 We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These words from the Declaration of Independence are familiar to many of us. And yet it took 143 years for women to get the right to vote, and 189 years for black people to get the right to vote. And still today, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are still only words for many people. Here in Boston, life expectancy varies by 30 years, depending on where you live. In Roxbury, with many poor and black people, life expectancy is 59 years. In the back bay, wealthy and mostly white, life expectancy is 91 years. It's tough to have liberty when you are in prison. The United States incarcerates 716 people for every 100,000 people. Our rate of incarceration is more than five times higher than most countries in the world. Millions of people in our country don't have health care, a decent job, good education, a home they can't afford, and that makes it pretty hard to pursue happiness. So on this show, you're going to meet people who are making it possible to have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. People today who are making the words of the Declaration of Independence come true. Hi, I'm Michael Jacoby-Brown. I'm your host for We Hold These Truths, and today we are honored and really privileged and lucky to have Brian Daw, who's the National Director of One Voice United. Welcome, Brian. Thank you, Mike. Nice to be here. You can tell me a little bit first about yourself, where you grew up, and where your values came from, and then tell us more about One Voice United. Well, thanks. Thank you for having me. Sure. I grew up actually just a couple of miles from here in Belmont, Massachusetts. Right. Basically, my dad was a truck driver. My mom was a house homemaker, and I credit all the values I do have to my mom and dad and the way I was raised, and that's about that. Now I started in corrections in 1982 as a state correctional officer in Massachusetts, totally by happenstance, a matter of economic necessity, brought me into the field, and I've been now in corrections for about 42, 41 years. And how did, tell me a little bit more about your dad. What was some of, I know a little bit we've talked, what are some of the lessons he taught you, those values? Well, I think one of the most important things he taught me was honesty and integrity. One of the very first lessons I learned from him was cooperation, working with other people is the way to get things done. He was a strong union guy, and he was a, he delivered liquor for, you know, he wasn't a healthy, a wealthy guy, it was a difficult job, and he brought me into that job as well when I was a young man. It was one of the first jobs I had, and I remember very fondly, one of the first times I went into work, actually it was the first time I went into work, he pointed you to the guy in the shop and said, that's Whitey, he says, Whitey's your union steward. When you get your first paycheck, make sure the union gets part of it, you're going to be part of the union. And so he taught me right then, the importance of working together with other folks for a common goal, and I think it started right back then, is my drive to do types of, that type of work, that type of organizing and stuff. And you said economic necessity led you to become a correction officer. Do you want to tell us, you know, what was going on there? Well I think Mike, probably like yourself, you grew up playing cowboys in Indians, cops and robbers, right? No one grows up locking their friends in the basement saying, I want to be a correction officer. That's not how it works. Over 90% of the people that I've worked with over the years have gone to corrections because of the economy of it. They needed a job, it's usually a state job, and there's usually good benefits, and that was the same with me. My first child was born on April 11th, and 50 days later I became a state correction officer for the first time. And I will say this, if you were to talk to my friends in high school, the last thing they would have thought of me was that they would have probably agreed that I could wind up in prison, but they never would have thought anyone would give me the keys. And like so many people in the business in corrections, it's a matter that you fall into it. You don't grow up wanting to do this job, it's a very difficult and dangerous job. Difficult and dangerous? What's it like on a, because you've been there for what, 18 years? Yeah, I worked behind the walls in MCI Norfolk, I was a state correctional officer for 16 years. And then I moved on to the national level and started working with organizations across the country. But as a correctional officer, it's a very, very difficult job. What's it like? Why don't you talk to people? Well, I'd go into work in the morning and it would be me and 60 convicted inmates, and I would control the housing unit. We didn't do any rehabilitation, unfortunately, that isn't what the job is about. It should be, but currently that's not what we do. We warehouse and we do security and we, and it's just a very tense environment constantly. There's no let up to that stress. You will go for months on end with absolutely nothing happening, nothing whatsoever. And then you'll come into work one day and there's a knife at somebody's throat that you're working with and you go from zero to 120 and you better be ready for that. And so it's a very difficult situation. It's very difficult for the folks that live there. When you look at the damage that it's doing to those who are incarcerated and those, the staff that work there, it shows you that there's a real, real issue that we need to address here that impacts all of us that are behind the walls whether you have the keys or you don't. Yeah. So what are those issues that you're trying to address with One Voice United? Well, One Voice United is an organization that's been formed by Andy Potter. Andy Potter is