 Thank you for being here on this wonderfully spring rainy day. I'm Elizabeth Sackler and I'm happy to welcome you to the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art, series States of Denial, the Illegal Incarceration of Children, Women and People of Color. The Sackler Center is entering its eighth year of high volume programming. We're home to the dinner party by Judy Chicago. We have feminist exhibition galleries including a herstory gallery and we host programs and lectures in the forum. Our mission continues to be to raise awareness of feminism's cultural contributions to educate every generation about the meaning of feminist art and to host lectures and discussions such as we have here today on feminist activism. Our series States of Denial continues here at the Brooklyn Museum in the Canter Auditorium today as it often does, a de facto extension of the Sackler Center. To anyone wondering why a museum is hosting this series and series like this, I'd like you to follow along with me. In the March 20th Museum Special Section of the New York Times, Holland Carter, within one article which he titled Museum Doors Barely a Jar to Much of the World, addresses three major issues. One on the circumstance of in the current protest reactions of the conditions of the migrant workers at construction sites for the Louvre and the Guggenheim to name but two in Abu Dhabi and he points out actually that most likely the people who are working on the buildings will never be allowed through their doors. Two, the lack of third-world art in our encyclopedic institutions and museums and three, an art market available only to 1% of the population. In a final call to action after noting our globalizing museums of modern and contemporary art are a market-driven culture without groundedness in a local context, Carter writes, they lack a commitment to the quote idea of art being intrinsically a form of social activism. Their very existence carries a political charge. Carter ends his article with I believe a manifesto. He says and I quote, yet it would take a real cynic not to speculate about how this might be different. What if seemingly incompatible institutional features human local wisdom and custodianship of the treasure of art could be made to coexist? We'd have a museum he writes that are on the right side of history and in which the future of art would be secure. That ideal is worth storming an empire for. Well, he doesn't need to storm an empire. We just need to take the two or the three train to Brooklyn or go across the Brooklyn Bridge because Holland Carter eloquently described the Brooklyn Museum. The Brooklyn Museum recognizes the relationship of art and life. The Brooklyn Museum recognizes the intersection of creation and activism and the Brooklyn Museum recognizes the power of expression and change. And the museum's support of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art is indicative of its ongoing commitment to educating all of us about art and culture as we envision and indeed as we work to create a just and meaningful future. Witness art and the civil rights movement is on the first floor and it is not to be missed. It is wonderful. You will see just outside its doors the bold question on the wall. What does your hashtag activism look like? And on the other side, the invitation. Find the intersection of art and hashtag activism. This clarion call expands us into a virtual universe. So I invite all of you to add to that universe during or after today's panel discussion on hashtag activism. Two weeks ago, Piper Kerman moderated one of our series with sentenced to change with Piper Kerman. Host Vivian Nixon, founder and CEO of CCF, and Tina Reynolds, co-founder and chair of Worth and Stacey McGruder, founder of Sisters Who Been There. If you are unable to be with us, you will find the video online probably next week at the Sackler Center for Feminist Art website under videos. And do check out our new website, our site Twitter, which is at Feminist Art, which also looks like Feminist Art, which I kind of like. Reverend Nixon said 700 million Americans are now disenfranchised, felons not allowed to vote, hold federal or state or city jobs, and bleak futures for gainful employment. There is a block the box movement underway. It was announced in California, and I hope that goes viral. As you know, there's been much news lately from Massachusetts to Rikers Island. And what has not adequately been reported, though, is that the United States has the highest incarceration rate per capita of any country in the world, that the privatization of prisons is a big business, and that today 2.5 million people are in prison, which means that entire populations become criminals with no recourse, and ultimately with no future. Today's panel is sure to educate and inspire us. I am delighted to have Sophia Elijah here, Executive Director of the Correctional Association, and she's moderating her discussion, a discussion amongst her panelists, Hernan Cervante, who is Research Assistant at the very Institute of Justice, Gabrielle Horowitz-Priscoll, Project Director, Juvenile Justice Project Correctional Association, and Mercedes Smith, Policy Specialist, Women on the Rise, telling her story that's worth, and Tamara Kraft Stolar, Project Director of Women in Prison Project Correctional Association. These are wonderful people to have with us today to discuss the issues at hand, and it is my pleasure to introduce them all. Sophia, Elijah, please come up, panelists, please join me on the stage and take your seats, and let us know what we can do, how we can do it, and that there maybe is just change in the air. Thank you very much. Thank you for that wonderful introduction, Elizabeth, and thank you to you and the Sackler Center for giving us this opportunity to share our work with the public and hopefully move some people to action, because that's what it's all about. It's particularly special to me to be here as a member of the People's Republic of Brooklyn. In fact, I reside right across the street, so I'm the last person that could afford to be late, right? We are really pleased to have such wonderful panelists joining me, and I'm just going to ask them to raise their hand so you know, face to name, so Tamara Kraft Stolar is to my far right, but that's not politically, it's just where she's sitting, and then I have Mercedes Smith sitting right next to me, and to my immediate left is Gabrielle Horowitz-Prisco, and to my far left is Hernan Cervantes. We're going to play a video for you in just a moment. Before we do that though, I just want to set a little bit of the context of what's going on in New York State. As Elizabeth said, there's over two million people incarcerated throughout the country, and in New York State, there's 54,000 people incarcerated. Approximately 27, 800 of them are women, and the remaining are men. In New York, a very unique thing has happened over the past 10 to 15 years, in that the prison population has actually decreased by about 15,000, and at the same time, the crime rate has gone down to about, it's gone down by about 40%, which tells us that it is possible to bring down the crime rate in the state without putting people in cages. Now we're going to talk a lot more about that over the course of the afternoon, but I just wanted to set the context a little bit. But as we reflect on those numbers, we must also remember the very sobering statistic that one in every three African American males can expect to spend some portion of his life behind bars. That is a startling and very disturbing statistic, and it is part of what moves us to come to talk with you this afternoon. So it is now time for us to look at the video that's going to talk about the fact that in New York State, we automatically prosecute 16 and 17-year-old children as adults, and we prosecute them and incarcerate them with adults, and then part of our discussion after we watch the video will focus on that reality. Thank you for your attention. Our county, we've done a lot of juvenile justice reform, working with kids below the age of 16, and we've seen tremendous strides in lowering their detention numbers, lowering their placement numbers. Those reforms work. I have a whole cadre of programs specifically available for young people that's solely targeted at turning those young people around. Those programs are available to people who committed crimes before their 16th birthday. But when the kids get to 16, we lose that. When I was 16, I was arrested for, so in the first degree, I was sent to a records album being charged with a new job. The first thing I seen was getting off the bus, it's like the full building itself just looked wicked. It looked family wicked. The people that's going, whatever they're doing in the house, they're going to come to you. Basically laying down the extortion game. So that's what happened. I told them to fly out. I can't do that. I can't do that. I'm not giving you that. So I just didn't. From this way, they all hit me from behind. The same four dudes, they were just all, they looked like the elephant man after. That was after being there for two and a half days. I actually been in prison with 16 or 17 young kids. They crushed them. They wound up joining gangs because they're scared, they're afraid. The ones that are scared or afraid, they think they're too tough. They want to either get stabbed to death or stabbed pretty bad where they almost beyond recognition were psychologically just completely destroyed. Some of them get raped. You think of a 16-year-old in an adult prison and it scares anybody who has a 16-year-old or knows a 16-year-old, right? Just to think of your son or daughter in an adult prison. We feel there's a better solution and it's really working with the youth. I lived in this area for 21 years. When I see the people, I just see that they're down. There's a lot of homeless people over here. There's a lot of drug-infested people over here and stuff like that. Stealing from where I am is pretty common. If you want something fast, you've probably taken this along. My friends, they will rob people all the time. I guess I was being a follower. I was doing it because they were doing it. That was not really my lifestyle. The first time I ever got in trouble with the law was at the age of 15. We saw this one kid, he had an iPod, so we decided to get it from him and then we beat him up that way. And the train station is allowed three blocks from here. Once we got to the train station, the cops were there, they were there waiting for us. His mom could have got a heart attack from here. Now his son got beat up and I'm really sorry for that because at the time I didn't care. Nobody's saying that these young people have not made poor decisions that there isn't a victim involved. We don't ignore that. It's very serious. But we also want to look at future victimization, too. So it's not just the first time they do it. It's, okay, what are you from here, to provide it for escalating or continuing? So training a 16-year-old like an adult really ignores the fact that the teenage brain is different from the adult brain. And that means neurobiological differences. Okay, well that would set the tone. So I'm going to put my first question to you, Hannah. Based on your personal experience, what do you think we need to do to change the youth justice system here in New York State? Well, just to kind of set a foundation to answer that question, you know, I think I also fit the discretion of the two of my peers who were shown in the video in terms of having been in the juvenile justice system myself and having had the fortunate luck of not having ended up in an adult facility. And that was all because of having committed my crime two days prior to turning 16. I ended up in a secure juvenile detention facility with an adult record, only because of those two days. I could have easily ended up in Rikers Island and I did it, which is one of the very, very things that has led me to, you know, kind of be an advocate