 I'm Elizabeth Sackler and it is a pleasure to welcome you this afternoon to what is a very important day. We have an incredible panel put together and it is our final states of denial, the illegal incarceration of women children and people of color. And I'd like to welcome Tina Reynolds, Peter Goldberg, Vivian Nixon, Carrie Walk, Susan Rosenberg, and Piper Kerman at the other end of the table. Since 2014 we have hosted 27 programs here at the Brooklyn Museum and we've heard 185 participants. And all of these programs are available for viewing, for referencing, and for sharing. If you google up EASCFA slash video you will be able to scroll down and find all of the incredible panels that have taken place and the speakers that have spoken here. I want to thank the NOVO Foundation for three years of support and specifically our liaison Jacinia Santana who is the program officer in NOVO's initiative to end violence against girls and women and also to their executive director Pamela Schiffman. Since Trump's election, NOVO instituted an initiative called Radical Hope Initiative to address human rights issues head on. And I thank NOVO for the support they've given to us and our work over the last three years and I wish them well. I really wish them well. I think we all wish them well in fighting with new strategies directly against this current administration. I'd also like to thank Arnold Lehman and Jack Tamagney. Arnold was the director and Jack was the board chair of the Brooklyn Museum at the time that I inaugurated States of Denial. And I want to give them a special shout out today because their commitment to equity and justice was evidenced by their support of this program and also thank the Brooklyn Museum staff and administration today. For many years, Jess Wilcox was our museum point person and Masa and Osario and more recently Tim was our AV team here and I want to thank them and to thank David Calderwood who is behind the camera there and Europe Pacific Films for having videoed and edited all of our transfers of 27 States of Denial, again making them ready for EASCFA slash video so that these will go on and have a life way beyond our sitting here today. Tina Vivian, Susan and Piper, welcome again. Peter Goldberg and Carrie Walk. It's wonderful to have you here to join us for the first time and for those in the audience who have not seen or been here with us for past programs, you can go back and see them and perhaps you will be so inclined to do so after this afternoon. So as our final program here at the Brooklyn Museum, I thought it was pretty essential to address the State of the Union from a States of Denial perspective. When we began in 2014 mass incarceration and state sanctioned violence was not recognized in the U.S. press or wider population as an abuse of human and civil rights and today it is, but although public awareness has grown, we are living under a regime that whips up rage and encourages and we know turns a blind eye to all levels of violence against our populations. So I'd like to address the current state of affairs and how we can confront these growing problems unsupervised privatized prisons, ICE and predatory bail practices. And how might we think about organizing in solidarity locally, statewide and also of course across the country. So I'd like to give you bios of our guests. To my left Tina Reynolds is co-founder and chair of Women on the Rise telling her story which is acronym for Worth. Worth is an association of formerly and currently incarcerated women who have been empowered by their own experiences while involved in the criminal justice system. Tina received a master in social work from Hunter College and is currently an adjunct professor at York CUNY in the behavioral sciences department teaching impact of incarceration on families, communities and children and human development. She has written about the abolition of prisons, the impact of incarceration on women and children, formerly incarcerated women and policy change. And she is an editor of an anthology titled Interrupted Life Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States. Tina was a states panelist in the March of 2014 and welcome back Tina. I'm so glad you're here. Peter Goldberg is co-founder and executive director of the Brooklyn Community bail fund. It's the largest charitable bail fund in the United States and widely recognized as a leader in efforts to advance bail and criminal justice reform. I'd say bail abolition but it came in as justice reform so I'll read justice reform but I'll say bail abolition. The fund provides bail for New Yorkers who cannot afford modest amounts or who otherwise would be jailed or forced to plead guilty simply to go home. It works with reentry specialists to connect clients in need of employment, education, housing and counseling and it is a leading advocate for reform. Peter is a frequent speaker and panelist on bail reform and serves on the New York City Bar Association's task force on mass incarceration. Prior to founding the fund Peter was an attorney at Clary Gottliebstein in Hamilton. He received his BA from Johns Hopkins University and JD from the University of Michigan Law School. Welcome Peter. Vivian Nixon to the left of Peter is the executive director of College and Community Fellowship a non-profit committed to helping formerly incarcerated women earn their college degrees. An alumna of CCF's program Nixon advocates nationally for the return of college level education to our nation's prisons and is an advocate for formerly incarcerated individuals. She is a Columbia University community scholar and recipient of the John Jay Medal for Justice, the Ascend Fellowship at the Aspen Institute and the Soros Justice Fellowship. Vivian received her BS from SUNY and is currently a creative non-fiction MFA candidate at Columbia University. Vivian has written articles for Vice HuffPost and Boston Globe and is a regular speaker on criminal justice reform. Vivian was a state's panelist also back in March of 2014 and I welcome you back Vivian so happy to have you here. Carrie Walk next to Vivian. Dr. Walk is the eighth president of Marymount Manhattan College. She's had more than 25 years of experience as a higher education leader. Prior to joining Marymount, Dr. Walk held academic positions at Harvard, Princeton, Pitzer College and Otis College of Art and Design. Carrie earned her BA in English with honors at Wellesley College and her MA and PhD degrees in English Literature at the University of California Berkeley. As president of Marymount College, she oversees the college's Bedford Hills College Program which has awarded over 225 associate and bachelor's degrees to incarcerated women each year at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility since 1997. Each year over 150 women enroll in at least one course in the BHCP which is funded almost entirely through private donations. I welcome Carrie. Susan Rosenberg next to Carrie to her left is a human rights and prisoners rights advocate. She is an award-winning writer and formerly incarcerated person. Her memoir, An American Radical, details her 16 years in federal prison as well as conclusions about her prison experience. She was released from prison in 2001 through executive clemency by the then president Clinton. Since then, Susan has worked extensively in the non-profit communication field with a focus on human rights. She is an agile lecturer at Hunter College and a member of the prison writing committee of Penn America. She is on the board of 1,000 currents and the Ladies of Hope Ministries and is currently the director of the Errol Garner Jazz Project. She lectures frequently on prison issues and is working on another book. Susan, I welcome you back. You've been a speaker here in March of 2015. It's a delight to have you. And Piper Kerman is the author of the memoir Orange is the New Black, My Year in a Women's Prison from Spiegel and Grau, which as we most all know has turned into an Emmy Award-winning original series for Netflix. Piper serves on the boards of the Women's Prison Association and on several advisory boards across the country. She's been called as a witness by the U.S. Senate to testify in solitary confinement women prisoners and the Federal Bureau of Prisons and she has spoken at the White House on reentry and employment. She's received numerous awards in 2015. The Equal Justice Initiative recognized Piper's champion of justice. She's been invited to lecture frequently of course at colleges and universities for a variety of different disciplines from criminal law to gender studies to creative writing. She is also invited to address professional organizations including the International Association of Women Judges and the National Criminal Association, Justice Association, as well as public defenders, justice reform advocates and formerly and currently incarcerated people. Piper is a graduate of Smith College and this is the fourth time that Piper has participated in states in March 2014, 2015 and September of 2016 and welcome once again Piper. Piper opened our series and thank you for being here to put closure to it. As you can see, this is an extraordinary group of people. All of their programs that have been here, as I said, are online at EAS CFA slash video and the Brooklyn Bale Community Fund and the Bedford Hills College program. You can find more information about those two things online as well. So I thought we would begin by my posing individual questions for the benefit of context for our audience and then specific questions for comment and conversation amongst the panelists. So I'd like to begin with Tina, who I said is co-founder and chair of Worth, Women on the Rise, telling her story. Tina, would you briefly describe when and why you decided to start Worth and has it grown or changed from what you envisioned and when did you start it? Sure. I'm very happy to be here. