 Hi everybody. It is so great to be here in every respect. I'm thrilled to be at John Jay. Be based at John Jay. I really love this institution. I love CUNY. I'm a product of the CUNY system. Queen's College class of long time ago. And so and it is wonderful to be able to be home doing this talk. I've had the chance to speak about this book in a lot of different places and venues and I'm most excited to be able to do it here with my people here at John Jay and to see so many of my old students. I guess I didn't torture you that badly. You came to see me speak so thank you very very much. So this book and this project of global prison travel was born here at John Jay. Well it was kind of born actually at an extension of John Jay in upstate New York and that's Otisville Correctional Facility where the Prison to College Pipeline program that I started six years ago is based. And the the Prison to College Pipeline program if you don't know about us find out. We're on the John Jay website. But through that program I was spending a lot of time in upstate New York in prison's teaching and when the program initially started I started working on it about seven and a half years ago when I would tell sort of your average person in the street that I was teaching in prison most of the time the response was what and why and are you crazy? Why are you going to prisons? Why are you teaching in prisons? Why do these people deserve an education? And what I started to notice about maybe two three years ago is that those kinds of responses stopped coming. Essentially people understood the moment I said I teach in prison or said the words Prison to College Pipeline. There was an immediate understanding of why this was necessary and why mass incarceration is a crisis almost across the board. And I think this is because we can all agree that a massive shift happened in the discourse around criminal justice and in the discourse around mass incarceration. There started to be under understanding that this was a crisis that it needed to be addressed. Something had to be done here. And there was obviously a lot of talk about it and there still is. Some of you may have seen the documentary that came out this weekend 13th. Ava DuVernay's wonderful documentary. But that's just one example, I think, of how sort of mainstream this discourse has gotten. But what I noticed in the context of that was that it seemed to me that there were two very big things missing from the conversation. There was a lot of talk and there is a lot of talk about the costs of mass incarceration, the practical issues around it, why it doesn't work, why it's making our country go broke. But there didn't seem to be that much talk about the moral dimensions of it and the philosophical dimensions of it, at least in a mainstream context. Why do we incarcerate? What are prisons for? What are we doing when we lock people up? What is the concept of punishment? Is it defensible as an ethical concept? It just seemed like a lot of these big moral questions were getting left out of the conversation. And the other thing that it seemed was missing was the global context for all of this. Plenty of talk, of course, about the US as the world's largest incarcerator with 25% of the world's prison population and only 5% of its population. But there again, in the mainstream circles, there didn't seem to be a conversation happening about how this is impacting the world and how the world is being blighted and impacted by mass incarceration and use of prisons altogether. And so I decided to take on writing a book that became incarceration nations by combining these two things, by on the one hand, trying to morally undermine some of these notions that we take for granted about prisons and incarceration. Number one and number two, think globally about this crisis. And so the book and the journey was born. And I knew two things when I started that guided my journey. One was that I wanted to write for a broad audience. I am, of course, an academic, I'm a professor, but I'm also a journalist and a filmmaker and a radio producer. And I really wanted this to be something that could extend beyond the academy and be talked about and galvanized change in a broader sense. So I knew I wanted it to be a broad audience. And I also knew that I wanted to do as opposed to stand and look whenever I could. I always seem I wear a lot of hats in the world, but I'm primarily first and foremost, always an educator. That's what I love to do the most. So I wanted to be able to teach, to be involved, to volunteer, to engage with people in prisons in the way that I do here whenever possible. A, because I've learned the most that way and B, because there's a lot of kind of anthropological rubbernecking that happens when you're working in the context of prisons. I wanted to minimize the voyeurism and try to be present as much as possible. And so what I thought I would do today is just take everybody on a whirlwind journey to the nine countries that I visited, give you a sense of what happened in them, what I focused on in each country and in each chapter, and then conclude with some kind of general visions looking forward, some takeaways. And so we start here in Rwanda. This is the prison in Kigali in Rwanda. The men in orange have been sentenced. The men in pink are on remand. I started the journey in Rwanda because of the one word that many, probably all of you, associate with Rwanda when I say it, which is genocide. So I come to this work from a restorative justice framework, which means that when I look at issues of crime and justice, I think of victims first. And I think of victims' needs first. And so I wanted to start the book not by looking at quote unquote offenders, but focusing on victims and focusing on the needs of victims and thinking about what those are and how we often get them wrong. And so I went to a country that embodies this on a grand scale and that's Rwanda. So after the genocide, there was a very notorious approach to dealing with this evil crime and this traumatic event. And that was the nationwide gachacha courts. So essentially after the genocide, everyone, those who committed it, or many of those who committed it who were caught, were thrown into prisons that then became massively overcrowded, disease-ridden. There are actually photos and documentation of the way people were literally dying on top of each other in the Rwandan prisons because of the overcrowding. And so President Kagame decided to go with a rather unorthodox approach, which was these gachacha courts, essentially community courts, whereby those who had committed the genocide could confront, face those whom they had harmed and work out systems of reparations and apologies for that. And this happened on a grand scale. It was a much bigger and more complex entity than that, but I'm giving you the nutshell version. And so it actually seemed to have worked in many respects. The prisons were slowly liquidated so that they were no longer dramatically overcrowded. They and many communities were rebuilt. So I wanted to kind of learn about this, but I also wanted to take it to the next level and take it to the next generation. This happened 20 years ago at the time that I was there. So there were no more gachacha courts happening. But what there were, what was happening was that there was a whole other generation of young people in Rwanda who were survivors, who were between 20 and 25, and thus old enough to have been deeply impacted by the genocide. Most of them were