for this issue and a lot of issues in the youth justice system because I was able to witness a lot of the things while I was in there for four years. And I think there are several things that can be done broadly to help the young people in the system, but it really bows down to addressing the major things, which is something like raising the age of criminal responsibility here in New York. As it stands, I currently have a criminal conviction, a B-class felony conviction. It's very difficult for me to obtain a job. I have a job, you know, right now as a research assistant, but the reality is that the agency that I work with, the organization that I work with, it really bows to focuses on addressing the issues in the system. So what would happen if I didn't have that position? I mean, I was in nine 15 jobs before I ended up at the Bureau of Justice and the conviction really carries a huge stigma in terms of even, you know, the applications and just in conversations I can sit here before everyone and, you know, I try to bring about my experience, but the reality is that I can't go about, you know, telling people I was arrested at 15 years old for the crime of attempted murder. You know, I was gang affiliated at the time. I had a lot of issues at home and these are things that people didn't address or things that needed to be addressed but were ignored at that point in time. You know, these are the conversations that nobody had with me, you know, kind of allowing me to bring those things out when I was younger. At 15, I really thought I had it figured out, but I didn't and the reality hit me when I ended up in the system for this particular crime. Thank you for sharing that very personal story. I'm going to talk to you now, Gabrielle. You run a project at the Correctional Association focused on this issue. Please explain a little bit about the work that you do and how it can make a difference with respect to raise the age. Thanks, Sophia. First of all, just thank you for the work that you do and for sharing your story. So at the Juvenile Justice Project, we do legislative and policy advocacy. We also run a youth training program for young people who have been system-involved and we evaluate the safety of young people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning who are incarcerated. And one of the things that we're doing is working very hard to raise the age of criminal responsibility. So the film showed and Hernan's experience talk a little bit about the issue of young people in the adult system. So New York is one of only two states. North Carolina is the other, where 16 and 17-year-olds are automatically prosecuted as adults. In addition, young people as young as 13 can be in the position that Hernan was in, where they are prosecuted as adults, but by virtue of their age, they're in youth facilities until somewhere between 16 and 21, at which point they can transfer to adult prisons. Like you saw in the film, young people in adult jails and prisons are incredibly vulnerable to sexual abuse, to physical abuse. A young person in an adult jail is 36 times more likely to commit suicide than a young person in a youth facility. 36 more times. In Rikers Island, young people can be placed in solitary confinement. About, I believe it's 71% of the young people in Rikers Island who are in solitary have been diagnosed with a mental illness. And young people can be in solitary. The average length of stay on Rikers for adolescents in solitary is 43.1 days. And I came to this work as I was previously an attorney for children and child abuse and neglect cases. And I can tell you that if a parent walked their child in a small room with no windows, with just a small slot in the door, that food is shoved through, with no human contact, total deprivation of interaction with other human beings, and not leaving the room to go to school, maybe just shoving some papers through a slot in the door, some schoolwork. If a parent did that and did that for 43.1 days, the parent would absolutely be charged with child abuse or neglect. In family court, certainly, the child and any other children in the home would be removed and placed in foster care, and the parent would also probably be arrested. However, our government is doing that with our taxpayer money to children because we prosecute children as adults. And I'll also just say the Correctional Association believes no human being should be in those conditions, regardless of age. But it's particularly shocking that we place 16-year-olds in those positions. So we do legislative work. We do community organizing. If you're affiliated with a community group, we'd love to come to your organization for a presentation. We have community meetings once a month where parents and faith-based leaders and community members can come learn how to get involved in work to raise the age. We have lots of interaction with the arts, and thank you, Elizabeth, for really reminding us about the intersection between arts and activism. For example, we co-sponsored lyrics on Lockdown, a one-man off-Broadway show that highlights this issue, and there's lots of other ways we try to incorporate poetry and art and imagery into our work. Thank you, Gabrielle. And, you know, before I turn to the Women in Prison Project, I should talk a little bit about the work of the Correctional Association as a whole. I doubt that there's anyone in here who was around when we were founded, since we were founded 170 years ago, by no one raised their hand. Okay, good. So we were founded by actually a group of very wealthy, concerned New Yorkers who were disturbed about what was happening in our state's prisons, as we should still be today. And two years afterwards, in 1846, the New York state legislature passed a law that gave us unfettered access to the state's prisons to monitor the conditions inside and to report out our findings, and we used that information to advocate for fundamental change in the system. We expanded our work to take on a number of criminal justice issues, but all of that work is grounded in the information that we gained from going inside the prisons and talking to the people who have firsthand accounts of what their day-to-day experience is behind the walls. We feel that it's extremely important for the entire public to know what is happening on the other side of the walls, because by knowing what is happening, then we can raise our voices to bring about fundamental change. With that short commercial about the work of the Correctional Association, I'm now going to turn to Mercedes Smith, who's working at Worth, and I ask you, Mercedes, from a personal standpoint, how do you feel you can use your personal experience to bring about change in the criminal justice system? Well, I believe that my personal experience can bring about change. For the simple fact that I did 20 years in prison, I know what it's like to have been there for 20 years, I know what it is that my sisters that I left behind is reaching out for that they need. I know about the inhumane treatment that goes on behind those walls, so since I've been home, it's been important to fight what I knew was happening inside, not that I read it in a book, not that I seen it in a film that I experienced it for 20 years. I'm going to ask you another question, Mercedes. Since you were in 20 years, tell us what were the demographics of the women in the facilities who you were held in? Well, the demographics were that it was a majority on black and Latino. We were the most inside the prison, and we were treated very badly. We were treated very harshly opposed to the other women that were there. And that demographic is what we find in the men's facilities, too. Approximately 75 to 80 percent of New York State's prisons are black and Latino, and that's what you find predominantly across the country. So, Talar, you run the women in prison project, and how does your work address some of these problems in the criminal justice system? Specifically, I know with the issues that women confront incarcerated. Well, thank you, Sophia, and we're so lucky at the women in prison project to partner with Mercedes and to advocate with her for change. So our project was started at the Correctional Association to really fight the rising numbers of women in prison and to try to create a criminal justice system that treats women and all people with fairness and with dignity and with justice. It was mentioned in the beginning, Elizabeth mentioned that this country has 5 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of the world's incarcerated population. If you look at that statistic when it comes to women, the statistics are even more staggering. This country has less than 5 percent of the world's women and nearly one-third of the world's incarcerated women. And as Sophia and Mercedes just talked about, it's not just any women that are incarcerated and that's what we're especially here to talk about today. The overwhelming majority of women who are incarcerated are from low-income communities. The vast majority are women of color. The majority are there for crimes that are related to domestic violence, to trauma, to addiction, to poverty, to things like mental illness. And it's not a coincidence that this is the makeup of our prison system in particular as it comes to women. It's the result of a criminal justice system that has deep racial bias that targets marginalized communities and that really uses incarceration as a primary response to problems that are at their root social and economic, not behavioral, not criminal. So Mercedes often talks about her experience as a mom. We might go back to that. And one other quick thing I'll say about that is it really is probably the defining legacy or one of the defining legacies of the incarceration of women is the destruction of families, the impact on families, the impact on children, the impact on communities. And to just pan out because we are talking about mass incarceration and mass criminalization, of course that has a mass impact on children. So 8.3 million children in this country have a parent under some form of criminal justice supervision. That's three times the size of the entire borough of Brooklyn. One in every 28 children has a parent that's incarcerated. That's essentially one child in every classroom in America, but of course it's actually not one child in every classroom in America. It's 15 children in poor communities of color that have students that look like me and that have the resources and opportunities that I did. So we focus on this issue of incarceration and the impact on families. And in particular we focus on the devastating impact on parents who have children who are in foster care. So there is a lot of work that I know that you've been doing around the issue of foster care and the impact that it can have in tearing families apart permanently. And there is a law, the ASFA law, and you're going to have to remind me what the initial stand for so that I don't embarrass myself. So please do that. There's an acronym for everything. Yeah, this incarceration has a particularly devastating impact on incarcerated parents who have children in foster care because of this law that Sophia has mentioned the Adoption and Safe Families Act ASFA. It's a federal law that was enacted in 2007, states enacted their own version in the years following New York enacted its version in 1999. And essentially what this law says is that foster care agencies are almost always required to file termination of parental rights proceeding. So that's the legal severing forever of the bond between the parent and the child if the child has been in foster care for 15 of the last 22 months. So this puts incarcerated parents at very serious risk of losing their parental rights forever. One, it's very difficult to meet the mandates of the child's welfare law from prison. Two, sentences come straight up against that 15 month timeline. So the median sentence for women in prison in New York state is 36 months. So you have 36 months