Dr. Craig Miller and Ashlee Felix-Taveras: Prison Education

1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:06,320 Welcome to Tomorrow Makers, where we explore how we learn, live, work, and play now and 2 00:00:06,320 --> 00:00:07,320 in the future. 3 00:00:07,320 --> 00:00:08,320 I'm Carlos Ramos. 4 00:00:08,320 --> 00:00:09,320 And I'm Sumer Beatty. 5 00:00:09,320 --> 00:00:10,320 Hello again, Sumer. 6 00:00:10,320 --> 00:00:11,320 Hello. 7 00:00:11,320 --> 00:00:12,320 Here we are. 8 00:00:12,320 --> 00:00:13,320 Here we are. 9 00:00:13,320 --> 00:00:16,600 And we are joined today by two amazing guests. 10 00:00:16,600 --> 00:00:18,480 This is a fantastic conversation. 11 00:00:18,480 --> 00:00:26,520 We have Dr. Craig Miller and our very own Ashlee Felix-Taveras, who recently graduated 12 00:00:26,520 --> 00:00:31,800 from Penn College and now works in our admissions office. 13 00:00:31,800 --> 00:00:37,360 This is so cool, I think, because Dr. Miller and Ashlee have this connection. 14 00:00:37,360 --> 00:00:41,240 And I think it's clear when you listen to it, it's like, oh my gosh, they know each 15 00:00:41,240 --> 00:00:42,240 other. 16 00:00:42,240 --> 00:00:43,240 They joke around. 17 00:00:43,240 --> 00:00:46,240 It's not your typical professor-student relationship. 18 00:00:46,240 --> 00:00:50,040 Maybe, I don't know, maybe, I guess at Penn College it kind of is, you know, but it's 19 00:00:50,040 --> 00:00:52,120 fun hearing them banter back and forth. 20 00:00:52,120 --> 00:00:53,120 Yeah. 21 00:00:53,120 --> 00:00:56,280 So we don't, I don't think we talked like more than like 12. 22 00:00:56,280 --> 00:01:00,000 I know I didn't really say much in this thing, which is awesome. 23 00:01:00,000 --> 00:01:01,700 They just kept at it. 24 00:01:01,700 --> 00:01:05,040 And the topic is incredibly fascinating. 25 00:01:05,040 --> 00:01:13,160 We're talking about prison, or actually education in prison, and just how meaningful it is to 26 00:01:13,160 --> 00:01:16,600 those that are in the system, their lives. 27 00:01:16,600 --> 00:01:19,280 I was just floored by what I'm hearing. 28 00:01:19,280 --> 00:01:20,280 Oh, totally. 29 00:01:20,280 --> 00:01:24,640 And if you're like me, it's something I never really gave much thought to before that conversation. 30 00:01:24,640 --> 00:01:28,280 And afterwards, I was just like, it was impactful, so impactful. 31 00:01:28,280 --> 00:01:30,080 It was a big wow moment. 32 00:01:30,080 --> 00:01:31,080 So, yeah. 33 00:01:31,080 --> 00:01:33,960 So definitely listen all the way through on this one. 34 00:01:33,960 --> 00:01:39,200 At the end, Dr. Miller gives us a really clear call to action and how we can make an impact 35 00:01:39,200 --> 00:01:40,200 here. 36 00:01:40,200 --> 00:01:44,720 So even if you're not familiar with the topic, there's definitely a call at the end that 37 00:01:44,720 --> 00:01:46,480 you can help out with. 38 00:01:46,480 --> 00:01:47,480 Yeah. 39 00:01:47,480 --> 00:01:48,480 So worth the wait. 40 00:01:48,480 --> 00:01:49,480 Great. 41 00:01:49,480 --> 00:01:51,480 So let's get into it. 42 00:01:51,480 --> 00:01:52,480 Let's do it. 43 00:01:52,480 --> 00:01:53,480 Here it is. 44 00:01:53,480 --> 00:01:54,480 Tomorrow Makers. 45 00:01:54,480 --> 00:01:55,480 Welcome. 46 00:01:55,480 --> 00:01:56,480 Welcome. 47 00:01:56,480 --> 00:01:57,480 I think we record that later, right? 48 00:01:57,480 --> 00:01:58,480 Yeah, but we want to say hello to our guests, don't we? 49 00:01:58,480 --> 00:01:59,480 Hello, guests. 50 00:01:59,480 --> 00:02:00,480 Welcome. 51 00:02:00,480 --> 00:02:01,480 Thank you for being with us today. 52 00:02:01,480 --> 00:02:02,480 Thanks for having us. 53 00:02:02,480 --> 00:02:03,480 We're really excited to get this conversation started. 54 00:02:03,480 --> 00:02:04,480 Yeah. 55 00:02:04,480 --> 00:02:05,480 I'm excited too. 56 00:02:05,480 --> 00:02:06,480 It's going to be fun. 57 00:02:06,480 --> 00:02:07,480 It's going to be interesting. 58 00:02:07,480 --> 00:02:08,480 We have different definitions of fun. 59 00:02:08,480 --> 00:02:09,480 Yeah, we definitely do. 60 00:02:09,480 --> 00:02:10,480 I think it's the age thing. 61 00:02:10,480 --> 00:02:11,480 Here, it starts already. 62 00:02:11,480 --> 00:02:12,480 Yeah. 63 00:02:12,480 --> 00:02:13,480 I'm excited. 64 00:02:13,480 --> 00:02:14,480 I'm excited. 65 00:02:14,480 --> 00:02:15,480 I'm excited. 66 00:02:15,480 --> 00:02:16,480 I'm excited. 67 00:02:16,480 --> 00:02:17,480 I'm excited. 68 00:02:17,480 --> 00:02:18,480 I'm excited. 69 00:02:18,480 --> 00:02:19,480 I'm excited. 70 00:02:19,480 --> 00:02:20,480 I'm excited. 71 00:02:20,480 --> 00:02:21,480 I'm excited. 72 00:02:21,480 --> 00:02:22,480 I'm excited. 73 00:02:22,480 --> 00:02:23,480 I'm excited. 74 00:02:23,480 --> 00:02:24,480 It starts already. 75 00:02:24,480 --> 00:02:27,040 Okay, I'll say that again. 76 00:02:27,040 --> 00:02:28,040 It'll be very insightful. 77 00:02:28,040 --> 00:02:29,040 How's that? 78 00:02:29,040 --> 00:02:30,040 That works. 79 00:02:30,040 --> 00:02:31,040 That's a good word. 80 00:02:31,040 --> 00:02:32,040 That's a better word. 81 00:02:32,040 --> 00:02:33,040 I like that word. 82 00:02:33,040 --> 00:02:36,420 Okay, we'll go with it. 83 00:02:36,420 --> 00:02:37,920 So I'm Ashlee. 84 00:02:37,920 --> 00:02:38,920 I'm Ashlee Felix. 85 00:02:38,920 --> 00:02:41,160 I'm a recent graduate of Penn College. 86 00:02:41,160 --> 00:02:45,620 I graduated from the Human Services and Restorative Justice Program. 87 00:02:45,620 --> 00:02:48,120 I am now an employee of the college. 88 00:02:48,120 --> 00:02:54,040 I work in the admissions department, and my guest today is Dr. Craig Miller. 89 00:02:54,040 --> 00:02:57,120 I just know him by Miller, but that's okay. 90 00:02:57,120 --> 00:03:02,520 But if you don't mind introducing yourself and what is it that you actually do here? 91 00:03:02,520 --> 00:03:07,160 Because I've known you since 2019 and don't know what you actually do. 92 00:03:07,160 --> 00:03:09,080 I think that's a good thing that people don't know what I do. 93 00:03:09,080 --> 00:03:11,480 It keeps them guessing. 94 00:03:11,480 --> 00:03:12,480 My name is Craig Miller. 95 00:03:12,480 --> 00:03:15,960 As Ashlee said, I've been at the college since 2011. 96 00:03:15,960 --> 00:03:18,640 I'm a professor of history and political science. 97 00:03:18,640 --> 00:03:22,840 I also am a department head for social sciences humanities. 98 00:03:22,840 --> 00:03:25,800 So I work with the Human Services and Restorative Justice Program. 99 00:03:25,800 --> 00:03:29,640 I work with our emergency management and homeland security program. 100 00:03:29,640 --> 00:03:33,040 And that's the capacity of working with the Human Services and Restorative Justice Program, 101 00:03:33,040 --> 00:03:39,920 where I got to know Ashlee, both having her in class and as an advisee. 102 00:03:39,920 --> 00:03:41,720 And I've been here since 2011. 103 00:03:41,720 --> 00:03:42,720 Nice. 104 00:03:42,720 --> 00:03:44,280 Well, that's good to know what you do. 105 00:03:44,280 --> 00:03:47,080 I always thought you were just a person I got to complain to. 106 00:03:47,080 --> 00:03:48,640 That's my other duties as assigned. 107 00:03:48,640 --> 00:03:49,640 Yeah. 108 00:03:49,640 --> 00:03:50,640 Okay. 109 00:03:50,640 --> 00:03:52,040 I see that that's like that part of the job description. 110 00:03:52,040 --> 00:03:53,040 Okay. 111 00:03:53,040 --> 00:03:54,040 All right. 112 00:03:54,040 --> 00:03:58,840 Well, I don't know if you guys know this, but Dr. Miller actually ran a college program 113 00:03:58,840 --> 00:04:00,840 in SCI New York. 114 00:04:00,840 --> 00:04:06,000 And then for those of you who don't really know our prison education like jargon, SCI 115 00:04:06,000 --> 00:04:08,100 means State Correctional Institution. 116 00:04:08,100 --> 00:04:12,520 So he ran a program in New York and it was called the Consortium of the Niagara Frontier 117 00:04:12,520 --> 00:04:15,480 before he was employed here at Penn College. 118 00:04:15,480 --> 00:04:20,680 So can you talk a little bit about that and how that like how was that and then how that 119 00:04:20,680 --> 00:04:22,960 kind of led you to be here at Penn College? 120 00:04:22,960 --> 00:04:23,960 Sure. 121 00:04:23,960 --> 00:04:26,560 Actually, it directly led me to be here. 122 00:04:26,560 --> 00:04:30,920 I went to graduate school for my PhD at the University of Buffalo. 123 00:04:30,920 --> 00:04:36,880 While I was there, I was contacted by a colleague, a friend of mine who was working for Literacy 124 00:04:36,880 --> 00:04:44,640 Volunteers of America, and they needed somebody to do a pilot project offering literacy evaluations 125 00:04:44,640 --> 00:04:46,800 inside of correctional institutions. 126 00:04:46,800 --> 00:04:52,360 So they needed somebody to go into the city jail, the Erie County Holding Center, and 127 00:04:52,360 --> 00:04:56,520 then potentially into some of the state correctional institutions as well. 128 00:04:56,520 --> 00:05:03,440 I started working in family court, which was not what I was supposed to do. 129 00:05:03,440 --> 00:05:08,360 There was a judge who had come to a county judge who had come to visit literacy volunteers 130 00:05:08,360 --> 00:05:10,920 the day that they were doing the training to get me in the prisons. 131 00:05:10,920 --> 00:05:13,480 And she was like, hey, would you be willing to come in and sit on family court? 132 00:05:13,480 --> 00:05:17,600 I would like all of the people coming through to have literacy evaluations because she felt 133 00:05:17,600 --> 00:05:22,080 it was a barrier to a lot of the people coming into our courts in terms of regaining custody. 134 00:05:22,080 --> 00:05:25,040 One of the things you need to do is be able to find gainful employment, find housing, 135 00:05:25,040 --> 00:05:28,560 all these things that if you can't read, it's just an extra layer of hardship on top of 136 00:05:28,560 --> 00:05:31,120 what you're already trying to accomplish. 137 00:05:31,120 --> 00:05:35,160 And it was through her I got introduced to a gentleman named Bob Housewrath, who ran 138 00:05:35,160 --> 00:05:40,000 a college program inside of Wyoming County Correctional Facility, which is a medium state 139 00:05:40,000 --> 00:05:42,160 run facility in New York. 140 00:05:42,160 --> 00:05:45,160 He was the head of a consortium that included three Catholic colleges. 141 00:05:45,160 --> 00:05:50,040 I think it was Canisius, Niagara University, excuse me, and Damon College. 142 00:05:50,040 --> 00:05:54,600 And he was basically running a nonprofit that he had started in the 1970s. 143 00:05:54,600 --> 00:05:59,600 So this is 2004, 2003 when I started working with him. 144 00:05:59,600 --> 00:06:01,840 I was going to make a joke, but you keep going. 145 00:06:01,840 --> 00:06:04,600 The jokes are going to continue throughout because you can't help yourself. 146 00:06:04,600 --> 00:06:05,600 Prepare for it. 147 00:06:05,600 --> 00:06:10,560 This is something that has to do with every day of my college career. 148 00:06:10,560 --> 00:06:14,160 The fact that I keep getting older and all of you stay the same age means that I get 149 00:06:14,160 --> 00:06:18,780 ridiculed by the same jokes semester after semester. 150 00:06:18,780 --> 00:06:20,960 But he started the program as a nonprofit. 151 00:06:20,960 --> 00:06:23,600 So he wasn't an employee of the prison system. 152 00:06:23,600 --> 00:06:26,880 He was working within the prison system as an independent contractor, which gave him 153 00:06:26,880 --> 00:06:28,920 a lot of flexibility. 154 00:06:28,920 --> 00:06:33,560 And the program he constructed was, I'll get into the details of it a little bit, but it 155 00:06:33,560 --> 00:06:35,920 was inspiring to me. 156 00:06:35,920 --> 00:06:40,800 So I started, I met him and then I started tutoring inside and doing literacy evaluations 157 00:06:40,800 --> 00:06:43,200 inside the Erie County Holding Center. 158 00:06:43,200 --> 00:06:46,920 When one of his adjunct instructors, almost all the instructors who were working in his 159 00:06:46,920 --> 00:06:51,240 college program were adjuncts, he didn't really have anybody full time other than himself 160 00:06:51,240 --> 00:06:54,880 and a few part time work study people. 161 00:06:54,880 --> 00:06:57,960 But a position opened up, they needed somebody to teach an introductory history class. 162 00:06:57,960 --> 00:07:01,680 And I was like, well, I'm a PhD student in history, so I would jump at the chance to 163 00:07:01,680 --> 00:07:02,680 do that. 164 00:07:02,680 --> 00:07:07,040 And in the first class, it was the most interesting, challenging and rewarding experience I've 165 00:07:07,040 --> 00:07:08,080 ever had. 166 00:07:08,080 --> 00:07:14,760 So the first day of class, I was teaching US history, US history I, so like Columbus 167 00:07:14,760 --> 00:07:17,080 to the Civil War. 168 00:07:17,080 --> 00:07:21,140 And I get in front of the class and I do my introductory spiel, which you've probably 169 00:07:21,140 --> 00:07:23,400 heard a dozen times already. 170 00:07:23,400 --> 00:07:27,760 And I start getting into a lecture and like 30 seconds in, four hands raised and they're 171 00:07:27,760 --> 00:07:32,040 like, on page 47, paragraph six, he disagrees with everything you just said. 172 00:07:32,040 --> 00:07:36,680 I was like, you actually did all the reading before the first day of class. 173 00:07:36,680 --> 00:07:40,440 And then at dawn, I'm like, you have the time to do this. 174 00:07:40,440 --> 00:07:45,280 But one of the things that jumped out at me initially was there were some men in those 175 00:07:45,280 --> 00:07:49,400 classes who were ready on day one to start talking, to ask questions and the others were 176 00:07:49,400 --> 00:07:52,920 really hesitant. 177 00:07:52,920 --> 00:07:57,920 But by like week two, they were all like the they were all participating in ways and my 178 00:07:57,920 --> 00:07:58,920 street classes never did. 179 00:07:58,920 --> 00:08:01,440 And I guess I should street classes are like my regular college classes. 180 00:08:01,440 --> 00:08:04,800 That's just the lingo that they use inside. 181 00:08:04,800 --> 00:08:10,080 And so the more I learned about the ways in which prison education was empowering to the 182 00:08:10,080 --> 00:08:13,100 individual, I just I'd always thought about it being a leg up, it's going to help you. 183 00:08:13,100 --> 00:08:16,160 But I'd never really thought about kind of the personal growth and empowerment that comes 184 00:08:16,160 --> 00:08:17,480 from education generally. 185 00:08:17,480 --> 00:08:23,520 And obviously, in my own story, that was part of it, but I'd never really thought about 186 00:08:23,520 --> 00:08:27,760 the ways in which this could open doors for other people. 187 00:08:27,760 --> 00:08:28,760 Right. 188 00:08:28,760 --> 00:08:29,760 Yeah. 189 00:08:29,760 --> 00:08:33,360 So I started hounding Bob saying, can I teach more classes? 190 00:08:33,360 --> 00:08:35,240 And he thought at first, I just needed extra money. 191 00:08:35,240 --> 00:08:38,560 Granted, I was a graduate student making like $12,000 a year so I could use all the extra 192 00:08:38,560 --> 00:08:40,160 help I could get. 193 00:08:40,160 --> 00:08:46,640 But it was just I never knew like in my history classes when I was at the University of Buffalo, 194 00:08:46,640 --> 00:08:50,440 I kind of knew how the conversation was going to go in almost every class. 195 00:08:50,440 --> 00:08:51,440 They were all history majors. 196 00:08:51,440 --> 00:08:54,080 They'd all been in the same kind of cohorts together. 197 00:08:54,080 --> 00:08:57,400 Every time I walked into the prison class, I had no idea what was going to come out of 198 00:08:57,400 --> 00:09:01,560 somebody's mouth because their experiences were so different than the experiences of 199 00:09:01,560 --> 00:09:03,000 the students in my street classes. 200 00:09:03,000 --> 00:09:06,400 This doesn't mean I didn't have formerly incarcerated students in my street classes, but this was 201 00:09:06,400 --> 00:09:11,340 like having an entire class of formerly incarcerated people who had all these life experiences, 202 00:09:11,340 --> 00:09:15,600 like having discussions about the origins and history of welfare with a group of people 203 00:09:15,600 --> 00:09:19,200 who have spent the vast majority or a sizable portion of their life in prison was a much 204 00:09:19,200 --> 00:09:22,440 different discussion than I would have with a group of middle to upper middle class white 205 00:09:22,440 --> 00:09:25,560 kids in Buffalo. 206 00:09:25,560 --> 00:09:32,280 And so as I got closer to finishing my PhD, the director of the consortium was getting 207 00:09:32,280 --> 00:09:35,760 ready to retire and asked me if I would be interested in taking it over. 208 00:09:35,760 --> 00:09:39,120 So I started as assistant director, I think in 2006. 209 00:09:39,120 --> 00:09:43,040 I finished my PhD in 2009-ish, 2010. 210 00:09:43,040 --> 00:09:48,280 And I took it over about six months before then, and then the financial crisis hit. 211 00:09:48,280 --> 00:09:53,280 That program was completely, well, not completely, about 40% of our money was from grants, from 212 00:09:53,280 --> 00:09:55,440 private institutions. 213 00:09:55,440 --> 00:09:59,640 The rest of the money came from member item money from the New York state legislature. 214 00:09:59,640 --> 00:10:03,560 Member item money is money that they used to have in the New York state legislature 215 00:10:03,560 --> 00:10:07,880 where each member got a budget that they could basically allocate on their own without having 216 00:10:07,880 --> 00:10:09,720 to go through a normal appropriations process. 217 00:10:09,720 --> 00:10:13,360 For people listening who don't know what an appropriations process is, that means you 218 00:10:13,360 --> 00:10:15,680 have to get something voted on in order to spend the money. 219 00:10:15,680 --> 00:10:16,680 Oh, thank you. 220 00:10:16,680 --> 00:10:17,800 I didn't know what that meant. 221 00:10:17,800 --> 00:10:21,080 These member items, they would vote on a general appropriation so that each member gets X amount 222 00:10:21,080 --> 00:10:24,520 of money and then you can divert it to the organizations you want to. 223 00:10:24,520 --> 00:10:28,600 We had a lot of, one of the ways in which the prison system works is you rarely get 224 00:10:28,600 --> 00:10:34,480 incarcerated in the region or county or city that you were arrested in. 225 00:10:34,480 --> 00:10:38,680 So Wyoming County Correctional Facility is about an hour south of Buffalo, New York, 226 00:10:38,680 --> 00:10:42,600 the vast majority of the people who were in that prison were from New York City. 227 00:10:42,600 --> 00:10:47,440 So a lot of New York City legislators were willing to fund the program and we got a lot 228 00:10:47,440 --> 00:10:48,600 of really generous support. 229 00:10:48,600 --> 00:10:52,840 In fact, even the state senator who was the representative of the district that the prison 230 00:10:52,840 --> 00:10:56,080 was in was one of our biggest supporters. 231 00:10:56,080 --> 00:10:57,880 But a lot of things converged in 2008. 232 00:10:57,880 --> 00:11:01,680 The financial crisis was one of them, but there was also the reaction to the financial 233 00:11:01,680 --> 00:11:02,680 crisis. 234 00:11:02,680 --> 00:11:06,640 So for those listening who don't remember or don't know a lot, in 2008 there was a major 235 00:11:06,640 --> 00:11:13,960 mortgage crisis, a banking crisis, and the government responded to those crises in different 236 00:11:13,960 --> 00:11:18,040 ways, state governments and federal governments, but there were also outside responses. 237 00:11:18,040 --> 00:11:21,000 So one of the big challenges, one of the big responses to that was the origins of the Tea 238 00:11:21,000 --> 00:11:22,560 Party movement. 