This is Democracy – Episode 109: Prison Reform Revisited: COVID, Black Lives Matter, and New Opportunities for Reform

[0:00:00 Narration] This Is Democracy, a podcast that explores the interracial inter generational and intersectional unheard voices living in the world’s most influential democracy.

[0:00:17 Jeremi Suri] Welcome to our new episode of This Is Democracy. This week we have the wonderful privilege of bringing back onto our podcast one of our most popular guests, my colleague and friend Michele Deitch. Michele, as many of you will remember from an earlier episode, she is one of the leading experts in the country and certainly in Texas is well on prison reform and many elements related to incarceration in the criminal justice system. She’s an attorney with more than 30 years of experience working in this area. She’s an award winning teacher. I know that as a colleague of hers, Ah, many times I have students who were in her class, and they just rave about her teaching. Michele is a faculty member at the LBJ School and the School of Law at the University of Texas at Austin. She’s an award winning teacher, a Soros senior justice fellow, and her specialties include independent oversight of correctional institutions, prison conditions, the management of youth in custody and juveniles in the adult criminal justice system. She co chairs the American Bar Association Subcommittee on Correctional Oversight and has been involved in drafting many of the important professional standards and policies and studies regarding these issues. Michele, thank you for joining us today.

[0:01:39 Michele Deitch] Well, thank you so much for having me back to army. It’s a pleasure.

[0:01:42 Jeremi Suri] Well, it’s it’s really great to have you on today. We’re going to discuss prison reform, criminal justice, issues related to incarceration, with particular attention to the influence that cove it and the black lives matter movement are having on the ways that Michele and others who work on these issues think about them and pursue reform today in what really is a new world from 2019. Before we get to that discussion, of course, we have Zachary’s scene setting poem Zachary. What’s the title of your poem today?

[0:02:16 Zachary Suri] The difference between the one and the other.

[0:02:19 Jeremi Suri] Well, let’s hear it.

[0:02:21 Zachary Suri] I look out when it rains through windows with horizontal bars, sitting, staring through Venetian blinds at a world stopped by sickness. Somehow, a man not so much older than darker and poor looks out through windows with vertical bars. It rain that falls in a world of sickness I look back, pick up a cup of tea, sit in a rocking chair and smiled at the ceiling fan facemask on a stroll around the block and take out from the restaurant somewhere. A man not so much older than for gotten and forgetting turns back to a room of wheezing faces and beds two feet apart and sits on a shared toilet, thinking of his bare face. I look up at night in a bed like an island in the dark, with windows and air vents and people who seem like miles away. And maybe I’m afraid of the dark, But I’m not sleeping restlessly because of disease. Sometime, I have gone without gourmet coffee. Sometime I have gone without my favorite bookstore. Sometime I have been forced to face time instead of handshakes. Sometimes the man has gone without his family. Some time the man has gone without hope. Sometime the man has gone with how being counted. But he is still forced into the field so he can think of his friends dying unseen in solitary so he could be punished for not wanting to die. And still you ask, what is the difference between the one and the other.

[0:03:43 Jeremi Suri] What is your poem about Zachary?

[0:03:44 Zachary] My poem is really about the immense difference in inequality between those of us experiencing a pandemic at home and lucky enough Teoh to be able to survive a pandemic like this in comfort. And those who are in prisons and incarcerated, who in many cases are forced to ignore health regulations and continue to work or continue to, ah, to stay in crowded cells

[0:04:11 Jeremi Suri] Michele is that accurate? Is our prison system poorly adjusted to the conditions were in

[0:04:17 Michele Deitch] Well, first, let me just say that I am blown away once again by your poem. Zachary. Just you’ve got such a grasp of the issues that are front and center here. And I love the parallels, but also the other ring that’s inherent in that in that poem, I mean, you’re seeing the commonalities between us and people who are incarcerated, but you’re also seeing the inequities there and, um, the ways in which our our situations are so, so different. So thank you for that. I think in answer to your question, Jeremy, Yes. I mean, I think that Zachary put his finger on so much of you people inside are suffering under these conditions. Right now, being incarcerated has always been extraordinary challenge. But under these conditions it’s unimaginable how much pain and anxiety and and stress they must be feeling. And we read

[0:05:21 Jeremi Suri about figures like Michael Cohen and Roger Stone and others who have been released. Does that happen for ordinary prisoners? Do they get released for health reasons, or how does that work?