orphaned by it, but young enough such that it may not be something they remember as an actual event. And so they wanted to confront this massive event, this trauma in their lives, and they were part of an organization or the ones that I connected with were part of an organization called Never Again Rwanda. And so they, I got in touch with them and ultimately this led to my working with these young people to start what became the Prison Visiting Project. These young people wanted to go into prisons and engage in workshops, film screenings, discussions, games, entertainment events. They wanted to create a bridge between outside and inside. Now 80 percent of the prison population in Rwanda is still in for the crime of genocide. So you're talking about young people, college age students, who wanted to go inside and confront the people who potentially could have murdered their parents. And they wanted to do this as a gesture of reconciliation, of peace, as a welcome, as a way of saying you're still part of us and you're going to come home soon and we welcome you, but also as a gesture of healing for them. And this was, so I spent a couple of months in Rwanda working with them and kind of guiding the construction of this and then of course left it in their hands and went with them on the first day. This picture is from the first visit that they took. And many, many things come out of the Rwandan experience and of course in the book I get into the complexities of them which is that Rwanda is no utopia, there's a lot bubbling underneath the surface now politically that is quite dangerous involving Kagame. But the thing that I did see in Rwanda is what human beings are capable of when we talk about forgiveness on a grand scale and what reconciliation, when handled properly, when accompanied by reparations can look like both then in the context of the national experiment but also on a personal level with these young people. They came out of these prison visits, energized, fueled, they felt a sense of having confronted this what had been to them a sort of anonymous monster in so many respects and it was it was driving them in finding healing and finding peace in their own lives. And so I think the time in Rwanda allows us to radically rethink our assumptions about the needs of victims and what is capable and what those who are harmed are capable of when we think about restoration, reparations, and especially forgiveness. And this theme continued in the next country that I visited, which is South Africa. South Africa, of course, being a country that also experienced a grand trauma on a national scale, the legacy of a partaid, and that was also dealt with on a grand scale in a national experiment that is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But what I wanted to think about in South Africa was kind of continuing this theme of forgiveness, reconciliation, reparations, making amends, and sort of alternatives to revenge-based systems of punishment. So I wanted to think about that on a personal level. So I went to Polesmore Prison. This is a photo taken inside Polesmore Prison, which is one of the most notorious prisons in the world, certainly in Africa. It's the largest prison in Africa. It's a bit like the Rikers Island of Africa, in that it is meant to be a temporary stay facility while people are shuttled off to prisons in other parts of the country. But in fact, people end up staying there much longer. It's also quite similar to Rikers in terms of its legacy of atrocious violence. It's one of the most notoriously gang-run prisons in the world. Almost all the men in this room are affiliated with the gangs known as the 26s, the 27s, and the 28s. It's violently overcrowded. Most of the cells have 40, at least in the adult men's unit. There are 40 men in a cell. So it's about 233% occupancy rate. It is full of brutality. The corrections department in South Africa owes billions of dollars to those who were formerly incarcerated there from harm that was caused to them when they were incarcerated there. There is a 90% TB transmission rate. I can go on and on with the hard statistics, but you catch my drift. It is quite an awful and atrocious place. Mandela spent six years there at the end after Robin Island before coming home. But what I actually went to see was a kind of sliver of light in all of that, a sliver of possibility, and that's a restorative justice program run by a formerly incarcerated pastor, someone who used to be at Pulse Moore, came home and devoted his life to restorative justice in South Africa. And so the men in this group are part of an eight-day restorative justice workshop, where they have the opportunity to confront victims, to confront each other, to think about the role that violence has played in their lives. Most especially to think about the way that they've been victimized, both individually and by systemic racism, systemic poverty, to think about how all of these things have impacted their lives and shaped the decisions that they've made and shaped their entire existence in so many ways. And so, and at the end of these eight days, these men had the opportunity to confront their family members, many of whom they had committed crimes against. So you're talking about men who would sometimes rape their wives, children who had robbed their parents. And this was their chance in front of everyone to confront each other after most of the time not having seen each other in years. And I think what the takeaway from this, and I can honestly say this was the most profound eight days of my life. I ended up serving as a facilitator because somebody dropped out. So I ended up filling those shoes. But the incredible lessons of that time was that number one, I mean, the concept, the way that these men's lives have been clearly shaped by the townships, by the legacy of apartheid, deeply asks us to question our ideas about free will choice, picking ourselves up by the bootstraps, and so on and so forth. The idea that these of the victim offender binary, that we imagine that those in prisons are the offenders and those outside or, you know, confronting them in court are the victims is simply ludicrous. And this is true, I think globally. I know it's certainly true about prisons here in the U.S. The bulk of people in prison have been victimized. And so we're talking about a cycle of violence that when we punish and engage in revenge as our system of justice, we only perpetuate the needs again, thinking about the needs of victims. It was incredibly powerful to watch these family members react to the act of narrative making of hearing the I'm sorry is again and again, the explanations again and again. And there are and I get into this in the book, there are many studies that talk about how misled we are about victims as needs. And these needs being empowerment, restoration of respect, primarily through narrative speaking about the crime, creating a narrative about it, the need for truthful answers and the need for restitution. And ultimately prison as a system of justice addresses essentially none of these restorative justice as a process. And certainly as I saw it enacted in South Africa is actually giving victims that which they desire, need and deserve. And so there's a lot of I think both these chapters, Rwanda, South Africa, are really a meditation on the meaning of forgiveness, the meaning of reconciliation, the role of restitution in thinking about reconciliation because I don't think sorry can sorry is an action word it needs to be accompanied