versus 15 months. And then third, the stigma that people have been talking about, there's tremendous stigma there. And so we see that the scale gets tipped towards termination even in cases where it's actually in the best interest of the family to keep the family together. So our project with Mercedes and with other women incarcerated and formally incarcerated advocated for changes in this law and were successful in New York state to address this really just massive human rights violation. And we have a video that we'd like to show about it. Just before we show the video, I just want to put a little bit more context on it. Before I, I guess, morphed into teaching and then being the executive director of the Correctional Association. I represented adults in criminal court and in family court. And in family court the adults that I represented were people who were accused of abusing or neglecting their children or who were facing having the parental rights being terminated as Tamara was referencing a few minutes ago. Sometimes my clients weren't actually in court with me. They were incarcerated parents and also being charged with having their parental rights terminated on the basis or the accusation that they had failed to maintain meaningful contact with their children during the time that their children were incarcerated. But you have to understand for children who are in foster care they obviously can't just hop on a bus and travel upstate New York which is where most of the prisons are to visit their parents. So they had to rely on a case worker to take that trip with them upstate. And at that time the kind of general mindset was that it was actually harmful for children to continue to have relationships with their parents who were incarcerated. So case workers were loathe to actually take the children to visit with their parents. So the relationship between the child and the parent became more and more strained over time and then the parent was faced with a filing a petition in Family Court to terminate the parental rights when the parent had no way to maintain contact with the child and often the parent wasn't even kept informed by the foster care agency as to where their child was located. So the work that Tamara and other women have done in this area is historical in that it has helped to stop this tide that we had of ripping families apart particularly black and Latino families. So with that context I'd like to show you a short video about the ASFA Extension Law. and be there with her and then she could be by my side. I'll get that call one day saying are you my mother and I'll be there to open my arms and just hold her. So I just wait for that day because I just know one day it's going to happen. It was a special bond between me and Kayla and that's just something that's never going to be broken. So when I see her it'll be like I was always there for her and she was always in my heart. And that's when she'll stay and so she'll tell me I want her to know that I do love her. And I miss her the other time and she's gone and I don't know I don't want her to hate me because of what I've done. Your mom's locked up in prison behind bars or behind a door that's locked. You just gotta hold on and pray that your mom come up because there's a prayer every night for her not to let your mom come up. The people that have had work that have made that family family the ladies not my real mom and the dads not my real dad and the brothers and sisters that are not alive. I want to live with my own family and I want to live with some other family. The hardest thing was me not seeing her and me not because I have a name instead of the kids with their moms and they're all happy and they do a few stuff with your mom's locked up and we put that hand. Every time I threw out a candle I would wish that the world would come up first. I recently did two years of incarceration and to be out here and to start this positive new life that I have out here it's incredible and to be able to do it with my child is a complete blessing. I love the mother and her child I'm grateful to have her and that she has changed me. She keeps me very strong very focused, very motivated the fear of losing her letting her down she deserves the best mother that she can possibly have and I want to be that mom for her I want anybody else to comfort her when she's crying or tell her I'm better tonight and I know that if I let her down let myself down then I won't be raising her My life is so much better with her than without her Every mother deserves a second chance to love their child and be a mother Mercedes So, I went to prison for 20 years when I was incarcerated I had a daughter that was 6 I had a son who was 4 I had a son who was 2 months and I was pregnant at the time I couldn't imagine leaving my children as all the other mothers in Bethlehem Imagine leaving them Imagine getting your termination rights You lose all parental rights to your children You can never see them again I was fortunate it didn't happen to me but in turn because it was happening to so many women at Bethlehem I decided to spend my time at Bethlehem working in the parenting center where we grab these women as soon as they touch the ground they was in reception building we reached out to them if we have children we need to come to the parenting center immediately we did not want anybody's rights to be terminated we know how important it is to be a mother and we didn't feel that there was a lot of stigma about you could not mother from inside a prison they were completely wrong if you wasn't in prison how did you know I could mother from behind prison I was a great mother before I went to prison and while in prison so I spent my years in prison working with the mothers of Bethlehem to make sure their rights didn't get terminated I spent time facilitating them I spent time making sure they went on visit I coordinated several children programs where the children came up to visit their mothers spent time with their mothers we didn't want the courts to say oh you was out of your child's life for this many months so now you can't see them or you wasn't in contact with them and the parenting center we even made it a way where the social workers did not want to bring the children up or the foster care parents did not want to bring the children up at Bethlehem we made a way to go get those children we had chaperones that worked diligently going to pick up these children from all boroughs it was even harder for the children that lived in the upstate counties because they had to get up at 6 o'clock in the morning after going to school all week long getting up early these kids got up at 6 o'clock willing and ready to come to Bethlehem to see their mothers so if those were children who was happy seeing their mothers abandon with their mothers you know I didn't understand about you want to terminate her right as a parent you actually lock her up in prison she still want to be a mother things happen bad decisions are made it doesn't mean that you're a bad mother we all get angry we all may do something wrong some get caught some don't but that doesn't determine whether you're a good mom or you're a bad mom in prison they talk about the second chances we deserve a second chance these moms deserve a second chance they deserve to be raised by their mom parents said that we made a way so that you can be in every aspect of your child's life you could go to the school you could call the school we had advocates that went up to the school that stood in place for you we fought really hard so that these mothers would not get their rights terminated there were some mothers that got their rights terminated but we helped them to build a relationship with whoever had their child so that they would still be able to be in their child's life I mean the courts say no you shouldn't do that but we felt that it was important to that child you know we can't help what the lords decide but if that forced the parent and that mother wanted to make an agreement we felt that it was alright because every child needs their mother or their father and whatever the situation may be they deserve to be with them if you ask a child do you want to go see your mother they will always say yes I mean we can sit on this stage where we can talk about when my mother beat me of course I was mad at her I would say I would never want to see you again and I was angry and as soon as the pain went away from my little spanking I wanted to be with my mother this is the same with the children in prison they get angry they leave I was talking to Tamara and I said to her that they talk about when the kids go to school and the parents go up to the school and they say oh little Johnny is going through something his parents are getting a divorce the teachers they work with little Johnny but when they come up and say little Johnny's mother is incarcerated so that may be why he's acting up the first thing they say is don't take little Johnny back to see his mother what's the difference he needs to be worked with anyhow whether it's a divorced parent or a parent incarcerated thank you thank you very much Mercedes so I want to open up a little bit now and talk about the collateral consequences of a criminal conviction and how that impacts the individual who has the criminal conviction but also how it impacts the family of that person and the larger community from which that person comes who would like to start okay I'll start so my story is a little twisted I came home from two or twenty years so I felt like I had strikes against me already one I was a black woman two I went to prison I was incarcerated so I had strikes against me a black woman a single mom coming home from prison and on top of that once I got released from prison I did the other side of it I had a child that was in prison my son that was two months old when I went to prison he was incarcerated so that part was even harder for me because one once I was released from prison my prison time didn't stop because when I became incarcerated I incarcerated my entire family my entire family needed somebody to get this out of them and even though I was released from prison my son was in prison so that meant our whole family stayed in prison and we followed that around but you know we worked with a lot of different organizations that we got the great support that we needed to help us to deal with incarceration and how it affected my family and other people's families thank you what are some of the collateral consequences that people face when they come out of prison I think I have a few things that I could add to that I already mentioned the employment aspect of it is probably one of the largest collateral consequences I came out of the juvenile justice system with an adult conviction and I'm thinking I've never held a job before I've never had any of these different employment skills and I come out and I have a daughter that I have to take care of that in itself was hard enough I'm just kind of trying to find the job to get some money to bring some food in the table to pay the rent I mean it was hard as it was my family had already been taking care of my daughter for a very long time and her mother and really the responsibility fell on them I mean everything that I had done up until had been arrested they paid for my court and that money was not present at the time they had to put it together my relationship with my family as a result of my incarceration was strained drastically although I get along with my family now during my time incarcerated I really couldn't find a way to connect with them let alone relate to them given that I was in a different predicament but when I was released even now to this day to today I have a hard time having conversations with them really because they don't understand that experience of having been in the system they too fear the system in a sense not the criminal justice system but the immigration system they themselves are immigrants to this country and the reality