a 30-year correctional officer out of Michigan. And Andy's idea is to make sure that with so much reform going on. And we agree, there needs to be a lot of reform and corrections. But the voices of the staff, the men and women who do the job every day have been left out of that conversation. For all these years, we've been just relegated to just do as you're told. It's a paramilitary situation. You're not asked for your opinion, you're just told what to do. And the men and women who do the job know better than anybody the reforms that are needed that can help change the system the way it is. Yet we've been left out of that conversation forever. So Andy's entire motivation in that of One Voice United is to bring those voices of the men and women who do the job every day to the forefront in corrections reform. And to unite where we can on those issues of commonality, to make the changes we need to be made in corrections, to make it a better place for everybody. So that can be about rehabilitation and corrections. Yeah. You say, what are the things that correction officers really know a lot about? Well, they know interactions with human interaction. They know the inmate population. They know their proclivities. They know who they hand, who they chum with. What we don't get to know, unfortunately, and this is something that's very unfortunate in the culture. The inmates that I worked with, those are incarcerated I worked with, never met Brian Doe. They met Officer Doe. And conversely, I've never met John Doe's citizen who became an inmate. I've met Inmate Doe. Because we're all programmed before we even get into the system, that the system acts in a certain way and you're supposed to act within the system in that way. So as I approached the gates for the first time, my entire knowledge of corrections was based on what I learned from Hollywood and movies. And so you know that's bad. And the same thing goes with somebody who's just being incarcerated for their first time. What do they know? What they've seen in movies. So we assume those personas before we ever get in the door and we never meet each other. And the system then is designed to make sure we never meet each other. To keep us apart from each other and to keep us separate. It's a typical us against them divide and conquer mentality. So how does the system do that? How does it do that? Us against them? You know, I don't know that there's any one individual, individuals who set up to put one side against the other. It's the way the culture has developed. Good guys versus bad guys. And that's the way we've developed all the way along. And so we've never really looked in this country at corrections as a way of real abutation. We like to say we have, but we haven't. We've looked at it as warehousing and the main process is security and keeping the public safe and whatever happens to those inside happens. So what would it take to be a place for real rehabilitation? It takes listening. It takes cooperation. It takes money. Could you be more specific like what is the money going towards? Well, one of the things, if you want to look at some of the systems around the world that are considered to be successful. One of the situations that people always will point to is Norway. And they're a fine example. They were very much like the United States years ago and they had a cultural shift where they decided they weren't going to treat those who are incarcerated the way that they had been treating them all along. And so they changed to what they call the situation of normalcy where they believe they would start to treat the individuals who are incarcerated as normally as they could. They provide an environment that was more normal than we see in our prison system here. But what they realized is three key principles that we've never picked up on here, at least we refuse to. Number one was the training of their staff. In the United States, our average training will go from 3 to 10, maybe 13 weeks before you're a correctional officer. In Norway, it's two years. And they spend a year of that in basically a college environment, learning about rehabilitation, learning about intercommunication, learning about how to bring people into reentry, how to find them places to work, how to find them places to live. And that's their job as correctional officers. That's actually correcting. Another thing they do in Norway is it's in their constitution that you must work with the unions. The administration must work with the unions in order for any change to take place. So they mandate participation from line staff. In this country, we do the exact opposite. We don't want to hear from our unions. We don't want to hear from our associations. We just want you to do what you're told in corrections. So those are two of the major things. And the other major thing is they put their money where their mouth is. They invest in their system. Understanding, we know that it costs us more when we don't do the right thing when they come out on the other end. We know that, but we don't do anything about it. In Norway, they decided to do something about it. So they put their money up front, and now they're seeing the results they're seeing. Now, I don't want to say it's a perfect system, it's not. No system is. And they are now having to have some backsliding as their budgets have been cut a little bit. Their staffing ratios have increased. Now in our country, where I worked, and now this is back in 1988 when I started 82, I worked on a housing unit with 44 inmates and just me. When I left, it was 66 inmates and just me. The staffing ratio in Norway is 1.1 to 1. Now you get a lot more done, and you can do a lot more rehabilitation, and you can do a lot more one-on-one counseling with those types of numbers. It's simply not possible in this country because we don't want it to be. We prefer to just lock people up. Right. So what is, what are some of the things