239 00:11:22,560 --> 00:11:26,360 And the Tea Party movement was largely but not exclusively within the Republican Party 240 00:11:26,360 --> 00:11:30,760 of people who were arguing that the reason the financial crisis happened was that there 241 00:11:30,760 --> 00:11:35,200 were too many regulations and that government was putting money into places that it shouldn't 242 00:11:35,200 --> 00:11:39,160 and that the way to prevent financial crises from happening in the future was to roll back 243 00:11:39,160 --> 00:11:41,040 all government spending. 244 00:11:41,040 --> 00:11:46,560 And so one of the biggest challenges we had was the Republican state senator in our district 245 00:11:46,560 --> 00:11:50,880 where the prison was who was a huge supporter was being challenged by a Tea Party person 246 00:11:50,880 --> 00:11:52,140 in his primary. 247 00:11:52,140 --> 00:11:54,520 And he said to me, I can't support you publicly anymore. 248 00:11:54,520 --> 00:11:57,080 It's like I believe in what you're doing, it works. 249 00:11:57,080 --> 00:12:00,120 But if I say prison and education in the same sentence, nobody's going to hear anything 250 00:12:00,120 --> 00:12:02,320 else I say in this political environment. 251 00:12:02,320 --> 00:12:08,160 The same thing happened to our legislators in New York City area. 252 00:12:08,160 --> 00:12:11,760 There was a reorganizing of the state government where the governor ended up taking away the 253 00:12:11,760 --> 00:12:12,760 member item money. 254 00:12:12,760 --> 00:12:16,080 So all that money was being housed in the governor's office. 255 00:12:16,080 --> 00:12:19,600 Most of the private grant organizations who were giving us money were in a position where 256 00:12:19,600 --> 00:12:24,480 they wanted to hold on to what they had because they wanted to see what the fiscal environment 257 00:12:24,480 --> 00:12:27,460 and the economic environment was going to look like over the next three years. 258 00:12:27,460 --> 00:12:31,600 We had just gotten a major grant from the Sunshine Lady Foundation. 259 00:12:31,600 --> 00:12:36,360 The Sunshine Lady Foundation is run by Doris Buffett, who is Warren Buffett's sister. 260 00:12:36,360 --> 00:12:39,440 And her goal is she's like, I'm giving away all of my money before I die, every single 261 00:12:39,440 --> 00:12:40,440 cent. 262 00:12:40,440 --> 00:12:41,440 She's like, I don't want to have anything left. 263 00:12:41,440 --> 00:12:42,440 I want it all gone. 264 00:12:42,440 --> 00:12:45,840 But at that point, they were just starting to seed projects and they wanted to wait a 265 00:12:45,840 --> 00:12:47,240 couple of years to see what happened. 266 00:12:47,240 --> 00:12:50,060 And we told her, I said, I don't have a couple of years. 267 00:12:50,060 --> 00:12:52,680 This program was dependent upon outside money. 268 00:12:52,680 --> 00:12:54,480 None of these men were paying. 269 00:12:54,480 --> 00:12:58,520 And I'll get into why that was at the time. 270 00:12:58,520 --> 00:13:01,840 So that program folded about 2010. 271 00:13:01,840 --> 00:13:05,740 I spent the last two years using the money we had left to graduate as many students as 272 00:13:05,740 --> 00:13:07,120 we could. 273 00:13:07,120 --> 00:13:10,200 That program was offering associates and bachelor's degrees. 274 00:13:10,200 --> 00:13:15,600 Most of the men were getting associates in things like accounting or marketing, mostly 275 00:13:15,600 --> 00:13:17,000 business degrees. 276 00:13:17,000 --> 00:13:21,040 And one of the bonuses for us that kept the cost so low is that Canisius, Niagara, and 277 00:13:21,040 --> 00:13:24,820 Damon, the three colleges we're working with, offered a massively reduced tuition. 278 00:13:24,820 --> 00:13:28,240 I think they were charging us like $50 a credit hour, which is literally like... 279 00:13:28,240 --> 00:13:31,000 Keep in mind, these are $2,008, right? 280 00:13:31,000 --> 00:13:33,000 But still. 281 00:13:33,000 --> 00:13:36,800 Because it was part of their mission to increase social justice. 282 00:13:36,800 --> 00:13:40,520 And I'll talk about that a little bit too if you want to get into the social justice 283 00:13:40,520 --> 00:13:41,520 conversation. 284 00:13:41,520 --> 00:13:43,120 Do we have enough time? 285 00:13:43,120 --> 00:13:45,340 We have all the time we'd like. 286 00:13:45,340 --> 00:13:50,940 So we graduated as many students as we could. 287 00:13:50,940 --> 00:13:52,240 And I had to get back on the job market. 288 00:13:52,240 --> 00:13:55,960 One of the challenges for me is the traditional career path for an academic is to get your 289 00:13:55,960 --> 00:13:58,320 dissertation published to get on the conference circuit. 290 00:13:58,320 --> 00:14:01,280 I didn't do any of that because I was like the prison job was the best job I'd ever had 291 00:14:01,280 --> 00:14:02,280 in my life. 292 00:14:02,280 --> 00:14:03,280 And I was like, this is what I want to do forever. 293 00:14:03,280 --> 00:14:05,640 I don't care if I publish. 294 00:14:05,640 --> 00:14:07,520 And people are like, well, you could publish about your work in the prison. 295 00:14:07,520 --> 00:14:09,120 I'm like, somebody else can publish if they want. 296 00:14:09,120 --> 00:14:10,760 Like I like boots on the ground. 297 00:14:10,760 --> 00:14:12,240 I like working with this population. 298 00:14:12,240 --> 00:14:15,520 I like the work I'm doing lobbying in the legislature. 299 00:14:15,520 --> 00:14:17,820 That was satisfying to me. 300 00:14:17,820 --> 00:14:21,000 But it put me at a disadvantage when I was going back on the job market because all of 301 00:14:21,000 --> 00:14:23,880 my peers and all the other graduate students already had publications. 302 00:14:23,880 --> 00:14:26,360 They had been presenting at more conferences. 303 00:14:26,360 --> 00:14:29,920 And I saw a job posting for the Pennsylvania College of Technology. 304 00:14:29,920 --> 00:14:32,640 No history major whatsoever. 305 00:14:32,640 --> 00:14:35,320 They have a social sciences and humanities department. 306 00:14:35,320 --> 00:14:38,120 But it ended up being perfect for me because they were looking for a teacher more than 307 00:14:38,120 --> 00:14:40,640 they were looking for a researcher. 308 00:14:40,640 --> 00:14:44,640 And I loved being here too because my colleagues at UB were like, you're going to hate it there. 309 00:14:44,640 --> 00:14:45,640 They're going to hate you. 310 00:14:45,640 --> 00:14:46,640 They're going to hate history. 311 00:14:46,640 --> 00:14:47,640 Engineers don't like history. 312 00:14:47,640 --> 00:14:50,560 And I was like, well, it's a job. 313 00:14:50,560 --> 00:14:51,720 So I'm going to take the job. 314 00:14:51,720 --> 00:14:56,240 But I found that this is in some ways not similar to the prison population, but it's 315 00:14:56,240 --> 00:15:01,160 similar in that the students who come to my classes have much different experiences here 316 00:15:01,160 --> 00:15:02,160 too. 317 00:15:02,160 --> 00:15:03,160 Of course. 318 00:15:03,160 --> 00:15:04,160 A lot of first generation students here as well. 319 00:15:04,160 --> 00:15:08,640 But also I found that the engineers and the other, like the welders who were in labs all 320 00:15:08,640 --> 00:15:11,960 day long were just happy to be doing something different than being in the lab all day long. 321 00:15:11,960 --> 00:15:15,800 And it was a chance for them to kind of get engaged in stuff that they didn't before. 322 00:15:15,800 --> 00:15:18,760 So this ended up being the perfect transition for me. 323 00:15:18,760 --> 00:15:19,760 That's cool. 324 00:15:19,760 --> 00:15:23,080 I'm going to keep my feet wet in the prison rubble, which I'm guessing we'll get to in 325 00:15:23,080 --> 00:15:24,080 a bit. 326 00:15:24,080 --> 00:15:25,080 Yeah. 327 00:15:25,080 --> 00:15:27,920 And I'll say from first person experience, because I've had you as a professor, you're 328 00:15:27,920 --> 00:15:32,360 really good at playing devil's advocate with everybody. 329 00:15:32,360 --> 00:15:37,640 And I really appreciate that because you give everybody the chance to speak their side, 330 00:15:37,640 --> 00:15:41,040 to speak their perspective and say their experiences. 331 00:15:41,040 --> 00:15:46,860 But you also present the other side in a way that's very respectful to the person. 332 00:15:46,860 --> 00:15:53,360 And that you're able to get the full picture of a situation rather than just focus on your 333 00:15:53,360 --> 00:15:54,360 side. 334 00:15:54,360 --> 00:16:00,920 Because I know from my experience in your class, I was very different than a lot of 335 00:16:00,920 --> 00:16:02,480 the other students in the class. 336 00:16:02,480 --> 00:16:05,080 And so our perspectives clashed a lot. 337 00:16:05,080 --> 00:16:09,840 But you were really good at making me see their side and them see my side. 338 00:16:09,840 --> 00:16:17,480 And I came out of that more understanding, and I feel like a more well-rounded person. 339 00:16:17,480 --> 00:16:21,440 So I appreciate that that's the way you run your classes. 340 00:16:21,440 --> 00:16:22,440 That's the goal. 341 00:16:22,440 --> 00:16:23,440 And I appreciate that. 342 00:16:23,440 --> 00:16:26,040 It means a lot because I can't inflate your grade at this point. 343 00:16:26,040 --> 00:16:27,040 You've already graduated. 344 00:16:27,040 --> 00:16:28,040 I know. 345 00:16:28,040 --> 00:16:29,040 He already failed me, guys. 346 00:16:29,040 --> 00:16:30,040 It's okay. 347 00:16:30,040 --> 00:16:33,360 But this is something that I loved about history from the get-go is that I think one of the 348 00:16:33,360 --> 00:16:38,080 things that frustrates people who take history classes is that is the thing that I love about 349 00:16:38,080 --> 00:16:41,280 history is that there aren't right answers. 350 00:16:41,280 --> 00:16:42,760 The revolution happened when it happened. 351 00:16:42,760 --> 00:16:44,240 The Civil War happened when it happened. 352 00:16:44,240 --> 00:16:48,320 But when you're talking about why it happened, what the consequences of it happening were, 353 00:16:48,320 --> 00:16:51,120 that really depends on the perspective of who you're looking at it from. 354 00:16:51,120 --> 00:16:56,240 If you're talking about the American Revolution, we think of liberty and representation and 355 00:16:56,240 --> 00:16:58,420 no taxation without representation. 356 00:16:58,420 --> 00:17:02,160 But there are native people who picked up guns and fought for both sides, and they didn't 357 00:17:02,160 --> 00:17:03,360 care at all about representation. 358 00:17:03,360 --> 00:17:04,880 They didn't care at all about taxes. 359 00:17:04,880 --> 00:17:08,120 They had their own rationales and reasons for picking things up. 360 00:17:08,120 --> 00:17:10,680 And then the historical question is, well, whose perspective is the one that we should 361 00:17:10,680 --> 00:17:11,680 focus on? 362 00:17:11,680 --> 00:17:14,280 And that really depends on what it is you're trying to get out of the past. 363 00:17:14,280 --> 00:17:17,720 And so one of the things I love about history that I know frustrates everybody else is that 364 00:17:17,720 --> 00:17:18,720 there aren't right answers. 365 00:17:18,720 --> 00:17:19,720 There's analysis. 366 00:17:19,720 --> 00:17:22,420 There's debate. 367 00:17:22,420 --> 00:17:23,960 But it should also be utilitarian, right? 368 00:17:23,960 --> 00:17:27,580 We're all going to take something different away from the past because we all have a different 369 00:17:27,580 --> 00:17:28,580 connection to it. 370 00:17:28,580 --> 00:17:30,520 We're working this semester in world history. 371 00:17:30,520 --> 00:17:35,360 We're going to be in the fall on myth and the myths that connect every society, right? 372 00:17:35,360 --> 00:17:36,720 The myth of America is this myth. 373 00:17:36,720 --> 00:17:41,400 And I'm not saying myth because it's not true, but every society has its founding origin 374 00:17:41,400 --> 00:17:42,400 myths. 375 00:17:42,400 --> 00:17:43,400 Yeah. 376 00:17:43,400 --> 00:17:48,320 And for us, it's that defining moment in 1776, the Declaration of Independence, the revolution 377 00:17:48,320 --> 00:17:50,960 that comes after it, the Constitution. 378 00:17:50,960 --> 00:17:54,160 But everybody in America doesn't have the exact same experience. 379 00:17:54,160 --> 00:17:58,040 So one of the things I love to do in my class is, particularly in American government and 380 00:17:58,040 --> 00:18:01,480 in US history is on the first day, try to see if we can come up with a common definition 381 00:18:01,480 --> 00:18:02,880 of what it means to be an American. 382 00:18:02,880 --> 00:18:04,840 Yeah, that was fun. 383 00:18:04,840 --> 00:18:06,520 And nobody can ever do it. 384 00:18:06,520 --> 00:18:10,320 We can all say, yeah, well, we value freedom and we value liberty and we value order. 385 00:18:10,320 --> 00:18:13,780 But what those things actually mean has a lot to do with the experience you've had of 386 00:18:13,780 --> 00:18:16,720 America, the ways in which you connect to that founding myth. 387 00:18:16,720 --> 00:18:18,120 And that's never going to be the same for anybody. 388 00:18:18,120 --> 00:18:21,580 It's one of the things I'm trying to do in my classes is give people the space to figure 389 00:18:21,580 --> 00:18:25,040 out how they connect to it, but also how other people connect to it. 390 00:18:25,040 --> 00:18:28,700 The hope being that there's kind of some common ground you can find within that. 391 00:18:28,700 --> 00:18:30,800 Which is the cool part, because it's always a common ground. 392 00:18:30,800 --> 00:18:36,840 Even if we leave the conversation with like, we can agree to disagree, but there's common 393 00:18:36,840 --> 00:18:37,840 ground, you know? 394 00:18:37,840 --> 00:18:38,840 That's the hope. 395 00:18:38,840 --> 00:18:39,840 Yeah. 396 00:18:39,840 --> 00:18:40,840 Was that guy Voltaire? 397 00:18:40,840 --> 00:18:42,840 He was a French author? 398 00:18:42,840 --> 00:18:43,840 He was. 399 00:18:43,840 --> 00:18:48,680 He said, I may not agree with the words you say, but I will defend to the death your right 400 00:18:48,680 --> 00:18:49,680 to say it. 401 00:18:49,680 --> 00:18:50,680 Yeah. 402 00:18:50,680 --> 00:18:53,400 Free speech is one of the most important components of an open society. 403 00:18:53,400 --> 00:18:54,400 Yeah. 404 00:18:54,400 --> 00:18:58,040 So let's go back to the topic, though, which is prison education. 405 00:18:58,040 --> 00:19:00,040 We could do four hours on free speech. 406 00:19:00,040 --> 00:19:01,040 I know. 407 00:19:01,040 --> 00:19:02,040 Okay. 408 00:19:02,040 --> 00:19:05,280 So you talked about how you started in New York, and then you ended up here at Penn College. 409 00:19:05,280 --> 00:19:09,960 And then you recently started here, which is going to be funny because the acronyms 410 00:19:09,960 --> 00:19:10,960 are funny. 411 00:19:10,960 --> 00:19:13,080 You started prison to college. 412 00:19:13,080 --> 00:19:14,080 Yeah. 413 00:19:14,080 --> 00:19:15,080 PTC, PCT. 414 00:19:15,080 --> 00:19:19,920 You say that five times fast. 415 00:19:19,920 --> 00:19:22,640 I'm not going to, because I'll embarrass myself on the podcast. 416 00:19:22,640 --> 00:19:26,120 Yeah, I haven't really come up with a good name for it yet, but prison to college is 417 00:19:26,120 --> 00:19:27,600 just kind of what's stuck so far. 418 00:19:27,600 --> 00:19:28,920 Yeah, no, I like it. 419 00:19:28,920 --> 00:19:34,640 So what made you, because I know obviously it was such a passion for you, and you were 420 00:19:34,640 --> 00:19:39,100 there, and then you came here, and it kind of, you know, you really dove into teaching. 421 00:19:39,100 --> 00:19:45,200 What made you kind of pick it back up and start it up here? 422 00:19:45,200 --> 00:19:51,020 As a historian, it's always difficult to figure out where to start the story. 423 00:19:51,020 --> 00:19:57,960 So the thing that drew me to this world in the first place was my own personal experience. 424 00:19:57,960 --> 00:19:59,440 I was a high school dropout. 425 00:19:59,440 --> 00:20:03,680 I was running with people I probably shouldn't have been running with, doing things I probably 426 00:20:03,680 --> 00:20:05,640 shouldn't have been doing. 427 00:20:05,640 --> 00:20:11,360 And it took me probably four or five years to really get myself back together. 428 00:20:11,360 --> 00:20:13,940 And one of the things that happened in that period is on a dare, a friend of mine dared 429 00:20:13,940 --> 00:20:16,640 me to take a class at a community college. 430 00:20:16,640 --> 00:20:17,640 And so I did. 431 00:20:17,640 --> 00:20:20,680 I took a class at Monroe Community College in Rochester, New York. 432 00:20:20,680 --> 00:20:24,440 This will shock you, but it was a history class. 433 00:20:24,440 --> 00:20:30,400 And I was astounded by how much I didn't know versus what I thought I knew. 434 00:20:30,400 --> 00:20:35,800 And I enrolled the next semester, and education was literally transformative for me. 435 00:20:35,800 --> 00:20:40,600 My life was going in a pretty bad direction, and higher education was one of the things 436 00:20:40,600 --> 00:20:42,040 that pulled me out of it. 437 00:20:42,040 --> 00:20:43,560 And so I knew I wanted to teach. 438 00:20:43,560 --> 00:20:45,800 And originally I thought I wanted to teach high school. 439 00:20:45,800 --> 00:20:49,200 And then I did, when I was in college, I was in an education program, and I sat in a high 440 00:20:49,200 --> 00:20:50,800 school class. 441 00:20:50,800 --> 00:20:54,400 And I know you, you're like the crankiest man ever. 442 00:20:54,400 --> 00:20:56,080 High school kids? 443 00:20:56,080 --> 00:21:01,560 See cranky is a very subjective term. 444 00:21:01,560 --> 00:21:04,080 But so like I wasn't even doing student teaching. 445 00:21:04,080 --> 00:21:07,200 This was just like an observation and the professor, the teacher's hair was all messed 446 00:21:07,200 --> 00:21:08,200 up. 447 00:21:08,200 --> 00:21:09,200 Half his shirt was untucked. 448 00:21:09,200 --> 00:21:10,680 His class was a hot mess. 449 00:21:10,680 --> 00:21:14,520 And we sat down after for a debrief, and I started to like, I had my prepared questions 450 00:21:14,520 --> 00:21:15,520 kind of like you do now. 451 00:21:15,520 --> 00:21:16,520 And he said, shut up. 452 00:21:16,520 --> 00:21:17,520 Nope. 453 00:21:17,520 --> 00:21:18,520 You like teaching. 454 00:21:18,520 --> 00:21:19,520 And I said, yeah. 455 00:21:19,520 --> 00:21:20,520 He said, do you like history? 456 00:21:20,520 --> 00:21:21,520 I said, yeah. 457 00:21:21,520 --> 00:21:22,520 And he said that this isn't the job for you. 458 00:21:22,520 --> 00:21:23,520 All I do is manage people all day long. 459 00:21:23,520 --> 00:21:30,040 And I was like, okay, maybe I should explore other options. 460 00:21:30,040 --> 00:21:33,680 But so and my college professor had been pushing me to try to go for the PhD, not just to get 461 00:21:33,680 --> 00:21:36,320 the master's in education. 462 00:21:36,320 --> 00:21:37,320 And so I did. 463 00:21:37,320 --> 00:21:41,720 But the moral of the story is that for me, education really like allowed me to look at 464 00:21:41,720 --> 00:21:45,240 myself in a different light to see the way in which I connect to my community, the way 465 00:21:45,240 --> 00:21:48,960 in which I connect to people in my family and friends, that everything I was doing was 466 00:21:48,960 --> 00:21:54,520 not just about me, that whether I liked it or not, it had had a broader impact. 467 00:21:54,520 --> 00:21:55,880 And I didn't know it at the time. 468 00:21:55,880 --> 00:21:59,720 But the word that encapsulated all this was empowerment. 469 00:21:59,720 --> 00:22:00,720 Education empowered me. 470 00:22:00,720 --> 00:22:01,720 Definitely. 471 00:22:01,720 --> 00:22:02,720 And so that's what I wanted to do. 472 00:22:02,720 --> 00:22:06,320 I wanted to be able to provide that opportunity and experience to other people. 473 00:22:06,320 --> 00:22:10,040 It wasn't like my college professors opened doors for me and they got me interested in 474 00:22:10,040 --> 00:22:11,040 stuff. 475 00:22:11,040 --> 00:22:12,560 But at the end of the day, I was the one that had to walk through. 