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. To be on this panel with some of my colleagues and friends and be here with you as well is very important and this conversation four years later has definitely changed in some way. So specific to Worth, we always start with a story. Ayanna has been incarcerated for four years. She has had five children. She has five children. This is her first incarceration and she remains very active in the lives of her children. She co-parents with her grandmother and her mother and they've developed guidelines for her children to follow in her absence. She checks in with her children on a daily basis through phone calls. She encourages them to complete their homework to come home when they're they're supposed to, to be nice to each other in her absence. To be their word to be honest and be truthful. She has regular visits with them, physical visits. She also participates in teleconferencing once a month with her children. It is an enormous loss for the family. However, there is abundance of unconditional love. Worth was started in 2004 out of knowing that this happens with women, knowing that there's this existence of love and passion and compassion and need to be connected with their families. In 2004, the services back then there were no television services. Many people didn't think that it was important for children to visit their parent physically. They felt that, why would they? Women were identified as not having the right to see their children and continue to parent their children. So in 2004 to 2008 we began holding meetings where a lot of formerly incarcerated women met and began having discussions about what to do about the issues of women impacted by incarceration and out of that came worth which was focused on leadership development, advocacy and advocacy and policy work membership and being a support for those that came home. In the beginning we did a lot of work in supporting our sisters who came home. We were connected with other people we worked in criminal justice and human services agencies. We made sure that they had a place to land once they came out. One of the things that we tried to focus on through our sisterhood was the rebuilding of self, the healing that needed to happen, which only we could do for ourselves with ourselves developing a sisterhood. We had a sister circle made up of women who were, and I'm saying had in the past tense because worth is transitioned into something else now. So at that point we had a sisterhood, a sister circle of women who were professionals that could advise us and also support us as we were growing through our transition. And a transition is ongoing once you come home from prison transition is ongoing. And so I myself in transitioning all the time. But healing is very necessary and we saw that as an essential part of our work. Advocacy became the focus of our work specifically around some of the conditions of confinement and we were able to change some policies and bring laws to that have impacted women negatively. The anti-shackling legislation, the conditions of confinement for women with HIV and the Adoptions Safe Families Act was an integral part of the work that worth has done. It came out of a need to hear our stories. Worth came out of a need to be present and to be able to give voice to who we were. To be able to be present in those conversations where we are often missing. And to be able to focus our conversations on what we needed to have changed in response to what was happening with women inside prison and then after. And we continue to do that work as individual members and as people who are working in the criminal justice and human service field. How has it changed? So how it has changed? You mentioned that there's been a... Yes, so in 2015 we moved from our Manhattan office to Queens specifically at the request of an elected official to start a program to develop a program actually for Queens that would focus on connecting mothers with their children to teleconferencing. Queens had the highest rates of incarceration of women and due to the war on drugs in Far Rockaway in South Jamaica and in Long Island City. And we focused on those three areas collaborating with the Osborne Association and our children. And we also began collaborating with the Department of Corrections, Rikers Island and the Department of DOCCS, Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. Those relationships are new. Formerly incarcerated women and formerly incarcerated people hadn't interfaced back in 2004, 2008 with those systems very well. But through the advocacy work that we'd done in 2009, moving forward, we were able to establish these relationships and go in and develop this program and implemented. The idea was to have continuation of services from RMSE to Bedford and Teconic, Bedford which is the receiving facility, Teconic which is a medium facility. So if a woman would have televisioning start within Rikers she would continue those services and then be referred to Osborne if she were transferred to Albion because we had those connections and partnered with Osborne as well. And so it was about establishing relationships and it's been about establishing relationships. We currently offer leadership development in Rikers and in Bedford and Teconic to women who are currently incarcerated. And we offer counseling services to their families because we find it essential for us to while we attempt and move forward with the abolition of prisons and jails that we maintain a focus on the healing that needs to happen between families while this process goes on because it's very traumatic for families to experience incarceration and the whole family experiences it not just the parent or the child. And so within this program that we've developed as a part of work, counseling, reentry services, all of the services that are necessary. Working with a very small staff they go into both the jails and the prisons and interface with people and they interface with their families and they make the connections in offer advocacy support, advocacy and support as needed to the families so that they can understand how to navigate the criminal justice system, to speak for themselves. We have caregiver groups, grandparent groups and youth activities. And so that's how it's changed. That's wonderful Tina and thank you very much. I think the question of why there has been an increase in the rate of arrests of women and incarceration we will touch upon later. But obviously you have created a network of support for women and their families. Thank you. Peter Goldberg, Executive Director, Brooklyn Community Bail Fund and before getting into the goals for changing this system that I hope we will discuss today, can you give us a brief synopsis of how we've ended up here at this point in time and what the ramifications are of that? Hi and good afternoon. And I just want to say how lucky and sort of honored I am to be on this panel with this group of badass advocates whose work I know or admired from afar who I'm just learning about and also how much I appreciate this invitation. We got our start around three years ago and you've been convening these conversations for significantly longer than that and helped really create the space for organizations like ours to do the work. So thank you and I feel great to have this be my first one. I hope maybe I'll be one of the repeats going forward. And I really I love this question. I appreciate you specifically saying that it's abolition and not reform. Reform has to do with fundamentally rethinking a system and how it treats people who are struggling, how it criminalizes race and gender and actually not reforming it but dismantling it. I think the question of how we got here is especially important for an organization like the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund because while we are committed to this dismantling, we're also part of the system. We are in courts and jails every day literally purchasing people's freedom, which is a disgusting proposition but one that we have. So we need to be incredibly cognizant of how we can operate within it but push to end it. So we just turned three and we just paid for client number 3,000, which is this accomplishment but also this odd distinction because our goal is to put ourselves out of existence. This is in New York 80% of Rikers Island or folks who are there who are presumptively innocent. Nationwide it's going to be millions of people this year who are going to wind up in a cage in a jail for the inability to afford cash bail. So bail funds are never going to be the solution by getting people out but we can be part of coalitions that are working to fundamentally change all of this. So you mentioned a little bit of going forward. We at the Bail Fund and all of us I think need to have a laser-like focus on what it takes to dismantle this system and I'm thankful that in the past four years at least as long as I've been in this field and in this work, there's been an increased understanding of the intersection between the work that we're all doing and really an increase in collaboration across issues and between issues. So I just say with respect to the criminalization of women, there's been a 14-fold increase in the amount of women who are in jail pre-trial for the inability to afford bail over the past 14 years. When we're talking about the issues that affect women that lead to the arrest and the issues that, you know, talked about torture them when they're in, you can't do that with also tackling the issue of money bail. And for bail funds working on this issue, we need to be focused not just on the dismantling of bail, but discovery reform, speedy trial, ways to ensure that this current system is not just punishing people perpetually. So I think for the next four years, right, we have to make sure that we're continuing on this. And I think while we have a far way to go, the work that we've been doing over the past four years hopefully has positioned us well to do that. Thank you very much, Peter. Thank you for your work. And I look forward to having you on another panel also and look forward to discussions as we move forward today. Vivian, Nixon, you have been intensely committed to CCF, to the College and Community Fellowship. And could you tell our audience about what the fellowship provided for you? And now what your overarching goals are for it as Executive Director? Certainly. Of course, I want to thank you, Elizabeth for inviting me here again. And thank all of my esteemed co panelists for doing the work that you do and that I have witnessed over the years, as we try to kind of push against the ocean together to swing the tide in favor of justice for all human beings. College and Community Fellowship is a very unique organization in that during a time when very few people were focused on paying attention to the numbers of people being released from prisons and what they were going to do with their lives afterwards. This organization was so far ahead that they weren't only thinking about what are people going to do afterwards. They were thinking about it in a way that people would not begin to think about it en masse until around 