[0:05:34 Michele Deitch] Well, first of all, that’s the federal system that we’re talking about. And of course, most people in this country are incarcerated at the state level and at the local level. So yes, there are plenty of examples of people who are being released, but it is not nearly as widespread as it should be. And the examples of these high profile folks who are getting out is really warping the public’s perception of both. What needs to happen and gives the impression of a lot more people are getting out than they are. There’s a lot of inequities. The people with the resource is to hire lawyers to take advantage of some of these policies that are quite appropriately in place. Um, they’re getting results

[0:06:24 Jeremi Suri] and are we still ah, locking people up, particularly those from minority backgrounds and at very high rates. Or has that changed?

[0:06:33 Michele Deitch] Um, our prison system is a reflection of the vast disparities in who in this country gets caught up in the criminal justice system. Who gets arrested, who gets charged with certain types of offenses, who gets attorneys, who gets, gets convicted and what kind of sentence they get. So as a result of ah, cascading Siris of disparities throughout the criminal justice system, those we see similar kinds of disparities playing out in terms of the population of our prisons and jails we’ve we’ve seen

[0:07:12 Zachary Suri] recently To a lot of politicians and leaders across the country, particularly in in smaller states with large incarcerated populations, trying to count incarcerated populations is separate from the from the non incarcerated populations. When it comes to Cove in 19 data, how can we address the gap between prison populations and non incarcerated populations? When it comes?

[0:07:38 Michele Deitch] That’s a That’s a great question. You’re absolutely right. There have been a number of instances where, for example, in some county that’s supposed to be reporting, the number of people who have Covic have tested positive for Cove. It They exclude people who are in a prison located in that community, which is a crazy thing to do for a 1,000,000 different reasons. But it’s really a reflection of the fact that we treat people who are incarcerated as though they’re not part of our communities. And in fact they are. And I think that the whole covert crisis has really driven that point home. You can’t draw an iron curtain between what happens inside these facilities to the people inside. And what happens in the communities those air, very porous curtains, people go in and out of jails was a very high rate of churn as they come in and they’re released hours later. Days later. In our prisons, you’ve got not only people who are being released because they finish their sentences or people who are coming in to begin a sentence. But you also have staff who are going in and out of these facilities on a daily basis. So if staff are being exposed to the virus inside, they’re bringing it back to their free world communities into their families, and if someone inside gets sick and the facility is not capable of taking care of them. They’re going to go to a free World hospital and take up a bed in that community. So the idea of not counting people, uh, with cove it inside and treating them as something apart from our communities is this really false dichotomy that needs to be changed?

[0:09:25 Jeremi Suri] It’s such a good point, Michele. Um, and I wonder, following up on that. Ah, have we seen evidence that the black lives matter, movement and much of the activism that has certainly increased in the last few months because of the pandemic and following the assassination of George Floyd? Have we seen that bubbling up within the prison system?

[0:09:47 Michele Deitch] Absolutely. In the confluence of cove it and black lives matter is like a perfect storm for the president, prisons and jails in this country. It none of the issues are new, but it’s made them front and center. You have to confront them. So is in terms of black lives matter. We’ve got a look at the fact that so many people in card, first of all, that there are so many people incarcerated, more prisons in jails, which means that there’s no possibility of social distancing inside, and then we need to look at who’s being incarcerated. Um, end. Most people who are inside are people who are particularly medically vulnerable there at high risk. Um, you’ve got ah, you’ve got a look at the immense disparities and whose their racial disparities, economic disparities on health disparities, all of those challenges make them far more vulnerable to the ravages of this disease. And so, yes, black lives matter. Issues are bubbling up on the part of advocates on the part of people who are incarcerated on the part of their families. And it’s really a message that we need to ask questions about why people are incarcerated. Do they need to be there? And what can we be doing, too? Handle our criminal justice system in a different way?

[0:11:26 Jeremi Suri] And I get a sense from your answer. Michele. On from so much of the important work you’ve done that you don’t think the solution is minor reforms, but something much bigger. Can you share with us what? Some of your thoughts and the thoughts of others in this field who have this expertise What what? What are the thoughts you you you have on bigger changes to the prison system.