476 00:22:12,560 --> 00:22:16,360 I was the one that had to do the work, as you well know. 477 00:22:16,360 --> 00:22:19,680 And so when I taught in that first prison class, it was just astounding to me. 478 00:22:19,680 --> 00:22:24,080 A lot of the men in that class, it was clearly the first time anybody had ever asked them 479 00:22:24,080 --> 00:22:25,080 what they thought. 480 00:22:25,080 --> 00:22:26,080 Yeah, probably. 481 00:22:26,080 --> 00:22:29,680 Probably the first time that their opinion actually mattered to anybody. 482 00:22:29,680 --> 00:22:32,640 And anybody who's been in the criminal justice system knows the criminal justice system is 483 00:22:32,640 --> 00:22:34,680 not designed to empower you. 484 00:22:34,680 --> 00:22:35,680 No. 485 00:22:35,680 --> 00:22:36,680 Right? 486 00:22:36,680 --> 00:22:41,880 And I don't want to just talk extremely poorly about the criminal justice system, but I feel 487 00:22:41,880 --> 00:22:44,560 like our criminal justice system in a lot of ways was not well put together and not 488 00:22:44,560 --> 00:22:48,000 well thought through in terms of what the goals are of having it. 489 00:22:48,000 --> 00:22:49,000 Right. 490 00:22:49,000 --> 00:22:51,600 For a lot of these men, they had spent the... 491 00:22:51,600 --> 00:22:54,520 The vast majority of men I worked with, and I was primarily working in men's prisons, 492 00:22:54,520 --> 00:22:58,840 I taught one semester in Albion, which was a women's facility. 493 00:22:58,840 --> 00:23:00,840 That was a struggle because they had no program there. 494 00:23:00,840 --> 00:23:05,600 And I'll talk a little bit more about the benefits of having an educational culture 495 00:23:05,600 --> 00:23:06,880 inside of a prison. 496 00:23:06,880 --> 00:23:08,680 Albion did not have one at all. 497 00:23:08,680 --> 00:23:11,040 And so it almost felt like teaching a high school class. 498 00:23:11,040 --> 00:23:14,000 That particular high school class, in fact, where I was managing behavior more than I 499 00:23:14,000 --> 00:23:17,120 was teaching content. 500 00:23:17,120 --> 00:23:22,280 But most of the men I worked with had been through at an eighth grade education, probably 501 00:23:22,280 --> 00:23:23,280 60 to 70% of them. 502 00:23:23,280 --> 00:23:26,200 And I was like, okay, well, there's clearly a correlation here, if nothing else, between 503 00:23:26,200 --> 00:23:29,320 your level of education and your likelihood of getting caught up in the system. 504 00:23:29,320 --> 00:23:30,320 Oh, yeah. 505 00:23:30,320 --> 00:23:34,160 The vast majority of the men that I worked with were people of color. 506 00:23:34,160 --> 00:23:37,520 There's that connection too. 507 00:23:37,520 --> 00:23:43,320 But I witnessed a lot of these men recognizing for the first time that there's somebody out 508 00:23:43,320 --> 00:23:45,680 there that actually cares what I think. 509 00:23:45,680 --> 00:23:49,120 What I think actually matters beyond what's going on in my own head. 510 00:23:49,120 --> 00:23:54,640 And the criminal justice system in many ways convinces you on a daily basis to not invest 511 00:23:54,640 --> 00:23:59,800 in yourself and to not really think about what you want to do or what your values or 512 00:23:59,800 --> 00:24:01,000 opinions are. 513 00:24:01,000 --> 00:24:04,440 The system basically tries to fit everybody into the same both figurative and literal 514 00:24:04,440 --> 00:24:06,360 box. 515 00:24:06,360 --> 00:24:11,440 And then we have this strange expectation that people who spend four, five, 10, 15, 516 00:24:11,440 --> 00:24:15,880 20, 25 years in that figurative and literal box are somehow going to be able to magically 517 00:24:15,880 --> 00:24:18,040 transform themselves the instant they get out. 518 00:24:18,040 --> 00:24:19,040 Yeah, of course. 519 00:24:19,040 --> 00:24:20,860 How can you not? 520 00:24:20,860 --> 00:24:26,880 So when I got here, I never gave up on the desire to be engaged with that particular 521 00:24:26,880 --> 00:24:27,880 population. 522 00:24:27,880 --> 00:24:31,640 And I love the population I work with at Penn College, because again, this is a very unique 523 00:24:31,640 --> 00:24:33,880 population. 524 00:24:33,880 --> 00:24:40,080 But about six years ago, our current president, who at that time was the dean of the school, 525 00:24:40,080 --> 00:24:44,600 had been contacted by somebody from Bucknell who was looking to put together what's called 526 00:24:44,600 --> 00:24:47,600 a consortium of higher education in prison. 527 00:24:47,600 --> 00:24:51,980 There's a national association called NAHEP, the National Association for Consortiums of 528 00:24:51,980 --> 00:24:54,800 Higher Education in Prison. 529 00:24:54,800 --> 00:24:58,080 Lots of states have chapters, and they're all put together by colleges and universities 530 00:24:58,080 --> 00:25:03,840 who band together and pool resources to try to increase educational access inside of prisons. 531 00:25:03,840 --> 00:25:07,760 To lobby state legislatures to increase funding. 532 00:25:07,760 --> 00:25:11,420 But then also, and this is the more complicated part, to build what are called articulation 533 00:25:11,420 --> 00:25:13,440 agreements between those colleges. 534 00:25:13,440 --> 00:25:19,240 The challenge could be if I get incarcerated, say, in Cole Township, but then I get released 535 00:25:19,240 --> 00:25:23,840 on the other side of the state before I finish my degree, do I then have to try to get all 536 00:25:23,840 --> 00:25:26,640 the way back to where I was taken to the college or whatever? 537 00:25:26,640 --> 00:25:29,480 Let's say it was Bucknell that I was taking classes with, I've got to then go back to 538 00:25:29,480 --> 00:25:30,480 Bucknell. 539 00:25:30,480 --> 00:25:33,440 I might have restrictions on not being able to leave the county if I'm still on probation. 540 00:25:33,440 --> 00:25:35,580 So I can't do that. 541 00:25:35,580 --> 00:25:38,040 Some people will get transferred while they're serving their sentence. 542 00:25:38,040 --> 00:25:42,280 So I might be in Cole Township and they get transferred to Benner. 543 00:25:42,280 --> 00:25:45,760 In those instances, what we're trying to do is have educational programming in all of 544 00:25:45,760 --> 00:25:49,480 those facilities, but say that if you're taking Bucknell's program at Benner, but you go 545 00:25:49,480 --> 00:25:52,840 to Cole Township where Penn College has a program, we'll accept the credits and vice 546 00:25:52,840 --> 00:25:55,840 versa. 547 00:25:55,840 --> 00:25:56,840 Most colleges already do this. 548 00:25:56,840 --> 00:26:00,280 So when a transfer student comes into Penn College, if they've come from another institution, 549 00:26:00,280 --> 00:26:03,880 one of the first things we do is a transcript review and we already have some pre-existing 550 00:26:03,880 --> 00:26:07,480 articulation and say, yeah, the psychology you took there is the same as the psychology 551 00:26:07,480 --> 00:26:08,480 here. 552 00:26:08,480 --> 00:26:09,480 We'll take the credits. 553 00:26:09,480 --> 00:26:11,400 But sometimes we just don't have those built in. 554 00:26:11,400 --> 00:26:13,640 So there has to be a review done of them. 555 00:26:13,640 --> 00:26:17,480 One of the things that this consortium is trying to do is do all that legwork now. 556 00:26:17,480 --> 00:26:24,760 Say if Penn College was going to offer a CNC machining degree that had a math requirement 557 00:26:24,760 --> 00:26:29,680 as well as an English requirement and somebody transferred out but still needed that English 558 00:26:29,680 --> 00:26:32,400 and math, could they take it somewhere else or could English and math that they've taken 559 00:26:32,400 --> 00:26:33,400 somewhere else transfer in here? 560 00:26:33,400 --> 00:26:37,760 We just want to have those agreements kind of baked in the cake already. 561 00:26:37,760 --> 00:26:41,240 So we've been working with that or I've been working with that organization. 562 00:26:41,240 --> 00:26:45,120 It's currently Bucknell, Villanova, Temple, Penn State. 563 00:26:45,120 --> 00:26:47,720 I think one of the reasons that Penn College is in the room is because of the uniqueness 564 00:26:47,720 --> 00:26:49,560 of the degrees we offer. 565 00:26:49,560 --> 00:26:53,220 This will be a conversation when we talk about politics in a little bit. 566 00:26:53,220 --> 00:26:56,960 So we've been working on that, but because a lot of the work that's going there is lobbying 567 00:26:56,960 --> 00:27:01,000 and grant writing, it takes a lot longer to get things done. 568 00:27:01,000 --> 00:27:04,800 One of the other challenges is right about the time we're ready to hit this up and take 569 00:27:04,800 --> 00:27:07,080 off, COVID hit. 570 00:27:07,080 --> 00:27:10,520 And the year before COVID hit, I don't know if any of you remember, there was an issue 571 00:27:10,520 --> 00:27:13,880 in prisons where people were smuggling in drugs on paper. 572 00:27:13,880 --> 00:27:17,800 And this shut down the availability to bring paper in. 573 00:27:17,800 --> 00:27:23,720 And the other challenge is if you're incarcerated, most SCIs in the state do not allow any internet 574 00:27:23,720 --> 00:27:24,720 access. 575 00:27:24,720 --> 00:27:28,400 So I can't use digital forms, I can't get somebody onto a learning management system 576 00:27:28,400 --> 00:27:33,160 like our desire to learn our Plato system, and I can't bring paper in, which just really 577 00:27:33,160 --> 00:27:36,840 made things even more challenging for the existing programs. 578 00:27:36,840 --> 00:27:44,240 The other challenge, and we're going to get to this later, is that most prison programs, 579 00:27:44,240 --> 00:27:50,280 the few prison programs that exist currently, at least up until about a year ago, had no 580 00:27:50,280 --> 00:27:52,480 access to federal funding. 581 00:27:52,480 --> 00:27:55,920 Because federal funding was cut off in 94, which I know we're going to get to. 582 00:27:55,920 --> 00:28:00,520 So because of COVID, because of the long, derayed kind of nature of what we were trying 583 00:28:00,520 --> 00:28:05,000 to work, I was still chomping at the bit to get something concrete done. 584 00:28:05,000 --> 00:28:11,960 And so I approached President Reid when he was provost, this is 2021, I think, maybe 585 00:28:11,960 --> 00:28:18,320 2020, and said, excuse me, would you be willing to run a pilot program in the county prison 586 00:28:18,320 --> 00:28:25,160 where we offer them one class free of tuition in the hopes that, one, the education itself 587 00:28:25,160 --> 00:28:29,320 just is still empowering to those individuals and reduces recidivism and the likelihood 588 00:28:29,320 --> 00:28:30,840 that people are going to go back to prison. 589 00:28:30,840 --> 00:28:31,840 That's what recidivism is. 590 00:28:31,840 --> 00:28:33,840 It measures the likelihood of somebody going back to prison. 591 00:28:33,840 --> 00:28:34,840 Wow. 592 00:28:34,840 --> 00:28:37,200 He just answered my next question before I even asked. 593 00:28:37,200 --> 00:28:40,520 It's a complicated one, though, so we're going to have to unpack that a little more. 594 00:28:40,520 --> 00:28:43,920 And the agreement I made with him is if he would be willing to do this for two years, 595 00:28:43,920 --> 00:28:50,200 I would write grants to see if, to support tuition for some of these, this population 596 00:28:50,200 --> 00:28:54,320 if they took the class when they were released, wanted to enroll at the college. 597 00:28:54,320 --> 00:28:58,200 We enrolled our first two, and there's possibly a third that are going to happen within the 598 00:28:58,200 --> 00:28:59,200 next week. 599 00:28:59,200 --> 00:29:00,400 We successfully got some grants. 600 00:29:00,400 --> 00:29:03,600 We're in the process of writing more. 601 00:29:03,600 --> 00:29:07,200 But so that, and the class we're offering there is a communications course that focuses 602 00:29:07,200 --> 00:29:16,120 on workplace communication, conflict resolution, resume writing, interpersonal communication. 603 00:29:16,120 --> 00:29:20,360 So and the instructor's teacher, Anjara Campbell, is an English instructor on campus who's phenomenal. 604 00:29:20,360 --> 00:29:21,360 Yes, she is. 605 00:29:21,360 --> 00:29:26,680 Ashlee and a former, a friend of hers, a former student at the college too, Rachel Thompson, 606 00:29:26,680 --> 00:29:32,560 have both come into the class to talk to these students about, you know, they both have a 607 00:29:32,560 --> 00:29:35,680 pretty good understanding of restorative justice and restorative practice as well as experience 608 00:29:35,680 --> 00:29:37,480 with the criminal justice system. 609 00:29:37,480 --> 00:29:38,740 They're both non-traditional students. 610 00:29:38,740 --> 00:29:42,480 That's one of the big challenges for a lot of people coming out of the criminal justice 611 00:29:42,480 --> 00:29:45,520 system who want to get education is, they're like, one, I'm going to be the oldest person 612 00:29:45,520 --> 00:29:46,520 in class. 613 00:29:46,520 --> 00:29:49,320 Two, what if people find out I've been inside? 614 00:29:49,320 --> 00:29:53,520 And I tell these students, I say all the time, the non-traditional students from a professor's 615 00:29:53,520 --> 00:29:56,400 perspective, we gravitate towards you, right? 616 00:29:56,400 --> 00:29:59,840 Because I know that you're not here to party, right? 617 00:29:59,840 --> 00:30:01,180 You've had some life experience. 618 00:30:01,180 --> 00:30:03,320 This is probably, you're paying for this out of your own pocket. 619 00:30:03,320 --> 00:30:06,640 You're invested in it, not to say that other traditional students aren't. 620 00:30:06,640 --> 00:30:10,880 But when I see somebody who's older than a traditional student, I know that they're focused 621 00:30:10,880 --> 00:30:11,880 and dedicated. 622 00:30:11,880 --> 00:30:12,880 Yeah. 623 00:30:12,880 --> 00:30:15,440 But so that's what I'm currently doing. 624 00:30:15,440 --> 00:30:19,220 That's how, the reason I got back to this at Penn College is because I saw the impact 625 00:30:19,220 --> 00:30:20,220 that this has. 626 00:30:20,220 --> 00:30:23,960 And just to give you another quick recidivism, which I think is where you want to go next, 627 00:30:23,960 --> 00:30:27,280 that measure of how likely somebody has to go back to prison. 628 00:30:27,280 --> 00:30:33,640 In 2008, 2009, my last ditch effort to save that program was I did a recidivism study, 629 00:30:33,640 --> 00:30:37,920 10 years, where I compared New York State's overall average recidivism rate for their 630 00:30:37,920 --> 00:30:42,560 general population, and then the 10-year rate for people who had been through our program. 631 00:30:42,560 --> 00:30:46,720 The rate for New York State at that point was 46% or 47% of the people went back to 632 00:30:46,720 --> 00:30:47,720 prison. 633 00:30:47,720 --> 00:30:48,720 In my program, it was 7%. 634 00:30:48,720 --> 00:30:49,720 Nice. 635 00:30:49,720 --> 00:30:50,720 Wow. 636 00:30:50,720 --> 00:30:51,720 That's incredible. 637 00:30:51,720 --> 00:30:52,720 Which was insane. 638 00:30:52,720 --> 00:30:55,780 And again, I gave these numbers to the state legislature and they're like, we know it works, 639 00:30:55,780 --> 00:30:56,780 but we can't help you. 640 00:30:56,780 --> 00:30:57,780 Right. 641 00:30:57,780 --> 00:30:58,780 Yeah. 642 00:30:58,780 --> 00:31:00,680 So this is one of the things to anybody who's listening, when you want to make change, it's 643 00:31:00,680 --> 00:31:03,440 not just about the change you want to make, it's about the environment in which you want 644 00:31:03,440 --> 00:31:04,760 to make the change. 645 00:31:04,760 --> 00:31:08,300 One of the things that's working to our advantage right now is that there does seem to be more 646 00:31:08,300 --> 00:31:14,080 of a push towards criminal justice reform that's focused in cost savings. 647 00:31:14,080 --> 00:31:18,800 Because of the pandemic, because of the unprecedented economic stimulus and fiscal stimulus, monetary 648 00:31:18,800 --> 00:31:22,440 and fiscal stimulus that were put out there, we're starting to see a contraction, right? 649 00:31:22,440 --> 00:31:26,960 The Federal Reserve is raising interest rates, state budgets are getting tighter. 650 00:31:26,960 --> 00:31:30,080 And one of the arguments I've always made, I've never focused on social justice. 651 00:31:30,080 --> 00:31:31,760 I've always focused on dollars and cents. 652 00:31:31,760 --> 00:31:37,360 So with that New York program, they made an investment of $3.5 million over 10 years from 653 00:31:37,360 --> 00:31:41,680 the state to the program and they saved $37.5 million in reduced incarceration costs. 654 00:31:41,680 --> 00:31:42,680 Wow. 655 00:31:42,680 --> 00:31:46,160 And that's the low estimate, right? 656 00:31:46,160 --> 00:31:48,840 If you don't go back to prison, it stands to reason, the reason you're not going back 657 00:31:48,840 --> 00:31:50,360 to prison is you got a job. 658 00:31:50,360 --> 00:31:51,360 Exactly. 659 00:31:51,360 --> 00:31:53,920 You're working, which means you're paying taxes, which means you're also a consumer, 660 00:31:53,920 --> 00:31:55,440 so you're contributing to the economy. 661 00:31:55,440 --> 00:31:58,040 So there's all those associated benefits. 662 00:31:58,040 --> 00:32:01,600 And then there's the social cost of the crimes that aren't being committed to that community. 663 00:32:01,600 --> 00:32:08,880 The fact that people who are successfully reenter society after being incarcerated reconnect 664 00:32:08,880 --> 00:32:10,640 with family, reconnect with friends, right? 665 00:32:10,640 --> 00:32:12,360 So those bonds. 666 00:32:12,360 --> 00:32:14,360 But those are kind of the unquantifiable benefits, right? 667 00:32:14,360 --> 00:32:19,080 I can't show you a chart of how many men or women reconnected with family and follow that 668 00:32:19,080 --> 00:32:20,140 chain down. 669 00:32:20,140 --> 00:32:21,880 But it is a generational effect. 670 00:32:21,880 --> 00:32:22,880 Yeah, of course. 671 00:32:22,880 --> 00:32:23,880 Yeah. 672 00:32:23,880 --> 00:32:24,880 A generational impact. 673 00:32:24,880 --> 00:32:25,880 Definitely. 674 00:32:25,880 --> 00:32:28,760 When you take a parent, for example, out of a home that has a big effect on a child and 675 00:32:28,760 --> 00:32:32,720 how they grow up and then it keeps going because then that could affect how they, if they have 676 00:32:32,720 --> 00:32:35,000 children and it goes down the line. 677 00:32:35,000 --> 00:32:37,980 And the reverse of that is too, if you're having somebody who has been inside of a state 678 00:32:37,980 --> 00:32:41,280 correctional facility or a federal prison or even a county jail and then they're trying 679 00:32:41,280 --> 00:32:44,680 to reintegrate into the family, what baggage are they bringing with them? 680 00:32:44,680 --> 00:32:45,680 Yes. 681 00:32:45,680 --> 00:32:46,680 No, definitely. 682 00:32:46,680 --> 00:32:50,920 And you know, we've kind of had that conversation because, you know, my partner, he was in a 683 00:32:50,920 --> 00:32:55,320 state correctional facility for four years and that was like, it was a lot. 684 00:32:55,320 --> 00:32:59,840 And now he's about to graduate in a semester with a bachelor's degree in engineering. 685 00:32:59,840 --> 00:33:05,320 So just to see like how you said before, like education is very empowering. 686 00:33:05,320 --> 00:33:11,600 And that word is so, it has a lot behind it to empower somebody like that. 687 00:33:11,600 --> 00:33:18,280 We see studies in higher education around upward mobility and the results that come 688 00:33:18,280 --> 00:33:21,440 from students coming in. 689 00:33:21,440 --> 00:33:28,140 Are there studies in prison education that are attempting to make that same connection? 690 00:33:28,140 --> 00:33:31,880 More so in the last 10 years than before. 691 00:33:31,880 --> 00:33:35,400 One of the challenges with doing research with a population of people who are incarcerated 692 00:33:35,400 --> 00:33:39,480 is one they're elusive, particularly upon release. 693 00:33:39,480 --> 00:33:45,000 So the program that I worked at at New York, the directors, one of his philosophies was 694 00:33:45,000 --> 00:33:47,760 I don't contact them after they've gotten released. 