by actions. And how do we how do we sort of restore terms like restitution, reparations and reconciliation instead of revenge to the crops of our justice system. The next I stayed in Africa for one more country and that is Uganda. These are students in Luzira prison in Kampala, Uganda. And it's actually the most overcrowded prison of the many overcrowded prisons that I visited. It was built for 600 individuals and it's home to 5,000 men, women and children, including a death row. The good chunk of them are in there for because they could not afford a bribe. Every single one in this picture is in there for a crime of property for which they could not afford to bribe their way out. It's a quite a dire dire scenario there. People are literally sleeping standing up. And I went there actually in that context to think about the role of the arts in prison in the most dire of circumstances. There are a lot of programs that offer theater writing visual arts inside prisons and speak about sort of the healing mechanisms of these of these art forms. So what I wanted to do was see it at play in the context of two very dire scenarios. So one of them is Luzira prison here in Uganda. And the other is this is just the front of it. They wouldn't let me take my my camera inside. This is in Kingston, Jamaica. This is General Penitentiary in downtown Kingston, Jamaica. Another overcrowded prison. This one built for also built for 600 and now home to almost 2000. There are relative about four to seven people in a cell. There are no toilets and the individuals are kept in those cells for cells for all but four hours a day. And that's so they have four hours in which they're out of their cells. That's it. The rest they're inside. So two very dire circumstances in Jamaica. I was looking at music. There's a reggae music program music studio. It's very small and bare bones. But it's trying to again use these terms like rehabilitate through art in the same way that creative writing. I tried to do that with Uganda. I launched a creative writing program in Uganda and then worked with the men incarcerated there to keep it going after I left and use poetry and use narrative to to deal with trauma and deal with insanity producing conditions. And I think of course I mean there are many takeaways but perhaps the biggest one is that the line that I use in the book to to talk about what art can do in the context of places like general penitentiary or Luzira is be a bandaid on an amputated limb. And it's I mean it is not going to solve the systemic problems and in some ways is dangerous in that beauty dazzles us. Beauty can can make things look pretty and make us look away from the sort of gaping wound at the heart of it all. And that's why I use the bandaid analogy. So I mean a bandaid can stop the bleeding but a bandaid is not going to heal in any capacity. And often a bandaid if it's if you're not seeing the blood flow then you're not aware of the problem. And so there are kind of ways that I think the arts can be that that that blocker that smokescreen in in the context of prisons that are screaming for massive overhaul and instead are getting feeder and art and and and so on and so forth not to minimize the power of those things when we do talk about healing and quote unquote corrections which is supposedly what our prison system is doing. Certainly they're enormously valuable but in the context of dire situations unfortunately they can sometimes do the opposite in terms of being a grand and very beautiful diversion. The from there this is the women's prison in Ratchaburi Thailand. So I turn to another region of the world and also to the other half of our our gender population. So women as probably many people here know are the fastest rising prison population that's true here. It's true globally as well. And I went to Thailand in particular to look at how in many respects Thailand is a microcosm of this crisis of female incarceration. So there are 25,000 convicted incarcerated women in Thailand. 21,000 of them are in for anyone want to guess the crime drugs drugs and that's true again so much of what's true about Thailand can be generalized to the female prison population all together. They're in for the crime of drugs 18,000 of them are serving at least 20 years for that crime. And this is because well for several reasons one is Thailand and actually I've been thinking of Thailand a lot. Yeah that's that's this that's the sound of crisis but I've been thinking of Thailand a lot because of what's happening in the Philippines right now which I'm following really closely and is exactly very much what happened in Thailand which is a draconian crack down and irrational crack down of course. Right I'm looking at you Ernie treating treating this as a criminal justice problem instead of a public health one. So Thailand changed its policy on meth overnight in 2003 went after people in exactly the same way that is happening in the Philippines right now and many of these were women and that's because women are often the hapless soldiers in the drug trade and the bulk of them actually more than half of women in the Thai justice system have co-dependence and the good 80 percent of them that have co-dependence those co-dependence are their male partners or husbands. And so they're in a situation of essentially duress there's a legacy I mean some of the statistics around abuse of women in Thailand are dramatically high. Likewise the statistics around these women and their representation in one study 74 percent of women had no lawyers during their questioning. So we're talking about women who are being asked told to do to carry drugs by husbands partners friends carrying those drugs not knowing the consequences of them necessarily and how dire they can be. For instance if you cross the border into Laos with just a couple of pills you can end up with the death penalty very easily. And then not being properly represented. So I think Thailand really is that that dramatic microcosm of the crisis facing women. This right here interestingly enough so I went to Thailand because of also because of a John Jay connection and that is the princess of Thailand. She's actually intervened in this crisis by starting a an organization called Kam Long Chai it's which means inspire it's the inspire project. So she's building her and her team are building model prisons all over the country and trying to kind of clean up the mess and turn them into kind of maternal maternal dormitory dormitory scenarios almost. So here you have the women making origami there are all kinds of programming. They're being trained in massage skills cooking origami classes. I went with Professor Lorraine Mowler trying to see if she's here. No. So Professor Lorraine Mowler who's in the theater department here was the one who connected me to the princess and both of us went together and engaged in a drama workshop with the women there and we stayed for a week and really had the chance to see these model prisons which again are kind of little spots of hope bits of progress and what is otherwise quite dismal. But I will say that we then ended up going back to Thailand and meeting the princess. They threw a grand event in this same prison which is their flagship facility that was televised all over Thailand. I had to learn how to curtsy in the proper way somehow I managed to pull it off. But what was so rich about that experience I mean it was cool to meet a princess certainly. But what was amazing about that experience was the impact