is is that my predicament in the system put them in a very vulnerable position yet they still held on for that and many of my peers currently who are in the community I mean they're going back into the system with much more serious felonies because they couldn't find a job the supportive services weren't there for them and the reality is is that those consequences are a result of them having come out of the system with their criminal conviction and not receive someone to really catch them when they were released and that's what people are thinking neglect at times you know in the system right now to address the core issue that really is helping everybody who's coming out offering them what they need thank you, Gabrielle do you want to add to that yeah I would just add that some of the collateral consequences that can impact both young people and adults and just to say collateral consequences the term that generally means the consequences beyond incarceration itself but the things that come along with it so if a young person has a criminal record they put both themselves and their whole family at risk of eviction from public housing there's laws about people with felony convictions being in night shop New York City Housing Authority housing and so it's a particular challenge for young people and families because parents also have a legal obligation to provide housing for their children so a parent who has let's say their 16 or 17 year old son living with them at home in public housing can be evicted however if they don't allow their child to live with them they can be charged with child neglect because there's a fundamental contradiction in our law where we say a 16 and 17 year old is a child and deserves the protection of child abuse and neglect laws except for we criminalize their behavior and treat them as adults in this one situation in which case they for example as I mentioned before can be abused in ways that children are not supposed to be abused by their own parents and there's a ton of contradictions and the housing consequence is one of them people with records have to check a box for the rest of their life for many employment applications Elizabeth talked about the ban the box movement which is to get rid of the box where you check having a conviction in some situations you also have to disclose arrests young people and adults with criminal records can be barred from certain professions forever some of those are kind of bizarre like being a barber for example something you cannot do if you have a felony conviction there's restrictions on getting loans for college and given the intersection of poverty and the criminal justice system it's particularly troubling that children who come from low economic backgrounds can be prohibited from getting loans to pay from college and college education is one of the best things we can do to reduce recidivism and I think we're going to talk a little bit later about what are some of the solutions and something I just want to emphasize is our current approach to the criminal justice system does not keep communities safe it is criminogenic which is a fancy way of saying we cause more crime so things like keeping people with criminal histories from employment from participation in society from safe housing doesn't keep them or our community safe it creates more crime it creates more crime it creates more poverty what do you want to add to this one thing and very quickly the thing about the barber when we go and visit women's prisons one of the number one programs is cosmetology so it's of particular importance just to point out that cosmetology is in the prisons and you can't can't be a cosmetologist although you can actually work around it but still it's a serious contradiction and one thing I just wanted to add because everyone spoke so powerfully about all of the different barriers education housing employment family reunification that all of those and the stigma that all of those combine to it's the sum total of all of them everyone talked about keeping people in the cycle of lack of opportunity and lack of social mobility and so we really see that the criminal justice system and mass incarceration it comes out of racism and sexism and social injustice and it's also one of the preeminent forces in this country that's perpetuating those problems and one of the reasons why it is one of the rudders of those problems not just something that's the result of those problems is because of the combined total of barriers to entering how they keep people in a cycle and how they really set people up and that's what Michelle Alexander author of the New Jim Crow meant when she said essentially that we haven't gotten rid of racial caste in this country we've just redesigned it that this is this is really a form of government-sanctioned institutionalized racism and larger social injustice that happens because of the barriers and what that means on a larger level and although in New York state thank you to her although in New York state people can reclaim their right to vote once they are finished with parole in some states you are permanently disenfranchised if you have a felony conviction if you combine that with the disproportionate aspect of the impact of the criminal justice system on black and Latino people then you can see that more and more black and Latino people will be permanently disenfranchised in the United States also access to TAP and Pell grants are disallowed to people who have a felony conviction and for anybody who has been incarcerated and also if you are on parole then you do not qualify for public health benefits so you have no health insurance and you cannot get public health benefits if you are on parole so we have a multitude of collateral consequences that permanently create a second class status for a growing number of people in our society but now that we've painted that very grim picture let's talk about some of the solutions what are some of the things that we can do and we are working on to create a better world to imagine a world where people are before prisons so I'll turn back down to Gabrielle tell us some of the things that you are doing with the juvenile justice project and how you are going to create at least a better world in the youth justice system I don't know, I would like to think we are going to create a better world it's certainly the project we are engaged in to join us so as I mentioned before we do a lot of legislative and policy work we run a coalition the juvenile justice coalition and we invite community members to join us and you can see me afterward if you are interested or visit the correctional association's website we go to Albany to meet with legislators and we love to bring people from the community with us so that's another way you can get involved and you can join our work to raise the age of criminal responsibility I think another thing that we can do sort of in addition to thinking about legislative advocacy and policy advocacy is about a cultural change and so I also just want to talk for a moment about the way that we see children in our society so I often talk about children being the canary in a coal mine and so it used to be that when coal miners went into a coal mine they would bring a canary with them because a canary is very small and has very sensitive lungs this is true, you might know like if you have a bird at home you shouldn't cook with certain kinds of toxic cookware because you'll kill the bird to me that's a good reason not to cook with it in any situation but it's the same thing that was happening in the coal mine so children to me are like the proverbial canary in a coal mine when they're in distress when they're acting out what's going on in the mine not what's wrong with the child not let's handcuff and shackle the child or criminalize the child let's think about the conditions in the mine that are making the child act out and I think that we as a society as adults have a real obligation to think about what are the conditions we are creating and participating in and if our children and they are all our children are distressed if they're acting out, if they're in gangs if they're using substances if they're engaging in violence rather than shooting the canary we would do well to say what's going on in the mine and how do we fix the mine and I think it's really important to think about those of us who have resources and have privilege as I do what can I do as an individual what can we do as individuals to work with young people who may not have privilege and so some of the things I really think about are mentoring young people one of the research shows but most people know in their hearts that when children succeed and children are resilient it is usually because there's an adult who loves them and believes in them and there's a person supporting them even in the face of adversity so that's a really important way people can get involved another way you can really become involved is to speak out on behalf of children children can vote they don't have economic power and poor children of color are the kids who are impacted by the criminal justice system in New York City 95% of the kids who are in secure detention are black and Latino and they don't abuse you that I did many of the things that they are locked up for but I was a white kid from a middle class neighborhood in Staten Island and I didn't go to jail for smoking pot or shoplifting from Macy's generally I didn't get caught but if I did, that was not the outcome for me but for poor kids for kids of color we lock them up for normal adolescent behavior and for things that in certain communities we just say we lock them up for legislators and so those are things we also have to push for policy and public change and children, no one's calling their legislators to say what's happening to kids why are 95% of kids our taxpayer money are going to lock up why are 95% of them black and Latino or why does it cost $266,000 a year to lock a kid up in a state facility so the facility that Hernan was in cost $266,000 a year he was in for four years, it cost $1,000,000 to take this young man who is now a college student who is a research assistant who is an advisor to the National Academy of Sciences our taxpayer dollars spent $1,000,000 putting him behind bars what could we have done for him and his family instead and we need people to call their legislators, visit them and ask these questions does everybody get away to make that call so you know we've been talking about some of the collateral consequences that people experience on a personal level I think we should also remember that the collateral consequences felt by the community are also in an economic context so for all the people who are incarcerated that means they're not in their communities renting apartments or buying homes or spending money at the local grocery store or paying money to go to the movies or any of the things that people spend money on that feed the vibrancy of the economic foundation of that community so small wonder that the cycle of poverty continues unabated when you continue to lock up certain members of our society mostly poor and black and brown people they cannot get out of that cycle of poverty because the community from which they come is continually impacted from an economic standpoint because the money that they would be spending in that community has been taken away so there are multiple levels of the collateral consequences that communities of color are facing because of the criminal justice system tomorrow I want to put another question to you some speak about the fact that perhaps we could change the dialogue instead of talking about a criminal justice lens for this issue we talked about a public safety lens so I'd like you to address that how could a public safety lens help to change the way the system has been functioning well it certainly could change because for public safety and I think a number of other lenses could really change public health public safety