695 00:33:47,760 --> 00:33:51,680 I give them all my information and they can contact me anytime they want. 696 00:33:51,680 --> 00:33:54,200 But he got a lot of flack from some of his grantors because they're like, well, we want 697 00:33:54,200 --> 00:33:55,960 you to do some research and collect data. 698 00:33:55,960 --> 00:33:59,360 And he's like, some of these men need to leave this behind the minute they step out those 699 00:33:59,360 --> 00:34:03,160 doors and I don't want to draw them back in by calling them up. 700 00:34:03,160 --> 00:34:09,200 So it's a challenge to monitor that population after release because the state doesn't do 701 00:34:09,200 --> 00:34:11,440 it like, well, people are incarcerated. 702 00:34:11,440 --> 00:34:16,680 Recidivism is relatively, I should say, easy but easier to track than mobility because 703 00:34:16,680 --> 00:34:19,720 those are longitudinal studies you're talking about when you're talking about mobility. 704 00:34:19,720 --> 00:34:23,280 Like, can I track this person over five or 10 years and how many people can I? 705 00:34:23,280 --> 00:34:27,160 So there's a lot of anecdotal work that's out there that talks about individual stories. 706 00:34:27,160 --> 00:34:29,600 There is a guy and I cannot remember his name. 707 00:34:29,600 --> 00:34:35,760 I think he went through the Bard Prison Initiative program in New York. 708 00:34:35,760 --> 00:34:36,760 Max Kenner runs that program. 709 00:34:36,760 --> 00:34:38,840 It's the gold standard that in San Quentin. 710 00:34:38,840 --> 00:34:42,360 Max Kenner was able to keep that program running through every financial crisis that's ever 711 00:34:42,360 --> 00:34:43,360 happened. 712 00:34:43,360 --> 00:34:44,360 He's impressive. 713 00:34:44,360 --> 00:34:49,400 But one of his graduates who had been arrested twice for armed robbery is now a clerk for 714 00:34:49,400 --> 00:34:52,600 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California. 715 00:34:52,600 --> 00:34:53,600 Wow. 716 00:34:53,600 --> 00:34:54,600 Awesome. 717 00:34:54,600 --> 00:34:59,320 So there are a lot of anecdotal stories like that, but the kind of the broader longitudinal 718 00:34:59,320 --> 00:35:01,200 studies that just don't exist yet. 719 00:35:01,200 --> 00:35:04,400 And a lot of that, again, is not just the elusiveness but also funding. 720 00:35:04,400 --> 00:35:07,880 I could probably track down the vast majority of the men who went through the New York program 721 00:35:07,880 --> 00:35:11,440 over the last 10 years, but I would need resources to do that. 722 00:35:11,440 --> 00:35:15,280 And one of the challenges for people who do this work is what's the best use of the resources? 723 00:35:15,280 --> 00:35:19,880 On the one hand, the more you can convince people that this works, the more traction 724 00:35:19,880 --> 00:35:20,880 you're going to get. 725 00:35:20,880 --> 00:35:21,880 But at the same time, the resources are limited. 726 00:35:21,880 --> 00:35:25,040 I want them all being directed towards the education and reentry itself. 727 00:35:25,040 --> 00:35:28,800 But it's a great question and it's one of the challenges for the field. 728 00:35:28,800 --> 00:35:29,800 Thank you. 729 00:35:29,800 --> 00:35:36,220 You kind of touched on this before, so we'll kind of bring it back. 730 00:35:36,220 --> 00:35:43,480 So recently, I think it was in 2020, the FAFSA Simplification Act, which for anybody is also 731 00:35:43,480 --> 00:35:46,140 known as the Act, was signed into law. 732 00:35:46,140 --> 00:35:52,520 So the law restored the federal Pell Grant eligibility to confined or incarcerated individuals. 733 00:35:52,520 --> 00:35:56,360 And you mentioned it was for the first time since 1994. 734 00:35:56,360 --> 00:36:00,480 Side note, I was born in 1995, just saying. 735 00:36:00,480 --> 00:36:03,880 And it went into effect in July 1st of this year. 736 00:36:03,880 --> 00:36:09,040 So for the listeners and even for me, because I'm not exactly sure, can you break it down? 737 00:36:09,040 --> 00:36:10,500 What exactly is it? 738 00:36:10,500 --> 00:36:16,460 How does it affect and help the prison reform movement and the prison education? 739 00:36:16,460 --> 00:36:19,200 So because I'm a historian, I have to start there. 740 00:36:19,200 --> 00:36:24,160 In 94, Bill Clinton cut a deal with the—at the time, they were calling the Contract for 741 00:36:24,160 --> 00:36:25,160 America Congress. 742 00:36:25,160 --> 00:36:29,000 The Republicans had taken majorities in the House and Senate. 743 00:36:29,000 --> 00:36:35,880 And excuse me, Bill Clinton worked with them on welfare reform and other measures that 744 00:36:35,880 --> 00:36:38,280 didn't necessarily please a lot of the Democratic base. 745 00:36:38,280 --> 00:36:43,120 But Clinton's argument was, I have to kind of work down the middle if I want to get anything 746 00:36:43,120 --> 00:36:44,120 done. 747 00:36:44,120 --> 00:36:48,560 So one of the consequences of the welfare reform that they did was they eliminated prisoners' 748 00:36:48,560 --> 00:36:49,960 access to Pell Grants. 749 00:36:49,960 --> 00:36:53,680 Now, a Pell Grant, for people who are listening and don't know, is a grant from the federal 750 00:36:53,680 --> 00:36:56,620 government that you do not have to pay back. 751 00:36:56,620 --> 00:37:01,120 And you are eligible for it based on your income and your family's income. 752 00:37:01,120 --> 00:37:05,940 So the metric changes, but it's a certain percentage, if you're a certain percentage 753 00:37:05,940 --> 00:37:10,280 below the poverty line, you qualify. 754 00:37:10,280 --> 00:37:16,260 Cutting off that access was killed about 95% of all the higher education college offerings 755 00:37:16,260 --> 00:37:19,880 inside of prisons in the country, because that's how the vast majority of them were 756 00:37:19,880 --> 00:37:20,880 funded. 757 00:37:20,880 --> 00:37:21,880 Wow. 758 00:37:21,880 --> 00:37:25,040 Now, keep in mind, too, the cost of a college degree going back to 1994 was significantly 759 00:37:25,040 --> 00:37:32,280 less than it is now, because of not just inflation, but also just when the financial crisis hit 760 00:37:32,280 --> 00:37:36,100 too, a lot of colleges started competing with one another for a more limited population 761 00:37:36,100 --> 00:37:37,100 of people. 762 00:37:37,100 --> 00:37:41,780 And so you get colleges doing things like building fancier dorms and offering more ancillaries 763 00:37:41,780 --> 00:37:44,240 to try to attract students. 764 00:37:44,240 --> 00:37:48,260 But the vast majority of programs were funded through Pell Grants. 765 00:37:48,260 --> 00:37:51,760 And when the Pell Grants got cut off, most of the prison programs went away. 766 00:37:51,760 --> 00:38:01,300 So beginning with President Obama in 2008, or 2009, don't quote me on the year, there 767 00:38:01,300 --> 00:38:05,700 had been more of a push for criminal justice reform, particularly, and we're going to talk 768 00:38:05,700 --> 00:38:10,100 about restorative justice in a little bit, too, but different approaches to trying to 769 00:38:10,100 --> 00:38:15,660 deal with crime overall, but the people convicted of crimes, too. 770 00:38:15,660 --> 00:38:18,860 Ironically, and this is one of the things that still astounds me, the state of Texas 771 00:38:18,860 --> 00:38:21,420 was at the forefront of some of this criminal justice reform. 772 00:38:21,420 --> 00:38:22,420 Really? 773 00:38:22,420 --> 00:38:24,740 Texas has a part-time state legislature. 774 00:38:24,740 --> 00:38:26,320 They don't work full time. 775 00:38:26,320 --> 00:38:30,620 I think they only meet like two or three months out of the year, and they just get like stuff 776 00:38:30,620 --> 00:38:33,860 thrown in front of them like, well, we're spending this much on education. 777 00:38:33,860 --> 00:38:37,640 And somebody in the Texas state legislature read that you can reduce recidivism by offering 778 00:38:37,640 --> 00:38:41,100 education to inmates inside, and Texas is like, well, it's a way to save money, so we're 779 00:38:41,100 --> 00:38:42,100 going to do it. 780 00:38:42,100 --> 00:38:43,100 Wow. 781 00:38:43,100 --> 00:38:45,060 And so that kind of got the ball rolling. 782 00:38:45,060 --> 00:38:46,060 Go Texas. 783 00:38:46,060 --> 00:38:51,180 On some things, go Texas. 784 00:38:51,180 --> 00:38:54,660 But when Obama was elected, he had run partially on a criminal justice reform. 785 00:38:54,660 --> 00:38:59,580 What was dominating the 2008 election was Afghanistan primarily and Iraq. 786 00:38:59,580 --> 00:39:03,060 But I think because, again, context matters, because there was so much attention being 787 00:39:03,060 --> 00:39:07,100 paid to Iraq and Afghanistan, and particularly because of the financial crisis that emerged 788 00:39:07,100 --> 00:39:12,800 during that campaign, these ideas about spending a little bit of money to save money started 789 00:39:12,800 --> 00:39:13,800 to gain traction. 790 00:39:13,800 --> 00:39:15,680 And this is a truism in business. 791 00:39:15,680 --> 00:39:17,380 You can't cut your way to growth. 792 00:39:17,380 --> 00:39:20,300 You're going to have to invest somewhere if you're trying to get somewhere. 793 00:39:20,300 --> 00:39:21,300 Exactly. 794 00:39:21,300 --> 00:39:24,580 So he started with what he called a second chance Pell program. 795 00:39:24,580 --> 00:39:30,540 A second chance Pell said that if you were a college who wanted to offer a full program 796 00:39:30,540 --> 00:39:36,140 inside of a prison, that you had to go through a process to become what's called a PEP, a 797 00:39:36,140 --> 00:39:37,140 prison education program. 798 00:39:37,140 --> 00:39:40,700 So you made an application to the Department of Education. 799 00:39:40,700 --> 00:39:45,300 And if you were approved, then every inmate who enrolled in your program could qualify 800 00:39:45,300 --> 00:39:46,980 for Pell. 801 00:39:46,980 --> 00:39:49,580 So Bloomsburg University was actually one of the first to do this. 802 00:39:49,580 --> 00:39:51,100 I think Villanova did it too. 803 00:39:51,100 --> 00:39:53,220 I'm pretty sure Temple was on board with it. 804 00:39:53,220 --> 00:39:56,900 Bucknell may have been for a little while too, but I'm not sure about Bucknell. 805 00:39:56,900 --> 00:39:58,220 But it was a pilot program. 806 00:39:58,220 --> 00:40:02,540 So it ran throughout the Obama administration when Trump was elected. 807 00:40:02,540 --> 00:40:06,300 Trump also got involved in criminal justice reform with the First Step Act that allowed 808 00:40:06,300 --> 00:40:08,240 a lot of nonviolent offenders out. 809 00:40:08,240 --> 00:40:10,500 And Trump's education department said, we want to continue this. 810 00:40:10,500 --> 00:40:12,140 And so they continued it. 811 00:40:12,140 --> 00:40:16,780 Then the Biden administration finally with the FAFSA Simplification Act made it permanent. 812 00:40:16,780 --> 00:40:21,700 So the challenge, it's great on one hand because it provides opportunities. 813 00:40:21,700 --> 00:40:26,620 The biggest challenge for prison education is how the tuition is paid for. 814 00:40:26,620 --> 00:40:29,780 There are lots of colleges and universities who want to offer these programs. 815 00:40:29,780 --> 00:40:31,700 The demand for the coursework is there. 816 00:40:31,700 --> 00:40:34,580 A lot of the state departments of corrections are on board with it. 817 00:40:34,580 --> 00:40:37,620 The question is, who's paying the tuition? 818 00:40:37,620 --> 00:40:40,380 Pell doesn't come close to covering tuition. 819 00:40:40,380 --> 00:40:45,520 So the maximum Pell amount, I think, for 23, 24 is about $7,500. 820 00:40:45,520 --> 00:40:48,660 But that has to be split in between two semesters. 821 00:40:48,660 --> 00:40:52,460 That probably could get you about two to three classes. 822 00:40:52,460 --> 00:40:58,060 So the other challenge is that it is really, really cumbersome to apply to become an approved 823 00:40:58,060 --> 00:40:59,580 prison education program. 824 00:40:59,580 --> 00:41:02,620 Penn College is in the process of trying to do this because of a grant we just applied 825 00:41:02,620 --> 00:41:06,980 for through the Department of Justice to offer that programming inside of Muncie, expand 826 00:41:06,980 --> 00:41:10,180 the programming we're offering inside of... 827 00:41:10,180 --> 00:41:11,180 Muncie is a women's state... 828 00:41:11,180 --> 00:41:13,020 Muncie is the SCI Muncie is a women's state prison. 829 00:41:13,020 --> 00:41:14,020 Thank you. 830 00:41:14,020 --> 00:41:16,220 ...and they're going to have to claim in the county pre-release center. 831 00:41:16,220 --> 00:41:18,500 The challenge for the pre-release center is that it's just one class. 832 00:41:18,500 --> 00:41:21,540 None of the men enrolled in that class are enrolled in a program, so they're not eligible 833 00:41:21,540 --> 00:41:23,660 for Pell anyway. 834 00:41:23,660 --> 00:41:26,940 And so we've got to go through this cumbersome paperwork process to demonstrate... 835 00:41:26,940 --> 00:41:27,940 I mean, it makes sense, right? 836 00:41:27,940 --> 00:41:30,620 You don't want people just calling out of the woodwork and saying, yeah, this is a college 837 00:41:30,620 --> 00:41:33,020 degree and we're offering it to them and they're totally going to be able to use this when 838 00:41:33,020 --> 00:41:34,020 they get out. 839 00:41:34,020 --> 00:41:37,580 We don't want the University of Phoenix model that got people in trouble. 840 00:41:37,580 --> 00:41:41,100 But at the same time, it becomes a barrier if that institution doesn't have the resources 841 00:41:41,100 --> 00:41:43,200 to develop to get to this program. 842 00:41:43,200 --> 00:41:47,500 Anybody who's ever dealt with a federal grant or a federal agency before has learned what 843 00:41:47,500 --> 00:41:51,140 bureaucracy means and not necessarily a good way. 844 00:41:51,140 --> 00:41:56,380 The other challenge is that for a program to be approved, not just approved by the federal 845 00:41:56,380 --> 00:41:59,380 government, all colleges and universities or most colleges and universities choose to 846 00:41:59,380 --> 00:42:00,380 be accredited. 847 00:42:00,380 --> 00:42:05,100 So it's another way of letting the prospective student and parent know that this institution 848 00:42:05,100 --> 00:42:08,100 has, there's outside review going on. 849 00:42:08,100 --> 00:42:10,900 Well, our accrediting bodies like this is new for us. 850 00:42:10,900 --> 00:42:15,060 So generally speaking, a prison program would be the same as an offsite location. 851 00:42:15,060 --> 00:42:16,140 We have one in Wellsboro. 852 00:42:16,140 --> 00:42:18,500 We have the Earth Science Center, right? 853 00:42:18,500 --> 00:42:22,660 So those students need access to the exact same services that every student on main campus 854 00:42:22,660 --> 00:42:23,660 has. 855 00:42:23,660 --> 00:42:26,140 I can't do that inside of a prison. 856 00:42:26,140 --> 00:42:29,160 And Middle States knows this and the Department of Education knows this, but because nobody's 857 00:42:29,160 --> 00:42:34,980 done this since 1994, there's no kind of institutional historical knowledge about how you approach 858 00:42:34,980 --> 00:42:35,980 doing this. 859 00:42:35,980 --> 00:42:37,220 So everybody's just like, we don't know yet. 860 00:42:37,220 --> 00:42:39,740 We don't know yet. 861 00:42:39,740 --> 00:42:44,500 So on the one hand, like with everything in terms of the criminal justice system in particular, 862 00:42:44,500 --> 00:42:48,420 but when you're talking about kind of nationwide system in general, change is always going 863 00:42:48,420 --> 00:42:49,900 to happen slowly. 864 00:42:49,900 --> 00:42:51,820 The Confucian in me says that's a good thing, right? 865 00:42:51,820 --> 00:42:56,220 The Confucian idea was that change that happens too fast has too many unpredicted unintended 866 00:42:56,220 --> 00:42:57,220 consequences. 867 00:42:57,220 --> 00:42:58,220 You don't know what's going to happen. 868 00:42:58,220 --> 00:43:00,700 Sometimes it's better to move slow. 869 00:43:00,700 --> 00:43:02,620 And I agree with that on the one hand. 870 00:43:02,620 --> 00:43:04,140 But the other side. 871 00:43:04,140 --> 00:43:07,580 Well, to make a historical analogy, right, that was Lincoln's argument about slavery, 872 00:43:07,580 --> 00:43:08,580 right? 873 00:43:08,580 --> 00:43:12,660 If you cut it off in these places, it'll die slowly and it'll give people time to adjust. 874 00:43:12,660 --> 00:43:14,540 And slaves are like, well, we're ready to adjust now. 875 00:43:14,540 --> 00:43:15,540 Right. 876 00:43:15,540 --> 00:43:16,540 Right. 877 00:43:16,540 --> 00:43:17,980 So it's everybody else that needs to figure out the adjusting. 878 00:43:17,980 --> 00:43:19,340 It's the same for inmates, right? 879 00:43:19,340 --> 00:43:21,460 They're like, we're ready to make the adjustment now. 880 00:43:21,460 --> 00:43:22,460 Right. 881 00:43:22,460 --> 00:43:23,460 Yeah. 882 00:43:23,460 --> 00:43:24,620 So it's a step in the right direction. 883 00:43:24,620 --> 00:43:26,140 I were working the other challenge. 884 00:43:26,140 --> 00:43:28,700 I don't know if we want to get here now because this isn't exactly Pell. 885 00:43:28,700 --> 00:43:30,740 I think you have a question about state funding later. 886 00:43:30,740 --> 00:43:31,740 Yep. 887 00:43:31,740 --> 00:43:33,980 That's going to be my next question if you just want to start. 888 00:43:33,980 --> 00:43:34,980 Yeah. 889 00:43:34,980 --> 00:43:36,540 I mean, Pell is going to Pell. 890 00:43:36,540 --> 00:43:40,620 I think there's a movement right now amongst a lot of academics who are involved in this 891 00:43:40,620 --> 00:43:45,940 work to try to, and this is not just about prisons, this is about anybody because any 892 00:43:45,940 --> 00:43:51,460 student, any potential student who is not incarcerated is eligible for Pell too based 893 00:43:51,460 --> 00:43:52,900 on their income. 894 00:43:52,900 --> 00:43:54,680 But it's not enough. 895 00:43:54,680 --> 00:43:58,740 And so there's a movement to try to increase the overall Pell amount so that it makes college 896 00:43:58,740 --> 00:44:02,380 more accessible to a larger population of people. 897 00:44:02,380 --> 00:44:08,260 The state aid challenge is that in 19...you had a specific question before I actually 898 00:44:08,260 --> 00:44:09,260 go down. 899 00:44:09,260 --> 00:44:12,540 No, I was just going to be because obviously we're in the state of Pennsylvania. 900 00:44:12,540 --> 00:44:19,000 So Pennsylvania State Grant, there's an eligibility section where it talks about the good moral 901 00:44:19,000 --> 00:44:20,500 standing clause. 902 00:44:20,500 --> 00:44:21,500 Character. 903 00:44:21,500 --> 00:44:22,500 Right. 904 00:44:22,500 --> 00:44:30,260 So for the listeners, can you elaborate a little more on what it is and how that affects 905 00:44:30,260 --> 00:44:34,380 not only maybe inmates, but other populations as well too? 906 00:44:34,380 --> 00:44:35,380 Sure. 907 00:44:35,380 --> 00:44:40,620 In the 1960s, and I don't remember the name of the act, but is when the Pennsylvania State 908 00:44:40,620 --> 00:44:44,860 Legislature created a grant program for higher education. 909 00:44:44,860 --> 00:44:48,780 And one of the clauses in there, and this was typical of virtually every state in the 910 00:44:48,780 --> 00:44:52,740 union did this, they said you had to be a person of good moral standing or good moral 911 00:44:52,740 --> 00:44:56,580 character I think is the phrase, which astounds me that I was even able to get into the state 912 00:44:56,580 --> 00:45:01,260 governing that law exists, but here we sit. 913 00:45:01,260 --> 00:45:07,620 And what the law does is it also creates an agency called FIA, P-H-E-A-A, which I believe 914 00:45:07,620 --> 00:45:11,420 stands for the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Association, but I'm not sure that's 915 00:45:11,420 --> 00:45:13,180 exactly what the acronym stands for. 916 00:45:13,180 --> 00:45:15,500 They're the agency that doles out the money from the state. 