that it had in terms of changing hearts and minds. The princess is deeply loved in Thailand. She is this heroine. She's a fashion icon. She's admired by everyone. So the very idea that she was broadcast in the heart of a women's prison in rural Thailand all over the country and it was the biggest news story all month said something very powerful in terms of making people change their minds about what they should care about and what they should invest in. So that was incredibly powerful thinking about the value of PR in a sense. No. So the next country now this I love this photo because when you look at it it could be anywhere basically. It could be a prison anywhere and actually I should say the same about a couple of the other ones if you notice the one of Jamaica that one looks like a lot like the prisons of upstate New York. So not that is not an accident and that actually was part of the revelation of these journeys that I took which is that the bulk of prisons around the world are modeled after ours. We exported our prison system to the world. We did this first in the 19th century in the context of building the first two modern prisons Auburn and Eastern and after which leaders from around the world came saw took it back home copied it sent it to their colonies used it as tools of social control in their colonies. So actually that Jamaican prison I'll go back to it for a second. That is a direct imitation of Eastern penitentiary in Pennsylvania it was modeled over 300 prisons around the world were modeled after Eastern and this is one of them the director of prisons in Jamaica came made special visits to the US in order to build this system. Now a century later we have the same thing happening with Supermax prisons. This is Brazil. This is in Catanduva Brazil and this is a Supermax prison modeled directly after our Supermax prisons. So America we invented the modern prison system based on European ideas we enacted these ideas we exported them and then we continued to sort of innovate dare I say in the field of prison making and one of these innovations was the development of the Supermax in the 1980s that has been exported to at least 12 nations around the world and one of them is Brazil. Brazil is home to the fastest rising prison population in the Americas with more than half a million people incarcerated and it has in the past decade decided to institute Supermaxes and made visits to the US I was told by the guards there to build these huge entities and in these entities individuals that have been deemed the quote unquote worst of the worst are spending 23 hours a day in a cell for years at a time the basis of a Supermax system is solitary confinement and so I went to Brazil to think about this practice of solitary and see it enacted in this Brazilian prison and what I saw there wouldn't didn't surprise me and I don't think would surprise anyone in this room who's even a little bit aware of what solitary confinement does to someone but you essentially I saw people going flagrantly mad before my eyes you see people breaking down in every capacity and what is especially distressing and this is certainly applicable to our system here and it's true globally this term the worst of the worst that are in here when I started to probe just a little bit about what that means why is this this 17 year old in solitary confinement for three years now I was told oh he spit on the prosecutor's face so and and then these things started to emerge that what is the worst of the worst is actually much more a political designation than it is any statement about crime justice or safety so ultimately and I had the chance to teach I had to teach through bars and there was a line on the ground that I was told I would never to to go near that line otherwise the men will will arrive with rifles it was certainly my first time having to teach with bars between me and the students but the stories that I heard again and again were essentially versions of the stories that I hear at Otisville the stories that I heard in South Africa these are stories of the favelas the favela is the township is the ghetto whatever you call it the narrative is the same they're all settings that are essentially conditioning individuals for these prison cells both in a historic context and a contemporary one and I think what is particularly vile about Katendubes and this is the first one actually I should say of many there are now five super maxes in Brazil and it costs them a hundred twenty thousand dollars a year to hold one person the price of a person to be held in the state system in Brazil thirty six dollars so clearly that's a statement about what is not being provided to people in the in the state system but it is certainly a statement about a country liquidating its its its budget on these super maxes it costs 18 million dollars to build this one entity and now there are five more of them and clearly Brazil's financial woes are something we're hearing about in the news a lot lately too so and it's very much about a political show of law and order a political statement of we are cracking down on these gangs we built these super maxes it's political theater at at the cost of human lives at the cost of taxpayers monies so a very a very I certainly say it's the most depressing piece of the journey another prison that looks like it could be anywhere this is in Australia this is a free mantle it's actually a museum it's not it's not a prison anymore but it was a prison and I went to Australia to continue this theme of thinking about all of these copycatting approaches around the world the way that countries have copycatted our systems and Australia copycatted our private prison system prison privatization another issue that probably you're hearing a lot about especially in the federal government news that's another one of the great American inventions around the prison system the idea to privatize the system and Australia took that and really ran with it so they have the largest percentage of people in private prisons in the world 19% of their prison population is are held in private facilities 100% of their immigration detention system is private so yeah no no accident there and this is of course a multi-billion dollar industry and there is a lot hence the discussion in the federal government now or the decision to phase these out we'll see what happens on that front there's a lot more work that needs to be done but needless to say I went to Australia feeling clear sense of anticipated disgust at what I was going to see going to these private prisons what what through a wrench in that plan was that the private prisons I went to us in Australia were actually engaged in some fairly progressive work one of them was a facility is called one do and it's run by a company called Circo it's a it's a UK based private prison company and they actually have created a a prison designed for 18 to 25 year old young men who are old enough to be imprisoned in general population but young enough to be especially vulnerable there so one do built what essentially looks like a campus or a recreation center looks like one of those fancy rehab centers in California it's an open prison the young men engage in restorative justice work they're able to come and go and do community service it's all run on on restorative justice principles it's really quite an amazing place and as close to a you know humane prison a paradoxical term for me but as close to a humane prison as as it comes the other prisons that I went to