2008. So we were founded in 2000 with a mission to provide support systems to women coming out of prison who had a very specific goal and that goal was to earn a college degree. Around four years later in 2004 is when President George W. Bush started the second chance initiative in his state of the union. He announced that the government was going to start an initiative to help people coming out of prison and he recommended three ways to do that. One was employment. One was housing and the third was employment housing and substance abuse treatment. All very important things education was not mentioned and we had already been doing specifically education focused work for four years. So this and now I'll bring myself into the story. So I witnessed all of this happen first from the inside of a prison and then post prison. And when I found college and community fellowship I found them because I had heard about them through word gets around in prisons when something new is being offered when you're returning home because there's so little offered to women. And when I got home and I visited many of the other programs that were serving this population of people coming out of prison. That's exactly what I found. I found what George W. Bush would promote two years later. I found opportunities to get help with housing. I found opportunities to get help with substance abuse treatment. I found opportunities to work a transitional or minimum wage job. None of which I needed because at that particular time I was fortunate enough to have a family who provided me with food, clothing and shelter until I could get back on my feet. What I knew I needed to get back on my feet was to increase my level of education to get some type of certification or degree that would allow me to earn enough money to live on my own and survive in a economy where minimum wage just doesn't cut it. In a city where minimum wage will never, ever cut it. So I started in prison. I had been hanging around the education office in the prison because they didn't know what to do with me. If you already have a high school diploma, your options are limited in terms of what your job assignment is in the prison. So I became a tutor. I tutored women of all ages from age 17, some 16 at the time because we were still incarcerating adolescents as adults. So from age 16 all the way to women in their 70s who had very low literacy or were completely illiterate. And I began to realize at that time that the privilege I bought into my situation, I walked into incarceration with a privilege. I had an education. I had a very good basic education. Went to one of the best public school systems in the country on Long Island. Even though my parents weren't wealthy, we were centered as a hub in a very wealthy community because wealthy communities need that hub of workers to serve them literally. And going back generations, that's what my family did. They worked in service to larger states on Long Island. So by benefit of having this really great education, I was able to teach other women to read and write, to pass the GED. And then I get this flyer 30 days before I'm released saying, if you want to get a college degree, we can help you. That was College and Community Fellowship. And what it did for me is it gave me a chance to put to use something I was passionate about, had become passionate about, which was educating women, but also to overcome a huge, you know, we all have those moments in our life where we fail ourselves and we fail the ones we love and it creates the deepest type of wound because it's that type of failure that just won't go away. Well, for me, it was having my parents send me to college and flunking out. That was my core wound. That was the thing that got me off track. So CCF provided an opportunity for me to correct that original wound, a flunking out of college, disappointing my family, disappointing myself. They worked with me, they got me a tutor, they got me in the right education program, asked me what I wanted to do. I said, well, I think the first thing I want to do is work in a nonprofit and really help people. I don't want I don't know what I want to do after that. So let's just think about a bachelor's degree for now. And I did that. I went and I got a bachelor's degree in nonprofit management. A year later, I was working for the organization and have been working for the organization ever since. First as a community organizer from 2004 to 2006 and from 2006 until today as executive director. So it changed my life in multiple ways. It helped me to heal, but it also introduced me to a world of other advocates who care about this issue and expanded my vision about what is possible for women who have been incarcerated or who have been convicted and assigned a number and a criminal record in our society. It also gave me a vision for what abolition really looks like because abolition, we throw that word around a lot and what it does is it frightens people because, you know, and we can't pretend that people that people don't want jails and prisons like en masse because that's just not true. It makes people feel safe that if people are really dangerous, they can be put away and they won't cause us harm. When I speak about abolition, I think about all the things we can do to make our society more safe in the community to begin with because it is a basic sense of of of injustice and unsafe communities that is causing the violence that we are experiencing. Many of the people who are committing violence were violated long before they ever thought about being violent to others and it is the most, is the community's most impacted by violence were never treated as victims but always treated as perpetrators. So when I talk about abolition, I'm talking about the system as it exists now needs to be abolished and we need to be looking at how other countries do this in a much more humane way. So that's how it changed my life. It got me really thinking much more deeply about what we do around criminal justice in this country, what abolition really means, what justice is and how education can transform a life from a life of hopelessness to a life of real contribution in civic engagement. Thank you very much Vivian. I want to ask you what do you think the benefits of in prison or in jail education is for women who have very long-term sentences? Well, I know women who have done decades in prison and have written academic papers for journals that enlightened other professionals on what goes on in prisons that have taught other women how to read and write who have developed a culture of learning. Learning is a lifelong experience for all of us and I don't think that learning should be contingent upon if you learn this you will get a job or if you learn this you are less likely to recidivate. I think learning helps us to become fully developed human beings and helps us to have an impact on the circumstances that we're in and also respond appropriately to the circumstances that are put upon us so that we are all living in a better society. So I have no qualms about long-term is receiving education that that is one of the arguments around denying funding for education in the prison systems using federal funding which is Pell grants which funds poor students students who cannot afford college get money from the federal government not a lot but enough to pay for a few courses. One of the main arguments on the floor of Congress was that well if a person is going to be in prison longer than X number of years why do they need an education and we push back against that very hard because it change you know this is not a primary reason but it does change the environment in many prisons from an environment of hopelessness to an environment of learning and education so I think it is critical that when we expand opportunities for higher education in prison we include everyone in prison and not exclude certain populations. Thank you very much. We will turn to Kerry Walk who is president of Marymont and also oversees the Bedford Hills College program and your program has been going on with Mary month in Bedford since 1997 and you are still providing educational opportunities for women incarcerated there now so you've been doing this for 30 20 years and would you give us an overview of how the BHCP program is run and as well as who it serves. Certainly I'd like to begin by thanking you for the opportunity to be a part of this conversation and also for having me go after Vivian and the reason I say that is that Vivian has just given a wonderful and inspiring description of the power of education to change lives and not just individual lives but families and communities and communities both inside and in community and that's really important because education is about self- empowerment being able to make good choices and being able to become a role model for your children your parents your community so it's wonderful to hear your words about this transformative power of education. In order to talk about the Bedford Hills College program I need to tell you a little bit of history quick and that is that the Pell grants were extended to low-income people including incarcerated people through the Higher Education Act of 1972 and as many of us know that that program was pulled in 1994 and the 350 college education programs around the country were shut down it happened overnight that was 1994 there was a lot of upset as you might imagine this extraordinary door to a future had been closed and at the Bedford Hills correctional facility for women which is the only maximum security prison for women in New York State a group of incarcerated women working with faculty members who had been teaching there and also working with community leaders and activists said hey we've got to work to revive this program even without federal funding and it didn't take them very long in 1997 they reopened the Bedford Hills College program through private donations and today as Elizabeth mentioned the Bedford Hills College program has awarded over 225 associate's degrees and bachelor's degrees to women this is over a 20 year period and students who don't receive a degree a degree are often enrolled so this is a facility with 600 incarcerated women and in any given semester 150 or 200 are taking courses in our program 75 to 85% of these women are mothers 43% came to prison without a high school education or a GED of those who came with a high school education or a GED another 43% had no college education at all so we're talking about 86% of these students who are