if we looked at things from a different perspective we'd realize what Gabrielle was actually saying it's not working what we're doing is not working it's not making us safer, it's not making communities safer it's not making people healthier and so if you look from public safety and from public health it's not especially in terms of public health it's not only about addiction and the war on drugs everything is a public safety issue everything is a public health issue trauma is a public health issue and a public safety issue the war on drugs is one of the most stark examples of where we've gone so terribly wrong by not actually looking at what is underpinning public safety and public health very quick thing just to mention that underscores that point are the Rockefeller drug laws in New York state and what happened as a result to our prison population as a result of reforming those laws so in 1973 in New York and after the Rockefeller drug laws there were mandatory sentences for even low level possession or sale drug crimes and they were kind of the grandfather of mandatory sentencing and active throughout states at that time and they really drove the prison population up in New York state from 1973 to 1997 the number of women in prison increased by 900% across the country was about 800% number of women of color in the 1990s was over 80% in New York's prisons there were a series of reforms to those laws in the early 2000 and in part as a result of changes in those laws opening up judicial discretion the ability of judges to divert someone for prison and actually send them to an alternative to incarceration where they could help and treatment and stay with their family as a result of that number of women in New York state prisons from the beginning for the total population for women it's dropped by about 38% and the number of women of color has gone from just over 80% to just over 60% now of course there's still far far too many women who are locked up and there's still a hugely disproportionate impact on women of color but the fact that changes to sentencing laws could have an impact in this way just really highlights the fact that it's not behavior that drives the system it's who we criminalize and what we criminalize and that really comes out of not having the right lens, not having a public health lens not having a public safety lens and not having any other lens really other than a lens of punishment which is at the root of what of how our criminal justice system unfortunately functions in this country Thank you Tamara we have in our work at the criminal justice excuse me at the correctional association at the correctional association look at a number of different issues that are impacting the people who are behind bars and one of the things that we have found is a disproportionate number of people behind bars suffer from some form of mental illness and the correlation between poverty and mental illness and the fact that in our immaculate wisdom many years ago most of the mental health public mental health facilities in the state meant that people who were poor who were in need of mental health treatment really were left with nothing and people who are more affluent could afford to have private therapy sessions and get the services that they needed but the poor who were suffering with mental illness got nothing the only thing that we provided them with was a cage we found that more and more people who had mental health issues on the street were being swept up by the police in a variety of accusations and prosecuted in court and being locked up in our state's prisons most of whom do not have any form of mental health treatment behind bars we have to have a serious mental health diagnosis in order to qualify for any kind of significant mental health treatment in our state prisons so you have many many people who have mental health treatment and they are just trying to function in general population and then after a number of years of humiliation behind bars then we release them to the streets expecting them to be able to function so that's another driver that we need to address if we plan to make any significant difference in this system I know we sound very, very bleak up here but that's because the situation that we're facing is bleak we have a change I can tell Tamar has something on the typical time to answer that we have another short video that we would like to show you about the work of the correctional association and then after we do that we want to open it up for questions and answers I think this might be a good time to do that I'm waiting for someone to give me a signal is that right Elizabeth? so let's show that video and then we're going to entertain some questions from you we do want to show that video I want to present a visit my heart is very heavy now let me forget the look in the faces of the men particularly in Attica when I went to visit them and I guess desperation and despair like the air they were breathing was destroying them because the atmosphere the way they were forced to live the way they attempt for human growth and development and I feel that our society is hidden all time low that we can treat other human beings this way that we can cage people for decades and decades and just ignore them ignore their families and think that as a society we're not all going to be impacted by that I just was not myself I was like a walking zombie I knew that I could get myself in trouble by any word that came out of my mouth or an action that I did but I'm actually a different person outside and outside I'm the clown and I'm always joking and in jail I couldn't do those things so it was like a part of me was dying these black and Latino boys would come in very dejected, heads down uniforms from the institutions where they were and they would be handcuffed and the cuffs would be taken off and the kids hands would remain in the cuffs position what have we done to these children when they have internalized they have internalized handcuffing themselves that's really a blessing on the society as a whole the fact that we don't really seem to believe in which is redemption my experience as a formerly incarcerated person here this organization sees that as valuable as my degree from NYU and my education at Columbia and any other like formalized education that I've had my experience as a formerly incarcerated person is seen as a form of expertise and not many organizations can say that at the correctional association we have a deep faith in the human capacity to change one of the most brutal aspects of the criminal justice system is the way it tries to strip people of the humanity and their spirit our mission is to counter this brutality to affirm the value of all people to promote policies that can transform individuals and society for the better I left connecting with the young people and seeing them meet themselves they come to the program to meet other people and to learn things but they learn about themselves and meet the real them that they can meet we went up for a lobby day we went up with a team, it was mainly formerly incarcerated moms and there was this one team that was sitting with one of the four senators and he came into that meeting thinking these are bad mothers mothers who go to prison are bad mothers and the formerly incarcerated moms who were in that meeting talked to him about how they were fighting for their kids how some of them had gained custody of their kids and how others of them had actually lost custody but didn't want anybody else to have their parental rights terminated he by the end of that meeting was willing to vote for that legislation and in fact he cast one of the deciding votes in making that bill law the women who participate in the reconnect program they want to make a change so that another woman doesn't have to walk the road that they walked I've done 26 years I'm blessed to come to work every day because I'm able to get back I'm able to those men who didn't survive that torture and that pain I'm able to do them some justice to speak in their voice we are trying to actually have people know that there's someone outside of the prison who cares about what happens to them and that we will be their voice when their voice is unheard what could the world look like if we put people, people, people before prisons I think we have to create a world where prisons are obsolete where communities have the capacity to nurture themselves to be actual communities if all the women's prisons closed and we started actually treating women and families and communities with humanity and with opportunity and resources that they need to be healthy and whole and productive I would jump for joy what I would strive for at the core of my meeting in these prisons as we know are a thing of the past that there's no more Attica no more Clinton no more humanizing process where we take people and all we do is punish them mass incarceration devastates our families and our communities a criminal justice system that degrades and demeans certain members of our society degrades and demeans all of us we advocate for a justice system that can hold a person accountable for a crime yet not condemn an entire life based on one act what could the world look like if we put people before prisons we could create real freedom for all of us we could treat children like children we could have more black fathers Latino fathers in our community we could turn our tragedies into our treasures and a world that has people before prisons we can have an equal education we could replace gang activity with something positive we could learn to forget so that we could heal the world what would the world look like we could really put people before prisons I think it would be a better place it is something that I look forward to this issue of mass incarceration is the human rights issue of our time if we seize this moment we can build a world that puts people before prisons all we need now is you I think tomorrow you wanted to share something just very quickly to the question to the audience of how to get involved I just wanted to mention a couple key ways that you can get involved Gabrielle mentioned our coalition our women in prison project we also run a coalition called the coalition for women prisoners Mercedes is a leading member of that coalition so we are 1,800 people from over 100 different organizations across the state if you care about changing the criminal justice system as it affects women and children and families come we have a meeting fire that is on the table we have a number of really powerful campaigns going on right now one would stop the shackling of incarcerated pregnant women an issue that we didn't talk about today which was talked about at the last panel discussion by Piper and by Tina Reynolds excuse me Piper Kerman Tina Reynolds very powerful work on trying to ban the shackling of incarcerated pregnant women and that we have a major campaign going on that we have a petition so please sign it we also have a major campaign going to try to open up judicial discretion give judges the option to divert domestic violence survivors who act to protect themselves against their abusers from being sent to prison for years and years and years sometimes decades so we also have letters of support that are out there and in addition to our coalition we also do the monitoring work we monitor conditions in the women's prisons and so if you're interested in finding out more please come and find out more from us after this and we also run a leadership training program called ReConnect and throughout the correctional association and certainly at our project we really hold this core principle and you've heard people talk about it that people who are most directly affected by the criminal justice system really are the experts and have the right to directly affect their lives and so we carry that throughout all of our work and certainly in our leadership training program so if you yourself are formerly incarcerated if you're