One Voice United is doing now, this group of correction officers? And can you tell me a little bit, you said Andy Potter started it. And what's your role been? Well, actually, I was a union official in Massachusetts after a few years. I got involved with the union. We actually started our own union in 1988, the Massachusetts Correctional Office Federated Union, and I was involved with them for quite a while and started networking with other unions across the country. And through those different machinations of different networking, I met Andy Potter probably about 15 years ago. And our paths had crossed on numerous occasions on various issues that we were dealing with. He's working for officers in Michigan. I was working for officers in Massachusetts. We found ourselves in a couple of panels over the last six or seven years about wellness issues, correctional officer mental health. And we found ourselves to be in complete agreement on not only that, but on a lot of other issues that we felt were pressing and needed to be addressed in our profession. So after I worked with Andy in a couple of projects that they brought me on as a consultant at first. And then they asked me if I would come on as their national director. And so I've been working with them now on starting my 34th year. And what are some of those wellness issues for correctional officers? We have basically four pillars that we work on. And wellness is one of those key pillars. If you look at our PTSD rate, the average citizen in the United States has a 3.5% PTSD rate. A correctional officer has 34%. A police officer is 15%. Wow. If you look at our suicide rates, a police officer's suicide rate is 15% per 100,000. Correctional officer is 38% per 100,000. We lose 11 officers a year to violence behind the walls. We lose 156% three per week to suicide. The damage it does to our families. And now all the problems we've had with COVID-19, under staffing, we can't hire, we can't retain. We're getting force mandated over time, three, four times a week. It's impacting our family lives. It's impacting our sleep patterns. It's impacting our eating patterns, our mental and physical health. It's having a devastating impact. Who wants to do that job? And as it gets worse and worse, fewer and fewer people wanna do the job and fewer and fewer people stay. We're seeing a huge staffing crisis across the country right now. And I don't think there's too many departments in the corrections, department of corrections across the country would disagree with that. We're hearing constantly about the problems with retention. And a lot of that stems from staffing and wellness. When you don't have the proper staffing, you can't provide the time off, you can't provide the training. And more important, most importantly, I'm not equally important, let me put it that way, is that you can't provide the programming things that are necessary for those who are incarcerated to be able to re-enter society in a positive way. You can't do programming. You can't have educational. You can't have vocational programming. You lose your substance abuse programming. All these important factors in rehabilitation take a back seat. If you don't have staffing, you can't do any of these things. Because our first protocol is and always will be safety, security of the public. That's number one. That's our first protocol. Our second protocol is safety and security of the staff we work with, civilian staff. Our third protocol is the safety and security of our brother and sister offices. And our fourth protocol is the safety of those who are incarcerated. And we have to take it in that step. And if we don't have the staffing to make sure that those areas are taken care of, we can't do anything else. Right. One Voice United has been working with reform groups and prisoners and ex-prisoners to find common ground. Can you explain a little bit more about that? What you're actually doing? Well, the first thing we do on any of the issues of reform, the first thing we do is we get informed by our members, but not our members, by the men and women we represent. We form focus groups with officers and staff around the country. And we sit down with them. We say, these are the issues. How do you look at this? How is this impacting you today? Because to be honest, I haven't worked behind the walls in several years and neither has Andy. So for us to say we're informed on the day-to-day, we're not. We are to an extent, but the actual living of it every day, we need to be informed by the men and women who are doing the job. Once we understand where they're standing, then we take a look at what issues may work with the incarcerated population. Things like single bunking, like increased visitation, like food quality, food should be of good quality. It should be served in the right proportions if we serve at the right temperatures and at the right time. Things like this that we can agree with, increased programming. Currently, we're doing something right now where we're gonna be meeting with myself and seven other former correctional officers. I'm meeting with eight former felons in North Carolina for a three-day retreat at the end of October, the end of September, just to sit down and see where can we find common ground? Where are some of the key issues that impacted all of us when we were behind the walls? And how can we make it better? How can we work with these different groups and make it better? How did you get that to come about? Finding the... That's Andy and his connecting and his network and the people on our team that have those types of connections that work with these groups. And to be quite honest with you, they're seeking us out. They're seeking you out. Yes, they are, because for the first time, there is a legitimate voice that is looking towards working together to make change. Right, so you're talking about single bunking, that would take, what would it