essentially undereducated they don't have various kinds of opportunities available to them and what we do through the Bedford Hills College program is make those opportunities available and that's critical so the way the program is structured there we offer college prep courses so that students can get into the program once they're there they can earn an associate's degree in social science and then they can earn a bachelor's degree in sociology and we recently introduced a second major in politics and human rights from my perspective it's very important that these are the areas of study because our students are able to learn new frameworks for understanding the the forces that work in our culture to put them in the position they're in and they can also learn to understand themselves better and the choices available to them so that's how the program is structured and do your Marymount students participate your Marymount college students in Manhattan they absolutely do in 2002 in order to protect the program the college made the Bedford Hills College program a branch campus so that's very significant became the became the sole degree granting program and raised a two point nine million dollar endowment which spins off enough funds to support the half of the operating budget of the program and we have involved our students deeply those who are inside and those who are on the main campus in a variety of ways one is through combined courses sometimes we call these inside outside courses where our students and students from several other colleges go to the Bedford Hills facility and take classes with Bedford Hills students and as you can imagine this is an extraordinary exchange of life experiences and of ideas I believe that one of the goals of higher education is to enable students to learn to take others perspectives and in so doing to be able to take steps toward becoming creative change makers very important to put these different kinds of students together in a room and very powerful for them we also have several other ways that we connect our Bedford Hills students with the main campus one is through a crossing borders conference that happens every one or two years where our students and faculty from the main campus go to the Bedford Hills facility and there's a conference where all read their papers on panels and that's very exciting to be able to have that exchange of ideas we also on the main campus on honors day we read papers of Bedford Hills students because obviously they can't read them there themselves but we want them to have their voices heard that's very important to us we have regular exhibitions of Bedford Hills artwork recently a wonderful exhibition that drew over hundred people on opening night where we put professional artists work alongside Bedford Hills artwork and it was a very powerful experience for everyone who was there and finally I'll say that we have a student run Bedford Hills organization and the students in that about 25 students are very involved in supporting their counterparts in the Bedford Hills College program it's very important to have these exchanges as I said of life experience and of ideas and to for everyone to be reaching out a hand and holding hands because it's through that holding of hands that we will ultimately be able to combat many of the forces that are leading to mass incarceration increasing the number of women who are incarcerated lowering the number of incarcerated people upon release who are able to get jobs so those connections I think are vital Carrier are you aware whether or not I don't know the answer to this whether or not other college programs barred Wellesley and any of the other schools whether or not they have this off-campus relationship and and that kind of interaction student interaction do you know whether or not that's so they do and I should say as well that with the the second chance Pell program that was piloted in 2014 and that has a very good chance of turning into a permanent program so we've got bipartisan support for restoring the Pell program that all of a sudden many colleges are now stepping forward and they're able to offer these programs so you see institutions like Cornell of course barred has been offering college programs for a decade but Cornell has stepped into this space and they have a very interesting well-rounded program and others Mercy College Sarah Lawrence so institutions that have not been able to be providing college programs are now able to and that means we can reach that many more incarcerated people thank you very much one of the things that I think we're hearing over and over again has to do with education and that reflects back on to our public school education and right now we're tax-based public school education which is to say your public school is dependent and the the value if you will after your public school is dependent upon whether or not your taxes are high or low and if we took the federal money for public schools and divided it equally amongst all public schools not tax-driven we would have a population in this country of young and educated people and I think that one of the things that we're talking about when you're when Vivian was mentioning you know having to look at the entirety the holistic cultural and societal and political arena of this country that's one of the areas I think that that needs a special attention so I will move on to Susan Rosenberg who is author of an American radical political prisoner in my own country when you were here Susan in discussion with Nikitji Taifa in March of 2015 you shared details of your rest and that your time inside as a political prisoner and I know it goes back now many many decades and you've been out for almost two decades but could you just remind people of the circumstances you choose to of your rest and of your experience as a political prisoner which I'd like for you to do to lead into the question of whether or not the fate of political prisoners in a system of arrest without recourses has changed at all thank you but let me just start by saying I want to thank you Elizabeth and the Brooklyn Museum and the states of denial panel and it is also an honor to be on the panel with all these different people Tina and Vivian and Piper in particular because of having been formerly incarcerated and come out of prison and dedicated their lives to the women we all left behind and there's something there's something very important about that when people make that choice so thank you very much yeah I yes I have been out 18 years this year I'm out longer one year than I was inside so I celebrated this this year as a special a special year but what what led me to to going to prison to begin with so I think it's a relevant now because it was the product of a social political radical time in American history that I come out of and the 60s and 70s of the last century it's getting farther and farther into the past but not irrelevant to the current time that we live in I think and so I come out specifically of the student movement against the war in Vietnam this the the movement against militarism and then what we called US imperialism that I think we might want to bring that term back for where we are now and was involved in prison work in organizing in the women's movement was involved in Puerto Rican independence movement solidarity all different kinds of political work as a as an 18 and 19 year old student at Columbia and Barnard in that period and I think just really quickly to to say this was a time in the late 60s and 70s when the struggle of the African American freedom movement transitioned from a civil rights movement to a national liberation movement to a revolutionary movement along with other groups that also transitioned into the idea that we needed to fight state power that we needed to fight for liberation and to overthrow the system and I was involved with those very radical elements the very first time I went into a courtroom was to see and support the New York Panther 21 case which I'm not going to go through a whole long history of radical left and different kinds of politics from that period but just to say I was captivated by the idea that revolution could happen that it could happen in my own lifetime that there were thousands of people who thought that as well and so joined with revolutionaries in small organizations and ended up doing illegal work against the government and so I went to prison for possession of weapons in the in the 1980s because that's part of what we were involved in trying to do to expose the government for the violence the state violence that it was committing against large large numbers of people I went to prison it actually a little bit late in terms of this particular history in 1984 and I was sentenced then for weapons possession and got a 60 year federal prison sentence which at the time was the longest sentence that somebody had been given for possessory offense and I say that to say that I think at that time the example that was being given in the treatment of all the political prisoners was huge sentences terrible prison conditions and it was justified on the basis that we were the that at that time the terrorists right we were the radicals and I think when and we said at the time that we were arrested that if the government succeeded in criminalizing political people going to prison at that time that they would be able to normalize the practices that were being employed against us to the entire prison population and I have to say that that is what happened so now a 60 year sentence we think of is like you know it's not that long right because people we read about and know about have three life sentences if then they're eligible for parole but in the 80s we weren't quite where we are now you know and the question that Elizabeth posed to us at the beginning is are are we better than we were four years ago in the issue of the state of denial of the unbelievable crisis that exists in our country around criminal justice and I mean I hope we're going to really get to that question but in terms of your other question has the situation with people changed since I have been released or how what is the current state first of all the United States government still denies that it holds political prisoners doesn't believe that there are there is actually a group of people in American prisons who are in prison for political reasons whether that is because of speech or whether that's because of their activities or whether that's because they've been framed right so