and I taught some workshops in another private prison that what that was more traditional prison like with bars and barbed wire and so on but it had an unbelievable level of programming the likes of which I've not seen anywhere in terms of college programs business classes again restorative justice workshops community service programs and the thing that I was told again and again in both of these facilities was that it was easier to innovate in the context of a private company that it was in the context of the state given the red tape of bureaucracy and that I was told again and again by the people working in these private prisons my job is to innovate now this is by no means representative of all private prisons there are reams of data and plenty of narratives of horror shows about all of the mistreatment that happens at many private prison facilities and not to mention of course the blatant problem of making money off incarcerating individuals but I do think it complicates the narrative a bit and it actually asks us to recognize that progress can be found in unusual places which I think is only part of the impetus that I'll get to in terms of conclusions to think broadly and think globally when we talk about change so I think it was definitely it was certainly something that upended a lot of my ideas in interesting ways second to last and in some ways closest to home although furthest is Singapore so Singapore probably when I say Singapore you think caning you think draconian punishments all of this is true Singapore still uses that violent practice and is notorious for its draconian laws chewing gum is is banned plastic bags are banned all kinds of you can you can earn potentially you could earn prison time for eating durian fruit on the subway in Singapore not the least of which it's draconian drug laws again mirroring Thailand actually dwarfing Thailand's in so many respects in terms of just how stringent they are using the death penalty to to kill those you can potentially earn the death penalty if you hold the key to a home that has marijuana in it in Singapore so it's an enormously draconian drug sister drug war taking place there and not only that there are as in Thailand and actually as as in Indonesia as all over Southeast Asia the options for rehab are very minimal in Singapore if you go in for rehab treatment the doctors must report you to the central narcotics bureau and so who are then who then may not arrest you immediately but are certainly going to turn your life into a surveillance hell so you're not even the minimal rehab options that are available are essentially not a real option so all of that in all of that I actually went to look at the one bright light in Singapore which is a program called the yellow ribbon project I wanted to think about something that that I think about every day every second here because of the prison a college pipeline and that is reentry this crisis of people coming home from prison after years how do they reintegrate how do we find them jobs education opportunities how do we promote acceptance of these individuals on our college campuses in our communities in our families and Singapore actually has some really interesting approaches to this to this problem they've developed something for one they develop something called score which is a job placement entity they actually do something that to me is a no-brainer they place you in a job before you come home they have employers going into the prison interviewing people and taking applications taking resumes and they set them up in job placement from well before they've actually come home they have a 99% success rate in finding people who come home from prison jobs the other thing that they do is kind of around the hearts and minds issue which is they promote acceptance of formerly incarcerated people through something called the yellow ribbon project and the yellow ribbon project this is an example of one of the ads from the yellow ribbon project and it's called that because it's meant to evoke the idea of veterans coming back from war that these people coming home from prison are like those coming back from war they have served their time and they need to be re-entered so they have ads all over the country TV ads as well they take over bus stations the entire September is a yellow ribbon month people I went into many a taxi in Singapore and found people with yellow ribbons on their dashboard it's a mainstream campaign whereby people can signal I accept those coming home from prison I am part of this movement that supports this now it's not all wine and roses and kumbaya there are ulterior motives here as far as the Singaporean government goes and you can find out about them if you read the book but regardless I think it raises the question of whatever their motives clearly what they're doing in terms of generating corporate responsibility for mass incarceration and creating a change in public perception is very very powerful and was quite amazing to see even in the context of the horrific drug war being enacted and the draconian punishments so the book ends in yes that's a prison that is Norway that is the famous Bastoy Island prison in Norway so I ended the book in Norway because it's Norway and it is famous for being an incredibly just society really on every level but particularly in terms of its criminal justice system and there again as I said when I started about Rwanda there are no utopias Norway is not perfect but it is a stunning thing to see the Norwegian prisons particularly the Norwegian open prisons so the open prison model was established in Scandinavia it's used in all of the Scandinavian countries as well as parts of Europe not all of Norway's prisons are open about 30% of them are and Bastoy is kind of the crown jewel it's in Michael Moore's new documentary it's gotten a lot of press and an open prison is what it sounds like it is there are no there's no barbed wire there are no bars it is open the individuals incarcerated there come and go in this case they come and go on a ferry that takes them to the mainland they work jobs on the outside they have the opportunity to have family leave they go home and spend a week with their family and come back and it's incredibly profound to see for so many reasons number one it works Norway has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world it's a notoriously safe society it's also of course no accident a notoriously equal society and I kind of think of it I was I walked around Bastoy and I was brought back to Robin Island in South Africa which is of course a museum now it's not a working prison but thinking about South Africa as being one of the most unequal places in the world and therefore one of the most crime ridden and thinking about Norway as sort of what is the opposite of its doppelganger in a sense the Bastoy Island is the good face of a Robin Island in a place that is one of the most equal societies in the world and therefore one of the least crime ridden so clearly that correlation between inequality and crime and Bastoy is run much like a nature reserve the men who are incarcerated there and its men from across the board in terms of crimes are living in log cabins and engaged in horticulture and there are horses and it's really a holistic lifestyle that is quite incredible I also went to another prison in Norway called Halden which is a more traditional prison it has a wall around it and the men are in something that slightly resembles a cell but Halden often gets called