[0:11:49 Michele Deitch] Well, we have to start by trying to deke arse aerator thes facilities as much as possible. And that’s true both for Cove, it and uh, from a black lives matter perspective and also because it’s good criminal justice policy. There are far too many people locked up, and it is not keeping us safer. In fact, it’s making us less safe as a society and much poorer because it’s very expensive to keep people locked up. So we need some pretty radical changes in terms of who we decide needs to be kept separate from our communities. Um, we also need to stop being so punitive in our approach. I think that the covert crisis has driven home exactly how punitive we are as a society in other countries. There have been mass releases of people from prisons and jails because they are so vulnerable and such at such high risk and from just a simple humanitarian perspective, it’s understood that that’s what needs to happen here. We are dead set on keeping people locked up to serve every minute of their sentence and sometimes beyond that, um, because of that punitive impulse. So I think we need to start switching from wanting to punish people, to wanting to find ways to meet their needs. What what needs did they have that lead them to involvement in the criminal justice system? And can we address that in ways that don’t involve the criminal justice system? What if we invested in communities? What if we invested in education and health and jobs so that criminal justice doesn’t become the default way of dealing with our country’s social problems?

[0:13:47 Jeremi Suri] It sounds Michele, like this, is connected to the movement also to reallocate funding from police departments to other parts of local communities and state communities. Is this connected to that?

[0:14:00 Michele Deitch] It’s absolutely connected to that. These issues air absolutely related to the police reform movement. Policing issues have got the public thinking about. Are there other ways we could deal with social problems? Can we take the money that we’re spending on policing and reinvested in our communities in different ways? Can we can we find ways to it involves social workers or the health system or the mental health system and instead of the criminal justice system, it’s a very short step from there to how are we using our prisons in our jails? Who are we locking up? Why air we locking them up? What can we invest in? There was a study, uh, some years ago, and it’s been replicated many places showing that we have in this country what we call $1,000,000 blocks, where you can literally identify a single block in New York City from which so many people go to prison that we could say we’re spending a $1,000,000 a year toe lock up people from that block. Well, suppose we took that $1,000,000 that were spending to do nothing other than to cage them. And we re invested it in that community. Because if we do that, we are actually promoting public safety by preventing those harms from occurring and preventing the need to lock people up. So reinvesting in our communities, it’s a form of what we call justice reinvestment. We need to look at those kinds of strategies.

[0:15:43 Jeremi Suri] I mean, it seems to to make a lot of sense, it’s It’s almost as in health care, right, instead of instead of developing the greatest hospitals to deal with problems when people get really sick, let’s let’s focus on preventive care so that people don’t get really sick. How, How how is this country and the criminal justice Experts and policymakers in this country failed for so long to see this as a problem and failed for so long to see that criminal justice has to be about more than just punishment.

[0:16:14 Michele Deitch] You know, I think that that really goes to our country’s culture. I think we are an extraordinarily, um, a country that thrives on the notion of individual responsibility and holding people responsible way. We give people tremendous amount of individual freedom, but we also, uh, want to punish them when they do something wrong, and that’s a very different attitude than many other countries have. So I think that that is part of the problem that we have not yet seen, that we are better as a society from having a more communal approach and more holistic approach to these social problems. So that’s part of it. I think that many policymakers were so long saw these investments as very expensive, but what they fail to see is that we’re spending orders of magnitude more on incarceration that we reduced the need for incarceration by making those kinds of investments.

[0:17:30 Jeremi Suri] Michele, do you  see, um, racism is at the core of this. I mean, many. Many are now arguing and and many did before, but particularly the last few months. Many have come to argue that the entire criminal justice system, particularly policing and incarceration, that these look more and more like vestiges of slavery and convict labor, legitimized in ways to look different but actually really carrying the same route forward. And that’s one of the explanations for why particularly young African American men tend to be in the worst situations in our prison system and white men who commit fraud and banking, banking crimes and even electoral crimes. They don’t get the same kind of punishment, even though one could argue those those crimes are more harmful to society. Is race really central to the explanation? And how how do you see it as part of the larger story?

[0:18:24 Michele Deitch] It’s absolutely essential to the system. You cannot look at our prison system today and not see in it the vestiges of our country’s history with slavery. Many of the Texas prisons are literally located on the land from plantations from slave times. Um, you’ve got people well, from from those slavery periods up through on the convict leasing periods when people in custody were literally rented out to, uh, farmers with lands that needed ah, tilling, um, where it was a system of slavery by another name to the current day system, where people in custody are still working those same lands and even growing cotton. You’ve got, uh, prison facilities that are literally named for slave owners and for the owners of those plantations for people who, uh, were high up in government door prison officials who were brutal in their treatment of people in custody. There’s no way you can look at that system we have today and not say it is connected. We have not, as it country as estate, as a society ever grappled with the connections between our history and where our criminal justice system is today. And we’ve got to do that.