the US still doesn't recognize that and I don't expect that it will especially with the current administration that we're facing now but the same many of the people that were incarcerated out of the 70s and 80s from political movements whether they were the Black Liberation Movement or the Native American Movement or the Puerto Rican independence movement or the environmental justice movement or people who were Muslim prisoners who were targeted and incarcerated the people like Guantanamo all those people are still in prison and this is 40 years later so you know writ large the answer is that the situation and the conditions with political prisoners is not good and we have lost many people over the last 10-15 years who have died in prison who have not been able to get out of prison so and I think you know there is a whole new wave of political prisoners and I think that's part of why my story and other people's stories are relevant now is that we have to understand that there are people who are being repressed for political action against not just the Trump administration but the repressive institutions of the society as a whole there were all of those people who were arrested during Trump's inauguration who are facing huge amount of prison time these are people who were at a demonstration so I think we're going to be seeing this more and more and the the last thing I would say is that where and this is a case study and an act of solidarity and a historical set of conditions but the current situation in New York State where there are several political prisoners who have been in prison since 1971 and 74 one of them was recently released Herman Bell and I would like to talk about that later about sort of what the process was to get Herman Bell released on parole and what the response by the government and the police and the police benevolent association has been to try and put him back in prison and to try and ensure that no other convicted people convicted of violent offenses the ones that are the harder ones for us to understand and to take on will be released on parole so I want to come back to that all right thank you very much for for sharing your story and for addressing some very important and relevant issues before and again now Piper, Herman, four years later orange is the new black on Netflix is still going strong and you are still going strong and I was curious to know whether or not you had imagined that it would become what it has become when you wrote the book and has its success do you think raised awareness a bad incarceration and in what way and then I would love for you to tell us about your current work and the current book you're working on but we'll start first with orange. Thank you, sure, Elizabeth I just want to echo everyone else's gratitude thank you so much for establishing this series and for inviting so many amazing people to come up on the stage and thank you to the Brooklyn Museum for supporting such an incredible diversity of work on this broad set of issues that so disproportionately impact women and children and particularly people of color so we are grateful. Yeah I came home from prison in 2005 and I was like wow that was a that was really fucked up. Pardon my French I was like I I can't even believe what I just experienced and witnessed I come from a really ordinary middle-class family and went to good public schools and my skin is white and so I did not come from a community that had experienced criminalization policing you know disparate policing disparate prosecution disparate incarceration for you know not just the last four years of mass incarceration but for the entire history of this country so that's not where I came from so my experience in the criminal justice system as a criminal defendant as a prisoner and then in that process of re-entry was very shocking to me and I came home in 2005 to New York I lived here then and I didn't really know what I was going to do but I was like yeah that's not an experience I can put behind me and we have to do something about it and so I just tried to begin to educate myself and the way that I did that was that I heard people like Tina and people like Vivian I went out and I listened to those women who are already out advocating in the community powerfully on the specific issues of expertise that they have and that was really inspiring I'm like that's what you need to do you need to use your voice that's all we can do so when I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to write the book my simple hope was that someone would read it who might not otherwise read a book about prison and that has a lot to do with race and gender in class because we don't expect upper middle class white women to be in prison because that's what the system this sort of hideous carceral state those are the people that are supposed to be protected by the system in theory because those what those people would never commit crimes right I mean I committed a crime and I pled guilty to it and I experienced this harshly punitive system which has been so disproportionately directed towards poor people and people of color so that's what I hoped in telling the story and of course you know we have a number of other writers up on the stage here everyone I hope agrees that you have to fantasize success otherwise you'd never finish anything so every writer fantasizes success but but I did hope that what success really looked like to me was that would be if someone came away from the book with a different idea about who's in prison why are they there what really happens to them there and it was important to me as you know as a feminist as a person who has been fortunate to be part of a number of different kinds of women's communities that people come away with a much greater understanding of the unique situation that women and girls face in the criminal system not just in prison or jail but in the entire system so so that was my avid hope right I was very very lucky to have the book published I was lucky to have the book adapted by someone you know who had a creative and provocative vision and drew a lot of other creative people to to do that work and I'm grateful that the adaptation was good first of all and also successful so it's hard to measure that's one of the toughest things I think about advocating and I imagine I'm curious what other people up here think about that it's hard sometimes to measure the impact of your work you hope to have impact I know that many people have read the work of you know Susan myself of other first-person narratives that represents some aspect of this experience of being criminalized and being incarcerated and returning to the community and what that's like and I believe that those stories have to be absolutely central to any effort to transform what we have currently and I hope my fundamental hope the reason to entrust a story which is very personal to other people to do something creative and different with is my hope is that you know that tens of millions of fans of the show think differently about the real people behind the walls of our prisons and our jails in this country in part because they are attached to the protagonist that the show puts forward that's that's my avid hope because I think that sense of being on someone's side when that person was someone who might otherwise have been labeled as completely different from you was very important and without question I wrote the book with the hope of persuading people who are fortunate enough not to ever have been subjected to our existing policies and practices to think about what if it was me or what if it was someone that I loved and what about all these people who you know these millions of people who this has already happened to in this country and that sense of identification you know so many folks have already referenced that question of of narrative and that question of identity I mean I think Tina really spoke so beautifully about this question you return particularly returning home you have this question about who am I in this moment of transition and every step of the way is a moment of transition when you are forced to relinquish your identity as a free person and become a prisoner that is this powerful moment of transition and the work to come home is a really important moment of transition as well and that's why I do what I do now which is teach right so I teach in two state prisons and my students do narrative nonfiction writing they write their own stories they write the things they've experienced they write the things they've witnessed we can't possibly comprehend the biggest carceral state in human history without hearing many many many stories from many many different minds and yeah my that's that's the thing that I I hope might actually motivate many different people to make the changes that are necessary and the hardest people to to motivate are those who are most wedded to the current system thank you very much thank you thank you all for the work you're doing I'd like to throw out some general questions and hope that you'll chime in and perhaps have also some discourse amongst yourselves for me I see that we're looking at a very different overt political stance than we were four years ago with local and state military might used against the populations of citizenry we hear the hatred being spewed we see the violence is directly or by code encouraged racism is without reins and state sanctioned violence abounds and ice is now very active and on the loose my first question is whether or not you think for African Americans has daily police violence increased over the last four years six years or is the general public now more aware of the terror due to social media well I based on absolutely no empirical data I would there is I don't think there is any and so I think it's really a question of because it was hidden for so long and I think actually that you know the emergence of filming these events that began when the Rodney King case became so popular and the increased popularity of devices that can record instantly may have actually reduced the amount of overt violence but we don't know that yet because we haven't we haven't bothered to find out but one thing I don't think it's done is bring to our attention anything that most those of us who live in those communities didn't already know existed and it's just that the response to it has changed the response used to be staying far away from it is possible because you're going to get caught up in it and you're going to get a beat up to now the