interested in joining that program you know somebody who is you just want to find out more please take some materials and I realize the last piece I should have mentioned once Sophia asked about a public safety approach is that there are alternatives that work so there are alternatives to incarceration there are programs and services in the communities that not only cost a fraction of what prison costs but even to reduce recidivism so there are other ways to do it that have been proven we do not take advantage of those ways and if we actually were looking at what really is public safety what really makes sense we would take advantage of those thank you so much Tamar we also have an advisory council that is comprised of formerly incarcerated men who advise the work with the prison visiting project and allows us to make sure that the work that we're doing is informed by those who had first-hand experience behind the walls there was one there was something else I was going to share of course I'm having that senior moment what could that be hopefully it will I know I'm very particularly proud of the fact that a quarter of our staff is formerly incarcerated so they have the ability and it's important to us that they play a fundamental role in the work that we do in making a difference so with that we'll start with questions I'm inclined to always start to my left so I'm going to start to my left and I'll go back and forth I'm going to cheat I have two questions Rita Henley Jensen from Women's E-News and I was under the impression there were court decisions that ended shackled birth practices at least in New York State but to make an analogy what Mercedes said that she her whole family was put in prison if in fact Mercedes was shackled while she gave birth it's not a metaphor and so the second part of the question is the denial of welfare benefits to mothers leaving prison and therefore cannot not neglect their children to bring your point regain custody to my youngest child who I was pregnant with when I was incarcerated and one of the reasons that I connected with Worth who was a part of organizations that helped to write this law and get passed was because they were still actually shackling women even though the law was passed that they shouldn't remain in prison which is so inhumane to treat a woman like that while she's giving birth although they have changed the law in a number of states New York are not following the law the correctional facilities are not following that but they are still shackling women absolutely to what Mercedes said so we are women in prison project partnered with Worth with many other organizations to lead an effort that passed a law in 2009 that banned shackling of incarcerated women during childbirth and what we found through our monitoring visits is that there are actually serious violations of that law so that there has been some progress but that women are still routinely being shackled on the way to the hospital even when they are in labor they are still routinely being shackled right after they give birth even for long periods of time immediately after they give birth even when they are interacting with their newborns and then also on the way back to the prison and shackled with waste chains usually shackling it's hand cuffs it's often a black box that goes between it's waste chains which are attached to the hand cuffs and it's ankle cuffs and we found women who were shackled in that entire for the entire full shackling even three days after they've had C-sections with a waste restraint so we are working both to strengthen to bring light to the fact that that law is being violated not implemented effectively and also then to expand protections for the ages of pregnancy which is also a routine in in our state's prisons and in our local jails as well that women are shackled all throughout so we are very actively working on that and looking for people to come on board with that campaign so before I take the next question do you want to talk at all about the reproductive reproductive justice report what a wonderful lead in because you talk about the reproductive justice report I guess and shackling is also in a prison project just finished a five year study of reproductive health care for women in New York state prisons very much taking the lens around reproductive health and around reproductive justice seeing mass incarceration as a serious infringement on reproductive health on reproductive rights on reproductive agency looking at issues of shackling, looking at issues of access to the gynecologist often women have severely substandard care in prison for OBGYN care looking at care for pregnant women in general looking at shackling and so really encourage people to access the report once it comes out contact us to get a copy if you're interested and also join the campaign or kind of larger campaign on reproductive health and justice of what shackling is a part thank you my name is Carl Dixon Carl Dixon first I want to salute the work that the correctional association is doing because the injustices that you point out targeting young people, targeting women in prison targeting transgender by gay lesbian prisoners all of that's very important it's a part of the picture but I want to go to something that Ms. Tamar Kraft talked about about criminalization and that being why there's been a skyrocketing of the numbers of people in prison and why it's targeted in the way that it does because you've got a system that's operating in a way that it's withdrawing work from the ghettos and barrios of this society you've got an educational system that's geared to fail many of those youths because they don't need to educate them to get them into the work force and the point that the sister made about a family being in prison when one person goes in and says that is reality you send a brother or sister to jail their children's lives are enmeshed in the criminal justice system their partners lives are their parents lives mothers have to be like can I pay the rent or do I have to pay a big phone bill for calling my child in prison this is unjust it's immoral and the way that I come at this I'm going to ask if you could tell us what your question is well it's more of an observation than a question I'm going to ask you to make your observation I'll wind it up real quick we have to be the ones to stop it we have to change the way people in society look at it and that's why Cornell West and I have proposed a month of resistance to mass incarceration this October we're going to be mobilizing people to have demonstrations, cultural events panel symposiums reverberations and ferment in the faith communities and anybody here because people who've been incarcerated need to stand up and resist this but if you live in this society you cannot stand by and let this injustice be done anybody who wants to be involved in this come and talk to me afterwards and I'm going to invite all the panelists to be involved in this effort because we need to just change the way the society looks at it the people are in jail because they have done bad things but that they've been put in a climate and a situation where there's no future being offered to like tens of millions of people thank you Carl you know I believe remiss in my views if I didn't also share in addition to the wonderful staff that we have we have a wonderful board of directors I don't know if any of them are here with us today but they were, I thought I saw some I read it and it was interesting to support our work and we couldn't do it alone so the healthy relationship that the staff and board have together is what enables us to be so effective in the work that we've been doing for the past 170 years gentlemen to my left hey good afternoon I get my hair cut in Harlem and I was just telling one of my friends all of my barbers have been to prison at some point so I was very astonished by that by that particular collateral my name is Michael Lopez my question is about demographics you all seem to be very well versed on the issue of demographics I'm a member of an organization called the Afro Latino Forum and we're focused on Latinos of African descent specifically here in the United States and a lot of the conversation that happens not just on the issue of the prison industrial complex but it over all is a dichotomy that we create between black and Latino and them being very specifically explicitly separate and so I'm just wondering how and if we're doing a conference of this year about called race counts and what we're looking at is the numeric system and how are people counted and one of our conversations is about this exact same subject and so what I'm wondering is are Latinos of African descent are biracial folks counted in the system and if so how and so I was just hoping that maybe that conversation can start because I just recently had a conversation with Professor Juan Flores about this very issue and I'm sure you worked with him and the fact that the the counting is not being done so we don't have accurate figures and part of the reason for that is because people self-identify when they come into docks you check a box and that's how docks gather some information there's no one in docks that's assigned to determine whether or not you're African Latino African American, African Caribbean African from the continent there's just none of that that's going on you're brown, you're black you're white or you're other that's basically the categories that exist for docks so that level of evidence gathering and data gathering is just not happening gentlemen to my right my name is Jim Hicks I'm the Vice President of the London Terrorist Tennis Association which is just an identification I have two questions I don't represent I'm not representing them but I can I have two questions the first question is why isn't the government doing their thing here and then because I've seen them in much less important events than this and the second is do you know which governor built the most prisons in New York State yes the father of the current governor yes Mario Cuomo built the most prisons in New York State Mario Cuomo and because it's his son's duty to close more prisons that his father built oh that's very good with respect to why C-SPAN isn't here I think we all want to know that the answer to that question thank you to my left hi I'm Beth Rebar I have the pleasure of working with Mercedes at the coming home program at St. Luke's Hospital and I was thinking about doing health care and I know that with the Affordable Care Act and states that expanded Medicaid formerly incarcerated individuals will be covered and I was thinking of yes yay and I know it's to the credit of amazing organizations like the Correctional Association who do incredible in-depth reports and really advocate on their behalf I'm also was thinking about magazine doing an in-depth profile about the prisoners who did a hunger strike at Pelican Bay and it strikes me that there's for the first time in a long time like a little bit of hope and I was wondering if you could sort of speak to that and how can we sort of leverage this and what is it about is it the political landscape is it passionate people what is it about what's going on right now that some things are making small changes but you know historically at least in America this pendulum swings far to the right and then swings not as far as I like to the left and I think that we are in that pendulum swing and that the images from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib did more than we thought that they would do to kind of shock the conscience of the American public to know that our country could be responsible for such horrors and those of us who have been toiling for many many years in the trenches with respect to pushing for criminal justice reform said well hold on a minute those atrocities that we've been talking about and we're all concerned about in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are actually also happening