[0:19:58 Jeremi Suri] And I know this is something you’re you do pioneering work on, and it’s one of the areas. Is a historian that I have such high regard for your work. What does it look like when maybe in this moment we can begin to talk about these connections. What does that look like in in the in the changing nature of the policy debate? What do you see changing?

[0:20:18 Michele Deitch] Well, I think it begins with an acknowledgment of history and say, saying or understanding how it brought us to this place, that we have to understand that that’s where our punitive response to criminality stems from. That’s where are but the brutality that we often see inside custodial environments comes from. That’s where we see all the other ring that happens inside the US them mentality. That’s where comes from. So we need to start by acknowledging all of that and seeing if we can accomplish a culture change both in a societal way so that we treat people who are incarcerated differently, and we treat people who, uh, get involved in criminal activities differently on. But it begins by seeing the humanity of people who are locked up and recognising much in the same way that, uh, that Zachary’s poem highlighted that they’re not that different from us there. People with hopes and dreams and fears and anxieties and families and kids, um, they’ve got they’re not that different from the rest of us. And I think in this moment we’re called on to look at people who are incarcerated with that recognition of their humanity and asked, What would it take to treat them with dignity and respect and to try to meet their needs, because that is going to make us safer as a society and better as human beings.

[0:22:05 Jeremi Suri] It seems from what you’ve said so eloquently that at the root of this is is really having a deeper discussion about crime and and what crime is and what it isn’t and why we call certain activity criminal and other activity, not criminal. It seems to me that’s at the root of this of this. But that’s a very difficult conversation to have right?

[0:22:27 Michele Deitch] Absolutely, absolutely mean. I fully recognize and appreciate that there are some very, very serious crimes that are committed, And, uh, no one should be subjected to that. There are many people who have been victimized by others. The question is, can we respond to those crimes in a way that we still respect the dignity and humanity of the people who committed them and meet the needs of people who have been victimized for a sense of justice. And what would it take to accomplish those things?

[0:23:09 Jeremi Suri] I was just thinking, as you were, Aziz. You were describing this so well of Ah, some of these horrible campaign ads we’re already seeing from the president. United States, you know where it is. It an older lady in her house. And there’s so no, if you’ve seen this machine someone you know, coming to the door to try to break in, you know, dark silhouette Ah, and you know, she’s calling for the police. And that’s sort of the fear that Americans have in the ways in which this is nothing new to this president. The ways in which politicians often play to the fears of citizens, it seems in some way like we have to. We have to educate ourselves out of that without in any way denying that there are serious crimes. But recognizing that the fear might be disproportionate and misplaced from what the rial set of crimes are,

[0:23:59 Michele Deitch] that’s absolutely right. I mean, I think that throughout the last several decades we have politicized the crime issue and the way that we talk about it through political ads through the media has totally distorted the public sense of how big a risk there is to our communities. In fact, violent crime is a very, very, very small portion of, uh, cases that get investigated by the police. The police, in fact, are very rarely investigating crime at all or stopping crime at all. They’re mostly involved in other kinds of activities. Um, so these cases that generate the public outrage and fear are a tiny fraction of the crimes that people are going to prison for. We’ve got a very distorted sense of who’s in prison.

[0:24:54 Jeremi Suri] And one of the other things I’ve learned through our podcasts and through other discussions, is that actually, one of the worst crimes, which would be sexual assault, seems to be one of those that’s at least prosecuted in places like Austin and other cities. But it seems to me almost backwards from the way one would expect this.

[0:25:13 Michele Deitch] Yeah, that is, that is absolutely true. I mean, in those cases are hard to, uh to prosecute and to investigate. They raise a lot of different challenges, but it’s certainly one that many people are quite rightly concerned about.

[0:25:30 Jeremi Suri] Yeah, I think that what makes this moment do Ah, so powerful is we’re finally recognizing that crime and that that crime, but also the mishandling of law enforcement, are symptoms of a larger problem. They’re not the problem themselves, and I think that’s what really allows this moment. To have such a broad scope when it comes to re analyzing our history is that it’s not just about one problem or just about police brutality. It’s about examining what our country’s history means and how it affects us today.