responses get your cell phone out and record the incident the violence is such a part of our DNA I just don't understand how we can think that because we now see it because there are all of these ways in which is being reported and documented that it's new it is a foundational component of the structure of our society state violence is what it's it's the weedies that we built our country on so no I don't think that there's more I think it's more recognized it's being talked about more and unfortunately I think it's actually being validated more by a bully pulpit that believes it will bring back some kind of a nostalgic era during which people who feel some type of power and control has been taken from them will be given back to them I would just add I agree with all of that Vivian but I and I and I also think though that there is a green lighting of a more organized white supremacist movement that we're seeing that results in is affected and is enabled through the use of violence and and both in general but also police violence and so again it's true I don't have I don't have the data but it seems that that there is every day they're the the role of the police and what the police are doing in communities around the countries is is is at a high pitch is it more than it was two years ago or ten years ago or has racism is racism stayed the same I mean those are those are all related but it seems to me there is a explicit rise in armed violence by the state against poor people and people of color and the black community in particular I would say I mean I was in Montgomery Alabama last month for the opening of the Equal Justice Initiative Memorial to Peace and Justice and the memorial documents the murder of 4,400 African Americans via lynching and that kind of state violence has been I mean that is state violence in theory those those murders were extrajudicial but we know it's well documented that law enforcement often participated either tacitly or directly in those kinds of in that kind of racial terror and nothing's changed right I mean some of the the ways that that violence is implemented have altered but not that much and that is really brought home when you visit that memorial and there's a company museum which makes quite detailed documentation of this long line of state violence from the period of you know chattel slavery through the reconstruction you know through the new Jim Crow and to our present day and so I think we are simply perceiving violence that has been very apparent to the communities that have been targeted by it well we certainly as you are all aware we are bait we are a country that is living on the on the history of genocide of the first peoples of Turtle Island and and slavery and so we it is in our very fabric of the country and as Brian Stevenson says he feels until we have some discussions and until this we have truth and reconciliation that we're we're going to be not able unable to move forward I had put up here it was a couple of years ago it was in the New York Times a photograph of all of the states that had received in the cities that had received warfare armaments arms from the Pentagon and so and it's everybody it was completely orange the whole map of the United States what has changed is that our police force is now trained as paramilitary and perceive themselves as paramilitary and I think that's the pitch that you're talking about Susan and it has it has been aided not only by the volume of white supremacy and hatred and bigotry but also then with the arming of police officers and state officers with terrifying weapons so we now have an entire population not only people who have been historically fearful but we have a population of people who historically have been protesters who historically have gone out and spoken for and against terrified any country that can keep Guantanamo Bay open is sending a very clear message to its population and so I think there are there is reason for concern why do you think the race of arrests for women have multiplied a hundredfold over the past actually it's only half a decade that the numbers are astounding those are statistics that are available do you want to say something I had a comment please other yes please question I wanted to offer some I guess insight into this issue how just from my perspective how I see violence state violence and I see the young people involved in the language that they're using in the efforts that they're making through black lives matter through the music my son and I he's 24 he came home from prison with me when I was released in 1994 we had a discussion last week about how music has infiltrated and possibly brought insight and knowledge to young people around the issue he went back to the night to the 1980s where rap music was then talking about there were certain rappers talking about I'm not going to steal from you I'm not going to rob from you these are black rappers and and so he had taken me through the history and it came up out of a conversation with childish Gambino's new new video around and in his song and you know just the the ideas of that it gives folks and young people the ideas and the voice that is coming out of young people I reminded my son and most of us as mothers of color have to share a story with our children about how to behave when they go out on the street knowing that that's the story that we as women of color have to share with our children specifically that white women do not share this story and that is how to behave in the street when you are confronted by the police how to how to be when you are so that you are not emasculated when you are you and you're not you're not you're being targeted you're being profiled but that you don't lose your sense of self and your dignity because the dignity is often stripped from you immediately and so out of this conversation I had with my son I just want to offer this to young people that there are conversations happening there are confident they're using their platform to have these conversations and if you're listening to the music and you know I have the benefit of having this 24-year-old and oftentimes I don't think about that music that is is coming into his life but he sat me down and he said Kanye West and Tupac Shakur and Kendrick Lamar and then took me back and had me watch the Childish Gambino video and I was like hmm I wonder whether young folks are really listening so there is hope while there is that devastating knowledge that there is that on the other side there is hope because this is happening you know and I'm I'm I'm eager to see and see what happens with our young people and how they how they take it moving forward thank you for that thank you I think it's a great question the increase in arrest and what's driving this I think for I imagine for all of us part of the answer is the prison industrial complex you know if you build the prisons you build the jails that's where the revenue comes from got a film with people right near and dear to my heart is the commercial bail bond industry which siphons billions of dollars from low-income communities into the hands of for-profit insurance companies who have every incentive because it's their their money to push for some of the most progressive and punitive laws and the most harmful police practices right and I would also note that the militarization is terrifying but we know that cops can choke someone to death we know that they can taste someone to death we know that people held in solitary in prisons can it's fixate themselves right and are forced to kill themselves so I think it's not to be too depressing but terror on top of terror right and requires again bold initiatives and to really realize that in many cases we have to follow the money in following the money Peter can can you talk to us a little bit about how we can as individuals participate in demanding a change in bail system and I would love to a few things I would note one is in New York City we've launched with our allies a bail bond accountability campaign that started seeking the investigation and regulation of the industry but now demands the complete elimination of the industry and working with amazing groups like color of change we really got the word out we got 40,000 signatures we presented it to the governor controller stringer released an amazing report highlighting the economic impact right it's around 30 million dollars from just in New York City from our poorest most vulnerable neighbors and recently we have a bill that was introduced by senator Benjamin and assembly member Blake here in New York State that calls for the complete elimination of the industry right and this is in terms of getting involved I would ask folks to be supportive of that bill I would also say that at the bail fund working with our colleagues we've launched something called court watch NYC which trains New Yorkers to get into the the courts into the arraignment parts to be the eyes and ears of what's going on to pressure da's to be as liberal as they promised us would be and as we know it's just not happening in the same communities that were affected before are you know just as criminalized by these new policies right so this is a plug to for folks to become court watchers right it really does create community power and I think I think yeah it's some things are just require awesome what's so great about this panel the all the work you do is just to be honest about what's going on in foreign people thank you very much according to a recent virile list statistic the numbers of incarcerated people have dropped by half a million in 2017 and it's the lowest number since 2004 and at the same time we have privatized prisons multiplying and I want to ask panelists what their take is on how the statistic has come about is it state-by-state is is there a way of understanding that drop because doesn't feel like there's any drop I mean I can start we know that several things happen to contribute to this recent decline in the the annual incarceration rate some states like New York and New Jersey and California though California is sort of a funny case not funny haha have reduced their state prison population significantly you know by you know more than 20 percent which is a really important accomplishment and the way that those reforms happened those reductions happened you know look a little different state-by-state but they typically all in encompass some sort of sentencing reform some kind of parole reform and an increase in alternatives to incarceration or other sort of