the Ikea prison or the Five Star prison it's very beautiful the conditions are incredible there's a music studio a Mac computer lab cooking classes painting classes everything incredible and it's done as a statement of investing in genuine rehabilitation I asked one of the wardens why do you do this this place is so over the top magnificent and he said because we can clearly Norway has the money to do engage in this kind of work and engage in this thing called corrections and so they chose to put their money where their mouth is and built Halden in addition to the open prisons but I have to say in Norway and I think this is probably the most popular question I get asked is but can that ever be translated here I can talk more about that in the Q&A because I think the answer is yes but I think the most profound thing in Norway happened when I visited the staff training academy where corrections officers go to school and that's an academy that it's a two-year program the corrections officers in Norway it's considered a very respectable job much like a professor or a teacher it was there were thousands of people applying for the slot for about 500 slots in the time that I was there so it's a desirable job it's a well-paying job and it's an intellectual job two years of training in philosophy law social work psychology and a little bit of criminal justice no military training or you know fighting tactics it could not be any more radically different than the way we train officers and so therefore the approach in Norway and again this was repeated like a mantra throughout my trip there relations the most important thing is relations between corrections officers and the incarcerated individuals because that is where the real impact is going to happen that is where the correction happens and that is kind of the most important thing in impacting lives and again in genuinely enacting this thing we call corrections and so Norway's approach to relations its approach to this job of corrections officers is so sort of obvious and yet radical at the same time and incredibly powerful so ultimately I mean I came back from from Norway very inspired and moved I came back from some of these countries very moved others profoundly depressed usually a strange mix of both but I think in the end in terms of kind of grand takeaways here for one I like to think of a quote by Nils Christie who's a Norwegian Norwegian philosopher really he gets tagged as a criminologist or a criminal justice scholar but really he's writing about the world and I had a chance to meet him before he died in Norway and he has a line from one of his books where he says sorrow is inevitable but not hell created by man and essentially prisons are hell created by man in any which way you slice it and it is our responsibility to as Christie says to reduce the pain of that hell I certainly count myself a prison abolitionist I don't think prisons are a responsible a morally ethical a fiscally smart response to crime and I think we need to to approach justice restoratively I think we need grand scale reformation of what's happening we need to undermine sort of the axiomatic thinking that says crime prison and we need to think about radically different approaches ultimately and so for me I think it's about we need to for one think globally about the problem we need to recognize that this is a system that America essentially created and then by way of colonialism and globalization foisted upon the world so what that means is we made the mess it's incumbent upon us to clean it up not just here but globally speaking as well and it's really quite an incredible thing and in many ways a really traumatic thing to travel around the world to be on the other end of the earth and see in that space a prison that looks like an exact replica of our own and not only that to see the same patterns repeated again and again especially as it pertains to systemic racism and systemic poverty right we know that in this country certainly we have criminalized and mass incarcerated black and brown folks for centuries but this is a pattern that exists globally as well in South Africa this is true about blacks and the what are called colored population in Brazil this is true about blacks in Australia this is true about aboriginal people in New Zealand the Maori in Uganda frankly it's the poor so all of these countries are engaged in this act again much as we've done here in America of mass criminalizing an other group choosing who that other is and then mass incarcerating them usually in order to produce a labor force and that's again whether we're talking about cotton in the US coffee in Brazil gold and diamonds in South Africa industries that have been built on the back first of slaves and then of those incarcerated and this is not some you know conspiracy theory this is history this is the reality and to see that pattern played out again and again from shore to shore only should reinforce our sense of America's responsibility in the world to engage in cleaning up the mess we made I have to say one of the most inspiring things or pieces of good news that I've heard in a long time was in an email from the Norwegian prison warden who let me know he said to me we're getting a lot of visitors lately from all over the world they're all telling us that we're stopping to go to America to look at your system for tips and coming to Norway instead so that was that was definitely good news to me and then I think ultimately and I'll end on this we have to think globally about the problem but we also have to think globally about solutions and one of the things that I did in the book I mean I organized the chapters by theme thinking about particular issues but I also kind of looked for pockets of hope amid the despair in every country I went to because there are innovative things happening everywhere and I go back to the evil demon that is the private prison in Australia even in unexpected places like Singapore like Thailand like the Australian private prison system there are progressive things happening and it is incumbent upon us to look globally for solutions I for one have become sort of exhausted by talking about the problem and I watched when I watched the 13th Ava's documentary I thought brilliant elucidation of the problem now let's talk solutions and I think what's required from us in order to do that is a global perspective for one and for two imagination we need to radically reimagine what justice looks like and what a justice system outside a prison looks like and to do that we need to look at what's happening here we need to look at what's happening in Rwanda in South Africa and really turn what has become a very vibrant and exciting national conversation into a global conversation so I'll end on that thank you Q&A now normally when we do these Q&As we have a microphone that we like to stay around to the questioner we don't have that today so I'll ask questioners to use your loud voices much like I am right now and I will let Bas actually do the calling so if Bas wants to use she's probably calling on you I am no more Bas called that day and I want to take the organizers privilege to ask a few questions which is this is something I've seen before but I'm wondering how you as a prison abolitionist who actually runs a program that needs to go into existing prison how do you how do you think that affects your interactions with prison administration both in the way that you approach them and then in the way that they then respond to you