917 00:45:15,500 --> 00:45:18,300 So the state appropriates the money, FIA gives it out. 918 00:45:18,300 --> 00:45:21,500 So there was this debate for a long time that FIA was the one that was holding it up because 919 00:45:21,500 --> 00:45:26,860 their interpretation of good moral character was people who were incarcerated couldn't 920 00:45:26,860 --> 00:45:28,300 get access to the money. 921 00:45:28,300 --> 00:45:29,940 It's actually not on them. 922 00:45:29,940 --> 00:45:34,820 It's literally in the law that says there's a good moral character part that can be applied. 923 00:45:34,820 --> 00:45:40,060 So it says things like if you have been convicted of a felony, it may disqualify you. 924 00:45:40,060 --> 00:45:44,580 But it specifically says incarcerated people fall into the bad moral character and they 925 00:45:44,580 --> 00:45:47,100 are ineligible for that funding. 926 00:45:47,100 --> 00:45:52,660 So in order for that to change, the colleges I'm working with through the consortium, Bucknell, 927 00:45:52,660 --> 00:45:58,860 Temple, Villanova, Penn State, have all been trying to figure out how to change the rules. 928 00:45:58,860 --> 00:46:01,980 And the first step of that process is figuring out who you actually need to talk to. 929 00:46:01,980 --> 00:46:03,700 So we actually met with FIA. 930 00:46:03,700 --> 00:46:06,740 There was a representative from Philadelphia, and I can't remember her name. 931 00:46:06,740 --> 00:46:09,740 I think it's Cynthia, Cynthia Gar, maybe. 932 00:46:09,740 --> 00:46:11,780 But that might not be her name. 933 00:46:11,780 --> 00:46:17,060 She actually, FIA was being, during an appropriations subcommittee meeting, she brought the money 934 00:46:17,060 --> 00:46:19,900 up to them and they were the ones that said on the record, like, this isn't up to us. 935 00:46:19,900 --> 00:46:24,460 If you guys change the law, we'll dole out the aid to anybody who qualifies. 936 00:46:24,460 --> 00:46:27,900 So now the challenge is finding people in the state legislature who are willing to sign 937 00:46:27,900 --> 00:46:28,900 on. 938 00:46:28,900 --> 00:46:33,980 We've had some initial interest from state legislatures in changing that provision, which 939 00:46:33,980 --> 00:46:38,860 would open up state access for people who are currently incarcerated, which would be 940 00:46:38,860 --> 00:46:40,820 very helpful and would definitely expand access. 941 00:46:40,820 --> 00:46:41,820 Of course. 942 00:46:41,820 --> 00:46:46,500 So what can like listeners or citizens, taxpayers, like what can they do if they want to help 943 00:46:46,500 --> 00:46:49,260 and help that situation? 944 00:46:49,260 --> 00:46:52,700 Writing your representative from the assembly and the state senate, if this is something 945 00:46:52,700 --> 00:47:00,260 that you're interested in, in terms of increasing the access to educational aid, writing your 946 00:47:00,260 --> 00:47:05,860 state legislator and saying, this is something that I support, it's pretty easy to find out 947 00:47:05,860 --> 00:47:09,480 who your state legislator is by looking online if you don't already know. 948 00:47:09,480 --> 00:47:14,980 And most state legislator's websites have an email button or a contact button. 949 00:47:14,980 --> 00:47:16,820 There is an election coming up. 950 00:47:16,820 --> 00:47:19,380 I was going to say, I get those phone calls all the time. 951 00:47:19,380 --> 00:47:23,820 So but yeah, I mean, right now, this is basically just about a consciousness raising campaign 952 00:47:23,820 --> 00:47:26,940 because my suspicion is the vast majority of state legislatures don't even know that 953 00:47:26,940 --> 00:47:30,700 this barrier actually exists because there's a law passed in the sixties. 954 00:47:30,700 --> 00:47:31,700 Yeah, yeah. 955 00:47:31,700 --> 00:47:35,140 Yeah, because I didn't know about that till we were having that conversation about it. 956 00:47:35,140 --> 00:47:36,620 And I was like, oh, that's... 957 00:47:36,620 --> 00:47:41,900 And this is there about 33 states who I think have changed this. 958 00:47:41,900 --> 00:47:47,020 The group, the colleges I'm working with was working with a lawyer from, I think, Illinois. 959 00:47:47,020 --> 00:47:50,780 She was either Illinois or Ohio. 960 00:47:50,780 --> 00:47:53,660 But they successfully lobbied their state legislator to remove the barrier. 961 00:47:53,660 --> 00:47:54,660 Oh, awesome. 962 00:47:54,660 --> 00:47:59,140 And there's an organization called Vera that does a lot of criminal justice reform too. 963 00:47:59,140 --> 00:48:04,400 They've been big on this and trying to network people with resources in states who have made 964 00:48:04,400 --> 00:48:07,700 these changes with people who are living in states that haven't made these changes. 965 00:48:07,700 --> 00:48:08,700 Okay. 966 00:48:08,700 --> 00:48:10,660 So there's a kind of a full court press going on right now. 967 00:48:10,660 --> 00:48:11,660 All right. 968 00:48:11,660 --> 00:48:15,540 So, you know, me and you, we always, because I've learned it from you, play devil's advocate 969 00:48:15,540 --> 00:48:17,300 and play on the other side. 970 00:48:17,300 --> 00:48:20,540 So kind of, let's talk about the other side a little bit. 971 00:48:20,540 --> 00:48:21,540 So... 972 00:48:21,540 --> 00:48:23,980 I'm starting to regret teaching you these things. 973 00:48:23,980 --> 00:48:26,500 So there are, you know, there's a different perspective. 974 00:48:26,500 --> 00:48:30,740 There are people who say like hardworking American citizens fight every day to be their 975 00:48:30,740 --> 00:48:34,480 best and striving to be the best they can be. 976 00:48:34,480 --> 00:48:39,540 So why is it fair that inmates or citizens who have committed crimes are able to receive 977 00:48:39,540 --> 00:48:42,220 funding for a college education? 978 00:48:42,220 --> 00:48:45,260 So I used to, these are reasonable questions, right? 979 00:48:45,260 --> 00:48:49,180 And in an open society like this, we shouldn't just blindly accept things because the argument 980 00:48:49,180 --> 00:48:51,980 is made by somebody we like or because it sounds like a good argument. 981 00:48:51,980 --> 00:48:55,060 In fact, arguments that sound like good arguments are the ones that should probably question 982 00:48:55,060 --> 00:48:56,060 the hardest. 983 00:48:56,060 --> 00:48:57,060 Exactly. 984 00:48:57,060 --> 00:48:58,060 What was the Socrates phrase? 985 00:48:58,060 --> 00:48:59,740 I used to throw at you guys all the time. 986 00:48:59,740 --> 00:49:02,620 The only thing I'm absolutely certain of is that I'm not certain of anything. 987 00:49:02,620 --> 00:49:03,620 Yes. 988 00:49:03,620 --> 00:49:04,620 I like that. 989 00:49:04,620 --> 00:49:05,620 So... 990 00:49:05,620 --> 00:49:07,900 He should have it tattooed on him as his favorite phrase. 991 00:49:07,900 --> 00:49:12,420 Too old for tattoos now, they hurt too much. 992 00:49:12,420 --> 00:49:15,860 This was one of the biggest complaints I got from corrections officers when I was working 993 00:49:15,860 --> 00:49:17,340 inside the New York State Prison. 994 00:49:17,340 --> 00:49:18,340 Okay. 995 00:49:18,340 --> 00:49:21,180 Some of them were like on board with it and they were like, look, these guys are clearly 996 00:49:21,180 --> 00:49:22,820 well more well behaved. 997 00:49:22,820 --> 00:49:24,740 I have no issues with them whatsoever. 998 00:49:24,740 --> 00:49:25,740 This program clearly works. 999 00:49:25,740 --> 00:49:28,940 But I know those who are like, well, I'm paying for my son's education and he didn't commit 1000 00:49:28,940 --> 00:49:29,940 a crime. 1001 00:49:29,940 --> 00:49:32,220 So why, how is this fair? 1002 00:49:32,220 --> 00:49:34,960 And if they were my age or a little bit older, I could throw at them, well, didn't your parents 1003 00:49:34,960 --> 00:49:37,260 ever tell you life wasn't fair? 1004 00:49:37,260 --> 00:49:41,620 But I think that's a generational comment that I'm not sure works as much. 1005 00:49:41,620 --> 00:49:47,500 The argument that I make is that this isn't about what's fair. 1006 00:49:47,500 --> 00:49:48,620 It's not even about what's right. 1007 00:49:48,620 --> 00:49:51,180 It's about what makes sense. 1008 00:49:51,180 --> 00:49:56,940 In any society that has the number of people we do, we have 350 plus million people, you've 1009 00:49:56,940 --> 00:50:01,140 got to make decisions about what the best way to allocate public resources are. 1010 00:50:01,140 --> 00:50:06,540 And we are currently allocating public resources to a system that doesn't work. 1011 00:50:06,540 --> 00:50:09,820 And by doesn't work, I mean, remember we were talking about recidivism before? 1012 00:50:09,820 --> 00:50:13,780 And the recidivism rate in Pennsylvania, excuse me, New York was 44% in 2008. 1013 00:50:13,780 --> 00:50:17,400 The recidivism rate in Pennsylvania, and these are not my study, this is the Pennsylvania 1014 00:50:17,400 --> 00:50:21,260 Department of Corrections study, the recidivism rate in the state of Pennsylvania is 67%. 1015 00:50:21,260 --> 00:50:22,260 Oh my gosh. 1016 00:50:22,260 --> 00:50:28,260 67% of people go back to prison, at least, excuse me, once after they've been incarcerated. 1017 00:50:28,260 --> 00:50:32,140 And so the question for me isn't about what's fair, it's about what's the best use of public 1018 00:50:32,140 --> 00:50:33,720 resources. 1019 00:50:33,720 --> 00:50:39,220 And if you want to see less crime, if you want to see, I mean, workforce participation 1020 00:50:39,220 --> 00:50:40,740 is a huge issue right now, right? 1021 00:50:40,740 --> 00:50:44,500 I have a lot of employers that have jumped in on these programs, these prison programs, 1022 00:50:44,500 --> 00:50:48,260 because they're having a hard time finding qualified, dependable employees. 1023 00:50:48,260 --> 00:50:51,100 And I often tell some of these employers, I'm like, if you're looking for people who 1024 00:50:51,100 --> 00:50:54,500 know how to navigate a diverse environment, the people coming out of prison know how to 1025 00:50:54,500 --> 00:50:57,980 navigate a diverse and stressful environment. 1026 00:50:57,980 --> 00:51:01,300 But so the other thing I say is the vast majority of these students, if they were on the street, 1027 00:51:01,300 --> 00:51:04,580 would qualify for every kind of aid that's available anyway. 1028 00:51:04,580 --> 00:51:07,580 Because if the vast majority of people go to prison, there are people who live below 1029 00:51:07,580 --> 00:51:11,420 the poverty line at the time they were arrested, charged, and then eventually convicted and 1030 00:51:11,420 --> 00:51:12,740 incarcerated. 1031 00:51:12,740 --> 00:51:14,780 So they're going to qualify for aid anyway. 1032 00:51:14,780 --> 00:51:19,260 This is taxpayer money that I argue would just be being used more wisely than it currently 1033 00:51:19,260 --> 00:51:23,340 is, because again, the education reduces recidivism. 1034 00:51:23,340 --> 00:51:26,700 But the question I always ask people is, do you want somebody who's going to get locked 1035 00:51:26,700 --> 00:51:31,620 up in a gladiator canopy for five years and then get out with fewer options? 1036 00:51:31,620 --> 00:51:37,700 Or do you want somebody who has the space inside that time, as well as the opportunity 1037 00:51:37,700 --> 00:51:41,080 to become empowered, to become a little bit more educated, to become more trained? 1038 00:51:41,080 --> 00:51:42,820 So is that the person you want getting out? 1039 00:51:42,820 --> 00:51:46,500 Or is it the angry person who's been fighting and throwing in with gangs, because that's 1040 00:51:46,500 --> 00:51:49,660 basically the only way to survive prison? 1041 00:51:49,660 --> 00:51:55,740 And so society is rarely about what's fair, particularly when you're talking about large 1042 00:51:55,740 --> 00:51:57,300 nations. 1043 00:51:57,300 --> 00:51:59,100 We have to make tradeoffs all the time. 1044 00:51:59,100 --> 00:52:00,460 Especially in a democracy. 1045 00:52:00,460 --> 00:52:02,260 I know we've had that during class. 1046 00:52:02,260 --> 00:52:07,860 We talk about even in a democracy, there's a losing side, regardless of the majority 1047 00:52:07,860 --> 00:52:08,860 is 95%. 1048 00:52:08,860 --> 00:52:11,580 That 5% on the other side is still losing too. 1049 00:52:11,580 --> 00:52:12,580 So either way. 1050 00:52:12,580 --> 00:52:14,780 I remember we talked about this in American government on the first day. 1051 00:52:14,780 --> 00:52:18,100 The biggest lie in American politics is that there's a right solution that makes everybody 1052 00:52:18,100 --> 00:52:19,100 happy. 1053 00:52:19,100 --> 00:52:20,100 Exactly. 1054 00:52:20,100 --> 00:52:21,580 There are always winners and there are always losers. 1055 00:52:21,580 --> 00:52:25,640 And so the question is, what can you do in a system that's never going to please anybody 1056 00:52:25,640 --> 00:52:27,220 to get the best outcomes? 1057 00:52:27,220 --> 00:52:31,580 And in my opinion, the best outcome here are that people who are going to prison, who get 1058 00:52:31,580 --> 00:52:35,620 out of prison have more options or as many options as they possibly can when they're 1059 00:52:35,620 --> 00:52:37,860 released because that's better for them. 1060 00:52:37,860 --> 00:52:38,900 It's better for their families. 1061 00:52:38,900 --> 00:52:40,040 It's better for the communities they live in. 1062 00:52:40,040 --> 00:52:41,140 But it's also better for us. 1063 00:52:41,140 --> 00:52:45,860 I would prefer my tax dollars going to something other than incarceration. 1064 00:52:45,860 --> 00:52:50,460 But the current system means that my tax dollars are going to currently to just re-incarcerate 1065 00:52:50,460 --> 00:52:51,980 people over and over again. 1066 00:52:51,980 --> 00:52:54,340 And I don't take away personal responsibility. 1067 00:52:54,340 --> 00:52:55,340 Personal responsibility matters. 1068 00:52:55,340 --> 00:52:59,460 When I worked in New York state prison, I worked with members of the MS-13 gang. 1069 00:52:59,460 --> 00:53:03,060 I was pretty happy that they were locked up because those guys straight up to my face 1070 00:53:03,060 --> 00:53:07,300 told me that if you let me out of here, I'm going to do exactly what I did. 1071 00:53:07,300 --> 00:53:11,500 And those are issues that are beyond or above my pay grade. 1072 00:53:11,500 --> 00:53:15,420 I can deal with education, but when you're talking about gang initiation and membership 1073 00:53:15,420 --> 00:53:18,660 like that, that there's a whole psychology around that that that population to get somebody 1074 00:53:18,660 --> 00:53:22,460 out of that situation is something else. 1075 00:53:22,460 --> 00:53:25,660 But for somebody who's drug dealing because they didn't have other options, because one 1076 00:53:25,660 --> 00:53:29,140 of their parents or both of their parents themselves were drug dealers or engaging in 1077 00:53:29,140 --> 00:53:33,500 prostitution or one of their parents were incarcerated, and that person ends up dropping 1078 00:53:33,500 --> 00:53:38,700 out of school in the eighth grade for whatever reason, that person has some level of personal 1079 00:53:38,700 --> 00:53:39,700 responsibility. 1080 00:53:39,700 --> 00:53:44,100 But to a degree, like society needs to step up and say, OK, do we just want to keep re-incarcerating 1081 00:53:44,100 --> 00:53:47,680 these people or do we want to do something constructive with it right now? 1082 00:53:47,680 --> 00:53:49,220 This doesn't solve society's ills. 1083 00:53:49,220 --> 00:53:53,940 I'm not trying I'm not in a position to say I know how to fix people from going to prison. 1084 00:53:53,940 --> 00:53:58,860 All I'm trying to do is suggest that if people who do go to prison, the programming that 1085 00:53:58,860 --> 00:54:02,820 we're offering and the money we're investing means that they're less significantly less 1086 00:54:02,820 --> 00:54:04,780 likely to go back and let's benefit everybody. 1087 00:54:04,780 --> 00:54:12,140 Yeah, I read somewhere in like 2015, they said we spend like $87 billion in jails in 1088 00:54:12,140 --> 00:54:13,700 prison. 1089 00:54:13,700 --> 00:54:14,700 And they were saying like 40. 1090 00:54:14,700 --> 00:54:15,700 Was it 40 years ago? 1091 00:54:15,700 --> 00:54:19,380 I think I've ever written down. 1092 00:54:19,380 --> 00:54:23,780 In 1975, it was only $7.4 billion. 1093 00:54:23,780 --> 00:54:27,100 Thank you, Richard Nixon and the War on Drugs. 1094 00:54:27,100 --> 00:54:30,020 Nixon's such a fascinating character because on the one hand, he's like responsible for 1095 00:54:30,020 --> 00:54:32,820 like most of our innovation in space. 1096 00:54:32,820 --> 00:54:39,020 He's the person who proposed the EPA, which doesn't seem very Nixonian. 1097 00:54:39,020 --> 00:54:42,060 But then he also wrote and passed the Controlled Substances Act. 1098 00:54:42,060 --> 00:54:46,660 The Controlled Substances Act, if you look at a chart of incarceration from like 70 or 1099 00:54:46,660 --> 00:54:51,380 1950 up to now, there's a spike from like 1978 to the present day. 1100 00:54:51,380 --> 00:54:55,700 And the vast majority of those are straight drug convictions or drug related convictions. 1101 00:54:55,700 --> 00:54:59,620 And again, like when you criminalize something and this is the other thing I like to point 1102 00:54:59,620 --> 00:55:02,660 out to people who like to say, you know, that this isn't fair. 1103 00:55:02,660 --> 00:55:07,980 Well, criminalizing drugs in the way we did in the 1970s drove all of drug dealing and 1104 00:55:07,980 --> 00:55:11,020 all of the distribution into America's inner cities. 1105 00:55:11,020 --> 00:55:12,020 Right. 1106 00:55:12,020 --> 00:55:15,100 But most people aren't driving up and I mean, I'm not saying there aren't drugs in places 1107 00:55:15,100 --> 00:55:16,180 like oil sock, right? 1108 00:55:16,180 --> 00:55:21,140 But the vast majority of drug distribution is happening outside of suburbs. 1109 00:55:21,140 --> 00:55:25,540 And so and policing the job of police and many of these communities became how do you 1110 00:55:25,540 --> 00:55:29,740 keep that crime from getting out of the suburbs where the higher tax bases are? 1111 00:55:29,740 --> 00:55:32,580 We could get into a discussion about redlining and why does there's very little tax base 1112 00:55:32,580 --> 00:55:34,380 to begin with in a lot of American cities? 1113 00:55:34,380 --> 00:55:35,380 That's another episode. 1114 00:55:35,380 --> 00:55:36,380 Indeed. 1115 00:55:36,380 --> 00:55:39,700 I like your thinking, Ashlee. 1116 00:55:39,700 --> 00:55:43,060 But at the end of the day, right, that what we're dealing with are the consequences, not 1117 00:55:43,060 --> 00:55:46,260 just of individuals choices, but societal choices. 1118 00:55:46,260 --> 00:55:50,640 Society made a choice in the 1970s to back a plan to criminalize drugs and we are dealing 1119 00:55:50,640 --> 00:55:51,820 with the aftermath of it. 1120 00:55:51,820 --> 00:55:52,820 Right. 1121 00:55:52,820 --> 00:55:54,940 We can kind of say the same thing about like prohibition, right? 1122 00:55:54,940 --> 00:55:58,380 Like that was a whole thing that spiked up a lot. 1123 00:55:58,380 --> 00:55:59,700 And I think that went all that well. 1124 00:55:59,700 --> 00:56:00,700 Yeah, I don't think so either. 1125 00:56:00,700 --> 00:56:03,500 You think we'd have learned a little bit from that. 1126 00:56:03,500 --> 00:56:04,500 We don't. 1127 00:56:04,500 --> 00:56:07,340 There's a line from a television show I love called The Wire where there's two cops talking 1128 00:56:07,340 --> 00:56:10,140 about the war on drugs and the one cop says, you can't even call it a war. 1129 00:56:10,140 --> 00:56:11,460 And the other guy's like, why not? 1130 00:56:11,460 --> 00:56:15,060 And he's like, because wars end. 1131 00:56:15,060 --> 00:56:17,740 I love that episode. 1132 00:56:17,740 --> 00:56:18,740 That's a Dave. 1133 00:56:18,740 --> 00:56:19,740 Professor Bjorkman. 