community-based accountability options for for the court systems and one of the other things that happened is that there was a fairly significant reduction in the federal prison population on the heels of some policy changes that were made by the prior administration and those things probably account for that that drop the most that I travel a lot I've been to 48 of our 50 states and it's really interesting what's happening out in the states some states are or you know in localities are working really diligently to be less reliant on jails and prisons and are really making progress and some states are doing the exact opposite and we see in many states that incarceration rates are rising and that's particularly true for women and girls even as even as there have been reductions in the incarceration of men we do see that incarceration rates rates for women and girls tend to be going up everywhere but those are some of the things that I think account for that drop I'm not super optimistic about the federal system continuing to to decline in its population but I am cautiously optimistic that more states may pursue what are now you know pretty proven reforms that get good results I just want to I go cautionary tale here so many of the private prison companies who are noticing this drop in incarceration levels especially in some of the states where they have the most private prisons have wanted have started this movement this very conservative very right facing movement to kind of join the reform club and so they're saying yes you're right you're absolutely right there are too many prisons and we should reduce the number of people in prisons so we've changed our corporations focus to re-entry and so these very same companies are now opening facilities across the country called re-entry transitional housing facilities that are as bad or worse than the prisons they were running so you know we say that what we need in order to get real reform or real or start moving toward abolition in a very real way we need bipartisan support but we need to be very very careful about those who we befriend and who we work with because the motive motivation matters so I mean I've worked with advocates for many many years and there are times when we say well let's just get it done if they're if they're doing it for a different reason it doesn't matter as long as we get it done I think there are places where it does matter what the motivation is and I've said I've been sitting in some rooms in DC with this is the emergence of all of these little not not permanent think tanks but big think tanks who are convening smaller groups of people to talk about this and the rooms are always very mixed right you have southern you have you have every region represented you have every ethnicity represented you have the left and the right represented but it's all to come up with a strategy that can maintain this maintain the status quo so that the money doesn't stop flowing to where it's been flowing the whole time we've got to be very very careful about this I'd like to yeah I think that's really important I'd like to add to that also which is that I think another thing about what are the real numbers or what is the real repression that the carceral state is still conducting whether there's an actual drop in numbers of people in the institutions is the whole rise of electronic monitoring and what that represents what will happen with that that is the e-incarceration which is going to be you know something that is going to get dropped and is being dropped on whole communities so I think there's there's a number of alternatives to incarceration that are being considered by the very same people who run the carceral state and I think that's what Vivian is saying I think it's very important and part of it though is is that when the prison if the prison movement I mean when I started working in this it was called the prisoners rights movement right and this was right after the Attica rebellion happened so that's how long ago there's been a movement around prisoners rights but that the issue of of what are our principles as a formerly incarcerated lead led movement of people right who have to become the critical voice within this sector of the work what are our what are our principles what do we what is our strategy who are our allies what do we think and if we we really have to do that in a in a very big way because the forces that are uniting now the very conservative right wing forces are if we're not clear what their motivations are who they are trying to organize and why we will we will have a much harder time with decarceration and you know that this last thing I would say is that I also think it's about what are our goals and there have there is there has been forever in all movements how do you deal with structural change while you also work with people who are in desperate need of help because they're the victims of that system right what is the relationship of those two things and how do you deal with that so this is really big in the prison movement right because the lives and content of what people are experiencing in prison are horrific and we have to help them in every way that we possibly can right that's what's motivated all of us to do the work on the one hand and on the other how do we have a framework that's an abolitionist or a more radical framework or a framework that says prison is bad there is nothing good for people coming out of prison and while we want all these alternatives what do we how do we negotiate that and I think that unless we have more clarity within the actual prison movement itself we're going to repeat some things that we could avoid so I feel I feel like we're at a very crucial moment you know and it isn't not not optimistic it's just this is a more complicated set of contradictions that we have to face and resolve an answer than we have had in a while so how do how do conversations begin that come up with the strategy that addresses just the as you the two of you pointed out Vivian and Susan I mean those those are huge areas but how do we begin to strategize as you said Vivian inside earlier about being in silos how are we going how we break it down the silos I mean I think we have to contend with there's two really big things that we have to contend with as we move forward and you're right the sort of what we've always thought of as the opposition or those most wedded to the carceral state are morphing and adapting to shifting sands and changes in the way that a broader number of people understand and and think about where we're at currently and so you know lots of people have raised this question of like follow the money right the criminal justice system monetizes the bodies of poor people right and that's a core part of our history as Americans is the monetization of bodies and the bodies of the most vulnerable and the most marginalized people and so contending with this question of you know the shifts of the carceral state you know potentially away from you know the most literal cage and to you know simply a form of containment which might be in the community but still is not liberation is something we have to definitely contend with because absolutely like we want to get people off Rikers we want to get people out of prison and out of jail because that's the setting the situation hidden behind those walls where any abuse you can think of can take can and does take place so we do want people you know sometimes we have this hideous choice of you know are we going to collaborate and in order to have people at least not hidden behind a wall or not and the other thing I think that we have to contend with also is this question of well if we're not going to use prisons and jails as a response to violence or you know or some some subset under violence what are we going to do and abolition movements you know continue to contend with trying to help people who are not necessarily on board with that envision a world one of the areas that gives me the most hope around making manifest that is the potential to abolish juvenile prisons and so we see some conversation up in Connecticut about you know literally the abolition of juvenile prisons and that's exciting to me because one of the things I believe is that you've got to sort of prove to people that things can be done and you have to show progress and that is you know a big you know catch 22 to contend with but the abolition of juvenile prisons is something I firmly believe we can do if we want to do it and then potentially we will have proved to you know naysayers or skeptics you know that in fact will be a much better place if we're not reliant on on prisons and jails at all but that's that's the sort of the the glimmer of hope because we have reduced you know the juvenile prison population substantially nationwide not in every jurisdiction of course the kids who are left in the system are kids of color overwhelmingly and in some cases almost exclusively so you know all of the the challenges to progress that most confront us you know sort of live in these these issues and in the potentiality I think that when we think about this issue this question in particular when you think about decarceration the idea about people returning home and that people do not return back to prison so decarceration is the opportunity to choose to make sure that you are supporting those that are home you are educating folks that have come home and you are educating them while they're inside so that they know that they do not they have other choices they have other choices but folks have to be given choices first and so when you're talking about a punitive oppressive system you're talking about it from the perspective of how it is now when you think about it from an abolitionist perspective it's like get rid of the prisons get rid of them they're of no use what's going to happen so decarceration takes a total different lens and look at how to do so from a personal perspective holding people responsible right and then by holding people responsible and offering them opportunities for education they can hold the systems responsible they can be involved in those conversations to change policy and procedure and laws and it's important for me at least to see the two differences but we have to also think about the healing of people from those two perspectives the need for healing from those two perspectives is is paramount because this is not something that has happened just for the length and lifetime of their imprisonment or their incarceration this