thinking that we're a bunch of idiots letting things like this happen. I'm watching a court show on TV where they have three judges to determine the decision of what's going on. We need more than 12 people to sit on a jury stand and determine what goes on. We need to change the structure. We need to get involved and know that one day maybe one of ours will be sitting there. So I just want to say that all of us, we have organizations and you can support. You can support by going on Holla's website and hit that, you gotta donate now button up there. We always, yeah, I mean, no amount of money is too small and we love reoccurring money that we can count on. So there's Holla's website. There's Hope House's website and there's a new way of life's website. If you want to support with dollars, just go there and support us. And there's other things you can do but I just wanted to put that out there. It's easy, reoccurring, whatever and support our work. We always need that unrestricted money to do things. One thing I wanna ask you, your youth that are in the training program, it felt like a little time. It's your compensation for them for participating, right on. Supported by Brooklyn Community Foundation. All right, all right, I gotta get you a card. Big round of applause for Susan Tamikat. Thank you. So I'm gonna sign books for whoever wants a signature.