1134 00:56:19,740 --> 00:56:24,100 Professor Bjorkman episode for him. 1135 00:56:24,100 --> 00:56:27,420 Okay, but kind of following about that. 1136 00:56:27,420 --> 00:56:31,220 So there's people also, because there's like a safety aspect that I want you to kind of 1137 00:56:31,220 --> 00:56:36,600 touch on because you work obviously with inmates and in that setting, there are people that 1138 00:56:36,600 --> 00:56:40,220 are going to say things like, well, you're putting professors and teachers in a very 1139 00:56:40,220 --> 00:56:46,540 dangerous environment and situation where they can risk things if the student, let's 1140 00:56:46,540 --> 00:56:49,260 say, gets out of hand. 1141 00:56:49,260 --> 00:56:53,740 And there's also that aspect of people say things like, well, you're giving somebody 1142 00:56:53,740 --> 00:56:59,100 who could have went to prison, who put time and effort into thinking about their crime 1143 00:56:59,100 --> 00:57:03,420 and now you're giving them that education and you're giving them kind of making them 1144 00:57:03,420 --> 00:57:09,700 smarter, more knowledgeable and they can use that to get better at their criminal activities. 1145 00:57:09,700 --> 00:57:11,300 So what do you say to people? 1146 00:57:11,300 --> 00:57:15,020 How do you see the other side of that? 1147 00:57:15,020 --> 00:57:16,580 Great questions. 1148 00:57:16,580 --> 00:57:20,140 To the first question about safety, I've been teaching in prisons for the better part of 1149 00:57:20,140 --> 00:57:21,140 the last 20 years. 1150 00:57:21,140 --> 00:57:23,980 I've had more fights in my street classes than I've ever had inside. 1151 00:57:23,980 --> 00:57:28,620 In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a fight inside of a prison class. 1152 00:57:28,620 --> 00:57:34,900 I'm trying to think, there was a screaming match between two women in my out-being class. 1153 00:57:34,900 --> 00:57:37,740 Two had been dating and then broke up and then started dating somebody else who was 1154 00:57:37,740 --> 00:57:39,700 in the class and it turned into a screaming match. 1155 00:57:39,700 --> 00:57:40,700 This happened in the prison? 1156 00:57:40,700 --> 00:57:41,700 In the women's prison. 1157 00:57:41,700 --> 00:57:47,020 I was trying to teach colonial New England history. 1158 00:57:47,020 --> 00:57:49,780 Maybe that was what sparked it. 1159 00:57:49,780 --> 00:57:53,860 But I've never had any kind of physical altercation in any of the men's classes ever. 1160 00:57:53,860 --> 00:57:56,620 I have at the University of Buffalo. 1161 00:57:56,620 --> 00:58:00,060 I think here there was an altercation in the class that I wasn't in, but it was across 1162 00:58:00,060 --> 00:58:03,860 the hall for me. 1163 00:58:03,860 --> 00:58:07,500 What I would say is that it's about designing the right program. 1164 00:58:07,500 --> 00:58:10,860 So in the consortium of the Niagara Frontier, the program in New York, the thing I loved 1165 00:58:10,860 --> 00:58:14,400 about it was that the men in the program read it. 1166 00:58:14,400 --> 00:58:18,700 So I had men who had been in the program, some of whom were lifers, who might have gotten 1167 00:58:18,700 --> 00:58:23,300 out on parole, might not, were meeting and doing advising with the other students in 1168 00:58:23,300 --> 00:58:25,380 the program to figure out what classes needed to be offered. 1169 00:58:25,380 --> 00:58:28,060 And they'd give that information to me so I could build a schedule. 1170 00:58:28,060 --> 00:58:32,220 I had guys who had been white collar criminals who were locked up for financial crimes. 1171 00:58:32,220 --> 00:58:35,700 Anytime I had a computer problem, they fixed my computers. 1172 00:58:35,700 --> 00:58:39,820 They did tutoring sessions to teach men how to type. 1173 00:58:39,820 --> 00:58:43,220 What happened in that program is that the men in that program, it became a fellowship 1174 00:58:43,220 --> 00:58:46,020 for them in a way where they were invested in it. 1175 00:58:46,020 --> 00:58:49,900 I never had to police bad behavior because they did. 1176 00:58:49,900 --> 00:58:53,160 Even if somebody wasn't doing their homework or turning stuff in, they would get to sit 1177 00:58:53,160 --> 00:58:55,980 down with some of the other guys in the program and be like, look, you could ruin this for 1178 00:58:55,980 --> 00:58:56,980 all of us. 1179 00:58:56,980 --> 00:58:57,980 Wow. 1180 00:58:57,980 --> 00:58:58,980 Right. 1181 00:58:58,980 --> 00:58:59,980 No, definitely. 1182 00:58:59,980 --> 00:59:00,980 Yeah. 1183 00:59:00,980 --> 00:59:02,020 And so it kind of self-policed and they were all of the opinion. 1184 00:59:02,020 --> 00:59:05,540 They knew how unique the opportunity they were getting was. 1185 00:59:05,540 --> 00:59:08,220 They became invested in keeping it going. 1186 00:59:08,220 --> 00:59:10,980 And so I never had any disciplinary issues in that program whatsoever. 1187 00:59:10,980 --> 00:59:12,500 It's the same at the PRC. 1188 00:59:12,500 --> 00:59:16,580 I mean, Andrea Campbell is in a room with eight men by herself. 1189 00:59:16,580 --> 00:59:18,980 And she said to me that she has never felt threatened at all. 1190 00:59:18,980 --> 00:59:23,780 I was going to say, she never looks like she's always so happy and she loves being there. 1191 00:59:23,780 --> 00:59:24,780 And it reverberates out. 1192 00:59:24,780 --> 00:59:25,780 They love her. 1193 00:59:25,780 --> 00:59:26,780 They love Andrea. 1194 00:59:26,780 --> 00:59:27,780 Yes, she is amazing. 1195 00:59:27,780 --> 00:59:33,100 But one of the things that I went to visit one of the inmates at the PRC in the middle 1196 00:59:33,100 --> 00:59:36,980 class, he was struggling with something else. 1197 00:59:36,980 --> 00:59:40,220 And then it was a day they were taking their final exam. 1198 00:59:40,220 --> 00:59:43,060 And so I'm sitting there talking to him and there's like guys who are not in the class 1199 00:59:43,060 --> 00:59:46,780 walking past the classroom where the men are sitting there like getting ready, like going, 1200 00:59:46,780 --> 00:59:47,780 you're going to get it. 1201 00:59:47,780 --> 00:59:48,780 You got this. 1202 00:59:48,780 --> 00:59:51,460 Like guys just mopping as they're walking by. 1203 00:59:51,460 --> 00:59:54,660 But like the entire facility knew what was going on. 1204 00:59:54,660 --> 00:59:57,940 And so I would say that it's not only a safe environment. 1205 00:59:57,940 --> 01:00:03,260 Yeah, there's like a stereotype, I think, that people don't understand that inmates 1206 01:00:03,260 --> 01:00:04,900 want what's better for them. 1207 01:00:04,900 --> 01:00:11,420 They don't want to live in a crappy place or have crappy resources. 1208 01:00:11,420 --> 01:00:14,300 And if they have something precious, they're going to protect it and they're going to do 1209 01:00:14,300 --> 01:00:15,300 their best. 1210 01:00:15,300 --> 01:00:18,700 You can take human beings away from humanity, but you can't take humanity out of it. 1211 01:00:18,700 --> 01:00:19,700 Yeah. 1212 01:00:19,700 --> 01:00:27,060 So ironically, the prison environment actually ends up being more safe, in my opinion, because 1213 01:00:27,060 --> 01:00:28,940 again, and there's always guards around, right? 1214 01:00:28,940 --> 01:00:31,340 There's correctional officers around for most of my classes. 1215 01:00:31,340 --> 01:00:33,980 But even at the New York program, I got to the point where like the corrections officer 1216 01:00:33,980 --> 01:00:36,740 was down the hall listening to the radio the whole time because they weren't going to be 1217 01:00:36,740 --> 01:00:37,740 issues. 1218 01:00:37,740 --> 01:00:40,340 And they would tell me like, I get to catch up on my reading because I don't have to worry 1219 01:00:40,340 --> 01:00:41,340 about what's going on right now. 1220 01:00:41,340 --> 01:00:42,340 Right. 1221 01:00:42,340 --> 01:00:43,340 Yeah. 1222 01:00:43,340 --> 01:00:46,180 What was the second part of the question you asked about like them gaining knowledge to 1223 01:00:46,180 --> 01:00:48,700 maybe help their criminal activity? 1224 01:00:48,700 --> 01:00:50,740 I mean, that's a risk you take with educating anybody, right? 1225 01:00:50,740 --> 01:00:51,740 I was, yeah, definitely. 1226 01:00:51,740 --> 01:00:56,340 I mean, didn't you just say you had like their Wall Street guys? 1227 01:00:56,340 --> 01:01:00,220 Yeah, the Wolf of Wall Street types for sure. 1228 01:01:00,220 --> 01:01:02,540 But I mean, it's a risk of educating people on the street too, right? 1229 01:01:02,540 --> 01:01:06,020 I'm quite sure that Hitler had some form of education at some point in his life. 1230 01:01:06,020 --> 01:01:07,620 Stalin was educated, right? 1231 01:01:07,620 --> 01:01:14,140 So it's a risk you take with educating anybody. 1232 01:01:14,140 --> 01:01:15,260 But like with anything else, right? 1233 01:01:15,260 --> 01:01:18,900 I mean, if you have a, are you going to not have a public education system because it 1234 01:01:18,900 --> 01:01:22,940 offers people the opportunity to engage in violence in the public education system? 1235 01:01:22,940 --> 01:01:24,300 That's true. 1236 01:01:24,300 --> 01:01:26,460 And so again, society always has to make choices. 1237 01:01:26,460 --> 01:01:27,460 There's always trade-offs. 1238 01:01:27,460 --> 01:01:28,460 There's always winners and losers. 1239 01:01:28,460 --> 01:01:31,940 I might end up training, you know, the next criminal mastermind. 1240 01:01:31,940 --> 01:01:33,180 I doubt it. 1241 01:01:33,180 --> 01:01:36,220 I'm not very good at training criminal masterminds. 1242 01:01:36,220 --> 01:01:39,100 I might train the next annoying historian. 1243 01:01:39,100 --> 01:01:41,540 You better not be looking at me. 1244 01:01:41,540 --> 01:01:45,660 But so it's not something I think about too much because there's, and again, it's something 1245 01:01:45,660 --> 01:01:48,740 that would be impossible to quantify in any meaningful way. 1246 01:01:48,740 --> 01:01:54,300 But again, the way you could quantify it is the reverse, that the recidivism rates for 1247 01:01:54,300 --> 01:01:57,620 people get that education are significantly lower. 1248 01:01:57,620 --> 01:02:01,460 So maybe they're becoming such criminal masterminds that they don't get caught anymore. 1249 01:02:01,460 --> 01:02:02,820 But that's typically not the case. 1250 01:02:02,820 --> 01:02:05,020 So we're going to switch gears a little bit. 1251 01:02:05,020 --> 01:02:07,940 Now we're going to talk about restorative justice. 1252 01:02:07,940 --> 01:02:11,140 So I know I mentioned in the beginning, that was my major, it was called human services 1253 01:02:11,140 --> 01:02:15,420 and restorative justice, and you're the department head for that major. 1254 01:02:15,420 --> 01:02:18,980 And our major is kind of broken into two parts, you know, human services and the restorative 1255 01:02:18,980 --> 01:02:19,980 justice part. 1256 01:02:19,980 --> 01:02:25,000 And my niche, my heart was always in the restorative justice part of it. 1257 01:02:25,000 --> 01:02:30,780 So kind of for our listeners, can you explain kind of what restorative justice and restorative 1258 01:02:30,780 --> 01:02:32,460 justice practices are? 1259 01:02:32,460 --> 01:02:33,460 Yeah. 1260 01:02:33,460 --> 01:02:40,060 So the concept of restorative practice, restorative justice goes back several decades, in fact. 1261 01:02:40,060 --> 01:02:44,860 In the 1960s, part of the counterculture and hippie movements and anti-establishment movements 1262 01:02:44,860 --> 01:02:50,580 argued for things like abolishing prisons, for completely rethinking the way in which 1263 01:02:50,580 --> 01:02:54,020 we understand concepts like punishment and victimhood. 1264 01:02:54,020 --> 01:02:59,100 Again, it was the 60s, they were pretty, you know, transformative times and people push 1265 01:02:59,100 --> 01:03:03,060 things pretty far and got pretty radical. 1266 01:03:03,060 --> 01:03:06,820 But I think this is just the kind of normal ebb and flow of things. 1267 01:03:06,820 --> 01:03:12,820 And this started to really gain traction nationally and internationally, it was after the Rwandan 1268 01:03:12,820 --> 01:03:14,420 genocide. 1269 01:03:14,420 --> 01:03:17,540 One of the challenges, and for those of you who aren't familiar, the Rwandan genocide 1270 01:03:17,540 --> 01:03:24,180 broke out in 1994, over about a four-month period, in which two populations, Hutus and 1271 01:03:24,180 --> 01:03:30,900 Tutsis, engaged in a conflict where the Hutus tried to massacre and kill every single Tutsi 1272 01:03:30,900 --> 01:03:35,940 and any so-called moderate Hutu who might be sympathetic to the Tutsis. 1273 01:03:35,940 --> 01:03:38,860 The challenge was, the only way you could really tell the difference between Hutus and 1274 01:03:38,860 --> 01:03:42,860 Tutsis was by identification cards that the Belgians had passed out when they colonized 1275 01:03:42,860 --> 01:03:48,580 the place in the late 19th century, throughout the middle of the 20th century. 1276 01:03:48,580 --> 01:03:51,340 Not to say that the Hutus and Tutsis weren't separate populations, but you couldn't tell 1277 01:03:51,340 --> 01:03:55,020 by looking at somebody necessarily. 1278 01:03:55,020 --> 01:03:59,260 So one of the challenges was when the genocide broke out, the vast majority of the killings 1279 01:03:59,260 --> 01:04:02,580 were done with machetes, which means close quarter combat, and the vast majority of the 1280 01:04:02,580 --> 01:04:04,620 killings were done by people who were not members of the government. 1281 01:04:04,620 --> 01:04:07,220 They were literally like neighbors killing neighbors. 1282 01:04:07,220 --> 01:04:13,900 There was this radio called RTLF that's basically hate radio where the Hutus controlled it, 1283 01:04:13,900 --> 01:04:16,340 and they were saying that Tutsis are cockroaches. 1284 01:04:16,340 --> 01:04:18,900 And if you see a cockroach, what do you do with a cockroach? 1285 01:04:18,900 --> 01:04:20,020 You stamp it out. 1286 01:04:20,020 --> 01:04:22,500 But then you want to make sure that other cockroaches don't come, so you have to kill 1287 01:04:22,500 --> 01:04:24,500 all the cockroaches' family. 1288 01:04:24,500 --> 01:04:27,580 And so you literally had a situation where neighbors were just macheting and hacking 1289 01:04:27,580 --> 01:04:29,460 other people to death. 1290 01:04:29,460 --> 01:04:34,060 And the challenge was, well, when it was over, how does society put the pieces back together? 1291 01:04:34,060 --> 01:04:37,980 How do you live next door to somebody who you know may have tried to kill you or kill 1292 01:04:37,980 --> 01:04:41,620 people you knew, not because they knew you or you had done anything to them, simply because 1293 01:04:41,620 --> 01:04:43,100 of your identity? 1294 01:04:43,100 --> 01:04:47,060 And so they started to put together what are called Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. 1295 01:04:47,060 --> 01:04:50,580 And the idea of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission is that you think of criminal justice 1296 01:04:50,580 --> 01:04:51,860 as a two-way street. 1297 01:04:51,860 --> 01:04:54,820 It's not just about the crime that's committed. 1298 01:04:54,820 --> 01:05:00,740 It's about the victim who the crime impacted, but also the victim understanding from the 1299 01:05:00,740 --> 01:05:03,180 criminal's perspective why they did what they did. 1300 01:05:03,180 --> 01:05:09,340 And so these Truth and Reconciliation Commissions would take men who had been accused of participating 1301 01:05:09,340 --> 01:05:15,580 in the genocide and bring them out into public parks with police there and then a facilitator 1302 01:05:15,580 --> 01:05:16,580 there. 1303 01:05:16,580 --> 01:05:20,040 And then people who were members of society who had experienced the genocide could stand 1304 01:05:20,040 --> 01:05:26,340 up and either accuse somebody directly and say, I watched you do X, Y, and Z, or I want 1305 01:05:26,340 --> 01:05:28,880 you to know the impact of what your actions were. 1306 01:05:28,880 --> 01:05:31,100 And people just told their stories. 1307 01:05:31,100 --> 01:05:35,580 And the idea was it was a chance for the catharsis for the victims, for people to be able to 1308 01:05:35,580 --> 01:05:37,780 tell their stories in a public venue. 1309 01:05:37,780 --> 01:05:41,340 But for the part of the punishment, and punishment isn't really the right word for it, but part 1310 01:05:41,340 --> 01:05:45,700 of the process for the people who had committed these crimes but were going to be let back 1311 01:05:45,700 --> 01:05:50,820 into society at some point for them to understand the broader impact of what they had done. 1312 01:05:50,820 --> 01:05:54,600 And so what's kind of grown out of that over the last 30 years is taking a more holistic 1313 01:05:54,600 --> 01:06:01,040 approach to understanding what we really mean when we say punishment and what we really 1314 01:06:01,040 --> 01:06:03,620 mean when we say crime. 1315 01:06:03,620 --> 01:06:08,100 The idea is that, again, punishment is going to be something that is going to be limited 1316 01:06:08,100 --> 01:06:09,240 in duration, right? 1317 01:06:09,240 --> 01:06:11,980 For most people who go to prison, they're going to get out at some point. 1318 01:06:11,980 --> 01:06:16,540 And so the idea is what's the best path to helping this person reenter society? 1319 01:06:16,540 --> 01:06:19,540 And part of that is including the victim in the process. 1320 01:06:19,540 --> 01:06:23,820 So there are laws passed in Pennsylvania that are, the restorative justice practitioners 1321 01:06:23,820 --> 01:06:26,660 debate this, but there are laws in Pennsylvania that basically say if somebody is going to 1322 01:06:26,660 --> 01:06:30,660 get early paroled or petition early parole, the family gets a say, the family of the victim 1323 01:06:30,660 --> 01:06:33,700 or the victim themselves gets a say in that. 1324 01:06:33,700 --> 01:06:38,020 There are restorative circles, right, in which they have support groups in which people who 1325 01:06:38,020 --> 01:06:42,060 have been victims of particular crimes can speak their piece in front of people who have 1326 01:06:42,060 --> 01:06:43,960 committed those kinds of crimes. 1327 01:06:43,960 --> 01:06:46,660 And the idea is even if I'm the person who has committed that crime, I didn't commit 1328 01:06:46,660 --> 01:06:48,420 it against any one of these people. 1329 01:06:48,420 --> 01:06:49,420 It's helpful for me. 1330 01:06:49,420 --> 01:06:54,960 Remember when I talked about the idea of education kind of empowering me to see how my actions 1331 01:06:54,960 --> 01:06:56,420 impacted other people? 1332 01:06:56,420 --> 01:07:00,100 So this is the idea of restorative practice and those restorative circles that you understand 1333 01:07:00,100 --> 01:07:03,140 that the world is more than just you. 1334 01:07:03,140 --> 01:07:07,580 The world is a place in which every single choice you make has an impact on other people. 1335 01:07:07,580 --> 01:07:11,740 And hearing those specific stories is part of your path to recovery as well as the victim's 1336 01:07:11,740 --> 01:07:13,880 path to recovery. 1337 01:07:13,880 --> 01:07:18,660 So restorative practice argues and restorative justice argues that incarceration isn't enough. 1338 01:07:18,660 --> 01:07:22,980 Incarceration, I talk about this in class a lot, like it feels good sometimes if you're 1339 01:07:22,980 --> 01:07:26,540 the victim of a crime to know like justice has been done. 1340 01:07:26,540 --> 01:07:30,620 And societies that don't have any kind of justice can have all other kinds of social 1341 01:07:30,620 --> 01:07:31,620 problems. 1342 01:07:31,620 --> 01:07:35,100 I use a terrible example in my class of imagine that I was a serial killer and all I did was 1343 01:07:35,100 --> 01:07:38,460 kill grandmas and I'd killed all your grandmas like I had blue haired wigs hanging up in 1344 01:07:38,460 --> 01:07:39,460 my basement. 1345 01:07:39,460 --> 01:07:40,780 But I get off on a technicality, right? 1346 01:07:40,780 --> 01:07:42,780 I don't go to jail, I don't get incarcerated. 1347 01:07:42,780 --> 01:07:46,020 And every time you go to the grocery store, you see me shopping. 