right in our own backyard and that kind of opened up the opportunity to build on a conversation that we had been relegated to just a whisper prior to those images frightening us across the pages of the media outlets that momentum is what I think we're riding the tide of right now and it's coming upon all of us to seize the time and I know that's a throwback phrase but it you know everything comes around again it's my son telling me all the time mom you are the ultimate old it is important for us to seize the time and a process work with a sense of urgency the likes of which we've never felt before because the pendulum will swing again and that's what's so concerning about the analysis that focus only on the economics how much money we spend per person because the humanity of those individuals cannot be lost ultimately if we want to build a better world we can't just analyze it in dollars and cents we have to analyze it from the human cause so the media has been kind to us recently but we can't take that for granted so we have to take every nanosecond and exploit it for all that it's worth so that our children and our grandchildren don't look back and say and hang their heads in shame and said what were you thinking at that time in 2014 anybody else want to add to that who would only maybe add that you're absolutely right but the prison population overall we've seen it for the past couple years actually start to decline and it's this much decline but it's actual decline which is a huge difference from what it's been doing over the past 40 years and so just to build on what Sophia was saying that there is and also what Gabrielle started out by saying is that the increasing awareness there's increasing public awareness there's more media articles and the economics are absolutely driving the argument and that's so important and critical to point out why it's important to make that work for us but not only rely on us because it rely on that because the trap that will get us into but I think important to also know that the numbers and the mass effect of this is having an effect on people most people are now able to cite the number of people who are in prison in the United States and the fact that we incarcerate more people in the country in the world and years ago that would not have been the case so kind of small shifts in public perception and thinking about it and keep talking keep calling your legislators even if you just call what Gabrielle was saying just call and say I care about these issues I believe in alternatives to incarceration I want you to as well that makes a huge difference to legislators and I think it's that kind of activism that's really been from the ground up and now is increasing because of the economics of it from the top that can meet and there's more and more forums like this there's so many forums about mass incarceration now I can't keep up there's just that many but you know one of the things that we have to also understand we're creating more and more ambassadors and those ambassadors have to be analytical so let's take an example in California advocates in California fought long and hard to deal with the frightening levels of overcrowding in the California prison system the solution that was fashioned in California though actually is almost as problematic as the original problem so the solution was to move a number of people out of the prisons in California to other states other states in the south eastern part of the country making it totally impossible for poor people who had been incarcerated in prisons in California to have any connection to their families now that they're incarcerated in Georgia, Alabama and the Pacific the other half of the solution was to move people to local jails where there was absolutely no programs for people who were serving lengthy sentences so you created more idleness for a larger number of people so as we create more ambassadors to fashion solutions to our problem of mass incarceration they have to be analytical enough to understand what solutions actually work and what solutions actually should be in the problem column of the analysis yes, another question to my right Hi, my name is Lauren Elfan I'm an attorney at the Bronx Defenders and we represent parents who are charged with abuse and neglect so I worked with Gabrielle a long time ago my question is both maybe Fritz Mara and Mercedes something that we see a lot in representing incarcerated parents mothers and fathers who are dealing with trying to unify with their families trying to maintain their bond and connection with their families there are two things that I was hoping you could talk about one is why an arrest in the first place has to trigger child welfare involvement to begin with because that issue is number one but number two is once that child welfare is involved what we see is family members and community members coming forward and saying we don't want those children to be in foster care we love those children they're part of our family we'll take them until the mother or father can come back and take care of their children themselves but they are then barred talking about collateral consequences of conviction they are barred from coming forward as resources to those children because they have their own criminal history however minute or remote they may be or their own ACS you know administration for children services history so my question is I guess in two part one is what kind of policy work is being done so that arrests don't trigger child welfare because they often have nothing to do with the children nothing to do with the care of the children nothing to do with the parent as you said Mercedes we represent wonderful mothers and fathers who are convicted of things that have absolutely nothing to do with their children and two what kind of policy efforts are underway so that these collateral contacts don't bar family members from coming forward and keeping their children in their community out of foster care to begin with well I one of the things that's so important to me is the fact that you know I do know that Osborn is working on something where they cannot make an arrest if a child is present they cannot actually physically put their handcuffs on you in front of the child they're supposed to remove the child from the situation before they actually make an arrest but you know my questions are always the same what does this child have to do with the arrest like that does not say what type of mother you are so you know one of the things that we work on is making sure that the mothers and the children are in contact immediately upon being in prison that way they can't try to determine that all this mother has not reached out to this child and what you don't know is that it's so hard when you first get incarcerated to be in contact with anybody so you know we immediately as soon as they come in I know at the parent center we immediately reach out to these mothers to make sure they make some type of contact so when the system jumped down on them they're prepared for the fight so we start the fight like on the inside where we can and as far as I still go into the prison system right now to do support work for the women and men inside and I continuously tell them to be in contact with your children right to your children all the time you know don't let the system make that choice for you write the letters even if they come back you have to write these letters that way you can say well I wrote a letter because nine times out of ten the judge need proof they want to know that how would you in contact what happened and tomorrow I can tell you about the actions that we take the policies exactly what Mercedes said I think those are I don't know of any organizations that are specifically tackling that that are specifically tackling that and you brought up those are two critical issues the Osborne Association has a really incredible initiative the New York Initiative for Children of Incarcerated Parents run by a woman named Tonya Croupat that's doing a ton of work on child sensitive arrest as Sadie has mentioned to the extent that it could ever be child sensitive but really trying to say you have to take steps that recognize that the child is going to have a supremely traumatic experience just by virtue of being there when the parent is arrested but what you're talking about around barriers to be a resource, to be a caregiver to be even someone who's taking care of someone in kinship foster care I'm not aware of anybody that's working specifically on trying to remove that barrier it's enormous, thank you for raising it I have heard conversations of much advocates as to what would be the likelihood of getting policies in place or legislation that would require sentencing judges to do a family impact or child impact analysis before declaring a sentence on someone who is facing a possibility of incarceration we're long ways away from that but the more ambassadors that we create to push that agenda we might actually be able to move that forward can I also say something that I do know a lot about the Bronx Defenders work and I'm really happy about the work you're doing with mothers one of the things that I also usually tell the women and the men is that you know, I didn't go through that when it happened to me because my mom stepped in immediately and took my children but I tell them all the time that you know the fight is a hard fight and if your children are that important to you, you have to fight the fight do not give up don't let the system take your children because they will take your children and then becomes the problem that these children become rebellious and then they want to give them medication and put them away somewhere in the end but do they ever think that it's because we started this from the beginning we traumatized these kids by removing them from where they taking them out of their comfort level and placing them in a strange household and one of the things I also tell them is I was very clear with the judge when they asked me did I have anything to say to the judge the first thing out my mouth was what about my children I need my children and I need to always be where they can reach me so I also encouraged them to tell the judges I was a mother before I was put in prison I did everything with my children I took them to school, I bathed them I put them to bed at night I wasn't an absent parent in their lives and if you take me away from them you will destroy them Thank you Ms. Davis, yes, next question I just want to thank all of you for putting this event together and anyone who collaborates and is not present on stage thank you, oh my name is Jade and I have two friends who are going to be teaching at low SES schools in New York City and I'm wondering what they can do besides being cognizant about these issues what essential things can they do with their students knowing that one in 28 students have a parent who is incarcerated That's a great question I think that there are a lot of resources for teachers I mean I'm not a teacher although I'm married to one and the child of one too but I think there are some really important organizing happening around children in the criminal justice system which is run by a woman named Sally Lee is one organization there's NYCOR which is a coalition of radical educators and I think that probably looking for resources within the radical teaching community and the political teaching community is probably a great first step I don't have specific access to resources for teachers but I think a point that Mercedes made that was really powerful is about thinking about children who have incarcerated parents from a trauma child centered perspective and that that is no different than a child in a human level in our hearts the way we are mindful and attentive to children going through divorce or the death of a parent or other strain and to sort of also think in all of this work from the perspective of a child that a child his parent is incarcerated