yeah a good question I didn't actually want my book to ever make it to Otisville because I thought about and folks reading it but I mean I understand I think for me it's about understanding that those who work in prisons are often victims as well and in fact I heard this again and again particularly from the men's I didn't talk about the men's prison that I went to in Thailand but the folks there the corrections officers kept saying to me we are in prison we are in prison we are in prison their job is so low paying it's extremely violent it's psychologically destructive and I think you know and I often think about the slavery comparison an institution as violent slavery dehumanizes the master and the slave both and I think the same is true about prison as an institution that it harms everyone that it touches and that often includes the people working there on a day to day basis and so I think so I am so I'm by no means someone who said oh I don't I don't I hate all people who work in prisons and prison administrators not at all I'm sensitive to their plight and sensitive to their needs as well and that a good system makes it better for all of us and so I think that you know my sensitivity hopefully comes across in the way that I deal with people in that context well it's interesting you say that well for one Norway's prison population over 30% of it is foreign born mostly from Eastern Europe so it isn't you know there is this notion of oh Norway is just totally homogenous that's not necessarily the case it does have it's issues around xenophobia and things like that but I think too so but yeah they might be you know racially similar but the fact of the matter is that in many places including the US those who work in the prisons and those who are in prison come from the same race background I mean Rikers is a perfect example of that so just by virtue and there and yet can they can still think so radically different so I don't think that that is necessarily going to impact the relations there I mean one of the things that's often said to me in terms of Norway is oh we can never be like Norway because they're so racially homogenous and I think you know that's that's a very depressing statement to make does that mean because we're racially diverse we're not capable of high levels of justice I mean I for one have a higher standard than that so yeah that's a great question what makes a prison not become a prison anymore and I thought about it a lot because I think the two places where the entity was so unlike a prison as to be worthy of another name were certainly Norway and Bastoy but also Wando the facility for young men in Australia that was so radically different and I said would I be comfortable with this and I think I can say yes because I think ultimately and you know I can't give the nutshell version of sort of a vision of the future that I try to outline or at least touch on at the end of the book but I do think there is a place for homes of corrections right I mean there is a place for I hate the word rehabilitation because globally speaking most people in prison were not habilitated in the first place so rehab is a misnomer but there are places where you know one can engage in making reparations make a man making amends healing addressing trauma need to be held away from the person that they have harmed for a certain period of time while perhaps a plan of justice is being devised and so in the book I call them interventions I think we need to change the name prison because when we say prison that's already problematic on so many levels so yes I think that that's the place where they become something altogether different and most fundamentally what distinguishes them is that are we motivated by harming people by creating a hell or are we motivated by genuine corrections right genuine rehab well I mean I think we can take pieces of it definitely and you know I shy away from being God knows I don't have all the answers or anything close to all the answers but for one one thing that Norway does is spread its prisons throughout the country and all of the individuals incarcerated in prison in Norway they remain connected to their communities and maintain the same social services they had when they were out of prison now and so it's really a community-based approach theoretically is that possible absolutely theoretically could we take a different approach radically different approach to drug crime absolutely thereby reducing our prison population could we take a radically different approach to training corrections officers and changing the whole sort of structure of what it is to be a CEO absolutely and could we create some sort of what already in many respects we have educational leave we have work leave theoretically as part of our system they're just not used very much so it's in many ways it could be about tinkering with what we have already what criminal officials in terms of here or government officials here gotcha yeah so so the interesting thing actually about since the book has come out has been going back to some of those countries and being able to give the book to government officials and have conversations with them and the two countries where I've been able to do that have been Jamaica and South Africa and both of them responded and I was very nervous about South Africa very nervous that they would read the chapter and then kind of ban me from the prisons there for life and there goes any work that I could possibly do but they were actually really excited about it and they were excited about the prison of college pipeline and they were excited about John Jay and I think in many respects I wasn't telling them what they didn't already know in terms of the problem with their system and so in both of those countries that led to discussions about working with them to enact change and specifically around education since that's that's my kind of intervention in this in this field but the I actually met with the Minister of Justice in Jamaica who and we're starting a prison of college pipeline in Jamaica in the Jamaica in that same Jamaican prison that I went to in partnership with the University of the West Indies so that's actually been the best part is I wrote the book because I wanted it to to do something I mean I wanted to impact people's thoughts ideas and hearts and minds but also I wanted some I wanted us to kind of come together as a community doing this work and engage in change making together that's one that we can do but what what do you think are the steps that we should be taking out of the society to get to that point where now it's no longer about continuing to shame people once they return because essentially being that fulfilled their debt to the society yeah we still treat it like we have so there's so much to say on that because there's so much that needs to be done and in fact I see in the audience my wonderful colleagues from the Prisoner Reentry Institute who work we all work together trying to do this basically every day but in a nutshell I mean there's the policy side and there's the hearts and minds side certainly on the policy side the ban the box efforts in relation to college campuses but also in relation to jobs I mean I think all of us in the Prisoner College pipeline are sick and tired of our students getting denied jobs because of that box day after day after day so certainly banning the box and I mean but I think in many ways the work that has to happen most broadly is I'd love to see a version of that