[0:26:03 Michele Deitch] That that’s absolutely right. And these are structural issues and you know, these air, not one off bad Apple situations we need to be asking. But when we see that there’s a horrific case of police brutality or some incident that occurs in in prison that involves brutality or a suicide in in jail, any of these issues we need to be asking not just why did this incident happen and what went wrong here. But what are the larger issues that might have contributed to these kinds of situations? Is there anything we could do to what lessons can we learn? Is there anything we can do to prevent them in the future and those with larger questions that I don’t see us asking sufficiently.

[0:26:52 Jeremi Suri] So Ah, Michele, As you know, Ah, we’d like to always close our podcast with ah, call to action with positive pathways that listeners particular younger listeners can pursue with the knowledge that you’ve provided them with the historical background. So So what are the things? And you do this with students in your classes through class projects? What are the things that young people can do to make a difference if they care about these issues, as I believe many young people do? What can they do to make a difference today?

[0:27:24 Michele Deitch] Sure. And I do believe that the young people care about this issue tremendously. My classes really have made that so clear to May First of all, educate yourself about these issues. This is something. There’s a lot of great literature that has been published in recent years. Read everything you can about the history of our prison jails and about the kinds of reforms that advocates are recommending and that researchers have been able to write about contact your legislators, contact your public officials, the governor’s office. Tell them that you care about these issues. One of the biggest problems is that our our governor and legislators don’t realize that anyone really worries about people who are inside. And so they feel like, well, we could just keep them locked up. It doesn’t matter if they get Cove, it’d woman affect us. It’s that other ring that we talked about. So the more you could say in your letters, What are you doing to prevent Cove it inside? Why are you letting people who are not a risk to our society remaining inside where they are at incredibly high risk to get Cove It Cove it is now. Our many of these prisons and jails are among the cove in hot spots in the country, so we need to be releasing people. And it’s your letters and your communications, your messaging that’s going to help make that message meaningful. Listen to by public officials. Let them word that someone cares.

[0:29:08 Jeremi Suri] That’s right, just activism. Good trouble is, John Lewis would call it right.

[0:29:12 Michele Deitch] Good trouble.

[0:29:14 Jeremi Suri] Do you think voting is also an issue? It This has become an issue in a state like Florida, where there’s been a lot of very effective activism, including a referendum to give former felons back the right to vote that’s been denied to them. But yet they’re things being done to prevent them from voting. Is that an issue to show we tryto active, activate Fallon’s and former felons to become voters again?

[0:29:37 Michele Deitch] Absolutely. I mean, there’s no better way to help people reintegrate into our communities and realize that they are part of our communities than by giving them that civic responsibility to vote. So trying to register people who do have a right to vote who were formerly incarcerated, getting the word out that it is important for them to be involved in the civic in the civic responsibility critically important. Zachary is this motivating

[0:30:11 Jeremi Suri] for many of your your young friends and peers? I mean, do you see this is an issue that that matters? I think Michele and I have seen at the university that there’s more interest in these in this these days. Do you think that’s something that’s enduring?

[0:30:25 Zachary Suri] I definitely think that there that that that that there is a huge interest among young people in these issues, I would just encourage my peers toe, look deeply into the history of these issues and see them not just as incidents that need justice for individuals, but larger historical and structural problems that need to be addressed in our society. And I think that’s where scholarship from people like you is really important because it helps us to visualize how this isn’t just a one off problem. This is something that needs to be addressed because it’s gonna keep happening until it is.

[0:30:58 Jeremi Suri] But I agree. Zachary, I think that Michele’s work illustrates Ah, really, how This is one of the issues where scholarship and policy really can work hand in hand. The work that you’ve described. Michele highlights this problem, and it points to actually what seemed like some common sense solutions. I mean, that’s every time I listen too much. I think it’s strange we haven’t done these things, isn’t it?

[0:31:21 Michele Deitch] Well, I like to think that it’s it’s common sense as well. Unfortunately, there’s that’s something that’s in short supply.

[0:31:28 Jeremi Suri] Well, Michele, thank you for joining us today again and really updating us on these crucially important issues and helping us to see that in this difficult moment we’re living through right now, there is a possibility, maybe to focus energy upon this problem and a problem that if we focus energy on, we can make some real progress on it’s It’s really it’s really wonderful to have you on. Thank you, Michele.

[0:31:52 Michele Deitch Thank you again and I’m thank you to all your listeners and to Zachary for his wonderful poem and very insightful commentary.

[0:32:00 Jeremi Suri] Absolutely thank you to everyone who joins us each week for this is Democracy.

[0:32:04 Narration] This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke. You confined his music. Harrison Lemke dot com