take to do that? Well, it takes money, it takes will. But when you see a lot of, we lost a lot, didn't lose a lot, a lot of inmates were released early. A lot of people were released early during COVID, whether they were geriatric or they had healthcare issues. And we saw a lot of facilities with open spaces. Well, rather than single bunk the inmates, they just moved them into another area and they kept them triple and double bunked. We need to have them single bunked. Why is that good for the guards, for the correction officers? It's good for the incarcerated too, for their privacy. They have a time if they want to study, they don't want to be pressured by somebody else. They may not like their celly. I mean, you don't get to choose who you room them with in a six by eight. You get who you get. And a lot of times that doesn't work out too well. So we think, and also from a security standpoint, if we have to search a facility, an inmate cell, well, we have to go in and unfortunately bring them out of the cell because they won't come out. Well, it's a lot easier if we're dealing with one individual rather than several. And so from a security standpoint, it's important, but it's also important from a physical space standpoint for those who are incarcerated. And so that they can have that little modicum of privacy and there's very little in a prison setting. But so they can have at least a little bit for themselves. Right, and you mentioned other things. Food, programming, we're not trained in mental health. 60% of the inmates are 60% of the people entering our system right now have one or more mental health issues. We're not trained to deal with that, never. Very, very few academies ever deal with Michigan as one of them, I'm not aware of, most of the others don't, with any mental health training, even the awareness of, okay, these are the signs and symbols that this looks like there may be something here, this individual may need special hope. And actually in reality, we're taught to do the opposite. Because if we identify somebody with a mental health issue and we show them any favoritism as a result because we understand there's a cognitive issue here, we inadvertently put a target on their back from the other inmate population. So we're forced in a situation of having to be very careful, even with showing empathy and compassion. And we're not trained either in exactly how to do that and how to identify that. And those units need to be separated so that that part of the population can get the treatment it needs without being a situation that can be pretty volatile otherwise. Right, and does One Voice United work with government, states? Absolutely, we work with the Bureau of Justice Assistance. We're working with the CLA, which is the Corrections Leadership Association. We work with all of these groups to find out where are the common points, where can we start to make advances and make changes? One of the things we have to realize too, as we bring these two groups together, for reform, as we try and find those common issues that everybody... The groups are the correction officers and those incarcerated, the reform movement. We have to realize that we're dealing with 200 years of failure. We're dealing with 200 years of us against them. And no one's gonna come in and wave a magic wand and all the attitudes are gonna change. It's not going to happen. It's going to take a long concerted effort that takes baby steps so that those who do the job can feel that we have credibility, that they can trust what we're trying to do. And the reformers can also feel the same that our motivations are similar to what they're trying to do as well. We're all better from a system that's healthier psychologically and physically. And we don't have that system right now. In fact, I mentioned that the PTSD of correctional officer, 34%. The PTSD of the inmate male population is 60%. Now you put 60% and 34% together in that type of an environment and you can see the volatility. And when there's no training or very little training in dealing with some of that stuff, you can see why we have the situations we have. Right, and if you had some success in moving, you said it's a slow process to change 200 years of bad policy, bad culture. Just the fact that we're gonna be sitting down with eight formerly convicted felons and discussing these issues is a huge step forward. Right, has that ever happened before? Not that I'm aware of. Really? I'm not saying that it hasn't, but it hasn't happened that I'm aware of. We also did our first ever Blue Ribbon Commission on Wellness where we brought academia together. We brought experts from around the country together and exposed the trauma that staff feel when they have to do these jobs and staff family when they have to do these jobs. It really impacts our family as well because we don't come home and talk about what we saw. I'm not gonna tell my wife some of the things I had to see or the things that had to be done today. That's not a family conversation. So where does that conversation take place? It either doesn't take place or it takes place in the bathroom, I mean in the bathroom, or it takes place in your sleep, in your nightmares. And you need a release for that and we're trained to not have a release for that. We're trained the opposite. We're trained to toughen up. And so what's the result when you're trained to toughen up? Our mortality rate has us dead between 59 and 61 years old. We lose about 17 years of our life to be a correctional officer compared to the average citizen. It's a hell of a price to pay to do that job. That's the result. The health issues that we have, the obesity issues, the substance abuse issues, divorce. All of these things in the correctional officer profession are far above the baseline for anybody else in public safety. And that includes Iraqi military veterans, that includes firefighters, EMTs. That's something