Singaporean campaign here in fact I was recently contacted by someone from a prison group in Colorado trying to replicate it here a subway ad campaign that is I mean it is it is really quite shocking how many people's conception of who's in prison is so radically wrong and and by people I mean across the board even people who kind of should be more clued in so I definitely feel like pop culture and art these are spaces where there's so much room for an intervention around understanding who who people in prison are and how they're not the people you think they are especially around this binary victim offender binary that the bulk of people in prison have been victims deeply victimized as well both on a social level and on a personal familial level so I think you know there's there's so much to be done but definitely if you're interested connect with the prison reentry institute around the manifold ways that this work is happening so well I'm actually so I'm working on two things now one is I always envision incarceration nations visually as well and I work in film and radio so I'm working on a docuseries based on the book going back to some of the countries and then potentially adding some new ones which again for me the hope is just get this in America's living room so that this becomes recognized and I think also a lot of times for people to see in many respects the chapters of this book are mirrors of us so it's a way of seeing ourselves and looking at these other countries and recognizing all the ways that our problems are represented in them and then written wise so I've become quite obsessed with with the notion of a truth and reconciliation commission and this idea of and again thinking about I'm really interested in answers and forward looking in imagination and so I'm really interested in how we can practically speaking enact truth and reconciliation commissions in this country on a grand scale but also on an individual level what does restorative justice when implemented as a system of of a system of justice in lieu of prisons what can that look like in various respects so that's the the the concept yes well I mean it looks a lot of ways I mean I think thinking about the most so for me I think about Rwanda, Chile and South Africa these are three countries that have engaged in versions of kind of grand scale truth and reconciliation commissions or versions thereof and in Rwanda in Rwanda I mean it literally was happening in communities I sat in on a a community meaning of a peace village in Rwanda which is populated by individuals who survived the genocide alongside individuals who were killing their family members 20 years ago and what they did is they worked out a system at one point in the meeting a group of men stood up and then sat down actually there was men and women they sat up and sat down and I was it was explained to me that they had officially paid off their debt 20 years later and were had been welcomed back into the community so there were you know there are systems of narrative truth telling whereby those who are who have been harmed can confront the person that harmed them and tell them what their needs are the person who harmed them can offer a version of an apology and whatever capacity that looks like and the most importantly a system of how do I pay you back is enacted and that could be community service I will you know I will build houses for the village for the next 20 years or it could be individual payments payment plan or I will work on your field for the next 20 years as was the case that I saw in in that village that I went to in Rwanda but it doesn't you know it looks it can look all kinds of ways and this is why I think it's so interesting in Chile which is considered to have after the Pinochet regime it had what's considered the most successful national truth and reconciliation commission and Chile created avenues for reparations that involve school scholarships of survivors school scholarships for survivors and housing amenities housing funds for those who needed it they created these government funds that those who were who had survived the atrocities could apply for as reparations and they also had grand courtroom narrative telling opportunities for the two to confront each other and then South Africa tried to do that and is considered one of the least successful in terms of its truth and reconciliation commission precisely because the reparations piece was so sorely lacking they tried to create again scholarships housing funds and so on but it never it was sort of a grand flop and there were all kinds of flaws too in the narrative telling process so for me and I'm learning more about this constantly because I said I'm kind of obsessed with it as a system of justice I think it's all about looking really hard at what works what doesn't what's effective what meets the needs of victims and how we do this practically speaking oh god well I don't think I wouldn't reform it I tear it down and start anew I don't I don't think I don't think a place like Luzera prison in Uganda or General Pententiary GP in Jamaica can really be reformed so I think like I said I think it has to be radically destroyed and built anew and that you know and and how I do that is sort of too much for me to answer in in a quick two minutes but I think for one clearly we need to look at who we're sending to prison and why and and certainly rethink drug laws around this issue but also rethink our approach to what happens when someone does commit a crime think about corruption that's happening Uganda and Jamaica and I'm I'm pointed to them but it really I could be pointing to so many of the prisons certainly Brazil and solitary confinement but these are places where corruption is endemic and so you're having people in prison for in essence minor crimes Jamaica is one of the highest homicide rate rates in the world and has for the past at least decade and yet the people in prison are serving under three years often for minor offenses so I'd relook at why these people are there and come up with an alternative program for them most of which would have I mean I'll I'll I'll preach education not incarceration till the cows come home so educate well that's a million dollar question which is why are we addicted to mass incarceration in the first place right and I think again there's no short easy answer to that but for one I think that certainly mass incarceration has been part of a grand capitalist plot in this country to create labor forces and to systemically oppress people of color in this country post slavery and so and conveniently to do them in one fell swoop with this same system and so America's invested you know in in keeping this going and I also think that America is fundamentally and perhaps this has to do with our period and roots we are punitive we are addicted to ideas around punitiveness we morally justify revenge in this country we think it's a viable we think revenge is justice and and we kind of have for a very long time and so take those two things together and surely there is an impetus to reform the greatest impetus to reform today came from economic need hence what I had said at the beginning about the danger of that because if it's only economics that we're worried about we'll find a cheaper way to oppress people of color and create labor forces it's not that hard right we can create factories of despair in this country very well so that is that are we I think we are officially out of time okay so let's begin now to thank thank you