1348 01:07:46,020 --> 01:07:48,600 Knowing I killed your grandmother and knowing that I'm walking free. 1349 01:07:48,600 --> 01:07:51,100 How long is it before you decide to take justice in your own hands? 1350 01:07:51,100 --> 01:07:55,740 Or how does that impact your belief in the systems of society, the legitimacy of government 1351 01:07:55,740 --> 01:08:00,620 overall, and that the less quote unquote justice there is, the more social problems you can 1352 01:08:00,620 --> 01:08:05,020 have vigilantism but also just the things that are associated with people not believing 1353 01:08:05,020 --> 01:08:07,340 that the system works. 1354 01:08:07,340 --> 01:08:10,180 The challenge right now is that the system doesn't work. 1355 01:08:10,180 --> 01:08:14,620 But it works well enough for people who aren't in it to make everybody think that it does 1356 01:08:14,620 --> 01:08:15,620 work. 1357 01:08:15,620 --> 01:08:19,220 If you lock people up, they did something bad, that's where they should be. 1358 01:08:19,220 --> 01:08:21,920 The restorative practice, I'd say that this isn't enough. 1359 01:08:21,920 --> 01:08:24,840 And there are people who have made the arguments that a lot of the mental health issues we're 1360 01:08:24,840 --> 01:08:29,940 seeing across the country are interrelated to our inability to really deal with the victims 1361 01:08:29,940 --> 01:08:34,940 of crime as well as dealing with the perpetuators of crime, that you can't separate the two. 1362 01:08:34,940 --> 01:08:37,340 There's a symbiosis between them. 1363 01:08:37,340 --> 01:08:45,580 So do you think doing restorative practices can lower the recidivism rate more than compared 1364 01:08:45,580 --> 01:08:47,420 to the traditional system that we have now? 1365 01:08:47,420 --> 01:08:48,420 I think it's unquestionable. 1366 01:08:48,420 --> 01:08:53,000 I mean, this is one of the places I tend not to be too definitive about anything. 1367 01:08:53,000 --> 01:08:55,940 Because I don't think there's any question that the more restorative practice, the more 1368 01:08:55,940 --> 01:09:00,460 counseling that's available, the more education that's available to people incarcerated. 1369 01:09:00,460 --> 01:09:05,200 But the same is true on the other side, the more that's available for victims, the fewer 1370 01:09:05,200 --> 01:09:09,820 people you're going to see recommitting crimes and getting incarcerated, but the more, for 1371 01:09:09,820 --> 01:09:13,180 lack of a better word, the healthier society is going to be. 1372 01:09:13,180 --> 01:09:21,420 When we recognize that people, I don't personally believe in good and evil in a clear cut way. 1373 01:09:21,420 --> 01:09:24,500 Maybe Hitler and Stalin fall into that category. 1374 01:09:24,500 --> 01:09:29,980 But I think for the vast majority of people, it's about your circumstances and choices. 1375 01:09:29,980 --> 01:09:31,060 And people make bad choices. 1376 01:09:31,060 --> 01:09:33,100 There are people who do bad things to other people. 1377 01:09:33,100 --> 01:09:36,300 But I do believe that most people have the capability for change. 1378 01:09:36,300 --> 01:09:39,620 I have to believe that people have the capability for change, or I wouldn't do what I do for 1379 01:09:39,620 --> 01:09:40,620 a living. 1380 01:09:40,620 --> 01:09:44,940 So do you think it will help also with the community's fear of crime and kind of how 1381 01:09:44,940 --> 01:09:50,460 we, as a community, how we look at incarcerated people and them coming back to society? 1382 01:09:50,460 --> 01:09:53,140 Sure, stigmas are one of the biggest challenges, right? 1383 01:09:53,140 --> 01:09:56,660 Everybody, the vast majority of people, I should say, have opinions about, well, if 1384 01:09:56,660 --> 01:10:00,620 you've ever been in jail, that there's something, you're bad, or you're a person I need to 1385 01:10:00,620 --> 01:10:03,180 be careful around. 1386 01:10:03,180 --> 01:10:05,380 And I mean, human beings are human beings, right? 1387 01:10:05,380 --> 01:10:06,900 Human beings are the most dangerous animal out there. 1388 01:10:06,900 --> 01:10:09,700 You need to be careful about human beings wherever you are, regardless of whether they've 1389 01:10:09,700 --> 01:10:11,060 been incarcerated or not. 1390 01:10:11,060 --> 01:10:15,100 And I've always been a person that's saying, I had to cut you off that. 1391 01:10:15,100 --> 01:10:19,020 Just because a person hasn't been to like jail or prison doesn't mean that they're 1392 01:10:19,020 --> 01:10:23,180 a good person, or that they don't do bad things. 1393 01:10:23,180 --> 01:10:25,820 They could have just not been caught yet. 1394 01:10:25,820 --> 01:10:26,820 Exactly. 1395 01:10:26,820 --> 01:10:33,220 So, yeah, the stigmas, the restorative justice also is about reintegration into society, 1396 01:10:33,220 --> 01:10:34,220 right? 1397 01:10:34,220 --> 01:10:42,740 The typical approach to reentry was you did your time, you're out, get it together. 1398 01:10:42,740 --> 01:10:44,420 And that's a real struggle. 1399 01:10:44,420 --> 01:10:48,700 Reentry is, when I was in the New York program, I had a guy who had gotten released in the 1400 01:10:48,700 --> 01:10:52,340 county he was incarcerated in, but the county he was incarcerated in was not the county 1401 01:10:52,340 --> 01:10:53,340 he lived in. 1402 01:10:53,340 --> 01:10:57,580 So he had no family there, no resources there, but that's where they released him. 1403 01:10:57,580 --> 01:10:59,340 And there was no available housing. 1404 01:10:59,340 --> 01:11:00,340 He couldn't find it. 1405 01:11:00,340 --> 01:11:03,820 They put him on a bus, they dropped him off in the county at like two o'clock in the morning, 1406 01:11:03,820 --> 01:11:04,820 and they're like, good luck. 1407 01:11:04,820 --> 01:11:06,660 Guy had no money. 1408 01:11:06,660 --> 01:11:10,340 He collected a call through a payphone, which to many of the people listening are probably 1409 01:11:10,340 --> 01:11:12,540 going to know what a collect call or a payphone is. 1410 01:11:12,540 --> 01:11:15,100 And he's like, I don't know what to do. 1411 01:11:15,100 --> 01:11:16,100 And he's like, I'm kind of stuck. 1412 01:11:16,100 --> 01:11:19,780 And he's like, the only place that has an open bed is a halfway house that's also a 1413 01:11:19,780 --> 01:11:21,380 drug rehabilitation place. 1414 01:11:21,380 --> 01:11:25,220 And he's like, if I go there, I'm in violation of my parole because the only way you can 1415 01:11:25,220 --> 01:11:26,580 get in there is by saying you have a drug problem. 1416 01:11:26,580 --> 01:11:28,940 And if I say I have a drug problem, that means I'm going back to prison. 1417 01:11:28,940 --> 01:11:32,740 He's like, so he slept on a park bench for three nights until a bed finally opened in 1418 01:11:32,740 --> 01:11:34,260 a halfway house that wasn't. 1419 01:11:34,260 --> 01:11:38,420 I'm like, so you get out of prison, you have to spend your time, you have to figure out 1420 01:11:38,420 --> 01:11:39,420 how to navigate the system. 1421 01:11:39,420 --> 01:11:41,780 And the one place that's available to help you, you can't go to because they'll send 1422 01:11:41,780 --> 01:11:43,420 you back to prison for going there to get help. 1423 01:11:43,420 --> 01:11:47,100 So you sleep on a park bench and then everybody's supposed to just say, yeah, well, why can't 1424 01:11:47,100 --> 01:11:48,820 this person get it together? 1425 01:11:48,820 --> 01:11:49,820 Exactly. 1426 01:11:49,820 --> 01:11:50,820 Yeah. 1427 01:11:50,820 --> 01:11:55,620 I worked at a bank when I lived in Hazelton and there was like a bus station right there. 1428 01:11:55,620 --> 01:11:59,340 So a lot of the prison, once they got released, they would exactly like you said, give them 1429 01:11:59,340 --> 01:12:03,140 their little check, send them on the bus, give them a bus ticket, send them on their 1430 01:12:03,140 --> 01:12:04,140 way. 1431 01:12:04,140 --> 01:12:08,700 And then they would come in to cash the check and it would be like this whole big process. 1432 01:12:08,700 --> 01:12:13,340 And I would feel so bad because they have like their inmate card. 1433 01:12:13,340 --> 01:12:15,540 So I can clearly see it's you. 1434 01:12:15,540 --> 01:12:20,420 But bank policy is like, well, you need two forms of ID if you don't have a bank account 1435 01:12:20,420 --> 01:12:21,420 with us. 1436 01:12:21,420 --> 01:12:23,220 And they're looking at me like, are you stupid? 1437 01:12:23,220 --> 01:12:24,300 I just got out of prison. 1438 01:12:24,300 --> 01:12:26,260 How do I have ID? 1439 01:12:26,260 --> 01:12:29,580 And then if you don't have the ID, there's all kinds of other types of quote unquote 1440 01:12:29,580 --> 01:12:30,580 criminals out there. 1441 01:12:30,580 --> 01:12:32,780 So you go to the check cashing place and the check cashing place knows you're coming out 1442 01:12:32,780 --> 01:12:33,780 of a prison and you don't have ID. 1443 01:12:33,780 --> 01:12:37,220 So it's like, oh, there's a 35% processing fee. 1444 01:12:37,220 --> 01:12:39,700 And then it was the criminal. 1445 01:12:39,700 --> 01:12:41,260 So I mean, and this is the world. 1446 01:12:41,260 --> 01:12:44,100 And then again, like you learn when you get out that that's the world you're going to 1447 01:12:44,100 --> 01:12:45,100 have to navigate. 1448 01:12:45,100 --> 01:12:48,500 You can't go to a regular bank, but you can go to Joey, the loan shark check casher, who's 1449 01:12:48,500 --> 01:12:49,980 going to take 30% of your stuff. 1450 01:12:49,980 --> 01:12:52,700 But that's the world you ended up getting ingratiated back into. 1451 01:12:52,700 --> 01:12:56,780 And the money is usually like a lot of them wouldn't even have been from Hazelton or any 1452 01:12:56,780 --> 01:12:58,180 of the surrounding areas. 1453 01:12:58,180 --> 01:13:02,500 So now the money from the check is not even enough to get them a bus ticket to really 1454 01:13:02,500 --> 01:13:03,500 go home. 1455 01:13:03,500 --> 01:13:04,500 And it's just a cycle. 1456 01:13:04,500 --> 01:13:08,140 And again, for people listening, like the personal responsibility is still there, right? 1457 01:13:08,140 --> 01:13:09,140 People committed crimes. 1458 01:13:09,140 --> 01:13:10,420 But these are people who are getting let out. 1459 01:13:10,420 --> 01:13:12,820 Yes, and back into society with us. 1460 01:13:12,820 --> 01:13:16,540 And so the arguments that you've already paid your supposed debt, right? 1461 01:13:16,540 --> 01:13:19,860 But then society throws up more and more the system, I shouldn't say society. 1462 01:13:19,860 --> 01:13:22,420 Well, I guess I will say society because the system is us. 1463 01:13:22,420 --> 01:13:29,100 Yes, the system is what it is because of either our apathy towards it or our indifference. 1464 01:13:29,100 --> 01:13:30,100 Right. 1465 01:13:30,100 --> 01:13:34,620 So with costs, because we were talking about money and costs, to compare like what are 1466 01:13:34,620 --> 01:13:38,420 the associated costs with restorative justice when you compare them to like the traditional 1467 01:13:38,420 --> 01:13:40,220 system that we have now? 1468 01:13:40,220 --> 01:13:41,540 Top front, it's more, right? 1469 01:13:41,540 --> 01:13:45,740 If you're going to be take the like, Homing County Prison, one of the challenges in like 1470 01:13:45,740 --> 01:13:48,740 Homing County Prison is that a lot of people who get incarcerated are people who are having 1471 01:13:48,740 --> 01:13:49,980 mental health crises. 1472 01:13:49,980 --> 01:13:50,980 Yes. 1473 01:13:50,980 --> 01:13:55,980 So if I'm having a mental health breakdown in the middle of the street somewhere, and 1474 01:13:55,980 --> 01:14:01,060 it looks to other people as though I have a potential threat, you don't call a psychologist 1475 01:14:01,060 --> 01:14:02,060 in that, right? 1476 01:14:02,060 --> 01:14:04,420 You call the police and the police show up and the police have limited options. 1477 01:14:04,420 --> 01:14:07,860 If you're having that mental health crisis and you do something that looks like what 1478 01:14:07,860 --> 01:14:11,340 Professor Bjorkman would call a furtive move, right, you can end up in handcuffs and end 1479 01:14:11,340 --> 01:14:12,340 up in jail. 1480 01:14:12,340 --> 01:14:16,300 The like, Homing County Prison has no staff psychiatrist or psychologist. 1481 01:14:16,300 --> 01:14:20,020 And it's not because they don't want one, it's the question of where do we get the money 1482 01:14:20,020 --> 01:14:21,020 for this? 1483 01:14:21,020 --> 01:14:22,020 How do we pay for it? 1484 01:14:22,020 --> 01:14:24,220 Then it's also a challenge of finding someone who's willing to work in a prison because 1485 01:14:24,220 --> 01:14:27,220 there's all kinds of not just stigmas about prisoners themselves, but there's stigmas 1486 01:14:27,220 --> 01:14:29,620 about working in a prison system. 1487 01:14:29,620 --> 01:14:37,100 So the upfront costs are, I mean, they're substantial. 1488 01:14:37,100 --> 01:14:42,540 So you would in any kind of in carceral setting, I mean, most state correctional institutions 1489 01:14:42,540 --> 01:14:46,660 do have a staff psychologist and a staff psychiatrist, they just don't have enough of them. 1490 01:14:46,660 --> 01:14:51,760 The county prisons are the bigger challenges and city jails because they're totally underfunded. 1491 01:14:51,760 --> 01:14:53,900 The populations in those places are much more transient. 1492 01:14:53,900 --> 01:14:57,900 I was going to say they change a lot. 1493 01:14:57,900 --> 01:15:03,100 But like anything else, the upfront cost is justified if you're seeing back end results 1494 01:15:03,100 --> 01:15:04,540 in terms of reduced recidivism. 1495 01:15:04,540 --> 01:15:08,020 And again, that reduced recidivism is reduced cost too. 1496 01:15:08,020 --> 01:15:10,860 So that program in New York, right, they had to make it the state of New York made a three 1497 01:15:10,860 --> 01:15:12,940 and a half million dollar investment over three years. 1498 01:15:12,940 --> 01:15:14,980 They were giving us about $350,000 a year. 1499 01:15:14,980 --> 01:15:19,700 That was enough to run a program with about 100 to 120 students a year. 1500 01:15:19,700 --> 01:15:24,060 But again, the state saved 37 and a half million off that three and a half million investment. 1501 01:15:24,060 --> 01:15:26,900 And so this is one of the challenges in a democracy, right? 1502 01:15:26,900 --> 01:15:29,540 Look at things like climate change or any other kind of problem that's going to take 1503 01:15:29,540 --> 01:15:30,540 a long term solution. 1504 01:15:30,540 --> 01:15:33,460 Like people are like, well, I want change now and nothing I'm going to do is going 1505 01:15:33,460 --> 01:15:35,100 to make change now, so why would I bother? 1506 01:15:35,100 --> 01:15:36,980 Somebody else can deal with that. 1507 01:15:36,980 --> 01:15:41,220 You're not going to see the savings from the investments upfront. 1508 01:15:41,220 --> 01:15:43,540 And this is one of the big challenges. 1509 01:15:43,540 --> 01:15:47,180 And quite frankly, it would be either easier sometimes if you're in an authoritarian system 1510 01:15:47,180 --> 01:15:49,100 where the leader is like, it doesn't matter what the rest of you think. 1511 01:15:49,100 --> 01:15:50,100 We're doing this. 1512 01:15:50,100 --> 01:15:51,100 Right. 1513 01:15:51,100 --> 01:15:56,020 And in smaller societies too, the Iroquois, I studied a lot of native history in college. 1514 01:15:56,020 --> 01:15:59,220 The native, the Iroquois perspective was you don't do anything unless you think about how 1515 01:15:59,220 --> 01:16:02,660 it's going to affect at least three or four generations down the road. 1516 01:16:02,660 --> 01:16:06,260 That's easier to do when your society is a few thousand people or a few, maybe tens of 1517 01:16:06,260 --> 01:16:07,260 thousands of people. 1518 01:16:07,260 --> 01:16:09,580 When you're talking about hundreds of millions of people with, as we were talking about at 1519 01:16:09,580 --> 01:16:13,620 the beginning, everybody has a very different experience of this place we call America. 1520 01:16:13,620 --> 01:16:16,900 And getting them all on the same page to say, I know this is going to be investment right 1521 01:16:16,900 --> 01:16:20,180 now that you may not see the benefit to in your lifetime. 1522 01:16:20,180 --> 01:16:23,980 But if I can go off on a quick tangent, we don't do generational thinking in America 1523 01:16:23,980 --> 01:16:24,980 anymore. 1524 01:16:24,980 --> 01:16:25,980 No. 1525 01:16:25,980 --> 01:16:26,980 I don't think anybody does anyway. 1526 01:16:26,980 --> 01:16:30,620 Think about like what it was like to be the first person to lay a brick on the Sistine 1527 01:16:30,620 --> 01:16:37,020 Chapel knowing that it would be your grandchildren who would finish that project. 1528 01:16:37,020 --> 01:16:40,820 Because of the speed of technology, the speed of change, we don't think that way anymore. 1529 01:16:40,820 --> 01:16:42,780 We think about everything happening within our lifetimes. 1530 01:16:42,780 --> 01:16:47,260 I think in some ways, and this is another podcast topic, it makes us a little bit more 1531 01:16:47,260 --> 01:16:51,220 self-centered and it prevents change, the kind of long-term change from happening. 1532 01:16:51,220 --> 01:16:56,620 I think if we could find a way as a society to engage in generational projects, stuff 1533 01:16:56,620 --> 01:16:58,020 like this would be easier to change. 1534 01:16:58,020 --> 01:17:01,700 We want immediate self-indulging. 1535 01:17:01,700 --> 01:17:07,220 I can see that. 1536 01:17:07,220 --> 01:17:11,660 When I tell people what my major was and I break down the restorative justice, I always 1537 01:17:11,660 --> 01:17:16,740 see myself breaking down what restorative justice means and always getting people that 1538 01:17:16,740 --> 01:17:19,060 are like, ugh. 1539 01:17:19,060 --> 01:17:20,060 Having to break down that it's... 1540 01:17:20,060 --> 01:17:23,380 I'm not saying I don't want people to go to prison or people shouldn't have personal 1541 01:17:23,380 --> 01:17:24,380 accountability. 1542 01:17:24,380 --> 01:17:28,900 What I'm saying is you have to look at the person as a whole and you have to look at 1543 01:17:28,900 --> 01:17:32,820 the situation around the crime and involve the victim. 1544 01:17:32,820 --> 01:17:38,860 Because like you said, that I feel like sometimes people, the stigma is lock them up, cool. 1545 01:17:38,860 --> 01:17:44,260 But a lot of people that are inmates, they're like, I can do this. 1546 01:17:44,260 --> 01:17:46,140 I can do this time and then go back. 1547 01:17:46,140 --> 01:17:48,660 And then they don't even think about the crime that they committed. 1548 01:17:48,660 --> 01:17:50,500 And they just go about their lives. 1549 01:17:50,500 --> 01:17:55,180 But when you have that restorative justice practice to it and you have that back and 1550 01:17:55,180 --> 01:18:01,060 forth with the victim or finding out why the person committed the crime, you can pinpoint 1551 01:18:01,060 --> 01:18:04,420 things that you can change in that person's direction. 1552 01:18:04,420 --> 01:18:06,140 You can change somebody for the better. 1553 01:18:06,140 --> 01:18:10,440 And the recidivism rate, like you mentioned, you can see that in that. 1554 01:18:10,440 --> 01:18:11,740 You're absolutely right. 1555 01:18:11,740 --> 01:18:17,020 There are men and women who have figured out how to navigate the prison system. 1556 01:18:17,020 --> 01:18:23,340 There's a strange phenomenon in a lot of systems where you can get early paroled, early probation. 1557 01:18:23,340 --> 01:18:28,420 So there's a couple of guys I worked with in New York who had like nine months or six 1558 01:18:28,420 --> 01:18:31,740 months left on their sentence, but they got early parole. 1559 01:18:31,740 --> 01:18:34,340 And the condition was if you get released before you finish your sentence, you got five 1560 01:18:34,340 --> 01:18:35,340 years of probation. 1561 01:18:35,340 --> 01:18:40,100 And these guys are like, I'm going to violate my first day out because I can do nine months 1562 01:18:40,100 --> 01:18:42,780 or six months standing on my head and I don't want to deal with these people for five years 1563 01:18:42,780 --> 01:18:43,780 of probation afterwards. 