probably most situations is going to be really aching for their parent and it's going to have the normal acting out and sort of going back to the minors canary that when children are in distress they act out and that's normal that is normal childhood behavior it's normal adolescent behavior and that with children I think to see the problem as being inside of the kid as opposed to being thinking about a child having pain that needs tending to and so I don't have a specific resource but I think it's important for teachers and for anyone who comes into contact with children to really think deep in our hearts about children who are acting out and children who are having behavioral difficulty and teenagers who are on the subway and screaming that often what is happening is either just normal adolescent behavior I recently learned that part of adolescent brain development literally means there's a reason teenagers are louder there's actually a physiological reason but also that kids are often acting out because they're in distress and so how do we help them and I think it's a great question and I think connecting with some sort of teacher specific resources would be a good first step I actually know that Gabrielle said that I think the New York Initiative for Children of Incarcerated Parents is another good place to go because they are working with some teachers as you said that it reminded me working with some teachers who are working on curricula that are both sensitive to the fact that having an incarcerated parent is a trauma like other traumas and is also its own very specific trauma and so that would be another good organization if you want to come to us afterwards we can give you the specific information on that thank you next question I got two quick questions first with the rise of immigrants being incarcerated do they figure into the number that was thrown out there and if not why not and then second like the figure of a million dollars you know for the incarceration I I'm guessing there was different actors that may profit from that how do those kind of actors or corporations figure into your efforts to change the system and what sort of targeting can we do also because I imagine there might be different banks or other stuff that pushing for incarceration I honestly think for the question about immigration this is something that I actually recently have been more exposed to particularly because I've become more involved with activism around the immigration issue and the reality is that in the numbers we are not including entirely the population that is immigrant that is in the criminal justice system those prisons that hold immigrant detainees are part of our criminal justice system yet they are receiving far more different treatment and at times reading a report recently from Arizona the conditions at times are even worse than our regular criminal justice system so those are things too to consider in the numbers like I said I don't have the numbers specifically but they are definitely not the numbers you raised a good point which I forgot to mention earlier there's only two organizations in the whole country that have this access into the state prisons to monitor what's going on and there's no organization that has access to the federal prisons to monitor what's going on and that includes the detention centers so with regard to the cost of youth incarceration so the figure that I gave it's for the New York Office of Children and Family Services which runs certain aspects of the residential prisons for youth the figure is $266,000 a year that is just the cost of facility operation it's not all the ancillary cost so just to also say I can't even imagine what the figure would be if you added in policing defense attorneys prosecuting attorneys the sort of like all of the aftercare when kids come out and I think the number per year would probably be even more shockingly high we do not in New York State have private prisons for youth but many many states do there are two major corporations the geo group and corrections corporation of America that incarcerate a lot of people including in the immigration system we're outsourcing you know prisons and the privatization of prisons is a horrific problem there's actually a profit motive to keep people in there's a profit motive to not have robust services inside some of the worst abuses that have happened to children and adults have been when there's privatization of jails and prisons giving just two quick examples of walnut growth facility in Mississippi which was run by one of the two major prison corporations in America they found horrific sexual abuse of children things like kids being there was like a kid who was forced to eat drink bleach with dye in it and was ignored I think by staff you know staff selling drugs real horrific conditions and the ACLU did file a lawsuit and that facility is no longer run by a private prison and then the kids for cash scandal and if you haven't seen that movie I really encourage you to see kids for cash it documents the judicial scandal because in Pennsylvania were accused of various financial crimes related to taking money millions of dollars from a private prison developer and they basically sent kids to a juvenile detention facility that was privately run and for which they've taken significant kickbacks from the private developer luckily we do not have private youth prisons in New York but I will tell you that the issue does periodically raise its head and there have been advocacy efforts when it raises its head but that doesn't change the fact and I want to say this that incarcerating kids is still a business and there are still people profiting so one of the things the correctional association has had the chance to visit a number of state prisons and something that really struck me when I was visiting and we were taking a tour of the kitchen and I saw like all of these whatever it was let's say it was cans of tomatoes and it was just like can after can after can of tomatoes and I had this like realization like in my gut you know I was like oh that's a lot of money like what what company is the state contracting with to buy all of those tomatoes right and like all that cereal and all that milk and it flipped a lens in my brain where as we walk through the facility I started seeing all the money in it so even in a state run facility like the ones we have right that there's still a huge income stream about all the products and the services there's also a real challenge in New York where there's something called a one year notification role which means that the state has to give one year notice before closing a facility so there was literally there was a time when there was empty youth prisons that were being staffed with guards going around and guarding the perimeter and the facility was empty and I was like because they think people are going to try to break in and go inside the youth prison and hang out but it was because of this one year notification rule and because some of the labor contracts required a year's notice before closing a facility they have been able to make some special exemptions in order to close facilities and sort of shorten that notice period but there's a real issue with the upstate economies that are dependent on prisons on people being employed in prisons and I'll also just say and then I'll stop that incarcerating children and adults as governor Cuomo said in the 2010 state of the state he said really powerfully we cannot incarcerate children as a jobs creation strategy and he acknowledged that it was happening and he said it was going to stop and it was pretty amazing that governor said incarcerating some people's children so other people have jobs that are constitutional and immoral and it has to stop but there is also the reality that these upstate economies and we've gone on visits to some of these towns and like we'll go to get lunch in the town and there's nothing there like the stores are closed down and so there's this real pressure from upstate economies to keep prisons open and I think part of our work has to also be about coming up with viable economic solutions so that incarcerating human beings is not the way that our economies are running. Thank you Gabrielle. I think we have room for one more question so the gentleman who's over here I know was standing first I think so I'll take your question and we're going to be around afterwards so if you have a question you want to bring to us we'll be available to talk with you. Yes. Hi my name is Randolph Scott McLaughlin I'm a graduate student and I'm a professor right now and my research and focus is really on the mental health impact of parental incarceration on the adolescents and the children that are affected by this process and my question is what would you say to someone who's trying to learn more about this issue and not just learn about it but seek for ways to help the impact not just as an expert coming out and reading academic journals and learning from that way but also with working with the people who are actually being affected by this in a partnership type of way. I think the first thing I would say to them is come on a visit with us come inside once you come inside with us all the academic reports they kind of pale to having that experience and talking personally and seeing what people are being subjected to on a day to day basis what children and adults are being subjected to that will really frame your expertise and the professional reports and studies and research that you do because that human base and that human voice behind any report that you make is really going to make the difference. I would also just say please get involved in the coalitions that we mentioned the coalitions that Gabrielle mentioned the coalition for women prisoners it's a way to meet other organizations that are doing work on this issue it's a way to meet people and young people who are directly affected by the issue so kind of getting involved in the policy advocacy in trying to enact the change is another way to inform even if you're doing work on a clinical level on an individual level to inform what's the larger picture and really trying to make a difference so definitely invite you and everybody in the audience to come and join us in the coalition work I want to thank everyone and just say if you want to make a difference join us thank you for a wonderful panel thank you for all the information and thank you for all your work thank you C-SPAN C-SPAN called and they called after Piper Kerman's panel and said they wanted to come and be present during this panel and of course we were very pleased and about five days ago we got a call I didn't receive the call it came into the museum and they said they were not coming so I would appreciate it if everybody would let C-SPAN know that we would love to have them come and we really think they should and they should come as you might like to and join us on Thursday night on April 3rd we're going to be having our part 3 of the Sacramento series States of Denial the illegal incarceration of women, children and people of color which we have clearly identified today if not before and we will be screening crime after crime and we will have an opportunity on flying in the two attorneys Joshua Safran and Nadia Costa and it will be a rare opportunity to get them together and have a conversation and listen to them dialogue about their California seven year work in seeking to rectify an injustice against battered women and incarceration so I thank you all for being here today just so you know in the Sackler Center coming up on April 4th the day after crime after crime a Chicago NLA is opening up it's Judy Chicago's early work 1963 to 74 and in 1963 to 1974 she was fighting for women in art because there wasn't a whole lot of room for them so thank you for the inspiration to start to change things immediately and I think there is a lot going on right now and we've got to keep it going thank you all for being here