I tell this young kids too. No, I want to be a police officer. I want to be a firefighter. I want to be an EMT. Okay, you can be all those things, be a correctional officer. Because we're all of those things. There is no 911 in prison. We are 911. We respond to every emergency, assault, riots, fires, domestic disputes, medical emergencies. No one picks up the phone and says, call the fire department, call 911. No, it's us, we're there, we're it. And so tell me a little bit more about One Voice United and what its plans are now. Well, we're working, as I said, on four primary pillars. Training is a major one. Staffing is critical. And wellness is also a major component of what we have to work with. Those are part of the critical things that we're dealing with, with the infrastructure that we have to work with. We're working with officers around the country. We have leadership assembly where we deal with unions and associations. We bring officers in to learn tactic and strategies. We'll be going to Gettysburg in September on a leadership seminar to work with the U.S. Army War College on strategy and tactics and how to bring people together to open up doors to talk and to do more things than a more of a dynamic security sitting. Right. And as an organizer, I know you've developed independent correction officers union here in Massachusetts. Can you tell me some of, as an organizer, what are some of the lessons you learned just about how you went about doing that? I know you had to have people in every different prison and people who had trusted. I wonder, you know, if someone's starting out and thinking of organizing in as difficult an area as prison reform, what are some of the things you've learned as an organizer who's done it now for decades? I think the two key things I would say is number one, perseverance. And number two, pick up the phone. Successful people pick up the phone. Non-successful people talk about picking up the phone. Can you say more about that? What do you mean pick up the phone? You gotta make the call. You can't, you gotta look for people who are like-minded, people who are willing to do the things you wanna do. Have pilots, have meetings, get to know people, go to the institutions, talk to the facility people. And one of the things we used to do, and I get a big kick out of it, and we fell across it just by happenstance. We went to a prison one night, it was the 11-7 shift was changing over. So it was about 10, 30 quarter of 11. I was pouring rain out, just happened to be pouring rain. And the officers are coming in and going out. One of the officers says, what are you guys doing here? It's pouring rain, it's midnight, and right there. It hit me. And I turned to him when I said, this is 24 hours a day? Your prison's open 24 hours a day? Well, so aren't we. We're gonna be here, we're gonna represent 24 hours a day because that's what this job is. And so you find those areas of commonality, the areas where these guys feel, and these gals feel that they've been left out of the conversation. And you give them that hope and that insight and that the feeling that there is more, the feelings they're having, they're not alone. And in addition to picking up the phone, you also said you go to them. Absolutely. You didn't wait for them to... No, if you wait for them, you can just, you'll wait forever. Right. You have to be active. And so what did you actually do in Massachusetts? Where did you go? We went to all the prisons. We went to every single one of the prisons. Some of the guys we got on our board with state transportation. So they naturally went all around the state. And so we used those guys and brought them into the fold and they started supporting what we were doing as well. It was a lot of hard work. It was a heck of a fight. But we won. And now that union has been in place. It's the largest law enforcement union in England. It's been in place for 35 years. And what are some of the other things that you did that worked? Picking up the phone, going to people. What I wanted to do too was try and find best practices. So what I did was I started calling unions around the country who represented Correctional Office and asked them different questions. What are you doing on this issue? What are you doing on staffing? What are you doing on your contract, on particular items? And so it started almost an informal network which then I developed into the American Correctional Office Intelligence Network which still functions today under the OVU umbrella. Where it links all these key groups of associations around the country in establishing and seeking best practices in the field of corrections. That's great. Well, if you had one thing to tell someone who's trying to organize a group, whether it's Correctional Officers or prisoners or ex-prisoners or tenants, what would you tell them is the most important thing to do? I would have to say it would be perseverance. I would say don't let up. Continue with your dream. Continue to move forward. But listen, listen. It's very important. There's that old saying you have two ears and one mouth. Well, there's a reason for that. Listen, understand where the people you are trying to represent are coming from and what their feelings are in their position. They don't necessarily need to hear your motor mouth go. You need to hear what they need to say. And they'll go from there. Thank you, that's great. That's great. Listening, perseverance, Brian Daw from One Voice United, a great organizer who's doing incredible work, innovative work right now in 2023 and 2024 bringing together felons, prisoners, and correction officers. Again, thank you, Brian Daw from One Voice United for being here. I'm Michael Jacoby Brown, your host of We Hold These Truths, and we appreciate you, those of you who have listened and watched our show this time and we hope to see you again at the next time. Thank you very much. Okay, thanks, Brian.