1564 01:18:43,780 --> 01:18:45,820 So I'll just go back to prison. 1565 01:18:45,820 --> 01:18:49,500 But the other part of that is education is hard. 1566 01:18:49,500 --> 01:18:52,780 I'm not saying prison isn't hard, but like if you throw in with a gang, if you fall into 1567 01:18:52,780 --> 01:18:58,020 a routine, if you don't mind the regimented nature of that life, there are people who 1568 01:18:58,020 --> 01:19:01,220 can like, yeah, I can do a few years and then I'll get out and I'll do what I need to do. 1569 01:19:01,220 --> 01:19:04,700 But if you're also pressing that population, education is about self-reflection too. 1570 01:19:04,700 --> 01:19:05,700 Yes. 1571 01:19:05,700 --> 01:19:08,740 So that's kind of where the restorative piece of education comes in. 1572 01:19:08,740 --> 01:19:13,680 When I started taking those college classes, I started thinking about the choices that 1573 01:19:13,680 --> 01:19:16,260 I'd made and why I had made them and what the impact of those was. 1574 01:19:16,260 --> 01:19:17,260 And that was hard, right? 1575 01:19:17,260 --> 01:19:20,260 There were a lot of times I wanted to be like, no, I'm fine. 1576 01:19:20,260 --> 01:19:21,260 I'm a good person. 1577 01:19:21,260 --> 01:19:22,260 Everything I do is okay. 1578 01:19:22,260 --> 01:19:23,260 It doesn't really hurt anybody. 1579 01:19:23,260 --> 01:19:27,900 But confronting yourself is probably one of the hardest things to do in any situation. 1580 01:19:27,900 --> 01:19:30,780 And education can be a vehicle to help you get there. 1581 01:19:30,780 --> 01:19:31,780 Yeah, no, definitely. 1582 01:19:31,780 --> 01:19:36,540 Because I know in our courses, because it's about restorative justice, so we have those 1583 01:19:36,540 --> 01:19:41,220 practices like we do that in our class, so we can have that real world experience like 1584 01:19:41,220 --> 01:19:42,720 how we do here. 1585 01:19:42,720 --> 01:19:48,940 And in those courses, it was a lot of self-reflection of who I am and how I got here. 1586 01:19:48,940 --> 01:19:50,140 And it's tough. 1587 01:19:50,140 --> 01:19:54,460 It's tough to think about who you were before and those choices that you've made and how 1588 01:19:54,460 --> 01:19:59,860 they have impacted the people around you or how they've impacted your future, how much 1589 01:19:59,860 --> 01:20:03,020 harder things are when they could have been easier and things like that. 1590 01:20:03,020 --> 01:20:08,220 So it is, I think people throw it off like, oh, it's just this hippie thing. 1591 01:20:08,220 --> 01:20:09,700 But it's hard. 1592 01:20:09,700 --> 01:20:14,860 I think it's harder than just saying, yeah, I'll be in a box for two years and then I'll 1593 01:20:14,860 --> 01:20:16,500 get out and live life. 1594 01:20:16,500 --> 01:20:18,060 I agree. 1595 01:20:18,060 --> 01:20:19,060 Definitely. 1596 01:20:19,060 --> 01:20:26,260 But there are people who say like restorative options, they're more intrusive than like 1597 01:20:26,260 --> 01:20:28,360 the traditional option. 1598 01:20:28,360 --> 01:20:32,620 So consequently, wouldn't it be like a net whiting mechanism? 1599 01:20:32,620 --> 01:20:35,940 How do you mean on the latter part? 1600 01:20:35,940 --> 01:20:44,300 So like we're getting more, you're getting more involved in somebody's life. 1601 01:20:44,300 --> 01:20:46,340 Getting more up in somebody's business. 1602 01:20:46,340 --> 01:20:47,340 Yeah. 1603 01:20:47,340 --> 01:20:53,140 So how do you think that's appropriate in the sense that we're kind of, you know, like 1604 01:20:53,140 --> 01:20:56,740 the government, the system, we're getting more involved in somebody's life, which is 1605 01:20:56,740 --> 01:21:02,420 kind of not really the American way we see things. 1606 01:21:02,420 --> 01:21:03,420 Not necessarily. 1607 01:21:03,420 --> 01:21:06,980 But at the end of the day, I don't think prisons are going away. 1608 01:21:06,980 --> 01:21:07,980 Right? 1609 01:21:07,980 --> 01:21:12,380 I don't think they're always going to be, my dad used to say choices have consequences. 1610 01:21:12,380 --> 01:21:16,940 And so one of the consequences of the choice to commit a crime, regardless of what drove 1611 01:21:16,940 --> 01:21:20,860 you to that choice in the first place, is that you are subjecting yourself to more oversight 1612 01:21:20,860 --> 01:21:24,660 by the state and more intrusiveness by the state in your life. 1613 01:21:24,660 --> 01:21:30,460 I honestly think that the restorative piece of this is a way of the, in my perfect world, 1614 01:21:30,460 --> 01:21:32,540 the restorative practice wouldn't be being done by the state. 1615 01:21:32,540 --> 01:21:34,020 It would be being funded by it. 1616 01:21:34,020 --> 01:21:35,020 Okay. 1617 01:21:35,020 --> 01:21:37,060 So like that program that we had in New York, one of the best things about it was that it 1618 01:21:37,060 --> 01:21:40,500 was an independent agency that operated within the system. 1619 01:21:40,500 --> 01:21:44,300 If New York state had owned the system, if the government was basically responsible for 1620 01:21:44,300 --> 01:21:48,500 it, there would have been, it would have turned into a bureaucratic mess with reporting requirements 1621 01:21:48,500 --> 01:21:53,340 that were more about justifying the existence of the program than actually measuring the 1622 01:21:53,340 --> 01:21:55,100 impact of the program. 1623 01:21:55,100 --> 01:21:56,100 Right. 1624 01:21:56,100 --> 01:21:59,480 So, and as we were just talking about, I mean, the intrusiveness that we're kind of trying 1625 01:21:59,480 --> 01:22:03,980 to talk about here is putting people in a position where they have the ability to engage 1626 01:22:03,980 --> 01:22:08,500 in that self-reflection, but also quite frankly, part of restorative practice is making you 1627 01:22:08,500 --> 01:22:09,500 uncomfortable, right? 1628 01:22:09,500 --> 01:22:13,740 It is not easy as a person who has committed crime to sit in a room full of victims, hearing 1629 01:22:13,740 --> 01:22:16,780 about the impact of crime on them. 1630 01:22:16,780 --> 01:22:24,500 And quite frankly, I think I'd prefer that level of intrusiveness than mass incarceration. 1631 01:22:24,500 --> 01:22:26,900 Because again, like I said, we have to make choices. 1632 01:22:26,900 --> 01:22:31,780 And in my experience, anecdotally anyway, that works better than mass incarceration. 1633 01:22:31,780 --> 01:22:34,420 Again, it's uncomfortable. 1634 01:22:34,420 --> 01:22:37,140 But I think sometimes, what did Mandela say? 1635 01:22:37,140 --> 01:22:39,460 There's no progress without struggle, right? 1636 01:22:39,460 --> 01:22:44,300 Anytime you want to get anywhere that's meaningful and worth it, it shouldn't be easy to get 1637 01:22:44,300 --> 01:22:45,300 there. 1638 01:22:45,300 --> 01:22:46,300 Yeah. 1639 01:22:46,300 --> 01:22:48,460 I know if you put me in an uncomfortable position, I don't want to be in that position again. 1640 01:22:48,460 --> 01:22:52,300 So nine times out of 10, I'm probably not going to do that again to put myself there. 1641 01:22:52,300 --> 01:22:54,820 So I can see that. 1642 01:22:54,820 --> 01:23:01,740 So with everything that we've talked about, though, what are maybe one or two things that 1643 01:23:01,740 --> 01:23:07,220 you want our listeners to take away as a whole from our whole conversation? 1644 01:23:07,220 --> 01:23:10,340 The easy question last, huh? 1645 01:23:10,340 --> 01:23:15,180 I think one of the big takeaways for me would be that I hope that people are willing to 1646 01:23:15,180 --> 01:23:19,540 take a critical and skeptical look at the existing criminal justice system. 1647 01:23:19,540 --> 01:23:22,240 As I say in class all the time, your opinions are your own. 1648 01:23:22,240 --> 01:23:25,140 My job is not to lead you to think one way or another about anything. 1649 01:23:25,140 --> 01:23:28,740 My job is to provide you information and an environment in which you can substantively 1650 01:23:28,740 --> 01:23:32,660 engage with that information based on your belief system, your experience, and take away 1651 01:23:32,660 --> 01:23:34,860 what you're going to take away. 1652 01:23:34,860 --> 01:23:38,900 But I think we uncritically as a society accept too many facets of our society because that's 1653 01:23:38,900 --> 01:23:41,120 just the way things have always been. 1654 01:23:41,120 --> 01:23:44,380 And so my hope is that people who have listened to this would be willing to take a critical 1655 01:23:44,380 --> 01:23:48,340 look at what we're currently doing when it comes to criminal justice and particularly 1656 01:23:48,340 --> 01:23:51,620 incarceration and ask the question, why are we doing it? 1657 01:23:51,620 --> 01:23:53,380 What are the outcomes we're looking for? 1658 01:23:53,380 --> 01:23:55,660 And are we getting those outcomes in the system? 1659 01:23:55,660 --> 01:24:00,980 And I would argue that the answer to all those questions is no. 1660 01:24:00,980 --> 01:24:06,840 Second is to remember that people are human beings and that all of us have made choices 1661 01:24:06,840 --> 01:24:08,340 that we're probably not proud of. 1662 01:24:08,340 --> 01:24:11,980 All of us have done things that have negatively impacted other people and just not all of 1663 01:24:11,980 --> 01:24:15,100 us have had the same kind of repercussions of those choices. 1664 01:24:15,100 --> 01:24:19,260 So I'd hope that people would also reconsider the stigmas that they have or the kind of 1665 01:24:19,260 --> 01:24:22,500 internalized beliefs they have about people who have been through the criminal justice 1666 01:24:22,500 --> 01:24:28,540 system because that is one of the other barriers. 1667 01:24:28,540 --> 01:24:35,780 This is similar to anybody who is of a population that's not the majority population. 1668 01:24:35,780 --> 01:24:38,820 So I have conversations with white students who are like, I don't understand this whole 1669 01:24:38,820 --> 01:24:40,580 race issue and I don't understand why. 1670 01:24:40,580 --> 01:24:42,340 I'm nice to every black person I see. 1671 01:24:42,340 --> 01:24:46,400 And I'm like, do you wear a shirt around that says I'm not a racist? 1672 01:24:46,400 --> 01:24:49,700 Because if you're a person of color who has had any kind of interaction in America where 1673 01:24:49,700 --> 01:24:53,380 you've been the only person of color in a room over and over again and you know that 1674 01:24:53,380 --> 01:24:56,040 there's a chance that some of those people are treating you and thinking about you differently 1675 01:24:56,040 --> 01:25:00,820 because of that, it's understandable that that person would be apprehensive in that 1676 01:25:00,820 --> 01:25:04,140 situation regardless of your level of racism. 1677 01:25:04,140 --> 01:25:08,140 Well when you're talking about formerly incarcerated people, it's even more challenging because 1678 01:25:08,140 --> 01:25:12,820 most of those people don't wear on their shirt, I just got out of jail. 1679 01:25:12,820 --> 01:25:17,860 But you're always wondering who might know, how might they think about me? 1680 01:25:17,860 --> 01:25:21,180 And imagine, and I try to tell people, imagine thinking that way. 1681 01:25:21,180 --> 01:25:24,860 My white students, I'm like, imagine going into a room and every room you go into you're 1682 01:25:24,860 --> 01:25:28,380 wondering who hates you because you're white. 1683 01:25:28,380 --> 01:25:32,100 And then think about how well you're going to learn that day, how good your note taking 1684 01:25:32,100 --> 01:25:35,860 is going to be, how good your participation is going to be. 1685 01:25:35,860 --> 01:25:41,860 And so I guess the take would be to re-examine the stigmas and the kind of thought process 1686 01:25:41,860 --> 01:25:42,860 you have. 1687 01:25:42,860 --> 01:25:46,100 But one of the other things that I've learned to do at Penn College, I just smile at everybody 1688 01:25:46,100 --> 01:25:47,100 I see. 1689 01:25:47,100 --> 01:25:48,100 Yeah. 1690 01:25:48,100 --> 01:25:50,060 Right, and there have been times when I'm walking down the hall and I can see somebody 1691 01:25:50,060 --> 01:25:53,460 who's kind of outwardly just looking a little anxious and you smile at it. 1692 01:25:53,460 --> 01:25:55,700 It's amazing what one smile can do. 1693 01:25:55,700 --> 01:25:59,120 And so I'd encourage students to do the same thing, like you don't know who on this campus 1694 01:25:59,120 --> 01:26:02,860 is walking around feeling like they don't belong and I guarantee you the vast majority 1695 01:26:02,860 --> 01:26:06,100 of students on this campus want all the other students to feel like they belong. 1696 01:26:06,100 --> 01:26:07,100 Yes. 1697 01:26:07,100 --> 01:26:09,660 Like my students constantly, nobody, like there are very few students in my class who 1698 01:26:09,660 --> 01:26:12,900 are like, I want everybody to know that I'm a racist. 1699 01:26:12,900 --> 01:26:15,640 The vast majority of students, like I just, I don't want people to, I don't want to say 1700 01:26:15,640 --> 01:26:16,900 anything that offends anybody. 1701 01:26:16,900 --> 01:26:19,220 I don't want to put anybody off. 1702 01:26:19,220 --> 01:26:22,500 But because of that fear, I just don't say anything and outwardly to other people that 1703 01:26:22,500 --> 01:26:23,500 looks like, well, you're indifferent. 1704 01:26:23,500 --> 01:26:24,500 Yeah. 1705 01:26:24,500 --> 01:26:25,500 You don't care. 1706 01:26:25,500 --> 01:26:28,860 So I guess the other thing would be as hokey as it sounds, smile at people you don't know 1707 01:26:28,860 --> 01:26:32,020 because you never know who that person is, what they're carrying with them, right? 1708 01:26:32,020 --> 01:26:35,500 That trauma-informed approach that's going to make that day easier for that person. 1709 01:26:35,500 --> 01:26:36,500 Yeah. 1710 01:26:36,500 --> 01:26:43,940 And I think here at Penn College, that's really easy because we are such a, it's such a different 1711 01:26:43,940 --> 01:26:45,660 community when you come here. 1712 01:26:45,660 --> 01:26:51,140 And I think, you know, not just like, because we get that hands-on experience from all different 1713 01:26:51,140 --> 01:26:58,540 angles, I think it gives us as a person knowing, it just shows you that it's more beyond the 1714 01:26:58,540 --> 01:26:59,540 books. 1715 01:26:59,540 --> 01:27:00,620 It's more than just what you learn. 1716 01:27:00,620 --> 01:27:05,340 You have to take people for, you know, remembering that they're people and get to know them. 1717 01:27:05,340 --> 01:27:08,420 And I think that's really easy here. 1718 01:27:08,420 --> 01:27:12,300 One of my closest friends that I've gotten close to is a welding major. 1719 01:27:12,300 --> 01:27:14,980 And we would have never thought that, you know what I mean? 1720 01:27:14,980 --> 01:27:16,540 But it's just across the board. 1721 01:27:16,540 --> 01:27:20,060 So I'm really appreciative of the campus for that, you know? 1722 01:27:20,060 --> 01:27:22,820 I've even made some friends with some dirty welding professors. 1723 01:27:22,820 --> 01:27:23,820 It's crazy. 1724 01:27:23,820 --> 01:27:24,820 Exactly. 1725 01:27:24,820 --> 01:27:25,820 No, but you're right. 1726 01:27:25,820 --> 01:27:27,460 I mean, the small class sizes here are huge. 1727 01:27:27,460 --> 01:27:31,100 When I taught at the University of Buffalo, I was in like 300-person lecture halls. 1728 01:27:31,100 --> 01:27:32,100 Yeah. 1729 01:27:32,100 --> 01:27:33,460 How can you get to know somebody like that? 1730 01:27:33,460 --> 01:27:35,660 Yeah, but like it's harder to hide here, right? 1731 01:27:35,660 --> 01:27:38,500 You're in a room with 15, 20, 25 people at the most. 1732 01:27:38,500 --> 01:27:39,860 So I agree completely. 1733 01:27:39,860 --> 01:27:40,860 Yeah. 1734 01:27:40,860 --> 01:27:46,900 And it's okay if we have different perspectives and different, you know, we think things different. 1735 01:27:46,900 --> 01:27:53,260 It's just a matter of we still have to learn to coexist in the same room, in the same classroom. 1736 01:27:53,260 --> 01:27:57,660 So I know at least in all of my classes, but I've really valued that in your class because 1737 01:27:57,660 --> 01:28:02,940 you really made us look at that of we're all going to be stuck here with each other for 1738 01:28:02,940 --> 01:28:04,500 16 weeks. 1739 01:28:04,500 --> 01:28:05,500 So... 1740 01:28:05,500 --> 01:28:08,020 College should be a magical place where it's okay for people to disagree. 1741 01:28:08,020 --> 01:28:11,060 I mean, I tell people on the first day of class, if you agree with everything I say, 1742 01:28:11,060 --> 01:28:12,980 this is going to be a really boring semester. 1743 01:28:12,980 --> 01:28:13,980 Exactly. 1744 01:28:13,980 --> 01:28:14,980 But I thank you for this. 1745 01:28:14,980 --> 01:28:16,980 I always enjoy our conversations. 1746 01:28:16,980 --> 01:28:17,980 I do. 1747 01:28:17,980 --> 01:28:24,260 You know, I'm always a person that I always say, well, you know, I always tell you, and 1748 01:28:24,260 --> 01:28:28,380 you guys might have to cut this part out, but I always say like, real, recognize real. 1749 01:28:28,380 --> 01:28:34,740 And I'm very grateful to have met you and to have you in my life because you have made 1750 01:28:34,740 --> 01:28:40,620 me be able to see other sides of things because I have been the only person like of color 1751 01:28:40,620 --> 01:28:42,980 in rooms where I'm like thinking that. 1752 01:28:42,980 --> 01:28:49,820 But you have given me the tools to be able to understand better the other side of it 1753 01:28:49,820 --> 01:28:53,300 and not take it so personal anymore. 1754 01:28:53,300 --> 01:28:56,660 So I, you know, I, that's just a personal thank you for me. 1755 01:28:56,660 --> 01:29:00,100 But I've always been a person to say, you know, real, recognize real. 1756 01:29:00,100 --> 01:29:02,740 And I recognize you, Dr. Miller. 1757 01:29:02,740 --> 01:29:03,740 I appreciate it. 1758 01:29:03,740 --> 01:29:04,740 I appreciate you. 1759 01:29:04,740 --> 01:29:07,460 It's students like you and Rachel and a lot of the other students I've had from all the 1760 01:29:07,460 --> 01:29:11,660 other walks of life that this is why I want to, when I, when I, when I think back on why 1761 01:29:11,660 --> 01:29:14,580 I started doing this and I look at the work that I've done with students like you, I'm 1762 01:29:14,580 --> 01:29:17,620 like, okay, this is what this is exactly where I wanted to be and exactly who I wanted to 1763 01:29:17,620 --> 01:29:18,620 be working with. 1764 01:29:18,620 --> 01:29:19,620 So I should be thanking you. 1765 01:29:19,620 --> 01:29:22,980 Hopefully they'll call us back for another episode. 1766 01:29:22,980 --> 01:29:27,660 We got this one for free, so I'm going to talk about wages. 1767 01:29:27,660 --> 01:29:28,660 You guys were great. 1768 01:29:28,660 --> 01:29:29,660 You were awesome. 1769 01:29:29,660 --> 01:29:31,140 You made it so easy. 1770 01:29:31,140 --> 01:29:32,140 Absolutely. 1771 01:29:32,140 --> 01:29:33,140 Thank you, Ashlee. 1772 01:29:33,140 --> 01:29:34,140 Thank you, Dr. Miller. 1773 01:29:34,140 --> 01:29:35,140 Thank you so much. 1774 01:29:35,140 --> 01:29:36,140 Thank you for having us. 1775 01:29:36,140 --> 01:29:39,820 Thanks for hanging out with us today. 1776 01:29:39,820 --> 01:29:44,480 Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts. 1777 01:29:44,480 --> 01:29:48,460 Check out our show notes for bookmarks to your favorite sections and links to resources 1778 01:29:48,460 --> 01:29:50,500 that we mentioned in today's episode. 1779 01:29:50,500 --> 01:29:55,820 You can also find past episodes and see what's on deck for upcoming ones at pct.edu slash 1780 01:29:55,820 --> 01:29:56,820 podcasts. 1781 01:29:56,820 --> 01:30:00,980 And of course we are open to your thoughts, ideas and suggestions. 1782 01:30:00,980 --> 01:30:06,020 So send those over at podcast at pct.edu. 1783 01:30:06,020 --> 01:30:07,020 It's been real. 1784 01:30:07,020 --> 01:30:21,220 We'll catch you next time.