has happened from a part of who they are their lineage especially of people of color this has been a part of who we are and so how do we begin to heal through all that intergenerational pain and oppression how do we begin to see it for what it is when we when you talk about having a conversation about this is a difficult conversation this conversation about race is as difficult about as talking about death you know but they're one in the same as far as I'm concerned it's about having a conversation that is through love and understanding and being able to hear both sides to be able to understand both sides right and to take it from that point and to offer dignity to both sides to understand the black issue it is a black people's issue it is and that's it plain and simple no one has experienced what African Americans have experienced in America no one has and that's it and we need to be able to say that and need to see what needs to happen since most of us are inside those institutions most of us are targeted to go into those institutions you know when do we begin to have the conversation and see that as Piper said the monetization of people right knowing that they're there as a friend of mine used to say as a consumer of the correction of the criminal justice system when are we going to be able to see folks not like that that have been impacted historically over time I want to circle back to Elizabeth your question about the increase in of women in prison because as everyone has answered that question and subsequent questions I think that the situation of women generally and women of color in prison is an interesting one because although we may not be able to say exactly why that increase has happened though I think we've had some very good ideas about why that has happened we can certainly predict the effects and those effects have to do with the role of women in our communities and in our families that women weave the social fabric they mend the social fabric and when women are incarcerated they are prevented from doing that as I mentioned before 75 to 85 percent of the women at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility are mothers and I know many here have deep experiences thinking about keeping that family intact while a mother is incarcerated and the effect of a mother's incarceration on her children and on her family generally and enabling incarcerated women to become empowered become role models be able to lift up their families even during their time on the inside so I want to connect that idea which is you know it's very disturbing that though the overall prison population is decreasing we're seeing this increase in the in the female prison population and that suggests greater difficulty in in fighting these forces of mass incarceration at the same time we are seeing a 60 percent increase in women who are running for congress and gubernatorial positions a 60 percent increase since the 2016 election including a democrat in Georgia a woman of color who has a really good shot and if she is elected she will be the first female of color governor in the country and that's an extraordinary stat in 2018 but going back to strategy I think that this is part of the strategy is we need many more women in positions of power who are able to make these decisions and able to think hard about the the role of women in in mending and healing communities and lifting those communities up so um sometimes I love these conversations but I also get frustrated because every time I'm in a new conversation I get a new idea that I then have to dig into um so when when just now when you mentioned um that it's an encouraging thing that more women are running for office and and being in these powerful positions I absolutely agree with that but I've what I've seen over the years doing this work is that power is such a trap because power is where all of this happens in systems and groups of power that reinvent themselves according to um what is popular at the time so you talked about how how we invent strategy well here's here's how this goes um within the uh the multiple dimensions of the nonprofit industrial complex you have service providers providing services you have think takes um think takes think tanks um developing and spreading through very sophisticated means of communications ideas and targeting certain people with that those ideas and then you have conveners who bring all constituencies together to come up with new strategies and I am and I've been invited in this year in the past 12 months to be part of four different str- strategy groups all designed to do the exact same thing come up with a new strategy to reduce incarceration in united states I'm in four of those groups right now four and what I'm noticing is that every time I get in that room the majority of the people in that room are in positions of very of varying degrees of power heads of departments of corrections heads of corporate industries heads of nonprofits um and then there's a few representations of the least of these spattered around the room to legitimize this gathering and legitimize whatever outcome they're going to produce because power always leads to the same thing it leads to a quest for more power and when that power gets threatened you can have the best of all intentions and run for office and understand what the problems are and have really good ideas for solutions and then when you find yourself in the middle of that power structure know that in order to operate within that structure you're going to have to compromise that is how power is designed to work and I witness it I witness it every day and I would love to be able to stand up in the middle of one of those rooms and say enough you know we're not really trying to solve anything here what we're doing is passing we're sharing the power that we have amongst each other and sharing the resources that we have amongst each other but then what is my strategy for keeping my work alive it is it's designed to trap you in this never-ending cycle of not making anybody too mad so that you can pay the lights and pay your staff it's just I'm sorry yeah I mean well I this I mean unless we start having these types of conversations we this is where we're stuck yeah I mean I was gonna talk about this I think you just did it in a much more eloquent way than I was going to but I was gonna talk a little bit about the fact that one of the things that has also changed since the the in the last four years has been money and the philanthropic sectors relationship to the criminal justice system and sort of which is a huge topic of a really but an important one in looking at both the good and the bad right the good being that there's more money flowing to more grassroots people than there has been ever before around these areas of work and that's good right because that's the work bad that the same structures of power and privilege racism classism misogyny exist from the philanthropic sector to the very people that are being quote helped by that philanthropic sector and so that that's bad and and you know so a friend of mine who does this work said to me the other day that there needs to be an affirmative action program inside the heart of philanthropy itself which I don't think would solve it completely but it would but at least it would be a challenge on the table you know and so part of the issue is also that the formerly incarcerated people's movement that's evolved over the last 10 years has been demanding that there be not just seats at the table but like real a real role in policy a real role in leadership a real role in content and so I think you know this this idea about money you know when people don't have access to resources they are forced to make the work happen under the most egregious and difficult situations where people don't have enough money to pay the lights to pay the bus fare for their clients for their people you name it and that privilege that exists that I you know the philanthropic sector in conjunction with the nonprofit industrial complex has set up a whole series of very competitive issues among this part of the movement so these are all like these are the deepest challenges that we have is how and how do we again I don't have an answer I wish I had an answer but I am getting sharper about seeing what some of the real problems and challenges are and that has to be a first step that this needs to be led by directly impacted people and that the power you were speaking of needs to be community power something we've been working on quite a bit is accountability and how do you ensure it because we will hear from the people we elect oh trust me I've listened to you and now I'm going to fulfill you know the mandate that you all gave me which say for a DA will be we need to be decarceral in our policies we'll see Syvance and Eric Gonzalez say things like we're no longer prosecuting people for most misdemeanors and the people who are left out of most are the same people who were caught in the system beforehand so just ensuring that the movement is built and that it's sustained and the way things are sustained I guess that's something we're all lifting up is well it can't be sustained off of people's good intentions right there actually has to be investment in these movements well if we follow the money which of course we've been doing since Watergate not before we know that we have a 700 to 800 billion dollar military budget and we don't have education for our populations we don't have money for our newly named NGO complex we're having bake sales to try and change something that is enormous so I don't know quite how to look at the tsunami of our fascist government and the fear that so many people live under and the discouragement and because I want to end the panel on an encouraging note not a discouraging note and I think one of the ways to do that is to acknowledge each of the people who are sitting to my left for their incredible work the very first states of denial we had this auditorium was full to the rafters all the way upstairs and we had waiting line those people couldn't get in and the reason that we video these programs is because they're not to be missed so if you know people who you feel should see this it's very easy to tell them EAS CFA slash videos and all of our programs are there and to spread the word and to keep fighting and I think the more afraid you are the harder you have to fight and I thank you very much for joining us and I thank everybody on the panel for coming today thank you thank you everyone